Alchemised - 3

W HEN H ELENA WAS ROLLED BACK INTO THE lift at Central, she counted the floors of the Tower as they passed.

The Alchemy Tower had been an architectural wonder for centuries. It was only five storeys when initially constructed as a memorial to the first Necromancy War. Back then, alchemical resonance was an arcane ability, regarded as magic. Its practitioners, figures cloaked in myth and mystery, like Cetus, the first Northern alchemist.

The Holdfasts and the Institute had changed that, establishing alchemy as the Noble Science, something to be studied and mastered. When the Alchemy Institute threatened to outgrow the Tower, it was raised with alchemically wrought pulley systems to add additional storeys to the base. It had stood as the tallest building on the Northern continent for almost two centuries, growing ever taller as the city around it expanded and alchemists flocked through its gates.

The study of Northern Alchemy itself was entwined with the Tower structure. The lowest five levels with the largest lecture halls were the “foundations,” filled with initiates still discovering their resonance and mastering basic transmutation principles. Annual exams were required to ascend. After five years, most students would depart with their certification to join the guilds, with only qualifying undergraduates ascending to the next tier in the narrowing Tower to study more technical fields and subjects. Even fewer would rise past the graduate and research floors to achieve the rank of grandmaster.

The lift stopped somewhere amid the former research floors.

Helena strained her eyes, forced to peer through an aura of pain steadily fogging her vision. The walls blurred, her eyes failing to focus until she was rolled to a stop in the centre of a sterile room.

It had probably been a private laboratory once.

The straps pinning her in place were unfastened, and Stroud paused, checking Helena’s wrists.

The tubes running between her ulna and radius were nauseating, evoking a deep sense of wrongness. She couldn’t even twitch her fingers without feeling the way her muscles, tendons, veins, and nerves in that narrow space were all forced to accommodate the nullification driven through her.

“Very good,” Stroud said to herself before she turned to leave. Just before the door shut, Helena heard her say, “No one enters this room without my approval.”

There was a heavy click and the grind of a lock, and Helena was left alone.

She lurched up, but the drug had burned itself out of her blood and her muscles were cramping, contracting as though pulled taut. She tried to straighten, but the instant her feet touched the ground, her legs collapsed under her.

She slumped to the floor.

Run, a voice kept telling her. But she couldn’t; her arms and legs couldn’t hold her. In the absence of any physical ability, her thoughts turned inwards.

Had she really forgotten something?

Perhaps the Eternal Flame was not gone but remained as a hidden ember, waiting until the time was right. The possibility sparked a glimmer of hope. But how had she been made to forget?

Transference. Animancy.

Both words were unfamiliar.

She turned them over in her mind. Trying to contextualise the comments that had been made. Souls and minds and occupying the mental landscape of another person to transmute them from within. And the Eternal Flame had discovered this?

Surely not. Souls were considered inviolable among those of faith. The Eternal Flame considered even the physical alterations of vivimancy and necromancy a risk to an immortal soul.

Alteration of a mind, the transference of a soul: Surely that would be seen as infinitely worse.

Yet Shiseo claimed that the Eternal Flame had developed a way to perform this animancy-transference process. Something that Morrough, who’d unlocked the secrets of immortality, had not discovered.

Who was Elain Boyle? Helena didn’t know the name, and she was sure there had never been any other healers, much less a personal one, designated for Luc alone.

Luc would never have consented to receiving anything that wasn’t equally distributed to all the rest of the Resistance, and that included medical care and healing. He’d struggled with having paladins sworn to protect him, despite it being a tradition older than Paladia.

Stroud had to be mistaken.

Yet there was something hidden, changed about her. A secret so painstakingly concealed, Helena could not even guess at what it was.

Her muscles cramped harder. She lay on the floor, her body curled and contorted inwards like a dead spider, but her mind raced on.

What would Luc do if he were the one still alive? Captive. He’d already have a plan. He would have charmed Grace into passing a message for him, begun coordinating a way to escape, and plotted to rescue everyone on the Outpost.

That’s what he would do. Now it was up to Helena.

She couldn’t fail him. Not again.

H ELENA HAD EXPECTED THE TRANSFERENCE to begin immediately, but instead she spent what felt like days barely able to move as her muscles gradually un-cramped.

“Withdrawal,” Stroud said with a look of condescension as she forced a feeding tube down Helena’s nose and inserted a saline drip into her arm to keep her sedated. “No matter. I imagine they taught you to enjoy suffering. After all, sacrifice is a healer’s calling, isn’t it?”

Stroud was unveiled in her disdain for Helena with the revelation that they were both vivimancers, but on opposite sides in the war.

Stroud considered her a traitor.

“I don’t like those spasms,” Stroud later said during an examination, her mouth pursed when Helena’s fingers seized, making her drop a cup. “It’s not caused by the nullification set; do you remember when they began?”

Helena shook her head, flinching as the cold burning sensation of Stroud’s resonance sank into her left wrist, winding through the bones as she twisted and manipulated it for several minutes.

“From the condition of it, it appears you’ve broken this wrist several times. There’s old nerve damage. Do you remember when it happened?”

Helena had no recollection of ever seriously injuring her hands. Dexterous hands were vital for channelling and controlling resonance in both an alchemist’s practice and a healer’s work. She’d always been very careful with them.

“There wasn’t any mention of it in your student files, so it must have been during the war, but there’s no records there, either.”

Helena’s academic records had been unearthed, and Stroud liked to use them to interrogate her about the smaller details of her life. She suspected it was because Stroud was allowed to punish her for refusing to answer.

Where was her alchemy resonance first tested? At the Paladian embassy in her homeland, the southern islands of Etras. How old was she when she immigrated to Paladia to study at the Alchemy Institute? Ten.

How many years of education did she complete at the Institute? Six.

Did she remember Principate Apollo Holdfast’s death? Yes, she had been in class with Luc.

When did she join the Resistance? When the guilds overthrew legitimate government and there was a Resistance to join.

Stroud had not liked that answer.

When did she become a member of the Order of the Eternal Flame? Helena tried to avoid answering, but Stroud had the book of members, with Helena’s vows and name all written in her blood.

“Did the Eternal Flame’s Council know you were a vivimancer when you joined?”

Helena shook her head.

Stroud sat glaring at her, waiting for a verbal response.

“I didn’t know I was a vivimancer,” Helena finally said. “And after—once everyone knew—Luc didn’t care. He didn’t think a person’s abilities changed who they were, only what they did with them.”

“How magnanimous.” Stroud’s voice was chilly. Her fingers were creasing the file in her hand. “A pity he didn’t also step down. A great many people might still be alive then.”

“His family was Called,” Helena said, despite knowing there was no point in arguing.

“Yes, by the sun,” Stroud said, scoffing, her voice growing sharp. “I know they didn’t teach modern astronomy at the Institute, but did you ever study the newer astrological theories? You’re from the trade islands after all; you must have been exposed to all kinds of ideas. Did you really believe that the sun looked at the earth and chose a favourite? That a drop of sunlight endowed Orion Holdfast with such godlike abilities that all his descendants deserved to rule Paladia like gods themselves?”

Helena set her jaw, but Stroud would not stop.

“According to your academic records, you were considered bright. Surely you didn’t swallow every story you were told about the Holdfasts. Look me in the eyes and tell me: Do you really think the Holdfasts had a right to rule?”

Stroud’s fingers dug beneath Helena’s chin, forcing her to look up.

She stared squarely into Stroud’s face, feeling the threat of her resonance. “Better them than people like you.”

Stroud’s hand dropped, her resonance vanishing before she slapped Helena across the face so hard her head cracked against the wall.

“If you’d joined our cause, you could have been great.” Stroud was breathing heavily as she stood over Helena. “You would have been somebody. You’re nothing now. You spent yourself on the wrong side. No one will ever remember you. You’re ash, like all the rest. And a traitor to your kind.”

Once she was alone, Helena cradled the swollen side of her face, head throbbing.

The Resistance had considered the war a holy war—a divine battle between good and evil, a testing of the Faith. But Helena’s motives had been more personal than that.

Luc didn’t need to be divine for her to want to save him. He could have been entirely ordinary, and she would have made all the same choices.

Was there something she could have done that could have changed things?

When she’d first immigrated to Paladia, she’d thought it was paradise. Etras did not have much metal as a natural resource. Resonance was rare. There were a few alchemy guilds, but they offered no formal training. Reaching Paladia had felt like coming home; like finding the place where she’d always been meant to be.

She’d been vaguely aware that there was a hierarchy among alchemists that divided even the student body, splitting the devout families in close alliance with the Holdfasts apart from the guilds, but she wasn’t familiar enough with the city-state’s politics to understand the intricacies of it.

All she knew was that some students wouldn’t speak to her, laughed when she asked questions, and mocked her accent and way of gesturing with her hands when she talked. Later she learned that those were the guild students and to be wary of them.

It was Luc who’d had to explain that the guild students thought Helena’s enrolment had taken a spot that should have gone to the guilds—though Luc assured her that they were wrong. His family’s Institute hadn’t been founded for guilds but for people like her, the ones who didn’t have opportunities to study alchemy on their own. The guild students didn’t even need to attend; their places and futures were all as sured. For them, enrolment at the Institute was a status symbol. Once they had their certification, they’d all leave.

Helena was special, though. She’d be the one who’d stay beyond Year Five, who’d study more than just the principal foundations of alchemy. She’d ascend to the highest floors, make discoveries, and do the kind of work that would change the world. Her name remembered forever.

Why would his family want another guild student at their Institute when they could have someone like her?

Luc had always had a talent for making Helena feel like she was special rather than painfully out of place. She’d wanted to prove him right—that she was something, that she’d be worth believing in. His family wouldn’t be wrong about her.

She’d focused on her education and ignored the political hostilities around her.

Luc would mention things from time to time, how the guilds were convinced that his family was stifling alchemy’s scientific progress and preventing industrialisation, and then he’d wave towards the factories below the dam filling the sky with black clouds of smoke. That his father was being accused of allowing the country to fall behind because of his derelict governance. Or that the guilds had proposed that the Principate’s power be limited to religious affairs, and that they be the ones to run the country.

It had seemed that nothing Principate Apollo did was ever enough for the guilds; their complaints and demands were endless.

When Principate Apollo was murdered, the guilds didn’t see a tragedy at all, but an opportunity. They used Luc’s age, only sixteen, as a pretext for declaring a reformation: No longer would religious elites and a warrior class rule Paladia. The city-state would be governed by the newly formed Guild Assembly.

The guilds’ sedition would have been easy for the Order of the Eternal Flame to stop if it hadn’t been for Morrough. He appeared amid the upheaval seemingly from nowhere, offering immortality. Not an endless life of decay, but one impervious to age and injury, discovered not through any divine power but through science.

The guilds seized the opportunity, and the Undying began to appear. A select few at first, revealing themselves to be not only immortal but also capable of advanced forms of alchemy. Power and eternal life were suddenly within the grasp of anyone prepared to prove themselves loyal to Morrough. Aspirants flocked to join them, aligning with the guilds.

The ideas of “New Paladia” being promised by the Guild Assembly spread through the population like a disease.

When the Eternal Flame moved to restore order, the Undying revealed another ability: necromancy. On a scale never seen before. Rather than recruiting heavily from among the Aspirants, when attacked they’d kill the Eternal Flame’s soldiers, and then use reanimation to turn them back on their own compatriots, building an army with the Eternal Flame’s dead.

Luc, newly crowned as Principate, had been certain that the citizens of Paladia would be shocked into reason once they realised they were aligning themselves with necromancers. Necromancy had been a mortal crime throughout most of the continent for centuries. Not even the guilds would go so far.

He had been wrong.

“I F YOU WERE A HEALER, why aren’t you mentioned more in the hospital records?”

Stroud had returned in a state of high dudgeon, a stack of files with her.

Helena’s name was almost nowhere to be found. Stroud had only managed to find her signature on inventories of medical supplies, an application for a base-level alchemy knife, and a few request forms for the chymistry and metallurgy departments for certain compounds. The only interesting thing in the entire stack was a preliminary casualty list that had Helena listed among the presumed dead.

All told, in years of military files, Helena had scarcely existed at all. Stroud seemed personally affronted by it.

“Well?”

“Healing is a miracle; it’s not something you’re supposed to put your name on,” she said, reciting what she’d been told long ago. “There’s a symbol placed on medical records to indicate acts of—intercession.”

“Do you mean—” Stroud flipped through a file and turned it towards Helena. In the corner was a crescent shape with a slash across it. “This?”

Helena gave a short nod.

Stroud stared at it. “Then how on earth do you keep track of procedures?”

Tightness spread from her chest to her throat. “Healing’s not a procedure.”

Falcon Matias, the spiritual counsellor of the Eternal Flame’s Council and Helena’s direct superior, had been strict in his demands that the use of vivimancy not be documented in any ways which might glorify it. The act of vivimancy, he said, could only be purified through intentions of selflessness.

Although healers were relatively common in the remote parts of Paladia, vivimancy was rare enough that there were all kinds of claims about what vivimancers were capable of—that they could enthral the living just as necromancers enthralled the dead, for instance, and perform unspeakable transmutations upon living flesh.

Helena used to think these views of vivimancers unreasonably harsh, but now as Stroud’s subject, she began to understand.

Stroud was not enthralling, but she was expert in paralysing and transmutationally manipulating Helena at the slightest provocation. If Helena twitched too much, Stroud would fuse her bones together to keep her still. She seemed to take delight in the technicality of it not being torture. Sometimes she left Helena like that for hours.

It was a relief when Stroud finally seemed to lose interest, announcing that she had no more time to deal with Helena. Several times each day, two necrothralls would come to retrieve her and make her walk along the corridor that ran around the lift.

Her vision recovered, the necrothralls were horrifying to see. The adipocere gave a taut waxy sheen to the greyish-purple mottling of their skin, and the sclera around their clouding pupils were red or vivid yellow. Their fingertips were blackened and rotting off. The smell of chem ical preservatives and rot made Helena sick, but they wouldn’t let her stop walking until her legs gave out and they had to drag her back into the cell.

The walks blurred together along with the days. Helena didn’t know how long she’d been in Central; the lights never went out, and all the windows were covered and sealed.

“Is this her?” A man with a ghastly pale face and a sharp, needle-thin nose suddenly stepped out from a room and into Helena’s path as she was being shoved along the perpetual route.

Helena gave a gasp of shock. Standing before her, in elaborate embroidered clothes and jewellery, was Jan Crowther, one of the five members of the Eternal Flame’s Council.

“Crowth—”

A heavily ringed hand shot out, gripping her by the shoulder and dragging her close, peering at her.

“You knew him?” he asked, his fingers and rings digging into her skin.

She tried to pull free, but the necrothrall escorts held her in place as Crowther leaned in, closer and closer, drawing a deep breath, and a thick purple tongue flicked out as if he meant to lick her.

She recoiled, but he was close enough now that she could make out details. There was a slight yellowing in his sclera and faint patterns of dark veins beneath his vaguely clouded eyes. His skin was powdery, smelling strongly of lavender.

This wasn’t Crowther.

One of the Undying was wearing his corpse.

On the rare occasions when they couldn’t regenerate anymore, so grievously wounded in battle that their immortal bodies could no longer heal, the Undying could move themselves into their necrothralls instead. It was why the Resistance had called them liches.

It was an imperfect solution; even when maintained, the bodies rotted slowly around them and lacked the regenerative qualities of the near-impervious originals. Helena suspected this was why Morrough was so interested in transference—the method had the potential to allow the Undying to move into living bodies instead.

The lich using Crowther’s body drew back. He looked at her again, a strange expression sweeping across his face.

“I know you,” he said softly.

He gripped her face, twisting her head so that light fell on it from different angles. His eyes were crawling over her skin as if looking for something. He grabbed one of her hands, the dark heavy rings digging against her bones, shifting the manacle and sending a shock of pain down her arm. He looked at her fingers and then back to her face.

The necrothralls did nothing.

Was this the High Reeve?

“Yes. That’s her.” Stroud had appeared, her voice much softer than Helena was accustomed to. She looked irritated at the way Helena was being manhandled but seemed reluctant to protest. “She’ll be ready soon.”

The lich gripped Helena by her hair, his expression twisting as he leaned in again, a hungry, desperate look in his eyes unlike anything she’d ever seen on Crowther’s impassive face.

“I’ve seen her somewhere.” He gripped her tighter, shaking her so hard that her head snapped back. “Where did I see you?”

“This was the Holdfasts’ pet, Guildmaster. You probably saw her at the Institute.”

The lich’s face contorted with contempt at the mention of the Holdfasts, and he let go, abruptly losing interest. Now he looked angry, a deep purple rising along his neck, mottling his face. “I expected more than this. I was told this assignment was something special.”

Stroud sucked at her teeth. “Appearances are not everything. You can tell the High Reeve she’ll be ready for him soon. Now, you wanted to see the preparations for the chambers.” Stroud gestured towards the lifts. “I intend to begin with a test batch very soon to see how quickly we can get things started. The interest has been almost overwhelming. I have dozens of applications, and the announcement is still weeks away.” Stroud gave a nervous laugh but caught herself, clearing her throat as she pressed her hand against a panel on the lift. “It’s been difficult to determine the most promising combinations. I’ve taken what I can from the hospitals’ records. The guilds’ archives are quite useful, too, truly ahead of their time. But you’re the only one who produced exactly what we’re hoping to replicate here, so I’m very eager for your insight.”

The lich’s expression grew stony despite the praise. The lift arrived, and he and Stroud were gone before he gave an answer.

The necrothralls nudged Helena forward. She released a slow breath. Not the High Reeve, then. It was a relief that the first reanimated body she’d recognised had been Crowther, one of the more detached members of the Council, and not someone she’d known well.

She looked up and flinched at the sight of the only portrait that hung in the corridor.

The Tower used to be full of art and decorations, lined with portraits of significant alchemists who’d studied or taught at the Institute. Now there was only one, and it depicted a sallow, sullen-looking man with a large forehead and heavy chin.

The name ARTEMON BENNET was hammered into the plaque beneath it, with two dates below, spanning more than eighty years.

Helena remembered with visceral clarity the reports associated with that name. Once the Undying had established a strong position in the city, they put out a call for all the vivimancers and necromancers in hiding to join their cause, setting up laboratories where such supporters could explore their powers, freed from the oppression of the Faith.

When Resistance fighters weren’t simply killed and reanimated into necrothralls, they were sent to those laboratories as research subjects. Artemon Bennet had been the head of New Paladia’s science and research departments. It was reported that he had a particular interest in experimentation on alchemists.

The only good thing about the portrait was knowing that Bennet was somehow dead.

Another walk was finally coming to its end. Helena still struggled with breathing deeply, a habit ingrained by the stasis tank’s limited oxygen and worsened by the necrothralls’ stench. Her head was growing light, vision threatening to blur. Her footsteps began to falter.

The necrothralls gripped her, not letting her slow. Her feet began to drag across the floor.

A strangled gasp jolted her to alertness.

“Marino?” A dark-haired girl in a wheeled chair was passing her. She was gaunt, almost collapsed in on herself, but she straightened, leaning forward as her eyes fastened on Helena’s face. She had scars like Grace’s, and there was a blanket over her lap. She wore the same manacles around her wrists that Helena did. She was being pushed down the hall in the direction of an operation theatre that Helena had vaguely noticed was open.

Helena staggered, trying to find her feet. “Penny.”

Penny was a year older than Helena. One of the few other girls at the Institute to pursue undergraduate studies in alchemy. She’d been among the first to enlist with the Resistance, determined to go to the front lines and fight.

The orderly pushing Penny walked faster, turning the chair to block the exchange.

Helena and Penny both craned their necks, trying to keep sight of each other as they were pushed apart.

“Penny, what are they—” Helena didn’t get the whole question out as she was shoved towards her room.

Penny leaned over the arm of the chair, looking back, her face stricken. “You were right. I’m so sorry. We should have listened to you.”

There was no time to ask what she meant. The orderly sped up, and Penny disappeared.

“I’m delivering you today,” Stroud said, walking in with a stack of files she was immersed in. She’d been increasingly distracted every time Helena saw her. “Get ready.”

“I’m leaving?”

Stroud looked up and gave an irritated, nervous smile. “Yes. Central has other purposes. The High Reeve has been waiting for you. Come. Now.”

There was no readying for Helena to do. She was bundled into the lift with nothing but the clothes on her back and a pair of wool slippers too large for her feet.

The lift descended to the fifth floor, where the Alchemy Tower was connected by skybridges to the surrounding Institute buildings. In a city as vertical as Paladia, skybridges were frequently used to intercon nect buildings, some like slender passages, others large enough to hold plazas and gardens dozens of storeys above the rest of the city. As the city had grown, the lower parts saw their sky almost blotted out, creating a damp, darkened underbelly that festered with diseases.

She could see the commons below, grassy patches bisected by geometric footpaths that ran between the dorms and the Tower and the Science Main.

White marble steps led up to the vast Tower doors. Helena’s memory instantly superimposed the wave of blood and gore and bodies that had covered it when she’d seen it last.

She looked away.

She had to focus on the present.

H ELENA WAS PUSHED INTO THE back seat of a motorcar, a necrothrall cramming her towards the middle as it seated itself beside her. The smell of rot immediately began to fill the enclosed space.

Her throat convulsed, and she clamped a hand over her nose and mouth.

Stroud climbed in on the other side, seemingly immune to the stench, flipping through her perpetual stack of files.

The motorcar drove down a long tunnel, amber light from the electric lanterns flickering across Helena’s lap, giving way to drab grey when the motorcar emerged from underground. She peered out, taking in the sky. It was dark and overcast, a grey that seemed to leach the world of colour. Looking out at the city, she was shocked by the scars still starkly visible from the war: huge gaps in the skyline, burned-out buildings, and collapsed ruins. It hardly looked as if any rebuilding had begun. The road was the only thing that appeared new.

When the motorcar crossed from the East Island to the West Island, nearly all traces of the war disappeared behind them.

Paladia had been founded on a river delta in the basin of the Novis Mountains. The original island had a high northern plateau which sloped down to the southern tip. The Alchemy Tower had been built on the highest point of the island, and the town—eventually a city—had grown around it until every inch of land had been built on. The island of Paladia, later called the East Island, was home to industry, trade, government, the perihelion cathedrals, and the Alchemy Institute.

The West Island was built centuries later, engineered to accommodate the exploding population. All of it was newer, bigger.

During the war, the Undying held diluted control over the West Island, while the Resistance had headquartered in the Alchemy Institute, giving them an established point of defence on the East Island and splitting the city-state in two. Because the East Island held most of the crucial infrastructure and the main ports, it had borne the brunt of the war as the Undying tried to seize control.

Contrasted with the ruins of the East Island, the West Island looked almost unscathed, its vast interconnected buildings vaulting up towards the sky, gleaming and unmarred.

When Helena had first sailed up the river and seen Paladia, it had looked as if some great deity had laid their crown in the dip of the mountains, the spires and gleam of the city reflecting across the water. She hadn’t thought anywhere on earth could be so beautiful.

The motorcar felt tiny as it sped through the West Island, crossing another bridge towards Paladia’s mainland, which spanned the miles from the river shore to the mountain tree line.

The mainland was mostly mines and agriculture, and the little that wasn’t commercial was owned by the oldest families who’d joined the Institute centuries ago, at the time of its founding.

If she was being taken to the mainland, then the High Reeve must have an estate of some kind. Either one was seized and bestowed post-war, or perhaps he was from one of the wealthy guild families. There had been a number who’d seen their fortunes explode from the industrialisation of the last century.

She leaned forward, looking towards the front window, searching for any signs of their destination.

Removed from Central, she was finally beginning to develop a vague shape of a plan.

Realistically, her chances of escape were negligible. Even without the manacles impeding her dexterity and suppressing her resonance, she had minimal combat training. Her resonance had always been her greatest asset. Assuming she could somehow escape, she had nowhere to go, no idea who was alive or who could be trusted, or who would trust her.

If she was cooperative, there was a chance she’d survive transference, but if she did survive, she’d be betraying the Eternal Flame, giving up information she’d sacrificed her own memory to protect.

Her hands clenched, pain sparking like fire in her wrists.

In the stasis tank, she’d told herself over and over that she’d survive, that she had to hold on. She couldn’t explain why.

After all, the whole point of her healing had been to ensure the survival of the others, to be a fail-safe so that Luc would not die. There was no use in a healer when everyone was dead.

She wouldn’t be a traitor. Whatever she’d allowed to be hidden in her mind, she wouldn’t let the Undying discover it. Surviving didn’t matter. She’d kill herself before they learned anything from her.

Perhaps her violent captor could be her means to that end.

If what Grace had said was true, the High Reeve preferred murder to strategic choices like interrogation. Men prone to violence were generally thoughtless, acting with emotion first and applying reason after.

If she could provoke him, he might kill her on impulse. One mistake was all she’d need, and her secrets would be lost. No amount of necromancy could bring a mind back from death.

What would Morrough do to the High Reeve then? Undoubtedly something even worse than what was done to Mandl.

Helena hoped it would be.

She might not be able to avenge Luc, but she could get justice for Lila.

The thought of Lila Bayard, dead, her face ripped off, her corpse used to imprison the people she’d once protected, made Helena’s chest grow so tight, it ached.

Lila had been one of the few who wasn’t bothered by Helena being a vivimancer. During the war, they’d even shared a room. They hadn’t been close—as a paladin, Lila was often gone, fighting at the front— but she’d never treated Helena like she was lesser for not being in combat.

Lila had been considered a once-in-a-lifetime talent as a combat alchemist. She’d joined the crusades of the Eternal Flame at fifteen, travelling the continent, investigating rumours of necromancy. Her life had revolved around becoming a paladin and serving the Principate.

People used to call Lila the embodiment of Lumithia, the warrior goddess of alchemy.

Helena couldn’t imagine how anyone could have killed Lila, especially not after Luc had been killed. Lila would have died a thousand times over before she’d live to see Luc captured. She had lived and breathed her vows of protection.

Helena blinked as they stopped at a checkpoint.

The trees along the road were all skeletal, bare-limbed. The motorcar drove a few miles farther and turned off the main road.

A building loomed through the trees as they drove down a long lane and a heavy, ornate gate swung open. The motorcar drove through, towards a towering house.

It was an old thing, its façade covered in bare vines which crawled up the front like blackened veins. The architecture was far from the modern elegance in the city. There was a dark, heavy quality to the ornate details, which appeared to have weathered at least a century. It bore five dark spires that jutted across the sky, three on the main portion of the house, and one on each wing that sprawled forward to form a half circle.

The gate and wall and other buildings all curved in to create an enclosed courtyard with an overgrown garden in the centre. The motorcar crunched over white gravel as it pulled around and stopped.

At the top of a wide flight of stone steps stood a young woman.

Helena was shoved out of the car behind Stroud. She drew a deep breath of clean air and shivered. It was bitterly cold, the damp country air immediately seeping into her bones. She’d forgotten the brutality of Northern winters.

The woman on the steps was barely more than a girl, and she stood out starkly in the drab surroundings. She had light-brown hair that fell in perfect ringlets around her pale face. Her dress was poison green, embellished with a black external corset resembling a rib cage, and a gleaming plated bird skull was fastened so that the long beak ran down between her breasts. Several of her fingers bore alchemy rings, and she swung a short staff idly in her hand as she watched the party ascend the stairs towards her.

She stared past Stroud to Helena, pale-blue eyes narrowing. “Well,” she said as they reached her. “I suppose fanatics must come in all sizes.”

Her attention turned to Stroud, and she donned a brittle smile. “Welcome to Spirefell. My husband is waiting for you.”

Stroud fell in step with the lady of the house, while the necrothrall guard nudged Helena to follow.

The door of the house was held for them by a dead butler, and the sight made Helena’s blood run cold.

Unlike the necrothralls in Central, the butler was freshly deceased and immaculately dressed. She thought for a moment he was alive, or that he was a lich. His skin lacked the waxy adipocere sheen, and he moved with none of the sluggishness she’d come to associate with necrothralls. But his expression and eyes were completely blank.

He must have been recently killed. Grace had said the Undying kept necrothralls as staff, and a wealthy family wouldn’t want to deal with the smell, which meant they’d be replaced frequently.

Her stomach knotted as she stepped inside and took in the trappings of the house.

The foyer was large and cold, and the first thing she saw was a bright smear of blood.

Helena gasped, eyes and head instinctively averting.

“What’s the matter?” Stroud asked sharply.

“The blood,” she forced herself to say, unable to look again. All the executions flooded through her mind, the smells and sickening taste in the air, washing like a flood across the white marble.

Stroud glanced around the room. “Where?”

Helena tried to indicate, and Stroud only looked confused. She looked again and discovered her mistake. There was no blood.

A bouquet of roses sat arranged on a table in the centre point of the room. She flinched just looking at them.

“Never mind,” she muttered.

The girl in green was watching. She looked between Helena and the roses, and then a slight smile tugged at the corner of her mouth as she turned away, heading towards a set of doors across the foyer.

“Wait here,” Stroud said. The door shut, leaving Helena with the dead. She glanced around, trying to look anywhere but at the roses.

The gloom felt heavier inside than under the oppressive grey sky. Spirefell was a cavernous thing, shadowed with filigree metalwork. There was a large, ornate stairway to the right, leading to multiple landings that looked out over the foyer.

Darkened hallways led farther into the house, illuminated by weak electric sconces that hummed and hardly penetrated the gloom. The windows high overhead seemed designed to direct the light only to the table at the centre. There was a distorted black shape inlaid as a mosaic into the marble floor, encircling the table. From her angle, Helena couldn’t work out what it was.

The house felt dirty. There was no visible dust, but Helena couldn’t shake the sense that the place was untended. The air was stale, as if the building also were a mouldering corpse.

The door across the way opened. “Come, Marino,” Stroud said as if summoning an animal.

The room she entered had two immense latticed windows looking out into gardens with a large hedge maze. The winter curtains were drawn back to let in cold light. The girl in green had set the short staff aside and was seated on the edge of a spindly-looking chair, her skirts spread to show off the fabric. Across the room, by the windows, stood a dark figure.

The hair on her arms rose.

Stroud pulled her past the spindly chairs and chaises towards the figure.

Winter light silhouetted him, and it wasn’t until she drew near that Helena could begin to make out any details.

Pale skin. Silver-white hair.

He was old, then. He must be one of the guild patriarchs.

She’d met a few of them at the Institute. They were always the same. Prideful, obsessed with their power and perceived status, always demanding more respect.

This was exactly the kind of person who would be easy to manipulate. Helena would only need to be insufficiently cowed, and he’d snap her neck.

With luck, she might be dead within a fortnight.

He turned. Helena’s throat closed as the world around her vanished, footsteps faltering.

He was not old at all.

It was the iron guild heir. Kaine Ferron.

She stared at him in stunned recognition.

He’d been one of the few guild students who’d stayed at the Institute for undergraduate study. They’d been the same year, shared classes, even worked as assistants on the same research floors.

Her mind refused to accept what it was seeing, because it could not be Kaine Ferron.

His hair had been dark, now it was colourless. While the pallor of his skin didn’t come from age, he looked as if he’d been bleached in moonlight.

For an instant she thought he must be a corpse, like Crowther’s body at Central, but the silver-grey eyes that met hers were sharp, the sclera white, pupils black, no darkened veins anywhere beneath his skin. There were no veins visible at all, as if his blood were quicksilver.

“The last member of the Order of the Eternal Flame for you, High Reeve,” Stroud said, as if presenting him with a medal. “I believe you knew each other at the Alchemy Institute.”

His eerie silver eyes flicked away. “Hardly.”

“I know you’ve made preparations,” Stroud said, seating herself, “but I wouldn’t worry much; she has no training or combat experience to speak of. She’ll be quite manageable for you.”

He looked at Helena again, no emotion on his face, but there was a predatory calculation in his eyes, like a wolf. “I’m sure.”

Stroud cleared her throat, seeming uncomfortable with Ferron’s terseness. “Now then. The High Necromancer wishes to have results before the winter solstice. Per his commands, you’re to perform the temporary transference method upon her as frequently as possible to achieve singularity without extinguishing her soul. Once that is accomplished and you’ve accustomed yourself to her mind, I believe that reversing the transmutations of her memory should be a small matter for you. You may examine what’s concealed, and when it’s done, I’ll come to retrieve her. The High Necromancer intends to extract the memories as well.”

Ferron gave an idle nod.

“I’m sure you know, but this is an absolute priority. All other obligations should be considered secondary until completion.”

The girl in green made an abrupt sound, and all her perfect ringlets trembled.

“You mean, we really have to keep her?” she burst out. “I just don’t see how it’s fair. She’s not even Paladian. Why can’t she stay at the Outpost with the rest of them? Why are we keeping her here? I had all these parties planned this season. I’ve already had to cancel three dinners and make up excuses about why. No one asked me if I wanted a prisoner.” Her voice was fluting with a note of tearful petulance. “And what is she wearing? If anyone sees her, it’ll be all anyone talks about.”

“Shut up, Aurelia,” Ferron said, his voice like ice, not even bothering to look over.

“I—wasn’t sure what clothes would be appropriate,” Stroud said, her voice tight with embarrassment. “Of course, you don’t have to keep her in that. It was simply what was on hand.”

The windows rattled, and a low meandering howl of wind floated through the house. Stroud jumped. Ferron and Aurelia didn’t seem to notice it.

“It’s hardly a concern,” Ferron said. “I’m sure we’ll find something for her to wear. Aurelia has so much.”

Aurelia’s eyes went wide. “You want me to give her my clothes?”

“We don’t want anyone mistaking her for staff. Unless you prefer I have something made?”

Aurelia gave a horrified gasp, as if the idea were more scandalous than keeping a prisoner or running a house with dead servants.

“Excellent,” Stroud said in a bright voice as everyone pretended not to notice that Aurelia was on the verge of spontaneous combustion. “Now then, you’re free to examine her, High Reeve. She’s all yours.” She gestured towards Helena.

Ferron looked at Helena without moving. “Here?”

“Just a preliminary exam, to see if you have questions before I go. Do you—prefer privacy?”

“No. You’re welcome to watch.” He stepped towards Helena. He was all in black, dressed in city clothes. His coat and waistcoat were intricately detailed with black embroidery that only showed when it caught the light. At his throat, he wore a pristine white cravat.

Helena had never seen a guild alchemist wearing so little metal. Alchemists tended to keep metal everywhere: as jewellery, and woven into their clothes, walking sticks, weapons. Unusual alchemists like pyromancers always wore their ignition rings unless they were forced to remove them.

Aurelia was covered in metal, but not Ferron.

He pulled off a black glove, revealing a pale, long-fingered hand.

A vivimancer, Grace had said. Of course he didn’t need metal.

Helena tried to flinch back, all too familiar with the danger of Stroud’s grasping fingers, but when she tried to move, she couldn’t.

Without Ferron touching her, a frisson of resonance fine as spider silk had insinuated itself through her body, so subtle she hadn’t felt it. Now it held her fast. It wasn’t like Morrough’s; it didn’t fill the air until everything hummed. If she hadn’t tried to move, she wouldn’t have realised it was there.

Ferron’s eyes gleamed, as if he could feel her struggling. His index finger barely touched her temple, and then she truly felt his resonance, vivid as a live wire.

Sharp and finely honed, it sank through her skull. The room and Ferron all vanished as her memories sprang up before her eyes like a zoetrope.

The drive to Spirefell. Penny. Stroud’s interrogations. The lich in the Tower wearing Crowther’s body. The discussions of how best to extract the memories from Helena’s mind. Shiseo emerging from the darkness with his little case and awl. As Ferron went further back, the memories dimmed, flashing by as though her mind were a book he was flipping through to see if there was anything of interest inside.

He went all the way back to the stasis and the nothing that went on and on and on, then even further to the Tower and blood and the years in the hospital.

She hadn’t realised how small and repetitive her life was until she experienced it being skimmed through like that.

When it stopped, Helena’s mind was reeling. Ferron’s touch remained a moment longer, and she could feel his resonance through her brain, turning her vision red.

Finally, his hand dropped away and he stood there, staring at her.

“Well,” he said at last.

“Extraordinary, isn’t it?” Stroud said from somewhere behind him.

“Quite,” he said, his gaze splinter-sharp. He raised an eyebrow, still looking at Helena. “The war is over. What is it you think you’re protecting in that brain of yours?”

She met his stare without flinching.

Luc. She was protecting Luc.

“Holdfast is dead,” he said sharply, as if he’d seen the answer in her eyes. “The Eternal Flame extinguished. There’s no one left for you to save.”

He turned away, his expression venomous.

“Anything else?” he asked Stroud.

She shook her head.

The paralysis on Helena vanished. She’d been fighting it, and it happened so suddenly her knees gave out. She dropped, trying to catch herself, and the weight of her body slammed into her hands. Tearing pain exploded through her wrists, white-hot fire searing all the way to her shoulders.

She hit the floor.

Aurelia stifled a laugh.

“You met with Shiseo and went over everything several times before he left, I believe,” she heard Stroud saying. “After the first session, I’ll send someone for appraisal, so we can establish a timeline for results.”

“Yes, this plan has all been laid out for me in excruciating detail,” Ferron said tonelessly. “I’ll get it done. Now if you’ll excuse me.”

He stepped over Helena’s body and walked out of the room without a backwards glance.

Helena tried to sit up. Without use of her hands, she had to roll carefully onto her side and use her elbows, cradling her wrists protectively near her chest.

When she finally looked up, Stroud had gone, and Aurelia was standing impatiently a few feet away. The short staff was clasped in her hands.

“Get off the floor,” she said. “I’m to show you your room.”

Helena stood and followed Aurelia warily back into the foyer. Her wrists were throbbing. The necrothrall from Central was still there and shadowed them as Aurelia led the way down a hallway, up a flight of stairs, through a series of rooms, and into another hallway.

It was darker there. A different wing based on the angle of the light. Most of the windows were heavily draped, the furniture shrouded with dustcloths.

“To be clear, just because we have to keep you doesn’t mean I want to see you,” Aurelia said, walking quickly.

Helena already felt short of breath from the stairs and could barely keep up.

“I understand those bracelets keep you from using alchemy. Although that hardly matters here. The Ferrons built this house with pure iron, and there’s a reason I was chosen as Kaine Ferron’s wife.”

Aurelia paused and looked back at Helena, lifting one hand. Her wrist swished dramatically, and the alchemy rings decorating her fingers transformed, lengthening into knives that made her fingers look spider-like.

Helena watched the transmutation with trained interest. Natural iron resonance was considered somewhat rare among alchemists—though not as unusual as gold resonance or pyromancy. Raw iron was naturally intractable, to the point of being considered generally inert. Most alchemists couldn’t transmute iron without having it repeatedly exposed to lumithium emanations in an Athanor Furnace, and even then they fared better with steel than iron alone.

Aurelia’s transmutational work was quick and flashy. In class, she would have been docked for excess movement and imperfect iron distribution, but the ease with which she’d transformed her rings meant she had an extremely high degree of iron resonance, and if the house was iron, that meant Aurelia could wield it like a weapon, too.

Helena looked down, noticing then the wrought iron running through the floor and decorating the walls.

“We don’t use this wing,” Aurelia said, continuing down the hall. Her rings were pretty bands around her fingers once more. “I don’t want you seen, particularly when I have guests. Stay out of the way unless you’re sent for. The thralls all have instructions to keep an eye on you, so we’ll know if you cause problems.”

Aurelia stopped, setting the short staff on one of the iron bars in the floor and giving it a little twist. The iron shifted with a groan, and a door, heavily decorated with more iron, swung open.

It was a large room with two long windows and a canopied bed between them. There was a single wing-backed chair next to one window and an ornate table beside it. A large wardrobe sat against the far wall, a heavy rug covering most of the floor.

There was nothing on the walls except a clock too high to reach, but it was all clean and smelled freshly aired out.

Helena stepped into the room, taking it in carefully.

“Meals will be sent,” Aurelia said, and the door closed behind her.

It was only when she was alone that it struck Helena as odd that Aurelia had escorted her.

Perhaps the Ferrons weren’t as wealthy as their home would make them seem.

The house did appear understaffed. Their butler was a corpse—perhaps all the servants were. If they were desperate for money, that would explain why they had no choice but to keep Helena, and why Ferron spent his time hunting down Resistance fighters rather than managing his family’s guild and factories.

She remembered the Ferrons being among the wealthiest families in Paladia. They’d invented industrial steel manufacturing, allowing them to monopolise more than just Paladia’s steel industry. Most neighbouring countries had sourced from the Ferrons, too.

Clearly their fortunes must have turned if their house was in a condition like this.

She went to the nearest window. There was a radiator bolted beneath it, and the window was latticed with wrought iron and locked tight. No jumping, then.

She touched the iron with a fingertip and felt nothing. No connection to the cold metal, just that dead, empty feeling emanating through her wrist.

She pressed the length of her hand against it, bitterly missing her resonance. The world she’d known was always full of energy, humming with power that she’d been attuned to since birth.

Now everything was still. The constant sense of inertia was disorienting.

Peering through the paned glass, she saw wilderness and mountains.

She reconsidered her plans. If the necrothralls were there to watch her, they’d likely been commanded to keep her from killing herself.

She drummed her fingers on the windowsill, ignoring the little shocks of pain it sent up her arm.

Ferron, unfortunately, was not the stupid, deluded patriarch she’d hoped for.

His resonance was like Morrough’s, beyond anything she’d known was possible, but what worried her most was the way he’d gone through her memory. Morrough had done something similar, but that mental violation had been brutal and haphazard; Ferron had been surgical.

She’d assumed his quick kills were a sign of impulsiveness, but there’d be no need to keep prisoners if he could look inside their minds and take the answers.

How could she outwit someone like that? Could he see memories alone or her thoughts, too?

She turned from the window, surveying the room, wondering if his strange appearance was an effect of his abilities.

The Undying didn’t change after their ascendance. It was a part of the “gift.” Unless their bodies were so destroyed that they became liches, they were immutable. They could lose entire limbs and grow them back.

What would make Ferron look like that?

He seemed—distilled. As though he’d been taken and sublimated until all that was left was an essence—something deathly cold and gleaming. The High Reeve.

Not a person, but a weapon.

Well, Helena would be sure to treat him as one.