“I’m sorry.” I look down, like a heathen caught sneaking into church. “I— I—”
“You must never speak of what you’ve seen here this evening. Ever.” The alchemist’s voice booms. He eyes me sternly.
“I shall never.” My cheeks warm.
“Good.” His voice returns to its former frail state. He turns and shuffles about the room as if searching for something “If you do, you shall be thought a madman. And your fate will be sealed, as mine is.”
“I can change that for you.” I dart toward him, pity in my step. “I will change that for you—”
The alchemist turns, a pleasant smile on his lips. “I am afraid you are powerless in that realm, but thank you.” He bows.
“But—”
He raises a cautionary finger. “Remember, the magic you’ve witnessed here must never be spoken of to anyone, not even Eyelet, or it will no longer be real. Everything affected by its power will return to its former state.”
I frown. “You mean?”
“That’s right. It’s not for my protection that I ask this of you. In fact, it has nothing at all to do with me.” His eyes turn toward Eyelet and he shuffles away.
“But how?” I chase after him.
The alchemist turns, raising his shaky hand to my face. “You ask a great deal of questions for someone so aloof to magic.” He stares.
How does he know that I don’t—? I swallow hard, seeing him note the flash of shock in my eyes.
“I can entrust you with the severity of this secret, then?”
“Yes. Yes, of course.”
“And I have your word?”
“I give you my word—”
“‘Till your dying breath?” His gaze travels through me, white-washing my bones.
“And beyond if necessary.” I gaze back, squarely.
“Good.”
My eyes shift to Eyelet’s still-lifeless form resting on the stone slab. I start forward, but he catches me hard with a palm to the chest.
“No. Not yet.” His eyes are firm. “It’s too soon. The crystals. You must not disturb them. They need time to work their magic, son. After which, I’ll need all the items I spoke of before. The tubing, syringes and other things I mentioned early. Go hurry now to stoke the fire.”
“But Masheck is—” I point behind me.
The alchemist’s eyes flash beyond my shoulder. He looks suddenly nervous, like he’s seen a vision. “And a potion. I will need to make the potion.”
“What potion?”
“Immediately.”
He snatches me by the arm and whisks me from the room. His strength is incredible again. “It is time. Where is your hearth, boy?” His head twists, searching the hallway. His lips quiver.
“In the main room. Why?”
“Go there. Stoke the fire. I will come.”
“But what about Eyelet?”
He folds his hands and they disappear inside his massive sleeves. “She is in the hands of the others now. We mustn’t disturb them. Now go. And be sure to bring the sand with you.”
He pushes me, and I stumble forward over the tops of my shoes.
When I turn back he is gone.
Chapter Three
Eyelet
MUSIC FLOODS MY EARS, high pitched and fairy-like. As if thousands of tiny crystal bells were being struck at once. I see a light and I want to go to it, to feel its warmth on my face like our once shining sun. But when I reach out, the light eludes me. It shifts, hovering just beyond my fingertips. Each time I grasp for it, it moves farther away.
Is this illusion or is this real? Where am I? Where is Urlick?
Beyond the light, a paddlewheel turns, attached to the side of a plot of land, floating just beyond the tear in the jagged-edge in the sky. Birds sing. Grasses wave. Urlick waits beyond a fence. He reaches up.
“Urlick?” I shout, willing myself forward, but I don’t move.
He waves to me through the distant light, then flashes from view.
A barrier of belching black mist separates us. I push through the mist to find myself teetering on the edge of a bottomless crevasse. I throw my hands out and wheel backward to catch my balance, stopping myself from falling in.
The plot of land moves farther away from me.
“No.” I shake my head. “No, please don’t go. Urlick? Urlick, don’t leave me, please!”
“Eyelet?” His voice is a distant whisper inside the mist. Sardonic laugh drowns him out.
The wind picks up, wrapping me in a thick swirling blanket of darkening mist. I fight to get away but it shrouds me, trapping me within it—the closing lid of a coffin. I cannot move forward, yet I cannot retreat.
The light no longer shines in my face.
Darkness consumes me.
“Do not fight it,” a soothing voice tempts me.
“No!” I ball my fists and try to punch through the mist, but it clings to me, encircling my wrists. “No,” I shout, turning my face away from its ominous gassy stench. The laughing air sits sour on my tongue. Copper pennies float up in my mouth.
I try to spit them out, but they are not real.
“What is this? What’s happening?” The air laughs again.
A charge of electricity races through my veins. I jolt back from it and hug myself, rubbing the sting from my arms.
There’s a sudden whoosh and a feeling of emptiness. It settles on me like the weighty hand of death, and I shriek and pull away from it, my stomach a hollowed tree.
“Where am I?”
My voice comes back to me, frantic and shrill. I shudder at its helpless tone.
The light comes again, spiralling over my head, a dancing, bouncing ball. I reach up to catch it but the ball explodes at my touch like a festive cracker on Christmas Day. I draw my arm back in shock as the flickering sparks dissipate from my fingertips. Lightning bolts shoot from my nails.
I don’t understand this—none of it.
All at once I cannot catch my breath. It’s as if someone, something, has stolen it. I gasp and rail and pound at my chest. I fall to my knees, as my trachea constricts, shrivelling to a thin, airless cord. I cough and catch blood and stare down at it. Panic strangles all my thoughts.
No. I gasp for air. No, this cannot be happening. This cannot be the end.
I struggle to my feet, shocked to find ground beneath them, and lurch forward. I haul up my skirts and pick up speed, racing through the sour cloud cover.
“Eyelet?” I hear Urlick’s voice calling me. “Eyelet, please, don’t leave me…”
Leave you? “Urlick!” I reach for him in the darkness. “Urlick, I’m here!”
I take another step and I’m falling, falling, falling down a crevasse, through black mist, spiralling into another world. Spiralling and falling, twisting loose from my body. My skin trails after me.
I scream in pain.
My soul is wrenched from my body, my body torn from soul until there is nothing left of me but flame.
If the flame be doused, I cease to exist.
I must not let it go out.
“Urlick?” I whisper, and my flame bends. It threatens to flicker out. “Urlick, if you hear me,” I whisper as soft as I can. “Please help me. Please?”
A breeze traipses through the roiling cloud. It laps at my flame, tugging it sideways, dashing out its corners, causing the wick to hiss and scorch. I close my eyes and wait for the end to come.
For my tiny flame to relent.
But somehow, the breeze pulls with it oxygen that feeds the flame. It flashes bright yellow and draws it toward the sky—a dancing, thriving, thick golden ribbon, stretching higher and wider.
“Eyelet, can you hear me?” Urlick’s voice feeds the flame.
“Yes!” I shout. “Yes, I can!”
“Come home, Eyelet. Please come home!”
“I’m trying. Honest I am.”
With every word, with every thought, the flame roars higher, wider. It burns stronger. I’m pulled into its essence.
/> I’m melting, drifting, swirling, rising to the top of a new world, where I’m held, suspended and breathless in mid-air. There are ravens in the trees, and the same picket fence as before. Livinea hangs over it this time, waving…though not to me.
Iris is there too, along with Masheck and C.L. They are all strangely distracted by a man in an ink-black cloak.
His presence frightens me.
He has no face.
Urlick stands closest to him, chanting something.
Or is it the man in the cloak chanting?
Swiftly, the layers of my body return, spinning back into place—bone, flesh, blood. I drop back into my skin and suck in an arduous gasp.
“Eyelet?” Urlick calls, and I’m falling again, sailing straight into his arms.
But before I reach him, a massive, black, steaming hand reaches out and seizes me by the neck.
Somewhere in the distance, maniacal laughter plays in a continuous crackling loop as the hand rings my neck and chokes me.
Chapter Four
Urlick
I FLY UP THE BACK basement hallway, meeting Masheck halfway. His arms are piled high with medical supplies.
“What’s going on?” Masheck says. “What’s the matter?”
I stagger to a stop.
“How’s Eyelet? He hasn’t hurt her, has he?” His brows fiercely knit.
“I…I don’t know, exactly.” I pace, raking my fingers through my hair. Doubt comes crashing in. What have I done? Have I made the right decision?
“What do you mean, you don’t know?” Masheck searches through the darkness. “Where is the old man?”
“Gone.”
Masheck nearly drops the supplies. “He’s what?”
“Mysteriously vanished. Right before my eyes.”
“Is he coming back?”
“I don’t know.”
“I told you not to trust him.” Masheck’s jaw sets and he starts back toward the laboratory.
“No, don’t.” I catch him by the arm, my fingers digging roughly. I’ve not realized my own strength. It’s as if someone else—something else—controls my movements. I unclench my hand and stare down at it. “He sent me to stoke the fire.”
“It’s already stoked.”
“A bigger fire.”
Masheck stares into my eyes. “What happened back there in that room?” He jerks his head toward it.
“Nothing,” I say, too quickly. My good cheek warms.
Masheck tightens his sceptical look.
“Look, he warned me to never talk about it. Ever. So please don’t ask me. Now will you help me with this fire or not?”
Concern escalates in his eyes. For a breath, I fear he’s going to refuse me. “Fine.” he relents.
I slap his back, steer him around the corner, then gallop up the stairs.
“It has to be hot,” I say. “Extremely hot. Hot enough to melt sand.”
“Sand? But that’s impossible.”
“Trust me, from what I’ve seen, ‘impossible’ is not in the alchemist’s vocabulary.”
Together we race through the alabaster lobby and out the other side, through the parlour, and into the Great Hall.
The hearth is freestanding, perched in the center of the room toward the back. A massive structure, it stands at least twice a normal ceiling height. Cut from white stone, the arch over the top of the hearth features a pair of lion’s heads that jut out from either side. A bouquet of dying flowers fills the space between them. Embers crackle and pish past the lion’s heads, floating up toward the elaborately painted coved ceiling, sporting a scene of a heavenly hunt. The lions seem to snap at the embers on their way past, as they glow and rise in a winding spectacle of fading light. The whole vision is both alluring and disturbing.
I swallow down the ball of fear that rises in my throat and pull to a winded stop, searching the area for firewood.
“There!” Masheck points toward an odd seam in the wall behind the hearth.
I look to him, perplexed.
He drops the supplies he’s carrying and hurries to the wall, pressing his palms against a strange coloured stone. He releases the pressure, which activates some sort of mechanism that grinds and churns as the stone pops back into place. Slowly, enigmatically, a portion of the wall about six healthy strides wide trundles back on creaky casters and, with soothsaying divinity, the wall sinks into the floor.
I falter backward, clutching my heart, casting Masheck a baffled look. “You discovered this how?”
“Quite by accident, actually.” His voice lilts. “I leaned on it.” He demonstrates, tossing me an embarrassed grin.
“And to close it again?”
Masheck bounds over to the remaining partition of wall. “You just straighten this picture ‘ere.” He reaches up to the Monet hanging somewhat cockeyed next to the missing chunk of wall, then hesitates. “You’d better clear outta the way.” He waves me over.
I hustle left, and he straightens the Monet.
A spine-jolting clunk follows.
An orchestra of turbines clack and twist and fall into place, and the wall shoots back up again. The sides of my jacket are fanned open and my hair tossed back on its great, gusty draft.
“Amazing.” I stare up at where the opening had been.
“It is, isn’t it?” Masheck leans on the wallpaper again, and the wall submerges with a great thunderous whoosh. “Almost as good as somethin’ I’d make.” He smirks.
“Let’s not get carried away now.” I wink and pat his back.
Masheck’s haughty expression fades to a scowl.
I examine the threshold where the wall has sunk, and then the sides of the now divided wall. “It’s not going to eat me or anything if I step inside here, is it?”
“No, as long as you don’t step right there.” He tosses a fire poker onto a suspiciously high piece of floorboard, crooked up at the centre of the opening. The floorboard snaps up like the jaws of a steel trap, pinning the poker to the sidewall.
“I see. And how did you discover that one?”
“I didn’t.” Masheck gulps. “Not ‘till just now. High thievery in firewood perhaps?”
“Perhaps.”
We share an awkward, thankful look, and descend upon the woodpile, hurriedly getting to work.
The woodpile extends from the floor to the top of the fifteen-foot ceiling, and the wood crypt is piled three logs deep. “We don’t dare pull logs out from the middle of the heap or we’ll destabilize the pile.” I peer up. “But how on earth will we ever reach the top?”
“We don’t ‘ave to. Watch.” Masheck reaches out, frees a small boom from the recessed sidewall, and yanks it toward him. A rope and pulley hoist unravels from the ceiling in a long loop of sling-like chains. A small platform is anchored to its bottom of them all, like the seat of a child’s swing. He steps out onto it; tests it for strength, then reaches over to the wall and plunges down a lever.
An engine whirs inside the adjacent wall as a giant steel pulley activates. Slowly, flywheels propel a series of chains, and he’s drawn slowly upward toward the ceiling, perfectly balanced on the flat board swing.
“Goodness,” I gasp.
“I know, right?”
Uncannily, it stops level with the top layer of piled wood, dangling him within perfect reach of the closest log.
I squint. “How does it know to—?”
“I’ve no idea.” Masheck hangs onto the chains, cockily crosses his ankles. “Send up the belt, will yuh?”
I yank on a second chain and a wide cloth sling rises into the air, again, stopping miraculously in front of Masheck. He fills the sling with wood then tugs it twice to send it back down. Masheck lowers himself back to the floor, and together we take armloads of wood from the wall to the front of the stone hearth and begin to stoke the fire. Several trips later, we’ve created a monstrous flame. Orange tongues lick the mouth of the hearth and climb the massive throat flue. I stand back, admiring the roaring flames.
“That should about do it?” Masheck dusts off his hands.
“Let’s hope so.” I draw in a shaky breath, watching.
“Excellent.” The alchemist appears, as if by magic, at our backs.
Startled, we wheel around.
He floats over to us at what seems an impossible speed for his enfeebled state, his cloak fluttering out at his sides like a pair of falcon’s wings, a long metal hook in one hand. I wonder what he plans to do with it.
“Here.” He hands the hook to me and shoves back his sleeves, revealing his white, bony arms. “We’ve not a moment to waste.” He moves toward the fire, leaning so close, I’m afraid he’ll set his cloak ablaze.
“Where is the silica, the lime, the soda ash?” He turns back to us, his weathered cheeks flushed as if burning.
“Over there.” Masheck cocks his head toward the bucket of materials, then glances at me, a growing distrust in his eyes.
“I will need a metal trough. An iron one,” The alchemist says. “Strong enough to withstand great heat.” His eyes are dark and strangely changing. He turns back to the fire and stretches out an arms. His fingers thread through the flames.
Masheck glares at me.
“R-r-right.” I wheel around and head for the kitchen, still stunned.
Masheck follows, jogging. “Did you see that?”
“Yes.”
“What is he doing?” he hisses at my heels.
“I don’t profess to know.” I look back at the alchemist, who is leaning even more dangerously close to the flame.
“And yet you’re helping him?” Masheck studies me.
“It’s for Eyelet. Not for me.” I stare at him. “We need to co-operate. For Eyelet.” I turn, bolt through the door of the pantry and begin combing the kitchen.
“But—”
“He’s all we’ve got, Masheck,” I shout over the clatter as I clear a cookery shelf of its pans.
Masheck drops his doubting eyes to the floor. “Here,” I snap. “Help me with this, will you?” I toss aside another standing shelf of cooking pots and lids. “Grab an end.” I wrench the cook’s cauldron out from its position next to the wall. Its iron feet ring loudly. Together we haul it, feet screaming over the stone floors, out of the kitchen and into the other room.
Soleil Page 3
