Aether Spark

by Nicholas Petrarch

  “Still,” Margarete said wistfully, sitting up. “I would have liked to learn some things in a school, I think.” She smiled, though her eyes were moist. “Life might have been kinder, you know?”

  Chance returned to the couch and sat down beside her, wrapping her in an embrace. He held her there for a moment, a quiet understanding passing between them. It was still surreal how a woman so much older, and with such a strong exterior, would turn so soft in his presence.

  Without her walls, Margarete was a rare pearl. Selfishly, he hoped she’d always stay that way—that the dream would last forever.

  Eventually, however, Margarete made to stand.

  “Don’t go yet,” Chance pleaded.

  “I should. My girls will need me tonight,” she said. “And besides, if I stay too long we might cause more of a scandal than we already do.”

  Chance watched as she slipped back into her dress. She smoothed down the front, tugging at the laces until it fit just right.

  “I don’t care what people think of me,” Chance said as she retrieved her purse and checked herself in the mirror.

  Placing a hand on his cheek, she tilted her head and looked into his eyes. “Yes, you do. We all do. But it’s nice, isn’t it? The moments we forget? Thank you for the dye.”

  “Margarete,” Chance said as she was going out. She stopped in the doorway. “You are beautiful.”

  “I know,” she glowed.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Investigations

  An hour in a book can save you a lifetime of disasters repeated.

  — Alchemical Proverb

  S toddard stepped down from the carriage with Donovan close behind. He moved at a quick, agitated clip, forcing the man to break into an awkward jog to keep up. Ever since he’d received the letter, Stoddard just couldn’t move fast enough.

  “I forgot to mention, we received a request earlier from a Master Arden,” Donovan said as they entered the morgue. “He mentioned you’d given him permission to come speak with you, but I wasn’t certain.”

  “Yes,” Stoddard remembered. He’d forgotten all about the boy since his luncheon the day before. “Inform him I’ll meet with him at his convenience, but after I’ve had time to sort through this mess. But don’t use that word—mess.”

  “Yes, sir. Shall I just call it what everyone else is?”

  Stoddard cringed. The city had already taken to calling it the second miracle. He nodded, but made no effort to look pleased.

  “You don’t think it was a miracle?” Donovan asked.

  “The miracle will be if we’re able to get to the bottom of whatever actually happened.”

  They approached the desk where a young woman greeted them. “Good morning, Doctor Stoddard,” she said in a pleasing voice. “It’s so good to see you again. How can I help you?”

  “I need the records for Captain Harper,” Stoddard said. “All of them.”

  The girl hesitated a second, but nodded before retreating into the back room.

  “Sir, if I may,” Donovan said. “Don’t you think you’re being overly concerned about all of this? Isn’t fortune turning in your favor?”

  “I never trust things out of my control,” Stoddard explained. “No matter how favorable they may seem.”

  He glanced down and noticed the visitor’s board behind the desk. Picking it up, he leafed through it to the day Harper’s body was brought in. “As expected,” he sighed.

  “Sir?”

  “It’s empty.” Stoddard handed the board to Donovan. “Not a single visitor from the time he was brought in to the time he was discovered.”

  “You expected someone?”

  “No,” he said. “Not necessarily.”

  But then he paused. There had been someone that night. They’d passed him on the steps. He’d been walking as though he were about to enter, but he’d paused when they’d come out.

  “The record has been tampered with.”

  “Sir?”

  “Do you remember a man that night, as we were getting into the carriage?” Stoddard asked. “An elderly gentleman with a heavy coat?”

  “I don’t recall anyone.”

  “Of course you don’t,” Stoddard frowned. He closed his eyes, rummaging through his memory, trying to conjure an image of the man.

  He was... frail, his face sunken with both age and... illness.

  He could see it. He could hear the stranger’s labored breath on his way up the steps.

  “It’s possible there were no visitors that day,” Donovan suggested, but Stoddard hissed at him to be silent.

  Odd for a sickly man to be wandering alone in the rain so late. He closed his eyes again, beckoning the memory.

  He wore a heavy coat. It hung loose on him, old and tawdry. And it had... pockets. Many pockets. The collar was turned up close against his neck to shield his face...

  His face.

  Stoddard focused harder.

  The man’s eyes, nose, lips, and even his expression of apprehension and fear materialized in Stoddard’s mind.

  “There you are,” he whispered to himself.

  “Here are the recor—” The girl stopped short when she saw Stoddard holding the visitor’s log.”—the records for Captain Harper,” she finished. She set down the documents before Stoddard and smiled as pleasantly as she could. “Was there something you were looking for specifically?”

  “No, thank you,” Stoddard said. “Just being thorough.” He took the papers and flipped through them.

  “If I might say, it was amazing what you were able to do for Captain Harper.”

  “Mmm,” he murmured. “I amaze even myself it seems.”

  As he’d feared, the documents proved useless. No records had been kept in the midst of excitement which might have provided him any insight to the morning when Harper had been discovered.

  But Stoddard wasn’t about to let the facts evade him.

  “It’s interesting to me,” Stoddard noted, “that besides my assistant and myself it shows here there were no visitors to the morgue the night the captain’s body was brought in. And,” he glanced at the woman’s tag, “what good fortune. It seems you were the same attendant that night as well. Ambre, is it? I remember you, now that I think of it. Tell me, there was a man that night. We met on the steps as I was on my way out, but I see no entry in your log that he was here.”

  “A lot of people pass by our building,” she said. “There was no one after you.”

  “Interesting,” Stoddard said. “He seemed quite intent on coming in before we’d gone.”

  “He must have gone on when you left.”

  “Did you observe anything of interest during your shift?”

  “No,” Ambre said quickly.

  Too quickly, Stoddard perceived. “Nothing at all?” he asked.

  “I mean, nothing more than usual,” she tried to clarify. “I mean, it’s quiet here. Not a lot of people come and go. Besides the bodies, I mean.”

  “No, I don’t expect you get many visitors to a morgue so late in the evening.” He set the logbook down on the countertop. “You didn’t observe anything strange about Harper’s body in particular?”

  “No, doctor. It was next shift when he was discovered.”

  “Curious,” he said as he focused again on the file, leafing through a few more papers.

  “What is?” she asked.

  “Curious how these reports don’t match up, Miss Ambre,” Stoddard said, snapping the folder shut. His smile vanished and was replaced with a sneer. “Curious that none of this makes any sense to me. That from the moment I last observed the body of the captain—and I assure you, miss, he was just a body then—to the moment he was discovered alive the next morning there wasn’t a single thing out of place.

  “Stranger yet,” he continued, “considering the pooling of blood and the bruising of the skin which is typical of the recently deceased, is that a body would reanimate after such a long period of time. And yet, Captain Harper walks, eats,
and talks this very moment, the very picture of health, and he has no such bruises or pooling. How do we explain that, miss? Can you shed any light on any of this?”

  “I couldn’t say.” Ambre’s head sunk low.

  “You know,” he laughed, “I don’t believe I’m aware of a single instance throughout all of medical history when such a remarkable scenario has played out so naturally as this.”

  “A testament to your work,” Ambre ventured weakly. She was shaking with the effort to stand.

  “Yes... that’s what everyone is saying,” Stoddard frowned. “Do you know why I practice clockwork mechanics, Miss Ambre?”

  She shook her head.

  “Because there is consistency in it. Reliability. It functions precisely as its designer intends it to. Yet, here it seems to have taken on a function of its own. It’s quite unbelievable, wouldn’t you agree?”

  Ambre fidgeted. “Yes, doctor.”

  “I thought you might. Well, you have been most unhelpful, Miss Ambre,” Stoddard said, emphasizing her name one last time. “I’ll be keeping these records for a time. Please make a note of that fact for those who will relieve you.”

  Tossing the file into his briefcase, Dr. Stoddard snapped it shut and bid a final farewell to Miss Ambre.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Ashworth’s Summons

  All things are frustrating before they are understood.

  — Alchemical Proverb

  C hance?” Rhett said, poking gingerly at Chance’s shoulder.

  Chance stirred begrudgingly under his blanket and mumbled something unintelligible before turning over on the couch.

  “Chance!”

  “Rhett,” he groaned. “If you want to make it to the end of your apprenticeship you better not be here when I open my eyes.”

  “But you promised!” Rhett urged. “You said we’d get to fix my flying machine today.”

  Chance cracked his eyes open, blinking in the light that spilled through the window. It struck him like glass dust and he squeezed them shut to dispel the crusty morning haze. An empty bottle fell out of his blanket, clattering on the floor as it rolled away.

  Goodness did his head ache.

  “Shouldn’t you be helping Ashworth?” he mumbled.

  “He isn’t here.”

  Chance rocked up into a sitting position on the side of the couch. “You have your regular chores. Why not get to those?”

  “I already did them.”

  “Really?” Chance cast him a doubtful look.

  “Some of them,” Rhett confessed.

  “Well then, finish the rest. Ashworth will be back in a while and he’ll have something else for you to do.”

  “But...” Rhett’s pep was failing.

  Chance’s eyes narrowed. “What are you trying to get out of, Rhett?”

  “Ashworth said that we were going to clean the laboratory today. I thought if you had something for me to do then...”

  Chance smiled despite his hangover. Now things were beginning to make sense. “Ashworth would have to do it all by himself,” he concluded.

  “No,” Rhett insisted, folding his arms. “We could do it another day.”

  Chance smiled despite the pain in his head. There would be no appeasing the boy now that he’d gotten his hopes up. He’d be altogether useless until he was satisfied.

  “Alright,” Chance conceded. “Go grab your machine and we’ll take a look at it before Ashworth gets back. But, once he does, you’re his for the rest of the day.”

  They set up in the kitchen, leaving the door open to enjoy the fresh air coming in. As they set about removing each piece it became clear the flying machine was more complicated than it appeared. Inside were a series of tiny gears and levers which needed to be synchronized, or it’d throw off everything when the wings caught the breeze.

  Soon, without realizing it, an hour had passed. And then two. They stripped and reassembled the contraption time and time again. It didn’t help that Rhett got bored and distracted himself playing with the pieces. It made keeping track of what went where a real headache. Every so often, Chance sent Rhett off to fetch a tool he needed. Soon they’d nearly relocated the entire toolshed.

  “Where did that lever go? And where in this forsaken world did this come from?” Chance fumed, holding a tiny screw in his fingers as he examined the underbelly of the machine.

  “I dunn’o,” Rhett sighed, poking at his rat. He was at his limit.

  “Would you run and grab me the box of scrap from my workshop? It should be by the sink.”

  “Where?”

  “Never mind,” Chance said, getting up. “I’ll get it.”

  He needed the stretch. His legs were almost asleep and he shook them out as he walked. Unsurprisingly, the scrap wasn’t where it should have been. He turned the place upside down, shuffling the mess around from one place to another. After a few minutes, he stood exasperated in the middle of the room.

  “That’s it,” he conceded. “I’m cleaning you before the week is out.”

  Finally, after he’d turned over most of the room, he spotted the box nestled under the corner of his couch and snatched it up.

  “Find it?” Rhett asked when he returned.

  “Yeah.” Chance selected a tiny gear and tested the fit to the piece he’d been missing.

  “Those came while you were out,” Rhett said, pointing to a crate of tinctures in the corner.

  “Want to put them in Ashworth’s lab for me?” Chance asked.

  “They’re too heavy.”

  “Then how did you bring them inside?” Chance asked. Then he noticed the scratches across the floor. Sure enough, they led all the way down the hallway. “Never mind. I’ve got it.”

  He picked up the crate and carried it to Ashworth’s laboratory. Rhett was right, it was almost too heavy even for Chance. Carefully turning the doorknob so as not to lose the crate, he opened the door and set the supplies down by Ashworth’s workbench.

  The lab was definitely in need of a thorough cleaning. It wasn’t cluttered like Chance’s, but the residues and spills from countless years had collected so that there were few surfaces that didn’t have some substance caked to them.

  He was about to leave when he noticed one of Ashworth’s notebooks on the ground, its pages crinkled underneath. He picked it up and tried to straighten them out a bit.

  Despite himself, he couldn’t resist giving the text a glance while he held it. He wasn’t worried about reading something he wasn’t supposed to. Like many alchemist’s notebooks, large portions of each page were written in cypher. Alchemist spent years during their apprenticeships developing their own unique cypher to safeguard their research from prying eyes.

  Thieving secrets wasn’t exactly a common practice anymore, but the cyphers were still used. It was just one of the unwritten rules: alchemists dealt in secrets.

  He glanced over Ashworth’s cypher, looking for any similarities he’d inherited when he’d devised his own. There were some common symbols, but he couldn’t remember if he’d copied Ashworth for those or not.

  He did find one mark though—a precede. It symbolized the section was written out of order and that the rest of the passage was found earlier in the notebook. Flipping through, he tried to locate the connected passage. It was difficult, since he didn’t know how the mark would pair itself. He assumed it would mimic the pen strokes, but after a few minutes he gave up trying. Ashworth’s cypher had been developed over a lifetime. He wouldn’t crack it at a glance.

  He set the notebook down on the workbench and bumped square into Ashworth as he turned to go. His sudden appearance gave Chance a shock and he let out a cry of alarm.

  “Ashworth!”

  Ashworth looked a little shaken as well. He recovered quickly, however, looking a little amused by it. His eyes fell on the notebook.

  “Your orders came just now,” Chance tried to explain. “I was just putting the crate in your laboratory for you.”

  “And to do that,
you felt you needed to peruse my journal?” Ashworth asked.

  “It was lying on the floor. I didn’t read anything impor… what’s wrong with your arm?” Chance looked with concern at the bandage wrapped around the length of Ashworth’s forearm.

  “This?” Ashworth asked, as though he were only then noticing it. “Oh, this is nothing. Just a scratch.”

  “What happened?” Chance asked. “And where have you been? Rhett and I were worried about you. You didn’t even leave a note.”

  “I’m sorry about that,” Ashworth said, “but it couldn’t be helped. Something came up and I’ve been quite busy. By the look of things on the table out there it looks like you have been too.”

  “It’s just a toy Ponti found for Rhett. I’m helping him fix it,” Chance shrugged. “I replaced your hartshorn.”

  “Hmm?”

  “The hartshorn.” Chance pointed to a case by Ashworth’s components. “I purchased some to replace what I took last week.”

  “Oh, yes. I’d forgotten all about that,” he said, fetching it off the shelf. He turned the box over in his hands a few times.

  “You heard about Captain Harper then?” Chance asked, trying to sound casual.

  “Yes,” Ashworth smiled, returning the box to the shelf. “Remarkable, isn’t it?”

  “It’s the only thing anyone wants to talk about down at the pub. Well, except Serge. He’s a bit put off by the rumors going around.”

  “Rumors?”

  “About how he came back to life,” Chance explained. “Everyone’s speculating about what happened. I think I agree with Serge though.”

  “And what does Serge think?”

  “He’s convinced that the papers got it wrong—that Harper was never really dead in the first place.”

  “Oh, no,” Ashworth said. “I assure you he was quite dead.”

  His eyes were twinkling, and Chance was getting frustrated.

  “Okay,” Chance said, abandoning his act. “What is it? What do you know? And where in Septigonee’s Well have you been?”