by R J Theodore
Glass spheres hung in place of chandeliers at the lowest points of each ceiling arch, filled with churning swarms of glowing duskfey. The tiny creatures rioted within, their uncoordinated bodies hitting the glass as high-pitched taps and pings. The bulbs swung and shuddered from the chaotic movements, bringing them perilously close to the teetering stacks of boxes and books.
Along the inner wall, a horizontal rod was mounted just in front of an air-cycling unit. Dyed silk ribbons draped over it, waving and fluttering about in a frenzied dance as the natural heat of Lippen blew into the room. Equally frenzied, a calico kitten flapped its furry, oversized wings in an attempt to move as erratically as the strands did, determined to catch them all at once. The fluffy little creature was in heaven, and the ribbons were doomed.
Talis craned her neck to take in all the features and contents of the lab, though her mind failed to conceive purposes for everything she saw. Sophie kept her focus on Dug’s bed, unimpressed with the impossible mess around them. This was the lab where she once secretly worked for Kirna. Talis understood, now, why Sophie hadn’t feared being discovered by Amos. There were plenty of places to hide.
From a low set of rafters above the deepest part of the room hung an ancient air vehicle, its frame fabricated from long thin bones of some creature Talis could not identify. Straps for securing a body to the frame hung from a pair of rusty turbines. The center sagged, pulling on the hinged wings covered in large pale gray feathers. Or perhaps the feathers were once white. Difficult to say given the thick layer of dust. Talis tried not to imagine someone actually using the thing.
Rope led from the vehicle’s center of gravity to a fulcrum on the rafter above. From there it was tied, with dubious knot work, to the skeleton of a large upright reptile on display in the back corner. Several of its bones appeared to be crafted from paper paste, paler than the yellowed segments around them.
Pulling her attention back from the rickety craft and its fragile anchor, Talis almost walked into a shelf crowded with tall green glass bottles. The paper label affixed to the edge read ‘Corrosives: Wear Gloves and Goggles’ while the shelf below read ‘Wine For The Governor.’ Perhaps Amos had more of a sense of humor than Sophie had managed to convey. At least, Talis hoped it was meant to be humorous. But if that reflected his sense of humor or, worse yet, if it weren’t a joke . . .
She opened her mouth to ask, but Sophie caught her eye and shook her head.
The question was forgotten at the next turn anyway. They reached the far end of the long room. Tanks of murky green water climbed the wall. A series of filters buzzed beside them, a single generator strained to keep a crank-motor pump running. Behind a coat of algae slime on the inside of the glass, shadowed outlines of creatures barely moved. Talis recognized the silhouette of a sky skimmer, floating sideways in its tank, apparently having lost the use of its portside fins.
Kirna pushed Dug’s bed to a clear spot on the left wall and got him situated again. She fetched new drip stands and monitors and reconnected the tubes to his arms. As she worked, she threw furtive glances over her shoulder toward a glass-paned door in the opposite wall. The laboratory equipment blocked Talis’s view of what was beyond, but she could see a healthy, verdant light through its upper windows.
Kirna reconnected the last of the tubes to its needle in Dug’s arm, then stood back.
“There, then. I guess the only thing left to do is go find—”
A scuffle erupted, somewhere out of sight beyond a contraption that looked like a coin sorter crossed with a water fountain. It stood on ribbed metal legs that reminded Talis of the scaled foot of an enormous chicken. She saw the glass doors open, folding back against the wall with a clatter.
“Kiiirnaa!” The Rakkar girl emitted a small yelp as the gravelly voice boomed from beyond the wall of equipment, getting closer. “Girl, you forgot to feed the star sharks again, and now they’ve ruined another one of my coats!”
A wiry man rounded the corner, dressed in a white lab coat buttoned high beneath the hard plating of his chin. The sleeves were buckled tight at the elbow, above his chitin forearms. The edges of a tear in one sleeve were red with fresh blood. Over the coat he wore a brown leather apron that looked to have been in his employ since before Kirna was born. It was scuffed and stained, and the straps that held it around his neck were knotted, frayed, and re-knotted. Beneath these he wore dun work pants, and a pair of black ankle-high leather boots whose toes were seared and puckered from contact with acids.
The man stopped short, the admonishment interrupted by the sight of unexpected company. He adjusted the spectacles clamped on the bridge of his rigid, spiny nose.
“Kirna.” His tone demanded an answer.
She hurried forward, arms out as though to fend off an attack from the slender alchemist. He stood with hands clasped behind his back to await the girl’s explanation.
“Professor, these are my friends. Sophie, Tisker there, that’s Captain Talis. And this is Dug. He needs medical attention. Blood fever, possible foreign material involved.”
Amos squinted at Talis. “Is that my sweater?”
Talis self-consciously moved one hand to cover the opposite wrist where a portion of the sleeve had been singed before the clothing came into her possession.
Kirna went on, ignoring the question, and pressed her case. “The hospital staff don’t know what they’re doing. A Bone doctor treated him right after it happened, but I think there’s foreign, ensorcelled matter in the wound, and you know the hospital staff are really only trained for the mundane. I told Sophie you could help.”
The professor’s frown deepened, creasing the corners of his mouth. He stepped past Kirna, moving to Dug’s side. He put a hand against the wrappings, frowned, and then took Dug’s pulse. Dug tolerated the examination without complaint. His eyelids were drooping, and he did not seem to have the strength to argue. Amos considered the drip bags and, with sharp tugs and irritated muttering, disconnected two of the five, letting the needles dangle so that droplets of Dug’s blood and the bags’ contents made small puddles on the ornately tiled floor.
“Kirna,” he said, and Talis wondered at how many different ways he could say the girl’s name. The assistant appeared at his side quick as a bolt of lightning. “Tea.”
Her shoulders slumped, but she scurried off, leaving Talis and the others with her mentor.
“The original wound—deep puncture with a ragged blade. This man was victim of a stabbing,” he said, a certain tone in his voice that felt like an invitation to explain.
Sophie worked her lips silently, a not-quite-smirk cutting grimly across her face.
“There was an assassination attempt,” Talis admitted.
“Is your friend mixed up in something I should know about?”
Talis let out a short bark of ironic laughter. “Remember the fuss at Nexus two years ago?”
Amos stopped what he was doing and scanned their faces with a critical eye. “Am I to understand you were involved?”
“Might even be at fault,” Talis confessed. “Haven’t quite figured out who shoulders more of the blame: the Veritors, the Yu’Nyun, the Five, or us.”
“Come on, Captain,” Sophie started, but the argument died on her lips at a look from Amos. “Well. We mostly got it sorted.”
“Sorted,” Amos said, the word loaded with a scoff. “If that’s what you call it.”
He poked and prodded at Dug some more, then stood back. “Other than the infection, the surgical repair work appears to be holding with no further internal damage. Unfortunate, as I will have to reopen the wound to extract the inflammatory objects. His healing should proceed more quickly after. He should begin a regimen of stretches and exercises to regain strength and flexibility. He won’t recover if his muscles atrophy any further. I don’t know what he’s been eating, but from his muscle tone, I would venture that he needs more protein and l
ess porridge.”
Talis looked at Dug laying on the bed. He blinked slowly, losing the battle to stay conscious. But he nodded at the professor’s words.
A Bone man wasn’t meant to lie still. If he didn’t get full range and strength back, he might as well have been allowed to die in the street when he was stabbed.
“We can pay you for his treatment,” Talis said, once Dug gave up and fell asleep.
Amos made a snuffing sound but said nothing. Moving away from Dug’s gurney, he stripped off his apron and shrugged out of the stained coat. Beneath, he wore a gray dress shirt and a satin waistcoat. A silver watch chain caught the light above as the alchemist moved about.
Kirna returned with a teapot and five cups on an ornate silver tray as Amos examined the wound in his own arm and then selected a fresh white coat and apron from a tall wooden locker.
“Kirna, you’ll assist me in fishing out the items and installing a drain for the infected tissues.” He ignored the tea he’d asked for.
She put the tray on a nearby table and nodded to Talis, Tisker, and Sophie as a silent invitation to partake, then scooped her own fresh coat and apron out of another locker.
At a basin of clear liquid, Amos paused to dip his arms up to the elbows. Whatever the liquid was, it sublimated to a vapor that rose from his chitin plating as he held his hands aloft to dry. Kirna buckled the straps on her sleeves to keep them from sliding down over her tough forearms. Then she repeated Amos’s movements in the liquid and followed him to Dug’s side. In his sleep, Dug’s forehead creased with discomfort he would never have allowed to show while awake.
“Oh, we’re doing this now?” Talis felt a lurching in her stomach and swallowed against something moving up her throat.
Sophie tugged at her shoulder, and Talis followed her to the table, thankful for an excuse to turn her back on the business about to happen.
Sophie sipped at the tea, making a face as the hot liquid hit her tongue, and put the cup down again. “Maybe we should go find us a place to stay tonight. So we’re close by.”
Talis shuddered to think of sleeping beneath the volcano again. Once she’d boarded Im Ufite Rantor, she’d assumed somehow she would never have to sleep landlocked again. But to leave Dug here was as unthinkable and judging from the worrying murmurs that could be heard from Dug’s bedside, he would not be walking back aboard their ship that night. She would stay at Dug’s side and force her stomach and her anxiety to behave. She owed him that, and more. “You two go ahead. But just the one night. We need to get back to Cutter skies.”
“Oh, don’t bother,” Kirna said, looking over her shoulder as she swabbed the fluids from Amos’s work. “You can stay here tonight. There’s a room upstairs. I’ll clear it out after this.”
Tisker looked at Talis who shrugged. The high ceilings of Amos’s laboratory, cluttered as he kept them, were a grand improvement over the rest of Lippen’s offerings, as far as she’d seen.
“We’ll go fetch some things from the ship,” Sophie said, and the two of them retreated through the towering piles, leaving Talis on watch.
Talis took a deep breath to steel herself and turned back to watch the procedure. From this distance, and with the two of them hovering over him, she could see very little. The noises resulting from their work were rather juicy, though.
She focused on the background noises of the tank filters, the air circulator above, and the scuff of Kirna’s feet on the tile as she moved in a flurry around Amos. Aware again of the porcelain cup gripped tightly between her fingers, she placed it back on its saucer. She couldn’t focus on drinking it, though its spices were biting and might have soothed the roiling in her stomach.
Talis imagined for a moment that Dug might wake again and shoot upright. Talis had woken him twice in the entire span of their friendship and, each time, had been forced to defend against an instinctive blow. But he was so weak from his injuries and so stifled by the hospital’s cocktail of pharmaceuticals that he only turned his head side to side against the pillow. Kirna held a damp cloth to his forehead and shushed him with comforting whispers until he lay still again. Amos probed another area beneath Dug’s stitches before nodding and placing a finger on one spot. Kirna wheeled out a cart arranged with neat rows of scalpels, forceps, needles, suturing thread, flexible tubes, clamps, swabs, and gauze.
Talis felt dizzy and put a steadying hand on the table.
Sophie trusts Kirna, she reminded herself.
As they made a new incision in his stomach, Talis saw an unhealthy thick liquid ooze from the site. Her throat felt as though it were narrowing. Swallowing wouldn’t clear it. Water rose at the back of her mouth, and she decided to take a walk around the lab to clear her head. Try to anyway.
As she wandered around the aisles of terrariums, she got a closer look at some of Amos’s work. A blue-green pygmy frond wyrm sat atop the red legs of a sand toad. A blind tunnel mole blinked at her with the clear eyes of a zepherion ferret, the patchwork eyelids still rimmed with silver fur. Now she understood why Amos was better stocked for surgery than a fully operational hospital. She averted her gaze and returned to the makeshift medical theater, trying to unsee the hybridized animals and their mismatched limbs. At least the sutures on the unfortunate creatures appeared perfect, with precise, well-healed and barely visible scars.
With a clink of metal against glass, Amos dropped a blood-soaked metal ball into a dish atop the rolling tray at Dug’s side. Talis stepped to where she could see the object but remain out of their way. It was round and smooth, like a marble, about the right size to have once been housed in the notches of the assassin’s knife blade. Thick blood traced channels carved in its surface, in patterns that she recognized instantly: alchemy.
Chapter 30
Amos turned away from where Dug lay among blood-soiled linens, leaving Kirna to clean up and secure a bandage around the drain they’d installed. A pleased expression creased the softer portions of his face.
“We have extracted the foreign objects,” he reported to Talis. She’d seen for herself, but she nodded anyway. It was good news, and she’d listen to it over and over again. “The infection was the effect of the alchemical interference, and now that the curses have been removed, he will mend as quickly as a Bone body ought to. We will supplement the healing with life alchemy, and he can begin physical therapy after a day or so of bedrest.”
“Thank you, Professor.” Despite her misgivings about the man’s career choice, she meant it. She knew alchemists were unorthodox, to say the least, but it took one to reverse the effects of another. There might yet be worse secrets tucked away around the piles of books and intimidating machinery, any number of which would mean a heap of trouble if the wrong person knew about them. Unorthodox. Illegal. Heretical. Talis hardly cared. The pair had saved Dug’s life.
And it was what she wanted, anyway: to find Dug a proper doctor. Bless Sophie five times for her relationship with Kirna. And bless Kirna five times for her enthusiasm.
Amos washed up again, then stripped off the blood-stained lab coat and dropped it into the same hamper where his earlier coat and apron were discarded.
“Did Sophie or Kirna tell you about the solution we found on the Yu’Nyun ships?”
“Kirna mentioned it. I will prepare tests to determine the makeup.” The blood on his sleeve was dry, and he probed the arm beneath with a thoughtful look. After a moment, he turned back to Talis, adjusting his spectacles. “Tell me, what you claimed earlier—your involvement in the events that took place at Nexus—is this true? You were there?”
“We were.” Of course Amos would want to know about that. The Divine Alchemists. Talis and her crew had witnessed their powers up close, in a way that most Peridot citizens would never see. Full out battle, putting everything they had up against the Yu’Nyun starships. It had done them no good.
“Silus Cutter. Is this also true? You seem
to have suffered no ill effects.”
Talis hated to admit it, but Hankirk had been right. Though the Cutter god was dead, flotsam spun on as if nothing happened. She nodded. “The aliens killed him before we ever knew they were here.”
“What about Onaya Bone?”
“She lives,” Talis said. She noticed he didn’t ask about Arthel Rak, his own god. “But she’s lost her powers, and she’s stuck in the body of a raven. Saw her the other day, in fact. Still acts self-righteous, even if she’s all but mortal.”
“Our greatest deterring factor is now mortal?” Amos chortled lightly and turned to Kirna who was finishing with the clean-up. “It appears our discretion is no longer required.”
Kirna grinned at him as she finished tucking new sheets around Dug, and said, “That’s going to increase competition.”
Talis snorted in amusement. “Not sure I’d call the alchemists of Lippen ‘discreet’.”
A wrinkle tugged at the corner of Amos’s mouth. His black eyes sparkled with humor, but he waved a hand dismissively. “Within the rock, it hasn’t been as necessary. But if she is trapped in a corporeal form, we no longer need to take as many precautions to avoid her wrath. It will bring down the cost of crating and padding our wares significantly.”
Amos finally poured himself tea, then paused to frown at the lack of steam from his cup.
He placed it down again, and Kirna read his meaning. She stripped off her surgical gear, collected the tea effects, and rushed off to refresh them.
Amos clasped his hands behind his back. “Captain Talis, I would like to discuss payment for your crewman’s treatment.”
