Page 153 of Alchemised
Her suspicion seemed to anger him. Irritation flashed across his face.
She averted her eyes; best not to provoke him again. Given time, he’d be sure to change his mind, to redefine the terms to suit his ends, but in this moment, he wanted to believe he had some kind of moral code, that there were things he was above.
She nodded as if she believed him.
“I have an alchemy knife now,” she said, hoping the change of subject would distract him.
He held out a gloved hand. “Let me see it.”
He took it carefully, his gloves not even grazing her skin. He now seemed overly aware of her.
He inspected the knife, testing the balance. Despite his gloves, the blade morphed, the knife edge spiralling around the inner core.
The purpose was to stab when the blade was flat, transmute, and pull out, leaving a massive wound. The larger a wound, the longer it took the Undying to recover, and the quicker necrothralls were rendered immobile. The blade could also be manipulated into a range of lengths, but that took effort and required familiarity with the idiosyncrasies of the alloy to keep it from being shattered.
Because it was standard-issue, the knife had been forged using lumithium emanations to increase its resonance. That way, alchemists with limited steel resonance could still transmute it. Helena’s natural resonance didn’t need supplementing—it made the alloy resonance feel uneven—but she was assured that she’d get used to it.
“Are you trained with a knife?” he finally asked.
She’d hoped he wouldn’t ask that. “No.”
“You’d do better with something longer, then.” He flipped it in his hand, catching it deftly; slicing through the air, it morphed into a curving blade. “If anything gets close enough for you to use this, you’re already dead.”
The Resistance was not going to give a noncombatant anything but a basic weapon. “But … anything bigger is more noticeable. I’d be more likely to get stopped.”
“Mmm,” was all the answer she got as he transmuted the blade back to its base form.
“Any news about the chimaeras?”
He handed back the knife. “Four are already dead. They don’t tolerate the cold very well.” His mouth twisted with amusement. “Bennet’s in high dudgeon.”
“Where did the animals come from?” Crowther had told her to ask.
“He’s using whatever he can. Domestic animals are the most easily accessed, but larger predators are preferable. I believe there’ve been a few hunting trips into the mountains. There was also the zoo.”
“It seems a lot of work just to have them die in the wetlands.”
Ferron gave an absent shrug. His eyes avoided her, instead looking almost anywhere else in the room. “There’s not much else that they’re good for. They’re not manageable. There are rumours the High Necromancer feels misled about the project’s potential and the resources involved.”
He pulled out an envelope, but rather than handing it over, he set it on the table and left without another word.
It was the same routine for the next several times. Ferron would arrive, occasionally answer a few questions, and then leave. Sometimes he was there for less than five minutes.
There was no more mention of any training. Each time, Helena had to admit to Crowther that she had no progress to report. Ferron’s information continued to be good, but Helena was little more than a glorified mail carrier.
She kept training the other healers, and working in her lab, where she now had an unofficial assistant. Shiseo was a small, balding man with dark eyes. He could read and understand Northern dialect fluently but spoke very little.
He caught on to the techniques of chymiatria quickly but kept to himself, shadowing Helena at a conscientious arm’s length. Helena knew she should appreciate him—after all, she had asked for help—but with the trainees and now a lab assistant, there was nowhere left for her to go where she wasn’t reminded that the accommodations were there because her priority was supposed to be Ferron.
Everything else was theatre now, a cover for a mission she was failing.
FERRON WAS LATE AGAIN. HE was often late, but he’d never left her waiting this long. She dreaded the thought of going back empty-handed, but at least the trip hadn’t been a complete waste of her time.
She’d resumed foraging. The chimaeras had mostly died, and it felt criminal to miss the entire spring harvest. The river was rising, the floodwalls were marked to track the steady creep of Lumithia’s Ascendant phase, and the mountain wind was losing its icy edge, which meant that soon the snowmelt would come rushing into the basin and the wetlands would be left underwater until nearly summer.
She opened her satchel and started sorting her harvest, blinking to concentrate.
She’d been so tired lately. Hospital shifts sometimes left her so exhausted, she could barely make it to her room.
