Page 166 of Alchemised
She let her hand drop, avoiding his accusing glare. “I was ordered not to tell you.”
“And now?” His eyes were narrowed into slits.
“I don’t think it matters. If I don’t do something, you’re going to die.”
“I doubt I’m fortunate enough to manage that,” he said in a dull voice.
She reached out, just barely touching his arm. “Ferron, what’s happened to your back?”
His eyes fluttered closed as if he was too exhausted for the conversation. She could see the black veins even in his eyelids.
“See for yourself,” he finally said, “since you’re so determined.”
Very slowly and carefully she unfastened his cloak and lifted it off. He flinched but didn’t utter a sound. The miasma of old, fetid wounds filled the air as she unfastened the buttons of his shirt. Stepping behind him as gently as she could, she drew the clothing off his shoulders.
There were no bandages underneath. His entire back was a rotting wound, lacerated surgically from his shoulders down past his ribs.
There was an alchemical array carved into his skin.
He inhaled and she could see the white of his ribs, scored with grooves.
The incisions over his shoulders were the worst of it. Not merely cutting to the bone but into the bone, carving into his shoulder blades, a lumithium alloy welded in, bonded with the bone to keep the array intact and activated.
Whatever regenerative abilities Ferron had, it was not enough to counter an injury of this magnitude.
Arrays could be simply illustrative, to record or visually calculate a process, but they were also used for transmutation or alchemisation when the process was too complex for simple resonance manipulation, or when working with organically derived compounds that tended to be volatile. Drawn with chalk or charcoal, or etched into a surface with a stylus. But Helena had never seen anything like what had been done to Ferron.
“Why—” Her voice failed. “—why would they do this to you?”
“Well …” Ferron said slowly, his voice far away. “There were lots of ideas about what to do with me—all manner of punishments were discussed for my—failure. Bennet was put out over losing his lab, all those subjects and experiments of his. He’s been wanting to experiment on one of the Undying. He said that as the one who’d suffered the greatest loss, he should be allowed to punish me.”
He was silent for a moment and added, “The High Necromancer says if I survive, I’ll be forgiven.”
Helena couldn’t tear her eyes away from the wound. The skin around the incisions showed signs of septicaemia. Tendrils of infection were spreading beneath his skin, leaching into his blood.
Too afraid to touch near the array, she placed her hand on his arm. He flinched at the contact. His body was still trying to regenerate, to heal the wounds that made up the array. The nerves were all intact. He had to be in an incomprehensible amount of pain.
She didn’t know where to begin, but she couldn’t just stand there looking at it. She tried to numb the area, to work inwards, but it didn’t last. Anywhere with enough living tissue to numb, his regeneration reversed it. She couldn’t even spare him the pain.
Working as close as she dared, she could feel the metal welded into his shoulders was a lumithium-titanium alloy, its resonance so sharp that Helena could feel it in her teeth. She had no idea how Ferron was even sane while having it adhered to his body.
This was beyond the scope of her abilities, more than anything had ever been before.
“I’m sorry, I can’t heal this.”
He gave a dry laugh. “I know.”
“But—” She swallowed hard, still thinking. “—I think I could help contain it, and reduce the strain it’s putting on you. It might—give you a chance of surviving. That’s the condition, right? If you survive, they won’t do anything else to you.”
Ferron gave no response.
Starting on his left shoulder, she followed the veins with her resonance, her fingertips a breath away from his skin, drawing the blood poisoning back to the incision. Pus and blood that was nearly black trickled down across his back. She used the corner of a handkerchief to wipe it away as gently as she could, to keep it from getting into the other wounds.
Ferron’s whole body shook, and he gave a soundless rasp.
“What are you doing?” he ground out through his teeth.
“These incisions are poisoning you. You’ve been dying and your body is pulling resources from everywhere it can to regenerate and revive you, but it’s running out of places to draw from. This is like when you lost your arm. You couldn’t regenerate until you stopped bleeding. If you want to recover, we have to deal with this infection and work backwards from there.”
