Page 60 of Alchemised
The paper arrived with her next meal.
It featured a photograph of Ferron and Aurelia’s kiss on the cover. For all the world, they looked like a happy young couple, especially since the black-and-white photo made Ferron appear more human than he was in person. His hand was resting on his wife’s waist, and her embellished fingers were curved up around his shoulder as if she were clinging to him.
It looked romantic and delightfully celebratory.
The article made no references to Ferron murdering a family for his guests’ entertainment, as if it wasn’t even notable.
The next page had a picture of the High Reeve executing several more “insurgents.” Apparently in anticipation of the new year, public executions had been held on all eight days of the week leading up to the solstice.
There was also an article about the repopulation program “showing promise.”
Ferron arrived that afternoon to check Helena’s memories. It hadn’t happened since before the latest transference, as if he’d been waiting for her brain to recover enough to handle the intrusion.
He was disinterested in what he found aside from the moment that Lancaster had entered her room. He watched the encounter over and over, forcing Helena to repeatedly relive the abject mortification of her thoughtless relief when he’d stormed in. He took no interest in Aurelia’s affair, and when he encountered the conversation between Aurelia and her father, he chuckled as he broke the connection with Helena’s mind.
If he had eyes and necrothralls all throughout the house, there was likely little he didn’t know.
He pulled out a vial of the small white tablets. Helena cringed at the thought of the withdrawal but opened her mouth obediently.
In a matter of minutes, every feeling within her was gone; she felt placid as a frozen lake.
“That will be the last one,” he said before he left.
Helena resolved to explore the remainder of the house. She’d yet to venture into the east wing, and after such a large party there was a chance that something useful to her might have been left out.
She slipped through the house, listening carefully for the sound of Aurelia’s heels on the wood floor, starting on the top storey and making her way down. The east wing was not a mirror of the west wing but similar enough that Helena almost felt as though she’d already explored it.
The servant from the previous night was following her once again.
As Helena explored the main floor, the servant paused to close the door, and Helena noticed that a large door across the way had been left ajar.
That was unusual. Locked or unlocked, the doors were almost always closed.
On impulse, Helena made a lunge, darting through the door and slamming it behind her. There was a lock on the inside, and she twisted it an instant before the knob rattled.
If she weren’t drugged, her heart would be racing.
She knew she had minutes at best before the key would be retrieved, so she turned away, eager to experience the freedom of exploring on her own and hopefully finding something she wasn’t intended to.
There was a switch on the wall. A dusty chandelier overhead came to life, the bulbs humming, barely illuminating the room. The lights flickered unsteadily, casting shadows that scrabbled across the floor like rats.
She was standing in a large drawing room. The windows were covered, not merely curtained but boarded up, and the smell of dust and metal and something uncomfortably organic lingered in the air. There was a pungent metallic ozone scent that she could taste on her tongue, a thick sensation caused by heavy alchemy use. When resonance was channelled deeply, the air itself was left with traces of the transmutation.
It had been a long time since she’d encountered a smell like that.
She couldn’t help but feel that the heaviness about the house was stronger in that room.
There was a large cage welded into the floor, gleaming when the light flickered; the bulb filaments gave soft buzzing clicks each time.
She approached cautiously. The cage was too narrow for an animal but slightly shorter than Helena. A prisoner would be forced to huddle inside it.
It was iron, but roughly wrought, made with manual smithing not alchemy, which meant the iron was probably inert, not transmutable at all. She touched it, feeling the rough telltale traits that no alchemist would leave behind.
A pattern on the floor beyond caught her attention.
There was an alchemical array carved into the wood. The largest Helena had ever seen.
Transmutational arrays were often simply illustrative, to record processes, but they were also used for transmutation when the process was too complex for simple resonance manipulation. Alchemisation always required the stabilisation of an array. Proprietary arrays were what allowed the guilds to produce alchemical products inside industrial-sized forges.
