Page 80 of Alchemised
He released a huffing breath, as if suppressing a laugh.
“Are you wanting a confession?” he finally asked. “Shall I tell you everything I’ve done?”
She could only make out the vaguest shape of him, crouched in front of her. His breathing was still strained as he held her upright.
She wondered then if they’d paused there so she could recover, or so he could. The dose of laudanum she’d taken had eased the pain splintering her head.
A question rose to her lips, and she felt as if it was vital that she ask. She leaned forward, trying to see his face. “Do you want to?”
He was silent for a long moment, and then stood without answering, pulling her to her feet. Her body was half numb, and he had to nearly carry her the rest of the way to the motorcar.
In the light, she found she was covered in putrefied remains, rotted blood and gore smeared around her clothes and hands. All the necrothralls were watching as Ferron pulled her over to the car, handing her off to one of his own servants, letting it strip off her dress and wrap her in a wool lap cloth. She collapsed across the back seat.
Ferron sat up front. When the motorcar emerged from the tunnel, she was almost blinded by the vivid white of the overcast sky, but she managed to make out his profile. He was slumped forward, eyes closed. Pale as death.
IT TOOK TWO DAYS BEFORE Helena could see reliably, and three before she could sit up without feeling dizzy. She tried to read but the words swam, leaving her with nothing but her thoughts to preoccupy her.
One the third day, one of the maids brought a tray of porridge to her bed. She looked at it, meeting the cloudy blue eyes.
“Ferron, will you come here?”
The maid stared at her, and then looked away, leaving without acknowledgement, but that evening as she was picking at her dinner, the door opened and Ferron entered.
“You called?” His tone was sardonic.
“I had a question I wanted to ask you,” she said, sitting forward even though it made her head throb until her eyes threatened to pop.
She drew a slow breath, gathering up all the threads of information she’d collected over the months. As if without realising it, she’d been weaving a tapestry, and only now could she make out the image forming at her fingertips.
“Mandl wasn’t the first of the Undying to be killed,” she said at last. “They’ve been dying for weeks. I didn’t realise what the disappearances had in common until now. I thought it was censorship, that maybe they were dissidents, but it’s the Undying. They’re disappearing because they’re being killed, and you’re the one who’s been covering it up.”
Ferron said nothing, his expression carefully blank.
She swallowed hard. “You know, the Undying have never made much sense to me. Scientifically or logically. Immortality seems like a dangerous thing to just—gift to people, and Morrough’s hardly the altruistic type. I know how vivimancy works. There’s a price for complex regeneration, and someone always has to pay it. There’s no way around that. In order to regenerate the way the Undying can, someone is paying for it.”
“I thought you had a question,” Ferron said.
“I’m getting there,” Helena said calmly, trying to ignore the throbbing in the back of her head. “When the Undying are in dead bodies, they don’t retain their old resonance; they get whatever resonance the new body has. Like your father: He’s an iron alchemist, he doesn’t know anything about pyromancy. So if someone like you, an animancer, lost their body, you’d lose that ability, and if you thought being a lich was a punishment, something you do to teach someone a lesson, you’d cling to your body no matter what condition it was in and be desperate to figure out transference. But even if you did, you’d still need to find an animancer. But someone like that would fight the transference.”
She winced, pressing her hand against her forehead as if she could push back the pressure. “So … that’s where the repopulation program comes in,” she said unsteadily. “Morrough doesn’t care about the economy or what kind of alchemists there are in New Paladia. The real reason Stroud’s using selective breeding is to find a way to control what resonance children are born with. That’s why they brought back your father and I saw him at Central. She’s trying to produce an animancer for Morrough. If transference is perfected by the time she does, he’d have the means and the perfect vessel to use, but he’s—he’s running out of time.”
Ferron’s eyes narrowed.
She drew a deep breath. “Something’s wrong about him. He’s too old, and that should affect resonance, but it hasn’t with him. He’s got some other source for his power, something he can draw from. But he’s deteriorating anyway. I saw him only a few months ago, and he wasn’t like that. That throne is now keeping him alive. I kept trying to guess what could possibly hurt someone like him. It’s not like anyone could get close. Then I thought, maybe the source of his power is right in front of us, but it’s been disguised, so that people wouldn’t realise. Perhaps it’s presented as a gift, something people are desperate to earn, but really he’s the one who needs it.”
Pain shot through Helena’s head. Her vision turned red. She gave an agonised gasp, toppling sideways. Ferron was moving towards her.
She looked up, forcing her question out.
“The Undying. You’re his source of power, and the Resistance—we figured that out, didn’t we? How to kill him. How to kill all of you.”
CHAPTER 14
HELENA WAS SEATED ON A STOOL IN a laboratory. Lying on the table before her were rows and rows of transmuted metals and compounds, some shaped into hollow spheres, others still in small vials, waiting for testing.
Directly across from her sat Shiseo, studying a sphere grasped in his fingers, as he made notations on a slip of paper.
“You have an interesting repertoire,” he said in a quiet voice as he reached towards a vial in the third row. “Very unusual. Good attention to detail. I am surprised you are not a metallurgist.”
