Page 9 of Alchemised
Fingers gripped the base of Helena’s skull until nails bit into her skin.
She was spiralling down. Down.
A long tunnel. Twisting darkness.
Cold dead hands and the smell of death.
When her mind cleared, she was strapped down on a table. A bright light hung overhead, the beam directed at Helena so that the room beyond disappeared.
There was a small man beside her with a pinched nose, and he kept touching Helena’s face with sweaty, damp fingertips, prodding between her eyes, at her temples, poking through her hair to her skull.
“This is—quite a marvel of human transmutation, I must say,” the man was saying in a high, rapid voice. He had an accent—not the Northern dialect, but something more western sounding. “Vivimancy of this skill is—miraculous. Very right to call me.”
There was a long, oppressive silence.
He coughed. “The—the thing is. This is—impossible. This—can’t be done.”
“It’s obviously possible. The evidence is right here,” the woman said sharply from Helena’s other side, barely visible in the severe shadows.
“Yes, quite right, Doctor Stroud. Of course, it is as you say. But—the use of vivimancy on a brain has always been a most delicate procedure. Transmutation of this scale and complexity is beyond all known scientific possibility. Memory is a mysterious thing, very changeable as it’s moved around. Not a place, it is—the mind’s journey. A path. The more important, more journeyed, the stronger the path. The less journeyed”—fingers fluttered—“it fades.”
“Get to the point,” said the woman—Doctor Stroud.
“Yes, yes. There are areas of the brain that can be altered. In the laboratories, we have vivisected countless human brains and reassembled them in various ways, to some success and also … failure. This transmutation, however, is upon—thought. M-M-Memory. What has been done here—” Something wet fell onto Helena’s face, and she realised the man was perspiring on her. “This is alteration of the unalterable. Someone—has disassembled the pathways of her mind and created alternative routes for them. How could it be done without knowing all her thoughts and memories? No. No. This is scientifically impossible.”
“I thought the mind was your specialty.” A voice emerged from the darkness, low and rasping.
The man whimpered and looked ready to weep. “The—the brain is, Your Eminence.” He bowed towards the shadows. “But this work is beyond me. Bennet and I, you remember our labours for your cause? I hope … Memories cannot simply be regenerated; the mind and spirit must forge them. The spirit cannot be altered by external force—the—the fevers—”
“Is there any way to uncover what is hidden?”
The man opened and closed his mouth as if he were a fish, staring into the darkness as though he expected to be swallowed by it.
“The Holdfasts are dead,” the rasping voice said, “the Eternal Flame erased from this earth. What would they have hidden within her mind?”
The question was met with silence.
“Who placed her in that warehouse?”
Stroud stepped forward. “There’s nothing confirming it, but based on the records, Mandl was overseer at the time. It was shortly before her ascendance and transfer to the Outpost.”
“Send for her.”
Stroud nodded and disappeared. As she did, the shadows moved.
Helena could only see from the corner of her eyes, but she could not fail to notice when Morrough emerged from the darkness.
The High Necromancer was not what she remembered. When he’d killed Luc, he’d been human. Now he was mutated. His limbs stuck out in ways that were impossibly jointed, and he was nearly the size of two men.
She thought, at first, that he was wearing a mask. The High Necromancer had been masked during the celebration, wearing a huge golden crescent that concealed half his face like an eclipsed sun.
As he drew nearer however, she realised it wasn’t a mask she was staring at. Morrough’s face was skull-like, his features so sunken, the skin so translucently pale, that she could see through to the bone.
Where his eyes should have been were two blackened, empty hollows, as if they’d been burned out with live coals.
Somehow, he still seemed to see Helena.
He walked forward, one hand outstretched, but there was something wrong about it, over-jointed, the skin bizarrely stretched. Too many bones inside it. Before his fingers grazed her skin, the pain of his resonance lanced through her skull.
