The Lady Alchemist Page 7

  His body seized as he shouted his next attack.

  The ground beneath Destry punched upward, creating a perfectly cylindrical pillar of earth. Destry rocketed into the air, spinning wildly as she clutched her cannon, then came down in an uncontrolled freefall.

  “No!” Sepha screamed. She forced herself to ignore her howling panic and sprinted toward the alchems Destry had left behind. She couldn’t stand by while the homunculus killed Destry!

  But before Sepha could reach the alchems, Destry thudded into the muddy grass, softening her fall with a clumsy roll. Dazed, she shook her head, got to her knees, and fired off another round at the homunculus. This time, Destry aimed true. By the time the explosion and the resultant ball of fire had dissipated, the magician was gone.

  Gone. But, Sepha sensed, not dead.

  “Sepha!”

  It was Destry. She was stalking toward Sepha and looked angry enough to attack her, now that the homunculus was gone.

  “What are you doing out here?” Destry glared at Sepha. “Get back with the rest of the passengers and stay there!”

  “I wanted to help,” Sepha protested.

  “You were more likely to get killed than to help!” Destry snapped. “You don’t know how to fight. You’ve got no metal, and I’ll bet you don’t even have any alchems on hand!”

  Sepha flinched and took a step backward. Destry might as well have slapped her.

  Useless, crooned the snide voice. Already in everyone’s way.

  Destry huffed and continued, quieter, “Just go wait by the railcar. I have to take care of this situation.”

  Soaked to the bone, Sepha trudged back to where the passengers were huddled beside the railcars. When she joined them, they greeted her frantically.

  “Was that a magician?”

  “Are we going to die?”

  “We’ll miss our appointments!”

  Sepha ignored them all and squelched over to where Ruhen stood beside her homunculus.

  “Sepha,” Ruhen said. “What just happened?”

  Sepha was cold and empty. The tentative joy of the morning had vanished, and her life was once again a range of mountainous problems she didn’t know how to solve. “I don’t know,” she said.

  Ignoring Ruhen’s concerned gaze, she closed her eyes and crossed her arms, shielding herself from the torrential rain.

  What had just happened?

  Several hours later, the train was back on the tracks and clacking along as if nothing had happened. Destry and the train’s crew had managed, through no small alchemical and mechanical feat, to finagle the train back onto the tracks, and even to fix the tracks themselves. The engine, miraculously, had worked well enough to wheeze to the next train station, where it was replaced with a working one.

  “All’s well that ends well,” Sepha had heard another passenger say.

  But it hadn’t ended well. Two homunculi in one of the baggage cars had been crushed to death during the derailment. Their owner had ordered their bodies discarded beside the tracks.

  Sepha’s own homunculus, healthy and whole, was sleeping in the chair she’d claimed for him. Buying him that ticket had saved his life, and so he was truly hers now, in the ancient sense that the saving of a life created a sacred bond. Her tiny man, proportioned exactly like a normal adult. Only smaller. And a little strange.

  And that was all it took to make an entire race enslaveable. Discardable.

  Those two homunculi had died because they were baggage, and because the undead magician had attacked. Three more deaths because of Sepha. She felt numb from the thought of it.

  Why had he done it?

  If he needed a body so badly, why would he attack her? But he hadn’t really attacked her, had he? He had attacked the train and the crowd of people who were trying to fix it. He had attacked Destry.

  And what had happened during Destry’s fight, when that strange wall of water had deflected the homunculus’s second attack? Had Sepha only imagined it in the downpour, or had there been a third person involved in the fight, unobserved by anyone? But who here could’ve done it, and why would they hide?

  Sepha’s eyes traveled around the passenger car. Everyone had gone outside during the fight. It could’ve been any of them.

  Or none of them.

  She’d been in such a panicked state that she might’ve imagined it. Now that she tried to remember the series of events more precisely, her certainty began to slip. She’d been nearly blinded by the rain, and in such a panic. Gods, she was useless.

  Then the small worry that had been lurking in the back of her mind finally demanded her full attention.

  Destry must have seen the undead magician.

  Ruhen was already asking questions.

  What was she going to tell them? What was she going to do when she arrived at the Institute, to deflect the questions she knew would come? How did you do it? Will you do it again? Will you teach us how?

  Sepha hunched over and rested her elbows on her knees. She flexed her right hand, remembering the way it had ached just before she’d spotted the magician. He’d worked some sort of magic so he could find her. Maybe whatever he’d done was a sort of bond, just like the contract. A sort of bond, perhaps, that would make her hand ache whenever he was near. If so, at least she’d have a warning if he showed up again.

  Sepha sighed and sat up, leaning against the back of her seat.

  Destry pounced on the opportunity to speak. “Sepha, don’t be frightened,” she said, “but that was a magician back there.”

  “I know,” Sepha said, and then wondered if she should’ve lied.

  “I only wish he hadn’t been crouching in the grass,” Destry continued, tugging on the wrist of one glove and then flexing both hands, trying to keep the wet leather supple. “I couldn’t get a good look at him. Wouldn’t know him if he passed me on the street.”

  Had Destry really not seen him? The constricted feeling in Sepha’s chest began to release. Perhaps she wouldn’t have to explain everything immediately, after all.

  Ruhen, who’d been staring out the window, looked at Destry. “How do you know it wasn’t another alchemist?” he asked.

  “He didn’t use alchems,” she said. The word she hadn’t said, “obviously,” hung in the air between them.

  “Why do you think he attacked us?” Sepha asked, risking a half-glance at Destry.

  “The Magistrate and her council,” Destry said, choosing each word with slow deliberation, “posit that causing fear and chaos is in the nature of magicians. That’s why they’ve worked so tirelessly to eradicate them. And as the only person on this train who’s ever dealt with magicians before today, I have to say they may be correct.”

  “Dealt with?” Sepha asked.

  Destry fixed her blue eyes on Sepha’s hazel ones and said, “Finding and incapacitating magicians was my primary task for a few years. I was good enough at fighting magicians that I was always on the teams that went out to capture them.”

  “You’ve captured magicians before?” Sepha asked. Hope, less lovely than joy but far more tenacious, began to take root.

  “Yes,” Destry said. “Magicians are more powerful than alchemists, but there are ways of getting their own natures to work to my advantage.”

  Despite herself, despite her secret, Sepha sighed. “That’s a relief,” she said. “I always thought they were indestructible.”

  “They’re not,” Destry said. “I know it firsthand. It’s all a matter of finding that individual magician’s strength, then keeping them away from whatever it happens to be. Once you learn to do that, you can neutralize their magic completely. It cripples them.”

  “What do you mean, their strength?” Sepha felt breathless, jittery.

  Destry frowned down at her Guild ring. “I’m not sure how it works,” she said, “but each one seems to draw power from certain things around them. Earth or plants or even the air. And whenever they’re away from that
thing, their power begins to fade. Then it becomes a waiting game.” At Sepha’s confused look, Destry smiled and said, “They can run out of magic, but we can’t run out of alchemy. Any alchemist can defeat any magician in a one-on-one fight, if they’re smart and manage to survive until the magician’s power runs out.”

  Sepha blinked. “Oh.”

  Across from Sepha, the homunculus was dozing, his head bobbing with the motion of the car. Ruhen was staring out the window again, looking tired and bored. With a suppressed yawn, he leaned his head back against his seat and closed his eyes. Destry pulled a small ingot from her holster and began passing it from one gloved hand to the other.

  None of them realized that everything had just changed.

  Magicians could be defeated. Which meant that if Sepha failed to create a body for the undead magician, she might still have a chance to save her firstborn. Might even have a chance to avoid having a firstborn at all.

  It was small, the hope this gave her. But it was hope, and it was something.

  The rest of the day passed uneventfully. After the perfunctory getting-to-know-you topics—Destry was twenty-one and the oldest of two; Ruhen was twenty and the youngest of twelve brothers, and had a younger sister he’d never met—the conversation strayed to anecdotes of alchemical exchanges gone awry.

  Reluctant to outshine the other two, Sepha tried to keep quiet; as grand as her successes were, her failures had all been correspondingly huge. Neither Ruhen nor Destry would let Sepha hold out, though. Soon, they were all goading each other on, trading one disastrous story for the next. By nightfall, the three of them had lapsed into an agreeable silence, friends, or something like it.

  The train didn’t have a sleeping car for the passengers and didn’t stop for the night. They all slept as best they could in their seats, but Sepha slept too lightly to get any real rest. Her sleepless night made it more difficult, the next day, to force her mind away from her contract, her debt to the Magistrate, and the undead magician’s inexplicable attack. She retreated more into herself as the day went on. At last, she fell asleep.

  But she wasn’t destined to get any rest.

  That night, Sepha dreamed she was a mother. She was staring down at her infant with something like worship, something like terror. Someone she couldn’t see laid a hand on her shoulder and whispered, “You did it, Seph.”

  At this, the infant glared. It opened its mouth and said, in a horrible, guttural voice, “You … will … die.”

  Sepha gasped and wrenched her eyes open.

  The passenger car was dark. In the faint moonlight that shone through the windows, Sepha could see the homunculus sleeping in his chair with his fingers interlaced across his abdomen. Beside him, Ruhen was easing upright in his seat, blinking sleepily at her.

  Sepha’s cheeks went hot. “Sorry.”

  Destry stirred in her sleep. Sepha loosed a relieved sigh when she didn’t wake up. When she looked back at Ruhen, he was still looking at her. He seemed more awake now.

  “Everything all right?” he whispered. Half of his face was faintly blue from the light that leaked through the windows.

  “Bad dream,” she said, not quite meeting his eyes.

  Ruhen looked at her for a moment, then said, “Do you want to see something interesting?”

  Sepha hesitated.

  You did it, Seph, the dream-man had said.

  Him! that voice had said.

  Ruhen’s smile froze. “I mean,” he said, twisting his mouth to one side, “you don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

  “No, I want to,” Sepha said. Because she needed a distraction, and not because she wanted to spend more time with Ruhen. “Show me.”

  He smiled a relieved sort of smile and stood. Sepha stood too and tiptoed after him.

  The clatter of wheels on the tracks sharply increased as Ruhen slid open the door at the end of their car. He crossed the gap between their car and the next as if it was nothing and disappeared through the door.

  Gripping the sides of the doorway, Sepha straddled the brink, the tracks whipping fast below her. The knifelike wind slicing through the gap felt like a jolt of living. She paused, letting the wind whip her hair back and forth. The air was fresh and cold and clean as it licked across her skin. Sepha only now realized how stuffy the car was, how deadening.

  If Ruhen hadn’t been waiting, she might’ve stayed there all night, just breathing. But he was waiting, so she forced herself to move. She stepped into the next car, and the door slid shut behind her.

  Ruhen was standing just inside the car, and there was a smile playing about his lips that Sepha couldn’t interpret. He tipped his head toward the other end of the car, and Sepha tiptoed after him. When they’d snuck through three passenger cars and two baggage cars, Ruhen slid open a final door. He held a finger to his lips as they entered the car, which was lined on either side with bunk beds stacked three high. Sepha recognized the ticket master and the engineer in two of the bunks and realized that this must be the crew’s sleeping quarters.

  Ruhen led her to the door on the far end and eased it open.

  Beyond the door was a small platform with a waist-high metal railing. Ruhen stood off to one side, smiling and spreading out his arms with the air of an illusionist pulling a rabbit from a hat. Sepha grinned back and stepped onto the platform, letting the door slide shut behind her.

  Her mouth hung open as she stared at the night-washed landscape of grasslands receding into desert, the tracks rushing away behind the train. The sky was cloudless, swollen with stars whose light dusted the world with silver.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said, bracing her palms on the rail.

  The rail protested slightly as Ruhen leaned against it. “I came out here last night,” he said, his voice nearly drowned beneath the sounds of wheels and wind. “Thought you might like the fresh air.”

  “I do like it,” she agreed, looking up to meet his eyes. They looked black in the dim light, and Sepha suddenly recalled the first time she’d seen them up close.

  “Did I ever thank you?” she asked, as if they were in the middle of a conversation about the Wicking Willow.

  Ruhen seemed to understand. He smiled a lovely half-smile and said, “You did.”

  “You did save my life,” Sepha admitted, frowning. Thank you wasn’t enough, and neither was anything else she could think to say.

  “I’m just glad I was there,” Ruhen said.

  “Me too.” With a fortifying breath, she asked, “What brought you to the woods that day? Were you lost?”

  Ruhen smiled. “Nearly,” he said. “My brothers and I lived in the woods. I happened to be close enough to see you walk into that clearing. So, if I was lost, which I’m not saying I was, I suppose it was a good thing.”

  Sepha laughed, but then frowned. “You lived in the woods?” He nodded, and she tipped her head to the side. “I didn’t know anyone lived in the woods.”

  He shrugged. “We did, and we’re probably not the only ones.”

  “Huh,” Sepha said in response. Like an idiot.

  Around them, the grass grew sparser, and the air seemed drier. The silence between them went dry, too, and Sepha didn’t know how to fill it. The silence was awkward, but at least her contract wasn’t thrumming beside her heart. For now.

  “So, tell me,” Ruhen said, “how Sepha Filens of Three Mills became a Lady Alchemist with her very own homunculus.”

  Gods! Damn it!

  Sepha’s heart skipped a beat, found that the anxious rhythm suited it, and skipped a few more for good measure. But she forced a smile. She’d have to get used to telling people a strategically altered version of the truth; she might as well start now.

  Gritting her teeth against the guilt that reared up inside, Sepha told Ruhen about her disastrous alchemical demonstration and her catastrophic slip of the tongue.

  When she told Ruhen just the barest bit about Father—not in search of pity, never that
, only to explain why she’d been in such a stupid panic—his face went fierce.

  “He hit you?” he asked, slicing through Sepha’s prevarications with three sharp words.

  Sepha opened her mouth and closed it again. Father had hit her, yes, but it was the snide mutterings, the bellowed name-calling, the unwavering tight-fisted control over every aspect of her life—

  Sepha nodded.

  Ruhen lifted one hand to reach for her, but seemed to think the better of it and let it drop back to his side.

  Then she came to it.

  “I don’t know how the straw turned to gold,” Sepha said, which was technically true. She didn’t know a thing about how magic actually worked. Even so, she avoided Ruhen’s eyes as she continued. “Maybe it was only possible because I was so desperate. I doubt I could ever do it again.”

  Ruhen nodded as if that was very reasonable. Relieved, Sepha continued the story with the truth until the Magistrate had disappeared from the courtroom antechamber.

  When she finished, Ruhen stood quietly, twisting a curl around his finger in thoughtful silence.

  Unable to bear the silence because she didn’t know what it meant, Sepha said, “What?”

  Ruhen stopped fidgeting with his hair. “It’s unbelievable, that’s all.”

  “Unbelievable how?” Sepha’s heart was in her throat, that howling panic only a few breaths away.

  Ruhen tipped his head to the side in a shirking shrug. “You went through all of that and came out just fine. Then you were attacked by a magician while moving across the country with two strangers and a homunculus. And yet you seem … unfazed.” Sepha blinked. “You must be fearless.”

  Sepha let out a loud, relieved ha. “I’m definitely not.”

  “You seem like it.”

  Sepha swallowed. Not quite sure why she was bothering to correct him, she said, “I’m afraid of lots of things.”

  Ruhen studied her in the silver-lit dark. “Like what?”