“Bloodthorne!” The voice practically jumped with glee. “Come in, come in, there’s always room for you here.”
The crocodile snapped its jaws shut and was cranked back down to the earth from the strangely-jointed, metal legs, and then scurried back away into the bushes. Damien glanced over at Amma, her mouth falling open.
“You’re friends with that thing?” she asked.
“Friendsis a strong word.” Damien bade his knoggelvi up the path to the tower.
“I didn’t even know they could speak.” She was looking after where it had gone, but the crocodile was camouflaged already in the tall grasses.
He chuckled, but of course she wouldn’t recognize alchemical contraptions when she saw them. “They don’t.”
At the tower, they dismounted, and before Damien could prepare Amma, the door, a rusty-hinged slab of metal, burst open, and there stood a giant of a man absolutely covered from head to toe in soot.
Anomalous threw thick arms out, grinning a row of bright, white teeth from his otherwise blackened facade, but Damien leaned back just enough to avoid the man’s embrace. “Ah. Have you seen yourself?”
Anomalous glanced down, then back up. “Have you seenyourself?”
When Damien looked down at the mud-streaked and bloodied armor he wore, the man took the opportunity and embraced him in that back-breaking, too-tight, awkward way that Damien would never return—a thing Anomalous consistently found hysterical. Damien was no small man himself, but Anomalous was massive. That happened when one’s ancestry was riddled with giants and goliaths and a mammoth or two, and there was no avoiding his touch if that’s what he intended.
“And who’s this?”
Released and able to breathe again, Damien slapped his own chest, soot puffing up. Amma squeaked from the back of her throat as Anomalous reached out and took her hand, tiny in his colossal palm.
“Welcome to Craven Tower,” he said in his rushed way, shoulders hunched as he leaned down to shake. Her whole body rippled with the movement, and then she actually coughed out a laugh and smiled back at him. “I am Anomalous Craven, alchemist. And you are?” He was already pulling her into the building.
She glanced back at Damien warily as she was led inside. “Um, I’m Amma.”
“Amma. Am-ma,” he repeated, playing with the cadence of the name despite there being very little to work with, then rubbed her hand between both of his. “Hmm, well, nice skin you have.”
When he let her go, Amma looked down at her hand, covered in soot, then up at Damien who only shrugged at her bewildered expression and followed inside.
The entry space was crammed with crates and parts that had been dragged in and abandoned. Damien took a long step over the axle to a cart, hands behind his back. Everything was useful, according to Anomalous, just maybe not right now, so it was hoarded wherever was convenient, or not, and when one did not have many guests, an entryway served a greater purpose as a storehouse.
“Come with me, quickly, I’ve something to show you!” He waded ahead of them down a tunnel that was carved out of more hoarded goods, perfect for his size and no bigger. “You’ll never guess what I’ve got up on the slab, oh, it will be such a surprise!”
“Is it a man?” Damien asked, leaning away from a cracked lantern that hung off a fishing rod jammed between the wheel of a cart and a cast iron pan.
“How did you know?” Anomalous was hurrying ahead of them and disappeared into the next room.
Damien cocked a brow at Amma who was keeping close at his side in the cramped walkway. “It is literallyalwaysa man,” he whispered from the side of his mouth.
Amma giggled, a bright if quiet sound as she picked her way around a bolt of silky fabric that jutted out. Damien grinned, then saw Kaz trailing behind them, arms crossed, his sour expression going even sourer, and Damien corrected into a frown.
The room beyond the entry hall was a round space also crammed with objects, but the stairs that ran along the outer wall at a curve and took them upward were mostly clear. Anomalous was already halfway up them, and they followed, fewer of his precious goods as they climbed, and then finally freed themselves of the clutter on the next level. Here, there was a makeshift kitchen, a fireplace, a set of comfortable, if soggy-looking seats, and something bubbling away on the hearth and scenting the air with spices. The space was familiar to Damien, cozy even, but Anomalous continued on, upward. The next level was all books and papers and spilled ink. Damien lingered a moment, but knew there was no sense to be made of the mess, and finally they climbed up to the lab.
There was the rhythmic plunking of water, the incessant chirp of a cricket, and a skitter from somewhere unseen when they entered, all playing out over a constant hum. A huge, round space bathed in a green light emanating from glass jars strung up around the room, it was not so crammed with junk that it could not be traversed, but to say the room was not its own kind of mess would be a lie. Equipment that Damien did not care to think on for very long lined a wall, metal and strange and cobbled together dangerously, some sparking, others giving off groaning sounds like lost souls were trapped inside. Another curved wall held shelves, a few even straight, and were strewn with jars and cages and jugs. Much larger tubes were set on the ground, one filled with a yellow liquid in which something floated, animal-like, eyes closed and fetal. Finally, the curved roof on one side was made up of glass, and beyond it, clouds rolled in the darkening sky.
Though it was familiar enough to Damien, seeing Amma observe the lab for the first time with big, blue eyes that took it all in with a sense of wonder and horror tied together too tightly to ever be separated, reminded him of how impressive it was. Then her eyes fell on the table just in the room’s center and the gore laid across it, and he thought she might pass out. He grabbed the back of her tunic just as she wavered on her feet and kept her aloft.
Anomalous didn’t even notice, of course, wholly absorbed in whatever it was he had been saying their entire ascent despite being too far ahead of them to be properly understood. He was prattling on about veins, very specifically thicknesses, ways to connect them, and how he had discovered a new method that proved to be quite successful in fusing a swamp rabbit with a crane. “Didn’t ultimately survive,” he said with a sigh that had a sort of finality to it, “but for those seven and a half minutes we had a jumping, flying abomination that I could have really wreaked some havoc with. Called him Vinny. He’s buried out back with the rest now.”
“What is this place?” Amma finally asked, voice breathy as she got her bearings back.
Damien released her tunic, and she managed to stay upright. “Anomalous calls it a laboratory,” he said, gesturing to the man. “He does alchemy here. It’s a bit like magic, but with a lot of unnecessary steps.”
“That is, as always, completely and utterly incorrect, my friend, and yet close enough an explanation. And this,” said Anomalous, striding up to the table and running his hands along the long edge to loom over the pieces laid across it, “this is my great experiment.”
It was, of course, just an assortment of body parts, and not even enough for an entire being at that. There was an arm, torso, multiple pieces of both legs, nearly a whole head, and many organs, though Damien couldn’t differentiate a spleen from a liver if he needed to—piercing either brought pain, and it was really impaling the heart that ended things quickest. The smell was off putting to say the least.
