Amma wobbled again, pressing a hand to her stomach.
Then there was a plunking on the windows, and Anomalous stood straight, clapping. “Oh, good, the hag is back!” He bustled over and cranked a lever to open one of the glass panes inward.
Outside, a woven basket the size of a cart was hanging from a long cord on a pulley, and in it sat Mudryth, a woman, or at least something like one. “You wouldn’t believe the haul I got today, Louie!” She stood and stepped forward, perching a bare foot on the thin edge of the window sill and hoisting herself from the basket. Climbing inside with a sack over her shoulder, her long, spindly limbs were spider-like as she stepped down from the height that should have been much harder for her to traverse. With dark, wild hair that frizzed out in all directions, streaked with a shock of silver from her left temple, and ashy, greying skin, she may well have been part insect. “Oh, we have company? And look at yourself!”
“Bah!” Anomalous waved at her, making grabby hands for the bag she had just slung onto the ground with a wet squelch. It looked too heavy for her slim frame to carry, but then she was as tall as Anomalous, and, well, she wasn’t exactly human, Damien knew.
“Well, don’t you look absolutely dreadful,” Mudryth gave Damien a black-toothed grin from across the room but didn’t rush to embrace him like Anomalous always did, something he appreciated. “Hey, not yet!” Before the alchemist could reach the bag, the woman whipped her apron off and attacked his face, rubbing hard all over and into his hair. Soot puffed up and coated the closest machinery, but when she pulled back, she revealed a shock of ginger curls, ears a bit too big, even for Anomalous’s head, and a smattering of freckles on pale skin. “I’ll sort these, you clean yourself up.”
“Anomalous, I was actually hoping we could speak,” Damien interjected.
“Of course, of course, come with me.” The alchemist headed back to the stairs.
Damien turned to Amma whose eyes had gone wide, hesitating on the Chthonic word, and then not using it. “Do not cause any trouble,”—then to Kaz—“Watch over her.”
The imp, who had found a way to sulk twice as hard in the interim, finally grinned. “Of course, Master.”
Damien followed Anomalous to his office below where the man proceeded to scramble around for several minutes in the stacks, professing he had something for Damien, but ultimately coming up empty. Promising to find the mystery gift later, he took him out onto a walkway suspended between the tower and another stone building at the back. This building jutted off the tower with no support below it, but thick cords ran from the tower’s top to the stones at its corners, slightly offsetting the whole structure’s ever-increasing lean. New to Damien, it could have been magic that held it up, but Anomalous was never that practical. He had likely worked for moons and moons with numbers and odd, little letters, done hours of brutal handiwork all on his own, and suffered gobs of failure to get it right.
Open to the elements, a swampy breeze blew over them while they crossed the bridge. Above, the window Mudryth had climbed through was cranked shut with a slam, and Damien looked up, but couldn’t see within. He thought of Amma there, knowing she would be fine with the hag and the imp and the disembodied human parts even if she would likely disagree. But if she managed to work herself up into hysterics again, he supposed he understood how to calm her down. It would be a chore, of course, to summon the restraint, but if he had to wrap his arms around her—
“So, some terrible, hopeless thing has brought you all the way out to my corner of Tarfail, eh? I can’t imagine this is just a social call, not trailing a stranger along with you.” Anomalous had pushed on the door into the building, opening upward.
“Terrible, yes, but hopefully not hopeless.” The two entered into a dining hall of sorts, or it had been at one time, though it was turned on its side. That had been a window they climbed through, he realized, not a door, and the wooden floor ran the length of the wall many stories upward. Before them up the back wall were doors turned on their side, and a stairway had been cobbled together with old planks from carts that had been lost in the swamp to access each one, the rooms turned to form storied levels rather than a number of rooms along a hall. “Nice addition.”
“You like it? I lifted it off a ruin in the Wastes and brought it back with the spider.” Anomalous climbed into the bottom-most doorway.
“The Accursed Wastes?” Damien followed, ducking down and climbing through the doorway turned on its side. “You’ve got to be careful out there, Anomalous, even in that big, metal contraption. Shadowhart thinks he owns everything and everyone who wanders into his territory.”
“Bah!” Anomalous threw his hands up, waving the warning away.
Inside, the room was tall and long, though not terribly wide. The furniture was lined up in a row along the floor-wall and sconces had been hammered into the wall-ceiling, flicking on with flames when Anomalous pressed a button that had been welded beside the door. The action looked a lot like magic, if only the alchemist believed in that kind of thing.
“So?” Anomalous began pulling off his soot-covered clothing and dropping them as he walked to a wardrobe at the room’s back.
Damien focused on admiring a painting still hung on the wall that had become the floor. The flaking canvas depicted The Expulsion in a classical style. It was massive, and if Damien counted, he assumed all one hundred and forty-two gods may well have been illustrated upon it, frozen in the final moment before the one hundred and seventeen gods of goodness and light thrust the remaining twenty-five dark gods to the Abyss to be locked away for eternity. The “good” gods would then ascend to Empyrea, never to show themselves directly to earth-dwelling creatures again.
In the painting’s corners there were demons and dominions both, enjoying their last moments on earth before similarly being sealed in the infernal and celestial planes, the only hope of escape through summoning. His father wouldn’t be amongst them, Zagadoth hadn’t been around way back then, but if he had, Damien was sure he would know every detail of the event thrice over. Instead, the tale of The Expulsion was passed on second and third and fourth hand until it had become something of a legendary spectacle that he was unsure really happened quite the way it was often told.
“Damien?” Anomalous’s voice broke him of his long stare at the painting.
Where to start, he wondered, taking a deep breath, then delivered the news that he had finally done it, he had completed the talisman he’d been working on for years, and his father would soon be released.
The alchemist was incredulous and supportive even if he never wholly understood what it meant—Zagadoth being a demon, his spirit trapped within a crystal. No one had spirits, least of all demons who didn’t even exist to begin with, and people couldn’t be trapped in crystals. Damien was just an orphan in Anomalous’s eyes as they’d met well after all the unpleasantness.
“It all has a deeper explanation,” Anomalous would often say of crystals and magic and demons, “I just haven’t figured it out yet. But I am so happy that the thing you believe in is happening according to your perception.” That was Anomalous, the most supportive non-believer there was.
But for all the man’s obsession with alchemy and disbelief of the arcane arts, he was at least marginally perceptive. “But that’s not exactly why you’re here.”
“Ah, no.” Damien sighed, taking the fresh, wet linen Anomalous had offered him from a basin that ran clean water with the twist of a lever built into the wall. Aszath Koth’s keep had something almost identical, but it ran on magic instead of the not-magical arcana Anomalous insisted this was. “It’s the girl.”
“Of course it is! Who is she?”
“Oh, I don’t know, some little pickpocket who got lost in Aszath Koth,” he said flippantly, rubbing the muck and blood and dried werewolf drool from his face. “And she’s making me kill her.”
Anomalous made a surprised noise. “Kill her yet you don’t know her? But what if she’s one of those Holy Knights you’re always going on about? Or a lost princess? Maybe even the daughter of an ancient demon you’re meant to make more half-demon babies with?” This he said with a kind of mocking derision, but Damien knew it was probably his favorite theory—one couldn’t be an alchemist and not an idealist and perhaps a romantic too. That was the whole point of trying to make a person, he supposed—it was difficult to find a companion out in the swamps, one who was still alive and in one piece anyway.
“No, she’s definitely not a blood mage. There are so few of us, and I would recognize her from the Grand Order of Dread meetings anyway,” Damien mumbled, stripping off his leather armor to evaluate what had happened to his tunic.
