Amma hadn’t seen liathau since leaving home, but the feel of it in her hands was unmistakable, and she squeezed the trinket, a spark of happiness in her chest and a vision of the orchard passing through her mind.
“I think that just about does it!” Mudryth clapped her hands together, standing over the table where what looked like a full person was laid out, just in parts. “Now, I need to check on my stew, but I’ll be back in two shakes of a croc’s tail.” The woman swept off to the stairway, and Amma was left alone in the room save for one possibly-imaginary imp and a person who was actually a lot of people and none at all at the same time.
Amma carefully placed the tunic down and wandered over to the body. It was pretty well proportioned, and now that it had a whole head, it looked more human as well, though the face was bloated and the features hard to make out. Drowning, she assumed, swallowing back another roil of nausea.
As she worried the liathau wood trinket in her palm, she skimmed the rest of the corpse and noticed its missing little finger. She placed the trinket there in its stead, practically a perfect fit, and chuckled. That was better than throwing up, at least.
Amma wandered away from the table wrapping her arms around her middle. Not accounting for all the gore, the rest of the room was terribly interesting if totally incomprehensible. There were tools of questionable use, but many of them gleamed cleanly unlike the tables covered in body parts. There were also jars and bottles set into glass-covered cabinets with brightly colored liquids and suspended objects, some once—or maybe still—alive, and others shimmering like enchanted things.
Amma stopped before a box made up of glass, edges perfect and sealed, its contents roving constantly despite not being moved. There was a blobby goop inside that shimmered like liquid sunshine, and it was speckled with flecks of something silver, like a starry, golden sky. It reminded her, vaguely, of the ribbons of silver she had seen in that fissure to the infernal plane.
As she peered into it, she thought of the night before, staring out through the hut’s small window at the cloudy sky, not a star in sight, the sounds of the swamp all around. After Damien had ordered her to stay put, she was compelled to do just that, but when sleep took her, she woke right back up after slipping into a werewolf-filled nightmare. Then she found herself half dreaming, reliving the chase, the fear when the monster broke through the larder she was huddled in, and the decision to stab a living creature while knowing it could be the last thing she ever did.
Damien had vocalized exactly what went through her mind seconds before acting—if she had just let him be mauled, she would have been free of the blood mage. Amma didn’t really understand most magic, but unlike Anomalous, she believed in it—she was the victim of it, after all—but she had enough sense to know that if Damien were dead, the enthrallment on her would most likely follow suit. Yet when she saw him struggling under the werewolf, she felt compelled and not by way of some arcane force. It was ridiculous, really, but that was always her compulsion, to help, even if, like Damien, the person she was helping might not really deserve it.
Amma had always followed the impulses that would endear her to others. It was an impulse to smile and agree and go along with just about anything so long as it made everyone else happy. But this impulse, to risk murdering a man cursed to be a monster in order to save another man who was not cursed but just chose to be a monster instead, had been reckless and stupid, but it was, for perhaps the first time, a decision made wholly in her own interest. In that brief, perilous moment, she wanted to keep him alive, and though now she had no idea why, it was simply the thing she desperately needed at the time.
She truly hadn’t even expected him to acknowledge she had helped, let alone thank her, but as she stared at the tiny golden ocean made of stars in an impossibly clear box in the alchemist’s lab, Amma couldn’t shake the thought that somehow saving Damien was for once not a thing she was meant to do, not her duty, not her conscience, not an act honoring a vow to another, but just something she felt like doing. And for once that choice didn’t seem so bad, or, if it were, maybe that was okay?
No, that was as ridiculous a thought as thinking Damien wasn’t a complete jerk. He was unkind and cruel and a blood mage for Osurehm’s sake, and even if he acted as though he were human to her for a moment while they were holed up in that larder, when his touch had been gentle and his words soft, it meant nothing. Amma whipped away from the box, sure that it was some enchanted thing and putting all of those stupid thoughts in her head.
There was a click from across the room, and Amma looked up to see Kaz fluttering near a tall shelf. He had picked up a container and was eyeing her from across the room. Kaz grinned, those bottom teeth sticking out, and he extended his clawed hands out over the floor. “You shouldn’t have touched that,” he said, and let go of the jar.
CHAPTER 11
ALCHEMICALLY SIGNIFICANT SUCCESSES AND FAILURES
Amma dove across the laboratory, catching the jar Kaz had lobbed just before it smashed into the floor. The magenta liquid inside sloshed, coating the glass, but the bottle remained intact. “Stop that!” she shouted up at the imp, scrambling to her feet.
“No,youstop that.” Kaz flitted across the room to where the gently humming machine loomed and yanked down on a lever. There was a whirring as the air crackled.
Amma shrieked, abandoning the bottle on the slab holding the amalgam of a corpse as she bolted to the machine. She gripped the lever and tugged with all her might to switch it back off. The static in the air died down, and the whirring came to a slow halt.
Another jar sailed through the laboratory, and Amma was running after it without another thought, catching it before it smashed into a glass case filled with many more breakable things. “Kaz, no, please!” She clutched the jar to her chest and dove in front of another, the glass to this one thick enough to not smash when it hit the ground, rolling across the floor and under the slab. Amma chased after it and collected all of Kaz’s projectiles on the frosty surface.
“I’m not doing anything. In fact, I, Master Bloodthorne’s loyal servant, am trying to stop you, the current bane of his existence, from causing all this trouble!” He flicked his tail across a set of tools, knocking them to the ground with a clatter.
“But I saved your life,” she grumbled, hurrying to pick up the sharpened tools and trying to set them back as they were.
At that, Kaz made a noise she couldn’t place, an angry sort of squawk, and flapped his wings a little harder, a fine time for him to learn to fly just out of reach as he sailed past her. When she turned, he was holding up the glass box of golden ocean stars she had been so drawn to moments before.
“Don’t,” she pleaded, scurrying beneath where he hovered.
Kaz tipped the small chest before his face, darting away from her and over to the slab. “Can this really be? It’s so pretty,” he said, a terrible smile curling up over his pointed teeth. “No wonder you just wanted to see what was inside.”
“Kaz, please!” She jumped for him, but he was too high, hovering above and fiddling with the box’s latch.
Amma climbed up on the table, maneuvering around the things he’d thrown as well as bits of body, a knee, some intestine, a chunk of spine, and she reached for Kaz, but the imp had finally figured out the latch.
Amma jumped, knocking him out of the air, but it was too late. The sunshiney goo plopped out as Amma tackled Kaz into the humming machine, catching a lever in their descent, the table tipping over in her wake. The corpse pieces slid off and toppled to the floor, jars shattered and contents spilled, and the golden, silver-speckled goo landed atop the whole pile, spreading out in a thin layer over everything.
Amma gasped, pushing herself off the imp and crawling over to the mess. She looked for anything she might save, but the goop was quick to cover it all. There was an intensifying hum from behind her, a sizzle of sparks shooting through the air, and the whole laboratory lit up as a bolt of lightning shot out from the machine and struck the pile. Everything went blindingly white, and the air was sucked from the room.
Floating. Amma was floating in nothingness, and then, slowly, little golden specks formed all around her. One hundred and forty-two little golden specks, if she had been able to count them, but the vision cleared too quickly, and then she was just sitting on the floor of the laboratory again, blinking the stars out of her eyes to see the terrible mess did, in fact, still exist.
“Look what you did!” shrieked Kaz. “Look what she did!”
Amma turned from her spot on the floor to see Damien and Anomalous standing just at the top of the stairs, Mudryth craning her neck up over the landing a few steps below them.
