“My equations,” Anomalous said, shoving a roll of parchment into Damien’s face.
There were numbers and symbols alongside his scribbling in Key. Damien politely took the pages and flipped through them. He recognized most of the words, Key was the simplest of the languages he knew, but the true meaning of the diagrams and equations eluded him. “This would be like me handing you a book in Chthonic,” he said, squinting at a crude drawing of a humanoid figure in a tube and squiggly lines radiating off of it. “I imagine Mudryth would be a better assistant.”
“Oh, she will be assisting me, I just want you to know that I’ve run the numbers three times, and the whole experiment has a very low probability of going wrong.”
He went to hand the pages back, but paused. “Wrong?”
“For the girl.” Anomalous waved around a shining tool with a large, clipper-like end. “I know that’s top priority for you, keeping her alive, and chances are she almost definitely will stay that way!”
Damien cleared his throat, standing straighter and shoving the papers at him. “I did not specify the order of priority—”
“Ah, well,”—Anomalous snatched away the parchment, trading off his strange tool before Damien could refuse to take it—“you didn’t really have to.”
Before he could protest further, Mudryth announced her arrival with a bright greeting as she came up the stairs, a shorter form just behind her.
It was Amma, but Damien did not recognize her at first, her hair even more flaxen than he imagined it could be, clean and falling in waves over her shoulders—not that he had been imagining such a thing. Amma had looked like an urchin in the back alleys of Aszath Koth, and being covered in swamp grime had done her no favors, but she was much improved now. Her ratty, ill-fitting clothing had been swapped for tight, leather breeches it seemed Mudryth had sewn her right into. They would have to be cut off to escape, perhaps by that silver dagger no longer hidden, the thin straps of its holster just pressing into her thigh as it flexed with every step she took.
She was cinched in tight at the waist by a protective leather bodice, hugging how her body curved, and her new, white tunic didn’t dwarf her at all like the last. It perhaps had gone in the other direction, low enough in front to expose where the talisman had disappeared itself into her chest, but managed to just contain everything so long as the lace tying up its front wasn’t pulled, which, Damien thought, looked dangerously easy to do. It would only take a simple tug.
He averted his gaze from that detail as quickly as he struck the thought from his mind, which was at least two moments slower than it should have been, but he couldn’t really fault himself—there were very few humans in Aszath Koth, and humans were Damien’s preferred bedchamber companion, so when he saw one who had been cleaned up with their best assets on display, he was bound to find them even marginally attractive.
Her face was a good distraction from the body she’d been hiding as, for reasons unfathomable, it had gone very pink. She looked as she had in the alley of Aszath Koth and yet not—a woman, his own age yet unhardened and naive, but then he saw something else behind the first look of nervousness in her eyes. She was staring right back at him, reading him,seeinghim.
Anomalous bustled up to Amma then, ignoring how changed she was, and threw a huge, dwarfing arm around her shoulders to lead her deeper into the lab. He was saying something about metals and stones and conductivity as he gestured to the tube, but Damien refocused on the odd tool he’d been handed. There was no good damn way to hold the bloody thing, awkward as it was, but he’d been inexplicably hugging it to his chest. He had to have looked like an idiot holding the thing, and stashed it on the closest shelf.
“Wait, why do I need to get in the glass cage?” Amma’s voice wasn’t like how it had been the night before, neither the angry, strangled tone when she yelled nor the sad yet sweet lilt when she made another unnecessary apology. There was apprehension in it now, a taut quiver, but it had a friendliness to it too—that same voice some of the draekins and other servants at the keep used with Damien when asking something of him and fearing his response. He didn’t like it.
Anomalous stuttered a moment. “Data! What is an alchemist without his data? You see, I extract a bit of information from every being who enters the tower, and now it’s your turn!” Anomalous gave her shoulder a squeeze, eyeing Damien with a not-so-subtle wink. “It will only hurt a little.”
Amma was struck still by the space between Anomalous’s fingers when he held his hand up, likely meant to demonstrate something small, but with his huge hands it looked to be he was suggesting the interior of the tube was going to be extremely painful. She wasn’t going to move without more coaxing, and Damien didn’t want things to dissolve in that way.
“Sanguinisui, step into the tube,” Damien said with a hefty sigh, and Amma strode right up onto the dais and into the glass container.
Anomalous looked after her. “Well, that was useful. Any chance you could engineer me one of those talismans?”
“It’s one of a kind. And also magic, Anomalous.”
“Sure it is,” he said, swinging the door shut behind her. The click of its latch made Amma’s form twitch, and she turned to look at them through the glass, the rosy color draining out of her cheeks. An uncomfortable feeling swam in Damien’s stomach, and he would have realized it was guilt if he were more familiar with the sensation.
Anomalous skipped to the machinery the tube’s wires were attached to. With a giddy giggle, he began flicking switches and knobs, only pulling out the parchment he’d shown Damien once to double check something, reset a few dials, and then dropped the pages. He turned to Mudryth. “You did the thing, right?”
She blinked at him slowly. “No, Louie, I just let you load the little human up into your contraption all defenseless-like.”
Anomalous’s brows raised all the way up to his ginger hairline. “I almost threw this switch! She would have been—oh, oh! Muddie, I see what you are saying. Very funny.” He then smashed a lever upward with a resounding clang.
A blast of light like a divine spell filled up the chamber, and heat poured away from the tube. Damien shielded his eyes as Mudryth oohed and ahhed at the spectacle. When the brightness died down, Damien was sure the girl had been burnt to ash, but to his surprise—though he was unsure if it was a relief or an annoyance—she was intact, if glowing.
Mudryth crossed right up to the tube, handing Anomalous a pair of spectacles that he donned, making his eyeballs massive. Both pulled out parchment and scribbled down notes as they chatted to one another, but Damien held back. Amma’s body had been illuminated so that her insides were on display. Damien had gutted enough beings to know the colors weren’t right, but those were surely bones and organs exhibited in green and yellow and red. And just offset from the center of Amma’s chest was a point that had an even brighter glow, a radiating light clearly arcane that had to be the talisman. How it could emanate such a light, he had no idea—nothing he made ever looked like that.
Anomalous gave the glass tube a tap with the hardened reed he used to scratch out notes. Amma didn’t respond, her body, lit up in all the strange colors, unmoving.
Damien ventured a single step closer. “She can’t hear us?”
“She’s completely out,” Mudryth said in a dreamy tone as she placed long, spindly fingers flat on the tube. “I put a fancy, little spell on her that Louie’s metal gizmo triggers so she won’t remember being in there. It ain’t fun inside, I tell you what. But boy, that’s a pretty glow, eh?”
Damien hummed in the back of his throat a sort of agreement.
Anomalous was rounding the tube, muttering to himself and scribbling. He poked his head around the edge of it, magnified eyes blinking behind the lenses. “That’s a good job you did there, demon spawn. Couldn’t have augmented her better myself, I don’t think. It’s like you grafted that right onto her heart—look, all those capillaries are connected.”
