Tom clancys splinter cel.., p.4
Alchemised: A Novel, page 4
Her heart beat faster and faster. She had no answer.
Stroud leaned over as well, eyes narrowed in appraisal. “Your Eminence, perhaps if we removed the frontmost section of her brain, we might be able to penetrate some of the memories before the fevers become detrimental,” she said, trailing her finger thoughtfully across Helena’s forehead. “Or it might alter the pathways enough to revert things. I would be honoured to maintain her vitals while you perform the vivisection.”
Terror sliced through Helena as Morrough nodded. Stroud stepped to the side, adjusting the light overhead, as though intending to begin immediately.
“Pardon,” a soft voice interrupted, and Helena felt a rush of relief until she realised it was the traitor, Shiseo, standing with his case gripped in his hands. “I have just remembered one small thing. There was a General Bayard. His head was injured in the war.”
“Yes.” Stroud seemed irritated by the interruption.
“The brain was healed, but”—he paused as if struggling to find the right words—“it blocked him from who he was—his mind, his true self.”
“Yes. We are aware of what happened to Bayard. Nonverbal. Dependent. His wife had to care for him like a child,” Stroud said, her voice waspish.
“Of course, I apologise. It was probably nothing.” Shiseo bowed and appeared to be on the verge of leaving.
“Wait.” Stroud sounded conciliatory. “You’ve begun now. Tell us what your point is.”
Shiseo stopped. “I don’t know all the details, but I believe they pursued a cure for him late in the war. A complicated procedure of the mind.”
“By a healer or by a surgeon?” Stroud leaned forward.
Shiseo tilted his head as if trying to recall. “A healer.”
Stroud pursed her lips. “Elain Boyle, I imagine.”
Shiseo tilted his head again, no recognition in his face.
“She was Luc Holdfast’s personal healer. The Eternal Flame was rather lax in their record keeping, but Elain Boyle’s name appeared frequently in the last year of the war. She seemed to have become unusually distinguished.” Stroud tapped her fingers on her lips, sucking at her teeth again.
“Where is Boyle now?” Morrough asked.
“Killed when we seized the Institute. I believe her body was sent to the mines. We could see if there are any remains.” Stroud’s attention returned to Shiseo. “What did the Eternal Flame do with Bayard that you think is somehow relevant?”
Shiseo bowed again.
“I was only aware of this because they hoped there were similar techniques used in the Eastern Empire. The healer, I was told, had a special ability to—to alter not just the brain but the mind. They proposed to enter the mind of Bayard and heal him from within.”
The mood in the room suddenly shifted, growing electrified.
“That would be animancy, not healing,” Stroud said with slow incredulity.
“I do not know, the words were—different,” Shiseo said. “The mind, I was told, resisted another’s presence, but this healer believed that with many small treatments, it was possible. Like learning to tolerate a poison.”
“Mithridatism,” Morrough said slowly. He straightened into his full, tremendous height. “Soul mithridatism …”
He advanced on Shiseo as if intending to rip the answers out of him. “The Eternal Flame found a way to make living subjects survive soul transference? And you never thought to mention this?”
Helena thought she was about to watch another rib cage be torn open.
Shiseo remained eerily calm and bowed again. “I apologise. They asked me many questions. It is hard to remember.”
Morrough seemed appeased by this excuse and turned back, considering Helena once more as if still inclined to vivisect her in search of answers.
“If the Eternal Flame did have an animancer who developed a temporary transference method … could that explain this form of memory loss? If another person could enter someone’s mind like that, they might be able to alter thoughts and memories, just as we see here. It would explain everything,” Stroud asked, gesturing at Helena. “And … I must say it seems more likely than far-fetched notions of self-transmutation.”
“If the Eternal Flame discovered a viable method of transference, that has more significance than mere memory loss,” Morrough said. Helena could feel his resonance in her marrow, as if it were burrowing into her flesh, attempting to peel her apart, layer by layer.
He looked towards Stroud. “Record every detail Shiseo remembers of this procedure before his departure east. We will begin testing this gradual transference method. I want it perfected. If it is possible, we’ll use it to remove the transmutation on her and see what the Eternal Flame was so desperate to hide from me.”
Morrough drew a breath that rattled as he turned away.
“Your Eminence,” Stroud said, her voice nervous. “This transference procedure you wish to begin testing, it would require an animancer, I believe?” She gave a weak cough. “I’m sure Bennet would have been thrilled by the opportunity, but unfortunately souls are not within my resonance repertoire, and there’s only one other. Would this be something that you and I—” Her voice lifted hopefully.
“Let the High Reeve manage it.”
Stroud’s face fell. “But I found h—”
“I have other work for you.”
Stroud straightened but still looked disappointed.
“The High Reeve was Bennet’s favourite after all.” Morrough waved a dismissive hand as he vanished into the shadows. “It’s time he’s given more to do than hunting.”
CHAPTER 3
WHEN HELENA WAS ROLLED BACK INTO THE lift at Central, she counted the floors of the Tower as they passed.
The Alchemy Tower had been an architectural wonder for centuries. It was only five storeys when initially constructed as a memorial to the first Necromancy War. Back then, alchemical resonance was an arcane ability, regarded as magic. Its practitioners, figures cloaked in myth and mystery, like Cetus, the first Northern alchemist.
The Holdfasts and the Institute had changed that, establishing alchemy as the Noble Science, something to be studied and mastered. When the Alchemy Institute threatened to outgrow the Tower, it was raised with alchemically wrought pulley systems to add additional storeys to the base. It had stood as the tallest building on the Northern continent for almost two centuries, growing ever taller as the city around it expanded and alchemists flocked through its gates.
The study of Northern Alchemy itself was entwined with the Tower structure. The lowest five levels with the largest lecture halls were the “foundations,” filled with initiates still discovering their resonance and mastering basic transmutation principles. Annual exams were required to ascend. After five years, most students would depart with their certification to join the guilds, with only qualifying undergraduates ascending to the next tier in the narrowing Tower to study more technical fields and subjects. Even fewer would rise past the graduate and research floors to achieve the rank of grandmaster.
The lift stopped somewhere amid the former research floors.
Helena strained her eyes, forced to peer through an aura of pain steadily fogging her vision. The walls blurred, her eyes failing to focus until she was rolled to a stop in the centre of a sterile room.
It had probably been a private laboratory once.
The straps pinning her in place were unfastened, and Stroud paused, checking Helena’s wrists.
The tubes running between her ulna and radius were nauseating, evoking a deep sense of wrongness. She couldn’t even twitch her fingers without feeling the way her muscles, tendons, veins, and nerves in that narrow space were all forced to accommodate the nullification driven through her.
“Very good,” Stroud said to herself before she turned to leave. Just before the door shut, Helena heard her say, “No one enters this room without my approval.”
There was a heavy click and the grind of a lock, and Helena was left alone.
She lurched up, but the drug had burned itself out of her blood and her muscles were cramping, contracting as though pulled taut. She tried to straighten, but the instant her feet touched the ground, her legs collapsed under her.
She slumped to the floor.
Run, a voice kept telling her. But she couldn’t; her arms and legs couldn’t hold her. In the absence of any physical ability, her thoughts turned inwards.
Had she really forgotten something?
Perhaps the Eternal Flame was not gone but remained as a hidden ember, waiting until the time was right. The possibility sparked a glimmer of hope. But how had she been made to forget?
Transference. Animancy.
Both words were unfamiliar.
She turned them over in her mind. Trying to contextualise the comments that had been made. Souls and minds and occupying the mental landscape of another person to transmute them from within. And the Eternal Flame had discovered this?
Surely not. Souls were considered inviolable among those of faith. The Eternal Flame considered even the physical alterations of vivimancy and necromancy a risk to an immortal soul.
Alteration of a mind, the transference of a soul: Surely that would be seen as infinitely worse.
Yet Shiseo claimed that the Eternal Flame had developed a way to perform this animancy-transference process. Something that Morrough, who’d unlocked the secrets of immortality, had not discovered.
Who was Elain Boyle? Helena didn’t know the name, and she was sure there had never been any other healers, much less a personal one, designated for Luc alone.
Luc would never have consented to receiving anything that wasn’t equally distributed to all the rest of the Resistance, and that included medical care and healing. He’d struggled with having paladins sworn to protect him, despite it being a tradition older than Paladia.
Stroud had to be mistaken.
Yet there was something hidden, changed about her. A secret so painstakingly concealed, Helena could not even guess at what it was.
Her muscles cramped harder. She lay on the floor, her body curled and contorted inwards like a dead spider, but her mind raced on.
What would Luc do if he were the one still alive? Captive. He’d already have a plan. He would have charmed Grace into passing a message for him, begun coordinating a way to escape, and plotted to rescue everyone on the Outpost.
That’s what he would do. Now it was up to Helena.
She couldn’t fail him. Not again.
HELENA HAD EXPECTED THE TRANSFERENCE to begin immediately, but instead she spent what felt like days barely able to move as her muscles gradually un-cramped.
“Withdrawal,” Stroud said with a look of condescension as she forced a feeding tube down Helena’s nose and inserted a saline drip into her arm to keep her sedated. “No matter. I imagine they taught you to enjoy suffering. After all, sacrifice is a healer’s calling, isn’t it?”
Stroud was unveiled in her disdain for Helena with the revelation that they were both vivimancers, but on opposite sides in the war.
Stroud considered her a traitor.
“I don’t like those spasms,” Stroud later said during an examination, her mouth pursed when Helena’s fingers seized, making her drop a cup. “It’s not caused by the nullification set; do you remember when they began?”
Helena shook her head, flinching as the cold burning sensation of Stroud’s resonance sank into her left wrist, winding through the bones as she twisted and manipulated it for several minutes.
“From the condition of it, it appears you’ve broken this wrist several times. There’s old nerve damage. Do you remember when it happened?”
Helena had no recollection of ever seriously injuring her hands. Dexterous hands were vital for channelling and controlling resonance in both an alchemist’s practice and a healer’s work. She’d always been very careful with them.
“There wasn’t any mention of it in your student files, so it must have been during the war, but there’s no records there, either.”
Helena’s academic records had been unearthed, and Stroud liked to use them to interrogate her about the smaller details of her life. She suspected it was because Stroud was allowed to punish her for refusing to answer.
Where was her alchemy resonance first tested? At the Paladian embassy in her homeland, the southern islands of Etras. How old was she when she immigrated to Paladia to study at the Alchemy Institute? Ten.
How many years of education did she complete at the Institute? Six.
Did she remember Principate Apollo Holdfast’s death? Yes, she had been in class with Luc.
When did she join the Resistance? When the guilds overthrew legitimate government and there was a Resistance to join.
Stroud had not liked that answer.
When did she become a member of the Order of the Eternal Flame? Helena tried to avoid answering, but Stroud had the book of members, with Helena’s vows and name all written in her blood.
“Did the Eternal Flame’s Council know you were a vivimancer when you joined?”
Helena shook her head.
Stroud sat glaring at her, waiting for a verbal response.
“I didn’t know I was a vivimancer,” Helena finally said. “And after—once everyone knew—Luc didn’t care. He didn’t think a person’s abilities changed who they were, only what they did with them.”
“How magnanimous.” Stroud’s voice was chilly. Her fingers were creasing the file in her hand. “A pity he didn’t also step down. A great many people might still be alive then.”
“His family was Called,” Helena said, despite knowing there was no point in arguing.
“Yes, by the sun,” Stroud said, scoffing, her voice growing sharp. “I know they didn’t teach modern astronomy at the Institute, but did you ever study the newer astrological theories? You’re from the trade islands after all; you must have been exposed to all kinds of ideas. Did you really believe that the sun looked at the earth and chose a favourite? That a drop of sunlight endowed Orion Holdfast with such godlike abilities that all his descendants deserved to rule Paladia like gods themselves?”
Helena set her jaw, but Stroud would not stop.
“According to your academic records, you were considered bright. Surely you didn’t swallow every story you were told about the Holdfasts. Look me in the eyes and tell me: Do you really think the Holdfasts had a right to rule?”
Stroud’s fingers dug beneath Helena’s chin, forcing her to look up.
She stared squarely into Stroud’s face, feeling the threat of her resonance. “Better them than people like you.”
Stroud’s hand dropped, her resonance vanishing before she slapped Helena across the face so hard her head cracked against the wall.
“If you’d joined our cause, you could have been great.” Stroud was breathing heavily as she stood over Helena. “You would have been somebody. You’re nothing now. You spent yourself on the wrong side. No one will ever remember you. You’re ash, like all the rest. And a traitor to your kind.”
Once she was alone, Helena cradled the swollen side of her face, head throbbing.
The Resistance had considered the war a holy war—a divine battle between good and evil, a testing of the Faith. But Helena’s motives had been more personal than that.
Luc didn’t need to be divine for her to want to save him. He could have been entirely ordinary, and she would have made all the same choices.
Was there something she could have done that could have changed things?
When she’d first immigrated to Paladia, she’d thought it was paradise. Etras did not have much metal as a natural resource. Resonance was rare. There were a few alchemy guilds, but they offered no formal training. Reaching Paladia had felt like coming home; like finding the place where she’d always been meant to be.
She’d been vaguely aware that there was a hierarchy among alchemists that divided even the student body, splitting the devout families in close alliance with the Holdfasts apart from the guilds, but she wasn’t familiar enough with the city-state’s politics to understand the intricacies of it.
All she knew was that some students wouldn’t speak to her, laughed when she asked questions, and mocked her accent and way of gesturing with her hands when she talked. Later she learned that those were the guild students and to be wary of them.
It was Luc who’d had to explain that the guild students thought Helena’s enrolment had taken a spot that should have gone to the guilds—though Luc assured her that they were wrong. His family’s Institute hadn’t been founded for guilds but for people like her, the ones who didn’t have opportunities to study alchemy on their own. The guild students didn’t even need to attend; their places and futures were all assured. For them, enrolment at the Institute was a status symbol. Once they had their certification, they’d all leave.
Helena was special, though. She’d be the one who’d stay beyond Year Five, who’d study more than just the principal foundations of alchemy. She’d ascend to the highest floors, make discoveries, and do the kind of work that would change the world. Her name remembered forever.
Why would his family want another guild student at their Institute when they could have someone like her?
Luc had always had a talent for making Helena feel like she was special rather than painfully out of place. She’d wanted to prove him right—that she was something, that she’d be worth believing in. His family wouldn’t be wrong about her.
She’d focused on her education and ignored the political hostilities around her.
Luc would mention things from time to time, how the guilds were convinced that his family was stifling alchemy’s scientific progress and preventing industrialisation, and then he’d wave towards the factories below the dam filling the sky with black clouds of smoke. That his father was being accused of allowing the country to fall behind because of his derelict governance. Or that the guilds had proposed that the Principate’s power be limited to religious affairs, and that they be the ones to run the country.
It had seemed that nothing Principate Apollo did was ever enough for the guilds; their complaints and demands were endless.
