by J. S. Miller
“You realize everything about this is ridiculous, right?” I asked.
“I concur,” Coppersworth said, his tone abnormally hesitant. “Arthur’s research clearly did not prepare me for—”
He was cut off by a long, chilling howl. Coppersworth and I turned and gazed back into the woods, but Glynda hopped into the cart and began rummaging around.
“Anyone ever tell you humans you’re a buncha know-it-alls?” she said, jerking her head back and forth, making the basket sway. “Get in. Now. It won’t take them long now that they have our scent, and I have to prep this stupid thing.”
“Prep?” I asked.
“It’s short for prepare, genius, and yeah, unless you wanna get extremely dead, I need some prep time.”
“You think they’d kill us?”
“My dad won’t be able to stop them now that you’ve broken the sacred law.”
“Oh, right. That.”
Ignoring the voice in my head telling me to back away slowly, that I had so much to live for, that we should sit down and talk about this — I stepped into the basket. Glynda appeared to be priming a small motor in one corner. Coppersworth looked even less willing to experiment with gravity, but after another, much closer howl, he warmed to the idea and came aboard.
The motor gurgled to life, and Glynda switched to tightening straps with her powerful jaws. I made my way to the opposite side of the basket and gazed up at the rope and the city beyond. The sight made my stomach churn, and I looked around for something, anything, to hold on to. The straps Glynda had been tightening, which were fastened securely to the floor, were obviously my best bet. I kneeled and grabbed one. That’s when I noticed similar straps on the ceiling above. In fact, the entire top half of the cart was a mirror image of the bottom half.
“All right, here we go,” Glynda said. “Hold onto your butts.”
She hit a switch and the motor revved. The cart lurched forward, moving slowly up the diagonal rope. As it trundled toward the planet above, several shi dogs crashed through the underbrush and made converging bee-lines for the gondola, which, to me, seemed to be both gaining speed recklessly and not moving nearly fast enough. My emotional state skittered between wanting to escape and hoping this thing would break down so we could get dragged back to Tree Dog City.
The cliff disappeared beneath us, and my stomach somersaulted into my throat. As we flew out over the crater, the basket dipped as if snagged by something. Maintaining a death grip on my strap, I craned my neck and looked over the opposite edge. One of the hunting party’s shi dogs was hanging by its teeth from a stray leather strap, snarling through clenched jaws. It had braids just like Glynda’s.
“What’s going on?” Glynda asked. “Why are we slowing down?”
“One of your friends decided to tag along.”
She ran to the edge and peered over.
“Ah shit, Gert, hang on!”
As we plummeted toward the city above, I sensed gravity starting to shift. The motor sputtered fiercely as the basket tilted, rotating on its rope like a daredevil pole dancer. Glynda threw one last concerned glance at her friend and then clamped down on one of the leather straps on the floor. The enclosure flipped. For a moment we were weightless, but then the pressure formerly on my feet transferred to my hands. My legs fell toward the ceiling, and my shoulders nearly tore free from their sockets. I let out an inarticulate cry. Another sound, however, drowned it out.
“You felonious trickster!” Coppersworth bellowed as he tumbled around inside the cart, somehow not falling out. “I demand you cease this joyride post-haste!”
Glynda, who’d handled the inversion of gravity with the calm grace of experience, didn’t seem all that concerned about Coppersworth’s discomfort. She was already racing back to the edge of the basket.
“Gertrude?” she asked, peering over the edge.
Coppersworth slammed down onto a floor that had been a ceiling a few seconds ago. He stood quickly, once again trying to straighten his steel waistcoat. His pride was evidently frailer than his exoskeleton. It occurred to me that his tumble in the tiny cart had probably posed more of a threat to me than him.
“Do not turn your back on me, you ragamuffin. I ought to give you a good hiding!"
The shi dog ignored the robot and reached over the edge of the basket. Gertrude was still somehow holding on, dangling over the smokestacks of the city below.
“Hang on!” Glynda screamed. As if on cue, Gertrude smashed into a tall chimney. The structure exploded, spraying soot and debris, and the shi dog twisted in pain, letting go of the strap.
“No!” Glynda screamed, lunging after her friend.
The basket rocked wildly as it dipped below the city’s skyline. I turned just in time to see a gargoyle scowling at me from a stone ledge before the basket smashed into it and pitched forward, chucking me out. Flying head first toward the next building over, I covered my face and shut my eyes. Glass broke. Wood shattered. Then all the lights slammed out.
Chapter 12
The Earth’s yellow sun was setting, though I couldn’t remember why that surprised me. It was growing colder by the second, but she’d asked me to wait here, outside of my father’s old brewery, so you can bet your ass I waited. Only fools defied Abigail Bouclier. She’d told me so herself.
“You will be waiting a while longer, I think,” a voice rumbled behind me. “Come inside. I need your help with something.”
I turned back to the street, listening for the cough of her battered old Jeep. The man behind me chuckled.
“My daughter needs a peer,” Vincent said, stepping back through the door. “Not a puppy.”
I gazed up at the old brick building. Darkness was creeping in around it, but the bulbs in the sign began flickering to life, blinking like stars that had slept in past sundown and wanted to save face by coming on casually. The lights spelled my father’s name: Muller. Seeing it made me stand up a little straighter. You can kill a man, but you can't kill his name. That belongs to the people left behind.
We entered the main brewing room, where fluorescent lights gleamed on several large steel vats. Vincent stopped in the center of the room, next to an enormous iron cauldron giving off the burbling sounds of a rolling boil. The smell from within made me fear for my nostril hairs.
“What the hell is this, Vincent?” I asked. “Smells like a burning gym bag stuffed with rotten horse meat.”
The older man huffed out another laugh.
“Colorful as ever, Westley,” he said. “You should be able to deduce what this is, so please refrain from asking stupid questions.”
“I thought there were no stupid questions.”
“Who on Earth told you that? Of course there are stupid questions. If a grown man asked you, in all seriousness, where babies came from, would you ask him to do your taxes? Now focus. Maybe you can figure what this liquid is.”
I glanced at his gear but decided to play dumb. He’d never scolded me for breaking into his secret lab, so I assumed Abigail had decided not to reveal my transgression.
“Well, it’s not beer,” I said. “Unless you’re trying out a new recipe. But I don’t think you’ll move many bottles.”
“Correct. It is not beer.”
I studied the liquid, and he studied me, seeming to size me up despite having known me nearly my whole life. Then he nodded.
“It is alchemy,” he said.
I tried to look surprised.
“You have no doubt heard of it,” he said, rolling his eyes at my reaction. “But it is not like in the stories. It is governed by the same rules that bind our world together, using the energy within ourselves to alter how the elements behave. Nostrums, elixirs, potions — these were not always false remedies sold by charlatans. Alchemists were once … we were once respected. Admired. But now we hide in our laboratories and academies, neglecting the outside world.”
“So … it’s like any science, then?”
He smiled. “You think of chemistry, perh
aps, but there is a difference. Chemistry is the science of matter, of reactions between atoms and their physical bonds. Alchemy is the art of harnessing, enhancing, and manipulating the latent power of those reactions. Only certain people have this power … and the tools to wield it.”
Vincent held up one hand. On it was a ring. The gold and silver band had intricate patterns etched into its surface. In the center sat a smooth, gray stone.
“Each alchemist must make one,” he said. “It will focus the power in your blood.”
“In my what?”
“Your blood. It is the foundation of your power. Your father was strong, and you are more like him than you know. My daughter is strong herself, but you will need each other … after … after I am gone.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
The old man opened his mouth, but no words came out.
I jolted awake on a cold, hard floor. My hands and feet were numb, and my head throbbed. I lifted a hand to my forehead to inspect for wounds and winced as I felt one reopen. My fingers came away crimson, but it wasn’t gushing, which was a good sign. Still, based on what I could see of the room, I didn't feel like celebrating just yet.
It wasn’t the unmade single bed, or the dirty table surrounded by four hand-carved chairs, or the quaint electric lamps mounted on the walls. No, those items told a typical if slightly antiquated story about a one-bedroom apartment and its unlucky occupant. The alarming part was the black iron cage sitting in one corner, and the fact that I just happened to be locked inside it. That right there screamed torture dungeon.
Broken glass glittered in the green sunlight leaking in through closed curtains. A trail of blood led from the carpet by the window to the edge of my cage, and its dark brown color told me I'd been out for a while. City sounds drifted in through the window, but they were distant, echoing up from at least a dozen stories down. I tried calling out for help, but no one answered. Look on the bright side, West. At least you finally got that good night’s sleep.
I had been fiddling with the lock for about 15 minutes when the knob on the front door twitched. I reached for the Chemslinger, but it was sitting on the bed next to my satchel. My captor jangled the keys for a moment before the deadbolt clacked aside and the door creaked open.
In the doorway stood … no one. I pressed my head against the top of the cage, trying to peer over the bed, but only got a slightly better view of the hallway, where stained and yellowed wallpaper suggested we were not in the nice part of town.
The door swung shut, making the lights flicker and dim. I waited, and finally a stick with a hook reached up and re-locked the deadbolt. All right, I’d had enough of this.
“Hey, ass hat,” I snapped, going for my usual stellar first impression. “Whoever the hell you are, things’ll go a lot better for you if you let me out of here right now.”
A machine-gun burst of high-pitched laughter peeled around the room.
“Listen, pal,” I continued a bit uneasily. “I’m sorry I broke your window, but this seems a bit-”
The chirping laugh interrupted me again. Then it spoke in a giddy little singsong voice.
“Pal, pal, pal,” it trilled. “Now I’m its pal.”
“Uh … OK,” I said. “Listen, maybe you should come over here so we can—”
“No!” it shrieked like a brick on a chalkboard. “You listen! You listen!”
The thing jumped up onto the bed, flapping large, greasy wings the color of discount rainbows. Feathers covered it from head to tail, but they were oily, matted down, dulled by a waxy film. From its head peered beady black eyes above a long, hooked beak with some sort of white fungus spreading across it. Aside from that, the creature most closely resembled a parrot … one the size of a Rottweiler. And, like so much else on this fucked up rock, it was so perfectly, obviously wrong. Maybe it was the jerky tilt of its head, or the hungry intelligence in its eyes — or the tiny, razor-sharp teeth glinting in the light every time it spoke.
“It doesn’t talk! It doesn’t talk!”
It started spinning in circles, raising its wings and glaring down at the bed.
“Master talked, but master is gone. Gone, gone!”
“Where did master go?” I asked, not sure I wanted the answer.
The eyes stopped searching the sheets and locked with mine.
“Where?” it spat back at me. “Where, where, where!”
A black tongue snaked out over the edge of the beak, and the bird’s eyes flicked toward the floor of my cage. I followed its gaze and saw that the slab had been stained by large quantities of some dark liquid.
“Master talked too,” the bird-thing said. “Meat shouldn’t talk.”
Well OK then.
“I am an alchemist of the Royal Academy,” I lied. “And you will release me.”
The bird cackled again and began bouncing in circles.
“Master had names too. Too, too, too. Meat gives itself lots of names, lots of names. But names mean nothing, no, no, no. Nothing!”
I felt a sudden and acute desire to get the hell out of this cage. I glanced around, looking for something, anything, I could use to neutralize Toucan Son of Sam. I found nothing but the blood on my hand and the clothes on my back. Indestructible garments were great, but how were they supposed to open a lock?
Wait. Blood. My blood. I lifted my hand and stared at the drying liquid. What was it Vincent had said about blood? About an alchemist’s blood? About power?
I pressed my palm to the cut on my forehead, the result of the brave attempt by the glass to keep me from entering this terrible place. Warm liquid smeared across my palm and fingertips. Then I reached out with my bloodied hand, grasped the lock, and focused.
“What, meat? What’s this, what’s this?”
I centered the energy within and around me, and the black metal itself began to hum. The blood in my hand heated until it bubbled and popped and stank of iron, and the bars around it glowed white. The bird made a low sound, deep in its throat, but I ignored it. I could only focus on the heat, though my blood did not burn me. It could not burn me. The metal lock began to smoke.
“What? What, what?!”
“I warned you,” I said, keeping most of my focus on the bubbling blood. “Alchemist isn't like other names.”
The thing on the bed shrieked and hurled itself at the cage, talons out and teeth flashing. I had prepared for this. My feet lashed out against the door, shattering the lock. The bars flew open and caught the bird square in its white-speckled beak. Feathers exploded as it was flung head-first into a solid wood end table. It crumpled like an accordion and fell to the floor.
Exiting the cage, I examined the creature. It was still breathing, thankfully. I didn’t relish the idea of living with the memory of murdering a tropical bird, regardless of how crazy it was. That said, I also couldn't just leave it here to wake up and start eating neighborhood children. I reached down and grabbed the thing by its neck. It was surprisingly heavy, but I dragged it inside the cage, closed the gate, and shoved the bed against it. Pushing the wooden frame required significant grunting on my part, so I guessed that it would hold the bird. The thing would undoubtedly cause a ruckus when it awoke, and someone would call the authorities. If not, and it starved to death after chewing off its own legs … well, darn, I tried.
I readorned myself with satchel and Chemslinger and turned to examine the room one last time when I noticed a small mound of black powder glittering like glass on the floor where the bed had been. It looked like a stash, though I’d never seen this substance before. I retrieved an empty vial from my satchel and reached down, scooping up some of the black substance without touching it and then screwing the cap back on. After stowing it in my satchel for future experiments, I exited the apartment as quietly as I could, locking the door behind myself.
The street outside was mostly empty. I scanned for landmarks before realizing there was only one worth looking for: the gondola line. And there it was, running above me. I
followed it as best I could and eventually emerged onto a larger street.
People bustled everywhere, and they really looked like people, not iron men or talking birds or walking statues — just regular, vanilla humans. Well, mostly vanilla. They wore clothes that looked patched together from different eras in Earth’s history, and … one seemed to have small horns protruding from his forehead, while another had a thin layer of fur on her face, and another … you know what? Who cares. They were close enough to vanilla. I needed to find the end of that damn rope.
I took a winding path between buildings that resembled the clothes of their occupants, pieced together from various familiar architectural styles, as if the builders had based this entire metropolis on verbal descriptions of others. Which, based on what I knew about this world, sounded about right.
The rope swayed gently above sloping Japanese rooftops buttressed by Corinthian columns. Paper lanterns hung between Victorian spires, sticking out like sore thumbs shipped in from ancient China. The city was so visually perplexing that, when the rope finally came to an end, I nearly overlooked the basket standing empty near an old man wearing a broad-brimmed hat.
He sat in a chair with the hat over his eyes, the hillbilly version of a “Do Not Disturb” sign. But I could tell the basket was ours — it had clearly seen better days — so I sauntered up anyway, trying to look as casual and uninteresting as possible.
“Hello,” I said. “Quick question. Seen any talking dog statues or mechanical men lately?”
The man snorted awake and pulled back his hat. A broad mustache emerged, chased out by a set of milky white eyes. Not blind yet, but getting there.
“Can't say I have done, stranger,” he said, and his tone dipped into the solicitous sweetness of a salesman sizing up a mark. “Been hours since the ferry last moved."
“Any information would help.”