by Beth Revis
I leaned over the book, squinting through the embellished letters. The old tongue wasn’t an easy language to learn, but I sounded out the opening passages, partly from memory. They were about faith and love and forgiveness and acceptance, but my parents were still dead and gone, and none of these words would ever make that okay. I knew it, I know it, I will know it forever.
I closed the giant book and leaned down, resting my forehead against the cover. Hundreds of years ago, someone pressed heavy stamps into the leather to decorate the book, and someone else bound the pages that had been toiled over by someone else, and every single someone from so long ago had done that for this moment, to reach out to another they’d never know and hope the words meant something.
They didn’t.
But when I leaned back up, I saw not the words, but the love and work and hope that led to their creation, and maybe that meant something. Maybe.
I pulled down the next volume. An old atlas, with lines marking the Empire’s reach, the maps now incorrect. The mainland and capital city hadn’t moved, but the Emperor’s rule now stretched deep into Siber to the east, Enja to the south, and into the sea, into islands like this one. Pockets of colonies scattered across countries, each one with a new regent ruler like Governor Adelaide, each one serving under the Emperor. I wondered if the governors in Siber or Enja had ever experienced a civil war like we had so many years ago. I wondered if they still felt the repercussions, a century later. I wondered if some people scratched arrows on old buildings and whispered about another rebellion; I wondered if the Emperor knew or cared.
I shut the book with more force than I’d intended. What did I care about the rest of the world when my own was crumbling down around me?
I reached for the next book.
The cover was so worn I couldn’t read the title embossed into the tan leather. I opened it carefully; the paper was thin as onionskin.
It was an alchemical text, but handwritten in an older style, not Standard Imperial. Hope surged within me as I recognized some of the runes. Finally, finally, here was a book that may help me.
“Neddie?”
I was so startled that I dropped the book, losing my place. “Ernesta!” I snapped, impatient.
She shrank against the doorframe as if I’d hit her.
“What?” I said in a softer tone.
“Nothing.” She slipped back into the hallway, silent as a petal falling.
I rolled my eyes and carefully picked the book back up, my fingers peeling the thin pages apart. She had spent almost the whole week huddled on her bed and had chosen now to interrupt me.
The ink was faded and the light was failing, but I read anyway. My head ached. The book was mostly full of warnings about the evils of necromancy, but then I found what I was looking for.
“A skilled necromancer manipulates both death and life,” the book said near the middle. “Death comes in many forms. Perhaps the easiest to manufacture is by means of a plague. The necromancer’s hand can be seen by the black stain of the victim’s blood.”
“This is it,” I whispered to the dark. Proof, finally, that the plague really was caused by necromancy. My hands trembled as I turned the page.
But there was nothing else. No hint of how the plague was made, exactly, or how to stop it, short of killing the necromancer. “No,” I whispered, turning the thin paper so frantically that several pages ripped.
What good was knowing the cause if I still didn’t have a cure?
* * *
• • •
“Nessie?” I said gently on the seventh day. She didn’t lift her head, but she opened her eyes.
Dehydration, my student brain thought, taking in her symptoms—sunken eyes, sallow skin, ashen look. Lack of vitamins and sunlight. Depression. I had spent so much time trying to ignore reality that I hadn’t taken a proper look at my sister since this nightmare started.
“It’s time,” I said.
“Time?”
“We can go.”
From outside, we could hear a bell. “Brysstain family!” a male voice called from outside. “Do any of you still live?”
Ernesta wouldn’t put the quilt down. She carried it wrapped around her shoulders, the end dragging on the floor behind her, as we staggered down the hall together. I went to the front room door but stopped. We could go out the back. We went through the kitchen. Only dry goods left on the table—some beans, flour, salt.
I opened the door.
We blinked in the sunlight, our eyes stinging from the brightness. The bell that had been ringing silenced.
A dozen or so people stood at the gate. They all had masks covering their faces. I did not recognize any of them, and I didn’t care to.
“Just the two of you?” the man called.
I nodded.
“Any sickness on you?” In one hand, he held the bell. In the other, he clutched a gun. I looked past the fence, to the other houses on my street.
Every single one was draped in black cloth.
I held up my bare hands, then lifted my skirt to show my unblemished feet. When no one did anything, I pulled down my shirt, showing that my chest was uninfected.
“And her,” the man said, waving his gun to indicate Ernesta.
She tugged down the front of her tunic, then lifted her feet, first left, then right. She shifted the quilt from hand to hand, turning her wrists to show all sides. She kept her eyes straight ahead, staring at the man.
The man let his bell drop the ground. He aimed his pistol with both hands.
“Back inside,” he said.
I started to scream at him in protest, but then Ernesta held up her hand to stop me.
And I saw the blackness leaking from her fingertips into her right palm.
FORTY-THREE
Nedra
Back inside the house, I paced up and down the hallway.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I demanded, not stopping.
Ernesta sat in a chair by the door, her shoulders slouched. “I didn’t notice.”
“You didn’t notice!”
But I hadn’t noticed either. I’d let Nessie lie in bed, clutching the quilt, while I read and read and read. I had believed I might find answers to the plague in either Master Ostrum’s old book or my father’s, but they had proven woefully inadequate.
I snatched up her hand and squinted in the dim light at the darkness leaking through her skin. “It’s not that bad,” I said. “I’ve seen worse.”
“You can stop it?”
I froze for a moment.
Yes.
I knew how to stop it from spreading.
“We have to get you to the city,” I said. “To real medical alchemists. To a . . . to a surgeon.”
“A surgeon?” she asked.
Then her fingers curled over her palm. She understood. She wasn’t naïve. She’d heard Papa’s stories about the plague; she knew what I did at the quarantine hospital in the city.
Amputation.
“It’ll save your life,” I said. “It’s the only thing that’s worked to contain the disease.”
She set her jaw and nodded.
“We’ll go tonight. With that many houses fallen from the plague, there aren’t enough people left to stop us from leaving. We’ll take Jojo, and we’ll go.”
“Do you really believe I have a chance to—” Nessie’s voice was soft, and she didn’t finish her thought.
I gripped her hand—the uninfected one. “Yes,” I said, pouring every ounce of hope I had left into that one word.
* * *
• • •
We packed. And we waited. Darkness fell.
Ernesta held the quilt around her shoulders. I slid boots over her feet, using the action to confirm that they weren’t infected as well.
“I can carry something,” she sa
id as I slung the knapsack over my shoulder. At the bottom rested Master Ostrum’s book and the old book I’d found in Papa’s room, the alchemy text. And I packed a few knickknacks to remind us of home. Because we were never coming back.
And my crucible. Nessie wouldn’t let me take any of the pain from her hand. “You need your wits about you,” she said, and she was right.
“I have this,” I said, adjusting the pack on my shoulder. “Ready?”
Ernesta nodded.
I gripped a rope in one hand. Trying to take the cart would draw attention, but we could take the mule. Nessie could ride, and I’d lead.
Ernesta opened the back door. Quietly, we crept out onto the smooth stone step, the one my grandfather had found one day while plowing. We moved onto the path, my eyes fixed on our stable.
Nessie gripped my arm at the same time a shot cracked out across the night. I shifted my gaze. A stream of gray smoke rose from a man’s gun. I didn’t know him; he just vaguely looked like someone from our village, or perhaps the next one over.
“If you take one more step closer, I will kill you,” he said.
I had hoped that there wouldn’t be a night watch. That darkness would protect us, hide us for our escape.
“If you try to leave your house again until we call for you,” he said, “we will kill you.”
Under the starlight, I saw more people emerge from the darkness, lining up around our fence. They were all armed, their faces set in grim lines. There were no more children throwing rocks. The plague was spreading, and so was the fear.
“You won’t get another warning,” the man said.
Beside me, I felt Ernesta slouch, defeat radiating from her body.
“You understand,” the man said.
“We’re just trying to survive,” he said.
“Six more houses have fallen ill,” he said.
“We can’t risk it,” he said.
We said nothing. We turned and went back inside. I locked the door.
Ernesta sat down at the kitchen table. She put her head into her arms, her right hand sprawled out in front of her.
The windows were dark with night and the black cloth that covered them, but I could still feel the villagers watching us, their eyes like wolves’.
I lit the oil lamps and every candle I could find and set them around us. The flickering light bounced off the walls. I lit the fire in the oven and stoked it.
“There’s no food left to cook,” Nessie said.
I sat down across from her. I held her infected hand. I looked into her dark eyes, the same shade of amber honey as mine.
“We have to do it,” I said.
Her fingers curled into a fist, hiding the stain of black.
“We can’t wait until morning.” Mama and Papa had gone so fast. “No one has lived with their blood stained black. No one but those who cut it from their bodies.”
Nessie was my baby sister by only twenty-three minutes. But she seemed so small in that moment, so helpless, like we were years apart.
Papa kept grain liquor under the sink in a glass jar. I poured Nessie a shot and watched as she drank it, and then I poured her another one, and another. She kept clenching her hand into a fist, as if memorizing the way it felt for her fingers to fold over her palm, for the muscles to tighten and the skin to stretch and the bones to obey her will.
I pulled out Papa’s toolbox. The hacksaw, the teeth still stained with sawdust. The sharpest knife from Mama’s drawer. A needle, thread. Towels. Every towel I could find. Papa’s leather belt.
I stretched the belt out on the table and hacked off a piece, then used a punch to make more holes. I handed Ernesta the smaller piece of leather.
“What am I supposed to do with . . . ?” Her voice trailed off. She lifted the leather to her mouth and bit down on it. It was as much pain relief as I could give her.
I put the cast-iron skillet on the stove, letting it heat up. My grandmother had cooked on that skillet, my mother.
Silent tears leaked down Nessie’s face. Her fingers clenched, relaxed, clenched again.
“More,” I said, pushing the jar of liquor at her. She downed the rest of it, choking on the burning liquid, then took up the bit of leather again.
My heart raced, thudding against my ribs as if I’d just run for miles.
“Are you sure we can’t wait?” she asked in a small voice.
If I could give her anything, it would be time. I wanted so much to give her time.
“No,” I said.
Papa’s jar was empty.
The rope I’d intended to use as a lead for the mule now tied my sister to her chair. “Try not to struggle,” I said. “It’s instinct, but . . . try.”
I took Nessie’s hand in mine, turning it palm up, and stretched her arm on the table. Oh, Oryous. How quick could I make this? I couldn’t take her pain, not now, not when I needed my strength. I could only be fast. Fast as I could while still getting the job done.
“Neddie,” she whispered.
I shook my head. I couldn’t be Neddie right now. I had to be Nedra Brysstain, the top alchemical student at Yūgen, the girl who volunteered at the quarantine hospital.
There had been blood on my hands many times before. Just never my sister’s.
“Here,” I said, running my finger over an invisible line above her elbow, more than three inches from the faintest tint of black under her skin.
Ernesta nodded.
A human thinks of the pain, of the suffering. A human sees a hand and also sees the person attached to it. I couldn’t be a human in this moment. I had to be an alchemist. An alchemist sees the skin that must be sliced apart. The arteries that must be tied off. The bone that must be sawed through. An alchemist knows to hold the arm down so it doesn’t wiggle too much.
An alchemist folds the flaps of skin and flesh over the raw wound and stitches it. An alchemist moves to the stove quickly, picking up the hot cast-iron skillet and pressing the bottom against the wound to cauterize it.
An alchemist doesn’t hear the screams.
FORTY-FOUR
Nedra
When i finished, Ernesta was still awake, staring at her hand on the table. I untied her from the chair, then moved through the scent of blood and burnt flesh to pull the golden crucible from my bag. She watched me with deadened eyes as I clutched her shoulder and pulled the pain out of her and into me. I took it all without a drop of hesitation. It roared over me like an ocean wave, and I fell to the floor, whimpering. Nessie sighed and slumped against the table.
When I woke the next morning, she was gone. The hand was gone, too.
I staggered to my feet. I ached, my entire body tense, my bones flowing with fire. The kitchen was stifling hot. The lamps and the candles had long since died; the fire in the hearth smoldered.
I crept down the hall. Nessie lay curled in my bed, her severed arm held carefully out. I inched my way forward, looking at her skin for signs of infection, feeling her forehead for fever. Her skin was clammy, but she was going to be okay.
She might never forgive me, but she was going to be okay.
I lay down in the bed beside her. Without thinking, I reached my hand toward hers, but I stopped before my fingers brushed her wound.
* * *
• • •
When I woke the next morning, I went to my parents’ room.
I opened the book I’d found earlier—the old alchemy text—and laid it beside the one Master Ostrum had given me. Wellebourne’s journal was, at its heart, instructional. Step by step, in clear, simple terms, it outlined the journey to become a necromancer. The first step I already knew: Create an iron crucible, formed of blood and bone and ash, melded together through sacrifice.
Sacrifice was described in Papa’s book as well. In fact, it seemed to be a central theme. “Should the alchemist determ
ine to cross the god-placed boundaries twixt life and death,” the book warned, “his very soul may prove to be the price paid.” But just in case the reader was willing to be such a heathen, the book suggested a chant, one that mentioned both the power needed and the willing trade for it. There was no chant in Wellebourne’s book, just runes that had to be drawn prior to developing the iron crucible.
Papa’s book warned of how addictive necromancy could be. “Once a crucible is made,” it said, “the necromancer’s voracious need for death will be all-consuming.” I shuddered, remembering the strange hunger that awoke within me the first time I danced too close to Death. “Should the necromancer grow powerful enough to form a reliquary and become a lich, he will be invincible in the mortal realms.”
I forced myself to analyze both texts, trying to find some connection, some knowledge I’d not been aware of, something. Anything. The most I found was in Wellebourne’s book, but while it spoke of necromancer curses, it wasn’t specific to the plague. My heart sank as I read, “There are ways to free the undead, should the necromancer be weak. But even if the necromancer’s crucible is destroyed, a curse will linger as long as the necromancer lives.”
Master Ostrum’s book also included detailed charts and diagrams. I opened to one of a crucible cage, but immediately closed the book in disgust. I’d held Bennum Wellebourne’s crucible cage in Master Ostrum’s office, but now the image reminded me too sharply of my sister and what she had lost. I thought of her severed hand resting on the dining room table my mother used to roll biscuits on.
“Ned?”
I shoved the books under Papa’s bed and turned around. Nessie stood in the doorway, her silhouette blacked out against the light in the hall.
“What are you doing up?” I said.
“I missed you.”
She had the quilt wrapped around her.
“Go back to bed.” I tried to make my voice kind, but it was strained with worry. And guilt. Reading that book made me feel as if she’d caught me doing something deeply wrong.
Instead of going back to her room, Nessie sat down on Mama and Papa’s bed. “Tell me about the city,” she said.