He took no small time digesting the information, letting the heavy quiet settle back into the room before banishing it again with his perfect tones. “I am aware.”
Contrary to Mel’s own surprise, Netsa showed almost no change of expression. “Such is befitting of your unclouded eye, Brother.” Mel was uncomfortably reminded of Father Pacifica, but she pushed the thought down like she did the laughter, resolving to stay neutral.
“I received correspondence from Calcifer, in the mountain villages,” Gallant continued. In the stillness of the chamber, it was possible to see all three of the kneeling figures tense at the mention of the physician’s name. “He reports Lhord occupation in all the regions surrounding. They are, he says, camping out the paths to the capital, in search of a political fugitive. I suppose that refers to you.” It almost felt as if Gallant’s gaze held physical weight, pressing down on Mel as he turned his attention to her. “However, we agreed that it would befit an alchemist and physician of your caliber to use his study in his absence. You are granted permission to do so, Amelia Saul. Understand that your presence here is in the universe’s grand pattern; you may join the acolytes in their daily routines, and in return peruse the alchemical stores at your leisure.”
Mel summoned the voice she had perfected years before, addressing the Amoran Council. “Thank you kindly, Brother. It is very generous of you to present this opportunity to myself and July––Julius.” Mel felt a streak of guilt, white-hot in her chest, and made a note to apologize later.
“Julius. The doctor’s bodyguard.” Gallant said, leaning forward. Julius nodded, his expression moderate, but Mel could see the discomfort underneath. “I am told you arrived with a sword in hand, and I can see for myself that you are the type for action over words.” Mel saw Julius steel himself for a scolding, but none came. “You are of a rare breed this far north. I would like to ask you, in addition to the chores you will be receiving, to chaperone the acolytes’ trips into the forest. First bears, then wild dogs, and now soldiers––it appears we are living in dangerous times.”
Relief flooded Julius’ frame. He nodded gratefully. “Of course. I’ll keep my eyes peeled.”
Incredibly, a deep rumble of laughter rolled out from Gallant. “Very good,” He said. “Then you two should try to salvage a night’s rest. You will need it––chores begin early tomorrow morning. Netsa, stay. We have more to discuss.” Then a hand emerged from the great pile of robes that made up his sitting form, gesturing to the heavy door they entered through. The pair stood, Mel leading a short bow, then turned and passed into the hall quietly.
“I’m sorry for using your other name––I mean, your old name?” Mel said. She was unsure exactly how to phrase it, but she felt the essence of the message was present. “I’m going to need some time to change over.”
Julius seemed surprised by the apology, but he smiled and nodded. “I understand,” He said. “You’re trying. That’s all I care about.”
They climbed the stairs with little more discussion, and when Julius moved to continue down the hall to his dorm, they exchanged tired farewells. The sun was already beginning to rise; they would do well to get some sleep. But Mel questioned whether either of them would, knowing the snake was on their tail, resting in the mountains, waiting.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
ACOLYTE RIVER. THE CHAPERONE. ESCAPE.
As was becoming increasingly common, Mel found herself sitting at the table by the window of her childhood home. The glass was frosted, and the ground white with snow. Across the path, the weight of the snow had mounted so heavily on the roof of a particularly rotten building that the shingles had given away, leaving a gaping hole in the house’s ceiling. Between that and the dusty windows, it had the permanent appearance of a face, shrieking in surprised misery; Mel looked away.
Across the table, Aspen was fostering a cup of hot tea. He smiled at her, face as cherry red as she remembered, and took an endless draught of his drink. She felt as if she’d fallen off the middle of a sentence, curiously taken by the sensation of forgetting. There wasn’t anything particularly uncomfortable about this; it was much like the warm, dozing feeling one could culture by a raging fireplace. One such fireplace crackled in the corner of the room.
There were figures in the field of snow. She was surprised she hadn’t noticed them until now; they were directly in her line of sight, blocking the shrieking house. They were pale and waxy, but shiny, as if coated in a sheen of sweat. Their expressions were seized in featureless masks, like clay. In the front row, closest to the window and the fire, was her mother, hair swooped permanently with years of anxious running fingers.
Aspen was watching her now, the twinkle robbed from his eyes. The cup in his hands was empty. He dropped the porcelain carelessly, and a fracture like a fault in the earth split its painted face. There were beads of perspiration running down the cup; there were beads of perspiration running down Aspen’s face, which was clammy and grey, except where cut by sweat––leaving paths like trails wiped from a dusty mirror. Clutched by a panicked impulse, Mel overturned her cup of tea on Aspen. His skin hissed and washed away like makeup paint, revealing another face underneath, snarling and furious. It was Pacifica’s face, mottled with dirt and blood. He opened his mouth as if to growl, and a deluge of blood poured onto the kitchen table, washing away all the silverware but a lonely steak knife.
In the field of snow, a white colossus moved between the wax figures, its start and finish obscured by the window frame. It was viscous, segmented into bold, rounded stretches of thick hide, cut in places and oozing a green fluid. It disappeared entirely from sight, flashing its bulbous tail briefly; then it came back. Its skin didn’t seem flat anymore; it looked scaly, and the light of the growing flame gave it a deep scarlet hue. The wax figures began to shatter as it drove its heaving mass through them, until the titanic body was settled in a field of snow and fragments.
Mel got one look at its head; a snake, its eyes somehow empty and furious all at once. Then the steak knife was in her hands, and she wasn’t in control anymore––not of anything but her eyes, which slammed shut to avoid a future she could not change.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Mel awoke suddenly, with a feeling of intense claustrophobia. She kicked the damp blanket off her body, knocking her knapsack onto the ground in the process. There was a loud thump, followed by two more as she stood and backed away from the bed, images of her nightmare still echoing on the inside of her eyelids.
The door opened, and the cautious face of a woman peeked in, features alarmed. Mel recognized her as the acolyte who escorted them to Gallant’s chamber; the one who had checked on her at Netsa’s request.
“Are you okay?” She said. Mel was speechless for a moment, looking between the woman and the bed, then back to the woman. She entered the room and closed the door behind her, stepping cautiously closer and putting a hand on Mel’s shoulder. “You’re okay. Hey––you’re okay. You’re safe here.” The woman was oddly soothing; Mel didn’t stop her until the panic passed. Then she sat on the edge of the bed.
“I’m sorry,” Mel began. “I didn’t mean to startle you. Just a bad dream, I suppose.”
“Bad seems like an understatement,” The woman responded.
“Yeah. It was… vivid, certainly.”
“I imagine you’ve seen some hard things, being a doctor. I don’t know how you do it,” She said. “I just realized, I didn’t––I’m sorry, my name is River. Netsa posted me to the room under yours, in case more people try to come into the Monastery. I’m supposed to watch your door from dawn to when you leave, then be back an hour early, to make sure nobody’s waiting inside for you. It’s a little paranoid, but I think that’s how Netsa shows she cares.” She tucked a strand of loose hair behind her ear, and Mel was struck by what lovely features River had. A shame to waste her beautiful years in a shrine, her head whispered, too far back for her manners to reach. She ought to be out living life.
“I
apologize for imposing that on you,” Mel said, “and thank you. I appreciate the precaution.”
“Don’t be sorry,” River insisted. “It’s been nice. I’ve been taking the time to do some reading.” She reached into her robe and pulled out a thin blue book. It appeared to be a collection of poems. “It’s Yhiman. Do you know him?”
River was the first acolyte to introduce herself to Mel in the five days since they had arrived. This wasn’t to say the acolytes were not friendly people; everyone was outstandingly courteous, although eerily homogenous in their way of thinking. Instead of asking for help with a problem, most acolytes found the tools to do it alone. Evidently, the school of thought here was that the machine least likely to break was the one with only independent parts. Mel took an immediate liking to River, and saw the opportunity she’d been waiting for.
“Can I ask a favor of you, River?”
“Yes, of course.”
“I have a few hours free this morning. I’d like to go to Calcifer’s study.” Mel pulled on her jacket and took up her knapsack in a flurry of practiced movements. “Can you show me the way?”
River nodded. “In theory. I’ve never met him, nor been to his study––and people around here aren’t very fond of questions, if you haven’t noticed––but I have a good idea of where it might be.” She stepped into the hall, and Mel followed. Her eyes lingered on Julius’ dorm; but in the end, she figured he wouldn’t have any particular interest in a bunch of books and jars. Besides, he was probably on a foraging trip; he had chaperoned one every day since arriving, and today seemed no different. She moved along.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The study was in the opposite wing of the building, down halls west of the entrance, hidden from the harsh sun by a flank of piney trees. Mel noticed something that she hadn’t in her dorm; River walked with a slight limp in her right leg. She wondered if the woman had suffered a wound like Julius, or instead cultured some form of inflammation. She resolved to ask at some point; it was a small kindness in return for her unexpected friendship.
The door to the study was unremarkable, which was what Mel expected from a physician. Mel briefly worried that it would be locked, and she would have no way in without tracking down Netsa, but this was not the case––the door swung open easily.
“Thank Shina for the little things,” River hummed. They ducked inside.
The study was divided into two spaces. The first was more of a closet, its walls paneled with drawers, labelled in a tiny, angular handwriting, unusual but easy to read. The drawers themselves were filled with a variety of herbs and plants, many of which Mel knew but a handful of which defied her decades of experience. Each drawer contained as many as twenty round jars, corked and individually labelled. At first, it felt as busy and overwhelming as the cavernous library, but as Mel looked more closely, she realized there was a system in place, notated by a code of letters and numbers. This was the work of an intensely organized mind.
The second space was a tall window, on which a handful of papers were suspended by string, and a rectangular desk, shoved up against a bookshelf. The furnishings covered the wall perfectly, as if tailored for this room. The bookshelf was mostly medical texts, but the shelf closest to the ceiling held a row of leather books that Mel suspected from her own studies to be journals. She had a few like them, stored in a bank in the Republic of Amora until she settled down somewhere permanent. Immediately, she took one of the journals and began flipping through it, spraying a cloud of dust into the air.
“Never knew a man to keep a diary,” River quipped.
“Medical journals,” Mel said simply.
“I know––I was only joking.”
“Oh.” Mel, distracted, continued flipping. It was mostly observational notes on cases within the Monastery, interspersed with a couple passing travelers. She was almost disappointed until she looked at the amount of journals on the shelf. She could spend months looking for the right solution if she didn’t have help. She began to write a letter to Calcifer in her head, asking which book might pertain to her problem.
“Seems like a neat freak, this guy. I’ve never been in this room, so long as I’ve been here. He was never around when I was. How weird is that?”
Mel nodded absently.
“Um. Doc?”
Mel looked up. “Yes?”
“What do I call you? Dr. Saul? Just Saul?”
“My friends call me Mel,” She offered.
“Are we friends?” River said, echoing Julius’ words from months before. She remembered that night in the barn in Raoh quite clearly, and felt a bizarre compulsion to complete the script.
“Yes, I suppose so,”. There was a pang of nostalgia, and she distantly wondered where Julius was at that moment––whether he was thinking about her too in some strange universal alignment.
“Can you––gosh, this is going to sound weird––can you come by my dormitory tomorrow evening? I have to show you something.” River seemed slightly embarrassed at this, but Mel, dulled to shame by years of medicine, nodded, intrigued. There was another feeling lurking under the embarrassment in River’s eyes––a strain of desperation. She closed the journal and leaned against the desk for a moment, hoping to somehow soothe that desperation; but the moment passed. River looked away; Mel returned to the leather books.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Although many of his fears of a structured lifestyle were yet to be proven, Julius was relieved to be out in the forest again, sword at his hip. The acolytes followed him at a measurable distance, eyes on the ground for mushrooms and other goods to forage. If they were lucky, they would catch an unpilfered bush of frozen berries, solid but still good for breakfast the next morning. Julius shared in these pleasant surprises, but for the most part his eyes stayed on the depths of the woods; he was a chaperone, and his skills were distinctly unhelpful in mushroom identification, beyond the glowing blue type that attracted hordes of hell-slugs.
They had run into very little trouble thus far. This was the fifth and final foraging trip since he had arrived, the series of which would feed them for three or four weeks, he was told. On the first day, he had been so happy to reconnect with the woods, he had almost gotten the party lost, soaking in the feeling of peace instead of keeping track of their bearings. But by the third day, he had the business figured out; a rock was enough to chase away pesky knackerals, and the bear cave an hour’s walk from the Monastery was to be avoided.
That day was no different until the height of noon. The two acolytes he was escorting, whose names he had stopped bothering to learn, were particularly enthused by a patch of fallen logs, which generally hosted a colony of toadstools. Julius was busy doing nothing as a familiar black shape bounded through the woods, clearing a fell tree trunk and coming to rest almost at his feet.
“Fido!” He exclaimed, kneeling and putting a hand on the dog’s head. It was exactly as wiry as he expected it would be, and he gave it an affectionate rub, earning a few good tail wags. The acolytes looked up, then immediately backed away from what they must’ve assumed to be a wild dog. Fido, in turn, dropped down on his haunches, revealing a single snaggletooth with his curled lip and emitting that same quiet growl he had heard weeks prior. The acolytes moved back even further, taking a tree trunk as cover. Julius put himself between the dog and the acolytes.
“Why are you growling?” He asked Fido. “They’re okay. I thought you might’ve even belonged to them, although I’m kind of doubting that now.” Fido ducked his head around Julius’ knee, trying to keep the acolytes in sight. “Wow, okay. You really don’t like them, huh? It’s okay, Fido.” He soothed the dog, pulling a berry from a nearly-defrosted batch in his pocket and pushing it through the dog’s lips. Fido looked away long enough to swallow the berry whole. He looked to Julius, then the acolytes, then back to Julius, before turning and trotting back into the woods. He was gone as quickly as he had come.
“Visit soon!” Ju
lius called after him.
“Is––is that your dog?” One of the acolytes called from behind the tree.
He turned back to them. “No, I thought he was one of yours.”
The acolyte shook his head. “There are no dogs at the Monastery. There hasn’t been for years, and those dogs were given away. It was just too much strain on our food supply.” Julius tossed the acolyte’s words over. It made sense; he hadn’t heard barking or seen any dogs since arriving. It just meant that Aspen hadn’t visited the Monastery since the dogs had been given away. What it didn’t explain was why Fido kept visiting him now. The acolytes nervously returned to the logs, leaving Julius with his thoughts and the depths of the wood, as usual.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
They arrived at the gates of the garden just as the sky started to take on a pink hue. Unlike the first four trips, Netsa awaited them in the garden’s circular dais, hands folded in an imitation of patience. The acolytes dipped their heads in respect, still balancing deep straw baskets on their backs. Julius, holding the largest basket of the three, did not, instead looking Netsa directly in the eye, as was habit with people who grated on his nerves.
“You’re late,” Netsa commented.
“Lots of mushrooms.” Julius jostled the basket on his back, as if in demonstration.
“You were told to be back before nightfall.”
“I would hardly call this nightfall. Besides, we were back later than this yesterday,” Julius reasoned. “What’s the issue? Did something happen?”
Netsa only looked at him for a moment, lips tight, then said what she waited out in the cold so long to say. “The Lhord sympathizers are missing. When one of the lesser acolytes went down to check on them, the cell doors were open and they were gone. Apparently, they lifted the hinges off the doors and escaped through a window. We just wanted to make sure you didn’t see anything.”
After the initial surprise wore away, Julius thought over the day, and remembered nothing remarkable except the dog barking at the acolytes and then running off. “No, nothing comes to mind.”
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