The Lady Alchemist

by Samantha Vitale

  Sepha skidded to a stop and looked back at Ruhen.

  There was a strange wind around him. His dark curls whipped from side to side, and his clothes were pressed against him, the loose fabric flapping behind him like a banner. His arms were still outstretched.

  Sepha had a sudden inkling, and then a horrifying confirmation, as Ruhen shouted something foreign in a loud voice.

  In answer, the water surrounding the boat rose up and whipped around the sides in an angry, slicing vortex.

  Somewhere behind Sepha, the magician threw back his head and released a single, strangled “Ha!”

  Ruhen seemed suddenly the single spot of light in a field of empty darkness. As if he felt Sepha’s gaze, he shifted to look at her face-on. Those dark eyes were distant, those lips grim, and power radiated from him like heat shimmering above molten metal.

  Ruhen was not an alchemist.

  Ruhen was a magician.

  The realization struck her like a physical blow, and she took two stumbling steps backward. She felt that closeness, that knitted bond between them, unravel, as if its falseness couldn’t withstand her scrutiny now that she saw it for what it was.

  Understanding fell neatly into place like fitted blocks stacked one on top of another. Ruhen was working for the undead magician. Ruhen had been near the Wicking Willow because his master had made it. He’d known she was an alchemist, known the magician’s plan, and had told him where to find her. He’d come to the Institute to spy on her and the other alchemists for the magician.

  With a nauseating heat that made her sink to her knees, Sepha realized the fullness of it. The contract had picked Ruhen, had tethered him so tightly to Sepha, because the magician had picked him. Ruhen, the magician’s secret, effective weapon.

  Sepha’s secret darknesses hadn’t scared Ruhen away because he was a bigger monster than she could ever be. And unlike hers, Ruhen’s monstrosities were all intentional.

  A nearby door burst open with a clang. Destry, Ellsworth, and the most sea-hardened mariners barreled out, armed with enormous shotguns and strapped with glinting blades, bludgeons, and spears of Destry’s creation. Screaming like madmen, they rushed out in all directions.

  In the confusion, Sepha lost sight of Ruhen and the homunculus. That godsdamned tether flickered out again, making her lurch forward onto her hands. The wall of whipping water slowed, then cascaded down like a heavy rain. Three cleptapods immediately latched onto the ship, sending a tangle of arms straight across the main deck. The arms squeezed together in an orchestrated attack, trying to crush the boat in a horrific hug. Destry and the others leapt behind crates or between shipping containers, hiding from the sharp exoskeletons.

  The tether flicked back in, stretched farther now.

  Surrounded by the scraping of bone and shrieking of metal, Sepha could barely collect herself enough to think. She’d been so thoroughly fooled, she hardly knew what she was supposed to do or feel; and she was surrounded by so many enemies, she didn’t know which to kill first.

  Then, from beneath the web of overlapping tentacles, Destry exploded, her slashing knife a silver blur as she sliced clean through two arms. Her voice rose, hard and strong, above it all. “Attack!”

  As one, Ellsworth and his mariners resurfaced from their hidden positions, roaring as they stood. The cleptapods, sensing danger, released their tight grip on the hull. Their arms sprang to life, swiping and stretching in a tangle of sucker, sinew, and stolen bones.

  The cleptapods had to die first.

  Sepha surged toward the harpoon guns mounted on the forward bow. The tether stretched as she ran.

  All around her, the tentacles reached and grasped, shrinking back from the slicing attackers, only to reach in from the opposite direction. One of the arms found its target, and Sepha heard the man’s last scream as the tentacle snapped his spine. The tentacle lifted the mariner’s body high into the air and over the side of the boat, where the cleptapod’s beaklike mouth awaited, protruding grotesquely from its bulbous head.

  Sepha heard the man’s bones crunch over all the other noise. She kept running.

  Tentacles were pursuing her now. She reacted automatically, falling into the familiar stances of the morning evolution. She ducked, rolled, and dodged, focusing on the one thing that mattered: getting to those godsdamned harpoons.

  She was at the foot of the short stair that led to the first harpoon gun when the homunculus reappeared. He perched on the railing in spite of the furious wind and croaked, “No.”

  With a guttural, incoherent word, he crumpled the huge mechanism until it looked more like a wasted piece of paper than a gun. He bellowed again, and the second harpoon gun was wrecked just as fast.

  “No!” Sepha screamed and threw herself up the stairs. The homunculus laughed, opened a hole in the air, and launched himself through it. Sepha’s hands swiped through the empty space where he’d just been, and she swore. She’d only just missed him.

  Sepha knelt beside the gun’s mount, temporarily out of sight and safe from the tentacles, and pulled the alchem from her holster.

  That godsdamned magician really didn’t know anything about her.

  Sepha pressed the alchem against the mount. It was only a hundred small transformations. Nothing she hadn’t done before. She had five years of experience making guns at the mill, or at least the parts for them, and this was no different.

  She placed her fingers just so and closed her eyes.

  It was silent. It was dark.

  There was a prolonged pulse, and she opened her eyes.

  The gun was fixed, of course, gleaming and brand-new and begging to be used. And so she used it.

  The first harpoon released with a sigh and flew true. It pierced the cleptapod’s gleaming eye and continued through the unprotected flesh beyond. The cleptapod’s tentacles slumped to the deck and slid away as the huge body crashed into the water.

  Our Dear Lady was deep into cleptapod territory now, and Sepha saw the sea stacks the map had promised. A profusion of stony upthrusts rose from the water’s surface, huge masses of black against the night’s dark blue, in an unnavigable, deadly maze. Sepha expected every moment for the boat to be crushed against the rocks; but the water, with a strange, cushioning current, steered them to safety at every turn.

  The second harpoon launched with a sob and glanced harmlessly off the armor of human bones that protected its target.

  Far distant from Sepha, another mariner met her end, snatched up by the knees and dropped upside-down onto the deck, where her body crumpled like an accordion.

  Ellsworth aimed his shotgun at the tentacle that had dropped the mariner and pulled the trigger. The tip of the tentacle exploded away from the rest, thudding heavily on the deck beside the dead mariner.

  The third harpoon flew out screaming and was deflected by a sudden explosion amidships. The undead magician arched his body as he released magic in explosive, powerful bursts. Some of the mariners turned their guns on the magician instead of the cleptapods, and their eight-armed foes made effective use of the distraction. Sepha watched, frozen again, as two more men died screaming, bursting open on the deck like swollen balloons.

  And through it all, the tether flickered and stretched and shortened as Ruhen darted from place to place, working his secret magic.

  A cleptapod turned an intelligent eye toward Sepha and recognized her as the source of the problematic darts. It reached arm over arm, pulling itself laboriously toward her over the detritus on the deck.

  Then Destry reappeared, her face a symphony of rage and determination. There was a faint double pulse, and suddenly Destry was carrying her long, narrow cannon. She loaded and fired it in one fluid movement, catching a cleptapod in the eye. The round exploded inside it, momentarily backlighting the cleptapod’s exoskeleton with a horrible orange glow. It burst, spraying the deck with sickening orange slime.

  With a swallowed laugh, the undead magician threw himself into
the air and aimed his next attack at Destry. There was a blinding flash, and both of them flew backward. Destry, who’d landed hard against a shipping container, stood with effort and threw herself at the homunculus with a wordless scream.

  Not far from Destry, Captain Ellsworth fell, knocked out by a heavy blow from a tentacle.

  The fourth harpoon shot in silence and felled another cleptapod. Yet another took its place.

  The water beyond the boat writhed with bones.

  The fifth and last harpoon floated uncertainly and planted itself into the wheelhouse’s window, useless and unable to delay the inevitable. Sepha slid down the stairs, intending to run to the other harpoon gun, where more harpoons were ready and waiting, but she could hardly bring herself to move at all.

  How many mariners had just died?

  And if she failed to kill the undead magician, failed to thwart the contract beside her heart, how many more people would die?

  How many more would die when she could ruin his plans right now by dying, herself?

  The Dear Lady’s deck was a horror show of slime, severed tentacles, and corpses crushed and mangled. A few mariners still fought. Outnumbered by two magicians and a swarming army of cleptapods, they fought under the full knowledge that they were already dead.

  Another man screamed. As he rose into the air, swinging his sword ineffectually at the tentacle that held him, a glint in Sepha’s peripheral vision gave her fair warning. The cleptapod who’d spotted her had finally gotten within arm’s reach. As she ducked and dodged, keeping herself alive for the moment, she saw that it was crippled, with only three legs remaining. It glared malevolently at her, its three legs intent on trapping her, and Sepha knew that she could die, if she chose to. To save everyone else.

  The death would be quick.

  Sepha slowed, entranced by the thought, and felt as if her arms and legs had preceded her into the After, and she only had to join them.

  Sepha closed her eyes and waited.

  She heard a distant roar. Her tether flickered out and in.

  Two arms wrapped tightly around her, but they were warm and strong and unmistakably human. The arms threw her to the deck, and Ruhen’s voice bellowed something foreign.

  There was a roar as if the sea itself was roused to anger, and Sepha opened her eyes. Ruhen was crouching above her, arms outstretched, eyes flashing and furious. At his direction, the water formed a tornado, which bore down on the cleptapod and snatched it away from the hull, flinging it viciously against a rocky outcrop. Its work done, the tornado dissipated into a fine mist.

  Ruhen’s magic had bought them a moment of silence.

  “Magician,” Sepha snarled, pushing herself onto her feet. It was a curse, and she meant it to be deadly.

  “A good one, too,” he said, and clenched his hands into fists as he got to his feet.

  Sepha launched herself at him, hands outstretched to throttle him. He dodged her attack smoothly, grabbing her by the wrist and yanking her around so forcefully that her feet left the ground. He pulled her against him, an echo of their former embrace, and Sepha screamed, swinging at him as hard as she could with her free arm, once, twice, three times.

  But even without the added benefit of magic, Ruhen was twice Sepha’s size and as agile as he was strong. He dodged her blows without even trying.

  Sepha was crying now, and screaming-mad. “Liar!” she bellowed. “You were with him from the start! You tricked me! You,” she gasped, hardly able to breathe, “you betrayed me!”

  Ruhen stared at her in the gloom, his face a mask. She should have suspected, should have known it all along. His shyness about performing alchemical exchanges hadn’t been shyness at all, but caution, a necessary tactic to keep up his ruse. Every doubt she’d ever had, every time it had been too easy to explain away the contract’s many strangenesses, leapt to the front of her mind. If nothing else, his attentions toward her should have told her he wasn’t what he seemed.

  Catching on at last, eh? the snide voice cackled. No one so perfect would want you!

  Sepha pulled her free arm back, winding up to hit Ruhen, to hurt him as much as he’d hurt her, but he caught it and used it to pull her closer. He smelled like blood now. Blood and magic and death.

  “Sepha,” he said, and his voice was soft again, and raspy. It grazed her like a sword, and she flinched away. “Sepha, I can explain. I’m—I’m not—I’m a good magician.” There was desperation in his voice, but Sepha couldn’t fathom why. “I haven’t betrayed you,” he said, “and I won’t. Not ever.”

  Lies.

  Sepha struggled to break away from his grasp, furious that he would dare, that he had the gall to keep pretending, after all this.

  But then a scream, high and terrified and female, pierced through Sepha’s cloud of rage. Destry was high in the air, a leisurely tentacle hoisting her up by an ankle and moving her slowly over the edge of the hull. The undead magician watched from the deck, elated.

  Sepha froze.

  No.

  No!

  The scene progressed at half-speed. Sepha heard herself scream. She shook off Ruhen’s hands and moved with all she had in her, but she was too slow, too far away. She heard Ruhen shout something, saw a blade of water nearly overtake the murderous cleptapod. Saw the undead magician’s answering attack send the blade coursing harmlessly aside.

  The tentacle released Destry. She fell, ashen-faced and limp as a doll, still grasping her cannon in one hand, into the cleptapod’s waiting mouth. The mouth closed, and there was a crunch. It was the loudest thing Sepha had ever heard.

  Sepha spun to look, disbelieving, at Ruhen.

  Ruhen, who was a magician.

  Destry, who was dead.

  Tentacles groped the boat from all directions as the waiting cleptapods moved to claim the remaining prey. Their exoskeletons crackled in the night. Some of the bones were very small.

  She had to end them. She had to do it now.

  Sepha glared at Ruhen in fierce desperation and said, “If you’re with me, fight the homunculus.”

  Then she ran, holding her alchem crumpled in her fist, directly toward the evil-eyed cleptapod who’d just eaten Destry. Sepha reached the rail, braced a foot on the slick chain, and launched herself over the side and onto the bulbous head of the cleptapod.

  She landed hard and barely managed to catch herself on the cleptapod’s jutting bones. The cleptapod lurched to the side, its tentacles searching for her in the water, on the deck, everywhere but on its own head.

  Sepha hung there, legs dangling over the churning water, and felt as if she wasn’t really there. Wasn’t really anywhere.

  But Destry, the future Magistrate, was dead.

  It had been this cleptapod that did it.

  She would make it pay.

  Hand by hand, bone by bone, Sepha scaled the cleptapod’s armor until she was perched on the very top of its head.

  From this vantage point, she could see the deck, littered with bodies and severed tentacles. She noted, grimly, that Ruhen was locked in a fierce battle with the homunculus.

  Let them kill each other, she wished.

  Then she saw the dozen new cleptapods that had latched onto the boat and knew it was time for her to act.

  Feeling as if the fierce wind had imparted its power to her, Sepha knelt and spread her alchem onto the cleptapod’s head. She placed her fingers just so and closed her eyes.

  It was silent. It was dark. That something was back, roiling beneath the surface of her, dying to be released. Well, she would oblige. Then she would die, to make absolutely sure to derail the undead magician’s plans.

  And to find Destry in the After and apologize.

  What if …

  Sepha focused on the cleptapods, the one on which she knelt and those latched onto the boat, who were linked in a giant circle of entangled, writhing tentacles. Like a living alchem. She focused on these cleptapods, and on their offspring, and on th
eir comrades who were out hunting elsewhere.

  Then, inspired perhaps by the magicians fighting on the main deck, she used her own alchem and the one the cleptapods had created to access a nearby plane of existence. One where the cleptapods seemed to belong better than here.

  As it had been with her botched human transmutation attempt, so it was now. Sepha only saw one possibility, but it was the one she needed: octopuses. Only smaller and more innocuous.

  … just for a second …

  With an incredible burst of power from the something inside, she performed the exchange.

  There was a series of pulses, and the cleptapod beneath Sepha disappeared along with the rest of its species.

  … I forget that I’m not supposed to fly?

  Sepha fell through the dust that had been exchanged for the violated bones and crashed hard into the water far below. Water that was now churning with thousands of tiny, disoriented octopuses, which shot away from her in swarms of tentacles and clouds of ink.

  Living octopuses that she’d plucked from another reality. It had been easier than she’d thought it would be.

  Dragged down by the weight of her holsters, Sepha looked up with vague interest at the moonlight that danced on the surface of the water, filtered through the rapidly dispersing ink.

  Sepha closed her eyes. She emptied her lungs, releasing her breath bubble by bubble.

  And filled them again.

  Sepha awoke without intending to and felt as if her entire body, inside and out, had been rolled and crushed and bruised.

  A pair of rough hands pulled Sepha to sitting. Her head was too heavy, her mouth dry and foul tasting. She drooped forward, the weight of her head straining her neck. Sepha cracked her eyes open.

  She was sitting on the bottom bunk in the minuscule room she’d shared with Destry—Destry!—and Henric was scrunched into the narrow space beside the bed, looking desperate.

  “What happened to Destry?” he asked. “Did that bastard kill her?”

  Sepha blinked heavily. Bastard?

  “No,” she croaked, unsure who the bastard was. “Cleptapod got her.” Her voice cracked as she said it, but she was in a stupor that kept her beyond tears.