Chapter 43 #2
“Desmond…” I insisted. “Who would benefit?”
He sighed. “The Toolkeepers. They would benefit from keeping any strong alchemist out of the scriveners’ ranks. But your father would never stand for your injury—”
“Unless he believed he was saving me from greater injury or corruption.”
“Precisely.” Desmond’s eyes fell closed, and when he opened them again—when he met mine frankly—I understood.
“That’s why you wrote to him.”
“No. I wrote to him before I knew you’d lost your memory. I wrote to tell him you were in danger as soon as I realized what the Alchemary was doing to you. How it would corrupt you.”
That was how his correspondence had arrived so quickly. And why it hadn’t mentioned my amnesia…
“But I will admit that when your father arrived I studied his reaction, because I needed to be sure that he’d played no part in what had happened to you. And he seemed wholly and legitimately shocked to hear about the state of your memory, and truly concerned.”
“So if the Toolkeepers are responsible, my father played no part in it.”
“That is my conclusion, yes.”
“And you don’t think it was a scrivening?”
Desmond shook his head. “I can’t find any motive there.”
And yet the scriveners could do—and evidently had done—unspeakable things.
He studied the horror evidently written across my expression. “Did you truly think it was all levitating carnival carriages and skin-tightening creams? That the Alchemary would ever be satisfied with such a small scale?”
“No. I thought alchemy was medicine and altruistic advances.” I paused, tears threatening to spill. “And things like Wilder’s elixirs.”
“He was very skilled. But Wilder could not be controlled, and that would eventually have made him a threat to the scriveners, which would’ve outweighed the benefit of his skill.
Especially considering he’d begun to perfect his own versions of some very expensive elixirs scriveners reserve for their elite customers. And he was underpricing them.”
No wonder the board wouldn’t approve his research project.
“And I thought alchemy was pursuits like your effort to improve the human form.”
“The soldier’s form,” Desmond corrected. “I am tasked by the Alchemary with creating a stronger, faster soldier. A more efficient and deadly defender of the craft of alchemy in general, and the Alchemary in particular.”
“You…?” Shock rolled over me. I’d thought he was studying soldiers to understand the physical ideal. The peak of human health and ability. But…“You’re creating human weapons.”
He nodded. “Through alchemical advances. I am increasing the efficiency with which they utilize air when they breathe. Fuel, when they eat. I am strengthening muscles and increasing the speed of reflexes.”
“And armored flesh?”
Another nod. “What you saw at the carnival was a parlor trick. The real version of it is…well beyond.”
“But it’s for defense.” My voice felt soft and hollow. I couldn’t be sure whether I was stating or asking.
Desmond gave me another nod, but this one was short. Stiff. “For now.”
“What has any of this to do with my beyn?” I finally asked, resisting the urge to stare out at the ocean and let it calm me. “And with the reason you wanted me removed from the Alchemary?”
“That is all to do with the complications I mentioned. It is true that scrivening requires only one ingredient. Beyn. But the production of that beyn comes at a great cost.”
I waited, but for several seconds, he seemed either unwilling or unable to continue.
“A symbol can only be imbued with the power and intent of the element it represents if that intent is anchored—some say bought—with a portion of the human soul.”
“What?” I could not quite understand what he was saying, yet I felt the weight of it—the bitter wrongness—like a spot of rot in a bite of fresh apple.
“A very small portion,” he clarified. “Very, very small. So small that for a long time, the cost to an individual scrivener went unnoticed. Until it began to accumulate. To…change them. Now that they understand the cost, most scriveners are unwilling to pay it. Yet they are equally unwilling to give up the power of a grade-five elixir. So they foist that cost onto someone else.”
“How?” I asked, and it sounded like I was speaking from the end of a long, dark tunnel. Because some vague understanding was tugging at my mind, trying to bridge this new, horrifying concept with…something else. Something hidden in the dark recesses of my memory.
“The beyn necessary to create a scrivening must use some small part of the human body. In the past, scriveners have used a piece of their own hair, a stray eyelash, or fingernail trimmings. Occasionally a drop of blood or saliva. But when the cost became clear…”
“They began taking those parts from other people,” I concluded.
Desmond nodded. “Stealing bits of other souls, to fuel their alchemy. The theory was that if they spread the cost out, no one person would be noticeably affected.” But again he had that look, as if he were leaving something out.
Those scriveners, I understood, weren’t just taking stray eyelashes and fingernail clippings. They were…
But then that vague understanding was suddenly brutally overshadowed with another, more personal one.
“Chaos incarnate,” I swore as the truth crashed brutally over me. “That’s what I was doing, with my beyn.”
“Amber.” Desmond took my hand, trying to comfort me, but the truth shadowed his eyes like clouds rolling over the sun.
“I was stealing my classmates’ souls!”
“Yes,” he conceded. “But only a very, very small portion of them. Nothing that would cause damage. And you did not know. You had no concept of the consequences of what you were doing.”
“That makes it worse, not better!” I scrabbled back from him across the wood, heedless of splinters and damage to my frock. “I acted recklessly, with no way of truly understanding what I was—”
“You had no intent to steal any portion of anyone’s soul.
” He did not reach for me, but he looked like he wanted to.
“You developed your technique independent from the scriveners, and for an entirely different purpose. A separate but eerily parallel procedure, born of your sheer gift for the craft.”
“But you saw what I was doing. And you knew that if they figured it out…”
“They would never have let you go,” he said. “If the scriveners knew that you’d come up with their technique on your own, without their training or permission, they would either have whisked you into their folds—beyond my reach—or—”
His face paled with fear.
“Killed me.”
“They would have considered it the elimination of a threat. But yes. If they could not secure your cooperation and secrecy, they would have done you harm. And I couldn’t let that happen.”
“So, I stole and consumed portions of my classmates’ souls, and instead of telling the Bluehelm, you tried to protect me.”
He only blinked at me.
“Desmond, I used you, and—”
“Yes,” he finally said. “You used me. As if everything we’d been together meant nothing to you, beyond its scientific potential.
” Pain and betrayal were etched into the lines of his forehead, echoing in the crinkles around his eyes.
“A potential you didn’t even fully understand.
And the most wonderful—the most horrible—thing is that you were right. You did it, Amber.”
The ardent gleam in his eye set a bell tolling in my soul—an alarm ringing from high in a tower.
“What did I do?”
“What even the scriveners haven’t managed, in all this time. You completed your research. Your project. With the beyn you made from our…passion. I was angry. I was hurt, because I realized that nothing was sacred for you, outside of alchemy itself. Then you showed me what you’d done.”
He looked simultaneously proud and wounded, and the incongruence set me deeply on edge.
“You’d found the formula, Amber. You’d come up with the very solution Lord Calyx described in the notes I’d stolen from the research library for you: a thick, gold-flecked silver suspension that glowed even when no light was present.
You’d made that very thing, even though he never recorded his formula.
You’d come up with your own. And all you had left to do was—”
“Square the circle.” My voice sounded hollow. Distant. “That’s the part he never figured out: how to combine spirit with mind and body.”
“But you had. You said you’d figured it out, anyway, and squaring the circle was all you had left to do.”
“How?” I found myself leaning forward, perched on my knees, though I had no memory of taking that position. “Did I do it?”
The disappointed look he gave me—as if my interest and enthusiasm had turned me into Past Amber all over again—broke my heart. “I don’t know. I asked you not to do it, but I have no idea whether or not you did.”
“You asked me not to complete the Philosopher’s Stone? When hundreds of alchemists have tried and failed to do that very thing over the past century and a half?”
“Yes.” His voice was soft, yet his tone was hard.
Impermeable. He plucked at a loose thread on his trousers, then finally looked up again and met my gaze boldly, as the breeze stirred his dark hair.
“I could see what it was doing to you. What it could turn you into. You were corruptible, Amber. Just like any of us would be, in your position. Even aside from the threat of the scriveners, this place had already changed you. And I knew that if you finished the stone, I would never get you back. You would never get yourself back.”
“That’s the point!” I snapped, anger flashing in a million fiery explosions all over my body. “That’s what the Philosopher’s Stone does! It changes everything it touches into something better! Transmutation, at its highest form.”
“I didn’t want something better!” He stood, a single eerily fast and smooth motion, and the boards creaked beneath his feet with a startling cacophony.
“I wanted you! You. As you were. There is nothing alchemy could have done to improve you. It was only dragging you down, morally. Ethically. This place was making you into a monster, and if you’d finished the Stone, you would have instantly become the most powerful person here. ”
“And you were jealous!” The words exploded from some bitter font deep inside me, though I could not fathom its origin. I’d felt nothing of the sort since I’d woken up without…my memory.
Sudden understanding bruised me from the inside. It was remembered bitterness. The ghost of it, anyway. This was that inexplicable anger I’d felt at Desmond, over and over, though now it felt terribly…explicable.
I stood, facing him at the end of the dock, that same breeze ruffling my hair, and even the waves suddenly seemed fiercer, in concert with our discord.
“I was not jealous of your power, Amber.” Disappointment echoed in his voice. “I am already a scrivener.”
I blinked at him, shocked.
“I’m not above corruption either. I told you, it was you who pulled me back from that brink.
Long before I joined their ranks—corruption does not begin or end with scrivening.
You were a light in the dark, Amber. A flame lit beneath ice.
” He reached for my hand, and I let him pull me closer, across the dock.
“You kept me human, and I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I clung to you because of that.
Nothing seemed to have any depth or texture when you weren’t around.
The world had no color aside from the red of your lips and the gold in your eyes.
You reminded me what the true goal of alchemy is, and I thought we would reach it together. But then—”
“I began to lose sight of it.”
He nodded. “I wasn’t jealous. I was terrified of losing you.
” He blinked, and it was like a veil had descended over his expression, blurring all of the detail.
Shielding his thoughts from me. “But I lost you anyway. That night, you stormed out of the lab with your suspension, and the next time I saw you—when I came to your room to try again to make it right—I found you in bed with my brother.”
He let go of my hand, and it fell to my side like a horrible dead weight.
“And you had no idea how he’d gotten there, and no memory at all of completing the formula.
Of making the gold-flecked silver suspension.
On one level, you were an entirely different person.
You were a good person, who had no recollection of ever hurting me or any of your cohort.
Who didn’t seem capable of ever becoming that person again.
Because you didn’t remember what you’d done, or how you’d managed it.
You’d lost skill, but you’d regained yourself.
And I couldn’t stand the thought of you becoming that other person again. ”
“And yet, I did.” My eyes fell shut, and tears burned behind the closed lids. The ocean breeze felt suddenly frigid. “I got Wilder killed.”
“No.” Desmond pulled me close on the wooden planks, gripping my shoulders. Peering into my eyes. “No, you did not do that. As tragic as his death is—as excruciating as it is for me to even think about—Wilder did that to himself. Do you hear me?” He took my chin and stared straight into my eyes.
I could only nod, even though I did not believe a word of it.
“What happened to the solution?” I asked. To the gold-flecked silver fluid Lord Calyx had described and that I, evidently, had created.
Had I squared the circle? Or had I wound up with another beautiful, inert gem?
“I have no idea,” Desmond said. “And I will admit that when I realized you’d lost your memory, I thought one of the scriveners had stolen your suspension, to complete it for themselves.
That you’d lost your memory as a result of that theft or to cover it up.
But you had no physical injuries, and no one ever claimed to have completed the Stone.
So I have no idea what happened to your suspension, or whether you ever actually squared the circle. ”