Thea's expression didn't shift a millimeter. The elephant revolver braced across Vera's shoulder, muzzle leveled at the alchemist on the far side of the cellar, she asked the only question that mattered.
"Where's my money?"
Canaan went on tidying his bench — crucibles racked, distillation coil coiled, every motion unhurried — and smiled the small, courteous smile of a man who had answered this question before.
"Spent on materials, I'm afraid. Ritual configurations are not cheap. Though I must say, your sulfur-and-rhinoceros-horn tincture performs beautifully. If you ever cared to join the Hand of Transmutation, Miss Sorelle, I have no doubt you'd grow into a great alchemist."
Vera flicked Thea a panicked sidelong glance. "Don't you dare sell me out."
Thea pinched Vera's cheek between two fingers without looking at her — shut up — and kept her eyes on Canaan.
"You've already tested it on people, haven't you."
"Yes." He didn't even pretend to weigh the lie. "The eye is the window of the spirit; flesh is its vessel. Both are excellent substrates for spiritual extraction. I'm rather curious, actually — how did you work it out?"
"I've seen enough bones in my time. The ones outside aren't subtle. The whole place reeks of distillation residue, and I have a nose for it. And the morning papers, for the last week, have been wall-to-wall reports of cult initiates overdosing on sleeping draught in mass self-sacrifice. The Constabulary has knocked on my door, repeatedly." A pause, glacial. "Now. Are you going to pay me, or not."
"A few days' grace," Canaan said, all civility. "I'll bring you three hundred gold pounds. Acceptable?"
"Three hundred?" Thea raised one eyebrow by a fraction. "Counterfeit goods carry tenfold restitution. You owe me three thousand. Add lost wages. Add emotional distress." She appeared to consider a discount, decided against generosity. "Call it five thousand gold pounds."
Beside her, Vera's knuckles had gone white around the grip of the Angel rapid-fire pistol. Canaan looked at the trainee — the trembling hands, the awful seriousness — and showed a clean line of white teeth.
"It seems there's nothing further to discuss."
Splash.
Crack!
The two sounds arrived almost as one — water and gunfire.
Because in the same fraction of a second, Canaan completed the earth-to-water transmutation. The flagstone floor beneath the two girls and the soil under it dissolved into seawater.
Vera didn't even have time to swear. The marble underfoot turned thick and unmoored, surface tension giving way under her boots, and with a single graceless splash she dropped straight in.
She had been a full five meters from Canaan. A Sequence Eight alchemist's transmutation range was three meters. How?
Thea, in the instant Canaan's mouth had opened, had already pulled the trigger. The eleven-point-two-millimeter elephant slug screamed toward his chest, and the brutal recoil shoved her back several steps — which, conveniently, took her clear of the spreading patch of seawater.
The round was still in flight when Canaan laughed out loud.
Earlier, when he had heard the explosion above ground, he had read the situation correctly: whoever was coming carried heavy firepower and probably explosives. So he had hedged. Down here, in his sanctum, he had layered ritual after ritual over himself.
Blast Ward. Mirror Projection. Veil of Invisible Armor. Mind Stabilization. Efficient Casting. Slow Mend.
The elephant slug was a beautiful round. It also had to hit him.
Bang. The eleven-point-two-millimeter passed cleanly through where Canaan had been standing — and the figure shuddered like a strip of damaged film and burst apart into nothing.
Alchemical ritual — Mirror Projection.
At the same instant, a crimson robe whispered into existence at Thea's back.
"Miss Sorelle," Canaan's voice purred behind her, "you are very clever. You kept three meters between us from the moment you walked in. But you are not clever enough, because you do not understand the world of the Transcendent. You do not understand our powers."
Thea did not hesitate. She pivoted on her heel and brought the revolver around, muzzle finding him again.
Snap.
He clicked his fingers. A faint sting bit into her ankles — she glanced down, and dark green thorned vines were already crawling up her calves, locking her in place. She couldn't step back. She couldn't step forward.
Snap.
Before she could squeeze the trigger, something shifted inside the rifled barrel of the revolver. Out of the muzzle, slow and obscene as time-lapse, a white lily unfurled into bloom.
Shit. The gun was a planter now.
Her voice came out perfectly level. "Let me and the drowning idiot walk, or we all die down here together. I'm carrying enough explosives to bring this cellar down."
Canaan smiled. "No, no. I don't believe you brought any explosives at all. I think you're bluffing, Miss Sorelle."
Gunpowder was itself an alchemical product — the wedding of sulfur, saltpeter, and charcoal. The moment Thea had stepped through the door, Canaan, alchemist that he was, had failed to smell so much as a trace of sulfur on her.
"Try me, then."
"Oh? Miss Sorelle truly has explosives? In that case, allow me to test it. I'll set you alight. If you're carrying, we die together. If you aren't, please — stay. My ritual needs more spirit, and a clever subject like yourself is the finest possible substrate."
She edged back half a step. He stepped forward the same half-step.
He clicked his fingers — air to flame, the lightest of transmutations — and a small bright tongue of fire bloomed across the breast of her outer robe.
If she truly had explosives on her, ignition meant detonation, and detonation meant everyone in this cellar ended as wet paste on the walls. It was the maddest sort of mutual bet. Whether she had explosives or didn't, whether the fire took or guttered, Thea was supposed to die in this room.
She inclined her head. "Fine. That was a lie. But there are still five rounds in this gun."
Canaan stepped closer, leaned in, and made an exaggerated show of sniffing at the lily blooming from her muzzle.
"Can your gun even fire now? And besides — in another second, I'll just turn it to sand."
Snap. The barrel disintegrated into a small heap of grit that poured through his fingers into his palm.
His face twisted, the courtesy peeling back into something uglier. "I'm standing right here. Take your shot. Come on. One bullet. Give me one."
The words were still in his mouth when his voice stopped.
Something black and heavy was pressed flush against his sternum.
Elephant revolver. Eleven-point-two-millimeter bore. Seven thousand joules of muzzle energy. Manufactured at the Cathedral of Our Lady, Nuremport. Engraved along the barrel in a priest's neat hand: HEAVEN-FORGED — WILL NEVER BURST.
"I have to say," Thea murmured, her amber eyes glittering with something almost like amusement, "that's the strangest request I've ever heard." Her mouth curved by perhaps a millimeter. "I should mention I'm carrying a second one."
BOOM!!!
BOOM!!!
BOOM!!!
The first round took him through the heart. The horrifying kinetic energy lifted the tall alchemist clean off his feet and threw him backward, a tunnel punched clean through chest and spine.
The second round took him through the knee. The lower leg leapt away from the body with a wet thump and tumbled off into the dark; Canaan collapsed face-first onto the flagstones.
The third round took him through the skull. The bone vessel cracked apart like a dropped melon, brain and matter spraying out across a meter-wide arc on the floor.
Thea hadn't expected him to be quite so easy to bait. She hadn't needed any of her backups.
In her pockets she still carried two twists of slaked lime powder, a corked phial that — once smashed — released a fast-acting hallucinogenic vapor, and up her sleeve a stiletto whose edge had been bathed in a very particular poison.
With Canaan dead, she peeled off her outer robe and went into the seawater.
The drowning idiot, she discovered, had grown up speaking the dockside dialect of Nuremport and could not swim a stroke. By the time Thea got hold of her, she was unconscious.
Thea hauled her up, laid her flat on the wet flagstones, and stripped back her hood. Out tumbled soft, chestnut-brown short hair and a face fresh enough to belong to a girl who had only just stopped being a teenager. Faintly green around the edges. No more than twenty.
She tapped Vera's cheek. No response. The chest barely rose.
Nearest hospital, fifteen kilometers. She won't survive the trip.
No more time. Time to find out whether those CPR lessons from a different life still work.
She peeled open Vera's coat and shirt. Inconvenient. Even through the snug-fitting brassiere, Vera's chest was generous enough to half-spill free, and Thea wasn't sure her compressions would transmit cleanly through that much soft tissue down to the sternum.
She knelt. Set the heel of her right hand at the center of Vera's chest — the give beneath it was alarmingly soft, like pressing into cotton wool. She laid her left hand over her right, locked her elbows, and put the weight of her whole upper body into the push.
The worry, as it turned out, had been wasted. The compressions took.
She tilted Vera's chin up to open the airway, drew in a deep breath, and lowered her own face down toward hers, close enough that she could count every dark eyelash. She sealed her mouth over Vera's and fed the oxygen down, slow and steady — a careful, clinical kiss with another girl's life inside it.
Once.
Twice.
On the third breath, Vera's body gave a small convulsive jerk.
Working. Thea pressed a soft, parting kiss to Vera's lips before drawing back, and on the way her hand drifted — almost incidentally — across one of those pale, full breasts and squeezed once, lightly, because she knew exactly what was coming next and there was no better time.
"Hrgkk —"
The newly-revived Vera, with no memory whatsoever of the preceding three minutes, lurched onto her side and emptied her stomach of seawater all over the flagstones. A long, helpless coughing fit followed.
Thea exhaled.
The drowning idiot was alive. And after two solid months of preparation, the old alchemist was finally a corpse.
By long tradition, once you'd killed the boss, you collected the spoils.
She made a circuit of the cellar. Crucibles. Distillation rig. Standing cabinet. Stacked crates. A wall of bookshelves.
From the top shelf she lifted down a sheaf of dust-furred letters: every piece of correspondence Canaan Ogre had exchanged with his various contacts inside Nuremport. His rituals, his apparatus, his materials — all of it had flowed through this network.
Miss Sorelle was, regrettably, one of the nodes in that network. Not by choice. But if she left these letters where they sat, the Constabulary — who had been making such friendly house calls lately — would eventually pull her name out of them.
"Found it."
She slid out the envelope addressed Thea Sorelle, pinched it between two fingers, and folded it into her coat pocket.
Now — collections.
"Bastard. Absolute bastard —"
"Khhhk — khhk — khhk—"
Vera lay sprawled on the ground in a hazy daze for more than twenty minutes before she slowly regained her senses. When she crawled upright and looked around, she found Thea ransacking the cellar like a one-woman locust swarm: drawers torn open, crates overturned, the floor a snowstorm of reagent bottles, dried herbs, and small unidentified objects.
Then she looked down. Her own breasts were practically slipping free of her brassiere, the nipples half-visible — and they ached, in a very specific way, as if someone had recently been quite firmly handling them.
Thea wasn't looking. Vera yanked her shirt closed with frantic speed and asked, "Where's the alchemist?"
"Dead, killed him. Where is my money. Where is my money. Why are there only two hundred gold pounds in here — "
In the bottom of a strongbox, Thea found twenty crisp ten-pound notes, and her fingers actually trembled. For a moment she looked as though she might burst into tears.
Even Miss Sorelle, whose mind was wrought iron and who could face the prospect of her own death without blinking — even Miss Sorelle, in that moment, came perilously close to a complete spiritual collapse.
She had come here to kill Canaan for many reasons. The single most important reason, however — towering above all the others — was money.
She loved money. Only money.
She slumped onto her heels right there on the floor. From where Vera was sitting, a black aura of resentment seemed to rise off the witch's shoulders in visible coils.
But — Vera, peering over — there was, in fact, a thick layer of gold leaf coating the inside of the largest crucible. Scraped off and remelted, that would be worth a few dozen gold pounds easily. And inside Canaan's robes, a pocket watch set with stones. Another few dozen.
The robe itself was real silk. Off.
Six rings across ten fingers. Extravagant. Off.
This — whatever it was — off.
This — off.
By the time she'd finished her circuit, Thea had assembled a respectable mound of small shining things. Four hundred gold pounds' worth, near enough.
Not perfect. But she had recovered the principal and made some interest on top.
Vera watched her sweep the room like a plague of well-dressed insects, eyes round, and then looked down at the very thoroughly dead Canaan Ogre at her feet and finally said, "How did you actually kill him?"
"He told me to shoot him."
"…What?"
"So I shot him."
"…What?"
Vera was beginning to question reality. "Was he insane, were you insane, or am I insane?"
"Who knows. Probably him. He hasn't got a brain left to weigh in." Thea gestured at the body, which was now in much the same condition as Louis XVI — head no longer attached, or for that matter, present. "Come here. I need an Arcane appraisal."
"A what?"
"I want to know which of these things are worth money and which aren't. Plus the books on the shelf. I haven't gone through them. Take whatever you need, then we go our separate ways."
"You're cutting me in?"
Vera's eyes had gone enormous. She sounded as if she didn't trust the sentence she'd just heard.
"Wages —"
"What."
Thea exhaled, the smallest fray of impatience showing through. "I said it's your cut for helping me. Do I really need to say it twice?"
What Thea did not say was that part of Vera's wages also covered the matter of her chest.
"You could have led with that —" Vera muttered, sneaking another sideways look at the girl. Strange. Annoyed and sulky, Thea was actually rather cute. Much easier to look at than the glacial version.
Thea shoved a crate across the floor with her foot. Inside: a dozen phials of unidentified reagent, several rolled parchments inked with strange diagrams, a rust-pitted short blade incised with serpent-glyph runes, and a clutch of fossilized animal bones.
Vera was at a complete loss with the fossils and the reagents, but she knew her parchments.
"These two are alchemical advancement rituals. One's from the Kingdom of the Iris, the other's something out of an Eastern temple-order. One's the path of the Transmutation Scholar. The other's the path of the Great Philosopher."
"Difference?"
"They're the two branches of the alchemical Sequence. One is transformation, the other is sublimation. The Transmutation Scholars walk the path of transformation. The Great Philosophers walk the path of sublimation. Your friend Canaan there was a Transmutation Scholar."
Thea more or less followed: two specializations under the same parent class. Good enough.
"And the third scroll?"
"That one looks like a spirit-purification ritual. That's the one they use for the sacrifices. The blade — sacrificial knife. Ritual fitting. The knife and the purification ritual aren't any use to me — both yours. I'll take one of the alchemical rituals. That's what I came here for in the first place."
Vera lifted out the Iris-Kingdom version of the advancement ritual — the Transmutation Scholar path. Thea had no objection.
"Reasonable split."
"But the bones, hm —"
"Adult equine femurs," Thea said.
"How can you possibly tell?"
"Trochlea and condyles."
Vera stared at her. "You're an archaeologist?"
"Once," Thea said. "Sort of." That was a sentence belonging to Earth, and she didn't enjoy holding it up to the light.
"All right, fine. If they're horse bones, then yes — ritual material. They wouldn't be sitting next to the sacrificial knife otherwise."
She had no further interest in any of it. She had come for the advancement ritual; she had it. The acquisition process had simply been somewhat livelier than expected.
She crossed to the bookshelf and rifled along it. "What about the books? How do we split those?"
"You take what you can use. The rest is mine," Thea said, head buried in the largest crucible as she tried to coax out the last shavings of gold leaf.
"You're being generous."
"I never claimed to be a villain."
"I was rather worried, you understand, that you might put a bullet in the back of my head once we were done —" Vera was, at last, beginning to unclench. She started flipping through the books, three pages at a time.
Most were dross. A great many turned out to be pulp romances from the Kingdom of the Iris across the sea — penniless-boy-meets-rich-girl, ascending-to-glory sort of thing. Vera couldn't help making small disgusted noises as she paged through.
Two were worth keeping. The first Vera recognized — The Compendium of Alchemy, published by the Alchemical Guild of the Kingdom of the Iris. Not rare abroad, but inside Avengarde it was banned literature, which made it rare enough.
The second one — she couldn't read it.
"Most of this is junk. Trust me. Two are useful. One's the Compendium of Alchemy — incomplete, sadly. Mostly just recipes for commercially available alchemical tinctures."
"The other one I can't read."
"You can't read it? Foreign?"
"No. More accurately — it's a language that's vanished from the world. We call them the Hidden Tongues. There's no real lineage of teaching for them. Transcendents pick them up by accident when they go diving in the Nightmare."
"Nightmare. Diving. Explain."
"You — you don't know any of this?"
Vera saw Thea calmly thumb a fresh round into the spare elephant revolver, and her neck immediately retracted into her shoulders.
"All right, all right. Roughly speaking, the Nightmare is the other world you reach in deep meditation. It's the reflection of the material plane. Ancient sages called it the Ideal Realm. The Final Home. The Church calls it the Nightmare. Some people call it the collective unconscious."
"The Nightmare is a fragment of history. Like watching a film, or being inside a dream. Dying there doesn't actually kill you — you just wake up. The way you reach it is called diving."
"Transcendents I've heard talk about it say it's not fatal but extremely dangerous."
"So why would anyone go there?" Thea asked. "Voluntary suffering?"
"Don't be stupid. The advancement ritual has to be performed inside the Nightmare."
It was a lot at once. But Thea got the shape of it: to become Transcendent at all, you had to enter the Nightmare. And the Nightmare was a piece of history made real. That was why one could pick up languages there that had vanished from the world.
No wonder they called them Hidden.
She crossed the cellar and crouched beside the books Vera had laid out on the floor. Her eyes drifted to the cover of the Hidden Tongue volume —
And for a long, suspended moment, she went perfectly still.
This script. This. She knew it.
These were the very characters she had spent her undergraduate years on Earth deciphering.