Mercy, and Other Costly Mistakes (nsfw)

[Gargulec]

18. Vicious

Sight and sound dissolved into a milky haze, surrounding Ifi in a synesthetic susurrus. It wasn't that she was blind to the motion around her, or deaf to the music of the masque, but they reached her in scintillating shards, scattering and shattering across the surface of her senses. Sometimes an image would break through this shimmer, manifesting a burst of noise or a rhythm traced out in swirls and swooshes of white dresses. She forded straight through the rushing torrent of the crowd, shining in the bright charmlight, and yet so remote, so far away.

Only touch remained with her, its tactile presence the one thing cutting through the weaves of incoherent, cascading thoughts. Ifi's body was near to her. It remained present in the push of the straps securing her arms tightly around her chest, and in the way her breath struggled and failed to loosen them. It was in the way the cuffs at her thighs shortened each of her steps, and in the focus needed to keep herself steady on the spikes of her heels. It was in how the collar and the muzzle locked her head in place, turning each attempted sideways glance into a reminder of her bondage, and in how her teeth and tongue kept slipping around the gag forcing them apart. It was in the sharp reminders sent by the hook impaling her, coming with each little motion of her body, and in the desperate, damp want she met them with. And, of course, it was anchored to the tug of her leash, the braided cord holding her in the here and now, even as it extended towards the fiery blur that was all she could perceive of Shard.

No, her body would not slip from her attention – nor from the attention of others. People stared. Ifi felt their looks as a pressure settling from all sides, as hundreds of little touches and caresses brushing across her skin. There was no hiding from their tiny pinpricks, there was no looking away from the hungry eyes taking the hold of her, there was only the burning shame of exposure barely concealed behind the mask and the muzzle. Locked into proud uprightness, denied the choice of flight or a shy sideways glance, Shard held her up, stripping off everything other than her most naked self.

She leaked – drool, sweat, arousal, and else. She wanted to stop. She couldn't. She was thankful. She hoped others couldn't notice. She was desperate for others to see.

At the edge of yet another crowded floor, Shard stopped and wrapped a hand around her waist. She flaunted her to the world, and made her bow to the dancers below. As the dress tightened around her, it drew an involuntary, beautiful moan from her distorted mouth. Ifi was gone. Only a body remained, uninhabited and unburdened by all the weights that it had suffered under. The memory of the moment etched itself into the foundations of her, to forever remain a warm trace buried deep in her muscle and bone.

In the moment, the dumb bliss seemed like it could last forever, leaving her with its gifts of emptiness and weightlensses, of defeaning light and blinding sound. But the waters had to recede at some point, and there was only so much her body could take, flooded as it was. She followed Shard floor after floor, passing through a mass of white that slowly resolved itself into singular bodies and individual masks. The little discomforts of her dress increased, not nearly enough to become unwelcome, but still enough to drag on the free flow of her sensations, slowing and taming them.

In a way – and that was the first lucid thought she had in a while – she knew this feeling. It was the leisurely comedown from a potent relaxing tonic, one brewed well enough to leave only by imperceptible degrees and linger long after the last of it had been flushed away. She tried to exhale deeply, mostly to remind herself that it was not a comfort she was allowed.

The elevator they were in brought them to a circular gallery running the edge of the tower's wall, far away from the noisy dancefloors. Private booths lined the length of it, colorful curtains and muffling charms separating them from the rest of the feast. Shard let Ifi step out first, then followed after, looking around with a slight lean. The alchemist had no real idea what she was searching for, nor exactly what it was that had brought them here in the first place. Distantly, she recalled images of Shard holding a conversation with Villis, and a sense of her disappointment. The finer details were harder to hold on to.

Realizing that her memory was giving in made her quiver in excitement.

Shard gave her a light shove, pointing her in the direction of an isolated booth set by a tall stained glass window. A few people loitered around, their demonic masks drawn slightly up, cocktail glasses in hand. Obediently, the alchemist started to shuffle towards it, the below-spawn shadowing her, quiet on her feet.

"There you are!" one of the feast-goers exclaimed, sauntering towards Shard and Ifi.

Shard stopped, pulling at the leash and almost getting Ifi to stumble in turn. She blinked, trying to remember why the blue goblin mask seemed so familiar – she must have had a run in with this man earlier? Her thoughts trickled through her mind as if through a sieve – a feeling she tried her best to savor.

"Father is waiting inside," the man declared, his lips indicating that the amber cocktail in his hand was hardly his first one tonight. "You should have seen his face when I passed him your little offer!"

Shard nodded curtly, making a sound between a thanks and a feline hiss, then shortened Ifi's lead, pushing her through the curtain and into the dark of the smoke-filled booth. There was a popping sensation in the alchemist's ears as the muffling charm welcomed them in, the sounds of the party instantly fading into a heavy silence.

"Shard of White Obsidian."

There was a table inside, and behind there sat a man, a sea-foam pipe dangled inches from lips. In the dim light, only the glint of his silver half-mask showed, alongside dozens of little charms rimming the collar of his shirt. His voice trailed heavily through the artificial quiet, laden with impatient hunger.

"Master Anateus," Shard replied, inclining her head. "I've come to negotiate."

Ifi didn't have to wait for the pull of the leash to know where she was supposed to be. She dropped to her knees, feeling Anateus' eyes follow her down.

"Is this a joke?" he asked, glaring. "Don't you know to come alone?"

"I did," Shard waved her hand, settling down herself. "She is not a party to any of that. She is not even from the Table."

"I can see that," Anateus knocked the ash out of the pipe, then set it carefully in its stand. "Get your whore out. Then we can talk."

The word caught Ifi like a slap on the face; she flinched, less so from the insult itself, and more from the well-practiced contempt it carried.It described everything she could ever be in his eyes.

"Don't you call her that," Shard protested. "She is not a servant to be-"

"I don't care," Anateus interrupted, rapidly drumming his fingers on the table. "We are either talking it between ourselves, or not at all. And judging by Alissa's mood," his fingers stopped mid-strike, "I don't think either of us has time left to waste."

Ifi twisted her torso to look at Shard, briefly meeting the ruby eye of her mask. The below-spawn opened her mouth, pointed teeth forced into a grimace, then quickly slipped an a finger under Ifi's collar, urging her to pull herself up from the floor.

"It will only be a moment," she promised into her ear, guiding her out of the booth and to the railing running across the gallery's edge.

A delicate thread tensed inside Ifi as Shard loosened the leash from her wrist, before looping it around the ornately pattern metal railing. She made a noise through the gag, somewhere between are you sure and fine, but didn't protest.

"Just a moment," Shard reassured, touching the tips of her fingers to Ifi's cheek.

There was a kind of a charm to the idea of being left alone, like a pet or a slave in one of the stories. Sure enough, a barbed fear lurked beneath it, but if it was only going to be a moment, then what was the harm? She nodded at Shard, resolving to be brave, made all the easier in the afterglow of her long comedown.

"I won't be far," Shard said, wiping some drool from underneath Ifi's chin with the hem of her robe.

Only after the below-spawn vanished into the curtained interior did Ifi realize that with the muffling charm, there would be no way for Shard to hear any of her struggle. She was, for the time being, alone. It took a few moments for the thought to build up properly, spreading across the expanse of Ifi's consciousness before closing its grip with a crushing force. She was alone, bound and gagged, left unattended in full display. Mere weeks ago, she could have only fantasized about being so thoroughly helpless. As if to give it a test, she tried to take a step back from the railing, watch the leash unfurl and then pull taunt; the braided ribbon was far stronger than she was.

Another arrested breath, restrained by the collar and the gag was enough for the thick flicker of excitement to shake through her. She was alone, bound and gagged, thoroughly helpless. Once again, she strained against the sleeves and straps holding her arms, and once again she was reminded of how firm and tightly-fitted they were. This was enough for a warm fluster to wash over her, and for the sucking sensation in the pit of her stomach to expand. She burned.

A pair of short steps brought her back to the railing; carefully, feeling the hook twist inside with every twist of the upper body, she propped herself against it. There was no way she could describe the experience of it digging into her inside as pleasant, and yet it indisputably was – in a way that made her cry so very quietly, the sound dying behind the muzzle. She looked down at the gala below, but her thoughts were instead taken by the image of slender white fingers, slick and warm from working her over.

There was this story, stuck in her head, from those lewd pornographies she had once so loved; it was about a woman driven into madness from sheer want, from arousal so titanic that its unfulfillment left her mind permanently shattered. As with most of the Southern Teacher's output, it was revolting to read and entirely impossible to scrub from Ifi's imagination. Trying to follow the Feast and being only able to really think about the throb of her own desire, and the impossibility of relieving it, she had to consider if that is how she was going to go.

What she didn't account for was boredom.

The initial rush of excitement took some time to drain, but drain it did. Minutes passed unmarked, with Shard still vanished inside her secret negotiations, and Ifi left unattended. There was a novelty to it, and many little pleasures, but not much more beyond. Unfilled time began to unspool. The alchemist kept glancing over her shoulder, expecting Shard to appear behind her at any moment, but instead each thrown look was just another jab up her backside. The first few were jolts of pain thoroughly mixed with pleasure; the ones that followed simply annoyed. She turned around to avoid them in the future, instead exposing herself to the laboriously mounting frustration of waiting with nothing to do. She couldn't even tap her fingers impatiently against the railing; the cuffs at her thighs made it difficult to drum her foot as well. Standing mostly still and staring mostly ahead was all that was left to her; that, and feeling the spit pool in the corners of her mouth, before tickly slowly alongside the edge of her jaw.

The mounting frustration was not without a sweet edge of its own, and Ifi tried to hold onto it, imagining it as a kind of a play from Shard, a trick performed on her to make her more compliant and weak for the rest of the night. And after all, it was not like she had been really abandoned; there was no way for Shard to leave the booth without showing herself to Ifi. All she had to do was wait. There really wasn't a reason to be worried, there was no cause for anxiety, and the little discomforts of her situation were, in themselves, a kind of a pleasure.

"Hey!" a voice reached her over the idle murmur of the Feast.

She turned to see the group of three masked men that had greeted her and Shard before, apparently returning from their trip to the bar. One of them was pointing towards Ifi with flute glass.

"Isn't that…" he asked, slurring lightly.

"Oh fuck, yes, that is her!" another, the one with the blue goblin mask, responded excitedly. "Want to take a look?"

In an instant, Ifi's heart swelled a size. Her first instinct was to take a step back, only to be reminded of the railing behind her. The group of men approached her, stopping a short distance away, their colorful masks all turned towards her. They took a moment to take the sight in, properly.

"Damn," the one with the flute whistled. The others laughed.

"Told you," the blue goblin took a long sip from his glass.

The third one, wearing a mask in the shape of a deceitful devil leaned in, the tip of his long, red nose pointing at Ifi's face.

"Wow," he mumbled. "Even the eyelashes, see?"

She had to meet his eyes; breathing was suddenly so very difficult. Then again, a breed of weird and altogether disturbing satisfaction did settle in her throat, insect-like. If they were just going to watch – maybe that, too, could be a good memory. Something to remember.

"That's so weird," the first one muttered. "Must have hurt as shit, no? Looks like some reptile."

"Bet she begged the demon lady not to do it!" the blue goblin snorted. "On her knees and all. And then…" he mimed a hand pulling something out at eye-level. "Bam!"

They laughed again, the sound burning cold. It occurred to Ifi that she couldn't move – not just because of the bindings, but that something in her head seized up like a broken mechanism. She kept staring dead ahead, past the men, and at the booth, waiting for the folds of the curtain to sweep aside, and for Shard to finally step out and…

"Look, she's drooling," the long-nose pointed.

Ifi tried to swallow; a trail of spittle extended down her chin. Even her thoughts ground to a frozen halt.

"Lowborns," the flute glass groaned, his dismissive contempt little different from Master Anateus'. "So filthy…"

"You mean hot?" the blue goblin slapped him on the back. His chortled out a sloppy, runny laugh.

"Get better taste, An," the response came out easy and casual. "Didn't you fuck enough of those already?"

"Jealous much?" he snapped back, swaying into a half-crouch. "Hm…"

Ifi's throat closed on itself, crushing the inkling of hope that this would be a pleasant memory. He was staring at her crotch. But Shard was just behind the curtain. Nothing bad was going to happen. This was just a scare.

"You know," he mused with a drunken cheer, "I think she's dripping from the other hole too."

"What, at you?" the long nose snorted.

"Bet. You know how bitches are."

"Bullshit!"

They laughed so hard that the glass flute ended up coughing some of his drink; that made them howl again.

"But for real," the blue goblin reached under his mask to wipe his mouth. "Now I'm curious. Let me check…" he put the cocktail glass on the floor.

It was a small grace that Ifi's imagination was also completely locked. She stared.

"Wait" the long-nose reached. "She's, you know…"

The curtain twitched. Ifi was a statue, a thing, a wait. The blue goblin fumbled with his glove.

"Who cares that much about a servant," he slurred, finally getting it out. He kept staring at Ifi's crotch, fingers twitching expectedly. "Me and Shard go a long way, she won't mind a quick-"

The booth opened up. The below-spawn's red-vested form emerged from the zone of silence, her head immediately darting towards the throng of men around Ifi. The alchemist's heart skipped a beat; the blue goblin didn't even hear the light porcelain steps behind him. A clawed hand arced through the air.

"Son?"

And then, it stopped. Behind Shard, there was Master Anateus, beholding the scene with a deep, angry frown. The blue goblin stifled a curse; the long-nose helped him up and around.

"We were just talking, father," he grunted out. "Just having some fun."

Ifi watched Shard stare straight at him, the half-extended claws retracting quickly.

"Did you touch her?" she snarled in a voice murderous enough to be a cut in itself.

Ifi smiled under the gag, letting relief wash over her. She'd hug her, if she only could. The blue goblin made a stumbling, awkward step back – but he was not looking at the below-spawn.

"No!" he threw his hands up. "What's wrong with you lately! It's just some girl!"

"If you…" Shard began.

"Don't waste your breath on this," Anateus grunted, voice like churning gravel. He was staring at the blue goblin with a well-worn frustration on his face. "And for our both's sake, don't threaten my son."

There was supposed to be a curt why not; Ifi couldn't wait to hear those words. But Shard remained rooted in place. The blue goblin stumbled back into an upright position, the flute glass patting his back.

"It was all just some misunderstanding," he muttered. "Me and Shard would never, father, never…"

"I sure hope so," Anateus spat, turning towards the elevator. "We don't have time for this."

Slipping between him and his son, Shard skipped towards Ifi, reaching for the knot at the railing.

"Shard!" the old glassmaker's voice shot out. "Which part of 'no time' don't you understand?!"

The below-spawn's hand stopped again, just inches from the leash. Ifi looked directly into her face, the flames painted across it, and the helpless line of her hidden mouth.

"I'm not leaving her," she began, but her voice trailed off.

"You're not dragging an eye-candy to what we're about to do!" Anateus growled. "She can wait until I have the damn city back!"

The worst part – worse than the desperate memory of the promise given, worse than the gut-shredding fear that followed, worse even than the absolute despair Ifi saw in Shard's brief hesitation – was the fact that the alchemist wasn't surprised at all when the below-spawn straightened away from her. Her heart broke a second earlier, just to soften the blow.

"Just a moment longer," she promised, her words empty and dry. "I'll make it up to you. I swear."

Strangely, the first thing she felt wasn't sadness, nor rage, nor even fear, but rather a disturbingly familiar sense of disappointment in herself.

In the end, Ifi had only herself to blame for the glassy tap of Shard's feet, as she walked away, trailing Anateus on her way back to power and prestige. Had she not been warned, multiple times? It was her choice to ignore all those warnings and instead pursue a fantasy. Now, this was coming to the kind of a close her beloved stories had never really covered. She sagged in her bindings, or as much as she was allowed to. Her body hurt.

The blue goblin spent a few moments trying to pick up his glass, his eyes following his father all the way to the elevator.

"Wow," the long-nose muttered. "Everybody's so mad tonight."

"I don't get it," the blue goblin shook his head. "What was she thinking I was about to do, fuck her latest toy? I know better than that."

"Right," the flute glass nodded eagerly. "And during a party too."

"All I wanted," he continued his angry rant, "was to check something. Like that!"

Ifi made very little noise as she felt his hand push up the cloth on her thigh, warm and sweaty. She couldn't move anyway. The touch was mercifully brief; she felt sick of herself, and of the world.

"Was that worth working herself up like that?" he waved the hand to his friends, the drink spilling from his glass. "Was it?"

"Nah," the flute glass agreed.

"So, is she wet?" the long-nose couldn't hold his curiosity down, even now.

"Oh, yeah," the blue goblin muttered, the matter clearly no longer of interest to him. "Like a complete slut. Fuck," he sighed. "I need another drink."

"Preach."

For the second time in the night, Ifi was alone. At least this time, there was no boredom to the solitude, replaced wholly by a vast and bitter sense of disappointment and broken hope. She stared dead ahead, at the empty booth and the window past it, without really seeing either.

The future unfolded before her, regret bringing out clarity. Shard was going to come back for her or she was going to die due to the consequence of her plotting; in either case, there was only one thing Ifi intended to do next. Get released, by the below-spawn or a contrite servant or whoever else, and then just run back to the safety and seclusion of her workshop, away from everything and everyone. And there, she would brew herself a bottle full of oblivion, a potion to strip the last few weeks from her memory like old paint. And if that left a scar on her mind for the rest of her life, it would still be better than remembering the brief few moments when she was as happy as she could be, and the crushing realization that they were built on yet another lie.

The ease and fluidity of her thoughts, long arrested, baffled her, but they were helping her. They were building a firewall between her and everything else, between her and her body, and all that stuck to her, all of its disgusting leakages and pathetic humiliations. They were the prize and the price of her mistakes, along with every other indignity of the night. They all belonged in the same ledger. All in all, she was probably going to live. The High Families saw her as little more than a discarded toy, and really, given what Shard has just done, wasn't she just that? Not ever worth the time and effort to properly smash before tossing it aside.

The spiral of self-loathing unwound in front of her, inviting her to take a slide to an unreachable terminus. She took the opportunity, gladly drowning herself in the rotten reassurance of despair and self-pity; it muted all other hurt, for the time being. Then-

The crystal gong split the tower from top to bottom, the noise loud enough to break even through the ugly veil Ifi spun around herself. By the instinct of the mind less than an impulse of the will, she turned around to see Master Glassmaker at her balcony again.

"I apologize for interrupting this enormous waste of everyone's time," she declared brightly. "But I have a few words of appreciation I'd like to offer to a pair of people who have endeavored to make this night as special as possible for me! Please," Ifi could just hear the smile, "I invite everyone to look at the main dancing floor."

Driven by an awful exception, Ifi looked down as much as the collar would allow, taking into view the floor below, where a crowd in white was clearing space around a pair of figures, one of them draped head-to-toe in fiery red. In their side galleries, musicians set their instruments aside, the last few notes of the melody trailing out into a storm of whispers.

"I have often been called vicious," Master Glassmaker continued. "A woman only after blood and power. I would add justice to that, but otherwise, it's not wrong. Still, I do appreciate finer things, from time to time."

In the crowd around Shard and Anateus, Ifi spotted motion. Three shapes, larger, leaner, and more predatory than any human could be. Though the white porcelain faded into the color of the Feast, the way the shapes moved was a tell enough. Ifi swallowed; Shard's comeuppance was coming in fast.

"Fashion, for example," the words came in a light cascade, "My attempted killer, now killing with her dress! So much more interesting than most of you! If only her eye for allies was just as sharp."

The three below-spawn, each with a long leash extending from their backs into the hands of black-clothed handlers, broke into the cleared space, surrounding Shard from all sides. Even from a distance, Ifi could hear them laugh out a skittering series of cruel clicks.

"I can also be forgiving, even to my most ardent enemies. For an impressive enough price, that is."

In distant silence, Ifi watched as Shard leaped towards Anateus, claws outreached, only to be tackled and pinned to the floor by the three of her siblings, their triumphant howls drowning out the scream of the crowd.

"And this brings us to my personal, thoroughly unexpected, highlight of the evening!"

One of the below-spawn, wrapped in criss-crossed black fabric, a dark shape painted across its face, jammed its claws into Shard's mouth, prying it open. Another hurried with a flask of a milky potion, pouring it down inside. Ifi looked away.

"To the Lair-Mother below," Master Glassmaker exclaimed, "as proof of our alliance, I offer her errant child, to be dispensed with as she sees fit. And to all of you, I raise a toast: to vengeance, the basest and best of all pleasures!"

On the dance-floor, the below-spawn dragged Shard up, legs buckling under her as the slowmilk took hold. A slight, absurd mote of pride flitted through Ifi's consciousness – they were using the same solution she came up with, all on her own. Another thought, awful and thorny, followed: that there was some kind of justice in this world, even if it brought no one happiness.

"I'm sorry!"

The familiar voice rose from Shard's throat, carrying up above the dance-floor. The words were smoothed around the edges, already weakened by the poison, and yet ringing with more than hurt.

"It's long past time for apologies," Master Glassmaker responded from up high. "For you, at least."

She didn't understand, and it occurred to Ifi that no one did. That no one but her could hear that under fear and despair so audible in Shard's shout, there was more.

"I'm sorry!" Shard wailed.

Nothing backed that apology; nothing could Ifi remembered the last time the below-spawn promised her to do better, and how she failed to do so. Through the fog of the night, she fished out the words that Villis spoke: none of it is real. The alchemist understood why he had thought so – it wasn't hard to see. But those desperate shouts?

They were. They had to be. The realization sunk into her slowly, finding its place alongside regret and heartbreak, and the trembling anger she still felt towards Shard.

She wanted to respond, even though she didn't know the word that would fit. It was moot, anyway. Even if she could find them, she couldn't speak them.

"You were-"

Words died in Shard's mouth as one of her siblings punched her, the sound another tolling of a bell. Then, it punched again, and again, until she was quiet. Then, Shard vanished, pulled into a hidden path on the side of the tower. For the third time, Ifi was reminded of just how alone she was.

She was given much time to dwell on the feeling as the night dragged on and no one paid her any attention, leaving it to servants to sweep her aside later, alongside all the other refuse of the Feast. The dress strained her body, the loss strained her mind, all combining together a murky haze she was settling in slowly and without any choice in the matter. Worse yet, the warmth of the evening before, of those moments in empty-headed bliss refused to fully flush away, remaining in the recesses of her as a reminder of everything she was losing. But even that realization was without proper bite, failing to find solid purchase on the piece of flint that Ifi was rapidly becoming.

Even when the help came, with the beautiful golden hair of Eusi, and the blank-faced powerful arms of her wife, the alchemist struggled to react with more than just a weak nod.

"We've been looking for you," the woman whispered, carefully undoing the gag and the collar. "Let's get you out of here."

The alchemist allowed herself to be handled, freed, and led away; as the tension released from her tired body, so did the senses give way, one by one, the feeling of strong hands helping her up the last thing she remembered from the Feast of Indulgence.

 

[Gargulec]

19. Time

A claw scratched a line across the porcelain of Shard's wrist, drawing out a vibrating, discordant note.

"You could have taken my offer," Cuts crooned, letting the sound vanish into the thick dark around them. "You could have stayed my cripple-toy."

How many times has she had this realization, Shard asked herself, weak beyond motion? How many times did she have to see that she has always had the choice to stop, to walk away? How many times did she have to be surprised at the event of her fall?

Too many.

A chisel ground against a whet-stone. A sturdy steel table awaited.

But also never again.

"Mother wants you alive."

Though it was a cold comfort, it pleased Shard to finally understand what it was that she had been missing all those times. What she had failed to account for, every time she slipped and fell, always lower.

"But you have taught us well, dear sister."

Shard thought of Ifi, and of every single promise she had made to her and broken before her. She could only hope that someone else would take care of the alchemist, and better than she ever could. As for herself…

"You showed us that we do not die easily."

As for herself, the truth was that now, as before, she deserved everything that was coming to her.

"So we have time."

 

[Gargulec]

20. Reckoning

"Wake up."

Immediately the last night reasserted itself, exploding out into a tangled, thorny mess of images, impressions, and feelings. They were all chokingly bitter, aside from those that really hurt, which tasted sweet instead. No matter how much she tried, there was no holding onto the dissipating remnants of sleep; she tried to screw her eyes shut and refuse the rush of consciousness. Instead, she only immersed herself in it.

She remembered hands, careful and attentive, ushering her out of the feast, freeing her from that damn dress, holding her as she sobbed unconscionably and aimlessly. They helped her wash herself, they led her through a thick fog of words, and promises and explanations that could find no purchase in the miasma of her mind, and finally, they laid her down on a bed, under a warm blanket, in a room so far above the ground, and so far away from home. She remembered the names and faces that those hands were attached to. Eusebia. Prunikos. She even remembered the immense, guilt-shot sense of relief of having them take care of her, having them save her from the inevitable consequences of her own mistakes.

But most of all, she remembered the dull, directionless anger swelling with each moment parting her from that fucking below-spawn.

"Wake up!"

Grudgingly, Ifi opened her eyes, to see Pris lean over her, hair tied into a neat bun, face severe. She cut a dark figure against the golden daylight filling the room behind her. The alchemist mumbled half-coherently, and dug herself up, blinking rapidly to get the last dregs of sleep away from her eyes. There was so much charm glass around her, veining up the walls and to the ceiling, slowly pulsing out the High City's intimate heartbeat.

"My lady wife apologizes for waking you up," Pris added, stepping back from the bed. "But there is someone…"

The elixir woman's voice had changed, Ifi realized, a pinprick of professional pride puncturing through the haze surrounding her. She leaned forward, just to make sure.

"...someone here to see you. So please, get dressed and join us. This really can't wait. There are fresh clothes on the dresser."

There could be no mistake. Of course, the alchemist knew, it was probably rude to try to listen for the remains of the tell-tale masculine timbre in Pris' voice, and of course, she could just about pick a note or two of it in that rich contralto, but only because she knew where to look. Anyone else would surely be fooled, especially under the remains of Pris' lowborn slur. The tincture worked far better than expected.

"Right," she nodded, grasping the fleeting sense of accomplishment like a lifeline. "Wait," she realized belatedly. "Someone is waiting for me?"

The span between a burst of hope, and its rapid receding, hurt.

"Master Glassmaker wants to have a chat."

It hurt a lot – enough to make her miss the hook so blatantly present in those words.

"So please hurry," Pris finished, face pulled into a deep frown. "You've tested her patience enough already."

Ifi nodded, watching the other woman walk out of the room to give her privacy. Strangely, as much as she should be worrying about a visit from the City's most powerful, something else pinned her attention. Though Pris wore a plain, neck-high dress, a corset still cinched her waist and chest, laced high and tight. The alchemist stared at the row of knots lining the woman's back, a sick kind of longing blooming in the corset's afterimages.

Her own blue dress lay neatly folded on the dresser, right next to the clothes prepared for her for today – and right next to the rest of last night's accessories. The hook gleaned, polished to mirror sheen; Ifi swallowed, realizing her jaw still felt stiff, and her throat crushed. The impressions of the Feast lingered on the body. The heels – the absurd heels she barely managed to walk in – waited nearby. Her feet still hurt from them.

If she could find it in her to cry right there, she would. But her eyes were dry; though bile swelled at the sight, what followed was no great outpouring of sadness. Just that anger, that cold, indistinct feeling seizing her up and refusing to allow anything else in. With shaking hands, she reached for the clothes offered to her by the lady of the house, and started to change.

Her feet hurt her, her legs were shaking. Her back felt stretched and sore, and she could barely move her neck and her jaw. Last night would not wash away with just a single night of sleep – nor would yearning leave. As she struggled to put on the plain dress, all she could do was to have her mind wander. And what images it reached! Cold, porcelain hands taking this soreness as an offering, squeezing and rubbing it in; insatiable, but loving hunger feeding on the last dregs of night's pain; a cruelly caring voice praising her, for she did well, she had been brave, she made it through-

"Fuck," Ifi exhaled, grabbing the dresser's edge and staring at the exhausted battlefield of her face. Even there, the feast remained visible, its mark left in scratches and indents impressed into her skin by the gag's jeweled harness. "How could you?"

The question helped – it provided focus for the mounting anger. It clung to the idea of Shard, of that stupid, awful creature who had to break every promise, who had to make every mistake, who was too stupid to notice how much she was hurting others, or worse yet – refused to care. Who gave Ifi every hope under the sun, and – for a scant few hours – the taste of happiness. Who, in the end, only reminded the alchemist of that very happiness' impossibility.

"I hate you," Ifi spat into the mirror, her voice a trebling mess.

That was an obvious lie, and its obviousness was the reason why the alchemist wanted nothing more but to shatter the mirror, break the dresser into splinters, and howl in numb fury at how she could not rid herself of longing for that dumb, demonic, duplicitous beast named Shard. But such fantasies have a course that seldom leads through enactment. She exhaled, and made herself a promise she instantly knew she was never going to keep. Still, to her own reflection she pledged that this time, she would give up and forget. For real. For good. Again. Forever.

If that was meant to get the anger to recede, it only pulled up more bile up her throat. But at least she finished dressing, splashed some water over her face from a charm-refilled basin, and left the room. She let Pris guide her down a spiraling staircase, through a modest living room, and then through a glass door onto the sun-drenched apartment's balcony.

"Remember that we've helped you," the elixir woman stated coldly, letting her outside. "Be mindful of what you say to her."

Whatever that remark was meant to imply fled from Ifi's attention at the first breath of the air outside. It tasted nothing like Ifi was used to. Clear, sharp, fresh – it carried no hint of smoke, of sweat, of the effusions of the city, of its industry, of soot and smog that legions of workers scrubbed daily from the white facades of the Middle City. She inhaled sharply, letting the icy wind in, the cold instantly drawn out by the bright-burning day – and by the spiraling glass pattern embedded into the balcony's floor, emanating warmth and turning away gales. And beyond the balcony's edge, there opened a view onto a forest of slender towers, charm-studded and linked by a cat's cradle of walkways and hanging gardens. So far above the world, the HIgh City appeared nothing short of a skyward archipelago.

"Not now," Pris whispered, leading her towards a low table, and expectant faces.

Not without effort, Ifi peeled her eyes away from the stunning vista, and towards her host – and Master Glassmaker seated next to her, currently stirring sugar into a coffee cup. Ifi recalled her from the feast as a distant, small figure with a ringing voice; what she didn't realize was just how massacred a full half of that woman's face was. At some point, it burned until it melted, sloughing off before solidifying into a disfigured topography of hills and valleys rendered in scar tissue. Ifi had seen older alchemists who had lived through laboratories going up in their faces; none of that compared. It was a miracle that Master Glassmaker was still alive, let alone smiling at her.

Though, it had to be said, with the glacial-blue jewel set into the woman's eye-socket, the smile could hardly come across as warm, or inviting.

"And there she is," she announced, raising her cup in a mock-toast. "Come, sit. Now is the time for your trial."

Far too belatedly, Ifi realized – with an awful lurch of her stomach – that she should have been holding onto worries far larger than just the mute anger at what Shard did to her. Escorted by the stare of the lifeless, jewel eye, she shuffled into a wicker chair, right next to taut-faced Eusi.

"Master Glassmaker," Pris' wife announced, affecting a tone so formal as to make Ifi's back straighten on sheer reflex, "let me introduce you to Ifigenia Juno of the Subtle Fellowship of Brewers, presently a guest of my house. Ifigenia, this is Master Glassmaker. She wishes to ask you about last night's events."

A light meal waited on the table – forest fruit and yogurt, fresh bread and excellent coffee. But aside from Master Glassmaker herself, no one seemed to be eating. Pris held herself straight as an arrow, hands folded on her lap, face blank. Eusi kept frowning, nervously playing with a silver spoon in her hands shooting furtive glances at the burned woman, who only continued to smile.

"It's an honour," Ifi bowed her head, "of which I am unworthy."

Words – distant and distorted memories of Master Glassmaker's speech from the Feast – echoed in her head, foretelling murder. And yet, that same fury she woke up to continued to expand and bloom into new, choking forms.

"I'd ask what happened to you last night," Master Glassmaker said, tone playfully cruel, "that you look so dogshit today. But I think I know – conspiracy to overthrow the rightful hierarchy of the High Table, wasn't it?"

Eusi started to protest; Master Glassmaker didn't let her. With a slasher grin, the burned woman watched as the alchemist curled down on herself, stewing in the notion that perhaps the bigger threat than getting gutted by Shard was what the below-spawn's real enemies could do to her.

"For that the punishment would be too obvious to merit mentioning," Master Glassmaker continued, "though it certainly will be quite a sight to behold."

She let her voice hang, passing the silence that followed by grabbing a handful of berries and popping them into her mouth, letting the juice stain her lips blue. Somewhere far below, the bells of the Middle City rang, reaching to the heights as little more than a series tinny chimes.

"Unless, of course, this is all a big misunderstanding," Master Glassmaker added, finally swallowing. She flashed Ifi another mirthless smile. "After all, my good friend Villis tells me that you were not an accessory to that conspiracy, but just an… accessory."

She chuckled lightly. But it was not a joke, Ifi realized – without even having to see the imploring stare Eusi directed her way. It was a lifeline.

"It's true," Pris said suddenly, voice no less firm than the form her body was held to. "The demon seduced her, and used her. She bears no responsibility for the conspiracy, and-"

"Dear," Master Glassmaker raised a finger, "I want to hear it from her, not you."

Ifi had made a virtue for herself out of paying no heed to politics, to the games of the mighty, and the fates of the High Table. But for all of her recent, foolish mistakes, she understood well enough what was expected of her right now, and how she was going to save her life. And against that knowledge, she could only feel powerless, and so very angry. It was all Shard's fault; all the result of the below-spawn's idiotic machinations which had to terminate in Ifi denouncing–

–of all the ways to realize it and to put a name on it, this one had to be among the worst. The name and the word should bring joy, but instead they bore with them nothing other than a promise of a long life lived in misery and longing, in waking up to an absence, and going to sleep in fear of dreams of what could have been–

–which had to terminate in Ifi denouncing the monster she could not stop loving. In defiance of reason, and everything else. And to know that – to recognize that necessity – was to make her feel like the weakest creature under the sun. And to know that – to recognize the injustice – was to let her anger finally find a voice.

"She used me," Ifi said, meeting Master Glassmaker's dead stare head on. "I saved her life. I nursed her back to health. I offered myself to her. And she used me, anyway. She dragged me all the way up here and broke every promise she had made. I trusted her over, and over again, and every time it turned out to be a mistake."

All of this was true, after a fashion. None of it was given as a lie. But it tasted so rancid to say. Each word cut Ifi up; and there were more coming, the ones that bore the real burden of her fury. She tried to bite on all of them, and still some got out.

"I would have been good to her," she finished, the little fragile testament to how it all felt, and to where the real seat of Shard's treachery stood.

Master Glassmaker listened to all of it carefully, the smile gradually warming up with each word Ifi cried out. In the end, it came close to being without malice.

"Well," she declared oh-so-very carefree, "I'm glad to hear. And, just to make sure, it was also her manipulation that led to Eusebia providing her with an invitation to the Feast of Indulgence? My distant cousin had no way of knowing who was puppetting you, yes?"

"Yes," she lied with as much conviction as she could muster. Eusi and Pris exhaled audibly.

"Perfect!" Master Glassmaker clapped her hands, beaming. "So there's that, all resolved, and not a single hanging to be had! I'll be going now. You are a terrific host, Eusebia. I should visit more often."

"The pleasure is all mine," Eusi replied, stilted and dry. "Our doors are always open."

Wicker scraped against the floor; Master Glassmaker straightened to her full, meager height, Pris, strangely tense, standing up to escort her to the door. Ifi sat in silence; after the surge of anger, what remained was a sinking kind of emptiness, no longer held aloft by the quick-burning fury.

"Is she dead?"

The question slipped from her mouth without passing through thought first. Eusi turned rapidly, twisting herself in fear; Pris shot her a hateful glare. But Master Glassmaker didn't seem to notice – or care – for the pleading note so very apparent in the alchemist's voice.

"Shard?" she shrugged, from the balcony's door. "Not yet. But don't you worry your little broken heart, miss alchemist. Right now, she is certainly wishing to be."

Afterwards, silence stretched, hostile to words. Master Glassmaker left, and for a time, Ifi and Eusi sat alone on the balcony, looking away from each other, and from the city. The view was really incredible; even through the fog of loss surrounding her, the alchemist could not hold back wonder. But however spectacular the slender white towers of High City were, or the hanging gardens linking them together with long strings of verdant green, it was what stretched beyond that she could not look away from.

With the bright sun and sharp winds keeping the sky empty and clear, she could see, far alongside the horizon's edge, the jagged gray line, a vast outline that could only be the Northern Limit. At first, Ifi couldn't believe it and thought it was some trick of the light, but no matter how much she squinted and rubbed her eyes, the image refused to go away. Tucked into a wicker chair on Eusi's balcony, the alchemist saw, for the first time in her life, the vast mountain chain that ringed the City's world. Past those impassible, snow-capped peaks the world ended, turning into a churn of monster kings and barbarous tribes. It was enough to keep her attention pinned, and for a moment, away from all the other thoughts poisoning her. After all, she had never imagined she would get as much as a glimpse of that faraway wall. It was her brother who called to adventure, to travel; she had always expected to spend her entire life without leaving the Middle City, let alone the City itself.

It was one thing knowing how vast the world could get, and the other seeing it. Though she knew she would never leave – there was little point left to dreaming – it still comforted her to imagine that somewhere past the mountains, there might exist a land where she could hide from memories, and from longing.

Pris returned eventually, carrying a bottle of dark-red liquor and three small glasses. Eusi downed hers in one gulp, and only then let herself look back at Ifi. She looked drained.

"I really should have been more careful with you," she sighed, but without reproach. "I should have realized just how dangerously clueless you really were."

Pris settled into a chair next to her, holding her glass without drinking. She let her wife speak, staring idly at some point in space. Eusi filled the air with exasperated, exhausted apologies for failing to notice that there was someone manipulating Ifi. If only she and Pris had managed to get the full story out before, then this could have been avoided, all this fear and all the hurt. If only Shard had been stopped from her abortive attempt at restarting the strife at the Table. Of course, Eusi couldn't really begrudge the alchemist for falling for the Lair-Mother child's lies; she was, after all, just a junior alchemist, too caught up in the petty world of the Middle City to know better. Ifi listened, half-attentively. On any other day, she would easily find in herself the indignation to rebuke being treated like an errant, stupid child, all her mistakes excused by small-mindedness of craftsmen. But in anger's wake, today had left her with little but piercing guilt.

So she tried to drape herself in Eusi's patronizing sympathies, and assume them as the truth of what happened. She tried to focus on Shard's betrayal, on being left and abandoned, but what came instead was the ringing cry of "I'm sorry". And love. Love, that monstrous, cruel feeling; love, the evidence of the failure of her reason.

"She was good to me," she tried to justify herself with a feeble lie. "She was lovely, and I needed her," she explained, a bit more sincerely.

"I know," Eusi nodded. "Which is why I have a… proposition for you."

Next to her, Pris abruptly pulled herself back from the table, as if stung. Hastily, she stepped to the balcony's edge and leaned against it, still refusing to look at either her wife, or the alchemist. Eusi glanced at her, confusion flashing through her face, before returning to Ifi.

"Your tinctures worked wonders," she said. "And I've been thinking if there is more you could do for Pris?"

Again, the golden-haired Glassmaker threw a glance at her wife; the elixir woman kept her quiet, seemingly focused on some point in space, beyond the scope of the conversation, or Eusi's praise.

"As in?" Ifi asked, for a moment distracted from the crush of the day.

"As in we could take you as a servant," Eusi explained. "Our own captive alchemist, so to speak."

Captive. The word was a lightning strike. It flashed Ifi's memory back to when she first met Eusi and Pris, and to all the playful hints that the Glassmaker woman left for her. And that – that even aside becoming a High Family's retainer. The alchemist could only gasp. Maybe there was going to be more to her life than yearning, maybe-

She imagined herself in one of Pris' torture dresses. She then imagined porcelain hands holding her in it. She winced, shame cutting through the daydream like a knife. But no, she was not going to let it strangle her again. She made herself a promise to forget that monstrous below-spawn, and this was the first step.

"I…" she began, trying to find the correct words to express the magnitude of her gratitude.

"Lady wife," Pris interrupted, turning back to face them. "I am sorry, but I must object."

The golden-haired Glassmaker recoiled, as if slapped.

"Pris, what?" was all she could get out, clearly shocked. "What's this all about?"

"This is my home, too. And I object to taking this woman into our service."

Eusi hid her face in her hands, exhaling in frustration. Pris kept herself still, imperious, impervious. And Ifi – again – found herself thinking about that wretched moment between being given hope, and having it ruined. It was a rhythm she really should have gotten used to long ago, and yet, it still hurt all the same.

"Pris, I beg you," Eusi uttered finally, "we've talked about it! This very morning! And you were fine with it. Why do you have to be difficult all of sudden?"

"Because I am your wife," Pris hissed. "Not your servant. And things have changed since this very morning."

Eusi glanced at Ifi, as if trying to offer her a wordless apology, then exhaled again. The alchemist just smiled desperately, the familiar pattern repeating itself in a perfectly predictable fashion.

"What has changed? Can you at least tell us what is this new objection of yours?"

"Gladly, lady wife," there was rage – barely restrained and vibrating like a string pulled close to snapping – in Pris' voice. "Up until moments ago, I wasn't fully aware of what kind of person she," she chomped down on the word, lacing it with enough callous contempt as to make Ifi flinch, "she is."

And when the flinch had passed, Ifi caught a flint-like hardness glinting in Pris' eyes; if before, the elixir woman had looked at her with distant sympathy, now it was something far more proximal – and far keenly felt.

"The one reason we are not being hanged for the kindness of your heart towards guild strays," Pris continued, "is because Villis, of all people, put a word in her favour."

"He only told Alisa the truth!"

"He covered for her," the elixir woman snarled back. "He lied on her behalf."

There was no hesitation and no doubt in that – and finally, the alchemist realized why. She sagged in her chair, the wave of anger returning as fetid, depleted resignation. For Pris, alone of them all, saw the love that lurked behind Ifi's words, hopes, and desires. She saw it, she understood it, and she found it worthy of nothing short of contempt. Ifi couldn't meet her stare anymore. She turned her eyes away, back towards the distant mountains. There was something reassuring about their faraway indifference.

"She was manipulated! You said so yourself!" she heard Eusi protest.

"You know damn well why I said it, lady wife," Pris' voice grew quiet, glacially cold. "But Alisa's not here anymore, so you don't have to pretend. You've heard what she said, haven't you? 'She was lovely to me'?"

It didn't matter that the alchemist didn't know what it was, exactly, that set Pris off. Why she could only meet Ifi's love for Shard with cold contempt. It felt unfair. But it almost certainly wasn't. Loving a monster does not undo what it did to others.

Around her, the argument continued, tuning into the distantly familiar cadences of a lover's spat.

"So what of that?"

"Do you seriously not understand? Do I have to remind you?"

"Sure, remind away!"

"I grew up in the fuck mud! In the Glassmakers Ward!"

"So what?"

"So your politics, your demonic alliances and dalliances? They were our fear and our death! We bled for your every little triumph, and cursed the hand that held the leash! And Villis-"

Hungrily, desperately, Ifi tried not to listen – she so wanted to believe that Eusi and Pris were above it all. That their love would never cut. That they were beyond hurting each other over past mistakes and present missteps. That she was not a party to any of it.

"Villis clearly didn't mind!"

"Then he is a better man than any of us, because there is no way in the world I will ever forget what those claws meant to us, back then! And she – he saves her life, and she still talks about her lost, lovely Shard?"

"Can I go?" Ifi asked, chuckling nervously, panickedly. She just wanted to leave. Forget. Just as she had promised herself. "I'll just-"

"Don't you fucking dare!" Pris howled, the chord finally snapping in her voice; it bounced and echoed off the High City's towards. "I'm not done with you!"

Absurdly, Ifi noted – with the same pride as in the guest-room – that even in a full shout, her tinctures held. Only the lowborn slur reasserted itself in full force, years of sliding off words and vowels. She shut up, and stood still. And quietly wondered if there was out.

She lost Shard already. She didn't want to lose Pris, too.

"You," Pris pointed her finger like a claw, straight at Ifi's chest, "will haul your demon-lover ass to Villis, and you will tell him how good that monster was for you and beg him to forgive you!"

"Pris, enough!" Eusi's shout too joined the booming echoes.

"And," the elixir woman didn't let it knock her off-course, "and if he really is over it all, if he really forgives you for kissing those blood-stained hands, then fuck it, you can stay here for all I care. But until then, get out of my house!"

 

[Gargulec]

21. Unforgiveable

Acrid smog continued to shroud the Glassworkers' Ward, in spite of the alleged work stoppages. Narrow streets choked under a blanket of dark smoke laced with silicate dust. Even the rooftops offered little reprieve. The Lower City was too squat to rise above the stinking haze, choosing instead to sit close to the ground; it made Shard of White Obsidian think of some kind of a bottom-feeding parasite, some eyeless, spineless slug from the deepest caverns. Every moment wasted here filled her with seething frustration. The rooftops croaked under her weight as she jumped from one ramshackle hovel to another, not even pausing to enjoy the small pleasures of being on a prowl. Stupidly, she had put on a new red kurta, and now the Lower City's odour was sure to suffuse it; this sort of filth rarely washed out, and so it would probably have to go straight into the furnace as soon as she returned home. And then, she promised herself, she would have a gaggle of servants scrub her and polish her shell to a mirror sheen, so that not a speck of this dump would remain staining her sleek body.

But alas, there was no returning to the towers without first handling that onerous Glassmaker business. She growled at the night, her voice vibrating with wordless frustration. Why her? Had she not outgrown dirtying her hands in the Lower City? Why her, and not that brute Cuts, or some other sibling of hers? But Master Glassmaker, that old mass of greed and blubber, kept yapping about the importance of this all, and the need to send his best servant there. So, once again, Shard found herself made into a simple catspaw, the pantomime of obedience expected of her denying her the pleasure of telling that mortal idiot to handle his business himself.

Her target was in view, a light spout illuminating smog with oil lamps and cheap charmlights. Some half-rotten dump where the lowborn congregated to rot their simpleton brains with the runoff of the Middle City's breweries. To call it a building seemed an insult to architecture: to the Lair-Mother's child, it appeared more like a mound of barely-arranged planks and sheets of corrugated metal loosely arranged in the shape of a tavern. As everything in the Lower City, it was little more than a pile of refuse that the City had vomited out and let the vermin move into.

Low noise of massed voices and frantic speeches seeped through the half-open door; a pair of muscle-bound thugs stood guard, heavy clubs no doubt making them feel like they mattered. They smoked, adding the stench of their cheap cigarettes to the already fetid atmosphere. In her perch above, Shard let her claws extend, the golden polish depressingly dull in the smoke. It was an honest struggle not to jump down and gut those brutes where they stood, but the Lair-Mother's child managed to tamp down on her hunger. What was that Master Glassmaker told her? I want the work to resume, he declared wagging his fat finger at her, and that takes workers, dear Shard. Rid me of trouble-makers, not labourers!

Her claws dug into the soot-stained wood of the roof; again, she had to fight the urge not to howl in frustration. She couldn't believe she was made to miss the Charmcutters' Gala for this! Master Charmcutter had recently acquired a real snake-woman maid from beyond the Western Limit and Shard had been waiting days to put hands on her!

But no, no, no. Instead, she was to terrify some worthless lowborn, a task that a bunch of guild muscle could accomplish just as well with some ardent application of the whip. She hissed, loud enough to make the brutes notice – but before they noticed her, she was already standing in front of them, claws on full display. Their fear exploded out, simple, but oddly fulfilling. For all of her frustration, Shard couldn't deny that this work had its advantages.

"He's inside!" one of the guards shouted, falling to her knees. "We're just- we're not with him! Don't kill us!"

"I won't," Shard replied with a shrug, stepping past them.

She gave the silent one a wide slash across the stomach, her back arching happily as pleasure jolted up her arm. The wound was shallow, but at least the man would learn to be more prompt the next time. His stifled scream accompanied her as she tore down the door, and stepped into the unbearable pit of lowborn flesh beyond.

Two, maybe three dozen bodies stood squeezed inside, tables pulled aside to make room. Glassworkers all, some still wearing their working clothes, heavy boots and burn-marked shirts. The shout at the door alerted them – heads turned, and when they saw who it was, all the noise died. Perfect silence surrounded Shard as she stepped inside, heavy with so much terror that Shard had fight not to overstuff herself just yet and ruin the coming main course.

"The first one to leave dies," she announced, flicking blood off her claw at some nearby fool.

The lowborn tumbled back; someone stuffed a fist into her mouth to keep her from screaming. It was pleasing, the Lair-Mother's child had to admit to herself, just how quietly she could speak and still be heard by everyone.

The instigator – the supposed source of recent trouble – wasn't hard to find. He stood on a stool in the middle, frozen mid-oration. At her arrival, he turned chalk-pale, giving his soot-stained face a monochromatic appearance.

This was the Lower City, and they all understood the rules of what was about to happen. They had to know that only Shard's good will was keeping them all from getting slaughtered like cattle. Stories of what happened to those who tried to fight back against her kind were what they all grew up on; not a single one of them would be keen to be added to those sorry legends. All they could do was hope, still as statues, mute as stone.

She squeezed herself past them, stepping lightly and smiling widely. A hundred eyes followed her every move with rapt, terrified attention.

"So what was this about?" she asked, looking up at the man on the stool and letting her teeth show in a vicious green.

To give him credit, he did not look away. The fumes of the Glassworks had not yet eaten him; he carried himself proudly and breathed freely. There was a youthful shine to his eyes, and even dirtied, he had beautiful golden hair. There was use for boys like that; it was a genuine shame that he hadn't been scouted for a better future than the one now awaiting him. But then again, pretty flesh was rarely ever in shortage.

"Protest," he responded, breathing in.

That took Shard aback. Not only did he speak back, but also showed some courage! What a rare and wonderful treat. Most lowborn knew only how to mewl. She was going to enjoy breaking him.

"Oh?" she brought her blooded hand to her mouth, miming interest. "And what against?"

"I was," he said, swallowing loudly. In the mass of sensations lapping against her shell, she could not pick his fear from that of the assembled mass; still, she had to assume that he was terrified. All the more impressive how level he was keeping his slurring voice. "I was trying to instigate against the latest work order."

Shard's smile faded – this was more than just bravery, she realized. This was conscious, and so dangerous, and so requiring the sternest punishment. Thankfully, this was not the first time she had come across this type. In fact, she was all too familiar.

"But they were uninterested," he added, stressing those words as if Shard was ever going to believe him. "They were laughing at me. They were all going to go back to work tomorrow."

"Such a brave boy you are," Shard hissed back at him, "but you have no reason to worry."

"Please," he continued. It didn't escape Shard's attention that the eyes of the crowd were away from her, and pinned to him, and his sacrificial gestures. "They are all innocent. Only-"

Shard didn't let him finish. She kicked the stool sending him tumbling to the beaten ground pretending to be the tavern's floor. Her claws extended an extra inch as he displayed the temerity to land on his feet.

"You are not dying tonight," her voice sizzled up into the room. "But you are learning."

Her hand shot to the side, grabbing some random throat from the crowd. It didn't really matter who it belonged to. She hoisted a body into the air, for all to see. It belonged to some man; it didn't really matter. It was going to be dead soon. Still, she had a lesson to deliver.

"What's your name?" she asked the soon-to-be-corpse.

"Let him-" the instigator started to plead again.

Shard kicked him in the gut, twisting the voice into a pained groan. Just for a good measure, she put her foot on his throat, applying just enough pressure so that he would not make any pointless noises until required.

"What's your name?" she repeated.

"M-eos," the vermin in her hand moaned, a voice so pathetic that even Shard couldn't sample the fear in it.

"Do you want to die, Meos?" she asked, tossing him from side to side.

"No," he cried. At least someone knew their role in this entire mess. "No! I didn't do anything! I have…"

This was enough noise for now. She squeezed his neck. He felt her claws dig into his flesh, and so shut up. She turned back to the instigator.

"You," she lifted her foot from his throat. "Beg me to kill him. Beg me to do it slowly."

Somewhere behind her, lowborn were scurrying. They knew her attention was elsewhere, and so tried to find a way out without drawing it. As long as they didn't make their attempts too obvious, she didn't really care. She only needed a handful of other bodies for the demonstration she was about to give.

The instigator stared at her, dumbfounded.

"Did you not hear me?" she spat at him. "Now. Beg."

The mewling sack of bones in her hands groaned; she crunched on its throat a bit more; besides it sent pleasant vibrations into her hand.

"He's innocent," the wannabe martyr whispered and moaned. "I'm the one you're after! Let him go, and kill me-"

Shard pushed down; he choked.

"Are you deaf?" she hissed. "You are not dying. You are learning about consequences. Want him to live? Fine!" she swept inside of the tavern with her free hand. "Just say the word. I'll just take everyone else's life instead."

The crowd was thinning, faster than before. Still, not everyone would dare to run. Enough would stay, and carry the story out later. Unless, of course, Shard was wrong about the man at her feet, and she would have to kill everyone instead.

Either way, she would be content.

"You have until the count of five," she announced, looking straight into the instigator's brave, defiant eyes.

"Please…" the soon-to-be corpse moaned.

"Just kill me!" the instigator shouted, and Shard couldn't believe just how intoxicatingly thick this man's despair was.

"One," she crooned.

"Two."

"Three."

He broke.

***

Shard threw the strip of the bloodied skin to the ground, along with the rest of the garbage. Her kurta was definitely ruined now, but at least she had eaten well. Her entire body tingled with excitement, and it was a struggle to hold herself steady on her feet.

The instigator sat nearby; he was the only one remaining in the tavern, everyone else having long since fled. The Lair-Mother's child had no doubts that not only would work resume first thing tomorrow morning, and in the years to come unruly lowborn of the Glassworks' Ward would think twice before letting anyone speak against the peace and order of the City. Even rats learned.

"You can go now," she brushed the man's cheek, spreading some of his victim's blood over his face. "Your education is complete."

He didn't move, or say anything. He just glared with the dumb, animal defiance practically indistinguishable from shock. Briefly, she entertained the idea of actually putting him out of his misery, but that would render the entire evening moot, and besides, there was no point in ridding Master Glassmaker of another worker. They were, allegedly, useful. So instead, she let him think about his mistakes.

"You should have killed me."

The instigator's wards caught Shard in the door. She didn't look back, merely shrugged. Mercy was hardly a habit of hers. She left, and hurried back to the High City, where a long and sorely needed bath awaited her.

 

[Gargulec]

22. Sign

"And that was my first encounter with Shard."

Although Eusi had directed Ifi to Villis' office – the Permanent Representative of the Fellowship of Glassworkers at the High Table – the man himself refused to meet her there. Instead, he had her wait until he was done with a throng of severe-looking patricians before taking her to a place where, he claimed, no prying eyes would spy on them. That meant a flying ruin.

Before a fire consumed it, the platform they were on used to be one of the many High City's hanging gardens – a domed enclosure suspended between towers. Exotic flowers filled it, coaxed by alchemy into permanent bloom. Their carbonized remains littered the floor, tear-drop spikes of melted glass poking between them. They were what remained of the dome – only the steel frame continued to stand, bent by sheer heat into a twisted canopy of winding metal branches. Ash piled in the places where wind couldn't sweep it out into the void, piling in the cracked ceramic pots. Only charm glass survived apparently untouched, long tendrils of braided glass snaking through the rubble, shining bright blue. They kept the whole platform aloft, preventing it from snapping free of its moorings and tumbling to the bottom of the City. It wasn't enough to prevent it from creaking and groaning with each seaward gust. To call that noise unnerving would be an understatement – which is why Villis maintained that there, alone, they could converse privately, and at length. The alchemist quickly came to regret it.

"Why are you telling me this?" she asked, images of cackling Shard drenched in human blood dancing in her mind, each death dripping merrily from the tips of her rending claws.

"Perspective, I guess?" he said, shifting awkwardly, seeming almost embarrassed by the entire situation.

Perspective. Ifi shuffled closer to the platform's edge. Between the twisted ribs of the shattered dome, the City filled the view far towards the horizon. The dark haze of the Glassworkers' Ward wasn't that hard to find, now that she wanted to take a look. Not that there was much to see: only smog, and a hint of orange light within, where the greatest foundries spread. Heaps of slag, tall as hills, ringed it; smoke climbed their slopes reluctantly, rarely getting to crest them and flow down into the rest of the City. Distantly, Ifi recalled learning of the great expenses that went into ensuring that the Glassworks wouldn't pollute with their fumes. It was a feat of urbanistic ingenuity that the waste of the foundries was what ended up keeping their malign influence away from the heights and powers. It had always felt like something to be proud of.

"So, what happened next?"

Behind her, Villis shrugged.

"I went to Meos' father to ask for forgiveness."

He had grown used to telling this story, Ifi could tell. It wasn't so much as picking at open wounds, not anymore. Everything he said, he delivered with a delicate, nearly apologetic smile that made him appear younger than he was, like a boy narrating his first heartbreak. But there was scar tissue there, there had to be. The alchemist couldn't believe wounds like that to be capable of healing in full.

"Did you get it?" she asked, sensing hesitation.

"No," Villis sighed. "He threw me out."

Ifi nodded slowly, surprised at how well she was taking the implication. No, there could be no forgiveness – not for Shard, and probably not for her. Especially since she couldn't even bring herself to feel guilty, only sad.

"But it wasn't your fault," she tried anyway, mostly for her own sake.

"So?"

"So he shouldn't have treated you like that."

"I kept telling myself that, yeah," he chuckled. "Waste of time. I shouldn't have bothered him. He had nothing to offer to me, and really, I have nothing to give to you, either."

"So your answer is no?" she asked, almost glad to be past hope.

"My answer, miss alchemist," old exhaustion weighed on his voice; he spoke quietly, as if to a child, "is that I don't care, and neither should you."

"But Prunikos-"

"You can pass to Pris," he cut her in, "that if she wanted to stay on that high horse, she shouldn't have married a Glassmaker."

The alchemist pursed her lips; this was as close as Villis came to telling her she was free to stay with Eusi and her wife, and it didn't seem like she was going to get anything more definitive than that. The realization did little to release the anxiety cinching her innards and twisting her guts into ornate knots, but it was probably better than the flat no she had been expecting.

"The reason I am telling you all of this," Villis sighed again, letting go of that brief flash of annoyance, "is that I hope you can get your head around what Shard was. Thank whatever you craftspeople worship you're still alive, and move on. Most people who cross her kind don't get that luxury."

Ifi looked up from the city below, trying to spot the Northern Limit on the horizon again. It vanished, hidden by the flaky clouds now strewn across the sky. The absence stung; it could help her to see something past the City that surrounded her, past its complexity and merciless logic. More and more, she came to understand her brother, and his dreams of escape.

"She was getting better," she protested, in spite of herself.

To her side, Villis groaned, rubbing his temples in mounting fatigue.

"Was she?" he asked, close to exasperated. "Was she really?"

Images flicked before Ifi's eyes in rapid succession. Her body tucked into Shard's, a porcelain hand holding her possessively close. The below-spawn's whined apologies coming at the heels of a mistake after a mistake. The sweet promise of keeping Ifi safe. The immediate breaking of that promise. And yet, the more she dwelt in those memories, the more they managed to burrow themselves into her, not bitter, not enraging, but marked by a profound, unbeatable sense of loss. There were tears in her eyes again.

"She abandoned you at the first opportunity," Villis continued. "She abandoned you for the most remote chance at regaining her status, after her previous idiotic plot came undone. Do you really think your life mattered to her more than mine, or Meos', or anyone else's? Because of what, because you're not from the wards? Who do you think gave Alissa her scars? To her, we're all meat."

Did Shard hold her like a slab of meat? Did Shard see her as nothing more but a stepping stone? There was a part of Ifi that wanted nothing more but to turn to Villis and slap him for the insinuation, to knock this disgusting slur out of his mouth. What did he know? What did he understand? He was a thug who had made it to the top of the world because he was that good at killing, and now he was acting like he was any better than-

"I love her," she whined, as if a confession could change anything, or turn Villis' heart.

"And you will never see her alive again," he responded, cool but not unsympathetic.

There was a part of her that could recognize the truth, no matter how much it hurt. Precisely because of how much it hurt. Something had to give in the way she held herself up; or maybe some muscle twisted her face into a mask of misery. Villis offered his arm in a gesture of comfort; Ifi flinched away, perilously close to the ledge.

"I tried to warn you, so many times," he said, keeping close, hand still extended. Was he expecting her to try to jump? "This was only ever going to end this way, or with you dead. Monsters like her don't change. They only grow desperate."

There was no denying anything he said, only escaping from it, and Ifi, frankly, couldn't find it in herself to keep on running.

"So what would you have me do?"

He looked away, ashamed.

"Give it up. Move on," he suggested, a small crack audible in his voice. "The world doesn't stop for anyone's grief. Didn't for mine, and won't for yours."

How can I, she thought of asking, like an accusation. I'm too weak, she thought of pleading. Go take a dive to the bottom, she thought of demanding. All those words swarmed around her, screaming into her ears the plain, undeniable fact: there was no other advice to be had. It was only ever going to end this way, or with her dead. And she wanted for too many things for the latter to enter consideration. She withdrew into the scorched garden, Villis exhaling audibly.

"Why are you telling me this?" she repeated her question. It was easier to push it out of her mouth than what was really gnawing at her: the cold realization that he was doing more to help her than she had given him any reason to.

"Not sure," he kicked some ash around, scattering it into the wind. "Seemed the right thing, I suppose."

There was much left to say, so when she couldn't find a response, he excused himself and left. She listened to his footsteps crunch against the debris, and then slowly fade into the whine of the erstwhile garden slowly swaying in its cradle chains. Then, that too started to dissolve, in time becoming one with the idle hum of the City that Ifi decided to try to lose herself in.

***

For a time, Ifi could almost believe in it working out.

Pris withdrew her objections. Apparently, Villis sent her a message; she tossed it angrily off the balcony and swore at him, but made no remark against Ifi's presence afterwards. In fact, she treated her like air, which Eusi claimed the alchemist would pass in no time at all.

"Unlike me," she assured, "my wife doesn't know how to hold a grudge."

For what it was worth, the Glassmaker seemed genuinely enthused to enter Ifi into her service, promising that correct papers would soon be drafted and the alchemist given a formal right to residency in the High City. She even showed her the room that she would be lodged in – smaller than the one she occupied in the below, but incomparable in luxury and amenities.

Between showing her around, Eusi kept making jokes. Ever so often, she would allude to Ifi's impending "captivity", warning her that a "thorough examination" would be necessary first. It took Ifi some time to warm to it, but between the suggestive winks, the excellent curry she had been for a late lunch, and the warm pleasure of a long bath that Eusi offered, the alchemist felt some of the pent up pressure of the past few weeks start to release. In its place came the unavoidable crash, and a dream-like wonder at the impossible change about to turn her life around.

Another virtue of the situation was that she found herself far too fatigued to think much, or worry, or remember. Eusi didn't mind her staying for a night longer; in fact, she even tried to convince Ifi to hire someone out to move what little possessions she had to the towers, instead of handling it alone.

"What equipment do you need?" she would ask. "Just make a list. I'll have it assembled within a week."

The idea was tempting, but having slept on it, Ifi decided that it would probably be smarter to wrap up her affairs below, first. Then, she laughed at herself in the mirror, realizing that she was already imagining this contract to be some kind of raunchy sexual servitude, of the kind she would read in books of smut, and then fantasise about when no one could see.

It was a struggle to believe that maybe, just maybe, she wasn't that far off the mark.

"Don't you mind her," Eusi suggested over the breakfast, when Pris again made a display of sulking when Ifi came into view. "Though maybe she will have to beat her frustrations out on you? What do you think, my beloved?"

The elixir woman cracked a smile at that, despite herself. It vanished no sooner than it had appeared on her severe face, but Ifi caught a glimpse of it, and with it, the promise that things were going to work out in the end.

On the slow elevator ride down, she kept thinking back to Villis – and to his scars. Whatever he had lost, whatever he could not be forgiven for, whatever he could not forgive himself; he let it all scab over, thick skin over old hurt. She thought of Shard, too, Shard who was probably already dead, and the thought was such a punch in the gut that she vowed, once more, to never allow it back into her head. The promise broke as soon as she had made it, but she kept assuring herself, and the empty elevator, that it was a matter of time. A matter of enduring. A matter of letting distance open between herself, and yesterday.

She also thought about her father; daydreamed telling him she was going to become a sex-slave at the foot of the High Table's. Oh, how would he love the idea – all his life, pushing her to try to make it to the towers, and receiving this in turn. Of course, she was not going to do it, out of respect for family, if nothing else. Besides, she admonished herself for making too much of Eusi's jokes. It was going to be a work thing, a retainer alchemist for a High Family. Maybe with some benefits, but those benefits were hardly central to the offer, even if they were the main draw.

Still, an odd sort of melancholy kept her company as she made the familiar travel down from the Lower Heights to her shop, sleepwalking through the bustle of the Middle City, the lights of terraces, the tolling of bells, the ceaseless flow of commerce from the roots of the world to its charm-studded canopy above. The closer to home that she got, the lighter her steps were; at the end, she felt like her feet were barely touching the white cobblestone. The terrifying idea of leaving – of throwing her life out – now could not only be glimpsed and touched, but also carried in itself a promise of a release. The alchemist couldn't tell from what, exactly, but freedom seemed at hand.

Between lurid fantasies and discarded woes – the world didn't stop for her grief, and she wouldn't, either – she composed the letter she would write to her father, or considered whether to rent her workshop out, or keep it as a retreat for when the High City got too exhausting. What were her peers going to say? How was Ciara going to react? Questions buzzed around her head, but distantly, as if separated from Ifi's thoughts by an opaque membrane.

When she came close to her doorstep, a worry came over her – there were traces of Shard all over her workshop. They would have to be swept away quickly, hidden or thrown out. Ahead of time, she urged herself not to allow even a single keepsake. The past few weeks were a nightmare, and she was waking to a better life.

The work was hard, but eventually, with enough tears and dull punches against stone walls, she numbed herself enough to stuff all the reminders of her big mistake into some chest, and then throw it in the corner of the kitchen, to remain unopened forevermore. She almost set fire to it, but ultimately couldn't bring herself to. In any case, it was enough, and then there was time to sleep once more, and in the morning begin the arduous process of dismantling her workshop for transport.

She woke up to a runner banging on the door of her shop, clutching a short letter sealed with ebon black lacquer carrying the sign of a wedge bursting into a block. She cracked it open on her kitchen table, right next to her morning cup of coffee. But there was no letter inside. Instead, rolled into the paper there was a piece of white porcelain shell. A few words were scrawled on it in a jagged-edge script.

She is crying out to see you. The Temple of Our Deprived Mother, Lower City.

The underside of the shard was wet with fresh, tar-like blood.

 

[Gargulec]

23. Escape

However vast the Lair-Mother's dominion was, it could not span the entirety of the subterranean world. Deeper into the bowels of the earth, where the air grew hot and heavy and swirls of strange fungi ornamented the cavern walls, there hid other realms. Of them, the Lair-Mother's children spoke rarely, when they did, in rumour only. After all, few, if any, of them could boast of ever having wandered the stalagmite forests where dark-skinned oreads blend with the living stone living stone, of having visited visited the silk-draped courts of the arachnid princes, or taken part in the slow martial waltzes of long dead royalty enthroned in the antediluvian necropoleis. Shard's siblings could, at most, trade in well-worn stories, exchange words of common warning, and sometimes—albeit rarely—express an indistinct longing for what hides below.

In all of those areas, Blood-Slick Thorn excelled like no one else in Shard's extended family.

"This way," it cheered, dragging Shard by the wrist, through water-slick tunnels long ago carved by the great underground wyrms. "We're near!"

However vast the Lair Mother's dominion was, it too had borders. Beyond the bend of the tunnel, a steep shaft opened, running near-vertically down, its bottom disappearing in a darkness that even Shard's keen senses could not pierce. Thorn skipped to the edge, pulling Shard behind itself.

"The edge of the world," it said, voice light with wonder.

"It's just a hole," Shard shrugged, but her sibling tugged at her arm, forcing her to sit down, perched at the precipice. "There's nothing there."

Thorn's hand darted to the side, claws slicing at the stone and plucking a pebble from the ground. It bounced it in its palm, and then chucked it down the shaft. Moments later, a splashing sound climbed back up, distorted by its echoes.

"A lake?" Shard asked, leaning curiously in, in spite of herself.

"Shh!" Thorn put a finger to her mouth.

Echoes of their words and motions faded slowly, until the perfect underground silence could reassert itself—almost. Distantly, a faint rustle marred it, reaching up from below, lurking at the edge of sound. But the more Shard focused on it, the more obvious the source became: at the bottom of the pit, water did not sit still. It flowed.

"Not a lake," Thorn whispered, as if afraid that its voice would scare that sound away. "A river! And you know what that means?"

Shard didn't, so she allowed Thorn to pull her back from the edge, and explain. She watched her sibling's face, painted into carpets of surface flowers, and immersed herself in its lovely, excited voice. The details mattered less than the timbre and cadence; she barely followed as it piled details upon details on the significance of there being a river. A river which, apparently, had to flow for a source to a sea, and so clearly made for a ready-made trail that one could easily follow, without the risk of ever getting lost in the immense labyrinth left behind by the old wyrms. Who knew, Thorn kept asking, what awaited at the end of that river? What sort of strange and alien realms could they find there, so far away from their spawning chambers, and the cruel decrees of their mother?

"We could escape, Shard," Thorn finished, tapping its claw on Shard's chest. "This is our way out."

At first, the significance of those words failed to register with Shard; what Thorn was suggesting exceeded what she was used to imagining. Instead, she glanced behind herself again, at the sheer drop, and the water-slick walls. Teeth-marks criss-crossed them, but ages of erosion smoothed them too much to make for good hand-holds.

"You would have to climb down, first," she observed, trying to think if her claws could bite into this stone securely enough. What if she missed a hold, and tumbled down? The drop felt long enough that her shell would easily shatter at the meeting with the water's surface below. Shard could almost hear that awful wet crack. She shuddered.

"This is why I brought this," Thorn pointed at the long coils of rope wrapped around its waist, a hook attached at both ends.

The rope, obviously, could snap, and there probably wouldn't be enough of it in the first place. Shard pointed that out, and Thorn quickly found out some new explanation for how they absolutely could descend down to the river, and go with its flow, wherever it may take them. There was a sweet back-and-forth in the conversation, the increasingly ludicrous ideas posited by Thorn drawing out stifled laughter from Shard.

"We don't drown easily," Thorn would say, miming swimming with its hands. "I can hold my breath!"

"For hours?" Shard would reply, smiling against her better judgment. "Days?"

Somewhere between the petty practicalities of their impossible escape, other images sneaked in. Thorn would take a pause from arguing about the rope to talk of it and Shard taking on an oread maid or three, or about showing the arachnid princes what real predation looked like. Those ideas, completely unmoored from the world they knew flowed at once dreamlike and strangely tangible; at times, Shard caught herself peeking over the edge, as if expecting to see the lights of distant kingdoms shimmer from below, inviting her in. The thread of Thorn's dreams kept reeling her in; the more it talked, the less focused its imagination was on hunts, or treasuries pried from decrepit, undead hands, and more on abstract impossibilities. Words like "freedom" flickered on and off in its speech, dancing between what it had to know: that it was all only ever a dream. That they were never going to leave their mother's dominion, that even if they managed to climb down this perilous shaft, even if they managed to swim the river to distant realms, that it would not be enough.

When Shard spoke, her voice was small and harsh, but honest. She tried to explain to her sibling—without breaking its heart—that the oreads would not go into their service, but hunt them in turn through their stone forests, that the arachnid princes would ensnare them and suck the life out of their shells, to later pass them on as gifts to long-dead monarchs in the deepest tombs. It was all a guess, of course, but Shard understood on some visceral level that she and all her siblings belonged to a race of monsters, unwelcome anywhere but in the domains under their mother's sway. And so, all those fugitive fancies were good for a laugh or two, but nothing more. It would be good for Thorn, she stressed, if itremembered that.

Her sibling listened to her attentively, and accepted nothing that Shard was saying.

"Run away with me," it pleaded, reaching for the rope.

Shard grabbed it by the wrist, pulled it away from the spooled cord. Thorn didn't resist the touch; for a moment, Shard almost felt as if it welcomed it.

"Tomorrow," she lied out a promise, hoping that it would be enough to dissuade Thorn from throwing itself away.

Her sibling sighed, then nodded its head in quiet surrender.

"Tomorrow," it repeated, standing up.

They spoke little on the long road back to the central chambers of their mother's dominion. Thorn would sometimes break out into a quiet hum, repeating some melody it brought from the surface. Shard, meanwhile, thought hard about how to make sure that her sibling would abandon its stupid dreams. She kept glancing at it, and each look reminded her that she would rather not surrender herself to a world where Thorn was not present to keep her company. But she knew it well enough to understand that left to its own devices it would, sooner or later, go through with its dreams—and it terrified Shard to realize that she was no longer certain if she had it in herself what it took to refuse to follow in its footsteps, down whatever dark pit Thorn would decide to descend.

Later, finally alone in her nook, Shard finally put a name on the way she was feeling. It was fear; fear of what would happen to Thorn, but no less important of what would happen to herself. She imagined breaking her body after a fall from a slippery hand-hold; she imagined drowning at the bottom of an underground river; she imagined falling victim to foreign kingdoms; she imagined a thousand and deaths lurking outside of the known world, laid in ambush for her and Thorn.

At first, those images were easy to turn away and rebuke, but for each one sent away, two new arose, swarming Shard with catastrophic visions of shared failure. Sleep did not come easily, then not at all all; she crawled out of her little stone niche and wandered the central corridors idly, irately. It was difficult to precisely pinpoint the moment when she arrived at her decision, at that one solution which seemed, however briefly, to serve as an oasis of hope for her and Thorn. They had a mother, did they not? A mother that could teach them to do better.

In hindsight, Shard had to admit that she was deceiving herself, and the lies she spun for her own protection came easily. But in the moment, it felt so very sincere. The Lair-Mother listened to her confession with rapt attention, and though each word Shard said reeked of a tragic mistake, by the time it fell out of her mouth it was already too late.

"I'm just worried for it," she croaked, hiding her face from her mother's gaze.

"Of course you are," the Lair-Mother replied, her voice warm and comforting. "You have done well to come to me. I will take care of both of you."

This was, of course, a lie.

Her siblings dragged Thorn in not long after; at first, it seemed confused by why it was pulled out of its sleep by a swarm of angry, white hands. Then, it noticed Shard prostrated before their mother, and understood at once.

If it said anything then, if it gave voice to the feeling of betrayal, if it cursed its sister for what had to come next, Shard managed to scrub that from her memory since, just as she had attempted with the rest of the night. Unfortunately for her, some things could not be forgotten—easily, or at all.

What stuck in her memory, then? Her mother's inscrutable face; the soft touch of her fingers on the side of her cheek. Thorn's grim silence. The small flock of their siblings come to see the beautiful spectacle of a fall from grace.

"So I am told you dreamed of escape?" the Lair-Mother asked then, stepping back from both of them. "I am told you had a plan?"

Thorn's silence was defiant, or terrified. Perhaps both.

"Call the family," the Lair-Mother instructed one of her children. "There will be a sermon soon. All are expected to attend."

She and her sibling knelt together, without giving a single word. Before them, their mother weighed in her hands implements of execution, and in the depths of her soul, past all the guilt and all the fear, Shard desperately hoped that she would be spared them. She kept glancing at Thorn, expecting to see in it some sign of the same; expecting to hear it beg, or shift blame. It stayed silent.

"And what should I do with such disobedience?" the Lair-Mother added a new question, a chisel in her hand. "Shard, beloved daughter, what should I do with your sibling?"

Once again, Shard tried to see if Thorn would make some gesture, some sound; once again, she saw nothing. Only a tense body passively awaiting its fate.

"Would you disrespect me with this quiet, too?" the Lair-Mother's words strangled with softness. "Please, tell me, what am I supposed to do with this little Thorn in my side?"

Her hand cupped Shard's chin; it pulled it up, forcing her to stare straight into her mother's face.

"You have until the count of five to tell me," she smiled. "Or I will assume you were in league with it."

The easiest way to break someone, Shard found, was to give them a choice.

"One."

Guilt was never a feeling Shard was prone to, and now as she was experiencing its wretched grip, she wished for nothing but to be done with it. Was this really her fault? She had to know what was going to happen, once she brought the matter to the Lair-Mother. Thorn was going to die, and it was her fault.

"Two."

No, it was not. It could not be—it was Thorn's own idiocy that brought it here. If it did not get lost in daydreams, none of it would happen. They could stay together, hunt together, they could outlive the Lair-Mother and find this outlandish dream of freedom some other time. Thorn had no one to blame but itself.

"Three."

All of it was a lie. Shard stared at the chisel in the Lair-Mother's hand, and could not keep herself from imagining it being driven into her shell, splitting her open like a rotten egg. She could not help herself from imagining the pain. It was not going to be brief. And she did not want to die.

"Four?"

Shard opened her mouth to plead.

"We can still escape," Thorn gasped out. "Together."

Its sister understood at once what it was suggesting, and the thought was so terrifying that her own words came out as a panicked shout.

"Thorn must be punished!"

The Lair-Mother's grip on her chin closed like a vice; she did not let Shard look away as she smiled and asked one final question.

"And by who?"

And then, it was done, and all that remained were the inevitable consequences, falling into place one by one, each unavoidably announced by what came before. The string of images, of feelings, and of words, burned itself forever into Shard's memory. She could not forget the hammer and the chisel, and the revolting sense of relief letting her know that she would not be paying for Thorn's dreams. But everything else could still be lost. In the days that follow, she worked to prune herself off the days before the sermon, rendering them first into a blur, and then a nightmare, swiftly dismissed moments after waking. Even regret, blissfully abated with time, waning enough so that she could pretend herself free of it.

It was not until she lay shattered on a steel table, awaiting the inevitable, that she managed to realize—in the brief moments when the waves of pain receded enough to let some of her consciousness rise to the surface—that Thorn was right.

She could have escaped.

She should have escaped.

 

[Gargulec]

24. Otherwise

All that Ifi needed to come to a decision was clarity, which took the form of a dull yellow potion stuffed in the back of one of her display cases. The wax seal came apart easily; she pried off the old cork and let the ugly odour of sulfur hit her. The herbs she had put in to mask the stench helped little, only making it taste like a laboratory fire. She swallowed quickly, washing it down with half a cup of horribly oversteeped tea, then leaned back in a kitchen chair and counted down heartbeats until the effects kicked in.

A brief spike of nausea smashed through her, going away as soon as it made her flinch. In its wake, the churn of her emotions stilled, solidifying into a heavy sediment that slowly settled in the bottom of her stomach, forming a layer of viscous, revolting sludge. Or, at least, that's how she imagined it; the potion wasn't, strictly speaking, a calming draught, nor was it meant to rid her of the capacity to feel. All it did was numb her thoughts to influence; none of that fear, none of that confusion, none of that want went really away, only transforming into a mute kind of a weight that would slip between her fingers if she tried as much as to grasp at it.

She fumbled to her feet, swaying slightly, the balance of the world playing tricks on her. The broken piece of Shard's shell—if that was what it really was—remained on the table; she would rather not be reminded. Distantly, she noted it should probably disturb her that even the below-spawn's name, and the whole string of associations it summoned, registered as not much more than a series of dull throbs: the sort of a pain one easily learns to live with. With an umbrella in hand she stormed into the drizzle outside, rushing to put as much distance between her life and herself before the potion expired.

Still, there was a kind of wicked poetry—even her blunted brain could recognize it—in the fact that this elixir was a by-product of her ridiculous desires, the very same ones that got her into this mess. It sat at the halfway point to that "mystickal elixir of dumb whoredom" she had cooked up out of a pornographic fantasy; the stupefying power of salts of sulfur mixed with dissociative toxins, but without the overpowering aphrodisiac distillates, nor the thought-destroying lunar vitriol. What exactly this poetry meant, what this halfway stoppage indicated—that was harder to grasp, and in any case she didn't exactly feel like she wanted to comprehend it. Truth be told, she didn't feel anything exactly, her thoughts dissolving and fraying into empty noise before they could fade into emotions. This, in turn, put her in the perfect state for quickly dismantling and packing one's life away.

Not so long ago, the idea that she could just remove herself from the Middle City seemed preposterous: she had so many obligations here, so many business dealings, so many contracts, commissions, agreements large and small that all worked to bind her into the trade bloodstream of the world of the guilds. But now, nothing seemed particularly real, and the moment the hawkish old lawyer of the Subtle Fellowship of Brewers heard the phrase "retained at the High Table" he replaced his frustrated frown with a focused smile. Who cared, after all, for some broken ties if it meant that a member of the guild was so elevated?

"They will keep me in a cage, you know," Ifi offered to him as he was dictating yet another release form to his scribe. "Or at least I hope so."

He hacked a laugh and asked if she was drunk; she tried to laugh back and didn't exactly manage. The signatures she put on the documents came in slanted and unsteady but, as the lawyer assured her, good enough for business. Then, thumping the pile of papers that used to be her life, he explained to her—slowly, as if to a cow—that it all would have to be cleared with the guild council, but that he didn't really expect any issues there. The Fellowship had a good couple of years; they would reimburse Ifi's clients, take in the care of her workshop, and ask for nothing more in return than her acquiting herself well in the service of the side branch of the Glassmakers.

"And besides," the lawyer added, accepting a cup of coffee from his hare-lipped secretary, "you don't even have apprentices. Finally a good thing came out of your… you know."

The alchemist knew, or at least she thought she knew; in the surface of her cup, she watched the thin layer of foam dissipate into the black drink beneath.

"The council meets in a week," he continued, "and then, you're clear to go."

There were more words that Ifi registered, and promptly disregarded. The lawyer said a few things about how he didn't really mind the new social order, and that she should stress that fact to her new employer when she has a chance. Then, he explained at length that it was nonetheless necessary that the Lower City unions not be allowed to operate on the level of the guilds, or else the disruptions to the industry would be too severe, and besides he was unconvinced that the new Master Glassmaker was going to actually go through with all those so-called reforms. Ifi nodded through it all, imagining each word and each thought as a little white flake of detritus slowly floating to the bottom of her coffee cup, and there joining with her feelings in that ever-thickening strata of things abandoned to drown. The cup remained full when she left, though it had turned cold by then.

She had expected to spend the rest of the day bouncing from one broken obligation to another, apologizing to her suppliers and offering refunds to her clients. But her guild was going to take care of it all, and she found herself with more time than she had any idea how to spend; the back-log of orders she had kept in a notepad in her laboratory abruptly and thoroughly stripped of its foreboding significance. So instead, she ambled towards Ciara's home, her unexpected visit greeted rather gracefully by the liveried servants. Ciara herself gladly tore herself away from the midday boredom, receiving the alchemist in a cozy, warm living room she had just finished redecorating. Her curiosity was boundless, and over a few glasses of wine, she dragged the whole story from Ifi, interrupting frequently, fervently, and with much fascination.

"What a story," she exclaimed after Ifi finished narrating the gala. "And what a dress you had! A hook up your…" she paused, affecting a scarlet blush. "Ifi, I would have never expected!"

"It's what matters to me in life," the alchemist replied, the sheer honesty met with an awkward, sidelong glance. "I really hope Eusi will keep me in a cage. Or give me to her wife, you know. I wonder if her wife still has a…"

"You really shouldn't speculate," Ciara interrupted, her smile growing thin and stretched. "It really must have been hard growing up like that, wasn't it?"

She offered the barb by the way of sympathy, and Ifi impaled herself on it in surprise at how dull the pain felt, especially compared to the rough pleasure of honesty.

"I hated it here," she admitted, wetting her lips in the wine glass. The aftertaste of sulfur lingered on her tongue, ruining the bouquet that she wouldn't be able to recognize anyway. "I just want an escape."

"Even from the below-spawn?" Ciara's eyebrow arched. "Didn't you say you were in love?"

The memory of being held against a porcelain body pushed its way into her mind; she thought of the heat of her flesh sinking into the cold shell and warming it by degrees as the possessive hands held her close and tight. The memory had an awful weight, and sank quickly all the way to the bottom.

"I am," she shrugged helplessly, "but she is currently being tortured to death by her kind. At least that's what I suspect. So there is nothing I can do. I really shouldn't be thinking too much about it."

Ciara's laugh was high-pitched and rather friendly, if really nervous. Or that, at least, was how it came across to Ifi. When a servant came in to refill Ifi's glass, Ciara shooed him away, mouthing a quick "she's had enough for the day", which was really not that accurate at all. The alchemist's glass was barely touched—she wasn't drunk at all.

"And besides, she's just an awful person," she added. "Left me alone at the party. Broke all those promises. She's getting what she deserves, for what she did to all the lowborn…"

Her voice trailed off as the profiled face of Ciara caught her attention. Her friend—which was to say accomplice, which was to say a former client—was looking aside, eyes trained on a curio of wrought bronze displayed prominently under her and Makarios' wedding portrait. The alchemist admired the sight shamelessly, in awe of the sharp lines of Ciara's nose, of the carefully styled hair held in place with gold pins, of the casual wealth emanating from every part of that woman's dress and stance. After marriage, Ciara made herself into the perfect display object, and Ifi could only dream that someday, someone would make her such, too. It was gently refreshing to entertain those dreams with the poisonous envy surrounding them subdued to little more than a mild, acrid note.

"It was never going to work," Ciara stumbled over the words, reluctant to look back at the alchemist.

Ifi was nineteen again, explaining to some lovesick man—her memories didn't allow for his name—what she would expect her lover to be like. His expression changed gradually, moving first through idle amusement, then concern, to finally arrive at a deep and abiding sympathy for that wanton girl carrying the terrible, unlivable burden of perversion.

The conversation came unglued after that, and soon enough Ifi found herself wandering the streets again. Generally, she had a pretty good idea where to head next, but even buoyed by her alchemy, she still suffered from enough of old reluctance to avoid the direct route. She stumbled through the familiar streets, floating on sound and motion, so wonderfully far away from herself. And somewhere, far below, Shard was being slowly killed, or was dead already. The shard of the shell, the invitation—there was doubt in Ifi's mind that it was some kind of a trap. What for, she couldn't be sure, what was more concerning was the idea that Shard, so close to death, was actually begging for Ifi's presence. Because if that was true, then it meant that the potion the alchemist took in the morning wouldn't be first. There were two or three more bottles she had stashed away, and then she would cook herself a few batches for the coming weeks. And maybe then, in Eusi's careful hand, she would allow herself a comedown, and everything else that was to come in its wake.

Little crawling motion disturbed the sediment at the bottom of her. Worms lived there, Ifi observed coldly, stopped at the intersection of uphill streets. She was too prompt to imagine it as dead, inert matter. Her feelings festered; they teemed with decay, and a single, unfortunate mistake would break the caked surface sealing them, and release it all in a single, noxious cloud. She picked up her pace; she still had plenty of time before the current dose ran out, but it was nonetheless prudent to make haste.

For the first time in years, the sigh of her father's knife-thin mansion came across without an attended gut-punch of anxiety. She knocked on the door, a rictus grin affixed to her face. Everything followed in a slight, distorted blur. There was Tilda and her overwhelming kindness, the spiraling staircase and the smell of tobacco announcing that she was close to her father's presence, and then, finally, the rustle of his morning newspaper as he looked up from it, the age-mottled face drawn back into an expression of old frustration.

"Are you sober?" he coughed out, angry for reasons that Ifi couldn't divine.

"I will be entering the service of Eusebia Koina," she blurted back at him.

The first reaction was the abrupt release of tension. The alchemist watched as her father first sagged, and then straightened in his char, the perpetual frown bolted onto his face struggling to twist itself into something less hostile. His hands shook as he folded the paper, smacking it against the edge of the desk, his mouth moving to some unspoken words, exhaling out small, dry sounds.

"I can't believe it," he wheezed, fingers smashing out an excited warble against the wood.

Effusive praise burst forth, frothing with reassurances—

"I've always known you were going to make it!"

—pride—

"I did raise you well after all!"

—and dogged satisfaction—

"And you kept bitching that I'm giving you bad advice! You just needed to stop wasting your talent, my girl!"

When was the last time she had seen him this happy? When was the last time she had seen him happy at all? Ifi couldn't remember. The twitching, elderly man showering her with self-satisfied compliments was undoubtedly her father, but the more she looked at him, the more she felt as if sitting in the presence of a stranger. The sounds he was making were words, heavy with meaning and deferred satisfaction, but they meant to him. Her eyes skipped over the leather-bound volumes of alchemical treatises she had once tried to memorize, now doomed to forever gather dust on a vicious merchant's bookshelf.

"Of course, a retainer, that's not sitting at the High Table yet," her father prattled on, "but it is a good first step. The next thing you should do, my dear daughter, is to…"

Ifi was twelve again, listening to him circle around her and sketch out her future. He built towers out of the books she was supposed to read, never once neglect to stress just how expensive and difficult to get those volumes were. Her clear aptitude for the Noble Art was going to elevate the Juno family name.

"You have to promise you won't stop there," his voice reached to her through the veil of memory, reeling her back into the present.

Usually, this would be the moment when her frustrations, when her sense of inferiority would catch up with her, rendering her too angry and too bitter to argue, or to think. There would be yet another shouting match, or yet another exchange of barbs. But it was all sinking now, vanishing into the depths and leaving her acutely, if lethargically aware of what the stakes really were.

"Just promise me, Ifigenia," he insisted, fingers banging against the desk, "you have already wasted too many opportunities."

"I need a moment," she said abruptly, her chair creaking sharpy as she pulled away and darted out of the room.

"Don't trip!" he laughed behind her, expanding with good humour.

On the first landing on the stairwell below, there was a small, round window in the wall, and through it, the High City could be seen—or rather just the monumental bases of its towers, rising above flat roofs of Lower Heights and shading the entire district like a grove of enormous trees. It was a sorry excuse of a view that suited her father very well; in fact, he had explicitly insisted on only having windows trained on this paltry vista, instead of opening on the slow slope of the Middle City, and vast expanse of the Lower City below. The entire arc of his life was an escape ever upwards and a refusal to ever look back. And now, as it was reaching its terminal phase, Ifi stood to inherit it all, continuing to play her pre-determined part in the slow-rolling drama of the City's history.

There was no alternative. No other path than the one already marked out in advance, and fenced off by the knowledge of how things are bound to be. Whatever happened between her and Shard could never work out, because Shard was a monster, and those never change. Whatever happened between her and Shard could never work out, because whatever desires Ifi had were a poor fit for her place in the world, which doesn't stop for anyone's grief. Whatever happened between her and Shard could never work out, because the best Ifi could hope for in life was to briefly bask in someone else's bliss, and maybe gather some scrapings afterwards. Whatever happened between her and Shard could never work out, which was a comfort, because otherwise there would be other ways.

Ifi was seven again, watching an alchemist work her art. In slack-jawed wonder, her eyes were trained on the handful of lead sprouting into a saturnine tree, its leaf-like tendrils swaying gently in the solution, by degrees turning golden. She badgered the alchemist with so many questions afterwards, demanding to know if the gold was real—it was—and if the lead was all gone–-after a fashion, it wasn't. That was her first, and the for the longest time only, love.

Finally, she had her clarity. She rushed back home as quickly as her feet would carry her, stumbling half-drunkenly into her laboratory, throwing all the lights on at once.

Alchemy welcomed her with familiar warm comfort, but now reinforced with the lightning-bright sense of purpose. Dull crystals cracked under her pestle, turning into iridescent powder; she dissolved it on high heat, dust vanishing into a perfectly clear solution. The desire of matter is to attain perfection. There could be no alchemy without this simple truth, rendered in rubricated script at the frontispiece of every treatise on the Noble Art, and learned by every apprentice long before they were allowed to enter a laboratory, let alone an alembic. If gold can be coaxed out of lead, it is only because somewhere buried with the nature of that gray metal lies the desire for it to be greater. This is why masters of alchemy would all teach that perfection is not a state to be chased, not a distant land to be reached, that it is not to be referred to in a future tense. Their lessons showed that it is already here, that it is within grasp, that one only needs to draw it out of its hiding, one only needs to unveil it.

Salts of sulfur went into the distillate; the idea she had sketched out in her head was theoretically sound, but there would be no real opportunity to test it. Furthermore, if it was to work, then it could not be tested, lest its effect be ruined. She ran the distillation again, and as the product gathered in the collection flask, she set out to write all the possible ways her plan could kill her on a piece of paper, marking every failure point with a little skull. Halfway through, she crumpled the paper in her hand and threw it away. It was either going to work, or it was not. Her elixir still blunted her fear, still took the edge off anxiety, but her thoughts were running quicker and quicker.

The gold was still lead, because lead contained within itself the aptitude to become gold. All things perfect contained within themselves the whole of the world, of which they were the crown. That was one way to explain the Noble Art, but over the years Ifi realized this core truth could also be stated differently. She didn't have to believe in the inherent perfection of matter, nor chart her passage from the base to the sublime. All that theory offered scant comfort, if one took it seriously. But the practice—her practice—carried a simpler lesson. Alchemy was a process of changing; of one thing transmuting into another.

Three heating charms crackled under the hot-plate; she put a steel pan on top, and dropped a handful of chipped venomstones onto the hot surface. To think that they used to be the toxin milked from the fangs of far-northern serpent-men, coagulated and bound into the form of dirty brown pebbles one could hardly tell apart from common gravel. The substance reheating them produced wasn't their venom, not exactly; the process of reduction and reconstitution changed it invariably, endowing with new properties, both deadly and medicinal. She scooped half of the goo-like substance into a new dish, and left the rest to cool on the pan, until it was solid enough to scrape off.

No, for Ifi the wonder of transmutation lay not in the potential of things to be better; it was enough to know—empirically, experientially, personally—that they could be different from what they were. Nothing was bound to the form first given to it. Maybe the masters of alchemy thought that just noting the possibility for alterity was not enough to sell their work as the Noble Art that seeks to elevate men closer to the divine. Or maybe it was not for masters of the art, in their warm libraries and well-stocked laboratories, to ponder the terrifying comfort of there always being other ways.

Ifi busied herself around the lab, observing her plan come together in the shape of a handful of clear, odorless liquid, bereft of both the iridescence of seer's bismuth, the stench of salts of sulfur, or the deceptive sweetness of reconstituted snakemen venom. It really looked like nothing; if she had more time, she would find some sort of a dye to put into it, some kind of a flavour to make this potion stand apart. Instead, she collected it into a small vial and sealed it with a piece of cork, turning to the venomstone crust left on the pan, and beginning the laborious process of turning it into the other part of her scheme. Somewhere midway through the process of powdering the crust, her morning elixir finally gave in, and she started crying. Thankfully, the final few reactions she had to run were rote; she could perform them adequately even when sinking into the depths of heartbreak, even when convinced of the fact of her impending death.

Breathtakingly spectacular, the saturnine tree was also forbiddingly expensive, taking reagents worth far more than the gold it could produce—if it produced anything. Just as often, the tree's branches would wilt, lead dissolving into a stinking sludge instead of transforming into a nobler metal. This was the risk inherent to the Noble Art, which distinguished it from mere craft, and the reason why Ifi would scoff at it. She had never felt the risk to be worth it, but watching her experiment finish, she had to quietly admit it, that she never understood it, either. Until today.

When she finished her work, she put on her best robe—which was no different from any other robe she had—along all the insignia of her station. She wiped her face clean of the laboratory grime, drew a new set of kohl eyebrows, and wrote down a short note, should it become necessary. The two flasks she suspended from her neck, like talismans held close to the heart.

Getting a golem carriage to drive her to the Temple of Our Deprived Mother turned out surprisingly easy once she shook enough glass at the steersman. It made for a pleasant ride, too, and surprisingly quick. Out of the window, she watched the Lower City in all of its ramshackle glory, but too drunk on her own fear and heartbreak—and maybe hope—to give it much thought. Whatever observations arose, they lingered at the edge of her thoughts, tiny little pinpricks of guilt and of revulsion at the sight of the City's sprawling foundations. The fact she drew attention didn't bother her at all—the worst thing that could come out of it was that Villis would learn of her decision, and in truth, she welcomed that idea.

The temple itself was a rotund brick stupa seated in the middle of a small square. The buildings ringing it all looked long-abandoned, boarded shut and collapsed under their weight. When Ifi looked over her shoulder to find the city lights above, they filtered reluctantly through the heavy haze carpeting the Lower City, the towers visible less as concrete structures and more as cyclopean pillars of glow, yellow, red, blue. They looked like a dream.

"Please wait until I return, or until morning," she instructed the steersman, encouraging her with a clinking pouch of glass pounds.

The woman tipped her hat and nodded, knowing better than to ask questions. Ifi dropped out of the carriage, feet sinking slightly into the rain-softened mud below. There were tracks in it, though the alchemist could not tell how fresh; enough of them to signify a small crowd, all leading towards the dark entrance into the temple. The old door hung bent its hinges, threatening to snap off at any moment.

With the first of her potions tightly in her hand, she approached. A young boy in a flat cap and surprisingly well-kept overalls stepped out from his hiding spot in the crook by the door; she stopped, glancing at him nervously.

"The temple's closed, ma'am, and…" he began, before his eyes settled on Ifi's badge of office. "Oh," he blurted, glancing at the towers above. He gave her one more look, this time almost surprised. "Good luck."

Before she could ask him anything, he was off, feet splashing in the mud, rushing to somewhere far away, and leaving her alone with the dark temple, and the strange kind of quiet that ruled those half-abandoned streets. She swallowed nervously, then uncorked her potion. It really smelled like nothing, and went down like water. If her intuitions were correct, she would have at most a few minutes before it started taking effect, and about an hour before it killed her.

The last fact made it all the more easier to step into the dark inside. She opened her mouth to cry out a challenge, but found her throat clenched with fear strong enough to make her sweat. Thankfully, the dark took notice on its own. Cold porcelain closed on her shoulders, razor-sharp claws easily parting the fabric of the robe and scraping against the skin. She knew what this kind of touch could do, all too well.

"Oh," a voice entirely unfamiliar and completely without mercy announced as the swarm of hands dragged her into the killing-room below, "this will be a feast."

 

[Gargulec]

25. Death

This is the way Shard of White Obsidian, the once-favoured daughter of the Lair-Mother, whom her countless victims had called a defiler, a despoiler, and a demon, died: with prying shears grasping the split plates of her shell, and with strong porcelain hands ready to pull. Hers was not the death of the body, however, which, while inevitable, was only promised for later. It was a more insidious death, one that left her still breathing and still bleeding, but no less obliterated: it was the death of the soul.

When her siblings bolted her to a steel table and presented to her the tools of her unmaking—the hammer and the chisel, the shears and the saw, the scalpel and the cleaver—Shard made a promise to herself that she would not beg for reprieve. After all, her captors were her kin, and she knew them well enough that there would be no real mercy coming, only ever an illusion of it meant to render the deferred torment even more intense. The promise broke quickly: as her siblings turned her body into a shattered porcelain plain mottled with lakes of gushing black blood, Shard screamed for any kind of relief; then she couldn't scream again, so she was given a chance to regain her voice, before the tools were put again to her shell and her flesh.

But, unfortunately, that was not enough to kill: not the body, and not the spirit. At the end of the day, Shard was put on that plateau of pain past which suffering becomes distant and abstract, too vast to encompass with thought or experience. And yet, she lived, and worse yet, she remained with herself, buoyed on the surface of an endless, drowning sea. For her siblings, this was a mark of their failure, because they took their sister in to do more than just torment her, but to destroy, like she had destroyed so many of them before.

Circling around the bloodied table, they conferred with each other, looking for a new approach, one that would bring them their long-awaited revenge for what she had done to Blood-Slick Thorn, but really for the more profound injustice that was the fact that Shard used to be in their shared mother's greatest favour. Neither the hammer nor the chisel, neither the shears nor the saw, neither the scalpel, nor the cleaver would achieve it alone: a change in approach was needed.

Throughout the next day, they did not touch her a single time. Asphalt-like scabs closed over the bleeding wounds, the robust physique of a Lair-Mother's child refusing to give up even on a body long past repair. They gave her water to drink, ushering back a kind of consciousness into what they had reduced into a quavering sort of nothingness the day before. And when Shard could again recognize them, and name them, the one called Cuts made her an offer.

"Do you remember, back in my temple?" it asked, the black wedge painted freshly over its head.

Of course, Shard could not reply in kind, not with her mouth pried open, and tongue pulled out. All that was left to her was to watch her sibling, deftly balanced on a low stool, beholding its victim with an inciting smile.

"I asked you then," Cuts continued, drawing complex shapes in the air with the tip of her extended claw, "if you would not like to be a piglet of mine. No hands. No feet. No tongue. A very sorry life. But a life. And you wouldn't even have to suffer too much, too often."

It took into its hand a splitting saw, and scraped a fleck of dried blood from between the pointed teeth. This is where Shard's death began in earnest: with her mind conjuring up the image of being turned into Cuts' permanent trophy, of a life reduced to dumb humiliation and ceaseless abuse, but a life nonetheless. Her mind then put the image against the idea of the saw biting again into the cracks of her shell, against the idea of the wet crack of more of her body being permanently laid bare, against the idea of the bowl filled with the shards of her growing even more full. Death was in the way the scales tipped.

Cuts had to sense that, so it applied the saw. Tenderly, though, less to hurt, and more to remind Shard of its tangibility and proximity. Once the awful, grinding sound died down, it perched itself back up.

"Do you think we could convince Mother," it asked its siblings, "to let us keep her that way, forever neutered? Would it not make for a better lesson than the pit?"

Others chimed in with their opinions, trilling in favour, or voicing concern that Shard was too broken to serve well in this function. But Cuts dismissed that, and went on to argue if this experiment in punishment was to work out well, maybe the Lair-Mother could even be convinced to patch up the gaps left in Shard, to make her serve all the better as their little piglet.

"Our little bitch," another sibling, whose name was Ruining Motion, and who wore a veil over its face offered.

"Yes," Cuts agreed, nodding eagerly. "A bitch! She has insisted on that femininity, has she not? Perhaps we should not take it away from her, if it is so dearly held."

Helpless not to follow the discussion closely, and growing wretchedly hopeful that perhaps her future would have in it something other than the chisel and the hammer, Shard died by degrees. She moved her fingers, thinking of the world where empty stubs replaced her hands; she breathed laboriously in, and out, every expansion of her chest another jolt of spearing pain.

"We should have her teeth filed, though," Dream of Midnight, whose body was splattered in silver and gore, suggested. It took a metal file and touched it to a Shard's fang.

Others laughed in a multitude of hungry voices.

"Why not pull them out altogether, then?" Nothing Riddle, who, true to its name, never revealed its porcelain skin from under its coiled robes, replied. "Why let her bite at all?"

"I still think it is pointless," Poetry of Fall shrugged from above its basin, where it was currently trying to remove crusted blood from the instruments of torture. "So much effort, for so little gain. Let's just give her to Mother."

"Maybe, maybe," Cuts nodded again, pointing at Motion to grab the shears.

It had them inserted right below an exposed piece of Shard's shell, the cold metal pressing into the bloodied flesh beneath, the delicate pull slight enough to precisely foretell the cataclysmic pain that could follow at a single motion. Then, Cuts reached into Shard's mouth, and freed it, releasing the jaw and the tongue, drawing only a single tiny wound across its inside.

"Now," it said, letting Motion lean on the shears ever so slightly. "Tell me, sister. Would you want to be our bitch? Or is this," between its fingers, it flashed a little scalpel blade, "what you prefer?"

Though the answer was obvious to Shard, she was still too alive to say it freely. She choked on the words, until delicate encouragement made her spit them out from her steel-clenched throat.

"Say it louder," Motion demanded, applying a little bit more pressure to the shears, tearing the shell just a little bit away from the flesh.

This, alone, was enough.

"I want to be your bitch!" Shard whimpered as close to a shout as she could manage.

The reward was instantaneous: the pressure did not increase. Still, Cuts appeared unconvinced, the scalpel still dancing circles in its fingers.

"Unfortunately for you, the offer is no longer free," it explained. "You should have taken it back then. Now, I have more on my hand, and I am not sure if I am ready for the commitment. But maybe, maybe you have something you can still give, hmm? You had such riches given to you, sister."

"Your pain is stale," Dream added. "Feed us better…"

"...and we will convince Mother to take mercy on you," Riddle clacked.

"Maybe," Poetry shrugged again, "they can't guarantee it.

Motion pulled once more; Cuts played with the blade, waiting for Shard, and Shard, trapped a single stroke away from the obliterating pain, finally received the small mercy of having her soul die in full. She whispered out a name she had already betrayed too many times, and when the offering was accepted, her siblings left her in peace.

And thus, there was no more Shard. What remained bolted to the table was a breathing vessel, mostly broken, but not entirely. It was going to serve well as a toy, completely given in, and fully emptied. Whatever had once filled it drained away, leaving behind bare life, tender flesh, and nothing more. It watched the room it was in impassively, without a thought or a feeling, having finally found a measure of peace. Though its body hurt, the pain reached it as if from behind a thick veil, subdued and flat. For Cuts, this was an enjoyable sight, and it spent long hours discussing with its siblings how they would train their bitch, once Mother was convinced. With the soul being so obviously dead, the successful convincing was looking increasingly likely; Mother would have no use in punishing something so insensate. Only Poetry worried that they would too be held responsible for failing to deliver Shard alive into their mothers' hands, which was an honest concern to have, but what could they do but wait?

After some time, Motion and Dream vanished from the cellar, and when they returned, they held in their claws a mortal girl with a cleanly shaved head, and eyebrows painted on with kohl. The girl had once meant something to the shell that used to be Shard, but fortunately not even the sight of her—nor the overwhelmingly sweet and familiar taste of her fear—managed to rouse anything out of the cracked vessel. It observed idly as its siblings held the girl, who named Ifi, aloft, and explained to her, in great and vivid detail, just how deeply Shard's treachery ran.

All the way through this conversation, the girl's eyes were primed somewhere else: on the ruined body bolted to the table. She just could not pry them away from the open wounds and the ruined landscape of the once-pristine shell, not even when Cuts slapped her across the face to grab her attention.

"Is she dead?" she demanded to know, her voice laden with so much worry and so much fear that even the dumb, empty body that used to be Shard could not help itself but to savour this wonderful feast.

It could also see how its siblings were already getting drunk on this. They had not yet even laid their claws on her, and already she was feeding them such exquisite agony of the heart; Shard had truly paid for the survival of her flesh in full, and more than that.

To think that they didn't need to shed blood to draw even more out of this mortal. Still kept off the ground, the hem of its robe collecting dust and dried blood, Ifi had it presented to her what was the reason she was called to this place.

"You will help us," Cuts crooned, deliriously sated, and yet hungry still, "remove those parts of her that are no longer necessary. You will make sure she doesn't bleed out as we take her tongue away."

If the shell could think, instead of simply letting the stimuli flow through, perhaps it would note that it was ridiculous for it to be referred to as "her", given how Shard was dead, and only flesh remained. But it could not, so instead it just submerged itself deeper and deeper in the bottomless ocean of Ifi's fear and despair, without even noticing the false note lacing its calamitously sweet taste.

"Once you do," Motion added, preparing the surgical instruments for the amputations, "we will kill you, just the way we like."

The broken vessel acknowledged, though without the surprise it should have evoked, that this promise prompted no new bloom of delicious anguish. Ifi was still looking at it, her eyes still wet with tears; she was ignoring Cuts.

"So she is alive," she exhaled with deep relief.

Cuts slapped her again, the sound echoing off the walls of the torture chamber.

"Have you not heard?" it demanded. "You will help us cripple her. And then..."

It left its voice hang, a claw pointing out at the piles of implements of torment scattered all around. Ifi shook her head, uninterested in the sight. Slowly, her fear began to recede, its sweet wave withdrawing further and further back. But its taste was not as quick to leave. It lingered behind, increasingly bitter with each passing second. A delicate quake of nausea went through the emptied shell: a sign of what was to come.

When Ifi did not react again, Cuts shook her violently, petulant.

"Do you not see?" it asked, wincing at some unseen sensation. Voracious greed laced its voice, reaching for more of that honeyed terror, and finding only less of it. "How are you not afraid?"

Finally, for the first time since getting dragged in, the alchemist looked away from the bloodied ruin on the steel table. Worry, exhaustion, and sadness marked her face as she stared straight into the featureless mask that was Cuts.

"I am already dying," she explained, so very light, so very gentle.

The words passed through the cracks in the shell, and came close to finding something left inside. But then, another sick tremor shook the body, making it twist in the bonds. An awful, frothing bile bubbled up its restrained throat. It noted that it wasn't the only one feeling it. Its siblings glanced around nervously, confused as the overwhelming high of Ifi's fear transmuted into a gnawing sickness.

"And so are you," the alchemist whispered, her voice cracking slightly in pain and in triumph.

Black, stinking foam gushed from behind Motion's veil, half blood, half poison. It screeched in mortal pain, the sound quickly turning into a wet gurgle as it clattered the floor, its swinging arms dragging trays of murderous steel down with it. Cuts froze in shock, and before this shock could turn into a realization, or into murderous intent, it was bent in half with a hacking cough, black goo splattering everywhere around it. Ifi slipped from its hand, jumping back as the Lair-Mother's children turned their claws on her in a desperate, final act of violence.

Dying in the flesh, the shell that used to be Shard saw none of the slashes find its mark. It watched porcelain bodies stumble, trip, and collapse. None of them died instantly; the Lair-Mother's children were known for their iron grip on life. The mess of blood, bile, vomit, steel, and porcelain writhed on the torture chamber's floor, wheezing breaths and horrid damp screeches marking its slow passage into the stillness of death. The emptied vessel could feel it taking it over, too, the burning course of a toxin turning its blood into fire. It hurt. It really hurt. Thankfully, the pain was far away.

In half crouch, the alchemist spat out blood herself, and then, hands shaking, she grabbed something from under her robe: a flask. The cork fell out, and she gulped down half the liquid inside, before coughing again; but it was a different sound, more complete. Her eyes returned to the table, and to the dying body bolted to it. That body could feel the burning, hot pain the alchemist broke through as she dug herself up from the floor, and carefully stepping over the horrid swamp of death churning underneath her feet, made her way to the broken vessel.

She poured the rest of the flask into the broken body's mouth, and forced it to swallow. The liquid met with the black froth somewhere in the throat, and parted it, draining down into the body and blood, stopping its boil. In its wake, there was a new pain, just as distant, but far less deadly. But the alchemist didn't know that.

"Please work," she prayed, waiting to see if she was going to survive and, more importantly, if the shattered remains of Shard were to live, too. "Please work."

The words were a softly repeated litany, braided together with heavy, pained breaths. Around the table, the torture chamber slowly went still, the bodies of Lair-Mother's children finally succumbing to the poison. In the silence that followed, every breath and every heartbeat resounded bell-like.

"Please work," Ifi asked one last time. Then, after a short, tight pause, she added: "It did."

The broken vessel was going to live, and so was the alchemist. The antidote evaporated the poison, leaving only a faint, acrid taste behind. Ifi exhaled again, leaning against the table, legs buckling her under.

"Shard," she said in a tired whisper, "it worked. Sun and stars, what did they do to you…"

She was seeing the ruin of the body again, this time without the veil of fear; she had to force herself to look at the scabbed over wounds, or at the pile of broken shell fragments in a bowl by the table. With each look, with each detail registered, her fear started returning, the golden wave swelling once more and sweeping into the wounds of the emptied vessel, once more lifting it up blissful waters.

"Shard?" a new kind of worry lanced through the alchemist. Smaller than the fear before, but infinitely sharper. "Shard, can you hear me?"

The body could hear, but that meant nothing. The sound was registered as any other stimuli would be. What voice could come out of an emptied, broken dish? What thought, what feeling? There was nothing.

"Shard!" Ifi raised her voice to a shout, and when that didn't help, her fear exploded into a bloom of pain so sublime that nothing before could compare. "Shard!"

To the emptied vessel, it was like sinking into the sun. Like being lifted up from the base world, and surrounded with a pleasure beyond description, a beatific bliss beyond words, experiences, or thoughts. The Lair-Mother's children were taught to eat pain and drink fear, to feast themselves on misery: and those feasts were so filling that few of them ever strove to reach past the easy harvests of murder and terror. But, in that moment, the emptied vessel had to wonder just how much of a waste this was, when breaking your lover's heart could elevate it to such lofty heights. Nothing would ever feel so good again.

Nothing ever should. This was wrong. The broken vessel did not deserve this feast. It was not-

"Don't you fucking dare, Shard!" from somewhere far away, a voice reached it, a familiar one. It was strung so tightly with despair, but held together by fury.

There were hands on its shell, warm, demanding. The touch was so very familiar. So very close to-

"No, no, no," Ifi pleaded with the empty torture chamber, and with the empty shell. "Please. No."

She didn't deserve to suffer like that. It should not be making her suffer like that. She should not be making her suffer like that. She had been hurt enough. Shard had hurt her enough. Something stirred in her, some remnant grasping at the edges of consciousness, and trying to pull herself up from the abyss. It almost worked. But Shard was a ruined mess, and her body could no longer hold her self inside. She slipped, and felt that moment of lucidity leak out, as if through a sieve, once again leaving behind an empty, dumb vessel.

Above the broken body, Ifi sat still, hands folded on the head, staring at the living flesh that nonetheless no longer seemed to contain the monster she came to love. It seemed impossible to believe, and even harder to accept, that all that was left to her to reclaim was just some broken porcelain, and some raw meat. The litany of denials, of profanities, of pleas, failed to reel Shard back in. In its place, resignation crept in, extending its welcoming, soft embrace with the promise that it could all be declared over, and finished.

"At least I killed them, right?" the question came out small and flat, a piece of flint chucked into black depths. "The ones who did this to you."

Her hands were on the cracked shell, feeling the edges where the porcelain fractured, pressing against the sharp edge. They refused to let go, however futile it really was. It seemed that even dead Shard could not stop hurting this girl, nor drinking her pain. It dripped like a soft rain from a summer sky, so bright, so vibrant. If the shell could want, it would want for nothing but to stay in this light forever.

Screws groaned as Ifi undid the bolts holding the shattered body's arm to the table; she wove her fingers with its, holding the hand as if it could mean anything.

"I should hate you, you know?" she asked, only a little less cracked than the ruin she held in her hands. "I should have let Villis kill you. I should have thrown you out. I should have left you here to rot. I should have never let you give me hope."

None of it was true, and even the broken vessel could register as much. The words had hooks at their ends, slipping into the many openings left in what used to be Shard, looping through the bare flesh and pulling taut, drawing the last vestiges of guilt from where it settled in bone and muscle.

"Everyone kept telling me that," Ifi's voice reeled the lines back in, straining under the weight of what it was trying to dredge up from the bottom. "Everyone. Myself included. And what of it? I'm here, you're saved, and not even here anymore."

There was space for a single breath; for one more blossoming of that divine pain, the one that felt too good to endure, the one that even the dead shell could not bear without shame.

"Everything you do is betrayal. I should hate you. But, instead, I..."

"I'm sorry," Shard said, whispering through a throat shot from screaming.

The veil parted; the hooks anchored the soul to the remains of the body, pinioning them in place with guilt, regret, and something else, that should remain without a name, lest Shard betray it, too.

"Shard?" the alchemist's voice ground to a halt over a single question, suspended between obliterating despair, and the single burning moment of hope.

"I'm sorry," the Lair-Mother's child said with the last of its voice.

Then came the time for a silence of confusion, of relief, of dry, cracked fury at everything that had culminated in this swamp of dead bodies and shattered lives. But they made it through, to the simple declaration waiting on the other shore.

"You damn better be," the alchemist exhaled, the fear cut off as if with a knife, replaced by tender, exhausted, exasperated joy. "Because I am not forgiving you ever again. You fucking monster."

 

[Gargulec]

26. The Work

And after everything, joy.

There was a moment—so wonderfully extended, so sweetly reluctant to end—when the world ceased to matter. Ifi held Shard's hand in her own, and felt the warmth of her flesh sink into the blood-stained porcelain. So what that Shard lay shattered, that her body was more scabbed wounds than complete shell? So what that Ifi wasn't even sure if she could unfasten the below-spawn from the torture table without having her fall apart in her hands like a broken dish? So what that the stench of ugly death filled the cellar, rising from the mire of bile and ankle deep blood? It all felt small, insignificant, and transient compared to that which was to last: them, together.

Perhaps it was the lingering poison, not yet fully neutralized. Ifi had bound death to her fear, and served to all who sampled it; it stood to reason, then, that the antidote would have to kill fear as well. But however much sense the lyricism of alchemy made, the reason seemed easier to pinpoint: times like this, it was easy to imagine that things would, eventually, work out.

"Don't worry," Ifi promised, "I'll put you back together."

Already, her mind was racing to the workshop, to the potentials of the Noble Art, to questions of how; because it was possible to put Shard back together. It had to be possible; to think otherwise was to violate the sanctity of this moment, and of those fingers so tightly woven together. But faith alone could not move a body out of a killing room, let alone carry it over to the sanctuary of an alchemist's workshop.

That called for the help of others.

"Did you come here to finish me?" Shard asked suddenly.

For the first time in minutes, or maybe hours, Ifi looked away from the broken and bloodied body of her love, and saw Villis descend into the cellar, girded for battle. In his hand, there was a killing spear; from his wrist swayed a striking charm, glowing pale yellow with the power contained inside. When he stepped inside, he carried himself like a coiled spring, ready in all directions, awaiting an ambush. Then, his feet sank into the mess of porcelain, bile, and steel that littered the floor, and the tension left him, replaced by a strange kind of sadness.

"No," he replied in a voice that bore the mark of stunned disbelief. "Only to help."

"Then help," Ifi demanded, pointing at the table. "We need to get her out of here."

He bound the striking charm securely around his forearm; he propped the spear against the wall, and carefully stepped through the swamp of death, and towards Ifi and Shard. The torture devices the below-spawn used were familiar to his hands; quickly, he guided Ifi through how to dislodge the flat of the table from its mooring, while still keeping Shard securely bound to it. As he worked, he kept glancing at his enemy's free hand, searching for a hint of an extended claw. But, of course, there were none.

Before they left the torture chamber, Ifi wrapped the bowl with pieces of Shard in a shred of cloth. Villis followed her gestures with strange, quiet curiosity, but asked no questions. Instead, he gave commands; told the alchemist how to grip the table securely, and when her legs buckled under the strain, he made sure to shoulder the bulk of the weight on the way up from the cellar, and into the streets. Only once they were securely in the carriage, the table held fast by the draft golem did Ifi think to ask about how Villis knew to come.

"I was worried the demons were going to try to get to you," he explained with a small shrug. "So I made sure to leave look-outs by their den. I came as quickly as I could."

On any other day, Ifi would begrudge him from withholding from her where Shard was being tortured, back in the High City. But now, another question burned its way through her thoughts.

"But why come at all?" she asked, watching the ramshackle streets of the Lower City roll past the carriage.

"You keep asking me that question," he muttered, unsure. "And I am wondering the same thing about you."

When they passed the Middle City limits and reached Ifi's shop, he helped her carry Shard inside, and clear the room in the laboratory of the tabletop. The below-spawn herself seemed to lapse back into some kind of unconsciousness, which Ifi quickly deepened with an extra dose of slowmilk, just to keep the pain away. The bowl with the shards landed on a nearby bench; Villis looked for a chair, and sat himself down.

"Why are you staying?" Ifi asked, lining up a series of wakefulness tonics for use. There would no sleeping in the coming night, and little on the nights to come.

"Because once Alisa realizes what you have done, she will send someone to deal with you."

"Ah."

The elixir rolled down her throat with the familiar, galvanic taste. Cold, unpleasant energy spread through her, thinning exhaustion into a light cloud she could stride through. Shard slept nearby, her body a sore ruin that required a repair, and Ifi would provide. Only how? For a moment, she waited, head rested on folded hands, thoughts trying to conjure up some restorative recipe that would undo the damage. Obviously, there was none: she could not grow a new shell for Shard, not transplant her into one, even if she had somehow acquired it. All that remained was to somehow piece her back together.

With a piece of damp cloth, she started to clean the broken-off shards, their sharp edges never far from slicing her hands open. Bowl after bowl of dirty-black water went down the drain as the pristine white pile grew. There were so many pieces, chipped and cracked; but some of them fit together, holding onto the impression of their old integrity, just waiting for something to knit them together again.

Villis raised an eyebrow when she abruptly left the laboratory, only to return moments later, holding in her hands a small volume bound in red leather. There, in that little book, in an obnoxiously opaque poem, hid the lesson on how to make tangible the essence of attraction, which holds souls together and makes their love pure. Which, in other words, could mean a kind of glue.

The Descent into the Depths of Solitude, and the Triumphant Return Into the Light of Truth. Surrounded by the remains of her lover, and convinced somewhere deep inside that she could be reassembled, Ifi found in herself a new, fresh appreciation for what this title suggested. She had already probed those depths, and made for herself a home in them. Now was the time to leave, and ascend. Maybe she was too quick to dismiss her teachers' insistence on the desire of matter towards perfection.

"How much time do you think I have?" she asked Villis, making sure she had enough ingredients prepared for a simple saturnine tree.

"You will have enough," he promised. "And not more."

He was right. In the morning, dour-faced men with iron-bound cudgels and glass badges marking them the rulers of life and death banged at Ifi's door. The alchemist did not budge from her seat, watching with familiar wonder as flakes of gold spiraled down from the branches of the saturnine tree, settling at the bottom of the flask. Villis, however, went out to meet them; they left after the conversation, carrying with them a small message to be delivered to Master Glassmaker's own hands.

With a glass full of gold powder, Ifi continued to read and reread the poem, to find in it clues for how to render the essence of attraction tangible. Long unused dictionaries of allusions and reference books for allegories surrounded her, and an ever growing mound of quickly scribbled notes. So many of the reagents to be used were horrible poisons: vitriol of phosphorus, quicksilver salts, bitter water; the trick in the creation of the elixir of love was to find the perfect balance between them, so that they would neuter each other and leave only their beatific properties. But what Ifi was attempting didn't have to be so careful, as she was to bind them all together in the panacea of liquid gold, and hope that the thickened paste would serve to sanctify the power of attraction.

Midway through the day, the whizz of distillation rigs woke Shard up from her sleep; Ifi gave her water and restorative potions, and a numbing salve onto the open wounds. For all her damage suffered, the below-spawn held onto life and lucidity strongly; her kind was not easy to put down.

"You have to strike the heart," Villis explained from over the book he was thumbing, "or the brain. Or, I suppose, feed them horrible poison. That was a brilliant idea, by the way. It may yet save your life."

Even caught up in her work as she was, Ifi still had to admit some pride at hearing that. But other tasks lie ahead of her: a paste to taste and mix, and then a love to reassemble. She focused on it, potion after potion sharpening her thoughts until it felt like her mind was a stack of needles pointing outwards; such was clarity. Around her, Shard and Villis conversed, in low voices talking about the past, and the future, and how things could have gone otherwise. It was a bitter and unpleasant conversation, and Ifi was lucky to miss most out it.

"Don't you ever try sorry to me," Villis would exclaim, his voice falling into a register brittle like glass. "You do not have the right. You never will."

Bolted to the table, Shard protested, and defended herself, and then stopped. The conversation returned to a lower intensity, though it grew slow and sluggish, letting the alchemist concentrate more. With a small stick, she applied some of her gold paste onto the edges of two pieces of shell. It filled the gaps; as she squeezed the shards together, some of the paste rose up, hardening quickly to a low ridge joining the pieces together hard and fast. All that was left needing to be done was to file the excess and polish the shell. Ifi counted the shards remaining, and imagined just how many days would take.

No matter.

Some of the elixirs she took deadened the ugliest emotions, and left only mute focus. In its cold light, the whole task took on the shape of a puzzle; and the parts of her that could never stop loving admired the chance to grow so familiar with the topography of Shard. Ifi measured the body, found where the plates had gotten snapped, and made sure that there was a fit between the shell still holding to the flesh, and the pieces she was working with. Then, in the morning after the second night, she smeared the underside of a small shard with a healing salve, and checked if it would stick to Shard. When it clicked in place, and stayed there even as Ifi withdrew her hands, Shard whimpered in careful vulnerability.

"You are really putting me back together," she said, reaching towards the restored part of her.

Ifi brushed her hand away.

"Don't touch, or I'll bolt it back down," she said, a small part of her wondering about how it would feel to be bolted down by Shard. That the thought wafted around her mind at all was a good sign.

At some point, she slept, or maybe just collapsed; Villis woke her up, bringing her a steaming mug of coffee, and demanding that she ate before she was to disappear into the laboratory again. Outside, it was a late afternoon, the sky painted in smudges of pastel blue and pink. Downstairs, Shard writhed impatiently on the table; Ifi rushed to see if the glue was still holding. It was; a golden ridge marked her success, as hard as the shell it was joining. Relieved, the alchemist returned to the puzzle arrayed on her workbench, and the battery of potions meant to let her keep her mind primed on the task at hand.

"How long do you think it will take?" Shard asked.

"Don't rush me," she replied harshly, but not unkindly.

Her work was too precise to accommodate a conversation, anyway, leaving no room for it. Every step was a new challenge. Sometimes, parts of Shard were missing, or lost to chipping and powdering. But the paste Ifi had created filled in the gaps well, spreading into small golden pools where it reached those voids. Under the alchemist's hands, Shard's shoulder slowly emerged back as a complete shape, now branded with a sparkling web. Ifi set it back on the below-spawn later that night, finding a new metal fastener to make sure it stayed attached correctly. Even through the glimmering haze of elixirs keeping her afloat and conscious, the act of adding to her lover's bondage put a smile on her face. Gently, she slapped Shard's face, before returning to the porcelain puzzle.

"Hey," the below-spawn snorted. "I'll remember that!"

There was something in those words that made it all worth it, and more. Ifi let herself lean back in her chair and stretch, uplifted by pride, and something more.

"I'm counting on it," she laughed, returning to work.

Around the time of the next morning, much of Shard was reassembled, large porcelain plates splattered with gold and waiting to be mounted back onto the flesh. Ifi weighed one of them in hand; she had never stopped to think much about it before, but as it rested in her palm, she considered how it was possible that something this rigid and hard could yield itself to the easy grace with which Shard moved. Shouldn't it be more like plate armor, bulky and unwieldy? More importantly, was whatever magic that gave this its flexibility going to return, or would Shard remain forever crippled by a fundamentally alien body grafted onto her flesh? Ifi couldn't allow herself to worry, lest she risked losing focus, but it was difficult not to wonder, or not to rush forward with testing. No, she had to put her faith in the craft, and in the art, in alchemy's grand promise. She had to hold to the meaning of what she was doing.

As the morning gave way to another lovely afternoon, Villis returned to the laboratory from his watch-post on the shop's main floor. He approached Ifi's bench, and for a time observed her put together a plate that would cover Shard's stomach. A chunk of it was nowhere to be found; he recognized it readily.

"I should have aimed higher," he mused. "But it was never meant to be a killing blow."

With an inarticulate groan, Shard voiced her protest; Villis shrugged it off, following the work of Ifi's hands with rapt attention. For the alchemist, it was the trickiest part; no longer joining parts together, but building one anew, out of alchemical gold and mysterious poisons. Strip by strip, she applied layers of the glue, slowly shaping it into an extension of the plates around it. It was a laborious process, even by the standards of her whole task, and yet pleasing in excess of mere restoration. It meant something more, and though the details, the specific names or proper analogies could find no purchase in Ifi's addled mind, she recognized the significance just by the galvanic charge it seemed to hold under her touch. She battled through a temptation to impress some mark of her, a name or a sigil, into the golden mass, but how garish would that be? No, no matter what, Shard's body would remain forever marked not by the wounds it had suffered, but by the hand that built it back up.

"I will need your help again," she announced to Villis, readying herself for the final reassembly.

He had rough hands, used to violence more than care; or so Ifi assumed, until she saw the tenderness with which he held onto the shards of Shard and the measured pressure he put onto them as the alchemist set them back into the openings of the below-spawn's body. It should not be a surprise to her, she thought. He was a glassworker before he was a hero. Maybe it even pleased him more to work again with porcelain than to make his life matter with violence.

"How does it look?" Shard asked, straining to get a look at the reworking of her body; but the metal band kept her head away, and Ifi refused to give her a mirror.

"How does it feel?" she asked back.

"Incomplete."

"Then have patience."

Completion appeared so tantalizingly close. Ifi took a step back, surveying a white body marked by a network of golden ridges; for the first time, no hint of flesh showed, no crack, no opening. She reached to the bolts fastening Shard down, then withdrew her hand. She, too, had to have patience; now was the time to wait for the attraction to solidify, and then for the work that still remained to be done.

"One more night," she made a promise, a wave of exhaustion threatening to drag her to the bottom of sleep. "And remember, no touching."

Upstairs, in the kitchen, Villis seated her at the table. From what little supplies remained in the alchemist's cupboard, he made a shockingly hearty stew, and served it to her, steaming hot. Eating was a struggle; the poisons that kept Ifi upright straining the body in dangerous ways. But she did eat, and she did feel better at the end. Once the bowl was empty, she crashed, the unspoken "why are you doing all of this" retained on her lips.

She never got around to asking it. In the morning, Villis was gone, having left a note warning that he would be back by evening, and likely with difficult company. The implication went over the alchemist's head, for something else, and ar more important, held all of her attention. She found one last bottle of liquid wakefulness sequestered away, downed it, and rushed back to Shard.

A steel file, a roll of sandpaper, a metal brush, a sponge and a bottle of polish; the last step might have seemed mundane compared to the fine magic of transmutation and restoration. Ifi knew better. She set the strongest glowing charm into a socket above Shard's table, moved a chair next to it and ran her fingers across the rough, ridged surface of the below-spawn's restored body. Then, she touched the file to the hardened glue, and ground down and to the side. A crystal-fine whine bounced off the laboratory's walls.

"Ifi?" Shard asked at the surprising touch.

"Shh," the alchemist whispered. "It will take a while."

The labour progressed so very slowly. First, she filed the glue, then she sanded what remained, and only made it perfectly flush with the gradual work of the brush. But her hands were on Shard all time, her warmth soon fully seeped into her, the porcelain body yielding to her perfecting touch. The glue—the elixir—the work—had done more than just set. As its excess was scrubbed away, it revealed perfectly thin golden lines, shining with greedy, needy light. In places, the gold spread and pooled, painting a new geography of Shard, no longer immaculate, but mottled, marked, tried and true. If Ifi had harboured any doubts as to the efficacy of her alchemy, they dispersed without a trace. Or maybe not on account of beauty, but only the sheer pleasure of that touch, of being allowed to hold the body so close and so tender, to work it until it gained a mirror sheen.

Shard's free hand reached for Ifi, and Ifi leaned into it, letting it brush her skin and drink her warmth. Rhythmically, she polished the remade shell, imagining what this hand could do to her—but some other day. So she fastened it again, to make sure it did not interrupt the finishing touches too much. Shard grumbled in protest, but did not resist; words that were in her mouth melted down until all that was leaving was a low, undulating purr, in tune with the motions of Ifi's hands.

And then, all of a sudden, there was nothing more left to file, to sand, to polish. Shard lay on the table, gleaming like a freshly-cut gem, the golden warp spread over her shining with a light that was not entirely reflected. Reluctant to release something that marvelous from her hold, the alchemist nonetheless moved to undo the bindings, finally releasing the below-spawn from her bondage.

"Can you stand?" she asked in a voice that surprised her with its firmness.

She helped Shard up, watching her struggle to keep her balance, but only for a moment. Soon enough, everything was back as it used to be. The glue held; the plates did not snap or bend. They joined to the flesh below, growing from it their necessary properties, indistinguishable from those gained in the vats of the Lair-Mother's kingdom; or perhaps better than that. What could compare, after all, with love and mastery?

"How do you feel?" she demanded to know.

"I don't know," Shard hushed.

"Then keep your eyes down."

Two stairwells separated them from the mirror in the bathroom above, and the conclusion of this work. They walked up slowly, savouring every step of a life returned and of a hope fulfilled. Ifi held Shard's wrist tightly and possessively, like she had always wanted to be held, and guided her towards a better life, like she had always wanted to be guided. But she had to also acknowledge a kind of a defeat; all her life, she had refused the dream of alchemy as anything but a tool, scoffing at those seeing it as a path to a better life. But perhaps she had spent too much time thinking of the High City buffoons and their bad poetry, and not enough of the basic truth of what transmutation could accomplish.

Shard's feet clicked against the tiled floor of the bathroom; Ifi put the light charms on, and breathed.

"Look up," she ordered, pointing the below-spawn at the mirror.

Her love obliged. She raised her head and stared directly into her new reflection, splayed with gold. Her fingers touched the shining trail that began by the neck, and followed it all the way down to the golden pool that filled what a killing spear had once broken open. She trembled, and Ifi only held tighter.

"It is perfect."

And so it was, and so was the work completed, and so was the change affected upon the world, indelible and undeniable.

 

[Gargulec]

27. Mercy

Inevitably, the elixirs took their toll. Once the work was complete, Ifi stumbled out of the bathroom, her grip on Shard's wrist going slack, and tried to mumble some new command. No words formed on her lips, however; she gurgled something incoherent, and then finally her legs gave in. The Lair-Mother's child rushed forward, caught her before she smashed all the way to the floor, and lifted the alchemist to the nearby bed.

There was so little of her, lost in the folds of her voluminous robe. In Shard's arms, she may as well have weighed nothing at all; as with all mortal life, it bore a mark of profound fragility. It could be torn apart so easily, splayed open and bled dry. A single twist of the claw would end it, in a gush of scarlet, intoxicating pain. And as always, the temptation remained; that little pull of tension at the tip of her fingers, ready to extend and sharpen with just a thought.

She lay Ifi in bed, and put a pillow under her head, took a step back. Was she ever going to fully unlearn the ways of looking at that girl as if she was nothing but meat? The old hunger gnawed at the back of her soul. Which was not to say that there was a threat; other, stronger desires held it in check. And those desires expanded in Shard's mind, eclipsing visions of evisceration and slaughter. She ran her fingers around her wrist, where the last motes of Ifi's heat lingered. No, she would not allow the girl to think she had her fully tamed.

No, no, no. Ifi was going to suffer for her dominant pretense. The Lair-Mother's child smiled at that notion. It was going to be a maddeningly impatient wait for the alchemist to wake up.

It was a surprising kind of lust, at once intimately familiar, while also unlike anything Shard had felt before. It spread from the gold-joined cracks in her shell, expanding into the flesh below, digging its little roots in the black veins and metal bones. Once, she would have reacted to it as if to an alien body, seeking to tear this parasite away; but if this was Ifi's spell, then she welcomed it gladly. The alchemist was owed as much, and infinitely more.

The air downstairs reeked of Ifi's alchemy, of her sweat, of her exhaustion, of her toil. Shard threw the windows wide open, hoping that this at least would mute the want; it certainly made breathing easier. Another kind of pleasure accompanied this busywork; the budding realisation that she was where she wanted to be.

The thought had crept up on her, and when it hit in full, Shard found herself forced to pause and sit down. For a moment, she was reduced to admiring the golden web now adorning her shell, trying to make sense of everything she could no longer feel. The great hunger that had been driving her for as long as her memories could reach was nowhere to be found. She tried to imagine climbing back to the pinnacles of power, and the idea carried no taste, brooked no fascination. What would have once propelled her ever forwards was now still, and at peace.

Alas, it too was interrupted.

The door to the shop swung open. Shard jumped up, instincts already extending her claws as she dropped to the floor, ready to face the intruders. Her old enemies were back.

"Hello there, Shard," Master Glassmaker threw down the hood of her capacious cloak, old hate glinting in her grey eyes. "I was under the impression you were supposed to be dead."

Behind her, there was Villis, face tense, a striking charm held securely in the palm of his hand. He did not let it extend yet, however, though he watched Shard's hands carefully. The Lair-Mother's child straightened, doing her best to not let the urge to kill—or sheer panic—cloud her judgment. It was an uphill struggle.

"Alisa," she hissed.

"That's Master Glassmaker for you, thank you," the woman smiled back, striding inside, Villis following close behind.

She looked around, surveying the emptied display cases, and the general mess left by Ifi's hasty work. At Shard, she did not look, though she made sure to keep her burned profile turned towards her all the time. The meaning behind the gesture couldn't be more clear.

"What do you want?" Shard asked, trying not to think about the way their last meeting went; those details would not help either of them in the conversation.

"Is there a chair somewhere?" Alisa ignored her, quickly turning around before spotting the seat behind the counter. "Perfect."

Somehow, Shard ended up staring down at Master Glassmaker leisurely slouched in Ifi's chair, hands playing with the underside of the old wooden counter.

"So, to answer your question," she said, "I am here to inform the owner of this shop of her impending arraignment for royally fucking up my plans…"

Muscles tensed underneath Shard's shell, her body drawing itself tight and taut; her fingers ground against each other as she hid the extending claws in balled fists.

"...not to mention her absolutely rancid taste in women. A hanging offense, in my city."

Villis sighed wordlessly; Shard dropped into a lower hunch, head trained on Master Glassmaker and her extending smile.

"Look at her," Alisa chuckled dryly, waving Shard away as she spoke to Villis. "You weren't kidding! So protective. You were going to try to gut me, huh?" she turned to the Lair-Mother's child. "Just because I threatened to hang that Ifigenia? Honest answers only, please."

Shard exhaled, glancing at Villis; his face remained inscrutable. But she knew Alisa enough, or at least she knew enough about her to recognize what this all was: a game. And one she was in no position to try to interrupt.

"Yes," she nodded, trying to keep her tone neutral. Her claws withdrew back; she opened her hands and demonstrated them to Villis.

"Incredible," Alisa snorted. "You're not only honest, but also domesticated! Wonderful, really. Villis, be a dear and fetch coffee. I don't think this little creature will be trouble."

With another heavy sigh, he nodded, and left for the kitchen, constantly looking back, as if expecting Shard to try something; she couldn't blame him for that. Looking at Master Glassmaker, she was sorely tempted. She froze in place instead, staring at the woman and trying to imagine what she was after.

"Just to clarify," Alisa continued, "you will not be trouble because if you so much as twitch, I will let this wonderful charm fry you…"

Her hand was below the counter; the slight electric charge in the air reminded Shard of the security system Ifi had threatened her with, all those weeks ago.

"...something you should be familiar with," the grin on Master Glassmaker's face turned positively murderous; she ran her hand on the deformed side of her head, letting her fingers mark out a bumpy trail across all the knotted scar tissue.

For a moment, there was silence, marred only by the wheeze of the kettle in the kitchen.

"Not even a word snapped back, huh?" Master Glassmaker shook her head. "You surprise me, Shard. What happened to you? Aside from the obvious."

"I don't want you to hurt Ifi," she replied.

"Which means I should have her skinned alive," Alisashrugged back. "Just as a matter of principle."

Only a few feet separated Alisa from Shard, and Master Glassmaker was old and life-weary; her reflexes should not be the sharpest. If the Lair-Mother's child was to take a lunge, she could probably sink her claws into her throat before the shocking charm erupted. And then, of course, Villis would storm inside and kill her. Which, as she was beginning to suspect, could be the point.

"Are you trying to provoke me?"

"Yes, obviously," Alisa snorted. "Shard, sweetheart, do you have any idea how disappointed I was to hear you somehow made it out alive? And that it was that little miss alchemist, who swore up and down that she was nothing but your victim, who bailed you out?"

Villis returned from the kitchen, a steaming mug in hand; he left it in front of Master Glassmaker, withdrawing to her side. If anything, he looked bitterly exhausted. The disfigured woman blew the steam away, then tasted the coffee. This, finally, managed to wipe the smile from her face. She reached under her cloak, to find a small hip-flask inside. A strong stench of Lower City moonshine hit the air as she poured the contents into the mug. She screwed the bottle back, leaving it on the counter.

"But, apparently, I can't have nice things. Where is she?"

"What do you want from her?" Shard repeated her question, straining to not let her voice rise.

"To have an honest heart to heart about what she did, and to explore potential ways of moving forward," Alisa replied, sipping. "But no. Don't worry. Villis talked me out of having her hang. As for you, however…"

Again, she sipped; Shard felt the power she held press down on her life, and on her future. Once again, as ever, all her dreams of freedom had to concede to the fact that there would always be someone whom she belonged to. Without meaning to, she put her hand to the golden pool where the spear had once pierced her.

"I am sorry for what I did," she whispered, and she was genuine; or at least tried to. Somehow, she couldn't stay certain if the regret she was experiencing was the one expected of her.

"As I have already explained to you," Alisa's voice dropped a pitch, "it's long past time for that. Do you remember what I promised you, when you left me to die?"

It was night then; an ugly autumnal one. Shard dragged a weeping body, half its face bleeding blood and pus, and left it hooked hanging from the Mason's Bridge, so that others would get the message that not even Glassmakers were safe, if their treachery ran deep enough. And of course, that body was screaming and shouting things back at her, as they all did in their terminal moments. The words slid off her shell that night, right into oblivion; why commit to memory the refuse of history?

"Do you?" the question sounded again, this time serrated at the edges.

Gold marked Shard's body where she had been restored; gold, love, hope. It remade where she had been destroyed, and dredged her up from the bottom of despair to a new life, and a new peace. But it seemed that there were limits to what alchemy could transmute, and the past was beyond its reach.

"No," the Lair-Mother's once-favoured child admitted, finding in herself a new kind of shame.

The air crackled as the charge gathered in the shocking charm in tune to the abruptly tensing expression on Alisa's face. Shard braced herself for pain. None came. Villis' hand landed on Allisa's shoulder, gripping lightly.

"And maybe that is for the better."

A sense of betrayal flashed through Master Glassmaker's face, followed by sharp anger. In an instant it was gone, leaving in its wake the wreckage of years of unanswerable rage. But that too drained away, disappearing into apast whichcould neither be altered, nor relieved. The older woman breathed out, shrugging away the unbearable weight of history, and took a sizeable gulp from her mug. Coffee and booze splashed out as she smashed it back to the counter.

"You will leave the city," she passed her judgment, not a shred of humour left in her voice. "You will scurry far enough that not even from the highest tower will I be able to spot you. You will never return, not in a year, and not in ten generation's time, because if you do, every promise I have made will be fulfilled, to the last drop of your blood. This is all the mercy you can expect from me, Shard, and far more than you have ever deserved. Now, where is the alchemist?"

Villis stepped in before Shard could give voice to her shock.

"Probably upstairs, and asleep," he pointed.

"Well," Master Glassmaker lifted herself forcefully up, the mug in her hand. "I will be waking her up, then. You two stay here."

When she left, Shard slumped; the future that had, just moments ago, felt clear and at peace was again a dark churn. Everything she had thought she gained slipped like sand between her fingers, vanishing into nothing, and…

"She will follow you, you know," Villis shifted a step closer; there was something akin to pity on his tired face. "She will not let you leave alone."

Again, there was a stab of shame; how could she ask that of Ifi, how could she demand that the alchemist give up her life just to follow her into exile, far beyond the civilized city, where barbarian tribes dwelt? How could she expect her to follow? Even if she did, even if Villis' calm assertion was a lifeline tethering her back to hope.

"How do you know?"

Villis eyed the hip-flask Alisa had left, and after the briefest hesitation, opened it again, taking a long swig. He wiped his mouth with the flat of his hand, and chuckled dryly.

"Shit, Shard, what sort of an answer do you expect?" he gave her an askew look. "She is madly in love with you, and wouldn't hesitate to sell the world just to stay at your side. Please tell me you noticed as much."

In the silence that followed, Shard could almost hear the conversation happening upstairs; but the walls and the floors were thick, and whatever words seeped through them, they could reach her only as general impressions. She felt small, and guilty, but also knew that Villis was right. There could be no doubt; the gold that marked her stood in testament to that. And, really, it wasn't even that much of an ugly feeling; quite the contrary. If it terrified her, then not because she wanted to escape from it, but because she knew it was not a responsibility she had ever expected to bear. But then again, that made no reason to refuse it.

"Just be good to her," Villis murmured, emptying the flask. "She deserves better."

"I will try," Shard promised, meaning it with all of her being. "I will do my best."

The tones reaching from above were measured, calm; Shard could not sense despair, nor surprise there, but rather something else—a timbre of quiet resolve, and maybe, almost, relief. Villis was no longer looking at Shard, his eyes staring through the window, and out into the night's sky. An unspoken question waited between the two of them.

"Why?" even if she could only approach it, she tried to put it into words.

"Why what?"

"Why everything. If not for you, then me and Ifi…"

He cut her off, harshly, as if he couldn't bear to hear the rest of it. But she got honesty out of him.

"Because I wanted to see if I could get myself to forgive you."

"And?" Shard asked, though she already knew the answer.

"No. Of course not."

At first, when Alisa condemned her to an exile and called it a mercy, Shard had to take it for a mockery; now that Villis' words sank in, she understood how genuine it was, and how enormous. There was nothing left in the city she could return to, and the world beyond was open and vast beyond the wildest imagination.

"Thank you all the same," she whispered to Villis, who said nothing.

Some time later, Ifi descended in Alisa's company, face like stained parchment, eyes blood-shot. Shard startled, already on her feet to search for signs of distress in her lover; she found none, only the familiar exhaustion that the interrupted sleep could have barely dented.

"Hey Shard," the alchemist waved at her as Master Glassmaker motioned to Villis to leave. "I've got some bad news for you. We'll be leaving soon."

Even though she expected to hear regret in those words, to find in them a bitter resignation and protest, Shard couldn't help but to feel that they were feather-light.

"Where to?" she asked sheepishly.

"Wherever. I'm fucking done with this city."