And again, it didn’t work.
Sepha tried until her hands were numb, but it was no use. She didn’t know what those etchings were, but they sure as After weren’t alchems.
If she wanted to survive, there was only one thing to do.
Sepha approached the Military Alchemist’s transmutation alchem.
It was different from the one she’d traced at the mill. That transmutation alchem was meant to turn raw steel into tirenium. This one, she guessed, was the standard alchem for transmuting lead into gold. Only instead of lead, she had straw.
Ludicrous.
Alchemy operated on the simple principle of exchange. To start, Sepha would put a material inside her alchem and place her hands just so on the alchem’s rim. Then, with the proper amount of focus, the alchem would become a portal through which Sepha could access dozens of pocket realities, each of which contained a different version of the material she’d placed inside the alchem. To perform the alchemical exchange, Sepha would select the version she desired and swap it with the original material. The portal would close, the pocket realities would vanish, and the original material would cease to exist, replaced with the version she’d selected.
But for the alchemical exchange to work properly, the starting material and the ending material had to be closely related. Straw and gold were not closely related.
But. Maybe there was some copper in the straw, leached up from the heavy mountain soil. Copper and gold were close enough for a proper exchange.
Sepha grabbed an armful of the dry, crackly straw and stacked it in the center of the alchem.
She walked back to the alchem’s outermost ring and knelt beside it.
Sepha thought hard about the trace amounts of copper that might be somewhere in that pile of straw. She focused on exchanging the copper for flecks of shining golden dust. Placing her hands just so along the alchem’s outer rim, Sepha squeezed her eyes shut.
It was silent. It was dark.
Straw into gold.
There was a strange, stirring sense of something before her, and Sepha opened her eyes. She did not see the straw.
She saw a dark-haired, sallow-skinned homunculus, his lips cast in what might loosely be called a grin, except it showed altogether too many teeth. He opened his mouth, tongue outstretched, and said in a horrible, guttural voice, “You are going to die.”
Sepha stumbled backward in alarm. The homunculus—who should not be here, how did he get here—stared at her with a snarling leer. Something malicious glittered behind his dark eyes.
But no, that couldn’t be! Homunculi didn’t think or plan or feel. They weren’t good or bad. They couldn’t be malicious!
“I—what?” Sepha cried.
The homunculus’s voice box worked up and down as he tried, again, to talk. “You—will—die,” he repeated in a strangled voice.
Nearly sure this was a hallucination, Sepha responded weakly, “Maybe not!”
To be talking to a homunculus—and to hear him talk back—was so utterly ridiculous, so impossible, that she could hardly believe it was happening at all.
The homunculus shook his head. “No maybe,” he said slowly, as if each word took monumental effort. His unnatural, cruel grin closed as he licked his thin lips and said, “Will.”
Sepha’s heart pulsed erratic and feather-light against her ribs. “Are you going to kill me?”
He threw back his head and let out three long laughs that sounded as if he’d swallowed them and spit them back up. He looked her straight in the eye—which homunculi did not do—and said, “Not me. Madame.”
Well, obviously, Sepha thought. Was he just here to remind her she was going to die, as if that was something a person could forget?
“Why are you here?” she demanded, emboldened by this blip of anger. She glanced at the cell’s metal door. She hadn’t heard it open, and now it was shut again. Damn it all. “Who let you in?”
The homunculus worked his mouth into a sneer. “Not let in. Not sent. I decided. I came.”
“That’s a lie,” Sepha snapped, before her mind caught up and she remembered homunculi couldn’t lie. But they weren’t supposed to speak, either, yet here this one was. Speaking.
The homunculus shook his head. “Not.” He was easing toward her, and although his head didn’t even reach her waist, Sepha backed warily away. There was something wrong with this homunculus. Something broken. Something evil, a small voice inside whispered, but she ignored it.
“Who owns you?” she tried again.
“No!” the homunculus shouted, a rough and grating sound. He balled his hands into fists and thumped his chest. “I own. No master.”
“No master?” Sepha repeated. “What happened to your master?”
The homunculus’s mouth twisted into a leer more vicious than the last. “Gone.”
Something about the quirk of his eyebrows, about the way he worked his tiny hands as he spoke, sent shivers down Sepha’s neck. He made her think of creeping things lurking out of sight, and of death unlooked-for. She swiveled her head quickly, just to make sure there was nothing lurking out of sight, and looked back at the homunculus just as quickly. He was not a thing one left unobserved.
Had he—had he killed—
To avoid asking the question that had leapt to her lips, to avoid hearing the answer, Sepha reverted to an easier, more immediately relevant question. “Why are you here?”
“You will die,” he said again, his mouth working grotesquely as it went against its own nature. “I save.”
Sepha stared blankly at the tiny man, and he stared back at her, his eyes as intelligent as they were cruel. This homunculus who talked—who owned himself, who thought and planned and decided—had appeared inside a cell that was designed to keep alchemists in so he could save her?
Sepha blinked rapidly. She couldn’t understand all of the impossible things contained inside this one tiny person. Her eyes wandered to the huge transmutation alchem behind him—something she could understand—and the pile of straw she’d placed at its center. It was unchanged, of course, completely unaffected by her weak attempt at transmutation.
Then her eyes flicked toward the thing she’d been trying to ignore: the titanic mountain of straw, which loomed so high that the top was, from here, out of sight.
Would she have been able to transmute that much straw into gold in one night, even if she could perform the transmutation? Alchemy took time, focus, and energy. If she worked from now until noon and was successful on each transmutation attempt, she wouldn’t even be able to work through a third of that mountain.
“I am going to die,” she whispered, the realization finally settling in her bones.
“Yes,” came the guttural answer, making Sepha jump. “But I can save.”
“How?” she asked. Her voice sounded harsh and desperate. “Can you get me out?”
The homunculus clicked his tongue and shook his head. “No,” he said. “Cell. Wrong walls.”