All should have been made right.
But it hadn’t been.
The pair remained lost to each other, bitter. Anger and guilt had rooted too deeply, becoming as much a part of them as their own bones. If Tylar hadn’t started his underhanded dealings with the Gray Traders, soiling his cloak…if I had trusted his professions of innocence to murder…if only I’d told him of our child… And though they had stumbled over words of forgiveness to each other, the words were spoken with the tongue and not the heart.
At least not yet.
But now Tylar was returning.
Kathryn knocked again, needing to consult Gerrod, ever her counselor. Long ago, Gerrod had helped lift her back into her life after she fell down here the first time. She trusted no one more, not even herself.
A coarse bark answered her. “I’m not to be disturbed!”
“Gerrod!” Kathryn called through the door. She leaned close, keeping her voice low. She had come buried in her shadowcloak, shying from others. Even now, Grace flowed through the blessed cloth to hide her among the shadows.
“ Kathryn…?”
“Yes!”
She heard steps approach, and a latch scraped back. The door swung open. Gerrod pulled it just wide enough for her to enter, but no more.
“Hurry,” he urged her.
She thought at first the master’s furtiveness was because he had shed his armor’s helmet, exposing his pale and tattooed flesh. Gerrod preferred to keep his true face hidden.
He closed the door behind her, leaned an ear against the wood, then stepped away. “Hesharian knows I’m dabbling in something secret. He’s already visited twice this morning.”
“Does he know about the skull?”
Gerrod shook his head and clanked over with a whir of mekanicals to the far side of his chamber.
Kathryn caught the whiff of burning black bile, which even the sweet scent of myrrh boiling on his braziers could not mask. She also noted the state of his room. Normally Gerrod was fastidious in his upkeep, but the four bronze braziers in the corners of the room-in the fanciful shapes of eagle, skreewyrm, wolfkit, and tyger-were blackened with smoke, and piles of ash lay unswept beneath them. At his wide desk, a teetering stack of ancient tomes covered the surface, some open, others facedown, spines bent. In one corner, a stack of scrolls had spilled to the floor, and a candle had burnt to a slagged puddle of wax with a wan flame floating in the middle.
Her friend looked just as wasted, sustained by as weak a fire.
She doubted he had slept at all since acquiring the skull.
“I think Hesharian grows suspicious of my studies,” Gerrod said. “The last time he appeared on my doorstep, he came with a strange milky-eyed master named Orquell. The man hails from Ghazal, where he has been studying among the Clerics of Naeth of that volcanic land.”
Kathryn was well familiar with the cult of Naeth. Unlike most of Myrillia, the followers shunned any worship of the aethryn, the sundered part of the gods that had fled high and away into the aether, never to be heard from again. The Clerics of Naeth sought communion with the naethryn, the undergods, through strange practices and acts of blood sacrifice. While no one had been able to prove it, if ever there was a ready source of Cabalists, it would be found there. But as the followers rarely left their subterranean lairs, they seemed harmless enough, for now.
“Why did this master come here?” Kathryn asked, suspicious of anyone associated with such clerics.
“Summoned, I heard-by Hesharian.”
Kathryn frowned.
“They’ve spent some time up in the Warden’s Eyrie. Behind closed doors.”
Kathryn suddenly remembered. “Dart mentioned such a man…”
Gerrod nodded. “From such meetings, I can fathom why Hesharian has summoned this master from Ghazal.”
“Why?”
“Because of Symon ser Jaklar, the warden’s best man, turned to stone by Argent’s corrupted sword. Hesharian still keeps the man’s body in some secret hole. But to lift the curse would surely raise our esteemed master’s status-at least within the eyes of the Eyrie.”
Gerrod finally waved the matter away. “But that is not why you came down here, was it? You came to inquire about the skull.” He turned toward the arched opening that led into his alchemical study. The thick ironwood doors were open, and the scent of bile emanated from within.
“You must see this,” he said and disappeared through the archway.
Kathryn followed him into his study, where the smell of black bile was riper. The windowless room beyond had been carved into an oval. In the center was a scarred greenwood table with a complicated apparatus of bronze-and-mica-glass tubing above it, attached to the arched stone roof. All around, the walls were covered from floor to ceiling with cabinets, shelves, niches, and nooks. At the far end rose Gerrod’s repostilum, a mosaic of blessed glass cubes, each die no wider than a thumb, eight hundred in number, containing drops of each of the eight humours from all hundred of the original settled gods, an alchemical storehouse of great wealth.
Gerrod crossed to the center table. “I may have discovered some answers, but each revelation only begat another mystery.”
In the center of the table rested the misshapen skull.
Gerrod had painted its surface with black bile, so artfully that it looked carved of the warding Grace. The only spot not covered was a perfect circle on the top of the skull. The jaundiced bone looked pitted there as if eaten by caustic oils.
Kathryn knew it hadn’t been oils that ate the bone-but Grace-rich humours. Positioned directly over the skull was a bronze-and-mica spigot, draining from the apparatus above. The device was used for mixing humours in alchemical experiments.
“Here is the most intriguing discovery.” Gerrod reached forward and delicately turned a bronze key. From the tip of the mica tubing, a single drop of humour welled and clung precariously. “I’ve used a trickle of phlegm to bind blood and tears. Watch this.”
The drop fell from the spigot and struck the skull. It rang most peculiarly, as if the bone were some sort of stone bell. The sound echoed for a breath as if trapped within the walls of the study and seeking a means to escape. Kathryn felt its passage almost like a wind. Her cloak trembled from her body, ever so slightly, lifting away, then settling back.
As the echo faded, silence settled over the room, heavier than a moment before.
She stepped away. “What was that?”
Gerrod waved a hand through the air as if wafting something foul away. “The humours-blood, tears, even the phlegm-all came from Cassal of High Dome.”
“A god of air,” Kathryn said. All the gods, while varying in the cast of their humours, could be relatively separated into four aspects: loam, water, fire, and air.
“Exactly,” Gerrod said.
“But what made that sound?”
Gerrod nodded. “I don’t think made is the right word. I think the sound was already there, trapped in the bones of the skull, bound down into its mineral matrix. It is hard to believe, I know, but you must first understand that our bones are not pure stone, like some might imagine. There is flesh in there, too. If you leach away the minerals, you can reveal the flesh within. And in this skull there remains the desiccated flesh of a rogue god.”
Kathryn felt a sick unease.
“I believe the alchemy of air unbound some corrupted Grace still trapped in that flesh. An echo of power.”
“What sort of Grace?”
“That has been a good part of my study. But I believe I rooted out an answer from some old books. Tomes that dealt with the work of Black Alchemists. You are familiar with how loam-giants, wind wraiths, and fire walkers are born?”
Kathryn nodded. Though the details were beyond her knowledge, she was aware that women, heavy with child, could ingest certain alchemies and give birth to children bearing special traits.
“It is not only clean Graces that might transfigure such births. Corrupted Graces can do the same. I studied tomes that spoke of children born of cursed alchemies. Specific to this matter, children born of air alchemies.”