“Hello,” he said, cautiously. Whether it was an Elderspawn monstrosity in that shadow or a girl in a stiff and ragged cloak, a greeting couldn’t hurt.
“I’m not…” she kept speaking, but her voice dropped too low for him to hear it. “…okay?” she finished.
Calder peered closer into the shadows. Now that he was paying attention, he could read the darkness to some degree—the storm of chaos around her head was just hair, frizzy and wild as though it had never been combed. The shroud on her body meant she was wrapped in clothes too big for her, and her face…as he looked, he could see that her pale skin had been smudged with grime.
So one of the residents of this street had come to sleep here after all. He felt a surge of guilt, and finally sheathed his sword. It was pitiful enough that a little girl should have to spend the night in an alley behind an alchemical workshop; he didn’t have to threaten her as well.
And if she was an Elderspawn who had perfected her disguise to this degree, then as the great strategist Loreli had once said, “Sometimes one is simply beaten.”
“I beg your pardon,” he said, holding his hands out to demonstrate that he’d left his weapon behind. Very slowly, he rummaged around in his coat pockets. He hadn’t taken a billfold with him, having not expected a cash transaction tonight, but he should have something. He came up a few seconds later with four crumpled marks, six copper bits, and a tired silvermark. He presented them to her in both palms, as though offering seed to a sparrow. “I’m afraid this is all I have on me.” A sudden idea struck him, and he added, “Though if you need a place to stay tonight, I have a ship in the harbor. We’re anchored through morning.”
The girl’s entire outline shook briefly as she shivered. “Ah. That’s not. I have…” She held up a wine bottle and shook it. The liquid within sloshed, and as it did, it glowed a pale orange.
He was no alchemist, but he suspected that wasn’t actually wine.
“You needed.” She didn’t finish the sentence, but instead made an explosion noise and moved her hands apart, demonstrating a blast.
Calder eyed the bottle. “That’s not going to explode, is it?”
She shook her head vigorously, and then jerked her head at the big metal box beneath her. Reaching her hand down, she gave the side a slap.
Just as before, the top lifted with a steady hiss, this time carrying her along with it.
“Look,” she said, now from overhead.
With a hesitant glance up at the lid—if he leaned in to look and the top crashed back into place, he was afraid it would smash his head like a grape—he peeked inside.
It wasn’t the dump he’d expected. Only one corner was walled off to contain garbage, with about the same capacity as a trash-bin. The shattered remnants of Lampson’s cylinder lay in that section, liquid pooling at the bottom but not spreading to the rest of the box. The six-legged cat was nowhere to be seen.
Outside of that partition, the space looked like a miniature alchemist’s workshop.
Rows of colorful potions were displayed on a short rack against the far wall, and a pair of goggles sat next to a pair of gloves on a folded apron next to them. A stack of books bore titles like, Effusions of the Various Kameira in the Southwest and A Lexicon of Philters, while a miniature table and stool dominated the remainder of the floor. The table was covered in notes, diagrams, and sketches, while the stool was padded with a small cushion. A half-eaten sandwich rested on a plate.
Of all the things Calder had imagined might be inside the mysterious metal box, he had never considered this.
His attention turned back to the desk. With the lid closed, even someone six inches shorter than Calder would have to work with their neck bent. Calder himself would have had to lie halfway over the table, if he were seated on the stool. It would be worse than working in a closet.
He glanced up at the girl, and this close, he could tell that the complex alchemical scent was coming from her, not from her lab. He could also see her face in much more detail, and she was looking at him with a childlike expression of apprehension. Waiting for his opinion.
“Are you an alchemist?” he asked as steadily as he could.
She smiled a little, nodded, then reconsidered. After another few seconds, she shook her head. “Not Guild,” she whispered. “I was an apprentice.”
He wouldn’t ordinarily ask for the personal history of this strange back-alley alchemist, but she’d already shown him her home. He could use a few more details. “What happened?”
She fidgeted, avoiding his gaze. “Delivery to the palace. I messed it up. Imperial Guard didn’t want me…” she trailed off again before picking the sentence back up. “…back here. The alchemists let me use what they don’t need.”
Calder still wasn’t sure how she’d ended up in a sealed mechanical box, but he could piece the rest of the story together well enough. She’d continued her alchemical studies, obviously, but she couldn’t work for the Guild if the Imperial Guards were after her. He couldn’t imagine how she did any business in the Capital at all, in a situation like that.
“…quicklamps?” she asked. He missed the first half of the question.
“Do I have quicklamps? Yes, on the ship.” Quicklamps were effectively glass jars of glowing liquid, and they could be brightened or dimmed to almost nothing by adjusting an alchemical valve. They were much safer than traditional lanterns on a ship, for two reasons: first, quicklamp glass was tempered by alchemists, and could withstand impact that most lanterns could not. Second, quicklamp fluid on its own was difficult to ignite and put out very little heat. So no one could be burned by a quicklamp, and if it did break, it wouldn’t light the ship on fire. There would just be some luminescent paint on the boards for a while. It would only go up in flames if they were struck by lightning or attacked by some sort of fire-breathing Kameira—a dropped match wouldn’t do it—and in those cases, the ship was in danger anyway.
You could buy fifty lanterns, a cask of oil, and a crate of candles for the price of one quicklamp, but no solution was perfect.
“Fuse?” she asked. “Powder? Alphidalious extract? Black amber resin?”
“Fuses and powder, but extract…can you spell that for me?”
She shrugged and slid off the lid of her box, slipping inside with the fluid motion of a stage performer. “Okay. I have it. With all that, I can make a bomb.”
Calder had been waiting at the bottom of a cold, black hole, and now he was watching a rope ladder slowly drift down from the heavens. “You’re willing to make explosives for me?”
By this time, she was scuttling around her little cabin, packing everything she could into a cloth pack. She carefully slipped a pack of sealed tubes into a pocket, buttoned the pocket shut, and looked up at him. “Favor,” she said firmly.
So she’d heard him already, and she was ready to take the deal. He would have preferred a skilled Guild alchemist, but anyone who would work without deepening his debt was a miracle to him. “Of course, yes! I’ll have a contract drafted up, if you like.”
She pushed a book into her pack before looking back up at him. “Take me with you.”
He hesitated. Except in the unbelievably unlikely coincidence that she wanted to go to the city of Axciss in Izyria, anywhere he could take her would be out of the way. “I have urgent business in Izyria,” he said. “I need to put your explosives to work. But if it’s somewhere close…where would you like to go?”
“Somewhere,” she whispered, then shook her head as though correcting herself. “Anywhere.”