Autumn was a battlefield. Summer had held on longer than anyone expected it to: fighting hard against the onslaught of winter and only reluctantly yielding each inch to the advancing snow from the south. The battle raged in the form of thunderstorms and winds that blew hot and cold by turns; one day the sky flew summer’s blue flag, others it was wintery white. But winter’s victory was inevitable; the season rolled forward inexorably.
The mid afternoon sun, tired from fighting through the cloud cover, lay defeated across the mountains to the east, not even trying to cast a shadow on the greys and browns of the shale. The beech forest encroaching up from the valley was blood red, and at its edge a robin trilled in an aggressively cheerful manner, defying the oncoming cold.
A stream trickled cautiously onto the grassy hilltop before sliding on down into the forest, following a path down that it had laid itself, decorated with rocks that it had carried down from the mountaintops itself, in younger, brighter days when the snow melted more readily. A squirrel paused on its banks to listen to an approaching noise, then ran back into the forest, clutching nuts to add to its own fortifications.
Josephine reined in her horse and the rest of the party fell in around her; the gargoyles dropping to the ground in a flurry of obsidian wings, the clunking of the golems stopping in almost deafening unison, leaving only the clump-drag of the gremlins heaving their chains behind them as they brought up the rear. The magi, always prone to talking among themselves, stood together and continued their conversation as if nothing had changed.
The horse nickered and pawed at dead leaves as one of the angels landed next to her, hir huge wings creating a massive localised wind. Mounted as Josephine was, her head came to the angel’s shoulder.
“Ogres,” ze said. Like most of the things angels said, it carried little intonation, no indication of whether she needed telling, or was being asked what her plans were.
Josephine nodded. “And beyond that, our destination.” She pointed with her standard, beyond the camp, to the dull stone building nestled in the base of the mountain. It had been two days riding, a pleasant enough journey but the grasslands were too warm for Josephine’s taste; she was keen to get this done and return to her work.
There were lots of them, great hulking greenskins with huge clubs the size of one of their legs each. They had heard Josephine and her party arriving - there was no disguising the approach of stone golems - and now they were standing together, glaring up at her menacingly.
She sent a gargoyle down, an old limestone figure carrying a message that she only hoped the ogres could read:
King Gavin requests the release of your prisoner into his custody.
The lead ogre certainly looked at the paper long enough to suggest reading. He looked up, met Josephine’s gaze directly, and swung his club.
The gargoyle shattered into dust.
Josephine turned in the saddle and surveyed her group. The gargoyles weren’t as numerous as she’d like, but they had some fight left. Her golems, of course, were ever reliable. It was the living she was worried about. Gremlins were always keen to fight - it broke the monotony of their manual labour, she supposed. The magi, however, were still bitter about the loss of the genies, and her single remaining naga...
Amrita felt Josephine’s eyes on her and raised her head up, stretching her four arms out so the sun flashed off her blades, a light reflected in the heat in her black eyes.
“We’ve faced longer odds together, Alchemist.”
Josephine nodded, once. They had, but she wasn’t inclined to take the same damages again. But today, with the angels at their side, they probably had a chance. She turned back, raised her hand, and brought it down hard, pointing forward at the ogres.
A mighty wind sent the stream water spraying out of its banks as the gargoyles and the angels took to the air. The golems marched forward, Amrita leading the ground charge. Josephine stayed back, the gremlins on one side of her, the magi on the other, all conversation over, their focus purely on the offensive spells.
The angels hit first: tough, and strong, and smart; everything that the gargoyles weren’t. Even as the air throbbed under the beating of enormous feathered wings and flashed with swordfire, obsidian and limestone shattered and splintered, littering the battlefield with rocks. Josephine felt each destruction, the energy that had animated each gargoyle dissipating into the air.
Drawing from the spare mana emanating from the magi’s work, Josephine threw a haste spell on her golems: They were dependable and strong, but they could only manage the slowest of paces down the hillside: the gargoyles might be expended before they got there.
And then Amrita was among the ogres, rising up on her tail until she was almost the height of an angel, and falling down on her enemies, her blades a tempest of steel too fast to counter. Greenskins fell around her, but then they turned their attention to her: a dozen ogres against one naga, their eyes flashing dangerously. Josephine desperately hurled healing spells at her friend, and yelled “protect her!” at the magi and gremlins. Beams of energy and heavy stone balls pelted the ogres.
Then the golems reached the fray. Amrita slid back, tired but alive, and the statues trooped over the ogres, resisting damage and dealing out heavy strikes in all directions. The angels swooped in and cleaned up the remaining guards.
Quiet descended.
The golems and the few remaining gargoyles stopped, staying exactly where they were until commanded otherwise. Josephine and Amrita shared a nod as the naga circled her huge tail around herself and settled down into its curls, taking advantage of the stillness to rest and recover. The angels lowered their swords to their sides, and they and the magi on top of the hill watched as Josephine rode down towards the prison.
She dismounted at the prison, and almost put her boots on the stone hand of a golem, having flown free of the battle by the same force that had shattered the arm at the elbow. She bent down and picked it up, looking over her shoulder to see the corresponding golem marching towards her.
Josephine scooped up a handful of mud from the ground and used it as a makeshift adhesive to place the hand back on the arm. The golem used its other arm to hold it in place, and she used her little finger to draw a small glyph in the mud, drawing anima down from the golem to fill the dead stone. The mud was sandy, with only just enough clay content to stick, but it would do temporarily, until she’d have time to alchemise a decent replacement on returning to the factory.
Then she turned back to the prison and heaved the door open.
The air inside was cool, dry and dead, and carried the faint smell of a place that wasn’t cleaned as often as it should be: too-old meat and unattended latrines. As Josephine walked in, she heard a scrambling sound and a low mutter in a language she didn’t know. A door opened ahead of her and two goblins hurried out, carrying sacks over their shoulders which were already turning red from the meat inside. They scattered to a halt when the saw her, but she stood to the side, her sword undrawn, and they raced in the other direction.
Most of the cells were empty, and relatively clean. Josephine found a couple of thieves and a poacher, none of whom wasted any time in sprinting towards the exit. Gavin had said she’d know her target when she found it, and she let the petty criminals go.
It was at the bottom of a spiral staircase, the dungeon. Heavy iron bars lay across the oak door, and several separate locks hung along the edge, from floor to above Josephine’s head. Even the slit at the bottom, which she assumed was for food, carried its own padlock.
Josephine hadn’t stolen any keys. She rubbed her hands together, smearing mud thinly over both of them, and reached into one of the bags on her belt. She kept a handful of vials in there for emergencies, and needed to run her thumb along the seal on each to gauge its contents. The third one she tried had the potion she wanted: a thick colourless concoction that slid cleanly against the side of the glass.
With instinctive care, Josephine bit into the wax seal and pulled out the stopper. Then, starting from the bottom of the door and working up, she carefully tilted out one drop of the potion onto the mechanism of each individual lock. The viscous fluid sat for a second each time against the lock, before fizzing and turning pink then red, as it seeped through the iron of each lock. By the time Josephine was on the topmost locks, the bottom few were already bleeding and crackling. But a few proved too robust or had something in their makeup that resisted the corrosion. Careful to avoid skin contact with the red goop, Josephine used a pin to scrape away what had been affected, and discovered that the metal beneath had the wrong lustre: too much shine for real iron. She scraped at it a little, and settled on etching an appropriate sigil, casting a small spell, and forcibly transforming it into iron. It was imperfect alchemy, but enough of the metal reworked itself that the corrosion took hold and the lock flaked away.
Inside, the cell was dark, and smelled even sharper; Josephine took a second for her eyes and nose to adjust before coming in, letting the torches from the corridor light her way in.
The prisoner sat against a wall, her legs drawn up towards her with her chained wrists looping her knees, and her shackled ankles attached by two opposing chains to the wall. Her frame was gaunt, and her lips pale, but her eyes watched her rescuer fiercely, unblinking in the new light and defiant even in the face of rescue.
“My hero?” Her voice was as dry as her tone, cutting through the dust in the air like the blood potion Josephine used on her chains. “To whom am I to be indebted?”
“King Gavin of Bracada,” said Josephine, offering her hand, and then her shoulder, to help the prisoner stand, although the effort was nearly ruined when the woman fell back against the wall, a dry rattling laugh shaking her chest.
“Is that so? Gavin wants my service so much that he’ll send someone to break me out?”
Josephine didn’t know what to say in answer, so she said nothing, and helped the prisoner out onto the battlefield, where her army were waiting, ready.
Blinking in the light, the newly freed prisoner eyed each of Josephine’s troops. The angels, standing tall and proud next to Amrita, caught her attention first, and she tilted her head back in order to get a full look at them, holding out a skeletally thin hand to shield her eyes from the lowered sun. Josephine waited, expecting questions, but whatever there was to say about the presence of angels in a small army were put aside when the woman noticed the golems.
She pointed at them, and turned towards Josephine, one eyebrow arched questioningly. “And what, pray, are those?”
“Golems,” Josephine answered, aware that her face was warming - with pride or the pressure of scrutiny, she wasn’t sure - “are you not familiar with them?”
The woman shook her head and walked forward. She was standing taller now, her back straight and head high, and only the strain in her walk suggestive of her time in captivity.
“These are no gargoyles,” she said, honing in on the golem with the crude repair job from earlier. “They’ve got anima of their own.”
Josephine followed behind her and explained: “They’re not that dissimilar, as it happens. The anima is still basically drawn from the anima mundi, but I modified the process used to bond it to the stone. It’s more robust this way.”
That arched eyebrow returned to face Josephine. “You created these?”
The warmth returned to Josephine’s cheeks. “I did.” Golems were in fairly common use these days. It was unusual for someone to be surprised by their presence. Even more so to be interested in their inventor.
“What’s your name?”
“Josephine.”
She smiled, and with her hands pressed palm to palm in front of her, the woman gave a small bow.
“I am honoured to be in your presence, Josephine the alchemist. I am Vidomina.”
Keen to change the subject, Josephine hit upon the bow. It was a Brocadan custom, and she now recognised the accent. “You are from Brocada,” she said, “are you an alchemist yourself?”
Vidomina gave another dry smile. “Once maybe. Now I apply my talents elsewhere. But now I am in service to Brocada again, thanks to Gavin sending you here for me.”
Josephine inclined her head yes. “He has a task for you, I suppose. I am to bring you to Cloudspire to receive your orders.”
“Then we should go,” Vidomina replied. “It won’t do to keep the King waiting.”
But she paused before following Josephine, looking around at the battlefield and the fallen orcs still lying there.
“But of course it won’t do to arrive without an army of my own, will it?” she said.
What happened next sent Josephine’s blood cold. Vidomina crouched down by the body of one of the ogres,, and used her finger to draw in the ground, where green blood mixed with the mud. She drew a large circle, then a pentagram, and inscribed symbols over it that hurt Josephine’s eyes to look at. A low incantation, and Vidomina leaned forward, pushing both hands into the air in front of her with a harsh gasp.
The gasp stayed in the air even after the former alchemist had closed her mouth, growing louder and coarser, pitching into a low growl that soon fell out of range of hearing, leaving the air and ground vibrating with power.
One of the magi shouted with incoherent rage as the ogre corpses themselves began to shudder with the ground they lay on, and his voice was joined by his colleagues’ as slowly, the corpses themselves started to move, pitching and jerking like grounded fish.
Josephine’s stomach turned as she watched the carcass nearest Vidomina start tearing itself apart, and the skeleton pushed its way out of the flesh like a sleeper rising from the bedsheets, which it left on the ground, bloody muscle and viscera on a bed of skin, so much discarded clothing.
One by one, several skeletons forced their way up and turned to Vidomina, staggering towards her and falling into line like so many of Josephine’s golems. Standing at their head, Vidomina tossed a brown curl from her head and looked at Josephine with a proud, unapologetic smile.
“And that is why I can no longer call myself an alchemist.”
Vidomina was a necromancer.
The ride back was quiet and sullen. The angels flew overhead with the gargoyles, and the magi huddled in on themselves, muttering below the sound of the wind. The gremlins said nothing at all. Even the golems, marching noisily behind Josephine, seemed to carry the general feeling of dread with them, though she knew that was impossible. The presence of skeletons in the party cast a long shadow.
Slithering along the side of Josephine’s horse, Amrita refused to avert her eyes like the magi were doing, and cast a few occasional glances over towards Vidomina.
“What does Gavin want with a necromancer?” she wondered out loud.
“Maybe he just wanted to enlist the service of an experienced commander,” Josephine offered mildly, but Armita laughed softly, dismissing that idea.
“She was an alchemist, she said. Now she raises skeletons using rituals and runes. She’s an alchemist still, I’d say.”
“Necromancy is a form of magic.” Josephine said mildy. “You’d have to ask a wizard.”
Amrita hissed her her breath, sounding not unlike a bell rattling. But she dropped the subject. “Let’s go home and be rid of her and her cursed army.”
Josephine turned her head away from Amrita, and her eye briefly met that of Vidomina; proud, cold and silent. She had heard every word, Josephine was sure.
They arrived at Cloudspire at noon on the third day, and Josephine gave her army leave to remain. The magi returned to their tower, but not before one of them, a Cloudspire native named Divna, surprised Josephine by telling her she’d be happy to fight by her side again.
“On the condition you don’t expect me to work with the undead. Their presence corrupts my magic.”
Josephine, who had found no particular effect on her own spells, agreed to the condition before they parted. She bid a fond farewell to Amrita, off to her husband and family in the Pavilion, then Josephine returned with her golems to the factory.
She had to reform and reanimate the lost arm, and numerous other small bits of damage to her army, but as she worked systematically through the task, her mind was elsewhere.
The blood potion worked on most metals, because it burned away the iron into the air, producing something that only looked and smelled like human blood. It was the same process, although massively accelerated, that caused iron tools to rust and decay over time and improper care. This was the exact reason that amina didn’t work on iron: the energy burned the metal too quickly and the life itself bled out too quickly.
But the locks that hadn’t corroded - they’d been protected by the use of other metal, poured through or over the iron in a way that had made it resistant not just to her potion, but to longer term decay. Josephine had been reworking the technique since encountering the lock, and as soon as her golems were restored, and before she could be given another task, she retreated to her workshop, firing up the forge.
A few hours into her work, Josephine became aware of a draft of cool air into the heat of the workshop. Looking up, she saw the door to her workshop has been opened, and Vidomina now standing in the doorway, watching her.
The last few days had been kind to the necromancer. She stood under her own strength and at her full height, giving her a few centimetres on Josephine. She wore a royal blue dress, long and form fitting, and a light veil draped over her hair, now clean and curling gently around her thin face. As Josephine sat up away from her work and put her pliers down, Vidomina gave her a thin smile.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt,” she said. But she came into the workshop anyway, her head turning as she looked around, brushing her the black silk of her gloved fingers lightly over the small figurines that littered the shelves - samples and prototypes and mockups. A small stone frog leapt back away from her touch, and Vidomina smiled.
“Did you make all of these?” she sounded impressed.
Josephine nodded. “Most of them. I can work with other people’s handiwork, but it’s easier if I control the composition.”
“Yes,” Vidomina said, “your work on golems, right? You’re still working on it?”
Again, Josephine nodded. “Currently the process only works on stone, but I think I can refine it to animate metal.”
She picked up her pliers again to raise the small iron lizard on her workbench slightly so Vidomina could see. It was cooling now, and was taking on its final matt grey lustre that made it unappealing as a work of art, but functional for Josephine’s use.
Vidomina left the crowded shelves and came over to Josephine’s workbench, standing at her shoulder to get a better view. She wore a delicate, floral perfume that didn’t seem to fit her, but offered a pleasant alternative to the sulphur Josephine usually found her own self smelling of.
“And how will you animate this little creature?” She asked, curious as anything.
“I don’t know that it will work,” Josephine offered by way of pre-empting any disappointment, but it wasn’t strictly true - the theory said it would, and she’s based that on her own work with the metals in question. But with someone else there, watching her with piercingly intelligent eyes, she wanted some visible results.
Josephine picked up a length of cotton and dragged it through a plate of olive oil before using it to wrap the lizard tightly, leaving just its head exposed, protuding above her fist. Holding the model carefully, she picked up a vial of quicksilver from her rack and slowly dropped one... two... three... drops into the gaping mouth. As the quicksilver flowed into the animal’s hollow insides, she switched the vial in her hand for an awl and held it in a candle flame for a few seconds before carefully carving a glyph into the lizard’s palate. A tilt of the hand brought the quicksilver flowing back, running smoothly over the carved letter.
She put the lizard down gently, and carefully unwrapped the cotton. It was already warm in her hand, and she was worried it would melt or rust away, but after a second, it slowly moved its head to the side, and lifted a foot, starting the process of dragging itself determinedly to where a pile of parchment offered a marked shadow on her bench.
She heard a sharp intake of breath - Vidomina had gasped beside her.
“Look at that! Animated iron.”
“It’s a start,” Josephine said, watching the lizard for any signs of instability. “The robustness of the animation depends on size. It’ll be some work to scale up the process to something of a useful size.”
Vidomina bent down, over the workbench, and watched the lizard, before turning her attention to the other things on the workbench. She picked up the vial of quicksilver and swirled it around, watching the liquid metal slide over the glass. Then she picked up a jar of ground sulphur, tapping the side so the yellow powder jumped in its repose, before replacing the jar next to the small collection of unrefined sulphur brought in from the dunes that had yet to be prepared. Josephine watched her for a few minutes: picking things up, peering at them and replacing them; and then got on with the work of recording the her results.
“I’ve been reading your research notes,” Vidomina said after a while, moving out of Josephine’s immediate vicinity just long enough to find herself a stool to sit at the workbench alongside her.
Josephine looked up, surprised: “Really?”
It wasn’t inconceivable: all of Josephine’s published work was available in the library for anyone who had the time and inclination to find it. But her treatise on golem animation had been simplified into a single leaflet so the apprentices working in the factory knew everything they needed. Since work on animation had been widely accepted to have no significant impact on longevity research, and even less to contribute to transmutation, most alchemists considered golems to be a distraction from more important pursuits. So a strange necromancer, seeking out her work specifically to read, was unexpected.
But Vidomina merely smirked at her surprise.
“I was covering similar ground before my exile. Animation of inanimate tissue. But I didn’t expect to have the kind of success you did by refining the gargoyle process.”
“Because you believed that gargoyles were limited by material, not anima.”
“Well, that’s what most of us are taught in our apprenticeships.”
Josephine gave a small smile, tucking her hair behind her ear as she thought. It was true: the gargoyle animation was so old, and so basic, that people had long since given up on refining the animation process, until she started experimenting with fixing the anima more strongly to the form.
“Well, it’s not entirely untrue. The traditional gargoyle technique involves binding parts of the anima mundi to the stone. The more varied the composition, the stronger the bind, but the more limited movement. Golems are more individual: the anima interacts directly with the form. You’ve read Piquedram?”
“The world expert in gargoyles? I’ve skimmed his abstracts. His style’s always been a bit too ponderous for my taste, at least for the actual content beneath.”
“I consulted with him a few times in the early stages,” Josephine explained. “His monographs are founded on years of unpublished work on material properties that he only published a fraction of.” She lifted her pen to indicate boxes of partially sorted paperwork piled on shelves above her ceramic menagerie.
“Once I looked into it, I realised that the improvements he was proposing to the material would open the door to animation refinements that researchers had dismissed as impossible.”
“And thus proved centuries of accepted dogma to be so much nonsense.”
Josephine looked up at Vidomina, but couldn’t find anything in her face to suggest that she’d intended that as sarcasm. “Rather, centuries of research led to new understanding and the development of new ideas.”
“If you want to put it like that.” Vidomina smirked again, and leaned forward, holding her hand out to the lizard, which had grown still with no stimulus to respond to. She cast a small cooling spell, and watched it shift and lumber towards a pool of sunlight to warm itself up. “Still, you broke free of the obsession with material. Even I was stuck in the thinking that animation relied on substance.”
Josephine’s understanding, growing slowly since the meeting at the prison, came to light now.
“Organic matter,” she said, and even as the words formed, she realised what she hadn’t even considered. “Already contains the channels required for the anima to flow.”
Golem animation took hours, sometimes days, to prepare the form so the anima flowed properly. Vidomina’s necromancy had been comparatively instantaneous.
“Right.” Vidomina looked up, meeting Josephine’s eye with an expression somewhere between smug and delighted. “All the restrictions from using stone are meaningless when you could just use nature’s own animate materials.”
It was a few seconds before Josephine was aware of the weight of silence between them.
“That’s why you were exiled,” she said, stating the unspoken.
“That’s why I was arrested,” Vidomina replied, “Gavin had me locked in isolation for years for my heresy - before you came to my rescue.”
“Gavin sent me to rescue you.”
“Oh yes,” Vidomina replied, and waved a hand. “Gavin sent you to murder the greenskins and break me out, because he knew it would bind me to him in a way that simply admitting he was wrong wouldn’t manage. There are rules, of course. Now he has use for me, he lets me pretend to be free.”
Josephine said nothing - there were rules, that was true, but she wasn’t prepared to risk a charge of treason by agreeing with Vidomina’s accusations. She let the necromancer continue.
“Anyway, that was the real reason I came down here. To thank you for rescuing me and to tell you I’m to be on my way. Bracada is expanding its territory to the west: there is a newly conquered Necropolis in a valley that offers some strategic advantage - I’m to raise an army and protect that advantage with my life.”
Josephine thought about this: “I’m sure you could also continue your own work much easier in a town like that,” she said.
Vidomina laughed. “Well, aren’t you the optimist?” she said. “Farewell, Josephine. I look forward to hearing about your newest breakthrough when we meet again.”
The wind slapped Josephine sharply in the face, leaving her sore and red within seconds of stepping out of the factory. She pulled her hood up over her head and squirreled her hands away into her cloak as she walked out into the chill. On either side of her, the street was lined with bone white heaps of snow, left by one of the golems the factory leased out to the city to clear the roadways. The skeletons of dormant trees, gifted from Avlee and non-native to the region, flanked her way to the tavern, and she picked her way carefully, aware of the death trap that the flagstones could be in this weather.
Winter had hit suddenly, it felt like. But Cloudspire’s residents never minded the cold. The warmth from the tavern spilled out in a red glow on the snow, and the chatter within nearly drowned out the heavy tock of the clock tower.
Amrita was waiting at the door, tucked away from the wind despite the heavy fur lined cloak she wore over her upper body. Her tail stretched out into the building, tip flicking gently in the warmth of the roaring fire. She laughed when she saw Josephine fighting against the icy wind, and held out two of her hands in greeting.
“Whatever possessed you to think that was suitable attire for this weather?” she asked, tugging Josephine further inside. “Did you even look out of the window?”
“My work’s light sensitive - I’ve had the curtain drawn for some while,” Josephine said. This wasn’t exactly true, but she didn’t even notice the lie as it slid out. “I suppose I thought I had another week until the storm hit.”
“Ah well, such is winter in Cloudspire,” Amrita said. Drawing into the tavern, they both removed their outerwear and settled at a table in the centre, where the noise was at its peak but where the storm couldn’t reach them. “And you, of course, when the inspiration hits you. Hard at work, alchemist?”
Josephine nodded. A week ago she’d delivered to the factory floor her final designs for the iron golems, and that had been later than she intended: as her attention had been somewhat stretched with other ideas. Although she had no particular aim in her sights, she’d still not been out of the factory in longer than she cared to admit.
But the iron golems had been successful, and the ringing of their movements was becoming a frequent sound, not just in the factory itself but out in the city. She’d heard of people coming in to buy more and more golems to add to their army, and pleasing reports of their increased strength and resilience on the battlefield. It had taken some work to refine, but it appeared to be worth it, for the advantages offered by the golems.
Amrita was talking, undoubtedly aware that Josephine’s mind had wandered by the way she watched the human’s hands turning the cup in front of her, as if the coffee within had the answers to a burning question. Josephine looked up, to apologise for her lack of manners, and finally noticed the crown that her friend had been wearing all this time.
“Your mother...” she started, realising immediately that wasn’t the way to broach the subject.
“...is at peace,” Amrita finished, inclining her head. “It was a long fight, but she gave it her all.” If she was offended that Josephine hadn’t noticed before, she didn’t say so. “Half a moon ago. We don’t usually announce these things among the humans.”
Status among the naga was complicated, and generally none of the business of other peoples. Naga Queens were not equivalent to the Kings and Queens of Bracada, Avlee or Erathia, and they had little impact on the naga’s alliance with Bracada. As Josephine understood it, Amrita now had responsibility for a small tribe of naga among the residents of Cloudspire’s Pavilion, which would include her siblings, their spouses, and children. Josephine has once compared it to being dean of the university and Amrita had laughed, but not definitively agreed.
“Will you be staying in the city?” Josephine asked, trying to ignore the selfish pang of regret the idea gave her, but she was relieved when Amrita shook her head, the jewels in her crown catching the firelight.
“Not for as long as you will have me at your side, alchemist. We’ve been too far together.”
Josephine smiled, and drank from her coffee as Amrita continued:
“In fact, two of my sons would like to join you on your next campaign, if you’d have all three of us? Though should we fall in battle, I must ask you to leave us be.”
The gasp that caused in Josephine almost made her choke on her coffee, and Amrita snickered lightly.
“I’m joking, alchemist. I forgot quite how taboo certain subjects were among your people. I know where your lines are drawn.”
“Why would you...?” Josephine protested, her nerves unsoothed by Amrita’s protestations.
“Hush! I’m just talking about your new friend. I’ve seen the bats arriving from the west and flying straight to the factory. Who would you be writing to that employed vampires as messengers?”
The heat from the fireplace burned hotly on Josephine’s cheeks. “She has an interest in alchemy.”
Again, Amrita laughed at her. “And you, my friend? You have an interest in her.”
They exchanged letters every couple of days. From her workshop in the town of Blackquarter, Vidomina had questions about golem animation and the interrelationship between the metal composition and the flow of anima within the individuals. Josephine found that explaining her work in letter format was an effective method of ordering her own ideas, and clarified them in a way that the formal composition of monographs and treatises couldn’t work for her. She’d also had her interest piqued by the conversation they’d left unfinished: the possibilities of organic matter as a conduit for anima.
So Josephine had closed the heavy curtains in her workshop, and brought in a handful of owl pellets she collected from the base of the castle. Picking one apart carefully, she started to investigate the properties of bone.
She started dropping ideas into her letters to Blackquarter. Things like “Calcium is behaving better under stress than I thought it might” and “the mercurial properties of iron in solution are opening up a range of possibilities.” In return, she received remarks such as: “I was thrilled to hear about your interest in carbon compounds” and “Do ask the bearer of this letter his opinion on your ferrous studies.”
It was fascinating, but not as straightforward as Josephine had imagined it to be. The tiny bones did react better to animation than inorganic metals, but corroded too quickly. Josephine’s first investigations involved a very simple flow of anima through individual bones, with no demands on animation. They seemed to flow freely at first, but two days later she would find her work crumbled to ash in the tray. Wood did the same thing.
At the marketplace one day, refreshing her supplies of sulphur and ore, Josephine passed an artist’s stall that sold small figures and curiosities. She knew the man who ran it - an apprentice mage who carved for a hobby and sold his own and sourced work to fund his research. Josephine had bought from him plenty of times before - sandstone and clay figures for her animation experiments. Today, she paused to look at some of his other wares - small animals and figures carved out of ivory.
Josephine bought a miniature horse, a fox, and a curled up snake, all in elephant ivory, and brought them back to the workshop. Clearing a space on her workbench, she started the slow, laborious work of animating these as miniature golems.
The intricately carved fox, that had cost Josephine a good portion of her weekly wage, exploded the instant she finished etching the glyph. The force knocked Josephine back off her stool, a cloud of sulphur-smelling smoke billowing out into the workshop. Her gloves had caught alight, and she ripped them off to save injuring her hands any more.
The fox had disappeared, leaving a few small hot fires burning in odd spots over her bench, and Josephine scrambled to dowse them all, adding steam to the smoke that was burning her throat.
She propped a window ajar and fled to the safety of her sleeping quarters to let the workshop air.
That evening she wrote of her experiment to Blackquarter. Vidomina replied:
“Silly goose. You can’t force a channel across existing pathways. Use the loci that already exist.”
Josephine had been putting it off. But she knew what it meant. Anima flowed through fixed pathways in the body. In the animation of gargoyles and golems, the pathways were forged in the initial creation. But living bodies had their own - and forcing the anima to run counter to these pathways was explosive.
On the very first day she’d dissected a pellet, Josephine had isolated and arranged the most complete skeleton she could find - a shrew, if her cranial anatomy was correct. It now resided in a small casket on a cabinet to the side of her workshop, where she’d never had any intention of disturbing it. The day after receiving Vidomina’s latest letter, Josephine cleared her workbench entirely except for a very few tools, a gramme of sulphur and a tiny vial of quicksilver. She laid out a silk kerchief on the surface, and reverentially laid out the shrew in front of her.
With the curtains drawn, the only light came from a sconce on the wall and her working candle. Still, the bones shone in the warm light, appearing almost to glow even before she started anything. Josephine checked the bolts on the door, and used candleflame and alcohol to clean the end of an awl.
Josephine had no need for incantation - she made a silent prayer to whoever had oversight for small mammals, and started to work.
She painted sulphur onto the bone ends where cartilage would have been, and pushed each tiny object together with a thin yellow cushion in place of every joint, and between each broken section of spine. Holding her hand as steady as she could, she carved a tiny glyph on the cranium and dotted pinpricks on the scapulae and sacrum. With one final offered blessing, she carefully dropped quicksilver into the marks.
The quicksilver flowed into the glyph and expanded, glowing silver then white, then yellow, with a warm glow that seemed to spread; a cold fire setting to the sulphur at the joints and flowing down the skeleton from the head to the tail. Josephine moved her hands away as the glow turned orange and red, flared up then suddenly faded away.
Two red pinspots of light appeared in the eyesockets.
The metacarpals began to vibrate, then twitch, then flex.
Slowly, but not as slow as any stone golem, the shrew began to pull its limbs in and lurched up onto its incomplete feet.
It tilted its skull, and turned up to look at Josephine.
She looked back at her work.
She gradually became aware of a cold pressing to her hands and heart, of a small pit of nausea in her stomach.
She was a necromancer.