Page 30 of Tidal Creatures

“I didn’t ask you who might be braiding her hair and singing her happy little campfire songs. I asked you where she went. Surely you’re not incompetent enough that you don’t know that much about the girl who, as you have so casually informed me, represents the greatest alchemical breakthrough this provincial little lab has managed to unlock.” He takes a step toward her, standing straighter as he does, until he looms in a towering collection of angles and bones. “If you’ve lost her, you’ll yearn for the death your superior was granted. I have much less pleasant tools at my disposal.”

The woman swallows hard, all color draining from her face. She makes a pretty picture, rigid and barely breathing.

“Well?”

“The cafeteria and the biology lab,” she blurts. “We let her feed the frogs. It kept her out of the way, and they seemed to like her—they responded well to her, at least, and who knows what a frog likes?”

“Another frog, I suppose.” He stops looming quite so intentionally. “Was any amphibian material used in her construction?”

“No more than the amount needed to stabilize the genetic matrix. Margaret thought it might confuse the sympathies if we crossed clades too much while she was being put together. I’ll take you to the cafeteria, sir.”

“You do that.”

Again, he follows her. She moves more quickly this time, clearly no longer entertaining childish fantasies of rescue and redemption. No one’s coming to save her. It’s time and past time that she admitted that, and he’s faintly impressed that she’s managed to reach that conclusion without any active threats. Too many people in her position think that as long as he’s not twirling the mustache he doesn’t have and cackling, they can still work their way out of the abyss. It’s tiresome. People who get themselves into the position of being listed as “expendable” should have the good grace to understand that it’s an irrevocable designation.

Of course, she might feel the reminder of how efficient alkahest is as a killer to have been an active threat rather than an alchemical fact. He’ll have to ask her while she’s still capable of speech.

He doesn’t pay much attention to where they’re going as she leads him down another set of halls, focusing instead on the architecture of the lab itself. They have subterranean fortifications like this one all over North America, the majority built since James Reed murdered much of the last American Alchemical Congress. Losing so many masters in one blow had been very nearly incapacitating for the continent’s alchemical interests. But their apprentices had survived, in many cases, alongside the independent alchemists, the up-and-coming, the ones whose ways of thinking had been too innovative or iconoclastic for the hidebound structures of the old Congress. Out of destruction could blossom new growth … at least for a while.

The old Congressional holdings had been cleaned out, the bodies removed, the traps disarmed, and the research fairly distributed among the surviving students of the lost masters. Then it had been distributed again, among the survivors of the argument over that ownership, until the strong and the clever had been the true survivors, and the time of rebuilding could begin.

Most of the old lab facilities had been too small, too cramped, and too designed for use by people who had been extending their own lives since the American Revolution, reluctant to consider other ways of doing business. Half the demolished labs hadn’t been connected to the phone system, much less equipped with modern internet, although a surprising number had been accidental Faraday cages, capable of blocking cellular signals with ease. Really, it was a miracle that some of those old masters had been convinced to wire their labs for electricity. Privately, Tristan suspected they wouldn’t have been willing to be convinced, if not for the increasing difficulty in finding apprentices who were willing to work by candlelight, or who inherently understood the safety protocols of carrying an oil lamp in enclosed spaces or around flammable materials. Modernization had come in fits and starts, resisted with every step.

In a way, Reed had done the Congress a massive favor by clearing out the old masters. Oh, knowledge had been lost, but not as much as had been originally feared; even the most paranoid among them had kept reasonably detailed notes, which had proven incredibly helpful once decoded and translated into instructions others could apply to their own efforts. But removing them had opened holes in the power structure, in which new powers had been able to arise, and new work had been able to begin.

The City is still the goal. The City is the goal across the globe, and every Alchemical Congress knows there can only be one winner in the race for metaphysical dominance over the universe. But finally, America is free to pursue other routes toward breaching those hallowed walls, while the other continents and regions continue to labor under the weight of centuries. They aren’t as nimble.

Facilities of the size a modern alchemical organization needed couldn’t be constructed in the open. Not without attracting the sort of attention that rendered the idea of a “secret society” somewhat moot. It was one of the survivors of the old Congress who proposed their current structure, a senior apprentice of a man who’d been trying to recreate true Roman concrete for the better part of fifty years. His theory was that modern material engineers failed in what should have been a reasonably achievable undertaking because they were missing some intangible portion of the process, some magical imbuement that would make it possible again.

His apprentices had been fond of that lost alchemist, making him a rare beast among the dead seniors, many of whom had been unpleasant verging on abusive, and they had continued his work in his absence, with the apprentice who now led the lab-construction efforts making the final breakthrough after she was given access to a dead Lunar for her own studies. She’d extracted a sample of the creature’s blood, taking it back to her own lab for further analysis, and upon spilling it into a batch of concrete in process had discovered the key:

Divinity. The Romans had bled their gods into their construction and been rewarded with a substance that could endure for millennia, that actively repaired itself when it was damaged, that would even grow back if it was chipped away. It was closer to living bone than to stone when looked at under the proper conditions, and all it had taken to mix enough to grow underground laboratories around the continent was ensnaring a few minor gods and trapping them in their ascended condition before bleeding them dry.

Lunar gods have the ability to move in and out of manifestation, much like the moon can wax and wane: one of them might seem perfectly normal and human, then turn around and begin to glow as they took on the aspect of their divine self. Still, there are ways of finding them even when they hide below the surface of their own mortality, and so many of them that it’s child’s play to pick off a few weaker members of the pack from around the edges. Best of all, they aren’t like the Seasons: killing a Lunar won’t cause an immediate search for their replacement. It’s like even the universe understands that they’re an archaic affectation, an oil lamp in a modern laboratory setting, but keeps making them out of habit.

To create a subterranean lab in a matter of days, all the alchemists need now is a dilute form of alkahest to chew tunnels into the earth, a suitable amount of concrete, a Lunar to bleed into their construction materials, and the bones of a dozen murdered innocents. Much like the Hand of Glory’s use as a thief’s best friend, the bones can be infused with slow-burning phosphorus and used to cloak the lab from all but the closest examination.

Alchemical labs have been seeded around North America like anthills or mushrooms after a rain, their entrances concealed beneath buildings secured by the Congress through one of a dozen shell companies, their utilities provided by local grids unaware that they’ve been parasitized, their foundations rendered safe and stable by the blood of the moon itself.

It’s an elegant solution to a problem that’s been looming larger and larger across the years: how are they supposed to transform the world when the world insists on leaving no place for them? Their art has been dismissed by the “proper” sciences, relegated to the sidelines and viewed as little more than another form of witchcraft, powerless and suitable only for sale at Hot Topic. They need space in which to work, shared labs in which to conduct their research, and the freedom to do these things away from prying eyes. Now, with the proper infrastructure finally in place and thriving in a modern setting, they can truly get down to the business of changing the world.

Best of the construction project’s dividends is the wealth of knowledge it’s forced them to acquire about the Lunars. Catching a reliable supply of the weak, often ineffectual creatures meant learning how they operated, where to find them and how to lure them away from their fellows. Some of them protested when they were grabbed, saying they couldn’t be abducted, they couldn’t be held prisoner, because they had an essential job to do.

That was how the alchemists came to learn something new and wonderful about the Impossible City. Tristan would have said there was nothing new for them to learn, not after centuries of studying the place, decades spent trying to break through the walls and take their birthright at the head of the universal powers. But it seemed the City still held her surprises and her secrets, and from the Lunars, they have learned that each night, all over the world, windows appear and incarnate moon gods slip through, becoming that which they embody as they make the slow trek across the sky. They shine on the Impossible City. These small, useless slices of divinity come closer to eternity than most creatures will ever even dream.

The alchemists have also learned—or, rather, confirmed—that Lunars are universally arrogant and self-important creatures, believing themselves somehow special just because they’re touched by an archaic sort of divinity. Efforts have been made to use them to access the City, but even Lunars who know themselves to be on the verge of dying have refused to allow the alchemists access. No amount of cajoling or threatening breaks through their pompous dedication to their duty.

Margaret’s project began as an attempt to get around that dedication. Many Lunars had been represented across the centuries with animal partners of one sort or another, beloved companions who might provide a lever to get that final, essential degree of cooperation. Those animals stopped embodying some centuries before, the universe deeming them unnecessary as people stopped believing in them. That didn’t mean they’d never existed, or that the potential for their manifestation might not still be floating somewhere out there in the ether.

Alchemists could catch Lunars, easily. What they couldn’t do was control them, and control was what they needed. It helped that most of the Lunars with animals worth chasing were on the stronger side—Diana, Artemis, Chang’e. The big gods of their pathetic pantheon. Get one of them to join the cause, and it would be child’s play to either convince or remove the rest of the Lunars, and then? An open door into the City, and a guide to get them there.

The Lunars moved back and forth between states, now mortal, now divine. The recreated embodiments wouldn’t need to do that. If they could be shaped successfully, they wouldn’t be anything other than themselves, with no shifting between states. They couldn’t retreat into themselves to become less of a lever against their primary. They could always be leaned upon.

Margaret’s proposal was sound, and her early results were promising enough that this lab was planted and grown to her specification, hidden in the city with the largest growing concentration of Lunars, right under the nose of Reed’s cuckoos. She was young, clever, and ambitious, and Tristan was honest enough to admit to himself that he’d been expecting the order to kill her because of her success, not because of her failure. The new rulers of the Alchemical Congress liked their positions, and they’d been young and hungry recently enough to not nurture their own replacements longer than they had to.

The long hall from the residential quarters to the cafeteria is carefully devoid of character, with blank white walls and concrete-gray floor and ceiling. When there was always a chance that any sort of accident would require sterilizing the place with an alkahest wash, there was no point in customizing it. Anything apart from the living concrete would dissolve.

Roman concrete, prepared with gods’ blood, survives even alkahest. It’s a fascinating contradiction, a substance the supposedly universal solvent can’t destroy, but the stuff is too useful not to keep making, and if anything, its existence will motivate them to improve the alkahest, to make it what it was truly meant to be.