Page 47 of Inkpot Gods

She’s worried about a lot of things. This is the sort of place one goes to worry.

The voice draws closer, although there isn’t any splashing, and nothing to indicate that the speaker has climbed up onto the desk to make itself more clearly heard. “They won’t come for you,” it repeats. “I can smell the sympathy of your skin. You’re nothing’s incarnate, and you’re no shaper of realities. You’re just a human being. Weak, frail, not worth saving.”

“You say that, but she’s saved me so many times it defies description,” says Smita. “She’ll come for me.”

“And when she doesn’t, when you have to go into the water, I’ll have your pretty little inkpot god-in-waiting for a snack to fill my belly, and make the hours go quicker,” says the voice. “I’ll have her, and my cousin will have you, and we’ll both be fed as we slink back into the shadows to wait for the next little lunches to come wandering down.”

“That’s why you didn’t attack me.” Smita turns abruptly, opening her eyes, and finds herself face-to-face with a parody of herself. It still wears something that is recognizably her face, but rotted and ripped away, with no nose, and with eyes sunk so deep into their sockets that looking at them is like trying to see something deep below the ground, shrouded and shaded and hidden away. Its hair is lush and black, and that alone looks healthy, like all the resources it has left have gone into that hair.

Smita looks at its nearly lipless mouth, its bristling rows of needled viperfish teeth, and smiles with her own soft lips, showing square white teeth designed for nothing more than chewing, not ripping or rending flesh from bone.

“You can’t touch me, can you?” she asks. “Whatever an etiäinen is, you can’t hurt the one whose face you wear.”

“You’ll never get her to dry land, and if you try, my cousin will have you for a prize,” snarls the creature. “I can’t hurt you, but I can hurt her, and my cousin can do what I can’t. You’ll never leave here alive.”

“Maybe that’s so, but you’ll forgive me if I don’t take your word for it.”

The creature draws back from her. Then, to her dismay, it starts to laugh, a sound like gas bubbling up from chambers deep in the earth.

“No need, no need!” it says triumphantly.

It’s not looking at her anymore. Smita’s eyes widen as she realizes that it’s looking past her, to Lilianne. She whips around, grabbing the other woman by the arm just before her slow lean to the side would have sent her tumbling into the water. She yanks, and Lilianne flops over on top of her, blood still leaking from the wound in her shoulder.

Her eyes are closed.

Smita usually tries not to think too hard about the first time she remembers dying. It’s a dark, terrible thing to remember, and more, the human mind is not designed to retain memories of its own death: her thoughts shy away from the reality of what she knows she’s been through, refusing to dwell on the details. But the details are there, buried deep under justifications of careful self-delusions, and she can confront them when she has to.

It was confronting them that led her to take several classes on first aid, on basic paramedic skills. She won’t be ready to serve on an ambulance any time soon, and she’s not planning to go to nursing school, but she can apply a tourniquet and bandage a wound. She knows what to do.

She hasn’t been looking closely at Lilianne’s injuries while she argued with the etiäinen in the water. Now, however, she hasn’t got a choice, and so she looks.

The gashes are as deep as they seemed from a distance, slicing through muscle and fat like they offered no resistance. Somehow, the creature managed to miss the brachial artery, although it’s entirely possible that was on purpose: this is an alchemical creation, after all. It may know enough about human anatomy to play with its food, keeping Lilianne alive as long as possible for the sake of having more time to enjoy toying with her. Smita peels off her sopping-wet lab coat, then looks to the etiäinen. Almost primly, she grabs the cuff of one sleeve and stretches it out as far as it will go.

“Can you cut this off at the shoulder?” she asks. “I don’t have any scissors with me.”

The etiäinen blinks at her. “You want me to help you?”

“If she dies while I’m on this desk with her, I’ll do everything in my power to keep her from falling into the water where you can get her, and if you could take her away from me, you would have done it already,” says Smita calmly. “If you cut the sleeve off like I’m asking, I can bandage her shoulder, and she’ll stay alive. That means you get another chance at hunting her down.”

“You think like an alchemist,” says the etiäinen, and there’s a note of delight in its voice that wasn’t there before. It extends its hand, wiggling its fingers with their surplus of joints, then slashes its claws down and through the sleeve.

The sleeve comes off in Smita’s hand. She looks at it, nods, and says, “Thank you. This will do nicely.”

She turns her attention back to Lilianne, wrapping the cut-off sleeve around her shoulder and tying it tight.

Lilianne screams as soon as the fabric tightens, grinding against the damage that’s been done to her shoulder. Her eyes snap open, and she struggles to sit upright, Smita pushing enough to help her, then grabbing her arm to keep her from toppling off the edge.

“Hey, Lily,” she says, trying to sound soothing. “Hey, you’re okay, you’re okay, you’re—well, you’re not okay, you’ve been ripped open and you’ve lost a whole lot of blood, but you’re as close to okay as you’re going to get until someone comes down here to get us out.”

“No one’s coming,” moans Lilianne. “No one can find this place.”

“We have at least two people who don’t need to find it, because they’ve been here before, plenty,” says Smita. “I’m pretty sure my roommates have been here before. I wasn’t with them, because they try not to lead me into life-threatening situations if there’s any other choice. They still think of me as being innocent and easily frightened. I don’t blame them much. That’s exactly what I was, for the longest time you can imagine. They’ll be here. They’ll come. Whenever I’m in danger, they come.”

Lilianne blinks at her, then slumps against her, not making any real effort to stay upright. “I screwed it all up,” she says, dolefully. “I didn’t find the lost lab. I found the people who’d already found the lost lab, and I let you think I was stupid, just babbling on at you about things you already knew.”

“I never thought you were stupid, Lily. And I wasn’t being fair. I was letting you think all this was new to me, because, well. We’ve had some issues with alchemists in my household. They’re not always very nice people.” She gestures to the etiäinen, the one in the water and the one out of the water. “They make things that aren’t very nice either. It can be a little terrifying sometimes, and we don’t enjoy it. So I didn’t let on that I knew most of what you were saying. And I did learn new things. I learned about you.”

“Me?”