Page 58 of Inkpot Gods

“How did it end?”

“Diana died.” There’s a calm to that reply that Lilianne doesn’t like. They were just wandering around a lab made possible by the sacrifice of one of the Lunars, and yet she doubts even its architects were that unbothered by the idea of ending a life.

Smita holds up her hands, apparently reading the direction of Lilianne’s thoughts in her expression. “Oh, no, none of us killed her. It was a Lunar thing. We just weren’t horribly upset when we found out about it, especially given what she’d done.”

“What did she do?”

“She was selling other Lunars out to the alchemists. It turns out that incarnate moon gods don’t like it very much when you treat them like exploitable resources, and they hit back as soon as they saw an opportunity. The alchemists left Berkeley for a reason, Lily. And Berkeley isn’t in any hurry to have them back again.”

Lilianne is speechless. She leans back into the couch and just stares at Smita.

Smita sighs, head drooping. “I’m sorry I lied to you. I really didn’t feel as if I had any choice, not when you were talking about finding things that we’d decided were best left lost. If it helps at all, I felt bad leading you on. I should have said something right from the start.”

Lilianne tries but can’t quite conceal her wince. If Smita had openly admitted to everything she knew about the alchemical world right from the start, she would have asked her to stay behind, to go away and let Lilianne search on her own. The pendulum had worked; Lilianne would have managed to find the lab with or without Smita. And if she’d found it on her own, she has every faith that she would have died down there. Their escape had been partially luck, but mostly Smita’s friends caring enough to come looking for her—caring, and having the particular set of skills that had made finding her possible.

“It’s okay,” she croaks, throat dry and words reluctant. “I wish you hadn’t lied, but I can’t be mad that we’re both still alive.”

“Good,” says Smita, relief obvious. “I would hate to have you mad at me because we didn’t die. I won’t lie to you again if I have any choice in the matter.”

“Good.” A wave of weariness washes over Lilianne. She closes her eyes, sinking deeper into the softness of the couch.

Then Smita’s hands are on her shoulders—and both those things are miracles, Smita touching her and the absence of pain when she does; both of those things are sweet dreams she would have been perfectly content to leave unrealized, being practical enough not to wish for the truly impossible—and she’s being pulled back into a proper sitting position. “Hey,” says Smita. “No sleeping. It’s time for staying awake. We need to get you downstairs so we can feed you properly, and you can meet everyone else.”

“How many people are in this house?” asks Lilianne sourly, opening her eyes unwillingly. “I didn’t sign up for some sort of Addams Family reunion.”

“We’re not the Addams Family,” says Smita. “We’re not all related, although some of us are very related. Some of us are more related than is technically biologically possible.”

Lilianne tries to puzzle through that statement, then abandons the attempt as her head begins to throb again. She’s too tired for this. She’s lost too much blood.

Although she supposes it’s not lost. She knows exactly where she left it. It’s just that the greatest alchemist in the world wouldn’t be able to extract it from solution and return it to something that could fill her veins. The blood she left behind in the lab is gone forever, no longer hers, never to belong to her again.

“I don’t want to go down stairs,” she says instead, a weak defense against a frightening situation.

“I’ll be right there to make sure you don’t fall.” Smita slides to her feet, still holding Lilianne’s shoulders, then slides her hands down the other woman’s arms until she’s gripping Lilianne’s wrists, pulling as hard as she can without hurting her.

Lilianne groans. She’s bigger than Smita; she could stop this just by pulling briskly away, and might even get a lapful of Smita for her troubles. But Smita looks so earnest, so hopeful, and she really does want to understand how they were able to heal her shoulder so quickly; she should be looking at months of recovery, not wishing for a little arnica to ease the ache away. So she stands, allowing herself to be pulled, and tries to repress the flash of delight she gets when Smita beams at her, bright as a floodlight.

Smita is not her friend. Smita lied to her. Smita has taken her to a house full of people who apparently know more than normal people are meant to know about the alchemical world. Smita can’t be trusted. She needs to remember that, no matter how pretty Smita is when she smiles.

She has to remember.

Smita releases her right hand but keeps hold of her left, pulling her through the sun-soaked library to the door on the far end. “The house is a little weird, architecturally speaking, but it’s not dangerous,” she says. “Just keep your eyes on me, and don’t pay attention to anything that doesn’t make sense.”

Then she’s opening the door and pulling Lilianne into a U-shaped hallway illuminated by carnival-glass skylights. It’s like walking through a rainbow, or into a cartoon, something from the eighties, when technology had just discovered a way to display every color the eye was capable of perceiving and animators decided to throw them all into the same scene as often as they possibly could. The walls are lined with more shelves, and many of those are lined with books, but they seem almost incidental after the book-choked confines of the library.

There is, as promised, a staircase leading down. Smita goes first and Lilianne follows, taking each step one foot at a time, like someone recovering from a long illness: she steps down, waits to be sure she has her balance, then adds her second foot to the same tread, pausing before she retreats the process. It’s slow, and makes her feel terribly fragile.

Smita doesn’t say a word, only keeps guiding her down, to a dimmer second floor that looks like it’s mostly used for residential purposes, individual doors closed against the public spaces. There’s another staircase there, and Lilianne barely has time to catch her breath before Smita’s guiding her down this one as well, into another sun-soaked hall, this one clearly on the ground floor: there’s a door with several inset glass panels (more carnival glass; was this house built by circus performers) that must lead to the outside, and rather than stretching out in front of the stairs, the hall flows around them and leads deeper into the house, creating a central corridor that only makes sense on the ground.

The front door is at the far end of a small, box-like entry foyer, large enough for two more doors, one to the left and one to the right: the lefthand door is closed, but Lilianne can hear voices from behind it, deep in some incomprehensible conversation. Smita starts tugging her in that direction. Lilianne digs her heels into the floor, refusing to be moved.

“Do I have to?” she asks.

Smita turns to give her a half-frustrated look. “You do, actually,” she says. “You’d be dead now if Artemis and Erin hadn’t come to find us, and if Isabella hadn’t been willing to come and help Roger talk your veins back together. They were shredded, just like everything around them. Your survival was a group project, and it’s polite to thank the people who did all the work. Which doesn’t include me. I’m good at drawing blood and tying off a few stitches, not at complicated semi-alchemical surgery.”

“Semi-alchemical…?”

“The things that chased us down there are called ‘etiäinen.’ They’re alchemical creations, sort of like the auf, except unlike auf, they don’t start as living things that get taken apart by alchemists who don’t care about other people’s right to exist. They start as inert materials, and they’re brought to life from there. Alchemists seem to create in three categories, as far as I’ve been able to determine: auf when they have a corpse they don’t want to waste, etiäinen when they want a few corpses, and cuckoos when they’re creating life that’s meant to have a more-complicated purpose.”