Page 72 of Inkpot Gods

“Pardon, miss, but they weren’t my anything. They were the children of one of my donor bodies, and nothing more than that. They didn’t have any connection to me. They were just meat by the time I came for them, and they were dead long before they passed into your uncle’s hands. Don’t make the mistake of thinking of me as a human being just because I can carry on a conversation with you. I’m something else entirely. I have been since your uncle took my base components apart and put them back together again.”

“But the sympathies of those original forms remained,” says Asphodel slowly. “Your components had children, and you’ve lived substantially longer than an auf is supposed to. Not ‘lived.’ You know what I meant. You’ve stayed functional.”

“I serve my purpose.”

“The other older auf I’ve met also held together longer than the norm. I thought it was because they’d been alchemists when they were alive, but that wasn’t it, was it? They had children.” And none of them had outlived their creations that she’s heard of. But they, they weren’t supposed to. Auf aren’t built to outlast their makers. Auf are made to serve.

Right up to the end.

“Yes, miss.”

“How long have you known this?”

“I don’t know anything, miss. I do my job and that’s enough for me.”

Asphodel swallows her groan. There’s no point in getting frustrated with Miss Cottingsly: she won’t understand it, and it might slow things down. “Do you know any other auf whose donors had children?”

“Not outside the ones you’ve already mentioned.”

“So it’s the sympathy of the children. Of having something still living that shares your bloodline. It may be something in the nuclein, a sympathy we don’t understand yet, but one that’s still enough to bind.” Asphodel turns back to the table, scowling down at it. Nuclein is a relatively recent discovery, a substance made inside the body and invisible to the naked eye. It might be the lost humor, the thing that brings bile and phlegm and blood all into harmony with one another. Like aether among the elements, it’s the unseen something which quickens the base into the divine.

(In later years, “nuclein” will be understood as a component of DNA, one of the primary building blocks of life. Asphodel wasn’t too far off with her contemplation of humors and natural balance. At the same time, she was so far off that she couldn’t have reached the truth in a hundred years. She might go on to be lauded as the greatest alchemist North America had ever produced, but even she had her limitations.)

“It can’t be blood,” says Asphodel thoughtfully. “Not if the fathers of alchemists are also able to benefit from this sympathy. The father contributes no blood, simply a quickening—the nuclein must be involved in the expenditure of generative seed. It’s the only thing that makes the process of conception and the father’s contribution make sense. We can see that contribution in the child, once born, but he gave nothing but a moment of ejaculation.”

She’s wondered, often, whether her hair was a gift from her father, or whether she looks as much like her mother as her uncle has sometimes implied. She knows Elisabet was no beauty, that any loveliness she has, she must have generated on her own, or received from the storm who sired her.

His name is yet and will forever be a mystery to her. There are candidates, some more likely than others, and she suspects she knows which it was, but there’s no way of being certain, not without summoning him the way she once summoned Dionysus, and she has done no god-working since the day Phaesyle bled out before her. Even if her father isn’t a member of the same pantheon—and she truly believes he is, that none of this makes sense if he isn’t—he’s unlikely to accept her slaughter of a minor, harmless goddess without some complaint. She’s almost done with her education. She doesn’t have the strength or the skills to stand up against a god in the fullness of his power and deny him anything he might desire from her.

And given the god she suspects sired her, his desires could be virtually anything. He’s never shied away from bedding his own children before, after all.

“Auf aren’t alive,” she says, speculatively. “They don’t grow, don’t change. And for most auf, their only sympathy is with the dead who were used to create them. They’re made already linked to the grave. But an auf with children, they have sympathy among the living. They can draw on their descendants to revitalize themselves when the spark of their creation begins to fade.”

Miss Cottingsly says nothing, only stands in patient silence and watches her work through the implications.

“Any living child is sufficient. It’s that link to the living that matters. Using parents at the exclusion of all others would make it easier to build a workforce, to create a legion of auf who could continue to fulfill their purpose long after their creators would have reason to expect. It could save so much labor over time.”

“Yes, miss,” says Miss Cottingsly.

“But it’s not enough,” says Asphodel, voice dripping in despair. “It’s not an Invention, just an expansion of something others have created and refined. It’s not an Innovation, either, because you already exist; my uncle innovated when he made you, whether he understood or not. I could work and work and work, and it would change nothing of my station.”

“What will you do?”

“If it’s the nuclein that matters, I’ll find a way to better isolate it,” says Asphodel. “The aether of the body is a true innovation. It may have existed from the beginning, but if I can stabilize and understand it, I can change everything we know. I can remake the world in my own image.”

“Then you understand what you need to do next?”

“I do,” says Asphodel serenely. “Bring me my book. This won’t take long.”

Three months later, Asphodel is nearly at the end of her year of Invention, and she has as yet created nothing. She has refined some processes, found some answers that others have sought before her, but has failed to change the world. She’ll be a footnote in some greater alchemist’s history if she can’t finish some grand invention before the year turns, another forgotten failure.

And because she’s the first woman whose training has been approved by the Congress in over two decades, she’ll drag all the other aspiring female alchemists down with her. The fear of exactly that is what has her in her uncle’s study at almost midnight, working despite the winter storm that rages outside, lightning lashing hard against the sky. The world is so wet since she brought back the rain. People older than she is tell her that this is the norm, not the drought that comprised the majority of her life; it’s supposed to rain and storm and empty out the heavens on a regular basis, like the sea is trying to come to land and reclaim the people who once left it so unkindly behind.

She doesn’t care for it much. She has a certain fondness for the rain, since restoring it allowed her to pursue the thing she’s wanted for as long as she can remember, but that doesn’t mean she wants it keeping her awake, weighing down her hair, dampening her skirts, and otherwise inconveniencing her. She would gladly cast it aside again, if she could only find the Invention she needs.

But there is no Invention here. Only the flicker of her uncle’s futuristic electric lights—he, along with the city’s other alchemists, was among the first to have his home wired for the exciting new power, and now it flows through their walls, ready to be summoned with the flip of a switch—and the sound of rain are here to accompany her.

Electricity is much like lightning somehow captured and contained in a manmade vessel, the uncontrollable cast in glassed-in captivity. Asphodel can’t look directly into the bulbs for long without ghostly afterimages dancing behind her eyelids, and so she looks off to one side, considering the light.