Page 76 of Inkpot Gods

“Then I will set myself against them,” says Asphodel.

John jerks guiltily, pulling himself away from Miss Cottingsly. She looks less startled by Asphodel’s appearance; as is almost always true, she is serene, impassive, as unbothered as the grave.

Asphodel looks like a witch out of a children’s story, gaunt and disheveled, her eyes red and bright with weeping, her lips bitten bloody by her own anxiety. He looks at her and cannot imagine her an alchemist, composed in her ritual robes, content in her small corner of the world. She looks like she belongs among the alchemists of old, swinging wildly at the sun and changing the rules by which the universe functions.

“If you do, they will never forgive you,” he says, through numbed lips.

“Who says I want their forgiveness?” she asks. “They should be the ones who beg for mine. They should bow before me and apologize for their weakness in every way their tongues know how, not expect me to ask them to forgive me for aspiring to something better than the station they would grant me. Does a storm beg forgiveness for raging? Does the rain beg forgiveness when it falls? I am going to be great, Uncle, and nothing they do has ever had the authority to stop me. I am going to change the world. My name will be remembered when their bones are ash and dust, too worn away to even fuel an auf.”

“You’re distraught, my dear; have Miss Cottingsly prepare you a cup of hot tea, and we’ll talk about this in the morning—”

“No!” she snaps, and for a moment he can almost see the lightning in her eyes, almost see the storm that sparks and crackles inside her. He recoils, and she visibly composes herself, shaking her head. “No. I won’t be here in the morning.”

“Asphodel, what—”

“I can’t stay here any longer. The Congress has spoken. They will not finish my education; you will not be allowed to train me. Eliza is a miracle—my miracle, born of my effort and my art. I won’t keep her here where those hidebound little men can wrest her away from me and claim her as a part of their own studies. I’ll take her far from here, to a place where I can educate and understand her. Miss Cottingsly will accompany me.”

“Miss Cottingsly is my creation.”

“And I have more than paid for her, with the blood and bodies of three incarnates. She was operational when I arrived here; as an auf, she can’t have much longer before she begins coming apart at the seams. She’ll do it with me, safely hidden from the world. You won’t be forced to put her down before the public sees her dissolving. If that’s not enough for you, I’ll go with her to the graveyard and we’ll build you a replacement before we take our leave of you. Only promise you won’t pursue us.”

“I can’t leave the Congress,” says John, looking profoundly uncomfortable. “They’ve been my allies for longer than you’ve been alive.”

“I didn’t ask you to leave them. I didn’t ask you to come with us.” Asphodel looks down her nose at him, and he wonders whether this is how the parents of prophets once felt: old and worn out, watching the children they raised become greater and more terrible than they could ever have dreamt they would be. She is a young woman, if old to be yet unmarried, and she is neither an alchemist nor a part of the mundane world around them, and none of that matters, because she is powerful and terrifying, and Miss Cottingsly—his Miss Cottingsly, the auf he crafted with his own hands to serve his interests, to work by his side—Miss Cottingsly is standing slightly behind her now, ready to serve. He didn’t even see her moving.

The American Alchemical Congress has made a terrible mistake on this day, and John Baker is the first person to truly understand the scope of what they’ve done. They may never be forgiven for their trespasses, may spend the rest of their alchemically extended lives attempting to apologize, to make amends to one who has no interest in receiving them, but in the end, they will fail.

Whatever Asphodel intends, she was willing to be restrained for the sake of her art, perhaps—in some small way—for his sake, the uncle who wanted her as soon as he knew she existed, who lifted her out of a life of obscurity and placed her where she could reach for greatness. She was willing to stay small if only the people who controlled the golden gates of wisdom would be willing to open them for her, and when they refused her great and remarkable sacrifice, she became justified in rejecting them.

And reject them she has. He can see it in her eyes. She will never be tamed again.

“Will you write to me?” he asks.

“I will change the world, Uncle John. I will remake it in ways even I don’t understand yet, and I will have your name on my lips as I do. I will study Eliza until I understand what I’ve made in her, and once I do, everything will be transformed. I will storm Olympus, by whatever name you care to call it, and I will have it for my own.”

“How will you begin?”

“One step at a time,” she says, and her smile is a terrible thing, brutal and cold. “That’s how one walks a road, isn’t it? One step at a time.”

“My apologies for interrupting, but we came here to wake the child, and look.” The Page gestured to Zib, who was leaning on Jack’s arm, the tiny flame still burning at her breast. “The child is awake, and seems well enough for all that’s happened to her thus far. The tower is dark. You must return to the Impossible City.”

“And I can’t go,” said Niamh, finally turning around, with a look in her eyes like her heart was being broken.

“Of course you can go,” said Soleil.

“Drowned girls are very possible,” said Niamh. “I went the first time by the graveyard path, as I told you when the road was still with us. The path will not have me a second time.”

“A drowned girl accessing the City a second time is entirely impossible,” said Soleil. “It has never happened, not once in all the days of the Up-and-Under.”

“Then I will stay here, in this dry and blasted place, until Fern returns from wherever the great owls go when they go missing, and then perhaps the Page and I can convince her to carry me back to the Saltwise Sea and let me go.”

“You aren’t listening,” said Soleil, for the first time sounding ever so slightly annoyed. “Anyone dead can take the graveyard path when they want to visit the City. But if they want to visit the City again, they have to find something even more impossible than a dead person following a road. The City will let you in because you’re with me, and because it’s impossible for you to come in a second time.”

“Even more impossible than following a road,” said Niamh, with slow wonder. “Was it always that easy?”

“Not if you were looking the rules head-on, but once you step to the side, yes.”

Avery’s temper caught like the fire burning at Zib’s breast. He whirled on Niamh. “You said all the way back at the beginning that you couldn’t go with us into the Impossible City, and so we walked away, and all this has happened because we followed you! You could have gone there any time you wanted to!”

“No, Avery, she couldn’t have,” said Soleil. “She had to move far enough into impossibility that the gates would open.”

“And if you hadn’t gone on this adventure, so many things wouldn’t have happened,” said Jack. “You found Soleil’s heart! You found the Lady of Salt and Sorrow, and let her be one person again, when she’d been trapped as two for so long! You found the Page of Gentle Embers and made sure she wasn’t alone anymore! You found me. I would still be a captive in my mother’s cage if you hadn’t come along to make me fly for freedom.”

Zib put a hand on his arm, steadying him as he was steadying her, and looked to Avery, her own face pale and drawn, especially when compared to how brightly she normally burned. “We had to walk the improbable road long enough to make the impossible things possible,” she said. “Sometimes it’s about taking the journey on your own. It’s why my daddy gets mad at me when I don’t want to do my homework. He says it doesn’t matter if I’m bored, I need to go through all the steps, or the ending won’t make sense when I get there. We couldn’t go straight to the ending when we were first setting out. It wouldn’t have made any sense.”

“Soleil’s the Queen of Wands, and has been the whole time,” Avery informed her.

“Yes,” said Zib.

“Doesn’t this bother you?”

“Why should it?” She shrugged. “Royalty in disguise happens all the time in the fairy tales, and this is sort of like a fairy tale, if you squint at it and take a few steps backward. She didn’t lie to us, if that’s why you’re unhappy. She didn’t know. Someone who says something that’s true when they say it doesn’t become a liar just because that thing changes.…”

—From Under the Smokestrewn Sky, by A. Deborah Baker