Page 90 of Inkpot Gods

Kelpie’s feelings about Margaret will never be untangled, and maybe Margaret saw her as an owner sees a pet, but she still saved her life. Kelpie won’t forget that.

“I think we can move deeper,” says Artemis. She doesn’t shoulder her bow, keeps it out and ready to fire at anything that moves.

Kelpie nods, and turns to start down one of the short halls that branch off the main lab like spokes of a wheel. Artemis follows.

They’re almost to the door at the end of the hall when a voice speaks from the shadows, poisonously sweet and slightly lisping, like the speaker is trying to navigate a set of inhuman teeth.

“Little cuckoo, you’ve returned,” it purrs. “I never thought to see you haunt these halls again. Come to join the other ghosts? We’ve saved a space for you in the depths.”

Kelpie stops in her tracks, still looking straight ahead. Behind her, she knows Artemis has done the same. They’re both too smart to look behind themselves. Anything that speaks out of the shadows like this is unlikely to attack as long as it remains unseen. That might not work with natural animals, but with alchemical creations, refusing to see them directly is often the surest means of survival.

“Did you take the bodies?” she asks. “If you’ve saved a space for me.”

“There were no bodies,” says the voice. “Of the staff of this lab, only the subjects walked as cuckoos do, and only they survived the purification. Of course, a cuckoo’s flesh is flesh still, and they needed to eat if they wanted to survive. Sad for them, that they were all so well confined. They couldn’t get out, couldn’t get away, couldn’t do anything but dwell and die where they were. You were our only loss, little cuckoo, our only survivor. Now that you’re home, we’ll have the full collection once again.”

“And the other cuckoos?” She was never on the staff for those experiments, wasn’t allowed to work around the cuckoos. Something she resented once, but now sees as the blessing Margaret intended it to be. She has no faces to put to the bodies the thing in the shadows describes. They’re only shadows to her, and as long as they can stay that way, she doesn’t have to mourn them.

“We took them when their eyes went dull, when their hearts stopped beating and the flesh began to cool. They were ours by right. We hungered, and the final alchemy they performed was to fill our bellies, for a time.” The voice is getting closer. “Might you do the same?”

“No,” says Kelpie. Her voice is strong and clear, and for a moment, she’s proud of that. For a moment, she’s untouchable. “I am not on the menu.”

“Listen to the lady, beast,” says Artemis.

“Lunar,” hisses the voice. “We do not answer to you.”

“No, but you’ll listen to me, if you don’t want to find out how much of you I have to ruin before the rest of your ‘we’ comes for lunch,” snaps Artemis.

“Ruin?”

“Injury is no disgrace,” she says. “Warriors bear scars. Losing a piece of yourself in the course of the hunt is unavoidable, and no one should shame you for it. But if I were to slice you bit from bit, little pieces of you dropping to the ground and severed from the whole, skin flayed and muscle exposed … I could ruin you. One cut at a time.”

She makes it sound so reasonable that Kelpie stiffens, reminded what sort of woman she’s welcomed to her bed, what sort of ageless authority she sleeps beside at night. She is a cuckoo and Artemis is a natural incarnate, but even apart from that, they embody forces of such dramatically different power that it’s like comparing the sun to a candle.

The etiäinen that’s been taunting them—for it can be nothing else—hisses wordlessly, and although she can’t hear it moving, Kelpie has the distinct feeling that it’s pulling away, moving farther into the shadows.

“I can mirror neither of you,” it complains, tone turning sour. “I’m supposed to pluck an image from your mind and make myself over in its image, and then anyone who doesn’t share that face can be meat for me. But when I look into your minds, all I find is the shining of the moon.”

“Then you should leave our minds alone,” says Kelpie reasonably. “We’re going into the office now. It was very nice to meet you.”

“No, it wasn’t,” says Artemis.

“No, it wasn’t,” agrees Kelpie. “But it’s important, when you’re dealing with alchemical constructs, to maintain a veil of civility. If you’re polite to them, they have to be polite to you, at least to a certain degree. So we play nicely, and then they do the same.”

“That sounds like something out of the Up-and-Under.”

“Of course it does. The Up-and-Under is something out of alchemy. The rules they follow there came from the rules as written here.” Margaret’s office door is unlocked. Kelpie opens it easily, looking back at Artemis for the first time since they entered this hall. Are the shadows behind her deeper than they ought to be? Is something hidden there?

“Everything changes so that it can stay the same,” says Kelpie. She musters a frail smile for Artemis, who returns it and then follows her into the small office beyond the door.

Like the desks in the main lab, Margaret’s personal effects are still in their original places, pictures tacked to the corkboards on the wall and adorning the edges of her monitor. There are a few small toys and pieces of art mixed in with the books and piles of papers. It looks like she just stepped out for a moment. It looks like she’ll be right back.

“I was never allowed in here unsupervised,” says Kelpie, walking over to the desk and resting her fingertips against the blotter. “Margaret didn’t like it when people touched her things.”

“Most people don’t,” says Artemis. She steps out of the doorway, closing the door behind herself, and freezes.

“Kelpie,” she says, in a very carefully calm tone, “what was the order of floors here?”

“This is the main lab. It’s at the bottom of the structure,” says Kelpie, continuing to study Margaret’s desk. “This was mostly used for theory and formulation. We mixed a lot of necessary solvents here. Which is a little odd, because it meant the fumes had to travel through the longest possible distance in order to clear the lab. We should have been mixing caustic chemicals closer to the surface, if we were going to mix them at all.”