Page 93 of Inkpot Gods

“Is this a story or an alchemical working?”

Kelpie looks down for a moment, silent. Finally she says, in a soft voice, “We should keep moving. We need to find the others.”

It’s not an answer and it is an answer at the same time, and so Artemis counters with a comment of her own. “This is a hunt now. Follow me.”

She leads Kelpie across the room of flesh, to a doorway like a sphincter leading deeper into the body of this impossible beast. The edges are red, irritated, and raw. She doesn’t want to touch them. She knows, from the undefinable disturbance of the air, that their people went this way; there are no tracks, no trail to follow, but she is the goddess of the hunt, and she can see the signs of passage where no one else would.

So Artemis walks, and this time Kelpie is the one who follows, letting her open the way through the sphinctered door and into the tissues beyond. The next room is humid, the air rank with the smell coming off the impossible skin surrounding them, the temperature elevated by the unspeakable fluids, blood or otherwise, moving through the tissue. The sphincter closes behind them, sealing shut with a terrible squelching sound that makes Artemis’s shoulders tense briefly. They are walking into the impossible unknown. There is no mercy to be expected here.

No mercy, but, as they continue onward, a hairclip, small and copper-toned, the kind that come in packs of twelve. Artemis stoops, plucking it from the floor (which has, she notes with disgust, begun to pulse slightly; whatever terrible fluid keeps it suffused and moist, it is getting more plentiful, and stronger, something neither of them wants to consider much) and turning it over in her hand.

“This is Erin’s,” she says, after a moment of consideration. “She must have dropped it.”

“How distracted would she have to be before she started dropping things?” asks Kelpie, anxiety painted loud across her words.

“She’s the living force of Order. Losing your hairclips is disorderly. I’m going to say ‘extremely,’” says Artemis. She tucks the clip into her pocket, finally re-drawing her bow and readying an arrow. She has no valid targets right now. That doesn’t matter. She feels better with a bow in her hands, and if there’s going to be some terrible danger lurking at the end of all this, she wants to be prepared to fight back. Even if it’s only for a moment before they’re all devoured by something much bigger than themselves.

Even if this is the end.

The thought is surprisingly grim, considering how much they’ve all been through. She’s been here before, in the depths of this lab, and she survived: she not only survived, she came away with a lover and companion, someone to keep her endless nights from stretching on forever. They’re not alone down here. It only feels that way, and even if they were alone, Kim and Tim are back at the house with David. Two unhatched cuckoos and a fully manifest Lunar aren’t the best possible backup, but they’re better than nothing.

Artemis just needs to keep telling herself that. If she can manage to halfway believe it, maybe the smell rolling off the walls won’t make her throat so tight, and maybe the fear of something happening to Kelpie won’t force her heart so high into her throat.

Maybe.

The second room is larger than the first, the shapes of the walls and equipment that used to be here obscured beneath the veil of skin that covers absolutely everything. It’s been split in a few places, none of them particularly fresh, and red ropes of veins and lumpy muscular tissue bulge out of the slashes, wet and terrible. The smell is even worse here than it was before, and Artemis almost gags at the thought of how much worse it’s going to get. There’s a terrible moisture in the air, humid and heavy. Breathing feels almost like chewing.

Kelpie coughs, clearly struggling to keep herself from gagging on her own breath. She shoots Artemis a frantic, wide-eyed look, whites showing all the way around her irises. Her goat-slit pupils are narrowed, making them almost invisible.

“Hey, Kelp. Hey, baby. Breathe,” says Artemis. “I get that you’re freaking out right about now—I’m freaking about as bad—but you need to keep breathing. Please. If you pass out because you stopped, I’ll have to carry you out of here. I can’t carry you and aim my bow at the same time.”

Kelpie visibly fights to calm herself, something that’s hard to do when the air has become the enemy. She looks around, then back to Artemis.

“This was where they kept the live animals,” she says. “Dogs and cats and pigs and monkeys and everything else.”

“Does giving me a list help you feel better?”

“Yes. No. I don’t know.” Kelpie shrugs, looking momentarily helpless. “I know what should be here. I guess that makes it feel like I have to make sure you know, too, so everything that’s lost won’t be forgotten.”

“What’s lost is always forgotten, in the end,” says Artemis, as gently as she can. “Would the animals we’re not seeing have been enough to account for this much mass? If you added in the alchemists?”

“No,” says Kelpie, with assurance. “This is—it’s too much. Even if you liquified everything they kept in here, it wouldn’t have been enough, and there’s no channel to hydroponics, so whatever reaction caused this wouldn’t have been able to obtain more r-raw materials.” She stumbles at the end, apparently remembering that she’s talking about her friends and colleagues, but recovers quickly.

“All right. Where does the next door lead?” Artemis swings her bow around so that her arrow points at another sphincter set into the wall, another hall presumably concealed beyond. “If we go that way, where do we end up?”

“The—the morgue,” says Kelpie, voice small.

Artemis stares at her.

“Margaret always hated it when we called it that, said it was disrespectful to the human bodies we sometimes had down on the bottom floor, but the alchemists who worked up here said that all their subjects deserved to be remembered, and they didn’t want to call it ‘cold storage’ like she wanted them to. So they put all the bodies in here once they were done running their tests, and supposedly the apprentices would take everything up to the surface every few months, but they never did. They just shoved it further and further back in the freezers, and counted on Margaret never coming in here to check.”

“Was that enough to account for all this excess biomass?”

Reluctantly, Kelpie nods. “It could have been,” she says.

“That’s good. That means the lab hasn’t somehow been sending runners out through the sewer and going hunting.” Artemis shudders. “A place like this shouldn’t hunt. It shouldn’t be allowed.”

“It’s not just a straight line down here.” Kelpie points to the other sphincter leading out of this room. “The personal labs are that way. I don’t know what was kept there.”