Page 97 of Inkpot Gods

If Asphodel wishes to plan for the future, she’ll need to make herself a more-fitting avatar, a man with the same cuckoo’s nest inside his soul, who can carry her alchemy into the bright and distant world to come. She walks around the house, consumed with thoughts of everything he’ll need to be, everything he’ll need to do in her service.

His body won’t be assembled for another month, pieced together from what corpses she can cobble, what slivers she can steal, but in many ways, this is the moment when James Reed is born: he will be her first intentional cuckoo, her first studied creation, and he will be the one to show the Alchemical Congress the scope and severity of their errors. One day.

Not this day. On this day, Asphodel hurries around the house and out into the meadow, where she sees Eliza in the distance, standing at the edge of the open space, in the tangled shadows of the trees. The child has a stick in her hand, and is using it to prod at something unseen. Asphodel heads unhesitatingly toward her, gathering her skirt in her hands to keep herself from treading on the hem.

As she draws closer, she sees what the girl has found: a rabbit, its neck clearly broken and its gut ripped open, stirred up by some predator’s claws. Eliza is poking her stick into the remains, watching the flesh and organs move around it, a look of intense focus on her face.

“Eliza,” says Asphodel.

The child raises her head and slowly blinks, catlike. There is no guilt or confusion in her expression: her knowledge of good and evil have been lost along with everything else, and she has no cause to question what she’s doing. Not until Asphodel teaches her she should.

Asphodel intends no such thing.

“What do you have there?”

“A rabbit.”

“Did you see what killed it?”

“A hawk.”

“Some of the organs are missing. Would you like to know the names of what’s still there?”

Eliza nods.

Asphodel reaches for her stick. “May I?”

After only a moment of hesitation, Eliza gives it to her, and Asphodel begins using it to indicate the organs remaining inside the bodily cavity, laying a name to each of them. Eliza listens intently, as a normal child might listen to a bedtime story. When Asphodel finishes, Eliza reaches out a hand, silently requesting the return of her stick. Asphodel gives it to her, and watches as Eliza begins to indicate and name the organs, following Asphodel’s lead.

She doesn’t get a single scrap wrong. When she’s done, she looks to Asphodel for approval.

I can do this, thinks Asphodel. I can raise up a full intrusion of cuckoos and set them on the Congress, and they’ll regret that they ever turned me away. I can make their world my own.

“Very well done, Eliza,” she says. “I think you’ve earned an extra serving at supper tonight, don’t you? You’re a growing girl.”

“Can we eat the rabbit?”

“No,” says Asphodel. “It’s been dead on the ground long enough to cool, and we’ve stirred its guts up with a filthy, filthy stick. I can set some snares tomorrow, and we’ll have rabbit for our supper later in the week, but this one, I think we leave to the forest as a thanks for giving us such good shelter.”

Eliza considers her words, then nods gravely and tosses the stick aside before reaching out for Asphodel’s hand.

Asphodel allows it, twining her fingers with the girl’s own, and they walk side by side through the field behind the house where Asphodel was born, together as she was never able to be with her own mother, silent in their respective thoughts.

The first sign that something is wrong comes when Asphodel opens the door to the house and is met with a silence so profound that she can’t pretend there’s anyone else there. The comforting presence that even an auf can generate is gone, replaced by stillness. Letting go of Eliza’s hand, she walks alone to the bed where Miss Cottingsly has been declining, holding her breath and her tongue alike as she waits to see what she’ll discover.

When she steps around the end of the bed and sees what awaits her there, a small sound escapes her lips, even as tears cloud her eyes. She claps a hand over her mouth, simply staring.

“Del? What is it?” asks Eliza.

Working hard against instinct, etiquette, and grief, Asphodel forces her hand down. “Miss Cottingsly has gone,” she says.

“Oh. Will she be back soon?”

“I don’t … I don’t believe so,” says Asphodel. The remains in the bed are not those of a singular woman, but a horrific patchwork of five different women in varying stages of decay, mixed with pieces of animals, stitched together with a practiced hand. She didn’t know auf reverted to their component pieces when they died. Presumably, that was one of the secrets she would have learned in the last two years of her apprenticeship, the things that would have grounded her in her art and granted her the title of alchemist in the eyes of the Congress.

Miss Cottingsly, the woman and the working, is no longer with them. What she’s left behind is what’s unneeded, ready for disposal.

“Oh. What are we going to do now?”