Page 49 of Alchemised
“Outside,” he said again, a look of irritation flashing across his face as if somehow reading her intentions. Helena retrieved her cloak with a sigh. The lights in the hall were all off, only the dim illumination of daylight trickling through the windows, but she was unafraid. She knew they were only shadows.
She descended the stairs and went to the veranda, standing in the doorway for a moment, but the courtyard was of no interest to her.
She turned to explore the house. She couldn’t help but wonder at Ferron’s choice to drug her. Wasn’t it more convenient for her to be afraid?
He had to have some kind of fail-safe, some trick of keeping an eye on her that she hadn’t realised yet.
She stopped in her tracks, a sudden thought occurring to her, one which had never entered her mind when she’d been consumed by thoughts of shadows.
She turned around and walked back towards the west wing. Ferron was on the veranda, reading a book. He glanced through the open door, but she ignored him, ascending the stairs, scanning every corner as she went towards her room.
She’d rarely looked up. The ceilings were shadowy, the darkness always pressing down on her when she looked too long. She’d focused on her most immediate surroundings, the walls within reach, the next place she’d step, the space between the shadows. She didn’t look up.
There were two dead maids in her room, turning down the bed, the windows thrown open. They dropped the duvet and instantly snapped the windows shut, locking them as Helena entered.
She ignored them, seizing hold of the armchair and dragging it over to the far corner of the room as the manacles bumped against the bones inside her wrist. She stood on the chair and finally resorted to tilting it against the wall, clambering up the back so she could get a good look at the high-up corner nearest the door.
Tucked into the shadow was an eye encased in glass. It swivelled, the pupil contracting, as if it were still alive, and stared straight at her.
The iris was a beautiful, deep blue.
They’re offering a lot of money for eyes, Grace had said.
The upholstery of the chair was slick. Helena slid back, and it thunked onto four legs as Ferron walked in.
“Took you long enough,” he said.
“Are you always watching me?” she finally asked, still staring at the corner. The eye was so cleverly concealed that she could scarcely make it out. How many did he have in the house? It couldn’t be the only one if the speed at which the necrothralls found her was anything to go by.
He scoffed. “Hardly. You’re terribly boring.”
She should be horrified. She would be—but it would have to happen later. In the moment, all she felt was curiosity. She looked at him. He had a book on poisonous plants in hand, index finger marking his page.
“How does that work? I didn’t know you could—reanimate parts.”
“It’s actually easier than thralls,” he said, coming to stand beside her. “Reanimation is like electricity. Just channelling the right kind of energy to where it needs to go and keeping it there. It takes barely anything to maintain something so small once it’s encased in the proper preservatives.”
That was less interesting than she’d hoped. She turned to watch the maids, who were finishing with the room.
They were remarkably reanimated. A person might not notice they were dead. They were agile and precise in their tasks and without any signs of decomposition. It was undeniable that Ferron had a horrific talent for necromancy.
It had to take a tremendous amount of mental resources to maintain and independently monitor them to behave like that. There was a reason necrothralls were mostly used for repetitive labour and battle hordes: Complex tasks were beyond their limited mental capacity.
How was that possible?
She looked at Ferron, scrutinising him.
“You’re not a homunculus, are you?” She felt ridiculous asking the question. Artificial humans were considered as mythical as chimaeras or philosopher stones. One of the many ideas attributed to Cetus in the prescientific era.
Of the three, homunculi were a particularly enduring concept. The idea was that by placing a man’s seed in a cucurbit with the proper environment of stable warmth, it could come to life on its own. After being fed distilled blood, it could grow into a human of limitless alchemical potential and utterly without flaws because it was unspoiled by the inferior environment and contributions of a female womb—the source of all humanity’s flaws.
Ferron stared. “Pardon?”
“Never mind,” she said quickly. Obviously, he wasn’t; she’d known him as an ordinary boy, and a “flawless” human would not be a mass murderer. “I’m just trying to figure you out.”
He laughed. “I suppose I should be flattered that that’s what you came up with, but no, I’m not a homunculus.” There was a pause. “Although Bennet did spend years trying to grow one. All he ended up with was a lot of cucurbits of putrefied sperm.”
She grimaced but eyed him again.
