complicated process; destroying it is even more difficult. Still, a few drops of the thing can go a long way toward making the supposedly impossible happen. Even death, it seems, can be dissolved.
The woman who calls herself “Asphodel” walks a slow circle around the table, studying her handiwork for flaws. She finds none, but still she circles, restless as a shark, unwilling to commit to the final stages of her task until she’s certain. Certainty is a requirement of her profession, a bone-deep, rock-solid certainty that her will is strong enough and her desires are clear enough to remake the world in her own image.
She isn’t the greatest alchemist of her age yet, but she’s going to be. There is absolutely no question in her mind of that. If she has to drag those fools in the Congress kicking and screaming into the bright and beautiful future she can see unfolding ahead of her, she’ll do it, and she won’t be sorry. If they didn’t want to follow her, they should have had the sense to get the hell out of her way.
Asphodel Baker is twenty-one years old, thirteen years away from the publication of the book that will cement her legacy in the hearts and minds of children everywhere, twenty-three years away from her disappearance and “death,” and she can no more conceive of failure than a butterfly can conceive of calculus. She’s going to change the world, remake it in a better image than the one it’s made in now, and no one’s going to stop her. Not her parents and not her teachers and certainly not the Alchemical Congress.
She was a gifted student: no one who’s met her, who’s seen what she can do, would deny that. The denial of her mastery is nothing but shortsightedness and spite, the old guard refusing to see the bright and brilliant future rushing up behind them like a steam engine roaring down its track. This is her time. This is her place.
This is her chance to show them all.
Asphodel stops circling and reaches for the bowl she has prepared, its contents glowing glittering gold and mercury bright. Dipping her fingers into it, she begins drawing runes down the chest of the flawless body that lies before her, skin naked to the air. He is a beautiful man. Time and care and access to several morgues operated by hungry, unscrupulous vermin have seen to that. She has purchased each piece of him according to her precise specifications. Thanks to the alkahest, there aren’t even any scars. A universal solvent has endless applications, when properly controlled.
When she is done, she steps back and considers her handiwork. So much of her plan depends on this piece being perfect. But what is perfection, really, if not the act of winning? So long as he can carry her to victory, he’ll be perfect, no matter what his flaws.
“You will rise against me, my beautiful boy,” she says, in a voice like honey and hemlock intertwined. “You will throw me down and swear you saw my bones. You will take my crown and my throne and carry my work into the new century, and you will never look back to see what follows in your wake. You will be my good right hand and my sinister left, and when you fall in finishing my design, you will die without complaint. You will do what I cannot, for your hand will never waver, and your mind will never sway. You will love me and you will hate me and you will prove me right. Above all else, you will prove me right.”
She puts down the bowl and picks up a vial filled with liquid starlight, with mother-of-pearl that dances and shines against the glass. She raises it to his lips and pours a single drop between them.
The man she has assembled out of the dead gasps, opens his eyes, and stares at her with fearful wonder.
“Who are you?” he asks.
“Asphodel,” she says. “I am your teacher.”
“Who am I?” he asks.
She smiles. “Your name is James,” she says. “You are the beginning of my greatest work. Welcome. We have so much to do.”
He sits up, still staring at her. “But I don’t know what the work is.”
“Don’t worry.” Her smile is the first brick in what she will one day call the improbable road. Today, now, in this moment, they are beginning their voyage toward the Impossible City.