Had I not been daydreaming about the circus, I would have noticed that there was something wrong with my murk wings as I pestled them. Their tiny translucent bodies popped instead of crumbled, and their odor was too pungent to be properly dry, but I wasn’t paying attention. Instead, my thoughts were dominated by images of lights, magick, and scantily-clad acrobats.
I scooped my work into the jar to my right and ignored the way my mixture hissed as the murk wings fell in and started incorporating. It wasn’t until I added two spoons of powdered wormwood a few seconds later and the jar started groaning that I realized my folly.
Cursing, I dove to the floor and scrunched my eyes shut. I covered my ears with my hands as the jar exploded and splattered a slurry of vaguely toxic materials and bits of broken glass all over my workroom.
Even though it wasn’t normal for concoctions to explode more than once, I stayed on the ground for at least thirty seconds, trying to calm my racing heart and slow my breathing before I got back up to survey the damage. There were a few burning spots on my right arm, and a quick visual examination confirmed my suspicion: some of the glass had buried itself in my skin.
Shit.
I got back up to my feet, trying not to watch the tide of purple curse spreading from each wound as I went to the corner of the workroom and grabbed my mop and bucket to start cleaning up. Like most curse wounds, it looked worse than it was. For now anyways. So long as I got the injury treated “soon” – which meant in the next day or so – I’d be fine. A little sore at most.
Of course, if I didn’t get it looked at and taken care of before then, I’d lose the arm. That might sound scary, but I really wasn’t worried; four years in an alchemist’s workroom had almost completely desensitized me to the dangers of working with cursed ingredients. This wasn’t my first accident, and I would have been lying to myself if I said it was going to be my last.
Besides, it wasn’t like my master, Oren, was going to let me go without treatment. Lunar hells, I could already hear him stomping toward the workroom, bellowing at the top of his lungs. The thick walls muffled his words, but I’d heard him shout my name and his favorite profanities enough times to recognize them both.
He kicked the door open like he was one of the king’s own musketeers raiding an unlicensed necromancer, and his scratchy voice shook the workroom’s walls as he stormed into the room.
“Basil! In the six names of the dead god! What are you doing in here?”
My master was a small, impish man with thinning hair and a bushy beard. He sounded angry, but I could see the tiny creases near the corners of his bright blue eyes that only appeared when he was worried, like when I’d caught a nasty case of soot flu in my first month of being his apprentice. Though he’d barely known me back then, he’d sat by my bed for an entire day and night straight, force feeding me an awful mixture of chicken broth and majurika powder until he was certain that I wasn’t going to start coughing up my own lungs.
“Jar exploded,” I said with a shrug as I continued sweeping up bits of broken glass. “Murk wings must have still been wet.”
He glowered at me. “How many times have I told you to be careful with those things?”
“Almost as many as you’ve told me to hurry up with my mixing, master.”
I twanged those last few words a little bit, slipping back into that syllable-swallowing pattern of speech known as orphan’s cant throughout the city, as was my way when I was irritated. “I was just thinking about other things.”
To his credit, my master didn’t react to my outburst the way others probably would have. That wasn’t his way. In fact, in all the time I’d been his apprentice, Oren had never raised a hand against me in anger, though I’d certainly given him plenty of good reasons to want to. Instead, he patiently gestured to the chair next to my work bench and waited for me to sit.
“Are you hurt anywhere?”
I shrugged again. “Just a few scratches on my arm. They sting a little bit, but I’m fine.”
“Let me see. Do they seem cursed?”
I nodded, and when my master saw the tiny purple rings he turned to leave the room.
“Don’t move, I’ll be right back with my kit.”
He stomped back into the hallway, yelling the all clear and telling the other apprentices that it was safe to get back to work.
While I waited for him to return, I drummed the fingers on my uninjured hand against the stained wood desk and watched the long arm on the clock above my door move like a snail. If it wasn’t too far off – which it shouldn’t have been, since Oren calibrated them to the church bells once a week -- there was a little more than two hours before the circus’s first curtain went up. That meant that I had plenty of time to clean up and change into fresh clothes before heading over.
If Oren didn’t rescind his permission for me to go, that was.
My master returned a few minutes later with his healer’s kit under one arm and a battered stool under the other. He sat down beside me and drew out a pair of pliers, sanitizing them with a quick bit of purple sorcerous flame that he conjured out of thin air. Once they were ready, my master opened the tiny bottle of brandy he kept in his kit and handed it to me.
“Take a swig,” he ordered.
I did so, wincing at the burn in my mouth and throat as I swallowed. Unfortunately, that pain was like a kiss from a pretty girl compared to what happened once Oren started ripping the glass out of my arm. I’ll spare you the – surprisingly – gory details. Thankfully, his many years of experience as an alchemist had given him plenty of practice with this kind of thing, and the entire process was finished in less than fifteen minutes.
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Unfortunately, that meant it was time for the monk’s tincture, which was easily the worst part of a curse cleaning. The shimmering blue liquid was said to be a gift from one of the first Saints – Gervain, if memory served – to protect the faithful from the horrors of curse wounds. It was made by boiling laddereal, heglearry, and angel chervil, three common roots, which made it the cheapest way of clearing cursed injuries that I’d ever heard of. Of course, it also stung something awful when it was applied, and I’m not ashamed to admit that I yelped with pain as Oren swabbed each of my wounds.
When he was done and all his tools were put back where they belonged, my master picked up the bag of murk wings I’d been using and stared at the label.
“This packaging doesn’t look like it came from Lina’s,” he said quietly. “It’s thinner than her normal stuff.”
“That’s because I got them from Beron’s,” I admitted, wincing inwardly.
My master’s expression darkened at the apothecary’s name. “How much did he charge you for them?”
“Three and a half crowns.”
My master stroked his chin and closed his eyes. “So, barely a quarter of what Lina charges? I see. Such a discount must be rather attractive for a young apprentice. Especially one with aspirations like yours.”
He was, of course, referring to my desire to join the musketeers, but I wasn’t interested in having that particular argument again just then so I let the comment slide. Contemptuously dropping the bag, Oren gave me a stern look and said, “This is why I tell you apprentices not to shop at Beron’s. His prices are good, but they carry a hidden cost. Everything he sells is crap, and he doesn’t bother checking them properly. Now in addition to the three and half crowns you paid Beron, you get to go pay Lina fourteen for a bag of proper murk wings and another thirty-six for a replacement jug.”
“But that’s fifty crowns!” I spluttered. “That’s nearly a month’s worth of wages!”
“A small price to pay for a lesson like this one, don’t you think?”
He had a little smile on his face that I knew meant there was no point in arguing with him, so I stood back up and said, “Fine. I’ll go to Lina’s and get everything once I’m done cleaning up here.”
“Go ahead and go now,” Oren said. “I want to make sure that all the curse is neutralized before you return so that you can get right back to work. You’re planning on going to the circus tonight, right?”
I nodded.
“Then walk quickly, Basil. I’m sure you don’t want to miss it.”
###
Rain dripped off my umbrella as I carefully navigated my way through the fetid alleys that led to Lina’s apothecary and tried to keep my boots as clean as possible. Normally, I didn’t need to worry about the piles of trash and refuse because I hired an urse cart to take me over, but my pocketbook was pre-emptively reeling and I’d decided to walk instead.
That was probably a mistake, I thought, as I stepped in a pile of something wet and squishy. Holding a rosewater-scented handkerchief over my nose and mouth to guard against the smell, I scraped my boot clean on the nearby wall and resumed my trek.
The streets were emptier than I was used to seeing them at this time of night. Only a handful of shoppers and bar patrons lined the streets. That was understandable, really; people were still wary after the string of disappearances last month, even though the musketeers said they’d caught the perpetrator and things were safe.
Not everyone in this part of town shared my trust of the king’s own.
I opened the door to Lina’s, shook my umbrella dry, and stepped inside. Immediately, the smell of licorice and dried herbs overwhelmed my senses, including a strong whiff of my namesake. Those were always there and I was used to them, but there was something else in the air too. It was smoky and dark; an incense that I didn’t recognize, and Lina’s voice sounded strained as she called out her welcome.
“Who is it, and what do you want?”
Far more curt than usual.
“It’s Basil Ap D’Oren,” I said. “I was hoping to buy some dried murk wings and replace a shattered jar.”
She didn’t answer right away, so I threaded my way through the chest-height shelves that were all stuffed near to bursting and went to the counter. Once there, I looked around the apothecary, craning my neck to try and see if there was another patron already being served. Unlike most apothecaries, who specialized in providing goods useful for alchemy or sorcery, Lina proudly carried products for both. It was a smart decision, as the line between them was blurry, and plenty of practitioners dabbled in each. My master, for example, won prizes in the annual sorcery contests from time to time, using his internal mana to create wonders of magick. Sadly, despite my best efforts, I had no internal mana to speak of, so it was clear that I was doomed to never follow in those footsteps. My lot in life was to grind things into powders, titrate them into liquids, and pray to the random factors that my recipes would work the way I wanted them too.
Not that I was bitter.
In addition to all the pills, enchanted papers, and desiccated insects, Lina also carried books. Most of them were simple tomes, but I knew that she also had a shelf in the back for those interested in the, er, darker cousins of sorcery and alchemy.
Necromancy and diabolism, the so-called dark magicks.
Neither was strictly illegal, of course, but as she was a respectable merchant, she required proof of a king’s license to see or purchase them. I’d learned that first hand during one of my earliest trips to her shop, when I’d thought the way to give myself mana was to bind my will to a daemon, as I’d so often read about. In the years since, I’d simply accepted that not all men were meant to do all things, and had focused my efforts more on strengthening my sword arm so that I could join the musketeers when I turned nineteen.
A few minutes of waiting later, Lina stepped out of the back carrying my murk wings and a jar that was the perfect mirror for the one I’d lost. The fact that I hadn’t said what size I needed didn’t matter. Lina always knew.
“You have the impatient glare of a young man with somewhere else to be,” she said with a laugh as she set the goods down on the counter and waited for me to pay. “Are you, perhaps, going to the circus tonight?”
I smiled back and nodded. “That’s the plan, though I’m not sure I’ll be able to make it before it starts.”
“That’d be quite a pity,” Lina said. “From what I’ve heard, the opening act is the best part of the show.”
A man in the back of the shop coughed politely, and Lina gave me a sorry expression as she held out her hand to collect her payment. Not wanting to interrupt her other business, I reached into my pocket and counted out the necessary crowns. Then, with a little bow, I left the apothecary and traced my steps back to the shop. The errand had taken nearly an hour, which meant that I didn’t have much time before the circus was scheduled to start.
I’ll spare you the boring details of remaking the murk wing tincture. Alchemy tends to be rather dry, so long as the ingredients are good, and Oren watched over my shoulder the entire time. He would never admit it, but I knew that he was worried about me.
As soon as I handed the jar over and it passed my master’s approval, I ran back to my room to change my clothes, wipe my face clean, and spritz myself with rosewater before going out.
“Be careful,” Oren called as I pulled on my heaviest jacket and left the shop. “It’s a full moon out there tonight!”
I waved without turning around and headed to Maester’s Square. I made it with just ten minutes to spare before the show was set to start. There were two doormen counting tickets, but there was still a crowd of people outside the big top, and little did I know as I waded into that frothing mass of bodies that a coldblooded killer lurked among us, waiting to strike.