> “What remains to be seen is whether this is the same adversary that plagued Rita at the end of her life or whether the fragile truce with the East has been broken. I do not know which I prefer.”
“You’re holding back,” said Beatrice, who thrust forward with the Medoblad, as I struggled to parry the small dagger with the much larger pole arm. “Your opponent won’t.”
“You try fighting with this thing!” I said. I tried to swat Beatrice’s wrist aside with the body of the staff, but every memory of what her blade had done came pouring back in all at once, and instead I stepped to the side, as I had been doing all morning.
“Gladly,” she said. “I’m already imagining how quickly I could slice off someone’s arm.”
“That’s not how I want to fight,” I said, assuming my spread-foot stance again and waiting for Beatrice to come at me. This time she didn’t, and I was forced to make the first move. I rocked back and forth on the balls of my feet before deciding to try a horizontal swipe. But thanks to my momentary hesitation, Beatrice was already ready for the attack, and blocked the pole with her padded forearms, before countering with a quick stab that pierced me right in the gut.
I looked down at my side, but thankfully, I was not turning to stone. Instead, only a small amount of blood had seeped out of me, thanks to the nature of the Medoblad’s healing end, which caused the wound it made to close up immediately. Of course, it had a much greater effect when used on someone who was already stone, but this ability allowed us to better emulate an actual fight.
Beatrice set her Relic down on the small table she had brought down to BSG’s basement, which she had cleared out for our training exercises, and grabbed one of the silver beads that were laid out on its surface.
“Here,” she said, handing me a piece of electrum that Ty had given me earlier in the day, but I nearly shoved her away.
“No,” I said. “No more of those.”
“OK then,” said Beatrice. “Your key to victory then will be your sheer force of will. It’s not as if Emma is an accomplished street fighter. I’m sure you’ll do fine.”
I tossed Curtana aside, and it slid unceremoniously across the cement floor, before kicking over the training dummy nearby for good measure and letting out a primal scream.
“Oh, are we about to have another Jen pity party?” said Beatrice, smirking. “Save it for someone else. Whatever happened to you down at the wreck is over. You need to move past it and focus on what’s next.”
“So I don’t have a choice, then?” I said. “I thought you were all about choices now. I don’t want any more memories in my head. That’s my choice.”
“Then have fun with your 30-second duel,” she said, as she set the dummy back upright. “Why go through all the trouble of retrieving your own Relic if you won’t learn how to use it?”
“I do,” I said, “just not like this.”
“Well, if you’re not going to eat this one, let me show you what you’re missing.”
She ate the electrum bead, and her face blanked out as the memories flowed into her head. Just as quickly, she returned to herself and I nodded as she bent down to retrieve Curtana from the ground. She marveled at the Relic’s airy quality and took a few practice swings before assuming the stance I had been using for the last hour. But rather than attacking with clumsy downward swipes, Beatrice spun Curtana in a circle like a baton, slicing through the dummy in a flurry, before bringing it around in one smooth swing to cut the head clean off.
“Holy crap,” I said.
“See?” said Beatrice, smiling. She withdrew a handkerchief from her pocket, wiped the dust from Curtana’s blade, and then placed both down on the table.
“I do,” I said. “But … you weren’t down there, trapped in someone else’s past. I don’t know if I fall into that abyss again, I’ll be able to surface.”
“Actually, I do know how it feels,” said Beatrice.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s how I got this,” she said, holding up the Medoblad. “The former Keeper’s memories. They were stored, preserved, in a bead of orichalcum. The principles probably operate similarly to electrum, but-”
“I need to show you something,” I said. I pulled out the bead from the Foxhound’s cabin and laid it flat on my palm.
“Did you try to eat that?” she asked, taking it from my hand and putting it against her ear.
“Maybe last week I would have, but now…”
“Good,” she said. “Because if you had, it would have made your diving debacle feel like a picnic.”
“Why is that?”
“Because that also happens to be a bead of orichalcum,” said Beatrice.
“What’s so different about this that made you so afraid?”
She licked the bead and grimaced before putting the whole thing in her mouth and swallowing. Unlike the electrum she imbibed earlier, this flavor kept her wide awake. But when her body started to move again, it was as if someone had attached strings to her limbs and was controlling her like a puppet.
She walked around the room, as if she was searching for something, and I had to step out of her way several times, as she seemingly had no idea I was even there. Finally, as she was about to pick up Curtana, I grabbed her wrist and her eyes snapped to attention. Only the person looking at me wasn’t Beatrice.
“We must smite the egg with fire before it hatches,” she said, with a strange accent.
Then she reached around me to grab the handkerchief on the table, and wretched into it.
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“That … was unpleasant,” she said, withdrawing the somehow still clean orichalcum from inside the cloth’s folds.
“What just happened?” I asked. “It’s like you were possessed.”
“I was,” she said. “I thought I was in a strange library, books stacked to the ceiling. But, Curtana, it was there too, along with someone else, and when I grabbed the Relic, I told them-”
I repeated the cryptic line, but even with the added context, it still made no sense to me.
“I wish you had let me stay in there a bit longer,” she said. “To see what was about to happen.”
“If I did that, you probably would have stabbed me,” I said.
“No, I wouldn’t have,” said Beatrice. “Ordinarily, using orichalcum is like being subsumed into the recollections in the bead. But fortunately, I stumbled onto the key to staying myself quite by accident. The focus buff provides a counter to the weight of the orichalcum’s stored memories.”
“I didn’t see you eat one just now though,” I said.
“That’s my secret, Jen,” said Beatrice, tossing aside the padding to reveal an intricate network of jade green symbols tattooed on her forearm. “I’m always focused.”
----------------------------------------
The next week was a complete blur. Training followed by more training followed by hours-long sessions where Beatrice would apply her buff ink to my arms in differing combinations.
She started small at first, tattooing only enough for a few uses, as I soon learned that like all alchemy, there was a finiteness to how long the ink would last before it was consumed. Even activating a three-second burst took many hours of focus and concentration. It was as if I was communicating with a new part of my body that my brain didn’t know how to speak to.
That was not the only obstacle to hurdle, though. I still refused to use any of the electrum, but it was getting harder and harder to maintain the front, as one of the nights (I can’t remember which), I arrived back at my apartment to find a briefcase full of the silver stuff on my bed with a note from Dalia that said “Return this to me empty.”
That is not to say I didn’t try to learn to master Curtana. There were other methods of learning that Beatrice had developed, as I discovered the next morning when she placed an old scroll in front of me and admitted that she had spiked my coffee with a focus buff. She unfurled it and my mind tore through the fighting stances and diagrams and movesets and theories like it was a sponge. When I came to who knows how long later, a new training dummy was a few feet away from me and Curtana’s case was open, a beckoning siren perched on a bluff in the sea.
I picked up its handle and the images I had digested flashed through my head. The muscle memory was lacking, but I surprised myself when I landed a flawless series of jabs that I finished off with a one-handed swing that knocked my stuffed opponent to the ground. My confidence increased with every moveset I executed, and by the end of the day Saturday, I had managed to knock the Medoblad out of Beatrice’s hand through a combination of strength, speed, and a roundhouse kick she was not expecting.
“When did you learn that?” she asked, as I helped her up from the floor.
“Dunno,” I said, looking at my forearms to find all traces of ink gone. “Must have been an insert stuck in Talhoffer’s Techniques. Should we go again?”
“Negative,” said Beatrice.
“Why not? It’s only 11 p.m.”
“Because you’re delirious,” she said.
“Am not!” I said, but Beatrice just rolled her eyes.
“I have a seven-year-old who is going to come barging into my room in a few hours demanding to know how the espresso machine works for the umpteenth time. And I still need to apply a fresh set of ink to your arms. You’ve gotten better at controlling the duration, but you need to be able to activate a light touch, so that you can last the whole fight.”
“All the more reason we should practice again once I’m re-inked. I-”
Beatrice shook her head.
“I’m calling it. You’ve done all you can. Plus, I finally made headway on your glamour side project. If I’m going to have any chance of finishing before your fight, you need to let me rest a bit. Especially now that our betters have summoned us.”
She grabbed her phone and handed it to me.
The group text from Ty was brief:
“Mooney House, 12:30 p.m.”
And so, after a delightful brunch prepared by Svetlana, who also somehow knew how to cook the perfect omelette, the two of us found ourselves on the doorstep of the Guild’s downtown annex. We approached the old manse with trepidation, as this had been where Ty had confined Doug while she molded him into the Gilbert she had hoped he would become. The front entrance bore the same lock as my office and the Foxhound’s cabin, and so it opened easily after I slid my gold token into the nook. I looked over at Beatrice as I pushed open the creaky door and wondered if she ever wished that our tokens had been reversed, that this was her burden to shoulder, instead of mine.
Ty was waiting inside in the kitchen, perched on top of a white marble counter that was wildly out of place compared to the rest of the room. She hopped down and walked silently toward a particularly old looking wooden door, which barely managed to open. Behind it was a set of stairs that I thought I was going to fall through that led down into absolute darkness.
At the bottom, Ty stomped on the bottom step twice, and the chamber beyond flickered to life thanks to tiny glowing orbs inset in the walls.
“This place,” said the teen, “is the oldest surviving row house in the city. The Guild bought it from Mooney on his deathbed and has used it ever since.”
“I am truly honored that you invited us to this hallowed ground,” said Beatrice
Ty ignored her, and we walked onward into the basement, which was devoid of anything except the wooden beams holding up the structure above. And at the back of the room stood Dalia in a gleaming white dress.
“Why are we here?” I asked.
“To remind you what is at stake tomorrow,” she said, rapping her knuckle against one of the beams. “The foundation of the Guild is still strong, but you need to fill the crack that has appeared. Are you ready to do that?”
“I hope so,” I said.
“Hope is not enough,” said Dalia. “The hopes of the many have been snuffed out time and again by the power of the few. We have labored for centuries as the bulwark against the exhaustion of the remaining magic in the world. We’ve gone up against things worse than those awful children who seek my Chair, but if they were to get that vial of Dragon’s blood, there’s no telling what they could do before we would be able to stop them.”
“The way Ty tells it,” I said, “they’ve already cornered the market on Philosopher’s Stones. How much harm could one more do?”
Dalia glared at Ty, who shrugged her shoulders.
“A great deal,” said Dalia. “Alchemy is more than just a list of ingredients. It takes skill, finesse, creativity, things that the Van Asch Corporation has sacrificed in the name of efficiency and scale. So yes, they may have multiple ‘Stones,’ but they have likely wasted Starkey’s legacy crafting mediocre little gems that won’t last more than one use.”
“Not to mention,” said Ty, “that the Compendium includes the true recipe for the Stone.”
“There’s a reason I didn’t mention that,” said Dalia, “especially given our present company.”
“She deserves to know,” replied Ty. “They both do. Jen has put herself on the line over and over for the Guild, for you. And Ms. Stallard, despite her past transgressions, has been a valuable asset.”
“This is so heart-warming,” said Beatrice. “It’s like we’re all having a moment.”
Despite the snark, I had to marvel at the way things had seemingly turned. Despite our differences, despite the enmity, we had all united behind our common goal of making sure J.P. would never take the Chair’s Seat.
“Indeed,” said Dalia. “Ms. Jacobs, please lend your blonde friend your cloak. She should be in attendance during the Trial tomorrow.”
I nodded, and Dalia turned to walk away, only to pivot on her heels suddenly and throw something at me.
But I was ready for her.
I closed my eyes and felt the speed buff’s tattooed symbol on my skin, and my right arm vibrated in response. I opened my eyes again, and the world had slowed to a crawl. A silver dagger hung in mid-air a few inches from my face, as if it was suspended on a string. My fingers danced against the cold steel and for a just a second, I considered what I could do with this blade. But the moment passed, and instead, I grasped the dagger’s handle, took another breath, and returned time to its normal pace.
Dalia’s mouth broke into a small smile as I dropped the weapon onto the stone floor.
“I expected nothing less from my Champion. Until tomorrow.”