Against my better judgment, we’d gone through with stealing the irreplaceable rare book Remy had been sent to take. Briar said that she’d take responsibility for us borrowing the book and would see it returned. There were probably official channels she should have gone through, but those would have taken time, and Remy was on a strict deadline he was already running late for.
I’d been sure the alarms would go off as we walked out of the library, or we’d get caught in a security ward, but between the fact that the backpack Remy had been given had some hard-core wards built into it and contained several other charms to facilitate this theft, which was how Remy got the book off the shelf in the first place, and the fact that Briar carried it out the same way she’d walked in, no one had blinked as we walked out of the library. Judging by the amount of magic embedded in the bag, Gauhter was not playing around or sparing any expense. Which meant this book had to be important.
But why?
I’d held on to the bag and book during the drive to try to figure that out. The book Gauhter had Remy steal was the journal of an alchemist who’d died hundreds of years before the Magical Awakening. There had been a lot of magic in the world before science and technology first began crowding it out, but magic had long been in heavy decline by the author’s lifetime. During his time, there had been a lot of incorrect assumptions about how the world worked and superstitions that weren’t magic at all. Alchemy was a gray area of history. It was considered a magical science, but whether any of it actually worked was a highly debated topic. Many scholars had studied the old texts and illuminations since the Magical Awakening, and some of the things alchemists strove to achieve could be done with magic these days, but the processes and recipes that had survived seemed rather ludicrous. As Falin drove, I flipped through the journal’s pages, occasionally stopping to scan a hand-scrawled block of text or carefully drawn image.
“You should be wearing gloves and using tools. That book is probably four hundred years old,” Falin said, glancing at where I was poring over the pages.
“Remy had it shoved in a backpack,” I said as I flipped another page. “It’s seen worse.”
Falin didn’t argue, but his lips compressed into a thin line of disapproval. I consented to digging out my gloves. I had them on me anyway, though they made turning the pages significantly more difficult.
From what I could gather from my quick skimming, the book was a journal chronicling the alchemist’s experiments. His main areas of alchemical interests were the creation of an immortality elixir and engineering homunculi. Neither were unusual alchemical goals for his time, but there was no proof any alchemist had ever succeeded with either goal.
During the author’s lifetime, magic would have been thin. If this alchemist had been studying ancient texts, what had worked in ancient times wouldn’t have created any results for him. Alchemists of his era ended up using a very strange pseudochemistry approach to magic, which was evident in how he logged his experiments. I turned the page to discover a carefully illustrated account of one homunculus attempt that involved slowly heating a chicken egg in a mix of urine, semen, and silver nitrate at a precise temperature for two weeks. Case in point.
So what did Gauhter expect to find?
I flipped to the end of the book, but the last third seemed to be blank. Either the writer had given up before he ran out of paper, or he’d succeeded and stopped having to track his experiments. I thumbed back, looking for the last journaled page. When I finally found it, the page didn’t contain any words but was a line drawing of a woman heavy with child standing on a moon with stars in her hands. While it may have been some sort of alchemical imagery—my limited knowledge of alchemy came from history class back in school and a recent brush with a fae alchemist distilling glamour—but the image seemed very out of place in the book. I laid two gloved fingers on the page and let my ability to sense magic stretch.
It took a moment. The spell on the page was so old and so unlike any kind of magic I’d ever felt before that I almost missed it, but it was there. I couldn’t have proven the alchemist was the one who placed the spell on the page, but the magic was definitely old. A whole lot older than seventy years, so someone put it on the page before the Magical Awakening. I tried to untangle the traces of information I could feel buzzing through the page, but the magic was too foreign to gather a hint of what it might do.
I flipped back a few more pages and found more enchanted illustrations. When I finally found more text, it was clear several pages had been torn from the book between the last journal entry and the first full-page illustration. I glanced over that last entry. It was more of the same as the first part of the journal except that this one ended midsentence before the formula was listed. So had the alchemist torn out the pages to hide his results, or had someone else? And were the odd illustrations clues to his final experiment, meaningless ways to help mask whatever the spells on the page hid, or part of the spells themselves? I glanced over the handful of illustrations, but they were bizarre: men in beakers, the sun and moon in each other’s landscape, and so forth. They looked vaguely alchemical, so they might have had deeper meaning. Or they might have been nonsense.
I closed the cracking cover and called Briar. When she answered I said, “I don’t think we can risk handing over this book.”
“We’re not going to let the necromancer keep it,” Briar said, as if nothing could possibly go wrong. Taking the chance of allowing Gauhter to slip away with whatever information he was searching for between the covers of the book sounded like a really bad idea to me.
“I’m not sure if he’s after eternal life or the ability to create a homunculus, but there is something hidden behind really old magic in this book. If he knows how to activate the spells, he could very well get whatever it is he’s after.” I explained what I’d found in the book. I couldn’t show her the images, as she was in the car ahead of me, but I told her about the spells and gave her a brief summary of what the images depicted.
I didn’t realize that she had me on speakerphone until Remy said, “Wanting eternal life I get, but what is a ‘homunculus’?”
“It means ‘little man,’” Briar said, and since she had me on speaker, I put her on speaker as well so that Falin could hear more than my side of the conversation. Briar went on, “It was said to have been a perfect copy of the alchemist who created it, except small.”
“So a magical clone?” Remy asked.
Briar made a sound that made me think it had accompanied a shrug. “Sort of. But it lacked a soul because it was never technically born. Or that’s what is theorized. There’s little to no evidence that anyone was ever successful in creating one. Craft, I want to see those images before we turn this book over.”