The Blackthorn Key

I thought of my master’s sad, scrawled confession. The Archangel’s Fire was never meant for mortal men. . . . What have I done? I thought, too, about him burying his friend the best he could, in the hallowed ground below the stone angel. My master, working all alone in the dark, able to tell no one what had happened. My heart ached for him.

Even still, my master’s obsession with how the Prima Materia might be shaped to help humanity made him come back. He’d kept going, even after what had happened to Hugh, to find some way to purify the Archangel’s Fire, to see if it could be turned from a weapon of destruction into an agent of healing, like an alchemist turned lead into gold, or an apothecary turned the poison of madapple into a remedy for asthma. And, at least in part, he’d succeeded. The sawdust—my sawdust—had changed the nature of the Archangel’s Fire and tempered God’s wrath. The cylinder with the cannon fuse had been knocked off the workbench by the blast, but it hadn’t exploded when it hit the ground. Master Benedict was right. When mixed with sawdust, the weapon would need fire to release its power.

Power. Was that word enough to describe God’s terrible gift? Tell no one, my master had warned. I understood those words now. I remembered him asking me if I’d wanted the life he’d given me, when he’d offered me the chance to walk away. I wondered for a moment what he would have done if I’d taken it, but that was time wasted. I’d never have chosen anything else, never would have abandoned him. Even now, as shaken as I was, I was so proud that he’d trusted me.

With this legacy comes a choice you will have to make, Isaac had said. I understood that now, too. In sending me here, Master Benedict had placed the final decision about the Archangel’s Fire in my hands. What would I do with his discovery? Work with it, like my master had, to try to change its nature further and unlock God’s healing power? Hide it, and let no one know it had been discovered? Or should I destroy it, and keep it out of human hands forever?

Master Benedict had searched for the raw power of the universe, to be shaped for the betterment of man, and instead had found an unearthly weapon. His friend Hugh had died because of it, and ten others had been murdered in the hunt. The very first lesson Master Benedict had ever taught me was that our recipes were only tools, directed by the hearts and hands of the men who used them. The killers had already shown us their hearts. And if this tool got into their hands, so many more people would fall.

An army that walks with the Archangel will be invincible. And the mortal general who led it could do anything he wanted. Who could stop him? Who could stand against the Almighty? A man could overthrow His Majesty, Charles, and proclaim himself the new king. Kill the king, force Parliament to fall in line, and England will be theirs, Oswyn had said. And then what? The rest of the world?

Another war awaited us. With the Archangel’s Fire, this one would be a slaughter.

The blast had rattled my head. But it also shook the cobwebs away. I remembered Wat, in his apprentice’s blue apron; Wat, with Stubb, calling him Master; Wat, at Apothecaries’ Hall, conspiring with Martin and the Elephant. And I knew.

I knew the truth about the murderers, the truth about the Cult of the Archangel.

And now I had a plan.

? ? ?

Tom stood over my shoulder as I finished writing the second letter, his hands clasped to his cheeks. “You’ve gone mad,” he said. “The Fire’s scrambled your brain.”

I folded both letters and dripped wax on the edges to seal them. “You don’t think it’ll work?”

“If by ‘work,’ you mean ‘get yourself killed,’ then sure, it’ll work.”

“If everything goes right,” I said, “I won’t even come back to the lab. No one has to know.”

“Of course. Because all your plans are so successful.”

I wrote the names on the letters I’d sealed. “Just deliver these,” I said. “And whatever you do, don’t come back.”