Arianna grabbed one of her daggers and drew it across her palm, showing Charles the same stream of gold she’d displayed to the Vicar Tribunal. Showing was always better than telling. “Proof enough?”
Charles’s eyes darted from her palm to her face several times. “Yes.”
“As you build, Charles can sketch schematics and I can take notes,” Willard instructed as they finished clearing the table. “That’ll make it easier to pass on the information to the initiates and journeymen who will be working on and overseeing the line.”
Arianna could only nod. The idea of making the Philosopher’s Box again put a lump in her throat.
“Let’s begin, then.”
If she allowed herself to think about how her hands were moving, she risked error. Arianna pushed all else from her mind, beyond the numbers that gave structure to her creations. It had been a long time since she had last made the box, and there were parts that came more slowly to her than others. Still, she worked through them logically; after all, the only other option was allowing Willard to take the only other prototype in existence and build a model based off reverse-engineering. Ari wasn’t about to let that happen.
They worked well into the night, tinkering until the box had mostly taken shape—minus one or two essential parts that could be manufactured with ease. Arianna looked at her work, a nearly identical replica of what sat in her chest and kept her alive.
“So now what?” Charles asked.
“It’s implanted in place of the heart.”
“This . . . it’s just a glorified pump. How does it create a Perfect Chimera?” he asked skeptically.
“It’s unfinished until it’s tempered.” Arianna leaned against the table, ignoring what she had just produced. Her eyes swept over the detailed notes and skillful schematics the men had drawn. The greatest thing she had ever done, reduced to a few sheets of paper.
“Tempered?” Charles’s confusion reminded her that he hadn’t been privy to the Tribunal and that Willard hadn’t had time enough to fill him in.
“There’s a special flower from Nova that has magic properties. It cleans blood of rot.” Judging from Charles’s facial shift, she didn’t need to explain the rest.
“So, when do we get our hands on it?” He looked to Willard.
“Louie, the man whose airship I arrived on, has been asked by the Vicar Raven to procure it, along with the necessary organs.”
Arianna folded her arms over her chest as a physical reminder to keep things close. She wasn’t ready to expose her whisper link with Cvareh yet. Not until she had to. Purely because it was an advantage, and those were best kept as secret as possible for as long as possible. There were no other concerns, Arianna assured herself. She’d see if Louie could do it first, and then step in as necessary.
“I see . . .” Charles hummed. “Well, if it’s what the Tribunal decided . . .” The man chuckled, shaking his head at himself. “Things I never thought I’d say or hear.”
“Indeed, friend, indeed,” Willard agreed. “For now, it’s been a long day. We’ll resume tomorrow, setting up the journeymen on building out a manufacturing line for this. Can the metal be tempered after the fact? Or is it a high-heat tempering that will warp?”
“It can be.”
“Good, then we’ll produce as many as we can while we’re waiting for the supplies to finish them. Rest well, you two. We have a lot of work ahead of us.”
Dismissed, she and Charles wandered back through the empty guild. He made no attempts at conversation until they were back at the masters’ hall.
“What you said, about killing Oliver . . .” She’d commend him for holding in the need to clarify for as long as he had.
“It’s not a lie.” Arianna sighed when she saw the spectrum of emotions run across his face. “But it’s not entirely the truth, either.”
“Why?”
“I had my reasons.” That I will not divulge. She’d had enough of baring her soul to strangers.
“Well, if the vicar is unconcerned, then I am, too.” Charles let the matter go. “After all, no one held Oliver in higher esteem than Willard.” Before Arianna could ask him to elaborate, he started for his chambers. “I’ll see you in the morning, Master Arianna.”
“In the morning, Master Charles,” she murmured.
Arianna looked toward the back of the room for a door that was now completely shrouded. She wondered if in that darkness, the ghost of her former master still lingered, watching, waiting. She started for the door.
“I’m here, Master,” she whispered. Her fingers hovered over Oliver’s lock. “Sorry I’m so late.”
Without a second thought, she spun the dials on Oliver’s lock in a succession that required a series of clockwise and counterclockwise rotations, pulling on the different dials, and unlatching small parts of the lock itself to reveal secondary push buttons. After a long minute, the lock eventually gave with a click. It was a code he hadn’t decided to tell her until she’d made the Philosopher’s Box.
Now, Arianna wondered if the man had somehow foreseen their betrayal by Finnyr. How much had he accounted for?
Inside, the musty air of the room hit her like the first yawn of a long-slumbering beast. It smelled of oil and grease, metal, aging paper, cracked leather, and the faint tinge of a floral note that was in Oliver’s blood, one that Arianna could never quite place. Nostalgia attacked her from every corner.
Understandably, the room hadn’t been fitted with electricity. But Arianna knew exactly where he’d kept his oil lamps and matches. Illumination did little to scare away the lingering memories clinging to every wall, book, and unfinished piece of creation that still sat out, waiting for its master to return.
She walked over to his desk, drawn by a familiar set of scribbles. Arianna lifted up her own schematics, done in a rough hand years ago when she was little more than a child.
“Why did you keep these?” she whispered. Her heart knew the answer. It was the same reason why she would always carry a canister marked with the notches of a clumsy Revolver-in-the-making.
Speaking of Revolvers . . .
“Letters with the Vicar Revolver . . .?”
She pushed papers aside, skimming through about a month’s worth of missives. They went back and forth about ideas, about Dragon bone density and how coronas worked. The words “in a purely hypothetical question for intellectual pursuits” were scrawled multiple times over, safeguarding each page against potential accusations of treason.
“Intellectual pursuits.” Arianna scoffed at the idea. This was talk of methods to kill Dragons. She’d always known Oliver to be a revolutionary, but it seemed to extend into his entire history.
Her hand shifted a letter to the side and exposed a very different schematic than the childish one she’d held earlier. This was done with a graceful, steady hand, lines built on each other, coming together to form what Arianna could only describe as a masterpiece of death. And just perhaps, Loom’s salvation.
Florence