Aboveground, I hand the bottle to the Everless boy Ivan Tenburn. I pour a few drops of the liquid into a bottle, dark green to hide its contents’ diamond quality. Energy courses through the room, magic in every particle just waiting to be unlocked and set loose on the world, snarling like a pack of wild dogs. I wait for her time to fight its way out of me like something alive. I wait for the time to coalesce into a thousand daggers like it did that night at Everless, the night I finally realized who Jules Ember was under her skin, in her heart. I breathe, alive, grip the edge of the table as my weak body shudders. I think of the world as a hide stretched taut across the frame of a war drum, the kind I remember from centuries ago. The ash and grime billow around me before the boom knocks us both off our feet. When the timelender tips the vial of Jules Ember’s blood into his little cauldron, light flashes through the room-as if we’re not far underground, as if day has come early and all at once. But the right blood-iron could burn down the world. When they don’t drink them like beasts, they fritter them away to make their flowers bloom, or feed them to their fires to make themselves warm in the winter. The people of Sempera are so uncreative with their precious time, their blood-irons. But something tells me tonight will be different. All have been inadequate so far all have died for it. He’s the latest in a long line of timelenders I’ve commissioned to lure the Alchemist out of hiding. A timelender hunches across from me, sweating as he mixes powders at his workbench. I stand in a room deep below the ballrooms and balconies of Shorehaven.
Tonight, I will make the Alchemist’s blood-Jules Ember’s blood-into a weapon.
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