Chapter 37

Scorio filled the next five days with arduous training, hours spent practicing the First Form, and several hunting forays that netted him a half-dozen Coal Heartstones. As promised, he restricted himself to minor foes, and was able to defeat them without suffering anything more than scrapes and minor cuts.

But all the while he waited for eight days to pass since he’d inserted the reeds. When the day finally dawned, Scorio returned to the chasm to check on his farm’s progress. The way there was now familiar to him, and in his eagerness, he took it at a run; when he drew close to the chasm’s edge, he peered down, sharpening his darkvision to help him focus into the gloom, and breathed out a deep sigh when he saw the hundred or so plants still standing in their neat little rows.

Quickly he fashioned his harness for the steel rod, then leaped down to the second ledge before repeating the process of dropping down to the island. He was so eager that he nearly missed the edge; for a moment he teetered back and forth, arms windmilling, and when he finally lurched forward, he immediately vowed to never be hasty about getting down again.

But none of that mattered. All barely constrained eagerness, he dropped to his knees by the closest plant and carefully, fingers steady, drew forth the reed. Thin lines of sticky black sap drew out for a moment and then snapped as he pulled it away, and immediately he summoned his Heart, focusing his darkvision at the base of the narrow reed.

There. Gleaming, precious, and calling to him in the sweet voice of power made tangible, was a bead of Coal mana.

Scorio drew forth a small, palm-sized bottle, uncorked it, and held the reed to the mouth, tipping it up.

The bead didn’t pour out.

Frowning, Scorio tapped the reed against the glass, then gave it a sharp shake.

Nothing.

Pushing his senses forth, he felt the bead where it had slowly begun to roll out of the reed’s base. At this speed, it would take him an entire cycle to cajole every reed into disgorging its contents.

Instead, he closed his eyes, focused his will on the bead, and pulled.

The black, gleaming droplet leaped out and plopped into the bottom of the bottle.

Grinning to himself, Scorio carefully reinserted the reed, making sure not to widen the hole, and moved to the next plant. This time he didn’t hesitate; he placed the reed immediately to the bottle’s mouth and pulled the bead forth.

A second black oval appeared at the base of the bottle as if by magic, then slowly melded with the first.

Working quickly, methodically, and with great care, Scorio made his way down line after line of the plants, his movements becoming precise and practiced, until at last, twenty or so minutes later, he was done.

Scorio held up the bottle and peered through the cloudy glass at its contents. Two or so fingers’ worth of raw, liquid Coal mana gleamed within. Enough for six elixirs, barring errors.

With great care, he inserted the cork and wedged it deep. Slipped it into his robes, tucked it firmly under his belt, and then sat back on his heels to gaze at his little farm in contentment.

He was going to need another thirty or so plants to get a full week’s worth of elixirs, but for now, he couldn’t have been more satisfied.

Rising to his feet, he took up his rope, whirled the steel bar about a few times, then hurled it up high to begin the next step of his plan.

* * *

The closer Scorio got to Naomi’s room at the top of the tower, the more he regretted his impulsiveness. She’d never extended an open invitation for him to visit, had made it clear that the one time she’d brought him there was due to exceptional circumstances. He was sweating more than he should have been when he reached the tower top, and took a moment to inhale a deep, shaky breath.

What was the worst that could happen?

Reaching out, he knocked hard on the heavy door and moved back and down a few steps. He resisted the urge to clear his throat, and instead forced himself to straighten his spine and square his shoulders.

The door slid open a crack, and the Nightmare Lady’s blade slipped out, seeming to hover as if underwater at the end of its segmented tail, turning in questing curiosity to aim its tip at his face.

“Good to see you, too,” he called out. “Always nice when a friend drops by. Right?”

The door eased open further, a black hand with inch-long talons fanning out over its front, and the Nightmare Lady stepped into view, her sulfurous green eyes narrowed, her whole form nearly quivering with tension.

“Brought a surprise,” said Scorio, fighting the urge to take another step down. “Which, to be clear, isn’t my own sudden appearance. Ha. That was, ah, a joke.”

The Nightmare Lady stood in silence for a beat longer, then her form shrank and sank away to become Naomi’s, her thick hair falling in an unkempt curtain about her face, her chin lowered, her face cast into a sullen frown. “I knew I shouldn’t have brought you here.”

Scorio pulled his bottle out from his robes. “Look what I got.”

And despite her clear irritation, she leaned forward to peer at the jet-black contents. “Is that…?”

“Condensed Coal mana, the product of over a hundred and fifty-nine Black Star flowers. That’s right. Scorio the Abhorred has a green thumb.”

“Black thumb,” muttered Naomi, forgetting her annoyance and stepping out onto the landing to take the bottle and hold it up where the clear rays of Amber could pass through the clouded glass. “A fair amount, too. A hundred and fifty plants…?”

“Fifty-nine,” said Scorio. “I’ll have another dose of the same amount eight days from now. If I can secure a few more plants, it should be enough for an elixir each morning.”

“Ah,” said Naomi. “Hence your coming to me.”

“I’d leave you alone if I had an alchemical laboratory in my own rooms, I swear. But seeing as how I am but a poor, indigent orphan, cast out upon the mercies of this cruel world…”

“Oh, enough,” said Naomi, turning around to pad back into her room. “But if you want me to work on this, you had best take a vow of silence.”

Scorio hesitated. How best to inform her that he was willing to be quiet with her back turned? How to ensure the appropriate amount of appreciation?

In the end, he settled for a grimace and followed silently after.

Her room was the same as before; the massive, sunken four-poster with a sagging canopy of faded blue silk listing upon the off-kilter floor; carpets scattered haphazardly everywhere; heavy pieces of battered furniture set against the walls; the thin curtains blowing in through the open doorway that led out to the Amber-lit ruins beyond.

Scorio followed Naomi to the large table covered in arcane alchemical equipment, and watched as she set about preparing for the process.

“It’s eerie, your being completely silent,” she said after a while. “You can talk, but keep it to a strict minimum.”

“A minimum,” he agreed. “Can I help?”

“No. This is a simple process. We’re going to dilute the mana and then heat it over a controlled flame while adding alum to induce flocculation.” She paused, eyeing him. “You’re not planning on creating poisonous elixirs, are you?”

“What’s the term for half a poisonous elixir?”

“Idiocy.”

“That’s it. I’d like to only filter out half the toxins. According to the treatise I purchased, that should ensure the elixir is as strong as the tincture I drank while I only suffer half the side effects.”

“Idiocy,” said Naomi again, setting a small iron pot over a pile of kindling. “You do understand that there’s a reason Great Souls everywhere don’t abuse their bodies and Hearts like you do.”

Scorio thought of the filament-thin pattern he’d noticed of late on his Heart. “I know. But we’ve discussed this before.”

“True.”

He felt the faintest whisper of her will, and the contents of the bottle sluiced down into the pot, to which she added a cup of water. “Very well. We’ll filter half of the toxins out. That should only cost you a morning. You plan to give up your every morning from here on out?”

“No,” he said. “First, I’m hoping to build up a tolerance. Second, I plan to walk it off. Third… I’m working on the third part.”

Naomi took a live coal from a horn and carefully set the kindling on fire, then added ever-larger twigs and snapped segments of branches until a little fire was burning. Scorio watched in silence as she stirred the liquid, and when a faint steam began to rise from the pot, she took out a vial and tapped a beige powder into the mix.

“The alum will cause the toxins to separate from the solids,” she said quietly. “They should then burn off in the steam, leaving the concentrated, half-purified mana behind. You sure you don’t want it in pill form?”

“No, that process weakens the potency of the mana in exchange for easy handling. I’ll keep it a treacle and take my dose each morning with a spoon.”

To which Naomi simply nodded and resumed stirring.

Scorio moved to sit cross-legged on the balcony and watched the ruins under the bright light of Amber. He allowed his gaze to drift out over the city, to follow a flock of predatory wastru birds as they chivied a school of floating nimbus jellyfish, and finally closed his eyes to work on his mana manipulation.

It was Second Bronze when he stirred, and he saw that Naomi had silently joined him on the balcony, her knees tucked under her chin, her thick hair drawn back and tied off with a thong of leather.

“It’s reducing,” she said, gazing out over the flat rooftops. “Should take a few hours. If you want an accurate gauge of its potency, you should take some to Jelan. He can measure it for you.”

“Good idea. I also need to talk to him about my collection of Heartstones. They’re starting to pile up. Be good to change them into octs.”

They sat in silence for a while.

“I think the tincture you’re making will be weak level Bronze. In terms of potency. Your classmates at the Academy receive a filtered pill each morning, if not better, but their baseline should be minimal Copper. Each spoonful that you take of this mixture will be twenty times stronger than what they usually receive.”

“Good to hear,” he said quietly. “I need to catch up.”

“There’s another reason I haven’t taken the Sapphire vials,” she said. “Nor given one to you. Do you know how many times more powerful one of those vials is than your Bronze-level spoonsful?”

Scorio stiffened. “I—no. How many?”

“The whole vial, if it’s base Sapphire, is fifty times more potent than the poison you’ll be taking. Do you know what would happen if you drank it?”

“No,” he said quietly, staring at her intently.

“Your Heart is that of a Cinder, and though it's strong and unusually deep, I reckon it can’t comfortably hold half of one of your pills. The rest, when you eat it, will simply stretch your Heart and then dissipate.”

Scorio nodded.

“If you were to drink that vial? Your Heart might sunder, and the vast majority of the Sapphire mana would be wasted. The same, unfortunately, goes for me.”

“I’ve got to increase the amount of mana I can hold in my Heart till I can barely ignite,” said Scorio softly, desperately not wanting to wake her from this pensive state and have her change the subject. “What do you have to do?”

“I have to condense my Heart back to its former size, and in so doing return to my former ignition point.” Her smile was bitter. “Over the past few years I’ve made some advances in that direction—my Heart is no longer this vast and unwieldy object I can barely control. But it’s still far from where it was before I made Emberling.”

“Oh.” Scorio leaned his head back against the wall. “Condense. So you retain the capacity but decrease the mass?”

“Something like that. You have what’s called a reservoir within your Heart. That’s what holds the mana and dictates the amount you can hold. You’re seeking to expand your reservoir as much as you can to increase the amount of mana you can drink at the cost of being able to ignite quickly. I’m trying to squeeze it back into a regular-sized Igneous Heart while retaining the amount I can absorb and regain my original reactivity. Once it reaches maximum density, your trial triggers.”

“I see.” Scorio nodded slowly. “So you don’t even really need the high-quality mana at this stage. You just need to work on your control over your Heart.”

“True.” Her expression was melancholy as she gazed out over the ruins. “I may not even be able to use it till I make Tomb Spark. But then it will prove vital if I’m to reach Flame Vault.”

“And that is—?”

“None of your business,” she said, voice sharpening. “How did we get on that topic? I was trying to tell you something about your elixirs. There’s no sense in keeping the toxin level high if you’re still going to vent most of the mana each time you consume it.”

“I disagree.” Scorio sat up. “My Heart has to grow used to the strain. The more I strain it, the faster and larger it will grow.”

“At the expense of its integrity, your health, and your sanity.”

He shrugged. “I’ll make sure I don’t go too far.”

“Why don’t I believe you? Still, it's your Heart and body. You’re meeting your friends tomorrow, are you not?”

“That’s right.”

Naomi nodded and looked away.

“How about this?” Scorio shifted his weight where he sat. “Bring the—what are we calling it? Syrup? To my place tomorrow at First Rust. That’s when Leonis and Lianshi will be arriving. You can simply meet them, and if you don’t like what you see, we’ll say you just came by to drop off the mana. But if you feel more comfortable, you can come with us to the Academy.”

“I don’t need my hand held,” she snapped.

“Of course you don’t. Just an idea.” And sensing that her mood was turning sour, he rose smoothly to his feet. “Thank you for the help with the syrup. It’s truly appreciated. See you tomorrow morning?”

“Perhaps.” She made no move to rise nor look his way.

“Great. Until then.”

He entered her chamber, took a detour to peer into her pot, then let himself out her door and back into the stairwell.

Humming to himself, he skipped lightly down the stairs. Everything was falling into place. The syrup would give him the raw power he needed, the Gauntlet was proving to be the perfect source of tension and training, and his friendship with Leonis, Lianshi, and Naomi meant that he no longer felt alone in the world.

Everything was starting to look up.

Better yet, tomorrow was the Eighthday, which meant meeting up with Lianshi and Leonis.

And Scorio couldn’t wait to show them how far he’d advanced.