The city, the mushroom fields, the decrepit factories latched onto the boundary walls like steel tumors –the pyromancers burned them all.

Sam sat on the hill and gazed at the inferno. Mud houses on fire. The irrigation lines a maze of shimmering blue. The smokeless flames produced an intense heat. It made her dizzy, and her mask made it worse.

Lucia sat two feet away, perfectly still, her pink blindfold fluttering in the heat. Sam had chosen the flamboyant color as a distraction, but in the flickering firelight it looked blood-red, and that was no distraction from anything.

Behind them, people were laughing.

Two hundred alchemists from twenty-seven guilds stood under a row of silk marquees, nibbling on persimmon and figs and pickled dates, drinking the red, chatting excitedly about the economy, the wife and kids, investments with their disposable income, that sort of thing. They have gotten steadily drunker and louder over the last hour.   

Sam wanted to cover her ears, but her arms were lead. She was hyperventilating, even though she had only sat and watched. Sat and watched as the children walked down the decline holding hands, still in their tatty uniforms. Sat and watched as Finley’s amblers erected palisades behind them and lined the ramparts with pikes and flamethrowers. Sat and watched as the great bellows pumped up and down, up and down, blowing tank after tank of Kohn’s Miasma into the old mines.

And they were only halfway done.

An ambler was running up the hill. Its head was twisted backward as though someone had left it unfastened. The left half of its face was putrefied; chunks of rotten flesh had fallen away, revealing the blotchy skull underneath. It had quarts for eyes, roughly chiseled orbs that jittered in their sockets. Its orange overall was splattered with mud and purple infusion. Intestines dangled from a gash on its hip, whipping round and round with each step.

Yet it ran faster than any sprinter, cutting a direct line across boulders and crags and a near vertical cliff. A straight line to the marquees.

One man stepped out to meet it. He was huge, wider than he was tall. The Finley sigil rippled on his great ermine cape: a grinning cartoon skeleton with a pickaxe hoisted over one shoulder. THEY WORK TO THE BONE, the bright orange slogan below it read.

He held up a hand as if about to click his fingers. The sprinting ambler collapsed in a bone-breaking split.

‘Our time has come,’ he declared to his esteemed company. ‘The harvest has been prepared. I ask my colleagues to join me in the raising of the dead. Maestros, if you please.’

Six emerged of the party, all but one followed by a sizable entourage.

‘I, Jack Finley, fourth of that great name, hereby initiate the raising of the Floor of Nine. With me are my associates, Maestros Edwin Finley, Edmond Finley, Edward Finley, Maestro James Cowen, Maestro Kina Enri, Maestro Moeffe Bhusaku, and members of their Households.’

A smattering of polite applause.

‘Before we begin, I must remind you all to keep within your assigned quotas. As per clause three through five of your contracts, excess claim – intentional or otherwise – will result in disciplinary action and exclusion from future collaborations, so please take care, Maestro Enri.’

‘I would never,’ Enri muttered.

‘I understand it was two Floors ago, Maestro, but consider this your final warning. Now, without further delay…’

They stood in a line and raised their hands, and the Green rose from their fingertips. A hundred thousand strands of ethereal silk canopied the sky in an emerald cocoon that spread in an instant to all corners of the Floor, pulsing as if it breathed. From the marquee came oohs and ahhs and sporadic clapping.

The twitching began at Lucia’s fingertips. Then her hand. Then her entire left side. She scratched at the hem of her cloak and tore holes in the chainmail underlay like it was stitched paper. Then, like a puppet with its strings yanked, her shot up to her face and grabbed the blindfold.

Sam saw it coming. She had slipped a hand onto the knot just in time, and Lucia crushed it. A wet, mulchy crunch. Bones snapped. Three fingers bent three ways as skin flapped at Sam’s wrist.

‘Lucia, listen.’

Lucia’s trembled, the intensity waxing and waning with the pulsing Green. In the eerie green light, her face was a mossy bust with perfect cheekbones. Beautiful.

‘Lucia…listen.’ But what was there to say?

The Green pulsed faster, faster. Lucia doubled over but did not try for the blindfold again. Without thinking, Sam brushed at Lucia’s brittle white hair with her broken hand, dabbing it red.

‘It will be over soon,’ Sam said. ‘They don’t have approvals yet for the next Floor.’

Giggles fell out of her mouth and she could not catch them. High-pitched, red-faced, they raced all over the hill and tied a stone around her throat. One Maestro took the time to glare at her.

‘I think they heard me.’ Sam could barely hear herself. ‘Just another apprentice going crazy. But I’m not. I’m not. I know how cashflow works, and you can’t be crazy if you know how cashflow works.’

Lucia was looking her now, which was impossible - blindfold, remember? - yet it really felt like…

‘Don’t look at me like that. One day I’ll be a Maestro, then I’ll get to kill my own Floor, and raise them, and rent them out, and I’ll be richer than Finley.’

Sam laughed and gagged on nothing. Too late for throwing up. Should have thrown up three Floors ago. Doing it now would only seem…

‘…seem weak, like I couldn’t handle myself. But I could. This is my fourth harvest. It’s easy now, really. It’s all a matter of experience.’

Suddenly becoming aware that words were coming out of her mouth, Sam squeezed her eyes shut and swallowed. The heat, the pain shooting up her fingertips, the suffocating mask – it all came thundering back…and even though she has done nothing today, she was exhausted. ‘I can’t sit through this, Lucia. I might lose it.’

Lucia took her hand. Cold. Her fingers were talons of ice, yet she was delicate around the broken bones and the torn skin, and her gentleness was so alien, so unexpected, that for a moment Sam forgot what she was talking to.

‘Do you see them in the Green? Are they suffering?’

Ah, what was she saying? Lucia did not have the faculty of speech nor the comprehension routine required to understand stupid questions. She was an ambler, after all; a reanimated corpse tethered to Maestro James Cowen, incapable of speaking, thinking, or acting on her own. No one in their right mind would ask an ambler for their opinion.

How strange it was, then, that Lucia was opening her mouth, revealing two rows of perfect white teeth and a dark purple tongue. One might mistake her for trying to talk.

Trying to…

Sam blinked, fascinated and terrified.

‘Lucia?’

The Green draped over the Floor of Nine, and it was bright as the sun she has never seen.

Next Chapter: Chattel (2)