Marynath the alchemist grimaced over his smoldering pentacle.
Why isn't this working
, he thought. The elements—expensive as they were—were now useless, only half-transmuted and fallen into piles of black-and-purple ash, lacking the vital humors to complete the recipe. Each should have liquified and polymerized, running into the center of the pentacle to be collected, but they had not. A draft shivered the candles and a pang of desperation crept up him.
An apple crunched wetly outside his door and the human winced. It was bad enough that the muscle never slept, and was always seemingly creeping someplace near, but that the Zhajeeni thug kept crunching those infernal apples was enough to drive a person mad. He started the process over again, sweeping the half-transmuted ashes from the altar.
He redrew the pentacle, changed the configuration of the runes, and brought some more of the precious materials together. Sweat began to dapple his forehead. One more failure and his life would be in mortal danger. The sheer expense of the ingredients, the importance of the final elixir, and not least of which, the man he was working for, were all militating against him.
He muttered a short prayer as he began the distillation process. His heart pounded in his chest, the candles shifted to an eerie green. Why he had taken this job from so dangerous a man, he did not know.
Please, please, please.
Well, he
did
know. It was the money. Malario Baal'nadis supplied the rare components, and Marynath supplied the raw talent. The mixture began to glow—a pale-blue light, almost imperceptible.
Come on...
The reaction was sustaining itself! Rearranging the life rune was the trick, he was sure of it.
Fool
, he thought,
why couldn't I see it before? The equation needs creative power! It needs nature's kiss!
And just like that...
The candles guttered back to yellow. Nothing.
'Damn it!'
Marynath hissed as smoke curled from the cooling ashes, his horizons collapsing before him. He only had enough of the precious ingredients left for one last transmutation attempt, two if he somehow found more Olyrium Root on his own and short-changed the remaining gold dust, but that might poison the recipe anyway. To get more supplies, he would somehow have to get out from under Baal'nadis's hired hand.
The crunch came from just over Marynath's shoulder now, and he cursed audibly. That filthy cat could move quieter than a shadow when he wanted to.
'I thought you said you were an expert,' Savaad purred in that deep, mellow rasp of his. The man-beast was tall and lithe, armored lightly in leather and fur—animal and his own—and a long, thin dagger always hung from his belt. It was that above all that the alchemist wished to avoid.
'And I thought cats were obligate carnivores,' Marynath said, swiping a lock of brown hair from over his eye and straightening his tunic. 'How you can constantly crunch those confounded apples is a mystery to me.' The Zhajeeni mercenary rumbled a small laugh somewhere in his throat, a sure and secret laugh that made Marynath uneasy. Everything the cat did made him uneasy.
'I have been to many places,' he said, 'killed many things—I pick up many strange habits. I am not like the rest of my people.' Another damnable crunch. He would have to escape somehow, flee the deal. There was no way he could make the elixir now. He would stall until the cat had to sleep—everything has to sleep, even the damn Zhajeen. He would change his name, hide out in the far provinces...
And look over his shoulder every day of his life.
If I get that far,
Marynath thought. He saw the Zhajeeni hireling's reflection in a bronze mirror. He was
smiling
. He turned to face the brute.
'Yes, well, I have much more work to attend to, so if you'll just...' His eyes met the man-beast's, and he found nothing warm, nothing human there. How eyes so lustrous and gold could be so dark and frigid, he had no guess. Dark and roan stripes reminiscent of the tiger ran in bands along the felid's long body, and tufts of blond hair curled up from bobcat-like ears. Savaad's main was plaited in elaborate braids. On arms and legs, chest and head, striped fur peeked from leather and cloth. Mounds of long, wound muscle lay beneath, still as death—but not the stillness of inaction. It was the stillness of the predator ready at any moment to make the kill stroke. There was something inexplicably... enticing about that morbid connection.
'You are thinking of escaping,' he said, with the disappointment of a hangman resigned to do his duty. As though he had expected more.
'Preposterous, I—'
'You were hired to do a thing,' Savaad interrupted, taking a step forward. 'I am also hired to do a thing. Watch over the alchemist, protect him. Ensure my master gets what is due to him. And if he runs...' The cat was practically looming now, death in his eyes. Marynath glanced to the sheathed dagger, then back to those cold, gold eyes.
'I wasn't going to run, I just need more—'
'No more,' the Zhajeeni said. 'You said you could perform with the materials given. You swore an oath on this, and now you wish to break this oath.' Savaad had him dead to rights. He began to stammer something, but his voice died in his throat when the Zhajeeni thug placed a hand on the hilt of that dagger. Any second it could flash from the sheath, and that would be the end. Would Savaad eat his remains? The thought seemed silly.
'There—there are extenuating circumstances, unforeseen problems,' Marynath pleaded, terror becoming increasingly evident in his voice. But then, the cat could smell his terror all along. He did not need to see it. The eyes never wavered, never blinked. The hand stopped moving.
'Go on,' Savaad said. The human released a palpable sigh of relief.
