Give the Dark My Love(57)

“You’re hurting it,” Nedra pointed out, still pretending to read.

Hurting rats was part and parcel of being an alchemist, but the rat inside my crucible seemed to be in agony that far outweighed anything I’d seen before. I was concentrating too hard, struggling to maintain the alchemical connection, but even though I didn’t answer Nedra, my focus was shot. The rat died.

Nedra pulled my crucible closer to her when I leaned up, peering inside it with a strange look on her face.

“It’s not fair, what we do to rats,” she said.

“We should leave our patients in pain when we could relieve them of that much at least?”

I pulled the crucible away from her and tilted it to its side. The rat flopped onto the table, its claws seized into sharp angles from the pain I had put it through before it died. A twinge of sympathy shot through me. Maybe Nedra had a point.

She reached over me and picked the rat up as if it were a dear pet.

“Nedra,” I said. “It’s not ideal. It’s not fair. But the basic principle of alchemy is equivalent exchange. You can’t just make the pain of our patients disappear. It has to go somewhere. And better it goes to a worthless rodent than a human.”

“You’re just saying that because rats are ugly,” she said, her eyes still on the rodent. “If we had to sacrifice fluffy bunnies or kittens or something, more people would protest. It doesn’t have to be this way,” she told the dead creature in her arms.

“Alchemy is about equivalent exchange,” I said again, gentler this time.

Nedra ignored me. She carefully placed the rat’s dead body on the table, as if it were in a casket being laid into the ground. She held her hand out for a scalpel, and, thinking she was going to perform a dissection, I handed it to her. Instead, she carved a rune through the fur and into the skin of the dead animal. Nedra consulted the book she’d been reading and muttered some runes I didn’t recognize.

“Nedra, is that . . . ?” My stomach dropped.

“It’s not necromancy,” she said quickly, in a hushed voice.

“But—”

“Grey.” She said so much in that one syllable.

And the rat squeaked back to life. Just a moment, just a tiny little sound, but it was deafening.

“That’s—” I started, horror growing inside me. She might not have a necromancer’s crucible, she might not be a true necromancer, but using her golden crucible to go past healing into resurrection was absolutely forbidden and the first thing all alchemists were taught not to do. Such twisted use of her golden crucible wouldn’t last, much like animation with a silver crucible failed after moments, but it was still wrong.

The rat’s snuffling squeaks pitched higher, into a squeal, a pained sound. Its eyes bulged; its body spasmed. In seconds, it was dead again, but this death seemed much more excruciating. The rat’s lips were curled into a snarl, its sharp yellow teeth gouging the table. In moments, its fur started to sizzle, melting away in a grayish-whitish-pinkish blur, filling the room with an acrid stench. Soon there was nothing but sizzling bones.

“It wasn’t supposed to happen like that,” Nedra said, shock on her face.

“It wasn’t supposed to happen at all!” I roared, throwing back my chair.

“Don’t tell anyone,” she said immediately. “I’m still learning—”

“Learning? Learning?” I snarled. “Nedra, that’s necromancy. You can’t be learning necromancy! This isn’t just against the rules. This is illegal. And . . . wrong.” Wrong on such a deep, fundamental level. That rat had been dead. And then it wasn’t. And now it was again, but much, much worse.

I stared blindly around the room, at a loss for words. I saw Master Ostrum’s name scribbled on the sign-in sheet at the door. “Is this what Master Ostrum had been teaching you?” I asked.

“No, no, Grey—it’s not what it looks like.”

“Really? Because it looks like necromancy.”

“Not to practice it,” Nedra insisted. “To study it. I think maybe . . . maybe it could help us figure out the plague.”

“Don’t ever do it again.” My voice was vicious, but I didn’t care. Nedra never thought about the consequences. She could be imprisoned for a dead rat. “Promise me,” I ordered.

“I—” she started, but then gasped, her hand reaching for her head as if it suddenly pained her. Through her fingers, six long strands of her black tresses turned solid white.

“This kind of stuff—it’s bad, Nedra. You understand?”

She nodded, her eyes on her hair.

“Even if it has something to do with the plague, don’t you get caught up in it.”

Nedra wound the white strands around her finger and yanked them from her head. She scooped up the bones of the rat, cradling them as if they still had life, and moved toward the rubbish bin.

“Someone will see it there,” I said. “Here.” I thrust out my copper crucible to her. She dropped the remains and her hair inside, and I sealed the crucible, hiding the evidence of Nedra’s first necromancy experiment gone wrong.

We didn’t speak again as we left the lab. The other rats watched us, their beady eyes focused on Nedra as I turned off the lights and darkness swept over us.