She came upon another chamber. This one contained a row of stone sarcophagi with the likeness of brave warriors etched upon their surfaces. She pulled out her parchment and began mapping the area. The tops of the sarcophagi were too heavy to lift on her own, but she knew that inside they contained high ranking officers and generals from Móráin’s Conquest, perfectly preserved by archaic alchemical oils and ointments.
Morrígan checked her updated map and saw that there was possibly a shortcut from this chamber that looped back around towards the workshop. There was a thin path across the way that looked like it led back into the eastern portion of the lake. Satisfied with her work, she pocketed her parchment, amplified her torch, and returned to her uncle’s base of operations.
***
When Morrígan found him, Yarlaith was hard at work, cursing and muttering before a wooden table covered in severed limbs. In his bloody hands he held an arm, cut at the elbow.
“Morrígan! Make up another measure of balanth serum.”
Without hesitation, Morrígan set to work, picking out the bottles of solutions and setting the ingredients down on a separate table kept clear for alchemy. Any contamination from a flake of skin or a drop of blood could render a potion useless, so she carried out each step with extreme caution.
She slowly heated a pot of water over an array of red focus-crystals, crushing a handful of balanth stalks in a mortar and pestle until they became a fine powder. She used a brass scales and tiny iron weights to measure out exactly six ounces of balanth, all while keeping an eye on the water, careful not to let it boil. When the powder was prepared, she added the balanth to the water and immediately transferred the solution to a second array of red crystals, enchanted to produce twice as much heat as the first. The water turned cloudy and grey as it began to boil, and the powder disappeared into the liquid. This was a sign that it was time to add the blood, which she did, dropwise, using a long glass pipe filled with gauze.
Ten per ounce, she reminded herself, counting each drop as it fell into the potion. She let the solution cool for exactly three minutes, counting on her uncle’s Simian-made pocket watch, and then it was time to add the remaining ingredients. They were already prepared with the exact amounts needed so they could be added quickly. The bottles were labelled with numbers, but Morrígan didn’t bother to learn their real names. She hated alchemy.
When the serum was ready, she brought it to Yarlaith, who was still fixated on the severed arm.
“Grab the swab and apply it to the elbow, right where it has been cut.”
The first time he asked her to do this, Morrígan was terrified of getting too close. Now, even as the blood had grown foul and crusty around the exposed bone, she barely hesitated.
She worked in silence, blotting the liquid around the flesh of the torn arm. Nothing happened. She watched for a moment, then blotted at the flesh again.
“Stop, Morrigan,” said Yarlaith, putting the arm back onto the table, defeated. “The reaction should be immediate. Are you sure you added the blood at the right—?”
“Yes! I did exactly as you asked,” she snapped. “How can you expect to repeat the experiment exactly as it happened to Fionn, without another armless mage to work on?”
Yarlaith shook his head. “That shouldn’t matter. Once the solutions and poultices are exactly as they were that night, I should be able to make the flesh my mark again. I achieved that much before I even began sewing the arm onto Fionn’s body.”
“What if the corpses were fresher? I found some sarcophagi today, out in the eastern tunnels.”
“No, Morrígan. We’ve been through this. It won’t make a difference. Besides, I need to focus on these limbs for now.”
“But even if you take control of the arm, how will that bring back Mother?”
“This is how research works, Morrígan. We often must stray far from our goal to learn how we can achieve it. Necromancy has never been studied properly, and before we can even consider bringing your mother back, we need to learn how it works. Now, I must go and record these findings while they are still fresh. Can you prepare more medicine for Mrs. Mhurichú’s next few rounds? We’re running low.”
Yarlaith sat down at his desk near where Mother lay and set to work with his writing.
“Yarlaith,” asked Morrígan, all too aware of how he hated to be disturbed from his work. “I know how important all this is, I really do. I just think that I’m not all that equipped to help you, to really help you, unless I know how to perform magic of my own.”
“I already told you, it wouldn’t make a difference,” he said, not looking up.
“You did,” said Morrígan. “But you promised, Yarlaith. Back after the beadhbhs attacked. You promised you’d help me learn.”
“But now you’re helping me. As this is far more important than learning the basics of the Six Schools. I’ve taught you alchemy, haven’t I?” He glanced up at her as he turned a page of his notebook.
“Yes,” said Morrígan, with a sigh. Of course, alchemy was one of the Six Schools, but it was hardly magic. More like cooking. “But surely I need to know the basics too.”
“And what makes you say that?”
“Well, if something were to go wrong with the fire crystals, or the balanth serum, how could I even begin fixing them without knowing how they work? And if something did go wrong, I probably wouldn’t even be aware of it.”
Yarlaith paused. “You’ve been making blood potions for almost a month now. Are you telling me you don’t know how focus-crystals work?”
“I know that they produce magic, like Pyromancy, and—”
“Focus-crystals do not produce magic.” Yarlaith shut his notebook with a slam. He stood and walked past Morrígan, then picked a crystal from the alchemy workstation. It shimmered with a faint crimson glow between his fingers. “They are nothing but empty vessels. Repeated instances of tiny structures that a mage can alter based on his or her own needs.”
The crystal slowly turned from red to blue in Yarlaith’s hands. He tossed it to Morrígan; as she caught it, she realised that its heat had vanished and was replaced with a numb, freezing aura.
“You changed it,” she said. “It’s giving off Hydromancy now….”
“All I did was alter the structures that make up this crystal, and now the instructions for performing red magic have been replaced with those for blue magic.”
“Instructions? What instructions?”
The question escaped her lips before Morrígan had a chance to prevent herself from appearing ignorant. She expected Yarlaith to grow irritated with her questioning, but instead he smiled.
“Consider that you and I were separated by darkness over a large distance, and the only means we had of communicating was with a single torch. I would easily be able to communicate two messages with the torch. Lit and unlit. On and off. One torch can provide two discreet signals. Do you follow?”
Morrígan nodded, realising that some warmth had returned to Yarlaith’s voice. From the reading and writing lessons he had given to Morrígan and her friends when they were children, it was clear that Yarlaith took great joy in teaching, especially through meandering metaphors.
“Now, if I was in possession of two torches, and we had agreed on a code beforehand, how many messages could I relay?”
Morrígan thought about it for a second.
On-off, off-on. Both on… both off.
