Simon gestured at the sealed wall with something between reverence and proprietorial pride.
"A door would be madness. Any opening risks a breach, and a breach at that temperature means we are ash before the nerve signals reach our brains. The only safe point of entry is through a translocation circle. That's what the magicians are for."
Billy stared at the wall for a moment. "So what exactly are we supposed to—"
"We," Simon said, with the particular condescension of a man who finds it mildly entertaining to be misunderstood, "are not supposed to do anything. That is rather the point of having specialists. You, Mr. Billy, are here to observe. I suggest you do that."
Billy swallowed the response that occurred to him and produced a thin, diplomatic smile instead. He had been producing diplomatic smiles since before Simon was likely born, and he was good at it.
✦ ✦ ✦
The two magicians drew the circle around the girl with practiced efficiency—chalk and something darker, applied with the speed of men who had done this many times before. They motioned the others back. A brief incantation. A flash of light that left white shapes on the inside of Billy's eyelids.
And then she was gone from the room.
And then she was visible through the glass.
The chamber on the other side of the wall was a different world entirely. The air inside did not merely shimmer—it writhed, convulsed, behaved like a liquid that had forgotten it was a gas. The heat distorted everything: the walls, the cauldron, the floor, the girl herself, who stood for perhaps two seconds in the center of the room before her body registered what surrounded it.
What happened next was not clean.
The skin on her arms went first—blistering in an instant, the blisters splitting before they had fully formed, the fluid inside them vaporizing rather than running. Her hair ignited at the tips and burned upward in a fraction of a second, gone before it could properly catch. The exposed flesh beneath the skin turned the color of coals—dark red, then black at the edges, cracking in the particular way that meat cracks when the liquid inside it boils faster than the surface can release.
She was screaming. The four men watching could not hear it through the glass and the metal wall, but they could see it—her mouth wide, her neck straining, the cords of her throat standing out before the fire reached them and silenced her permanently. The scream became nothing. A shape without sound.
Her eyes went next. The fluid in them superheated and expanded and the eyes collapsed inward in a way that Billy did not look away from, though some instinct in him registered that he probably should have.
Then something else happened.
The burning continued—but the body began to resist it. Not stop it. Not reverse it. But slow it, in the way that a tide is slowed when it hits something solid rather than yielding. Where the flesh had gone to char, it darkened further and then—very slowly—something pale began at the edges of the damage. Not skin yet. Not anything recognizable yet. But something that was working toward skin, methodically, with the persistence of a process that had no capacity to give up.
Simon watched this with the focused stillness of a man seeing what he had expected, but not quite believing it even so.
Billy, beside him, said in a voice that had gone very quiet: "I'd say that's proof enough."
"That," Simon said, "is merely the first part."
✦ ✦ ✦
Billy turned to look at him. "There's a second part."
"There is." Simon pointed through the glass at the cauldron at the room's center, sitting massive and black over the Baissu flame. "The real trial is there."
"What's inside it?"
"Umbresca oil. We placed it there a week ago to heat."
Billy's expression shifted. Umbresca oil was not a commodity that passed through ordinary markets. Black as an absence, reflective of nothing, it had the property of interacting not with the body but with what the body contained—what some called the soul, and what more careful people called simply the animating principle, because soul implied more certainty about its nature than the evidence supported. Umbresca oil could heal that principle, under the right conditions. Under the wrong ones, it dissolved it.
"How are you getting her into it?" Billy asked.
"The hypnosis we placed on her in the hall—mild, but sufficient. One signal and she will follow the instruction we embedded. She will go to the cauldron herself."
Simon nodded at one of the magicians.
The magician snapped his fingers.
Through the glass, the girl—still burning, still regenerating, the two processes fighting each other across every surface of her body—stopped her writhing and became still. Then she began to move. Not with urgency. With the terrible, purposeful deliberateness of something following an instruction it cannot question.
She crawled. Across the floor of the chamber, trailing strips of herself on the stone—skin and worse, peeling away at every point of contact, leaving dark smears that smoked and then ignited. She left a path behind her. It burned.
Simon watched with his hands clasped behind his back.
The rate of regeneration is faster than it should be, he thought. Months to days when she was healing before. Now—even here, even in this—she is keeping pace with the destruction. That is not a property of any curse I know. That is something else. Something that accelerates with exposure, with damage, with time. If it is a lost spell, it is one that improves. Or perhaps it is not a spell at all. Perhaps she is the source.
He filed the thought away.
She reached the base of the cauldron. The iron ladder that ran up its side had been there long enough that it had partially fused with the cauldron's surface in the heat. She gripped the first rung. The flesh of her palms adhered to the metal and tore free when she lifted her hand to reach the next one. She climbed anyway. Each rung took a piece of her hand. By the time she reached the top, her fingers were down to the bone—but the bone was already acquiring something new at its base, pale and fibrous, growing with the methodical patience of a thing that cannot be stopped by merely destroying its progress.
"If she survives this," Simon said quietly—to himself, mostly—"she is the one I have been looking for."
Billy, barely audible: "Jump."
She obeyed. Without hesitation. Without the pause that even animals take at the edge of something lethal. She went in.
The Umbresca oil received her without a splash—it was too thick for that, too heavy. She disappeared into it the way a stone disappears into tar. The surface closed over her head. The four men watched the glowing orb in the magician's hand.
It remained white.
One of the magicians stepped back from the glass. His voice, when he spoke, was the voice of a man who has spent his life in the presence of extraordinary things and has just seen something that exceeds his categories.
"The heat and pressure in that oil would unmake the soul of anything I have ever examined. The soul is not a physical thing—it does not burn. But Umbresca oil at this temperature does not burn it. It erases it. Removes it from existence, not from the body. And she—" He stopped. Started again. "She is still there."
Simon said: "Bring her out."
A flash of light. On the other side of the glass, the surface of the oil broke, and what rose from it was placed in the room's center by the translocation—and what it was, now, was a skeleton. Clean. Intact. Every bone in place, articulated as though still held by invisible tissue. The glowing orb pulsed once, steadily white.
Billy stared. "Is she dead?"
"The orb says no," Simon said. "She is not dead. What you are looking at is not death. I don't have a better word for what it is, but it is not death. The fact that the skeleton is intact—" He paused, and for the first time Billy heard something in Simon's voice that was not controlled. Not quite awe. Something adjacent to it. "—is itself impossible. The soul should have been erased. The bones should be powder. That they are not means the oil reached her and found something it could not dissolve."
He turned from the glass.
"Let's go upstairs."
✦ ✦ ✦
The elven woman came when Simon clapped—long black hair, the sharp ears of her kind, the particular economy of movement that comes from years of domestic service in a household that does not tolerate imprecision. Simon gave her instructions: take the skeleton to a private chamber, observe it, record every change. She bowed and left with it, and the four men followed her upstairs to the room where the candles burned without consuming themselves.
They sat. Coffee appeared, as it had before, without being requested.
Simon leaned forward and said, simply: "Your price."
Billy had been holding the number in his mind for months. He had decided on it during a sleepless night in a village inn, calculated it from first principles, revised it upward twice, and then decided he was being too conservative and revised it upward once more.
"Fifty-seven billion gold pieces."
Simon's eyebrows rose by a precise, controlled fraction. He said nothing for a moment.
Billy continued before the silence could be used against him. "Consider the arithmetic. One organ harvested per month—conservative estimate, hundreds of thousands per organ on any serious black market. With your resources and your network, the figure is higher. Call it a billion per month in returns. At that rate, you recover the full price in under five years. After that, the profit is pure. And that's before you account for—"
He leaned forward.
"—the Elixir of Life."
Simon was quiet for a moment. Then: "So you worked that out."
"Your collection pointed in one direction. The tests you ran pointed in one direction. The week you asked for—time to prepare the Umbresca oil, which is not something you keep on hand for routine purposes. You have been looking for a source, and you have been going through candidates to find it, and disposing of the ones that didn't meet your criteria. The girl is not a candidate. She is the answer."
Simon studied him with the expression of a man recalibrating his assessment of someone he had underestimated.
"You are sharper than you present yourself to be, Mr. Billy."
"I find it useful to present myself as slightly less sharp than I am. It's a professional habit."
Simon almost smiled. "The gold will be ready in two days. How do you intend to move it?"
"A billion now. I'll acquire a pocket dimension for the remainder and return for it."
Simon nodded once, with the finality of a man who has made decisions of far greater magnitude than this one and finds the mechanics of it straightforward.
"Two days," he said. "We have a deal."
They did not shake hands. Men like Simon did not seal arrangements that way. The deal existed because both of them had decided it existed, and that was sufficient.
Billy walked out of the estate into the evening air and stood for a moment in the particular stillness of the grounds, feeling the weight of the number—fifty-seven billion—settle into his body like something physical.
He had done it.
Whatever else was true, whatever Shaal thought of him, whatever the world would eventually make of what he had done over the past year—he had done it.
He walked to his cart. He sat down. He picked up the reins.
He did not think about the skeleton in the private chamber, or what it was doing in the dark, or what it would look like when the bone began—as he was certain it would—to acquire something new at its edges, pale and patient and impossible.
He thought about the number.
He drove home.
✦ ✦ ✦