I counted out the amount, and despite the lightness of my coin purse I tipped him lavishly, hoping to buy some small portion of loyalty.
We climbed onto the open bench and drove west, to a well-tended section of the city with tidy paved streets and tall, dignified buildings surrounded by high iron gates and walls. It was a respectable neighborhood. But even here the night air was heavy with a sooty fog. Will’s address was well to the east of here, which was good. When the constabulary showed up at the staging post, they might follow us here, but I would make sure they could not follow us farther.
We stopped outside a row of unassuming brick buildings.
“This is it,” said the cabdriver.
“This? Which one?” I asked. There were no markers, no crucifix or statues or even a sign.
“This is the Bavarian house, what has a chapel,” said the coachman with a shrug. “I’d try around the side if I was you. Want me to wait?”
“No, thank you,” I said. From now on, we would have to walk.
Dominic had already leapt from the coach and knocked on the front entrance. When there was no answer, he hurried around the side street. I followed him.
The cabdriver seemed to have the right idea. A small cross hung over the side door. Heartened by this, Dominic pounded on the door, paused a few moments, and pounded again. I looked around the alley, wincing at the noise. Despite the presence of the Roman chapel, this looked like the sort of street whose inhabitants might not take kindly to being woken well before dawn.
Dominic took a few steps back, peering up at the window on the second floor.
“Dominic, maybe we should go,” I said. “No one seems to be waking. The priest might not even live here.”
But Dominic picked up a handful of gravel from the street and starting flinging it at the window. It was quieter, at least, than his pounding on the door had been. And in a moment it proved more effective as well. Light glowed through the window. Someone had lit a lamp.
In another minute, the door opened. A bald, middle-aged man in a dressing gown peered out.
“Are you a priest?” asked Dominic.
“I am,” said the man. He was bleary-eyed and half awake but did not seem irritated to have been woken.
“I need to confess, Father.”
The priest nodded and beckoned him inside. Dominic went in without a backward glance, and then the priest noticed me.
“Come in, my dear. Are you also in need of a confessor?”
“No, thank you—Father.”
My tongue tripped on the title, enough for the priest to smile slightly and understand that I was not one of his flock.
I followed him in, and I noticed with gratitude that he locked the door behind us. I looked around in the uncertain light.
It was not a big chapel, but that much I knew from the outside. There were a dozen or so rows of pews facing a set of stairs and an altar. Nothing burned but the light the priest carried and a red lamp hanging in front of a screen beside the altar. The close air was thick with the smell of stale incense. Dominic knelt and crossed himself, facing the altar, and then didn’t get up. The priest hung back a moment. I heard a muffled, wet sound. Dominic was crying.
The priest put a hand on Dominic’s shoulder and murmured something in a low voice. Dominic got up and followed the priest into a dark, curtained box. I knew enough to recognize it as a confessional, though I had never been inside one. My experience with church was limited to a few solitary forays, fueled by curiosity. My mother had no religion but her own, and that was alchemy. Her patrons had been men of liberal religious sentiment, believing it a beneficial practice for a certain sort of person—though naturally not enlightened, rational men such as themselves. Even Will, who was so different from those men in so many other ways, was just like them in this.
I wondered what any of them would do if they unexpectedly found themselves a killer. I wondered what I would do.
Inside the confessional, Dominic’s voice had turned to sobs. My own throat started to feel tight.
I sat in the pew farthest from the confessional. I heard Dominic, but the words were indistinct, as were the priest’s murmured replies. A wave of exhaustion hit me. Just across the room from me, Dominic was laying down a burden, giving it to someone else who was sworn to take it, and to tell him he was free of it. There was no one like that for me. If alchemy was our religion, then we were its priests. We held the power, and we would reap the rewards, but the burdens were ours alone. No one could take them from us. If my mother had been judged unworthy by some god of alchemy, then there was no priest who could make her better. I simply had to be good enough to pass the test, to make the Stone and save her.
But good enough at what? There were no Ten Commandments of alchemy. Adepts had brought their own moralities and religions to the practice and claimed they were essential, but my mother and I had never given credit to any of that. Perhaps I should ask Dominic to teach me. He seemed to be well versed in the practice of being good. If I couldn’t learn from him, then I would have to count on my natural moral instincts, because the only virtues I had been trained in were those of diligence and honesty. The latter, not because an adept should not lie, but because my mother refused to be lied to.
Gone was the exhilaration I had felt at the thought of making the Stone myself, proving myself to my mother and the
