The Alchemists of Loom (Loom Saga Book 1)

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters and events in this book are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons living or dead is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Published by Keymaster Press

  3971 Hoover Rd. Suite 77

  Columbus, OH 43123-2839

  Copyright © 2016 by Elise Kova

  All rights reserved. Neither this book, nor any parts within it may be sold or reproduced in any form without permission.

  Edited by: Rebecca Faith Heyman

  Cover Design by: Nick D. Grey

  Proofreading by: Christine Herman

  Layout Design by: Mr. Merwin D. Loquias

  ISBN: 9781619844414

  eISBN: 9781619844421

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2016932412

  Printed in the United States of America

  Also by Elise Kova

  LOOM SAGA

  The Alchemists of Loom

  The Dragons of Nova

  AIR AWAKENS SERIES

  Air Awakens

  Fire Falling

  Earth’s End

  Water’s Wrath

  Crystal Crowned

  GOLDEN GUARD TRILOGY

  The Crown’s Dog

  for grandpa

  the man who taught me the beauty in science

  CONTENTS

  1. Arianna

  2. Cvareh

  3. Florence

  4. Arianna

  5. Florence

  6. Cvareh

  7. Leona

  8. Arianna

  9. Cvareh

  10. Arianna

  11. Florence

  12. Leona

  13. Cvareh

  14. Arianna

  15. Leona

  16. Cvareh

  17. Florence

  18. Arianna

  19. Leona

  20. Cvareh

  21. Arianna

  22. Leona

  23. Florence

  24. Cvareh

  25. Leona

  26. Arianna

  27. Florence

  28. Cvareh

  29. Arianna

  30. Cvareh

  31. Florence

  32. Leona

  33. Cvareh

  34. Arianna

  35. Florence

  36. Arianna

  37. Cvareh

  38. Florence

  39. Arianna

  40. Cvareh

  41. Arianna

  42. Florence

  43. Petra

  APPENDIX: World of Loom

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  1. ARIANNA

  Arianna had a bomb, three bullets, two refined daggers, a mental map of her heist, and a magic winch-box. All she waited for now was darkness.

  The refinery she stared down upon had been coughing up only wisps of smog from its spiraling smokestacks since sunset. Ari had been watching it dwindle for weeks until it finally all but wrote “Tonight is the night, oh White Wraith” in the sky. She’d been eager for this job; the pay was astounding. But that hadn’t been what drew her to it. No, she loved the challenge of it, the way it dredged up patience and planning and calculation from her like rare minerals from a mine.

  Weeks of preparation—listening in on grunts describing their rotations, lifting papers from refinery manager’s homes, studying the logic behind the blackened, mammoth skeleton of steel and iron that was known as the refinery—had come down to this night. She looped her line through the stonework next to her and clipped it to itself. Dortam’s infamous White Wraith was so very ready for what was coming next.

  Moonlight streamed bright enough to cut her shape into the ground far below, making her presence known to any who bothered to take note. But Ari stood with relaxed shoulders and a slack posture. The grunts would be called into the refinery’s core to provide extra protection when the reagents were switched. They wouldn’t know they were a glint in her eye until it was far too late.

  The refinery belched up a sudden stream of smoke. Thick, inky, oppressive. It sizzled across Ari’s nose with the uncomfortable tang of magic turned sour. The reagents had been exhausted.

  The moon’s annoyingly attentive stare finally faltered in the clouding sky, and Ari stepped forward into welcoming blackness. The winch box on her hip sang as it funneled golden cabling from spools attached to her belt and through the harness strapped across her waist and chest. Seconds ticked by in her mind, sharp and precise. Ari knew how fast she would fall, and the exact height of the building where she’d perched just a moment ago. After that it was basic arithmetic to determine how long it’d take to reach the top of the iron-spiked wall that bordered the refinery.

  Magic pulsed from her fingertips as she tapped the winch box. The gears within clicked smoothly, slowing her descent at her behest. Ari reached down and felt the top of one of the spikes just beneath her, exactly where she had expected. Vaulting off the wall, she pulled the linchpin of her line and tumbled onto the barren ground below.

  Ari rested a hand on one of the two crossed daggers at the small of her back and summoned the line back into the spool on her hip. The metal cord shuddered and sprang to life at her silent magical command, slithering back to its home like a snake to its den. She turned on her heel and strode through the murky darkness without need of a light. The refined goggles that served to enhance her already-above-average eyesight made easy work of navigating the night.

  A giant, ineffective padlock attempted to bar her entry. She’d taken apart her first Rivet lock when she was a toddler; the satisfying weight of the tumblers engaging with the soft click that followed filled her with a familiar delight.

  Numbers remained consistent. Numbers and facts attempted to bring order from a chaotic world, to make sense of the impossible. They were the foundation for colossal structures and the tiniest of clockwork machines alike. Ari loved numbers, and not just because they saved her life by keeping her alert in her surroundings.

  She knew that each of her long strides were about a peca. She knew the dimly lit workers’ passage she went through was about twenty pecas long. And just for fun, she knew—based on the foreman’s old schematics that she lifted from his home office a week earlier—that they placed tiny bioluminescent scones about every two pecas.

  She moved with the ease and purposefulness that came from being unafraid and unhindered by the concerns that clouded the emotional mind. It all vanished the moment she became the White Wraith. Like this, she was an extension of the will of her benefactors, an enemy to all Dragons, and more than just a Fenthri. She cast aside the mortal coil to become something…more. When Ari felt the tattered flaps at the bottom of her white coat hit her booted calves, she felt like a bloody god.

  The slow beats of mechanical hearts grinding to a halt echoed up to her from deep within the refinery. Mechanisms that spun molten steel for final refining grew still. The room would cool, then Revo grunts would guard the Alchemists as they replenished the reagent chambers anew. Which meant that right now, two floors above her, they were preparing the next batch of reagents for refining. They had been taken from a chilled stasis locker and were waiting, ripe for the taking. Ari’s fingers twitched.

  With impeccable timing, Ari reached the grated door of one of the refinery’s four supply elevators. The New Dortam refinery could process four separate chambers of reagents, but the smokestacks on the north end had been cool for over a month. As expected, the elevator was still and silent, just waiting for her.

  The motor glinted high above, at the top of the shaft. Its large wheels nearly glowed through the filter of her goggles. Ari focused on it care
fully, willing it to life. The cogs obeyed, slowly churning in the darkness. She stepped onto the roof of the elevator as it eased by, and rode it two landings up.

  When heists were this easy, it almost felt like she hadn’t done anything to earn her infamy. The “impenetrable fortress” of New Dortam had presented a challenge no greater than the one posed by a standard bank vault.

  The elevator put her just where she expected: a dark wing of Alchemist laboratories. Magic hung heavy in the air, nearly suffocating. It made her skin crawl with the sensation of rot. Experiments they had been working for far too long were locked away in some of these chambers.

  She stopped at the twelfth door, spinning the map of the refinery in her head. Each room was five pecas wide. On the diagonal heading she’d made after entry, she should be just above the reagent preparation room.

  The door lock was plain iron—not a trace of gold about it. Ari clicked her tongue against her teeth. Unrefined and nonmagical. She’d have to open it manually. It was trickier than the Rivet padlock, but just slightly, and equally ineffective at barring her entry.

  The room was thick with the nearly visible haze of magic and chemicals. Worktables stood littered with records and research. Beakers sat out, some full, some empty. Ari reached into her inner breast pocket and pulled out the metal disk that had been digging into her chest all night beneath the straps of her harness. She tossed it into the center of the room haphazardly before strolling back out.

  Some Alchemist was about to have a really bad morning.

  With a thought, the gold at the center of the disk turned molten and the heat activated the powder packed around it. The bomb exploded with a BANG of satisfyingly epic proportions. With it, Ari’s relatively quiet heist was thrown full steam ahead.

  She started to run.

  She clipped her line to the handle of the door that had just failed to keep her out, jumping through the now gaping hole in the floor. She landed on rubble and the remnants of half the reagent preparation room. The blood of an Alchemist oozed from underneath the pile, and Ari was careful not to step in it. Blood left tracks that were too easy to follow by Fenthri, Chimera, and Dragon alike. The other Alchemists were still reeling, coughing, wheezing—trying to figure out what was happening.

  “Th-the reagents…” one wheezed.

  “Have been so beautifully prepared,” Ari praised brightly. “Still cold and encapsulated, their magic preserved just so… Perfection!”

  She grabbed the three golden tubes from the floor where they’d landed after the explosion. Her prizes had been destined for refining, but now she would whisk them away from the hands of Dragon dogs.

  “White Wraith, die!” one of the Alchemists shouted.

  Ari scrutinized the woman. Her hands were long and bright red, a thin scar around her wrists where they met pale grey flesh. Ari’s eyes fell on the woman’s face. Two triangles—one pointing up and the other down, connected by a line that intersected their off-set points—were tattooed in black ink on the woman’s cheek. A bold circle encased them. “You’re young for a circle. Don’t throw your life away.”

  The woman charged with a cry.

  “I warned you,” Ari sighed dramatically. In one swift movement, she stepped to the side, drew her dagger, and plunged it to the hilt in the woman’s gut. Ari hated murdering talent; the world had such precious little of it. But the woman had been warned. Ari pulled her magic back, only lacing her dagger with enough to make the wound difficult to heal but not impossible. The Alchemist was a Chimera and, if her Dragon blood was strong enough, she’d manage to survive such a wound.

  The doors to the room burst open, the grunts behind it freezing at the sight before them. Ari grinned wildly. Their cheeks bore the tattooed symbol of a revolver chamber, with one of the six holes filled. Revo grunts.

  “Too late!” Ari gleefully withdrew her dagger from where it still nestled in the woman’s gut. The winch box on her hip sprang to life with a thought and she sprang upward, back through the hole and up onto the floor above.

  Gunfire pelted the opening she’d just traversed, leaving singed and pitted marks.

  “Incendiary rounds, for little old me? You shouldn’t have.” Ari pulled her head away just in time for another volley of shots to light up the ceiling above her. Barely marked Revos. It took nothing to goad them into wasting a precious canister on her taunting.

  “Get her!” someone cried, rather unhelpfully.

  Ari would’ve been nervous or scared by the proclamation if anyone actually competent was on her tail. She bounded down the hall, each long stride of her muscled legs carrying her toward freedom, success, and a tidy sum of dunca. She threw her shoulder into a door as she opened it, letting the momentum swing her around a corner to another access hall.

  Footsteps were incoming from the left, but Ari was too fast. She ran with her life on the line and, instead of fear, she felt elation at the fact. Blood pumped through every inch of her, racing as fast as her feet. Her skin tingled with the magic that mended the tiny tears from exertion in her muscles as soon as they formed.

  Ari bounded through a door at the end of the hall and was met with the early light of a gray dawn. With near mechanical precision, she clipped onto, and leapt from, the railing surrounding the suspended walkway. Ari fell harmlessly, slowing just before the ground rose to greet her.

  “It won’t work,” she called up to the grunts trying to cut through her clip. “For working at a refinery, you’re certainly imbecilic about gold.”

  With a touch that was befitting of the White Wraith’s reputation, Ari snapped her fingers at the clip high above her. It unclipped itself and reared back before slapping across the grunts’ faces like a barbed whip, leaving a sharp crimson line across their tattoos in its wake. She swung her arm and watched with curt satisfaction as the clip soared to a balcony on the other side of the refinery wall. The winch on her hip couldn’t have moved faster; Ari didn’t have time to properly brace herself and her head shot back with the force of the pull. It wiped the smug grin off her face.

  Magic was electric in the air, sending tiny daggers prickling against her exposed skin.

  The seconds she took to move her line were almost too long. The ground rattled right where Ari had been standing, imploding inward in what should have been a lethal attack. Bloody, steaming, Chimera, circled Revo.

  This was not like the Chimera Alchemist Ari had encountered in the reagent preparation chamber. This Chimera was a hulking creature whose skin was a scarred patchwork of a dark Fenthri gray and Dragon rainbow. Ari turned, straining her neck in spite of the pain to get a good look at him. If he had been chasing her from the onset, she would’ve been in trouble. He hadn’t been in any of her notes.

  She braced herself, slammed into the balcony railing she’d chosen, and flipped over it. The Chimera roared, foaming at the mouth. Imperfect, poor soul. The powers that were at the refinery had taken a circled Revo—a master of his craft—and stuffed as many Dragon parts as they could into him. He was a Chimera in the worst of ways, and he wasn’t long for the world now. No matter how many organs or how much blood the Alchemists pumped into that “experiment” of a creature, his core was still Fenthri. And that much magic was breaking down his body, starting with his brain.

  Ari thought he might not see more than another dawn, but that was enough time to make trouble for her.

  The Chimera raised a hulking weapon. A crackle of magic filled the air and Ari was off with barely enough time to fill her lungs again. She wasn’t there to slay any forsaken Chimera—that was way above the pay-grade for this job, even at the insane amount she’d been contracted for. Ari was proud, but she wasn’t stupid. She didn’t fight battles she had a slim chance of winning if there wasn’t a reward on the line.

  The creature gave chase the second Ari was on the move. She bounded from rooftop to rooftop as more grunts poured out from the refinery. The stone and concrete skeleton of a building under construction had her skidding to a halt over ro
of shingles. She pulled a small canister from her belt, three notches marring the otherwise flawless exterior. Ari drew her revolver from its holster on her left leg and popped the canister into one of its open chambers.

  Malice.

  It surged through her, the will to destroy—the desire to burn and crash. The want to explode things into a million tiny pieces that could never have any hope of being put back together. Alchemical runes on the outside of her gun shone white as she pulled the trigger, and let go of it all.

  Florence hadn’t been lying. The girl had outdone herself with the canister, which demanded an exhausting amount of magic, but in turn shot a beam of pure power to the structure Ari had chosen. The explosion was as bright as sunlight and nearly blinded her with the magnification of her goggles.

  The building shuddered and groaned, coming to life. Ari pushed herself as hard as she could, the Revos from the refinery still hot on her tail. But she was several steps ahead, literally and figuratively. She knew how the building would sway and fall. She knew the way to run to narrowly miss the first colossal beam collapsing. Once more, it all came down to numbers: the number of load-bearing pillars, the weight distribution of the structure, the probability of how the collapse would occur.

  The second she crossed onto the other side of the smoke and chaos, Ari dropped down into an alleyway. She’d had her grand finale. Now it was time for her to do as her namesake and disappear like a wraith with the dawn.

  Ari didn’t have any safe houses in New Dortam. She could never feel safe in an area that worked so closely with the Dragons, their Royuk language was used as commonly as Fennish. Even if her eyes could make sense of the rectangles, lines, and dots, she avoided reading the Dragon notices and advertisements plastered on buildings.

  Well, almost.

  “That looks nothing like me.” Ari squinted at the drawing of a lithe and long-haired woman on a wanted poster that had White Wraith written in bold Royuk below, along with an impressive sum of dunca. The reward for her head had gone up, Ari noted with pride. She tore the notice off the wall. Florence would find amusement in it as well.