Here's the next installment of our Metallum Nocturne story. If you need to catch up on any of the previous episodes, click here.
Episode Thirty-Nine
The Order of Honorable Alchemists Hall was located in the first ward. The building had the feel of an expensive corporate headquarters crossed with a gothic church. Celesse D'Agastine may only be the third most famous mage after Invictus and Frank Orpheum, but she was definitely the richest. D'Agastine Industries was the premiere maker of commercial elixirs, enchanted cosmetics, and a million other personal improvement products. Her businesses spanned the globe and could be found in every country.
Claire rode the train across the city. The first ward was unfamiliar and she was low on funds, so it took her longer than she planned to locate the Hall on foot. The area was less touristy than the second, but the number of gawkers on the sidewalk, staring at the Spire, or the high end magical boutiques that existed still made travel annoying. She'd forgotten how busy the inner ring wards were compared to the outer ones.
As she approached the building, Claire caught strange looks from the students leaving as if they recognized her from the papers, or knew that she didn't belong. She reached the front doors and waited for a student to approach. A girl her age with lustrous brown skin and her hair pulled back in two balls that gave her the profile of a mouse approached the doors, swinging wide to avoid Claire.
"Excuse me. I just need a moment of your time."
"Take your sales pitch somewhere else," said the girl.
"I'm not selling anything. I need to talk to your Patron. I'm a member of the Halls myself. Metallum Nocturne. Please. I have something of hers that I think she might want."
Claire held out a faded letter. She'd picked one that she thought Celesse might remember. The girl looked at the envelope as if it were a live bomb.
"What is it?" the girl asked with crossed arms.
"A letter she wrote to my patron. I have a bunch of them. Found them at my Hall. I wanted to return them and also I need to talk to her."
The girl furrowed her forehead suspiciously, making a noise in the back of her throat.
"I don't know," she said, edging towards the door.
"It's not cursed or anything. You can check it. Please take it to her. It's important."
The girl glanced up. "Do I know you?"
Claire nodded. "From the papers. I'm the one Annette Block is suing."
The girl reached out and cautiously accepted the letter. "I can't promise anything and I don't even know if she's here. Our Patron is a busy woman. She could be in Italy for all I know."
"I understand."
After the girl went inside, Claire paced around the front. She stayed there for an hour until she realized that Celesse was either uninterested in meeting her, or not in the building. Claire wished she'd added her number or another way to contact her, but had been too nervous about the approach in the first place.
"This was stupid."
The train station was three blocks away. Claire meandered at a languid pace, letting the sun warm her back even as the light hurt her eyes. When she'd first come to the city of sorcery, she'd been enthralled by the sights. The accident and lawsuit had sucked the color from the world. Everything seemed drained of its vitality.
She was so deep in her thoughts she didn't realize the black SUV had pulled up until the window rolled down. A man in body armor and wearing dark sunglasses leaned out.
"Get in."
"What? No way. I've already been abducted once this month."
He held up the letter she'd given the Alchemist student.
"Oh, right. I'm an idiot."
Claire expected to find Celesse in the back, but it was empty. The SUV surged away, heading across the city to the third ward. The vehicle dropped her off at a store called the Elysium. A woman in a body-hugging cream silk dress opened the door.
"Welcome, Miss Teller. Please follow me."
The interior was a revelation. Claire didn't even know what the store was selling as there were no products showing. She spotted an older woman leaving a room with a delirious expression, heading the other direction. The doors they passed revealed clues as she heard giggling, pulsing dance music, and the slap of wood on flesh.
"Excuse me, what does Elysium sell?"
"Experiences," said her guide. "For those who can afford it."
"Like anything?"
The woman coyly glanced over her shoulder. "Within reason."
"What's the strangest thing you've provided to a customer?" asked Claire curious, but also trying to keep her mind off who she was about to meet.
"An older woman wanted to experience being eaten as an insect." They stopped at a glistening elevator which opened. "It will take you to her."
The door closed behind Claire. There was no sensation of movement, only the lights dinging up the board until they reached seventeen. She exited into an octagonal chamber with no obvious door. Unsure if she'd stepped off at the wrong floor, she touched the panels in search of a handle. Halfway around, she startled when the opposite one opened, revealing a man in a bulletproof vest wearing mirrored sunglasses.
"This way, ma'am."
The interior felt like she was wandering through other realms. Cultured jungle. Egyptian oasis. The guard pointed her through an archway. Claire stepped into a glass and steel dome surrounded by lush, sunset kissed clouds. The tops of the towering thunderclouds were orangish-red on the top and bruise purple on their flat base. She saw no city beneath, which made her wonder if the elevator or strange octagonal room had been a portal, but she'd felt no vertigo which she'd heard was a sign of interrealm travel.
"Lovely, isn't it."
The silky voice wormed into her brain. By the time Claire turned to see Celesse striding towards her in a sculpted white dress, she wanted to fall to her knees. The patron wasn't unfamiliar. Claire had seen her on the internet dozens of times. But in person, it felt like the difference between seeing a bomb explode through a movie screen and standing at a barely safe distance. The golden hair, wide doe-eyes, and features smoothed to silk combined with a heady perfume left Claire stunned, her jaw hanging low.
Then the murderous voice in her head said something imperceptible and the compulsion fell away. Claire found herself suddenly able to think.
"It's beautiful. The tips of the clouds remind me of a crucible of metal," said Claire, fidgeting with her hands behind her back. She turned her head. "Where are we?"
The perfection that was Celesse's forehead wrinkled briefly before returning to a smooth expanse.
"Claire Teller. Fifth year student of Metallum Nocturne and focus of Annette Block's ire. How did you come by this letter?" she asked, holding up the envelope that Claire had given to the student.
"Patron Canterbury gave me his trunk of things. I don't think he'd looked within since he moved into Adolphus' old apartment in the Hall."
"I believe you're not telling me the whole story. A Hall Patron doesn't simply hand over a former patron's personal effects without a reason."
Claire studied the older woman. She was by some estimates at least two hundred years old, probably more, but barely looked the back end of her twenties. She had an ethereal glow. Rather than answer, Claire lifted the side of her shirt, eliciting a sucked in breath from the beautiful patron.
"I see."
Celesse reached out and caressed the striations of night metal. Goosebumps exploded over Claire's skin and those earlier pangs of desire returned, but she regained control of her thoughts.
"The papers didn't say anything about what kind of metal you were using." Celesse turned away, staring at the voluminous clouds. "I thought I'd never see something like that again."
"What happened to Adolphus? I read his diary. I know he didn't die right away like the history says."
"My dear, Adol? I'm guessing I don't have to tell you what was happening to him."
"Did he talk about the Night Mother? Or Umbra?"
Celesse spun on her heels. The focused gaze of the patron felt like being put under a microscope.
"You're quite resourceful if you've learned that much."
"I haven't had much of a choice."
"We always have a choice. Most people would rather lie down in their grave than face their fears. But I should have guessed as much since you took a bullet in a church. I was wondering how you survived that, but now I see the reason."
The idea that one of the most famous people in the world had been following her exploits was mind shattering. Claire felt like she'd just learned that the sun was an illusion. Celesse extended her fingers.
"It also explains why you're not a stammering idiot right now." She gestured to her face. "The downside of this sorcery is that it's hard to have a normal conversation anymore without having to ask them to wipe the spittle from their lips."
"What happened to him?" asked Claire.
Celesse bit her lower lip, the echoes of distant pain in her gaze.
"You don't want to know."
"Let me be the judge of that," said Claire.
"Tough as you might be, a girl of, what, twenty-two year's old has not the knowledge to navigate the treacherous path before you," said Celesse.
"Then help me."
"Maybe I should, then it will end this silly farce with the Blocks. Her ambitions are endless. I wouldn't have put it past her to have let her daughter die just for this opportunity."
Remembering the pain and anguish from the courthouse bathroom, Claire replied, "I think she's being honest in her grief."
"The powerful know how to turn anything into an advantage, especially tragedy. Don't let her crocodile tears fool you."
"What happened to him? Did he find a way to Umbra? Did he meet the Night Mother?" asked Claire.
"Umbra," said Celesse, the emotion draining from her expression. "You might as well travel to the infernal realm. It's not so different, even if it has kept itself shrouded from prying eyes."
"So it is a real realm?"
Celesse snapped her fingers and through an illusionary wall came an attendant with a tray of champagne glasses. Claire took one when offered and joined the Alchemist Patron on a couch near the window. The thundercloud pulsed with lightning, rumbling and ominous, and beautiful from their airy perch.
"Umbra is real. It is a precursor realm, much like the infernal, but much less is known about it. Almost nothing, in fact. This Night Mother, if she is a real being, has no interest in the rest of the realms, as far as I can tell. Almost sixty-five years ago my Adol entered Umbra and that was the last I saw of him."
"I'm sorry."
Celesse's lip curled in anger. "Don't be sorry, be afraid. I know what drove him to take such a journey. I assume it's the same reason you found me. You’re being driven to do things you don't want to do."
"I killed a man in the Undercity." The admission didn't bring surprise from the Patron. "He was trying to kill me first, but before that, I felt an overwhelming compulsion to take a life. She told me I owed her a life for saving mine."
Celesse looked away. "His first kill was a vagrant. The second was a student who came to him for help in the middle of the night."
"He killed a student?"
"It was what pushed him to go to Umbra. He didn’t feel safe running the Hall. Edward and I had to pull a lot of strings to hide the killing. It's no wonder that he never went through Adolphus' things. It brought too many bad memories."
Claire closed her eyes, placed her fingers against her temple and massaged. When she opened them, Celesse was watching her.
"Is there another way?"
"If there had been, I'm sure he would have taken it."
"Will you help me get to Umbra?"
Celesse placed her hands on her knees. "No. I signed his death warrant when I sent him. I will not sign yours."
"Then you're cursing someone else to die, if what you say is true about the Night Mother's influence," said Claire.
"That's not my problem. It's yours."
The hardness in the woman's tone was a reminder that she was not unused to difficult decisions.
"Annette is offering a deal. I blame Metallum Nocturne and the Halls for her daughter's death in exchange for a lesser payment," said Claire, ignoring the fact that the deal had expired days ago.
"And be the villain for every mage who ever graduated from the Halls?"
"What will it matter if I go mad from the voices, or I’m thrown in jail after succumbing to the need to kill." Claire took a drink to calm her beating heart. "I know the situation the Halls are in right now. Invictus has been gone for, what, sixteen years now? The university is a mess. Look what's been happening in the city. The killings from last year, the explosions, rumors of fights between Patrons, dangerous creatures loose on the streets. You said it yourself, Annette is an opportunist. She sees the distress in the Hall leadership without the Head Patron. She knows she can translate that into a position of power and I can guarantee mayor of the city is only a stepping stone."
Celesse's nostrils flared. Claire worried she'd gone too far speaking to the Alchemist Patron like that. Clearly the woman hadn't been on the receiving end of a rant in a long time because she looked like she was contemplating how exactly to kill Claire and how painful it should be. Then her hard expression broke. She set her glass on the table.
"You want to go to Umbra? Fine. I'll let you kill yourself like Adolphus. But I want those letters back. Edward should have never kept them," said Celesse, chin raised.
"I'll have them sent over," said Claire.
The idea that she would send them over, as if she had people working for her like the Patron was laughable, but Celesse didn't call her out. Instead, she walked over and stared her down with the intensity of a viper about to strike.
"I haven't decided if I like you are not," she said.
In that instant, Claire saw her for what she was: a contradiction. Celesse D'Agastine was a vain woman, but she was also a powerhouse of personality. Claire wasn't sure if that should make her feel better that even the powerful were insecure in their own ways.
"I don't care."
The response brought a curl to the corner of Celesse's lips. She strode away, the standoff coming to an end, pausing halfway to the hidden door.
"I'll send someone to pick up the letters and to show you how to reach Umbra. But remember, you asked for this."
Celesse D'Agastine, patron of Alchemists Hall, and richest person in the world, walked through an illusionary wall, leaving Claire by her lonesome. She considered staying in the suite to watch the infinite sky pass by, but the guard with mirrored glasses appeared shortly after and drove her back to Metallum Nocturne.
