The Verge Of An Empire

37

Sebastina helped me sit up and piled plates around me, interspersed with documents. I ate something without looking, sorting through the results of examinations, the conclusions of the coroner, the reports of alchemists and forensic magicians. Perhaps the most interesting was the description of the black substance found in Incival's house. Neither magicians nor alchemists had any idea what it was. More precisely, the alchemists knew what they had found, but they did not understand how it got there and what it was used for. The guys from Kalkstein University even sent us a list of the elements that make up that mass: water, carbon, ammonia, lime, phosphorus, salt, saltpeter, and so on, some other number of substances that could say something to Inchival, and not for me.

- Some kind of nonsense. They say that this mixture is not particularly flammable, therefore, it is not a fuel, it cannot be consumed, which means that it is not a medicine. Not vegetable, not organic. Not acid, not… An