The door banged open and hit the wall behind it. Nothing jumped out. Nothing roared. A little dust came down from the top of the frame and landed in my hair.
 
“You said three,” Agnes said.
 
“I said on three. Two is on the way to three.”
 
She tossed her torch into the room before I could argue more. It landed on the floor and rolled, and the light went sliding across a desk, a bookshelf, and a bed with a blanket so dusty it had gone gray.
 
It was a bedroom. Somebody's actual bedroom.
 
I went in first with my sword up, because that's my job. I checked the corners. I checked under the bed, which was a mistake, because there was a lot of dust under there and most of it went up my nose. I sneezed three times. Nothing attacked me while I was sneezing, so I decided the room was safe.
 
Agnes came in and went straight for the bookshelf. Of course she did. I went to the desk.
 
It was a mess. Loose papers everywhere, piled on top of each other, some of them with tiny holes chewed through. A notebook lay open in the middle with half a sentence on the last page, like whoever wrote it got up for a snack and never came back. The writing was neat and curly and totally unreadable. Not a language I knew. Not even close.
 
In the corner of the desk sat a little leather bag. I opened it. It was full of smooth, round stones in every color. Green, blue, a deep red like a cherry. They were a little warm.
 
I picked up a blue one and held it up to the light. There was a faint glow deep in the middle, like something in there was still awake. I leaned in closer. Across the room, Agnes's pages had stopped turning. It was dead quiet.
 
“Those are slime cores.”
 
Her mouth was about an inch from my ear.
 
I jumped so hard I banged my knee on the desk. The core went flying. I spun around with my sword halfway out, and a noise came out of me. It was high, and it was loud, and it was not a noise a grown man should make, and it bounced off every wall in that little room.
 
Agnes put a hand over her mouth. Her shoulders were shaking.
 
“Oh, Colm,” she said through her fingers. “I didn't know you could hit that note.”
 
“Shut up.”
 
“Hedda would love that.”
 
“Hedda is never going to hear about it.”
 
“Mm.” She patted my head like I was a dog. A good dog. A dog with a very high voice. Then she went back to the books, still smiling.
 
My face was hot. I put the slime core back in the bag and very carefully did not look at her for a while.
 
“Colm,” she said after a minute. Her voice was different now. Quieter. “Come look at this.”
 
She had a book open on top of the shelf. Big, old, the leather cover gone soft and cracked. The pages were covered in the same curly writing as the notebook, plus drawings. Circles inside circles, like the ones on the front door. Little sketches of jars and bottles with things growing in them.
 
“I can't read it,” she said. “But I've seen notes that look like this. At the chapel. A visiting scholar had some.” She tapped a drawing of a bottle with something curled up inside it. “These are alchemy notes.”
 
“Alchemy.”
 
“I think this was an alchemist's room.”
 
Alchemists don't start out as alchemists. You start as a mage, and you study for years and years, until you're about as good as a mage can get. Then you get to pick. Almost everybody picks archmage, because archmages throw fireballs and get rich. A tiny handful of weirdos pick alchemist instead and spend the rest of their lives in a basement, mixing stuff.
 
I'd never met an alchemist. I didn't know anybody who had.
 
“That's… good, right?” I said. “That's rare. Rare is good.”
 
“Rare is very good,” Agnes said. “A real mage could learn a lot from this. Pell would cry.”
 
I looked around the room again. The messy desk. The books. The bag of warm little stones.
 
Then I opened my adventurer's sack.
 
An adventurer's sack looks like a normal bag, but it holds way more than it should. Mine was old and had a patch on the bottom, but it still worked. I started feeding the desk into it. The papers. The notebook. The bag of cores. A pen. A cup that might have been worth something or might have just been a cup.
 
“Colm.”
 
“What?”
 
“You're taking the cup.”
 
“It could be an alchemy cup.”
 
“It has a chip in it.”
 
“It could be a chipped alchemy cup.”
 
She sighed and started handing me books off the shelf. I put them all in. Then the candle stubs. Then, after thinking about it, a pair of slippers by the bed. Agnes didn't say anything about the slippers, which meant she thought they were dumb, which meant I was definitely keeping them.
 
When we were done, the room had a bed, a desk, an empty shelf, and a lot of dust. The sack didn't feel any heavier. That's the magic part.
 
We went back out into the hallway. Same red bricks. Same purple mist. But it felt a little less creepy now, because I had an alchemist's slippers in my bag.
 
“I wonder who lived here,” Agnes said, as we started walking again.
 
“We'll figure it out from the notebook. Later.” I hitched the sack up on my shoulder. “Right now I just want to find the way out.”
 
She nodded. Then she glanced back at the bedroom door, still hanging open behind us, and walked a little closer to me than before.