Vitality Alchemist

The Vitality Alchemist on the Vanguard's Citadel roll is Field-Alchemist Imke Sallow, age twenty-eight, schooled at the Aegis dispensary and assigned to the inner gate for the past three campaigns. Her speciality is delivery rather than surgery: the tincture the Vanguard's surgeons brew for closing wounds works as well from thirty paces as from a bedside, and Imke is the reason the surgeons know that. The syringe-launcher is brass and glass, ornate because the Aegis glassblower who made it for her could not help himself, and it takes the green vials she brews herself and labels by batch — she can put a vial into an ally's shoulder at thirty paces and has never once hit a buckle. The surgeons call the launcher unsafe. She has a ledger of six hundred and forty vials fired and their outcomes, and has offered it to the surgeons twice, and the surgeons have not asked to see it a third time.

Her combat-grant is the green vial: a growth-tincture that keys, when it is brewed, to the leyline-sign of the squad she serves, so that a vial fired into a friend closes the wound and a vial fired into a stranger does nothing at all but bruise. This is the property that lets a medic fire into a melee without choosing, and Imke's standing rule — in private, to the gate-guard who covers her — is that the alchemist moves first because the alchemist does not have to choose between targets. The brass dart she fires from an empty chamber is her ordinary answer to whatever arrives at the gate, and she does not write those down; she keeps a second, shorter ledger for the eleven times she has fired one at an enemy while a green vial was owed to somebody inside her reach, and that ledger has a column the first does not. The gate-sergeant has read both. He has not asked about the column.

She reloads at the inner gate behind Line-Guard Ansel Tarrow, who holds the gap in front of her while she does, and what passes between them is never said aloud: she leaves the glass alone, and he leaves her targets alone. The gate-sergeant, who has watched it work for a season, has written it up as 'effective and not in the manual.' Sister-Weaver Ottilie Danvers of the Cathedral has taken two of her vials into the loom-cloister for study and has reported that the tincture and the cloth do the same thing by different routes, which Imke has filed and the Cathedral has not. Batch nine, which is not on either ledger, is the batch she brewed the week the sky broke, keyed to a squad that no longer exists. She has not fired it. She has not thrown it out. It is labelled.