by K. J. Parker
“Six weeks.”
“Thought so.” He smiled at me, and behind me, someone opened the door. “Six weeks, then. I’ll hold you to that,” he said.
*
YES, I’M THE world’s greatest living alchemist. Foolish to deny it, a sort of reverse boasting. But please accord due emphasis to the word living.
Consider, for example, Laelianus the Attagene. Brilliant man; refined lachrymae dei while he was still a student at Faenori, the first man to split silver into its four aspects—I knew him, for a short while, at Elpis. Or take Herennius, who completely reshaped the way we understand the reintegration of humours. If he was still alive today, I wouldn’t be worthy to carry his lecture notes. Not to mention Gordianus Secundus; now there’s a man I’d have liked to have known, but he was already dead by the time I came to Paraprosdocia. Codrinus—
Well. Of interest only to members of the profession. Fact is, this is the golden age, no pun intended, of alchemy. There have been more epoch-making discoveries in the last fifteen years than in the preceding two centuries. And as for geniuses, truly exceptional minds; two dozen, at the most conservative reckoning. But here’s a curious thing. Of that two dozen, none of them survived past the age of thirty-three.
At that time I was thirty-two. Thirty-two and eleven months.
*
THERE WAS A craze a while ago for copies of famous paintings—you know the sort of thing; Judgement of Timaeus, The Battle of Sineo, Girl with a White Dove; exact copies, except for one thing left out; the jug in the Judgement, or the king’s shield in the battle-scene, or the Girl’s left earring. The idea was, you hung the painting directly over where you’d be sitting at your dinner party, and you got your fun watching the expressions on your guests’ faces as they tried to figure out what was wrong.
Well; the missing article in Workshop of Saloninus the Alchemist was one corpse, female. I had no trouble at all spotting it. There might as well have been a hole in the world, through which you could see the stars beneath us.
“Thanks, gents,” I said to the guards, as they ushered me in. “I can find my own way from here.”
It’s a bad sign when you’re reduced to bouncing bon mots off the military. As the door closed, I sank down onto the floor and started to shake. Not the sort of thing I usually do. I think it must’ve been sharing an enclosed space with the thing that wasn’t there.
After a while, I pulled myself together, somehow or other; stood up, managed to get the fire going. I’d lost track of when I’d last eaten, but I simply wasn’t hungry. While the fire caught, I went to the ingredients cabinet and fished out a bottle of acquavit. The pure colourless stuff. I only had it for fuel for the spirit burner. I swallowed three mouthfuls.
Made me feel worse, if anything.
Well, I thought, what the hell do I do now?
The irony was, any alchemist who knew what he was doing would kill for a bench like mine. Every piece of equipment you could possibly think of, all the very best quality; a row of bottles and jars like soldiers on parade, every rare and obscure material—some of them a hundred angels an ounce, more on the black market (except they’re so rare, everybody in the trade would know in an instant where they’d come from). If there was a specialised item I wanted made up, all I had to do was bang on the door and give the guard a detailed specification, he’d take it off to the toolmakers or the glassblowers, and I’d have it in my hand the next day. Expense no object. Unlimited research funding. If there’s a hell, I truly believe, it’s getting exactly what you’ve always wanted.
I had six weeks to find the secret of transmuting base material into gold. This is impossible. I reached up to the top shelf of the bookcase and pulled down Polycrates’ Diverse Arts. Chapter six, page nineteen, paragraph four. To turn base metal into gold.
Ah well, I thought.
First, take common salt (got that) and vitriol (plenty of that); mix well with a glass rod. Done that. Next, take aqua fortis (buckets of that). Combine the aqua fortis with the salt and vitriol to form aqua regia. The trouble with Polycrates, unlike me, is not so much what he includes, which is often true, but what he leaves out; trifles like incredibly volatile or will produce large volumes of toxic gas or for crying out loud, do this on a block of ice. Fortunately, Onesander of Phylae went through this procedure with me shortly after I left Elpis the second time, so I knew more or less what to do. A great man, Onesander, and it was a crime against science when he was hung for issuing fake six-angel bits. His coins were actually three points purer than the government issue, would you believe. I understand they’re eagerly sought after these days, by jewellers.
Three or four steps into the procedure, you have to dip the corner of a linen napkin in the brew, then set light to it. Alarming is putting it mildly. I was extremely lucky to have been shown how to do it by an expert; that said, Onesander’s wanted poster called him “a tall man with no eyebrows”, a description so accurate that he was in custody within three days of its appearance on the Temple doors. As a precaution, I filled the big basin with water and dunked my head in it. When the napkin had burned away, I shook the ashes carefully into a pot, and worked the bellows until the fire was as hot as I could get it.
Next, the crucible, which I half-filled with expensive copper nails (hell of a waste; but they’re nearly pure copper, and I wasn’t paying for them). I used up most of a half-hundredweight sack of charcoal before they melted; whereupon I poured the molten metal into my dainty little five-cavity ingot mould and put them aside to take the cold. My bottle of aqua tollens proved to be empty, which was annoying, so I had to make some up from scratch; add salt to water, then add raw fine powdered silver to aqua fortis; combine the two in a glass vessel to produce a brown sludge; add spirit of hartshorn until the sludge disappears; aqua tollens. By the time I’d done all that the little copper fingers were cool enough to knock out of the ingot mould. Take one ingot, lower it slowly with tongs into the aqua tollens; wait five minutes, then fish it out again, wash off the aqua tollens, dry carefully. One small silver-plated copper ingot. Naturally, I’ve simplified and falsified the instructions (because if I told you how it’s really done you could do it too, and put me and my brethren out of business).
Four copper ingots, one silver one. I put on my buckskin glove, shook a little of the burnt-napkin ash onto the tip of my index finger, and gently stroked the silver-plated ingot until the ash was all gone. It happens so gradually that at first you don’t notice, unless the light from your lamp catches it at just the right angle. It’s a long, slow business, and just as you’re in despair and convinced that it’s not working, the smear on the surface of the silver assumes an undeniably yellow tinge. That restores your faith, and you carry on until all the ashes are gone and your fingertip’s numb, and the silver ingot is now deep, glowing, honey-yellow gold.
Piece of cake, really.
Time doesn’t register when I’m working, so I had no idea how long all this had taken me; experience suggested six hours, but the copper had been painfully slow to melt, whereas the ashes had worked in quicker than I’d been expecting. Broad as it’s long. Time melts sometimes, flows and congeals, forms a hard skin over a molten core.
I put all the bottles and jars carefully away, so anyone snooping around wouldn’t know what I’d used, then I closed Polycrates and put him gratefully back on his shelf.
I poured water into a glass beaker, then added a drop of blueberry juice to turn it a harmless, inert blue; then I put the gold ingot in the beaker, and stacked the four copper ingots neatly next to it. Then I took my four-pound straight-peen hammer off the rack, wrapped the head carefully with cloth and banged on the door with my fist.
The usual graunching of key in lock, and the door opened. I didn’t know the guard. I tried to look past him, but he stood in the way.
“I need some stuff,” I said.
He nodded. “What?”
“Sal regis, furor diaboli, radix pedis dei, saturated sal draconis in vitriol—”
He scowled at me. I smiled. “Come inside,” I said. “I’ll write it down for you.”
He went off, with his little slip of parchment, and the door closed and the lock graunched. I upended my four-minute timer and waited for the sand to pour through. Then I knocked on the door again.
The guard stuck his head round the doorframe. “What?” he said, and I hit him with the hammer. He went down like an apple from a tree. I waited, counting up to six, then carefully opened the door; there’d never been more than two guards on the door before, but there’s a first time for everything. Fortunately, not this time. I dragged the guard inside, slipped out into the passageway, gently pulled the door shut and turned the key. An hour, my best guess; maybe a bit more, unlikely to be much less. Just how far could I get in an hour?
*
SCHOLARS ARE PROVERBIALLY celibate, and the life of the professional criminal doesn’t leave much time for romance, so it won’t surprise you to learn that I was only in love really and truly the one time.
Which would’ve been enough, if things had worked out a little better. She was perfect; beautiful, clever, kind, funny, gentle; a joy to be with, under any circumstances. And she loved me, almost as much as I loved her; but what she loved most of all (which was better than her loving me) was philosophy. If it hadn’t been for her, I’d never have written On Form & Substance. She had this way of making me think; just the slightest of frowns, or a tiny upwards movement of an eyebrow, and suddenly I could see past the certainties to the real questions behind them. She made me realise that, up till then, all I’d cared about was making it so my enemies couldn’t prove me wrong; in other words, winning. Then she came along, and the world changed, and what actually mattered wasn’t beating some opponent but getting it right—
Perfect. Almost perfect. Just one thing about her that I’d have changed, if I could. She was married. To prince Phocas.
Which led, I’m sorry to say, to a falling-out between my old college chum and me. Not the first, and certainly not the last. He took the view that it was a betrayal of trust, not to mention criminal adultery and treason. I could see his point, and I also accept that under the circumstances, given his position of head of state and fountain of all justice, he had no option but to allow the law to take its course. What I couldn’t forgive, still can’t, is that it wasn’t me he put on trial.
To his credit, he entered a special plea for clemency on her behalf. Unfortunately, in the political climate prevailing at that time, he couldn’t have made things worse if he’d tried; the six judges were all Popular Tendency, and that was that. There have been times, in my darker moments, when I’ve wondered whether he made that plea deliberately, knowing it’d prompt the judges to order the death penalty out of sheer spite; but no, I don’t think so. He loved her, no doubt about it, and losing her, especially that way, tore him apart. Didn’t exactly cheer me up, either. By loving her, I’d killed her, simple as that. Phocas was just the weapon I used.
So; she died, I lived. Phocas had his chief investigator swear on oath, by the majesty of the Invincible Sun, that he hadn’t been able to discover the identity of the adulterer. The judges (two of them are dead now; the other four will have to wait till I’ve got a little free time) offered to grant him permission to put the accused to torture to extract the name, if he thought that would do it; I remember, he went white as a sheet and mumbled no, he didn’t believe torture would be effective in this case. And the judges shrugged, as if to say, well, if you’re sure, and moved smoothly on to passing sentence.
I watched, from a high window. I remember how she stayed calm and controlled right up to the moment they started roping her to the stake. Then, when they grabbed her wrist, she screamed and went all to pieces, she was terrified, it took four strong men to hold her still while they tied the knots. They put a lot of green wood in, so the smoke killed her before the flames reached her. Standard practice, I gather. It’s one of those small mercies we’re supposed to be grateful for.
I’m a terror for not wasting anything useful, so when it was my turn to deliver the Onesander Memorial Lecture at the Studium, I used her death as a paradigm of alchemical theory. She was, I said, made up, like everything else, of earth, air, water and fire, in due proportion, held in equilibrium by the vis minor, which Philosthenes argues is ultimately derived from the movement of the Invincible Sun in orbit around the Earth. When she was put to death, the addition by an external agency of additional fire broke the vis minor, allowing the external fire to encounter and react with her component elements. Her earth was consumed and transmuted into res iners Polycratis. Her water was evaporated, and joined the greater external. Her air was expelled by vis major and dissipated, while her internal fire was subsumed by and joined with the external fire to produce ignis nobilis, the assimilatory or communicative process, analogous to the extraction of quicksilver from amalgam. What, I asked, do we learn from this? In transmutation, in this case her flesh and bone to ash, there is exchange through loss, since the ashes weighed considerably less than the unburnt tissue, and communication through change, in that flesh (a soft material) and bone (a hard material) are converted by an agency and a process into ash (an impermanent, brittle material soluble in water and easily dissipated in a draught of air); thereby, we can see that earth is essentially a donor element, weak, suitable for conversion. In the evaporation of water, by contrast, there is communication through continuity, in that her water became steam and migrated, ultimately to join with other vapours in the clouds, in due course to return to the lower levels through the medium of rain; therefore continuity, in that water is never lost and, though capable of transformation, ultimately defies transmutation through the agency of memory. Turning to her air, being the breath in her lungs and other hollow parts at the moment of death, simple expulsion through the action of heat removed it, essentially unchanged in form (though arguably in structure; see Brunellus on the forms of air), so that communication consisted of nothing more than a removal from one place and a relocation in another; which is why we call air the elemens invicta, because it is untouched by mere process. As to her fire, I argued, that was a different matter entirely. In the consummation of the process (my voice was a little shaky at this point), there was a coming together of the external and the internal to form one, a process akin to the act of love, a union or true combination, in that as the process took its course, inner and outer fire combined into an indissoluble whole, burning from without and from within, and where there were two there was now only one. Hence, I went on, fire is the agent among the elements, and it is to fire we must look. In fire all things have their origin (the ignis genitiva of Marcellus) and their ending (ignis feralia, as postulated by Caesura; but see Ammianus for a conflicting interpretation), only through fire can the other processes operate, only through fire in its aspects as destroyer and refiner can we achieve our objective; transmutatio vera, the genuine transmutation, transmigration of one element into another.
Not everybody agreed, needless to say; but I think I had something there. Where I messed up was going on to associate the vis mutationis with the human emotion of love, and the process of burning with the transmutation of love into hate, or guilt, or misery, or pain, analogous to the refining of the noble metals from base ores by the agency of quicksilver. What can I say? It’s one of those intuitive connections you feel but can’t really prove, and once you get a reputation for intuition in academic circles, you’re screwed. Not that it mattered particularly, in this instance. Three months after I gave the lecture I got caught trying to stow away on the stupid bloody avocado freighter, and that was that; no more public appearances, ejected from my Chair, back to the laboratory with two guards on the door. Story of my life, really.
*
So THERE I was in the passageway. Right or left? I went left. Good idea at the time.
Left led past the minor state apartments (where they dump lesser ambassadors, trade attaches, counsel for appellants in civil cases, unimportant depend
ents and poor relations) to the back or kitchen stairs, which go down two flights to the stable yard, from which it’s possible, if you’re agile enough, to climb the curtain wall and sneak out onto the leads of the chapel roof; then down the waterspout into the cloister garden, pinch a gown from the vestment room, and then you’re just another Brother milling about in the chapel forecourt. That was how I got out the time before last, and on that occasion I got no further than the Chapter yard before the scuttlehats grabbed me and hauled me back in. Therefore, they’d argue, I wouldn’t go that way again.
The important thing is, not to run. It’s hard. The temptation is to move as quickly as possible while unimpeded movement is feasible. But running sounds like nothing else, and in the palace, nobody runs. So I walked, hands in pockets, down the corridor, trying to sound like some minor functionary, in no particular hurry, waddling from office to archive or one duty station to another. Authenticity is the key. Learnt that the hard way.
I was three quarters of the way along when I heard footsteps coming the other way. The corridor floors are ancient oak boards; you can’t help making a racket, unless you’re wearing slippers. Only one thing I could do. I pushed open the first door I came to and slipped inside.
It turned out to be a bathroom. Phocas has a minor fetish about cleanliness, so there’s bathrooms everywhere in the residential areas. Lucky for me, I thought. I ducked down behind the bath and crouched on the floor, waiting for the footsteps to go away.
There was this smell; really strong (it’d have to be, or I wouldn’t have noticed it. You can’t spend a large slice of your life in close association with oil of hartshorn and similar noxious substances and expect to keep your sense of smell). Familiar. It was a hell of a time to be struck down with scientific curiosity but I couldn’t resist. Why had somebody filled a whole bath full of honey?