by Unknown
Rhodel looked back. “Eh, I know men, an’ I know ye know that last were a crock.” She took another swig of anisette. “Care for a nip?”
Norret looked at her poxy lips. “No, thank you.”
Rhodel took another swig of liquid courage, stowed the flask in her cleavage, and seemed to come to a decision. “Let me help ye wid dat,” she breathed, reeking of anise, alcohol, and decay, like Urgathoa on a bender. Norret recoiled in horror as the harlot leaned over and expertly unlaced the fireworks tray from his waist, then took it and put it on herself.
“I’ve already said too much, might as well say a bit more,” she declared. She stood, witch’s candles and siren fountains bowing away from her bosom. “Follow me, Young Norret.”
Norret got to his feet and grabbed his crutch, but it was a sad testament to his state that an aged drunken dollymop driven mad by hag pox still moved faster than he did, staggering down the steps and continuing her song, skipping a few verses along: “Down in the dung there lived a crone! A warty toad with a precious stone! Upon her brow, a diamond shone!”
Rhodel stopped and sustained the note, having found the spot on the landing where the belvedere of the chateau behind her and the hills of Kyonin before combined to amplify her already impressive pipes. Norret had almost caught up when she concluded the phrase: “The Cap of Crapaudine!” drawing applause and causing the revelers on the stairs to part for her as she flounced down with all the joie de vivre of a maiden who has made up her mind.
By the time Norret got down to the dock, Rhodel had climbed atop the dais and lit a goblin brand. It fired shells with a series of loud reports: blue, white, and red flew into the air, the colors of Galt, followed by green, gold, and rose, the colors of Dabril. “Now that I have yer attention,” Rhodel declared, “I would like ta address this meetin’ a the Council a Dabril!”
There were murmurs in the crowd and words like “mad” and “drunk.”
“Thatsh right,” Rhodel agreed. “I may be mad, I may be drunk, but I’m the one with the bombs, so ye all get ta listen ta me fer a change!” She held the smoldering remains of the goblin brand over her tray. A few of the wiser and faster ran in terror, but others, underestimating the explosive capacity, foolishly thinking that the fires of joy could only be used for joy, or just as trapped as Norret was by his crutch and the press of the crowd, simply stayed, petrified as if by a cockatrice’s touch.
“This is our independenshe!” declared Rhodel. “Independenshe from what? Truth? Common sense? Fear? Well I’m dyin’ so I’m done wid the last, so I’ll tell ya a few things the old don’t wanna admit an’ the young only suspect. Our duchess? She were a good duchess! An’ she worked her ass harder’n I ever worked mine on these streets! Ye all think perfume ‘n’ gloves sell themselves? She pimped ‘em hard at court, an’ our guilds got rich. An’ if she took some fer herself, so what? She earned it! An’ her husband, old Arjan, the ‘bad’ duke? He were a scared old man too busy snorting mercury ‘n’ tryin’ ta make the elixir of youth ta have time ta whip peasants! Yeah, he taxed us an’ spent too much on his weddin’. Boo hoo. We still got taxes! And death too, an’ a lot more o’ that! An’ shpeakin’ a death, maybe the duchess poisoned old Arjan and bribed the priests ta say he weren’t comin’ back, or maybe he just were too old like she said. Who cares? That be the truth!”
Rhodel was just getting wound up. “Want another bit a truth? Half a ye are are smugglers selling perfume ‘n’ brandy ta the elves so we kin have food, an’ half are spies fer the Gray Gardeners, an’ that be a joke right there because ye know yer Litranaise? Yer ‘March a’ the Revolution’? Darl Jubannich were a hack! He recycled shtuff from his operas! That started as the ‘Silver Maidens’ Song’ he wrote fer the masque fer our duchess’s weddin’, an’ I know ‘cause I were only six but I got ta play the Horse! Then Jubannich reused it for his ‘Tales of— Oh bugger…” Rhodel trailed off, looking down at her tray where a stray spark from her goblin brand had ignited several fuses. “I was gonna shay more….”
Whatever she was going to add was silenced by the witch’s candles, which began to scream, and the siren fountains, which sang like sopranos at the top of their range, their blue flames and waterfall of sparks setting fire to the shreds of Rhodel’s tattered gown.
Corsetry, however, is a form of armor, and with icy dignity the old slattern marched forward, hop-frogs hopping from her tray and scintillating as she stepped onto the raft tied at the end of the dock. She embraced the effigies of Traxyla and her cronies like sisters, setting fire to the Shelyn’s roses on their breasts which began to twirl like red windmills as she cast off, the raft drifting into the Sellen as the blaze began in earnest.
Then a voice rose up, defiantly echoing off the hills of Kyonin: “But up in the air flew King Coco! The unicorn’s horn, where could it go? Then Patapouf found a hole below….” Rhodel sustained the note, harmonizing with the siren fountains until at last concluding with a flourish, “The tail of the cockatrice!”
With that, the dragonfly rockets Norret had bound to Traxyla’s broomstick went off in sequence as he had hoped, bearing her effigy high over the river before exploding in a brilliant blue flash of witchfire and brimstone.
He had not thought she would have a passenger.
Chapter Three: The Feaster in the Dark
The wheel of the year had given a quarter turn and reached its end, the final day of Kuthona, the last month, ruled by the twisted god Zon-Kuthon. Winter, the Season of the Black Dragoness, the watery drake who embodied the phlegmatic humor, had begun but nine days before with the solstice, which the Midnight Lord’s sister Shelyn, in her infinite kindness, had declared Crystalhue. The Eternal Rose’s warm heart warded the days and nights afterwards and they were filled with feasting and merriment—all save the last. Once the sun had set on the final day, the Dark Prince flung open the gates to Pharasma’s Boneyard and reminded the people of all they had lost. The Night of the Pale had begun.
This night was not named for the Pallid Princess, Urgathoa, although it was said that she relished it. Nor was it so named for the fearful faces of the living who huddled indoors and made a show of merriment, lest they encounter the spirits of the previous year’s dead. Rather it was named for a simple thing, the pole or piling which marked the boundary of a temple yard. For on this night only a fool or one with some fell errand would venture beyond the pale.
Norret was not certain which applied to him—probably both—but he had left the outmost gatepost of the beer garden of the Transfixed Chanticleer half a mile behind, stumping along with his crutch through the snow, having committed he didn’t know how many sacrileges against the tavern’s patron god, Cayden Cailean.
The first had been staying sober. The third had been volunteering to tend bar, and in the guise of getting a bottle of rare liqueur from the top shelf, taking down the shining ormolu form of Coco the cockatrice and slipping it into his soldier’s pack. The second? Lutin, the tavern cat, was also fond of the top shelf, sleeping in front of the cross-stitch sampler that composed the Accidental God’s shrine. Norret had sprinkled an alchemical preparation of powdered herring scales over him, camouflaging the cat as Coco.
Norret hoped that Lutin would continue to sleep, or at least that the devotees of the Drunken Hero would write off the sight of an impaled gilded meowing cockatrice as an ecstatic vision from the god himself.
The Night of the Pale was clear and freezing, lit only by the stars and Norret’s bullseye lantern. He quaffed an extract of coltsfoot, giving himself the endurance of a horse and some of its surefootedness to offset his limping, and at last arrived back at the Liberty Hostel.
Sulfurous steam curled from the unfrozen end of reflecting pool as Patapouf the unicorn stood over its wellspring, glaring at Norret accusingly as if he were the one responsible for the creature’s missing horn.
Norret sighed, leaned his crutch against the carriage porch, and unlaced his boots. If the worst horror the Night of the Pale held was wet feet, he would be a lucky
man.
He unstopped a flask, applying a drop of viscous golden fluid to the thick end of the alicorn, taking a moment to open another phial and slick the stopper with an unguent of goose grease and eel liver before replacing it. He had heard the Katapeshi alchemists used the peels of some yellow Mwangi fruit to the same effect with a more pleasant scent, but an alchemist in Galt couldn’t hope for imports.
Norret then stepped into the pool. The water barely covered his calves but the warmth made his half-frozen feet feel like knives were being applied. It had been years since he had done this, a frightened boy with a rose and a simple wish, whereas he was now a crippled man with a complicated one. Yet like a rose, the complications were simple when you thought of them: After a great deal of research and revelation, Norret had realized that the interconnected baths and fountains of the Liberty Hostel formed a giant water clock, and while it might be possible to jury-rig some means to open any hidden chambers, that would be like sticking a fork in a broken Brastlewark timepiece hoping the bat would fly out the belfry while the little wooden devils came out to do the dance of the hours. But if one could obtain the original parts….
Before the glue set, Norret lifted Coco the cockatrice—who the sculptor had actually skewered above tail, not beneath, though with the way it twisted around the spiraled unicorn horn, this was not immediately obvious—and fit Patapouf’s horn back into its empty socket.
The unicorn said nothing. No thanks for the return of his alicorn or complaints about the still missing carbuncle.
Norret stood there for a long minute, freezing and frozen, looking at the statue, repaired but useless.
Then Coco’s beak opened:
No chicken laid this royal egg.
What hand shall hatch it now, I beg?
Norret stood stock still for another minute, unmoving, as if the cockatrice had petrified him. Coco repeated his rhyme. Norret nodded, then hobbled his way back to the icy lip of the reflecting pool. He took out his formulary and used a lead stylus to write down Coco’s verse, then got his feet out of the pool, slipping and rolling through a snowdrift until he collected his crutch and his boots, stuffing his wet feet inside before they could freeze to the ice. Teeth chattering, he gathered his lantern and staggered inside the Liberty Hostel. The sad fact was that he feared his own countrymen more than he feared the unknown horrors of the Night of the Pale, and this was the only night he was likely to have the chateau to himself.
Despite its haunted reputation—the lights in the corridors, the whispers from inside the walls, the unfortunate deaths and unexplained disappearances—the duchess’s former chateau had a number of permanent residents, and Norret was only one. Another had been Rhodel.
As was the custom, any room was free to any guest to stay in as long as he liked so long as he worked for the good of the household. Rhodel had chosen the duchess’s boudoir, and since no one else had stepped forward to claim it after the old dollymop’s flamboyant death, it was now Norret’s.
So were its heated floors, and as much as his countrymen might decry the late duke’s extravagant remodeling, at the moment Norret thought the geothermal piping beneath the tiles was worth every last copper. He stripped off his damp boots and snow-dusted clothes and left them steaming on the floor.
As for the rest of the chamber, Rhodel had turned it into a fantastic magpie’s nest of oddments scavenged from about the chateau: here a scrap of tapestry, there a swag of lace. A mangy hobby horse sized for a halfling or a human child lay propped in one corner, button eyes staring sadly, and beside that stood a changing maiden, a curious appurtenance that resembled a mad wizard’s golem more than a furnishing one might expect to see in a noblewoman’s dressing room. On the bottom was an unremarkable three-legged round table, but a pillar spiraled from the center with two arms, one holding a mirror, the other a tray, and at the top was the head of a beautiful, if bald, woman.
This one appeared to be ebonized wood, but appearances could be deceiving. Norret had quickly recognized the black as silver sulfide—or more prosaically, tarnish. Of course, if it were pure silver, the maiden would have been smelted for coins years ago, but scratches in the wash revealed the galena gray of poor-quality pewter. Like the pinchbeck and paste jewels once favored by the nobility when traveling, the odd vanity-cum-wig-stand was nothing more than gaudy trash meant to be stolen by highwaymen or dim-witted monsters.
Even so, she still proved useful. The maiden’s tray worked as a fireproof stand for Norret’s lantern while her mirror acted as an excellent reflector, providing both light and additional heat, for the Night of the Pale was as dark and cold as Zon-Kuthon’s heart.
Far more valuable than the maiden but even less saleable in current-day Galt was the grand bed where Norret now crawled between the worn duvets and decaying featherbeds. Carved of costly Qadiran rosewood, the decorations depicted some unfamiliar eastern legend involving courtiers and concubines with pipes chasing a gold dragon through fields filled with poppies, at last coming to a poppy-themed palace where they smoked more pipes as the good dragon imparted his wisdom. Norret’s only dealings with dragons to date, thankfully, had been the draconic system of alchemy favored by Powdermaster Davin. While that dealt with the cruel chromatic dragons, it only did so in the metaphorical and symbolic sense, and there mostly only with the four—the green, the red, the blue, and the black—that corresponded with the four elements, the four humors, and the four seasons. The white was reserved for the quintessence. Metallic dragons were more of a mystery, and while Norret suspected the bed’s carvings depicted some alchemical metaphor from Tian Xia, it could just as easily be a historical record of the great gold dragon Mengkare and the founding of the fabled nation of Hermea.
Regardless, it was also the place where Rhodel had plied her trade for the past forty years. Norret had of course rummaged beneath the mattress for anything of value, finding a small stash of silver and a large cache of negligees, but after imbibing Cedrine’s decoction of fern seeds, his attention had focused on the carvings. One of the pipes in a courtier’s hand could be pushed in like a peg. One of the concubine’s bound feet could be twisted like a knob. And once Norret had moved both of those, he impulsively tweaked the sun disk at the tip of the dragon’s tail.
Like a gnome puzzle box, the hidden panel in the headboard slid aside, revealing its treasure: a book.
“It seems that Rhodel was telling the truth all along.”
It had not been, as he had hoped, Duchess Devore’s alchemical formulary, or even that of her late husband, but it was something hidden since the Revolution, and a final present from old Rhodel.
Norret opened the panel again on this, the coldest and darkest of nights, retrieving the book, and reread the title: The Alchymical Wedding: A Masque of Allegory. And below that, in grandiose script: By Darl Jubannich.
The Revolution’s poet and co-instigator had even signed the manuscript with a signature even larger and more vainglorious than the typeface, and added a personal dedication: For Rhodel, our little Horse.
Norret had read it cover to cover. It was a masque of the sort no longer seen in Galt but still beloved by Shelyn, a grand flowering of art and science, artifice and architecture, and no little wit. It was also a piece of contraband which could send anyone to the guillotine, for rather than the chromatic dragons favored by Powdermaster Davin, or the poetic tree of birds of Katapeshi alchemy, or the mountain of the philosophers or whatever exotic metaphor the alchemists used in Tian Xia, the manuscript referred to the philosopher’s quest and the alchemist’s great work by means of the worst possible metaphor in post-revolutionary Galt: a royal wedding.
The masque’s plot was relatively simple: The youngest daughter of the King of the Moon—symbolic of silver and womanhood and played by Anais Peperelle-née-Devore—had come to wed the Golden Youth, the son of the Golden Sovereign, the Sun King, both symbolic of gold and manhood and both played by the elderly Duke Arjan Devore, using a magic hat to make the former role credible. Assor
ted ambassadors and emissaries of the planets and elements arrive, bringing with them nuptial gifts of alchemical significance, each more fantastic and valuable than the last, until at last the Silver Maiden and Golden Youth exchange betrothal gifts, the Carbuncle and the Crapaudine, the fabled ruby and diamond periapts of House Devore—the Carbuncle returning after centuries as part of Anais’s dowry, as the Peperelles were not old nobility but a family of wealthy spice merchants who had managed to obtain the stone in Taldor, using it as the sovereign glue to cement a splendid match for their brilliant young daughter.
Just when the treasures could not get more ostentatious, the Golden Sovereign reveals his own gift for the happy couple: the philosopher’s stone, the jewel in the crown of the royal art and the substance which could not only transmute lead to gold and resurrect the dead, but could also restore the aged to youth.
At this point the Golden Youth removes his disguise, revealing that he and the Golden Sovereign are one and the same, and confessing the other sad fact: his philosopher’s stone is broken and useless without the Silver Maiden’s aid.
Here alchemical metaphor began to cross into alchemical fact, for as amazing as the fabled artifact was, it shared the flaw of the least extract of the alchemist’s art: when exposed to air, the philosophic mercury in its center quickly decayed, and quickly tarnished into uselessness. This had occurred with the Golden Sovereign’s broken stone.
However, useless does not mean worthless, and an artifact is not so easily destroyed. Just as tarnish can be turned back into silver with the application of a bath of soda ash and foil of a lesser metal—the alchemical reaction to remove sulfur from silver—Duke Arjan Devore hoped, with the help of his clever young bride and the purifying radiance of the toad stone and the unicorn’s jewel, to discover a process to separate the philosophic mercury from the philosophic sulfur, thus recreating the White and Red Elixirs, the penultimate stages of the great work.