Academic Exercises (67 page)

Next, I needed materials and equipment. With the three angels I’d stolen from the wooden pot on Astyages’ desk (you remember, I sat down on it when he was trying to keep a steady hand) I was able to buy basic glassware and most of what I’d need in the way of ingredients. That was a risk, needless to say. Even in Paraprosdocia, there are only half a dozen places selling that sort of thing, and I’d been expecting all of them to be watched. In fact, I’d tried my level best to think of how I’d get in and buy what I needed without being immediately arrested and my mind just went blank, so I pulled the risk out of my head like someone drawing a bad tooth, and went anyway. I was terrified all the time I was there, and the storekeeper must’ve picked up on that. He gave me a very odd look when he thought I wasn’t looking, but that didn’t stop him from taking two of Astyages’ hard-earned angels. He packed the stuff up for me in a wooden box, stuffed with straw and with a bit of straw rope for a handle. Too heavy and fragile to run with, so I walked as fast as I could back to the tannery. Didn’t see anyone following me.

One angel and five bits left. I spent four bits on bread and cheese (which is all you need; all other forms of food are self-indulgence). Through the obscure alchemy of trade, the angel transformed into a few basic pieces of hardware, including a short-handled axe, about the only thing even vaguely resembling a useful weapon that a man can legally buy in this benighted town. Transmuting gold into base metal. Ha.

I was left with four bits. Armed with four bits, a man can go to the central beef warehouse, where they make up the durable provisions for the military, and buy himself a two-foot cube of government surplus ice. By the time I got it back to the tannery, my hands were past aching and into the numb stage.

You need a calm head and a steady hand to make ichor tonans safely. Once I’d thawed out my frozen fingers over the fire, I found I was shaking like a leaf, and my mind was full of guilt, terror, apprehension and doubt. On the other hand, ice melts, and I didn’t have any money left to buy more. It’s a miracle I managed to get the job done without setting off a blast that’d have meant they had to redraw all the maps.

It’s a lie, propagated and spread by me, that the slightest little jar will set the stuff off. It needs a good, sharp bump. There’s been times when I’ve walked around for days at a time with a little bottle of the stuff in my coat pocket, though I confess, I died inside every time I got jostled in the street. I left it on the windowsill, went out again, went and sat in that little park just south of the artillery platform, where nobody ever goes. I sat on a low wall and thought about—

In your mind, picture me mixing the blue distillate with the green reagent. I gave it a little stir, for luck, with a glass rod, and put it on one side. It was fizzing, which I hadn’t been expecting. I weighed out two scruples of vis zephyris, two of sal petris, one of ossa terrae, loaded the mix in an alembic over a low heat. I felt like my mother, fixing dinner out of leftovers. The blue-and-green mix was still frothing, and I thought; I know what’ll sort that out. So I put in two drachms of sal draconis, figuring that the vis alba in the sal would precipitate the fors levis in the blue, which I assumed was what was getting it all worked up. The precipitate would stay behind in the filter when I drained it, so it’d be safe, I thought.

I was in two minds whether to add the solids to the liquid or the other way round. In the end, I got the biggest block of ice we had in store, put the mix on top and slopped in the solids, after first cooling them off on the ice-block. No explosion; so that was all right. Also, the colour had changed, to a sort of brackish purple. I didn’t know if that had any significance, but I assumed it was a good omen. You know; purple, the colour of royalty and authority. Can’t be bad, surely.

Soon as it was cool, I filtered it through charcoal and then again through paper; left behind a load of shiny bits, like iron filings. Good, I thought, that’ll be the fors levis. I decanted the stuff into a tall glass beaker, put it on the bench and looked at it.

The elixir of eternal youth. Well.

Point is, how would you know if it’d worked?

If it hadn’t worked, of course, I’d know straight away, in the ten seconds or so it’d take me to die; though, from what I’d gathered from the literature, the failure of my experiment would be pretty low down on my mental agenda during that period. Fors levis eats the brain. I wondered if I’d done the right thing, putting in the sal drac; but the frothing must’ve meant that the lux stellae in the blue was reacting with the cor tenebrae in the green, in which case they’d get together and make lead, and the whole thing’d have been a waste of time. The sal drac was to draw off the malign humour in the cor, which had no useful work to do anyway, and leave behind the benign humour to transmute the malign in the lux. All very simple and straightforward, in theory.

But if it worked; the elixir of eternal youth, to prevent aging. Fine. You drink it, you look in the mirror. You look just the same as you did five minutes ago. It’d take ten years before you could say for sure if it’d really made any difference. Oh, fine, feed some to a rat, see if it lives longer than other rats. But what does that prove? Here’s a potion that delays aging in rats. Not much call for that in these parts. She’d suggested trying it out on a baby; you’d know within months, if the baby stopped growing. She wouldn’t have had a problem with that. As far as she was concerned, ethics is an excuse for a deficiency in vision and outlook.

There it was on the bench, just sitting. Well, I asked myself, what’re you waiting for?

And then she came in.

I maintain that if our society were properly ordered, and women were allowed to participate directly in the sciences, she’d have been a first-rate alchemist. She never had any trouble following my notes, even though she’d never been taught, she’d just picked it up from books as she went along. Being Phocas’ sister, of course, it was only to be expected she’d share the family obsession. But Phocas, in spite of three years at the university, still couldn’t grasp the fundamentals of the migration of impulses. Eudoxia could do migration equations when she was fourteen. In fact, I have reason to believe she did Phocas’ vacation homework for him, though of course neither of them would ever admit it.

She’d seen the stuff on the bench. “What’s that?” she said.

“Nothing.”

She gave me that look. “What?”

I told her what was in it. Took her about five seconds to put the pieces together. I could tell she was impressed. Her eyes were wide, and her face shone with that glow of excitement and greed. “Will it work?”

“How should I know?”

She bent over the beaker and sniffed it, pulled back and made a face. “It went volatile.”

“Yes, but I put in some sal drac to calm it down.”

Frown, as she worked it out in her head. “Filtered?”

“I’m not stupid.”

“Little grey bits like filings?”

I pointed to the pad of sodden paper. She inspected it, then nodded briskly. “So?”

I shrugged. “What’s the hurry?” I said. “If it works, I’ll have forever. If it doesn’t—”

“You’ll make some more,” she said quickly, as if she hadn’t intended to say anything. “For me.”

I didn’t reply. She scowled at me. “No,” I said.

“What?”

“No,” I repeated. “You want to try it, you know the recipe.”

“What the hell—”

“Oh come
on
,” I said, as if she was being stupid. “Let me draw your attention to the precise wording of the marriage ceremony. Till death do us part.” I smiled at her. “Be realistic.”

She gave me a look that was designed to take all the skin off my face. “You’re pathetic,” she said.

I’m many things, but not that. “All due respect,” I said, “but immortality is one thing. Being married to you forever and ever, on the other hand—”

“You bastard.”

“That’s unfair,” I said. “I’m not divorcing you. We’ll live out the rest of your natural life together, and then I’ll be free. That’s the deal you signed up for.”

“You’d let me die.”

“Everybody dies,” I said. “Mortality is the constant that defines our existence.”

“Fuck you.”

“Besides,” I said, “it probably doesn’t work. If it was that easy, someone’d have done it centuries ago. And it could be poisonous.”

“If it is,” she said pleasantly, “you’ll die, and I’ll know not to drink it.”

“Could be it’s one of those poisons that takes hours to work. Or days. Weeks, even. It’d be criminally irresponsible of me to let you drink it.”

“My brother—”

“Your brother,” I replied, “values me a damn sight more than he does you. As you should know by now,” I pointed out. “Twice a week you go whimpering to him about me, and what’s he done?”

“You going to give him some?”

I smiled. “If it works,” I said, “I may eventually publish. But not till I’ve given it a really thorough trial. Say, two hundred years. Earlier than that, it’d be bad science.”

“Are you going to give my brother some or aren’t you?”

“No,” I replied. “He’s funding me to turn lead into gold, which we all know is impossible. This is just a sideline of my own. He doesn’t own the research. This,” I went on, smiling beautifully, “is just for me. Because I’m worth it.”

I hadn’t noticed her slide her hand round the base of the beaker. Before I could move, she’d lifted it to her mouth. She’d swallowed twice before I was on my feet.

I shouldn’t have put in the sal draconis, I realise that now. Radix vitae would’ve leached out the malignity from the effervescence, and you can eat that stuff till you burst and be perfectly safe.

When the man turned up to light the lanterns in the park, I went back to the tannery and picked up the ichor tonans. On my way I’d fished an empty acquavit bottle out of the trash, and washed it out in a public fountain. I decanted the ichor, slowly, corked the bottle and stuffed it in my pocket, the way the drunks do. That, and the fact I’d slept in my clothes and not shaved for two days, really made me look the part. Drunks and beggars are invisible. The perfect disguise.

I wandered the streets for five hours, really getting into the part. My uncle always said I could’ve been an actor, and I think he was right. What you’ve got to get right, and what most people pretending to be down-and-outs always neglect, is the walk, the length of stride, the dragging of the side of the boot. You’ve got to walk like you’re always leaving, never arriving. A kind man actually stopped me and gave me three bits.

I reached the Eastgate just after the watch changed. I saw the relief sentry climb up into the watchtower; he’d be there for at least a minute, signing on in the book. That gave me forty-five seconds, more than enough time. I hauled myself up the stairs onto the rampart (nobody was watching, but I couldn’t help staying in character; a slight wobble, as you’d expect from a drunk climbing a steep staircase), looked down to make sure the coast was clear, took the bottle from my pocket, dropped it over the wall, and ran like hell.

I got four yards down the catwalk when the blast hit. Shook me off my feet; I landed painfully on my outstretched hands and one knee, only just kept myself from sliding off the catwalk and getting splatted. I dragged myself into a ball and curled up under the rampart.

I counted. On five, a dog started barking, about a hundred yards away. Then I heard the first running footsteps, and got my head down. Even if someone tripped over me in the dark, they wouldn’t think twice about a drunk hunkered down out of the wind in the shelter of the rampart, and they wouldn’t stop to arrest him for vagrancy, not when there were enemies loose in the City, blowing holes in the walls. Four or five watchmen did in fact run straight past me, but whether they noticed me or not I couldn’t say. There was yelling and running, lights waving about, doors slamming in the guard-house. I stayed put and clung to my vagrant persona like a drowning man clinging to driftwood. Even when the running around had stopped, I stayed where I was till five o’clock, by the Priory bell. Then I got up and hobbled back to the tannery.

A wise man once said that any human being is capable of infinite achievement, so long as it’s not the work they’re supposed to be doing. The
Dialogues
were a case in point. My thesis was supposed to be a metalingual analysis of Eustatius’
On Various Matters
; I started out with a hypothesis I really and truly believed in, and it took me two years of diligent, painstaking work (during which time I was working as a college porter, since I couldn’t afford the fees) to prove conclusively that my hypothesis was wrong. Along the way, quite by accident, I stumbled on some leads in a totally different field. I mulled them over while I was lugging heavy trunks about and scraping vomit off the flagstones after end-of-exams parties, and in a few idle moments I jotted down some stuff. That was the
Dialogues
. When the time came to present my thesis, I realised that it was going to be rather short—

Did Linguistic Forms Materially Affect Eustatius’ Logical Structures in ‘On Various Matters?’
No.

—so I left Elpis the night before I was due to appear before the examining board, leaving behind my notes, some unpaid bills and an old pair of shoes I couldn’t cram into my haversack. The shame, you see. Curious insight into the mind of my younger self; I thought it less disgraceful to take up highway robbery than to admit to my tutors that I’d just wasted two years of their time and my life.

Though I say it myself as shouldn’t, I was a good robber. I thought about it carefully first, rather than just plunging in at the deep end, which I gather is what most robbers do. I spent a week walking the City, taking notes on watch patrol routes and timings, lines of sight, direct routes from the big mercantile houses to the major banks. I went to the Court archive and read transcripts of hundreds of highway robbery trials, which gave me a pretty clear idea of where most robbers went wrong (sixty-seven per cent of robbers are caught because they start throwing money around in a suspicious manner; thirteen per cent attack men carrying concealed weapons; six per cent rob the same courier in the same place more than four times). I trained for two weeks at the School of Defence in Haymarket, and spent another week picking fights in bars. Only then did I sit down with a large sheet of paper, a map and a pair of compasses, and plan out my first robbery. It went beautifully and netted me seventeen angels thirty. I very nearly quit while I was ahead.