Blue and Gold (6 page)

“You thought I’d
assume that because you ran away, you’d killed her.” He shook his head, as
though stunned that anybody could be so stupid. “Well, the main thing is,
you’ve come to no harm. But really, for crying out loud, Nino, did you have to
blow up a fucking wall?”

I did my sheepish
idiot grin. “I couldn’t think what else to do.”

“Amazing.” He
smiled at me. “Someone could’ve been killed, you realise. And then you’d have
been in the shit.”

I hung my head.
“Wasn’t thinking clearly.”

“Just having the
stuff’ll get you your neck stretched. There’s only so much I can do, you know.”
He took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “How did it happen?” he said.

I told him. When I
described how his sister died, he closed his eyes and turned his head away,
just for a moment. Reminded me of me, when I was a kid and my mother killed a
chicken. Thing was, I ate the chicken, even though I disapproved of death. Some
things are ugly but necessary.

Then he shook
himself, like a wet dog, and said, “Why didn’t you warn her?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Not to drink the
stuff.”

I smiled weakly.
“You think she’d have listened?”

“No,” he conceded.
“No, I guess not.”

“Besides,” I went
on, “it was all so fast. And I suppose I assumed she’d know better than come in
the lab and drink a beakerful of stuff without asking if it was safe.”

He was interested.
“She just—”

“She asked me what
it was. I told her the ingredients. Next thing I knew—”

“Ah.” He nodded.
“That makes sense. She’d have reckoned she knew what it was from what was in
it. Always had a very high opinion of herself, my sister.”

“She was a good
scientist,” I said. “She’d learned a hell of a lot.”

“Which killed
her,” he said, quietly, like a man finally winning a chess game he’d lost
interest in a quarter of an hour ago. “Excellent argument against the education
of women, if you ask me. Thought she knew what it was, decided to swallow it
before you told her she couldn’t. Impatient, you see. She was like it as a kid.
Always snatched the honey-cakes as soon as the servants brought the plate in.”

“If I’d had the
faintest idea—”

“Of course.” He
raised his hand. Subject dead and buried. “Well,” he said, “I guess we can draw
a line under all that. I’ll issue a statement saying my sister died of natural
causes. We’ll have to have a state funeral, of course, I’ll need you there as
chief mourner. Sorry,” he added. “I know you can’t be doing with official
occasions.”

“Don’t worry about
it,” I replied. “Least I can do.”

“It’ll take a week
to arrange,” he went on. “And in the meantime—”

He didn’t need to
finish the sentence. Back to my bench, enough time wasted already. He really
didn’t mean it as a punishment. He sincerely believed I enjoy doing all that
stuff.

I stood up. “Just
one thing,” he said. “Not that it matters worth a damn, but somebody must’ve
helped you. Else, how did you get all that gear? You know we’re just fine, but
I’m going to have to ask you who helped you out. Got to give somebody to the
Prefect, or my life’s going to be hell for months.”

I sat down again.
“I have contacts,” I said.

“Yes, I’d
gathered.” There was a cold core to his eyes. I knew that look. “I’m sorry, but
I need some names.”

“In the Thieves’
Guild,” I said.

His eyes widened
slightly. “So there really is a Thieves’ Guild,” he said.

“Of course there
is,” I lied. “And I’m very sorry, but—”

He shrugged. “More
than your life’s worth, right. Fine, forget about it. Now I know there actually
is a Thieves’ Guild, the watch can take it from here. Thank you,” he added,
“that’s a real help.” He frowned. “Have I just landed you in it?” he asked.
“Only, if I have, I can forget what you just told me—”

“It’s perfectly
all right,” I said. “We assume you’ve known all about us for years.”

(And I thought;
curious. He’d asked about his sister’s death the way you ask about the health
of a business associate’s invalid spouse, but verification of the existence of
a Thieves Guild had been
interesting.
What would I have seen, I
wondered, if I’d been there when they came to tell him Eudoxia was dead?)

“How soon?” he
asked.

I’d just put my
feet to the ground, ready to walk out. “It’s hard to say.”

“Try.”

I shrugged. It was
the gesture of a man without a care in the world, fooling nobody. “Really, I
can’t say. Could be six weeks, could be a month, could be—”

“Six weeks.”

“Or six years,” I
replied, “it all depends on how lucky I get. If I’m lucky, this time tomorrow.
If I’m unlucky, never. There’s always the possibility that it simply can’t be
done.”

He grinned at me.
“I get the same from the highways contractors,” he said. “They know precisely
how long it’ll take to build a road from the City to the docks, but when I ask
them, they always add on two months. Then, when the job’s finished when they
knew it would be, they ask for a bonus for early completion. Come on, Nino.
When?”

“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.