Date: 2010-08-15 00:31:08+00:00
Keywords: Fantasy; Science Fiction; Humour; Historical
Description: 'Well, let me see,' I said, as the innkeeper poured me a beer. 'In the morning I discovered the secret of changing base metal into gold. In the afternoon, I murdered my wife.' For a man as remarkable as the philosopher Saloninus, just another day. Of course, we only have his word for it, and Saloninus has been known to be creative with the truth. Little white lies are inevitable expedients when you're one jump ahead of the secret police and on the brink of one of the greatest discoveries in the history of alchemy. But why would a scientist with the world's most generous, forgiving patron be so
Publisher: Subterranean

Blue and Gold

K. J. Parker

Blue and Gold Copyright © 2010 by K. J. Parker. All rights reserved.

Dust jacket illustration Copyright © 2010 by Vincent Chong. All rights reserved.

Interior design Copyright © 2010 by Desert Isle Design, LLC. All rights reserved.

First Edition

ISBN

978-1-59606-327-3

Subterranean Press PO Box 190106 Burton, MI 48519
www.subterraneanpress.com

“Well, let me see,” I said, as the innkeeper poured me a beer. “In the morning I discovered the secret of changing base metal into gold. In the afternoon, I murdered my wife.”

The innkeeper looked at me. “That’ll be two bits,” he said.

I dug in my sleeve for the coins. “You don’t believe me,” I said.

“I believe everybody,” the innkeeper replied. “It’s my job. Will you be wanting dinner, or just the room?”

Two bits from seven leaves five. “Just the room.”

“Ah.” The barman nodded and turned away. Alchemists, murderers and other cheapskates, the back of his neck seemed to be saying. I picked up my beer and looked at it. Worse things had happened, but not for a very long time. I drank it anyway. I was thirsty.

*

Saloninus the philosopher was born in Elpis towards the end of the reign of Philopoemen VI (the exact date is not recorded). He showed early promise during his time at the university, but was prevented from completing his studies by the death of his uncle, on whom he was financially dependent. The university authorities found him a job as a junior porter, and he was allowed to sit in on lectures when his duties allowed. After two years, however, he left Elpis under a cloud, and nothing is known about him until 2763 AUC, when he was arrested in Paraprosdocia on charges of highway robbery and violent assault. Condemned to the gallows, he was reprieved through the intercession of the Prince Regent, Phocas, a former classmate of his at Elpis, who employed him (much to the consternation of the court) as a scientific adviser. It was around this time that Saloninus began the alchemical experiments that were to culminate in his greatest achievement.

I’m Saloninus, by the way. And I tell lies, from time to time. Which goes to prove the old rule; never entirely trust a man who talks about himself in the third person.

*

It’s true, by the way, about me murdering my wife. At least, I count it as murder. Drink this, I said, it’s the elixir of eternal youth. She gave me that look, but she always— well, her opinion of me as a human being was always pretty low, and justifiably so. Saloninus is not a nice man, and that’s Saloninus talking. But she never for one moment doubted that I was—am—the finest alchemist the world has ever known. Also true. But even the best of the best makes mistakes from time to time. My mistake, I have since come to appreciate, was adding a quarter drachm of sal draconis. Her second worst mistake was drinking it.

*

I went up to the room. It was a room. There were four walls, a more or less level floor, and a forty-five-degree ceiling, which is what you get for sleeping right under the eaves. For the first time in a long time, I didn’t sleep alone (and, compared with some of the characters I’ve shared a bed with, the fleas were no bother. At least they didn’t keep pulling all the bedclothes off me).

But I slept, which surprised me. I think the six scruples of vis somnis I mixed in with the dregs of my beer helped a bit; but a man who’s just watched his wife die in convulsions on the floor has no right to sleep, no matter what. Nor did I have nightmares. If you must know, I dreamt about the sea (which definitely means something, but I’ve never quite managed to figure out what).

I know I must’ve slept like the proverbial log, because I distinctly remember being woken up. There were soldiers, two of them, in those shiny coal-scuttle-on-backwards helmets that only the Kitchen Knights are allowed to wear. They were looking at me as though I was something they’d found in an apple.

“Saloninus,” one of them said.

“No,” I replied.

“You’re with us.”

Actually, I’m not sure if one of them wasn’t one of the men who arrested me the time before last, when I tried stowing away aboard the avocado freighter. Soldiers in tall shiny helmets all tend to merge together in my memory and besides, I’ve never been that special with faces.

They let me dress, which was nice of them. I hate being arrested in the nude. But while I was dressing, one of them stood between me and the door, and the other one guarded the window. Well done, boys, I thought. It always pays to read the file first.

“What time is it?” I asked. They didn’t answer. Warning; do not allow the subject to engage you in idle conversation. He has the ability to suck men’s souls out through their ears. I wish.

All in all, I was fairly relaxed about it. Being arrested by the scuttlehats was probably the best thing that could’ve happened to me at that point. It meant prince Phocas had been told, and had decided to have his goons arrest me before the real law did. I had absolutely no interest in explaining my recent past to the Knights of Equity, thank you very much. Phocas, bless him, would make sure that wouldn’t happen.

Soon as I’d pulled on my shirt and pants and laced up my boots and put my coat on, they herded me to the door, like stockmen guiding a pig with a board. There was a third one outside on the stairs, which I found impressive and almost flattering. I did that palms-wide-open gesture that tells them you really don’t intend to give them any grief, and allowed them to sandwich me down the stairs into the bar.

My friend the innkeeper was there, next to the fire, moving grease around the plates with an old rag. He gave me the look that means he’d known all along it was just a matter of time. I grinned weakly at him. Then I stopped dead in my tracks. The two guards behind me froze in time not to cannon into me. “It’s all right,” I said. “I just need to pay the innkeeper for my room.”

There was a slight worried edge in the guard’s voice when he said, “Don’t worry about it.”

“No, please,” I said. “I hate owing money. Look, if you don’t trust me, I’ll give you the coins, and you can give them to him. All right?”

He looked at the innkeeper, who shrugged. “How much?” the guard said.

“Two bits.”

I smiled. “I’m going to put my hand in my coat pocket,” I said. “Nice and slow.” Which was what I did. Then I took it out again nice and fast, and threw the walnut-sized nugget of compressed pulveus fulminans that I never leave home without straight into the heart of the fire. What can I say? I have amazing hand-eye co-ordination. One of the very few gifts I was born with.

People have the wrong idea about pulveus fulminans, presumably because they believe what I wrote about it when I discovered it. They think that when ignited it goes off with a devastating roar, blowing out windows and cracking rafters. Not at all. What you get is an enormous whoosh, rather like a giant drawing in breath and sneezing, and a ball—often a perfect sphere, which intrigues me—of white smoke, and sometimes a sort of core of condensed fire, depending on how much of the stuff you use. Also depending on quantity, you can get a blast of hot air that’ll knock you sideways and singe your eyebrows if you’re too close. My standard getting-away-from-people nugget doesn’t do that. Last thing I want to do is risk hurting someone and getting myself in even worse trouble. I use five drachms of the stuff, pressed wet between two empty nutshells and allowed to dry on a windowsill for a day. That’ll more or less guarantee you three seconds when nobody’s looking at you, without trashing the place or setting light to the thatch.

To their credit, the three scuttlehats were after me pretty quickly. Running away from people, however, happens to be another of the very few gifts I was born with.

It’s not the quantity, I always maintain, it’s the quality.

*

YOU may think, basing your opinion on what I’ve told you so far, that escaping from prince Phocas’ guards at this stage in my career was a stupid thing to do; shortsighted, also tinged with ingratitude. There’s Phocas, you’re thinking, going out on a limb to rescue his old college chum from the proper authorities—not for the first time, according to the subtext. All right, I may not have deliberately killed my wife (an unwarranted assumption on your part, I should point out) so maybe it wasn’t murder, but didn’t I just say the last thing I wanted was to get myself arrested by the civil authorities? Damn fool should’ve gone quietly, you’re thinking, and I can’t fault your logic.

Instead, I ran like hell for about five minutes, at which point I’d used up my emergency turn of speed and had to stop for a bit. Fortunately, it looked like I’d done the trick. Paraprosdocia’s the sort of town where people look the other way when they see someone running like hell, and it’d never occur to anyone who lives there to give a truthful answer to any question along the lines of which way did he go? Just to be on the safe side, I sneaked in behind a big stack of barrels, sat down and emptied my mind of harsh, stressful thoughts.

Free and clear, then, for now. Net assets; what I’ve got in my head and my pockets. Net liabilities; everything not listed under net assets. First time I’ve been in this position? No.

I was born with all the advantages and had a good start in life. It was scrupulous honesty and clarity of thought that made me end up in this mess. Really and truly.

I had five bits cash and a stack of barrels to hide behind. On the other side of the barrels it was daylight, which made moving about the city a dangerous indulgence. If I could only make it to Choris Seautou, of course, everything would be different. In Choris I had another name, twelve thousand angels in the Catholic & Apostolic Bank and at least one business associate I could trust; also, there’s no extradition treaty between Choris and the Empire, and the mayor of Choris was an old college chum. But Choris is seventy-nine miles from Paraprosdocia, any day of the week, no matter how you measure it, and the first thing the Knights would’ve done would’ve been to put men who knew me on all five City gates. Also, there were still things I had to do here before I could indulge in the luxury of escape. Considering my situation dispassionately and in depth, I was forced to the conclusion that I’d have to be brave, resourceful and imaginative. Depressing. I hate situations that bring out the best in me.

In my mind, I drew a map of the city. Luckily I had a rough idea of where I was, because over the top of the barrels I could just make out the spire of the Early Day Temple, with the sun more or less behind it. That put me in Coppergate; not a bad place to be. For a start, it’s pretty much the centre of town, about as far from the gates as you can get, so they wouldn’t expect me to be there. Also, it’s a maze of yards, alleys, passages, roads that go nowhere. I’d probably hear a methodical search coming well in advance, because of all the yelling and swearing from the snarled-up traffic. Having reviewed all the data (scientific method, you see), analysed it and considered the various inescapable conclusions, I closed my eyes, stretched my legs out and went to sleep. It’s what animals do, and when it comes to being hunted by predators, they’re the professionals. Conserve energy, make yourself small and quiet in a dark, hidden place.

*

When I woke up, it was just starting to get dark. I could see the glow of lanterns on the far side of my wall of barrels, and a middle-blue sky.

Generally speaking, I don’t like sleep much. I tend to wake up with all the symptoms of a hangover—fuzzy head, furry tongue, sometimes a sharp pain in the temples, bitterly unfair when you consider that I very rarely drink strong liquor—and it takes me several hours before I’m human again, let alone intelligent. But sometimes, just occasionally, when I go to sleep with a really bad problem on my mind, I wake up with the answer suddenly there, fully-formed and perfect, like a chicken’s egg in the straw.

It says a lot about me that the answer to my problems was the first thing that came to me when I opened my eyes. There was an appreciable delay before the memory of the other big thing I’d done the previous day caught up with me. Killed my wife. Oh, that.

There are things you carry around with you wherever you go, like a snail’s shell; they slow you down and crush you, and you live in them. The image that came bounding to greet me was of my hand holding the cup— glazed pottery, because the sort of substances I work with do the most appalling things to metal, even gold and silver—and her hand taking it; and she said, “Are you sure it’s safe?” and I said, “Don’t be bloody stupid, of course it’s safe.” And she tilted the cup and swallowed twice and said, “God, that tastes revolting,” and put it down, and then there was a moment of dead silence, and then she said, “So now what?” and I said, “You’ve got to let it work, it’ll take a moment,” and she said, “Will I, you know, feel anything?” and I said, “Well,” and then she screamed.

I’m not proud of one of my greatest achievements. I’ve learned to lift certain things out of my mind, at least for a while. Let’s not think about that, I told myself. Instead—

My brilliant idea, which came to me in a dream (which sounds better than came to me in my sleep). I got up off the ground, didn’t stand up straight, kept hunched and low so I could peek over the top of the barrels. The yard was empty, but someone had been to the trouble and expense of lighting three lanterns and hanging them on hooks on the wall. There’s a common misconception that bright lights scare away thieves. Really, it just gives us, I mean them, light to see by. I straightened up and walked slowly and wearily (not acting; stiff neck) round the barrels, out of the yard, down an alley and into Coppergate.

I may have committed a lot of crimes, but I’m not a criminal, as such. Wish I was. Criminals, at least the ones I’ve known over the years, have a wonderfully instinctive way of doing difficult things, like walking unobtrusively down a street. A good thief is practically invisible. A basically honest man like me trying to walk innocently is the most suspicious sight you’ll ever see. Just as well there was nobody about—well, there wouldn’t be; day shift had just gone home, night shift not yet started. The ideal time to be out and about in Coppergate, and I wish I could claim credit for astute tactical thinking.

Walked up Coppergate, left into Old Street, right into The Mile; fifth left, second right. No reason whatsoever to assume he’d be at home. I stood under his window and looked up. A light burning behind the screens. I tried the door; open. Sometimes, you get bursts of good luck, for no perceptible reason.

I went up the stairs, which were dark and smelt of burnt tallow and urine. His door actually has his name on it. I knocked and pushed it open in one smooth movement.

Astyages, my old college chum, is a writer. He writes stuff. He’ll write you a bill of lading, a chancery pleading, a letter home enclosing two angels, a letter to a rich uncle begging for money, a deed of partnership, a will, a pretty good sonnet (five bits extra if he has to make one up from scratch). The joke is, he has lousy handwriting. But he does really pretty initial capital letters, with loops and scrolls and even gold leaf, if you’ve got the money. He says he only does scrivening to keep himself fed and clothed while he’s finishing off his great thesis, Some Aspects of the Caesura in Late Mannerist Minor Lyric Poetry. Really, he’s a spy for the government. At least, that’s what he tells everybody.

“You,” he said, twisting round in his chair and glowering at me over his spectacles (his dearest and only valuable possession; inherited from his father, a senior lecturer at Elpis before the War. Astyages actually has perfect eyesight, in spite of his trade, but he wears the things because they make him feel scholarly). “Actually, I’m not surprised. You lunatic.”

I smiled. “Mind if I sit down?”

He shrugged. “What do you want?”

“Message to Phocas,” I said, and he sighed.

“Tell him yourself,” he said wearily. “I had the scuttlehats here, earlier.”

“Of course you did,” I said. “Sorry about that.”

“That’s all right,” he said. “There’s beer in the jug, probably some cheese in the cupboard.” Astyages practically lives on cheese; he gets it cheap from the dairy on Ropewalk, but you’ve got to scrape the green bits off. “And I suppose you’ll be wanting money as well.”

I felt guilty. “I still owe you from last time,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “I can let you have two angels, but that’s it.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Will you—?”

He shook his head. “Go and see him, no,” he said. “Write him a note, yes. What do you want me to say?”

I thought for a moment. “Well, sorry’d be a good place to start,” I said. “And then, please don’t come after me. And it doesn’t work.”

Astyages frowned and adjusted the position of the glasses on his nose. They’ve worn a sort of slot half-way down. “Is that true?” he asked.

“Of course it is,” I said. “Come on, nobody can turn base metal into gold. It’s not possible.”

“That’s not what—”

“It can’t be done,” I said. “All my assurances to the contrary notwithstanding. So tell him, really sorry about the lies and the false hopes, and I’m going abroad, indefinitely. Usual best wishes, Saloninus.”

Astyages laid down his pen and looked at me. “You’ve cracked it, haven’t you?”

“I just said, it can’t be—”

“Don’t bullshit me, please. You’ve cracked it, and now you’re running away with the secret, before Phocas has you locked up in a tower somewhere for the rest of your life making gold. I know you,” he went on, overriding my attempts at protest. “You know, I always had this tiny sneaking suspicion at the back of my mind that one day you’d do it.”

“Really, I—”

He shook his head irritably. “So,” he said, “what was it? Sal draconis? Virtus aurei in a suspension of quicksilver?”

“Not sal draconis,” I said, with feeling.

“All right, then. It’s in the method, isn’t it? Something really obvious in the way you distil the—”

“It can’t be done, Astyages. Everybody knows that.”

“Fine,” he snapped, “don’t tell me. But when you’re obscenely rich and living in your palace in the Blue Hills, for once in your life do the decent thing and send me money. All right?”

“If it ever comes to that,” I said, “I promise. On my word of honour.”

He gave me a cracked grin, scrabbled for a fresh sheet of paper, and started writing.

I sat down. He wrote about a dozen words—he’s left-handed, and it always amazes me, the way he writes— then paused and chewed the end of his pen. “How’s the thesis coming along?” I asked.

“Oh, fine,” he said. “Another month and it’ll be finished.”

I believe him. I always have. Which month he’s referring to is another matter. He wrote another dozen words, then turned round slowly and looked at me. “The scuttlehats said Eudoxia’s dead,” he said.

“That’s right.”

“They told me—”

“That’s right too.”

He stared at me; forgot to look over the top of his glasses. “God, Saloninus,” he said. “That’s—”

“It was an accident,” I said.

“Well of course it was a bloody accident,” he snapped at me, “even you wouldn’t deliberately poison your wife.” He paused. He’d run into that terrible impassable barrier we all come up against when trying to express sincere sympathy to a friend. “I’m sorry,” was the best he could do. Actually, it’s not bad.

“Me too,” I said.

“I always liked her.”

I grinned. “You were nuts about her,” I said. “When I think of the exhibition you always made of yourself whenever she came to visit, back at Elpis—”

“Yes, all right.” He was actually blushing. “I knew I didn’t have a hope in hell.”

“No,” I said, “you didn’t.”

“She never liked you much either,” he said, and then realised what had just slipped past the gate of his teeth, and looked wretched. I smiled, to show it was all right. It wasn’t, but he was doing me a favour.

“She liked you, though,” I lied. “Not that way, but she liked you. Told me so, several times.”

A light came on in his eyes. “Really?”

I nodded. “Thought you looked sensitive,” I said. “Misunderstood.”

“Is that right?” he said, in a sort of stupid voice, and I nodded again. Actually, the only time I ever mentioned him to her, she said, “Who?”

*

I spent most of the night drifting around Coppergate, too scared to go in a bar out of the cold or crawl in a doorway. I walked up and down, trying to look like I was on my way somewhere. Fortunately, the people in that part of town can practically smell trouble and keep well out of the way of anybody who looks like he’s in it. I think I ended up on the steps of the Nika Fountain, along with a couple of crying drunks and an elderly streetwalker who’d given up trying for the night. At one point, I tried to remember all thirty-six of Zeuxis’ propositions of paradigmatic symmetry, but I only got twenty-eight of them, and knowing I couldn’t simply drop in to the library in the morning and look up the other eight made me burst into tears. One of the drunks offered me his bottle, which I’m ashamed to say I accepted. It was empty, of course.

Round about dawn, I knew from experience, the watch makes a tour of Nika Square and arrests anyone who can’t get out of the way, so I got up and headed back to Astyages’ place, taking my time. No sign of any scuttlehats but plenty of watch. I was sure they were going to pull me in, but they walked right past me, which made me wonder if Phocas had spoken to the City Prefect. One less thing to worry about if he had, but I couldn’t know that for sure. I made myself slow down, dawdle, the way I’d seen drunks and beggars to every day of my life, but suddenly I couldn’t quite call to mind the fine nuances of how they walk, how they stand, how their heads droop from their shoulders.

Astyages was already up and working when I got there. He likes to do his fancy penmanship in the early morning, when the light comes in through his window just so. He was hard at work on a W when I got there. Amazing what you can do with a simple everyday consonant if you’ve got the skill and imagination. He’d turned it into an amazing double-crested wave, with a little ship bobbing desperately on the middle peak. If you wanted to, you could see that as transmuting base material into gold, though if you ask me, it’s pushing it.

“Green,” I said. “Since when is the sea green?”

He gave me a filthy look. “For three bits,” he said, “the sea’s green.”

I grinned at him. Blue is, after all, impossible. Can’t be done. To get blue, you have to go all the way to Ges Eschatoi, buy a thumb-sized slab of lapis lazuli for the price of a good farm, trudge all the way back here, over the mountains and across the desert, grind it up in a pestle and mortar and add spirits of earth and gum. People I know in the painting trade reckon blue is proof positive of Nature’s nasty sense of humour. Blue sky, blue sea, and who the hell can afford to pay for realism? And even if you’ve got a ridiculously wealthy customer who’s prepared to fork out for the best, it’s still only background.

“Letter for you,” he said.

I was stunned. “Already?”

“Royal courier,” Astyages replied, pretending to concentrate on his W. “About an hour ago. It’s on the table, there, next to the glue-pot.”

*

Phocas to Saloninus, greetings.

It’s all right. It was an accident. Well of course it was. I’ve known you for what, ten years? I know you wouldn’t murder my sister.

And you know me. It’s all right. Really.

We can sort it all out, I promise; but not if the Watch catches you. You know how things are with me and the Prefect’s office. Pescennius would just love to put you on trial, to get at me. Don’t overestimate what I can do. There will eventually come a point where I can’t protect you any more.

The best thing would be if you stay put at Sty’s place and have him write me you’re there. I’ll send scuttlehats to bring you out nice and quiet.

What the hell were you thinking about, running away like that? For crying out loud, Nino.

*

“Plain paper,” I said. “His own hand.” Astyages was doing his letter, really concentrating on gold-leafing a loopy-scrolly bit. I folded the letter and put it inside my jacket, safe. Used just right, that letter could be a neat weapon. I picked up a sheet of blank paper from the table. “Do you mind?” I said.

He looked up. “What?”

“Better get rid of this,” I said, holding up the sheet.

“What? Oh, yes, good idea.” He bent his head over the page in front of him. One smudge or ink-blob and he could screw up two days’ work. I went over to the fireplace, made a show of screwing up the paper into a ball and throwing it into the fire. Phocas had always had a genius for details; he’d make sure his men asked; what did he do with the letter once he’d read it?

“What did it say?” Astyages asked.

“Come home, all is forgiven.” I sat down on the edge of the table. He scowled at me, and I stood up again. “What do you think?” I asked.

He took time off to consider his reply. “I honestly couldn’t say,” he said. “Give him his due, he’s a fair-minded man. If he believes it was an accident, he’s capable of forgiving you. Also, I don’t think they ever got on, not even as kids. Especially as kids. And there’s always politics, which I know absolutely nothing about. Could be you’ve done him a favour, for all I know.”

“Or he could be trying to lure me back so he can have me slowly tortured to death.”

“That’s possible, yes.” Helpful as ever. “So,” he said, pausing to tweak the hairs of his brush into a sharp point, “what’re you going to do?”

*

It’d depend on whom you asked. Ask, say, the Dean of Philosophy at Elpis, and he’d say my crowning achievement was the Dialogues, in which I expound the theory of correlative forms. Ask the master of the Temple, he’d say the Essay on Ethical Theory. Ask the president of the Mystery, he’d tell you it was vis mercuriae, or possibly combining mel fortis with strong acids on a block of ice to make ichor tonans. The chairman of the Literary Association would go for Aspis, though I’d be inclined to doubt he’s ever managed to read all forty-seven cantos; privately he’d tell you he much prefers the sonnets, or Fulvia and Luso. Down at the patents registry, they wouldn’t have to think about it; the Vesani wheel, for forming curves in sheet metal, and if only I’d held on to the patent, instead of selling it for the price of a good pair of boots, I’d have been a rich man at twenty and none of this would ever have happened. If it was the chief of the watch, he’d have no hesitation in going for the Lystra Bank job; I believe it’s still required reading for fast-trackers in the Criminal Investigations division. Ask me what the best thing I’ve ever done is, I’d have to reply; I don’t know, I haven’t done it yet.

Ask me what I’m proudest of; no problem. None of it.

Well, hell. There’s a fundamental flaw in the logic of the Dialogues that nobody’s figured out yet, but they will, one day, and then my reputation will be landfill. Ichor tonans was, admittedly, a stroke of genius, but what’s it good for? Blowing things up. I believe they’re allowed to use it in the mines, and for blasting roads through the mountains, but even so. You can’t really glory in the invention of something when getting caught with a thimbleful of it carries the death penalty. Aspis I wrote for money, and they still owe me most of it; Fulvia is derivative, and I didn’t write the sonnets for publication. A lot of bastards got rich from the Vesani wheel, but I didn’t. I take no pride whatsoever in my criminal past. I was moderately pleased with The Madonna with Open Hands (her head is actually too big for her body, but nobody’s ever commented) but that was confiscated when I was arrested the first time, and some toad bought it cheap off the bailiffs, and it hasn’t been seen since.

*

Saloninus to Phocas, greetings.

All right, then, and thanks. But not in daylight. You think you’re scared of the Watch catching me. Try being me.

Send scuttlehats, in a closed carriage, one hour after sunset. I’ll be here.

Thanks again. You’re a true friend.

*

I left Astyages’ place as soon as he’d sent the letter. I was nervous, but buzzing with energy. Getting the scuttlehats off my back for a while was the nudge I needed to snap me out of my horror-induced lethargy and get me moving again. I still didn’t know how I was going to get out of town, but I knew from experience that when I’m fizzing, I come up with stuff that never ceases to amaze me. Meanwhile, until inspiration struck, I could usefully fill up the time with various necessary chores.

First, I needed premises. Nothing grand; just an enclosed private space with a hearth and a chimney, at least one window, affordable, discreet landlord. With uncharacteristic foresight, I’d investigated a few possibilities a few weeks earlier. The first was already let, but the man who owned the next on my list (disused storage out back of a tannery; perfect) duly took the two angels Astyages had given me as three months’ rent in advance, handed me the key and forgot he’d ever met me (I got the impression he’d had plenty of practice).

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 tene-brae 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 guardhouse. 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.

But Elpis isn’t a big town, and there were too many people there who knew me, so I took the mail coach to Paraprosdocia. Took me a month to get it mapped out and reconnoitred, and what happened? Third time out, the sedan chair I robbed in Goosefair turned out to be carrying the provost of my old college back at Elpis. I cleared out the next day and got as far as Choris Seautou, where I banked my savings and organised a bolthole for future use. Then I went back to Paraprosdocia and sent a letter to my old college chum, prince Phocas, making him an offer I knew would interest him. On reflection, I still believe it was the smart thing to do; if the watch had got me, the Prefect would’ve strung me up before Phocas knew anything about it, and I’d have been dead. Death or Phocas; a close call, but on balance I reckon I made the sensible choice.

*

It was all over town the next day. A certain Saloninus, alchemist, scholar and gentleman thief, wanted for questioning in connection with the death of the lady Eudoxia, had skipped town by the rather drastic expedient of blowing a seven-foot hole in the City wall. It could only have been Saloninus, they reckoned, because the only known explosive capable of doing that much damage was ichor tonans (invented by the said Saloninus); only five men in the world know how to make that stuff, and of those five men, four were out of town at the time. According to a watch captain I overheard in a barber’s shop, where I’d just got a job sweeping up for three bits a day, the Prefect had sent a whole company of light cavalry after this Saloninus, so there was no way he’d get far. Meanwhile, the prince was absolutely livid, and had sent a squadron of scuttlehats after the Prefect’s men, thereby implying he didn’t trust them to do a proper job, an implication the watch captain clearly resented.

I managed to stick it in the barber’s for three days, just to make sure the watch wasn’t still looking for me in town. Then I mugged a slobbering-drunk Vesani merchant outside the Wisdom Temperance; five angels twenty. Next morning, I booked on the first mail coach to Choris Seautou. Piece of cake.

Goes without saying, I didn’t get on the coach. I turned up at the stop, outside the Mail Office, making sure the booking clerk, yard master and coachman all got a good look at me; got in the coach and sat inside for quite some time, till it was ready to leave; then quietly opened the door on the blind side, slipped out and darted up that little alley that leads to the cheese warehouse; scaled the wall, quickly across the yard, through the back gate into Cutlers’ Yard. Then I went to the tannery, cleared out my stuff and hired a cellar under a closed-down inn next to the old Instruction Theatre in Browngate. Sure enough, a few days later, I overheard two off-duty scuttlehats in the Chastity Rewarded telling someone they had a red-hot lead on Saloninus that put him in Choris Seautou, and he’d be in custody inside of a week.

The trouble is, when you get a reputation for being clever, you have to live up to it.

The cellar under the inn was perfect for what I had to do. Money, of course, was my biggest problem, followed by the dangers I’d have to run getting supplies. I really didn’t want to do any more robberies. Even under ideal circumstances it’s a horribly dangerous way of earning a living, and my background information, I knew for a fact, was seriously out of date. Also, I don’t think it’s a very nice way to behave. And, as the greatest living authority on ethical theory, I guess I have a duty to set an example. But I needed money; not so much for food and stuff, because I’ve learned the hard way how to do without it for prolonged periods, but for supplies and equipment; my other difficulty. I thought long and hard, but no flash of inspiration came. With great regret, I decided it was time to cash in one of my last few remaining assets; namely, Professor Laodicus.

*

Things are best, but people can be useful sometimes. Laodicus is a case in point. Back at Elpis, the second time I was there, just after the Dialogues came out, I was the newly-appointed lecturer in moral and ethical philosophy, and Laodicus was the scrawny, tongue-tied, earnest student who doesn’t make friends and can’t seem to get a handle on the course material. I was going through one of my recurrent being-a-decent-human-being phases at the time, and I got Laodicus through Preliminaries, albeit by the skin of his teeth. He was shaping up to be a worthwhile student when my circumstances changed and I had to get out of town in a hurry. Now, here he was at the Studium, professor of Major Arts, with a keyring that gave him access to the petty cash and the store cupboard. In Essay on Ethical Theory I argued strenuously against the enlightened-self-interest view of altruism, dismissing it as thinly-veiled mystical nonsense. Guess I was wrong about that, too.

I walked in through the front gate of the Studium and nobody looked at me. This was because everybody there who might possibly have recognised me knew I was in Choris Seautou. I’d had a wash in a horse-trough and a shave in a barber’s shop, and I was wearing a smart, quiet gown I’d lifted off a washing-line on the other side of town. I asked at the porter’s lodge where I might find Professor Laodicus at that time of day. Easy, they told me, he’ll be in the Old Library. I nodded my thanks, which was what a distinguished visiting academic from the provinces would do. It was a trifle stiff and cold, because of the handle of the axe sticking into the inside of my thigh.

The Old Library at the Studium is big. If you burnt it down and ploughed over the site, you could grow enough grain there to feed a village. The philosophy section is the whole of the second floor (up a tightly-coiled stone staircase that plays hell with my vertigo}. It took me a while to track down Laodicus, but I recognised him from twenty yards off. He’d lost his hair (he was thin on top at nineteen) and puffed out round the middle, but his face was the same. Unnaturally so; as though someone had flayed it off and sewn it onto a bald head attached to an older, chubbier body.

He was standing with his head bent over a book. I couldn’t resist. I walked up on him nice and quiet, until I was directly behind his left shoulder, and said, “Hello, Laodicus.”

Wasn’t the smart thing to do. I could have triggered heart failure. As it was, he jumped about a foot in the air and made a squealing noise, like six pigs at market. He looked at me, mouth open and moving, no words coming out.

“Walk with me,” I said.

One of those people who’ll obey you instinctively if you use the right tone of voice. He turned his head so he didn’t have to see me, and said, “What are you doing here? Don’t you know—?”

“I’m not here,” I said, smiling, as though we were sharing a pleasant memory. “I’m in Choris Seautou.”

“You can’t stay here.” His eyes were bulging, as though I’d put a cord round his neck and pulled it tight. “If they find you here—”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “You can get rid of me very quickly and easily. Where’s your office?”

“New Quad,” he replied, then realised he shouldn’t have. “What do you want?”

“Keep going,” I said. “And smile.”

I wish I hadn’t told him to do that. He looked like one of the heads they hang up on Northgate, after it’s been out in the sun for a week. “What do you—?”

“Shh.”

Down the back stairs, out into South Quad, through the cloister to New, turn left. He had a ground-floor set, which implied status. Didn’t lock his door, implying either beautiful trust in his fellow men or rank carelessness. I shut the door and slipped the bolt.

“You don’t seem pleased to see me,” I said.

“You’re mad coming here,” Laodicus said. “If they catch you here, it’ll ruin my career. I’ve already had the prince’s men here, asking questions.”

I hadn’t anticipated that, though I should’ve done. “Well, that’s fine,” I said. “Obviously they believed you when you said you hadn’t heard from me, and there’s no reason for them to come back. Now, listen. I need your help.”

He looked very sad. “What—?”

I told him. He stared at me, as though I’d just asked for his liver. “I can’t do that,” he said. “It’d be stealing. If anyone found out I’d misappropriated supplies and funds—”

I gave him my hurt look. “In chapter seven, section five, paragraph nine of Ethical Dilemmas,” I said, “you argue that loyalty to a friend must always come before loyalty to the State. You use the analogy of bricks in a wall; unless each brick bonds to its neighbour, you say, it doesn’t matter how straight and level the rows are, the base will never support the upper floors.” I smiled at him. “I used to take the opposing view, but you changed my mind. You know, you really have come a long way since your first year at Elpis.”

He gave me a terrified look. “I can’t,” he said. “I’m too scared.”

“Nonsense.” I’d already won the battle. “You’re confusing moral and physical courage. In chapter nine, section two, paragraph four, you write—”

“All right.” One of those born academics who’d rather have his teeth ripped out with pliers than have his own words cited against him. “Stay here. I’ll be as quick as I can.”

I shook my head. “You won’t be able to carry all that stuff on your own,” I pointed out. Which was true. I, on the other hand, had two years as a porter and a succession of heavy-lifting jobs during my bad years behind me. He couldn’t fault my logic.

*

Fact is, I stumbled into alchemy by accident, during my second spell at Elpis. I’d always been vaguely interested in it, but I was far too busy with my prescribed studies and besides, I couldn’t afford the kit. Then I got to know Euelpides, one of the research fellows. He was looking for an assistant. Pretty soon, we’d exchanged roles; and when he retired, they offered me his job. I needed the money.

Never hard, of course, to attract research funding for alchemy. As long as people believe it’s possible to turn base metal into gold (it isn’t), you’ll find rich men willing to invest. So long as they were prepared to pay, I was happy to try and do the impossible. Where I went wrong, of course, was falling in love with the subject, about three months after I took the job.

A mistake; I can see that now. It was a bit like falling in love with your wife after you’ve been married three years. Warps your judgement, puts you at a disadvantage. I should know. Done both.

Talking of which; Eudoxia never gave a damn about me. I genuinely believe she was incapable of any kind of affection. And she was terrified—real, tangible, wake-up-in-the-night-sweating fear—of getting old. Not death, which she never thought about, as far as I know. But being old; she said once that age was alchemy in reverse, turns gold into shit. I couldn’t really understand that, but I can reconstruct what led her there. At nineteen she was exceptionally beautiful. At twenty-five, she was starting to coarsen up a little, as though someone had subtly defaced a beautiful painting. She used to stand in front of the mirror staring at a new line or wrinkle nobody else could see, and I could practically smell the fear. So; once she’d reached the conclusion that I was the best alchemist in the world, it wasn’t enough that I was working for her brother, under contract and practically a prisoner in the wing of the palace he’d had converted into a laboratory for me. She had to make sure, which meant I had to be in love with her; with her beauty, to give me the strongest possible incentive. I came to hate her, the same way I came to hate alchemy, and for roughly the same reason. Even now, I find it hard to forgive her for that.

It’s a central paradox that love and rape both find expression in the same act. For two years, I raped science, trying to give Phocas and Eudoxia what they wanted, gold and youth. Couldn’t be done, of course. Not possible. But they both had blind, unlimited faith in me; like being in love, or believing in God. I think I could’ve endured that. I might just possibly have been able to keep going, trusting that sooner or later the faith would start to crack and break up, they’d realise I wasn’t nearly as clever as they thought I was, and they’d eventually let me go, or kill me. What ruined that was the other thing; the discovery, or the faint possibility of it; my one and only truly worthwhile achievement, if only I could achieve it, that would bring me wealth, fame and maybe—just maybe—happiness.

*

Thanks to Laodicus, I had everything I needed; the last remaining supplies and bits of equipment, and ten angels cash, which he kindly embezzled for me from the Social Fund, of which he was trustee. With my wooden box under my arm, I walked briskly back to my cellar, thinking only about the experiment I was about to conduct, anticipating problems, working through each step in my mind. I can’t actually remember reaching the cellar, setting up the new apparatus, lighting the fire, drawing the water. Time melts in the presence of intense concentration. It expands, so that a pot of water takes forever to come to the boil, and contracts as you work through each step of a procedure, trying to get seven things done at the same time without rushing. I’d organised my mind so carefully that I didn’t waste a second, but either there wasn’t enough, or there was far too much.

The blue and the green. I heated lacrimae dei and flowers of strong metal in a crucible while the compounds were reducing, then mixed the blue and the green in a stone beaker and added the solids to the liquid. No effervescence this time, but a dense white vapour, which made me realise that a windowless cellar wasn’t entirely ideal for my purpose after all. I added vis cer-ulea, a scruple at a time. The corner of a clean rag, dipped in the beaker, came up sky blue. Once step closer to genuine immortality.

Trouble with concentrating on one thing, you neglect other stuff. I had my back to the door; they walked in quietly. First thing I knew about it was when they grabbed me.

*

The captain told me it hadn’t been all that difficult. He’d sent out patrols with orders to report strange and unusual smells. Apparently, you could smell me halfway down the street. As simple as that.

I had a short ride in a closed carriage, wedged in between the captain and a sergeant, with a rope tied to my ankle. When we reached the junction of Whitegate and Long Row, I waited to see which way we’d turn; left to the Station House, or right to the palace. We turned right.

“We’d better get you cleaned up,” the captain said, as we drove through the main gate. “Can’t go and meet the prince in the state you’re in.”

I pointed out that we’d been students together, living in self-induced squalor and degradation. First time I met Phocas, I told him, he hadn’t shaved for a week and he had vomit on his shoes. The captain smiled at me, and said that he hadn’t gone to university. He’d have liked to, but his father was a clockmaker with six children. That, apparently, was me put in my place.

I’d never been forcibly washed before. I told them I was perfectly capable, but I guess they were reluctant to allow me full use of my limbs, in case I got away. The shave wasn’t so bad, in fact it brought back old memories. By no means the first time I’d had a blade pressed to my throat while four men held me down. They issued me with a plain, clean gown, slightly frayed cuffs, sort of beige colour. No pockets.

The captain and his men took me as far as the great hall, where I was handed over to the Duty Chamberlain’s men. As he handed over the end of my rope, the captain nodded politely and wished me good luck. I was so stunned, I couldn’t speak.

*

The first time I met Phocas, of course, he was nobody. In fact, he was less than nobody. He was twelfth in line to the throne, which meant he had no chance whatsoever, and his father had just been executed for treason. It was amazing how many people could look straight at him and not see he was there.

I, by contrast, was the favoured nephew of a prosperous land speculator with important political connections, a rising academic star, and one of the inner circle of the inner circle of the in crowd. In fact, I was so central, you could have plotted the location of everybody else by sticking the point of a compass in the top of my head. By rights, I should never have wasted my precious time and attention on a negative quantity like Phocas. But I liked him, then.

He was being thrown out of a party just as I was arriving. He was aggressive-drunk, and the reason for his expulsion, I later gathered, was that some of the puke missed his shoes and hit the hostess’s dress, which he’d been endeavouring to remove, regardless of her objections, when his digestive system betrayed him. Two footmen carried him out into the street, with his feet off the ground, kicking in air like a hanged man, and dropped him neatly in a big brown puddle. He sat there for, I don’t know, five seconds; then he stood up, a bit shaky but with a certain essential grace and dignity like a cat; then swayed and flopped up against the wall.

The people I was with marched past him, all don’t-look-at-him-you-don’t-know-where-he’s-been. But he smiled at me—I could see him clearly by the lantern light—and his face said, please don’t think too harshly of me, you’re not quite catching me at my best. I grinned back at him, and he fell over.

Next time I met him was at one of Menestheus’ lectures on Stratylides. I’d been sitting patiently, formulating a question in my mind that’d demonstrate beyond doubt to any perceptive witness that I was ten times cleverer than Menestheus, and at least three times smarter that Stratylides. I was putting the finishing touches to it when the old fool stopped talking. Phocas promptly stood up and asked precisely the question I’d been planning.

Well, not precisely the same. Not nearly as tersely or elegantly phrased. But he’d picked up on the same frayed end in the logic as I had. Menestheus gave him a look, then said, “Actually, that’s not quite as stupid a question as it sounds”, and went on to give an answer I’d have had great difficulty beating. I was grateful to Phocas for saving me, and impressed with the quiet, good-humoured grace with which he accepted the mincing he got. I asked some people I was with who the kid who asked the question was, and they told me. I arranged to have him invited to a party I was going to, and made a point of talking to him; we chatted for half an hour about ethical positivism, then slipped the party and went for a drink. He didn’t have any money, so I lent him half an angel.

A year later, we had the plague. It killed off nine of Phocas’ eleven supervening cousins, and my uncle, who proved to have been on the edge of bankruptcy. He was, in fact, a conman of substantial ability but limited intelligence; he hadn’t foreseen the flaw in his scheme, which would’ve collapsed round his ears inside of a month if he hadn’t died first. I was six months off my final exams; I had a trunkful of clothes, which my landlord distrained on for arrears of rent, five dozen books and four angels cash.

It never ceases to amaze me how adaptable social geometry can be. Within a couple of days I went from being the centre of the circle to an indefinite point outside its circumference. I couldn’t even get close enough to my old friends to ask them for money, and Phocas, newly rich, was out of town, up at the capital for the funerals. My tutor, who admired and loathed me, got me the porter’s job. I stayed on and became invisible.

So what? Big deal. I learned an important lesson in alchemy, at any rate; the catalytic agency of gold in the process of conversion between precious-rare and dross, the mutability of all things. Other things I learned; how to shift heavy objects, how to sweep floors, clean up mess, stand perfectly still and quiet for three hours and not be noticed. All good stuff, much more use to me in later life than the course material. I take the view that we’re the sum of everything that happens to us, good and bad. It’s an alchemist’s interpretation, of course, seeing people as a compilation of ingredients combined and acted on by processes. The implication is, if you leave out one of the ingredients, even if, particularly if, it’s unstable or noxious, you get a different result. If the experiment comes out well, then you can’t say any one particular ingredient or process was bad. If you end up with a result like me—well, good and bad are by definition unscientific terms. What matters is the purpose of the experiment and whether or not you achieve it.

By any reasonable criteria, Phocas was a successful experiment. He started off as garbage and came out of the crucible pure gold. A lesser man might’ve celebrated his sudden, unexpected transformation into heir apparent with a whirlwind massacre of everybody who’d derided and despised him when he was nobody; this would’ve entailed wiping out ninety per cent of the university of Elpis, but that was the sort of thing Phocas’ family had been doing for centuries, and nobody seemed to think any the less of them for it. But Phocas wasn’t like that. He forgave his enemies and rewarded his friends, except for me. Don’t get me wrong. He wanted to help. He tried quite hard to find out what had become of me. But by then my tutor was dead (the plague; we had it relatively easy at Elpis, but he was one of the victims) and nobody else knew or cared. I carried on portering and working in the library when the students were in bed or out drinking, without the faintest idea that Phocas was trying to find me, until I ran into a spot of trouble and had to leave town.

History will have all manner of nice things to say about Phocas; how he checked the power of the provincial nobility, ended the war with the Ammagene, got the public finances under control. In fact, history will love him. No matter which side’s in the ascendancy, there’ll be a bit of Phocas they can grapple on to and make their own. The Optimates will admire the way he broke the power of the labour guilds and supported free trade, while the Tendency will worship him for his welfare provisions and land reforms. They’ll debate endlessly about what his real agenda was, which side he was actually on, and they’ll never get within a long spit of the truth, because history refuses to recognise the possibility that great events and changes of lasting significance could be brought about just because once upon a time there was an absolute ruler who simply couldn’t make up his mind. His intentions were always good. Where he was luckier than all his fellow altruists was in somehow contriving to pursue his good intentions without doing irreparable damage to everyone and everything around him. The truth is, he was a simple-minded, basically decent sort of a fellow, born well outside the dangerous confines of the purple, who did the best he could to keep things ticking over quietly so they wouldn’t distract him from his overriding mission in life; to discover, or more realistically sponsor the discovery, of the secret of turning base metal into gold. If ever I get around to finishing my Ideal Republic (started it ten years ago, paid in advance, spent the money), I’ll have to fit him in somewhere as a model autocrat; the man who rules well because he doesn’t really want to rule at all.

*

“Hello, Phocas,” I said.

He looked up at me from the papers he’d been reading. “What the hell was all that about?” he said.

I shrugged. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought—”

“No,” he snapped, “you didn’t, that’s the point. Damn it, I wrote you a letter. And you’re supposed to be smart.”

I sat down. The guard didn’t like it, but Phocas didn’t notice. “You see,” I went on, “I had the idea that you might, well, blame me—”

“Really.” He gave me a hurt, angry look. “How long have we known each other?”

“I’m sorry,” I repeated. “I panicked, all right? It happened, and I just had to run, get out of there, as far away as I could. And then I thought, how suspicious does that look? I thought—”

“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.

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 dependents 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?

So I looked.

She lay on her back, naked, with the meniscus of the honey just covering the tip of her nose. Her eyes were open, and her face still had that look of mild bewilderment that I’d seen the last time I saw her, as the beaker slipped through her fingers and smashed on the floor. Her hair was trapped in the stuff; she reminded me irresistibly of a fly caught in amber, and that, of course, was the general idea. Honey, as is well known, is of all the soft materials the least prone to corruption, which is why it’s such a good preservative. Immerse a piece of meat— which was what Eudoxia was, now—in pure, clear honey, and it’ll stay good almost indefinitely.

Good is a comparative term, and not one I’d ever be in a hurry to apply to my late wife. But, lying there submerged in the liquid gold, she was fighting decay and winning, no doubt about that. There was none of the shrinking of the flesh, withering of the lips, puffing and poaching of the ears and fingertips that you generally get with a dead body at that stage of the process. If there was a distortion, it was only the effect of light refracted in slow, golden liquid, adjusting rather than bending the line of her jaw, the angle of her nose to her brow. She was, I have to say, as beautiful as ever, and likely to remain so; exactly what she always wanted, frozen in her youth in her golden bath, finally safe from the vis mutationis, the weakness of earth, the spite of water, the gnawing of air and the irresistible compulsion of fire. I guess it comes down to what you want and what you’re prepared to pay in order to get it. In her case, death; but she’d never really got much out of being alive, because of the constant terror of loss, change, deterioration, decay. It was enough to make me want to sit down and write a paper then and there. I’d finally given her what she wanted, the elixir of eternal youth, effected by the removal of her internal fire (the catalyst of change) through the agency of death. She’d have been so pleased, if only she’d been there to see it. Still, you can’t have everything, and her body always mattered more to her than her soul, for want of a better word. I couldn’t help smiling. Now that’s alchemy, I thought.

I stood there looking at her for quite some time, until an observation eventually filtered its way through my thick skull. The footsteps I’d heard in the corridor had got gradually louder until they reached more or less where I was, and then they’d stopped. Which meant that the stepper of those steps must have stopped too, directly outside the door of this bathroom. Factor in the presence of the prince’s dead sister—not something you’d leave lying about unguarded—and I was forced to a painful and humiliating conclusion. I could only suppose that the scuttlehat detailed to guard the body of the princess had gone away for a short while—call of nature or whatever—during which time I’d slipped in and closed the door. Now the guard was back, and I’d trapped myself in there, with no realistic chance of getting out.

Idiot, I thought.

Well, there was nothing for it. I went to the door and belted it with my fist.

Wish I could’ve been on the other side of that door and seen the poor bugger’s face. The guard would’ve been aware that he was standing outside a room containing one dead woman. Forcible knocking from inside the room, therefore—Well, he must’ve pulled himself together by the time he opened the door, because he had that scuttlehat look on his face; dead, stuffed and mounted. He recognised me, of course. They all know me.

“Sorry,” I said. “Must’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere. Do you think you could show me the way to the back door?”

He thought about it just long enough. I really hate punching out scuttlehats. Miss by an eighth of an inch, and either they don’t go down or you skin your knuckles on the sharp edge of the steel ear-flaps. Luckily, I was on target this time. He sank to his knees with that faint sigh you get sometimes. I stepped over him and ran for it.

*

Really, though, I was just killing time. I made it as far as the porters’ lodge, just inside the main gate. There’s a little sort of alcove in there, where they dump the mail sacks. I scrambled in and pulled a full sack on top of me, making sure there wasn’t a telltale foot or elbow sticking out. Time to think.

Time, as I think I may have told you already, melts. In its liquid form (aqua temporis?), it seeps and penetrates, like a thin mineral oil, and pools, and floods, under the influence of heat (the agency of fire; see above, passim). Withdraw that influence and it congeals, like hot fat in a pan, and in its solid state undergoes a kind of slow transmutation into a gooey mess, in which you get stuck. Time pooled and congealed under that mail sack, whose coarse hemp fibres chafed my cheek as I huddled, denying myself the agency of movement. I hate waiting. I can feel time passing, I sometimes kid myself—time passing is a transmutation of decay, communication by an exchange through loss; components dwindle and are lost, though what remains is by definition the enduring, therefore the refined, the desirable. In theory, you can refine gold by just leaving it lying around, letting the rain and the damp air corrode out the impurities, until only the gold remains. Wouldn’t try it though. Someone like me might come along and steal it.

I thought; do I really have to go through with this?

They found me, in the end.

*

Picture the scene. Phocas and me, at the university, two fresh-faced young intellectual drunks bumping along a narrow alley, having been thrown out of the Divine Forbearance, on our way to create the circumstances that led to us being thrown out of the Charity and Social Justice (breathing with intent gets you slung out of the Forbearance, or it did in my day, but in order to get bounced from the Charity, you really have to try).

Talking, the way students do; too loud, too fast, from the bottom of our hearts, about things we understood in theory and principle, though we hadn’t got a clue about the proof and the practice.

“Hell of a good way to make money, though,” I think I said.

“Alchemy.” He snorted. It’s thing people only do when they’re drunk.

“Not that it’s possible,” I pointed out. “Can’t be done.”

“Don’t be so sure,” he replied darkly. “Amazing, what people can do. Look at cattle-breeding. Or glass-making, I mean, there’s a case in point. I mean, who’d have thought you could take a load of sand, like just ordinary sand, off a beach, any God’s amount of the stuff, and you stick it in a crucible and heat it up really, really, really hot, and next thing you know, you got glass. I mean,” he added with intense feeling, “glass. Impossible.”

“No it’s not,” I felt obliged to point out. “Glass is actually no big deal. People make the stuff every day.”

“Yes, but it shouldn’t be possible, is what I’m saying,” he said. “Stuff that’s solid, so you can touch it, so it’s really there, but you can’t see it, you can just see through it. That’s not possible.” He paused to regain his balance, which had temporarily escaped him. “It’s more like bloody magic than anything sensible. Well, isn’t it?”

I shrugged. I’d forgotten what point he was trying to make.

“So,” he went on, his face screwed up in concentration, “maybe the same thing goes for alchemy. Base stuff into gold. Just because we can’t do it now doesn’t mean to say it can’t be done. Well?”

“But it can’t be done,” I said patiently. “Because of basic alchemical theory.”

He spat; so much, then, for basic alchemical theory. “And bloody good job too,” he said. “You know what? If ever I get to be prince—”

He paused, stopped dead and swallowed hard half a dozen times. I took a long step back, recognising the symptoms. But he was all right this time. “If ever I get to be prince,” he went on, “first thing I’m going to do. Want to guess?”

I shook my head. “What?”

“Hunt down all the alchemists,” he said, “string the buggers up. No mercy, no exceptions. You know why?”

“Enlighten me.”

“Because,” he said, “alchemists are the greatest potential danger to the state. Really. Because,” he went on, rubbing his eyes with thumb and forefinger, “what’s the basis of government revenue? The gold standard. Why? Because gold is scarce. You get some bastard comes along, figures out how to turn base metal into gold, what d’you get? Total fiscal chaos, that’s what. Market flooded, gold worthless, billions of angels wiped out of the economy in a matter of hours.”

I wasn’t really interested in the subject, but I felt obliged to argue, because when you’re that age, and a student, and drunk, you argue the toss about everything. “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Surely the trick would be, to keep it to yourself. Not let everybody know about it.

Then you could have your tame alchemists down in the cellar cooking up millions of angels, and only you’d know it wasn’t the good stuff. You’d be rich, everybody’d be fine, no problem, surely.”

He gave me a filthy look. “Wouldn’t work,” he said. “Can’t keep something like that a secret for long. Bound to get out, and then you’re screwed. Only thing you can do, lure all the really good alchemists to you with bribes and stuff, keep a really, really close eye on them; then, soon as they look like they’re on to something—” He did that finger-across-the-throat thing, and hiccoughed.

“Bit harsh,” I said.

“Harsh,” he replied, “but right. The right thing to do. Always do the right thing, if you’re the prince. Hold on there a second, gotta take a leak.”

He paused in the doorway of the Convent of the Sisters of Divine Grace, and there was a trickling noise. Then he scampered to catch me up.

“So that’s what you’ll do, then, is it?” I asked. “When you’re the prince.”

He laughed. “Not going to be the prince.”

“Really?”

“Impossible,” he said. “Can’t happen.”

*

When I got back to my laboratory, the gold ingot was almost, but not quite, where I’d left it. Ah, I thought.

“Four guards,” the guard said.

“Excuse me?”

“Four guards,” he repeated. “Outside your door, at all times, from now on.”

“I’m flattered,” I said.

He gave me a look. “And private Syriscus is in the hospital. You cracked his skull.”

From time to time, I really hate myself. It doesn’t last long and then it goes away, and then it comes back. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“Sure,” he said, and left the room. I heard the lock. So what? I thought. He was a scuttlehat. They get paid to stand in harm’s way. He was there to keep me from getting out, and I’m a free man, a citizen of the universe, not a chicken in a coop. I never set out to hurt anybody, not ever. Well, not often. And when I do, it’s never the primary purpose, just an unfortunate inevitable consequence. Mostly.

I sat down and read a book; Arcadius on functions, which is fundamentally flawed but still makes a kind of sense. They brought me something to eat; fresh bread, strong white cheese, five slices of farm sausage, an apple. “How’s Syriscus getting on?” I asked. They just looked at me. I ate the food, then put my feet up on the bench and closed my eyes, but all I could see was her face just below the surface of the honey. Not guilt; more like the first stirring of an idea. I got up, found some paper and a pen and some ink, and started to write. (And if you happen to be a student in your second year at any decent Vesani university, you’d recognise what I wrote. Hell, you can probably recite the opening paragraph by heart, which is more than I can. There’s a really basic flaw on page three, by the way. A small prize if you can spot it.)

I must’ve fallen asleep, because when they woke me, I was face down on the paper, with the ink forming a small lake on the bench-top. I looked up. Scuttlehats.

“Come with us,” they said.

“Do I have to?” I said, with a yawn. “It’s been a really long day.”

“On your feet,” they explained. I got up, and they shunted me out of the door. I wasn’t happy about being manhandled, but then I thought about the man whose skull I’d broken and decided not to make an issue of it. Memo to self, I thought; must make special effort not to hurt people.

Phocas was waiting for me in the South Library. Disconcerting. I’d been in there twice before, once as a friend and honoured guest, once when I was burgling the palace (long story) and took a wrong turning. It’s a hell of a room; on the small side, by palace standards—you could just about squeeze a cavalry squadron in there, but they’d have to leave their horses outside in the corridor— half-panelled in rich golden oak with late Idealist carvings of harvest and pastoral subjects, with a moulded-plaster roof gilded and painted in trompe l’oeil to represent a canopy of vines and mulberries (traditionally there’s a two-angel prize for new visitors if they can spot the life-size moulded wren hidden among the vine-tendrils; I didn’t find it until my second visit); five free-standing bookcases, unchained, one of which houses the current prince’s own personal collection of books. I was touched to note that three shelves of this bookcase were taken up with the collected works of Saloninus.

“You’re impossible,” he said.

“Strictly speaking, no. Highly improbable, yes, but—”

“You put a guard in the hospital.” Phocas not in mood for jokes. “The other one lost two jaw teeth.” He paused, and looked at me. “Where did you learn to punch like that?” he said. “Not at the university.”

“I sort of picked it up as I went along,” I said truthfully. “Look, I’m really sorry about the guards. It wasn’t—”

“Deliberate?” He shook his head. “Well, they’re the least of our problems.” He picked up a sheet of paper and waved it at me. “You know what this is?”

“Enlighten me.”

“It’s a warrant of friendly rendition,” he said, and I saw that his face was milk-white. “Sworn and sealed by the Mezentine charge d’affaires, relating to charges of forgery, sedition and false coining. You know what that means?”

In other words, extradition. I just about managed to keep a straight face. “You won’t let them take me,” I said.

He closed his eyes for a moment. “I really don’t see that I have a choice,” he said. “It’s a properly-drawn warrant, there’s a valid treaty, they know you’re here, and they went to the Senate instead of me personally. If I try and bury this, the Tendency’ll have my head on a pike.”

I didn’t dare look him in the eye, so I concentrated on the tiny plaster wren, directly above his head. It seemed as though it was singing to me. Extradition; I get formally handed over at the Northgate into the custody of three or four armed couriers. I go quietly. Sooner or later we stop at an inn or a post-house or a road station. A walnut-sized gob of pulveus fulminans goes in the fire, I go out through the window; free and clear. Of course, most of the major governments know me quite well by now, there’d be searches, including body cavities. But if it came down to a choice between my dignity and comfort and my life, no contest. You can easily hide enough pulveus fulminans to take out a wall where the sun doesn’t shine.

“Please,” I said. “Don’t let them do this. It’s the gibbet for coining in Mezentia.”

“Should’ve thought of that before you did it.” He paused. “You did do it.”

I nodded. I make it a rule to tell the truth when there’s nothing much riding on it. “I was starving,” I said. “I met some men in a bar. They said it was for jewellery, not counterfeiting.”

“Nino, you idiot.” There was something in his voice, something so close to genuine feeling, that for a moment I felt physically ill. “What can I do? Come on, you’re the genius. Suggest something.”

“I’m not a lawyer,” I said. “Ask the professionals, it’s what you pay them for.”

“I already did,” he snapped, turning his head a little so he wasn’t meeting my eye. “They couldn’t think of a damned thing. Best they could come up with was a plea of benefit of clergy. But that won’t wash unless it’s made when you’re on Mezentine soil.”

Benefit of clergy, I thought, now that’s smart. I liked it. Never been a priest before. “Will it work?”

He scowled, a sure sign of deep concentration. “They believe so,” he said. “The treaty’s four hundred years old, it was meant to protect our missionaries when they made trouble for themselves preaching the overthrow of the Guilds, but it’s still in force and it specifically covers sedition and related offences. So, yes, probably.”

“So you can get me out.”

“Only if we let them take you in first.” He rubbed his eyes, as though he’d been awake for three days. “It’s those bastards in the Tendency,” he said, “using you to get at me. Bet you anything you like they put the Mezentines up to it.”

“Let’s think about this,” I said, in my best serious voice. “If you try and bury it, like you said, you’ll play into their hands and you’ll have a constitutional crisis. If we go along with it, due procedure, all straight and above board, you can get me out and stick it to the Tendency at the same time.” I shrugged. “Looks pretty straightforward to me,” I said. “I’ll go.”

He sat still and quiet for a while, during which time I had to make an effort to remember to breathe. Then he seemed to come to a decision, then pull back from it. “Talk about timing,” he said. “When you’re so close—”

He looked up as he said that. There’s a card game we used to play in the prison hulk at Phrontis Tropaea. I forget the name of it, but there’s a point in the game where you’ve got the option of deliberately letting the other players see your cards. Never played it against Phocas, but I bet he’d have been good at it.

(When I’d gone back to the laboratory after my last outing, I’d picked up the gold ingot, once I’d noticed that it had been moved, and checked the underside. Sure enough, there was a thin line scribed on it, deep enough to cut through the layer of gold plating formed over the silvered copper by the Polycrates process. What I think I neglected to mention was the other ingot, which I’d cast some time earlier from the same mould, out of pure gold, which I’d put next to it. Archestratus in the Materials conjectures that the transmutation process starts with the outside and works slowly inwards, like the thawing of frozen meat.)

I managed to make myself look offended. “I said six weeks,” I said. “I don’t make promises I can’t keep.”

The enormity of that lie filled the room for a moment, then dissipated like gas in a breeze. “You’re following Archestratus?”

I pulled a disdainful face. “Hardly,” I said. “But it looks like he may have been right about something, for a change. But it’s not ready,” I went on. “If you’d cut into that bar with a chisel, you’d have found it’s still copper half-way through.”

(Which was true. Hell of a job, casting gold round a copper core. I had to support the copper bar inside the mould with four copper nails, so the molten gold would flow round and under it. Attention to detail, you see. It’s everything.)

“If I let them take you—”

“Don’t worry,” I said bravely. “I’ll be fine. And when I get back, I can finish the job.”

*

It’s been on my conscience for some time now that I haven’t been exactly straight with you. What really happened was this.

She came in. She saw the stuff on the bench. “What’s that?” she said. “Nothing.”

She gave me that look. “What?” I told her what was in it, leaving out one key ingredient. Took her about five seconds to put the pieces together. “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 sweet spirits of colocynth to calm it down.”

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—”

“All due respect,” I said, “but immortality is one thing. Being married to you for ever 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. 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 takes hours to work. Or days. Weeks, even. It’d be criminally irresponsible of me to let you drink it.”

“You going to give Phocas 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 saw her slide her hand round the base of the beaker. With a really rather graceful movement, she lifted it to her mouth. I sat back in my chair to watch the show. When it was over (and it wasn’t long; I chose sal draconis because it’s quick) I got up and stood over her, turned her face with my foot so I could see her eyes. Not a flicker.

One down, I thought. I’d known, ever since college when she came up to visit Phocas and met me for the first time, that she was trouble. When Phocas more or less kidnapped me and brought me to Paraprosdocia, in the ludicrous but utterly sincere belief that I could figure out how to turn base metal into gold one day, she didn’t object. Far from it. Don’t you ever let him go, I heard her say to him once; it was the third, no, sorry, make that the fourth time I tried to escape. I was wandering aimlessly through the palace trying to find a door that led to the street, and I happened to stray into the small cloister garden, where they were drinking wine beside the fountain. He assured her that the only journey I’d be making from the palace was the short distance from the back door to the midden—technically outside the palace grounds, because it’s on the other side of the curtain wall. Soon as he’s cracked transmutation, I get rid of him, Phocas said. Don’t you dare, she replied, not till he’s made me the elixir. He grinned at her. Oh, go on, then, he said. But then—

Didn’t come as a surprise, not one bit. I’d always known, ever since that drunken episode back at Elpis. The last thing Phocas wanted was for there to be a way to turn garbage into gold. After all, the prince owns more gold than anybody else this side of the Eastern Sea, so he’s got the most to lose. Hardly a coincidence that the half-dozen or so incredibly eminent alchemists who’d worked for him before I came, men whose glassware I wouldn’t be worthy to wash out, had died in the palace. Irony; transmutation really and truly isn’t possible. But I can easily picture what happened. Phocas keeps putting pressure on them to achieve results. They can’t do the impossible, so they cheat. Cheating’s easy. There are a dozen reliable recipes for instant gold plating, as many again for fool’s gold that’s practically indistinguishable from the real thing, and let’s not get into the murky realm of rigged experiments, sleight of hand, false-bottomed cupolas, and the third and fourth books of Xenocrates’ Experiments (I lost my copy years ago, but not before I committed the whole of those books to memory). So; they cheated, plausibly enough to convince Phocas that they’d finally done the trick, and that the trick was possible after all. And then he killed them.

Eudoxia was, of course, much smarter than her brother, and she’d taught herself alchemy to a remarkably high level. She knew transmutation couldn’t be done. I guess she thought, if it gives my brother pleasure to kill a bunch of charlatans, let him. She certainly knew better than to argue with him once he’d got an idea stuck in his head. But she’d read that universally-acclaimed early work of mine, On the Properties of Organic Materials, in which I proved conclusively that an elixir of eternal youth was not only theoretically possible but almost within our grasp.

Properties was another of my little grey lies. There’s a fault in its logic that’s so huge, I didn’t feel guilty about publishing, on the grounds that anybody who couldn’t spot it deserved to be made a monkey of. But nobody spotted it, not even brilliant Eudoxia. Now, she knew me well enough to know that bullying just doesn’t work. More flies with honey than vinegar has always been the core of her philosophy. She figured that if I was deeply, hopelessly in love with her, I’d make her the elixir to preserve forever the beauty to which I was devoted. To be fair, I don’t think she planned to have me killed after I’d come across with the stuff. She’d just leave me to Phocas. At any rate, she sold the idea of marrying me to him by arguing that a man with my propensity to running away couldn’t be restrained by force. Instead, make me want to stay; and afterwards, when she was a widow, she could marry again. Phocas agreed; not because he was convinced by her arguments, but because he knew she’d very nearly married Opianus, leader of the Popular Tendency and Phocas’ deadliest enemy in politics; her reason being, she’d done the sums and figured out that it was only a matter of time before the Tendency prevailed and Phocas’ head found its way onto a spike on Northgate. If she married Opianus, she could hurry along the inevitable, secure her own position and effectively rule through him, if she could be bothered. I don’t suppose she could, actually. My belief is, she wanted to make sure her head didn’t end up next to her brother’s when the end finally came. In any event, the deal fell through when Opianus was supplanted in a particularly nasty bout of Tendency in-fighting; his successor as Tendency leader, Pescennius, was widely known not to like girls, so she gave up. It was therefore in Phocas’ interests to have his sister safely married to a political nonentity; the collateral benefit of keeping me on a leash, if it actually worked out that way, was just icing on the cake.

I’d made up my mind to kill her quite some time ago; then I changed it. I’m deeply ashamed of this, but I’m helpless around beautiful women. That’s how I allowed myself to fall in love with Theodosia, and after Phocas killed her, Eudoxia was still there, just as lovely, just as desperate to keep me hooked so I’d brew her stupid elixir for her. Just run away, I told myself, there’s no need for another lovely woman to die. The transmutation of flesh to putrefaction, of warm to cold, is established fact, it doesn’t need proving again. Just run away, and leave them both behind.

On that occasion I got as far as Lachrima, on the shores of the Great White Lake.

*

Extradition. So much to do, so little time.

The worst part, of course, was knowing I’d have to rely on other people. I have a thing about that. Mostly, I guess, because other people have always let me down, when it mattered; but it’s also this deep-rooted hangup I’ve got about trusting people. Never really been able to do it. I guess it’s because we always instinctively use ourselves as paradigms of humanity when calculating the likely behaviour of others. I wouldn’t trust me further than I can spit, so why would I trust anybody else?

Also, there’s some procedures you just can’t rush. It takes time for Element A to react with Essence B and produce Compound C; sometimes you can bustle it along with a little judicious heat, but not always, and if you get it wrong, you screw up Compound C or blow a hole in the roof. Furthermore, it’s never ever a good idea to hurry when you’re using strong acids. Think about it.

Add fine silver to aqua fortis, then add wood alcohol, as pure as you can make it. I spent years figuring out how to do this reaction so as to produce a stable product. Now I was faced with the tricky problem of making it so it’d be unstable. That too is the story of my life.

I started with twenty silver dollars; not the crappy government issue, which is ninety parts silver to ten parts copper, but some home-made (I prefer the term hand-made) of my own manufacture, ninety-nine point six pure, which I’d collected from a safe place after I went to see Astyages. One of the reasons I’ve never made any money out of counterfeiting is, I make better coins than the State. Can’t seem to help it. Always the quiet voice in my head telling me; if a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing properly.

Put the dollars in the bottom of a big glass beaker. Slosh in a whole pint of the very best aqua fortis; made it myself, because you can’t get good stuff commercially. Stand well back, because the foul-smelling white steam will kill you if you breathe it in. Watch those little smiling bubbles as the acid eats the silver. Enough to break your heart.

The guards turned up with the ice I’d asked for. They treated me like a cross between a leper and an active volcano. I smiled, and gave the sergeant the twenty-first dollar.

“No, really,” I said, as he stared at it. “And thanks.”

You could see the battle going on in his mind. On the one hand, I was the unbelievably devious master of escapes, who thought nothing of maiming honest soldiers if they got in my way. On the other hand, a silver dollar is a silver dollar is a month’s pay. Of course, it wasn’t a silver dollar, because it was in fact illegally better, but he wasn’t to know that. Eventually his fist closed round it, and he got out of the room really fast.

I get my wood alcohol from Sirmis. It’s the best money can buy. I put the beaker on the ice, glugged in the wood alcohol, stoppered the bottle and stood well back. So far, so good. As soon as it stopped gushing out killer fumes, I trickled in cold water, to start the crystals growing. Tricky part over; now all I had left to do was the relatively trivial chore of turning base metal into gold.

I don’t actually know—I’m being totally honest with you now—whether it’s possible or not. Truth is, I’ve never had the enthusiasm to run the experiment to its conclusion. If I’d happened to stumble across the secret before Phocas got hold of me, maybe I’d have been a bit more motivated. As it was, discovering how to do it would’ve been my death warrant, so it stayed entirely theoretical. I didn’t even dare write it down and work it out on paper, in case Eudoxia saw it. It’s been in my head for years, and I never tried it out.

It’s a six part procedure—you’ll pardon me, I’m sure, if I don’t tell you about it, just in case you’re tempted to give it a go yourself, which (trust me) would lead to all manner of horrible consequences for you as and when your king, prince, duke or city council finds out what you’re up to. The most I can bring myself to do is give you a hint. You add stuff to stuff, do stuff to the resulting stuff, and you get stuff out at the end, which may or may not be gold, depending on whether or not it works. It’s all quite straightforward and doesn’t need ice; you could do it at home, on the kitchen table, but don’t, please.

So I did that. Then I ran up three walnut-sized knobs of pulveus fulminans, wrapped them in incredibly thin gold leaf and put them where they wouldn’t be found. I won’t dwell on that stage of the operation. All done, and just in time.

“I need to see the prince,” I said.

The sergeant—not the same one as last time—nodded. I got the impression he’d been expecting me to say that, so presumably Phocas intended to say good-bye, as I’d hoped he would. Say what you like about Phocas, he’s always been predictable; a fine quality in an ingredient, essential to a well-controlled experiment.

(It’d have been so nice if my life had been a well-controlled experiment. You know; start off with your basic ingredients, add education, experiences, events, stirring with a glass rod, when appropriate retarding the reaction with a block of ice. Predictable consequences, intended results, and something worth having at the end. Hasn’t quite worked out like that. As for the result, the product, we’ll have to wait and see. I may yet surprise myself.)

“The lawyers say it ought to be all right,” Phocas said. He looked grey with worry. “They’ve drawn up the heads of defence and I’ve sent the papers on ahead by express courier, so they’ll be there before you arrive. With any luck—”

“I’ll be fine,” I said. “Really.” I smiled at him. “You know, I always thought I was smart, but benefit of clergy—”

“Damn it,” he said, “I almost forgot.” He scrabbled among the papers on his desk, found what he was looking for. “Lucustus Saloninus, do you solemnly swear to perform and uphold the office of deacon in the most holy and sacred convocation of the Company of the Invincible Sun? Say yes.”

“Yes,” I said, and waited. “Is that it?”

“That’s it. You’re a priest. Now get out of my sight.”

“Really a priest?”

“Yes. Good-bye. Try not to rob anybody or blow anything up.”

“Phocas.” I looked straight at him, something I wouldn’t usually do. “I need to tell you something before I go.”

“Well?”

“In private.”

He looked dubious, and the scuttlehats went suddenly tense. “Oh come on,” I said. “I’m a priest now. If you can’t trust the clergy—”

“Fine.” He nodded at the sergeant, and the scuttlehats left the room. “Well?”

I lowered my voice just a little. “It’s started,” I said.

“What?”

“The experiment.” It took a moment for it to sink in, and then his eyes grew round as dollars. “I’ve started it up. It’ll take about five hours.”

He’d grabbed my sleeve. “You mean—?”

“In my laboratory,” I said, “on the bench, there’s a stone basin, next to the water-clock. In the basin there’s a handful of iron nails, covered with a pale green liquid. In about an hour from now, you should start to see a pale yellow coating on the nails. Whatever you do, don’t touch them, the stuff in there’ll eat your fingers to the bone. Just let them be, but someone’s going to have to watch the stuff like a hawk. So long as the liquid stays green, it’s fine. If it starts to turn blue, someone’s got to add two drops of the dark brown stuff in the dark green glass bottle; that’ll put it right, but it’s got to be done the moment the liquid starts changing colour. Otherwise the whole experiment’s a write-off and I’ll have to start again, it’d set us back months.” I grinned. “This is about the most inconvenient time they could’ve picked.”

He frowned at me. “Couldn’t it have waited till you got back?”

I shook my head. “The principal reagent only stays stable for a day or so,” I said. “It takes nine weeks to mature once you’ve brewed it. Also,” I added quietly, “I may not be coming back. I’d hate to die without having tried.”

He looked sick. “Don’t talk like that,” he said. “The lawyers—”

“I’ll write it all out when I get to Mezentia,” I said. “I’ll mail to you via the diplomatic courier.”

“No.” He looked terrified. “For pity’s sake, don’t do that. We can’t trust anybody with something like this. When you get back, there’ll be plenty of time.”

I shrugged. “Suit yourself,” I said. “Just make sure there’s someone watching that stuff for the next five hours. That’s all I ask.”

“Don’t worry,” he said, and his voice was just a shade higher than usual. “I’ll do it myself.”

“Really?”

“You have my word.”

I smiled at him. “In that case,” I said, “I’ve got nothing to worry about. Bless you, my son,” I added, and went and banged on the door.

*

The story of my life, so far.

When I was young, I wanted to know the truth. I was impatient. I saw things so very clearly. It’s probably a mistake to teach logic to the young. Logic is a weapon as well as a tool. You learn it, you master it, you can’t wait to go out and use it on someone. At Elpis, I laid about me with the sword of logic till nobody was left to fight. Then, absurdly, the money ran out, and shortly afterwards, so did I.

Running away; the story of my life. I ran away from philosophy and set about doing stupid things. Stealing is stupid, because sooner or later you get caught. Getting caught is also the story of my life. I always get away but I always get caught. I used to think I just stumbled into alchemy by accident, but now I’m old enough to know better, I understand that there’s no such thing as a coincidence. The two predominent factors that make me up, philosophy and criminality, when combined together on the block of ice hat serves me for a personality go to make up alchemy. We were, to coin a phrase, made for each other.

The stupid thing is, I probably am the greatest alchemist who ever lived. Not because I may or may not have found out how to turn base metal into gold, but because—well, we’ll come to that later. I’m also a pretty competent philosopher, but only as long as someone’s prepared to pay me to do it. The longer you think about truth and wisdom, the more clearly you come to understand that they’re figments of the imagination; and what does that leave? Well, there’s the sheer pleasure of fencing with logic, which wears a bit thin after a while, and there’s the reasonable living that can be made from lecturing and writing and teaching. I’d have settled for that, if only I’d been left alone, but no such luck.

Phocas and Eudoxia shaped my life. When I wasn’t running away from them, I was lying to them, to keep from getting killed. I murdered Eudoxia because I had to; too old and tired to run any more, too weary to keep pulling knobs of pulveus fulminans out of my arse and jumping through windows. As for Phocas; I guess he meant well, but that’s no excuse. I’ve meant well at various stages in my life, and there’s no excuse whatsoever for me.

Curiously enough, one of my greatest talents, before I lost it, was making friends. People instinctively liked me, once upon a time. Theodosia loved me. You’d need to be ten times the scientist I’ll ever be to figure out the chemistry behind that.

Well. I’m sorry by the way, that I lied to you earlier. Couldn’t resist. I guess that above all, I’m a showman, a performer, a liar. And you can take that to the bank.

*

“For God’s sake,” Pescennius said, scowling at me. “Did you really have to trash the entire palace?”

He was exaggerating, needless to say. But, “Yes,” I replied. “Omelettes and eggs,” I explained. “Also, if a thing’s worth doing—”

He poured me a cup of that pale green tea that’s so fashionable these days. Myself, I’d as soon drink rainwater from the gutter. “How did you do it, exactly?” he said.

Pescennius, formerly head of the Popularist Tendency and now First Citizen of the Republic, is, of course, an old college chum of mine. We go way back. “This stuff tastes like piss,” I said.

“Yes. How did you—?”

“All right,” I said wearily. “But it goes no further, right?”

“You have my word.”

I knew him too well for that. Still, it didn’t matter. He and I had a murder in common. That sort of mutual bond is something you can trust.

“Argens fulminans,” I told him, stretching back into his really quite comfortable chair. “Otherwise known as fulminate of silver.”

“Never heard of—”

“You wouldn’t have,” I said. “I discovered it. Fulminate of gold’s been around for centuries, it’s in all the books. I wondered if you could get the same effect with silver. They’re both completely useless, of course.”

He scowled at me. “Slow down,” he said.

I grinned. “Fulminate of silver,” I said, “is an explosive, a really powerful one. Trouble is, it’s incredibly unstable. Other fulminates blow up when you bang them or drop them. Silver fulminate tends to go off under its own weight. No, I’m serious. The weight of one layer of crystals forming on top of another is enough pressure to detonate it. That’s why it’s so useless. You can’t make more than a tiny quantity before it self-destructs, unless you slow it right down with ice. And when the ice melts—”

He was thinking really hard, trying to keep up with me. “Go on,” he said.

“I brewed up a large quantity of silver fulminate,” I said. “On a big block of ice. I left it on the bench in the laboratory along with another experiment I knew Phocas was interested in. That was just to get him in the same room as the fulminate and keep him there till it blew itself up. And him with it, of course.”

“And the whole of the east wing.”

I shrugged. “It’s not like I had reliable data to work from,” I said. “So I had to guess. You’ve got to admit, I erred on the safe side.”

“You could put it like that.”

“Anyhow,” I went on, “it worked. And, thanks to you arranging the extradition for me, I was twelve miles from the city in the company of irreproachable witnesses when Phocas died, putting both you and me in the clear. Then, all I had to do was escape from the Mezentines—”

“How did you—?”

I mock-scowled at him. “Trade secret,” I said. “Which I intend to keep to myself, for when I need it to escape from your scuttlehats, when the time comes.”

He was too smart to be drawn by that. “It worked out all right,” he said, “just about. When you suggested this whole thing, I—”

“You thought I was crazy, I know. But you trusted me. Thanks.”

“I have this feeling I’ll live to regret it,” Pescennius said.

“Then you’ll be luckier than Phocas,” I replied. “Anyway, the hell with it. You got what you wanted; Phocas dead, the government in chaos, all the ingredients for a successful coup.”

“Don’t call it that,” Pescennius said irritably. “It was a popular revolution.”

“Of course it was.” I stood up. “Thanks for the tea,” I said. “I’ll be going now.”

He looked at me. “Where?”

I smiled. “I’ve never lied to you,” I said. “So don’t ask me that, or I’ll have to spoil a perfect score.”

He nodded. “Take care,” he said. “For what it’s worth, you’re a hero of the people.”

“And a priest, too,” I said. “Is there no end to my talents?”

*

I went to Choris Seautou, where I had money and a place to work, and it was there that I successfully concluded my life’s work, the achievement with which my name will for ever be linked, my great contribution to humanity, the source of my considerable wealth. It was about time, and I’d earned it.

And here I am. After a lifetime of wandering and running away, I now live in a big house, with two hundred acres of parkland and seventy-odd servants. I spend most of my time reading, now that I can afford to buy all the books I could possibly want. I don’t write any more. Don’t need the money.

I did make some notes of my various experiments in alchemy; but last year I had a huge bonfire out in the meadow and burned the lot. So, for example, the only directions for making silver fulminate anywhere in the world are the ones you’ve just read. The idea is that anyone disturbed enough to want the stuff will follow said instructions and, since there’s a deliberate mistake in them, won’t survive the attempt. The recipe for gold-out-of-garbage will die with me; arguably no great loss, since I never did find out if it works or not. The only data from my alchemical researches which will survive me is the formula for my great invention, which I sold, along with the business, to a Vesani consortium for more money than anybody could possibly spend in a lifetime. Needless to say, they intend to guard it with the utmost ferocity. It was a term of the contract that I didn’t keep a copy of the formula myself. No problem, I told them.

I’m an honest man now, a pillar of the community. I even pay taxes. In fact, last year alone I paid enough to keep a regiment in the field for a year (now, there’s something a man can be proud of, don’t you think?) Every Solstice I get a basket of white plums and a case of Faventine red wine from First Citizen Pescennius, who never did get around to holding free and fair elections, and is now practically indistinguishable from my other college chum Phocas, except he doesn’t kill alchemists. I eat the plums and give the wine to my gardeners.

Oh, and last autumn I got married. She’s a nice girl; not much to look at but sharp as a knife, and she makes me laugh. She married me for my money and my library. I think I married her because I like someone who gets their priorities right. I still think about Theodosia, of course. After giving it a great deal of thought, I’ve reached the conclusion that I probably didn’t kill Phocas because he had Theodosia executed. I’ve tried to blame him for that, but I can’t. My fault.

My invention, by which I turned base materials into negotiable gold and assured myself of the only true immortality—Sorry, I haven’t been entirely straight with you. My name really is Saloninus, but I changed it when I came to Choris. You’ll know me as Longinus Agricola, the inventor of synthetic blue paint.