Star Winds

Besides the furnaces the room contained a fantastic clutter of alembics, retorts and cucurbics, crucibles and mortars, and more elaborate apparatus such as the kerotakides for performing projection, which had been used recently for it stood blackened on the workbench, and the infusorator, a cumbersome piece of equipment incorporating plates of zinc and copper bathed in acid. Gebeth crossed to the other side of the laboratory and returned with a slab of something gleaming. “This I made today by projecting mercury on sulphur.”

Rachad accepted the object and inspected it. It was yellow, with a red tint; heavy and with the feel of metal. He gasped involuntarily as he turned it over, rubbing it and holding it to the light. His eyes widened with excitement and triumph.

“You have succeeded at last! You have made gold!”

With a sour smile Gebeth took back the slab. “Not gold. This is merely a form of cinnabar, which I have given some of the properties of gold. But it is not gold.”

Rachad looked crestfallen, and stuck out his lower lip in a pout.

“All metals, as you know, are compounded of mercury and sulphur in various ratios,” Gebeth said, “so theoretically any metal can be transformed into any other by altering those ratios. That mercury and sulphur can, by marrying, yield cinnabar, would seem to confirm this fact Yet others besides myself have gone down this road, tinting and projecting for years on end without finding true gold at the end of it. Without preparing the tincture itself, nothing can be done.”

“So?” Rachad frowned. He knew the alchemist was leading to something.

“Look at me, Rachad. I am an old man. For nearly forty years I have been on this quest, trying to turn base metal into gold. But where is my gold? Do you want to expend your life likewise, Rachad? You are not properly into the hunt yet. But once it grips your soul—” Gebeth clenched his fist convulsively. “It will not let go. My advice is to leave the great work alone.”

“I have never heard you speak like this before, sir,” said Rachad in a disappointed and surly tone. “You have been full of encouragement up until now.”

“True, but in the past few days I have reached a momentous conclusion. Never will I make gold. Never will I have the Tincture that heals metals in my possession. Of that I am certain.” The old man’s voice was dry with a defeat that he had forced himself to face up to.

Rachad instantly wished that he had withheld the money he had just given Gebeth, but the thought was squashed in his general dismay. “But you have been so close,” he protested weakly.

“Hundreds of others have been as close. How many have made gold?” Gebeth took out his key ring again, and moved to a wall safe which he opened with considerable squeaking and clanging of steel. Carefully, as if handling something precious, he took out a stiff, bulky book. “There are definite reasons for my decision, which means that as from today I shall probably abandon my efforts—the last in the street to do so.” He paused and his eyes went dreamy, as though he remembered past colleagues and neighbors. “It is only fair that I should explain why. Four years ago this rare book came into my possession. Few copies of it exist in the whole world, and I am showing it to you now only in the belief that you can hold your tongue and speak of it to no one.”

Dumbly Rachad nodded.

“Let us return to the other room,” Gebeth said.

Back in the living room the alchemist laid the book on the table under the lamp. Rachad saw now that though the book was large in area it actually had few pages, but that these were thick and stiff. The binding was of beaten copper and was engraved with letters and figures in some foreign script he did not recognize.

Gebeth opened the book and began to show him some of its pages, which were closely lettered in the same strange language or else finely colored in beautiful and mysterious pictures, usually several pictures to a page, though sometimes a whole page was devoted to a single illustration. One or two of the figures had some meaning for Rachad—such as the figure of mercury, and the caduceus, a staff entwined with two serpents, which filled the seventh page—but most were completely baffling to him. Then again some of the illustrations of alchemical vessels which accompanied the text were familiar to him, but they were followed by glowing scenes which were wholly symbolic. On a high mountain grew a flower with a blue stalk, sporting white and red flowers and golden leaves, and shaken by the wind while dragons and griffins nested around it. In another picture a king and his soldiers slaughtered many young children, gathering their blood in a vessel in which the sun and the moon bathed.

Gebeth kept silent while Rachad pored over the pages.