Star Winds

What layman, by following this poem, would be able to alloy copper and silver, heating them in the presence of mercury which bound them into a single white amalgam?

Gebeth had tried hundreds of recipes for the making of gold, generally useless and even fraudulent, which could be obtained from spurious books or from “alchemists” who were little more than tricksters. He had learned the hard way how to distinguish those works which were genuine and imparted real knowledge. Among these were The Sophic Hydrolith and The Chariot of Antimony. He well remembered how, by following these and other authenticated works, he had embarked upon a detailed procedure for preparing the Tincture. In the course of a process lasting several months he had observed with excitement the predicted color changes, first to the deep black known as the Raven’s Head, then going through a reddish phase, then from the Peacock’s Tail with its white, green and yellow spots, to the deep red Blood of the Dragon. Then, sealed in a transparent receptacle of rock crystal, the preparation had been subjected to the most intense heat. At last it had transformed itself into the Raven’s Wing—a semi-gaseous, semi-liquid haze of glorious purple color that swirled and raved, the penultimate step, so the books said, in the creation of the Tincture. Yet try as he might Gebeth had not, after cooling and breaking open the receptacle, been able to accomplish the final stage. Several times he had started anew and repeated the whole procedure, believing that his ingredients had not been purified enough—and once wrecking his laboratory when the crystal vessel exploded—before admitting failure and immersing himself in yet more study.

On the other hand his career had not been without its joyous moments. He had, for instance, isolated the essence of animal vitality. This he had done by boiling off large quantities of urine until a residue remained. Upon his opening the vessel and exposing it to the air this residue had instantly flared up to flood the entire room with a vivid white glow eerie to behold, which had caused him much wonderment. The manual he had consulted for the experiment called this unstable substance phosphorus, explaining that it was almost unique among the compounds of earth and fire in being earth in which was mixed enormous amounts of fire in its purest state. So easily did this fire flee its corporeal prison that phosphorus constituted the natural essence for animating the body; it was responsible even for bodily warmth. Needless to say, Gebeth had been immensely impressed by this example of how subtle and variegated were the admixtures between the five elements earth, water, air, fire and ether.

Rachad was staring blankly at the tabletop. “Well, isn’t that real hard luck, sir? To learn a thing like that and not be able to do anything about it.”

“I imagine I would never have received the information if it had been at all possible to act on it,” Gebeth said resignedly. “The high priest of the Holy Ciborium would not have disclosed the tale, nor would my itinerant visitor have disclosed it to me, were not the Temple of Hermes Trismegistus wholly inaccessible. Only worthless knowledge is gained so easily.”

Gebeth smiled. Rachad’s chief interest in the business was plain to see, of course. He lusted after gold. That was the reason why he had so eagerly apprenticed himself to Gebeth.

And at the beginning, Gebeth reminded himself, he too had been driven by that hunger, almost to the exclusion of everything else. But time and decades of work had somehow wrought a change. He sought the stone by this time not merely for the wealth it would bring—he was old, now, and how much good could that wealth do him?—but for the glory of succeeding in the Great Work, for the sake of verifying with his own eyes that base metal could be transmuted into gold, and for the joy of seeing the secret operations of nature laid bare in his very own vessels. He could not say just when this change had come about. It had emerged gradually over the years.

“Mars!” exclaimed Rachad in a savage tone, thumping the table with frustration.

Outside the shuttered room, the sun sank slowly in the west.

Chapter TWO

Captain Zebandar Zhorga came out of the Portmaster’s office wearing a glum face. He muttered a few curses for the man, glancing back at the office’s lighted windows, then padded with his lumbering gait across the beaten earth of the field.

Captain Zhorga was a man whose qualities could all be summed up in one word: bluntness. His approach to problems was always direct, often clumsily so. His weather-beaten face showed this, with its heavy-lidded, slightly bulging eyes and powerful nose that was corrugated through having been broken twice. The hairs of his beard were like stiff black wires, though fringed with gray.