The Pillars of Eternity

The alchemists were indeed contemptuous of danger. Their skin was discoloured and bore the marks and scars of many strange burns and lacerations. Boaz alone took the precaution of wearing a face mask in the mercury-laden, vapour-drenched air of the laboratory, and many were those present whose breath came in gasps or whose limbs shook from the intake of similar unholy mixtures over the years.

Boaz counted himself lucky. Since coming to the planet the team of adepts had been preparing a singularly arcane experiment, and it was about to come to culmination. Dorsuse had promised to take him to the firepit to witness the climax.

The object of the operation was to isolate a particularly potent and rarefied form of fire as the alchemists understood the element. They called it ethereal fire. According to them, its existence was so far hypothetical only. The firepit, dug by the alchemists themselves, was lined with mica and diamond laminate. For nearly a standard year they had been slowly dripping into it a mixture made up of more than forty substances, including plutonium, electronium (a form of matter whose nuclear protons had been replaced by positrons; the substance was electrically neutral but incredibly light, and capable of numerous fanciful molecular configurations impossible for normal matter), mercury which had been treated by a secret process known only to alchemists, and other substances which they also claimed were not known by orthodox science.

The real secret, Dorsuse assured him, lay in the measured proportions by which the ingredients were slowly introduced to one another. A century of experimentation, he told Boaz, had gone into the formula that was now being tried. It was calculated that on the 29th of month three, the meld would be complete, all the ingredients being exactly tempered and suffused. The result should be ethereal fire.

Boaz was excited. With Dorsuse and two other alchemists, he stood on the overhanging observation platform on the lip of the pit. Down below was a faint orange-green radiance from a cloudlike mass.

He was wearing dark goggles Dorsuse had given him. The alchemists had goggles, too, but careless as ever, they left them dangling around their necks. On an impulse Boaz tore off his goggles too, and gloried in the stinging sensation in his eyes as the glow fell on them.

He wanted to make the most of this. He switched on rheobase setting three, felicity setting two (he didn’t want to lose control by setting too high). Preservation, of course, was already on. He never switched it off.

Glow, glow, orange and green. The now-familiar intensification of vision due to lowered rheobase hit him (lowering the rheobase threshold intensified sensation; raising rheobase dimmed it). The depth of the pit, with its dark, round, brooding walls, the nascent life of the cloudy mass, made him heady with anticipation.

‘I think the light is increasing,’ Dorsuse said.

Another of the alchemists nodded. ‘Do you think we shall be on schedule this time?’

‘Schedule’ was an obsessive word with Boaz’s hosts. Their theory of chemical operations contained a time factor. Ordinary chemical reactions, which took place immediately or in seconds or minutes, were in their parlance ‘vulgar’ or ‘common.’ The arcane chemical processes took place over time spans of days, months, years, even decades (there was a legend of an alchemical reaction that took more than six hundred standard years to take place). The sought-for transformation of substance, however, usually happened suddenly at the end of this time, and was supposed to be predictable to within seconds. This was what was implied by ‘schedule.’ In fact, an alchemical operation was likely to involve a whole sequence of colour changes, transitions between solid, liquid, gas and plasma, or other signs Boaz was not familiar with, all consequent on the continued application of the enlivening energy source, and if any single one of them failed to occur on time the whole procedure was deemed abortive.

For all that, there was a great deal of self-glorification in the alchemists’ own descriptions of their art. Though they would speak airily of predicting the outcome of years-long operations to ‘within seconds,’ in practice they could rarely calibrate their schedules to less than a calendar day.

‘Yes, it is increasing,’ Dorsuse said. He leaned out over the parapet, craning his neck to get a better view.

‘Is there any danger?’ Boaz asked tentatively. ‘How will the ether-fire manifest itself?’

‘Well, we can always get out of the way if anything alarming looks about to happen….’

As he spoke the incandescent mass exploded. It reared up the well of the pit in a gaseous flash. The platform supports were burned through in an instant. Down fell the platform and its occupants. The ethereal fire (for that was what it truly was) boiled over the rim in a foaming, expanding mushroom head of light.