He flipped through it and came upon the following statement: "True Cross is in appearance almost indistinguishable from Almost True Cross. Unfortunately, it will not work in formulas of alchemy.
However, Almost True Cross can be boosted in its power and so serve for the real thing by adding equal amounts of potassium and common lampblack."
Faust had his vial of potassium right to hand. He had no lampblack, but if, as he suspected, the serving girl hadn't cleaned the lamps recently… Yes, he was right, plenty of lampblack!
After the lampblack and potassium were added there were various changes of light and color in the mass in the alchemist's furnace. A dense gray vaporarose and for a moment clouded Faust and his equipment.
When the vapor had dissipated, Faust was no longer in the room, nor, for that matter, was he in Cracow.
Faust's first impression was of a pearly grayness that suffused everything. That persisted only for a moment, however, as Spiritual Space accommodated itself to the novelty of having an earthly observer within it by expanding outwards on all sides. After that, Faust saw that he was standing just on the outskirts of a small city, very like in appearance to cities he had seen in his travels around Europe, though by no means identical.
He had certainly gotten to this place very quickly. But that stood to reason, since the Spiritual Realm, having no substance except for that imposed by the temporary rules of Solidification, can be shrunk down to a tiny compass by Nature, which abhors a vacuum and isn't about to leave a lot of unused space around, either. The learned doctors at the Jagiellonian taught that when the Spiritual Realm wasn't being used, it resided in a space no larger than a pinhead—to such an infinitesimal mass may the immaterial be reduced! The only thing that would cause it to expand was the presence of an observer. Then the space created itself, with the sort of scenery and personnel as might be expected in this place and at this time.
Faust entered the city and saw a row of storefronts. Above each was a sign. Faust could not decipher the lettering on them, by which he knew they were not for him to enter. At last he saw one sign that read,
'the witches' kitchen'. And he knew that was the place he was to go to. (So much is inherent in the Transportation Spell, which takes you unerringly to the threshold of your next adventure, though you're on your own after that.)
Faust approached the Witches' Kitchen. He walked up to the door and touched it with a gingerly gesture. He had been afraid that his hand would pass through it, since only spirit is supposed to exist in such a place, and spirit is well known for its ability to pass through other spirits. But the door felt solid and a moment's reflection told him that even if a body in this place were not solid, it would have to act as though it were in order for anything to happen; for as the ancient philosophers have pointed out, there's no drama unless things can bump into each other. But how, being aethereal, had they managed to become solid? Faust decided that it must be because the entities here had taken a formal oath to maintain solidness despite the comforts of intangibility, and above all not to melt into each other.
Faust entered the Witches' Kitchen and saw a whole host of small demons of not very frightening aspect attending to a group of patrons who sat in chairs with striped sheets over their bodies. It seemed to be a beauty salon of some kind. These demons were evidently barbers, or surgeons, for not only did they cut hair, they also scalloped away fat from obese bellies, trimmed beef from sausagelike thighs, and added strands of glistening red muscle to wasted arms and shrunken calves. They scrubbed dirt off the body and sandpapered blemishes out of the skin. Under their skilled claws, faces were reconstructed, the devils utilizing gobs of all-purpose flesh that they kept in vats beside their barber chairs.
In a moment, however, it became obvious that the demons were mere assistants. Walking among them, supervising, and themselves performing the more delicate bits of reconstruction, were a dozen or so witches. They all wore the same ragged, rusty garments, and they had high peaked hats perched on their narrow heads, hats whose brims sloped uncannily over their glittering eyes. And they all had high lace-up boots around their skinny shanks, and most of them had a baleful black cat perched on a knobby shoulder.
"Well, what's this?" said a senior witch, whose rank could be told by the black crepe rose she wore pinned to her hat. "Are you the basic material package we requested? Step over here, dearie, and we'll have you dismembered in no time." "I am nobody's package," Faust said proudly. "I am Johann Faust, a doctor of the Earth Realm."
"It seems to me we just had a person of that name passing through here," the witch said.
"Was he accompanied by a tall, skinny demon named Mephistopheles?"
"Why, yes, he was, though he wasn't skinny to my tastes."
"That man with him was not Faust! He was an impostor! I am Faust!"
The witch looked at him levelly. "I thought he was young to be a learned doctor! Do you have any identification?"
Faust rummaged through his wallet (which had been transported and spiritualized but otherwise was the same as back on Earth) and found an honorary sheriff-ship from the town of Lublin, a voter's registration shard from Paris, and a silver commemorative medal awarded to him at the Great Fair of Thaumaturgy that had taken place two years past in Prague.
"Well then, you are Faust," the witch said. "And that other fellow deceived me, and Mephistopheles, too, unless I miss my guess. It's too had. We gave him such a nice rejuvenation. You would have wept to see how beautiful we made him." "It was wrongly done!" Faust cried, gnashing his teeth. "Now you must do the same for me!"
"That will not be possible," the witch said. "We already used up most of the allotment for that rejuvenation. Still, let's see what we can do." She guided Faust to a chair. There she called over one of her demon assistants, and the two conferred in low voices.
"The trouble is," the demon said, "we used up almost all the longevity serum on the other fellow." "Strain out the dregs and use them. They're better than nothing."
"But his features!" The demon tilted Faust's head to one side and then to the other. His eyes, hard as agates, studied Faust's features and showed no sign of being impressed. "Lacking a beauty pack, what can I do with this gross, long-nosed, sunken-cheeked, thin-lipped, and ill-formed visage?" "Hey!" Faust cried. "I didn't come here to be insulted!"
"Shut up," said the demon. "I'm the doctor here, not you." Turning to the witch, he said, "We could build up his physique, not to superhuman powers, of course, since that preparation hasn't come through, but to a respectable degree."
"Do what you can," said the witch.
The demon worked swiftly and with an elan that frightened Faust until he perceived that the demon's ministrations didn't hurt. Then he relaxed in the chair while the demon, humming monotonously to himself, plucked away some of the more pendulous portions of Faust's anatomy and molded fresh flesh in their place, holding the strips of dripping skin in place until they had hardened to the bone. Lastly he ran strands of nerve and muscle and sinew 'into the appropriate places so that Faust could smile or grimace or move his limbs, and fixed them in place with small applications of Universal Fastener.
Faust beheld in the glass a man rather more robust than he remembered himself. His skin had lost the waxy whiteness of old age and had taken on the ruddy hue of the middle years. His eyesight was improved, too, as well as his hearing. His features were still recognizably his own, but the demon had fined down his rather peremptory nose, brought out his chin a bit, and taken away his dewlaps. All in all he was a better-looking man than before, though he was still not likely to win one of the male beauty contests that were held secretly in some parts of Italy.