The bang deafened him. He felt as though he were being burned alive.
He regained full possession of his senses to see that the chamber was wrecked. The bars of iron had fused and melted. Of the cucurbit, scarcely anything was left There was a strong stench in the air, a stench he knew well from previous infusoratory disasters.
His clothing was charred. And when he tried to move, he discovered that the flesh beneath, too, was blistered and seared. Every inch of the front part of his head, limbs and body—the part that had faced the cucurbit—blazed with agony.
He knew that he was lucky to be alive. Ruefully he recalled the other precondition for attempting the lightning method—that the adept must have a nearly indestructible body. Even so, the damage was not so great that it could not be attributed solely to the release of electric fluid. The greater forces locked in the prima materia had evidently not gotten out of control.
He hobbled over to the shattered remnants of smoking metal and molten glass, stirring through the mess with his shoe and kicking aside fragments.
He was not long in finding it, even though it was coated lightly with a white ash which dropped away when he picked it up, leaving it clean and unmarked.
In color it was pale green, slightly translucent, like jade. Despite the intense heat it had undergone it was cool, smooth to the touch but with an odd smoothness so that the fingers were not quite sure they had touched anything.
Amschel was vibrant with anticipation as he carried the reward of his labors into the next chamber for evaluation. His injuries almost forgotten, he placed it on a table and sat down.
Through a magnifying glass he could detect no blemish on the perfectly spherical surface, or beneath it. Laying down the lens, he proceeded to the specified tests. He imagined the sphere to be a cube, and projected the thought. Instantly it was a cube, the sides perfect planes, the edges straight and square-set. Likewise he transformed it, by thought, into a double-ended cone, a tetrahedron, a torus, a statuette of the goddess Demeter.
He nodded, letting it revert back to a sphere. The test of amorphism was satisfied. The stone had no intrinsic shape. Next he took up a sharp saw-bladed knife and set himself to carve off a portion of it. Although of gemlike hardness in the hand, the stone offered little resistance to the blade, and he sliced off a piece of about an inch in thickness.
The severed portion hit the tabletop, but no longer as the jade-like substance of the stone. It had instantly decomposed into a scintillant red powder.
Amschel well understood this. Divorced from the fundamental unity of the stone, the fragment could not maintain itself and had begun to decay into merely normal states of matter. Already it was compound, partly elemental.
With this powder marvels could be performed. Compounded further, introduced into other substances, it would create a whole new range of efficacious agents.
More important, however, was that when pared the stone had immediately reconstituted itself. It was as if the knife had done no more than slice through water.
The test of wholeness and indivisibility was satisfied.
Amschel lifted the pale green ball and stared straight into its heart. This, then, was the Stone. This was the Tincture, the Most Excellent Medicine, the secret substance of the universe, wrenched out of the hylic realm by a blast of manmade lightning. Gazing upon this wonder, Amschel experienced a supreme joy and exultation. Now he knew that the Hermetic art was real, that the vision of Zosimos was true, that nature applied to nature transforms nature!
This much proved, it remained but to verify one more property of the stone—a little-known property conveyed cryptically, elliptically, in the alchemical code word V.I.T.R.I.O.L.: Visita Interiora Terrae, Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidem—“Visit the Interior of the Earth, Through Purification Thou Wilt Find the Hidden Stone.”
Few indeed knew that this formula indicated how the adept may be transformed into a Magus of Power. The earth symbolized the adept’s own body, the place where the Stone could be hidden away from the sight of ordinary man. Amschel moved the Stone. He pressed it to his forehead, between his eyes—and pushed. The Stone moved—inward, passing through skin and bone.
Into Amschel’s brain.
In the Philosopher’s Stone was no differentiation of parts. The Stone was Ultimate Oneness. Immersed in the Stone, the tissues of Amschel’s brain experienced transcendental unity, total access—to one another, and, eventually, to the macrocosm itself.
Amschel’s consciousness was whipped away from the narrow laboratory where he sat. It expanded and expanded, until he seemed to be moving through an endless dark, a dark that was paradoxically filled with light.
The Black Light of the adepts, by which one saw without seeing. Vastness, vastness. And now Amschel perceived the macrocosm.
It was not a place, or region. It was the infinite world system seen from the point of view of totality, endless movement without destination, coming without arriving, going without departing. Man’s reason, evolved in the microcosm, could not grasp the essence of the macrocosm. Even when super-conscious as Amschel’s was, the mind could see it only in terms of entities, signs and symbols, the ancient eternal symbols of alchemy. The mighty Worm Ouroborous, appearing as a vast ring galaxy larger than milliards of galaxies put together, spinning at colossal speed, endlessly devouring and reevolving itself—thus was the macrocosm maintained! The alchemical marriage of King and Queen, conjunction of opposites by which the eternal mystery of merging and separating was brought to pass.
These and other visions of macrocosmic processes blasted into Amschel’s consciousness with such a sense of super-reality that the myriads of worlds flowing away from them seemed mere shadows. Then the direction of his gaze became more specific. He witnessed, as if it lay below him in some multidimensional region so that he saw it from countless vantage points at once—from north, south, east, west, nadir and zenith, externally and internally—the staggering spiral blaze of his own galaxy. He saw, slumbering coiled like a quiescent serpent within the spiraling star arms, the power known as the Sleeping Sulphur, and he saw that this power could, if one knew how, be prodded and disturbed, even, momentarily, awakened.
But he saw, too, that the struggle between man and Kerek, between self-determined consciousness and hypnotized slavery, was of no consequence to nature. It had no place in the macrocosm.
But Amschel did have a place. He was a Magus of Power. He could rotate the elements, converting one substance into another. He could rotate space and time, projecting himself to distant places. He was not governed by number: he could project himself into several different locations at once, unlimited by a single body.
He could, if he chose, disturb the Sleeping Sulphur.
With an effort, Amschel scaled his mind down from the Great World that was not available to him. He was back in the microcosm, sitting in his adamant-lined chamber, the burns on his body beginning to heal.
He had discounted the use of purely physical powers to achieve his long-term mission, but that did not preclude their deployment in a more limited sense, at this juncture, anyway. He must, he decided, arrange some means for his helpers to escape their adamant prison.
Also, he must cover his tracks.
Four days passed before Wolo could be prevailed upon to lead Rachad and Baron Matello back into the laboratory. The other assistants had come out two days before, but had said little.