“How is he?” Zhorga demanded.
The surgeon shrugged as he packed away his instruments. He did not speak until he was able to turn away from the barely conscious soldier.
“What do you expect?” he muttered. “He’ll be dead before sunrise.”
Zhorga nodded, feeling very, very sad. The injured trooper was Rachad Caban.
He looked up over the rim of the dugout, at the drooping violet trees that perpetually dripped moisture into the marshes. It was this accursed world that did it. Elsewhere Rachad might have stood a good chance of recovering from his injuries. Here wounds turned septic almost immediately, producing a rotting gangrene and death within hours.
Previously the planet had been uninhabited, but the Kerek appreciated its strategic value and had moved in to begin converting its atmosphere. That could not be allowed, with the war swaying back and forth across Maralia the way it was, and King Murdon had sent in Baron Matello at the head of a large force—as punishment, perhaps, for his formerly stubborn allegiance to the disgraced and imprisoned Lutheron—to prevent it.
“Ah, Rachad, you’ve come a long way with me,” Zhorga muttered, staring down at the pale, blank face with its enlarged pupils. “What a pity you have to turn in your ticket now.”
It was one of those flying sickles that had sliced the young man open. Zhorga wondered if it might be kinder if he were to finish the job now. But instead he turned and clambered up the walls of soft red earth and made his way back to what he had been doing when he heard of the incident—supervising the placing of a great bombard to assail Kerek positions.
For about an hour Rachad drifted into a dreamless sleep. When he awoke, his whole body seemed to be burning.
Blurrily he saw someone come softly down into the dugout and lean over him. His vision cleared somewhat, and he gasped as he recognized a small, slightly monkey-like face, with quiet brown eyes and silky hair.
For a moment he could not speak. He stuttered.
“Master Amschel!”
The alchemist wore light leather armor and a brief, almost superfluous iron helmet. He ran his eyes over Rachad, as if inspecting him, then reached inside his leather hauberk, producing a small phial.
“You’re supposed to be dead!” Rachad protested. “How did you escape from the laboratory—the explosion?”
Amschel ignored the question. “You are dying, my friend,” he said in a dry tone. “Drink this excellent medicine, the true elixir. It will vivify your body, throwing off disease, hastening the healing of even the deepest wounds.”
He must have fled the laboratory in advance of the explosion, Rachad reasoned hazily. He must have hidden somewhere, eventually contriving to leave the Aegis along with the rest of them. But what was he doing in Matello’s army?
Amschel put the neck of the phial to his lips. A thick liquid poured out.
Rachad became immediately absorbed by a taste that was like a golden glow, so vivid he seemed almost to see it. The medicine trickled down his throat with a gentle burning, like the finest liqueur, and as it reached his stomach he felt golden drops of liquid radiance spreading through his body, giving him a feeling of lightness and vigor.
“That’s… wonderful,” he whispered.
Amschel smiled. “It has even been known to revive men thought dead. But I see you have changed your occupation from that of laboratory assistant to that of soldier. Are you no longer seeking the Stone? What did you do with the book I gave you?”
“I left it in the Aegis, Master Amschel. After what happened I decided its information was too dangerous.”
“I see.” Amschel seemed to reflect. “The Stone can make you proof against the Kerek Power—have you not considered that? It could be important, in the times that lie ahead.”
“But we are already holding our own against the Kerek!” Rachad boasted. “The tide has turned—Zhorga says we will have driven them out of Maralia altogether in a few years.”
Amschel smiled. “Perhaps—but for how long? This is only one of the Kerek’s present theaters of conquest. If they fail with Maralia they will simply, in a few years, transfer even greater forces from elsewhere.”
“Perhaps we will have greater forces by then,” Rachad said defiantly.
Amschel nodded. “Well, I must be on my way. Rest now. I think you may feel much better in a day or two.”
“Wait!” called Rachad as he saw Amschel disappearing over the lip of the dugout. He struggled up and, holding his middle with one arm, crawled up after him—an exercise that only minutes before he would have found impossible.
Ahead, he saw the dismal landscape that covered most of the planet: great flat mist-covered marshes, interspersed with hillocks and ridges of firmer ground, out of which grew drooping violet trees.
Amschel’s stooped figure was picking its way along one of these ridges. It was then that the Kerek sally came, as it did every hour or so. This time it was not a flock of flying sickles or disks, but a brief barrage of bombard shot. Rachad uttered a loud cry, the exertion tearing painfully at his stitches, as a ball exploded near the alchemist.
Even from where he lay, he could see that Amschel was practically ripped apart. Like a rag doll the alchemist’s body, whether living or dead, was flung off the causeway-like ridge. Rachad crawled toward the spot, careless of any hurt to himself now, but already Amschel’s remains were sinking into the wet bog, disappearing with a slurping, gurgling sound while Rachad looked on with horror.
He closed his eyes, overcome with nausea. War, he thought. This was what war meant.
Eventually he opened his eyes again and began to crawl back to his only shelter, the dugout. He had to admit that considering his injuries it was amazing how well he felt. The medicine Amschel had given him seemed to be glowing in every vein.
Was it really the true elixir, as Amschel had called it, or was that by way of being an apothecary’s exaggeration?
Seeing Amschel again had put a different complexion on everything. Had what had seemed a dreadful accident in the infusoratory laboratory been misinterpreted? Had Amschel, in spite of such destruction—perhaps by means of such destruction—actually produced the Stone?
The question was already academic. The Stone, if indeed Amschel had possessed it, was at this moment accompanying him to the bottom of the marsh.
With a grunt and a sigh Rachad rolled into the dugout, where he fell once again into a deep sleep.
Olam was a quiet place these days. With the sea trade taking so much of commerce, with flying ships being grounded one by one for lack of silk, the time had come when the whine of ether whistle, or the billowing of blue sail over the rooftops, was unusual enough to make the townspeople stand and gaze nostalgically, knowing that before long such visions would be gone forever.
The Street of the Alchemists had also sunk into quietude as the town’s fortunes declined, and fewer and fewer feet trod its sand-covered way. Master Gebeth was therefore surprised, late one winter evening, to hear a knock on his door. He opened it to see a small man, wearing a brown woolen cloak, and who addressed him by name in an accent he could not place.
The stranger introduced himself as a fellow practitioner, adding that he had been given Gebeth’s address while living in foreign parts, and said that he would be glad to discuss the Spagyric art with one who had also sought the universal medicine. Gebeth, who had come to accept his loneliness along with his failure, nevertheless invited the fellow into his living room, and for an hour or so they conversed.
The visitor spoke with a strange confidence, as though the Hermetic goal were attained fact rather than something much sought after, and Gebeth, who knew all too well the difficulties involved, grew irritated with what he took to be a pretended knowledge. He asked his guest if he could tell him what was the menstruum, or solvent by which the mineral spirit could be extracted from metals. The other replied, with a smile, that it was a heavenly salt known only to the wise, an answer that Gebeth could as well have given himself.