"Aye, those were the names. Caspar and Memnon. Sorcerers, as you say. I think of them as warlocks."
"What's the difference?"
"Very little on the surface, I suspect. To my mind, however, a sorcerer is one who seeks to use things magical, supernatural, to influence the world of men. Whether they do it for good or ill matters little and depends upon the sorcerer himself, or herself. But since I do not believe in magic or the supernatural, I find sorcerers to be pitiable, laughable and usually harmless, once they've been exposed as being impotent."
"Woman can be sorcerers?" He sounded surprised, and I laughed at him.
"Arthur, women can be anything that men can be, except fathers. You'll find that out very soon now."
He was not to be distracted from his main interest this time.
"Tell me then, if sorcerers are pitiable, what makes the difference between them and warlocks?"
"Warlocks are an altogether different form of being, Arthur—at least they are in my estimation. The difference is no more than a matter of degree, in some respects, but in others—very important others—it is a matter of great moment. You should understand, of course, that that's no more than my own, personal opinion and I could be wrong. Nevertheless, I have thought about it long and often. Warlocks are real and frightening. They seek, and exercise, powers that normal men cannot credit, let alone understand. And in contrast to those others whom I think of as sorcerers, warlocks deal only in evil. They use physical magics like these things you see here: a hundred forms of poison, each one causing death. Warlocks bring death in their train. They deal only in evil and in ruin for the people they encounter." I had surprised myself, never having put these feelings into words before.
The boy sat staring at me. "Well," he said at length, "that's the death part. What's the dilemma? The death I can understand, if all those packages and boxes and those vials contain the poisons you spoke of. Do they? Every one of them?"
"Near enough. I don't know every use of everything that's there, but all of those I have identified are carriers of death in one form or another, most of them agonizing."
"Will you show me?"
"Partially. I'll show you those I have identified, but I will not demonstrate their venom for your amusement. You'll have to take my word for that."
"And you say you haven't yet examined everything in the boxes? How can that be? Aren't you curious? I would have had them all out and examined by now. How can you be so ... disciplined? You're amazing, Merlyn."
"You must call me Cay, remember?"
He threw me a glance of pure irritation. "Yes, I remember, but we're here alone, and you've always been Merlyn to me." He ducked his head. 'That one slipped out. I'll try not to let it happen again. But you still haven't told me what your dilemma is, regarding these ... things. Is there a name for them?"
"I think of them as nostrums, but that's not accurate, for nostrums are medicaments, whereas these are malignancies. As to the dilemma they present ... " I smiled at him, a weary smile completely lacking in amusement. "Can you not guess?" I did not wait for his response. "I don't know whether to destroy them or to study them further."
"You should study them, of course. But how would you destroy them, even if you wanted to?"
"Some I would burn—most of them, in fact. Others I might bury, or dilute to nothingness."
He inched his stool closer to the chest. "Show them to me, please."
Item by item, then, I showed him the various substances I had identified in the larger chest, beginning with the glazed clay boxes, with tight-fitting lids, that contained the noxious, greenish paste that brought awful, burning death to anyone cut by a weapon coated in its residue. This was the venom, I explained, that Lot's warriors had smeared on their arrowheads when they ambushed his father's troops in Cornwall, and which I had used to execute the warlock Caspar, slitting his brow with one of those same arrowheads.
Arthur listened closely, eyes wide with fascination as I moved on to unwrap and expose other items with which I had become slightly familiar during my first few weeks of study long years before. Among them were the tightly wrapped linen strips containing the deadly, envenomed thorns with which Caspar had thought to make me keep my distance from my threatened Aunt Luceiia. The notes which I had made at the time of my first, investigations were still there, folded on the topmost tray of the larger box, and I consulted them as I went on, remembering the thrill with which I had first ventured into these mysteries, and detailing my own discoveries about them for Arthur's understanding. I showed him all of those I had defined to any depth at all, and those I had set aside as having properties which I had not yet identified.
Watching his reaction, it was easy to recall my own fascination with the astonishing array of nostrums spread before us now. I remembered my amazement at the range of colours—every colour I had ever seen and many I had never seen before—and the textures and materials that had emerged from all the many wrappings and containers held within the compartments of each tray: glass phials and stoppered tubes of weird and wonderful proportions held dozens of crystalline mixtures and unknown powders; small boxes and containers made of wood, or clay or sometimes waxed papyrus, held strange pastes and crushed mixtures of things that had been ground down by mortar and pestle; others contained unguents and oily substances that seemed to me to have been rendered over fire; rolled tubes of bark and others made of leather protected bunches of varied grasses and dried leaves and twigs, and there were tiny, cunningly made boxes filled with dried berries, seeds and nuts.
I reached out and picked up one handspan-long tube made from the bark of some exotic tree and tied with a leather thong. It held a single twist of long, dried, yellow grass, folded upon itself time and again and bound, in turn, with a loop of its own stuff.
"This," I said. "I have no idea what it might be, and it looks innocuous enough, but I suspect, from the care with which it has been wrapped, that it has more than casually lethal properties."
He nodded "What would you do with it?"
I shrugged. "Who knows? Cut it up into tiny flakes and sprinkle it in someone's food? Boil it in water to extract its juices? Set it alight to give off lethal smoke? I've no idea. But judging from the materials with which it is surrounded, all of which are highly toxic—and I know that, before you ask, because I fed small amounts of each of them to animals and they all died—I would hesitate to think that this particular grass might have some therapeutic quality. There's little fear that I would bind a wound with it, for example.
"There is my dilemma, in miniature. If I wished to destroy this grass, this single substance, how would I go about it, safely? Can't burn it, because I might inhale the smoke and die convulsed. Nor can I bury it without wondering if something might dig it up and eat it. Can't scatter it upon the wind, in conscience. And yet it is no more than a twist of grass, only one element of what these chests contain." I paused, remembering. "But here's something else that will interest you, and it is the single, most convincing reason I have found for not destroying everything that's here, because it's the one and only thing I've found in here that is not poisonous, and I've tested it quite thoroughly. It is, nevertheless, lethal."
I dug into the lowest layer of the open chest, removing the remaining trays one by one, and finally brought out the most fascinating substance I had found in the entire collection. It was contained in a rather large; flat wooden box, the largest of all the boxes in the chests, that was tightly bound with twine. I undid the twine and removed the lid to reveal a blackish, granular powder, knowing it would fail, utterly, to impress Arthur visually. The powder was odourless and practically tasteless save for a saline, brackish tang. I knew it to be non-poisonous, since I had tested it by feeding it to three rabbits, none of which had suffered any ill effects. This powder, I had long since discovered, would not dissolve in water, but when I had thrown it on the fire, thinking it useless, it had frightened me near to death by flaring up with an appalling, flashing hiss and throwing off great clouds of dense, black, bitter smoke which had made me splutter and cough but had done me no other harm. Recovering from my first terror, I had made other tests and found this mixture to be the most volatile and dangerous material I had ever experienced, igniting even with the heat of a stray spark. What purpose it might serve lay far beyond my ken, but I suspected it must be dire. I had attempted to visualize the conflagration should an errant spark once fall into the box, and my spirit had quailed at the horror. In consequence, I treated the substance, which I thought of as "fire powder," with great care and circumspection.