Chapter One: The Roses of Dabril

It was spring like the day he had left, the Season of the Green Dragon, the aerial drake who embodied the sanguine humor and led his retinue of floral fey in a gay procession. Hyacinths and narcissi dotted the meadows where they had passed, the blossoms’ soft perfume filling the cool air, and then a breeze came up from the river, bringing with it an indescribable fragrance, something Norret Gantier had taken for granted all the days of his boyhood and had only smelled traces of since, on musty scent bottles and moldering boudoirs from before the Red Revolution: the wonderful bouquet of the rose fields of Dabril.

He took a moment to breathe it all in, closing both eyes even though only the right still functioned, the left hidden beneath a patch. The wars had also cost him an ear, an arm and a leg. They were still there, after a fashion, as was he, a mixture of pain and numbness, courtesy of a concussive grenade. His grenade? Another’s? Did it matter? No. At the end of the day, all that mattered was that a half-blind, half-deaf lame alchemist was as good as dead and so, to save the Red Grenadiers of Galt the expense of a funeral and a bereavement purse, it was judged cheaper to simply send him home with a few trinkets of gilded tin, some snippets of ribbon, and a pretty piece of paper.

He had had to pay for the crutch himself.

“Every soldier leaves a part of himself behind on the battlefield. Sometimes several.”

The road meandered down to the village at the river’s bend. Across the water to the west lay Kyonin, its meadows bright with elven starlilies, while to the north the bogs and fens of the Sellen’s many tributaries were held by the River Kingdoms.

Norret limped down the dusty lane, past the ancient rows of roses which still bore the names of noblewomen and beauties of ages past: Lady Gemerel, a pretty pink cabbage rose, simple but sweet and a once great favorite at court; Viscountess Vavarin, a ruby damask temptress, rich with intoxicating musk; and Duchess Devore, an unassuming apothecary rose of great strength and subtlety that he smelled before he saw. A light blush tinted the arsenic-pale petals like a touch of rouge across a noblewoman’s cheeks and led to a drop of blood at her center like the infamous moue of Anais Devore’s carmine lips. Tales were told of her pomading them with everything from love philters to the water of death, but as with everything from before the Revolution, Norret was certain the legends were half fabrications and half wishful thinking. Poisoning her aged husband, the legendarily cruel Duke Arjan who had taxed Dabril into penury redecorating his ancestral home to suit his wife’s extravagant taste? Conspiring to become the royal mistress? Seducing the Chelish ambassador, conceiving his love child, and then aborting the devilspawn abomination with a solution of pennyroyal and alkanet?

It was possible, certainly. Every alchemist favored a different starting point, or “first matter,” for use in his or her formulations. Some, particularly dwarves like Powdermaster Davin, preferred mineral compounds, such as arsenic and antimony. Others went the bloody route of animal tinctures, from as common as doe’s heartblood to as rare as the teeth of winter wolves. Still others like Citizen Cedrine, former confectioner to a disappeared lord, favored vegetative matter, and could in one moment concoct an aniseed comfit to soothe a wounded soldier and in the next use a violet pastille to blow off an enemy’s head. If Anais Devore had used herbs in her alchemical dabblings, she would hardly be the first.

Poisons were not Norret’s strong suit, let alone selective banes that could slay one creature while leaving another unscathed, but like tansy and rue, pennyroyal and alkanet were classic abortifacients, and catalyzed by the royal art…?

Norret bit his tongue mentally. In Galt, such thoughts could get you killed. Alchemy was still welcome after the Revolution, its bombs having played a rather large part, but solely as the philosopher’s craft. Royal water, the acid that dissolved gold, was now euphemistically termed “the blood of the green lion,” and even pennyroyal was too monarchist. A careful speaker referred to the herb as flea mint.

Nor did it do to remind folk that the acme of the alchemist’s quest, the great work, allowed the seeker to perfect himself and thereby bring about many wonders, one of them being the philosopher’s stone, an artifact which could transmute base metal to gold or resurrect the dead. With the so-called “Revenant Princes” in the River Kingdoms currently resurrecting every noble corpse that might support their mad plan to retake their former Galtan holdings, such an artifact was about the last thing the Revolutionary Council wanted to exist.

Yet as for the roses, keeping the old names was less seditious than it might seem: Like the beauties for which they were named, the roses of Dabril all lost their heads. Snip, Lady Gemerel! Snap, Viscountess Vavarin! Here’s a basket to catch you!

Of course, the metaphor broke down in the case of Duchess Devore. Unlike the flower bearing her name, the crafty duchess had evaded the Gray Gardeners and their Final Blades.

Madame Devore—duchess no longer—was still a person of interest forty years hence. Norret shook his head. That was twice as many years as he himself had been alive, and the broadsides were still using a woodblock that had been ten years out of date when the Red Revolution began. Unless Anais Devore, born Anais Peperelle, had achieved the pinnacle of the metaphorical mountain of the alchemists and elected to taste the elixir of eternal youth, she was unlikely to resemble the coy coquette in her wanted poster. Norret had better things to do with his shattered life than accuse random beldames of being Dabril’s former duchess.

Tattered bunting straggled over the city gates: blue for fidelity, white for virtue, red for the blood of patriots—and everyone else, for that matter. Below the dusty blue, dirty gray, and faded rose madder lay another rose, this one carved in bas relief, held by a stone glove, the combined signs of the Perfumers and Glovers Guilds, together the arms of Dabril.

When the Revolution came, there had been an unfortunate dilemma: The Revolutionary Council demanded that all noble crests and related imagery be destroyed, whereas Shelyn, goddess of beauty and Dabril’s patron, forbade the destruction of any beautiful thing unless it were replaced by even greater loveliness. Accordingly the crown that had once surmounted the town’s shield had been chiseled out, replaced with a liberty cap that everyone agreed was far prettier. Publicly. Privately, Norret thought the shapeless pit resembled a puckered wound.

He adjusted his own cap, the same style that the twisted forest gnomes sometimes dyed with the blood of their victims. Norret had achieved the proper red via an admixture of sulfur and mercury, creating vermilion, also known as cinnabar—a formula taught by Powdermaster Davin. The answer to the seditious question of why the Revolution had adopted a style of hat most popular among bloodthirsty and toadstool-addled fey was taught by painful experience: If you were going to be lobbing bombs, it paid to wear a high hat with a curved point and no projecting brim.

A tricorne, on the other hand, was a hat almost perfectly designed to catch bombs.

Norret was a casualty of poor uniform design. He limped along painfully with his crutch. Oh well. Everyone was a casualty of something, and the fool who had thought he was giving the grenadiers nice new hats had made a date with Madame Margaery, the Final Blade of Isarn.

Norret had left Dabril at thirteen, conscripted with no protest from his parents lest they appear unpatriotic. He’d left no bride behind to widow, and if he could have left orphans, the earliest would have been at a farm west of Edme a couple years later. But Dabril still had her roses, and nothing could compare to their scent, except maybe the scent of a woman, his nose to her neck in the morning after making love, both still grateful to still be alive.

It would be a while before he enjoyed that again.

Grisettes and dollymops were still willing, of course, but not for what little coin he had left, and the ones in Dabril looked even older and more haggard than he remembered them. Well, all save for one who had always looked that way. “Rhodel, isn’t it?”

The woman looked, then after a moment exclaimed, “Young Norret, hardly recognized ye! Ye sound like a citizen a’ Isarn. Ye lost yer Dabrilaise!”

“Along with a few other things,” he admitted wryly, touching his gloved hand to his patched eye.

“Eh, time be not kind ta any of us.” She smiled up at him, showing the remnants of three teeth just below an unpatched sore. Once, vain noblewomen and foppish men had covered such blemishes with artfully cut bits of black taffeta, but since the Revolution, such beauty marks were considered unpatriotic in Dabril, and bards now extolled the fresh, unpainted Galtan beauty such as Rhodel displayed. In theory.

At least patches were still allowed for soldiers’ eyes.

The old dollymop’s lashes fluttered like tattered butterflies. “Always knew ye’d end up taller than yer da.” Her scabbed lips drew over her gums then and she looked about warily.

Norret knew the look. “When?”

“Five years last autumn,” she said softly. “Sent to Woodsedge t’meet Jaine.”

She left off the “Bloody” that usually described the guillotine that still awaited Darl Jubannich, former poet of the Revolution. “Best I don’t know.” Norret sighed. “My mother?”

“Married t’Baker Gentz.” The old slattern looked him up appraisingly. “Know I’m not what ye’re lookin’ fer nowabouts, but ye were a fine lookin’ boy and ye’re still half a fine lookin’ man, ‘n’ comfort is comfort….”

“I’m down to my last copper.”

“I’m a patriot.” She gave a rotten-toothed grin. “Soldiers get one free. Always have.”

“I’m not a soldier anymore.”

“Eh, my rules. Vet’rans count too, ‘n’ honest men more so. My bed’s open whene’er ye want, fer mem’ry’s sake if naught else.”

It was a kindness, and another that she didn’t press. She just laid a gentle hand on his arm. “Let me show ye ta yer ma’s….”

Norret scarcely recognized the woman who opened the door. She was smaller than he remembered, and fatter, and had one fussing baby held in one arm and another peering out from behind her skirts. Norret would have knelt down if he still could, if his legs and the crutch would allow it, but he looked at his mother’s face to see if she still recognized him. She did, but what he could see even more clearly was that she recognized that he was not the bereavement purse her new family could have used.

Norret barely remembered the grenade that burst, robbing him of half his hearing, half his sight, and the use of a whole body. He knew he would never remember all of that conversation with his mother, either, but it cost him half his heart.

He remembered some. Raw fragments: His younger brother, Orlin, dead. A fever six summers past. His only sister, Kerril? Married to a charcoal burner somewhere. Three years since anyone had seen either.

When he asked of Ceron, his older brother, his mother pronounced a single syllable: “Jaine.” Then she shut the door.

Norret was not told his half-siblings’ names or even number.

He somehow found his way to the village cemetery. The gravedigger eventually decided Norret was not some shambling ghoul or other undead staggering around dazed in the noonday sun and at last took pity on him.

The gravemarker had fallen over, eaten by worms at the base, but once righted, the name was still legible: Orlin Gantier. Crude scratches were twined around, meant to represent the blooms of Shelyn, the Eternal Rose, guardian of the innocent.

Norret could not mourn Ceron or his father, their bodies burnt to ash and cast to the four winds, their souls trapped in Jaine’s bloody steel, but at least Orlin’s soul was free and his body here. The grave of a child was something even the poorest necromancer would not bother with, and so its desecration had been relegated to the lowliest fiend, Neglect.

Norret tended the grave as best he could. He trimmed the grass with his belt knife, heaved himself back up with his crutch, and gathered Shelyn’s wild roses from the graveyard fence, fashioning a garland. The thorns pricked his fingers, but at least his left hand could not feel pain. He made what prayers he could and watered the grave with his tears.

It was near nightfall when the gravedigger fetched him, offering to show him the way to the Liberty Hostel, the place the village council had set aside for the homeless and itinerant. Norret had slept by roadsides and in battlefield trenches and would have slept by his brother’s grave, but one did not question the decrees of any authority in Galt if one valued one’s life.

Even so, when he saw the building, he could not help but let out a dark laugh. Cayden Cailean, God of Accidents and Ale, had played his finest jest. The hostel was none other than the former duchess’s chateau.

Norret turned and asked bluntly, “Is it still haunted?”

The gravedigger’s pale face told Norret that yes indeed, it still was, but he was a man who buried corpses for a living. “I’ll accompany ye as far as the front hall.”

The carriage porch, where nobles would have once alit, lay shadowed save for the moonlight illuminating the statue of the old ducal arms. Its inverse shimmered in the chateau’s reflecting pool. Melzec, the fife and tabor player of Norret’s old company, had taught him that, in blazon, the language of heraldry, the arms of the late Duke of Dabril were properly termed vert, a cockatrice in his majesty displayed and inverted tergant regardant or issuant a fountain and transfixed by a unicorn incensant argent. Or, more prosaically: a green field with a crowned golden cockatrice flying out of a pool, only to get stabbed in the back by an angry white unicorn.

Of course, the cockatrice was not actual gold but alchemically gilded bronze, was informally known as Coco, and had long ago been removed along with the alchemically silvered steel horn to become the mascot of Dabril’s tavern, known variously as the Transfixed Chanticleer, the Goosed Goose, or the Chicken-on-a-Stick. The unicorn horn—properly termed an alicorn and exceedingly useful for healing physics—was lovingly polished, as were Coco’s gilded bat wings and serpent’s tail, usually while singing “The Tale of the Cockerel,” a bawdy and increasingly improbable Dabrilaise song Norret had learned as a boy. He’d taught all his fellow soldiers, singing of how Coco’s father was a cockerel who, after a night of debauchery with a cross-dressing peacock (likely the Mother of Monsters disguised), laid an egg that he hid in a dunghill. It was there adopted by the lady toad Crapaudine, who fancied herself royalty as she was crowned with a diamond periapt of the same name, an actual magic gem commonly referred to as toadstone, and a natural mithridate. The toad queen’s monstrous son then hatched bearing a crown of his own—though unless the singers were exceptionally drunk, this was changed to “liberty cap,” which neither rhymed nor scanned—and every All Kings Day there was a contest among the village women to celebrate Galt’s glorious independence by knitting a new cap to cover the crown worn by Coco’s gilded effigy.

After kissing his mother goodbye and subsequently turning her to stone, the song went, Coco flew off to seek a bride, only to instead find Patapouf, a bumbling unicorn looking for a pure-hearted virgin’s lap in which to lay his horn, but who instead sticks it up Coco’s bung. After a verse about the alicorn itself and how it sprung from another wondrous jewel, the legendary carbuncle—not the enigmatic lizard which wears a ruby in its forehead like one of the fabled houris of Katapesh, but a blood red cabochon on the unicorn’s brow akin to the bud of a stag’s antler—Crapaudine’s dungheap somehow becomes a well. The petrified Patapouf then falls in, the screeching Coco still buggered on his horn, all of which explained why to this day the waters of the village still reeked like the bad egg while possessing the alicorn’s healthful purity.

Less romantically, a sulfur spring flowed beneath the chateau, feeding the baths and fountains, and as every alchemist knew, the mineral possessed properties both baleful and beneficent without additional assistance from dead monsters and lost jewels.

Bereft of his horn, the statue of Patapouf looked like an angry white marble horse with a goatee, but instead of a gem, the hole in his head held a single wilting red rose. Norret grinned wryly. There was a village superstition that if a pure-hearted virgin waded across the pool and brought a replacement for his lost carbuncle, the unicorn would grant a wish.

Then again, it was also said that Patapouf did this about as well as he’d slain the cockatrice. Norret sighed and shook his head; he could not complain. After all, he had lived to return to Dabril and seen his family again. Half a wish was better than some of his comrades’ fates.

He touched his cap in respect to the statue, then looked to the frightened gravedigger.

The great doors to the Liberty Hostel were unlocked and opened easily. Once there would have once been beeswax tapers, if not flambeaux ensorcelled with cold flame, but now the foyer was lit by a single rushlight unable to produce more than shadows and greasy smoke.

That said, even a crippled alchemist was not without his resources. Norret took a snuff mull out of his bandolier, uncapped the little horn, and sprinkled a pinch of one of Powdermaster Davin’s formulations onto the tallow-soaked rush. The stench of sulfur did nothing to improve the smell of rancid mutton fat, but the luminosity increased a hundredfold, the dip burning with the brilliant blue-white radiance of a magnesium torch.

Cracked and blotched mirrors sprang alight, still able to catch the illumination and send it back, and chandeliers hanging askew and missing half their crystals multiplied it further, spawning rainbows. The humble rushlight shone brighter than day and illumed the life-size fresco of a woman, a black patch in the shape of a crescent moon by her left eye, one in the shape of the sun on her right cheek. Her overskirt was beribboned with a thousand ivory rosettes, a single garnet bead studded into the center of each, and on her left hand she wore an ornate, lace-cuffed green glove with a diamond cabochon set in the back, its fingers holding a single white rose with a red heart surrounded by rays like the sun. Around her waist she wore a golden chatelaine from which depended all the accoutrements of the alchemist’s trade—phials and vinaigrettes, ampoules and flaskets, snuffboxes and comfit cases, touchstone, quizzing glass, bodkin, powder horn, miniature mortar and pestle, patch box, cricket cage, a pair of gilded scissors in the shape of a stork, and more. Above, her elaborate coiffure had been ridiculously covered by a crude liberty cap, and her opposite hand, instead of being open in a gesture of welcome, now awkwardly held the banner of the Revolution.

One mindful of his words would say that this was an image of Liberty leading Her people, but anyone with half a sense of history would know that this was Anais Devore, the Dowager Duchess of Dabril, in the full flower of her youth. There was no mistaking that arsenic-powdered face, those dainty painted lips or their artful pout.

Then they spoke:

Who stands before I do not care.

My secret’s gold awaits my heir.

Norret would have listened more except his shock and amazement were interrupted by the shrieks of the gravedigger, who ran from the hall as if Urgathoa and all her ghoulish minions were after him.

He looked back, only to see Duchess Devore’s mouth once again forming its infamous moue, looking coquettishly down at him as if they both shared a secret.

Chapter Two: The Torching of the Traitoresses

Half the wheel of the year had turned since Norret’s return to Dabril. The ruddy firedrake who ruled summer, salamanders, fire mephits, and tinderbox imps had at last spent his rash choler and ceded his place to autumn, the Season of the Blue Dragoness, the earthen drake who embodied the melancholy humor and was thus honored by carbuncles, gnomes, jewelers, and those who harvest the fruits of the earth. It was also the Fifth of Neth, fortieth anniversary of Galt’s independence. In Dabril, that also meant time for the Torching of the Traitoresses.

When he was nine, Norret remembered Mad Maudine, who swore that she had uncovered a nest of nobles who had secretly drowned themselves to escape the justice of the Final Blades and were then reincarnated by a royalist druid. Dabril’s council was less than pleased to find that the purported nobles were now a flock of wild geese, and were even less amused when Maudine referred to a particularly pretty and friendly goose she had tamed as ‘Lady Gemerel,’ especially since it was well accepted that the infamously empty-headed ingénue still had her soul residing in Bloody Jaine.

The geese were beheaded with normal blades and roasted, and Maudine’s fate was somewhat similar. Dabril was too small to warrant a permanent guillotine, so rather than transporting her down the Sellen to Jaine—inviting questions from the Woodsedgeans as to what constituted a felony in Dabril and jokes about foolish provincials—Dabril’s council declared Maudine’s crime a misdemeanor. Thus she would suffer the same fate as scolds, gossips, innwives who watered their wine, and those who consorted with monsters or gave birth to them. She was placed in a farthingale woven from osiers, covered with a gown of straw, and had her head locked into a gossip’s mask, a monstrous piece of ironwork inspired by Lamashtu with the ears of foolish donkey, the snout of a truffle-hunting pig, and the voice of a silly goose. This last was created by means of a razor-edged kazoo forced down the condemned’s throat so that she gurgled blood and made absurd sounds as she begged for mercy.

Of course, it was a mercy. Once she was placed on a raft packed with stakes, a few fellow traitoresses, a lit torch, and a hayrick, Maudine’s foolish soul was free to journey to the Boneyard and whatever fate the Lady of Graves decreed thereafter.

Norret still did not know what crimes his father or Ceron had committed to warrant a Final Blade, but knew better than to ask.

Thankfully, this year Dabril’s traitoresses were mere wicker and straw, effigies of the hag Traxyla and her cronies who had once disastrously usurped the Revolutionary Council, packed with fireworks so they would burn more brilliantly. Those who wished forgiveness for small transgressions, wished to appear patriotic, or just liked to blow things up could purchase a council-approved firework to add to the pyre. As an alchemist and former apprentice to Powdermaster Davin, Norret had found gainful employment.

The boy clutched a coin purse, his fingers pink in the crisp autumn air, and eyed Norret’s tray greedily. The formula for thunderstones, when cut, yielded pouches of popping pebbles. Sunrod amalgam, instead of tipping iron crows, could also be applied to thin wire to create sparklers. The receipt which created smokesticks sufficient to fog a battlefield could be diluted and adulterated with salts and essential oils so as to create wands of incense which left trails of pleasantly colored smoke, the most popular being the patriotic punks Norret had triple-dipped such that first they would release blue smoke scented with heliotrope, then white scented with jessamine, and finally red perfumed with Dabril’s own roses. Similarly, the formulae used for creating alchemist’s fire and explosive petards could be used to create what Powdermaster Davin had termed “the fires of joy”—hop-frogs, dragonfly rockets, crackers, squibs, a pretty wheel called Shelyn’s Rose, goblin brands, siren fountains, and witch’s candles.

“Why they be called ‘witch candles’?” asked the boy. “‘ese cast hexes?”

“They burn blue and scream when you light them.”

“Ma granmere’s a witch. Candles only burn blue when she cackles.” The boy looked to the hop-frogs, which Norret had given scintillating incense pastilles for the jewels in their foreheads rather than the fuming arsenide pills he would use for venomous toads, adding, “Knows a hex that kin make toads hop outta yer mouth too.” He paused. “Only uses it on those the Council marks, mind ye.”

“Do the toads make noise when they hop, then explode into swarms of fireflies?”

“No,” the boy admitted dubiously. “What sorta hex be that?”

“No hexery,” Norret corrected. “Alchemy. Natural magic, the art of the philosophers.”

The boy was suitably impressed, emptying the purse of coppers and even a few well-worn silvers for an assortment of hop-frogs, rockets, sparklers, squibs and small fountains. Norret added a witch’s candle as lagniappe, and the boy smiled and took it. “Gonna slip this inna granmere’s hex bag when she ain’t lookin’….”

Norret was deaf in one ear and could pretend he had missed that. “Thank you for your patriotism, citizen.” He watched as the boy ran down the stairs to the dock and proceeded to stuff rockets up the wicker witches’ skirts. “Joyous independence!”

The gardens of the Liberty Hostel were filled with colored smoke, pops and whistles, and sparkling flashes from those who could not wait for nightfall. The chateau itself might be haunted, plagued with inexplicable lights in the corridors, mysterious whisperings from the walls, ghostly music in the grand ballroom, and the occasional unfortunate death or disappearance of those who went poking about too deeply for undiscovered treasures, but the grottos and garden follies, and indeed the rest of the grounds, were blissfully unaffected and treated as the people’s park.

A few intrepid souls who were not desperate or brave enough to live there already snuck up onto the dolphin terrace and stole a glance through the shattered panes of the ballroom doors, shivering with delight at their daring since the music sounded like no earthly instrument save the accursed armonica, the glass organ so much in fashion with the nobility before the Revolution. Created by the Andoran inventrix Alysande Benedict, its rotating bowls were tuned to the resonant frequencies of the celestial spheres, said to mimic the voices of angels, the wails of the damned, and all spirits in between, and performances of the infernal device could induce madness or even death. Even so, some declared the unseen minstrels to be the ghosts of patriots since the tune of the spectral armonica at times sounded like the Litraniase, the Chant of the Gray Gardeners.

Norret didn’t know about the madness or death, but considerable annoyance was possible. He also personally thought the invisible armonica players were counter-revolutionaries, since half the time he had heard the revolutionary march echoing down the halls, it was played up-tempo, turning the tune into a mocking minuet. He could even hear a slight echo of it now, the merry timing completely at odds with the lyrics: Cruel tyrants, hear the widows weep! The beggars howl like starving trolls! Galt’s children in the Boneyard sleep / But Mercy’s Blade will hold your souls!

Still, the terrace commanded the best view of the river, and there was a comfortable bench by the fountain where, thanks to Norret’s handiwork, the dire dolphins were spouting and gargling for the first time since the Revolution.

It had not been intentional.

Like many guests of the Liberty Hostel, Norret had gone exploring, discovering garrets and wine cellars, attics and crypts, parlors, pantries, the buttery, the scullery, and even a still room presided over by a fresco of Patapouf the unicorn in a field of flowers. There, where the duchess and her servants had once prepared the simples, preserves, medicaments, soaps, and of course perfumes a large household required, Norret had unslung his bedroll and now used the old marble mortars and tables to compound fireworks.

That said, while the duchess’s still room was the most lavish work area Norret had ever had the privilege to use, the alembics he had cobbled together from jam jars and jelly pots were a far cry from the grand alchemical laboratory a duke and duchess obsessed with alchemy must have had. Flauric, the gnomish chef who made the kitchens his personal domain, claimed in a rare bout of sobriety that the stench of sulfur beneath the chateau came not from the magical dungheap of a cockatrice-hatching toad but from a great lake of brimstone where the duke and duchess stewed to this day, for the duke’s laboratory was in Hell itself!

Norret personally doubted this. Not the bit about the ultimate fate of Arjan Devore’s soul, but the idea that Anais Devore had already joined him and that the chateau’s cellars contained a portal to the underworld. However, the laboratory had to be somewhere, and forty years of propaganda could easily confuse a secret alchemical workshop with Hell itself.

Consequently, Norret had compounded one of Cedrine’s formulae—a vegetative extract composed of fern, the puckish herb even illiterate witches knew could grant both invisibility and the ability to sense the hidden—and an exploration of the cellars led him to the pump room, a tangled mass of broken pipes and frozen valves, rusted gears and corroded machinery.

Fortunately what man and time could break, alchemy and art could repair. Unfortunately, when he managed to turn a series of valves he was certain would open a passage to a secret laboratory—or at least a lost ducal treasury—Norret instead diverted the hot springs to the dolphin fountain which had long ago been planted with sugar beets, causing an eruption of molten mud and molasses on the back terrace.

Norret was reeking of sulfur like a parboiled steam mephit when he was brought before Dabril’s council. It did not help that rumors were circulating that he was the lost heir of Duchess Devore, here to reclaim his mother’s legacy.

Men had been sent to the final blades for less. However, Norret made a pitiable sight and pled his case: His real mother had disowned him, the rest of his family was dead save for one sister, and despite his father and brother’s crimes against the state, he was a child of Dabril and patriot of Galt, a decorated veteran with an honorable discharge. Also, while hot mud baths were said to be therapeutic, he had just been trying to open a pipe to one of the Liberty Hostel’s other baths so he could soothe his war injuries. As for brimstone, while he could not summon fiends with it, he did know how to turn it into fireworks.

The truths were true and the lies and fabrications were relatively slight, so aside from making fireworks for the council to sell for All Kings Day, Norret was tasked with cleaning out the fountain and then using his alchemical arts to tint the waters red, for this was the Red Revolution’s Ruby Anniversary and the council thought it would be festive.

Norret accomplished this by installing a mercury drip in the pump room. Combined with the sulfur already present in the water, and adjustments so as to not create metacinnabar, the rarer black form of mercuric sulfide, this precipitated cinnabar’s beautiful red form, vermilion, also known as the limner’s pigment Tien red.

Norret thought the water looked like fine claret and was quite proud of himself until one of the older citizens of Dabril came to purchase fireworks and took a moment to praise his verisimilitude, saying the fountain looked just like it had when Bloody Jaine stood on the bench where Norret now sat.

The old timer regaled him with memories of that great day, how the stone basin had caught the spurting blood and the fantastically fanged maws of the dire dolphins had spat it back just as the basket caught the heads! Just imagine—the line of the condemned had stretched all the way down the wide marble stairs to the boathouse which had once housed the vain duchess’s swan boats but was now filled with the council of Dabril, currently judging the knitting contest for Coco the cockatrice’s new liberty cap.

Norret dully tallied up the old man’s purchases and smiled as best he could as he received the council’s money along with the man’s praise of how patriotic he was to restore such a fine reminder of Dabril’s glorious past!

Norret sat there for a long while, listening to the gurgling of the fountain and the ghostly armonica echoing from the ballroom until they were drowned out by another tune, a woman’s voice singing: “There was an inn, oh long ago. Its cockerel would crow and crow. Now comes the time ye all should know”—the singer sustained the note masterfully, a rich dramatic contralto, before concluding the verse—”the Tale of the Cockerel….”

This was followed by hacking and sputtering and a loud slurp. “Pfah, thish izh rosewater,” slurred the same voice next to him, no longer singing. Norret looked.

A woman, laced into a gown that would have been more becoming when it was fifty years less moth-eaten but still displaying an attractive figure, had come out of the chateau in her salvaged finery and now leaned over the bloody red water, cup in one hand.

The council had also asked him to do something about the fountain’s scent, but had thankfully made no preference beyond that. Attar of roses was common in Dabril, one of the few perfumes strong enough to mask brimstone, and Norret had just thought it would be nice. “You were hoping for some other flavor?” he asked querulously.

“Was hopin’ fer a tipple fer me gout,” the woman confessed. “Looksh like wine….” From the aroma of anise and alcohol wafting from her, Norret assumed she had already tippled quite a bit, anisette being a potent if poor imitation of elven absinthe.

Healing elixirs were not Norret’s strong suit either, more the pity, but he knew from the doctrine of signatures that the shape of a plant indicated the malady it treated. “‘The bulb of an autumn crocus resembles a gouty toe,’” Norret quoted, retreating to pedantry. “If you could find one, I could attempt a stronger tonic than… mineral water.”

“Rhodel may not be the prettiest doxy in town, but she’s by far the bravest.”

“‘s’not gout,” the woman admitted, staggering, then turned and abruptly sat down on the edge of the fountain. Norret realized with some horror that the owner of the attractive figure, impressive singing voice, and salvaged pre-Revolutionary gown was Dabril’s oldest piece of laced mutton, Rhodel, her weathered breasts corseted high. “Got anythin’ fer hag pox?”

She used the vulgar term rather than the seditious “Galtan pox” or the flowery elven “syphilis,” which sounded more like some frolicking shepherd from a pastoral lay than a malady that resembled a hag’s curse, able to take a hundred evil forms, from sores to deformity to outright madness, and thus utterly defeat the doctrine of signatures.

Fortunately that doctrine was subset to the law of sympathy and names still held power. “Wild pansies,” Norret declared. “Halflings call them ‘heartsease’ and the elves call them ‘love-in-idleness.’”

“D’they work?”

“Citizen Cedrine swore by them, but only shared her formula to turn them into a love philtre.” Norret shrugged. “I haven’t any sure healing receipt save thieves’ vinegar, and that’s just an antiplague, not a panacea.”

Rhodel leered at him, taking in his crippled form slumped on a bench with a tray of fireworks in his lap and his crutch at his side until a smile came over her scab-encrusted lips. “An’ if ye had one a those, ye’d have already taken it….”

Norret nodded. “I can’t even compound a decent mithridate. Powerdermaster Davin commended the curative properties of pure mercury, but he took that with mithridate to belay the poison. The best I can concoct is antitoxin.”

“Fewmets…” Rhodel swore. “Fine sort of alchemist ye are!” She reached into her ample cleavage and produced a flask from the depths of her bodice. “Ye’re sure no duchess!”

“What do you mean?”

“Back when the duchess threw a ball, she really threw a ball! She tossed a bash bomb big as a pomander into thish fountain ‘n’ all at once the water started frothin’ ‘n’ bubblin’.” Rhodel uncorked the flask and took a swig, the air filling with the odor of badly aged anisette. “When it cleared, it were filled wid champagne cold as a midwinter mornin’ and nicer t’an anythin’ ye’re likely ta taste in yer lifetime—an’ it could cure ev’ry ill, even ma turned ankle!”

“‘Bash bomb’?” echoed Norret. “What’s that? A concussive grenade?”

“No, I shed ‘bash bomb,’” Rhodel corrected. “Like the duchess used ta take a bath.” She pointed to the fountain. “She had a pink one ‘at made healin’ champagne ‘ an’ a white one ‘at made a beauty bath a’ ass’s milk.” She took another drink and looked at the bottle, then at Norret. “Y’know this was when I were a parlor slave here an’ the wicked duchess weren’t beatin’ me wid ‘er ridin’ crop while kickin’ da turnspit dogs wid ‘er fancy boots. Because, y’know, she did.”

“Of course,” said Norret.

Rhodel looked back. “Eh, I know men, an’ I know ye know that last were a crock.” She took another swig of anisette. “Care for a nip?”

Norret looked at her poxy lips. “No, thank you.”

Rhodel took another swig of liquid courage, stowed the flask in her cleavage, and seemed to come to a decision. “Let me help ye wid dat,” she breathed, reeking of anise, alcohol, and decay, like Urgathoa on a bender. Norret recoiled in horror as the harlot leaned over and expertly unlaced the fireworks tray from his waist, then took it and put it on herself.

“I’ve already said too much, might as well say a bit more,” she declared. She stood, witch’s candles and siren fountains bowing away from her bosom. “Follow me, Young Norret.”

Norret got to his feet and grabbed his crutch, but it was a sad testament to his state that an aged drunken dollymop driven mad by hag pox still moved faster than he did, staggering down the steps and continuing her song, skipping a few verses along: “Down in the dung there lived a crone! A warty toad with a precious stone! Upon her brow, a diamond shone!”

Rhodel stopped and sustained the note, having found the spot on the landing where the belvedere of the chateau behind her and the hills of Kyonin before combined to amplify her already impressive pipes. Norret had almost caught up when she concluded the phrase: “The Cap of Crapaudine!” drawing applause and causing the revelers on the stairs to part for her as she flounced down with all the joie de vivre of a maiden who has made up her mind.

By the time Norret got down to the dock, Rhodel had climbed atop the dais and lit a goblin brand. It fired shells with a series of loud reports: blue, white, and red flew into the air, the colors of Galt, followed by green, gold, and rose, the colors of Dabril. “Now that I have yer attention,” Rhodel declared, “I would like ta address this meetin’ a the Council a Dabril!”

There were murmurs in the crowd and words like “mad” and “drunk.”

“Thatsh right,” Rhodel agreed. “I may be mad, I may be drunk, but I’m the one with the bombs, so ye all get ta listen ta me fer a change!” She held the smoldering remains of the goblin brand over her tray. A few of the wiser and faster ran in terror, but others, underestimating the explosive capacity, foolishly thinking that the fires of joy could only be used for joy, or just as trapped as Norret was by his crutch and the press of the crowd, simply stayed, petrified as if by a cockatrice’s touch.

“This is our independenshe!” declared Rhodel. “Independenshe from what? Truth? Common sense? Fear? Well I’m dyin’ so I’m done wid the last, so I’ll tell ya a few things the old don’t wanna admit an’ the young only suspect. Our duchess? She were a good duchess! An’ she worked her ass harder’n I ever worked mine on these streets! Ye all think perfume ‘n’ gloves sell themselves? She pimped ‘em hard at court, an’ our guilds got rich. An’ if she took some fer herself, so what? She earned it! An’ her husband, old Arjan, the ‘bad’ duke? He were a scared old man too busy snorting mercury ‘n’ tryin’ ta make the elixir of youth ta have time ta whip peasants! Yeah, he taxed us an’ spent too much on his weddin’. Boo hoo. We still got taxes! And death too, an’ a lot more o’ that! An’ shpeakin’ a death, maybe the duchess poisoned old Arjan and bribed the priests ta say he weren’t comin’ back, or maybe he just were too old like she said. Who cares? That be the truth!”

Rhodel was just getting wound up. “Want another bit a truth? Half a ye are are smugglers selling perfume ‘n’ brandy ta the elves so we kin have food, an’ half are spies fer the Gray Gardeners, an’ that be a joke right there because ye know yer Litranaise? Yer ‘March a’ the Revolution’? Darl Jubannich were a hack! He recycled shtuff from his operas! That started as the ‘Silver Maidens’ Song’ he wrote fer the masque fer our duchess’s weddin’, an’ I know ‘cause I were only six but I got ta play the Horse! Then Jubannich reused it for his ‘Tales of— Oh bugger…” Rhodel trailed off, looking down at her tray where a stray spark from her goblin brand had ignited several fuses. “I was gonna shay more….”

Whatever she was going to add was silenced by the witch’s candles, which began to scream, and the siren fountains, which sang like sopranos at the top of their range, their blue flames and waterfall of sparks setting fire to the shreds of Rhodel’s tattered gown.

Corsetry, however, is a form of armor, and with icy dignity the old slattern marched forward, hop-frogs hopping from her tray and scintillating as she stepped onto the raft tied at the end of the dock. She embraced the effigies of Traxyla and her cronies like sisters, setting fire to the Shelyn’s roses on their breasts which began to twirl like red windmills as she cast off, the raft drifting into the Sellen as the blaze began in earnest.

Then a voice rose up, defiantly echoing off the hills of Kyonin: “But up in the air flew King Coco! The unicorn’s horn, where could it go? Then Patapouf found a hole below….” Rhodel sustained the note, harmonizing with the siren fountains until at last concluding with a flourish, “The tail of the cockatrice!”

With that, the dragonfly rockets Norret had bound to Traxyla’s broomstick went off in sequence as he had hoped, bearing her effigy high over the river before exploding in a brilliant blue flash of witchfire and brimstone.

He had not thought she would have a passenger.

Chapter Three: The Feaster in the Dark

The wheel of the year had given a quarter turn and reached its end, the final day of Kuthona, the last month, ruled by the twisted god Zon-Kuthon. Winter, the Season of the Black Dragoness, the watery drake who embodied the phlegmatic humor, had begun but nine days before with the solstice, which the Midnight Lord’s sister Shelyn, in her infinite kindness, had declared Crystalhue. The Eternal Rose’s warm heart warded the days and nights afterwards and they were filled with feasting and merriment—all save the last. Once the sun had set on the final day, the Dark Prince flung open the gates to Pharasma’s Boneyard and reminded the people of all they had lost. The Night of the Pale had begun.

This night was not named for the Pallid Princess, Urgathoa, although it was said that she relished it. Nor was it so named for the fearful faces of the living who huddled indoors and made a show of merriment, lest they encounter the spirits of the previous year’s dead. Rather it was named for a simple thing, the pole or piling which marked the boundary of a temple yard. For on this night only a fool or one with some fell errand would venture beyond the pale.

Norret was not certain which applied to him—probably both—but he had left the outmost gatepost of the beer garden of the Transfixed Chanticleer half a mile behind, stumping along with his crutch through the snow, having committed he didn’t know how many sacrileges against the tavern’s patron god, Cayden Cailean.

The first had been staying sober. The third had been volunteering to tend bar, and in the guise of getting a bottle of rare liqueur from the top shelf, taking down the shining ormolu form of Coco the cockatrice and slipping it into his soldier’s pack. The second? Lutin, the tavern cat, was also fond of the top shelf, sleeping in front of the cross-stitch sampler that composed the Accidental God’s shrine. Norret had sprinkled an alchemical preparation of powdered herring scales over him, camouflaging the cat as Coco.

Norret hoped that Lutin would continue to sleep, or at least that the devotees of the Drunken Hero would write off the sight of an impaled gilded meowing cockatrice as an ecstatic vision from the god himself.

The Night of the Pale was clear and freezing, lit only by the stars and Norret’s bullseye lantern. He quaffed an extract of coltsfoot, giving himself the endurance of a horse and some of its surefootedness to offset his limping, and at last arrived back at the Liberty Hostel.

Sulfurous steam curled from the unfrozen end of reflecting pool as Patapouf the unicorn stood over its wellspring, glaring at Norret accusingly as if he were the one responsible for the creature’s missing horn.

Norret sighed, leaned his crutch against the carriage porch, and unlaced his boots. If the worst horror the Night of the Pale held was wet feet, he would be a lucky man.

He unstopped a flask, applying a drop of viscous golden fluid to the thick end of the alicorn, taking a moment to open another phial and slick the stopper with an unguent of goose grease and eel liver before replacing it. He had heard the Katapeshi alchemists used the peels of some yellow Mwangi fruit to the same effect with a more pleasant scent, but an alchemist in Galt couldn’t hope for imports.

Norret then stepped into the pool. The water barely covered his calves but the warmth made his half-frozen feet feel like knives were being applied. It had been years since he had done this, a frightened boy with a rose and a simple wish, whereas he was now a crippled man with a complicated one. Yet like a rose, the complications were simple when you thought of them: After a great deal of research and revelation, Norret had realized that the interconnected baths and fountains of the Liberty Hostel formed a giant water clock, and while it might be possible to jury-rig some means to open any hidden chambers, that would be like sticking a fork in a broken Brastlewark timepiece hoping the bat would fly out the belfry while the little wooden devils came out to do the dance of the hours. But if one could obtain the original parts….

Before the glue set, Norret lifted Coco the cockatrice—who the sculptor had actually skewered above tail, not beneath, though with the way it twisted around the spiraled unicorn horn, this was not immediately obvious—and fit Patapouf’s horn back into its empty socket.

The unicorn said nothing. No thanks for the return of his alicorn or complaints about the still missing carbuncle.

Norret stood there for a long minute, freezing and frozen, looking at the statue, repaired but useless.

Then Coco’s beak opened:

No chicken laid this royal egg.

What hand shall hatch it now, I beg?

Norret stood stock still for another minute, unmoving, as if the cockatrice had petrified him. Coco repeated his rhyme. Norret nodded, then hobbled his way back to the icy lip of the reflecting pool. He took out his formulary and used a lead stylus to write down Coco’s verse, then got his feet out of the pool, slipping and rolling through a snowdrift until he collected his crutch and his boots, stuffing his wet feet inside before they could freeze to the ice. Teeth chattering, he gathered his lantern and staggered inside the Liberty Hostel. The sad fact was that he feared his own countrymen more than he feared the unknown horrors of the Night of the Pale, and this was the only night he was likely to have the chateau to himself.

Despite its haunted reputation—the lights in the corridors, the whispers from inside the walls, the unfortunate deaths and unexplained disappearances—the duchess’s former chateau had a number of permanent residents, and Norret was only one. Another had been Rhodel.

As was the custom, any room was free to any guest to stay in as long as he liked so long as he worked for the good of the household. Rhodel had chosen the duchess’s boudoir, and since no one else had stepped forward to claim it after the old dollymop’s flamboyant death, it was now Norret’s.

So were its heated floors, and as much as his countrymen might decry the late duke’s extravagant remodeling, at the moment Norret thought the geothermal piping beneath the tiles was worth every last copper. He stripped off his damp boots and snow-dusted clothes and left them steaming on the floor.

As for the rest of the chamber, Rhodel had turned it into a fantastic magpie’s nest of oddments scavenged from about the chateau: here a scrap of tapestry, there a swag of lace. A mangy hobby horse sized for a halfling or a human child lay propped in one corner, button eyes staring sadly, and beside that stood a changing maiden, a curious appurtenance that resembled a mad wizard’s golem more than a furnishing one might expect to see in a noblewoman’s dressing room. On the bottom was an unremarkable three-legged round table, but a pillar spiraled from the center with two arms, one holding a mirror, the other a tray, and at the top was the head of a beautiful, if bald, woman.

This one appeared to be ebonized wood, but appearances could be deceiving. Norret had quickly recognized the black as silver sulfide—or more prosaically, tarnish. Of course, if it were pure silver, the maiden would have been smelted for coins years ago, but scratches in the wash revealed the galena gray of poor-quality pewter. Like the pinchbeck and paste jewels once favored by the nobility when traveling, the odd vanity-cum-wig-stand was nothing more than gaudy trash meant to be stolen by highwaymen or dim-witted monsters.

Even so, she still proved useful. The maiden’s tray worked as a fireproof stand for Norret’s lantern while her mirror acted as an excellent reflector, providing both light and additional heat, for the Night of the Pale was as dark and cold as Zon-Kuthon’s heart.

Far more valuable than the maiden but even less saleable in current-day Galt was the grand bed where Norret now crawled between the worn duvets and decaying featherbeds. Carved of costly Qadiran rosewood, the decorations depicted some unfamiliar eastern legend involving courtiers and concubines with pipes chasing a gold dragon through fields filled with poppies, at last coming to a poppy-themed palace where they smoked more pipes as the good dragon imparted his wisdom. Norret’s only dealings with dragons to date, thankfully, had been the draconic system of alchemy favored by Powdermaster Davin. While that dealt with the cruel chromatic dragons, it only did so in the metaphorical and symbolic sense, and there mostly only with the four—the green, the red, the blue, and the black—that corresponded with the four elements, the four humors, and the four seasons. The white was reserved for the quintessence. Metallic dragons were more of a mystery, and while Norret suspected the bed’s carvings depicted some alchemical metaphor from Tian Xia, it could just as easily be a historical record of the great gold dragon Mengkare and the founding of the fabled nation of Hermea.

Regardless, it was also the place where Rhodel had plied her trade for the past forty years. Norret had of course rummaged beneath the mattress for anything of value, finding a small stash of silver and a large cache of negligees, but after imbibing Cedrine’s decoction of fern seeds, his attention had focused on the carvings. One of the pipes in a courtier’s hand could be pushed in like a peg. One of the concubine’s bound feet could be twisted like a knob. And once Norret had moved both of those, he impulsively tweaked the sun disk at the tip of the dragon’s tail.

Like a gnome puzzle box, the hidden panel in the headboard slid aside, revealing its treasure: a book.

“It seems that Rhodel was telling the truth all along.”

It had not been, as he had hoped, Duchess Devore’s alchemical formulary, or even that of her late husband, but it was something hidden since the Revolution, and a final present from old Rhodel.

Norret opened the panel again on this, the coldest and darkest of nights, retrieving the book, and reread the title: The Alchymical Wedding: A Masque of Allegory. And below that, in grandiose script: By Darl Jubannich.

The Revolution’s poet and co-instigator had even signed the manuscript with a signature even larger and more vainglorious than the typeface, and added a personal dedication: For Rhodel, our little Horse.

Norret had read it cover to cover. It was a masque of the sort no longer seen in Galt but still beloved by Shelyn, a grand flowering of art and science, artifice and architecture, and no little wit. It was also a piece of contraband which could send anyone to the guillotine, for rather than the chromatic dragons favored by Powdermaster Davin, or the poetic tree of birds of Katapeshi alchemy, or the mountain of the philosophers or whatever exotic metaphor the alchemists used in Tian Xia, the manuscript referred to the philosopher’s quest and the alchemist’s great work by means of the worst possible metaphor in post-revolutionary Galt: a royal wedding.

The masque’s plot was relatively simple: The youngest daughter of the King of the Moon—symbolic of silver and womanhood and played by Anais Peperelle-née-Devore—had come to wed the Golden Youth, the son of the Golden Sovereign, the Sun King, both symbolic of gold and manhood and both played by the elderly Duke Arjan Devore, using a magic hat to make the former role credible. Assorted ambassadors and emissaries of the planets and elements arrive, bringing with them nuptial gifts of alchemical significance, each more fantastic and valuable than the last, until at last the Silver Maiden and Golden Youth exchange betrothal gifts, the Carbuncle and the Crapaudine, the fabled ruby and diamond periapts of House Devore—the Carbuncle returning after centuries as part of Anais’s dowry, as the Peperelles were not old nobility but a family of wealthy spice merchants who had managed to obtain the stone in Taldor, using it as the sovereign glue to cement a splendid match for their brilliant young daughter.

Just when the treasures could not get more ostentatious, the Golden Sovereign reveals his own gift for the happy couple: the philosopher’s stone, the jewel in the crown of the royal art and the substance which could not only transmute lead to gold and resurrect the dead, but could also restore the aged to youth.

At this point the Golden Youth removes his disguise, revealing that he and the Golden Sovereign are one and the same, and confessing the other sad fact: his philosopher’s stone is broken and useless without the Silver Maiden’s aid.

Here alchemical metaphor began to cross into alchemical fact, for as amazing as the fabled artifact was, it shared the flaw of the least extract of the alchemist’s art: when exposed to air, the philosophic mercury in its center quickly decayed, and quickly tarnished into uselessness. This had occurred with the Golden Sovereign’s broken stone.

However, useless does not mean worthless, and an artifact is not so easily destroyed. Just as tarnish can be turned back into silver with the application of a bath of soda ash and foil of a lesser metal—the alchemical reaction to remove sulfur from silver—Duke Arjan Devore hoped, with the help of his clever young bride and the purifying radiance of the toad stone and the unicorn’s jewel, to discover a process to separate the philosophic mercury from the philosophic sulfur, thus recreating the White and Red Elixirs, the penultimate stages of the great work.

At this point alchemical theory moved back to poetic metaphor and the conventions of the theater: The White Queen and the Red King combined, singing a particularly passionate duet, then merged into the Divine Hermaphrodite and gave birth to their magical child, the Golden Heir. For the masque’s finale, all the wedding guests reappeared, ascending the mount of the alchemists to attend the christening, singing the praises of the heir who was one and the same with the philosopher’s stone, and also praising the proud parents, the King and Queen, not only separate once again but both now blessed with the glory of eternal youth for achieving the alchemist’s quest, and even the birds in the tree of knowledge at the summit joined in the song.

That was the theory, at least. In reality, Duke Arjan died of old age and his bride ended up fleeing a revolution.

Of course, very few lives go according to plan. Norret paged back through the book to the part where Aballon, the Horse, fastest of the planets and symbolic of quicksilver, sends the youngest filly from his herd as both herald and wedding gift, there to act as page and messenger in the happy couple’s hall. Rather than being played by the child of some nobleman or other powerful friend, this part was given to the daughter of the duke’s stable master, a remarkably pretty child with her hair braided with ribbons, a happy smile on her face, a hobby horse in one hand, and dreams of one day being a great bard or entertainer.

It had taken Norret almost a minute of staring at the hand-tinted etching to realize he was looking at Rhodel, ten years before the Revolution. Ten years before she had slept with the revolutionaries who came for her former mistress and every soldier since, taking up a rather different form of entertainment than she had originally planned, successfully saving her neck, if not her dignity.

Norret closed the book. Rhodel had taken that dignity back at the end. Say what you would about the old slattern, but despite madness, drunkenness, disease, and desperation, she had not chosen a coward’s fate and would face the Lady of Graves with her head held high.

That said, the credits and thank-you notes of Darl Jubannich’s masque explained a great deal more. Formerly, all Norret had known about the Liberty Hostel’s design was that Duke Arjan Devore had bankrupted the village creating ostentatious expansions to his ancestral manse and redecorating to please his vain young bride. The text of masque did not dispute that, but explained that the entire chateau was not only rigged up like an immense steam-driven musical waterclock, the baths and fountains forming the mechanism, but was also an alchemical allegory on a grand scale, each and every chamber symbolizing a different stage of the great work, like interconnected vessels in an alchemist’s laboratory.

Tintinetto, the famous halfling muralist, had painted frescoes. A wizard had then placed magic upon the figures’ mouths, creating as he called them “philosophic eggs”—a pun on the actual egg of the philosophers, an ovoid glass vessel—such that they would speak when certain actions were taken or certain words said, but it was up to the wedding guests to divine what triggered each, and there would be a prize for the one who discovered the most!

This amusing party game explained why the chateau was now haunted by indistinct mumblings, since when the Revolution came to Dabril, the priestess of Shelyn, faced with the displeasure of her goddess if she allowed the destruction of priceless works of art and the even greater displeasure of the Red Council if she did not, was inspired to a divine solution. Specifically, a solution of slake lime and water, commonly known as whitewash.

Of course, Norret had his own solution: concentrated champagne vinegar mixed with his last drops of the universal solvent. He got out of the bed and got his clothes back on, now mostly dry. The Liberty Hostel was abandoned by every resident save himself, and if he wanted to hear what the frescoes were muttering about beneath the whitewash, the Night of the Pale was the safest night for it, ironic as that might be.

Norret moved the changing maiden’s mirror so that his lantern illuminated the blank wall of the boudoir, then picked up one of the duchess’s perfume atomizers that had somehow survived the years. He squeezed the bulb.

The slake lime hissed and bubbled away, revealing Anais dressed as a royal bride facing a regal young man. In her right hand she bore a spiraled ivory horn, but was using it like a fencing foil, spearing the youth through the back of his left hand and causing a gout of blood to well up like a jewel on the white glove he wore. To be fair, he had already unlaced the front of her gown, but instead of grabbing a bit of flesh like any normal groom, he was instead holding up a large toad to nurse. Either milk or poison flew from the suckling toad, spattering the back of the green glove his bride wore on her left hand, glittering like a crazed diamond.

It was an allegorical illustration of the exchange of the Carbuncle for the Crapaudine, but Norret was certain the priestess of Shelyn had understood none of that, only that it appeared monstrous, perhaps related to Lamashtu. As such, she would have had no qualms about covering any of it up.

A few more spritzes revealed an old king pointing at the younger man’s back, his left hand wearing a white glove fringed with unicorn mane, the back adorned with a ruby cabochon—clearly the Carbuncle again. Norret was certain he was looking at Duke Arjan Devore.

Norret took the perfume atomizer and set it deliberately on the maiden’s tray. The figure then spoke:

Though I seem age and he seems youth

Both he and I are one in truth.

A nice reminder from an old duke to his young bride, but as Norret knew from reading the masque, it possessed a great deal more significance.

Norret recorded the rhyme and confirmation of its trigger in his formulary, then picked up the atomizer and hung his lantern from its belt clip. A soldier was nothing without gear fasteners, and an alchemist doubly so. Being lame made the necessity triple.

He opened the door of his room and glanced out. The hall was deserted save for a magical light drifting lazily along to the tune of the phantom minstrels. So far, the Night of the Pale was turning out somewhat less than horrifying. While a ball of blue witchfire might frighten some, Norret had read Jubannich’s masque and so knew that a long-forgotten illusionist had placed dancing lights in the gallery—lights which would be less frightening if there were actual dancers—and occasionally one spun off and went drifting down the corridors, presumably to illuminate portraits that no longer hung there.

Norret, however, had only so much solution, so it would be best to start with the most promising chambers first. Lame as he was, he decided to go with Powdermaster Davin’s advice: Begin at the bottom.

Norret avoided the various wine cellars for the moment, as they were a sea of broken bottles and smashed casks, their noble vintages long since drunk by reveling revolutionaries. The pump room he would save for last. Yet soon the open drawers of the Devore family crypt gaped before him like empty sockets in a toothless skull, the coffins removed long ago to fuel pyres or resurrections, and even the coins from the corpses’ eyes were now likely in some soldier’s pocket or harlot’s purse.

He turned to the whitewashed wall opposite the shattered sepulchers and, as the strains of the spectral armonica drifted down the stairs, applied his solution, watching as streaks of charcoal and drops of blood began to appear. The bard who had enchanted the chateau with the phantom minstrels had cued them to play various songs at different intervals so as to not become tiresome, but Norret was already quite tired of the Litranaise, the familiar lyrics clear in his head: O royal guards on your patrols Each of your crimes we will repay We whippoorwills will catch your souls / We are the Gardeners in Gray….

The familiar masks of Galt’s executioners appeared on the wall, the Gray Gardeners holding the duchess’s mysterious red-and-white rose to their lips with skeletal hands like angels of silence or hooded wraiths. Of course, having read the masque’s libretto, Norret knew the Gardeners’ leitmotif properly belonged to the shades of the frost, allegorical figures of putrefaction, come for the rose of mystery, another symbol of the great work given form by a literal-minded druid: We come to blight the blooming rose We shades of frost, we fateful fey We mourning doves, we hoodie crows / We are the gardeners in gray….

Doves and crows were common alchemical symbols, the colors of their feathers corresponding to the hues seen within the philosophic egg, but whippoorwills were little mottled brown soul-stealing nightjars favored by necromancers who liked cute familiars, and the colors of their plumage would only indicate that the alchemist had screwed up.

Screw, however, was the operative phrase. When Norret had asked about the Liberty Hostel for phrases the inhabitants had heard from the ghosts in the walls or actions that might disturb the spirits, Flauric had cautioned him to never drink in the crypt, for doing so incurred the horrible, disapproving whispers of teetotaling spinster ghosts!

Norret was a soldier, however, and knew that libations for the dead were an ancient sacrifice. He uncorked a bottle of claret he had requisitioned from the Transfixed Chanticleer and compounded his sins against the Accidental God by pouring the first taste on the floor.

The shades whispered in chorus:

Divine the figures of death’s dance.

Unlock the secrets of our manse.

Norret wrote the rhyme in his formulary, considering, then recorked the bottle and made his way back upstairs.

The ceiling of the grand ballroom rose three and a half stories with two galleries. Two ormolu chandeliers still hung in the vault while the third had crashed through the parquet floor. All had been stripped of their ensorcelled flambeaux and most of their crystals, but Norret still had his lantern. There were also magical lights in the uppermost gallery, currently moving through the figures of a sprightly gavotte. He quirked a smile as he recognized the tune: “The Caged Phoenix,” the aria sung by Pharadae, ambassador of the salamanders, as she presents her nuptial gift.

Norret was not a phoenix, but he was not going to climb two flights of stairs with a crutch when the original phoenix’s cage was still there, its ormolu bars cast in the form of a nest of Osirian palm fronds and flames. And moreover, he had repaired the mechanism.

The elevator door clanged shut, cables and counterweights engaged, the whole powered by the ancient hydraulic technology sometimes called the Azlanti Screw. Norret ascended, feeling not so much like a phoenix arising from his pyre as a crippled alchemist about to make a crucial discovery.

A walkway bridged the vault, opposite the largest, whitest wall in the chateau—and likely the greatest mural—but what Norret was interested in at the moment was the dancing lights. They moved like lanterns carried by capering ghosts, in and out the patterns of a figure, multiplied by the mirrors of the gallery into a sea of constellations.

Norret shuttered his own lantern so he could observe them more clearly. Thankfully, he was tall and so could look down on them slightly, seeing the shapes they traced in the darkness repeated to infinity in the mirrors, slightly angled, like bones landing in a spiral. The patterns were not just choreography, but mathematical figures, combinations spun clockwise and widdershins.

The wheels of the valves in the pump room formed a similar line, and Norret realized that, just as the dances of the masque ran in sequence, so could the valves be turned in the same pattern.

There was one troublesome light, however. One that moved through the constellations like a wandering star or bobbed at the corner of the set like a wallflower at a dance. Norret looked at it in the darkness a long while, pondering its meaning, before at last speaking aloud. “What are you doing here?”

“I could ask the same,” said the light. It was an inhuman voice, like the voice of the armonica, its tone too pure, too clear, too cold. “Why is there no terror?”

Norret recognized it. A will-o’-wisp, one of the death-fires that followed armies, feeding on the fear of dying soldiers.

“Everyone I loved is dead. I’ve no time for terror.”

“How tragic,” the corpse light said, and vanished, swallowed up by the darkness. “Perhaps now? I can see you but you cannot see me….”

There was a virtue to being blind in one eye: Despite being half deaf as well, Norret had learned to use his hearing that much more, and could sense vaguely where the voice had drifted, near one of the dead chandeliers. He reached to his bandolier, retrieving a small metal tube like a child’s tin whistle. He raised it to his lips and blew a blast, but instead of sound, what issued from the end was shimmering glitter.

Twinkling, it dusted down, a preparation of powdered mica, luminescent phosphorus, and crushed moon moth wings.

The will-o’-wisp reappeared, now glowing a ghastly greenish-white rather than witchy blue like the rest of the lights. The chandelier’s remaining crystals winked and glittered with the illumination and a faint odor of garlic filled the air, a curious property of phosphorus.

The corpse light screamed, an unearthly howl like all of an armonica’s crystal bowls touched at once, and launched itself at Norret.

Norret held up a hand to ward it off, his numb hand, still clutching the duchess’s perfume atomizer. A bolt of pure voltaic energy sparked from the will-o’-wisp, but glass was an insulator, proof against any and all galvanic power. Unfortunately, brass and silver were not, and the fittings drew the electricity inside, bottling the lightning and volatilizing the mixture of acids.

The atomizer atomized.

Norret felt the pressure rather than pain as the explosion drove splinters of glass through his gauntlet into his hand and slammed him back into the railing. The garlic scent of phosphorus was replaced by that of vinegar—searing, eye-watering, and caustic. Vinegar was said to be the sign of Cayden Cailean’s displeasure, but the god of Accidents and Ale was either sending mixed messages or else equally displeased at everyone, for the expanding force of the acid gas also flung the death-fire back into the elevator car.

Norret held his breath. If the will-o’-wisp had wanted fear, it had done the wrong thing, for he was a soldier, and beyond panic lay the battle calm. He took stock of the angles, the placement, the lines of railings and chandelier, then lobbed a bomb, a soft underhanded toss with a short fuse.

The concussive grenade exploded, loud and deafening, but this time Norret was prepared for it. He grabbed the ormolu railing with both hands, the brass strong beneath the gold as the blast knocked his cap and crutch flying. Like frames in a zoetrope, crystals shattered in slow motion, and he saw rather than heard the glittering golden door of the elevator slam shut, the latch close.

With all his might, he hurled a tanglefoot bag directly at that latch, falling to the walkway and taking deep ragged lungfuls of the clean winter air that had replaced the vaporized vinegar and solvent.

A surge of electrical energy flew from the wisp but arced back from the bars, bouncing about inside the cage with a brilliant blue-white light. Again the creature launched lightning and again the bars caged it. Then again.

Norret was intrigued. An alchemical property of ormolu? Some elemental abjuration on the phoenix’s cage? Outright divine intervention?

It made no matter. The tanglefoot glue was smoking. Norret hauled himself up by the railing, using it to limp along.

“You wanted terror.” He pulled a flask from his bandolier. “Have some!”

Norret hurled it over the railing, his aim precise. The flask burst, the goose-and-eel-liver salve coating the cables and over-greasing the gears. The next moment, they slipped, the elevator plummeting to the floor with the will-o’-wisp inside.

One fall was not sufficient to kill the monster, but five were. Once Norret hobbled down the stairs and collected his crutch, he jiggered the mechanism and smashed Pharadae’s cage up and down until at last luminous ichor of the sort wizards use to pen secret missives leaked between the gilded bars.

With the will-o’-wisp’s death, a last crackle of galvanism crept up the cables, arcing back and forth between them in the phenomenon known as Sarenrae’s Ladder. Between that and the alchemical lubricant, another mechanism activated.

Norret heard a beautiful sound outside, like a siren singing, which was not surprising given that such was exactly what was rising from the dolphin fountain. Astride another fearsome dolphin, green with verdigris, sat the shining ormolu figure of the siren of the philosophers, diadem of stars upon her brow, milk or possibly coffee spurting from her breasts.

The fountain had not been cleaned since All Kings Day.

As soon as Norret approached, the statue paused her wordless song for spoken rhyme:

If you would solve my mystery

The silver maiden holds the key.

Norret knew exactly the maiden of which she spoke.

Chapter Four: The Silver Maiden’s Key

The wheel of the year had begun again and with it the month of Abadius. Abadar, Master of the First Vault, did as he had always done, and politely but firmly informed the spirits of the dead the Night of the Pale was over.

In other lands and other times, New Year’s Day was an occasion for market fairs and festivals, but in Galt forty years after the Red Revolution, the holiday was more often a time for cleaning, putting things in order, and general tidying.

Norret Gantier kept this custom better than he ever had, bandaging his injured hand, decanting the will-o’-wisp’s luminous ichor into pre-revolutionary champagne magnums, preserving the strange sponge-like body for future study, writing notes about the curious behavior of the lightning in the elevator cage, and telling the other inhabitants of the Liberty Hostel repeatedly that he was as mystified as they were at the miraculous restoration of the unicorn-and-cockatrice statue in the reflecting pool, the sudden appearance of the siren in the dolphin fountain, the reappearance of all the frescoes about the Liberty Hostel, and whatever that glowing mess was in the elevator.

Flauric called a mandatory household meeting for all the guests to discuss these issues—which is to say, when he served up the New Year’s luncheon of Liberty Cabbage, the goose confit and sauerkraut he had left simmering since the night before, he sprang it on everyone.

Of course, those gathered in the banquet hall were already discussing it, starting with the fresco that now adorned that chamber, something between a royal wedding feast and a menagerie. Here was the duke, there was the duchess, there was Crapaudine the giant toad dressed like an old witch with a lace collar and a pointed beaver hat festooned with ribbons, alongside her horrid son, Coco the cockatrice. Further along, standing on his hind legs and dressed as a court fop, was Patapouf the unicorn, flirting with a camelopard dressed as a houri from Katapesh. The chamber depicted the alchemical process of Dissolution, not just because the wedding reception looked like a remarkably genteel afternoon tea in honor of the Mother of Monsters, but because at one end of the table sat the Green Dragon with his ward, the Green Lion, in the process of eating one of the solid gold wedding plates, the allegory for royal water dissolving gold. Not that Norret was explaining this.

There was particular consternation about the fresco in the front hall, as the image of Liberty had lost her liberty cap and the banner of the revolution but otherwise remained untouched, making her look much more like Duchess Devore—especially since her husband had appeared on the wall opposite. Norret privately surmised this was because Tintinetto had sealed his works with an alchemical overglaze derived from copal that allowed objects to resist the passage of time, and the patriotic overpainter had not been privy to this trade secret. Thus, when the fog containing the last of Norret’s universal solvent had drifted through, it stripped the additions but left the originals intact.

Nowhere was this more apparent than the grand ballroom, where three and a half stories of whitewash had vanished overnight, replaced with Tintinetto’s masterpiece, a glorious mural of the Mountain of the Alchemists with the Tree of Knowledge at the summit.

All the wedding guests were there, garbed as the various planetary emissaries and ambassadors of the elements, from the six-year-old Rhodel with her hobby horse to the duke and duchess representing the Sun and the Moon, wearing planetary symbols on their bodies and not much else. The Tree of Knowledge was a great ash, with silver branches, golden leaves, and every symbol from the requisite mole nibbling the deepest roots to the poetic birds of Katapeshi alchemy nestling in philosophic eggs where the uppermost twigs extended into the lunette at the top.

There were two main schools of thought among the inhabitants of the Liberty Hostel as to what to make of all this. The majority, led by Joringel, the gardener, who had spent the Night of the Pale at the Tabernacle of Shelyn along with most of the village, were of the opinion that the sudden appearance of so much beautiful artwork featuring so many lovely roses could only be a sign of Shelyn’s divine favor—and the weird kinky stuff was probably just a peace offering from the Eternal Rose to her misguided brother, Zon-Kuthon. Indeed, Joringel explained excitedly, she had wept tears of joy to see so much beauty, and at this point began to spout utter gibberish. Older inhabitants of the Liberty Hostel explained that he was speaking in tongues, specifically the celestial language of the angels, as Joringel went to the elevator cage and began to ecstatically smear himself with glowing will-o’-wisp ichor, gesturing for others to join him. Some did.

The minority opinion, led by Flauric—which Norret found himself expected to go along with, as he also claimed to have spent the entire night drunk at the Transfixed Chanticleer and no one had contradicted him yet—was that since the Liberty Hostel reeked of vinegar, this could only be a sign of Cayden Cailean’s divine displeasure, in no way related to the fact that Flauric had possibly overcooked the sauerkraut, or maybe confitted enchanted geese (even if this would also explain the smell of goose grease and garlic in the ballroom). Besides which, his sauerkraut had been nowhere near the tavern when Coco the cockatrice’s statue had come to life and everyone had chased the monster out into the snow—even Lutin, the blessed tavern cat, who had come back two hours later, bedraggled and cold. But as everyone could see now, the brave cat had chased the monster all the way back to the Liberty Hostel, where it hopped back onto the unicorn’s head—because as everyone knows, water is the one thing even the bravest cat will not touch.

Tantif the falconer, the household’s sole worshiper of Erastil, usually stayed in the mews but had spent the Night of the Pale in Old Deadeye’s lonely shrine—a folly in the shape of a hunter’s hut at the edge of the snow-filled gardens. She suggested that the two interpretations were not mutually exclusive: Perhaps the Accidental Hero had helped the cat chase the metal cockatrice back onto the unicorn’s head, and then the Eternal Rose had decided that since one bit of pretty artwork had been restored, she might as well restore the rest of it. Maybe the time had come for the art to be seen again, for what could the grand mural be but the Liberty Tree itself? Indeed, there was now even a liberty cap atop it!

There was indeed a liberty cap atop the Liberty Tree, or at least Norret’s cap caught in the chandelier nearest the mural of the Tree of Life where it had landed when the grenade exploded. Tantif sent her favorite falcon up, and it returned a moment later with the cap, looking at her disappointedly as if it had expected a dead rabbit. She rewarded it regardless, then shared a significant look with Norret.

He tried to work out whether the reflecting pool was visible from the garden folly, but it didn’t matter. The road certainly was, and a man with a crutch made a distinctive silhouette and track.

Dissembling quickly, Norret claimed that when he was at the tavern, he threw his cap at the cockatrice, and it stuck on the horn coming out of the monster’s chest. He then collected it from Tantif, showing the hole conveniently made by the falcon’s claws, and opined that perhaps the vinegar smell was from Cayden’s displeasure at Coco as the god’s blessed cat chased the cockatrice around the Liberty Hostel?

Everyone looked like they bought this except Tantif, but she held her tongue. Norret put his cap back on.

The birds in the top of the tree then began to sing:

The summit of our mount have ye

Yet what to choose now from the tree?

Everyone looked at the painted birds, then Norret, then back as the birds continued in order.

The phoenix: Eternal Youth?

A pelican pecking blood from her breast: Unending Health?

A clever-looking raven: Infernal Wit?

A halcyon floating atop a sea of mercury: Undying Wealth?

A cockatrice: The Baleful Sting of Poison’s Feast?

Finally, a griffin: Or Every Strength of Every Beast?

It was the riddle of the alchemists: what to choose once the great work was complete, for while there were six known prizes at the end of the alchemist’s quest, an individual could pick only one. Or at most two, if united in an alchymical wedding.

Or one could die en route, as had Arjan, or get distracted by petty things like revolutions, like Anais. Or…

Norret wasn’t certain what the “or” was for him, but suspected it might end with his head meeting a Final Blade like his brother and father, despite the fact that he was currently a slight favorite of the village council, his fireworks having lined their coffers nicely last All Kings Day.

Someone then remarked how strange this was, for earlier that day they had played a game in the billiards room and the great shark that had appeared on the wall had spoken a rhyme as well. Others then revealed similar experiences, and it was put to the test by Norret being asked to doff his cap and put it back on again. Norret did, and again the birds sang their rhyme.

Most were mystified, but a few posited that this was some arcane wizardry or fey sorcery, like the talking mirrors and snuffboxes in the bards’ tales—illusion rather than necromancy.

Norret took out his formulary, opened to a completely blank page, and wrote down the rhyme, then asked the others what the frescoes had said in the other chambers and what the good citizens of the Liberty Hostel had been doing just before they did.

This explained everything except why Coco’s statue was still wearing his own liberty cap.

Tantif then remarked that if a metal cockatrice was smart enough to remember that cats hate water, he was probably smart enough to keep his liberty cap on, given the opinion of crowns in Galt.

Everybody laughed, although Norret’s was forced.

The citizens then agreed, by unanimous vote, that as this was the Liberty Hostel, the mural must now officially be the Liberty Tree, for it would be seditious to call it anything else, and all the other artwork might be similarly patriotic with just a little imagination. Indeed, there was even a portrait of the Gray Gardeners in the crypt, and the unseen armonica often played the Litranaise as well. If that wasn’t patriotic, what was?

Norret bit his tongue. After reading The Alchymical Wedding, he knew that the Litranaise was just a slowed reprise of the Silver Maiden’s song, the girlish minuet the accursed armonica also played at times.

Rhodel was also right. Darl Jubannich was a hack. In the libretto, under the title of the Silver Maiden’s song, was a note: Sung to the tune of “The Seven Merry Maids of Westcrown.”

Regardless, everyone thanked Tantif for imparting Erastil’s wisdom, some more than most.

As part of the celebration of New Year’s Day, local custom was to sort through the unwanted clutter from one’s life and give away what one could not use. Norret offered Tantif all of Rhodel’s old clothes, which he thought she might get some use out of, and in the middle of the bundle was the pouch with Rhodel’s savings, which she certainly could.

Tantif smiled and thanked him.

Over the course of the next few days, Norret set about gathering the rest of the rhymes and triggering actions, recording the various mathematical patterns of the dancing lights, as well as scavenging ingredients to concoct more of the universal solvent so he could properly clean the changing maiden.

As a rule, alchemists did not trust wizardry. Not because it was not efficacious, but because it was not efficacious enough. If one wished to hide something from divination, for example, a wizard would cast various abjurations and illusions that were neither foolproof nor permanent, and even if made permanent, could still be suppressed or dispelled. An alchemist faced with the same task would rely on natural magic, specifically the fact that lead was the metal symbolic of Eox, the dead planet, and deadened divinatory magic accordingly. Thus, all that was necessary was a thin sheet of the metal and a thinner application of sovereign glue.

Norret had composed his latest solvent from the various citrus oils used in Dabril’s perfumes, primarily bergamot and neroli, fresh from the orangery, and as he applied it, the lead sheeting peeled back like the rind of a bitter orange.

Soon Madame Devore’s changing maiden stood there in all her silvery glory. Where there was once plain lead with poor silvering, she was now a masterpiece of occult engraving over purest mithral, the wondrously light planetary metal symbolic of Liavara, the Dreamer. The mirror’s back was cut into the diamond quadrants of a horoscope, the tray into a horary circle, the table was a map of the constellations, and even the maiden’s head was now no mere stand for hat or wig but a phrenological head with the face marked with the signs of astrological physiognomy: on the chin, the Hammer; by the right side of the mouth, the Key; on the left of the nose, the eight-pointed Star of Wisdom; on the right cheek, the Shield; by the left eye, the Book; and on the brow, the mark of the constellation the Revolution had rechristened the Liberty Cap, but properly known as the Crown.

Norret was out of fern seed, so mixed another of Citizen Cedrine’s signature extracts, a tincture of pimpernel to clear the eyes, plus two drops of eyebright to sharpen them. He applied this prescription to his good eye and blinked twice, but only once he looked under the table did he see the secret drawer. The central pillar appeared affixed by a knob, but his preternatural acuity showed this to be false. Around it were three bands marked with the sigils for the sun, the moon, and the constellations. Norret then found that the maiden’s arms were now free. Moving the mirror moved the moon’s dial. Moving the tray, the sun’s. The constellations were fixed in their zodiacal houses.

Norret tried a number of combinations to no avail. Norret whispered a prayer to Abadar, Master of Keys, then looked to the wall of his room and noticed the lunar and solar patches on the faces of Anais and Arjan Devore, then back to the map of physiognomy on the face of the mithral maiden.

Norret moved the moon and sun to one position, then another, the horoscopes of Anais and Arjan. Nothing happened. Then his good eye came to rest on The Alchymical Wedding. Norret opened it, and after a moment’s calculation added a third date.

The drawer dropped open.

Norret used tongs to retrieve a cylindrical leaden casket, a final protection against divination. He placed it on the table, then put on the mask he wore when dealing with toxic fumes. There were none, and when he opened the casket, the ivory leather inside tested negative for contact poison.

He unrolled it, revealing a glove of fine kidskin. Then he realized it was something far finer: unicornskin, for the cuff was fringed with silken beard below the palm and snowy forelock at the top, and the back was set with nothing less than the Carbuncle itself, a ruby cabochon lobed like a heraldic rose or the base of a unicorn’s horn. Once he had taken off his mask in wonder, he noticed the whole was softly perfumed: Duchess Devore, the rose of mystery. It was the glove the elderly Arjan wore here, perfumed with his wife’s signature scent.

Norret unwound the bandage from his left hand. His scars now had more scars, but the wounds were mostly healed. He pulled the old duke’s glove over his hand. The duke had been a smaller man, but the glove expanded to fit. This was magic, and not just the natural magic of alchemy, but a product of wizardry or sorcery. The Carbuncle shone on the back of his hand, glowing softly with an inner light which grew brighter and began to pulse with the beat of his heart.

He remembered something from a tale Melzec told once after a battle, of a gloved assassin who had but to snap his fingers to have a flask of poison appear. Norret had thought this exceptionally silly, and said as much, since poison could be hidden in anything from rings to fan mounts with no magic required. Even so….

Norret snapped his fingers. A book appeared in his hand, and from the stains and scorches, Norret knew exactly what he was holding: the formulary of Anais or Arjan Devore.

He opened it and began to page through. This was Arjan’s, but with copious notes and annotations in a ladylike hand. This was the backup Anais left when she fled the Revolution.

It was a treasure for any alchemist, but especially for Norret. There were formulae for powders and tinctures, dust and unguents, alchemically infused bath bombs and clever methods of reducing potions so they could be used as patches and beauty marks. Yet most important of all, there were formulae for extracts, the prescriptions an alchemist mixed to take advantage of his own natural magic, far cheaper than potions and able to be prepared on the fly. As one might expect of an old man, Arjan D’Ivore’s formulary included healing balms of all different strengths and purposes, swabs to mend a deaf ear, drops to clear a clouded eye….

The tinctures of pimpernel and eyebright were already to hand, so Norret healed his eye first, almost throwing the patch away in delight, then on second thought, simply left it flipped up, still attached by a bit of spirit gum.

His ear was next, and with a brief popping sound, the volume of the music drifting down the hall doubled. It was the accursed armonica playing the Litranaise again, but for once, no sound could be more welcome.

Last came the healing balm. Norret composed it as ointment, smearing down his left side where the bomb went off almost a year ago. It sank in and soothed, then all at once began to itch terribly. Norret scratched and clawed at himself, then gazed in wonderment as sheets of dead skin fell away, leaving fresh pink flesh and the ability to feel once again.

Norret closed the formulary and would have kissed it, save that he would not even do that with his own given the number of powders and tinctures it had absorbed over the years. Instead, he removed the unicornskin glove and applied the last of the healing balm to his scarred hand. The formula worked as it was meant to, scarred skin flaking away like winter’s snow, and he then replaced the glove and set to perusing the rest of the formulary.

There were a dozen recipes he wished to try, and a dozen more he knew he would, but soon he found the information he both suspected and sought: the glove was the key he needed, but only half. The other half was still locked beneath Dabril’s snows.

Norret then glanced up and blessed old Rhodel. She may have been a slattern and dollymop, but she was a true daughter of Dabril. Rhodel had gathered the flowers from the Liberty Hostel’s gardens and dried them herself, blending her own sachets and potpourri, and as any child of Dabril would, she had kept the varieties separate for when she chose to blend more.

Norret fished through the jar until he found a bloom that was still intact, if dried, then said the word written in the formulary: “Anais.”

The duchess’s rose shrank away to nothing, vanishing from sight, but Norret knew it was still there.

He gathered up the formularies and stowed them in his pack along with The Alchymical Wedding, added the glowing bottles of will-o’-wisp ichor, kicked the scraps of lead under the bed, then took a few minutes to figure out how to release the catches to disassemble the changing maiden. It came apart, a marvel of engineering, able to be reconfigured to anything from an astrolabe to a spinning jenny according to the instructions in the formulary, even an armonica using a series of nested crystal bowls stored inside the skull, though Norret was more interested in configuring it as a portable alchemy lab. All the components stowed save the tabletop, which he wrapped with his grenadier’s blanket to give the appearance of a round shield.

Norret then flipped down his unnecessary eyepatch and picked up his unneeded crutch. Unnecessary and unneeded did not mean they were no longer useful, and even the scabbed bandage still served a purpose, disguising the duke’s glove and the Carbuncle.

Norret proceeded to the pump room, hurrying a bit at the end because his two good ears now heard the finale of Jubannich’s masque, and to operate the water clock, it was necessary to start at the beginning.

In what he had formerly thought of as the blessed silence between performances, Norret reset all the baths and fountains and even the heating ducts for the various floors, allowing the pressure in the spring to build until he heard the first haunting sounds of the glass armonica drifting down the stairs with the opening notes of the prelude.

It was more tedious than difficult: this valve turned here, that pipe diverted there, a bath drained, a fountain filled, and patience. He heard the sounds of the chateau shifting, the siren lowering and raising, the geyser shooting out of the reflecting pool, a dozen small bits of choreography that would have been observed by the masquers as they went about grounds while the inventor—perhaps Alysande Benedict herself—stayed here behind the scenes with perhaps her greatest invention, the steam-powered waterworks of the Devore residence.

At last it was done and Norret proceeded to the ballroom.

It was a while before he could get it to himself, as Joringel had taken it as a divine mission from Shelyn to repair the beautiful things that had been broken, and so was enlisting folk to help rehang the fallen chandelier, repair the floor, and possibly use the smashed casks and bottles in the winecellars as materials to mend the shattered doors. Norret was exactly the man that he’d been wanting to speak to, especially since the alchemist had been doing such a fine job repairing the fountains. No one had ever seen the geyser before!

Norret talked pleasantly about the chandelier, trying to figure out how to rehang it while time was wasting, as the window of opportunity was only so long. But then Flauric came in to announce that his famous cassoulet that had been simmering since Crystalhue was at last done!

Norret silently blessed Flauric. His cassoulet was even more effective than the Night of the Pale for clearing the ballroom. Norret told Joringel to run on ahead and save a seat for him; he would be along momentarily.

Norret entered the elevator car, the will-o’-wisp’s ichor now dried to an irridescent shimmer. He shut the door, then looked about until he found the ormolu flames in the shape of a hand. In the middle was a raised design in the shape of a rose. Norret unwound the bandage and placed the glove over the flaming hand, then with his free hand, pushed the control lever down.

The mechanism engaged and the elevator began its descent, at first into darkness lit only by the warm glow of the Carbuncle but then into brilliant illumination.

The alchemical laboratories Norret was used to were grubby affairs, at best back rooms of former apothecary shops with dusty stuffed crocodiles or house drakes dangling from the rafters. This was bright as day, with clean white marble and the cold light of a hundred ensorcelled flambeaux set in untarnished alchemical silver sconces never looted by the Revolution.

There were apothecary cabinets on the walls, drawers clearly and neatly labeled, cabinets full of tinctures and reagents, bottles of acid and jars of mineral salts, and specimens preserved in oil, wine, or the fluids of Osirian alchemy. In the middle of all this was a great table stacked with a veritable mountain of alchemical glassware: alembics, retorts, cucurbits, crucibles, pelicans, and even a philosophic egg in the center.

Some grand experiment had been left to run while the duchess had fled, but now the burners beneath the crucibles had gone out, the fluids in the pelicans had clouded or sedimented, and in the philosophic egg, rather than the snowy white of albification or the beauteous iridescence of the stage of the great work known as the peacock’s tail, all that was left was an ugly charred lump that looked like a black rock.

Norret looked again.

In all of the illustrations, the philosopher’s stone was shown as a gleaming golden nugget shining forth with radiance and power, with all the figures seeing it being awed by its majesty or capering about in attitudes of joy. Certainly that’s how the grand finale of Darl Jubannich’s masque The Alchymical Wedding had ended.

The reality was somewhat less and ever so much more. Just as silver tarnished, so did the stone.

Norret took his mineral hammer out of his pack, delicately cracking the philosophic egg until the charred black lump fell out the hole at the bottom.

He then began to tap at the stone itself until a piece cracked off. It was like a geode, but instead of being filled with jewels or mineral crystals, in the hollow all that could be seen was a bit of shimmering mercury. The mercury of the philosophers.

Norret’s breath stilled. This was a treasure beyond price. Not because it could be used to purify base lead into gold, or even iron into silver for that matter, but because it had a higher use, one Norret had not even thought to hope for. Yet it was still incomplete.

Norret blessed a third person that day, Anais Devore, the duchess of Dabril, for she had left her secret laboratory in a state of organization only a woman could. Even Citizen Cedrine would have approved. In the first drawer of the apothecary cabinet, alphabetically, was A for alicorn.

Inside was not a full horn, but a silver nutmeg grater, like a noblewoman would use to spice her food, or carry on her chatelaine as she had for her portrait. Inside were fragments of horn, ground down to little ivory nuts. Alicorn was unequaled for healing, and Norret would need nothing more than this.

That said, creating the potion still took hours, and there was only so long after being exposed to air before the philosophic mercury spoiled. Yet at last, it was done and the two were mixed. A golden oil formed in the flask, glowing with a soft radiance.

Norret stoppered it and gathered up his things, then stepped back into the elevator and ascended. It was night, so he was not troubled as he left the chateau, and while the gravedigger may have seen the will-o’-wisp glow from Norret’s bottles or the rosy light of the Carbuncle, he was too fearful or knew better than to trouble with such lights.

Orlin’s grave was undisturbed, but only for the moment. Norret took off his glove and put it in his pocket, then mixed tincture of tulip with lupin, creating a mutagenic tonic which gave him the strength and claws of a wolf. The ground was frozen, but at last his nails rasped on rotten wood.

Much has been written about the alchemical stage of putrefaction, but even winter’s cold and Dabril’s perfumes could only mask so much. Once the body was out of the coffin and resting on the snow, Norret shook off the wolfen mutagen and held the perfumed glove to his nose as he slit the winding sheet.

He did not want to look at the corruption, the worms, the decay, but he did. Then he unstoppered the flask and shook the liquid over the skeleton, starting with the worm-eaten husk that had once been his brother’s heart.

“Every alchemist must decide for himself what great end he strives for. I’ve already found mine.”

The wheel of the year ran in reverse, but only for this part. The heart healed, skin knit over bones, the bloom of mold melted away like frost on windowpanes, after a moment leaving nothing but the body of a child. A golden glow spread from Orlin’s healed heart, and he slowly opened his eyes and sat up, looking about himself, Then his gaze rose.

“Norret?” he asked. “Ye—ye got old….”

“Just twenty summers.” Norret smiled. “Hardly anything. But I’m back, and so are you.”

“I’s cold.”

“It’s winter is all.” Norret took his cloak and wrapped it around the boy, helping him to stand, then cut a bit of the winding sheet, wrapping and knotting it about Orlin’s feet. He tossed the rest down into the grave along with his eyepatch, then took his hated crutch and used it to shovel in dirt before tossing it in and kicking in the last soil with his boots.

Orlin watched him in shocked wonderment.

“Here,” said Norret. “Let me show you a trick. Something Powerdermaster Davin taught us to cover our tracks.” He took a snuffbox out of his bandolier and tossed a pinch of dust on the grave.

The ground smoothed over, then the snow reappeared. As a final touch, the grave marker collapsed and decayed. The grave looked as if it had been neglected ten more years than it had existed.

“‘Tis magic…” Orlin breathed.

“No,” Norret corrected. “Alchemy.” He grinned. “What do you say to visiting Isarn? I have friends there.”

Orlin looked confused, but nodded.

Norret hugged his brother. They could not stay in Dabril, but it did not matter. He had already claimed its greatest treasure.