Commandment (39 page)

Lakif’s attention was drawn to the table, a construct made of metal. An apparatus was erected on it. A rusted metal stand bore a circular ring clamp. Beneath the clamp pooled wax. The ring supported a glass retort. A thermometer protruded from it at an askew angle. The terminal end of the device hovered above the first of several Erlenmeyer flasks positioned to catch the distillate. Also scattered around were slender paper strips. They were discolored and curled, suggesting that they once served as litmus paper.

Several scratched glass beakers lay nearby; smaller ones were telescoped into larger to save on space. A posy of ground-glass stirring rods was crammed into the topmost beaker. There was a balance with various weights. Mixed amid this equipment were countless vials, more often than not uncapped. Some sealed tubes lay among them, along with a pair of tarnished tongs.

Lakif’s impression was that the assembly represented an experiment; one that had been interrupted. The apparatus was a type of distillation; Lakif had seen the setup depicted in diagrams before. She angled her eye into the retort, but all that she could see was a tarry residue caking the inner glass.

All the elements on the tabletop appeared to be perfectly standard components of a chemist’s lab. The only unusual feature was a cracked prism set near the retort. It captured the light and dispersed it across the table in an arching rainbow. Unlike the normal colors of the rainbow, however, the dispersed light spanned colors from bright red to gray. This reminded the Acaanan of the range of colors blood turns as it ages. Several ribbonlike insects scurried haphazardly among the colored glassware.

She turned her attention from the chemist’s bench to the rest of the cellar. Thanks to the lantern, Lakif could now appreciate the entirety of the cellar, which appeared to be an amalgam of root cellar and laboratory.

The table occupied roughly the center of the basement. The stairs, as noted, ended in a corner. The wall under the stairs, as well as the one heading off, was lined with shelves.

A third wall had all but collapsed. Anything that had been in the vicinity was now buried. All that remained of that end of the cellar were mounds of clotted dirt. Several holes were dug into the moldering dunes.

Between the table and the collapsed wall lay several oblong metal plates in the ground. They bore handles, betraying their use as some kind of lid. Lakif feared that they were covered vats, the ones narrated by the ancient taleteller. She entertained opening one. They were no doubt empty.

But something deep within forced her to investigate one. At first it looked like a wine vat, crammed with crushed berries. But to her surprise it was full of dead flies. She slammed the lid shut in disgust.

The far wall was dominated by an immense iron furnace. It was a free-standing husk, a squat metallic igloo. Its shadowy facade was obscured by cobwebs. Before it stretched a stone dolmen like a primitive altar.

Lakif pulled her cloak close around her. The cellar was bitterly cold, but the eerie feel of the place chilled her to a different degree. She wondered about the man who would call this place his haven, the high priest of the Lucent. Such a rakehell truly earned the ignominy of Grimpkin.

“Do you suppose that we are the first…since that day?” Lakif felt uneasy speaking aloud. Her breath was frosted into wispy ghosts.

“I would say so, given all the debris above.”

“So that’s an alchemical furnace!” Lakif could now reconcile the actual device with the image engendered by the Bard’s tale. “It’s an iron behemoth.”

“Hopefully not a dead one,” Bael replied.

“Can we even get it working?” Lakif appraised the tank with doubt. “It looks utterly ancient.”

“It’s older than the church itself, surely.” Bael approached the furnace. “I suspect that the dolmen was the original church. This was a sinister place harking back to the earliest crack of time. The edifice above grew up around it.”

Faced with the sinister contraption, Lakif had the feeling that they would need to offer a Human sacrifice to stir the ancient god to life.

“Something lives here.” Lakif pointed to the tunnels in the collapsed wall, hoping to change the object of her dread to a topic perhaps less disturbing. “That vat is a storage bin of mangled flies. Could they be kept for something in those tunnels? Do you think they go down to Erebus?”

“Most likely to a goblin nest. Goblins savor flies like a delicacy. But our noise should keep them away,” her friend reassured her. Lakif was calmed by Bael’s take on the tunnels. The tunnels were narrow enough to accommodate goblins, and if indeed they funneled into a goblin colony, they had little to fear. Goblins were famously weak; they were even bullied by imps! They certainly wouldn’t molest two adults.

There were no doors to seal up the furnace. The dome-shaped aperture was covered by a veneer of webbing that stretched from top to bottom, like frozen saliva spanning a voracious mouth. The High-man used his torch to burn away the tarp. Curiously, as the webbing disappeared, a sharp aroma of sulfur stung Lakif’s nose. It smelled like burning hair.

The two looked with trepidation into the device’s voluminous interior. At the iron hulk’s belly laid a mass of dust, insect husks, broken glass, and other unrecognizable objects all bathed in a pearly ash. The furnace could easily fit an average sized man. Lakif had no doubt she was viewing a crematory.

“The furnace worries me not,” Bael claimed, critiquing the device. “I feel that with a little elbow grease it may yet blaze to life. But we lack the last essential ingredient. Would you do the honors?”

“Laen metal.” Lakif mentally rehearsed the nursery rhyme in her mind. Part of her wanted to further vet the device. She felt that by sifting through the accumulated chaff within, she might glean some insight into its dark past. She would have loved to have pieced together a morbid narrative based on the vestigial elements rescued from the dust. But it promised to be a filthy chore. Therefore, she happily accepted her friend’s offer. As Bael began the unenviable task of clearing debris from the behemoth’s gullet, Lakif set about searching for the last necessary element for the ritual.

To that end, the Acaanan lit a candle and probed the rest of the cellar with a careful eye. She began searching at the wall that led perpendicularly off the foot of the stairs. It housed numerous shelves from floor to ceiling, each loaded with stacked tomes and bundled scrolls.

Innumerable spiders congested the tiered texts like damp clumps of earth. Some were larger than her fist, while others were the size of a thimble. The arachnids crawled over each other in an orgy of hairy legs. Many of the larger ones were slothful as her hand swatted them away. Others, more skittish, scurried into the recesses at her touch. Contact with the critters didn’t bother her in the least.

Curiosity raging, the Acaanan lost no time sweeping away the webbing and spidery inhabitants to retrieve a random text. It was a thick tome whose vellum was caked with excrement and untold other unguents. It was titled
The Alchemist’s Codex
.

Lakif greedily leafed through the fetid pages. There were over a score of chapters, each dedicated to covering the basic alchemical procedures. Pages were devoted to the mechanics of weighing, powdering, heating, smelting, casting, calcining, distilling, fermenting, dousing, and numerous other procedures. The text was inked in sloppy handwriting. She wondered if the priest had personally penned this tome as his own workbook. Lakif would have liked to examine it in greater detail, but the rotted pages tore at her handling. Furthermore, it smelled of hard science, and she quickly dismissed the text for another.

This second book was a bound collection of sketches. Each page highlighted an aspect of Human anatomy, with an emphasis on surgical techniques useful for exploration. Lakif stalled when she reached a page illustrating a method of surgically dissecting an eyeball in layers like peeling an onion. She slammed the text shut in revulsion.

Had the Acaanan more time, she would have been inclined to clear out the arachnids to see if anything was squirreled away in the back of the shelves. But as there were other places to search, she moved on.

The wall underneath the stairs held far more appeal. Like its neighbor, it too was lined with shelves. Broken glass peppered the floor before them. The glass slivers popped underfoot as she perused the area.

The crates within were storage bins for diverse alchemical equipment, filled to the brim with glass blow tubes, lenses, funnels, vials, test tubes, beakers, tongs, and yellowed litmus paper. Several cases were devoted to common apparatuses. There was a cracked alembic whose interior was smoky gray from countless distillations. Another box was crammed with crusty retorts, some still with residual crud caking their bellies. She even found a few carboys, the encasing wood dried and cracked, yet the glass tubes within preserved intact.

Other bins contained strange looking gizmos of unknown function. The assortment of hootenannies stumped the Acaanan.

One crate in particular captured her eye. It contained numerous talismans, each with a hole in the center, apparently looking to house some precious stone. The Acaanan fancied taking one in hopes of some day fashioning a regal medallion. Also in the box was a spy glass, a few cheap wands, and a key. She had no reason to believe the items were anything other than useless baubles.

Another shelf housed a squadron of bins full of jars and vials. She began methodically examining each in turn. Some vials were opened, their contents reduced to a crusty powder or a solid mass. Others were sealed tightly, their contents miraculously intact. She ogled viscous oozes, colored gels, and watery fluids that suspended multicolored crystals or fleshy membranes. Virtually all the vials were labeled with a white tape, although in most cases the tape was peeling off or curling up from age. Sometimes it was legible; other times it was so moldy as to be unreadable. But legible labels were scribbled with undecipherable symbols.

Lakif assumed the jargon to be alchemical shorthand for the substance in question. Initially, she was intimidated by the archaic labels and worried she wouldn’t be able to identify the substances. Fortunately, beneath the symbol was written the substance’s name in the Common Tongue. Some also contained additional information, such as the approximate mass or source of the material, written with such small lettering that the Acaanan had to draw the jar right up to her eyes to read. A plethora of common words of mass were scribbled down, such as grains, scruples, drams, and ounces, along with other words that were alien to her.

Some were peculiarly labeled
earth metal essences
, of which she identified sulfur, lead, iron, mercury, copper, silver, and tin. Still other jars contained slivers of precious stones. Specks labeled agate, amethyst, jade, onyx, pearl, ruby, sapphire, and turquoise all twinkled in their respective containers before her candle. Some wedges were smoothly cut with polygonal facets for engraving. Others were cabochons, with one face flat and the other domed, like a cut orange. Unfortunately, all were studded with obvious impurities. Some had outright bizarre inclusions, such as small insects trapped within. She swore one gem looked like it housed a tooth.

Some of the vials had bizarre names: goblin’s blood, salamander scales, snake venom, spider hair, froth of rabid dog, imp’s tongue, and wyvern’s barb. Beside those of creature origin, there were many more derived from fungi, herbs, or plants. Common varieties included absinthe, belladonna, elder, jasmine, mandrake, monkshood, thyme, mugwort, wolfsbane, and nightshade. Some of these she knew as poisons from Erebus. There were even vials of quite rare specimens, such as cleric’s cowl, black lotus, shrinking violet, and spirit bane. Unfortunately, all of these organic ingredients had long since decomposed to a useless goo.

Throughout her exploration, Lakif marveled at the eclectic mixture of ingredients. Some were as common as kitchen spices while others were exceedingly rare—the stuff of myth. She could only hazard a guess as to how the alchemist came by such rarities. It seemed to her that the mere acquisition of such unique substances would dominate any alchemist’s time and surely tax his resources.

One box contained larger jars sealed with tape. Within were various degenerating organs suspended in fixative liquid. Lakif choked with revulsion at the sight, almost dropping the box on the floor in shock. She quickly placed the odious crate aside in an effort to expunge the images from her mind.

At one point, the Acaanan turned to assess her companion’s progress. Bael was leaning into the furnace and shoveling the interior with a small brazier. As he cast out debris, it looked like he was excavating a grave. The soot swirled around him, and from Lakif’s vantage point it looked like Bael was swarmed with a plague of germs. He grabbed a poker and began spearing the flue.

“What do we have here?” The Kulthean dislodged something from the flue.

“What?” Lakif wondered if he had discovered something perverse.

“It was stuck up in there.” Bael flicked out a dried ball of fur and bones. It was only the mummified carcass of a rodent. But Lakif placed a vivid spin on the find. Perhaps the furnace had become
too
esurient for life. It devoured a rodent and swallowed it whole before it could be cremated by fire. As a result the creature had lodged in the flue, the very throat of the oven, and the furnace had choked to death.

Lakif returned her attention to the wall, which seemed much longer than before. She had rummaged through a few boxes, but an army more still waited. In addition, she was sampling only the boxes on the outer edge of the shelf. It was clear that the majority of the bizarre concoctions were lost back in the nether reaches where the Acaanan was loath to peer, let alone blindly reach in a vulnerable arm.

The more she found, the more she wanted to tamper with. In addition to raw ingredients, she ran across substances seemingly made by the alchemist himself and stored there. There were elixirs and solvents, which were sadly dried up, along with dusts and powders, which had hardened and discolored. Lakif felt that even if she could divine their use, it was very unlikely they would still function. Two especially were intriguing. One vial was labeled simply
desire
. It was empty. Whether it actually contained a special gas, or its contents had diffused out long ago, was anyone’s guess. Another was stamped
universal solvent-inorganic
. This latter container was a simple wooden vial. She hesitated about opening it but was intrigued enough by its billing. Before she knew it, she found herself tucking it away in a pouch for future inspection.