All of his alchemical supplies, gone.
Since then he had been trying to replenish his stores, with some mixed success. The market in the border town had supplied him with the firecrackers they had used so effectively against the Mongol war party, as well as a number of other basic ingredients. Yasper had been excited when they had first stumbled across the wormwood—the hearty plant native to these lands—but after days and days of seeing clumps of it everywhere, Yasper’s enthusiasm had diminished drastically. Cnán knew little about the alchemist’s recipes (and wanted to know very little, actually), but what she had gleaned was that all of his potions, unguents, powders, and salves were built from a carefully measured base of two or three simple ingredients.
Salt being one of those basic ingredients.
“What is it that you hope to create?” she asked, out of boredom more than any concerted interest.
Yasper offered her a wolfish grin. “Why, nothing more than the secrets of the universe, of course,” he laughed. “Every alchemist seeks to unlock the riddle of existence by discerning the secret methods by which God constructed the world. All of this,” he gestured around them, “though this is not much, but all of the world was created through a complex set of instructions. Men have spent their entire lives trying to enumerate the multitudinous mystery of creation. Pliny—do you know Pliny? No, of course you don’t—Pliny wrote thirty-seven volumes on the natural history of the world. Thirty-seven!” He sat up in his saddle, his mood improving as he spoke. “Can you imagine how complicated this world is that God has created? Don’t you want to understand how all the various pieces fit together?”
“I hadn’t really thought about it,” Cnán admitted. “But why do you want to understand it? So that you can become a god too?”
Yasper shook his head. “That would be heresy,” he clucked his tongue at her, a grin stretching his mouth. “No, we seek to understand who we truly are, and what our true purpose is. If we can comprehend how the world was made, and learn the power of transmutation—the art of changing one thing into another—could we not give ourselves that same gift?”
“Which gift?”
“Transmutation.”
“Trans-what?”
“Becoming something new.”
Cnán scratched her nose. “What’s wrong with what we are?”
Yasper closed one eye and stared critically at her. “What’s right about what we are?” he asked.
Cnán, now somewhat sorry she had even asked her initial question, shook her head and stared out at the horizon in the vain hope of finding something to distract the alchemist. He was warming to this one-sided conversation, and she feared it was only going to get more confusing. “Look,” she said, sitting up in her saddle and pointing. She was not embarrassed to hear a note of elation in her voice. “There!”
Ahead of them, a thin black shape reached up from the flat ground, a finger stretching to poke the empty dome of the heavens. It wiggled, like a worm struggling to pull itself from rain-softened mud.
“Rider!” Cnán called out to the others while Yasper stood in his saddle, shading his eyes. After peering through the heat haze for a moment, he sank back down into his saddle, and the slope of his shoulders told her everything.
“It’s Istvan,” he said bitterly.
As the Hungarian drew closer, she could confirm what the alchemist had noticed as well. The Hungarian was alone.
But what chilled her was the fact that he was in front of them.
Where had Graymane gone?
CHAPTER TWO
Factus Sum Tamquam Vas Perditum
He needed to make a dramatic entrance.
Not far from the secret door he used to come and go from the Septizodium, there was a crack in the wall that opened into a narrow slot. Previously, Fieschi had used it as a makeshift dressing room, exchanging the vestments of his station for a plain wool robe. Now, as the tunnels beneath the Septizodium began to fill with smoke and the cries of the panicked Cardinals, he waited patiently in his hiding spot.
Before squeezing into his secret sanctum, he had gone ahead to the secret door and released the hidden latch. He had pushed it open slightly, just enough for a little air to get in, and for a little smoke to get out. The young messengers had used the door, and while he suspected the two jesters—Colonna and Capocci—had known of its existence prior to the arrival of the intruders, he didn’t want to leave it to Providence that it would be found: he needed witnesses, an audience that would flock to his miraculous appearance.