The Tenebris Scientiam was, for all intents and purposes, a cookbook.
It wasn’t for delicious chocolate cakes or three hundred exciting recipes for paleo. No, this book was for alchemists, and it contained recipes and instructions for some very nifty potions discovered by hundreds of scholars over decades. Unfortunately, like paleo recipes, most tasted like crap.
But the things they could do! Enhance senses, change a person’s shape, heal, kill, distill emotions, manipulate reality. The possibilities were endless, provided you had the right ingredients. Which is where the problem really started. Because the local 7-Eleven did not have hydra venom, or the blood of a martyr, or mistletoe cut on a night when Mercury occults Uranus. Ingredients were expensive. Sometimes impossible to acquire. And I was running out.
I flipped the pages carefully until I reached a recipe I had already made several times: a truth serum. I read the instructions, though I knew them by heart. It required, among other things, a crystallized angel tear. Or, in accountant’s terms, it required nine hundred seventy-five dollars, which is what one of those tears cost, last time I purchased one. I had only one, and the thought of wasting it made me sick. But you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs, and you can’t get a combination key without spiking Maximillian’s drink, so waste it I would.
I walked over to one of the shelves and picked up a jar labeled in my own almost illegible handwriting: Cryst. Angel Tear. It had one small crystal in it, its color a sparkling silver. I put the tear in the glass retort and lit the flame underneath. The tear itself was highly poisonous to humans, but when distilled, I could extract its essence. I wasn’t sure exactly what it contained—perhaps God’s own DNA, or distilled holiness, or maybe just the condensed essence of a whiny angel. But regardless, the essence could compel truth, if used correctly. Which was what I needed here.
While the tear distilled, I went back to my cookbook and skimmed the instructions again.
Something thumped loudly behind me. Probably a client knocking on the shop’s door. I ignored it. The “closed” sign should have been clear enough on its own.
I took a bit of earth from the old country (a.k.a. England) and the shell of a bluebird’s egg, and crushed them together with my pestle. My sharp grinding movements aligned themselves with the rhythm of repeated knocks on the door. Finally, exasperated, I put the pestle down. I returned my cookbook to the safe, and locked it up. I verified that the gas flame wasn’t burning the angel tear, and that the essence was distilling nicely. Then I went to the shop door and unlocked it, preparing myself to shout at the persistent customer.
It was a short Japanese man, his hair the color of cinnamon, and a cheerful smile was plastered on his face. It took me a moment to recognize him. Last time I had seen him, it had been pitch-dark, and I had been vomiting.
“Harutaka!” I remembered I had told Sinead to ask him to come over.
“Yes!” he answered, his voice carrying a mild accent, and a tone of excitement. “You are Lou Vitalis, who saved my life four days ago.”
“You can just call me saved my life,” I said, and then, at his confused look, added, “Sorry. It was a joke. Not very funny. Not funny at all, really.”
“A dad joke,” Harutaka said helpfully.
“Yes, thank you. Come in.”
I moved aside, and he entered the shop, looking around in wonder. Magnus barreled into the room, barking excitedly at the new visitor. Harutaka bent his knee, crouching to look at my dog, frowning in a serious manner.
“That’s my puppy, Magnus. He’s very excitable.”
Harutaka smiled at the dog. Magnus barked again, wagging his tail, and licked Harutaka’s face.
“Magnus, no!” I rebuked him sharply. “I’m sorry. He really likes you, apparently. Usually he doesn’t lick anyone except me and his…” balls. “Uh… anyone except me.”
“Maybe that’s his way of saying hello,” Harutaka suggested, and then, to my astonishment, he stuck out his tongue and licked Magnus’ face.
My puppy was overjoyed. He ran all over the shop, knocking down a stool and a coat rack, then jumped at me, his eyes clearly asking me if I saw what had just freaking happened.
“I have dog hair in my mouth,” Harutaka said, standing up.
“That’s what you get, apparently,” I muttered. “Oh shit, the tear!”
I dashed back to my lab. To my relief, the tear hadn’t burnt yet. I quickly turned off the gas, inspecting the jar with the distilled essence. It condensed on the glass surface, a silvery fog speckled with tiny spots where the liquid materialized. It looked good.
“Can I come in?” Harutaka asked behind me.
Panicked, I glanced at the counter, where the cookbook had been, but then remembered I had put it back in the safe. Aside from it, I didn’t keep any secrets in my lab. “Sure, come in. I have to prepare some stuff. But close the door, don’t let Magnus in.” A wave of dizziness hit me and I leaned on the counter, breathing heavily. My dash had drained what little energy I had.
“Are you all right?”
“Yeah. Still a bit sick from that night. But I’m getting better.” I slowly shuffled back to the mortar and pestle, a wave of nausea roiling in my stomach.
“So.” I began to crush the earth and the eggshell again. “Sinead said you’re willing to help us.”
“Of course.” Harutaka pried a dog hair from his mouth. “After you saved me, it is the least I could do.”
I smiled, amused. “Don’t bullshit me, Harutaka. You’re not doing this out of a sense of debt. You’re doing it for the dragon scales.”
“Can it be both?”
“Sure, whatever floats your boat.”
“Then I would say it’s about twenty percent sense of debt, eighty percent dragon scales.”
I put the crushed powder in a sieve above a copper pot, and began wiggling it back and forth. The powder that filtered through the sieve’s holes and scattered inside the copper pot was brown and thin. “What were you doing in the Shades’ sacred library anyway?”
“I was searching for shadow magic runes.”
“Did you find any?”
“The books were all blank,” he said.
“Well, I guess the Shades don’t read the books, right? They read the books’ shadows.” I tossed the few pebbles and eggshell particles that remained in the sieve into the trash. Then I poured some water into the copper pot.
“That’s very true… What are you doing?”
“What does it look like I’m doing?”
“It looks like you’re preparing mud.”
“That’s pretty much what it is,” I agreed. “But it’s a special mud. Soil from various countries and eggshells of different birds form the baseline for many potions. Just like flour and eggs are often the baseline for cakes.”
“I see.”
I put the pot on the gas and stirred it occasionally. “But you must have known the books in the library would be empty. And you still went there.”
“I may have found a way to read the shadows of books myself,” he said carefully.