looks down at me again I smile, and he clears his throat.
“Let’s begin then.” He opens a square of wax paper marked with a circle, a line bisecting it, and I gasp.
“What?” he asks, alarm striking through his usual rasp as he looks at me, spilling white grains from the packet onto the table.
“Is that salt?”
“Yes.” He scrapes the fallen salt into his hands. “Why?”
“It was bothering me; I kept seeing it. I realized when we came here it was alchemic. But I didn’t know until just now that it meant salt. The great purifier.”
He huffs, then tips the white crystals into his scales, balancing them against expensive-looking bronze weights before he nods in satisfaction. “It comes from here, the salt. Crystals that form when water drips through the rock. That’s what glitters up there.” He points towards the sparkling ceiling, before tipping the salt into the pestle and beginning to grind it. “Sal Salis. It’s different from sea salt. You wouldn’t want to use it to season your food. Trust me, I learned the hard way.” He’s pushed the sleeves of his tunic right up, bunching them around the tops of his arms. I can see the muscles there flexing and tensing as he works and, despite everything, I find it strangely hypnotic to watch them bulge and then ebb as he turns the salt to powder before adding it to the bowl.
“Start the fire, please,” he says, shaking me from my trance.
Dimia appears by his side at the bench, smiling at me as she strikes the flint. I feel the sting of envy when I see her working by his side. I want to be part of this.
I stay silent as he tells her what to pass to him, watching as he adds it to the ceramic bowl, trying to keep up as he points out herbs, plants, powders, things I know, things I’ve never seen before, things I didn’t know existed. Marigold, morning glory, angel water, spagyric tonic, bay leaves, mandrake, convolvulus, yew bark, wheat. The names whirl around my mind and I try to remember them all.
As the mixture heats, a strange, herbal smell starts to spiral out from it, and I wrinkle my nose.
“It’s going to get a lot worse.” Silas leans away from the table and walks out of my sight. When he returns, carrying two earthenware jars, he peers into the bowl as he places them beside it. “Almost,” he says, as much to himself as to Dimia and me. He pulls the jars towards him and I see both have symbols baked into their side.
The first has a triangle with an upside-down cross stretching from the base, and from this he pulls a bright yellow rock. From the second, marked with a crowned circle, he pulls a red rock. He stands each in a tiny, shallow copper plate marked with the same symbol as was on the jar and places them in front of the tripod.
“You need to go now.” He looks at Dimia and she nods reluctantly, shooting a glance at me.
“I’ll see you soon,” she says, walking over and touching my hand. I think I feel it. I smile at her, and then she’s gone. I turn back to Silas.
He pulls a taper, a small dull knife, a glass pipe-shaped instrument and a crystal vial with a flat metal base towards him and arranges them in front of him. The way he does it is so precise, so deliberate, that I’m furious I can’t sit up, can’t see it properly. All at once it hits me that what I’m seeing is real alchemy. From start to finish. Not the end product following a drugged sleep, but possibly the last philtresmith in the world, making the Elixir from scratch, before my eyes.
Silas exhales, loudly, breaking into my wonder. With lightning speed, he plunges the taper into the flames beneath the white bowl and uses it to set both the red and yellow rocks alight. Instantly the room fills with a metallic, sulphuric reek and I wish I could cover my nose. He lifts the white bowl in his gloved hands and strains it into the crystal vial. He puts the thin end of the pipe instrument into the neck of the vial and holds it over the smoke from the red rock, and I watch as it flows in through the wide bowl, along the thin stem and into the vial, where it crystallizes and sinks to the bottom, forming a