A Star Shall Fall

The doctor nodded with good grace. “I see. My apologies, Mr. St. Clair. I did not mean to cause trouble.” Then his expression brightened. “Oh—but my experience with the salamander gave me an interesting thought. Come, let’s sit down, and I will tell you about it.”

Sitting down meant going to the other end of the room from the corpse and its shrivelled coal of a heart. Galen doubted that was coincidence. He went willingly, but waved away Andrews’s offer of coffee.

“It had to do with what that Arab fellow said,” Andrews began, “concerning alchemy. Now, most alchemists were mountebanks or poor deluded fools, and I very much doubt if any of them ever made an ounce of gold out of anything else, unless it was the hopes of their credulous clients. But what if it works here? Among the faeries?”

Galen frowned. “Dr. Andrews—I love a good conjecture as much as the next man, but how does this help us against the Dragon?”

“It doesn’t,” the doctor said, with far more excitement than those words merited. “But it may provide a way to make the Dragon help us.”

Which explained the excitement, but not its cause. “I don’t follow you.”

“Do you know anything of alchemy?” Galen shook his head. “It wasn’t just about turning dross into gold. That transformation, as they conceived it, consisted of purging a metal of its flaws and impurities, bringing it into a more perfected state. And the same thing, Mr. St. Clair, could be done to the human body.”

Galen shook his head a second time, still not following.

“I am talking,” Dr. Andrews said, “of the philosopher’s stone.”

He’d heard the phrase, in much the same way he’d heard of faeries before he saw Lune in the night sky. A foolish fable, indicating something dreamt of but unreal. In this case, the means of achieving mankind’s dearest dream.

Immortality.

But what could the Dragon have to do with that? Dr. Andrews said, “The details are complicated—indeed, over the centuries men devised a hundred variants upon the theme, and as I said, I doubt very much if any of them worked. Much of it, however, comes down to two substances: philosophic sulphur, and philosophic mercury.

“These are not to be confused with the substances we know, brimstone and quicksilver. They represent principles, an opposing pair. Sulphur is hot, dry, and active; it is fire and air, the red or sun king, brightly burning.”

“In other words,” Galen said, his mouth drying out, “the Dragon.”

Andrews nodded. “It seems very likely that this beast is the embodiment of the sulphuric principle. Mr. St. Clair, if the alchemist can conjoin and reconcile those two opposing principles… he creates the philosopher’s stone.”

Had they been sitting in Andrews’s house on Red Lion Square, it would have seemed absurd. The philosopher’s stone? Immortality? But they were in the Onyx Hall, where even the mundane trappings of chairs and carpets and tables could not disguise the fey quality of the place, the hushed mystery of London’s shadow.

Here, perhaps, it might be possible.

Andrews might as well have reached inside Galen’s head and turned his brain upside down. Not to fight or imprison or banish the Dragon, but to use it. Transform a threat into a tool, and once they had done so…

Galen’s fancy immediately slipped its leash, imagining not just the defeat of the Dragon, but the consequences of that success. Fame, fortune—the King was almost seventy-five. What might he give to the men who could restore his youth?

A dose of common sense helped. “As I understand it, alchemists worked with laboratory equipment, boiling and distilling things. How in Heaven’s name are we to wrestle your philosophic sulphur into any kind of conjunction, when it will be trying to burn us all alive?”

“I haven’t the first notion,” Andrews said. The gleam in his eyes chilled Galen, even as the possibility that sparked it quickened his breath. “That, Mr. St. Clair, is what we must devise.”

THE GRECIAN, LONDON

14 October 1758

Under most circumstances, Irrith would have enjoyed the chance to go into the city on someone else’s bread. After all, every bite she got from another was a bite that didn’t come out of her own meager store, and then she had a whole day of safety in the world above.

Most circumstances did not involve Valentin Aspell, and a meeting she wasn’t at all sure she wanted to attend.

They shared a hackney, which put her much closer to him than she wanted to be. The uncomfortable silence lasted for a few minutes before Irrith said, “Aren’t you going to make me swear an oath?”

His whisper-thin eyebrows rose. “An oath?”

“Not to tell anyone about this.”