As
soon as she arrived home Kathleen took her sampling funnel down into her
workshop. She had converted the basement
of her house, used by the previous inhabitant as a well-stocked wine cellar,
into a more than a well-equipped alchemist’s laboratory. It was a cluttered
space, full of a variety of metal, glass and wooden devices. Any connoisseur of
witchery, however, would have been disappointed to find that there was no
bubbling cauldron; although Kathleen did have a number of large solid
saucepans. Unfortunately, however, most of them had by now been taken up to be
used in her kitchen to make jam.
What Kathleen did have, however, was a
‘reality still’ and she was very eager to use it. It sat on a long bench on one
of the walls of the lab and was made of the same bronze metal as the sampling
funnel. It stretched across almost the whole length of the wall and consisted
of a series of seven tubular chambers of increasing size, each connected to its
neighbour by a short bronze tube. In addition each chamber was equipped with a
small stopcock on a downward pointing stub of a pipe. It looked like the odd kind of apparatus that
you might find in an exotic distillery.
As far as she knew, this was the only reality
still in the world. She had asked discreetly in every centre of learning and
research she had ever visited; Eth City, Visnea, Kingspit, and a host of other
smaller institutions, and in no case did they have any idea what she was
talking about.
She had found it in Babalia, in a warehouse
owned by a very old and very well-travelled merchant. He was close to retirement and he was trying
to shift all of his stock. The still was one of the few things left, and he had
been unable to sell it to anyone. The problem had been that its previous owner,
an elven mage, had mislaid its instruction manual. The merchant had seen that
thing was clearly very valuable, but had refused to buy it unless the mage
wrote out some instructions. They were now taped to the bench below the still.
Kathleen examined the yellowing pages for the
umpteenth time. The old elf had
scribbled, in a shaky hand, some very basic directions in Archaic Elven. She
had then drawn a series of boxes, in a row, each a little smaller than the
last, clearly intended to represent the seven cylinders of the still. There
were five boxes with clear labels and then the final two boxes had a fat black
line drawn through them and the comment ‘seem to be broken’ scribbled across
it.
The witch pulled her boots off and let them
drop on to the floor. She placed the funnel in its green bag on the large
table. She was in a dreadful hurry. The
council had heard from a number of its sources that there was every chance that
whoever was responsible for crafting the rays was experimenting with bigger and
more dangerous Outer Void creatures. The council needed Kathleen to develop a
counter spell as quickly as she was able. Kathleen was also waiting eagerly for
any news from Laurence, who was, she hoped, beginning his enquiries in Oikonde.
Her slippers were here somewhere. She poked
around under the table and found one crushed under the leg. It was with some
effort that she pulled it free. Where was the other one? How could she work if
she wasn’t comfortable? She ducked under the table and scrabbled around. She
reappeared holding the slipper in one hand and a mug in the other.
She wondered if she should have a cup of tea
before starting the distillations; she was very thirsty. She glanced down at
the green bag. No, she concluded – sort this out first, and then the cuppa.
She wriggled her feet into her shabby green
slippers and stood over the table. She picked up the hessian bag and undid the
ties. She put the funnel containing the outer void substance down in front of a
long row of identical funnels each with taps. Then, steadily, one by one she
inspected the row. She picked up each funnel so that she could see the window
of glass in its base. Then she tested the taps.
Once she was happy with these examinations
she took all the funnels and attached them one at a time to the subsidiary pipes
that hung down from each cylindrical section. Finally, she fixed a funnel at
the end of the whole series of compartments and opened the taps in both the
funnels and the compartment down pipes.
The still was now ready – she just had to put the Outer Void substance
into it and extract its essences.
Her hands were trembling slightly as she
picked up the sample funnel from the table and fixed it, with exceptional care,
on to the entrance valve to the still. The tap on the sample funnel was still
closed.
She took a step back and then did one final
inspection, checking the seal for all nine funnels that were now attached to
the still. In fact, from experience she
knew, just as the old mage had indicated, that the last two hanging funnels and
the one at the end never yielded any distillate and so she paid them almost no
attention; they just had to be fixed on to make a seal. Finally she was happy.
She stood in front of the largest cylinder
and whispered ‘twrf’. The first compartment sparked suddenly and
produced a very high pitch tone, almost like a screech. Kathleen opened the first
tap.
She knew that this first compartment was
vital for the success of the analysis. This was the place where all the random
pieces of reality, the bits that were always absorbed on to the surface of any
substance that was moved about through reality, would be distilled. This was
the noise.
The high hum died down slowly and abated.
Kathleen closed the tap on the pipe leading from the first compartment and as
well as the tap on its connected funnel. Then she pulled the funnel off from
the still. She tipped it and looked inside through the transparent base. Her
heart sank – there was nothing there. This usually meant that something had
gone wrong; perhaps the outer void substance had somehow leaked out?
She frowned, but continued half-heartedly
with the process. Each cylinder required a different trigger word and each
hummed to a different frequency. She went through the compartments quickly, not
wanting to waste too much time: physical
material, energy, magical charge, spiritual fabric. Every funnel was empty; she
felt devastated. This was the most important analysis that she’d undertaken for
at least a decade, possibly the most important in her whole life, and she had
failed even to get the sample into the still. How would she explain that to the
others?
All that was left to do was to vent the
system by opening the last three, redundant valves, and clean out all of the
funnels, but that could wait. She knew that there was no harm in leaving the
still indefinitely in this state. More pressingly, she knew she’d have get some
mail paper and write to John. She frowned even more deeply – that really
wouldn’t be an easy letter to write.
Oh well, at least she could have that break
now before she went to look for the paper and ink. She knew that absolutely
everything looked a little better after a nice cup of tea.
[1]
Fanemouth – coastal city in eastern Eth. A large merchant port, second in size
only to its naval equivalent, Seerport, further north. It trades extensively with Gorodnikov, the
cities of southern Paror and Haafez, in Babalia.
