And then he remembered that only hours ago he had been considering killing himself! And why? Because nothing had seemed very interesting to him anymore. Life had stretched ahead of him in its tedious regularity, scarce in pleasures, replete with pain, devoid of meaningful accomplishment. Now he was interested again, to put it mildly! The adventure that was his by right of fame and accomplishment had been taken from him. That he would not countenance. If it must, let this adventure kill him. Nobody was going to steal his offer from the devil!
He rose and kicked up the fire, which had burned down to glowing embers. He added wood and got a nice blaze going. He washed his face in the basin of almost fresh water the servant had left just two days ago. He found a piece of dried smoked beef, and washed it down with a tumbler of barley ale. And all the time he was planning out his next steps.
He would need a really strong spell to transport him where he needed to go. It would have to combine the potency of a Sending with the puissance of a Visitation. Transportation Spells were notoriously difficult, involving, as they did, the sending forth of a corporeal substance, in this case himself, to regions where creatures usually walked around in subtler bodies. The sheer amount of spiritual energy required for this was daunting.
He went to his bookcase and rummaged through his grimoires. He found a formula in Hermes Trismegistus' Surefire Travel to the Stars. But it was too complicated, calling for ingredients difficult to obtain, such as a Chinaman's left great toe, which was an item almost impossible to procure in Eastern Europe at that time, though in Venice they had a goodly supply of them. He searched on. In his Concordance to the Malleus Mallificarum he found a simpler formula with fewer ingredients. He set to making it.
Batwort… He had a whole vial of that around somewhere. And the recipe called for toad's stools, four of them entire, but luckily he had some, nicely dried and stored in a thimble. Hellebore was never any problem, white willow was common, mercury he had on hand, he was out of blackened wormwood but could pick up some more at his neighborhood pharmacy. But what was this? "Will not work without a fragment of the True Cross"!
Damnation! He had used up his last fragment last month!
Wasting no time, Faust picked up his wallet, put his emerald into it for unexpected emergencies, and went out into the street.
The corner pharmacy was closed for Easter Sunday, but by pounding on the shutters he managed to bring forth the pharmacist, who, grumbling, told him he had no True Cross in stock, and didn't know when the next shipment would arrive from Rome. He did, however, have a supply of blackened wormwood, which Faust purchased.
The bishop, lounging back in his great armchair in comfortable corpulence, shook his head uncertainly.
"I am so sorry, my dear Faust. The most recent Advice from Rome is that we are not to permit bits of the True Cross to be used for idolatrous purposes."
"Who's talking idolatry?" Faust demanded. "This is the science of alchemy we're talking about here."
"But to what end do you want to use it, my son? To gain great treasures, for example?"
"Not at all! I want it to right a great injustice!"
"Well, I guess that's all right," the bishop said. "But I warn you in advance, True Cross has gone up in price, which is only to be expected since it is a substance in limited supply."
"All I need is a fingernail-sized fragment. Charge it to my account."
The bishop took out a small japanned box containing True Cross fragments. "I was meaning to speak to you about your account."
Faust reached into his wallet and set down the emerald. "There's my down payment!" He wrapped the fragment of True Cross in birchbark and then rolled it into an old altar cloth while the bishop admired the shine of the emerald.
With the fragment wrapped securely, Faust hurried home. He started up a coal fire beneath his alchemist's furnace, and pumped the groaning leather bellows until the fire glowed red and white and gave off streams of tiny diamond sparks. Then he gathered the ingredients together. He put the jug of aqua ardens on a table near him, taking care not to spill it, since it could eat through anything not coated with aqua ardens repellent, powdered the sublimated antimony in a little brass bowl, laid out floral essences on one side, and, on the other, the toad turds, the calcified bat dung, the crystallized woodchuck's piss, and the fortified graveyard mold. He took care to keep them separate. It wouldn't do to mix them prematurely! Over here were his tartar, alum, and yeast. Here was the nigredo, which he had made just last week. He hated to sacrifice it, for with the right process it could produce a phoenix, and the phoenix was the loveliest of allegorical birds. But there was no time for aesthetics now! He was ready to begin.
And there came a knock at the door. Faust tried to ignore it, but it was repeated, and then repeated again, and behind it he could hear a babble of voices. In a very bad humor he stomped to the door and opened it.
Standing outside were four or five young men—it was hard to be sure of their exact number because they hobbled around so.
"Dr. Faust, sir! Don't you recognize us? We are students from your class in Origins of Alchemy 1b at the University. We need some advice on why the feminine anima image is always found in the changeable hermaphroditic body of Mercurius. They're bound to ask it at finals, sir, and we can't find a thing about it in our Introduction to Alchemy textbooks."
"Why, damn it," Faust said, "the entire subject of hermaphroditism and the sexual imagery of alchemy is covered in New Directions in an Old Science, by Nicholas Flamel, which I assigned you at the beginning of the year."
"You are supposed to know French!"
"But it makes no sense, sir, because if the principle of hermaphroditism according to Aristotle can be subsumed—"
Faust held up his hand, commanding silence. "Students," he said, "I am embarking on a difficult and complex experiment that will probably go down as a landmark in the annals of alchemy. I cannot permit the slightest interruption. Go to one of the other professors. Or go to the devil! Just get away from here now!"
The students left. Faust gave another bellowsing to the fire, checked to make sure his descensories, with their hair-thin crosslets, were clean and in working order. The alembics were already heated and ready to go, the sublimatory was in satisfactory condition, and the cucurbit was finally balanced to his satisfaction.
He began.
As the elements entered the crucible they changed colors in a satisfying manner. Reds and greens swirled in the gleaming liquid, layers of vapor were let out and condensed into a mist that rose to the ceiling and hung there like a transparent gray serpent. Faust put in the True Cross fragment. The substance lighted up for a moment and then turned black.
It is very bad when an alchemical reaction turns black. Luckily, Faust had noted the double flash of silver that occurred just before the blackening. He turned to his Alchemist's Trouble-Shooting Manual, produced by the wizards of Cairo University and translated by Moses Maimonides, and looked up the reaction. He read: "A double silver flash before the materia confusa goes to black means that the fragment of Cross used in the reaction was not True Cross. Check it with your religious assayer before going any further."
Damn it! Stymied again! And this time there seemed no way out. Unless there was a substitute for True Cross? He raced to his library again, but found nothing of use on its groaning shelves. He felt like screaming, so deep was his frustration. And then his gaze fell upon the parcel of books brought by the man who had entered his apartments.