Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [239]
With steady hands, he lifted the great jar and set it to its resting place over the fire. Next, withdrawing the clamp, he tilted the little box of powder so that its contents drifted within the neck of the crucible to join the metal inside.
For the space of a heartbeat there was silence.
Then with a waft and a roar, blue smoke lipped like cream from the mouth of the retort, folded, arched and rolled servilely through the hut. It thickened, dropping languid fingers to the floor and flattening itself against the wooden roof; it became dense, black and choking with the stink of sulphur; it yawned blindly in the senses and the fire, leaping as if freed of some monstrous birth, rent its thinnest layers with tongues of yellow and crimson.
Agnes screamed. Mariotta, after a single alarmed cry, held the girl tightly and stood still. Janet, gripping her stool, watched the Dowager until she could barely see her, close as she was, for the swirling fumes. They were enclosed, hot and foul and black as charcoal, they were defying panic when, sweet as a summer dawn, the smoke bloomed, and bright gold rising living from its roots flooded the dark curtain and turned it into the pure yellow of Easter sunshine.
The veil hung, fresh and precious for the space of ten seconds, and then, breaking like floss, melting, separating, sifting and dwindling through the air, it slowly vanished. Behind it, Johnnie Bullo appeared, a shadow, a monochrome, a flat and coloured impasto, and finally the vivid man, standing beside the furnace. In one hand was the clamp, and he was raising from the fire the heavy, blackened jar.
There was an iron plate on the floor in front of the Dowager. Bullo set the crucible there, and the heat from it made them draw back. They watched in silence as Johnnie stepped up, an iron bar in his hands. He swung it, and the neck of the jar broke at its base.
In silence he proffered the Dowager his tongs. She bent, groping within the crucible. The instrument gripped; she raised it and lowered what it held to the floor. It was a small block of dull metal, unmistakably gold. There was nothing else in the jar at all.
Words could not contain their triumph and amazement. The bottles and jars chattered and clinked and the walls wept tears of strange emotion. Where there had been a block of lead, there was a block of gold. The Stone of the Wise was powerful indeed.
When she could hear herself speak, the Dowager, scarlet with pleasure, was also urgently pressing. “May we see it again? May we see the Stone again? Now we know it is the true Stone.”
She had been less than tactful, and he demurred at first; but both Mariotta and Agnes added their voices, and finally he brought out the silver box. Sybilla opened it lovingly.
“Lift it,” said Janet. “Is it heavy?”
The Dowager inserted a delicate finger and thumb. “Not very. So small, and so powerful. If one scraping does all this, what mightn’t the whole Stone do?”
The white teeth flashed. Johnnie, royally confident, was in carefree mood. “It would burn as the sun in your hand would burn, my lady. But you will wish to use it sparingly and make it last long.”
“Not particularly,” said Sybilla. She weighed the precious thing a moment in her hand, a calculating look in the blue eye, and then pitched it wholesale into the heart of the furnace.
Everybody screamed at once, and Johnnie’s shout was the loudest of all.
The roar and belch of black smoke this time pounced on them like the black underbelly of the ancient Chaos himself, snarling and surging about them with inhuman venom. It grew dark: far darker than before. Their eyes became blind as the eyes of the dead and the unborn; their senses thickened and stifled beneath the blanket of sulphur and their skins grew heavy and clogged with the rushing filth. The furnace roared. The last thing Janet saw was Sybilla’s head, like eidelweiss on some black, mirrored