Blue and Gold by K.J. Parker Page A

napkin in the
brew, then set light to it. Alarming is putting it mildly. I was extremely
lucky to have been shown how to do it by an expert; that said, Onesander’s
wanted poster called him “a tall man with no eyebrows”, a description so
accurate that he was in custody within three days of its appearance on the
Temple doors. As a precaution, I filled the big basin with water and dunked my
head in it. When the napkin had burned away, I shook the ashes carefully into a
pot, and worked the bellows until the fire was as hot as I could get it.
    Next, the
crucible, which I half-filled with expensive copper nails (hell of a waste; but
they’re nearly pure copper, and I wasn’t paying for them). I used up most of a
half-hundredweight sack of charcoal before they melted; whereupon I poured the
molten metal into my dainty little five-cavity ingot mould and put them aside
to take the cold. My bottle of aqua tollens proved to be empty, which was
annoying, so I had to make some up from scratch; add salt to water, then add
raw fine powdered silver to aqua fortis; combine the two in a glass vessel to
produce a brown sludge; add spirit of hartshorn until the sludge disappears;
aqua tollens. By the time I’d done all that the little copper fingers were cool
enough to knock out of the ingot mould. Take one ingot, lower it slowly with
tongs into the aqua tollens; wait five minutes, then fish it out again, wash off
the aqua tollens, dry carefully. One small silver-plated copper ingot.
Naturally, I’ve simplified and falsified the instructions (because if I told
you how it’s really done you could do it too, and put me and my brethren out of
business).
    Four copper ingots,
one silver one. I put on my buckskin glove, shook a little of the burnt-napkin
ash onto the tip of my index finger, and gently stroked the silver-plated ingot
until the ash was all gone. It happens so gradually that at first you don’t
notice, unless the light from your lamp catches it at just the right angle.
It’s a long, slow business, and just as you’re in despair and convinced that
it’s not working, the smear on the surface of the silver assumes an undeniably
yellow tinge. That restores your faith, and you carry on until all the ashes
are gone and your fingertip’s numb, and the silver ingot is now deep, glowing,
honey-yellow gold.
    Piece of cake,
really.
    Time doesn’t
register when I’m working, so I had no idea how long all this had taken me;
experience suggested six hours, but the copper had been painfully slow to melt,
whereas the ashes had worked in quicker than I’d been expecting. Broad as it’s
long. Time melts sometimes, flows and congeals, forms a hard skin over a molten
core.
    I put all the bottles
and jars carefully away, so anyone snooping around wouldn’t know what I’d used,
then I closed Polycrates and put him gratefully back on his shelf.
    I poured water
into a glass beaker, then added a drop of blueberry juice to turn it a
harmless, inert blue; then I put the gold ingot in the beaker, and stacked the
four copper ingots neatly next to it. Then I took my four-pound straight-peen
hammer off the rack, wrapped the head carefully with cloth and banged on the
door with my fist.
    The usual
graunching of key in lock, and the door opened. I didn’t know the guard. I
tried to look past him, but he stood in the way.
    “I need some
stuff,” I said.
    He nodded. “What?”
    “Sal regis, furor
diaboli, radix pedis dei, saturated sal draconis in vitriol—”
    He scowled at me.
I smiled. “Come inside,” I said. “I’ll write it down for you.”
    He went off, with
his little slip of parchment, and the door closed and the lock graunched. I
upended my four-minute timer and waited for the sand to pour through. Then I
knocked on the door again.
    The guard stuck
his head round the doorframe. “What?” he said, and I hit him with the hammer.
He went down like an apple from a tree. I waited, counting up to six, then
carefully opened the door;