Lucas spent the rest of the day wandering the expansive building. No one stopped him if he tried to do that. If he went down the hallways to the other buildings, though, the guards asked his business and politely turned him away. It was a strange place, and the closest he could get to wrapping his mind around it was to think of the whole Black Gate Fortress as some kind of research site.
Or one of those black sites where they dissect UFOs out in Nevada, he thought glumly, wondering if this was the sort of place people disappeared from after their King no longer needed them.
Lucas had an early dinner of bland pasta before sunset, and then he waited for the gnome at the bottom of the stairs. Heisenburgle showed up exactly at sunset and seemed disappointed that Lucas was already there.
He was probably looking forward to chastising me for being late, he thought to himself. He seemed like the type.
“Hey man,” Lucas said, trying to smooth things over, “how’s it going?”
“I have no idea how things are going to go,” the gnome said, utterly misinterpreting him. “We won’t know until we take apart your recipe and we see what it is we are working with.”
“No, I mean, like, how are you doing?” Lucas asked as the two of them started to climb the tower very slowly. If Heisenburgle had been slow on the way down, he was glacial on the way up.
“I am doing as well as can be expected for a man of my stature when he has been saddled with inferior minds and insufficiently challenging tasks,” the gnome complained.
“Hey, it’s not like I wanted to be here either,” Lucas said after a deep breath or two, so he didn’t bite the gloomy little bastard’s head off.
“Unlikely,” the gnome said, disagreeing with even that. “An alchemist of your caliber would quite literally kill to learn my secrets. I should know. There have been several attempts on my life.”
“I’m sorry to hear that—” Lucas started.
“I’m not surprised, of course,” the gnome continued. “Here at Black Gate, we push the limits of understanding in so many ways, magically and alchemically.”
“Is that so?” Lucas said, happy to let the man talk for once if he was going to stick to this topic. “I thought this was just some kinda fancy lab.”
“Well, whoever told you that was entirely incorrect,” Heisenburgle laughed. “A proper alchemical laboratory requires craftsmen, true, but those forges out there? They are doing more than that, but I’ve said too much already…”
“I get it,” Lucas answered, trying to pivot to something more relevant now that they were almost at the top of the stairs. “But about the—”
“Oh, well, if you insist, I can give you one little hint…” the gnome said, obviously dying to tell someone. “What if I told you that we're attempting to tame elemental fire to make a tireless means of transportation that would take no grain and produce no manure?”
“I would say it sounds like you’re working on an internal combustion engine,” Lucas answered dismissively without thinking about it.
That stopped the gnome in his tracks, and he whirls around at the top of the stairs. For once, the difference in elevation made it possible that he could almost look Lucas straight in the eyes. “Who told you?!” he hissed with a look of shock on his face. “Was it the dwarves? The Prince? Did someone steal my plans to—”
“Listen, H-man,” Lucas started, “I—”
“That is not my name,” the gnome said, “Say it right!”
“Heisenburgle…” Lucas sighed, refraining from rolling his eyes with pure force of will. “I don’t really care about engines or automobiles or whatever it is you are working on in there. I just want to know who it is we’re working for on this project. On your project, okay?”
“Automo-what?” the gnome laughed, suddenly relieved. “No, there’s nothing automatic about the hyperquadabulator you have to… actually, you know what. Forget I said anything. What was your question?”
Lucas shrugged. “I just want to know what the prince wants the super blue for,” he answered as he walked into the lab and looked around the cluttered workspaces. “You can keep all the secrets you want.”
“That’s all?” Heisenburgle smiled, obviously relieved to be switching topics. “You mean you haven’t put it together yet?”
“Put what together?” Lucas asked.
“We are being commanded by his highness to make a drug so potent that it would stop the heart of even the strongest men, so who could it be for?”
“That’s why I asked him if he was going to assassinate someone with it?” You actually asked the Prince that, Heisenburgle scoffed, his eyes widening. “He’s much too smart to put together such a paltry plan, especially with the elixirs I create for him.”
“Elixers?” Lucas murmured to himself, suddenly wondering if some alchemical flask was what made the Prince so much smarter than a man like that had any right to be. After all, Lucas had his own endurance flasks; it was entirely possible that—
“I’ll let you think on it for a day or two before I give you the answer,” Heisenburgle smiled with a smug grin. “The question is not who is it for, but who could withstand the bliss that it provides. For now, though, I must insist we start looking through your ingredients.”
This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.
“Who's to say that if I give you my recipe, you aren’t just going to kill me or take over my business,” Lucas asked. He’d written the ingredients down earlier, knowing that he had no choice but to go along with this. Now that the moment had arrived, though, the idea of giving up his trump card felt like a bridge too far.
“I’ve never killed anyone,” Heisenburgle said, moving to a bench and sitting down in the chair next to it. “If by you, you mean the Prince, then I really can’t say, but I can tell you this. If you don’t do what he wants you to, then he'll find a way to motivate you, and no one wants that sort of motivation. Take it from me.”
That’s a nice girl you got there; it would be a shame if something happened to her. For some reason, the old gangster line ran through his mind, and at that moment, all he could think of was that they might hurt Danaria to get to him. There were worse things than waking up in bed with a horse’s head.
That was what finally made him pull the note he’d made from his pocket and hand it over. Lucas could come up with a new drug, but if these guys decided to hurt those closest to him, well, there was no replacing her.
“A lot of these ingredients are out of season, so we might have to send—” Lucas started to say, letting his worry gnaw at him. He was sure that once they got all the elemental bullshit out of the way, he could learn enough here to make this trade worthwhile, but even so, it killed him to let go of that paper.
“If you have anything that we don’t already have in storage on this list, I will eat my hat,” Heisenburgle answered as he snatched away the paper. Lucas noted that he was not wearing a hat to cover up his frizzy gray hair and large bald spot, which made that a pretty easy bet to make.
Before the gnome unfolded the list, though, he said, “I thought that it was a titration of rarefied blue esper sap, powdered azulite, and either dimonium blossoms or perhaps some concentrated jellyfish venom. I couldn’t quite make all of the mixtures stable, but the addicts we test the best results on claimed to feel a high that was similar but utterly inferior—”
“You just test random mixtures on addicts?” Lucas asked, vaguely horrified. “What if you poison them to death.”
“Well, they were bound for the noose regardless, so their lives are already forfeit.” Heisenburgle shrugged. “This way, at least they get to die doing what they loved.”
Lucas rubbed his eyes, completely blown away by that revelation. The alchemist might be smart enough to collect all these ingredients and try to distill starlight, but he didn’t seem to have any ability to see the strange pop-ups that Lucas saw, so it was entirely possible that he had no idea how toxic so of the ingredients he had might be.
While Lucas wrestled with the new facts, Heisenburgle asked, “How close did I get?”
“One for five, chief,” Lucas answered as he looked around for a stool built for humans and moved it so he could sit next to the tiny gnome.
“One for… there are five ingredients in this? How?” the gnome asked as he tore open the paper. “Sour dwarf berries? witch grass blossoms? blue esper willow vine sap? wizened gnome caps? … goblin bile?!” with each new item on the list, the gnome’s disbelief grew, and when he reached the last item on the list, he threw it up in the air in disbelief.
“You cannot be serious,” he said, obviously shocked. “These are… these are common herbs… and their elemental affinities are all over the map. You’ve got lesser fire mixing with greater and lesser water? That can’t be right!”
Lucas opened his mouth to explain, but the gnome wouldn’t let him get a word in edgewise. “Is this a joke? Am I a joke to you? Did the Prince send you here to test me? Is that it?”
“Listen, Mister Heisenburgle, I’m going to need you to calm down because you’re getting on my last fucking nerve,” Lucas said in a tight voice, with hard eyes that started so hard into the gnome’s that the alchemist eventually had to look away. “We gotta work on this shit or else, right? Well, you’re making that pretty fucking hard on me right now, and I’m getting a little sick of it.”
“You’re sick of it?” the gnome answered defensively. How do you think I feel? To be stuck with a man that only knows about herbs from the Greenwood and doesn’t even know the difference between ground-up earth shards and pulverized root rot?”
Earth Shards (Ground): Endurance 5, poison -1. Strongly earth-aspected.
Root Rot (Pulverized, Unsterilized): Poison 5, intelligence 3, endurance -3. Use without sterilizing runs the risk of spreading the disease to the imbiber.
Neither of the two were ingredients that Lucas had ever seen before, but he could see immediately why the gnome had chosen them. They were sitting close together in unlabeled jars, and they looked nearly identical. The earth shards were a touch grainer, and the root rot was just a little darker. Without his annoying little pop-ups, Lucas would have said that they were just dirt, but they clearly weren’t. They were powerful reagents, and the earth shards especially tempted him to want to learn more.
“I’d be careful with this root rot,” Lucas said as he reached for the correct vial and slid it before the gnome. “It doesn’t look like it’s been treated properly. Putting that in a potion might give whoever drinks it a real bad day.”
At first, Heisenburgle merely gaped at him, but after Lucas started talking about the root rot, he got very defensive. “What are you talking about?” the gnome said. It’s very clearly been… as he opened the jar and sniffed it, his expression soured, “Well, perhaps we will put it in boiling water a few minutes more, just to be sure. How did you do that? Is there a label somewhere that I missed?”
Lucas just shrugged. “Maybe I know more than you think I do. I might have a fancy background like you, but I’ve—”
“Prove it!” the gnome said, standing up and leading Lucas around the room by his hand like he was a child, and demanding him to identify this substance and that one. Lucas did as bidden for a while. He pointed out which watery fluid was deepwater brine on a shelf of other distilled waters. He correctly picked out the pixie dust from between two viles of fairy dust, too. Finally, when the man asked him which sort of dragon’s tooth a fine white powder came from, Lucas delivered the bad news. “This ain’t dragon, Mister H,” Lucas said, suppressing a smile. “These are pulverized kobold teeth. A lot less potent.” He had no idea if that last statement was true, of course, but it sounded true, and that was close enough.
Watching the man’s frustration and denial rise into pure apoplexy was the best, though. By the time it was done, the high and mighty Hiesenburg was a defeated man. Lucas thought about quizzing the gnome with a few unlabeled vials on a high shelf but decided against it. He’d already been humbled. He didn’t need to be broken.
Instead, Lucas finally said, “If you don’t believe me, then why don't you just try making some yourself and see what happens?”
“I would,” the gnome sighed, “But we don’t have any goblin bile.”
Lucas smiled at that but said nothing. “Why would we,” Heisenburgle snapped defensively. “It has no legitimate value as a reagent. It is nothing but a highly toxic substance! All of this stuff is, but that one is strong enough by itself to kill the average man.”
“It is,” Lucas agreed. “But I’m still going to need it, and you’re going to need a hat.”
“A what?” Heisenburgle asked, as he tried to understand what it was Lucas was referring to. When he did, he narrowed his eyes in anger at the other man.