As prisons went, the Salt Tower at the South West corner of the second inner rampart could have been worse, and was just down the wall from the disused royal apartments in the Lanthorn and Wakefield towers.210 The view from the window was tolerable, and you could just catch the river if you angled it right. The chamber was pentagonal, which the Alchemist appreciated, symbolically, and it even had a fireplace, completing the trifactor! All in all, it was about as close to an apology as an incarceration in the Tower of London could get... Clearly, the Lord Mayor’s conscience was troubling him, as well it should.
Pity it would all be ending tomorrow.
The walls had been well graffitied by former occupants: Jesuits mostly, by their poor spelling, but there was also a Giovanni Battista, Italian tutor to Queen Mary,211 and a Bristol innkeeper called Hew Draper who had been accused of sorcery and had, somewhat counterintuitively, decided to prove his innocence by carving out a full zodiac wheel (amateur).
The Alchemist paced the room, tracing an imaginary pentagram. The last month had been most perplexing. Somehow, the Elixir had failed. The fact that its release into the water system had coincided with the advent of this thrice-accursed plague was a coincidence so unfortunate that it practically screamed, “Shenanigans!” A cold thought was forming... what if the Elixir he had poured into the river had not been the Elixir... the hue had been atypical... what if it had, in fact, been something else.
“Shenanigans!” He began to hum softly to himself, an old minor-key childhood lullaby of his own composing.
“They are all around me!
They want to destroy me!
They know who I am!”
That Anbury lay behind his current predicament was beyond doubt. The Undertaker appeared to have disappeared of late,212 the hallmark of the true suspect; certainly, none had seen him in public. More suspect still, his business was booming, and even the parlour’s rent had been weaponized, paid up a year in advance just because now he could (the fiend)! Death should have died, and with it the Undertakers’ foul vocation; instead, it had made them flush! Now, Anbury rose, darkly ascendant, perhaps forever out of reach, manipulating all from the shadows, a former pauper now puppetmaster of most profitable purgatory, a charnel chessmaster whose egregious endgame was fast approaching – the imminent checkmate of the Alchemist’s neck beneath the axe!213
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“Oh that it should come to this...” he bemoaned to himselves as he crossed the transverse, “Laid low by my life-long nemesis! The very man that has bested me in a thousand insult duels across scores of sordid drinking establishments!”214
He paused. His eyes shifted.
“Shenanigans!
The world has deceived me!
But I’ll NOT be broken!
I’ll fight like a man!”
Something of the old cunning returned, reanimated from the dun dregs of desperation. The raptor hands began to whir...
“This shall not stand! Lead and stone are flimsy shackles indeed for the infernal machinations of my minds!”
It was true. The Alchemist ate lead for breakfast.215
“Anbury may have thwarted the Elixir of Life, but from the ashes of my failure, I shall breed a new form of success! It shall not be long before my druid brethren learn of my incarceration... They shall come for me with the rising of the blue moon! And then, Phil Anbury, I shall end this contest once and for all!” It was a sign of the moment that he had forgotten to refer to himself in the plural.
“Oh! You talking ’bout being rescued by druids?” A beefy warder216 stood in the doorway, a tray of vittles in hand. “Wouldn’t count on them! Everyone thought the druids were long gone – but, thanks to you, we now know they survived! Sneaky gits they are, I’ll grant you! But, we can’t have sorcerers running naked around Salisbury plain, can we? Bad for the tourist industry, it is! The Lord Mayor’s already dispatched the militia down south to deal with ’em. There’s going to be a massacre, so I hear! With any luck they’ll all be dead before St. Crispin’s day – that’s if the plague doesn’t get them first!”
The Alchemist’s wail, when it came, was soul-wrought. “No, it cannot be! My sacred brethren! Lost! Lost!”
“Friends of yours were they?”
“Bound to me from birth, held by the blood-oaths of the Goddess Danu, doomed to the fate of three!”
“Oh, good friends then! Tough break! Still – good news is... where they’re headed, by the time they arrive... you’ll already be there to greet ‘em!”
The warder tabled the tray and left, chuckling to himself.
The Alchemist fell against the wall and slid to the floor, just beneath the graffitied zodiac (amateur).
“Shenanigans!
They are all around me!
They want to destroy me!
They know who I am!
Shenanigans!
The world has deceived me!
My life now is over!
I’m a broken man!”
His head lolled and his eyes closed, pitching him into the welcome oblivion of dark despair.