It amazed him how calmly he accepted this. On the other hand, he’d had twenty-five years to live with the knowledge.
‘The Imperial Posting Inns, whenever you can,’ Zoticus was murmuring, head lowered still to the map, a curved, polished glass in one hand to magnify it. ‘Comforts and food are unreliable elsewhere.’
Crispin nodded, still distracted. ‘Dog meat instead of horse or swine, I know.’
Zoticus glanced up, his expression wry. ‘Dog is good,’ he said. ‘The risk is getting human flesh in a sausage.’
Crispin kept a composed face with some effort. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘Well spiced, I’m sure.’
‘Sometimes,’ said Zoticus, turning back to the map. ‘Be especially careful through Sauradia, which can be unstable in autumn.’
Crispin watched him. Zoticus had taken a quill now and was making notations on the map. ‘Tribal rites?’
The alchemist glanced up briefly, eyebrows arched. His features were strong, the blue eyes deep-set, and he wasn’t as old as the grey hair and the staff might have suggested. ‘Yes, that. And knowing they will be mostly on their own again until spring, even with the big army camp near Trakesia and soldiers at Meganum. Notorious winter brigands, the Sauradi tribes. Lively women, as I recall, mind you.’ He smiled a little, to himself, and returned to his annotations.
Crispin shrugged. Sipped his tea. Resolutely tried to put his mind away from sausages.
Some might have seen this long autumn journey as an adventure in itself. Cams Crispus did not. He liked his own city walls, and good roofs against rain, and cooks he knew, and his bathhouse. For him, broaching a new cask of wine from Meganum or the vineyards south of Rhodias had always been a preferred form of excitement. Designing and executing a mosaic was an adventure… or had been once. Walking the wet, windswept roads of Sauradia or Trakesia with an eye out for predators-human or otherwise-in a struggle to avoid becoming someone else’s sausage was not an adventure, and a greybeard’s cackling about lively women did not make it one.
He said, ‘I’d still like an answer, by the way, silly question or not. How did you know I was here all those years ago?’
Zoticus put down the quill and sat in a heavy chair. One of the mechanical birds-a falcon with a silver and bronze body and yellow jewelled eyes, quite unlike the drab, sparrow-like Linon-was fixed to the high back of the chair, screws adjusted so its claws held fast. It gazed intrinsically at Crispin with a pale glitter.
‘You do know I am an alchemist.’
‘Martinian said as much. I also know that most who use that name are frauds, hooking coins and goods from innocents.’
Crispin heard a sound from the direction of the fire. It might have been a log shifting, or not.
‘Entirely true,’ said Zoticus, unperturbed. ‘Most are. Some are not. I am one of those who are not.’
‘Ah. Meaning you know the future, can induce passionate love, cure the plague, and find water?’ He sounded truculent, Crispin knew. He couldn’t help it.
Zoticus gazed at him levelly. ‘Only the last, actually, and not invariably. No. Meaning I can sometimes see and do things most men cannot, with frustratingly erratic success. And meaning I can see things in men and women that others cannot. You asked how I knew you? Men have an aura, a presence to them. It changes little, from childhood to death. Very few people dare my orchard, which is useful-as you might guess-for a man living alone in the countryside. You were there once. I knew your presence again this morning. The anger in you was not present in the child, though there was a loss then, too. The rest is little enough altered. It is not,’ he said kindly, ‘so complicated an explanation, is it?’
Crispin looked at him, cupping his drink in both hands. His glance shifted to the jewelled falcon gripping the back of the alchemist’s heavy chair. ‘And these?’ he asked, ignoring the observations about himself.
‘Oh. Well. That’s the whole point of alchemy, isn’t it? To transmute one substance into another, proving certain things about the nature of the world. Metals to gold. The dead to life. I have learned to make inanimate substance think and speak, and retain a soul.’ He said it much as he might have described learning how to make the mint tea they were drinking.