“How may I help you?” he asked, exactly as he had back then.
“Does m’lord possess Cremor tartari? ” Svatopluk Fraundinst asked casually.
“Cremor,” said the apothecary, wiping his pate, “tartari! ”
“Precisely. I also need a little unguentum populeum.”
Reynevan swallowed in amazement. From what he’d heard, Svatopluk Fraundinst ought to be a famous and respected guest at the House at the Archangel, but the bald apothecary gave the impression he’d never seen him before.
“We have unguentum, freshly prepared… But cremor tartari is harder to come by just now… How much do you need?”
“Ten drachmas.”
“Ten? I may be able to find that much. I’ll have a look. Come through, gentlemen.”
Only much later did Reynevan find out that the apparently inane welcoming ritual had its purpose. The congregation of the House at the Archangel apothecary’s shop operated in utter secrecy. If everything was in order, the customer asked for two—always two—medicines. If he asked for one, it would mean he was being blackmailed or being followed. If, however, a trap had been set in the apothecary’s shop itself, Beneš Kejval would give a warning by saying he only had half of one of the quantities.
The actual apothecary’s shop was concealed beyond the oak door behind the shop counter. It was furnished in typical fashion for an apothecary’s shop: there were cabinets with dozens of small drawers, numerous dark glass jars and bottles, brass pestles and mortars and weighing scales. A dried monster—standard decoration for sorcerers’ workshops, apothecaries’ shops and conjurors’ booths—hung on a string from the ceiling. It looked like a mermaid, half-young woman, half-fish, but in reality, it was a fabricated fish, dried and split open. A ray, stretched out on a board, had convincingly taken on a mermaid’s shape: its nostrils imitated eyes and the broken cartilage of its fins, arms. The fakes were manufactured in Antwerp and Genoa, where the rays found their way via Arab merchants or ever-present Portuguese mariners. Some of them were so skilfully made that only with the greatest difficulty could they be distinguished from genuine mermaids. But there was a fail-safe touchstone of authenticity—namely that genuine mermaids were at least a hundred times more expensive than fakes and no apothecary’s shop could afford them.
“Antwerpian work.” Scharley sized up the dried monstrosity with an expert eye. “I once flogged a few of them myself. They sold like hot cakes. There’s still one in the Golden Apple apothecary’s shop in Wrocław.”
Beneš Kejval glanced at him with interest. He was the only sorcerer at the Archangel who didn’t teach at the university. He hadn’t even studied. He had simply inherited the shop. But he was an unparalleled pharmacist and a master at mixing medicines—magical and ordinary. His speciality was an aphrodisiac made from powdered agaric, pine nuts, coriander and pepper. It was joked that after consuming that medicine even a corpse would leap up from his bier and bound towards a brothel.
“Go down to the lower chamber, gentlemen. Everybody’s there. They’re waiting for you.”
“What about you, Beneš? Aren’t you coming?” Reynevan asked.
“I’d like to,” said the apothecary, sighing, “but someone has to mind the store. People are coming in all the time. It doesn’t bode well for the world if there are so many sick people dependent on medicine.”
“Or perhaps,” Scharley replied with a smile, “it’s only hypochondria?”
“Then it bodes even worse. Make haste, gentlemen. Aha, Reynevan! Watch out for the books.”
“I shall.”
The apothecary’s shop led out into a courtyard. A well, green with moss, suffused the air with an unhealthy dampness, bravely aided by a misshapen elder bush overshadowing the wall that appeared to grow not out of the ground but from a pile of rotting leaves. The bush effectively concealed a small door. The lintel was almost entirely covered in cobwebs. Thick, dense cobwebs. It was clear no one had passed through the door in years.
“An illusion,” Doctor Svatopluk explained calmly, plunging a hand into a cocoon of cobwebs. “Illusory magic. Straightforward. Quite primitive.”
When pushed, the door opened inwardly—along with the illusory cobwebs, which, after it opened, looked like a thick piece of felt cut with a knife. Beyond the door was a spiral staircase leading upwards. The staircase was steep and so narrow that anyone climbing it would inevitably rub off plaster from the wall onto their shoulders. After several minutes of panting, they stood outside another door. Nobody had bothered camouflaging that one.
There was a library on the other side, full of books, scrolls, papyri and various other strange exhibits. There was no room for anything else.
Piles of incunables were lying simply everywhere; you couldn’t take a step without tripping over something like Nicolas Flamel’s Le sommaire philosophique, Rhazes’s Kitab al-Mansuri, Morien’s De expositione specierum or Gervase of Tilbury’s De imagine mundi. Every incautious step risked a painful bang on the ankles from a metal-edged edition of a work of the renown of Albertus Magnus’s Semita recta, Witelo’s Perspectiva or Caesarius of Heisterbach’s Illustria miracula. It was enough to bump imprudently into a bookshelf for Artephius’s Philosophia de arte occulta, William of Auvergne’s De universo or Thomas of Cantimpré’s Opus de natura rerum to fall on one’s head in a cloud of dust.
In all this confusion, one could unwittingly bump into something or accidentally touch something that shouldn’t have been touched without exercising great caution. For it happened that grimoires, treatises about magic and compendiums of spells could spontaneously cast spells themselves—all one had to do was make a careless movement, knock or tap something and an accident was waiting to happen. Particularly dangerous in this regard was The Grand Grimoire, and Aldaraia and Lemegeton could also be extremely dangerous. As early as his second visit to the House at the Archangel, Reynevan had the misfortune of toppling a thick book which was none other than Liber de Nyarlathotep from a table piled up with books and scrolls. As the ancient incunable, sticky with greasy dust, slammed onto the floor, the walls shuddered and four of the six jars containing homunculi on top of the cupboard exploded. One of them turned into a featherless bird, another into something like an octopus, a third into an aggressive scarlet scorpion, and a fourth into a miniature Pope in pontifical vestments. Before anyone could react, all four of them melted into green, foul-smelling slime, while at the same time the midget Pope managed to squawk: “Beati immaculati, Cthulhu fhtagn! ” There had been an awful lot of cleaning up to do.
The incident amused most of the Archangel’s sorcerers, although several of them weren’t blessed with a sense of humour and Reynevan wasn’t elevated much in their estimation, to put it mildly. But only one of the mages continued to glower at him long after the incident and let him feel keenly what antipathy meant.
That man was—as can easily be guessed—the librarian and caretaker of the book collection.
“Greetings, Štěpán.”
Štěpán of Drahotuše, the librarian, raised his head from the sumptuously illuminated pages of Apollonius of Tyana’s Archidoxo magicum.