The Chemickal Marriage

explosives, their
alchemical
qualities meant nothing with regard to his reaching the door alive …
    Still, he must suffer these trappings. What planet went with silver? He’d no idea. At the touch of his fingers on a tile of streaked violet his teeth ached sharply, as if his mouth had been crammed with ice. He stepped ontothe tile, hacked an
x
in the corner, then jumped to a bilious tile in the seventh and last row that he knew he’d not yet used. No explosion.
    Chang marked his
x
, then reached under the helmet and tugged at the seal, wincing as he pulled off the awkward thing. He shook his head, eyes bare and blinking, and faced the four soldiers. He gave them a sardonic nod, which was returned by their leader, whose eyes were ringed with scars. Chang straightened, then whipped a glass sphere straight at the man, so it burst against his chest. As all four crumpled, Chang slipped through the door. Only a fool kept an enemy at his back.
    In the next room Chang found the Comte d’Orkancz – although not in body. Whereas the rest of the remade Harschmort had been expedient and raw, this was the man’s vision to the last detail: sconces shaped like open wounds, murals of elongated Byzantine bodies, blue carpets with lurid orange beasts. Every carpet made a path from a doorway – one in each wall of an octagonal room – to its centrepiece: a fountain of clear glass, whose pipes and chambers looped in two intertwined but separate routes, not unlike a human heart. The fluid gushing through one chamber was blue, and through the other orange.
    The fountain’s rim was inscribed.
Imbibo frater vivo
.
    Chang restored his spectacles. Drink, brother, and live … not damned likely.
    He glanced at the other doors. Did each hide a corridor of explosives? Would others – Schoepfil, Svenson, the Contessa – be driven to their own particular trial? It seemed ridiculous. While proving oneself worthy might well be a tenet of an alchemical treatise like
The Chemickal Marriage
, here it could result in the deaths of those persons Vandaariff had already selected – and protected – for their participation. What if Chang had chosen wrongly, and blown off his own skull? Where would Vandaariff’s great experiment be then? Was he so confident that his most desired guests knew the answers – and so willing to eliminate anyone else?
    Chang worked quickly around the room. Every way was locked save the double doors on the far side of the fountain. These revealed a dim room with a squat rostrum studded with knobs and switches. Chang took a step and knocked his chin into a wall of glass, flush with the archway – the glassappeared to be built into the frame. He tapped it with his fingers, then his fist. The barrier was too thick to shatter without a hammer or axe.
    On the far side of the small room was an identical archway, presumably sealed off as well, beyond which lay another large room, with an array of Vandaariff’s machines connected to five large porcelain tubs.
    Chang turned to the fountain. Did Vandaariff seriously expect him to choose between orange or blue, when the wrong choice meant death? And what in hell could the
right
one mean, apart from fulfilling Vandaariff’s intent? In the room at Raaxfall there had been an eighth card, of bright orange glass, the experience of which had nearly killed him. For Vandaariff the orange card had represented a kind of completion …
    Give and it shall be given. Chang fished the blue glass disc from his pocket, studying the pathways inside the fountain … and saw, right where the streams curled in a helix, two narrow openings in the glass …
    He inserted the disc into the orange stream, and at once the flow was blocked; pressure forced the fluid up a previously unused tube of glass and into the air. In moments it filled a trough deep enough for him to dip his hand. Chang sighed. He set down the brass helmet, scooped out a palmful of the orange liquid and raised it to his lips.
    He choked audibly and stumbled back, chin dripping, waving his wet glove as if it burnt. Chang’s eyes tipped back in their sockets, showing the white. He fell, limbs extended like a fallen horse. His breath came ragged and he went still, eyes open to the ceiling.
    ‘As tractable as a babe with an unknit skull. An object of desire dangles before it and all else recedes …’
    The diminished voice of Robert Vandaariff. Somewhere behind Chang, a door had opened. Slippered footsteps. The orange fluid