sound of her rubber-soled shoes on the grit was lost now, and she could hear, unmistakably, the deep voice of Jonas Seraph in an uninterrupted monologue. The walls turned another corner to the right, but she seemed to be nearly on top of the sounds, so instead of stepping out into whatever space lay beyond, she knelt, putting herself below eye level, and peered around the wall.
Opposite her, perhaps fifty feet away, a stone archway opened up—the right-hand half of the split corridor, which together with the one she had followed formed a squared Y around the central room. The wall between her and the archway had two doors, both shut. She eased herself forward, more and more of the room coming into view, until she saw a man seated on a high stool, his back to her. It looked like Marc Bennett; he seemed to be just sitting and gazing at something on a long, heavy, beat-up workbench. If she had chosen the right-hand passage, he would now be looking straight at her.
Keeping her body well back from the room's line of sight, she edged her gaze farther out into the room. Next she saw Jonas himself, also on a stool and directly facing her, although what she had thought to be monologue was actually him reading aloud from a heavy volume in archaic English on the Peacock stage of the alchemical process, and he did not look up. His voice rose and fell, infusing the nonsense with considerably more drama and meaning than it possessed.
The hiss and thump continued without faltering, and Anne braced herself for what else the room would contain. She was soon looking clear to the end wall, but what she saw was not a metallic pear-shaped object the height of a tall man emitting muffled cries of distress, but a small brick furnace topped by a pear-shaped glass object, the flames blown white-hot by a large bellows worked by Jason Delgado, stripped to the waist, with sweat coming off his back in runnels and his hair down in his face. His back muscles bunched and moved, and she could tell at a glance that every part of him burned with tiredness, yet his left arm kept a steady beat with the bellows handle. His right hand came up and dashed the sweat from his eyes, and then he shifted his position and transferred the handle over to his other hand.
She sat back against the wall with a thud. It took a moment for her mind to get around this image of Jason, it was so absolutely unexpected. She had been operating since the early hours under the assumption that for the second time in three weeks, Jason was trapped, sweltering and alone, inside a Change alembic. She had struggled and come to the decision that she had no choice but to sacrifice herself, Glen's investigation, and very possibly the lives of everyone here in the drive to free him, when all the time he was sweating not inside an alembic, but over one. She rested her head back against the stone wall and laughed silently until the tears ran down her face. Here she was, tiptoeing around like a criminal, pumped full of adrenaline, preparing to offer herself up for Jason's salvation, only to find him laboring away like an obedient young idiot over a fraudulent transmutation of matter. The sense of anticlimax would have been devastating had it not been so hopelessly funny.
Still, she reflected more soberly, Jason did not look very happy, and Dulcie would be waiting. Perhaps she could still save Jason some anguish and break up the uneven little triad in the next room. She got to her feet to go back down the corridor and upstairs to the kitchen, where like any good British housewife she prepared a tray with a pot of tea and a bowl of cookies—biscuits, she corrected herself, very nearly humming under her breath. One of the men came in while she was filling a jug with milk. He nodded at her, and ran more water into the kettle. She nodded in return and picked up the tray, walking openly through the door to the cellars. Three people saw her; no one stopped her. At the foot of the stairs she pulled open the middle door and walked in. She followed the right- hand passage this time, and without pausing she strode straight into the laboratory.
'Anyone fancy a cup of tea?' she said brightly. Marc Bennett leaped backwards at her sudden appearance, sending the stool flying until it tangled with his feet and brought him down with a crash and an oath. Jonas's reading was interrupted at the phrase 'spiritual fire'; he yanked off his half-glasses and glared at her with thunder gathering on his brows. Jason broke off his work at the bellows, tried to straighten up, and instead went down on one knee with a brief cry that was instantly clamped back inside his lips. Anne took one glance at the agony on his face as the extent of his pain made itself felt, and then she swept in, set the tea tray down on the scarred, cluttered wood of the laboratory table between an astrolabe and a tall object draped in a pristine white cloth, and prepared to pour the tea.
'What the fuck are you doing here?' Bennett shouted at her, extricating himself furiously from the long- legged stool. 'How the hell did you get in?'
Anne faltered, the teapot in one hand and a saucer in the other. 'I thought you'd like a cup of tea,' she repeated, sounding confused. 'Dulcie told me that Jason was doing his 'Work', so I figured you'd be down here somewhere, and the door was open, so I just came in. Why? Shouldn't I have?'
'I locked that door,' Bennett declared angrily.
'Well, someone left it open.'
'I locked it!' This time he looked to Jonas in appeal, but the big man just shrugged. 'I did!'
'All right, so you locked it,' Anne said, sounding like a mother soothing a petulant child. 'But it unlocked itself and when I tried the knob it opened. Now, do you want some tea?'
'But you can't interrupt a Work!' he protested. He sounded as if he was about to stamp his feet in frustration.
'Oh, I'm sorry. You mean you don't take any breaks at all?'
'You know the rules.'
She set the teapot down with a bang and turned on him indignantly. 'Well, actually, no, I don't know the rules. I've been with Change for more than six weeks and the only things I know about the Work of Transformation are what I've figured out by myself. Now, shall I take this back? You may have been sitting on your stool all morning, but the boy looks nearly done in.'
'Maybe she'd like to work the flames for a time, Marc,' suggested a deep voice from behind her. 'If she's so concerned for the boy's welfare.'
'But that's not—'
'I know,' Jonas said. 'But nothing else about Ana is usual; why should this be? Jason, show Ana what to do.'
The boy peeled himself off the wall and bent to his task with a groan between his teeth. She left the men to their refreshments and went over to the stifling heat of the furnace.
'How long have you been at it?' she asked him.
Jonas answered. 'He has been at his Work for six hours, and he will manage another six, with your help.'
Anne bit her lip and studied the process, which involved the slow, steady depression and lifting of the handle of a large fixed bellows, its nozzle aimed at the low brick furnace filled with charcoal. The alembic in the top was about eighteen inches high and had some unidentifiable blackened mass inside. The tube that ran through its stopper ended in a container of water, where it bubbled occasionally with escaping gasses. She waited until she had the rhythm right, and then she stepped up next to Jason and put her hand over his on the bellows handle. He kept his grip for two beats and then he pulled his sweat-soaked body away and let her work.
It was a hellish position, stooped and slow. In ten minutes her arm was numb, after twenty her shoulder burned from scalp to hip. She shifted arms, worked for another quarter hour, and then Jason took over again.
It was a long, long day. Jonas resumed his reading aloud, Marc perched on a replacement stool and climbed down from time to time to add charcoal to the fire or make minute adjustments to the alembic, the contents of which seemed to change not at all. Jason's unspoken and guilty gratitude each time she took over was all that kept her going. Even with his youth, his muscles had to be screaming every bit as much as hers. The phrase 'sweat meditation' floated into her mind, though she could not remember where it came from, and she would probably have continued with the pointless, hypnotic labor until she collapsed into the fire had Jonas not suddenly stood up, slapped his book shut, and declared, 'The stage of calcination is at an end, and our material must rest before the Work is resumed. You have done well.'
He moved to the workbench and snatched up the white cloth, revealing a tall, elegant glass pitcher and a matching glass. He filled the glass with water from the pitcher, picked up one of the teacups and dashed its dregs to the floor, then poured water into that, too. He carried cup and glass over to where Jason stood bent over and Anne sat against the wall, and presented her with the cup and Jason with the glass. When they had drunk the water, he took back the two vessels and put them next to the pitcher, and draped the cloth back to cover them. Marc Bennett had come around the table and was whispering furiously in his ear, but Jonas waved Bennett away and came back to stand over them, saying ceremonially, 'It is time to cleanse ourselves and to take food again, and
