Free The Snow Queen by Mercedes Lackey Page B

trappings, although the Magician visited him once, and it was obvious that although the Magician considered the Alchemist an inferior, he also respected the Alchemist’s abilities.
    Once again, the Tyrant had been clever enough to find someone who could be given everything that he wanted. Now, whether he was also clever enough not to waste his time in the search for the Philosopher’s Stone—which was a metaphysical concept anyway and did nothing to transmute base metals to gold—or whether he really did realize it was a metaphysical concept, he was not involving himself with crucibles and alembics and furnaces. She watched him, instead, making very useful things such as poisons and antidotes—cures for the unfortunate diseases that men who indulged themselves in certain vices were prone to—and watched with extreme interest as the Tyrant appeared for what must have been his daily dose of a concoction of at least thirty common poisons. No wonder he didn’t employ a taster! His Alchemist gave him immunity to anything but a truly exotic poison, and probably had the antidote handy for anything truly exotic. Exotic poisons tended to kill slowly, leaving plenty of time to administer an antidote. This was sheer brilliance.
    Once the Tyrant was gone again, the Alchemist turned to another pursuit entirely. Aleksia watched as he secured the door, bolting it from the inside, pulled a velvet pall off of some object and settled himself into a comfortable chair in front of it. He imbibed some sort of concoction of his own…and went into a trance. His head fell back so that Aleksia could see that he was staring into an enormous crystal ball.
    Now, as every Godmother knew, it was possible for perfectly ordinary people to have visions of the future, if they took the right sorts of potions. You had to be very disciplined—which this Alchemist clearly was—and you had to be good enough to know how to sort the hallucinations from the real visions. Usually these visions were not very accurate once you tried to look more than three months into the future, but for someone like the Tyrant, that would be enough.
    “Well!” Aleksia said aloud, staring into her mirror with probably the same expression that the Alchemist was wearing as he stared into his crystal ball.
    But it just so happened that anyone who did this sort of parlor trick could also be very easily deceived. And that gave Aleksia precisely the opportunity she was looking for.
    After all, the great crystal was a form of glass. She could make him see whatever she wanted him to see. In his drugged state, he would be very suggestible, and his powers of discrimination would be set aside. Besides, he would have no reason to suppose that anyone else would be sending him visions. Why should there be? There was no reason to think that anyone could, or would, interfere. No one knew about him but his Master and the Magician, and neither wanted him deceived.
    So it was that when he emerged from his drug-induced trance, it was to run straight to the Tyrant with the description of what he had seen—a conspiracy against the ruler, the meeting of the conspirators, all of whom were robed identically and masked. And just to make it all the more interesting, she had made the leader some sort of Magician, who had conjured up a demon that promised them success in their endeavor. The surroundings, as crafted by Aleksia’s imagination, were opulent, but apparently subterranean. When anyone spoke, it was with the cultured tones of the upper classes. And they made reference to the King In Waiting. It was quite the fantastic creation, but very believable, especially to someone like the Tyrant. The Tradition would be working against him in that way, making him suspicious and looking for conspiracies; the fact that he couldn’t find any would make him all the more certain that they existed.
    Now the Tyrant would be actively searching for this conspiracy, powered by a Magician. His search would