Free The Waters of Eternity by Howard Andrew Jones Page B

groaned. “You missed your true calling as a comic poet.”
    “You are unharmed? I heard shouting.”
    “I am unharmed.” Disappointed perhaps, but unharmed.
    “She is a poisoner, then?”
    “Indeed.”
    Dabir nodded and took in the room. “Almond cakes. As I expected. Come, lady. It is time for answers.”

IV
     
    Dabir led us along the darkened streets. Only a few stars glimmered through the overhanging clouds.
    Three figures lurched out of the darkness.
    “Begone!” I growled.
    They sang a few drunken snatches of song, laughed, and staggered on.
    We turned a corner and walked almost straight into a group of bravos. One raised a hand as though to command us to halt, but he stared at us and backed away. The others fell into a whispered discussion.
    My sword was bare in my hand, and the bundle over one shoulder looked remarkably like a corpse, for the bound singing girl struggled only intermittently. She mouthed something into her gag, then let out a muffled scream.
    Suddenly the thieves retreated to the mouth of the alley from which they’d come. They did not follow us. We must have seemed on an errand more villainous than theirs.
    A few hundred feet more brought us to the door Dabir sought. He bade me step to one side and pounded on it. “It is Dabir,” he called. “Open up!”
    After several moments of pounding, Jamilah’s student opened the door and peered at Dabir, who pushed wide the door and strode past him. I bore my squirming burden after. I kicked the door shut and motioned the young man ahead of me.
    The receiving area was a nest of shadows save for the tiny pool of light about a lantern that rested on a side table. Dabir lifted it. “Jamilah,” he said grimly to the nervous youth. “Where is she?”
    “In…in her laboratory.”
    “Show us.”
    “Lead us not astray,” I growled.
    The alchemist’s laboratory must have been a pleasant temperature in winter. Red tongues of flame flickered in two furnaces, and hot embers glowed in a third.
    A foul smell permeated the vast room and its source might have been any of the barrels along the walls or the bottles and boxes bunched in neat rows along a half dozen tables. Also there were strange tall cylinders of glass filled with a rainbow offering of colored powders, pottery and glasswork with beaklike spouts, and a shop’s worth of unlit lamps. Tongs and ladles and hammers and an assortment of other tools hung from pegs near the largest furnace, and dozens of bright metals set in a warren of cubbyholes threw back the light.
    Jamilah swirled a long ladle in a high-walled stone tub beside the largest furnace. She looked up at our entrance but did not leave off her work. Sweat plastered her hair to her face. She looked composed enough that she might have been cooking a meal.
    I set the singing girl down by her, expecting some surprised response from Jamilah. The songbird glared venomously at me, then cast pleading eyes up at the alchemist, but she was ignored, and the girl settled into vainly twisting her wrist and ankle bonds.
    I peered at the muddy brown mixture Jamilah stirred. Wisps of smoke danced above its surface.
    “Dabir Hashim ibn Khalil,” she said, pronouncing every syllable distinctly. “You returned even sooner than I expected.”
    I pointed her student to the girl. “Sit there.” I raised my sword.
    He did.
    Dabir spoke slowly, his voice heavy with sadness. “You disappoint me, Jamilah. You, to stoop to elixirs of life. Are you so desperate—”
    She laughed.
    “—to extend your allotted years? You are still young and fair.”
    “You look, Dabir, but you do not see.”
    This was exactly the thing Dabir said often to me, and it was strange to hear the accusation directed at him.
    “It is answers I want,” she said. “It is answers I have ever sought. You know this.”
    “So you seek to lengthen your life to seek them longer?”
    She frowned in exasperation. “No, Dabir. Khalid hid his true purpose in his writing on life