Free Time's Mistress by Steven Savile

manuscript salon and the exhibition of fine line drawings, down a twisting stair to the Roman gallery and beyond, to the bronze room with its clutter of hulking deities, heroes, mirrors, candelabra, lamps, and urns hiding the door itself. He moved carefully through the detritus of civilizations past, guided by the cyphers on the floor.
    Twin black crows marked either corner of the door, symbols of the black processes, calcination and putrefaction, and a golden knocker was set in its centre. The knocker was expertly wrought, a dog being consumed by the jaws of a wolf. Visitors to the gallery heard tales of Romulus and Remus, the twins of Rome, and the She-Wolf, but it was nothing more than spurious supposition on behalf of the docents. There was more symbolism hidden within this peculiar image, readily apparent to the knowing eye—the purification of gold using antimony.
    There was no doubting what lay behind the door; the clues were there for anyone with the vision to see them.
    He placed his hand flat against the wood, whispered his name, and pushed. It gave with a gentle snick, opening onto a dank passage that coiled down another fifty feet beneath the lowest galleries into the very foundations of London herself. The floor sloped gently downwards. Every sixth step the short stairs accelerated the descent. The door closed behind him, plunging the passage into darkness. He didn’t so much as break his stride, taking a small sulphurous bezoar from his pocket and sparking it against the rough wall. The compacted stone caught light immediately and burned with a small yellow flame that gave off no heat. The bezoar conjured a chiaroscuro of light and dark; within it he saw all that he needed to see. He walked on, his footsteps amplified by the peculiar acoustics of the tunnel.
    There was a second door, deep below the city streets, forged of iron and braced with lead, tin and silver. Rather than a key, the lock mechanism was a combination of pattern recognition and forgotten black alchemy, with over sixty symbols to choose from and any number of possible combinations. He knew the combination, just as any true adept would. He didn’t even have to think about it. With four confident depressions he squared the circle: the fiery golden sphere of the sun, the triangle of the fire itself, the smaller circle of gold, and finally the all encompassing square. And then a fifth depression, the quincunx, encompassing it all, man, his empire of dirt, and sky above. The final piece of the puzzle nestled into place with a delicate snick. The lock mechanism was protected by a quicksilver tilt; the wrong combination would tilt the switch, leaking quicksilver into the mechanism and fusing the lock closed forever.
    He grasped the golden handle and turned it.
    The pin pressed up against the glass and the clockwork mechanism ratcheted into place, but not hard enough to crack it.
    He opened the Kruptos Door and stepped into the al kimia, the hidden chamber as the words translated directly from the Arabic root. The wordplay amused him, as it no doubt amused the brothers of the rosy cross when they sealed the room up so many years ago. Even the most cursory inspect proved the place was every bit the treasure trove he had hoped. Skin-bound grimoires rested on lecterns, open on long forgotten wisdom. A glass cabinet contained the shards of a humble cup, a grail of sorts, though not the one so precious to the Christian stories. A black grail. It was, if the small note beside it was to be believed, the vessel used to collect the sacrificial blood of Iscariot after he had been cut down from his hanging tree. He pressed his face against the glass, his fingertips less than six inches away from the black chalice. He could feel the malice emanating from each fragment of the simple cup.
    He smiled and turned his back on it.
    Numerous other treasures caught his eye: statuary claimed from Tibet, a jade jaguar with the ghostly essence of the great beast bound to its