Free The Devil You Know by K. J. Parker

recently is basically perfecting those early experiments. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was almost there; I’d cracked it, the great mystery, dross into gold. There were just one or two errors that needed to be ironed out and fixed; mostly to do with the imperfect sublimation of cinnabar.” He looked at me and laughed. “Would you please not pull those dreadful faces,” he said. “I know this is all stuff you don’t like talking about, but you’re going to have to bear with me if you want to understand what I’m trying to tell you. I think that the reason why the earlier version of the elixir didn’t work—the one she drank—is because of a slight imbalance in the cinnabar’s sublimation ratio. From what I’ve found out since and know now, I overcooked it a bit, which means it wasn’t quite receptive enough to act on inorganic matter. Rock and metal and wood,” he translated, unnecessarily. “But organic matter; flesh and blood—”
    The implications hit me like a tidal wave. “A higher inclusion rate.”
    “Exactly.” His eyes were shining. “You see, you know all about it. Yes, the inclusion rate. It wouldn’t work on base metal. But it would have an effect on flesh and blood.” He looked straight at me. “I think what she drank really was the elixir of youth. Purely by accident, but it
was.
”
    “But she died.”
    “Did she? Or did she just lapse into a very deep coma while the sublimation took effect? It would look exactly like death to the naked eye. The flesh would be stone cold, the breathing so shallow it wouldn’t mist a glass. Two weeks? Three? Like a butterfly in a chrysalis. Bear in mind, her lunatic brother had her body put into a bath of honey, to preserve it. Sick idea, really, but he was like that. The point is, we wouldn’t have noticed the lack of decomposition. And then,” he went on, “I blew up the palace and left in a hurry. So I have no idea what happened after that.”
    “The body would’ve been destroyed in the blast.”
    He shook his head. “Flesh sublimated by cinnabar? No power on Earth could even scratch it. If I’m right, she’s not dead at all. She’s still out there, and not a day over twenty-eight.”
    My mind was reeling. “So what do you want me to do?”
    “Easy,” he said, quite calmly. “I want you to find her.”
    * * *
    27,886 women called Eudoxia living in the Northern hemisphere and aged between 24 and 34. None of them was her. 1,338,765 women of the right age living in the Northern hemisphere and answering her description. The one we were looking for was the 1,337,816th. So it goes.
    Her name was Heloria, and she was married to a respectable salt merchant in eastern Blemya. She wasn’t from those parts; that was obvious. How she came to be there she had no idea. Her earliest memory was waking up in the ruined shell of a collapsed building, with a roof-beam trapping her ankle. A party of looters, scrounging for floor tiles, found her and pulled her out; she went with them, having nowhere else to go, but they got sick of her temper and constant complaining and turned her out into the street. Her memory might have been a blank but she realised the danger she was in. Fortuitously she walked past the door of the Cold Star convent. The sisters were very kind to her, and she stayed there for a long time—six months, something like that—hoping her memory would come back. When it didn’t, she had to make a choice. Did she want to stay with the sisters and devote her life to contemplation and prayer? No, she realised, not in the slightest. She could read and write and do arithmetic. The sisters found her a place as a bookkeeper with a patron of their order, a good man who could be trusted not to take advantage of a vulnerable young woman. Three months after that they were married, and she’d been perfectly happy ever since.
    I showed him a vision of her. “Yes,” he said, “that’s my Eudoxia. I’d know her anywhere.”
    I was reading