Black Easter by James Blish Read Free Book Online Page B

pens and inkhorns.
    ‘Now you can see something of what I meant by requisite skills,’ Ware said. ‘Of course I blow much of my own glassware, but any ordinary chemist does that. But should I need a new sword, for instance’ – he pointed towards the electric furnace – ‘I’d have to forge it myself. I couldn’t just pick one up at a costume shop. I’d have to do a good job of it, too. As a modern writer says somewhere, the only really serviceable symbol for a sharp sword is a
sharp
sword.’
    ‘Uhm,’ Hess said, continuing to look around. Against the left wall, opposite the lectern, was a long heavy table, bearing a neat ranking of objects ranging in length from six inches to about three feet, all closely wrapped in red silk. The wrappers had writing on them, but again Hess could not decipher it. Beside the table, affixed to the wall, was a flat sword cabinet. A few stools completed the furnishings; evidently Ware seldom worked sitting down. The floor was parquetted, and towards the centre of the room still bore traces of marks in coloured chalks, considerably scuffed, which brought from Ware a grunt of annoyance.
    ‘The wrapped instruments are all prepared and I’d rather not expose them,’ the magician said, walking towards the sword rack, ‘but of course I keep a set of spares and I can show you those.’
    He opened the cabinet door, revealing a set of blades hung in order of size. There were thirteen of them. Some were obviously swords; others looked more like shoemaker’s tools.
    ‘The order in which you make these is important, too,’ Ware said, ‘because, as you can see, most of them have writing on them, and it makes a difference what instrument does the writing. Hence I began with the uninscribed instrument, this one, the bolline or sickle, which is also one of the most often used. Rituals differ, but the one I use requires starting with a piece of unused steel. It’s fired three times, and then quenched in a mixture of magpie’s blood and the juice of a herb called foirole.’
    ‘The
Grimorium Verum
says mole’s blood and pimpernel juice,’ Hess observed.
    ‘Ah, good, you’ve been doing some reading. I’ve tried that, and it just doesn’t seem to give quite as good an edge.’
    ‘I should think you could get a still better edge by finding out what specific compounds were essential and using those,’ Hess said. ‘You’ll remember that Damascus steel used to be tempered by plunging the sword into the body of a slave. It worked, but modern quenching baths are a lot better – and in your case you wouldn’t have to be constantly having to trap elusive animals in large numbers.’
    ‘The analogy is incomplete,’ Ware said. ‘It would hold if tempering were the only end in view, or if the operation were only another observance of Paracelsus’ rule,
Alterius non sit qui suus esse potest
– doing for yourself what you can’t trust others to do. Both are practical ends that I might satisfy in some quite different way. But in magic the blood sacrifice has an additional function – what we might call the tempering of, not just the steel, but also the operator.’
    ‘I see. And I suppose it has some symbolic functions, too.’
    ‘In goëtic art, everything does. In the same way, as you probably also know from your reading, the forging and quenching is to be done on a Wednesday in either the first or the eighth of the day hours, or the third or the tenth of the nighthours, under a full Moon. There is again an immediate practical interest being served here – for I assure you that the planetary hours do indeed affect affairs on Earth – but also a psychological one, the obedience of the operator in every step. The grimoires and other handbooks are at best so confused and contradictory that it’s never possible to know completely what steps are essential and what aren’t, and research into the subject seldom makes for a long life.’
    ‘All right,’ Hess said. ‘Go