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Enzo balked.
Fiore, who didn’t think his desire quite so odd, held his gaze.
“You may,” Enzo replied at last with no small hesitation. “It’s in the alchemy workshop downstairs. Do you feel up to venturing there? Or shall I bring it to you?”
A certain thrill had shot through Fiore’s heart at the mention of alchemy. “I’d like to see the workshop as well, if it’s all the same to you.”
The shy smile Enzo gave him in reply proved no less thrilling.
~
Fiore smelt the alchemy workshop before he saw it. Not an unpleasant scent, but one which nonetheless wafted down the corridor as Enzo led him toward it, their arms entwined, and grew stronger as they approached. It had a curious musk, spiced and strange and somewhat sweet. And somehow familiar. Fiore wrinkled his nose as he considered the matter.
Enzo halted before a particular paneled black-walnut door. He withdrew a silver key from within his waistcoat pocket and slid it into a lock which appeared less ornate than Fiore had expected.
Only when the door opened did Fiore recognize the alchemical scent as the peculiar note he’d long detected in Enzo’s own masculine musk.
Given this familiarity, he didn’t find the contents of the workshop quite so disturbing as perhaps he ought.
The object which asserted itself first and foremost to his sight was the desiccated crocodile suspended from the vaulted ceiling. It ran some twelve feet long—which covered little more than half the breadth of the chamber—and bared its teeth towards the entrance. Beside it hung a heron and a bat, both with wings outstretched, and the membrane of the bat-wing appearing particularly delicate. Beneath their watchful gaze lay a horde of curiosities. A glass case stood in either far corner; one holding a set of brass orbs suspended on geared arms, the other a diverse collection of living ferns. Stars within stars were inscribed on the slate floor; pentagrams, hexagrams, heptagrams, octagrams, all in perfect geometric harmony with the faint remnants of thousands of chalk marks between their deeply grooved lines. The clouded glass of the singular windowed wall faced the interior courtyard. No prying eyes outside could glimpse even a fraction of this alchemical sanctum. Sunshine lit the room through this and the likewise clouded skylights overhead. The hefty spyglass set on a tripod in the corner, combined with the brass model of the planets, made Fiore think this feature proved useful by night as well as by day. A long workbench ran along the wall beneath the windows, filled with glass-work tubes, beakers, and bottles, interspersed with intricate bits and bobs of silver and brass beyond Fiore’s powers of identification. Floor-to-ceiling barrister bookshelves occupied the entirety of the far wall opposite the door. Behind the glass fronts and alongside a multitude of leather volumes, some of which looked quite ancient, gleamed further silver and brass instruments amidst jars of powders and potions. The door, which drew Fiore’s notice as Enzo shut it behind them with a gentle yet resounding thud, was flanked by two charts as tall as Enzo himself. Each depicted a nude man; one surrounded by the zodiac beasts arranged according to which bodily aspects they supposedly governed, the other suffering every possible wound from every possible weapon whilst still standing defiantly alive. A menacing system of hooks, pulleys, and chains hung down from the rafters beside him.
“To set a dislocated limb,” Enzo said in answer to Fiore’s unspoken question.
Fiore, startled out of staring at his unfamiliar yet fascinating surroundings, glanced to Enzo and found him wearing the tentative and anxious look of an artist who’d just revealed the work closest to their heart.
“This is your sanctum, then?” Fiore asked.
Enzo nodded, looking no less bashful than before.
Fiore couldn’t make the smile in his heart reach his face. Still, he managed to put some of it into his voice as he declared, “It’s marvelous.”
Enzo’s shy smile spoke for them both.
Emboldened, Fiore stepped further into the workshop. The desk along the wall opposite the windows drew his notice. It resembled the captain’s desks he’d seen come up for auction now and again when a ship and all her fixtures were sold off in port. Though rather than jointed shutters, it closed with a singular cylinder of solid wood inlaid with the Scaevola family crest of the sable dragon segreant. The throne-like, shield-backed chair bore a similar design carved in deep relief. More striking than any of these details, however, were the two trinkets balanced on either side of the desk’s top-most pigeonhole shelves; a human skull and an egg of almost the same size.
Fiore gestured to the skull. “Friend of yours?”
“An ancestor,” Enzo explained. As Fiore’s gaze drifted naturally to the egg opposite, he added before Fiore could ask, “Not a dragon egg. An ostrich.”
Fiore knew not what an ostrich was but trusted he would find out in due time.
Enzo guided Fiore toward the chair at the desk and drew it out for him. Only after he saw Fiore safely seated—and had clasped and kissed his hand besides—did he leave him for even the mere moment it took to lock the door behind them both.
Fiore cast his gaze over the workshop, both in search of and dreading to find his missing finger. His eye fell upon a spiraling ivory horn, longer than he was tall, affixed lengthwise to the wall just between the molding bordering the ceiling and the arched peaks of the clouded windows. He caught Enzo’s notice and pointed to it. “Unicorn?”
“Narwhal,” Enzo corrected him, adding in response to Fiore’s evident confusion, “A porpoise of the northern seas. Unicorns are smaller.”
“Ah,” said Fiore.
Enzo approached the desk. Another key from the ring in his waistcoat pocket slipped into the lock on the front. The cylindrical front—either carved from a single block of burlwood or so cunningly crafted as to appear so—rolled smoothly up to vanish within the desk in a hidden crevice above the myriad drawers revealed by its departure. A pair of decorative columns adorned with the house’s customary scaled carving of spiraling serpents flanked the pigeon-holes. Enzo reached for the one on the left. With a delicate touch, he slowly spun it.
In the same instant, a slight scraping sound resounded further along the wall.
Fiore turned toward the noise and beheld one of the panels in the wall opposite the windows sliding aside. Behind it lay a scaled bronze door. A bas-relief dragon curled ‘round the keyhole in its center.
This likewise had its match in yet another key from Enzo’s ring, as he demonstrated by arising to turn its lock. This, at last, opened into a vault. Within it, a glass jar filled with a translucent blue liquid in which curled something small and pale and disturbingly familiar.
Enzo removed the jar from the hidden cabinet as delicately as if he feared it would shatter in his hands. He set it gently down on the desk in front of Fiore.
