NOVEL NEXT Welcome to the Shop, part 2
Several months later, Dzošajan and Quintus walked side by side down the bustling main street of the town of Extremum. Dzo’s spirits were high; it was in the guild outpost of this town where she and Quintus had signed the papers and spoken the oaths to the gods of the empire that formally marked the beginning of Dzo’s new life. Now all that was left was for Quintus to take her to his laboratory.
Extremum was a town far more busy than its size suggested. Many of the people Dzo saw in the street were not the typical townsfolk of the empire, in their pale trousers and cloth caps, but substantially more flamboyant individuals with swords at their belts and coin to spend. In other words, adventurers.
Dzo scowled as a group of four pushed past her, a crystal orb-bearing dwarf very nearly bumping into her. Quintus noticed out of the corner of his eye.
“You aren’t going to last long here if you can’t stand the sight of adventurers,” he said with a frown. “They fuel the entire town’s economy. And besides, they haven’t considered orcs an enemy since—”
“Since the death of Raldhvak and the end of the war, you’ve told me about twenty times,” Dzo said with a roll of her eyes. “And yet I’m old enough to remember what happened before then.”
“I do,” Quintus said. “But bearing a grudge is bad for you.”
Dzošajan bit back a harsh response; talking back to her master would get her in trouble. “How much further? My feet hurt.”
Quintus stopped in the middle of the street, a smile of slight pride crossing his worn, leathery face. “No further, my boy. It’s right here. Quintus’s Concoctions!”
Dzo raised an eyebrow. “Is that it?”
It was three stories tall, one of stone and two of wood, and it looked only slightly more expensive than every other building in the area. There was a sign above the door that indeed said “Quintus’s Concoctions,” as well as a sign nailed to the dark and polished wood of the door itself that said simply “Closed”.
“Were you expecting something different?” Quintus said.
Dzo shrugged. “A tower, maybe, or a strange dwelling out on the edge of civilization so as not to cause harm with your experiments. You never said that you run a shop. It looks like a bakery.”
“I need to get paid, Dzošajan,” Quintus said plainly. “And so long as there are adventurers, there will be a demand for potions. Let me show you around.”
The customer-facing portion of Quintus’s Concoctions struck Dzo as incredibly boring, based exclusively on the few shops she’d seen during the journey from her village. It was a plain but clean room, one side entirely empty, while the other side was filled with an enormous set of shelves, and the two halves separated by a long oaken countertop.
“I like to maintain an air of professionalism,” Quintus remarked. “No gaudy stuffed beasts or elaborate murals, just cleanliness and the assurance of good, quality materials.”
The rest of the first floor was a lot of stockrooms, crates and shelves full of both completed potions in bottles and raw ingredients in jars and sacks and clay pots. Quintus explained his elaborate classification system, based on effect and nature of the object rather than source; he assured Dzo that she’d get it eventually. There was also, in the back of the room, an enormous shelf full of thick codices. Quintus gestured to one, which lay open atop a small desk or table, at a height that suggested it was meant to be read while standing.
“This is the inventory ledger,” he said.
Dzošajan furrowed her brow. “Wasn’t the ledger out front?”
“No, that was the sales ledger. You keep track of money out front. The inventory ledger is where you note down every potion and ingredient which is removed from these stockrooms, as soon as you do it. Understand?”
“But if every sale is already being taken down in the other ledger, wouldn’t taking down inventory be redundant? Seems like a waste of time to me.”
Quintus flared his nostrils in dismay. “And risk error if a potion is created using an unusual ingredient ratio, or using a recipe which has not been properly noted down? I think not. You will take down every transfer of material and potions in this ledger. I assure you, it stops being difficult after a while.”
Dzo sighed. “Of course.”
The second floor consisted of a single large, open space, with a high, buttressed roof and walls ringed around with chimneys to vent the smoke from eight ceramic boilers, each one topped with an iron cauldron. The boilers were all unlit, which made the room seem incredibly sad and empty. Quintus spent several minutes explaining the basic workings of the boilers, how they were to be fueled with charcoal (and the charcoal taken down in the inventory ledger), and the temperature carefully monitored by examining a rune engraved on the side of each one. Dzo listened.
What she really wanted to hear about was what took up the far end of the room: the laboratory. There was a vast array of glass bottles and pipes, testing plates, small burners powered by pure magic, an abacus with beads of solid gold, and yet more shelving for books. Quintus, of course, explained none of this, except for a single thick tome sitting on a pedestal, its covers chained shut and secured with a padlock.
“This is the most important single object in the entire building, Dzošajan,” Quintus said gravely. “If the whole shop catches fire, you are to grab this first, because we could rebuild it all from the ground up using only what is contained within these pages.”
“Is it another ledger?” Dzo said, fearing the answer.
“No, no, the brewing ledger is…” Quintus gestured vaguely to his right, “somewhere over there. This is the Master Formulary. The Alchemist’s Guild exists to safeguard the secrets held within, and it is a mark of my membership in the guild that I am allowed to look within this book without getting beaten half to death and thrown in prison.”
Quintus reached into one of his many, many pockets; then, realizing that he’d reached into the wrong one, he put his hands into another, then another. Eventually he found the right one, and produced from it a small brass key, holding it out in his palm. Dzo took the hint and grabbed it.
“This unlocks the book, I assume?”
“Yes. Keep this key on or near your person at all times; that you own it marks you as a member of the Guild, even if only an apprentice. Show it to another Guild member, and you will prove that you are in association. Lose it, and the entire Guild will fall upon both of our heads with ferocity unmatched in the entire known world.”
Dzo swallowed, and moved to slip it into her pocket. “Understood, Master.”
Quintus shook his head. “Use it. The first lesson starts here, my boy.”
Dzo did as she was asked, and though it took some effort to get the tiny key to cooperate with her large hands, she did eventually unlock the Formulary. Opening it to the first page, she was immediately hit by a tidal wave of information. Each page was tightly packed with text, most of it in a shorthand that Quintus had been teaching her, including both structured recipes for the creation of potions and general notes and theorizations from an acting alchemist.
“Turn to the bookmarked page,” Quintus said.
Dzo did so. “Wait. Why is the bookmark glued to the paper? I think that defeats the purpose of a bookmark, does it not?”
“Read what it says at the top of the page.”
This was Dzošajan’s first serious challenge. Quintus’s lessons in the language of the Empire had included reading and writing, but even six months wasn’t much time to become familiar with a new tongue, let alone the formal scientific register used for alchemy. Still, she leaned over the book and began tracing out the script with one finger.
“A Potion for Throwing Fast Wounds?”
“Potion of Accelerated Wound Closure,” Quintus said gently. “Better known as the Potion of Healing. And the reason why the bookmark is glued to that page is because about eighty percent of what you’re going to be doing here is making that one potion over and over and over again. If you can’t recite the formula in your sleep by the end of the year, I’ll consider you a failure of a student.”
Dzošajan suddenly became far more interested in the formula, scanning over it from top to bottom. “I’ll believe what you say, Master, but I don’t see why you’d make so much of it, or how you’d be able to sell it all. Don’t adventurers know how to make potions out of roots and aurugenic creature parts they find?”
“Certainly, they can. Such… folk remedies are common among adventurers. But do you know what throwing the right creature parts into a pot gets you?”
Dzo considered for a moment, then shook her head.
“A shitty potion!” Quintus said with a truly geriatric cackle. “So no matter how great and skilled they are, the adventurers wouldn’t get anyway without a little help from Guildsmen like us. Never forget that, Dzo; they need us just as much as we need them, if not more.”
Dzo couldn’t help but crack the slightest of smirks. “Of course, Master.”
“That thought should also make it a little easier to deal with irritable customers,” Quintus said.
Dzošajan suddenly remembered something, something that she’d been looking forward to ever since not long after joining the Guild expedition. “May I look through the rest of the book? To see if anything catches my eye.”
Quintus had already begun heading toward the stairwell, apparently planning to show her the third floor, but stopped at the request. He turned, raising an eyebrow inquisitively. For a moment, Dzo was sure that he’d already caught on to her plan, and that she was about to receive a severe tongue-lashing. “I suppose there’s no harm in it,” Quintus said. “As long as you don’t neglect the essentials, you can memorize whatever potions you like. I’ll go load up the burners, if we aren’t going to continue the tour.”
Dzo immediately went back to the book. She knew she had to move quickly. Spending too long would make it overly clear that she was searching for something specific instead of just wandering, and she had the feeling that she wouldn’t be able to outwit the old elf once his suspicions had been roused. So she started at page one and moved as quickly as she could.
With no idea what name the potion she was looking for would be recorded under, Dzo left her success up to complete luck. She hadn’t found it by the time Quintus returned from the storeroom with an armload of charcoal, which he began to carefully measure into the burners. Sweat dripped down her face. She was sure that at any moment he would notice what she was doing and begin asking pointed questions from over her shoulder, but he seemed entirely engrossed in the mechanical act of burner loading. Page after page she flicked through the Formulary, heart hammering as she silently prayed that she’d find the right one.
Later that night, she offered fervent prayers to the gods as thanks for her luck in that endeavor. The page she was looking for was early in the book. As soon as she realized it was the one, her mind went into overdrive, memorizing every required ingredient and absorbing as much of the procedure as could be absorbed in a limited time window, as well as memorizing the page number so she could check more thoroughly later. The Imperial name for this potion, apparently, was the Elixir of Abundant Femininity.
