The artist is very talented, and he or she has embellished my words, put symbols and secrets to unlock into the work. Whatever you might look for, you will find echoes of it, hints and allegations of occulted truths. Mystical texts are inscribed here almost profligately, offering their meanings like fruit trees in late summer. This panel is Pythagoras, that one is an Orphic text on the transmigration of souls. Over there is something that could be a source for Hermes Trismegistos, or a carefully adulterated quotation from his work. The words of the Avesta are here, and this is a palindrome from the Ginza Rabba. All genuine texts of religion, all deeply held and loved by their adherents, all bound together into a sublime flimflam. There is more than I ever imagined: more detail, more scholarship. My jest has outgrown me—and in that evolution has become something far more frightening. This is work and effort and scholarship: a grand design of state or theology. Someone is perpetrating a ruse, political or personal, into whose path dead Scipio and Father Fishy have fallen. Fishy, in turn, has settled on me—I suspect as the most discreet and most proximate alchemist to whom he could safely turn—to advise him on the murder in this distressing spiritual context. What he imagines I can achieve, I cannot think. Unless he knows, or someone does, that there is no greater expert than I. Was his eye guided in my direction? Is it coincidence that draws me into this plot, who authored the lie on which it turns, or is it meant? Does the one behind this know that there is no Chamber at all, or is that the point, to smoke out the true crucible of the goddess by presenting a false one? That would be a grand enough purpose for a forgery of this magnitude. It is a paradox, otherwise: what possible benefit of building this Chamber could outweigh the cost? The materials alone are a nation’s ransom. And if a personal grudge were carried to such an extreme, the misperception of risk and reward is doubly insane. The death of Scipio, friend to the Eastern Emperor, Flavius Arcadius, will bring a harrowing far worse than any benefit might outweigh. Cicero said it, in another place: only an emperor could create such a thing, but one cannot imagine an emperor desiring it. A god, perhaps, might bid so high—or a Titan.