By Midnight (65 page)

The great Persian alchemists were men of infinite wisdom and vast ambition, and among their myriad lusts were three primary aspirations, to whit: the transmutation of base metal into gold, the creation of a panacea - a universal remedy that held the power to cure all known contagions - and the discovery of alcahest, a universal solvent which could dissolve any material, even the hardest stones. The most ancient and secretive of all the alchemists were the Hermetic scholars whose dread experiments combined all of the magick and heretical knowledge to one end: the search for immortality. Many believe that the Muslim physician Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi, or Rhazes, actually succeeded in his quest in the ninth century, inadvertently creating the vampire race, although another, equally lucid school believes the alchemists were searching for a cure to the vampire disease: a chicken and egg argument. What is indisputable is that by the early sixteenth century, with the rise of chemistry and biology as mainstream philosophical approaches, many branches of alchemy were forced to choose a side, go underground, or both -for example, the Guardian sect, direct descendants of the alchemist Rhazes, who had sworn to use their substantial knowledge to fight vampires and lycanthropes. The Guardians also swore to protect the Furies, a group of humans with the biological ability to destroy vampires. Guardian lore also contends that they held the antidote to the Fury virus, known as ‘Dragon’s Breath’, suggesting that the sect had great magickal learning. Little is known ofthis elixir, except that it involved distilling the root of the Hawmarsh tree and the leaves of the Spirula plant, only found in a very few ancient English woods. The recipe is supposedly hidden in the Latin tract Liber Albus, one of the many spellbooks lost with the rise of materialism.