He rose and kicked up the fire, which had burned down to glowing embers. He added wood and got a nice blaze going. He washed his face in the basin of almost fresh water the servant had left just two days ago. He found a piece of dried smoked beef, and washed it down with a tumbler of barley ale. And all the time he was planning out his next steps.

He would need a really strong spell to transport him where he needed to go. It would have to combine the potency of a Sending with the puissance of a Visitation. Transportation Spells were notoriously difficult, involving, as they did, the sending forth of a corporeal substance, in this case himself, to regions where creatures usually walked around in subtler bodies. The sheer amount of spiritual energy required for this was daunting.

He went to his bookcase and rummaged through his grimoires. He found a formula in Hermes Trismegistus' Surefire Travel to the Stars. But it was too complicated, calling for ingredients difficult to obtain, such as a Chinaman's left great toe, which was an item almost impossible to procure in Eastern Europe at that time, though in Venice they had a goodly supply of them. He searched on. In his Concordance to the Malleus Mallificarum he found a simpler formula with fewer ingredients. He set to making it.

Batwort… He had a whole vial of that around somewhere. And the recipe called for toad's stools, four of them entire, but luckily he had some, nicely dried and stored in a thimble. Hellebore was never any problem, white willow was common, mercury he had on hand, he was out of blackened wormwood but could pick up some more at his neighborhood pharmacy. But what was this? "Will not work without a fragment of the True Cross"!