Paolo Bacigalupi - The Alchemist

The last vision I had of Jiala was of Pila carrying her small form, her wracking cough echoing against cold stones.

And then Scacz came down to visit me again. He leaned against the wall, studying my dishevelment through the bars.

“The cold of the dungeon disagrees with her lungs,” he observed.

The repair of the first balanthast was the price of Jiala and Pila’s well being, but Scacz and our Jolly Mayor were not finished with me. In Jiala they had the perfect lever. In return for the magic and healing that only Scacz could provide, I created the tools and instruments they desired. My devices purchased life for myself and my family, and death for everyone else.

Blood ran in the streets. Rumors in my prison said that the Mayor’s halls were redder than a sunset. That bodies burned in bramble piles, the fat of their cooking twining with the yellow smoke of bramble to fill the skies with funeral pyres. The Executioner was so busy that on some days, a second and even a third were summoned to take over the efforts of the axeman who had grown exhausted with his work. Some days, they didn’t even bother with the effort of a public spectacle.

Scacz had laughed at that.

“When we couldn’t find these furtive little spell casters, we needed fear to keep the magic in check,” he said. “Now that we can hunt them down, it’s better to let them practice for a little while, and then seize everything.”

As long as I furnished the tools of the hunt, I was not harmed. Scacz and the Mayor had so many uses for me. I was a prized hawk. Free enough, within certain confines. The dynamic between us was as taut as the strings on a violin. Each of us would pluck at those strings, seeking gain, testing the other’s boundaries, trying the tenor of the note, the question of its strain. The workings of my mind and its creations tugging against the value of Jiala and Pila’s well being. And so we each tugged and pulled at that catgut strand.

I was not a prisoner, precisely. More a scholar who worked all day and all night in a confined place, building better, more portable balanthasts. Constructing devices better tuned to sniffing out magic. Sometimes, I myself forgot my situation. When the work went well, I was as focused as I had ever been in my workshop.

I am ashamed to admit that there were even times when I reveled in the totality of focus that my cell provided. When there is nothing to do but work, a great deal of work can be done.

“Come now. I brought sweets. You like them,” Pila urged. She sat outside the bars of my workshop, offering.

I sat, staring. “I’m not hungry anymore.”

“I can see that. You’re getting skinny.”

“I was skinny before.”

Pila watched me sadly. “Please. If you won’t eat for yourself, then at least eat for me. For Jiala.”

Unwillingly, I stood and shuffled over to her.

“You look unwell,” she said.

I shrugged. Of late, I had been having nightmares. Oftentimes, I would dream of a river of my victims. Dreamed them pouring down the streets to where the Executioner stood waiting, the hooded butcher chopping off heads as they flowed past, his axe swinging like a scythe, heads spinning in all directions. And I stood at the source of that river, casting each person into the flow. Illuminating them in blue fire before tossing them into the current, sending them tumbling toward that final cataract of the axe.

Pila stretched her hand through the bars, and clasped my cold fingers. Her skin showed wrinkles and her palms showed surprising dryness. I thought that maybe those hands had been soft, that she had been young once, but I could hardly remember. She clasped my hand, and against all the promises I made myself, I collapsed against the bars, pressing her fingers to my cheek.

That I hungered for her warmth was something I could barely stand. Majister Scacz had offered us “relief” as he called it, but he did so with such a leer that after the first time, I could do it no more, and spat in his face when he next suggested the idea. Which enraged him so much that he barred Pila from visiting for nearly six months. Only when I threatened to cut my own throat with a bulb of glass did he finally relent and allow her visits again, if only through the bars. I kissed Pila’s fingers, starved for her kindness and humanity in a place that I had turned brutish and bloody.

A few feet away, a guard sat, his body ostentatiously half-turned away from us, providing a semblance of privacy. This particular one was Jaiska. He had a family and his mustaches were long for his three sons, all of whom had followed him into the guards. Decent enough, and willing to give us a little privacy as we whispered to one another through the bars.

Not like Izaac, who loved to regale me with the executions he had seen, thanks to my inventions. Izaac said that within fifty miles of Khaim, no householder had passed untested by the balanthast. Heads not only decorated the city gates, but also the broad bridge that leaped the Sulong and now linked Khaim with its lesser kin. There were so many heads that the Mayor had gotten tired of mounting trophies and now simply ordered bodies tossed into the river to float to the sea.

“How is Jiala?” I asked.

“Better than you,” Pila said. “She thrives. And grows. Scacz still refuses to let me bring her, but she is well. You can trust that. Scacz is evil but he loves your work and so he cares for us.”

“Other people’s heads in exchange for keeping our own.” I stared at my workshop. “How many now have I killed? How much blood is on my hands?”

“It’s no use thinking about. They were using magic, which was always forbidden. These are not guiltless people who go to the Executioner’s axe.”

“Don’t forget that we were among them as well. Are among them, thanks to Scacz.”

“There’s no use thinking on it. It will only drive you mad.”

I looked at her bitterly. “I’ve been here for two years already, and if I haven’t found refuge in madness yet, I doubt I will.”

She sighed. “In any case, it’s slowing now. There are fewer who test the Mayor’s powers of detection.” She leaned close. “Some say that he now only finds magic on people who are too wealthy or powerful. Those ones he snuffs out, and confiscates their families and property.”

“And no one fights?”

“A few. But he has supporters. The farmers near the bramble wall say the vines have slowed. In places, they even cut it back. For the first time in generations, they cut it back.”

I scowled. “We could have cut back miles, if the Mayor had simply used the balanthast as it was intended.”

“It’s no use thinking on.” She pushed a cloth-wrapped bundle of bread through the bars. “Here,” she said. “Please. Eat a little.”

But I shook my head and walked away from her offering. It was a petty thing. I knew it even as I did so. But there was no one else to lash out against. A petty rebellion for the real rebellion I had no stomach for.

Pila sighed. I heard a rustling and then her words to Jaiska. “Give these to him when he changes his mind. Some for you as well. Don’t let him starve himself.”

And then she was gone, leaving me with my workshop and my killing devices.

“Don’t scorn her,” Jaiska said. “She stands by you and your daughter when she could walk away easy. Old Scacz likes to bother her. Comes and bothers her.”

I turned. “What do you mean?”

He shrugged. “Bothers her.”

“She doesn’t say so.”

“Not to you. Wouldn’t want you to do something stupid.”

I sighed, feeling childish for my display. “I don’t deserve her.”

Jaiska laughed. “No one deserves anyone. You just win ’em and hope you can hang onto ’em.” He offered me the bread. “Might as well eat while it’s fresh.”