Paolo Bacigalupi - The Alchemist

The mayor was nodding. “You’re right. This is worth our effort. Those silly weapons are nothing to this.”

Scacz took another sip of his wine, running his hand over the balanthast. A slow caress. “The potential here… is astonishing.” He looked up at me, inquiring. “I think I would like to test it for a little while. See what it does.”

“Majister?”

Scacz patted me on the back. “Don’t worry. We’ll be very careful with it. But I must examine it a while. Ensure that it truly uses no magic that will come back to haunt us.” He looked at me significantly. “Too many solutions to bramble have simply sought to use magic in some glancing way. To build a fire, for example, and then when the bramble is burned, it turns out that so much magic was used in the making of the fire that the bramble returns twice as strong.”

“But the balanthast doesn’t use magic,” I protested.

Scacz looked at me. “You are a majister to know this, then? In some cases, a man will think he is not using magical principles, because he is ignorant. You yourself acknowledge that something unique is afoot with this device.” He picked up the balanthast. “It’s just for a little while, alchemist. Just to be sure.”

The Mayor was watching me closely. “Don’t worry, alchemist. We will not slight your due reward. But for us, the stakes are very high. If we invest our office in something which brings the doom of Takaz instead of the salvation of Mara… I’m sure you understand.”

I wracked my mind, trying to find a reason to deny them, but my voice failed me, and at that moment, Jiala started to cough again. I glanced over at her, worried. It had the deep sound of cutting knives.

Scacz began to gather up the device. “Go on,” he said. “See to your daughter’s health. She is obviously tired. We will send for you quite soon.”

Jiala’s coughing worsened. The two most powerful men in the city looked down at her. “Poor thing,” the Mayor murmured. “She seems to have the wasting cough.”

I rushed to contradict. “No. It’s something else. The cold is all. It starts the cough and makes it difficult to stop.”

Scacz pried the balanthast away from me. “Go then. Take your daughter home and warm her. We will send for you, soon.”

All the way home, Jiala coughed. Deep wracking seizures that folded her small body in half. By the time we arrived at our doorstep, her coughing was incessant. Pila took one look at Jiala and glared at me with astonished anger.

“The poor girl’s exhausted. What took you so long?”

I shook my head. “They liked the device. And then they wanted to talk. And then to toast. And then to talk some more.”

“And you couldn’t bring the poor girl back?”

“What was I supposed to do?” I asked. “‘Thank you so much, Mayor and Majister, I must leave, and no, the lost wines of Jhandpara are of no interest to me. Name a price and I will sell you the plans for my balanthast, good day?’”

Jiala’s coughing worsened. Pila shot me a dark look and ushered her down the hall. “Come into the workshop, child. I’ve already lit the fire.”

I watched the two of them go, feeling helpless and frustrated. What should have been a triumph had become something else. I didn’t like the way Scacz behaved at the end. Everything he said had been perfectly reasonable, and yet his manner somehow disturbed me. And the way the Mayor spoke. All his words were correct. More than correct. And yet they filled me with unease.

I made my way up the stairs to my rooms, empty now except for piles of blankets and a chest of my clothes.

Was I turning paranoid? Into some sort of madman who looked beneath everyone’s meaning to some darker intention? I had known a woman, once, when I was younger, who had gone mad like that. A glassblower who made wondrous jewel pendants that glittered with their own inner fire, seeming to burn from within. A genius with light. And yet there was something in her head that made her suspicious. She had suspected her husband, and then her children of plotting against her, and had finally thrown herself in the river, escaping demons from the Three Hundred Thirty-Three Halls that only she could see.

Was I now filled with the same suspicions? Was I going down her path?

Mayor and Majister had both spoken with fair words. I unbuttoned my vest, astounded at how threadbare it had become. The red and blue stitching was old and out of mode. How broken it was. As was everything except the balanthast. It, at least, had gleamed. I had put so much hope into this idea, had spent so many years…

A knock sounded on my door.

“Yes?”

Pila leaned in. “It’s Jiala. Her coughing won’t stop. She needs you.”

“Yes. Of course. I’ll come soon.”

Pila hesitated. “Now, I think. It’s very bad. There is blood. If you don’t use your spells soon, she will be broken.”

I stopped in the act of fixing my buttons. A thrill of fear coursed through me. “You know?”

Pila gave me a tight smile. “I’ve lived with you too long not to guess.”

She motioned me out. “Don’t worry about your fancy clothes. Your daughter doesn’t care how you dress.”

She hurried me down the stairs and into the workroom. We found Jiala beside the fire, curled on the flagstones, wracked by coughing. Her body contorted as another spasm took her. Blood pooled on the floor, red as roses, brighter than rubies.

“Papa…” she whispered.

I turned to find Pila standing beside me with the spellbook of Majister Arun in her hands.

“You know all my secrets?” I asked.

Pila looked at me sadly. “Only the ones that matter.” She handed me the rest of my spell ingredients and ran to close the shutters so no sign of our magic would be visible, reportable to the outside world.

I took the ingredients and mixed them and placed the paste on Jiala’s brow, bared her bony chest. Her breathing was like a bellows, labored and loud, rich with blood and the sound of crackling leaves. My hands shook as I finished the preparations and took up Majister Arun’s hand.

I spoke the words and magic flowed from me and into my child.

Slowly, her breathing eased. Her face lost its fevered glare. Her eyes became her own again, and the rattle and scrape of her breath smoothed as the bloody rents closed themselves.

Gone. As quickly and brutally as it had come, it was gone, leaving nothing but the sulphur stink of magic in the room.

Pila was staring at me, astonished. “I knew,” she whispered. “But I had not seen.”

I blotted Jiala’s brow. “I’m sorry to have involved you.”

Jiala’s breathing continued to ease. Pila knelt beside me, watching over my daughter. She was resting now, exhausted from what her body had used up in its healing.

“You mustn’t be caught, Papa.” Jiala whispered.

“It won’t be much longer,” I told her. “In no time at all, we’ll be using magic just like the ancients and we won’t have to hide a thing.”

“Will we have a floating castle?”

I smiled gently. “I don’t see why not. First we’ll push back the bramble. Then we’ll have a floating castle, and maybe one day we’ll even grow wines on the slopes of Mount Sena.” I tousled her hair. “But now I want you to rest and sleep and let the magic do its work.”

Jiala looked up at me with her mother’s dark eyes. “Can I dream of cloud castles?”

“Only if you sleep,” I said.

Jiala closed her eyes, and the last tension flowed from her little body. To Pila, I said, “Open the windows, but just a little. Let the magic out slowly so no one has a chance to smell and suspect. If you are caught here, you will face the Executioner’s great axe with me.”

Pila went and opened one of the windows and began to air the room, while I covered Jiala with blankets. We met again at the far side of the workshop.