The Alchemist Read online

  I stopped, surprised.

  “What’s this?”

  Majister Scacz strode toward me, smiling greeting. “We thought there should be a demonstration.” He guided me over to a draped object in the center of the hall. From its shape, I guessed it was my balanthast.

  “Is that my instrument?” I asked, concerned.

  The Mayor joined us. “Of course it is. Don’t be nervous, alchemist.”

  “It’s a delicate device.”

  The Mayor nodded seriously. “And we have treated it with utmost respect.” Scacz patted me on the back, trying to reassure me. “These people all around us are the ones whose support we need, if we are to effect your new balanthast workshop. We must raise taxes for the initial construction, and,” he paused, delicately, “some of the old nobility may be interested in patronage, in return for ancient bramble lands reclaimed. I assure you, this is a very good thing. It’s easier to gain support when people whiff profit than if they simply feel they are being taxed to no purpose.” He motioned me to the balanthast. “Please, do not be nervous. All will be well. This is an opportunity for us all.”

  A servant brought in a huge pot, containing a cutting of bramble over seven feet tall. The thing seemed to fairly quiver in its pot, hunting malevolently for a new place to stretch its roots. They must have planted it the night before, immediately after I left, for it to have grown so large. Multiple branches sprouted from it, like great hairy tentacles.

  The assembled dignitaries sucked in their breath at the sight of humanity’s greatest enemy, sitting in the center of the gallery. In the light of day, with its hairy tendrils and milkweed-like pods dangling, it spoke of eldritch menace. Even the pot was frightening, carved with the faces of Takaz, the Demon Prince, his serpent heads making offers of escape that would never be honored.

  The Mayor held up his hands to the assembled. “Fear not! This is but a demonstration. Necessary for you to grasp the significance of the alchemist’s achievement.” He waved a hand at the servants and they lifted the drapery from my instrument.

  “Behold!” the Mayor said to the throng. “The balanthast!”

  The man had the gift of showmanship, I had to grant him that. The instrument had been polished, and now with sunlight pouring down from the upper galleries, it fairly blazed. Its glass chambers refracted the light, sending off rainbows. The copper bell mouths of its vents and the belly of its combustion chamber reflected the people in strange and distorted glory.

  The crowd gasped in amazement.

  “Has it been tampered with?” I asked.

  “Of course not,” Scacz said. “Just polished. That’s all. I examined the workings of the thing, but took nothing apart.” He paused, concerned. “Is it damaged?”

  “No.” But still I studied it. “And did it satisfy you? That it does not use magic? That it is not some device of the majisters pressed into new form?”

  Scacz almost grinned at that. “I apologize most profusely for my suspicions, alchemist. It seems to function entirely according to natural properties. A feat, truly. History can only bow to your singular genius.” He nodded at the assembled people. “And now, will you demonstrate for our esteemed visitors?”

  As I began assembling the ingredients, a general in the audience asked, “What is this instrument of yours, Scacz?”

  “Salvation, war lord.”

  A fat merchant, out of the diamond quarter with thick mustaches from his many children called, “And what is the use of it?”

  The Mayor smiled. “If we told you, it would spoil the astonishing surprise. You must see it as the Majister and I first did. Without preface or preamble.”

  I armed the balanthast, but then had to have the servants help me drag it over until it stood beside the huge bramble pot. Under the assembled gaze, it seemed to take forever to scrape the tripod over the flagstones. Despite my faith in my device, my heart was pounding. I pulled on a leather glove and pinched out a bit of the potted soil. Added it to the firing chamber. Plunged the delivery nozzles into the dirt. At last, I lit the match.

  For a moment, we all watched, silent. The collected ingredients burned, and then were sucked into the combustion chamber. A pause. I held my breath, thinking that Scacz and the Mayor had somehow broken the balanthast in their ignorance. Then the balanthast shook and the snake faces of the Demon Prince burst wide, spilling soil as the pot shattered. The bramble toppled and hit the marble. The crowd gasped.

  Yellow smoke issued from the bramble’s limbs. It writhed, smoking, twisting, boiling. Sap squealed and frothed as it effervesced, a dying howl from our ancient menace.

  People covered their ears as the bramble thrashed. More smoke issued from its vines. Within a minute, the bramble lay still, leaving ash and tiny blackened threads floating in the sunlight. Yellow smoke billowed slowly over the assemblage, sending people coughing and wheezing, but as the clouds dispersed, a great murmuring rose at the sight of the scorched bramble corpse.

  “Inspect it!” Scacz cried. “Come and see. You must see this to believe!”

  Not many cared to come close, but the general did. Unafraid, he approached and knelt. He stared, thunderstruck. “There are no seeds.” His wide-eyed gaze fell upon me. “There should be seeds.”

  His words carried through the crowds. No seeds. No seeds. The lightning strike of miracle.

  The Mayor laughed, and servants arrived with goblets of wine for celebration. Scacz clapped me on the back and the men and women of the great merchant houses came to stare at the cleansed soil before them. And then Scacz called out again, “One further demonstration?”

  The crowd clapped and stamped their feet. Again I primed the balanthast, eager to show off the wonder of our salvation. I looked around for another pot of bramble, but none was in evidence.

  “How will I demonstrate?” I asked.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Scacz said. “Let it ignite free.”

  I hesitated.

  The Mayor said, “Don’t be shy of a bit of showmanship. Let them see the glory.”

  “But it can’t simply be fired. It must have something to attach to. Some bit of earth at least.”

  “Here.” Scacz took something from his sleeve. “I have something else you might try this on.” He said something under his breath and suddenly, I smelled magic. The scent was different from the healing magic I had cast upon Jiala the night before. This was something special. Bright as bluebells in the summer sun, sticky as honey. He pressed a folded bit of parchment into my palm.

  “Put this in your balanthast chamber,” Scacz said. “It should burn well.”

  The whiff of bluebell honey magic clung to the paper.

  I didn’t want to. Didn’t know what he was up to. But the Mayor was nodding, and I was surrounded by the assembled people, all those great names and powerful houses watching, and the Mayor motioned me to continue.

  “Go on, alchemist. Show us your genius. The crowd loves you. Let us see this thing fire free.”

  And to my everlasting regret, I did.

  I braced the delivery nozzles so they poked into the air, and lit my match. The spelled parchment and the neem and all the assembled ingredients disappeared into the belly of the balanthast, and it roared.

  Blue flame erupted from the nozzles, a long streak of sparkling fire. Thick yellow smoke issued with it. And something else: the sticky breath of the magic-laced parchment Scacz had given me. Flower brightness, volatilized in the belly chamber of the balanthast, and now released as smoke.

  Beside me, Scacz’s body began to glow an unearthly aura of blue, sharp and defined. But not just him. The Mayor as well. His steward also. I stared at my hands. Myself, even.

  The fumes of the expended balanthast billowed through the room and others began to glow as well. The general. The fat diamond merchant. His wife. More women in their skirts. Men in their fine embroidered vests. But Scacz’s blue-limned features were brightest of all.

  “You were right,” the Mayor murmured. “Look at us all.�
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  Everyone was staring at the many people who now glowed with spirit fire, gasping at the wonder of their unearthly beauty.

  Scacz smiled at me. “You were right, alchemist. Neem loves magic. It clings to its memory like a child to her mother’s skirts.”

  “What have you done?” I asked.

  “Done?” Scacz looked around, amused. “Why, just added a bit of illumination to your neem essence. Your fine alchemy and my simple spellcraft, combined. A lovely effect, don’t you think?”

  Boots thudded and steel rang around the hall. Guards appeared from behind white columns and beneath the arches. Men in scaly armor, and the tramp of more boots behind them.

  “Seize them!” Scacz shouted. “All the ones who burn with magic’s use. Every one! If they are not of the Mayor’s office, they are traitors.”

  A babble of protest rose. Already the people who did not glow were shrinking from those that did.

  The general drew his sword. “Treachery?” he asked. “This is why you bring us here?” A few others drew steel with him.

  The Mayor said, “Sadly, war lord, even you are not immune to law. You have used magic, when it is expressly forbidden. If you have some excuse, the magistrate will hear you…” He paused. “Oh dear, it appears the magistrate is also guilty.”

  He waved to his guards. “Take them all, then.”

  The general roared. He raised his sword and charged for the Mayor. Guards piled atop him like wolves. Steel clashed. A man fell back. The general stumbled from within the tangle of steel. Blood streamed from half a dozen sword thrusts. For a moment, I thought he would reach us, but then he fell, sprawling on the marble. And yet still he tried to reach the Mayor. Scrabbling like a beetle, leaving a maroon streak behind him.

  The Mayor watched the general’s struggle with distaste.

  “On second thought, kill them all now. We know what they’ve been up to.”

  The guards howled and the blue-glowing nobility shrank before them. Too few were armed. They scattered, running like sheep, scrambling about the gallery as the guards hunted them down and silenced their begging. At last, there were no more screams.

  I stood in the midst of a massacre, clutching my balanthast.

  The Mayor waved to the guards. “Drag the bodies out. Then go and seize their properties.” In a louder voice he announced, “For those of you still standing, the holdings of the traitors will be sold at auction, as is custom. Your trustworthiness is proven, and you shall benefit.”

  He clapped Scacz on the back. “Well done, Majister. Inspired, even.” His eyes fell on my own blue-glowing form. “Well. This is a pity. It seems the Majister was right in all respects. He told me he smelled magic on you when we first met, and I didn’t believe him. But here you are, glowing like a lamp.”

  I backed away, cradling the balanthast. “You’re the Demon Prince himself.”

  “Don’t be absurd. Takaz would care not at all for stopping bramble.”

  The guards were grabbing bodies and dragging them into piles, leaving blood smears behind.

  The Mayor eyed the stains. “Get someone in here to mop these tiles! Don’t just leave this blood here.” He glanced around. “Where’s my steward disappeared to?”

  Scacz cleared his throat. “I’m afraid he was caught up in the general slaughter.”

  “Ah.” The Mayor frowned. “Inconvenient.” He returned his attention to me. “Well, then. Let’s have the device.” He held out his hands.

  “I would never—”

  “Give it here.”

  I stared at him, filled with horror at what he had done. What I had been complicit in. In a rush, I lifted the balanthast over my head.

  “No!” Scacz lunged forward.

  But it was too late. I threw down the balanthast. Glass vacuum chambers shattered. Diamond fragments skittered across marble. Delicate copper and brass workings bent and snapped. I grabbed the largest part of the balanthast, and flung it from me, sending it sliding, breaking apart into even smaller parts before coming to rest in the blood of its victims.

  “You fool.” Scacz grabbed me. His hand closed on my throat and he forced me down. The blue glow about him intensified, magic flowing. My throat began to close, pinched tight by Scacz’s hate and power.

  “Join the rest of the traitors,” he said.

  My throat bound shut. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t even cry out. No air passed my lips. The man was powerful. He didn’t even need an inked page to spell such evil.

  Darkness.

  And then, abruptly, sunlight.

  I could breathe. I lay on the flagstones and sucked air through my suddenly unbound throat. Majister Scacz knelt over me.

  His hand lay upon my chest, resting gently. And yet, at the same time, I could feel each of his five fingers beneath my ribs. Gripping my heart. I batted weakly at his hand, trying to push him away. Scacz’s fingers tightened, constraining the beat of my blood. I gave up.

  I realized that the Mayor was standing over us both, watching.

  “The Mayor points out that you are much too talented to waste,” Scacz said. Again he squeezed my heart. “I do hope his faith proves true.”

  Abruptly his grip relaxed. He straightened and waved for the guards. “Take our friend to the dungeon, until we have a suitable workshop for him.” His eyes went to the broken balanthast. “He has many hours of labor ahead.”

  I found my voice. Croaked out words. “No. Not this bloodbath. I won’t be a part of it.”

  Scacz shrugged. “You already are. And of course you will.”

  6

  Should I tell you that I fought? That I didn’t break? That I resisted torture and blandishment and took no part in the purge that followed? That I had no hand in the blood that gushed down Khaim’s alleys and poured into the Sulong? Should I tell you that I was noble, while others pandered? That I was not party to the terror?

  In truth, I refused once.

  Then Scacz brought Jiala and Pila to visit. We all sat together in the chill of my cell, huddling under the water drip from stones, smelling the sweet damp rot of straw, and listening to the wet bellows of Jiala’s lungs, the fourth participant in our stilted conversation.

  Scacz himself said nothing at all. He simply let us sit together. He brought wooden stools, and had a guard provide cups of mint tea and at first I was relieved to see Jiala and Pila unharmed, but then Jiala’s coughing started and wouldn’t stop, and blood spackled her lips and she began to cry, and then I had to call the guard to take them away. And even though the man was fast in coming, it was still too slow.

  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 furnis
hed 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.