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Khaim clings to life. Flooded with refugees and slowly starving, the last city of a once-great empire is surrounded by a choking thicket of poisonous bramble. This is a world where magic is toxic. Every time a spell is cast, the bramble advances, sprouting in tilled fields and roof beams, thrusting up from between cobblestones and bursting forth from sacks of powdered spice. A bit of magic, and bramble follows. A little at first, and then more – until whole cities are dragged down under tangling vines. Armies hack and burn... but in a world that can’t give up magic’s sweet succour, the bramble can’t be stopped.
Or can it? After ten years of research, an alchemist believes he has found a potent new weapon to wield against the bramble. His invention promises freedom from fear, freedom from hunger, freedom from the rule of Khaim’s tyrant, The Jolly Mayor. But this is not an exchange the Jolly Mayor is willing to contemplate...
Award-winning authors Paolo Bacigalupi and Tobias S. Buckell have created a fantasy for our times, exploring a world of glittering memories and a desperate present, where everyone uses a little magic, and someone else always pays the price.
Welcome Page
About The Tangled Lands
Part 1: The Alchemist
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Part 2: The Executioness
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Part 3: The Children of Khaim
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Part 4: The Blacksmith’s Daughter
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Afterword
About the Authors
An Invitation from the Publisher
Copyright
BY PAOLO BACIGALUPI
IT’S DIFFICULT TO SELL YOUR LAST BED TO A NEIGHBOR. More difficult still when your only child clings like a spider monkey to its frame, and screams as if you were chopping off her arms with an axe every time you try to remove her.
The four men from Alacan had already arrived, hungry, and happy to make copper from the use of their muscles, and Lizca Sharma was there as well, her skirts glittering with diamond wealth, there to supervise the four-poster’s removal and make sure it wasn’t damaged in the transfer.
The bed was a massive piece of furniture. For a child, ridiculous. Jiala’s small limbs had no need to sprawl across such a vast expanse. But the frame had been carved with images of the floating palaces of Jhandpara. Cloud dragons of old twined up its posts to the canopy where wooden claws clutched rolled nets and, with a clever copper clasp, opened on hinges to let the nets come tumbling down during the hot times to keep out mosquitoes. A beautiful bed. A fanciful bed. Imbued with the vitality of Jhandpara’s lost glory. An antique made of kestrel wood—that fine red grain so long choked under bramble—and triply valuable because of it.
We would eat for months on its sale.
But to Jiala, six years old and deeply attached, who had already watched every other piece of our household furniture disappear, it was another matter.
She had watched our servants and nannies evaporate as water droplets hiss to mist on a hot griddle. She had watched draperies tumble, seen the geometries of our carpets rolled and carried out on Alacaner backs, a train of men like linked sausages marching from our marbled halls. The bed was too much. These days, our halls echoed with only our few remaining footfalls. The porticos carried no sound of music from our pianoforte, and the last bit of warmth in the house could only be found in the sulphurous stink of my workshop, where a lone fire yet blazed.
For Jiala, the disappearance of her vast and beautiful bed was her last chance to make a stand.
“NOOOOOOOO!”
I tried to cajole her, and then to drag her. But she’d grown since her days as a babe, and desperation gave her strength. As I hauled her from the mattress, she grabbed hold of one huge post and locked her arms around it. She pressed her cheek against the cloud dragon’s scales and screamed again. “NOOOOOOOO!”
We all covered our ears as she hit a new crystal-shattering octave.
“NOOOOOOOO!”
“Please, Jiala,” I begged. “I’ll buy you a new one. As soon as we have money.”
“I don’t want a new one!” she screamed. “I want this one!” Tears ran down her reddening face.
I tugged at her, embarrassed under the judging gaze of Mistress Lizca and the workmen behind me. I liked Lizca. And now she saw me at my most reduced. As if the empty house wasn’t enough. As if this sale of my child’s last belonging was not humiliating in the extreme, I now begged a child for cooperation.
“Jiala. It’s only for a little while. And it will just be down the narrows at Mistress Lizca’s. You can visit if you like.” I looked to Lizca, hoping desperately that she wouldn’t contradict. “It will be just next door.”
“I can’t sleep next door! This is mine! You sold everything! We don’t have anything! This is mine!” Jiala’s shrieks rose to new levels, and this brought on her coughing, which alternated with her screams as I tried to pry her arms free.
“I’ll buy you a new one,” I said. “One fit for a princess.”
But she only screamed louder.
The workmen kept their hands over their ears as the gryphon shrieks continued. I cast about, desperate for a solution to her heartbreak. Desperate to stop the coughing that she was inflicting on herself with this tantrum.
Stupid. I’d been stupid. I should have asked Pila to take her out, and then ordered the workmen to come stealthy like thieves. I cast about the room, and there on the workmen’s faces, I saw something unexpected. Unlike Lizca, who stood stonily irritated, the workmen showed nothing of the sort.
No impatience.
No anger.
No superiority nor disgust.
Pity.
These refugee workmen, come across the river from Lesser Khaim, pitied me. Soiled linen shirts draped off their stooped shoulders and broken leather shoes showed cold mudcaked winter toes, and yet they pitied me.
They had lost everything fleeing their own city, their last portable belongings clanking on their backs, their hounds and children squalling and snot-nosed, tangled around their ankles. Flotsam in a river of refugees come from Alacan when their mayor and majisters accepted that the city could not be held and that they must, in fact, fall back—and quickly—if they wished to escape the bramble onslaught.
Alacan men, men who had lost everything, looked at me with pity. And it filled me with rage.
I shouted at Jiala. “Well, what should I do? Should I have you starve? Should I stop feeding you and Pila? Should we all sit in the straw and gnaw mice bones through the winter so that you can have a kestrel wood bed?”
Of course, she only screamed louder. But now it was out of fear. And yet I continued to shout, my voice increasing, overwhelming hers, an animal roar, seeking to frighten and intimidate that which I could not cajole. Using my size and power to crush something small and desperate.
“Shut up!” I screamed. “We have nothing! Do you understand? Nothing! We have no choices left!”
Jiala collapsed into sobbing misery, which turned to deeper coughing, which frightened me even more, because if the coughing continued I would have to cast a spell to keep it down. Everything I did led only to something worse.
The fight went out of Jiala. I pried her away from the bed.
Lizca motioned to the Alacaners and they began the process of disassembling the great thing.
I held Jiala close, feeling her shaking and sobbing, still loud but without a fight now. I had broken her will. An ugly solution that reduced us both into something less than what the Three Faces of Mara hoped for us. Not father and daughter. Not protector and sacred charge. Monster and victim. I clutched my child to me, hating what had been conjured between us. That I had bullied her down. That she had forced me to this point.
But hating myself most of all, for I had placed us in this position.
That was the true sickness. I had dragged us into danger and want. Our house had once been so very fine. In our glory days, when Merali was still alive, I made copper pots for rich households, designed metal and glass mirrors of exquisite inlay. Blew glass bargaining bulbs for the great mustached merchants of Diamond Street to drink from as they made their contracts. I engraved vases with the Three Faces of Mara: Woman, Man, and Child, dancing. I etched designs of cloud dragons and floating palaces. I cast gryphons in gold and bronze and copper. I inlaid forest hunts of stags and unicorns in the towering kestrel forests of the East and sculpted representations of the three hundred and thirty-three arches of Jhandpara’s glorious waterfront. I traded in the nostalgic dreams of empire’s many lost wonders.
And we had been rich.
Now, instead of adornments for rich households, strange devices squatted and bubbled and clanked in my workroom, and not a single one of them for sale. Curving copper tubes twisted like kraken tentacles. Our impoverished faces reflected from the brass bells of delivery nozzles. Glass bulbs glowed blue with the ethereal stamens of the lora flower, which can only be gathered in summer twilight when ember beetles beckon them open and mate within their satin petals.
And now, all day and all night, my workroom hissed and steamed with the sulphurous residues of bramble.
Burned branches and seeds and sleep-inducing spines passed through my equipment’s bowels. Instead of Jhandpara’s many dreams, I worked now with its singular nightmare—the plant that had destroyed an empire and now threatened to destroy us as well. Our whole house stank day and night with the smell of burning bramble and the workings of my balanthast. That was the true cause of my daughter’s pitched defense of her kestrel-wood bed.
I was the one at fault. Not the girl. I had impoverished us with every decision I had made, over fifteen years. Jiala was too young to even know what the household had looked like in its true glory days. She had arrived too late for that. Never saw its flowering rose gardens and lupine beds. Didn’t remember when the halls rang with servants’ laughter and activity, when Pila, Saema, and Traz all lived with us, and Niaz and Romara and—some other servant whose name even I have now forgotten—swept every corner of the place for dust and kept the mice at bay. It was my fault.
I clutched my sobbing child to my breast, because I knew she was right, and I was wrong, but still I let Mistress Lizca and her Alacan workmen break the bed apart, and carry it out, piece by piece, until we were alone in an empty and cold marble room.
I had no choice. Or, more precisely, I had stripped us of our choices. I had gone too far, and circumstances were closing upon us both.
JIALA KEPT FROM ME FOR SEVERAL DAYS AFTER I SOLD HER bed. She went out, and disappeared for hours at a time. She was resentful, but she spoke no more to me, and seemed willing to let me bribe her back to forgiveness with syrup crackers from Sugar Alley. She disappeared into the cobbled streets of Khaim, and I took advantage of the peaceful time to work.
The sale of the bed, even if it was a fabulously rare piece of art, even if it did come from kestrel wood which no one had been able to harvest in more than five decades as the bramble sprawl overwhelmed its cathedral forests, would only last so long. And after the money ran out, I would have no more options.
I felt as if I was trapped in the famous torture room of Majister Halizak, who liked to magic his victims into a closed cell, without door or window, and then slowly spell the whole room down from the size of an elephant to the size of a mouse. It was said that Halizak took great pleasure listening to people’s screams. And then, as their prison shrank beyond their ability to bear, he would place a goblet below the tiny stone box, to catch the juices of his dying enemies and drink to his own long health.
But I was close.
Halizak’s Prison was closing down on me. But unlike Halizak’s victims, I now spied a door. A gap out of my squeezing trap. We would not go without a home. Jiala and I would not be forced across the river to Lesser Khaim to live with the refugees of bramble spread.
I would be a hero. Recognized through the ages. I was going to be a hero.
Once again, I primed my balanthast.
Pila, my last faithful servant, watched from beside the fireplace. She had gone from a smiling young girl to a grown woman who now looked at me with a cocked head and a thoughtful expression as if I was already mad. She had brought in the final bits of my refashioned device, and my workshop was a new disaster of brass nails, armatures, and iron filings. The debris of inspiration.
I smiled at Pila. “This time it will work,” I said.
The reek of burned neem and mint filled the air. In the glass chamber atop the balanthast, a few sprigs of mint lay with bay and lora flower and the woody shavings of the neem.
I struck a match. Its flame gleamed. I was close. So very close. But Pila had seen other failures....
Pounding on the door interrupted my preparation.
I turned, annoyed. “Go answer,” I told Pila. “Tell them I am busy.”
I prepared again to ignite the balanthast, but premonition stayed my hand. Instead, I listened. A moment passed. And then a shriek echoed through the halls. Anguish and loss. I dropped the match and ran for the door.
Falzi the butcher stood at the threshold, cradling Jiala in his huge arms. She dangled limp, head lolling.
“I found her in a bramble,” he said. “Deep in. I had to use a hook to drag her out, it was closing on her.” Pila and I both reached for her, but Falzi pulled away from us. “You don’t have the clothes for it.” And indeed, his own leather shirt and apron were covered in pale, thready bramble hairs. They fairly seemed to quiver with wormy malevolence. Even a few were dangerous, and Jiala’s body was furred with them.
I stared, horrified. “But what was she doing there?” Jiala knew enough of bramble from my own work to avoid its beckoning vines. “She shouldn’t have been anywhere near bramble.”
“Street urchins...” Falzi looked away, embarrassed at the implication, but plunged on. “The Mayor offers a reward for bramble seeds collected in the city. To prevent the spread. A copper for a sack. Better pay than catching rats. Some children... if they are hungry enough, will go to the big brambles in the fields and burn it back. Then gather the seeds when the pods explode.”
“My workshop,” I said. “Quickly!”
Falzi carried Jiala’s small body easily. Set her on the stones by the fire. “What will you do?” he asked. “The poison’s already in her.”
I shook my head as I used a brush to push away the bramble threads that clung to her. Redness stained her flesh wherever they touched. Poison and sleep, coursing beneath her skin. When I’d cleared a place on her throat, I pressed my fingers to her pulse, feeling for the echo of her heart.
Slow. So very slow.
“I’m so sorry, Jeoz,” Falzi said. “She is too far gone.”
“I have supplies that may help,” I said. “Go. Thank you. But go!”
Falzi touched his heart in farewell. Shaking his head, he left us alone.
“Close the doors, Pila.” I said. “And the windows.”
“But—”
“Do it! And don’t come within. Lock the doors.”
*
When I first thought that I might have a method of killing bramble, it was because I noticed how it never grew around the copper mines of Kesh. Even as Alacan fell and landholders retreated all along the line of bramble’s encroach, the copper mines remained pristine.
Of course, over time it became impossible to get to the mines. Bramble surrounded that strange island of immunity and continued its long march west into Alacan. The delicate strand of road that led through the bramble forest to the copper mines became impossible to defend.
But the copper mines remained safe, long after everything else was swallowed. I noticed the phenomenon on my trips there to secure new materials for my business. Keshian copper made fine urns that were much in demand from my patrons and so I made the journey often. I remembered making my careful way down that long bramble tunnel when workers still fought to keep the road to the mines open. Remembered the workers’ faces sooty and sweaty with the constant chopping and burning, their leather bladder sacks with brass-nozzled burners always alight and smoking as they spread flaming paste upon the poisonous plants.
And then the copper mines, opening before me. The deep holes and scrapings of mine work, but also grasslands and trees—the huge bramble growing all around its perimeter, but none inside. An oasis.
A few majisters and scholars also noticed the Keshian copper mines’ unique qualities, but by the time anyone sought the cause of the place’s survival, the bramble was coming strong, and soon no one could hack their way back to that isolated place of mining tools and tailings ponds for more investigation.
Of course, people experimented.
A few people thought to beat copper into our roads, or created copper knives to cut through the bramble, thinking that the metal was bramble’s bane. And certainly some people even started to call it that. Copper charms sold well for a brief time. I admit that I even trafficked in such baubles, casting amulets and beating fine urns to ward off its encroach. But soon enough, people discovered that copper gave root to bramble as easily as a farmer’s tilled field and the mortar of Alacan’s massive city walls. Granite was better at warding off the plant, but even that gave root eventually.
Even so, the Keshian copper mines remained in my mind, much as they likely remained in the deep bramble forest, a dream of survival, if only we could puzzle it out. And so now, from memory, I sought to reconstruct the conditions of Kesh in the environs of my workshop, experimenting with the natural interactions of flora and ore, seeking that singular formula that had stalled bramble in its march.
*
The door closed behind Pila. I felt again for Jiala’s pulse. It was nearly gone. The drug of bramble has been used by assassins and thwarted lovers. Its poison produces an overwhelming sleep that succumbs to deeper darkness. It squeezes the heart and slows it until blood flows like cold syrup, and then stops entirely, frozen, preserving a body, sometimes for years, until rats and mice and flies burrow deep and tear the body apart from within.
And now bramble’s poisonous threads covered Jiala’s skin. I took a copper rod and ran it over her arms. Then touched mint to her flesh. With a pair of brass pincers, I began plucking the threads from her skin. Setting them in a pottery bowl beside me so that I wouldn’t carelessly touch them myself. Working as quickly as I could. Knowing that I couldn’t work fast enough. There were dozens of them, dozens and dozens. More coated her clothing but they didn’t matter. Her skin was covered. Too many, and yet still I plucked.
Jiala’s eyelids fluttered. She gazed up from under heavy lashes, dark eyes thick with bramble’s influence.
“Do I have enough?” she murmured.
“Enough what, child?” I continued plucking threads from her skin.
“Enough... seeds... to buy back my bed.”
I tried to answer, but no words came. My heart felt as if it was squeezed by Halizak’s Prison, running out liquid and dead.
Jiala’s eyes closed, falling into the eternal sleep. I frantically felt after her heart’s echo. A slow thud against my fingertip, sugar syrup running colder. Another thud. Thicker. Colder. The sluggish call of her heart. A longer pause, then...
Nothing.
I stumbled away from my dying girl, sick with my failures.
My balanthast lay before me, all its parts bubbling and prepared. In desperation, I seized it and dragged it over to Jiala. I aimed its great brass bell at her inert form. Tears blurred my vision. I swept up a match, and then... paused.
I don’t know why it came to me. It’s said that the Three Faces of Mara come to us and whisper wisdom to us in our hour of need. That inspiration comes from true desperation and that the mysteries of the world can be so revealed. Certainly, Mara is the seed of life and hope.
I knelt beside Jiala and plucked a strand of hair from her head, a binding, a wish, a... I did not know, but suddenly I was desperate to have something of hers within the workings of the balanthast, and the bramble, too. All with the neem and mint... I placed her hair in the combustion chamber and struck the match. Flame rose into the combustion chamber, burning neem and mint and bramble and Jiala’s black hair, smoking, blazing, now one in their burn. I prayed to Mara’s Three Faces for some mercy, and then twisted the balanthast’s dial. The balanthast sucked the burning embers of her hair and the writhing threads of bramble and all the other ingredients into its belly chamber.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then blue flame exploded from the bell, enveloping Jiala.
Wake up, Papa.
Wake up.
Wake.
Up.
Dim echoing words, pokes and proddings.
Wake up, Papa.
Papa?
Papa, Papa, Papapapapapa.
*
I opened my eyes.
Jiala knelt over me, a haziness of black hair and skinny brown limbs and blue skirts. Blurred and ethereal. Limned in an uncertain focus as light bound around her. A spirit creature from within the Hall of Judgment. Waiting for Borzai the Judge to gather her into his six arms, peer into her soul, and then pass her on to the Hall of Children, where innocents live under the protective gaze of dog-headed Kemaz.
I tried to sit up, couldn’t. Lay back. The spirit creature remained, tugging at me. The workshop was a shambles, all of it blurry and unsteady, as if it lay on the plane of clouds.
All of us dead, then.
“Papa?”
I turned to her echoing voice. Stared at her. Stared again at the ravaged workroom. Something cold and sharp was pressing against my back. Not spiritlike at all.
Slowly, I dragged myself upright, leaning against the stone wall. I was lying far across the room from the fireplace. The balanthast lay beside me, its glass chambers shattered, its vacuum bulbs nothing but jagged teeth in their soldered sockets. Bent copper tubes gleamed all around me, like flower petals scattered to Mara during the planting march.
“Are you all right, Papa?” Jiala stared at me with great concern. “Your head is bloody.”
I reached up and touched her small worried face. Warm. Alive. Not a spirit creature.
Whole and alive, her skin smoking with the yellow residue of bramble’s ignition. Blackened threads of bramble ash covered her, her hair half melted, writhing with bramble thread’s death throes still. Singed and scalded and blistery but whole and miraculously alive.
I ran my hand down her scorched cheek, wonder-struck.
“Papa?”
“I’m all right, Jiala.” I started to laugh. “More than all right.”
I clutched her to me and sobbed. Thanking Mara for my daughter’s salvation. Grateful for this suspended execution of my soul.
And beyond it, another thought, a wider hope. That bramble, for the first time in all my experiments, had truly died, leaving not even its last residue of poison behind.
Fifteen years is not too long to seek a means to save the world.
OF COURSE, NOTHING IS AS SIMPLE AS WE WOULD WISH.
After that first wild success, I succeeded in producing a spectacular string of failures that culminated in nearly exploding the house. More worrying to me, even though Jiala survived her encounter with the bramble, her cough was much worsened by it. The winter damp spurred it on, and now she hacked and coughed daily, her small lungs seemingly intent on closing down upon her.
She was too young to know how bad the cough had been before—how much it had greatly concerned me. But after the bramble, blood began staining her lips, the rouge of her lungs brought forth by the evils that bramble had worked upon her body as it sought to drive her down into permanent sleep.
I avoided using magic for as long as possible, but Jiala’s cough worsened, digging deeper into her lungs. And it was only a small magic. Just enough spelling to keep her alive. To close the rents in her little lungs, and stop the blood from spackling her lips. Perhaps a sprig of bramble would sprout in some farmer’s field as a result, fertilized by the power released into the air, but really it was such a small magic, and Jiala’s need was too great to ignore.
The chill of winter was always the worst. Khaim isn’t like the northern lands, where freezes kill every living plant except bramble and lay snow over the ground in cold drifts and wind-sculpted ice. But still, the cold ate at her. And so, I took a little time away from my alchemy and the perfecting of the balanthast to work something within her.
Our secret.
Even Pila didn’t know. No one could be allowed to know but us.
Jiala and I sat in the corner of my workshop, the only warm room I had left, amidst the blankets where she now slept near the fire, and I used the scribbled notes from the book of Majister Arun to make magic.
His pen was clear, even if he was long gone to the executioner’s axe. His ideas on vellum. His hand reaching across time. His past carrying into our future through the wonders of ink. Rosemary and pkana flower and licorice root, and the deep soothing cream of goat’s milk. Powdered together, the yellow pkana flower’s petals all crackling like fire as they touched the milk. Sending up a smoke of dreams.
And then with my ring finger, long missing all three gold rings of marriage, I touched the paste to Jiala’s forehead, between the thick dark hairs of her eyebrows. And then, pulling down her blouse, another at her sternum, at the center of her lungs. The pkana’s yellow mark pulsed on her skin, seeming wont to ignite.
As we worked this little magic, I imagined the great majisters of Jhandpara healing crowds from their arched balconies. It was said that people came for miles to be healed. They used the stuff of magic wildly, then.
“Papa, you mustn’t,” Jiala whispered. Another cough caught her, jerking her forward and reaching deep, squeezing her lungs as the strongman squeezes a pomegranate to watch red blood run between his fingers.
“Of course I must,” I answered. “Now be quiet.”
“They will catch you, though. The smell of it—”
“Shhhh.”
And then I read the ancient words of Majister Arun, sounding out the language that could never be recalled after it was spoken. Consonants burned my tongue as it tapped those words of power. The power of ancients. The dream of Jhandpara.
The sulphur smell of magic filled the room, and now round vowels of healing tumbled from my lips, spinning like pin wheels, finding their targets in the yellow paste of my fingerprints.
The magic burrowed into Jiala, and then it was gone. The pkana flower paste took on a greenish tinge as it was used up, and the room filled completely with the smoke of power unleashed. Astonishing power, all around, and only a little effort and a few words to bind it to us. Magic. The power to do anything. Destroy an empire, even.
I cracked open the shutters, and peered out onto the black cobbled streets. No one was outside, and I fanned the room quickly, clearing the stench of magic.
“Papa. What if they catch you?”
“They won’t.” I smiled. “This is a small magic. Not some great bridge-building project. Not even a spell of fertility. Your lungs hold small wounds. No one will ever know. And I will perfect the balanthast soon. And then no one will ever have to hold back with these small magics ever again. All will be well.”
“They say that the executioner sometimes swings wild, doesn’t chop a man in half with kindness. But makes him flop instead. That the Mayor pays him extra to make an example of the people who use magic.”
“It’s not true.”
“I saw one.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“It was last week. At the gold market. Right in the square. I was with Pila. And the crowd was so thick we couldn’t leave. And Pila covered my eyes, but I could see through her fingers. And the executioner chopped and chopped and chopped and chopped and the man yelled so loud and then he stopped. Not a clean killing at all, the pig lady said. She said she’s kinder to her swine.”
I made myself smile. “Well, that’s not our problem. Everyone does a little magic. No one will mind us. As long as we don’t rub anyone’s nose in it.”
“I wouldn’t want to see you chopped and chopped and chopped.”
“Then make sure you drink Pila’s licorice tea and stay out of the cold. It’s a hard thing to keep secrets. But secrets are best when there are only two to know.” I touched her forehead. “You and I.”
I pulled my mustaches. “Tug for luck?”
But she wouldn’t. And she wasn’t consoled.
*
A month later, as the muddy rags of cruel spring snow turned to the sweet stink of wet warming earth, I made the last adjustments to the balanthast and set it loose on the bramble wall.
We left the city deep in the night, making our way east over muddy roads, the balanthast bundled on my back. Jiala, Pila, and I. With the embrace of darkness, the women of the bramble crews with their fire and hatchets were gone, and the children who gathered seeds behind them in careful lines had given up. There would be no witnesses to our experiment. The night was chill and uncomfortable. We held our torches high.
It took only two hours to reach the bramble wall, much to my surprise.
“It’s moved,” I muttered.
Pila nodded. “The women who sell potatoes say they’ve lost more fields. Some of them before they had a chance to dig up the last of their crop.”
The bramble loomed above us, many tangled layers, the leading edge of an impenetrable forest that stretched all the way to fabled Jhandpara. In the light of the torches, the bramble threw off strange hungry shadows, seeming eager to tug us into its sleep-inducing embrace. I thrust my torch amongst its serpent vines. Tendrils crackled and curled in the heat, and a few seed pods, fat as milkweed, burst open, spilling new seeds onto the ground.
Tender green growths showed all along the edge where the bramble crews had been burning and pruning, but deep within, the bramble had turned woody, impenetrable, and thick. Sharp blood-letting thorns glinted in the torchlight, but more troublesome were the pale fine hairs shimmering everywhere, coating every vine’s length, the venomous fibers that Jiala had so nearly succumbed to.
I took a breath, unnerved despite myself in the presence of our implacable enemy.
“Well,” Pila said. “You wanted to show us.”
My faith faltered. Small experiments in the workshop were one thing. But out in the open? Before my daughter and Pila? I cursed myself for my pride. I should have come to test the balanthast in private. Not like this where all my failures could be mocked or pitied.
“Well?” Pila said.
“Yes,” I said. “Yes. We’ll get started.”
But still I delayed.
Pila gave me a look of disgust and started setting out the kestrel-wood tripod. She had grown insolent over the years, as her salary had been reduced and her responsibilities increased. Not at all the young shy girl she had been when she first came to the house. She now carried too much authority, and too much of a skeptical eye. Sometimes I suspected that I would have given up long ago on my experimentations, if not for Pila watching me with her silent judgments. It’s easy to fail yourself, but failing before another, one who has watched you wager so much and so mightily on an uncertain future—well, that is too much shame to bear.
“Right,” I murmured. “Of course.”
I unbound the balanthast from my back. Set it upon the kestrel wood to brace it. Since my first wild success, I had managed to dampen much of the balanthast’s explosive reaction, venting it from rows of newly designed chimneys that puffed like a cloud dragon’s nostrils. The balanthast now held fast and didn’t topple, and didn’t blow one across the room to leave a body lying bruised and dazed. I crouched and made sure that the tripod was well set in the muddy earth.
To be honest, the tripod could have been made of anything, certainly something less extravagant. But kestrel wood I loved. So hard and strong that even fire couldn’t take it. The northmen of Czandia used to forge swords of kestrel wood. Lighter than steel. Just as strong. The tripod seemed to say to me that we still had a future, that we might once again stand strong, and grow the wonders of old.
Or, if you were Pila, you called it the expensive affectation of a foolish man, even as she helped me fashion its sturdy base.
I straightened and unlimbered the rest of the balanthast’s components. Pila and Jiala helped me assemble its many pieces.
“No,” I whispered, and then realized that I was doing so and cleared my throat. “Jiala, put the vacuum chamber so that it faces forward, toward the mouth. And please be careful. I don’t have enough fire to blow another.”
“I’m always careful, Papa.”
At last we were ready, the brass belly chamber and curling copper tubes and glass bulbs gleamed in the silver of the moon, a strange and unearthly thing.
“It looks like something that would have come out of Jhandpara,” Pila said. “So much fine artistry, put into this one object.”
I primed the combustion bulb of the balanthast. Neem and bay, and mint and twilight lora flower and a bramble clipping. By torchlight, we dug into the earth, seeking the root bundle. There were many. With leather-gloved hands, I scooped out a bit of earth, bramble’s vessel. Mara’s fertile womb. The necessary ingredient that would contain the alchemical reaction and channel it into the deeply embedded bramble, much as Jiala’s hair had bound the reaction deep into her body. Saltpeter and sulphur and charcoal to drive the concoction home, poured into the belly chamber. I slid closed the combustion bulb, twisted the brass latches tight.
With a target now chosen, I thrust the balanthast’s three newly constructed nozzles into the earth beside it. Jiala covered her mouth with a tiny hand as I lit the match. I almost smiled. I set the match under the combustion bulb, and the assembled ingredients caught fire. It glowed like a firefly in its glassine chamber. Slowly the flame died. We watched. Breaths held.
And then, as if the Three Faces of Mara had inhaled all at once, the entire careful wad disappeared, sucked into the belly chamber. The primed balanthast quivered with power, elements coming together.
The reaction was so sudden that we had no chance to brace. The very earth tossed us from our feet. Yellow acrid smoke billowed over us. A desperate animal shriek filled the air, as if the swine women were amongst the pigs in a sty, wounding and bleeding a great herd and not killing a single one. We gained our feet and ran, coughing and tearing, stumbling over muddy furrows. Jiala was worst taken. Her cough ripped deep into her lungs, making me fear I’d need to use the healing magic on her again before the night was over.
Slowly the smoke dispersed, revealing our work. The balanthast quivered on its tripod, steady still where it had been jammed into the earth, but now, all around it, there was a seething mass of bramble tendrils, all writhing and smoking. The vines hissed and burned, flakes of ash falling like scales from a dragon. Another shudder ran through the earth as deep roots writhed and ripped upward—and then, all at once, the vines collapsed, falling all to soot, leaving clear earth behind.
We approached cautiously. The balanthast had not only killed the root I had chosen, but destroyed horse-lengths of bramble in every direction. It would have taken workers hours to clear so much. I held up my torch, staring. Even at the perimeter of the balanthast’s destruction, the bramble growth hung limp like rags. I stepped forward, cautious. Struck a damaged plant with a gloved hand. Its vines sizzled with escaping sap, and collapsed.
I swung about, staring at the ground. “Do you see any seeds?”
We swept our torches over the earth, straining to make out any of the pods that should have sprung out and burst open in the blaze of fire’s heat.
Jiala squatted in the hot smoking earth, turning it over and running it through her little gloved fingers.
“Well? Is there anything?”
Jiala looked up, amazed. “No, Papa.”
“Pila?” I whispered. “Do you see any?”
“No.” Astonishment marked her voice. “There are none. Not a single one.”
Together, we continued our hunt. Nothing. Not a single seed disbursed from a single pod. The bramble vine had died, and left nothing of itself behind to torment us another day.
“It’s magic,” Pila whispered. “True magic.”
I laughed at that. “Better than magic. Alchemy!”
THE NEXT MORNING, DESPITE THE PREVIOUS LATE NIGHT, we all woke with the first crowing of roosters. I laughed to find Pila and Jiala already clustered in the workroom, peering out through the shutters, waiting for enough sunlight to see the final result.
As soon as the sun cracked the horizon, we were out in the fields again, headed across the muddy furrows to the bramble wall. The first of the bramble crews were already at work, with axes and long chopping knives, wearing leather aprons to protect themselves from the sleeping spines. Smoke from bramble’s burn rose into the air, coiling snakes, black and oily. Dirty children walked in careful lines through the fields with shovels and hoes, uprooting new incursions. In the dawn light, with the levee labor all at the wall, it looked like the scene of some recent battle. The smoke, the hopeless faces. But as we approached the site of my balanthast firing; a small knot of workers huddled.
We slipped close.
“Have you come to see it?” they asked.
“See what?” Pila asked.
“There’s a hole in the bramble.” A woman pointed. “Look how deep it goes.”
Several children squatted in the earth. One of them looked up. “It’s clean, Mama. No seeds at all. It’s like the bramble never came at all.”
I could barely restrain my glee. Pila had to drag me away to keep me from blurting out my part. We rushed back to Khaim, laughing and skipping the whole way.
Back in our home, Pila and Jiala brought out my best clothes. Pila helped me work the double buttons of my finest vest, pursing her lips at the sight of how skinny I had become since I last wore the thing in my wealth and health.
I laughed at her concern.
“Soon I’ll be fat again, and you’ll have your own servants and we’ll be rich and the city will saved.”
Pila smiled. Her face had lost its worry for the first time in years. She looked young again, and I was struck with the memory of how fine she had been in youth, and how now, despite worry and years, she still stood, unbent and unbroken by the many responsibilities she had taken on. She had stuck with our household, even as our means had faltered, even as other, richer families offered a better, more comfortable life.
“It’s very good that you are not mad, after all,” Pila said.
I laughed. “You’re very sure I’m not mad?”
She shrugged. “Well, not about bramble, at least.”
*
The way to the Mayor’s House passes around Malvia Hill, through the clay market and then down along the river Sulong, which splits Khaim from Lesser Khaim. Along the river, the spice market runs into the potato market, runs into the copper market. Powdered spices choke the air, along with the calls of vendors with their long black mustaches that they oil and stretch with every child. Their hands are red with chilies and yellow with turmeric, and their lungs give off the scents of clove and oregano. They sit under their archways along the river, with their big hemp bags overflowing with their wares out front, and the doorways to their storehouses behind, where piled spices reach two stories high. And then it’s on to the women of the potato market, where they used to sell only potatoes, but now sell any number of tubers. And then the copper families, who can beat out a pot or a tube, and who fashion brass candlesticks for the rich and cooking pots for the poor.
When I was young, there was only Khaim. At that time, there was still a bit of the old empire left. The astonishing wonders of the East and the capital of Jhandpara were gone, but still, there was Alacan and Turis and Mimastiva. At that time, Khaim was a lesser seat, valued for its place on the river, but still, a far reach from Jhandpara where great majisters had once wielded their power and wore triple diamonds on their sleeves. But with the slow encroachment of the bramble, Khaim grew. And, across from it, Lesser Khaim grew even faster.
When I was a child I could look across the river and see nothing but lemon trees and casro bushes, heavy with their dense fruit. Now refugees squatted and built mud huts there. Alacaners, who had destroyed their own homes and now insisted on destroying Khaim as well. Turis, of course, is nothing but ash. But that wasn’t their fault. Raiders from Paika razed Turis, but Alacaners had only themselves to blame.
Jiala hurried along the river with me, her hand in mine. Small. So small. But now with a future. Not just a chance at life and wealth, but a chance that she would not run like the Alacaners from her home as bramble swallowed her childhood and history.
Out on the Sulong, tiny boats made their way back and forth across the water, carrying workers from Lesser Khaim into the main city. But now something else marred the vista.
A great bridge hung in the air, partially constructed. It floated there, held down by ropes so that it would not fly free. Magic. Astonishing and powerful magic coming into play. The work of Majister Scacz, the one man in the city who wielded magic with the sanction of the Mayor, and so would never fear the executioner’s axe.
I paused, staring across the water to the floating bridge. Magic such as had not been seen since Jhandpara fell. Seeing it there, rising, filled me with a superstitious dread. So much magic in one place. Even the balanthast couldn’t protect against that much magic.
A spice man called out to me. “You want to buy? Or are you going to block my trade?”
I tipped my velvet hat to him. “So sorry, merchantman. I was looking at the bridge.”
The man spat. Eyed the floating construction. “Lot of magic, there.” He spat again. Tobacco and kehm root together. Narcotic. “I hear they’re already chopping bramble on the far bank. Hardly any bramble on the west side at all, and now it’s growing in the wagon ruts. Next thing, we’ll be like Alacan. Swallowed by bramble because our jolly wants to connect here with there. Bad enough that all these new Alacaners use their small magics. Now we have big magic too. Scacz and the Mayor pretending Khaim should be another Jhandpara with majisters and diamonds and floating castles.”
“The Mayor says he wants to protect Lesser Khaim from the raiders who come from Paika.”
“They’re a nuisance, not a reason to build a bridge.” The spice man spat more kehm root and tobacco, and eyed the bridge again. “Executioner will be busy now. Sure as bramble creep, we’ll have new heads spiked on city gates. Too much big magic to let the little magics run wild.”
“Maybe not,” I started, but Jiala pinched my hand and I fell silent.
The spice man eyed me as if I was mad. “I had to burn an entire sack of cloves, today. Whole sack I couldn’t sell. Full of bramble seeds and sprout. Someone makes his little magic, ruins my business.”
I wanted to tell him that the bundle on my back would change the balance, but Jiala, at least, had sense, and so I kept my words to myself. Magic brings bramble. A project like the bridge had an inevitable cost.
I hefted my bag of implements and we carried on, around the edge of the hill and then up its face to where the Mayor’s House looked down over Khaim.
*
We were ushered into the Mayor’s gallery without fuss. Marble floors and arches stretched around us. My clothes felt poor, Jiala’s as well. Even our best was now old and worn.
In the sudden cool of the gallery, her cough started. A dry hacking thing that threatened to build. I knelt and gave her a sip of water. “Are you well?”
“Yes, Papa.” She watched me, solemn and trusting. “I won’t cough.” And then immediately her dry cough started again. It echoed about, announcing our presence to all the other petitioners.
We sat in the gallery, waiting with the women who wanted to change their household tax and the men who were petitioning to escape levee labor at the bramble wall. After an hour, the Mayor’s secretary came to us, his medallion of office gleaming gold on his chest, the Axe of the Executioner crossed over the Staff of the Majister, the twin powers that the Mayor wielded for the benefit of the city. The secretary led us across another marble gallery, and thence into the Mayor’s offices, and the door was shut behind us.
The Mayor wore red velvet and his own much larger medallion on a chain of gold around his neck. His fingers touched the medallion every so often, a needy gesture. And with him, the Majister Scacz. My skin prickled at the sight of one who used magic as a daily habit, passing the consequences of his activities onto the bramble crews and the children of the city who dug and burned the minor bits of bramble from between mortar stones and cobbles.
“Yes?” the Mayor asked. “You’re who, then?”
“Jeoz, the alchemist,” the secretary announced.
“And he reeks of magic,” Majister Scacz murmured.
I made myself smile. “It is my device.”
The Mayor’s eyebrows rose, fuzzy gray caterpillars arching over his ruddy face. His mustache was short, no child in his history at all. An old scar puckered one side of his cheek, pulling his mouth into a slight smile. “You practice magic?” he asked sharply. “Are you mad?”
I made a placating gesture. “I do not practice, Excellency. No. Not at all.” A nervous laugh escaped my lips. “I practice alchemy. It does not bring bramble. I have no dealings with the curse of Jhandpara.” It was unbelievable how nervous I had become. “No need for the executioner, here. None at all.” I untied my bag and began pulling out the pieces of the balanthast. “You see...” I screwed one of the copper ends into its main chamber. Unwrapped the combustion bulb, breathing a sigh of relief that it had survived the trip. “You see,” I repeated myself, “I have created something, which your Excellency will appreciate. I think.”
Beside me, Jiala coughed. Whether from sickness, or nervousness, I couldn’t say. Scacz’s eyes went to her. Held. I didn’t like the way he stared at her, his expression thoughtful. I plunged on.
“It is a balanthast.”
The Mayor examined the device. “It looks more like an arquebus.”
I made myself smile. “Not at all. Though it does use the reactants of fire. But my device has properties most extraordinary.” My hands were shaking. I found the mint. The neem bark. Lora flower. Set them in the chamber.
Scacz was watching closely. “Am I watching sorcery, sir? Right before myself? Unsanctioned?”
“N-no.” I shook under his examination. Tried to load the balanthast.
Jiala took it away. “Here, Papa.”
“Y-yes. Good. Thank you, child.” I took a deep breath. “You see, a balanthast destroys bramble. And not just a little. The balanthast reaches for a bramble’s root and poisons it utterly. Place it within a yard or two of a heart root, and it will destroy more than a bramble crew can destroy in half a day.”
The Mayor leaned close. “You have proof of this?”
“Yes. Of course. I’m sorry.” I pulled a small clay pot shrouded in burlap out of my bag and put on my leather gloves before unwrapping it.
“Bramble,” I explained.
They both sucked in their breath at the sight of the potted plant. I looked up at their consternation. “We use gloves.”
“You carry bramble into the city?” the Mayor asked. “Deliberately?”
I hesitated. Finally I said, “It was necessary. For the testing. The science of alchemy requires much trial and error.” Their faces were heavy with disapproval. I lit my match, and touched it to the glass bulb. Clamped it closed.
“Hold your breath, Jiala.” I looked apologetically at the Mayor. “The smoke is quite acrid.”
The Mayor and Majister also sucked in their breaths. The balanthast shivered as its energy discharged. A ripple of death passed into the soil. The pot cracked as the bramble writhed and died.
“Magic!” Scacz cried, lunging forward. “What magic is this?”
“No, Majister! Alchemy. Magic has never been able to affect bramble. It does not sap bramble’s poison, nor kill its seeds, nor burn back its branches. This is something new.”
Scacz grabbed for the balanthast. “I must see this.”