The Alchemist Read Free Page A

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 spirit-like 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 alright, 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 alright, Jiala,” I started to laugh. “More than alright.”
    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.

3

    Of course, nothing is as simple as we would wish.
    After that first wild success, I succeeded in producing a spectacular string of failures which 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, amidst the blankets where she now slept near the fire, the only warm room I had left, 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.