Read Online The Alchemist by Paolo Bacigalupi - Free Book Online

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 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