The Tangled Lands

by Paolo Bacigalupi

  “The Majister of the Blue City,” I said.

  “Indeed.”

  “I’d very much like to see it when it’s done.”

  Scacz looked over at me, thoughtful. “If these balanthasts perform as you describe them, Alchemist, then the very least I can do for you is to give you a domicile above the earth.”

  “A prison in the air?”

  “Better than one on the ground. You will have a most astonishing view.”

  I laughed at that. “I won’t argue. In fact, I will hurry the moment.” I turned to leave, but then paused, voicing an afterthought. “When the balanthasts arrive, I’ll also need several pots of bramble. To test and make sure my designs are correct.”

  Scacz nodded, distracted, still staring up at the triumph of his castle. “What’s that?”

  “Bramble,” I said patiently. “For the testing.”

  Scacz waved an acknowledgment, and the guards led me back down to my dungeon.

  Weeks later, I asked Jaiska to summon Scacz for the final demonstrations.

  I had lined up a number of bramble plants in pots. “It would work better if we were at the bramble wall,” I grumbled, “but this should suffice.”

  Along one wall, I had all the balanthasts of the city, lined up. Each one newly altered, its delivery tubes and chambers reshaped to their improved purpose. I took one of the gleaming instruments from its rank and plunged its nozzle into the bramble pot. The bramble’s limbs quivered malevolently, as if it understood the evil I planned for it. The dry pods rattled as the pot shifted.

  I lit the match and pressed it into the new combustion chamber. Much faster and easier to ignite now.

  A low explosion. The plant thrashed briefly and then disappeared in a puff of acrid smoke. There was simply nothing left of it at all.

  I laughed, delighted. “You see?”

  Scacz and Jaiska stared, dumbfounded. I did it again, laughing, and now Scacz and Jaiska laughed as well.

  “Well done, Alchemist! Well done!”

  “And it is prepared much more quickly now,” I said. “These chambers on top mix the ingredients, so that they are always at the ready. Open this valve, and . . .” I lit another match. Explosion. Vented smoke. The potted bramble soaked up the balanthast’s poison and disappeared in a squeal of burning sap and writhing smoke.

  I grinned. Did it again and again, working something greater than magic in my workshop. Jaiska stamped his feet and whistled. Scacz’s smile widened into a greedy astonished grin. And then I, laughing and in my folly, drunk on my success, grabbed a bramble with my bare hands.

  A silly, reckless thing. A moment of inattention, and all my genius was destroyed.

  I yanked my hands away as if the bramble was on fire, but its threadlike hairs clung already to my bare skin. The sleeping toxins numbed my hands, spreading like fire. I fell to my knees. Tried to stand. Stumbled and crashed into the balanthast, tumbling it and knocking it over, shattering it.

  “Fool!” Scacz shouted.

  I tried to get up once more, but fell back instead, tangling with bramble again. Its thorns pricked me, its threads clung to my skin, poisoning, clutching and hungry for me. Burrowing sleep into my heart, pressing down upon my lungs.

  Darkness closed on my vision. It was terrifyingly fast. I crawled away, stupid with the toxins, reached through the bars. Scacz and Jaiska shied from my thread-covered hands.

  “Please,” I whispered. “Use your magic. Save me.”

  Scacz shook his head, staying well away from my touch. “No magic works against bramble’s sleep.”

  “Please,” I croaked. “Jiala. Please. Keep her well.”

  Scacz looked at me with contempt. “There’s really no point, now, is there?”

  My limbs turned to water. I slumped to the flagstones, still reaching through the bars as he went blurry and distant.

  The Majister stared down at me with a bemused expression.

  “It’s probably better this way, Alchemist. We would have had to chop your head off, eventually.” He turned to Jaiska. “As soon as he’s done thrashing, gather up the balanthasts. And don’t be so stupid as he was.”

  “What about his body? Should I take him to his wife?”

  “No. Dump it in the river with the rest.”

  I was too far gone to panic. Bramble stilled my heart.

  7

  HAVING MY FLESH BURNED WITH blue flame is not my preferred method to awaken, but it is a great improvement over death.

  Another gust of flame washed over me. It burned through my blood, blistered my lungs, tunneled about in my heart, and dragged me back to life. I writhed in the heat, trying to breathe. Another blast of flame.

  And suddenly, I was coughing and wheezing. My skin burned, but I breathed.

  “Stop,” I croaked, waving weakly for mercy, praying I wouldn’t be scoured again. I opened my eyes.

  Pila crouched over me, a fantastic jeweled balanthast in her hands. Jiala stood beside her, worried, clutching at her skirt.

  “Are you alive, Papa?” she asked.

  I pushed myself upright, shaking bramble threads from my arms. Pila looked me over, brushed me with a gloved hand. “He’s alive enough, child. Now hurry and get our things. It’s time for us to run.”

  Jiala nodded obediently and ran out of my workroom. I stared after her, astonished. How she had grown! Not a small child at all, but tall and vital. So much change in the years I had been imprisoned. Pila continued to brush away the singed bramble thread. I winced at her touch.

  “Don’t complain,” she said. “Blisters mean you’re alive.”

  I flinched away from another round of brushing. “You found my body, it seems.”

  “It was a near thing. I was expecting a coffin to arrive. If Jaiska hadn’t been decent enough to send word of where you’d been dumped . . .” She shrugged. “You were nearly tossed into the water with the rest of the corpses before I found you.”

  “Help me stand.”

  With her support, I made it to my feet. My old familiar workshop, but altered under Pila’s influence.

  “I had to replace much of the equipment,” Pila explained as she braced me upright. “Even with your instruction, it was an uncertain thing.”

  “I’m alive, though.” I looked at her balanthast. My design but her construction, noticing places where she had made changes. She held it by a leather strap that she slung over her shoulder. “You’ve made it quite portable,” I said admiringly.

  “If we’re to run, it’s time we did.”

  “More than time.”

  In the hall, our last belongings were stuffed into wicker baskets with harnesses to hold them upon our backs. A tiny pile of essentials. So little of my old life. A few wool blankets, food and water jugs. And yet, there also, Pila and Jiala. More than any man had any right to ask for. We slung our baskets, and I groaned at the weight in mine.

  “Easy living,” Pila commented. “Jiala could carry more than you.”

  “Not quite that bad, I hope. In any case, nothing that a long walk won’t fix.”

  We ducked out into the streets, the three of us together, winding through the alleys. We ran as quickly as we could for the gates of Khaim, making our way toward the open fields. Inside, I felt laughter and relief bubbling up. My skin was burned, my hair was matted and melted, but I was alive, maybe for the first time in almost twenty years.

  And then the wind shifted and a cloud of smoke blew across us. One of my own infernal detectors, now standing sentry on every street.

  Jiala lit up like an oil lamp.

  Pila sucked in her breath. “She was only treated yesterday. The magic still shows. Normally I kept her in, after Scacz spelled her.”

  Quick as a cat, she swept a cloak over Jiala, smothering the blue glow. And yet still it leaked out. Jiala’s face shone an unearthly shade. I picked her up and buried her face in my chest. She was heavy.

  “Don’t show your skin, child.”

  We slunk through the city and ou
t into the fields as darkness fell. We went along the muddy road, trying to hide my daughter’s fatal hue. But it was useless. Farmers on the road saw and gasped and dashed away, and even as we hurried forward, we heard cries behind. People who sought to profit from turning in a user of magic.

  “We aren’t going to make it,” Pila said.

  “Run then!”

  And we did, galloping and stumbling. I panted at the unaccustomed exercise. I was not meant to run. Not after years in prison. In a minute, I was gasping. In two, spots swam before my vision and I was staggering. And still we ran, now with Jiala on her own, tugging at me, dragging me forward. Healthier by far than I.

  Behind us, the shouts of guardsmen echoed. They gained.

  Ahead, black bramble shadows rose.

  “Halt!” the guards shouted. “In the name of Khaim and the Mayor!”

  On the run, Pila fired her balanthast. Lit its prime. Prepared to plunge it into the ground at the bracken root.

  “No!” I gasped. “Not like that.” I lifted the device so it pointed into the guts of the bracken. “Don’t hurt the roots. Just the branches.”

  Pila glanced at me, puzzled, then nodded sharply. The balanthast roared. Blue flame lanced from the nozzle, igniting the branches. Bramble writhed and vaporized, opening a deep narrow corridor of smoking, writhing vines. We plunged into the gap. Another shout came from behind.

  “Halt!”

  An arrow thudded into a bramble branch. Another creased my ear. I grabbed Jiala and forced her low as Pila fired the balanthast again.

  Behind us, the guardsmen were stumbling across the tilled fields, splashing through irrigated trenches. Their swords gleamed in the moonlight.

  Blue flame speared the night again, and a writhing path in the bramble opened before us.

  I pulled out the spell book of Majister Arun. “A match, daughter.”

  I struck the flame and handed it to Jiala. In its flickering unsteady light, I read spidering text by the hand of that long dead majister. A spell for sweeping.

  A dust devil formed in the bracken, swirling. I waved my hand and sent it spinning down the narrow way behind us. A simple spell. A bit of household magic for a servant or a child. Nothing in comparison to the great works of Jhandpara.

  But to the bramble all around, that tiny spell was like meat tossed before a tiger. The vines shivered at magic’s scent and clutched after my sweeping whirlwind. I cast more small spells as Pila opened a way ahead. Bramble closed in behind, starving for the magic that I scattered like breadcrumbs, ravenous for the nurturing flavors of magic cast so close to its roots. Vines erupted from the earth, filling the path and locking us in the belly of the bramble forest.

  Behind us, the guards’ shouts faded and became indistinct. A few more arrows plunged into the bramble, ricocheting and clattering, but already the vines were thick and tangled behind us. We might as well have been behind a wall of oak.

  Pila fired the balanthast again, and we moved deeper into the malevolent forest.

  “We won’t have long before they follow us,” she said.

  I shook my head. “No. We have time. Scacz’s balanthasts will not work. I crippled them all before I left, when Scacz thought I was improving them. Only the one I used for my demonstration worked, and I made sure to shatter it.”

  “Where are we going, Papa?” Jiala asked.

  I pulled Jiala close as I whispered another spell of dust and tidying. The little whirlwind whisked its way into the darkness, baiting bramble, closing the path behind us. When I was done, I smiled at my daughter and touched her under her chin. “Have I ever told you of the copper mines of Kesh?”

  “No, Papa.”

  “They are truly wondrous. Not a bit of bramble populates the land, no matter how much magic is used. An island in a sea of bramble.”

  The blue fire of Pila’s balanthast again lit the night, sending bramble writhing away from us, opening a corridor of flight. I picked up Jiala, still amazed at how heavy she had become in my years away, but unwilling to let her leave my side even for a moment, welcoming her truth and weight. We started down the corridor that Pila had opened.

  Jiala gave a little cough and wiped her lips on her sleeve. “Truly?” she asked. “There is a place where you can use magic? Even for my cough?”

  “As sure as balanthasts,” I told her, and hugged her tight. “We only have to get there.”

  Another blast of blue flame lit the night, and we all forged onward.

  1

  LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT the first time I killed a man.

  On the morning of that day, my father, Anto, lay on the simple, straw-stuffed mattress that I’d dragged out to the kitchen fire, choking on his own life as a wasting sickness ate at him from the inside.

  He had been like this for days now. I had watched him grow thin, watched him cough blood, and listened to him swear at the gods in a steady mumble, which I struggled to hear over the crackle of the kitchen fire.

  I burned the fire to keep him warm, even though winters in Lesser Khaim were not the kind that kill men, like the ones far to the north. Winter was a cool kiss here in Lesser Khaim, and the fire kept him comfortable and happy in his last days.

  “Why haven’t you fetched the healer yet, you useless creature,” my father hissed at me.

  “Because there are none to fetch,” I said firmly, gathering my skirts around my knees to crouch by his side. I put a scarred hand, the sign of my long years of slaughtering animals at the back of the butcher’s shop, to his forehead. It felt hot to my old, callused palms.

  There had been a healer in this neighborhood, once. A wrinkled old man who lanced boils and prescribed poultices. But he’d fled the Jolly Mayor and his city guards when he’d crossed the bridge and the smoke stained him bright blue. The old man had been lucky to flee with his life toward Paika and the lands troubled by its raiders. Though who knew how long he could live out there?

  “Then bring someone who can cure me,” my father begged. “It would be a small magic. I’m in so much pain.”

  His pleading tore at me. I leaned closer to him and to the crackle of the fire, which burned wood we could barely afford in these times, when refugees from Alacan crammed themselves into Lesser Khaim, eating and using everything they could get their hands on.

  I sighed as I stood, my knees cracking with the pain of the movement. “Would you have me look for someone who can cast a spell for you, and then condemn us all to death when we turn blue from the Majister’s smoke? It would be a heavy irony for anyone in this family to die at the blade of an executioner’s axe, don’t you think?”

  I thought, for a moment, that he considered this. But when I looked closely at his face for a reaction, I realized he’d sunk back into his fever.

  My father had returned to muttering imprecations at the gods in his sleep. A husk of a blasphemer, he took so much joy in seeing the pious void their bowels at the sight of his executioner’s axe. This was the man who would lean close and whisper at the condemned through his mask, “Do you not believe you will visit the halls of the gods soon? Don’t you burn favors for a god, perhaps one like Tuva, so that you will eat honey and milk from bowls that never empty, and watch and laugh at the struggles of mortals shown on the mirrors all throughout Tuva’s hall? Or do you actually fear that this is truly your last moment of life?”

  That was my father, the profane.

  Unlike his outwardly pious victims, and despite his frequent irreverence, my father was a believer. He had to believe. He was an executioner. If there were no gods, then what horrible thing was it that he did?

  Now he was going to find out.

  It angered him that it was taking so long to slowly waste away into death. So he cursed the gods. Especially the six-armed Borzai, who would choose which hall we would spend eternity in.

  My father swore at Borzai, even though he would soon meet the god. And even though that god would decide his afterlife, my father was not the sort of man who cared. He had no thoughts fo
r the future, and he dwelled little on the past.

  I always had admired that about my father. Even though I hated much about his coarseness toward me.

  My oldest son, Duram, peeked around a post to look into the kitchen, his dark curly hair falling down over his brown eyes. “Is he sleeping?”

  I nodded. “Are you hungry?”

  “I am,” Duram said. “So is Set, but he doesn’t want to come down the stairs. He says it hurts.”

  Set had been born with a twisted foot.

  “Stay quiet,” I cautioned as I picked up a wooden platter. I spooned olives from a jar, tore off several large pieces of bread, cut some goat’s cheese, and then lined the edges with figs.

  Duram dutifully snuck back up the crude wooden stairs, and I heard the planks overhead creak as he took the food to his brother. Soon he would need to work for the family.

  But for now, I sheltered him in the attic with his brother and their toys. I wanted them both to have some peace before their worlds got harder. Particularly Set’s.

  I opened a window and looked outside. My husband, Jorda, was supposed to be working the field. Instead he was sprawled under a gnarled tree, a wineskin lying over a blistered forearm.

  There was always a wineskin. Ever since he had run away from tending the sentinel braziers along the Mayor’s Bridge. Unable to scrub the sweet smell of neem and mint from his skin, or unsee the people dragged away, glowing blue and sobbing because of him.

  I never passed him a single copper earned from my butchering, but he still found wine. He usually begged them from his friends among the Alacan refugees. He’d sit with them and loudly damn the collapse of Alacan, and they’d cheer him and buy him cheap wine.

  With a sigh, I shut the wooden window.

  My father groaned and swore in his sleep, disturbed by the cold air. I would have liked to have had a healer here. Someone who could give us bitter medicine, and hope. A kind ear for the betrayals of the body.

  But for all that I may have hated the Jolly Mayor and his terrifying majister, my family’s lives had depended on the Mayor over the years. My life, my two sons, my husband, and my father. For my father, skinny, frail, overtempered bastard and profaner that he was, was an executioner for Khaim and the Mayor.