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 which 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 my dying daughter. 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 Halls 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 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.
