Jalia on the Road (Jalia - World of Jalon) Read Online Free PDF Page A

her only lover and she obtained secrets from other alchemists in the guild who had a taste for young female flesh.
     
    Life was good for Jalia until she reached her sixteenth birthday. It was the news just days after it that was to send her life spinning out of control.
    Her father, Turan al’Dare, had been unusually secretive about his latest venture. He had told her that it would set them up for the rest of their lives. Turan borrowed money from practically every noble and tradesman in the city before leaving Bagdor on one last big expedition.
    He never returned. Word eventually came back that the deadly sand fairies living at the edge of the Atribar el’Dou desert had killed him. Jalia found herself beset by her father’s creditors, who took the roof from her head and the clothes from her back in an attempt to get compensation.
    Jalia set out to kill a giant with a bounty on his head. After she killed him the King refused to pay the bounty. That was the reason she and Marco stood watching walls of buildings explode in the sequence she had designed herself.
    “Why can’t you just steal the money?” Marco whined. He was cold in the night air and knew she could have easily broken into the palace to take the money she was owed. She broke into the Alchemists Guild regularly and that was probably better protected.
    Jalia pouted her lips.
    “It’s the principle of the thing, Marco. I want this toad to honor his word and place a large sack of gold into my waiting hands.”
    Jalia stood defiantly, looking out across the city, her legs spread a little apart and her hands gripping tight to her waist. She defied civilized conventions by wearing men’s clothes in the shape of a pair of dark trousers. That, and a black hooded jacket, made it difficult for Marco to see her in the moonlight.
    “You will never be able to live here again,” Marco continued. “This is your home, Jalia, where will you go?”
    “It’s a big world out there. I dare say I will get by,” Jalia said contentedly. She turned to him and smiled wickedly. “No one out there knows not to play cards with me, do they?”
    Marco nodded, conceding her skills in games of chance.
    “I suppose not. But if the guild finds out you know the secret of making black powder and that I helped you with this trickery, we shall soon be dangling from the end of a rope with our blackened tongues sticking out.”
    Jalia grinned. “Then we had better make sure nobody finds out.”
    She grabbed Marco’s hand and hustled him to the edge of the roof. They made the easy climb down to the next roof. From there, they climbed to the ground using a ladder that Jalia placed against the wall earlier in the day. She had an appointment at the palace that she planned to keep.
     
    When Jalia was thrown onto the streets by the palace guards some days earlier, she had made her way to Marco’s room in the Guild, evading detection and those guarding the building almost without thought of them. There, she explained her plan to a disbelieving and increasingly frightened man.
    The making of black powder was the most closely guarded of all the Alchemist Guild secrets and even Marco didn’t know how it was made. The only thing he knew was that brimstone and charcoal were two of its ingredients. The secret of its making was split between guild alchemists and no one below the Guild Master was allowed to see the total process.
    Jalia found out how to make it over a year ago, though it had cost her plenty in terms of the depraved acts her teachers required her to perform. Those tutors had been dead for nearly as long. Each being found in a locked room with their throats cut from ear to ear. The Guild had hushed up their deaths as Jalia anticipated and doubled security in the guild grounds. Trebling it would have been just as ineffective.
    The Alchemists Guild was frightened of black powder. They feared its explosive force and had not yet worked out how to make a reliable fuse to trigger it. Jalia