A Treatise on Balance and Compensation

In Qurtāsh, alchemy is a branch of natural philosophy: governed by mathematics, constrained by matter, and paid for through compensation. Every transformation must balance. And when it does not, something else pays the difference. Safiyya bint Idrīs al-Qurtāshiyya is a licensed alchemical examiner, trained to reconstruct failed equations, identify their causes, and trust that evidence properly weighed will lead the law toward justice. Nahla bint Khalaf, an acrobat turned bodyguard, has less faith in institutions and more in things respectable people fail to notice. Together they investigate a special kind of crimes: adulterated blood-ink, impossible deaths, corrupted scholarship, and violence concealed behind licenses, seals, and learned reputations. As each case forces them to reckon with what Qurtāsh chooses to value—and who is expected to provide the compensation—Safiyya and Nahla discover that balancing an equation is simple compared with balancing law against justice, and knowledge against power. Trigger warnings for the series include murder, execution, burning, scalding, crushing, suffocation, poisoning, asphyxiation, animal death, child endangerment, child exploitation, child murder, human sacrifice, medical torture, forced restraint, convulsions, graphic bodily injury, blood, body horror, permanent injury, grief, systemic injustice, sexism, misogyny, classism, corruption, fraud, financial exploitation, institutional betrayal, forced confinement, exploitation of orphans and disabled children, and the legal or moral justification of atrocity.