The Alchemy of Stone

Chapter 12




Iolanda did not take long to show up. She burst through the doors in a whirlwind of wild hair and flared skirts. “Mattie! Are you all right?”

Mattie nodded. “I’m fine.”

“What happened?”

“Loharri,” Mattie said. She explained the device planted in her head, and her desperate need to get her key back. She needed Loharri out of her head and her heart, she said.

Iolanda smiled at that. “Indeed,” she said. “I know exactly what you mean.” She pushed past Mattie to the laboratory, and took a step back once she saw Niobe. “Who is she?”

“Niobe,” Mattie said. “My friend. She was helping me with your request.”

“Ah.” Iolanda walked through the laboratory to her habitual seat in the kitchen, and laughed at the sight of the pile of Mattie’s dresses covered with a blanket. “How cozy! You’re sleeping here?”

“Yes,” Niobe said, showing neither embarrassment nor anger. “Mattie has no need for beds, so I have to make do.”

“A fellow alchemist then,” Iolanda said. “Thank you for helping with Mattie—I’ll pay you too.”

“There’s no need—”

“Of course there is.” Iolanda sat and played with a long strand of her curly hair. “There’s always a need for money.”

“Iolanda only employs women,” Mattie said to Niobe.

“How do they let you get away with it?” Niobe asked, visibly warming up to Iolanda.

“They don’t notice,” Iolanda answered, and both of them laughed.

Mattie did not quite understand what was so funny about hiding oneself, about being allowed to do what one pleased while no one was looking. They, the women, were like the gargoyles, Mattie thought. Respected in words, but hidden from view of those who ran the city and managing to live in the darkness, in the secret interstices of life.

“All right then,” Iolanda said and helped herself to the decanter with pear liquor. “Let’s see what you’ve cooked up for me.”

Mattie took the blood homunculus out of its jar.

“Ew,” Iolanda said. “What is it?”

The homunculus seemed to recognize Iolanda with the hair coiled in its chest, and it toddled up to her and grabbed at her skirts with its stumpy fingerless hands, leaving dirty traces on the fine silk.

“We better put it in the jar.” Niobe scooped the weakly resisting creature into its glass jail and stopped the jar before it could crawl out. She handed the jar to Iolanda. “There.”

Iolanda studied the creature through the glass, her full lips twisting in disgust.

Niobe explained how to feed the homunculus, and Iolanda looked even more doubtful.

She turned the jar this way and that, but no matter how she tried to turn the blind embryonic visage away from her, the homunculus always managed to turn to face her. “I don’t even know if it’s worth it,” Iolanda said. “Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate your fine work. It’s just—”

“That’s fine,” Niobe said cheerfully. “I’m sure Loharri would pay double for it—his hair is in too, so he can command it as well as you.”

Iolanda frowned, then unexpectedly laughed. “All right,” she said. “You made your sale, clever girl. Say, would you like a nicer bed than what you have right now?”

“And what would that entail?” Niobe asked, still smiling.

“Come stay with me. No one would hassle you there.”

“What will I do?”

Iolanda shrugged. “Minor remedies. And keeping me company. Most of my servants are automatons, not nearly as clever as Mattie, and they are dreadful conversationalists. In fact, they do not speak at all, they only listen and do as they are told.”

“That may be,” Niobe said. “But what do you really need?”

Iolanda shook her head in mock exasperation. “I want you to keep an eye on this thing you just so cruelly entrusted me with. I don’t want to see it or hear it. It looks like it might bite.”

“It has no teeth,” Mattie offered.

Iolanda continued as if she didn’t even hear Mattie’s interjection. “I won’t treat you as a servant. I know how stuck-up you alchemists are. Just take care of it for me, all right? And I promise I’ll protect you from the enforcers.”

“You’re too kind,” Niobe said.

“All right then! Get your things.” Iolanda thrust the jar with the homunculus in Niobe’s hands, all too eager to get rid of it. “Come on, come on!”

As Niobe hurried to pack up her clothes and her alchemical ingredients, Mattie stood by her bench, unable to quite articulate her hurt. She did not fault Niobe for choosing a better arrangement and greater protection than Mattie could offer. She didn’t even mind that it meant that she chose Iolanda over Mattie. But she was injured to the core that these two had such an easy time liking each other and trusting each other, despite the gulf that was supposed to exist between them. That the flesh women had some secret bond that Mattie did not share, that by implication she was excluded from their thoughts like she was excluded from their conversation. She was just a machine, a clunker one only acknowledged when convenient. For a moment, she regretted betraying Loharri to them—at least, he never made her feel like she did not belong.

With Niobe gone, Mattie distracted herself with her work on stone. She had mixed blood residue with stone dust and given the homunculus a small shaving off her finger for a heart. The animating essence of the blood stirred the slow, lumbering stone, and the homunculus awakened. Mattie had just started to make an emulsion of various minerals and gemstones to feed the homunculus and prod it to talking and divulging its secrets, betraying the bondage it had over the gargoyles. She felt so close now. Then came a knock on the door.

As Mattie walked to open it—just three steps—many thoughts darted through her mind like startled pigeons. It was Niobe, she thought, who had come back to apologize and stay with Mattie despite the inconvenience, because they were friends; it was Iolanda, holding the slender shaft of Mattie’s key in her soft, manicured hands; or it was Loharri who came to take her home forever, because she could not be trusted out of his sight, not even with the traitorous gears ticking in her head, monitoring her heart for any sign of doubt in him.

She opened the door. It was Sebastian—the only possibility she had not considered because she was afraid, Niobe’s insinuations still buzzing subsonically deep in her mind. You’re in love, you’re in love, Niobe’s voice teased, and he does not love you back because you are beneath noticing, you’re nothing but a mindless automaton that can be shoved aside as soon as it starts getting in the way of what a person wants. You are nothing.

Sebastian grabbed her hands and smiled. “Mattie? You’re all right!”

She nodded and took her hands away, demurring. “Loharri fixed me.”

His face grew somber. “I’m sorry I couldn’t.”

“It’s all right,” Mattie said. “No one expected you to.”

“No.” He frowned and sat by the table, in the chair recently vacated by Iolanda. “It’s my fault. I haven’t been practicing my work in years—do you know how much you forget this way? Can you imagine not practicing at all? I couldn’t rejoin the society now if they asked me.”

Mattie looked at him askance. He seemed so alien—always coming and going at odd hours, seemingly untouchable by either the enforcers or mechanics. He was like a gargoyle, hidden, having the gift of making himself invisible—a natural gift, Mattie thought. “Your name was on the list,” she said.

“What list?” He seemed momentarily disoriented by the change of topic but smiled. “What are you talking about, Mattie?”

“Your mechanic medallion was reported missing,” Mattie said. “I saw the list.”

“So? I’m sure there were plenty of others.”

“Yes.” Mattie paused. “Don’t you want to know why we had the list?”

He forced a smile. “Why, Mattie?”

“Because only the mechanics can legally order explosives from the alchemists,” she said. “We suspect that maybe there was a stolen medallion involved.”

Sebastian shrugged. “I wouldn’t know anything about it, Mattie. Ask the gargoyles—they saw me every day; they know I wasn’t involved in anything, no matter who the mechanics want to blame.”

“The gargoyles complain that their feeders are empty.”

“I’m sure the monks will find someone,” Sebastian said, his face coloring with a dark blush. “If they haven’t already.”

“Maybe.” Mattie studied him—she did not suspect him, not really. But there were questions that gnawed at the edges of her thoughts, leaving a latticed pattern of doubt and confusion. And she could not forget that he was a mechanic who knew something of alchemy—and who could say how much he picked up from his mother? Maybe the mechanics kept perfecting their art, making more and more complex things every day, but explosives had been made the same way for centuries. The alchemists enjoyed tradition and camaraderie more than efficiency; Niobe was right about that.

“So what, you gonna start suspecting me now?” Sebastian said. His years spent at playing simpleton with a bucketful of gravel had left their mark in his speech—she noticed it more when he got defensive, retreating into a pretense of simple-mindedness when questioned or confronted.

Mattie shook her head. “I would never suspect you, Sebastian.”

He smiled, still uncertainly. “And why is that?”

She saw no point in pretending—her mask was a part of her, her real face, her clean boyish features. “Niobe thinks I love you,” she said.

Sebastian stopped smiling and looked away. She made him awkward, Mattie realized—everyone felt awkward when they had to say no to someone who’d been kind to them. And occasionally, just out of gratitude, they said yes. “I’m flattered,” he said. “But even people could be mistaken about such things—why, you barely know me.”

“Barely.”

He coughed and got off the chair with an air of determination. There was nowhere to go so he just paced the length of the kitchen—three steps to the door, three back. “Have you seen the new contraption the mechanics are building?” he asked after a bit of frantic pacing.

“No,” Mattie said.

“They’re building it by the pond, not too far from the park. You really should see it—it is fascinating. They call it the Calculator.”

“Oh,” Mattie said. “Loharri mentioned it before—it’s the machine that is supposed to figure out the answers and find those responsible for the bombings, and help us figure out how to run and defend this city.”

“Yes,” Sebastian said. “My, you know a lot of things before they become public knowledge, don’t you?”

Mattie nodded. “Loharri doesn’t keep secrets from me. And the mechanics always talk freely when I’m about—I don’t think they take me seriously at all.”

“It’s their loss,” Sebastian said. “Trust me on this. Will you go see it?”

“Why do you want me to?”

“I thought you would like to meet another very smart machine,” he said.

Mattie shook her head. “It is not smart. It just analyzes—anyone could do that.”

“Why don’t they?”

“Because they don’t know all of the parameters,” Mattie said. “And the same is true for this machine—it doesn’t know everything, and it is unable to decide what’s important.”

She went to see the Calculator anyway. She saw it from afar—its smokestack rose over the trees of the park, gray and white, occasionally colored with the yellows of sulfurous fumes. The machine itself disappointed her—Mattie never dared to think it in such words but she expected an intelligent automaton that looked like her. Instead, it was a gigantic contraption, clanging with metal pistons and spewing steam from multiple pipes and openings covered with grating. It was like an angry house that was hissing and spitting at Mattie, and she did not know why it was so upset.

There were several engineers tinkering with one of the many square modules at the Calculator’s side. Loharri was among them, and Mattie’s instinct was to turn away and run home before he noticed her. She turned and hurried toward the safety of the street, where she would be hidden from his eyes by the buildings and the brightly colored but still-subdued crowd. The absence of dark faces was noticeable to Mattie, and she moved uneasily through the crowd, so homogeneous that Mattie stood out like a red roof in the gargoyles’ district.

“Mattie!”

She turned with ready moan of exasperation, to see Loharri running after her.

“Wait!” He slowed to a somewhat more dignified walk and weaved through the crowd, long and sinuous like an eel. “You don’t have to run every time you see me and make me chase you through the streets. It doesn’t look proper.”

Mattie shrugged. “I wasn’t running. I just didn’t like your Calculator.”

He grinned, briefly flashing his very white teeth. “Please don’t tell me you’re jealous.”

“Of course I’m not.” Mattie shifted on her feet, uncomfortable, all the while studying his face for any subtle change induced by Niobe’s alchemy. “I just think it is loud and dirty.”

He laughed, and bowed with an exaggerated flourish. “You, of course, are much prettier.”

Mattie huffed. “Has it occurred to you that being pretty might not be the height of my ambition?”

“Yes.” He smiled still. “It worries me quite a bit, actually. You were made to be pleasing to the eye and interesting to converse with, not to run off and take up a trade which frankly isn’t that different from the nonsense the Stone Monks ply.”

“Why do you hate them so much?”

He shrugged. “They are not rational, my dear girl.” That was his standard explanation for any dislike of others he had ever exhibited. “So all right, the gargoyles grew the city. It was awfully nice of them, but I don’t see why we’re supposed to worship them.”

“Not worship,” Mattie said. “Feed them and help them when they need it. And maybe listen to what they have to say.”

“Sure. This is why we have the monks in the first place, for feeding and helping. And now, apparently, you’ve joined the ranks of the helpers and listeners. Why would they need the rest of us?”

Neither of them mentioned the trade in children, the horrible deformed creatures, colloquially known as spiders for their short, round bodies and long, thin limbs, the pitiful terrors that emerged from the mine shafts every night. Honestly, Mattie was glad she did not have to see them—the stories were enough.

Mattie watched the traffic, now mostly caterpillars and just a few lizards, flow by with its usual hissing and groaning and metal clanking against stone. This is what this city is about, she thought. The metal against stone, the constant struggle, and the mechanics against the alchemists. Only now there was no doubt as to who had won—the mechanics had the upper hand; it was their city now.

“What are you thinking about?” Loharri asked.

“Nothing,” Mattie said. “Everything. The Soul-Smoker, for once—did you know that he had been in the orphanage?”

“Yes.” Loharri scowled. “I have to go back—the Calculator is malfunctioning.”

“What’s the problem?” Mattie asked.

Loharri shrugged. “We ask it how to increase the coal supply, and it tells us to send everyone in the city to dig for it.”

Mattie laughed. “It’s not just ugly, it’s also dumb.”

“You may be right. But we know what the problem is, we can fix it now.” Loharri turned away.

Mattie waved after his long, narrow back, clad in black wool despite the warmth and the sun. “That’s what you always say,” she whispered when she was certain that he could not hear her.

With Mattie, it was like this—her first weeks of life were spent on the bench in mostly- or half-assembled state. She retained snatches of those memories, even though they scared her with the sight of her own disembodied legs standing on the floor all by themselves, and several porcelain faces staring at her with empty sockets while she cried out, naked and alone. Loharri called it ‘growing pains’, and she agreed at least with the second part. He kept finding new problems and new solutions that in turn caused more problems, until Mattie was quite sure that she would never walk, would never be made whole. And then, as if by a miracle, she worked, complete and functional. In his weaker moments, Loharri called it a celestial intervention. Whatever the cause was, here she was now, Loharri’s voice still ringing in her ears. I now know what the problem is; I can fix it.

She returned home to find Sebastian preoccupied with one of her books—the one about gargoyle history. She watched his profile for a while, his crinkled forehead, his lowered thoughtful eyes. Perhaps Iolanda was correct—perhaps Mattie was in love. Or perhaps it was just desperation to break free of Loharri’s hold.

Sebastian looked up over his shoulder and smiled. “Mattie,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about what I said earlier. I didn’t mean to dismiss you; I didn’t mean to imply that . . . ” His large palm stroked his short hair absent-mindedly. “How do I put this?”

“You can’t love a machine,” she said. “I understand.”

He shook his head. “That’s not what I meant. I just don’t know . . . how.”

His skin, soft and smooth, beckoned her hand, and she touched his cheek, and felt the pulsing of blood under her fingers and saw the blooming of a dark blush a moment later.

“What are you doing?” Sebastian asked, but did not move away.

She remembered the words, even though she had never uttered them before. “Making love,” she whispered.

Sebastian remained seated, his black eye looking at her askance, as if unsure what to do.

Mattie was rather at a loss for ideas herself, and she bent down and wrapped her arms around him; her fingers touched on his chest, her cheek pressed against the back of his neck.

He grabbed her arm and pulled her in front of him. “Let’s take a look at you,” he murmured. “You know, I have no idea what you look like under this dress.”

Her fingers picked up the fabric of her skirt, lifting it demurely just above her ankles.

He studied the double bones, shining and slender, meeting at the metal joint that held the front and the back parts of her foot together—metal toes and wooden heel. He reached under her skirt, his warm fingers stroking past the roundness of her knee joint, brushing against the polished inner surface of her thigh, long and curved, and came to rest against the smooth metal plate between her legs.

“Not like this,” Mattie whispered, and touched his hand to her chest, pressing his palm against the tiny glass window.

He finally understood and pulled her into his lap. He yanked at the fabric concealing her breast, and his mouth found the keyhole as if by instinct. She froze—a troubling mix of fear and lightheaded pleasure—as his tongue circled the circumference of the keyhole. He forced the tip in, once, twice, and she felt the vibrant life flood her. He wasn’t winding her, but her whole body responded, rocking in rhythm with her heartbeat, she squirmed in his lap and his kisses and caressing fingers grew hungrier, more urgent. He pulled her dress off her shoulders, touched her inlays like piano keys, tangled his fingers in her hair. His mouth pressed against her lips and then her breasts, and then her lips again.

Mattie fled to the Soul-Smoker—it seemed like he and his many ghosts were the only ones she could still talk to. Confusion overwhelmed Mattie as she ran through the streets, so alive and yet so different from what she remembered. In search of any distraction to prevent her mind from latching onto the single thought—I have let him touch me. I made him touch me—she stopped by the public telegraph. The small foyer that hosted the apparatus and the long yards of tape it spewed incessantly, recording the news, passing messages, mounded in front of it, like some grotesque tapeworm tangled beyond any hope. The clerks let it be, sitting in their little niche, protected from the ravages of the public by thick bars.

“Anything for the alchemists?” Mattie asked.

The clerk, a young redheaded man named Janus, yawned. “Not since three days ago.”

Mattie felt a guilty pang from not having checked in so long. “May I see it?”

The clerk dug through the large metal case divided into hundreds of private enclosures, where the important messages went to sit for a week before being disposed off.

“It’s very quiet today. You were mobbed last week.”

The clerk, his shoulders and bony elbows moving energetically as if he were kneading dough, laughed. “Yeah, and two days ago everyone just decided, screw this. There’s so much bad news you can absorb before wanting to close your eyes and curl up in a corner, yes?”

“What happened two days ago?” Mattie asked the young man’s back.

“The Duke died,” he said. “His wife and daughter recovered enough to join the rest of the court.”

“Thank you.” Mattie’s mind tried to figure out what it meant for the city, and as chaotic as her thoughts were, she felt that the changes she considered were already in motion, the great blocks of stone that tumbled slowly into place, locking things in like the slab of the jail door slamming into its doorway, sealing off all sunlight and hope.

“Here’s your message,” the red-haired clerk said. “It’s encoded.”

Mattie took the ring out of her pocket and quickly read the message. She had to read it several times, since her eyes slid off the words, refusing to absorb their meaning.

The message was from Bokker, who had looked through the alchemical records. One of the names in the missing mechanics’ medallions showed up—Sebastian’s. The medallion was presented by a man who had ordered some quantity of explosives. Moreover, Bokker advised that the man who had used the medallion was tall but wore a hood obscuring his face; but by the color of his hands the alchemist thought that the man was an easterner—Bokker was especially insistent on mentioning this detail, as well as the fact that there were very few easterners admitted to the Lyceum, let alone to the society itself.

Mattie left the telegraph building, feeling a freezing cold starting at her heart and spreading outwards, freezing every emotion out of her. She tried to think of it logically—perhaps Sebastian’s medallion was listed because it was lost or stolen from him, perhaps someone else was using it. And yet, she knew that the medallion was on the list because he failed to return it after he was banished. Maybe he lost it afterwards, maybe he didn’t have anything to do with it. And yet, it fitted with his disappearances and his closeness to the palace, it fitted the overall pattern and his insistence that he could not leave the city. No matter how Mattie tried, there was no way of fitting it any other way without invoking a complex conspiracy—and as she knew, those were almost never true.

She hoped that Ilmarekh would offer her some advice, but she knew that she was beyond advice, beyond being able to cheer up at mere words. She needed to do something.

Having made a decision, she turned around and marched away from the gates. She passed by the factories, under the low-hanging clouds of smoke and soot, through the incessant banging and clashing of the machinery; she walked past the hovels and the hollow-eyed old people who passed the last of their days looking for sun in the endless haze, and hacking up gray pieces of their lungs.

“Friends in high places,” Ilmarekh had told her the last time. Iolanda. Mattie was willing to overlook the friend-theft at the moment, and instead decided to ask Iolanda for one of her many promised favors. She needed to know what was the right thing to do, and how the two of them fitted inside the machine of the city, more metal than stone now.