The Alchemy of Stone

Chapter 14




Mattie waited for Loharri to wake up, and idly picked through the icebox. He appeared to have gone to the market the day before, and she inhaled the smells of foods she could not consume—figs and pomegranates, fresh berries and coconut milk. She was satisfied with the smell alone.

She thought that the figs—dark-red, almost purple—looked like tiny hearts, and the juice of the pomegranates was the color of human blood. She had no instruments, but in the kitchen she mashed the fig pulp awkwardly with her fingers, whispering the secret words she had learned from Ogdela—the words, Ogdela insisted, that could heal the heart of the world if only said right and with enough conviction. She poured the pomegranate juice over the red pulp when Loharri, still half-asleep, stumbled into the kitchen.

“Something smells good,” he said, his voice still hoarse from sleep.

Mattie nodded. She liked the smell of people right after they slept—it was a warm, musky smell that made her feel at home and at peace. “How much damage did they do?”

Loharri shrugged and scooped a blob of fig and pomegranate mix with his fingers. “Mmmm,” he said. “Delicious. As for the damage, I truly do not know. I don’t want to know, frankly. I don’t think the city treasury has enough money for a decent rebuilding effort.”

“You’re thinking of rebuilding?” Mattie watched him eat. Not the heart of the world, but if she could fix his heart it would be enough. “How do you know they won’t come back?”

He stopped eating. “You think they will.”

“I think they might. The enforcers kicked them out of the city this time, but . . . ”

“I see your point.” Loharri finished his meal, stretched, and paced. “What is it they want?”

Mattie told him about the men who attacked her yesterday. “They don’t like being replaced in the fields by machines. They don’t like being forced into the mines. I can’t say I blame them.”

“We all have a role to play. Otherwise, society couldn’t function.”

“I never hear it from people with miserable roles,” Mattie said.

“Not everyone can be a mechanic. Or an alchemist for that matter, or a courtier.”

“They don’t want that,” Mattie answered. “They just want to be peasants again. Just that.”

Loharri sighed. “I better go and check on the Calculator. It was pretty well guarded, but still . . . ”

Mattie shook her head. It surprised her how little affected by the riots Loharri appeared—he seemed to see them as a minor inconvenience; he was not able to grasp that the order of the world—or at least the city—had changed fundamentally. To him, the mechanics were still in charge and business continued as usual, and the riots were nothing but a minor wrinkle in the fabric of life, easily shrugged off, smoothed out, and forgotten.

“I don’t think you understand,” she said. “They will return, in greater numbers. They will take the city over.”

Loharri laughed. “You’re over-dramatizing, Mattie. Your imagination is running away with you.”

“Look through the window,” she said. “Then tell me that everything is unchanged.”

He obeyed, nonchalant. He stared out of the window, over the rose bushes and into the streets clogged with traffic—caterpillars, lizards, men and women and children, in vehicles and on foot, most of them carrying or carting hastily assembled parcels of their belongings. Despite the commotion, the people remained curiously quiet—even children didn’t cry but remained serious and subdued. The caterpillars ground, metal on metal, and the lizards gave an occasional troubled bark—the only sounds in the street.

“Everyone has lost their minds,” Loharri observed. “They are dimmer than cattle.”

“They are not stupid. They are afraid. Maybe you should be, too.”

He stared into the street, his hand resting on the window trim. Mattie wished she could see his face when he said, “Do you suggest I run, too?”

“No,” Mattie said. “But you might want to start taking this seriously. Maybe stop scapegoating people and look for real culprits. Or listen to their demands and reach an agreement. Or maybe just find out what happened to the courtiers.”

“Who cares about them?”

“I do. Iolanda was there too.”

He shook his head without turning. “She wasn’t. I went there yesterday, but her automatons told me that she had left. I assumed she moved to the seaside with the rest of them, grew bored . . . but maybe she knew it was coming.”

“What about Niobe?”

“That alchemist friend of yours?” He turned around, grinning. “What, did she ditch you for Iolanda?”

Mattie nodded.

“Hm,” he said. “Apparently, there is an entire female conspiracy behind my back. What was it exactly you were doing for Io? And what does that girl have to do with it?”

“Iolanda bought perfume from both of us,” Mattie said.

He made a face. “Dear girl, you can’t possibly believe I’m dense enough to believe this foolishness?”

“But it is true,” Mattie insisted.

“I’m sure. You’re a bad liar, Mattie, and you know as well as I do that even if she did indeed buy some fragrant nonsense from you, it doesn’t form the basis of your association. Although I do appreciate your effort at at least partial veracity.” He laughed. “But you’re not going to tell me, are you?”

Mattie shook her head. He couldn’t really punish her, she thought; the days when he had enough power over her to take away her eyes so that she stumbled through the house blindly were gone now. Still, she worried that he would find another way to punish her disobedience.

Instead, he said, “Let me get dressed, and I’ll go see what is going on at the Parliament. You’re welcome to come along, of course—especially if you have any idea as to who the real culprit is.”

“I don’t,” Mattie said.

“No matter. Your leader Bokker just might.”

Mattie waited for him to get ready, listening for the soft stockinged footsteps and the rustling of clothes. Of course Bokker knew about Sebastian—of course he would tell the mechanics, to drive suspicion from the alchemists if nothing else. And they will look for him; she only hoped they wouldn’t search her house—even if he wasn’t there.

She felt a forceful pang of guilt when she thought about the last time she saw Sebastian. She had gained enough distance from the event to think about it now, but the shame and turmoil remained strong. She told herself that she had done nothing wrong, that this was what people were supposed to do when in love—and yet, he was the only one besides Loharri who had touched her secret place. She imagined what it would be like to give him her key, to let him wind her—and instead, she recoiled at the thought. If she were to get her key back, she thought, no one but her would ever touch it. She would wind herself well in advance so that she would never need to rely on another to keep herself alive.

They had to push through the crowd all the way to the ducal district, where the temple and the Parliament still stood but felt separate from the teeming life around them, like relics of a bygone era. They did not belong, Mattie thought, just like the gargoyles on the roof did not belong to the world around them. For the first time, she doubted her assignment—perhaps, she thought, she shouldn’t interfere with the natural order of things, perhaps it would be better to let the gargoyles pass into the realm of legends entirely. Perhaps they were turning to stone simply because there was no place for them.

Yet, it wasn’t true, Mattie told herself. There would always be nooks and fissures where ancient things born of stone could survive. There was no reason to let them go simply because the world was changing; ushering in the new did not have to mean discarding the old. Did it?

“What are you thinking about?” Loharri said. They were approaching the Parliament, deserted in contrast to the rest of the city save for a few enforcers guarding it—it seemed that everyone was eager to get away, and Mattie doubted that the Parliament building would be open.

To her surprise, once they stepped inside they were ushered along by several enforcers. “Emergency meeting,” they informed Loharri. “Would you like to leave your automaton here?”

“No, I want her along,” Loharri said.

They didn’t argue—apparently, they had more important things to worry about, and Mattie followed Loharri to the second floor, into a darkened and plush room dominated by a large oak table. Almost the entire parliament and a few other mechanics and alchemists sat around it. Loharri took a seat, and Mattie remained standing behind his chair, close to the wall, in the shadows where she betrayed her presence with only occasional glinting of metal and quiet ticking.

She listened to the men talk, and the same sense of disbelief and dread as she felt in Loharri’s kitchen descended upon her—they talked as if the destruction outside was a temporary event, a tornado, disruptive but fleeting. They talked about containment and rebuilding, they talked about reforms as if the city itself hadn’t turned on them; Bokker babbled about the missing medallions and the necessity to find Sebastian—or whoever he could’ve given his medallion to. The mechanics confirmed that his medallion was never surrendered upon his expulsion, and that they knew he was up to no good.

At this point, Loharri turned to look at her. Mattie remained motionless, her new face as mercifully blank as her old one. “What?” she whispered. “Do you need something?”

He shook his head and turned back.

Mattie listened to Bokker and Bergen argue about the measures that had to be taken—how they would look for Sebastian, and what they would have to do to stem the riots. “Cut the head off and the body will die,” Bokker said, and the rest nodded sagely.

Mattie wanted to scream at them that it wasn’t that simple—it wasn’t just Sebastian, there were others. Thousands of miners and peasants, the workers in the automaton factories and those who cleaned the garbage off the streets—they probably didn’t even know about Sebastian, and they wouldn’t miss him.

She left the meeting quietly, her steps muted by the thick carpet, her skirts whispering against the wall as she exited.

She pushed through the crowd, heading for the gates—she wanted to make sure that Ilmarekh wasn’t harmed by the violence, defenseless as he was alone in his this house, blind and weak.

The gates were guarded now—the enforcers swarmed like flies, their caterpillars staining the air with acrid black smoke. Those leaving the city were not detained, and she slid past the enforcers and their eyes hidden under the faceplates of their helms.

She ran up the hill and knocked on the Soul-Smoker’s door. He was there, thankfully whole and in high spirits. He sat by the fireplace where the last flames still guttered and smoldered, his pipe in his pale hand. He smiled when he heard her wooden footfalls, and waved his pipe festively.

“I’m glad that you are all right,” he said.

“I’m glad they didn’t harm you,” she replied.

He smiled a bit, his thin fingers fiddling with the buttons on his waistcoat. “Why would they? I am sympathetic.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Mattie replied. “It doesn’t matter to them.”

She had realized something last night, and the terror of the understanding weighed heavily on her mind. It didn’t matter what one thought or did—once perceived as an enemy by a malignant, blind force, one would be treated as such. Those who prided themselves in their intelligence and ability to rule and those who rebelled against them were just like the mindless automatons collecting the dead bodies and limbs amidst the carnage, like the enforcers that moved through the eastern district arresting whoever they saw fit and handing them over to the Soul-Smoker. There was no difference whatsoever; Mattie had been mistaken to think that there was, that they would listen to her.

“I don’t think you know what you are talking about,” Ilmarekh answered with a slight frown. “I can be useful to them—I am useful to anyone. You’re just afraid of change.”

“Of course I am!” Mattie stomped her foot, and the entire house shook. “Everyone should be afraid of change—people die in such times.”

“It has to get worse before it gets better.”

“Maybe.” Mattie paced across the narrow room. At least he recognized that the change was happening, unlike the old men at the Parliament. “I saw the mechanics and the alchemists today . . . they are talking about repressing the riots. Defusing the situation, as they call it. The miners will get better wages—they will promise them, at least. I don’t think they have enough money to do that, but they’ll promise, and they think it’ll be enough. Do you think it’ll be enough?”

“I’m afraid it just might be,” Ilmarekh answered with a sigh. “They are just people, Mattie. They don’t want to burn buildings and kill people. Even when it is called for.”

Mattie was not assured of the alleged docility of the men who almost killed her yesterday, but she did not argue. “Just be careful,” she said.

Ilmarekh nodded and slouched by the fireplace, groping for a cinder that could be coaxed into lighting his pipe. Mattie found one for him and held it close to the pipe as he puffed on the stem, his brow wrinkled. The opium, resinous and moist, caught fire reluctantly, and Mattie smelled the sweet, cloying smoke. The spirits stirred as soon as the twin serpentine wisps of smoke curled from Ilmarekh’s flared nostrils—the souls pried his mouth open and babbled, their voices mingling into an indistinct cacophony of word fragments and pained exclamations.

Mattie waited for them to calm down and sort out the speaking order among themselves; they always seemed so talkative when Mattie was around, and she thought that they probably disliked talking to each other—if they even could talk to each other—and resented Ilmarekh . . . they didn’t need words to haunt his every waking moment.

“Do they leave you alone when you sleep?” Mattie asked.

Ilmarekh shook his head, struggling for control over his mouth and voice. “I haven’t had a dream of my own in ages.”

“You deserve it,” one of the ghosts shouted.

“Leave him be,” another interrupted. “He’s not his own man.”

His voice garbled again under the assault of many souls pressing from behind, filling his mouth, his eyes with their ethereal shapes. They cried and pleaded in turns, one after the other—the unfairness of it all, the unfinished business. Each seemed to have something to say to Mattie, because she was the only one who could listen to them, without any fear of her soul being sucked out of her.

But perhaps not—she thought of the gargoyles, and almost cried out once she realized that the gargoyles would be capable of listening to the wrath and pleading of the spirits without any risk. Would the soul of a dead person sever their bond with the stone? Mattie did not know, but she thought that this was an avenue worth investigating. She filed it away, for the next time she would speak to them. Now, she needed to listen.

“What do you know about Sebastian?” she asked. “What do you know about the explosives?”

Ilmarekh and his ghosts grew curiously silent then.

“I promise I won’t tell anyone,” Mattie said. “I need to know . . . for myself.”

“They won’t tell you,” Ilmarekh said. “You’ve found him, haven’t you?”

“Yes,” Mattie said. “But I want to know what does he have to do with all of this. I want to help him, but I need to know.”

“Why?” Ilmarekh’s voice changed to a higher pitch, and Mattie guessed that it was Beresta, worried about the fate of her offspring.

“Because his mechanic’s medallion was used to buy explosives,” Mattie said. “The mechanics and the alchemists both know about it, they know he is in the city. He was only banished before, but now all the enforcers will be looking for him. I want to help, but I need to know what sort of risk I am taking.”

Another soul pushed Beresta aside—Mattie thought she could’ve imagined it, but she got a distinct impression of two transparent shapeless ghosts engaging in a bit of tug of war—and spoke, with a strong eastern accent. “I know the man,” the soul said. “I’ve done nothing wrong, but I was killed because I was a foreigner. You don’t treat us well, this city doesn’t. You don’t treat anyone well, not even your own. Many are unhappy—is it a surprise that they are coming together to stop your injustice?”

“So the easterners were involved?” Mattie said.

Ilmarekh shrugged. “Some were, some weren’t. I wasn’t and now I regret it. I blamed those who brought it on us, but now I realize that it wasn’t those who plotted, it wasn’t those who rebelled who were at fault.”

Ilmarekh sighed and spoke in his own voice. “I asked you about your friends in high places. Did you talk to them?”

Mattie shook her head, ashamed. “I never had a chance. I . . . ” She didn’t say it out loud, but she had been too preoccupied with plotting Loharri’s downfall to talk to Iolanda when she could. And now, how would she find Iolanda and Niobe?

“I can help you,” another ghost spoke. “I can tell you about a place they gather—but you’ll go at your own risk. If they don’t trust you, you are dead.”

Mattie inclined her head, agreeing. “Just tell me when and where.”

“Not far,” the ghost said. “No one comes to this blasted hill, and if you go down the northern slope at midnight, you’ll see the entrance to an abandoned mine. It’s closed during the day, but the spiders open it at night. Can you see in the dark?”

“Yes.”

“It won’t help you,” the ghost said. “It’s dark there, so dark, not even a torch will help you.”

Mattie waited for nightfall, listening to the rising wind outside. The Soul-Smoker’s pipe had been extinguished, and the spirits, exhausted, quieted down and only occasionally whispered dark warnings and petty complaints. Ilmarekh appeared to have fallen asleep in front of the cold fireplace, and Mattie found the sudden movements of his lips and fierce, abruptly whispered words disconcerting, and looked at the window, waiting for the moon to rise and the constellations to arrange themselves in the proper order for the middle of the night.

Beresta, the shy ghost, used the lull to surprise Mattie. “My son is a good boy,” she whispered, as if not to wake the others. “A good man. He wouldn’t do anything to hurt others.”

He almost killed me when I first met him, Mattie thought. She didn’t utter those words out loud—she was well familiar with the usual arguments people gave her. You do not count, you are a machine. You are made of metal, you have no soul. As if any of it mattered.

Beresta understood her silence. “You disagree.”

“I don’t think he is bad,” Mattie said. “I think I might even love him.”

“But you . . . ” Beresta choked down the reflexive protest.

“I was made to feel pain.”

The ghost recoiled, her translucent form shrinking close to Ilmarekh’s lips, coating them like water. “What sort of a man would build a machine who feels pain?”

Mattie saw no need to answer—they both knew it. It took a specific brand of cruelty, cruelty masquerading as concern. It will help you learn better. This way you won’t damage yourself. It’s for your own good.

And yet, Mattie could not quite bring herself to blame him—she knew how he had learned these words. “I can also feel pleasure,” Mattie said.

“That seems even more cruel,” Beresta whispered.

“And why is that?”

“You know,” the ghost said. “Machines break. Always, all of them, no matter what the mechanics say.”

“People die,” Mattie countered. And added, “Even the ghosts.”

“And yet you work on reversing death.”

“Don’t we all?” The words came out of her mouth of their own volition, but she immediately felt the truth of them deep in her metal bones. What else did they all do if not try to stave off disappearance? Alchemists cured the sick and made concoctions to brighten existence; the mechanics built, pouring their cold passion into things more durable than their own flesh; even the gargoyles grew stone to leave a trace in the world—something besides their lithified bodies.

“These are idle thoughts,” Beresta said. “You better get going, or you’ll daydream until morning.”

Mattie looked at the sky, at the constellation of the Lizard almost aligned with the Carriage, and hurried out of the door without saying goodbye. She walked down the slope, the wind shoving her in the back and buffeting her skirts as if they were a sail. It was dark, and she had to extend the stalks of her eyes and force the diaphragms open, to let in whatever little light scattered over the battered slopes of the Ram’s Head.

She saw the opening of the shaft—black on black, its square outline only hinted at—at the same time as she heard human voices. She stood still, listening, her heartbeat almost inaudible under the shifting of gravel under the clumsy footfalls and the lowered voices. Two men rounded the hill and came into her view, black and orange in the flames of their torches flailing in the wind. She wondered at first why they hadn’t brought lamps, but guessed that they were either poor or didn’t want to attract attention of their households.

There was nowhere to hide, and she stood motionless, even after the light of the torches snatched her out of the darkness and she had no doubt that the men could see her. Both were dressed in rough, unbleached linen shirts and no overcoats despite the chill in the air. They had dark faces, colored not by nature but by years in the shaft.

“Where are you going?” one of them asked. They did not look friendly.

“I’m looking for Sebastian,” she said. “I’m a friend of his.”

“Who’s Sebastian?” the first man asked, and his companion whispered in his ear. “Oh,” the first man said. “Did he tell you to come here then?”

“Yes,” Mattie said. “At least he didn’t say not to.” She hoped that an imperfect excuse would have the appearance of the truth.

“All right,” the second man said. “Come along then. But if you’re a spy . . . ”

“Look at her,” the first one interrupted. “If they sent a spy, wouldn’t they choose someone less obvious?”

Mattie followed them down into the shaft, down the rough wooden ladder into a tunnel where the air grew suddenly warm and still, as if it had been breathed in and out of human lungs over and over again, until it was drained of life and succor. She tried to think of something to say to these men, so aloof and alien, so different from anyone she ever knew, but the usual chitchat about the weather seemed frivolous, and questions about their occupation—extraneous.

After they traveled a short while down the tunnel, the flames of the torches smoldered as if suffocated by lack of sustenance in the air, but the men did not seem perturbed. They came upon a large niche carved into the stone wall, behind the wooden supports and scaffolds that kept the tunnel from collapsing, and her guides reached into the niche, the sounds of shifting stone and gravel disturbed by their hands muffled. The man nearest Mattie pulled out a strange contraption—a short belt of cured leather with its ends stitched together, and a small round apparatus mounted on the belt; Mattie recognized it for a miniature bronze lamp ensconced in porcelain. His companion helped him light the lamp from the torch, and it blazed with a bright white light. He affixed the belt to his head, and the lamplight cut a swath of light through the dank blackness of the tunnel.

“I was wondering how you worked there, in the darkness,” Mattie said and retracted her eyes back into her face, narrowing the aperture of the diaphragms. “It’s a clever contraption.”

“If you were wondering so much why didn’t you find out?” the man with the lamp on his head said as they continued along the tunnel.

Mattie faltered for words.

“I guess you weren’t really wondering then,” the man continued. There was no anger in his voice, just the habitual bitterness of an unhappy person. “You just thought of it now, making conversation.”

“Yes,” Mattie admitted. “I don’t know anyone like you.”

“Anyone who works for a living, you mean,” the second man said and spat.

“I work,” Mattie said. “I’m an alchemist.”

“You’re in the elite then.” The man chuckled, making the beam of light jump up and down. “It’s all right though. There are quite a few of you helping us. I won’t say no to a helping hand, although it beats me what your types see in it.”

Mattie was starting to wonder about the same question—even if a few alchemists or mechanics or courtiers weren’t happy with the way things were, they had so little in common with these crude men that she doubted that any alliance was meaningful. “Are there any other mines like these?” she asked instead.

The men laughed. “Sure,” the second one said. “The ground here, it’s riddled with mines like a honeycomb. You in the city, you think you walk on solid ground, and you don’t know what’s beneath you.”

“They extend under the city?”

The men nodded. “No exits there, so as not to bother the pretty ladies and the merchants, but there are mines there.”

“I meant other mines where people meet,” she said.

“Sure,” the first man said. “There are meeting places aplenty, only I’m not telling you where.”

“I wasn’t asking.”

“Good, ‘cause I’m not telling.”

They fell silent, but now there were other people and other light beams—they came from behind and from the side tunnels, and soon Mattie found herself walking in a small crowd. She looked over the faces, hoping to glimpse someone familiar, but they were all the same, the same men who attacked her the day before. But now they seemed different, as if the laws of the surface failed to apply to them and Mattie here.

She whirred and clunked along, feeling trapped and out of place. What if they decided to turn on her? What if Sebastian denied ever knowing her? Who would miss her, who would even know she was gone? She did not like to think of the answer.