The Alchemy of Stone

Chapter 15




We cannot help but think of the shafts now, winding deep in the stone below, looping through and running up and down; we cannot help but think of all the people underneath. They seem to like it lately, and we watch the furtive figures down below, certain that they are invisible in the darkness, dash through the streets snaking beneath us. The city smells of smoke and trouble, and we think that this smell is more appropriate for fall than spring, this tang of burning leaves and bitterness. It reminds us of the underground, of its suffocating air and the bite of brimstone and magma, boiling not too far underneath.

We did not understand why they had to change the city we’ve built, just like we do not understand now why they must destroy it—befuddled and distraught, we huddle closer together on the roofs, wing brushing against wing, our mouths mute, heavy with unborn words, the taste of gemstones still fresh in their crevices.

We do not like the metal girl going underground; we fear that the stone that gave us birth will lead her away from us, just like the books, just like the books. We feel selfish and undeserving as we consider our impending death and her reluctance to help us, her preoccupation with other concerns. But we suppose she cannot help herself, and we just try to maintain our faith, and we hold onto each other, as if a touch of hands will prevent our rough flesh from becoming stone, as if we won’t have to wake up with our arms wrapped around yet another one of our number cold and unresponsive and dead.

The meeting place felt as if it were in the very bowels of the earth—hot and stuffy, filled with the smell of pipe tobacco and opium, its cloying sweetness reminding Mattie of Ilmarekh. She expected something reminiscent of the meetings the mechanics and the alchemists held—if not actual long tables with interminable rows of chairs surrounding them in concentric circles, like waves after a stone tossed into the Grackle Pond.

Instead it felt like the telegraph or the offices of the Parliament—people came and went, and the telegraph chittered; she wondered at first where the telegraph apparatus came from, but then remembered that the one in Ilmarekh’s hovel seemed to be missing when she last visited. The widening of the tunnel lit by the hanging lanterns felt almost mundane, despite the blackness of two tunnels—two circles of nothingness—framing it. There were chairs and tables, a peeling chaise, a jumble of furniture and papers and pillows; it felt like a trash heap, and Mattie thought that most things here must’ve been salvaged from the trash.

People came in, and others left, and all this activity seemed directed at something by the back wall of the cave, next to the hungry, gaping mouth of the tunnel. Mattie approached meekly, apologetic in advance.

There were several chairs pushed against the stone wall and the lattice of scaffolding hugging it, and a few makeshift desks constructed out of roughly hewn boards and wicker shipping crates such as one usually found broken and empty behind the marketplace, after the market was over. They smelled weakly of peaches and scorched wood. People crowded around the tables, speaking in low voices; the new arrivals came up to say hello, and some of them were given parcels and papers.

Two men appeared from the tunnel, dragging a large wicker crate between them, and without even looking, Mattie guessed what was in it. They stacked the crate against the wall, and turned around to go back into the tunnel when one of them noticed Mattie. He squinted at her. “What are you doing here?”

“Looking for Sebastian,” she said.

“He’s coming,” the man said, and disappeared back into the tunnel.

Mattie looked around, by habit searching for familiar faces, but could not find any. She passed the time studying the crowd; to her surprise, a few of those present did not look like either miners or peasants—their fine clothes and clean hands, their affectations clearly indicated a higher station in life than of the rest of those present. They segregated in their own little group and talked in hushed voices, occasionally stealing glances at the people around them. Mattie noticed that they were all quite young and well-groomed—adult children who hadn’t come into their inheritance yet, Mattie guessed. Social butterflies with too much free time on their hands. She should’ve guessed that they would be involved in something like this.

They looked like people Mattie was used to, and she took a step closer to them.

“Hey,” said a young man with hair so light that he had an appearance of missing eyebrows. “I know you; you’re that automaton who used to come to Bergen’s parties a lot.”

“Mattie,” she said. “My name is Mattie.”

The man smiled. “That’s right. I’m Aerin. Nice to meet you; I’ve seen you many times, but I don’t think we’ve been properly introduced.”

“Charmed,” Mattie said, and shook the proffered hand. She felt suddenly at home, and she thought it odd that those who despised her and never saw her as anything deserving of consideration made her feel most at ease. “I’m surprised to see you here.”

The man shrugged, laughed, and gestured at his friends. “We all are here because we were concerned about the plight of the common man.”

“Was it you who blew up the palace?” Mattie said.

“You’re quite blunt,” a woman standing to Mattie’s right said. She had heavily lined eyes and an overall air of languor Loharri would’ve found appealing.

“Of course she is,” one of the courtiers murmured. “She’s an instrument.”

A few of the others snickered.

“That’s not what I meant, Cedrik,” the woman said, without even looking at Mattie’s detractor. She smiled at Mattie. “Don’t pay attention to him, dear. He’s daft. Now, to answer your question—yes, our group was a part of it. Actually, the initial explosion was meant to show people that we are on their side—after this, they had to believe that we have categorically cut ourselves off from the city’s government and its aims. We have disowned our parents and the advantages our birthright has conferred upon us.”

Mattie thought that apparently the disowned advantages did not include clothes, but nodded politely. “It is very noble of you.” Her mind boiled with questions, and finally she chose the most pressing one. “Is Iolanda all right?”

“Why?” the woman said. “Do you know her?”

Mattie nodded. “Is she all right? I was so worried when they . . . when the houses were burned.”

“She’s fine,” the woman answered. “Never better. She and that new servant of hers were not there—they are safe and well.”

“Niobe is not a servant,” Mattie said. “She is my friend. Where are they? Here?”

“No,” the man named Cedrik said. “We have many safe houses . . . but of course you will forgive me for not divulging their location.”

“Of course.” Mattie glanced toward the mouth of the tunnel, anxious to see Sebastian. “And this place here?”

“One of many,” he answered. “It’s just one cell, but there are plenty of others. It’s a good place to meet and distribute supplies and catch up on the news for those who can’t show their faces in the city proper.”

Mattie wondered if Ilmarekh had given them his telegraph apparatus voluntarily—but of course he had to. Mattie kept forgetting that his frail appearance concealed a remarkable weapon—people were afraid of him, in danger from his mere proximity. Of course he had to leave it outside, to be found or collected, the ghosts calling to those they had left behind.

She remembered something Ilmarekh told her on their first meeting. The spirits, he said, the souls. They are not angry at the living, they just want to help. Helping others is the only way we can prove we still matter. She looked at the apparatus with new respect—it wasn’t just a cast-off; it was an expression of support from those who were dead.

Mattie heard a familiar voice at the mouth of the tunnel, and focused her eyes to look at the face behind the blinding light beam. Her heart faltered and ticked louder as she recalled these eyes half-closed in ecstasy, this smiling mouth pressed against her chest . . . she suppressed the rising wave of shame and stepped forward to greet him.

His smile faded and his eyes widened for just a moment, but Mattie noticed. “Mattie,” he said. “How did you find me?”

She shrugged. “It wasn’t difficult. I need to know something.”

“Ask then,” he said, with just a hint of irritation giving an edge to his voice. “I’ve a few things I need to do.”

“Was it you?” she said. “Was it you who bought the explosives?”

He shook his head. “No. I did let them use my medallion, so there you have it. Anything else you want to know?”

Do you love me? she wanted to ask, but there were people and their faces, their eyes watching her askance, as if too embarrassed to admit that they were indeed looking. Instead, she looked at her hands when she said, “The mechanics and the alchemists know it was your medallion. They will be looking for you—and this time really looking for you. You can’t go into the city anymore.”

“They were bound to find out sooner or later,” he said with a shrug of his large shoulders. “But thank you for telling me. I’ll be careful.” He shifted from one foot to another and raked his hand through his hair. “Perhaps you should get going—there’s much to do, and for you there’s no point in getting involved and endangering yourself like that.”

Mattie realized that he was embarrassed of her—not just of what they had done earlier, but of her mere presence here. He did not want his friends to know that he was friendly with a machine. “When will I see you again?” she said. She did not know why it was important to her to make him admit that he knew her, that he was her friend.

“I don’t know, Mattie,” he answered. “But you’re welcome here any time—please come and visit.”

There was nothing left for Mattie to do but to say her goodbyes and head out. The way back through the tunnel, alone and in the dark so thick that even her eyes barely penetrated it, seemed longer than before, when there were people surrounding her. She wished she could’ve waited for someone else to leave, just so she wouldn’t have to travel alone, but Sebastian seemed eager to see her go.

She imagined things hiding in the darkness, terrible things that could rend her to pieces, limb by limb, gear by toothed gear, nothing left of her but a pile of spare parts, just like the one that occupied most of Loharri’s workshop. Her thoughts turned to him—was he mad at her that she had left so abruptly earlier? Would he be happy to see her back unharmed?

The walls, gray stone behind the scaffolding, reminded her of the color of the gargoyles—it was sleek and cold like their skins, and Mattie couldn’t help but think that this was the stone they came from, the solid mass of rock that gave them birth. It was not so solid anymore, shot through with shafts and tunnels and mines. Maybe this is why the gargoyles are losing their strength, their power, Mattie thought. People are destroying the stone the city is built on, and what could one expect but a collapse? She felt the floor by the walls blindly, until she found a few stone slivers, and put them in her pocket. She would work and find out how this stone was different from any other, and why it held the gargoyles in such thrall. Work offered the comfort of familiarity and preoccupation with matters she could control, and which did not hurt so much.

In her laboratory, Mattie crushed the gray stones almost vengefully, and listened to the smallest crystals sigh and squeal under the slow twists of her pestle. She poured solvents over the crumbs and set them ablaze, carefully noting the blue and green color of the flames and the tiny salamanders that frolicked inside, playful and mischievous like puppies.

Mattie watched them for a while. She remembered Ogdela giving her a funny look when she had first seen the salamanders. “What are you staring at?” Ogdela had asked her then.

“Salamanders,” Mattie answered. “The fire denizens.”

Ogdela snorted. “Silly girl, you can’t see them, so there’s no point in looking for them.”

“But I do see them,” Mattie said. “Look!”

Ogdela shook her head. “Your eyes are better than mine then. Better than anyone’s.”

When Mattie questioned Loharri about her eyes, he grinned with the undamaged half of his face, and said something about polarized light and varying light sensitivity. Mattie did not understand the exact meaning, but figured that it meant that her eyes were special—something she suspected ever since he took them away from her. He did it again on a few occasions—sometimes as a punishment, sometimes for mere tinkering and improving.

“They are good enough,” Mattie had begged on many occasions when he wanted to work on her eyes just once more. “Please, don’t do this again.”

“They could be better,” he always answered. “You could see things no one else could see.”

“I already can,” she told him. “And I don’t like it when you take my eyes—I can see nothing at all then.”

The flames went out and the salamanders disappeared, and Mattie shifted idly through the charred remnants of the rock, its essence burned away in the blue and green flames, leaving behind only the most simple and most basic constituents.

She dribbled some sheep’s blood over them, added the herbs and the elements, and a small crystal of her eye to animate it, to make it listen to her. The homunculus took form, and Mattie put it in the same jar as the previous one, made from regular stone before Sebastian’s appearance interrupted her work.

The homunculi bubbled and seemed to size each other up, and Mattie quickly poured the mineral essence into the jar to feed them, and tightened the lid. She watched as the two creatures lapped up her offering and then locked arms. They struggled and wrestled with each other, and for a while it looked like neither was gaining the upper hand, until Mattie realized that their hands and arms had fused together.

Their shoulders touched and stuck, then their stomachs. Mattie thought that soon she would be in possession of a much larger homunculus, when the one made with gargoyle stone opened its mouth with slow hissing and bubbling of drying blood, and engulfed the head of its adversary. The other homunculus, headless now, thrashed, and Mattie wondered if it was capable of feeling pain.

The homunculus made of gargoyle stone devoured its fallen opponent, wrapping itself around the lifeless body and engulfing it, bit by bit.

“Hm,” Mattie said. “I wonder what that means.”

The homunculus burbled and tittered, and banged its shapeless fists on the glass surrounding it. Pink bubbles formed on its lipless mouth as the homunculus closed and opened it, as if trying to speak. Mattie hesitated—she wanted to hear what the thing had to say, but she felt disturbed by its behavior; Niobe hasn’t warned her about the possibility of homuncular cannibalism. She also didn’t tell Mattie that these things could talk, or at least attempt to; or maybe Niobe did not know. Mattie felt an electric tingling in her fingers such as she usually experienced when something special happened.

She turned away from the jar and paced along the bench, her heart ticking like a cricket on July night. She was not prepared to have created something so unexpected—and, she guessed, horrible. For a moment she fought the temptation to just destroy the creature, fling it with its tightly locked jar into the fireplace and flee from the apartment; toss it onto the streets below and let the lizards’ claws and the segmented legs of the mechanical caterpillars tear it to pieces and smear it into a long bloody streak on the cobbled pavement; destroy it forever so it never got a chance to whisper its terrible secrets to her with its mutable, liquid mouth.

She stared out of the window, distraught, until she realized that the streets below were unnaturally silent. She hung out of the window, to see as far as she could, but there seemed to be no signs of disturbance. She was about to pull the shutters closed when she heard a distant but unmistakable crackling of musket shots—a fast rattle at first, getting more disorganized and scattered soon after.

Mattie wanted to worry, to run to the Parliament to see if everything was all right, to check on the unfinished Calculator to make sure it still stood. She could picture it in her mind, towering and clanging and belching, like a miniature foundry surrounded by a phalanx of grim and determined mechanics . . . Loharri would be there for sure, she thought, ready to defend the Calculator.

The sound of breaking glass startled her from her reverie, and Mattie whipped around, the joints of her waist whining with the sudden movement, the springs of her back taut and stretched to their limit.

The jar lay shattered on the floor—the homunculus inside must’ve wrestled it to the edge of the bench and flung it over, and now it gathered itself into a human form again, moving toward Mattie on its soft, boneless legs. It hissed and burbled, and Mattie stepped back, only to feel the hard ledge of the windowsill behind her back.

The homunculus, almost knee-high, reached for her, and its small, fingerless hands left dark smears on her skirt. Its hissing and bubbling grew louder, and it tugged in her skirt, demanding.

Mattie kneeled next to the creature, repulsed and intrigued. Its disgusting mouth formed another pink bubble, and it hissed—boiling of blood, susurrus of waves reaching the sandy shore—strange words. Mattie bent lower.

“Lissssen,” the homunculus whispered, its lips next to her ear.

The children of stone clamber to the surface in broad daylight, and we watch them with a measure of surprise. The spiders and the miners, the ones who smell of soft earth and grain (and we think, they shouldn’t even be here, underground)—they all are there, afraid yet exhilarated. They carry weapons—heavy axes and hoes, mostly, but there are a few muskets, the silver filigree on their stocks glittering.

We want to ask them to be gentle, but the very thought is ridiculous; their eyes, squinted in the sun glare, dream only of burning, we can see it plainly. They do not want to be underground, and we cannot blame them.

They emerge like cicadas, in great numbers and all over. We know the tunnels and the shafts under the city where they and others like them had burrowed for centuries—like cicadas—until one day they realized that instead of digging sideways they should go up, up, toward the sun, where they can become what they always dreamed of. We did the same before them—at least, we assume we did; we cannot remember our lives before the stone shuddered and vomited us into the pool of sunlight, harsh and beautiful, where only the basalt under our feet felt familiar.

The children of the city—our children—run at the sight of them, except the ones encased in metal, glittering like large iridescent beetles. They advance, on foot and on their small mechanized monstrosities that carry them around on their backs, metal heaped upon metal, and we wonder if there is any flesh in them at all.

One of the miners fires the first shot, and the metal man jerks backwards, an almost comical fountain of blood springs forth from where the metal of his head doesn’t quite meet the metal of his chest, and we guess that the flesh underneath was not just our imagination.

The metal men fire into the crowd, and many fall. And then other people come—they come from behind the houses, from the alleys, many on lizard back and dressed in expensive clothes; there are also the children of red earth, dark-skinned traders and artisans that tried to make their homes here, and we cannot watch anymore.

We flee from the carnage, aware of disregarding our duty of eternal watching, but our eyes refuse to look and close or turn away, and our legs carry us against our will across the roofs. In other streets, other places we see the same scene—we see blood and gutted lizards, the metal monsters devoid of their riders bumping mindlessly into the walls of the buildings, the sizzling metal buckles, the coal spills, the houses catch fire. We do not recognize the city anymore and flee to our only hope, to the girl who can help us.

We look through her window, suddenly worried that she might be dead and dismembered somewhere, the ticking of her heart silenced, the window in her chest broken. But she is alive and at home, and we sigh with relief, and wonder why is she kneeling next to the creature who smells of blood and stone, the creature who is whispering into the pink perfect shell of her ear. She is so absorbed in its words that she does not hear the door opening behind her, and we do not think of warning her.