The Alchemy of Stone

Chapter 4




Iolanda sniffed at the vial—Mattie had found the most expensive crystal, and the slanted sunrays lit the facets with red, yellow, and blue sparks—and smiled. “Not bad,” she said. “A little bitter for my taste, but I suppose it suits. I’m pleased I have put my faith in you.”

“Did I pass?” Mattie asked.

Iolanda’s eyebrows plucked to perfect black crescents arched in pretended surprise. “Pass what?”

“It was a test, wasn’t it?” Mattie said. “You wanted to see if I could follow your orders.”

“I assumed you could do that,” Iolanda said, and helped herself to a seat. “But yes, I wanted to make sure that you are good with deadlines and feelings—I know little of automatons, and I wondered if emotions are something you understand . . . ”

“Why wouldn’t I?” Mattie immediately worried that her words came out too defensive.

Iolanda shrugged, too languid to disguise her indifference. “You are made mostly of metal.”

“I won’t argue with the obvious,” Mattie said. “But what does it have to do with feelings?”

“You have a smart mouth,” Iolanda said, and smiled with faint approval. “I think I will work well with you. Now, I will depart, unless . . . ”

Mattie waited politely for the rest of the sentence, but since it was not forthcoming, she saw it fit to ask, “Unless what?”

Iolanda rolled her eyes. “As I suspected, you do miss some subtleties. I was just trying to give you an opening to ask for favors.”

“Thank you,” Mattie said. She considered feverishly whether to ask about Sebastian—Loharri seemed so reluctant to speak of him and his disappearance that she felt she had no other recourse. Yet, she feared that she was becoming a part of something she didn’t understand.

“Well?” Iolanda stood and tapped her foot on the leg of Mattie’s laboratory bench. “I haven’t all day.”

“I wanted to find relatives of a . . . a friend. Not really a friend—a deceased colleague. Beresta.”

“Never heard of her,” Iolanda said. “What are her relatives’ names?”

“There’s only one I know of,” Mattie said. “His name’s Sebastian; he’s a mechanic, I think . . . from the Eastern district.”

Iolanda’s smooth forehead acquired a thin horizontal wrinkle, which smoothed out as soon as she started to speak. “You ask for interesting favors, Mattie. Surely, you understand that associating with people like Sebastian is not good for you?”

Great, Mattie thought. A second undesirable in as many days. “No,” she said. “I just need to talk to him about his mother’s papers—I’m interested in her work, not him.”

“I believe you,” Iolanda said. “But that is of no consequence. Sebastian is not welcome in the city anymore—I imagine he lives outside the walls, perhaps on a farm somewhere.”

“Or he could’ve moved on to another city.”

“I doubt it. He still keeps in touch with some people here, and there’s a rumor that he and his associates are not far away.”

“What did he do?” Mattie asked. “And what does he want here?”

“He was a mechanic,” Iolanda said. “The Mechanics cast him out. You better ask them.”

Mattie bent her neck, indicating that she understood. “I will,” she said. “Thank you for your help.”

“Don’t mention it.” Iolanda straightened her skirt and smoothed the front of her blouse. “I’ve trusted you by hiring you—it is only right for me to be straight with you. Of course, I do expect the same back.”

Mattie bowed, and waited for Iolanda, the crystal vial clutched in her smooth hands, to leave. Iolanda seemed so alien—Mattie had not considered it before, but Iolanda and her abundance of flesh made Mattie conscious of her own small, long-limbed body of metal and wood, jointed and angular. The only person she was close to before was Ogdela, old and dry like a matchstick. Then there was Loharri, but he was always there and hardly counted. But even he was long and thin, almost insectile—especially when he worked with his slow, deliberate movements that reminded Mattie of the praying mantises that populated the wild rose bushes that had been taking over the back yard of Loharri’s house.

Mattie could not decide if she liked Iolanda—she liked her words and her apparent candor. But her fleshiness made her uneasy, and Mattie felt shallow because of that. And yet, the feeling persisted.

To take her mind off Iolanda, Mattie decided to go shopping. The money Iolanda gave her was certainly welcome, and Mattie decided to stop by a bookshop near the paper factory. It carried some books she had lusted after for as long as she had been on her own, after she had ended her apprenticeship with Ogdela—small, trim books with thick paper and ragged pages, books bound in cloth and leather, books with faded drawings painted with a thin brush dipped in ox blood.

Ogdela had given her a crude book printed on pounded birch bark and containing a number of simple recipes and a list of common ingredients. It was Mattie’s treasure, even though she knew every word by heart—it was proof that she was a real alchemist; then there were others, acquired through varied means—some as payment, others bought with money she should’ve spent on other things. But she longed for the expensive books. She justified it to herself by her need to learn more arcane things—after all, to deal with the gargoyles she needed more complex potions and mixtures, new and exotic ingredients. But in her ticking heart, she knew that she just wanted the books as objects, as small solid leather-bound weights of palpable luxury.

She walked to the store; it was midday, and the streets swarmed with oxen, lizards, and mechanized buggies carrying people and goods to the afternoon markets; a few pedestrians weaved in and out of the traffic, but they grew rarer as she approached the paper factory—the sun had heated up the noxious fumes emanating from it, making the air yellow and thick.

Mattie tasted bleach and sulfur on her lips, until she passed beyond the factory, away from the river, and entered a labyrinth of narrow streets occupied by tenements and small shops selling wares both expensive and mysterious; a faint smell of polished wood and ancient fabrics hung over the area. She could see the palatial spires of the Duke’s district far in the distance, piercing the low long clouds.

As she approached the bookshop, she felt a distant rumble underground, as if a thunderclap had struck deep within the earth under her feet. The air reverberated, and the windows of the shop—wide panes of glass—gave back a high-pitched, almost inaudible cry. Mattie paused, her hand on the handle. Its tremor, just on the edge of detection, transmitted to her fingers, making them itch. She opened the door.

“What was that?” she asked the shop owner, an old woman bent at the waist at precisely a ninety-degree angle.

She looked up at Mattie and smiled. “What was what, sweetness?”

“That . . . noise,” she answered.

“I didn’t hear anything,” the woman said. “Want me to show you some books?”

“Do you have any books on gargoyles?”

The woman laughed. “Do I ever! Come with me, sweetness.” She led Mattie to the back of the shop, where the shelves were covered with a thin layer of dust and books towered in haphazard piles, in almost unbearable opulence and bounty. The shop owner grabbed onto one of the shelves and miraculously straightened her back, as her hands moved up from one shelf to the next, ratcheting her to verticality. She pulled a few heavy books, thick and square, from the top shelf. “Here’s something to start you with.”

We do not live in the books written about us—we crawl on the walls and we hide, but not within these pages. We do not even believe in these books.

Not that they are untrue, but these accounts lack the immediacy necessary for understanding, and we want to tell the girl to turn away, away—these books will lead her down twisty roads, long, confused byways, away from us. We want to tap on the window, but she is bent over the pages, lost in them. Already lost to us, and we consider weeping.

And then another explosion rocks the air, and we look away from the window, startled, and at first we don’t see, we don’t understand—but there is an empty space in the clouds, a space where the tall spire used to signal our home.

Mattie stroked the page of the book in delight, quite refusing to believe that the picture in front of her was a thing of artifice—it had the appearance and the texture of something completely natural, springing spontaneously from the paper thanks to some obscure magic. The gargoyle in the picture squatted, its wings folded, its fists supporting its sharp chin, its face serene. It was just like Mattie remembered the gargoyles from the night they visited her—so gray and alien and sleek in their winged beauty, their flesh hard and cold like stone.

She read the words below the picture and soon she was enthralled in the history of them—of how they sprang from the ground, uncounted eons ago, of how they talked to the stone and grew it—at first, shapeless cliffs shot through with caves and encrusted with swallows’ nests; then, as their skill and numbers increased, they shaped the living stone whose destiny they shared—shaped it with their mere will!—into tall structures, decorated with serpentine spirals and breathtakingly sweeping walls, into delicate lattices and sturdy edifices.

The gargoyles needed no buildings, but when people came, the gargoyles built them—the Ducal palace was the first to rise from the wreckage of their former creations. They built for the joy of building while remaining elusive, hidden. And as people began to build their own houses and stores and factories, there were more places to hide. At night, the gargoyles went to the oldest of the buildings, to the palace, and they rested on its roofs and spires, haunch-to-haunch and shoulder-to-shoulder with their predecessors who had become one with the stone they had shaped. And they watched over the city as one would after a child.

Mattie closed the book and flipped through another—this one had no pictures and the words were crowded densely together, so that she had to extend her eyes a little to focus better. This book was full of dates and histories, and as far as Mattie could determine from her cursory skim, it was dedicated to proving that the gargoyles did not only grow stone but also had a power of controlling human souls, their thoughts and desires. The author argued in greatly heated and long sentences that the dynasty of the Dukes—the descendants of the first people to populate the gargoyles’ creations—were complicit in the gargoyles’ conspiracy, and that the source of their influence was not just social inertia but the hidden support of the gray creatures.

Mattie decided to get the second book as a gift to Loharri—even though he hadn’t given her the key, he was kind to her. And, most importantly, it looked like something he would enjoy, and Mattie believed that everyone should get what they wanted, just for the sake of it.

She flipped the page to read more, and then she felt another concussion of the air and the faint trembling, tingling shudder of the windowpanes. This time it was stronger, and the floor under her feet groaned, and the boards buckled, as if trying to shake her off. The bookshelves tilted and creaked, and before she could step away they assaulted her with heavy tomes, their rustling pages fanned as if in anger, and their leather bindings scraping her face. She shielded it with her hands—she liked this face well enough to protect it, and the porcelain was fragile. A book hit her hand, and something cracked, shifted, and hung limp—Mattie had to look to confirm that two fingers on her right hand were nearly broken off, two slender metal coils that remained connected to her with just slivers of metal.

The shaking and rumbling stopped, and Mattie looked around at the toppled bookshelves and strewn books, and at the owner who had fallen back into her gallows shape and now stood open-mouthed, surveying the destruction.

“I’m sorry,” Mattie said.

“What for?” said the owner. “You didn’t do this . . . did you?”

“No, no.” Mattie shook her head for emphasis. “How could I? I just wanted these books.”

“Then take them and maybe come back some other time,” the old woman said with a pained smile. “I’ll have quite a bit of work to do here.”

Mattie paid and headed outside but stopped in the doorway. “You have someone to help you clean up, correct?”

“Yes, yes.” The woman waved her hand helplessly. “The neighborhood kids, they always come to help. Just go now, please.”

Mattie left, her two books under her arm, her left hand cradling the injured right. There were people outside—everyone had rushed from their rumbling and shaking homes and shops, and talked excitedly. They all pointed in the same direction—west. Mattie looked too, but at first she could not discern what it was they were pointing at. She had to adjust her eyes again, and finally she discerned that blending with the low clouds a great puff of smoke and dust marred the sky, and that the spire of the palace had entirely gone from view.

“What happened?” she asked a young girl, a factory worker, to judge from her pale face and hair and chapped hands.

The girl squinted at the sky, her large, flat fingers tugging at the sleeve of her dark frock. “The palace’s gone, I reckon,” she said in a slow, thoughtful drawl. “Maybe an earthquake or maybe war.”

“Don’t be daft,” a tall stern man said to the girl, never acknowledging Mattie with even a glance. He wore a thick leather apron, and Mattie guessed him to be a shopkeeper. “There’s no war.”

“The gargoyles are taking back what’s theirs,” said an old woman, and wrung a wet shirt she held in her hands in apparent despair, or just out of habit—she must’ve been doing laundry when the quaking started. “Mark my word: they’re pulling the stones back under the ground, where they all belong.”

They stared into the sky, reluctant to move, as if any movement would upset the balance of their souls and bring the reality and its consequences crashing around them, like an avalanche of heavy books. Mattie was the first to break the spell.

She needed to learn what happened, and she had to talk to Loharri. A sickly tingling in her stomach, where all the sophisticated clockworks and mechanisms of her inner workings nestled, told her that her distress was greater than she had initially estimated. The gargoyles, she thought; the gargoyles. Had they been at the palace? Were any of them hurt?

She had almost reached home when with a wave of guilt she realized that she hadn’t even considered the lives of people inside. The Duke and the courtiers had been away—it was the planting season, and they visited the farms to bless the fields. But the servants inside . . . Mattie was not sure if the palace employed any human servants except the housekeepers and the overseers; they would be dead, she thought. But her heart ached more when she thought of the mindless automatons buried in the rubble, their lifeless eyes and broken limbs now just so much refuse, just guts and metal left in the wake of human need for something . . . she did not know what. Like the sheep who never had the chance to feel any pain or to consider their imminent doom.

On her way, Mattie picked up some gossip. She stopped by the public telegraph, a small structure painted yellow, where an ink pen on a long flexible handle endlessly recorded whatever news the operators fed it. She had no hope of reaching it to read herself—the telegraph booth thronged with people eager for the news, who shoved her aside like she was just an obstacle. Most ignored her questions, but from the snippets of their excited chatter to each other she learned the events, if not the precise details or reasons.

As she walked to Loharri’s house, the information kept replaying in her mind. The ducal palace had collapsed; there was talk of an attack from the outside, but the structure imploded and crumbled inwards, and the consensus among the Mechanics was that explosives had been placed inside of the palace. The first explosion destroyed the outside walls and wings, and the second destroyed the palace itself.

Loharri was home. Like most mechanics, he had his own sources of information.

“What do you make of that?” Loharri said when Mattie, trembling with shock and unarticulated animal hurt, showed up on his doorstep.

“I don’t know,” she groaned. “I have to sit down.”

Loharri wrapped his arm around her shoulders, and she was grateful for support and the gentle warmth of his breath. He almost dragged her to his living room that had grown even more cluttered since she last visited, and sat her on the chaise that wore a slight but unmistakable imprint of Loharri’s angular form.

He examined her damaged hand, tisking to himself, and brought out the soldering iron. “I’ll disconnect your sensors while I work,” he said. “You’ll lose all sensation in this arm—don’t be alarmed.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I bought you a book.”

He glanced at the proffered tome and smiled. “Thank you, Mattie. You didn’t have to.”

“I was at the book shop when the explosions happened,” she said. “I don’t understand who would do that. Unless . . . ” She faltered and bit her tongue, but Loharri was too engrossed in his own thoughts and speculations.

“There’s a pattern,” he said. The iron in his hand hissed and exhaled thin streams of smoke that smelled of amber. “Today was the day when most of the court were visiting the countryside. Everyone knows that, so whoever staged it wanted no casualties.”

“Or was looking for easy access without fear of being caught or interrogated.”

Loharri nodded. “Good point, darling. That would indicate an outsider; I was thinking more of an inside job, but you just may be right. Also, note how the explosives were rigged.”

“It collapsed on itself,” Mattie said. “They didn’t want to destroy other buildings.”

“Yes, but those explosives . . . the whole city shook. I wonder who could make something like that.”

Mattie did not have to answer—they both knew that the Alchemists were the ones with the capacity for making such things; Loharri was still sore since the time when the Mechanics had to go to the Alchemists with their heads uncovered and bowed to ask for their help in blasting a passageway through the mountains.

“Of course, the gargoyles can also command stone,” Loharri said. He flipped through the book Mattie brought him. “Look, it says here that they rebuilt the palace after the earthquake five hundred years ago. They could collapse it if they wanted to.”

He put the iron away and reconnected the sensors in Mattie’s shoulder. She wiggled her fingers tentatively. There was some stiffness, but little pain. She hoped it would go away with some practice.

She cocked her head. “Why would the gargoyles do that? They’ve been aligned with the ducal family since times immemorial.”

Loharri gave her a long look. “Have been brushing up on our history, have we? Be careful there, dear love—history leads to politics more often than you could imagine.”

“I’m not interested in that,” Mattie said. “Unless more buildings were to blow up.”

Loharri paced the room, his long legs loping like a camel’s. “I wonder if there will be. By the way, earlier . . . you said something, like you had some suspicions?”

“It’s probably nothing,” she said. “But at your gathering last night, I heard some mechanics talking about getting rid of the Duke.”

“They always blab about that,” Loharri scoffed. “It’s just talk, understand.”

“As far as you know.” Mattie could not resist this barb.

Loharri bit. “Are you implying that my brethren might have secrets from me?”

Mattie shrugged. “Talk to Bergen if you’re in doubt.”

Loharri laughed—the same soft, almost soundless laugh she learned preceded his more extreme temper tantrums. “And yet you dare to fool yourself that politics is of no interest to you.”

Mattie rose from her seat. “Your well-being is of interest to me. Talk to your friends. I’ll talk to mine. Come by when you feel like you can talk without being angry.”

Loharri seemed taken aback. “As you say, Mattie. Somehow, I missed the shift here—you talk to me like you are my master.”

Mattie shrugged and craned her neck in pretend pensiveness. “Or perhaps you just think that someone who doesn’t want to be your slave is aiming to be your master.”

She didn’t turn when she headed for the door, but all the way she felt Loharri’s burning gaze on the back of her neck.