The Alchemy of Stone

Chapter 5




The society of the Alchemists never held regular meetings. The news spread through the grapevine, and occasionally, when circumstances called for their special attention, they made use of the public telegraph. That afternoon Mattie decided to stop by the telegraph to see if a meeting was called—after all, the collapse of the ducal palace seemed reason enough to have one. Besides, Mattie thought, the other alchemists could not have missed the implications of large quantities of explosives that were apparently responsible for the disaster. It was only a matter of time before the Duke and his courtiers returned from their trip and started questioning the alchemists. There was also a concern about the gargoyles—always elusive, they never got involved in human disputes, but no one had ever destroyed their creations before; at least, according to Mattie’s book.

In the carefully worded telegram marked “alchemists only” and protected by encoding, Bokker, the elected chairman of the Alchemists’ Society, expressed his concern that the gargoyles might direct their displeasure at the Society’s members, and invited the meeting in his shed—it was a rather spare construction, holding decades’ worth of obsolete equipment, but large enough to fit all of the alchemists who would be concerned enough to attend the meeting. Mattie guessed that a hundred or so of them would show up—the same hundred that always stuck their noses into politics. This time, Mattie decided that she would attend as well.

After reading the missive, Mattie tucked her Alchemist Scrying Ring into her pocket, and her neck clicked pensively. She worried that the event would affect her relationship with the strange creatures she had grown quite fascinated with. She thought that she would not forgive her society if it indeed were their doing. Fuming and taken with dark thoughts, she headed for the meeting.

The Alchemists were not the majority party, and as such the society did not have the use of the palatial grounds. Mattie regretted it—she would’ve liked to see the devastation close up, but it was cordoned off by the courtiers and their enforcers.

She ventured as close to the palace as she could on her way, and was sternly stopped and turned around by a menacing, faceless figure in ornate armor, mounted on top of a mechanical buggy. Mattie could’ve sworn that with every day these ugly conveyances—clanking metal wheels wrapped in wooden frames, hissing and spitting steam engines perched on the bronze hulls, perilously close to their armored passengers—grew more numerous.

“Restricted area,” the man in armor said. “Only mechanics and construction automatons are allowed through.”

“Were there many casualties?” Mattie asked.

He shook his metal-encased head, and for a brief moment Mattie imagined him as another automaton, intelligent like her, and felt kinship.

“Be careful with that engine,” Mattie said before turning around. “It looks hot . . . and dangerous.”

“Mind your own business, clunker,” the metal rider replied.

Mattie hurried away, her heart ticking louder and faster than her steps with suppressed fury. No one had ever dared to call her a clunker to her face, and the slur caught her off guard—like a sudden failure of her sensors, when everything tingled and then went numb. She almost fled the district, hurrying away from the glimpses of splintered stone and fine chalky dust over everything.

Mattie realized that she was running late. On her detour she wandered far away from the eastern district and the Grackle Pond, and she had to hurry through the streets, tracing a wide arc around the pond and emerging not too far away from the house on the embankment where she first met the Soul-Smoker. A concern flared, and a memory that really, she had to visit him and to see if Beresta would talk to her again. And Iolanda had said that Sebastian would likely be outside of the city . . . perhaps Ilmarekh would know something or had heard something from his house on top of the hill.

She passed the house of the recent death, where the funeral wreaths had already wilted and the liquid smoke had dissipated, and entered the wide streets favored by wealthy alchemists. Mattie eyed the houses, assessing the rent—this would be a nice place to live, she thought, both for the view and for the convenience. Loharri would be much closer, and the shops that sold especially exotic plants and animal parts would be nearby. And it would give her more time to work, which would certainly offset the expense; plus, with Iolanda’s financial backing . . . she stopped herself from thinking in such a manner, since her alliance with Iolanda was a new affair, and was made all the more uncertain by recent events. If the court were to be forced to move out of the city, she realized, Iolanda and her revenue would be gone. She wasn’t sure whether she should be proud of her far-sighted self-interest, or embarrassed at being so mercenary. Iolanda was right—she still had trouble knowing what the right emotion for a given circumstance was; she only hoped that people occasionally had the same problem, and Iolanda would thus be unable to catch her in a lie.

When she arrived at the appointed place, she found twice as many people as she had expected—the shed could not hold them all, and the meeting was moved to the hothouse, which took up most of the sizeable yard of Bokker’s place. Bokker himself—a middle-aged man with white hair and no discernible neck—directed the late arrivals under the vast glass canopy. Mattie thought that it was a miracle that it still stood after the previous day’s explosion.

Bokker nodded at Mattie curtly; even this small gesture turned his face crimson. “Haven’t seen you in a while,” he said.

“This seemed important,” she said.

Bokker sighed. “You know, Mattie, everyone today said this. It makes me wonder, it truly does—is a disaster the only thing that can bring us together? Are we that selfish, that embroiled in our own lives? Is there a point to even having this society anymore?”

“Of course there is,” Mattie said, and dared to touch his purple sleeve with her fingertips, as reassuringly as she could. “We don’t have to see each other all the time to work together, do we?”

He sighed but looked somewhat consoled. “I suppose so, dear girl, I suppose so. We’re lucky—two of our Parliament representatives came today. They’ll tell us the latest rumors at the court and in the government.”

Mattie headed inside. The hothouse was not exactly suited for gatherings—it was a huge indoor garden, with potted and hanging plants covering benches, walls, and ceiling. Most of the plants she couldn’t even recognize—rare, exotic blooms nodded at her regally, iridescent blues and reds, and the air was thick with their cloying fragrance. She distinguished the smells of roses and orchid blossoms, of warm melting resin and sweet nectar.

The alchemists gathered between the benches, most of them sniffing and looking at the plants with appreciation. Bokker’s collection was legendary among them, and it was the result and the perpetuator of his wealth. Bokker did not look down on selling his surplus, and the alchemists were always willing to buy the plants from him. Bokker had a reputation for not being petty: lenient with his bills and generous with his measuring scales.

Mattie followed the row of potted plants, all of them in jubilant bloom—reds and yellows, whites and blues—and the scents of musky lilies and earthy irises snaked into the sensors on her lips, filling them to saturation. Still, she discerned the smells of lush greenery and rotting peaches, the sweet decay of leaf mulch lining the flower pots, the dark, foreboding scent of rare orchids that twined their thick white roots around the branches of the small trees cultivated for the purpose of being the orchids’ perch and sustenance.

She brushed her fingertips across a particularly lush, velvet petal, bright crimson streaked with gold, and it showered her fingers with bright yellow pollen. Her fingers smelled of saffron.

It struck her how large the hothouse pavilion was—two hundred alchemists milled about without jostling against each other or banging elbows, and some managed to carry on private conversations in soft blurred voices; despite her superior hearing, Mattie could not make out the words, but the overall tone seemed rather dark.

The gathering had filled an open area at the back of the rectangular pavilion, and stragglers had to strain to hear from the aisles between the benches. Bokker pushed past Mattie and took his place in the opening, among the garden hoses, buckets, and piles of peat moss. “Dear alchemists,” he started from his inauspicious perch. “I need not explain why we are gathered here. I need not tell you that things that turn bad have a tendency to become worse. I do need to prepare you for the blame that will be thrown at us by the Mechanics, and I need you to restrain yourself from blaming them back.”

“He has to be kidding,” the woman standing behind Mattie whispered. Mattie had not met her before, but her Scrying Ring hung conspicuously around her neck on a thin leather thong. The woman spoke with a slight accent, and her dark skin betrayed her foreign origin; no other society in the city would have tolerated her. “He expects us just to sit back and take it?” Judging from the growing murmur around them, many alchemists shared her position.

Bokker turned almost purple and raised his hands, waiting for silence. “I do not ask for your acquiescence in the face of accusations,” he said. “I ask for your tolerance and forgiveness. Do not lash back at those who accuse you, do not give them an excuse to rally the people and give power to the Mechanics. Realize that without ducal trust and support for our society, the Mechanics will rule the city.”

“They already do,” someone in the front shouted.

“Tides turn,” Bokker answered mysteriously.

The woman behind Mattie tugged at her dress. “Excuse me,” she said. “Why do the alchemists need ducal support? I’m new here, still learning . . . ”

“The Dukes had always insisted that both alchemists and mechanics are represented in the government,” Mattie said. “They represent two aspects of creation—command of the spiritual and the magical, and mastery of the physical. Together, we have the same aspects as the gargoyles who could shape the physical with their minds.”

The woman nodded. “I’m Niobe,” she said to Mattie. “And I thank you for your kind explanation. No one has been so nice to me here.”

Mattie noticed the tension in the woman’s shoulders, how she carried herself—as if not quite sure what to expect. “It’s all right,” Mattie said. “I’m a machine. No one explains anything to me either.”

“We will remain calm and we will be vigilant,” Bokker said. “And I propose we start with finding out whether anyone had received any orders for explosives lately.”

“Just from the goddamned Mechanics,” said an elderly woman to Mattie’s left. “You know that. You’d think they eat that stuff.”

“That’s a start,” Bokker said. “Anyone else?”

A few more alchemists said that they had filled orders for the mechanics—their usual demolition, everyone assumed.

Niobe cleared her throat. “How do you know that the people who ask for explosives are really mechanics?” She raised her voice enough for everyone to hear.

“We have a system of identification,” Bokker explained. “The Mechanics issue medallions to their members—unless one had graduated from the Lyceum and was initiated, they cannot get one of those.”

“Could they be faked or stolen?” Niobe asked.

“I don’t see why not,” Mattie said loudly. “It is possible.”

Niobe smiled gratefully, and Mattie’s heart throbbed in sorrow. Niobe seemed so ready for anger and scorn, so surprised at any sign of kindness . . . Mattie had to remind herself that she really had quite enough problems of her own. Right now, she realized that the entire gathering was staring at her and Niobe.

Bokker clapped his hands. “Everyone who received an order, see me immediately. We will put together the list of names and verify with the Mechanics that these people are members in good standing and their requests were legitimate. We will also need to find out if any medallions had been lost or stolen.”

“Like they will tell us if they lost anything,” someone said—Mattie could not see who for all the greenery. “That’ll put the blame on them.”

“Any thoughts?” Bokker asked.

Mattie raised her hand tentatively. “I could find out,” she said.

Bokker beamed at her. “Fabulous,” he said. “Just don’t do anything foolish . . . or suspicious.”

“I won’t.”

The meeting was dismissed soon after, and Bokker and a few others stayed behind to work on the list. Niobe and Mattie left Bokker’s house together.

“Where are you from?” Mattie asked. Niobe kept walking in step with her, and Mattie was starting to feel awkward about the silence.

Niobe gestured vaguely east, indicating the wide world outside of the city walls. “Big city,” she said. “Beyond the sea.”

“Oh,” Mattie said. “You were not happy there?”

Niobe sighed. “Happy enough,” she said. “Only . . . how can you sleep when the night is so dark it suffocates, how can you smell the incense in the air and wonder if there are different places, places your heart yearns to see? Didn’t you ever wake up in the middle of the night and wonder if there are places where the alchemists use metals and not plants? Fire and not oil? How can you stay in one place and not want to leave?”

“I don’t sleep,” Mattie said. “And I don’t wonder about other places.”

Niobe rounded her eyes at Mattie in mock horror, and laughed. “Maybe you didn’t have to. You live in the City of Gargoyles, and maybe in the heart of wonder there is no more wonder left. But I . . . I so wanted to come here. I’ve been in this city a month now, and I’ve yet to see a single gargoyle.” She pouted in disappointment.

They came to the Grackle Pond, and Mattie gestured to one of the wrought iron benches decorating the embankment. It was shaded by a slender cascade of willow branches, furry with pale young leaves, and Mattie judged that here they could sit in peace, enjoying the view and attracting little attention. “Let’s rest a bit,” she said, even though she was not tired, and drank in the thick smell of green stagnant water and silt. She trusted Niobe—she seemed so much like Mattie, and even though she was large and broad of shoulder, her flesh looked hard, as if carved of wood, so unlike Iolanda’s.

Niobe plopped down on the bench and stretched her legs, sighing comfortably. “Come on,” she said to Mattie. “Tell me about the gargoyles. You’ve seen them, haven’t you?”

“Yes,” Mattie said. She was unsure of how much she should divulge. “Only once. They hide during the day, and you can see them at night, if you want to, from a distance. Or you could at one time, anyway. They slept on the roof of the Duke’s palace.”

“Yes, I saw that,” Niobe said. “But . . . none of them move, and you can’t tell which ones are real.”

“All of them are,” Mattie said. “Most are stone, some few are still moving . . . but they all turn to stone eventually.”

“We will all become one with what we were born from,” Niobe said.

Mattie stared.

“Just a saying we have,” said Niobe, and laughed and pointed at a flock of ducks and ducklings that paddled to the shore, their black, beady eyes somehow managing an expectant expression. “Oh, they are cute.”

“Yes,” Mattie said, without looking. “What did you mean, becoming one with what we were born from?”

Niobe shrugged. “People came from the earth and return to it once they die, and become dirt. The gargoyles are born from stone. So they become it.” She laughed again. “Or something like that.”

“What about the automatons?” Mattie asked.

Niobe stared at the ducks that shyly wobbled ever closer. “I don’t know. We don’t have anything . . . anyone like you back home.”

Mattie nodded. She didn’t have to ask, really—she came from Loharri’s laboratory, born of metal and coils and spare parts and boredom; this is where she would find herself in the end, likely enough.

Mattie was fascinated with the change in Niobe—once they left the presence of the alchemists, Niobe seemed a whole new woman, laughing and moving freely. This is how Mattie felt away from judging eyes; the problem was, it only happened when she was alone, or with the gargoyles. Or Ilmarekh.

Her thoughts turned to the Soul-Smoker and the secrets of the souls that inhabited his weak, ravaged body. She felt selfish that she hadn’t thought of him in so long. Him or Beresta. Or her work. She groaned a little.

“Don’t be so glum,” Niobe said, and immediately clamped her hand over her mouth. “I’m sorry. I know the palace was important to you and your people.”

Mattie nodded. “And the gargoyles. I wonder if they will raise the palace again or if there are too few of them left. Where will they go if they can’t rebuild? Where will the Duke and his court go?”

“I’m sure it’ll work out.” Niobe patted Mattie’s shoulder, and the clinking of her rings sounded muffled by the cloth covering Mattie’s metal flesh. “I’m sorry to see you sad, and yet I’m happy that this misfortune allowed me to meet you. I haven’t made a friend here yet.”

“It can be difficult here,” Mattie said. “Alchemists are not too bad—they won’t be rude to you; at least, not to your face. But the mechanics . . . they’re a conceited lot, and if you aren’t one of them they’ll spit on you. The man who made me isn’t like that, but he too has his faults.”

“I often wonder what it would be like to know your creator,” Niobe said.

Mattie inclined her head. “It is aggravating,” she said. “And humbling at times. Loharri . . . he can be difficult. Possessive.”

Niobe laughed. “Of course he is. You’re . . . ” She paused, as if looking for the right word. “You’re precious, Mattie. There’s no one in the world like you. If I had made you, I wouldn’t let you out of the house.”

“I suppose I should be flattered,” Mattie said and stood. “It is nice to meet, you, really, but I should be going.”

“Oh no.” Niobe grabbed Mattie’s hand and peered into her blue porcelain face. “I’ve offended you.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Mattie said. “It will pass.”

Niobe stood too. “Listen. Come visit me the next holiday, all right? I live by the market, the one on the other side of Merchant Square. There’s a jewelry shop downstairs.”

“I know the place,” she said. “It’s owned by other . . . easterners? Like you?”

Niobe smiled. “That’s right. Will you come?”

As much as Mattie resented being treated like a thing that could be kept indoors at one’s whim, she thought that Niobe deserved another chance. After all, where else would she find someone as alone and mistrusted as herself? “Yes,” she said. “I will visit you. Maybe you can tell me about the alchemy you practice.”

Niobe’s face brightened with a smile. “Yes! And promise you’ll do the same for me. The alchemists here seem awfully protective of their secrets.”

“They don’t like outsiders.”

Niobe raised her eyebrows. “Really? I haven’t noticed.”

Mattie shrugged. “They did let you in, like they let me in. Believe me, this is the best either of us will be treated.”

“Unless we change that,” Niobe said. “I’ll see you the next holiday.”

Mattie headed down the embankment, unsure whether to go home or to visit Ilmarekh. She decided on the latter; it wasn’t just Beresta’s secrets or her elusive son, but Mattie worried about Ilmarekh, of how he withstood the assault of the ghosts inside him. She headed west, for the city gates.

We mourn today as we will have mourned tomorrow, and we hide in the rain gutters and the attics, we smell dust and people’s cooking. At night, we huddle on the roofs, the shingles rough under our feet, our folded wings chafing against the bricks of the chimneys. Sometimes, the wind blows and brings with it the sound of quiet laughter and the smell of lilacs, the humid breath of the water lilies in the Grackle Pond and the stench of bleach from the factory.

We are sad that we cannot smell cool stone, the dark moss pockmarking its surface, the rain and snow whipping its inert bulk and slowly, imperceptibly eroding it. And as we think of stone, we think of the things we haven’t thought about in ages—of how stone heaved and buckled and split, releasing us into the world; of how it followed us, like the night ocean follows the moon, how it bounded toward our hands, like a loyal dog to the beckoning of its master. When we were many, we could breathe a barest whisper, and it heard and obeyed, it listened. And now our voices are few and weak, and we cannot rebuild what has been ruined.