The Alchemy of Stone

Chapter 6




Mattie found Ilmarekh in his house on top of Ram’s Head Hill, and immediately saw that he was unwell. She cursed herself for not thinking to bring a tonic or a strengthening elixir.

“What’s wrong?” she asked Ilmarekh who sat, wrapped in a blanket, by the roaring fire despite a warm, balmy day outside.

He shivered in response. His teeth clattered so loudly that no words could come out.

Mattie moved closer, stepping carefully around dirty dishes on the floor and an occasional bowl of ash. She touched his forehead, and her sensitive fingers registered no fever, just a film of clammy sweat covering his brow.

It didn’t take Mattie long to recognize the symptoms of opium withdrawal—the alternating sweats and chills, the body aches, nausea, uncontrollable sneezing and watering eyes—she catalogued them in her mind and hurried back to her shop.

There was little to be done about that but wait it out, but Mattie looked to diminishing the pain before cures. She thought of buying more opium but instead decided to use what few dried poppy flowers she had left—they would be enough to ease Ilmarekh’s suffering and let him sleep.

She ran up the stairs, the light metal of her lower legs swinging over two steps at a time, and started her brewing. To opium, she added lemongrass against nausea, chamomile for a general calming, and vanilla to relax his knotted shoulders and let him sleep.

She flew through her shop, mixing and grinding, measuring and distilling, filtering and decanting. A plain bottle would suffice, she said to herself. What does he care? She rummaged through the jars and bottles and decanters crowding the shelf over the bench, and picked up an old apothecary vial shrouded with dust and cobwebs. She wiped the grime away and discovered on its side an image of a gargoyle in low relief on a flat medallion filigreed with gold.

When she was still living with Loharri, he sometimes took her eyes away as a punishment for disobedience, and she had to feel her way around for as much as a week. She still remembered her delight when her fingers stumbled upon a familiar shape and recognized it—a full, round surprise that made her heart bubble with joy. She remembered finding the vial with the gargoyle in it and secreting it in the folds of her dress, so she could trace the gargoyle wings in her room, in secret, and thus defy her blindness.

She cleaned the vial and poured her mixture into it. Surely the man who was blind for all his life was not immune to the joy of tactile recognition, she thought, and hurried back to the gates, the vial wrapped in the tight coils of her fingers. The elixir would make him better; she chased away the selfish thoughts of the questions she would ask him once he was coherent again. She needed to fix him, and did not dare to think beyond that.

Back in his shack, Ilmarekh had moved away from the fire; it still smoldered, ashes wet from a carelessly dumped bucket of water. He was now curled up on the bed, little more than a mere straw-filled mattress.

Mattie shook her head and poked at the wet ashes with the tip of her foot. “What are you going to do if you want fire later?”

He shrugged, sullen at the nagging note that crept into her voice.

“I brought you something,” Mattie said, softer now. “Please drink it.”

“Does it have opium in it?” Ilmarekh said.

“Very little—just to make you feel better. Why?”

He either shivered or shrugged, she wasn’t sure. “When I don’t smoke and my head is clear, the souls stop talking. I want them to stop talking.”

“Just drink this,” Mattie said, “and sleep—I promise they won’t bother you.”

“You won’t . . . you won’t do anything to hurt me, will you?”

From previous experience, Mattie knew that people didn’t trust her just because she mentioned her good will or kind nature. Nowadays, she relied entirely on mercenary arguments. “Why would I do that? I still have questions to ask you.”

Her words seemed to reassure him, and he propped himself up on one elbow, pulling a ragged woolen blanket around him. He grasped the bottle and drank, his long white fingers twitching on the glass, pulsating with every gulp as if they were the tentacles of an octopus testing the strength of its suckers. He was almost finished when his fingertips brushed across the glass medallion with the emblazoned gargoyle, and his blind white eyes widened in surprise.

Mattie was relieved to see a ghost of a smile touch his lips.

“Mattie,” he said. “This is a truly lovely engraving. Thank you.” He fell back on his mattress, still clasping the vial, and was asleep before he remembered to stop smiling.

Mattie guarded his sleep, which gave her plenty of time to look around. She knew the Soul-Smoker was poor, she just hadn’t realized how much so. The house—the hut, if one wanted to be honest—lacked even the most basic necessities. There was no running water, and the fireplace seemed to be the only way to cook meals and heat water for a bath. There was just one room, one corner of it sagging perilously and threatening to bring down the entire house. The wooden floors, drafty and not covered by anything but sparse trickles of sawdust, were worn to a soft shine by the feet of many generations of Soul-Smokers; their daily paths were clearly visible—one led from the fireplace to the table, rickety on its thin, deformed legs; another shot from the table to the bed and the deep ceramic tub in the corner next to it; the third led from the bed to the fireplace. A simple triangle enclosing a life of privation.

Mattie did not have to ask to learn Ilmarekh’s story—the Soul-Smokers were always the same, recruited from those who had no other choice. Usually orphans, usually crippled, those who had nowhere else to go and no one to turn for help to; those who had no chance surviving on their own, without the Stone Monks’ dubious charity.

The orphanage run by the Stone Monks was the northernmost building in the city, its wall just a hair’s breadth from the city wall by the northern gates. Mattie remembered coming there with Loharri—he seemed fond of coming there, with no other apparent purpose but to stand in front of the solid front wall, his hands in his pockets and his disfigured face twisted in an even more unpleasant grimace than usual. Mattie would stand next to him and occasionally ask questions to stave off boredom.

“Why did they put it all the way here?” she asked him once. “Their temple and the gargoyle feeders are all by the palace.”

“Noise,” Loharri said in a strained voice. “There’d be too much noise. They don’t want anyone hearing.”

Mattie cocked her head to listen then, but could not catch any sounds coming through the thick blind walls, just one door and no windows. The stone was too thick, too solid—the building looked like the ones in the ducal district, but the thin lines between blocks of masonry told her that it was man-made. “Why aren’t there any windows?” she asked then.

Loharri turned around sharply and headed away. As she hurried to catch up, her skirts flapping in the rising wind, she caught the sharp sound of grinding teeth. “The windows give one hope, Mattie,” he said. “This is not what this place is for.”

Now, she tried to guess what sorts of horrors happened inside, and just could not think of anything that would push Ilmarekh and his predecessors to choose living in a tiny hut with hundreds of ghosts haunting his every moment, never leaving him alone; he only had time to be alone in his skin during opium withdrawal. She realized that her own experiences had been rather benign and limited in scope, yet it made her fear more. If they could do this to a man, what about a girl automaton whose position in the society was tenuous at best?

She rose from her seat on the floor with a jerking movement, eager to do anything so as not to think the awful thoughts that threatened to overwhelm her. She regretted spending the money on books; she needed to hoard it, to save it, because there could be a day when she would need to bribe people to save her life . . .

Mattie collected every dirty, crusted plate strewn on the floor and on the table, and dumped them all into the tub. Irritated, she ran outside into the nascent rain, and found a small, primitive well behind the house, halfway down the slope. She filled the bucket she found by the well with water and she brought it back, dumped it into the tub, and went back for more. She used to be a house automaton, after all, and she scrubbed the dishes and rinsed them in cold water, she swept the floors with a fury of a tornado, she whirled like a broken mechanized dancer. The familiarity of the movement comforted her momentarily, but soon was supplanted by other memories.

She remembered Loharri’s house, as a house servant sees it—straight planes of the desks and benches and shelves that gathered dust, her habitual irritation at the piled up parts and flywheels and counterweight mechanisms that cluttered everywhere, and Loharri’s insistence that she mustn’t touch them and yet keep the place clean; the desolate expanses of wooden floors that needed to be waxed. Like him or not, but he did let her go—partially, at least.

She fetched another bucket of water and scrubbed the floors with unnecessary force and vigor, her metal bones creaking with the effort. The more she tried to understand what moved those around her, the more she failed—especially with Loharri. She remembered the women who came and went like the seasons; she remembered his long spells of ennui and seclusion, and then visits to the temple and the orphanage, the night stalking of the sleeping gargoyles, immobile and light like birds. And how he always brought her with him.

She soothed him; oh, how she soothed him. She remembered the cool lips on her porcelain cheek, the slight trembling of hands as they touched the metal and the whalebone inlays of her chest, the breath fogging the window behind which her heart whirred and ticked. The almost hungry caress of the fingertips as they traced the outline of the keyhole on her chest, and made her heart tick faster. The taste of human skin on her lip sensors, salty and precipitous, and the feeling in her abdomen that some great misfortune was about to befall her mixed with light-headed giddiness. The smell of leather and tobacco trapped in her hair afterwards.

And then he recovered and worked in his shop, and she cleaned, and the procession of dark-lidded women with heavy thick hair and small, secretive smiles resumed. Women like Iolanda who asked Mattie worrying questions. Mattie was a woman because of the corset stays and whalebone, because of the heave of her metal chest, because of the bone hoops fastened to her hips that held her skirts wide—but also because Loharri told her she was one. She thought then that he loved her; and yet, as soon as she was emancipated she forbade him to touch her.

She dried the dishes and stacked them neatly in the rack by the fireplace. She scrubbed the fireplace free of wet ash and brought in a fresh armload of logs, stacked outside under a sailcloth canopy protecting them from the rain.

Ilmarekh stirred in his sleep and sighed. Mattie settled on the floor by the fireplace and waited for him to wake up. She tried to keep her thoughts on a single track, from Sebastian to gargoyles, from the Alchemists to the Mechanics. The machinery in her head made small insect clicks, a familiar and comforting sound, and if she listened closely, she could hear the whisper of the undulating membrane, which, as Loharri had told her, imprinted her thoughts in her memory.

Ilmarekh sat up and smelled the air, his narrow nostrils flaring. “Who’s here?” he asked in a hoarse voice.

“It’s Mattie. I didn’t want to leave you alone.”

He wrapped himself in the blanket but did not shiver. “Thank you,” he said. “You did not have to do that. And thank you for your medicine—it is wonderful.”

“Are the souls bothering you now?” she asked.

He cocked his head, listening. “I hear naught but whispers,” he said. “Thank you. I can rarely afford such a break.”

“Why not?”

He grimaced. “It is painful. Besides, the souls need a link to the world. If I sever this link and refuse to open my mind to them with opium, they will go insane. And insane souls are not a pretty sight.”

Mattie thought a bit. “How long do they stay with you?”

“Until I die,” he said. “Every blessed one of them. When I die, my original soul leads them to their rest, and we all are free.” He smiled a little. “My predecessor died old, very old, but the one before him was quite young. They say, he went mad from being unable to contain the multitudes. They killed him then; I only hope that I manage longer than he.”

“I’m sorry.” Mattie couldn’t think of anything else to say.

He reached out and she moved closer, to let his spatulate fingers touch hers. “Don’t be. You’ve been kind to me. Kinder than anyone else. I’d like to help you.”

“Just ask Beresta of the whereabouts of her son,” she said. “I mean, when they . . . the souls are talking to you again.”

“I know where he is,” Ilmarekh said. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you earlier, but I didn’t think it was my place.”

Mattie squeezed his hand. “Where is he?”

“Where you wouldn’t look for an exile,” he answered with a smile. “In the heart of the city. I saw him at the temple—Beresta recognized him. She didn’t tell me but I felt it.”

Mattie shook her head. “The Temple? But . . . why didn’t anyone recognize him?”

“Because people don’t pay attention to those who are covered with mud and carry buckets with gravel for the gargoyles’ feeders,” Ilmarekh said, and sneezed forcefully.

“Thank you,” Mattie said and stood. “I have cleaned the house, and now you can just rest. If you wish, I can bring you food from the market tomorrow morning.”

He shook his head. “No, dear girl. Leave me be—food does not agree with me in this state. But rest assured, I welcome your visits.”

“There has to be something else I could do,” Mattie said.

He shook his head, mournful. “There’s nothing to be done. Just go, leave me to my silence.”

Mattie walked out of the door, feeling no joy that the object of her search was so near. She tried to imagine what it was like for the Soul-Smoker, to be finally free of the torments of the multitude of whispering residual lives and yet to be too ill to enjoy the silence. If his one true happiness was just to lie on a ratty, straw-filled mattress, his eyes open, drinking in the silence like a desert wanderer drinks in water, what was it to her?

And yet, she couldn’t shake her anger as she walked downhill. Not at Ilmarekh but at those who chose that life for him —just like the anger she felt when the soldier on the metal mount called her a clunker. There were these people—she wasn’t sure exactly who they were—who kept telling them what they could and could not be. And Mattie was quite certain that she did not request her emancipation just so she could obey others besides Loharri. She prayed for Iolanda’s protection and help, yet she hoped that there would never be a day she would need either.

In the night, Mattie’s heels clacked ever so loudly on the gray stone by the ducal palace. The enforcers were gone for the night, and only chains stretched between the black and glistening lampposts; their light was weak that night, as if its energy was sapped by the recent disaster. And not even the gargoyles stirred in the darkness. She was alone, as alone as Ilmarekh currently was in his skull. She shrugged off fear the best she could.

She crossed a wide swath of cobbled pavement—it used to surround the palace, but now that it was gone, it looked like empty no man’s land, strewn with rubble, seeded with a thick smell of sulfur and charcoal. She circumvented the rubble heap—so much stone!—as quickly as she could, afraid to look closer out of the superstitious fear that there was someone watching, and he would see and catch her the moment she locked eyes with him.

The building of the temple loomed behind the former palace; it was a dark place, rarely visited by anyone but the Stone Monks. And, apparently, the gargoyles—they studded the cupped roof of the temple, immobile and asleep; Mattie wondered if they mourned their stone friends who perished in the explosion, if the gargoyles ever mourned anyone. Mattie stopped and watched for any sign of movement on the roof, but the gargoyles appeared soundly asleep. No monks ventured outside in this dead hour, and she was now far enough from the palace to smell freshness in the air, the wet dust and stone—a reminder of the recent rain.

She passed the temple and approached the low wall that stood there as a reminder rather than a true obstacle—one could clear it in a single long leap if one were so inclined, and Mattie was. She picked up her skirts with one hand, placed the other on the mossy furry top of the wall, and vaulted over it, the springs of her muscles coiling and propelling her with ease. She now stood in a small courtyard that contained nothing but large stone urns half-filled with gravel, and a single tree, long dead but still reaching for the moon with the broken black fingers of its branches.

Mattie found the urn in which the level was the lowest, and crouched low next to it. The feeders were refilled at night and she waited, waited for the footsteps and clanging of the bucket filled with shattered stone, the gargoyles’ favorite food.

She did not have to wait long. Before the dawn arrived, the low gate connecting the courtyard to the temple swung open, and a tall figure appeared, a bucket in each hand. Mattie felt disappointed—it had to be an automaton, to carry such a weight, and she was about to leave her hiding place and depart, when the figure started to whistle. The mindless automatons did not whistle, and Mattie’s heart ticked faster.

The man with the buckets walked toward her hiding place, and as he got closer Mattie realized that his skin was the same color as Niobe’s, and she remembered that Loharri referred to Beresta, his mother, as an easterner. She wondered how he managed to remain hidden.

The man rested one bucket on the cobbles of the courtyard with a dull thump, and picked up the other with both hands. Mattie was close enough to see the ropy muscles on his arms tense under the ragged, unbleached linen of the shirt as he dumped the contents of the bucket into the feeder. The gravel rattled against the stone wall of the urn, and Mattie pressed her cheek to the rough surface, listening to the stone tumbling inside.

The man heaved up the other bucket and emptied it into the urn. He picked up both buckets and made a move as if to leave, but then he spun back around and looked straight at Mattie. “Are you gonna stay in there all night, or are you gonna say hello?”

She stood, trembling and feeling stupid. She just assumed that as a human he couldn’t see in the dark. “How did you know I was here?”

“You’re ticking, girl,” he said and cocked his head to his shoulder. “You might want to have that checked out.”

“No I don’t,” Mattie said. “It’s my heart, and there’s nothing wrong with that.”

“I was joking.” His teeth glinted briefly in the dark. “You’re an automaton, aren’t you? Haven’t seen one that clever before.”

“Not clever enough to remember that my heartbeat makes a sound,” she said, and extended her hand. “I’m Mattie. And you’re Sebastian.”

He touched her hand carefully. “My name is Zeneis. I don’t know who Sebastian is.”

“I looked for you on bequest of your dead mother,” she said, looking him straight in the eyes, so lost and dilated by darkness. “I spoke to the Soul-Smoker, and Beresta told me to seek you out.”

He hesitated just enough to convince Mattie that he was indeed Beresta’s son. “I don’t—”

“Hush,” she interrupted, in her best imitation of Loharri’s imperious tone. “Don’t lie when there’s no need. I have no interest in anything but your mother’s work. I’m an alchemist, and I want to know what she was doing for gargoyles. Of course, if you decide to not help me . . . ”

He sighed. “Dear Mattie, don’t threaten those who are stronger than you. I’ll wring your little metal neck faster than you can say ‘Aqua Regis’. You were stupid to come here all by yourself, weren’t you?”

She backed away from him. He did look strong, but Mattie suspected that she was just as powerful. The trouble was, she did not know how to fight.

He stepped closer, and the empty buckets clattered to the ground. “I’m sorry. I hate to hurt you, even though you’re just a mechanical thing. But I don’t trust those who threaten my safety and know my whereabouts.”

“I wasn’t threatening,” Mattie said and took another step back. “I was trying to help you.”

Sebastian smirked. “Help, eh? I’ve heard that one before. But every time someone in this city offers me help, I get worried. And remember, you came to ask me for help, not the other way around.” He sprang forward, his arms reaching out with the speed and strength of pistons, and grabbed Mattie’s arm.

She wrenched it free, and heard the thin bones of her forearm grind together. Shooting pain came a moment later. She swung a fist, aiming at his jaw, but he ducked, and she just caught the edge of his ear.

He hissed in pain. “You’re really going to get it now,” he said.

Mattie raised her hands to protect her face, and waited for the blow.

We shouldn’t intervene, even if there is a girl with the dead boy’s hair, and she is cringing in anticipation of a blow; we cannot bear the thought of her face shattered, the underlying gears exposed for all to see. We cannot bear having to ask another for help. And the man, we know him, as he is now and how he used to be—and we remember that he knows about us. Still, we shouldn’t intervene.

We flap our wings, and they both freeze as they are; she is covering her face, one blue eye looking between thin fingers hopefully in our direction, and he—imposing—with his shoulder thrown back, his elbow ready to release the tension of wound muscles, the fist heavy and bony and dead, as we feel his resolve draining away.

And then we arrive—we glide like leaves, like gray ugly stone leaves, we descend in a graceful arc, we float. We surround them, insinuate ourselves between them, gently pull them away from each other. We smooth her hair and chase the fear from every facet of her eyes, we tenderly take his hand—like a lover would, perhaps—and unclench his fingers, rest his arm by his side. We erase the frown from his high forehead, we smooth her dress. We position them with caring hands, with solicitous wings, to face one another.

“Now talk,” we say, and we wait for one of them to utter the first word.