The Alchemy of Stone

Chapter 7




Everyone had a story; Mattie had learned that a long time ago when Loharri explained such intricacies to her. She remembered it well—a sunny afternoon when wide slats of sunlight painted the dark wooden floors and striped the furniture, giving it a semblance of trembling and very quiet life.

“Sit down,” Loharri said.

She obeyed, sinking into the pillowed couch of his living room. There would be a lesson, she thought. She wasn’t yet sure how she felt about them.

“Do you know where you came from, Mattie?” He did not sit down but paced across the living room floor, his stockinged feet making no sound. It irritated her, his silence of movement—hers were not like that.

“Yes,” she answered. She was already learning to mimic some body language, and folded her hands over her breast and inclined her head, like a child reciting poetry by rote. “You made me just last week.”

“Two weeks,” he corrected. “A week has passed; time does not stand still.”

“So next week it will have been three weeks?” she asked.

He nodded. “As time goes by, things happen to you. You learn new things. You make yourself a story—your story. Everybody has one.”

“Do I have one?” Mattie asked. She was not sure why but she wanted so desperately to have it.

He sighed and raked his fingers through his dark hair that was long enough to touch his collar. “Not yet, Mattie. But you will.”

“Next week?”

He breathed a laugh. “We’ll see. It takes a bit of time, usually.”

“What is your story?” she asked him then.

“It’s not important,” he said, and paced again. “Let’s concentrate on making you one.”

Mattie’s story started in the mechanic’s workshop and continued among the shining pots in the kitchen, among the floor wax and wide windows that gathered soot like it was precious, and culminated in a small alchemical laboratory of her own.

And as it turned out, this is where Sebastian’s story started. He looked around Mattie’s alchemical bench and smiled at the sheep’s eyes and bunches of dried salamanders like they were old friends. “It’s just like my mom’s place,” he said. “She lived not too far from here.”

“Eastern district,” Mattie said. She still worried a bit about his presence among so many breakable and valuable chemicals and glassware—he seemed so awkwardly large in the narrow, cramped space that every time he moved his arms, she reached out involuntarily, ready to catch alembics and aludels he was sure to knock down.

He nodded and finally stepped away from the bench to sit down in the kitchen. “I grew up watching her work . . . I probably still remember some of the salves she used to make for ailing neighbors.”

She hurried after him, secretly relieved and already regretting letting him into her home—it was not safe, with Iolanda and Loharri liable to drop by. Why did he agree to come?

“So, you wanted to know about my mother’s work,” he said.

“Yes,” she answered. “Did she find out how to stop the gargoyles from turning into stone?”

“They still do, don’t they? No, she didn’t find the cure. She kept saying that it’s the stone that held them hostage, that they were one flesh. And only if she could break the bond with the stone . . . ” He cut off abruptly and gave her a sly smile. “This all sounds like nonsense to you, doesn’t it?”

“No,” Mattie said. “Not at all. It makes perfect sense.”

“This is why I became a mechanic,” Sebastian said, and stopped smiling. “The alchemists . . . you just babble nonsense and pretend that it means something.”

“It does,” Mattie said. “How did they let you into the Lyceum? You . . . you’re not like them.”

“My mother pulled some favors,” he answered, frowning. When he got angry, he seemed to get bigger, and the stool under him looked ready to give up and crumble, abandoning its duty. “But of course, once they let me in, they watched me like a thief in a jewelry store. I could do no right. No matter what I proposed, they refused it, and then acted like one of them came up with that idea. And it’s just relentless.” He slapped his knee. “Every day, every day!” His impassioned speech brought color to his cheeks, and despite her preoccupation, Mattie noticed how attractive he looked.

“You are very beautiful,” she said.

He looked at her—she couldn’t quite comprehend his expression, but it reminded her of the time she first asked Loharri for her key. “Not an hour ago, I almost hit you,” he said, quietly and slowly. “If it hadn’t been for the gargoyles, I would’ve killed you; you’d be just a pile of springs and gears. Why do you talk like that?”

Mattie realized that she had said something wrong. “You didn’t kill me, though,” she said. “You’re not my enemy.”

He shook his head. “How did you come to be an alchemist, anyway? And how come the gargoyles chose you?”

“That’s what I wanted to be,” Mattie said. “You became a mechanic because you were raised by an alchemist; I became an alchemist because a mechanic made me.”

He smiled at that, showing small, uneven teeth. “Fair enough. What about the gargoyles? They seem protective of you.”

Mattie nodded. “Yes. But I don’t know why they chose me after your mother. Because we are both women? Because we are resented for what we are?”

“You got that right,” he muttered. “She told me that the alchemists were better with the foreigners than the mechanics, but not by much. They just take the trouble to hide it a little.”

“That’s something, isn’t it? I feel grateful to even be emancipated, let alone accepted into the society.”

Sebastian studied her for a while, as if considering how she fit into his view of the world. “Emancipated, eh? And how did you manage that?”

“I just asked my master to be an alchemist,” she said. “As I got better, he decided that making me clean his house was a waste, and he made me new hands and built another automaton for housework.”

“It must be nice to have someone do for you the work you loathe,” he said. There was a hint of disapproval in his voice.

“It was a mindless automaton,” Mattie said. “Whatever the case may be, when I asked to be emancipated, my master agreed and signed the papers. I only see him when I want to.”

“Congratulations,” Sebastian said. “Who is your master?”

“Loharri,” she said. “Do you know him?”

“A little,” Sebastian said. “He’s not quite as awful as the rest of them.”

“He can be pretty awful,” Mattie said. “He was the one who told me that you were exiled . . . but he didn’t tell me why, and neither did you.”

Sebastian laughed. “I only just met you,” he said. “Suffice it to say, I’ve done nothing wrong.”

Mattie did not think it sufficed at all, but just nodded her agreement. “Why are you still in the city then?”

He stood. “I still have business here,” he said. “Do me a favor, don’t tell anyone you saw me.”

Mattie shook her head. “I won’t. Before you go, promise you’ll tell me if you remember anything else about the gargoyles and your mother’s work.”

“Will do.” He stepped to the door but paused on the threshold. “Come and think of it, I remember something else. The gargoyles have no souls.”

“Everyone knows that,” Mattie said, disappointed.

“That’s what she said,” Sebastian answered with a careless shrug of his large shoulders, and left. His heavy footsteps rattled down the stairs.

Mattie started on her daily work, potions and salves the apothecary downstairs bought from her as often as she offered them, her movements smooth and habitual, honed by long repetitious hours in the same cramped space. A small window over the workbench offered a small but welcome glimpse of the early morning sky, pinking around the edges, the clouds gilded by the still-invisible sun. Mattie worried if Sebastian would make his way to the temple undetected and scolded herself—of course he would; he survived here just fine, without her knowing or worrying about him.

There was a cadence to the movements of her hands, a rhythm to the small shuffling steps she took as she moved back and forth along the bench, mixing herbs and powders, cutting the sheep’s eyes open and squeezing the clouded jelly smelling of mutton into the bowl. Mattie tasted the air—still good, but she would need to stop by the butcher’s soon. She let her thoughts drift, and they tumbled in her head lazily, in beat with the whirring of her insides. Memories wafted in and out of her mind, and she watched them like a detached observer.

When she was first made, she did not feel pain. She fell and broke her face, and Loharri made sure that she knew hurt. “It’s for your own protection,” he said. “Pain is good—it warns you that you are about to hurt yourself.”

A week later, she passed out on the floor. He took out her key and wound her, and she flinched away. Then, he made her feel pleasure. Being wound had been the only pleasure she knew.

Until now, she thought, until she became an alchemist. Her hands flew, and her mind drifted, and her heart beat in a steady happy rhythm.

Mattie left the house and headed down the street toward the river; she meant to go to the butcher’s eventually, but for now she decided to take a walk along the embankment, away from the paper factory toward the western district, where the trees smelled sweet and cast cool shadows, where large, soft leaves absorbed the noise of the traffic.

She walked through the shaded alleys, enjoying the peace and the silence that did not belong to her. She stared at the whitewashed fronts of the houses, at the groomed trees in front of them. That was the only thing she missed about living with Loharri—the quiet and self-satisfied demeanor of this neighborhood. She felt exiled for no reason.

As she entered the streets that led to the market, the noise grew—there was a clip-clopping of oxen hooves, scraping of lizard claws, soft hissing of the buggies, and a clang of metal from some indeterminate source.

“Out of the way!” She heard a voice from behind, and bolted to the curb. She turned, to see a mechanized contraption she hadn’t seen before—it belched fire and twin streams of steam as it crawled down the street. The contraption had several pairs of stubby piston legs that gripped the cobbles of the street; its jointed back bearing several chairs (empty for now) moved in a sinusoid curve as the thing slithered down the street. A lone mechanic presided over the front end of the contraption; he sat on a small shelf jutting out of the monster’s flat metal face, and moved two long jointed levers.

“What is it?” Mattie shouted over the roar and hiss of the mechanical beast as it passed her.

“It’s a caterpillar,” the mechanic shouted back. “It can carry ten people at once.”

“What if they are going to different places?” Mattie asked.

The mechanic did not grace her with an answer—the mechanics often ignored stupid questions, especially if they came from automatons and easterners—and steered the metal caterpillar down the street. Mattie had a feeling that soon enough more of them would crawl through the narrow streets, displacing pedestrians and buggies and spooking the lizards.

She realized that her feet, of their own volition, were taking her to Loharri’s house. It was only natural, she supposed—she passed this market so many times, up the slight incline of the ancient hill eroded almost to nothing, to the white house almost hidden by overgrown rose bushes. Loharri paid little mind to the plants now that Mattie, who had planted them, wasn’t there to take care of the succulent green growth that seemed to become more audacious with every passing year. Ten years since she first planted the roses, and now they were taking over, erecting themselves into a formidable hedge. The first pale and red blooms studded the thorny branches, a decoy of beauty hiding their murderous intentions. Mattie imagined that one day the plants would take over the house and bury Loharri within . . . she could almost live with this thought, if it weren’t for the key he wore around his neck.

Mattie circled the house to check on the plants in the back yard, and she had to fight her way through the roses that crowded the path leading to the back door and grabbed at her skirts with their thorns. She tried the back door—unlocked as usual, and she pushed it open.

Despite the brilliant light outside, the kitchen remained subsumed by velvety dusk. This home had a special quality of light and air about it; it softened and gilded everything inside, and it was kind. Mattie’s eyes needed a second to adjust to it, and the familiar objects came into focus—the generous hearth, the glinting of kettles and pans suspended over the table in the middle, the reassuring solidity and slight woody smell of the cutting boards, the automaton in the corner . . .

The presumed automaton turned to face Mattie and she belatedly realized that it was a woman—scandalously underdressed at that, lacking her corset and bustle and even a skirt, wearing only a white shift flimsy enough to reveal the curvy, fleshy body underneath.

Mattie looked away quickly. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“Don’t be,” said the familiar voice. “I was just getting a drink of water. How’ve you been?”

Mattie dared to look up into the woman’s face. “Iolanda.”

Iolanda shrugged and the thin strap of her shift slid off, revealing a round and freckled shoulder. “You seem surprised.”

“I didn’t think . . . you liked him,” Mattie said.

Iolanda moved closer, silent on her bare feet. “I don’t,” she whispered. “And yet, here I am. And here you are.”

Mattie reached for the door. “I’ll come back later.”

“It’s all right,” Iolanda said, and grabbed Mattie’s wrist. “Don’t be so uptight.” She dragged Mattie along, yelling, “Loharri! Look what I found!”

He was in his workshop, thankfully dressed. “You don’t have to scream your head off,” he said. “Don’t they teach you any manners at the palace?”

“There is no palace,” Iolanda said cheerfully. “The Duke is moving.”

“Where?” Loharri and Mattie said in one voice.

“To his summer mansion, by the sea.” She gestured vaguely east, and laughed.

Mattie thought that she had never yet seen Iolanda like that—so energetic, so giddy, crackling with some hidden excitement. And the fact that she was here and undressed . . . she decided to ponder the implications later, when she wasn’t so distracted.

Loharri apparently thought the same. “What are you so happy about?” he murmured, and pretended to study a copper spring with greater attention than it warranted. “Eager to bathe in the sea?”

Iolanda giggled with a girlishness Mattie had not suspected in her. “I’m not going,” she said. “I’m staying here. A whole bunch of us are.”

“By ‘us’ you of course mean ‘courtiers’,” Loharri said, dropping the spring on the workbench and picking up a half-assembled clockwork heart—another automaton, Mattie guessed.

“Yes!” Iolanda clapped her hands. “You should hear the marvelous rumors . . . ”

“I hear them all day long, and there’s nothing marvelous about them,” Loharri said. “If they call one more emergency session, I’m going to leave this wretched city and go to the sea with the Duke.”

“You won’t,” Iolanda said. “You love this place as much as I do, and you are dying to find out what’s going on.”

Loharri shook his head. “Children,” he said. “You are all dumb, spoiled children who don’t recognize danger because you have no concept of what it is. People died in that palace, you know.”

Iolanda pouted. “Don’t be a spoilsport. There weren’t that many—maids and cooks, and that’s it.”

“And of course they don’t matter,” Loharri said, frowning.

“I never said that. It’s just that there weren’t many people hurt. Just automatons.” She huffed and spun around, and danced out of the workshop.

Loharri smiled at Mattie. “Speaking of automatons. What can I do for you?”

You can give me my key, she wanted to say. Instead she asked, “Have you seen those mechanical caterpillars?”

“Oh yes,” he said. “Adorable, aren’t they? And with their legs they don’t damage the streets as much as buggies, or even lizard’s claws. And they can run faster than either of those. It’ll cost a bit to build a few more and establish regular routes, but in the long run they’ll pay for themselves in repair costs.”

“I don’t like them,” Mattie said.

Loharri shrugged. “It’s just too bad then. You came all the way to voice your grievance with the mechanics’ way of running the city? Did your society send you?”

“No,” Mattie said. “But we are doing our own investigation. Can you help me?” She folded her hands pleadingly.

Loharri sighed. “Why do you always have to ask for things?”

“Because I cannot get them myself,” she said with a coquettish tilt of her head. “Will you help me?”

“Depends on what you need,” he said.

Mattie thought a bit. She did not want to tell him too much, yet she saw no other way of obtaining the information she wanted but direct request. Breaking into the office where the mechanics kept their records seemed risky, and Bokker told her not to do anything dangerous. “Can I trust you with a secret?” she asked, although she knew the answer.

He seemed startled. “Yes,” he said. “Of course. Have I ever betrayed your confidence?”

“No.”

“What do you need then?”

“Just some of the mechanics’ records. Nothing big, just if you issued any replacement medallions at any point—we think that someone could’ve ordered explosives by pretending to be a mechanic.”

“I can do that,” Loharri said. “This is not a bad idea, actually.”

“You wish you had thought of that?” Mattie said.

“We have an even better idea,” he said. “I can’t wait until the alchemists learn of it—they’ll pitch a fit. I would bet money that they’ll try to block us from getting to the city funds, but the Duke’s not here to lend them his support, so I believe there is nothing they can do.” He laughed softly.

Mattie knew him well enough to realize that only an invention he had an immediate interest in would please him so. “What is it?” she asked.

“A machine,” he said. “An automaton, but without a body, just pure mind, like yours—only bigger. It’s like a hundred of your brains stuck together, made for analysis. We tell it what happened, and it figures out who had the most to gain and therefore who is responsible, and what we should do next. Amazing, no?”

“Wouldn’t its answer change depending on what you told it?” Mattie asked.

Loharri stopped smiling and squinted at her in suspicion. “Of course it would. So we’ll just tell it everything.”

“You don’t know everything,” Mattie said. “No one does.”

Loharri frowned now. “Seriously, Mattie. We certainly know enough about this city and what’s happening here to give it enough information to figure things out. And imagine, a rational machine that can figure out the future! We won’t need the Stone Monks’ cryptic advice anymore . . . not that I ever thought it was useful, but maybe with this machine others will realize how ridiculous they are.”

“Maybe,” Mattie said. “I just doubt it would be much more reliable.”

“I doubt you know what you’re talking about,” Loharri said. His scar paled, and the skin around it turned a shade short of purple, indicating an alarming redistribution of blood. “Come by the Parliament building tomorrow morning, I’ll have the list of missing medallions for you. But now, I’m busy.”

“Thank you,” Mattie said.

Iolanda waited for her in the kitchen, by the door. “I’ll come by later,” she whispered, her lips urgent and warm by Mattie’s ear. “I’ll have a big order for you.”

Mattie walked all the way to the slaughterhouse on the southern edge of the city. Troubled thoughts churned in her mind, like they had been doing lately. She considered Iolanda’s semi-naked presence in Loharri’s house and her giddy excitement about the demolition; she thought of Sebastian and his words about the gargoyles, but even more so she tried to find a benign reason for him, a mechanic who had more than a passing familiarity with alchemy, to be in such close proximity to the palace. No matter how she turned it in her head, she failed, and she could not help but feel suspicious.

She passed a factory belching fire and steam, obscuring the sky. It was a bad area, surrounded by the slums where small workshops threw together crude automatons destined for the mines and factories. She had heard rumors that people worked in the mines too—they were more flexible, and could reach the more distant passages. Their fingers were also quick and precise, and if there was an avalanche or a collapsed mine, they were cheaper to replace than the automatons.

There were several caterpillars running at full speed toward and away from the factory, carrying metal from the mines just south of the wall, in the hills. The dull glint of copper and iron grew brighter in the light cast by the factory flames, and Mattie smelled sulfur and hot metal on the wind. She hurried past—she did not like the factory, and after it the sight of the slaughterhouse seemed a relief.

The butchers knew her by sight, as they did most alchemists—they waved her past the killing floor to the large wooden barrels filled with offal. She nodded to a few colleagues who were already picking through the barrels, their noses pinched shut with wooden clips. Mattie did not find the smell unpleasant, and moved leisurely. She grabbed a sheet of wax paper from the stack by the barrels, and walked along the row of barrels, looking for eyes.

She noticed a tall woman bent over a barrel, her skin a familiar dark hue. “Niobe,” she called.

The woman looked up and smiled. “Mattie,” she said. “I didn’t know you people used animal parts.”

“I didn’t know you did.”

Niobe held up a glass jar, half filled with sloshing of dark and thick blood. “We don’t. But I’ve learned some blood alchemy in my travels.” She handed the jar to Mattie.

“What does it do?” Mattie asked.

Niobe smiled still. “Come on. Get your eyeballs, and I’ll show you.”