The Alchemy of Stone

Chapter 9




Mattie went to the eastern gates to see the Duke and his court depart from the city. Despite the public telegraphs reassuring the populace that the measure was temporary, an uneasy air hung over the mostly silent crowd, occasionally punctuated by the crying of infants, which did little to lighten the mood.

“I can’t believe this is happening,” said a woman in a dress grown murky-gray from too many washes.

The man standing next to her nodded, but his eyes kept glancing away from her at Mattie. “Oh, it’s happening all right.” He spat on the ground, undeterred by the dense crowd. “His father must be trying to crawl out of his grave by now. The Stone Monks should be denouncing his treason from every roof, and it’s about time they did something useful. Disgrace, that’s what it is.”

The first buggies carrying the courtiers and the servants, flanked by shambling columns of automatons, passed the crowd. There were a few boos and a few restrained curses, but most of the people remained silent. Apparently, Mattie was not the only one who took the Duke’s leave at its symbolic value.

She looked over the crowd, moving her eyes separately to focus on different parts of the gathering; she saw a few familiar alchemists, but did not feel compelled to greet any of them. She looked for Iolanda or Niobe, and hoped not to see Loharri. Whatever happened between them, she did not feel eager to face the man she had betrayed. She did not go to the mechanics’ lodge the day before; she did not retrieve the information about the missing medallions. I’ll do it tomorrow, she thought, or the day after, or perhaps the day after that. Whenever she could bear the look of his slanted heavy hazel eyes that always seemed to see right to her heart and always forgiving her—even when she had done nothing that needed to be forgiven. Now at least he would have a reason.

The crowd shifted, breathing, sniffling, like a large animal. A small girl held high above the crowd on her mother’s shoulder sang in a small shy voice, and people whispered. Mattie’s sensitive ears picked up bits of conversation nearby and farther away. The Duke’s leave did not sit well with anyone.

“The gargoyles didn’t leave,” a male voice behind Mattie said. “The Stone Monks are still with us. Why is he so special that his hide needs to be saved before the city?”

“What’s he gonna do?” someone else asked.

“Nothing, like he done nothing for years. The Parliament will decide, and the Parliament will run things like they always have. Nothing’s gonna change.”

“He was only here to sit pretty in the palace,” the man who spoke first said. “If he ain’t gonna do that, why does he think he can tax us?”

The murmur hushed when the sound of screeching metal and heavy pounding reached down the street. Mattie stretched her eyes as far as they would go, and she glimpsed the rest of the procession, up the hill—the giant lizards resplendent in their brown and gold scales, their claws tipped with mercury and silver, dragged open carriages behind them. As they pulled closer, Mattie saw a number of well-dressed people swathed in yards of silk and brocade stiff with gems and rich thread as they smiled and waved at the crowd from the carriage. The Duke himself, a middle-aged clean-shaven man with kind and tired eyes, held hands with his wife; their daughters, all pretty and haughty in their youth, looked straight ahead of them, pointedly ignoring the rabble catcalling to them. A few more men and women crowded together; normally, the Duke’s favor conferred certain advantages to them, but now they looked fearful, realizing that the favor of a powerful man often had a downside.

The enforcers in full armor drove in small buggies, surrounding the carriages with a protective shield; but those who had foresightedly brought vegetables in regrettable condition were not deterred from throwing them. The enforcers made a move toward the crowd, and the vegetables ceased.

Mattie looked up the street, at the approaching caravan of mechanical caterpillars that hissed with steam and carried the courtiers, dressed somewhat less extravagantly than the ducal family and their favorites. They were less protected by the enforcers, and whatever produce remained in the hands of the displeased populace was thrown at them with guilty alacrity and a few constrained verbal outbursts.

Mattie was ready to turn away as the first carriages of the procession approached the eastern gates, leaving the city with a leaden finality, telegraph’s reassurances notwithstanding. It was almost as though a part of the city was detaching itself, leaving the place incomplete somehow, although not necessarily worse. There was a sense of freedom in having a piece missing, in having a void that could be filled with something new.

A man jostled past her; he was garbed in the habit of the Stone Monks, but did not move with the usual humility of the clergy—he strode through the crowd, parting it with his heavy shoulder. Mattie stepped aside, giving way, and so did a few of her neighbors.

The man walked past, and only then Mattie noticed that his right hand was deep in the pocket of his robe. Just as she thought that he was about to hurl a spoiled apple or a turnip at the courtiers and judged such behavior inappropriate for a monk, the man pushed into the street, steps away from the ducal carriage.

The object he extracted from his robe was neither a fruit nor a vegetable, but a large clear bottle filled with thick transparent fluid.

The enforcers turned the buggies toward him, screaming warnings. Some of them drew muskets and leveled them at the man, still imploring him to step back.

The man swung and threw the bottle at the carriage and ducked into the crowd just as the first shots rang out. And then all was chaos—Mattie was pushed and almost knocked off her feet as the people around her screamed and ran, as several people from the first row of the crowd fell under the musket shots. Mattie could not look away.

The bottle burst loudly with a flare of hungry fire that engulfed the side of the ducal carriage. The lizards thrashed, trying to escape the inferno, and got tangled in their tack. Their tails whipped madly, knocking over the carriage. The lizards of the carriages that followed reared up and turned away, some dragging the carriages into the crowd, others upsetting theirs.

The fire spread, engulfing two other carriages. Their passengers wrestled from under the wreckage, even as their clothes and their hair caught fire.

The crowd pushed Mattie away from the sight of the explosion, and she only saw snatches of the raging fire, of a bleeding woman, her face smashed on the cobbles into a smoldering ruin. A giant lizard, its scales glistening red, lay on its side, its broken leg a mess of red twitching meat and fragments of sharp, pink bone. It shrieked in a strange voice, like a child crying. Mattie had never heard the lizards utter anything but an occasional hiss before.

Mattie strained to see over the jostling bobbing heads of the fleeing crowd. She saw the slow mindless automatons snap to action—they did as they were told, and they started to clean up. They moved among the wreckage, picking up the bloody fragments of the bodies torn by the initial explosion. There was nowhere to put them, so they stacked them all in the middle of the street—bloodied limbs, charred corpses, lizard bones, the shattered wood of the carriages and torn pieces of tack. No one paid any mind to them—the street cleared, and before Mattie was swept along with the panicked crowd, she saw the gruesome pile built by the automatons growing higher, as they labored, slow and creaky and not at all perturbed. As far as Mattie was concerned, they were the most horrible thing she had ever seen.

Mattie was shaken enough by the day’s events to go see Loharri. On her way, she stopped by the telegraph, which was thronged as she expected. There were fewer casualties reported than she expected; two of the Duke’s daughters were dead. The Duke himself, along with his wife and the surviving daughter, were badly burned. The Stone Monks were caring for them, with their vast pharmacopoeia and the favor of the gargoyles. People whispered that this momentous event had even brought the gargoyles out of hiding, and that they watched over the injured, perched on the temple’s roof.

Loharri was not home, and she headed for the ducal district, expecting to find him in the Mechanics’ chambers of the Parliament. She realized the folly of her intentions as soon as she approached the Parliament, abuzz in movement, swarming with automatons and people, alchemists and mechanics both. A mechanical caterpillar stripped of its seats stood in the street, chuffing idle steam. Eight lizards harnessed double-file waited patiently in front of a low sled. Mattie guessed that the mechanics were evacuating valuables from the Parliament, afraid of another attack, and that Loharri would likely find no time for her.

She passed the open doors of the ossuary, and couldn’t resist peeking inside. The sealed sepulchers embedded in the floor offered no sight of interest, but the piles of bones stacked along the walls, the skulls in neat piles in the corners, never failed to fascinate Mattie. Loharri had told her that the bones were those of previous dukes and their wives, their courtiers and favorites, their children and servants. The skulls shone softly when the sunrays from the open doors, filled with dense clouds of motes, struck their suture-seamed yellow surfaces, the domes of the foreheads high and round, the eye sockets mysteriously dark, dripping with untold sadness and wisdom.

“In much wisdom there’s much sorrow,” Loharri used to say. Mattie thought that she agreed as she watched the skulls, their sockets seemingly following her every move from their corners. They smelled of old parchment and dry earth crumbling into dust.

Listen. A faint whisper caught her attention, and at first she thought that it was just the wind trapped inside, rattling the old bones.

Listen, again.

She stepped inside, looking through the dusk filled with remains. There were just bones, but then she caught a glimpse of movement out of the corner of an eye. And then—like in an optical trick the traveling performers entertained their customers with, where one was supposed to look at the jumble of leaves to spot a deer, a lizard, and a giant bird, and once one saw them they would not go away—she saw the folded wings and the gray skin blending with stone, she saw the heavy horned heads and slit eyes, the folded hands, the bent knees. And the mouths opening like fissures in the age-old stone to whisper to her urgent words.

Listen, they spoke in one voice, the voice of the stone the city was carved from. We will tell you a story.

There is a notion of time as an enemy, but we couldn’t tell you how fast it was passing until we heard the human heartbeats, counting the seconds as they fell into the eternity. So many million heartbeats ago, when you were not yet here and the eastern woman, the stranger, the daughter of red earth was young, there were two boys.

Three boys, maybe. We can’t remember, and we sometimes confuse death and sleep, sleep and oblivion. But in any case, there they were—feral children living off scraps and rotten fruit left in the market square after the market was over. They had forgotten how to speak and only snarled at pigeons and stray dogs if they went after the scraps the boys had their eyes on, and they spat and hissed at the passing of the Stone Monks, who were the greatest fear of all children, parented or not.

We weep often, for the Monks carry our name and everything that they do is attributed to us. But what can we do? We are weak and dying, and they fill our feeders, so we keep our thoughts to ourselves; we shove the gravel into our mouths hastily, rent with guilt, and we do not speak.

But the boys, the boys . . . one is raven-haired, narrow-eyed, and so beautiful, dirt and grime and lice notwithstanding; another is white-haired like an old man, and he moves on all fours, feeling his way like a crab. Yet another is quiet and small, and he cries often. He has no words, and his anguish wails and sobs through the night alleys, and we watch over them, like we watch over everyone who is marked for destruction by the grindstones of the world. There is nothing we can do but watch over them.

Mattie startled at the slamming of the door behind her, and the gargoyles fell silent, blending back into the surrounding walls.

“Anyone in here?”

“Just me,” Mattie answered. “Sorry, Master Bergen.”

The old mechanic shuffled closer, his limp more prominent now, accompanied by the tapping of a cane. “Mattie? What are you doing here?”

“The door was open,” she said. “I was looking for Loharri.”

“Of course you were.” His voice was paternal, soothing, and the look of his rheumy eyes kind. “We’re a tad busy here, but he’s around. I’ll help you look if you want.”

Mattie followed him to the exit. “What’s happening?”

“You’ve heard about the Duke, of course.”

“Of course,” Mattie echoed. She decided not to tell him that she was there—she was indisposed to answer questions, to relive the fear and the disgust she felt watching other automatons, purposefully excluded from the context, gathering limbs. “Terrible, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Bergen said without much conviction. “Terrible. Only now, who’s next?”

“You’re not leaving the city, are you?”

“Dear girl, no, pox on your tongue.” He gave a feeble laugh. “What, leave and let the alchemical vultures pick apart everything we’ve built here?”

“They’re not vultures,” Mattie said, narrowly avoiding using ‘we’.

Bergen shook his head. “Perhaps I’m being too cautious in my old age. But we are just moving the archives and machinery, in case they decide to bomb the Parliament. One must be careful—dark times, dark times.”

They walked to the Parliament building, Mattie tactfully restraining her step so as not to overtake Bergen. He kept talking about the intrigues and the damn alchemists, of how things weren’t what they used to be—Mattie saw no virtue in arguing with the latter point.

Inside the Parliament building, the chaos was even more overwhelming than outside. Mattie bumped into people who ran without heed, and narrowly avoided an automaton that shuffled by with a stack of papers high enough to completely conceal its torso and face. She looked around but saw no alchemists. She cursed her cowardice—if she got the list of the missing medallions in time, maybe her society would not need to be afraid to set foot in Parliament.

“He’d be in the archives,” Bergen said. “I must be getting on now, but you should find him—check all the way up the stairs, on the fourth floor.”

Mattie squeezed through the crowd, going against the stream of people and automatons. The stone steps under her feet were worn concave, and her feet nestled securely in the depressions made by many generations of human feet, giving her comfort and a fleeting sense of belonging to the great tradition. Even though she could neither vote nor be elected, she felt a part of it.

The crowd thinned after she passed the second floor where the offices and the chambers were, and almost disappeared by the fourth. When she set foot into the echoing silent crypt of the archives, it felt like she was the only person there—no, the only person left on earth, so desolate it was.

She found Loharri at the small desk tucked away in the back, where he sorted through stacks of hand-written and printed documents and scrolls. “Loharri,” she called.

He jerked his head up, as if coming from deep sleep. “What’s the matter, love?”

“I know it’s a bad time,” she said. “But the medallions.”

He nodded. “Here you are. I copied it for you last night and set it aside. Glad you came.”

She took the proffered scroll with only a dozen or so names on it. “Thank you,” she whispered, guilt washing over her anew. “I can’t believe you remembered.”

He smiled lopsidedly. “Have I ever forgotten you? Have I ever broken a promise?”

“No,” she said. “But with everything that’s happening . . . I thought you’d have better things to do.”

“But you still came,” he said with a shrug and pushed away the stack of papers in front of him. “See? Great events might shake our foundations, but we still remember our little inconsequential promises. And I bet you money that everyone still carries on as normal—people eat, children wail, couples fight and f*ck. These things are the true edifice of the city, not dukes or buildings, not even the gargoyles. How’s your work going, by the way? Found Sebastian yet?”

“It’s difficult,” Mattie answered. “I’m in a new territory—our formulae are all for people’s needs, not the gargoyles’. Imagine if you had to design a musket for creatures with eight arms and no legs.”

He laughed. “They wouldn’t run, and could reload much faster. But I get your point, dear girl. Stone isn’t flesh.”

“Or metal,” Mattie said. “I don’t even know how to begin thinking about it; I mean, I do, but I have no idea what makes sense and what doesn’t.”

He nodded. “I’ll let you know if anything occurs to me. Anything else you need?”

She thought of the gargoyles’ story and mentally cursed Bergen for interrupting. “Just a question,” she said. “Do you know the Soul-Smoker?”

His smile remained but changed, as if his mirth had drained away and only its ghost remained behind. “No,” he said. “Can’t say that I know the gentleman. I’ve seen him, of course.”

“Have you ever known him? When you were children?”

He shrugged. “Maybe. This city is not that big, and you know how children are, always running in packs. Why? Did he say anything?”

“No. Just wondering,” Mattie said. “He seems very lonely and very sick.”

“Comes with the job.” Loharri cleared his throat. “Now if you don’t mind . . . ”

“Of course. You have work to do. I will see you soon,” Mattie said.

As she turned to leave the archives, she heard a weak voice calling Loharri’s name from downstairs. She cocked her head, listening. “Can you hear that? Someone’s calling you.”

“They can come here,” he answered. His former good spirits were gone, replaced by bile. “What am I, an errand boy?”

“I think it’s Bergen,” Mattie replied. “It’s hard for him walk up the stairs.”

Loharri heaved a sigh and cursed under his breath, but stood and followed Mattie down the stairs. They met Bergen halfway between the second and the third floors.

“Loharri,” the old man wheezed. “Come quick. The enforcers arrested the man who threw the bomb at the Duke.”

Mattie thanked her stars and her lucky stones that Bergen was too perturbed to pay attention as she followed him and Loharri to the jail adjacent to the Parliament building. The old man worked his cane as if it were a hoe, reaching with it in front of him until the metal-clad tip caught between the cobbles and pulling himself along, his limp pronounced but apparently disregarded. Even Loharri’s long loping strides were barely enough to keep up with the old man, and Mattie trotted behind, hitching up her skirts slightly higher than was proper, but forgivable under the circumstances.

The enforcers crowded the courtyard of the jail, their buggies clanging against each other and chuffing, the hiss of steam sounding almost identical to Bergen’s wheezing breath—a pleasing symmetry, Mattie thought, since Bergen was the inventor of these buggies, and it seemed only right that they replicated their creator’s habits in such harmony.

The enforcers, armored and menacing, looked at Bergen and Loharri with suspicious eyes through the narrow slits of their bronze helms, but let them through; Loharri grabbed Mattie’s elbow and dragged her along, without giving the guards a chance to ask her any questions or consider her admittance.

“Thank you,” Mattie whispered, his kindness a stab.

“If anyone ever hassles you,” he whispered back, “just tell them you’re mine. Damn your pride and just say it, all right?”

“All right.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.” Her heart felt ready to give, to pop the rivets that held it together and explode in an unseemly shower of metal and springs and wheels toothed like dogs.

They entered the low arch, decorated like everything around this building with carvings of gargoyles—a show of gratitude from the city, from back in the day when the gargoyles were strong enough to grow a jail at the city’s request.

They had grown it large and sturdy, with a monolithic door that required twenty men to move it aside. There were no windows or water pipes or air ducts, and the jail, one with the stone that birthed it, was cold in winter and hot in summer, and not many lasted long enough to experience both extremes—one or the other killed them before that. But that was for the prisoners condemned for serious crimes; those who were found guilty of lesser offenses were transferred to the southern copper mines, or to the northern fields, where they died slower and side-by-side with people who had done nothing wrong apart from being born to an unpleasant lot in life.

They found the prisoner just inside the jail. He was dressed in the habit of a Stone Monk, torn at the shoulder, exposing a large gash crusted over with blood. The skin of his shoulder, smooth and brown, was stained with blood and bruised, and his thick lips opened and closed in quick, gulping breaths.

Mattie noticed his hands shackled together by an elaborate brass device consisting of several metal semicircles nestled inside one another, latching onto the wrists of the man in an overlapping lattice. She also saw the depression in his side, where the robe flapped, seemingly not touching the body.

“His ribs are broken,” she whispered to Loharri.

He nodded and narrowed his eyes at her, as if to warn her to stay silent.

Two mechanics and an alchemist surrounded the man; they were inflicting no violence on him, but their taut faces told Mattie that they wanted to.

Bergen caught his breath, and addressed the prisoner. “Were you working alone or did you have accomplices?”

The man just stared, his eyes startled and wide, his mouth still straining after each shallow breath.

“The bastard can’t even speak properly,” one of the mechanics said.

“Or he doesn’t speak our language.” Bergen cleared his throat and moved closer to the prisoner. He spoke slowly and loudly, as one did with children or feeble-minded. “Alone? Were you alone?”

The prisoner gasped. “I did nothing,” he whispered.

Mattie tugged Loharri’s sleeve. He frowned and shook her hand off. “What?” he whispered with a fierce expression on his twisted face.

“That’s not the right man,” Mattie whispered. She hadn’t realized how silent the room was, until her whisper resonated, and made everyone turn toward her. “It’s not the right man,” Mattie said, louder, addressing Bergen and everyone else. “I was there, I saw. The one who attacked the procession was much bigger. And he wasn’t an easterner, he was local. I saw his hand—it was pink, like yours.” She pointed at Bergen’s hand gripping the pommel of his cane.

Tense silence filled the room, palpable, broken only by the ticking of Mattie’s heart and the ragged breath of the prisoner who watched Mattie with almost religious hope on his face, mixed with open-mouthed wonder.

“Nonsense,” Bergen said, and turned away.

The rest of the mechanics coughed into their hands and shuffled their feet, covering up their visible relief.

“Loharri,” one of the mechanics said. “Perhaps you should take your automaton outside—she seems prone to hysterics. I guess all women are like that, mechanical or flesh.”

Loharri did not say a word and gave Mattie a gentle shove. “Run along, now,” he said softly. “I will see you soon.”

Mattie turned to the door, the gaze of the prisoner imploring her not to leave him. She gave a small shake of her head and walked out, the panicked eyes of the man, their whites prominent and blinding like those of the sheep in the slaughterhouse, burned into her memory.