The Alchemy of Stone Read online

  “Why do you hate them so much?”

  He shrugged. “They are not rational, my dear girl.” That was his standard explanation for any dislike of others he had ever exhibited. “So all right, the gargoyles grew the city. It was awfully nice of them, but I don’t see why we’re supposed to worship them.”

  “Not worship,” Mattie said. “Feed them and help them when they need it. And maybe listen to what they have to say.

  “Sure. This is why we have the monks in the first place, for feeding and helping. And now, apparently, you’ve joined the ranks of the helpers and listeners. Why would they need the rest of us?”

  Neither of them mentioned the trade in children, the horrible deformed creatures, colloquially known as spiders for their short, round bodies and long, thin limbs, the pitiful terrors that emerged from the mine shafts every night. Honestly, Mattie was glad she did not have to see them—the stories were enough.

  Mattie watched the traffic, now mostly caterpillars and just a few lizards, flow by with its usual hissing and groaning and metal clanking against stone. This is what this city is about, she thought. The metal against stone, the constant struggle, and the mechanics against the alchemists. Only now there was no doubt as to who had won—the mechanics had the upper hand; it was their city now.

  “What are you thinking about?” Loharri asked.

  “Nothing,” Mattie said. “Everything. The Soul-Smoker, for once—did you know that he had been in the orphanage?”

  “Yes.” Loharri scowled. “I have to go back—the Calculator is malfunctioning.”

  “What’s the problem?” Mattie asked.

  Loharri shrugged. “We ask it how to increase the coal supply, and it tells us to send everyone in the city to dig for it.”

  Mattie laughed. “It’s not just ugly, it’s also dumb.”

  “You may be right. But we know what the problem is, we can fix it now.” Loharri turned away.

  Mattie waved after his long, narrow back, clad in black wool despite the warmth and the sun. “That’s what you always say,” she whispered when she was certain that he could not hear her.

  With Mattie, it was like this—her first weeks of life were spent on the bench in mostly- or half-assembled state. She retained snatches of those memories, even though they scared her with the sight of her own disembodied legs standing on the floor all by themselves, and several porcelain faces staring at her with empty sockets while she cried out, naked and alone. Loharri called it ‘growing pains’, and she agreed at least with the second part. He kept finding new problems and new solutions that in turn caused more problems, until Mattie was quite sure that she would never walk, would never be made whole. And then, as if by a miracle, she worked, complete and functional. In his weaker moments, Loharri called it a celestial intervention. Whatever the cause was, here she was now, Loharri’s voice still ringing in her ears. I now know what the problem is; I can fix it.

  She returned home to find Sebastian preoccupied with one of her books—the one about gargoyle history. She watched his profile for a while, his crinkled forehead, his lowered thoughtful eyes. Perhaps Iolanda was correct—perhaps Mattie was in love. Or perhaps it was just desperation to break free of Loharri’s hold.

  Sebastian looked up over his shoulder and smiled. “Mattie,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about what I said earlier. I didn’t mean to dismiss you; I didn’t mean to imply that…” His large palm stroked his short hair absent-mindedly. “How do I put this?”

  “You can’t love a machine,” she said. “I understand.”

  He shook his head. “That’s not what I meant. I just don’t know… how.”

  His skin, soft and smooth, beckoned her hand, and she touched his cheek, and felt the pulsing of blood under her fingers and saw the blooming of a dark blush a moment later.

  “What are you doing?” Sebastian asked, but did not move away.

  She remembered the words, even though she had never uttered them before. “Making love,” she whispered.

  Sebastian remained seated, his black eye looking at her askance, as if unsure what to do.

  Mattie was rather at a loss for ideas herself, and she bent down and wrapped her arms around him; her fingers touched on his chest, her cheek pressed against the back of his neck.

  He grabbed her arm and pulled her in front of him. “Let’s take a look at you,” he murmured. “You know, I have no idea what you look like under this dress.”

  Her fingers picked up the fabric of her skirt, lifting it demurely just above her ankles.

  He studied the double bones, shining and slender, meeting at the metal joint that held the front and the back parts of her foot together—metal toes and wooden heel. He reached under her skirt, his warm fingers stroking past the roundness of her knee joint, brushing against the polished inner surface of her thigh, long and curved, and came to rest against the smooth metal plate between her legs.

  “Not like this,” Mattie whispered, and touched his hand to her chest, pressing his palm against the tiny glass window.

  He finally understood and pulled her into his lap. He yanked at the fabric concealing her breast, and his mouth found the keyhole as if by instinct. She froze—a troubling mix of fear and lightheaded pleasure—as his tongue circled the circumference of the keyhole. He forced the tip in, once, twice, and she felt the vibrant life flood her. He wasn’t winding her, but her whole body responded, rocking in rhythm with her heartbeat, she squirmed in his lap and his kisses and caressing fingers grew hungrier, more urgent. He pulled her dress off her shoulders, touched her inlays like piano keys, tangled his fingers in her hair. His mouth pressed against her lips and then her breasts, and then her lips again.

  Mattie fled to the Soul-Smoker—it seemed like he and his many ghosts were the only ones she could still talk to. Confusion overwhelmed Mattie as she ran through the streets, so alive and yet so different from what she remembered. In search of any distraction to prevent her mind from latching onto the single thought—I have let him touch me. I made him touch me—she stopped by the public telegraph. The small foyer that hosted the apparatus and the long yards of tape it spewed incessantly, recording the news, passing messages, mounded in front of it, like some grotesque tapeworm tangled beyond any hope. The clerks let it be, sitting in their little niche, protected from the ravages of the public by thick bars.

  “Anything for the alchemists?” Mattie asked.

  The clerk, a young redheaded man named Janus, yawned. “Not since three days ago.”

  Mattie felt a guilty pang from not having checked in so long. “May I see it?”

  The clerk dug through the large metal case divided into hundreds of private enclosures, where the important messages went to sit for a week before being disposed off.

  “It’s very quiet today. You were mobbed last week.”

  The clerk, his shoulders and bony elbows moving energetically as if he were kneading dough, laughed. “Yeah, and two days ago everyone just decided, screw this. There’s so much bad news you can absorb before wanting to close your eyes and curl up in a corner, yes?”

  “What happened two days ago?” Mattie asked the young man’s back.

  “The Duke died,” he said. “His wife and daughter recovered enough to join the rest of the court.”

  “Thank you.” Mattie’s mind tried to figure out what it meant for the city, and as chaotic as her thoughts were, she felt that the changes she considered were already in motion, the great blocks of stone that tumbled slowly into place, locking things in like the slab of the jail door slamming into its doorway, sealing off all sunlight and hope.

  “Here’s your message,” the red-haired clerk said. “It’s encoded.”

  Mattie took the ring out of her pocket and quickly read the message. She had to read it several times, since her eyes slid off the words, refusing to absorb their meaning.

  The message was from Bokker, who had looked through the alchemical records. One of the names in the missing mechanics’ medallions sho
wed up—Sebastian’s. The medallion was presented by a man who had ordered some quantity of explosives. Moreover, Bokker advised that the man who had used the medallion was tall but wore a hood obscuring his face; but by the color of his hands the alchemist thought that the man was an easterner—Bokker was especially insistent on mentioning this detail, as well as the fact that there were very few easterners admitted to the Lyceum, let alone to the society itself.

  Mattie left the telegraph building, feeling a freezing cold starting at her heart and spreading outwards, freezing every emotion out of her. She tried to think of it logically— perhaps Sebastian’s medallion was listed because it was lost or stolen from him, perhaps someone else was using it. And yet, she knew that the medallion was on the list because he failed to return it after he was banished. Maybe he lost it afterwards, maybe he didn’t have anything to do with it. And yet, it fitted with his disappearances and his closeness to the palace, it fitted the overall pattern and his insistence that he could not leave the city. No matter how Mattie tried, there was no way of fitting it any other way without invoking a complex conspiracy—and as she knew, those were almost never true.

  She hoped that Ilmarekh would offer her some advice, but she knew that she was beyond advice, beyond being able to cheer up at mere words. She needed to do something.

  Having made a decision, she turned around and marched away from the gates. She passed by the factories, under the low-hanging clouds of smoke and soot, through the incessant banging and clashing of the machinery; she walked past the hovels and the hollow-eyed old people who passed the last of their days looking for sun in the endless haze, and hacking up gray pieces of their lungs.

  “Friends in high places,” Ilmarekh had told her the last time. Iolanda. Mattie was willing to overlook the friend-theft at the moment, and instead decided to ask Iolanda for one of her many promised favors. She needed to know what was the right thing to do, and how the two of them fitted inside the machine of the city, more metal than stone now.

  Chapter 13

  Mattie headed north, for the wealthy district surrounding the former palace, where the houses were few and spacious, enveloped by delicately maintained gardens and tall hedges that tastefully contributed to the landscape yet managed to keep the owners’ private affairs in and the interlopers out. Her footfalls resonated in the wide, quiet streets lined with old shade trees that softened all other noises into a rich, velvety background that made her aware of her own noisy workings.

  The wealthy district lay a good way away from the gates, nestled in the very heart of the stone city, embraced by the semicircle of the palace district in the south and the park on the north. There were a few ponds here the names of which Mattie did not know, but even they seemed different from the Grackle Pond—the water here was pure like crystal, with the barest hints of blue shadows playing within; the schools of red and orange fish—some solid, some patterned—played in the emerald green tangles of the lake grass, their quick shadows streaking across the white, sandy bottom.

  Mattie had been here only once before, and she looked for Iolanda’s house. She did not know how she would recognize it, only that she would—every house here was elaborate, and Mattie thought she would spot Iolanda’s taste with ease.

  She spent a long time wandering between the houses, studying the ornate ironwork on the gates, looking for any sign of Iolanda’s presence. Most of the residences stood empty since their inhabitants had left the city, but a few harbored signs of life—soft music and laughter wafted through the air, along with a light clinking of dishes and glasses. But the gates were locked, and no matter how hard she looked, she saw no sign of Iolanda.

  She was ready to give up, and turned back, now lost in the maze of the wide, quiet streets. She felt even more alien in this eerie, luxurious place, and she hurried along, suddenly afraid. And then she saw people in the streets.

  They did not belong here either. Dressed in cheap, rough clothes covered with coal dust, their faces gaunt and peppered with coal particles absorbed into their skin so that no soap could get them out. They moved in a silent, tight formation, their eyes unnaturally light in their darkened faces. Several of them carried torches, and they cast a troubled orange light over the trees and the streets.

  Mattie got out of the way, flattening against an iron fence. The bars felt reassuring against the metal of her back as she watched the silent and somber procession pass by. The tide of miners did not stem—they filled the street, and Mattie tasted coal and hot metal in the air.

  There were others too—not as stained as the rest, but just as gaunt and silent. For a moment, Mattie thought that these people were ghosts vomited up by the Soul-Smoker and given flesh through some perversion of nature, through the foul magic of smoke and clanging metal that filled the city, rendering flesh more and more obsolete each day, and this unwanted flesh now walked the streets, lost.

  At first, they didn’t even look at Mattie, intent and determined. But as more and more men walked by, she noticed that a few glanced in her direction; when the end of the column was moving past her, they stared.

  “Hey,” one of them called, breaking the silence. “Shouldn’t we do something about the clunker here?”

  She was too scared to take offense as several men left their place in the column, creating a little eddy of people, and walked up to her.

  “I’ve done nothing to you,” Mattie said.

  “It talks,” one of them said, perplexed. “When did you learn to talk?”

  “I always could,” Mattie said. “I’m not like the other machines. I’m emancipated.”

  The man studied her, his narrow face unshaven and impenetrable. “We heard about the intelligent machine,” he said, finally.

  “The one who tells the government what to do with us,” one of his fellows added. “Is it you? Is it you who took away our land and stuffed us into mines?”

  “Their kind took our fields, too,” another one said.

  Mattie shook her head and folded her hands. “No,” she said. “It’s not me, I swear. I’m just an alchemist, I make ointments. You want the Calculator by the Grackle Pond.”

  “We’ll get to it in due time,” the first man said. “Now the question is, what to do with you?”

  Mattie sensed restrained violence in the tense set of his shoulders, in the subtle tightening of his fists, knobby and disproportionately large on his thin forearms.

  A shout from somewhere at the head of the procession tore at the silence, and there was a sound of smashed glass and whooping. More shouting, more noises, and a thin wisp of dirty smoke curled into the sky like a curlicue. Mattie’s interlocutors were compelled to look away, stretching their necks to see better.

  Mattie bolted. The man closest to her gave a surprised gasp as she pushed him away, and reflexively his fist caught her on the cheek; she felt cracks opening in her face, blooming into stars, but already she ran, the wind hissing in the fissures of her porcelain mask.

  The crowd had grown sparser and she had no trouble weaving her way between them. She was faster than any of them, and they seemed too preoccupied to pay her much mind. Her feet pounded the pavement, but instead of resonating loudly like before, her footfalls were nearly inaudible in the cacophony of destruction that erupted all around and behind her.

  She heard a woman scream, and thought that the rioters had breached the gates somewhere and were destroying the houses. There was a smashing of glass, and a smell of burning wood and something else—hair? horn?—chased after her. Mattie tried not to think about Iolanda and Niobe, and yet she felt guilty that she was unable to find them— although what good would it have done? She felt a chip of porcelain detach from her cheek and heard it clink on the pavement.

  Mattie slowed her steps only when she was certain that the rioters had passed by; even then, she walked quickly, clinging close to the walls of the buildings. There was no one in the streets, and only occasionally she saw a worried face peer through the shutters—a sign that the rioters
had passed this way. As she approached the palace district (she still thought of it this way, even though there was no palace anymore), she saw several of the enforcers’ buggies, heading in the direction she came from. They swarmed by the Parliament, organizing, and she breathed a little easier. The riot would be over soon, and she only hoped that it would be stopped before Iolanda and Niobe were hurt. She felt guilty for her earlier resentment of them, as if her thoughts had brought them into danger.

  They did not let her into the Parliament building, and she headed for Loharri’s house—it was closer than hers, and she was not ready to face Sebastian just yet. Sebastian. She thought about telling Loharri where he was, about the missing medallion and explosives. Surely, it would be a reason enough? And yet, her entire being cried out against it. It didn’t matter if he was the one who blew up the palace; it didn’t matter if he was involved in the riots somehow. She just couldn’t betray him. She had had enough of that for now. Instead, she wondered if perhaps Iolanda was visiting Loharri, and was thus spared the grisly fate Mattie tried really hard not to imagine.

  The door was locked, but Mattie decided to wait. With the shrubbery so bold and unrestrained, she could sit on the front stoop, hidden by the glistening green wall studded with creamy and red roses, drinking in their sweet fragrance. She watched the sky turn deeper blue, and gingerly touched her face, exploring the new cracks. She extended her eyes to take a closer look, and her heart fell—there were so many, with whole chunks of porcelain missing, exposing the shining gears underneath. The corner of her lips was cracked horribly, and she thought that it almost mimicked Loharri’s injury—now she too had half a face maimed. The difference was that he could replace hers.

  Loharri came home when the shadows from the hedge grew long enough to touch the walls of the house, to lap at the foundation and to reach up to the windows, gradually consuming the wall from the ground up. The rose bushes looked black in the dimming light, and the night flowers’ fragrance scented the breeze—Mattie smelled jasmine and gardenias, magnolias and lilacs in the thick night air, and almost missed the sound of familiar light footsteps on the path.