The Alchemy of Stone (12 page)

We hear the call, and we run, all the while wondering
whether we should be more dignified than to run errands. But the girl is ill—we saw her, her face torn off and the rest of her so broken we would’ve wept if we could. So we do the next best thing, and we rush. People in the streets crane their necks to see us bounding across the rooftops, in the clear light of the day, with no time to hide, and they point and shout. We think dimly that they must think that it was the recent events at the palace and the eastern gates that disturbed us so greatly.

The house where the girl was made, where she used to live is almost invisible for the solid wall of weeds and rose bushes—there’s a narrow path leading through the vegetation to the door. The house stands apart from the rest, and we have no choice but to descend and run across the ground, like fast gray dogs, running on all fours through the fragrant hedge. It lashes out at us, and the branches whip and slide off our hard gray skin, and we wonder if it is growing harder, if small fissures are starting to appear, and if last night another one of us has gone, to leave us fewer and weaker. We knock on the door politely.

A woman answers the door, a woman in loose gown sliding off her round shoulders, a woman with tangled hair and sleepy eyes, which she rubs with her fist like a child. She rubs them again, as if expecting us to disappear back into her dreams, but we remain, stubborn.

“Can I help you?” she says cautiously, after we start wondering if we should speak first.

“We need to speak to the mechanic who lives here.”

“What is that about?” Her eyes are awake now, curious.

We hesitate. “It’s about his mechanical girl,” we say.

She gasps. “Mattie? Is she all right?”

“She’s broken,” we say. “We need to talk to the master of the house.”

She moves aside and beckons us in, but we remain outside, where we would not be easily trapped.

She disappears inside the house, and we wait, hidden among the bushes from the curious eyes of any passersby.

And then he comes out with a small bag of tools, and we recognize him, even though he has grown tall and thin and hunched, his eyes still long and narrow, his face no longer beautiful. He is pulling his jacket on as he walks out on the porch where we are waiting. “Where is she?” he asks.

“In her apartment, high above the streets, her face is off and she is broken.”

“What happened?” he says, but already we bound away, our message delivered.

Mattie woke up to the familiar touch. She extended her eyes carefully, fearful that she still wouldn’t be able to see. Loharri’s stern face swam into her field of vision. She looked past him to Niobe standing by the window, her forehead lined with worry, her arms crossed over her chest.

“What did you do?” Loharri asked.

Mattie sat up from the floor and touched her face to make sure it was back in place. Sebastian had seen her naked, she remembered. She did not find the thought altogether repellent; she liked the way his calloused fingers fit under her jaw, how swift and unapologetic he was . . .

“Mattie!”

She startled at Loharri’s insistent voice. “Nothing,” she said. “I’ve done nothing wrong.”

Loharri shook his head. “Mattie. You don’t even know why you got ill, do you?”

She shook her head. “I was working too hard.”

His face remained composed, but she recognized the slight slow movement of his jaw, as if he were trying not to grit his teeth. “You were ill,” he said, “because you went against your desire to see me. I told you that you always must do so. Didn’t I?”

She nodded. “I didn’t know.”

“Wait a moment,” Niobe said and stepped forward. “You booby-trapped the poor girl’s head and didn’t even tell her? Just to make sure she didn’t get away from you?”

“Don’t talk to me like that,” Loharri said without even looking in Niobe’s direction. “You’re forgetting your place—what, the alchemists let you join and you think you are their equal?”

Niobe shrank away as if from a slap, but her eyes blazed.

“Don’t be like this,” Mattie pleaded and folded her still trembling hands over her heart. She remembered Loharri’s temper—he often spoke harshly, but it passed.

“I’m sorry,” Loharri said to Niobe. “I do appreciate your calling me and being here for Mattie—but please do not meddle in things that don’t concern you.”

Niobe didn’t answer, and Loharri turned his attention back to Mattie. “Now, what did you want to talk to me about?”

“About the bombing,” Mattie answered. “I told you last time that you got the wrong man, and yet you killed him.”

“How do you know that?”

“The gargoyles. And you keep taking people and banishing them from the city, and—”

“Enough,” Loharri interrupted and rubbed his face. “I don’t like it either, Mattie, but that’s politics for you. People are restless, and they need someone to blame.”

“This is it?” Niobe said. “That’s your entire excuse?”

“It’s not an excuse,” Loharri said. “Things started to change when you people showed up.”

“Your people show up in our cities,” Niobe parried. “We don’t make a fuss about it.”

“You would if your own people were losing jobs to the foreigners.”

“Your people are losing jobs to your machines,” Niobe said. “You put mechanizing everything and making it efficient above your people’s happiness, and you wonder why they aren’t happy?”

Loharri stood and turned to Niobe. “Don’t try to come between me and my automaton,” he said. “Seriously. I have no interest in finding scapegoats, and I’m not going to tell anyone about your presence here; you don’t need to worry about that. But if I have to remove Mattie from your company, I will. She does not need your influence.” He grabbed his bag of tools and was out of the door before Mattie had a chance to say thank you or goodbye.

Niobe waited for his steps to fall silent in the stairwell, stretched and laughed. “What an unpleasant man,” she said.

“He really isn’t,” Mattie said. “He has his problems, but he’s better than most. You just need to get to know him a little.”

“I have no desire to.” Niobe gave Mattie a quick hug and a pat on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, we all have friends everyone else hates. Just don’t let him hurt you.”

“I have other plans.” Mattie reached for the shelf over her bench, and picked up a jar sealed with a glass stopper, the figure of the blood homunculus visible inside.

Niobe’s help proved to be invaluable—she was better versed in the darker uses of blood alchemy than Mattie expected, and she managed to get the homunculus moving about and chanting strange words. It wobbled and bubbled along the bench, back and forth, unable or unwilling to get down, and hissed and sputtered. Its heart, woven from two-colored strands, pulsed with grim life.

“How is it supposed to work?” Mattie asked.

“This creature, while alive, holds two wills together as one. Whichever one of them feeds it can command it, and the other person obeys.”

“What does it eat?” Mattie asked.

“Blood. Isn’t it obvious?”

“I’ll tell Iolanda to get sheep’s blood then.”

Niobe shook her head. “If she wants to command the other, she’ll have to feed it her own blood. Don’t worry, it doesn’t eat much—just a pin prick will sate it for a week. The longer you feed it, the stronger it gets, but it only commands for a short time.”

Mattie watched the creature, fearful of it and yet fascinated. Just like Mattie, it was made, not born; and yet Mattie felt no kinship to it, the slimy, organic thing, not with her pristine metal and bone and shiny, hard surfaces. Not vulnerable to the creature, yet unable to command it, for she had no blood to feed it.

It occurred to her that her only kinship was with gargoyles and their affinity for stone and hard skin, with their tormented not-quite life. She felt sad when she realized that freeing them from fate would mean breaking the bond she felt with them, yet, to refuse it would be unkind.

“What are you thinking about?” Niobe asked.

“Sebastian. You think he’s safe?”

“I think so. He said he’ll return tonight to check on you, to make sure you’re all right.”

Mattie flustered. “Do you think he really cares about me?”

“Of course he does. He . . . ” Niobe paused and grabbed Mattie’s arm, and spun her around to face the light from the window so that Niobe could take a better look at her eyes.

Mattie could not avert them, so she retracted them instead. “What?”

“Oh, dear whales in the sea,” Niobe whispered. “You are in love with him, aren’t you?”

“I don’t know,” Mattie said. “Should I be?”

“I haven’t realized that you could . . . Oh, dear me. What am I saying? Of course you can. You are. This is why this bastard booby-trapped you, this is why he was so cross. He knows you love someone else, Mattie. What will happen to you?”

Mattie weighed her words. “I don’t know. I haven’t accumulated enough history to know things like that. I will ask Iolanda to protect me.” She pointed at the homunculus. “I’ll ask her to make sure that he gives me my key back.”

Chapter 12

Iolanda did not take long to show up. She burst through the doors in a whirlwind of wild hair and flared skirts. “Mattie! Are you all right?”

Mattie nodded. “I’m fine.”

“What happened?”

“Loharri,” Mattie said. She explained the device planted in her head, and her desperate need to get her key back. She needed Loharri out of her head and her heart, she said.

Iolanda smiled at that. “Indeed,” she said. “I know exactly what you mean.” She pushed past Mattie to the laboratory, and took a step back once she saw Niobe. “Who is she?”

“Niobe,” Mattie said. “My friend. She was helping me with your request.”

“Ah.” Iolanda walked through the laboratory to her habitual seat in the kitchen, and laughed at the sight of the pile of Mattie’s dresses covered with a blanket. “How cozy! You’re sleeping here?”

“Yes,” Niobe said, showing neither embarrassment nor anger. “Mattie has no need for beds, so I have to make do.”

“A fellow alchemist then,” Iolanda said. “Thank you for helping with Mattie—I’ll pay you too.”

“There’s no need—”

“Of course there is.” Iolanda sat and played with a long strand of her curly hair. “There’s always a need for money.”

“Iolanda only employs women,” Mattie said to Niobe.

“How do they let you get away with it?” Niobe asked, visibly warming up to Iolanda.

“They don’t notice,” Iolanda answered, and both of them laughed.

Mattie did not quite understand what was so funny about hiding oneself, about being allowed to do what one pleased while no one was looking. They, the women, were like the gargoyles, Mattie thought. Respected in words, but hidden from view of those who ran the city and managing to live in the darkness, in the secret interstices of life.

“All right then,” Iolanda said and helped herself to the decanter with pear liquor. “Let’s see what you’ve cooked up for me.”

Mattie took the blood homunculus out of its jar.

“Ew,” Iolanda said. “What is it?”

The homunculus seemed to recognize Iolanda with the hair coiled in its chest, and it toddled up to her and grabbed at her skirts with its stumpy fingerless hands, leaving dirty traces on the fine silk.

“We better put it in the jar.” Niobe scooped the weakly resisting creature into its glass jail and stopped the jar before it could crawl out. She handed the jar to Iolanda. “There.”

Iolanda studied the creature through the glass, her full lips twisting in disgust.

Niobe explained how to feed the homunculus, and Iolanda looked even more doubtful.

She turned the jar this way and that, but no matter how she tried to turn the blind embryonic visage away from her, the homunculus always managed to turn to face her. “I don’t even know if it’s worth it,” Iolanda said. “Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate your fine work. It’s just—”

“That’s fine,” Niobe said cheerfully. “I’m sure Loharri would pay double for it—his hair is in too, so he can command it as well as you.”

Iolanda frowned, then unexpectedly laughed. “All right,” she said. “You made your sale, clever girl. Say, would you like a nicer bed than what you have right now?”

“And what would that entail?” Niobe asked, still smiling.

“Come stay with me. No one would hassle you there.”

“What will I do?”

Iolanda shrugged. “Minor remedies. And keeping me company. Most of my servants are automatons, not nearly as clever as Mattie, and they are dreadful conversationalists. In fact, they do not speak at all, they only listen and do as they are told.”

“That may be,” Niobe said. “But what do you really need?”

Iolanda shook her head in mock exasperation. “I want you to keep an eye on this thing you just so cruelly entrusted me with. I don’t want to see it or hear it. It looks like it might bite.”

“It has no teeth,” Mattie offered.

Iolanda continued as if she didn’t even hear Mattie’s interjection. “I won’t treat you as a servant. I know how stuck-up you alchemists are. Just take care of it for me, all right? And I promise I’ll protect you from the enforcers.”

“You’re too kind,” Niobe said.

“All right then! Get your things.” Iolanda thrust the jar with the homunculus in Niobe’s hands, all too eager to get rid of it. “Come on, come on!”

As Niobe hurried to pack up her clothes and her alchemical ingredients, Mattie stood by her bench, unable to quite articulate her hurt. She did not fault Niobe for choosing a better arrangement and greater protection than Mattie could offer. She didn’t even mind that it meant that she chose Iolanda over Mattie. But she was injured to the core that these two had such an easy time liking each other and trusting each other, despite the gulf that was supposed to exist between them. That the flesh women had some secret bond that Mattie did not share, that by implication she was excluded from their thoughts like she was excluded from their conversation. She was just a machine, a clunker one only acknowledged when convenient. For a moment, she regretted betraying Loharri to them—at least, he never made her feel like she did not belong.

With Niobe gone, Mattie distracted herself with her work on stone. She had mixed blood residue with stone dust and given the homunculus a small shaving off her finger for a heart. The animating essence of the blood stirred the slow, lumbering stone, and the homunculus awakened. Mattie had just started to make an emulsion of various minerals and gemstones to feed the homunculus and prod it to talking and divulging its secrets, betraying the bondage it had over the gargoyles. She felt so close now. Then came a knock on the door.

As Mattie walked to open it—just three steps—many thoughts darted through her mind like startled pigeons. It was Niobe, she thought, who had come back to apologize and stay with Mattie despite the inconvenience, because they were friends; it was Iolanda, holding the slender shaft of Mattie’s key in her soft, manicured hands; or it was Loharri who came to take her home forever, because she could not be trusted out of his sight, not even with the traitorous gears ticking in her head, monitoring her heart for any sign of doubt in him.

She opened the door. It was Sebastian—the only possibility she had not considered because she was afraid, Niobe’s insinuations still buzzing subsonically deep in her mind.
You’re in love, you’re in love,
Niobe’s voice teased,
and he does not love you back because you are beneath noticing, you’re nothing but a mindless automaton that can be shoved aside as soon as it starts getting in the way of what a person wants. You are nothing.

Sebastian grabbed her hands and smiled. “Mattie? You’re all right!”

She nodded and took her hands away, demurring. “Loharri fixed me.”

His face grew somber. “I’m sorry I couldn’t.”

“It’s all right,” Mattie said. “No one expected you to.”

“No.” He frowned and sat by the table, in the chair recently vacated by Iolanda. “It’s my fault. I haven’t been practicing my work in years—do you know how much you forget this way? Can you imagine not practicing at all? I couldn’t rejoin the society now if they asked me.”

Mattie looked at him askance. He seemed so alien—always coming and going at odd hours, seemingly untouchable by either the enforcers or mechanics. He was like a gargoyle, hidden, having the gift of making himself invisible—a natural gift, Mattie thought. “Your name was on the list,” she said.

“What list?” He seemed momentarily disoriented by the change of topic but smiled. “What are you talking about, Mattie?”

“Your mechanic medallion was reported missing,” Mattie said. “I saw the list.”

“So? I’m sure there were plenty of others.”

“Yes.” Mattie paused. “Don’t you want to know why we had the list?”

He forced a smile. “Why, Mattie?”

“Because only the mechanics can legally order explosives from the alchemists,” she said. “We suspect that maybe there was a stolen medallion involved.”

Sebastian shrugged. “I wouldn’t know anything about it, Mattie. Ask the gargoyles—they saw me every day; they know I wasn’t involved in anything, no matter who the mechanics want to blame.”

“The gargoyles complain that their feeders are empty.”

“I’m sure the monks will find someone,” Sebastian said, his face coloring with a dark blush. “If they haven’t already.”

“Maybe.” Mattie studied him—she did not suspect him, not really. But there were questions that gnawed at the edges of her thoughts, leaving a latticed pattern of doubt and confusion. And she could not forget that he was a mechanic who knew something of alchemy—and who could say how much he picked up from his mother? Maybe the mechanics kept perfecting their art, making more and more complex things every day, but explosives had been made the same way for centuries. The alchemists enjoyed tradition and camaraderie more than efficiency; Niobe was right about that.

“So what, you gonna start suspecting me now?” Sebastian said. His years spent at playing simpleton with a bucketful of gravel had left their mark in his speech—she noticed it more when he got defensive, retreating into a pretense of simple-mindedness when questioned or confronted.

Mattie shook her head. “I would never suspect you, Sebastian.”

He smiled, still uncertainly. “And why is that?”

She saw no point in pretending—her mask was a part of her, her real face, her clean boyish features. “Niobe thinks I love you,” she said.

Sebastian stopped smiling and looked away. She made him awkward, Mattie realized—everyone felt awkward when they had to say no to someone who’d been kind to them. And occasionally, just out of gratitude, they said yes. “I’m flattered,” he said. “But even people could be mistaken about such things—why, you barely know me.”

“Barely.”

He coughed and got off the chair with an air of determination. There was nowhere to go so he just paced the length of the kitchen—three steps to the door, three back. “Have you seen the new contraption the mechanics are building?” he asked after a bit of frantic pacing.

“No,” Mattie said.

“They’re building it by the pond, not too far from the park. You really should see it—it is fascinating. They call it the Calculator.”

“Oh,” Mattie said. “Loharri mentioned it before—it’s the machine that is supposed to figure out the answers and find those responsible for the bombings, and help us figure out how to run and defend this city.”

“Yes,” Sebastian said. “My, you know a lot of things before they become public knowledge, don’t you?”

Mattie nodded. “Loharri doesn’t keep secrets from me. And the mechanics always talk freely when I’m about—I don’t think they take me seriously at all.”

“It’s their loss,” Sebastian said. “Trust me on this. Will you go see it?”

“Why do you want me to?”

“I thought you would like to meet another very smart machine,” he said.

Mattie shook her head. “It is not smart. It just analyzes—anyone could do that.”

“Why don’t they?”

“Because they don’t know all of the parameters,” Mattie said. “And the same is true for this machine—it doesn’t know everything, and it is unable to decide what’s important.”

She went to see the Calculator anyway. She saw it from afar—its smokestack rose over the trees of the park, gray and white, occasionally colored with the yellows of sulfurous fumes. The machine itself disappointed her—Mattie never dared to think it in such words but she expected an intelligent automaton that looked like her. Instead, it was a gigantic contraption, clanging with metal pistons and spewing steam from multiple pipes and openings covered with grating. It was like an angry house that was hissing and spitting at Mattie, and she did not know why it was so upset.

There were several engineers tinkering with one of the many square modules at the Calculator’s side. Loharri was among them, and Mattie’s instinct was to turn away and run home before he noticed her. She turned and hurried toward the safety of the street, where she would be hidden from his eyes by the buildings and the brightly colored but still-subdued crowd. The absence of dark faces was noticeable to Mattie, and she moved uneasily through the crowd, so homogeneous that Mattie stood out like a red roof in the gargoyles’ district.

“Mattie!”

She turned with ready moan of exasperation, to see Loharri running after her.

“Wait!” He slowed to a somewhat more dignified walk and weaved through the crowd, long and sinuous like an eel. “You don’t have to run every time you see me and make me chase you through the streets. It doesn’t look proper.”

Mattie shrugged. “I wasn’t running. I just didn’t like your Calculator.”

He grinned, briefly flashing his very white teeth. “Please don’t tell me you’re jealous.”

“Of course I’m not.” Mattie shifted on her feet, uncomfortable, all the while studying his face for any subtle change induced by Niobe’s alchemy. “I just think it is loud and dirty.”

He laughed, and bowed with an exaggerated flourish. “You, of course, are much prettier.”

Mattie huffed. “Has it occurred to you that being pretty might not be the height of my ambition?”

“Yes.” He smiled still. “It worries me quite a bit, actually. You were made to be pleasing to the eye and interesting to converse with, not to run off and take up a trade which frankly isn’t that different from the nonsense the Stone Monks ply.”