The Alchemy of Stone (10 page)

“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 fuck. 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.

Chapter 10

We follow the girl as she walks through noisy streets,
crawling with the vile mechanical contrivances that did not come from the stone. The girl walks as if blind, stumbling over the cobbles, and we hear her heart whir and whine deep inside her, creaking with tears she will never weep. We are glad that she is gone from the place of sorrow, where so many of our children have perished and so many others have behaved badly.

Content that she is on her way home, we turn and leap from roof to roof, our toes grasping shingles like steps; our wings balance us, keep us steady. We follow the inverse labyrinth of the buildings, the negative reflection of the streets between them, to a different location.

We see a small, white-haired man who used to move like a crab when he was little, but who has now learned to walk upright, with dignity and grace. He has words now, and we are proud of him, as proud as we are of any we like to follow. He moves toward the place the girl has just left, the pulsing streets converging on the ugly stone heart of the city, and we almost wish we hadn’t built it.

Everyone flees at his approach; the soulless creatures like ourselves are the only ones who are immune to his repulsive charms. We remember the time he swallowed his first soul, as we remember all the countless others, gone up in smoke and inhaled by his wide loving mouth. He is nothing but loving.

The courtyard of the jail is filled with people, but they too flee as he gets closer; they go into the jail building and wait inside. The only man left in the courtyard is the stranger—red earth, salty sea, hands bound, feet shackled, and nowhere to run.

The white-haired man, the smoker of souls, stands before him, quietly, mildly. “Are you ready?” he asks, his eyes of milk staring over the stranger’s head into the infinity of the jail walls.

The stranger shakes his head side to side, the frantic motion of a terrified child.

“Shh,” the blind man says, “shhh.” He takes the face of the prisoner into his hands, and the stranger goes limp and docile.

The blind man’s hands are soft and gentle, and he touches his lips to the stranger’s.

The stranger tries to keep his mouth closed, but it is of no use. His soul, sensing the companionship of many others, presses on his lips from the inside, and he finally gives with a loud exhalation. His lips brush against the blind man’s and open, and the two men stand for a while, eye-to-eye, mouth-to-mouth, and we listen to the hissing of the escaping soul, we watch the stranger’s eyes go white and empty like the clouds, and we hear the clink of his shackles as he collapses on the pavement, formless and soft like water.

A mindless automaton enters the courtyard and approaches the blind man who is motionless, his narrow chest expanded as if by an impossibly big breath.

“You have done your duty,” the automaton says in a grating voice, uncolored by either emotion or understanding. “Write your report by tomorrow morning; someone will be by to pick it up.”

We regret that he has to do it, we regret that among the souls that could not find rest there are others, to whom rest was denied in favor of extracting confessions. We know that our children are mendicant—they speak of never killing anyone, but they let buildings and the smoker of souls take the lives of those they cannot be bothered to kill themselves.

We did not want it to be like this, but what can we do? We are naught but a shadow of a distant memory, whispering in the rain gutters, clambering along the rooftops; we are nothing but decorations on the building, amusing in our grotesque bodies and webbed wings. We have heard of other cities where the buildings are decorated with statues of angels with golden wings, but we doubt that these angels were ever alive or even real. Most beautiful things are not.

We regret not having finished the story we started to tell to the girl—our understanding of time is vague, but we have a nagging feeling that it would’ve been useful to her. We resolve to tell her soon, and try harder this time, perhaps hold onto her skirts and plead with our eyes. Listen, we should say, listen.

We turn our attention back to the man and the automaton in the jail courtyard. The automaton gives its orders once again. The white-haired man nods and heads back home, the memories and the terror of the newly inhaled soul sloshing inside him heavily, like water in a bucket.

As the days wore on, Mattie noticed the troubling changes in the air—even though she rarely left the workshop these days, preoccupied with her work. She tried to get to the meaning of Sebastian’s words, of understanding the very soul of stone. For that purpose, the burners belched blue flames, and the alembics filled with ground stone were heated to a red glow.

She studied the transformation of stone. It turned the flames yellow and blue and sometimes green, it could be dissolved in Aqua Regis, and with enough heat, parts of it sublimated, leaving behind a hard and latticed carcass.

The stone was complex, as Mattie realized, consisting of many minerals so blended together that one could have no hope of separating them for individual study, and had to deduce the composition of it from its behavior during many transformations she subjected it to.

Mattie also taught Niobe—not about the blood alchemy but of the elements and their manifestations. She described the salamanders that lived in and commanded fire as golden lizards, and Undinae—as small girl automatons fashioned with webbed fins instead of arms and legs. Niobe laughed at her claims that she was able to see the salamanders, and Mattie did not really mind. She offered small sacrifices to the salamanders by burning some fragrant herbs along with stone, asking them to help her solve the riddle of the gargoyles.

But the stone alchemy was not the only thing that occupied her days and nights—having no need for sleep, Mattie felt superior sometimes at being able to accomplish twice as much in a day as any other alchemist. She worked on the stone during the day, when the light was bright enough to see the spectral colors and emanations; during the night, she practiced blood alchemy.

A deal was a deal, and she learned the new craft with dark satisfaction. She made a small homunculus from rendered sheep blood, with the heart woven from Iolanda’s and Loharri’s hair. The homunculus was still, waiting to be awakened in order to ensnare Loharri’s soul. The process took her longer than she wanted, but her learning was hindered by her inability to ask Niobe pertinent questions—she was ashamed to ask about compulsion and denial of will, and she feared that if Niobe found out about such practices, she would think poorly of Mattie. So Mattie saved the darkness for the night; night was for wounding.

During the day she helped Niobe decipher the recipes from her little birch bark book, and explained to her the properties of herbs and metals and sheep’s eyes. She showed her how to mix salves that reduced fever and unclouded the troubled mind. Day was for healing.

As the days passed, Mattie noticed a growing unease in Niobe. Mattie’s guilty conscience bounded to her mind’s surface, sending jolts to her heart and making it creak and moan faster and faster, its ticking loud and quick like the song of some demented cricket.

“What’s wrong?” Mattie asked her finally, as the two of them stood at Mattie’s laboratory bench, grinding herbs and extracting essential oils, each lost in her own private musings. “Are you mad at me?”

Niobe looked up from her fragrant aludel. “What? Of course not, Mattie. You’re the only friend I have—why would I be mad at you?”

Mattie shrugged, her pestle grinding against the porcelain interior of the mortar. “You seem upset lately.”

“It’s because I am, but it has nothing to do with you.” Niobe sighed and stirred the ground herbs, encouraging the oils to express. “You stay home, and you don’t see. But if you came by my neighborhood, you’d know.”

“What’s happening there?” Mattie tried not to feel too guilty about not visiting—among her crimes, this one seemed the most trivial.

“The enforcers swarm like black flies.” Niobe crossed her arms over her chest as if she grew suddenly cold, and paced alongside the bench. “They think that it is us, the foreigners who blew up your palace and your Duke.”

“Why do they think that?” Mattie interrupted. “I saw the man they arrested, and it was the wrong man . . . I tried to tell them but they wouldn’t listen.”

“Of course they wouldn’t,” Niobe said. “They decided to blame those they don’t like. They took the jewelers, and they took the bookbinders. They question everyone, men and women, and they threaten to call the Soul-Smoker every time something speaks against them. Half of the easterners left the city to go back home.”

“The Soul-Smoker is a nice man,” Mattie said.

Niobe laughed. “I suppose he is, right up to the moment when he sucks your soul out of you.”

“He has no choice,” Mattie whispered. “And I have no soul.”

Niobe shrugged. “We all have our burdens.”

“You can stay with me,” Mattie said. “Unless you want to go back home?”

Niobe shook her head. “I thought about it, but I won’t go back—at least, not now. I won’t give them the satisfaction.”

“Then stay here,” Mattie said. “It’s safe here, and I can protect you from the mechanics.”

Niobe smiled a little. “You? Protect me? They won’t listen to you.”

“But they’ll listen to Loharri,” Mattie said. “And I have money for bribes, lots of money.”

Niobe nodded slowly. “I suppose you don’t have to spend it on food.”

“No.” Mattie folded her hands, pleading. “Stay with me, I promise I’ll buy you food.”

Niobe laughed and hugged Mattie, her soft breasts giving under Mattie’s hard metal chest, pressing against the keyhole of Mattie’s heart. Mattie hugged back, guilty and grateful. “Thank you, Mattie,” Niobe said. “I would love to stay for a bit—it’s always safer for two than one.”

Mattie thought that she could tell Niobe anything—well, almost anything. She was reluctant to confess her misuse of blood alchemy, and instead decided to confide her next most bothersome secret. “Niobe,” she whispered even though there was no one there to overhear her. “I know a man with a skin like yours . . . he is in hiding, but I worry that now they will pay closer attention to him and find him out. What do you think I should do?”

“It depends,” Niobe said. “What did he do to have to go into hiding?”

“He told me that it wasn’t his fault. I do know that sometimes what people tell you is not the truth; I just don’t know whether to believe it to begin with.”

Niobe shook her head. “Mattie, bless your clockwork heart. You don’t decide to believe—you either do or you don’t.”

“I wouldn’t presume as much as not to believe someone just because people lie sometimes.”

“In this case, you should probably let him know that he is in danger. Only can you do that without endangering yourself? If someone sees you talking to a suspect—and believe me, he is a suspect—your master’s influence won’t save your little metal parts.”

Mattie thought a little. “Yes,” she finally said. “I think I can; we just need to wait until darkness.”

“Great.” Niobe smiled. “Where do you want me to sleep?”

Mattie knew how to make beds, but she wasn’t in possession of one. She decided to create a nice soft bed for Niobe in the warmest place, by the kitchen hearth—the nights were still occasionally nippy. Besides, it would be as far away from the bench as the apartment allowed, and Mattie did not want Niobe disturbed by Mattie’s nocturnal work.

She found a couple of quilts given to her by grateful but poor customers, and collected most of her dresses into a heap. Once she covered them with the quilts, the bed acquired quite satisfactory appearance—not of poverty but of whimsy. Mattie liked that, and so did Niobe.

The sun was still high enough in the sky, and they walked to the market to buy some provisions for Niobe. As they browsed, Mattie noticed a few suspicious stares in Niobe’s direction, and a few merchants refused to trade with them outright.

Niobe just shrugged, even though Mattie guessed that the deepening of the color on Niobe’s cheeks meant that she was more perturbed than she showed.

Nonetheless, Mattie led her to the booth that sold a good variety of herbs, and tried to distract Niobe by explaining how one decided on the plant’s usefulness. “You see,” she pointed at the dried plant with purple flowers, “its leaves are heart-shaped, which means it is suited for heart trouble.”

“Are you referring to the actual heart, or love problems?”

“The latter,” Mattie said. “See? Its shape is not of a real heart but of its symbol.”

“Symbol of a symbol,” Niobe muttered. “I see. What about this one?”

She pointed at the glass jar filled with fresh flowers, plump and red, their three petals dripping with nectar. “That’s for the liver,” Mattie said. “See the three lobes?”

“And this one?” Niobe picked up a dried stem clustered with strange fruit—brown and transversed with fissures. “Brain problems?”