The Alchemy of Stone (18 page)

She felt no satisfaction from her accomplishment but rather an emptiness she did not know how to fill—there was nothing left to do. The thoughts shifted sluggishly in her mind, as the gears turned and clicked with unusual hesitation. There was Sebastian and Iolanda and Niobe, none of whom wanted her. There was Loharri, who did not want her anymore either. Then there was the key—her key, the key that would spark her back to life. When she would be her own mistress, she would find a mechanic to fix whatever was wrong with her. And yet none of this seemed important next to the gargoyles, transformed by her alchemy.

They nudged her, gentle, still in awe of their new hands. “Shouldn’t we go after them?”

She looked after the pointing fingers, flushed gloriously golden, a real life pulsing within them. “Go after who?”

“Them.”

Then she forced her eye to move from the gargoyles to the object of their attention—the enforcers trudging dutifully toward the mouth of the mine. There were enough of them to open the hidden entrance, Mattie thought. There were too many of them to follow. “No,” she said. “They have muskets. They will kill us—even you. You are not what you used to be, remember that. You are mortal now. You can be killed.”

The gargoyle faces turned fearful, and she hurried to reassure them. “They won’t do anything unless you provoke them. And following them now would be provoking. Come on, you must know of other ways to get underground.”

The gargoyles nodded, all together, like they always did. “There is a secret place inside the city, near the district that burned first.”

“Can you take me there?”

They did not answer but swept her up again, holding her securely aloft, and flew.

The time of inactivity let Mattie think in ways she wasn’t able to while walking—she could force her thoughts into an organized pattern, to stack them against each other, to decide on priorities. Ilmarekh was dead, and she was done looking after the others. She needed her key so that she could take care of herself, not needing anyone’s condescending help or grudging friendship. And to get her key, she needed Iolanda. But not just as a friend; Mattie could call on a promised favor. And after that, the sting of their indifference would be tempered by Mattie’s knowledge that she did not need them. Perhaps then Sebastian would love her back.

The gargoyles landed just inside the northern gates. Mattie’s legs still felt wobbly, but she steadied herself, and bent them a few times, making sure that sensation and flexibility were still present. “Where to?” Mattie asked. The ruins of the orphanage towered above her.

The gargoyles pointed at what appeared as a small hollow in the ground—overgrown with sun-scorched grass, and quite unremarkable in itself. When she looked closer, she discovered an uneven patch of ground, with only a thin gap outlining its irregular shape.

The gargoyles gathered around it and fitted their fingers into the gap. They lifted the thin slab of stone, with grass still clinging to it, and Mattie felt the wet, dark exhale of the shaft mouth, with its familiar scent of stale air and deep underground wet and warm stone.

“Will you come?” she asked the gargoyles.

They shook their heads in unison. “We must go now, but we will see you again.”

Mattie descended underground, not looking back. There was no point in watching the luminous, winged figures soar over the still-beautiful city when one was about to descend into a dark place.

Her new eye could not see in the darkness, and she kept one hand on the wall of the tunnel, feeling her way with one foot. Her progress was slow and laborious, and Mattie worried that she had taken a wrong turn somewhere and was now heading down an abandoned dead end, where she would never be discovered, and would be unable to find her way back. She took mental notes of the bumps on the wall, of any distinguishing features she felt on the ground—an abandoned axe handle, a bundle of rags.

When Mattie saw a weak glint on the walls of the tunnel, she did not dare to believe that she was nearing the end of her journey. It could be the faulty eye or some underground fluorescent life; it could be anything. She did not let the hope take hold until the glint became a steady glimmer, an inviting white dot of light with thin rays radiating from it, and the stale, warm breath of the tunnel brought with it smells of burning lamp oil and sounds of human voices.

She emerged into the light and space with the walls receding at a distance, so suddenly large and free, and she cried out in relief and anguish. Her eye took a long time adjusting to light in the cave, and people around her appeared as blurs. They asked her questions, but their words all buzzed together, like the sound of flies that now swarmed in the streets, and instead she spoke. She told them about the enforcers who went down the other tunnel. She told them that the mechanics knew.

She felt arms wrapping around her, and for a moment she thought that they belonged to the gargoyles, that somehow the transformed creatures had found her in the darkest underground. She squinted and recognized Niobe’s face close to her, with Iolanda just behind. Both women looked changed—their features had grown gaunter, sharper, and their eyes seemed more knowing than before.

“Loharri,” Mattie said to Iolanda. “He knows about the tunnels, and he knows about you and the other courtiers. Don’t let him get to you, don’t let him take your spell away.”

Iolanda shook her head. “Don’t worry about that now, Mattie. What happened to you?”

Mattie’s legs wobbled.

“We need a mechanic here,” Niobe shouted into the interior of the cave. “This woman is ill.”

It was nice to be attended to, Mattie thought. Niobe and Iolanda made a fuss, insisting that she sit down by the wall, on a stack of empty crates. Everything in the cave seemed scavenged from the surface, and the smell of mold and rotten fruit clung to the crates as Mattie sank into them.

“What happened to you?” Niobe asked. And added, in a small whisper, “I’m sorry.”

Mattie told her—she told her about how worried she was, wandering through the burning district; she told her about the assault and Loharri’s betrayal, about the death of the Soul-Smoker and the gargoyles’ transformation.

“That was very clever of you,” Niobe interrupted her story. “I’m glad that you’ve succeeded.”

“Thank you for your aid,” Mattie said. “The things you taught me were beneficial.”

Niobe nodded. “I have to say the same to you. I’ve been caring for the wounded, and I couldn’t have done it without the knowledge of plants. Thank you for teaching me.”

“I hope we will be able to teach each other again soon,” Mattie said. She felt vulnerable now, and clung to the warmth in Niobe’s voice despite her earlier resolutions. “It is so much nicer than . . . this.” Her arm traced an arc in the air.

Niobe smiled at her vague gesture. “Indeed,” she said. “I think everyone is eager for the fighting to end. But I suppose it will be different.”

“They will always need alchemists,” Mattie said. “As long as people get hurt they’ll need us.”

Iolanda listened to their conversation with the impatient expression which she seemed to acquire whenever she was not talking. “This is all well and good,” she said. “But I can’t believe what this bastard had done to you.”

Mattie nodded and cringed at the clicking sound in her neck and the difficulty of such a simple movement. “I’m sure he feels the same way about me. I’ve betrayed him.”

Iolanda shrugged. “You had a better reason.”

Mattie did not feel certain that reasons mattered more than deeds themselves, but felt too exhausted to argue. After her initial burst of verbosity she seemed to have run out of words, and so she listened mutely as Niobe and Iolanda called for a mechanic again and busied themselves with rearranging the crates. Mattie’s heart groaned in laborious beats that seemed to fall farther and farther away from each other. And what did it matter? she thought. If her heart stopped, no one but Loharri would be able to revive her. And maybe as time went on he would forgive her. She could last like this, immobile, awaiting the gentle scraping of the key as it entered the keyhole, a slow turn and a click that would bring her back. Perhaps it would be better to wait until she was forgiven and things had sorted themselves out, so she could awake to a semblance of normalcy. It would be nice just to sleep the chaos away, and wake up in the world where Loharri did not hate her. Even in her pitiful state Mattie realized that it was not likely.

“Iolanda,” she said. “Please use the homunculus soon.”

“It’s not my decision . . . ” Iolanda started.

Mattie held up her hand. “I know. You want to wait until you have control of the city. But I cannot wait that long. Get my key for me, please. Even if my heart stops. You can wind me again. Just get my key, I beg of you.”

Iolanda nodded. “I will, I promise. Don’t worry about a thing.” She looked over her shoulder and threw her hands into the air. “Finally!” she said. “About time a mechanic showed up.”

As Mattie had hoped, it was Sebastian. He nudged Mattie to her feet. “Come on,” he said gently. “Come to my workshop, and we will get you fixed up.”

“My key,” Mattie whispered.

“Shhh,” Sebastian said. “Don’t worry about a thing—we’ll get you back on your feet yet.”

Mattie nodded and tried not to worry as she followed him through a wide, short corridor to another cave that smelled of metal, machine oil, and explosives.

Chapter 18

We look at everything with our new eyes, eyes attuned
to noticing flesh before stone. No longer are we paying attention to the buildings, but rather to the buzzing of the slow, overfed flies that seem to be everywhere. They smell our sweat and land on our lips and eyes, their buzzing loud and somehow unclean. We wince and wave them off our faces, but we still feel the greasy touch of their tiny claws.

And the smell . . . the mindless automatons are clearing the streets, but too few of them had survived the riots. Even those that did are in a poor shape—they stumble about, and some of their limbs are missing. And they collect the bodies of the dead miners the enforcers do not bother to pick up anymore. They still carry off their own after skirmishes, but we see the fatigue in their eyes, and we guess that soon they will abandon their bodies too.

There is a smell of rotting garbage everywhere, and it takes us a while to realize that it is coming from the dead bodies, stripped of their poor clothing and crude weapons by the scavengers. We recognize the scavengers too, hiding in the shadows—the light-eyed feral children let loose after the Stone Monks left the city.

We suddenly feel fearful and apprehensive, naked in our perishable flesh, and for just a moment we wish we could go back to being stone—crumbling in death rather than rotting, trapped inside an immobile prison of stone rather than reduced to immaterial souls like those that now rattled within our skulls. The moment passes. There is no point in regretting irreversible decisions—one has to live with them, and we try.

We move toward the building of the Parliament—the windows are yellow with light, even though it is morning, and we know that they have been in there all night, too preoccupied to remember to conserve oil, which is going to run out soon, just like everything else in the city.

We climb up the walls and crouch on the windowsills. They don’t see us, too preoccupied with peering inward and at each other. They seem worn now, ragged—their eyes are red and swollen, and their soft cheeks are peppered with steel-gray and dark stubble. And as we cling to the narrow windowsills, we feel the taut muscles in our legs cramping, we feel our fingers relax their grip on the window frames, fatigued, and suddenly we understand—in our bones!—how tired these people are, how vulnerable and hurt. Just like the ones fighting in the streets below, just like the ones waiting in the tunnels, just like the merchants in the market square and their skittish customers.

An explosion rocks the air, and a blast of warm and almost solid wind knocks us off our perch. We recover mid-air and spread our wings to buffet the fall, to let us land softly, with dignity and grace.

We look around, to locate the source of the explosion, but we cannot see if any buildings are missing: we would need to be higher, away from the ground. We hear a soft tinkling, and we look up, to see the shards of glass raining down from the destroyed windows of the Parliament, falling like jagged ice crystals; it is a miracle that we are not harmed.

We climb up the wall, pressing closely against it, so that the men who are now looking out of the windows—the unshaven and red-eyed alchemists and mechanics—can’t see us, but they are not even looking in our direction. They are pointing west, to the districts where the destruction has been the greatest.

We run through the layout of the city in our minds—there are houses there mostly, and the barracks of the enforcers not far from the western gate; there are telegraphs and the markets, there are factories. All of them seem like equally likely targets, and none of them matter.

It was the second time that Mattie found herself naked in Sebastian’s presence, and from his pretend lightheartedness and joking manner she surmised that he was thinking about it too. She wanted to ask him now, why did he go along with it? Why did he make love to her—was it a fetish of a mechanic enamored with intricate devices and easily prompted to express his affection the moment a device resembled a girl, or was it something else? She did not know how to ask, and her sluggish mind refused to do any more work than was strictly necessary—another self-preservation mode Loharri built into her, undoubtedly passing along the ridiculous desire to live despite one’s inevitable mortality.

Sebastian checked her joints, oiling and adjusting fiddly little parts in her knees. It hurt only a little.

“Pity,” Sebastian said. “I wish you didn’t feel it, like other automatons.” He still regretted their encounter, he still wished she hadn’t shown up to remind him.

“There’s a module in my head that disconnects the sensation,” Mattie said. “Only I don’t really know where it is exactly. And I didn’t like the last time it was used—I think this is why I’m so poorly now.”

“I won’t touch it,” Sebastian promised. “But I’ll have to check inside your head, to make sure there’s nothing broken there.”

“Last time you said you didn’t know how I worked,” Mattie said.

“I don’t. But I can still see if the gears are misaligned or if the connectors are missing or detached. Now that I’ve seen how it’s supposed to look.”

“I think I will need winding soon,” Mattie whispered, her voice giving out and then coming back again. “I need my key—make sure Iolanda gets it for me.”

“I will,” Sebastian said. His voice sounded so earnest that Mattie believed him. “I promise you I will.” He thought a bit, his hand clasping his chin absent-mindedly. “Maybe I could take a cast of the keyhole and machine you a new one. I have the equipment here.”

Of course, Mattie thought. They machined keys—Iolanda and the rest had access to every important keyhole in the city. That was why they could place the explosives wherever they wanted. In her muddled state, the walls of the cave—dimly lit, just bare hints of solid matter under the gauze of shadows—reminded her of the dark paneling of Loharri’s workshop. It smelled the same, and was just as cluttered, and Sebastian became Loharri in her mind and then himself again. Perhaps that was why the thought of a second key in another mechanic’s hands scared her.

“No,” she whispered. “Just let Iolanda or Niobe get my only key—I do not want more than one, I do not want anyone but me to have it. And I don’t want anyone but them touching it.”

Sebastian smiled. “Not even me?”

“Especially not you,” Mattie said. “No offense meant.”

“None taken,” he replied. “Maybe just a temporary one? I’ll give it to you right away.”

The vexing survival module let itself known again. “Yes,” Mattie whispered, and the shadows grew darker around her. “Just a temporary one then.”

“I will need to take a print,” Sebastian said.

Mattie nodded her consent and watched him take the glass bubble off the lamp, and heat a metal tin over the flames. When it started crackling and smelling of hot metal, he dropped a lump of wax into the tin, letting it soften but not melt. He tossed the tin down and blew on his fingers. The lump of wax had grown transparent around the edges, and Sebastian rolled in his hands, letting it cool a bit, stretching it between his fingers.

When the warm, fragrant wax touched her skin, Mattie gasped. This touch felt so alive, so gentle. The pliable wax pushed into the opening of the keyhole, and Mattie tensed, waiting for the turn of a key. None came, of course—it was silly to expect one, and yet she was so attuned to being wound that she could not completely extinguish her anticipation and excitement.

“Stay still,” Sebastian whispered. He pressed on the wax lump with his hand, and Mattie looked away. Not because she felt awkward (although she did), but because he was so mechanic-like now—his lips pursed in concentration, his eyes narrowed, he thought only about the task at hand, forgetting everything about Mattie. It struck her, in the slow, grating way her thoughts had acquired, how much like Loharri he was. She found it neither comforting nor disturbing, just odd.

Sebastian extracted the wax and squinted at it. “Son of a bitch,” he muttered.

“What?”

Sebastian shook his head. “Look.”

The wax looked like a simple narrow cylinder, devoid of any marks. “It doesn’t look like my key,” Mattie said.

“Of course it doesn’t. It’s protected, see—the outer opening is more narrow than the internal mechanism.”

“I think he told me once that it’s a complex key.”

“That’s an understatement,” Sebastian agreed. “It opens up once it’s inside and fits into the grooves. But I can’t make a print of it.”

Mattie lowered her eyes. “He didn’t want me to be able to get a copy. Even if I had thought of it earlier, I couldn’t have done it.”

Sebastian stared. “You never thought of it before?”

Mattie shook her head, and the joints in her neck whined. “I always thought of it as the only key. If there were more, it would be . . . disconcerting.” She thought a while, straining after some thought that kept flickering at the edges of her mind. Finally, she remembered. “Did Iolanda tell you about the thing in my head?” she murmured.

“No,” he said. “What thing in your head?”

She told him about Loharri and about her unwilling betrayal.

He listened, his hands clasped behind his back, his face carefully composed. But she could tell that he was upset: from the tendons in his neck, from the way they stood out under his skin. “You sure he took it out?” he said.

Mattie nodded.

“No matter,” Sebastian said, and reached for her face. “I’m going to take a look inside anyway. Let’s see what’s in there, hm?”

Mattie did not protest—it was just another punishment, she thought, her punishment for having done something wrong. She submitted to Sebastian’s hands taking off her face and popping out her eye, to his strong fingers digging with such cool nonchalance in her head. She felt him flipping switches and adjusting gears, and sometimes she blacked out, just for a moment, but she always came to. He found the switch that rendered her immobile. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I have to turn you off for a little while. I promise you will feel better.”

When Mattie came to, the quality of light in the cave remained the same—why would it change, after all, underground so deep that time did not dare to penetrate it. But it felt like time had passed—the oil in the lamps seemed lower, and Sebastian looked older, a dark shadow of stubble appearing on his face.

Mattie was relieved to have woken up, and to be able to see. She felt better too—her neck turned without grinding, and her thoughts flowed quicker and smoother, without the annoying snags of forgotten words or memories. He had managed to fix her, at least partially. “Thank you,” Mattie said. “I feel much better.”

He nodded. “Don’t mention it.”

Mattie hesitated. “What do I do now?”

He shrugged. “Whatever you want. I don’t advise going to the surface, though—there’s still fighting there.” He raked his hands through his hair. “I don’t know what they are hoping for—we are right under them! And still they build fortifications. They have a machine that detects vibrations now, so every one of the last raids to the surface was anticipated. Explosives seem to be the way to go, but . . . ” He stopped talking abruptly, and waved his hand in the air. “Go, Mattie. Find your friends. I have things to do.”

Her heart still whined occasionally, and the beats remained irregular. But there was no point in sulking or wishing that he didn’t treat her as an inconvenience. Mattie found one of the lamps that people underground wore on their heads, and she went exploring. The underground tunnels branched and multiplied and widened into caves, the intricate network rife with startling surprises—Mattie wandered through the labyrinth, occasionally finding hidden caches of explosives or food or clothes or equipment; sometimes she found secret groups of people; a few of them were spiders, and they watched Mattie silently out of their dark, sunken eyes. In the dusk, their eyes glistened deep within their sockets like the gems which the spiders often carried in their long hands—as reminders, Mattie guessed, or mementos. Or perhaps they were just entranced with their soft glow. The spiders rarely talked—Mattie supposed it was difficult for them, with their wheezing, whistling breaths. They made Mattie feel uneasy.

When she passed people in the tunnels, she tried not to look at the crates they carried, and she did not ask what part of the city they were going to. She did not ask about what happened to the enforcers who had gone underground before her eyes, and whether they found anything but the abandoned tunnels.

Other times, she helped Niobe to care for the wounded—there were few of them, and the two alchemists had no trouble mixing enough potions and unguents. They talked only of alchemy—Mattie shared her little secrets and contrivances about the use of aloe leaves or chamomile flowers; she taught Niobe to make a strong, tart-smelling brew of green blackberry branches and to apply it to the bandages for stopping bleeding. She talked about her concoctions with a sense of urgency; she never said it out loud, but with a fear that her heart might give out at any moment, she wanted to pass on as much of her knowledge as she could. Niobe did not talk about it either, but she remained alert and attentive.