The Alchemy of Stone (14 page)

Mattie inclined her head. “There was something you wanted to show me?”

He led her to his workshop, which seemed to grow more cluttered by the day. Under the piles of scrap metal and gear trains, racks and pinions, he found a large crate, uncharacteristically well-kept and neatly covered with straw. In it, there were several faces, and Mattie was surprised to discover that they were all different from the one she had worn until then. There were faces with thin noses and upturned noses, plump and narrow lips, high and low foreheads, and a wide variety of cheekbones. “This one sort of looks like you,” Loharri said and picked up a mask that indeed bore some resemblance to the face Mattie had grown accustomed to and recognized as her own—a face with rounded childish cheeks and wide eyes, with a small mouth smiling at some untold secret.

“I like this one better.” The face Mattie picked was unpainted and plain, with features that suggested neither youth nor wisdom of experience. It was a very average face, and Mattie suspected that Loharri considered it a failure and only kept it because he could rarely bear to throw anything away, on the off chance that he might decide that he needed it after all.

Loharri grimaced. “I’m usually not the man to criticize my own work, but I regret to say that you lack artistic taste, Mattie.”

“Can I have it?”

He shrugged. “Why not? It’s only temporary.” He helped her to put it on, and gave her a long appraising look. “Not terrible. But tell me something, my sweet machine, tell me—last time I visited, your face was already off. How’d you managed that?”

“I don’t remember,” Mattie lied. “I don’t remember much of that day—only that Niobe was there to help me.”

“And she’s not a mechanic.”

“Not that I know of,” Mattie answered cautiously. “Does one need to be a mechanic to take my face off?”

“It certainly helps.” Loharri watched her still, with a calm curiosity in his eyes that Mattie found unsettling. “If there was a mechanic who had stopped by, you would tell me, wouldn’t you?”

“Of course.” She made her voice as steady as she could manage. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“This is exactly what I’m trying to figure out,” Loharri said, smiling.

We feel a strange sense of kinship to the people who
are
burning the city down—not to their actions, but they have come from the stone, like us—the ground opened and disgorged them, a whole throng, torches and gaunt faces, as if they were born from the rock and appeared on the surface by magic, already sullen and dissatisfied with the world as it was.

And then we see the deformed spiderlike men crawling out, their long weak arms grabbing onto the rocks as they struggle to exit narrow passages where diamonds and emeralds and rubies hide, where only small bodies and long fingers can reach; they haul themselves out, with little help from their deformed spindly legs, weak from constant crouching. Their red-rimmed eyes blink even though the sun is setting and the shadows are long and velvet-soft. We wonder if these children of stone are to succeed us and if they are the reason for our decline, if the stone has planned it like this, all these centuries ago—that we are to return where we came from and others would come in our stead. But they look weak, and we know that they have been shaped by human hands—the hands that stuffed them into cages where their bodies could not grow; we know that they find it difficult to breathe and can easily suffocate in their sleep—every night is a gamble for them. Like it is for us, we suppose.

We follow them as they crawl, and more emerge from the earth, so pale, so blind, so helpless on the surface. They come in the wake of the first riots, and they watch the orange light tinting the horizon, streaked with black smoke. It’s not like they remember it from last night, but last night was different, too—they did not enter the city but instead crawled to their hovels outside the city wall, to sleep and dream of death. Tonight, they pass through the gates, and we follow them, curious now.

They notice us—we do not know how, but they do, and their red eyes linger as we cling to the city wall, to the buildings.

“Don’t be afraid,” they croak and coo and call us in strangled voices. In their hands they have gems—blue and green and red, the stone that gave birth to them still clinging to their rough uneven edges. They offer the gemstones to us, and we cannot resist—we have been hungry for so long. We descend to the ground, to their level, and we eat the stones out of their hands. Their slender fingers touch our faces in wonder and apprehension, they slide off the abrupt precipices of our cheekbones and noses. The stones taste of cool subterranean depths, and we suddenly miss home.

“Come with us,” they call and coo. “Come with us, help us like you haven’t helped us before.”

“But what can we do?” we say, the shards of emeralds and rubies grating on our worn teeth. “We can only watch.”

“Come with us,” they say and beckon. “There’s stone down in these tunnels, and great twisting passages; there are crystals growing from the low roofs, and there’s fluorescent moss covering the walls.”

“We can’t,” we say, and we move away, the crumbs of gemstones dropping from our lips.

We climb the walls again, and we follow them around the city on their slow, exploratory crawl. They pay us no attention, pretending that they have forgotten about us. But we know better. They are afraid of us, afraid that we will protect our city, and they want to lure us to the tunnels, where we will be out of the way, in the soft cradling embrace of our home. But we cannot go. The city is our responsibility—even though we can only watch.

They crawl toward the fires, drawn to them like all creatures living in the dark. There are men with torches everywhere, and they are not burning but fleeing now—we hear the distant clanging of the buggies and the shouts of their passengers, and musket shots ringing through the streets.

The windows are shuttered, and even the shopkeepers do not leave the safety when they hear the sounds of broken glass. The smells of smoke and jasmine make the air sing, make the darkness so much deeper, so much bluer. The buildings to our east are hidden by the darkness, but the ones to our west are outlined in black against the orange sky which grows brighter, then dims, pulsing, like a living heart.

We find that we are drawn to flames too, and we follow the crawling procession toward it. We taste soot in the air, and we almost weep when we see the scorched gardens, the blackened limbs of the dead trees still exhaling the heat of the recent fire, and we watch an occasional spark crackling and running along the fissures of the burned wood.

The broken windows gape, and there’s no laughter or music; the shots and shouts are far away now, and silence hangs over the formerly beautiful place like a shroud. We wonder where all the people who used to live here went, and then we turn away because we cannot come up with an answer.

But the crawling, seething mass of people below is not deterred—we watch them crawling over the hot cinders and rubble, we hear their soft, strained voices calling to each other. And then they turn back.

They crawl through the silent streets, circumventing the sounds of fighting, distant now, they crawl to the gates as the city around them remains mute but awake—there’s tension in the air, the tension that usually disappears when people sleep, but tonight, they are all watching through the shutters, their eyes glinting occasionally through the narrow slots. They watch and they pray, and just like us, they do not know what to do—they remain inside because once they venture out, they would be compelled to do something. Instead, they choose the dubious safety of the night vigil—even children are not crying—and they watch like we do, somber and quiet, as the gem miners explore the city they had left as children in small cages, as they talk to each other in tones of hushed wonder.

And we think the same thing the people in the locked houses think—or at least, we like to think that they do think about that, we like to think that as they look at the human spiders and their quick but uncertain crawl, they silently whisper to themselves,
what have we done
?

Chapter 14

Mattie waited for Loharri to wake up, and idly picked through the icebox. He appeared to have gone to the market the day before, and she inhaled the smells of foods she could not consume—figs and pomegranates, fresh berries and coconut milk. She was satisfied with the smell alone.

She thought that the figs—dark-red, almost purple—looked like tiny hearts, and the juice of the pomegranates was the color of human blood. She had no instruments, but in the kitchen she mashed the fig pulp awkwardly with her fingers, whispering the secret words she had learned from Ogdela—the words, Ogdela insisted, that could heal the heart of the world if only said right and with enough conviction. She poured the pomegranate juice over the red pulp when Loharri, still half-asleep, stumbled into the kitchen.

“Something smells good,” he said, his voice still hoarse from sleep.

Mattie nodded. She liked the smell of people right after they slept—it was a warm, musky smell that made her feel at home and at peace. “How much damage did they do?”

Loharri shrugged and scooped a blob of fig and pomegranate mix with his fingers. “Mmmm,” he said. “Delicious. As for the damage, I truly do not know. I don’t want to know, frankly. I don’t think the city treasury has enough money for a decent rebuilding effort.”

“You’re thinking of rebuilding?” Mattie watched him eat. Not the heart of the world, but if she could fix his heart it would be enough. “How do you know they won’t come back?”

He stopped eating. “You think they will.”

“I think they might. The enforcers kicked them out of the city this time, but . . . ”

“I see your point.” Loharri finished his meal, stretched, and paced. “What is it they want?”

Mattie told him about the men who attacked her yesterday. “They don’t like being replaced in the fields by machines. They don’t like being forced into the mines. I can’t say I blame them.”

“We all have a role to play. Otherwise, society couldn’t function.”

“I never hear it from people with miserable roles,” Mattie said.

“Not everyone can be a mechanic. Or an alchemist for that matter, or a courtier.”

“They don’t want that,” Mattie answered. “They just want to be peasants again. Just that.”

Loharri sighed. “I better go and check on the Calculator. It was pretty well guarded, but still . . . ”

Mattie shook her head. It surprised her how little affected by the riots Loharri appeared—he seemed to see them as a minor inconvenience; he was not able to grasp that the order of the world—or at least the city—had changed fundamentally. To him, the mechanics were still in charge and business continued as usual, and the riots were nothing but a minor wrinkle in the fabric of life, easily shrugged off, smoothed out, and forgotten.

“I don’t think you understand,” she said. “They will return, in greater numbers. They will take the city over.”

Loharri laughed. “You’re over-dramatizing, Mattie. Your imagination is running away with you.”

“Look through the window,” she said. “Then tell me that everything is unchanged.”

He obeyed, nonchalant. He stared out of the window, over the rose bushes and into the streets clogged with traffic—caterpillars, lizards, men and women and children, in vehicles and on foot, most of them carrying or carting hastily assembled parcels of their belongings. Despite the commotion, the people remained curiously quiet—even children didn’t cry but remained serious and subdued. The caterpillars ground, metal on metal, and the lizards gave an occasional troubled bark—the only sounds in the street.

“Everyone has lost their minds,” Loharri observed. “They are dimmer than cattle.”

“They are not stupid. They are afraid. Maybe you should be, too.”

He stared into the street, his hand resting on the window trim. Mattie wished she could see his face when he said, “Do you suggest I run, too?”

“No,” Mattie said. “But you might want to start taking this seriously. Maybe stop scapegoating people and look for real culprits. Or listen to their demands and reach an agreement. Or maybe just find out what happened to the courtiers.”

“Who cares about them?”

“I do. Iolanda was there too.”

He shook his head without turning. “She wasn’t. I went there yesterday, but her automatons told me that she had left. I assumed she moved to the seaside with the rest of them, grew bored . . . but maybe she knew it was coming.”

“What about Niobe?”

“That alchemist friend of yours?” He turned around, grinning. “What, did she ditch you for Iolanda?”

Mattie nodded.

“Hm,” he said. “Apparently, there is an entire female conspiracy behind my back. What was it exactly you were doing for Io? And what does that girl have to do with it?”

“Iolanda bought perfume from both of us,” Mattie said.

He made a face. “Dear girl, you can’t possibly believe I’m dense enough to believe this foolishness?”

“But it is true,” Mattie insisted.

“I’m sure. You’re a bad liar, Mattie, and you know as well as I do that even if she did indeed buy some fragrant nonsense from you, it doesn’t form the basis of your association. Although I do appreciate your effort at at least partial veracity.” He laughed. “But you’re not going to tell me, are you?”

Mattie shook her head. He couldn’t really punish her, she thought; the days when he had enough power over her to take away her eyes so that she stumbled through the house blindly were gone now. Still, she worried that he would find another way to punish her disobedience.

Instead, he said, “Let me get dressed, and I’ll go see what is going on at the Parliament. You’re welcome to come along, of course—especially if you have any idea as to who the real culprit is.”

“I don’t,” Mattie said.

“No matter. Your leader Bokker just might.”

Mattie waited for him to get ready, listening for the soft stockinged footsteps and the rustling of clothes. Of course Bokker knew about Sebastian—of course he would tell the mechanics, to drive suspicion from the alchemists if nothing else. And they will look for him; she only hoped they wouldn’t search her house—even if he wasn’t there.

She felt a forceful pang of guilt when she thought about the last time she saw Sebastian. She had gained enough distance from the event to think about it now, but the shame and turmoil remained strong. She told herself that she had done nothing wrong, that this was what people were supposed to do when in love—and yet, he was the only one besides Loharri who had touched her secret place. She imagined what it would be like to give him her key, to let him wind her—and instead, she recoiled at the thought. If she were to get her key back, she thought, no one but her would ever touch it. She would wind herself well in advance so that she would never need to rely on another to keep herself alive.

They had to push through the crowd all the way to the ducal district, where the temple and the Parliament still stood but felt separate from the teeming life around them, like relics of a bygone era. They did not belong, Mattie thought, just like the gargoyles on the roof did not belong to the world around them. For the first time, she doubted her assignment—perhaps, she thought, she shouldn’t interfere with the natural order of things, perhaps it would be better to let the gargoyles pass into the realm of legends entirely. Perhaps they were turning to stone simply because there was no place for them.

Yet, it wasn’t true, Mattie told herself. There would always be nooks and fissures where ancient things born of stone could survive. There was no reason to let them go simply because the world was changing; ushering in the new did not have to mean discarding the old. Did it?

“What are you thinking about?” Loharri said. They were approaching the Parliament, deserted in contrast to the rest of the city save for a few enforcers guarding it—it seemed that everyone was eager to get away, and Mattie doubted that the Parliament building would be open.

To her surprise, once they stepped inside they were ushered along by several enforcers. “Emergency meeting,” they informed Loharri. “Would you like to leave your automaton here?”

“No, I want her along,” Loharri said.

They didn’t argue—apparently, they had more important things to worry about, and Mattie followed Loharri to the second floor, into a darkened and plush room dominated by a large oak table. Almost the entire parliament and a few other mechanics and alchemists sat around it. Loharri took a seat, and Mattie remained standing behind his chair, close to the wall, in the shadows where she betrayed her presence with only occasional glinting of metal and quiet ticking.

She listened to the men talk, and the same sense of disbelief and dread as she felt in Loharri’s kitchen descended upon her—they talked as if the destruction outside was a temporary event, a tornado, disruptive but fleeting. They talked about containment and rebuilding, they talked about reforms as if the city itself hadn’t turned on them; Bokker babbled about the missing medallions and the necessity to find Sebastian—or whoever he could’ve given his medallion to. The mechanics confirmed that his medallion was never surrendered upon his expulsion, and that they knew he was up to no good.

At this point, Loharri turned to look at her. Mattie remained motionless, her new face as mercifully blank as her old one. “What?” she whispered. “Do you need something?”

He shook his head and turned back.

Mattie listened to Bokker and Bergen argue about the measures that had to be taken—how they would look for Sebastian, and what they would have to do to stem the riots. “Cut the head off and the body will die,” Bokker said, and the rest nodded sagely.

Mattie wanted to scream at them that it wasn’t that simple—it wasn’t just Sebastian, there were others. Thousands of miners and peasants, the workers in the automaton factories and those who cleaned the garbage off the streets—they probably didn’t even know about Sebastian, and they wouldn’t miss him.

She left the meeting quietly, her steps muted by the thick carpet, her skirts whispering against the wall as she exited.

She pushed through the crowd, heading for the gates—she wanted to make sure that Ilmarekh wasn’t harmed by the violence, defenseless as he was alone in his this house, blind and weak.

The gates were guarded now—the enforcers swarmed like flies, their caterpillars staining the air with acrid black smoke. Those leaving the city were not detained, and she slid past the enforcers and their eyes hidden under the faceplates of their helms.

She ran up the hill and knocked on the Soul-Smoker’s door. He was there, thankfully whole and in high spirits. He sat by the fireplace where the last flames still guttered and smoldered, his pipe in his pale hand. He smiled when he heard her wooden footfalls, and waved his pipe festively.

“I’m glad that you are all right,” he said.

“I’m glad they didn’t harm you,” she replied.

He smiled a bit, his thin fingers fiddling with the buttons on his waistcoat. “Why would they? I am sympathetic.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Mattie replied. “It doesn’t matter to them.”

She had realized something last night, and the terror of the understanding weighed heavily on her mind. It didn’t matter what one thought or did—once perceived as an enemy by a malignant, blind force, one would be treated as such. Those who prided themselves in their intelligence and ability to rule and those who rebelled against them were just like the mindless automatons collecting the dead bodies and limbs amidst the carnage, like the enforcers that moved through the eastern district arresting whoever they saw fit and handing them over to the Soul-Smoker. There was no difference whatsoever; Mattie had been mistaken to think that there was, that they would listen to her.

“I don’t think you know what you are talking about,” Ilmarekh answered with a slight frown. “I can be useful to them—I am useful to anyone. You’re just afraid of change.”

“Of course I am!” Mattie stomped her foot, and the entire house shook. “Everyone should be afraid of change—people die in such times.”

“It has to get worse before it gets better.”

“Maybe.” Mattie paced across the narrow room. At least he recognized that the change was happening, unlike the old men at the Parliament. “I saw the mechanics and the alchemists today . . . they are talking about repressing the riots. Defusing the situation, as they call it. The miners will get better wages—they will promise them, at least. I don’t think they have enough money to do that, but they’ll promise, and they think it’ll be enough. Do you think it’ll be enough?”

“I’m afraid it just might be,” Ilmarekh answered with a sigh. “They are just people, Mattie. They don’t want to burn buildings and kill people. Even when it is called for.”

Mattie was not assured of the alleged docility of the men who almost killed her yesterday, but she did not argue. “Just be careful,” she said.

Ilmarekh nodded and slouched by the fireplace, groping for a cinder that could be coaxed into lighting his pipe. Mattie found one for him and held it close to the pipe as he puffed on the stem, his brow wrinkled. The opium, resinous and moist, caught fire reluctantly, and Mattie smelled the sweet, cloying smoke. The spirits stirred as soon as the twin serpentine wisps of smoke curled from Ilmarekh’s flared nostrils—the souls pried his mouth open and babbled, their voices mingling into an indistinct cacophony of word fragments and pained exclamations.