The Alchemy of Stone (5 page)

“Don’t be daft,” a tall stern man said to the girl, never acknowledging Mattie with even a glance. He wore a thick leather apron, and Mattie guessed him to be a shopkeeper. “There’s no war.”

“The gargoyles are taking back what’s theirs,” said an old woman, and wrung a wet shirt she held in her hands in apparent despair, or just out of habit—she must’ve been doing laundry when the quaking started. “Mark my word: they’re pulling the stones back under the ground, where they all belong.”

They stared into the sky, reluctant to move, as if any movement would upset the balance of their souls and bring the reality and its consequences crashing around them, like an avalanche of heavy books. Mattie was the first to break the spell.

She needed to learn what happened, and she had to talk to Loharri. A sickly tingling in her stomach, where all the sophisticated clockworks and mechanisms of her inner workings nestled, told her that her distress was greater than she had initially estimated. The gargoyles, she thought; the gargoyles. Had they been at the palace? Were any of them hurt?

She had almost reached home when with a wave of guilt she realized that she hadn’t even considered the lives of people inside. The Duke and the courtiers had been away—it was the planting season, and they visited the farms to bless the fields. But the servants inside . . . Mattie was not sure if the palace employed any human servants except the housekeepers and the overseers; they would be dead, she thought. But her heart ached more when she thought of the mindless automatons buried in the rubble, their lifeless eyes and broken limbs now just so much refuse, just guts and metal left in the wake of human need for something . . . she did not know what. Like the sheep who never had the chance to feel any pain or to consider their imminent doom.

On her way, Mattie picked up some gossip. She stopped by the public telegraph, a small structure painted yellow, where an ink pen on a long flexible handle endlessly recorded whatever news the operators fed it. She had no hope of reaching it to read herself—the telegraph booth thronged with people eager for the news, who shoved her aside like she was just an obstacle. Most ignored her questions, but from the snippets of their excited chatter to each other she learned the events, if not the precise details or reasons.

As she walked to Loharri’s house, the information kept replaying in her mind. The ducal palace had collapsed; there was talk of an attack from the outside, but the structure imploded and crumbled inwards, and the consensus among the Mechanics was that explosives had been placed inside of the palace. The first explosion destroyed the outside walls and wings, and the second destroyed the palace itself.

Loharri was home. Like most mechanics, he had his own sources of information.

“What do you make of that?” Loharri said when Mattie, trembling with shock and unarticulated animal hurt, showed up on his doorstep.

“I don’t know,” she groaned. “I have to sit down.”

Loharri wrapped his arm around her shoulders, and she was grateful for support and the gentle warmth of his breath. He almost dragged her to his living room that had grown even more cluttered since she last visited, and sat her on the chaise that wore a slight but unmistakable imprint of Loharri’s angular form.

He examined her damaged hand, tisking to himself, and brought out the soldering iron. “I’ll disconnect your sensors while I work,” he said. “You’ll lose all sensation in this arm—don’t be alarmed.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I bought you a book.”

He glanced at the proffered tome and smiled. “Thank you, Mattie. You didn’t have to.”

“I was at the book shop when the explosions happened,” she said. “I don’t understand who would do that. Unless . . . ” She faltered and bit her tongue, but Loharri was too engrossed in his own thoughts and speculations.

“There’s a pattern,” he said. The iron in his hand hissed and exhaled thin streams of smoke that smelled of amber. “Today was the day when most of the court were visiting the countryside. Everyone knows that, so whoever staged it wanted no casualties.”

“Or was looking for easy access without fear of being caught or interrogated.”

Loharri nodded. “Good point, darling. That would indicate an outsider; I was thinking more of an inside job, but you just may be right. Also, note how the explosives were rigged.”

“It collapsed on itself,” Mattie said. “They didn’t want to destroy other buildings.”

“Yes, but those explosives . . . the whole city shook. I wonder who could make something like that.”

Mattie did not have to answer—they both knew that the Alchemists were the ones with the capacity for making such things; Loharri was still sore since the time when the Mechanics had to go to the Alchemists with their heads uncovered and bowed to ask for their help in blasting a passageway through the mountains.

“Of course, the gargoyles can also command stone,” Loharri said. He flipped through the book Mattie brought him. “Look, it says here that they rebuilt the palace after the earthquake five hundred years ago. They could collapse it if they wanted to.”

He put the iron away and reconnected the sensors in Mattie’s shoulder. She wiggled her fingers tentatively. There was some stiffness, but little pain. She hoped it would go away with some practice.

She cocked her head. “Why would the gargoyles do that? They’ve been aligned with the ducal family since times immemorial.”

Loharri gave her a long look. “Have been brushing up on our history, have we? Be careful there, dear love—history leads to politics more often than you could imagine.”

“I’m not interested in that,” Mattie said. “Unless more buildings were to blow up.”

Loharri paced the room, his long legs loping like a camel’s. “I wonder if there will be. By the way, earlier . . . you said something, like you had some suspicions?”

“It’s probably nothing,” she said. “But at your gathering last night, I heard some mechanics talking about getting rid of the Duke.”

“They always blab about that,” Loharri scoffed. “It’s just talk, understand.”

“As far as you know.” Mattie could not resist this barb.

Loharri bit. “Are you implying that my brethren might have secrets from me?”

Mattie shrugged. “Talk to Bergen if you’re in doubt.”

Loharri laughed—the same soft, almost soundless laugh she learned preceded his more extreme temper tantrums. “And yet you dare to fool yourself that politics is of no interest to you.”

Mattie rose from her seat. “Your well-being is of interest to me. Talk to your friends. I’ll talk to mine. Come by when you feel like you can talk without being angry.”

Loharri seemed taken aback. “As you say, Mattie. Somehow, I missed the shift here—you talk to me like you are my master.”

Mattie shrugged and craned her neck in pretend pensiveness. “Or perhaps you just think that someone who doesn’t want to be your slave is aiming to be your master.”

She didn’t turn when she headed for the door, but all the way she felt Loharri’s burning gaze on the back of her neck.

Chapter 5

The society of the Alchemists never held regular meetings. The news spread through the grapevine, and occasionally, when circumstances called for their special attention, they made use of the public telegraph. That afternoon Mattie decided to stop by the telegraph to see if a meeting was called—after all, the collapse of the ducal palace seemed reason enough to have one. Besides, Mattie thought, the other alchemists could not have missed the implications of large quantities of explosives that were apparently responsible for the disaster. It was only a matter of time before the Duke and his courtiers returned from their trip and started questioning the alchemists. There was also a concern about the gargoyles—always elusive, they never got involved in human disputes, but no one had ever destroyed their creations before; at least, according to Mattie’s book.

In the carefully worded telegram marked “alchemists only” and protected by encoding, Bokker, the elected chairman of the Alchemists’ Society, expressed his concern that the gargoyles might direct their displeasure at the Society’s members, and invited the meeting in his shed—it was a rather spare construction, holding decades’ worth of obsolete equipment, but large enough to fit all of the alchemists who would be concerned enough to attend the meeting. Mattie guessed that a hundred or so of them would show up—the same hundred that always stuck their noses into politics. This time, Mattie decided that she would attend as well.

After reading the missive, Mattie tucked her Alchemist Scrying Ring into her pocket, and her neck clicked pensively. She worried that the event would affect her relationship with the strange creatures she had grown quite fascinated with. She thought that she would not forgive her society if it indeed were their doing. Fuming and taken with dark thoughts, she headed for the meeting.

The Alchemists were not the majority party, and as such the society did not have the use of the palatial grounds. Mattie regretted it—she would’ve liked to see the devastation close up, but it was cordoned off by the courtiers and their enforcers.

She ventured as close to the palace as she could on her way, and was sternly stopped and turned around by a menacing, faceless figure in ornate armor, mounted on top of a mechanical buggy. Mattie could’ve sworn that with every day these ugly conveyances—clanking metal wheels wrapped in wooden frames, hissing and spitting steam engines perched on the bronze hulls, perilously close to their armored passengers—grew more numerous.

“Restricted area,” the man in armor said. “Only mechanics and construction automatons are allowed through.”

“Were there many casualties?” Mattie asked.

He shook his metal-encased head, and for a brief moment Mattie imagined him as another automaton, intelligent like her, and felt kinship.

“Be careful with that engine,” Mattie said before turning around. “It looks hot . . . and dangerous.”

“Mind your own business, clunker,” the metal rider replied.

Mattie hurried away, her heart ticking louder and faster than her steps with suppressed fury. No one had ever dared to call her a clunker to her face, and the slur caught her off guard—like a sudden failure of her sensors, when everything tingled and then went numb. She almost fled the district, hurrying away from the glimpses of splintered stone and fine chalky dust over everything.

Mattie realized that she was running late. On her detour she wandered far away from the eastern district and the Grackle Pond, and she had to hurry through the streets, tracing a wide arc around the pond and emerging not too far away from the house on the embankment where she first met the Soul-Smoker. A concern flared, and a memory that really, she had to visit him and to see if Beresta would talk to her again. And Iolanda had said that Sebastian would likely be outside of the city . . . perhaps Ilmarekh would know something or had heard something from his house on top of the hill.

She passed the house of the recent death, where the funeral wreaths had already wilted and the liquid smoke had dissipated, and entered the wide streets favored by wealthy alchemists. Mattie eyed the houses, assessing the rent—this would be a nice place to live, she thought, both for the view and for the convenience. Loharri would be much closer, and the shops that sold especially exotic plants and animal parts would be nearby. And it would give her more time to work, which would certainly offset the expense; plus, with Iolanda’s financial backing . . . she stopped herself from thinking in such a manner, since her alliance with Iolanda was a new affair, and was made all the more uncertain by recent events. If the court were to be forced to move out of the city, she realized, Iolanda and her revenue would be gone. She wasn’t sure whether she should be proud of her far-sighted self-interest, or embarrassed at being so mercenary. Iolanda was right—she still had trouble knowing what the right emotion for a given circumstance was; she only hoped that people occasionally had the same problem, and Iolanda would thus be unable to catch her in a lie.

When she arrived at the appointed place, she found twice as many people as she had expected—the shed could not hold them all, and the meeting was moved to the hothouse, which took up most of the sizeable yard of Bokker’s place. Bokker himself—a middle-aged man with white hair and no discernible neck—directed the late arrivals under the vast glass canopy. Mattie thought that it was a miracle that it still stood after the previous day’s explosion.

Bokker nodded at Mattie curtly; even this small gesture turned his face crimson. “Haven’t seen you in a while,” he said.

“This seemed important,” she said.

Bokker sighed. “You know, Mattie, everyone today said this. It makes me wonder, it truly does—is a disaster the only thing that can bring us together? Are we that selfish, that embroiled in our own lives? Is there a point to even having this society anymore?”

“Of course there is,” Mattie said, and dared to touch his purple sleeve with her fingertips, as reassuringly as she could. “We don’t have to see each other all the time to work together, do we?”

He sighed but looked somewhat consoled. “I suppose so, dear girl, I suppose so. We’re lucky—two of our Parliament representatives came today. They’ll tell us the latest rumors at the court and in the government.”

Mattie headed inside. The hothouse was not exactly suited for gatherings—it was a huge indoor garden, with potted and hanging plants covering benches, walls, and ceiling. Most of the plants she couldn’t even recognize—rare, exotic blooms nodded at her regally, iridescent blues and reds, and the air was thick with their cloying fragrance. She distinguished the smells of roses and orchid blossoms, of warm melting resin and sweet nectar.

The alchemists gathered between the benches, most of them sniffing and looking at the plants with appreciation. Bokker’s collection was legendary among them, and it was the result and the perpetuator of his wealth. Bokker did not look down on selling his surplus, and the alchemists were always willing to buy the plants from him. Bokker had a reputation for not being petty: lenient with his bills and generous with his measuring scales.

Mattie followed the row of potted plants, all of them in jubilant bloom—reds and yellows, whites and blues—and the scents of musky lilies and earthy irises snaked into the sensors on her lips, filling them to saturation. Still, she discerned the smells of lush greenery and rotting peaches, the sweet decay of leaf mulch lining the flower pots, the dark, foreboding scent of rare orchids that twined their thick white roots around the branches of the small trees cultivated for the purpose of being the orchids’ perch and sustenance.

She brushed her fingertips across a particularly lush, velvet petal, bright crimson streaked with gold, and it showered her fingers with bright yellow pollen. Her fingers smelled of saffron.

It struck her how large the hothouse pavilion was—two hundred alchemists milled about without jostling against each other or banging elbows, and some managed to carry on private conversations in soft blurred voices; despite her superior hearing, Mattie could not make out the words, but the overall tone seemed rather dark.

The gathering had filled an open area at the back of the rectangular pavilion, and stragglers had to strain to hear from the aisles between the benches. Bokker pushed past Mattie and took his place in the opening, among the garden hoses, buckets, and piles of peat moss. “Dear alchemists,” he started from his inauspicious perch. “I need not explain why we are gathered here. I need not tell you that things that turn bad have a tendency to become worse. I do need to prepare you for the blame that will be thrown at us by the Mechanics, and I need you to restrain yourself from blaming them back.”

“He has to be kidding,” the woman standing behind Mattie whispered. Mattie had not met her before, but her Scrying Ring hung conspicuously around her neck on a thin leather thong. The woman spoke with a slight accent, and her dark skin betrayed her foreign origin; no other society in the city would have tolerated her. “He expects us just to sit back and take it?” Judging from the growing murmur around them, many alchemists shared her position.

Bokker turned almost purple and raised his hands, waiting for silence. “I do not ask for your acquiescence in the face of accusations,” he said. “I ask for your tolerance and forgiveness. Do not lash back at those who accuse you, do not give them an excuse to rally the people and give power to the Mechanics. Realize that without ducal trust and support for our society, the Mechanics will rule the city.”

“They already do,” someone in the front shouted.

“Tides turn,” Bokker answered mysteriously.

The woman behind Mattie tugged at her dress. “Excuse me,” she said. “Why do the alchemists need ducal support? I’m new here, still learning . . . ”

“The Dukes had always insisted that both alchemists and mechanics are represented in the government,” Mattie said. “They represent two aspects of creation—command of the spiritual and the magical, and mastery of the physical. Together, we have the same aspects as the gargoyles who could shape the physical with their minds.”

The woman nodded. “I’m Niobe,” she said to Mattie. “And I thank you for your kind explanation. No one has been so nice to me here.”

Mattie noticed the tension in the woman’s shoulders, how she carried herself—as if not quite sure what to expect. “It’s all right,” Mattie said. “I’m a machine. No one explains anything to me either.”

“We will remain calm and we will be vigilant,” Bokker said. “And I propose we start with finding out whether anyone had received any orders for explosives lately.”

“Just from the goddamned Mechanics,” said an elderly woman to Mattie’s left. “You know that. You’d think they eat that stuff.”

“That’s a start,” Bokker said. “Anyone else?”

A few more alchemists said that they had filled orders for the mechanics—their usual demolition, everyone assumed.

Niobe cleared her throat. “How do you know that the people who ask for explosives are really mechanics?” She raised her voice enough for everyone to hear.

“We have a system of identification,” Bokker explained. “The Mechanics issue medallions to their members—unless one had graduated from the Lyceum and was initiated, they cannot get one of those.”

“Could they be faked or stolen?” Niobe asked.

“I don’t see why not,” Mattie said loudly. “It is possible.”

Niobe smiled gratefully, and Mattie’s heart throbbed in sorrow. Niobe seemed so ready for anger and scorn, so surprised at any sign of kindness . . . Mattie had to remind herself that she really had quite enough problems of her own. Right now, she realized that the entire gathering was staring at her and Niobe.

Bokker clapped his hands. “Everyone who received an order, see me immediately. We will put together the list of names and verify with the Mechanics that these people are members in good standing and their requests were legitimate. We will also need to find out if any medallions had been lost or stolen.”

“Like they will tell us if they lost anything,” someone said—Mattie could not see who for all the greenery. “That’ll put the blame on them.”

“Any thoughts?” Bokker asked.

Mattie raised her hand tentatively. “I could find out,” she said.

Bokker beamed at her. “Fabulous,” he said. “Just don’t do anything foolish . . . or suspicious.”

“I won’t.”

The meeting was dismissed soon after, and Bokker and a few others stayed behind to work on the list. Niobe and Mattie left Bokker’s house together.

“Where are you from?” Mattie asked. Niobe kept walking in step with her, and Mattie was starting to feel awkward about the silence.

Niobe gestured vaguely east, indicating the wide world outside of the city walls. “Big city,” she said. “Beyond the sea.”

“Oh,” Mattie said. “You were not happy there?”

Niobe sighed. “Happy enough,” she said. “Only . . . how can you sleep when the night is so dark it suffocates, how can you smell the incense in the air and wonder if there are different places, places your heart yearns to see? Didn’t you ever wake up in the middle of the night and wonder if there are places where the alchemists use metals and not plants? Fire and not oil? How can you stay in one place and not want to leave?”