The Alchemy of Stone

by Ekaterina Sedia

  “I sought not to offend,” Iolanda said. “I do confess to my prejudice: I will not do business nor would I employ a person or an automaton of a gender different from mine, and I simply had to know if your gender was coincidental.”

  “I understand,” Mattie said. “And I assure you that my femaleness is as ingrained as your own.”

  Iolanda sighed. Mattie supposed that Iolanda was beautiful, with her shining dark curls cascading onto her full shoulders and chest, and heavy, languid eyelids half-concealing her dark eyes. “Fair enough. And Loharri… can you keep secrets from him?”

  “I can and I do,” Mattie said.

  “In this case, I will appreciate it if you keep our business private,” Iolanda said.

  “I will, once you tell me what it is,” Mattie replied. She shot an involuntary look toward her bench, where the ingredients waited for her to grind and mix and vaporize them, where the aludel yawned empty as if hungry; she grew restless sitting for too long, empty-handed and motionless.

  Iolanda raised her eyebrows, as if unsure whether she understood Mattie. She seemed one of those people who rarely encountered anything but abject agreement, and she was not used to being hurried. “Well, I want you to be available for the times I have a need of you, and to fulfill my orders on a short notice. Potions, perfumes, tonics… that sort of thing. I will pay you a retainer, so you will be receiving money even when I do not have a need of you.”

  “I have other clients and projects,” Mattie said.

  Iolanda waved her hand dismissively. “It doesn’t matter. As long as I can find you when I need you.”

  “It sounds reasonable,” Mattie agreed. “I will endeavor to fulfill simple orders within a day, and complex ones— from two days to a week. You won’t have them done faster anywhere.”

  “It is acceptable,” Iolanda said. “And for your first order, I need you to create me a fragrance that would cause regret.”

  “Come back tomorrow,” Mattie said. “Or leave me your address, I’ll have a courier bring it over.”

  “No need,” Iolanda said. “I will send someone to pick it up. And here’s your first week’s pay.” She rose from her stool and placed a small pouch of stones on the bench. “And if anyone asks, we are casual acquaintances, nothing more.”

  Iolanda left, and Mattie felt too preoccupied to even look at the stones that were her payment. She almost regretted agreeing to Iolanda’s requests—while they seemed straightforward and it was not that uncommon for courtiers to employ alchemists or any other artisans on a contract basis, something about Iolanda seemed off. Most puzzling, if she wanted to keep a secret from Loharri, she could do better than hire the automaton made by his hands. Mattie was not so vain as to presuppose that her reputation outweighed common good sense.

  But there was work to do, and perfume certainly seemed less daunting than granting gargoyles a lifespan extension, and she mixed ambergris and sage, blended myrrh and the bark of grave cypress, and sublimated dry camphor. The smell she obtained was pleasing and sad, and yet she was not certain that this was enough to evoke regret—something seemed missing. She closed her eyes and smelled-tasted the mixture with her sensors, trying hard to remember the last time she felt regret.

  Chapter 2

  Mice fled from a tall house perched over the Grackle Pond, and Mattie nodded to herself. The Soul-Smoker could not be far now, and Mattie quickened her step, her fine wooden heels clacking on the cobbles of the pavement and then the embankment, as the stream of mice fleeing in the opposite direction parted around her feet. The house stood wrapped in mourning wreaths, dark cypress branches wound in liquid smoke, with windows dark and shuttered. The exodus of mice was almost over, and the family, clad in their mourning whites, huddled on the porch fearful to go back inside until the reluctant soul was evicted.

  Mattie wondered about the souls left behind like this, those little bodiless entities made of glassy, transparent fog that liked curling up inside the secret places of houses—behind wainscots, between the wooden planks of paneling, in mouse holes, in cupboards. She wondered why they and not the others lingered where they did not belong, where even mice fled from their watery, weak touch. What did they want? She supposed the Soul-Smoker would know.

  She curtsied to the family—two young girls and a small boy, clustered around a withered old woman, their grandmother by all appearances. “I’m sorry for your loss,” she said.

  They nodded to her, respectful through their grief. Emancipated automata were not numerous, and even the wealthy (and Mattie assumed the wealth of the family based on the size of their abode and its desirable location next to water) treated them with reverence for their presumed merit. “We put the opium out,” they said. “The Soul-Smoker should be by soon.”

  “I’ll wait with you by your leave,” Mattie said. “I have business with him.”

  They said nothing, but Mattie deduced from their lowered eyelids—shot through with delicate veins branching like naked winter trees—that they were not comfortable discussing the matter. She moved away from the porch and stood, erect and still, by an old tree burdened with ivy and long garlands of lichen. She waited for the Soul-Smoker in suitable silence and calm.

  She caught sight of him as soon as he turned onto the embankment, making his slow way along the edge of the black pond. The man was small and thin, black-and-white in his black suit and a shock of white hair. His cane drummed a steady rhythm along the cobbles, and his blind eyes, white in his white face, stared upward into the darkening sky. Those who were taking the evening air by the pond scattered at his approach, getting out of his way with almost unseemly haste, risking stepping into the spring mud and staining their ornate shoes and brocade gowns rather than meeting the gaze of his eyes, empty like clouds.

  When he approached the house, the family stepped off the porch and retreated into the depths of the garden, leaving the door open for him. His cane tapped on the steps and flicked from side to side, like a tongue of a venomous snake. He was about to put his foot onto the first step, but then he turned to Mattie, undoubtedly alerted to her presence by the loud ticking of her heart.

  “Kind sir,” Mattie said politely. “A word at your pleasure.”

  “Call me Ilmarekh,” he said in a soft, almost feminine voice that lilted with some slight unidentifiable accent. “It’s been a while since anyone wanted a word with me.”

  “I am Mattie,” she said, and softly touched her hand to the blind man’s.

  He started at her touch. “Dear girl, are you an automaton?”

  “Yes, sir,” Mattie said. “I am an alchemist, and I’m in need of your help. Do you mind if I watch you while you do your work?”

  “Not at all,” he said. “Come inside.”

  The hallway was subsumed by the twilight, long fingers of shadows stretching from the hollow of the cupped ceiling, reaching all the way down the walls, and only retreating by the western windows, which admitted the last of the sunlight. Ilmarekh sniffed the air, and Mattie tasted it too; both followed the sweet cloying perfume of opium to the kitchen.

  The soul of the deceased had already found it—there was a faint shimmer in the bowl of brown powder left on the kitchen table, and a strange watery halo surrounded it, as, Mattie imagined, through a veil of tears.

  The blind man carefully patted the pockets of his severe jacket and extracted a long-stemmed pipe with a small shallow bowl cut from ancient knotted wood, silvery with age. Without any ceremony, he stuffed the bowl of his pipe with the opium and lit it with a thick sulfurous match. Sweet smoke filled the kitchen, and the liquid shadow danced in the rising puffs and writhed under the ceiling, becoming smoke, becoming shadow and disappearing, sucked through Ilmarekh’s narrow, lipless mouth. His chest rose and fell in breaths that seemed too great for his narrow frame, and every last wisp of smoke was sucked into his chest and consumed.

  When there was no opium left, Ilmarekh sighed and collapsed on the stool by the kitchen table. Bronzed pans reflected his white
face and hair, and he seemed a ghost himself. The opium washed away the last color from his lips, and his white eyes were half-hidden under heavy eyelids.

  “Are you all right?” Mattie asked. “I have tonics with me, if you’re feeling weak.”

  He sat up, as if remembering her presence. “I am fine, I assure you,” he said. “A new soul takes a while to settle.”

  “How many do you contain?” Mattie asked.

  “Hundreds,” he answered, without any pride or remorse. “I imagine you came to ask me about one of them?”

  “Yes,” Mattie said. “There was a woman, some years back, an alchemist… she used to live by the river, in the eastern district. Her name was Beresta.”

  The blind man remained silent, chewing the air as if tasting something in it. “Yes,” he said after a while. “I know her.”

  Ilmarekh said that he wished the world were simpler; he had been blind since birth, and he tried to imagine seeing, from the vague and distant memories of the souls that lived inside him. His favorite things to imagine were reflections and shadows, and reflections of shadows running along a long, unending pane of glass. This is what he imagined the souls he consumed were like, and he fancied himself a mere reflecting surface—and instead of wandering alone through the world that was not kind to shadows, they found solace in seeing their reflection in Ilmarekh’s soul, and the reflection gave them substance and contentment.

  Among the hundreds of reflections he knew by feel and by their thoughts and memories twining with his own, he could locate Beresta with ease. He told Mattie that she was a shy, retiring soul that would rather remain unnoticed than communicate with him. “But I can coax her,” he said.

  Mattie tried to imagine what it was like, having someone else’s soul sloshing inside one, silvery and elusive like a small fast fish that one could cradle in an open palm full of water but could never grasp without inflicting injury and distress. This is probably what it would be like to have any soul, she thought.

  “She says she knows you,” Ilmarekh said after a protracted silence. “Rather, she knows the man who made you.”

  “He sent me,” Mattie said. Sitting in someone else’s kitchen like that, not letting the worry about the owners intrude upon her communion with this small, strange man felt almost criminal and yet giddy. The slanted red rays of the setting sun set the pans afire and spilled thick amber puddles across the floor. The air smelled of cedar and amber.

  “She says she knows your teacher,” Ilmarekh said. “She says she’ll tell you what you want to know if you tell her why you became an alchemist and why you chose the teacher you had.”

  Both questions had the same answer. Mattie remembered when she had been a simple automaton with sturdy metal hands designed for gripping broom handles and handling saucepans; she was intelligent enough for conversation, for Loharri did not like being bored. She used to bustle through the house crammed full of spare mechanical parts and sweep the workshop floors, raising angry clouds of dust full of tiny stings of metal particles, she cooked meals heavy with red, steaming meat designed to enliven her master’s pale complexion and melancholy disposition. She waged protracted wars with small mice who were reluctant to leave the house and insisted on partaking of the food she brought from the market. Sometimes she went out with Loharri when he needed to run errands and wanted company or someone to carry things for him. She asked for nothing else and had not even heard about emancipation, even though an occasional twinge of dissatisfaction came unbidden every now and again.

  This changed one day in June when Loharri, contrary to his complaints about the sweltering heat and repeated reassurances that he would not leave the house until the weather changed to something halfway sane, called her to go out with him. He gave her a machine to carry—a simple device, consisting of a bronze receptacle for water and a narrow nozzle; Mattie knew enough about Loharri’s contrivances to guess that when the water boiled, the steam would be forced through the nozzle onto the blades of a fan above it, spinning them and the platform mounted over it. There were deep depressions in the platform, currently empty, and Mattie guessed that they were meant for something—probably small things that needed spinning.

  She puzzled over the machine as they walked, turning it this way and that, and never noticed that they were walking all the way to the eastern district, a place populated by those who were not as wealthy as her master but not entirely poor. Apartments clustered on top of each other, wisely avoiding contact with expensive land underneath, and the air smelled of bleach and smoked fish, of old flowers and laundry drying in the sun.

  They headed to one of the tenement buildings, no different from the others under their roofs of overlapping red tiles. They walked up the rickety stairs; Loharri’s face was pale, and he sweated more than usual in his dark clothes; still no complaint escaped his tightly closed bloodless lips.

  Mattie followed him, counting the creaking steps, and wondering about the reason for such uncharacteristic silence—usually, her creator was eager to offer his views on the weather, people populating any given area, and the latest election, whether she listened or not. That went doubly for any bodily discomfort he was experiencing, and his lack of complaining seemed downright ominous by the time they reached their destination—a narrow garret at the very top of the building, where all the heat of the day and every drop of fish smell had curled up comfortably and refused to leave.

  Loharri knocked on the door upholstered with narrow strips of pounded bark, and listened to the slow steps inside. Mattie listened too, her head cocked to her shoulder, the thing in her hands whirring softly in the leisurely tepid breeze.

  A wild-eyed human servant, a small wiry girl with pimples and chipped teeth, opened the door, peering cautiously. She smiled at Loharri and opened the door wider, bidding him to come in. “Wait in the living room,” she said. “Mistress Ogdela will be with you shortly.”

  “Living room” was too grand a name for the narrow part of the hallway separated from the rest of the tiny apartment by a folding partition decorated with butterflies. A long and lumpy settee covered by a checkered white and yellow throw left only a narrow passage leading to the rest of the apartment; a candy dish with several dusty marzipans rested on the stained table by the settee. Loharri sat and drummed his fingers on the surface of the table, unconsciously following the pattern of circular stains left by glasses of assorted sizes. His gaze would not meet Mattie’s, and his mouth twisted especially tortuously.

  Mattie remained standing, the machine in her hands held primly in front of her chest. Beneath the lifeless demeanor of an automaton she assumed every time Loharri had company—by appearing inanimate she remained inconspicuous, and people talked like they would if she weren’t there—she wondered what it was about him today, why he was so different. The answer came to her when light, sprightly footfalls came from beyond the partition, and Loharri’s gaze flickered toward it, his light eyes suddenly stormy and troubled—it was fear, Mattie realized. She had never seen Loharri afraid, and her mechanical heart beat faster, eager to see the creature that had such power over Mattie’s creator.

  The partition folded to one side, admitting a small, silver-haired woman with a face carved into narrow slices by myriad parallel wrinkles; her eyes, dark and bright, looked at Mattie with curiosity. “Ah,” she said. “You made me my machine, and I thank you. Now, what can I do for you?”

  Loharri stood, stooping. “I need your alchemy, but I would prefer to talk in private, most venerable Mistress Ogdela.”

  The woman raised her eyebrows, temporarily smoothing a few of the wrinkles. “Secrets from your own automaton!” she said. “How very quaint. Come along then, young man, and we will talk.”

  The two of them departed, leaving Mattie to watch the painted yellow and blue butterflies that flitted across the lacquered wood. She listened to the low buzzing of voices behind the partition, and rolled the word on her tongue: alchemy. A word powerful enough to make Loharri quiet and pensive. She did not
know why it was so appealing to her; all she knew was that she wanted to learn Ogdela’s trade.

  When Loharri returned, a flask of clear liquid—paler than water!—clutched in his hands, Mattie had made up her mind.

  “Most venerable Mistress Ogdela,” she addressed the old woman. “With my master’s permission, I would ask to be your apprentice.” It was a shrewd choice, to ask in Loharri’s presence—he would not deny her without a good reason while others were watching, and he would not betray his fear outwardly.

  He shot Mattie a searing gaze. “I do not see why not,” he said after a short pause. “As long is it doesn’t interfere with your other duties.”

  “I’ve never taught an automaton,” Ogdela said to Loharri. “Is she up to the task?”

  Loharri sighed and handed Mattie the flask. “Sadly, yes,” he said.

  Mattie remained with Ogdela until the old woman decided that she was fit to go and open her own shop. Mattie had found a place just like Ogdela’s—“To be more like her,” she explained to Ilmarekh.

  Ilmarekh listened to her story, his face drained of color, calm and placid like the surface of the Grackle Pond outside. The opium smoke had dissipated, and Mattie imagined that the consumed soul was done with flailing inside its flesh jail and had started to settle in its new place.

  “So there it is,” Mattie said. “I studied with Ogdela… I wanted to be an alchemist because of the power they hold over others. I hadn’t realized then that not everyone is afraid of them, but I never regretted it, so it doesn’t matter.”

  “The ghost… Beresta, she says she also studied with Ogdela. She will answer your questions.” Ilmarekh stammered and stopped. Large drops of sweat swelled on his forehead, and he swallowed a few times.