The Alchemy of Stone

by Ekaterina Sedia

  Mattie walked all the way to the slaughterhouse on the southern edge of the city. Troubled thoughts churned in her mind, like they had been doing lately. She considered Iolan-da’s semi-naked presence in Loharri’s house and her giddy excitement about the demolition; she thought of Sebastian and his words about the gargoyles, but even more so she tried to find a benign reason for him, a mechanic who had more than a passing familiarity with alchemy, to be in such close proximity to the palace. No matter how she turned it in her head, she failed, and she could not help but feel suspicious.

  She passed a factory belching fire and steam, obscuring the sky. It was a bad area, surrounded by the slums where small workshops threw together crude automatons destined for the mines and factories. She had heard rumors that people worked in the mines too—they were more flexible, and could reach the more distant passages. Their fingers were also quick and precise, and if there was an avalanche or a collapsed mine, they were cheaper to replace than the automatons.

  There were several caterpillars running at full speed toward and away from the factory, carrying metal from the mines just south of the wall, in the hills. The dull glint of copper and iron grew brighter in the light cast by the factory flames, and Mattie smelled sulfur and hot metal on the wind. She hurried past—she did not like the factory, and after it the sight of the slaughterhouse seemed a relief.

  The butchers knew her by sight, as they did most alchemists—they waved her past the killing floor to the large wooden barrels filled with offal. She nodded to a few colleagues who were already picking through the barrels, their noses pinched shut with wooden clips. Mattie did not find the smell unpleasant, and moved leisurely. She grabbed a sheet of wax paper from the stack by the barrels, and walked along the row of barrels, looking for eyes.

  She noticed a tall woman bent over a barrel, her skin a familiar dark hue. “Niobe,” she called.

  The woman looked up and smiled. “Mattie,” she said. “I didn’t know you people used animal parts.”

  “I didn’t know you did.”

  Niobe held up a glass jar, half filled with sloshing of dark and thick blood. “We don’t. But I’ve learned some blood alchemy in my travels.” She handed the jar to Mattie.

  “What does it do?” Mattie asked.

  Niobe smiled still. “Come on. Get your eyeballs, and I’ll show you.”

  Chapter 8

  The streets in the city run like veins in a leaf, like paths in our very own labyrinth. We keep our hand on the wall at all times as we follow, unseen, gray on gray stone. We flatten ourselves against the stones, and we crawl in small and swift movements, like monstrous geckos. We follow the two women—one mechanical, the other alien to us, foreign—a child of shifting sand dunes and red earth, not of stone. Both smell of blood and hidden excitement, both carry jars filled with dark and viscous redness; it sloshes as they walk, laps at the walls of the jar with quiet hissing, and it reminds us of the ocean we’ve never seen but often imagined.

  We think it amusing that lately we cannot love our children—children of stone, children that came from those who first settled in our creation; they do not seem to love us either. They have destroyed what we have built, and they think of us no longer. Our feeders are not refilled today, and we go hungry. It seems fitting somehow.

  We remember another woman born of red earth on the other side of the sea. We remember her thin arms, fingers like bird claws. Her face covered in a cobweb of wrinkles, her dark-hooded fatigued eyes. Her soft, accented voice, always warmed by the elusive promise of salvation.

  “Why did you turn to me?” she asked us, at a time when her hands were too tired to move and her heart was ready to give out. Why me, a plaintive cry of every lone soul in this city, alone as the day they were horn.

  We cannot explain this feeling, this stirring, wistful like the smell of linden blooms in the blue moonlit night. We only feel, we feel the absence of love from the stone, from the city, we feel uprooted from our soil. And we seek salvation from all the unloved children of the world.

  On the way, Niobe relented under Mattie’s pitiful stare (she extended her eyestalks for that very purpose), and confided that blood alchemy had many uses—love spells and divinations, as well as darker purposes. She told Mattie that in her homeland the blood homunculi were used to temporarily trap restless spirits, forcing them to divulge their secrets and use their incorporeal nature to peek into the time yet unwashed over the world but accessible to spirits, unmoored as they were from their physical confines.

  “How far into the future can they see?” Mattie asked, fascinated.

  Niobe smiled. “It’s unpredictable. Sometimes they confuse future and past, or even present—it is all the same to them. Know where we could catch a few spirits?”

  “Yes,” Mattie said. “The Soul-Smoker has them all. But I doubt he’d give any of them up.”

  “Soul-Smoker?” Niobe asked, frowning. “What’s that?”

  Mattie explained what Soul-Smokers did for a living, and told Niobe about Ilmarekh and his sad state.

  “Isn’t anyone happy in this place?” Niobe said.

  Mattie considered her answer. “Some are. All are, at one time or another. I’ll bet even Ilmarekh is happy occasionally.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Niobe said but did not elaborate further. Instead, she quickened her step and sang a tune Mattie was not familiar with, swinging the blood-filled jar in rhythm with her song.

  Mattie hurried after, intensely curious about the blood alchemy now. “I wonder if Ilmarekh would agree to let us trap a soul or two before he gets to them. Or maybe he’d think it’s cruel.”

  Niobe laughed. “Patience, Mattie. Let me show you some simple stuff today. Besides, if I go to see the Soul-Smoker with you, won’t he steal my soul too?”

  “He doesn’t steal them.” Mattie felt protective of Ilmarekh. “It’s just your soul might decide to join the rest; believe me, he doesn’t need another voice whispering to him.”

  “He must be crazier than a fighting fish,” Niobe said. “You have strange friends.”

  “Only strange people want to be friends with a machine,” Mattie said.

  Niobe laughed. “I suppose so.”

  Mattie caught up to Niobe, and looked around. They were in the part of the district she rarely visited, and she realized that there were many dark faces among the passersby. It made sense to her, she supposed, that foreigners settled close to each other—people seemed to like company of their own kind.

  Niobe seemed to know many people—she constantly smiled and waved, and people smiled and waved back. The smells that wafted from the doors and windows, open on account of warm weather, set Mattie’s sensors afire with their strangeness—she recognized sandalwood and incense of some sort, fermenting bread, fresh berries, and unfamiliar cooking.

  “There seem to be a lot more of your people here since I last visited,” Mattie said.

  Niobe shrugged. “People move, they bring their families. They help each other too—when I first came, I had nothing with me but my bag and an address. And these people were strangers to me back home, but here they treated me like family, took me in, helped me find a place. Without them, I would never have figured out how to join the society and apply for an alchemist’s license. We have to stick together—I bet you stick together with your own kind too.”

  Mattie shook her head. The vision of the automata at the mechanics’ gathering moving along the walls in a blind, shambling procession, deaf and dumb and as unaware of the world as the tables around them, flashed in her mind. She wanted nothing to do with them.

  “Why not?” Niobe persisted, simultaneously making a pretend scary face at a gaggle of small barelegged children that ran through the streets with an air of great joyful purpose.

  “I’m not like them,” Mattie said, “Well, most of them. There are a few intelligent automatons around; a few of them are even emancipated. But you know, nobody likes making them. And they… we don’t even like ourselves
.”

  “I’m surprised to hear that.” Niobe turned into a street too narrow for proper traffic, animated by just a few pedestrians. There was a low buzz in the air, a suppressed droning of a multitude of voices at a distance, and Mattie guessed that they were getting closer to the market. “I would think that intelligent automatons would be valuable.”

  “They are expensive,” Mattie said, “but not valuable at all. We make poor servants—one advantage automatons have is that they don’t talk back or complain. Very few tasks need an actively engaged mind.”

  “And the mechanics and the alchemists have it covered,” Niobe said. “I understand.”

  The market had become larger too, and Mattie regretted not visiting it more often. There were quite a few booths that sold herbs and minerals and bits of rare wildlife. She couldn’t help but stop every few steps, craning her neck at a lovely display of boars’ hooves or bottles with golden oil of uncertain origin.

  Niobe followed her, asking occasional questions about the use of plants. She seemed curiously ignorant of their properties, and Mattie quite enjoyed explaining that two piles of small dried blue flowers were, in fact, quite different—one was lavender, the other veronica, and each had its own properties.

  Niobe sniffed at the flowers and laughed, and told Mattie that where she came from, all plants were subdivided into blood plants and water plants, plants with yellow sap, and plants that cured nausea. She scoffed at dried salamanders and insisted that only live ones were suitable for harnessing elemental powers, she lingered over large shapeless chunks of rock, her long fingers tracing the silvery veins of precious metals and her soft voice reciting their affinities to sulfur or volcanic fire. Mattie could not remember the last time she had been able to lose herself in conversation so completely.

  She lost track of time as well, and the sun was starting to tilt west when they finally emerged from the battleground of the markets, both loaded with precious ingredients and professing mutual surprise at how little they managed to spend in the face of overwhelming temptation.

  They entered one of the side streets, and Mattie recognized the jewelry store—the only one in the city that carried lapis lazuli, mother-of-pearl, and large chunks of amber. Mattie used to come there with Loharri—he picked through the precious stones for his projects, while she browsed through the piles of amber, looking for pieces with entrapped insects or bubbles of air from long ago.

  As if answering her thoughts, Loharri emerged from the doorway of the jewelry shop. His sharp eyes slid over Mattie to her companion and lingered a bit, before meeting Mattie’s gaze. “Slumming?” he said. “Don’t worry, I am too. Who’s your friend?”

  “I’m Niobe,” Niobe said. “Forgive me for not shaking your hand.” She shrugged apologetically at her many parcels.

  “Forgiven,” Loharri said. “What’s in the jar?”

  “Sheep’s blood,” Niobe said. “What’s your name?”

  Loharri frowned a bit. “Loharri’s my name. I am a member of the order of Mechanics. Surely you’ve heard of us?”

  Niobe nodded. If she felt out of place or intimidated, she didn’t show it, and Mattie marveled at the difference in her demeanor compared to the latest alchemists’ meeting. “I’ve heard of you. You’re the ones who build all those factories that make it impossible to take a stroll by the river.”

  Mattie cringed—Loharri didn’t like being challenged, or addressed in such a familiar manner.

  Loharri produced the coldest smile in his repertoire. “Everything has its price. Yet, we managed to do some good—I’m the maker of your friend,” he said, pointing at Mattie. “I’m sure she mentioned me.”

  “In passing,” Mattie said. She found it easier being rude to him while Niobe was nearby. “Niobe’s an alchemist, too.”

  “I noticed.” Loharri gave a cursory nod of his head. “You will excuse me, but I have a business meeting to attend. I’ll see you tomorrow, Mattie.”

  Niobe turned and watched him disappear behind the corner. She then smiled at Mattie. “Quite a character.”

  “Yes,” Mattie said, undecided on whether she should feel proud of Loharri or embarrassed by him.

  “What happened to his face?”

  “I don’t know,” Mattie said. “He rarely tells me anything about himself.”

  Niobe sighed and started up the stairs. “They never do,” she remarked in a low voice, apparently addressing herself more than Mattie.

  Niobe’s craft proved to be as difficult as it was fascinating. In her cramped laboratory, smaller than Mattie’s and twice as cluttered, Mattie learned to burn blood and refine it through a long, sinuous alembic; Niobe showed her how to mix the blood essence—black powder that smelled of burned horn and rust, and crumbled in Mattie’s fingers—with the viscous resin of rare trees, how to shape the resulting sticky mass into tiny figure and imbue the lifeless homunculus with powers curative or destructive—it didn’t seem to matter to the homunculus, who absorbed poison or antidote with equal ease.

  Niobe spoke at length about the properties of blood—its affinity with metals and earth, its ability to transform any element to its most basic and potent character. Its love of human flesh, the command it held over human mind, the raw power of both healing and ruin.

  “Would your potions work on automatons?” Mattie asked.

  Niobe shrugged. “I never tried it, but I think so. You are made of metal…”

  “And bone,” Mattie interjected. “Whalebone.”

  “And human hair,” Niobe said, looking over Mattie’s short dark locks that barely reached her shoulders. “That’s unusual.”

  “Yes,” Mattie agreed. “I don’t know of any other automatons who are made this way—I don’t even know why Loharri made me like this.”

  “Do you know where he got the hair?”

  Mattie shook her head.

  Niobe smiled, stretched, and stepped away from the bench. She had to light the lamp as the darkness gathered outside, and the high, tense voices of the children fell silent and were soon displaced by those of adults, coming from the people carrying leisurely conversations, sitting on their porches or standing by their windows, chatting with the neighbors across the street—a street so narrow that people on opposite sides could almost touch hands if they wished to do so.

  Mattie stood by the window, listening to the night voices— more resonant, it seemed, than during the day, and kinder, more sedate, lulled by the evening meal and impending sleep. Many spoke in a language Mattie did not understand, but the sound soothed her all the same.

  The house across the street from Niobe’s workshop had its windows open, and the second floor apartment had a window box, brimming with blooming lavender and small irises, blue like the night, bright white arrows on their lower lips shining in the darkness. Mattie smelled the sweet and bitter aroma of the flowers.

  Niobe stood by her side. “This is my favorite time of day,” she said. “I feel that I will grow to love this city.”

  “I like it too,” Mattie said. “I feel… invisible and yet a part of it.”

  “Invisible is good,” Niobe said.

  “Loharri doesn’t understand that,” Mattie said. “He always wanted to show me off, even when I thought I’d rather die than go out.”

  “Of course he doesn’t understand.” Now that they were alone Niobe did not bother to hide her contempt. “Even that scar of his… How do you expect him to know shame if he never had to hide in his life?”

  Mattie shrugged, the metal bones in her shoulders grating together with a long dry whisper. “Maybe he has. I know so little about him. He has many lovers, and other mechanics hate him—that’s it, really.”

  Niobe laughed. “Who would’ve thought?”

  “But it’s true,” Mattie said. “Why, just today…” She broke off, suddenly remembering Iolanda’s whispered promise.

  “What?” Niobe prompted.

  Mattie shook her head. “Nothing. I just remembered something. I have to go.”
>
  “It’s getting late anyway.” Niobe yawned. “Stop by soon, all right? I like working with you.”

  “I will,” Mattie promised. “Thank you for teaching me—I’ll teach you next time.”

  She clattered down the stairs and into the sweet-smelling night streets. The eastern district was vast, and she had a long way home before her. She decided to run.

  She picked up her skirts, her bag of offal and the jar of blood tucked under her arm, and she ran like the wind. Loharri discouraged her from running—her joints were delicate, and he did not want them to wear out too soon. Mattie decided that one time would not hurt her; besides, she enjoyed running.

  Her feet struck the cobbles with an alarmingly loud noise, but Mattie did not care. The cool breeze washed over her porcelain face, and thick locks of her hair streamed behind her, like the wings of a night bird. Her skirts, awkward and bulky, hitched by her knees, rustled as she ran. She needed no air, and she felt no fatigue, but the rhythmic motion helped her think.

  She felt closer to Niobe than anyone else. She loved Ogdela, but the old woman had never forgotten about the gulf between her and Mattie. Niobe was less polite than Ogdela, and occasionally her comments made Mattie self-conscious; yet, there was less of a chasm between them. Mattie resolved to teach Niobe her favorite formulae, even the ones she discovered herself and guarded as jealously as any other alchemist would.

  She slowed only once she saw her house and the apothecary sign in its downstairs windows. She straightened her skirts and walked up with calm steps, expecting to find an angry note from Iolanda or a bored messenger.

  Instead, she discovered Iolanda her own self. The joviality of the morning had disappeared, and she frowned at Mattie and rose from the steps where she sat like a commoner. “Where have you been?”

  Mattie held up her parcel and the jar of blood.

  Iolanda’s nose wrinkled. “That’s disgusting. And it smells like a dead sheep.”

  “Would you like to come in?” Mattie asked, and led the way up the stairs.