The Alchemy of Stone

by Ekaterina Sedia

  We turn our attention back to the man and the automaton in the jail courtyard. The automaton gives its orders once again. The white-haired man nods and heads back home, the memories and the terror of the newly inhaled soul sloshing inside him heavily, like water in a bucket.

  As the days wore on, Mattie noticed the troubling changes in the air—even though she rarely left the workshop these days, preoccupied with her work. She tried to get to the meaning of Sebastian’s words, of understanding the very soul of stone. For that purpose, the burners belched blue flames, and the alembics filled with ground stone were heated to a red glow.

  She studied the transformation of stone. It turned the flames yellow and blue and sometimes green, it could be dissolved in Aqua Regis, and with enough heat, parts of it sublimated, leaving behind a hard and latticed carcass.

  The stone was complex, as Mattie realized, consisting of many minerals so blended together that one could have no hope of separating them for individual study, and had to deduce the composition of it from its behavior during many transformations she subjected it to.

  Mattie also taught Niobe—not about the blood alchemy but of the elements and their manifestations. She described the salamanders that lived in and commanded fire as golden lizards, and Undinae—as small girl automatons fashioned with webbed fins instead of arms and legs. Niobe laughed at her claims that she was able to see the salamanders, and Mattie did not really mind. She offered small sacrifices to the salamanders by burning some fragrant herbs along with stone, asking them to help her solve the riddle of the gargoyles.

  But the stone alchemy was not the only thing that occupied her days and nights—having no need for sleep, Mattie felt superior sometimes at being able to accomplish twice as much in a day as any other alchemist. She worked on the stone during the day, when the light was bright enough to see the spectral colors and emanations; during the night, she practiced blood alchemy.

  A deal was a deal, and she learned the new craft with dark satisfaction. She made a small homunculus from rendered sheep blood, with the heart woven from Iolanda’s and Loharri’s hair. The homunculus was still, waiting to be awakened in order to ensnare Loharri’s soul. The process took her longer than she wanted, but her learning was hindered by her inability to ask Niobe pertinent questions—she was ashamed to ask about compulsion and denial of will, and she feared that if Niobe found out about such practices, she would think poorly of Mattie. So Mattie saved the darkness for the night; night was for wounding.

  During the day she helped Niobe decipher the recipes from her little birch bark book, and explained to her the properties of herbs and metals and sheep’s eyes. She showed her how to mix salves that reduced fever and unclouded the troubled mind. Day was for healing.

  As the days passed, Mattie noticed a growing unease in Niobe. Mattie’s guilty conscience bounded to her mind’s surface, sending jolts to her heart and making it creak and moan faster and faster, its ticking loud and quick like the song of some demented cricket.

  “What’s wrong?” Mattie asked her finally, as the two of them stood at Mattie’s laboratory bench, grinding herbs and extracting essential oils, each lost in her own private musings. “Are you mad at me?”

  Niobe looked up from her fragrant aludel. “What? Of course not, Mattie. You’re the only friend I have—why would I be mad at you?”

  Mattie shrugged, her pestle grinding against the porcelain interior of the mortar. “You seem upset lately.”

  “It’s because I am, but it has nothing to do with you.” Niobe sighed and stirred the ground herbs, encouraging the oils to express. “You stay home, and you don’t see. But if you came by my neighborhood, you’d know.”

  “What’s happening there?” Mattie tried not to feel too guilty about not visiting—among her crimes, this one seemed the most trivial.

  “The enforcers swarm like black flies.” Niobe crossed her arms over her chest as if she grew suddenly cold, and paced alongside the bench. “They think that it is us, the foreigners who blew up your palace and your Duke.”

  “Why do they think that?” Mattie interrupted. “I saw the man they arrested, and it was the wrong man… I tried to tell them but they wouldn’t listen.”

  “Of course they wouldn’t,” Niobe said. “They decided to blame those they don’t like. They took the jewelers, and they took the bookbinders. They question everyone, men and women, and they threaten to call the Soul-Smoker every time something speaks against them. Half of the easterners left the city to go back home.”

  “The Soul-Smoker is a nice man,” Mattie said.

  Niobe laughed. “I suppose he is, right up to the moment when he sucks your soul out of you.”

  “He has no choice,” Mattie whispered. “And I have no soul.”

  Niobe shrugged. “We all have our burdens.”

  “You can stay with me,” Mattie said. “Unless you want to go back home?”

  Niobe shook her head. “I thought about it, but I won’t go back—at least, not now. I won’t give them the satisfaction.”

  “Then stay here,” Mattie said. “It’s safe here, and I can protect you from the mechanics.”

  Niobe smiled a little. “You? Protect me? They won’t listen to you.”

  “But they’ll listen to Loharri,” Mattie said. “And I have money for bribes, lots of money.”

  Niobe nodded slowly. “I suppose you don’t have to spend it on food.”

  “No.” Mattie folded her hands, pleading. “Stay with me, I promise I’ll buy you food.”

  Niobe laughed and hugged Mattie, her soft breasts giving under Mattie’s hard metal chest, pressing against the keyhole of Mattie’s heart. Mattie hugged back, guilty and grateful. “Thank you, Mattie,” Niobe said. “I would love to stay for a bit—it’s always safer for two than one.”

  Mattie thought that she could tell Niobe anything—well, almost anything. She was reluctant to confess her misuse of blood alchemy, and instead decided to confide her next most bothersome secret. “Niobe,” she whispered even though there was no one there to overhear her. “I know a man with a skin like yours… he is in hiding, but I worry that now they will pay closer attention to him and find him out. What do you think I should do?”

  “It depends,” Niobe said. “What did he do to have to go into hiding?”

  “He told me that it wasn’t his fault. I do know that sometimes what people tell you is not the truth; I just don’t know whether to believe it to begin with.”

  Niobe shook her head. “Mattie, bless your clockwork heart. You don’t decide to believe—you either do or you don’t.”

  “I wouldn’t presume as much as not to believe someone just because people lie sometimes.”

  “In this case, you should probably let him know that he is in danger. Only can you do that without endangering yourself? If someone sees you talking to a suspect—and believe me, he is a suspect—your master’s influence won’t save your little metal parts.”

  Mattie thought a little. “Yes,” she finally said. “I think I can; we just need to wait until darkness.”

  “Great.” Niobe smiled. “Where do you want me to sleep?”

  Mattie knew how to make beds, but she wasn’t in possession of one. She decided to create a nice soft bed for Niobe in the warmest place, by the kitchen hearth—the nights were still occasionally nippy. Besides, it would be as far away from the bench as the apartment allowed, and Mattie did not want Niobe disturbed by Mattie’s nocturnal work.

  She found a couple of quilts given to her by grateful but poor customers, and collected most of her dresses into a heap.

  Once she covered them with the quilts, the bed acquired quite satisfactory appearance—not of poverty but of whimsy. Mattie liked that, and so did Niobe.

  The sun was still high enough in the sky, and they walked to the market to buy some provisions for Niobe. As they browsed, Mattie noticed a few suspicious stares in Niobe’s direction, and a few merchants refused to trade with them outright.

  N
iobe just shrugged, even though Mattie guessed that the deepening of the color on Niobe’s cheeks meant that she was more perturbed than she showed.

  Nonetheless, Mattie led her to the booth that sold a good variety of herbs, and tried to distract Niobe by explaining how one decided on the plant’s usefulness. “You see,” she pointed at the dried plant with purple flowers, “its leaves are heart-shaped, which means it is suited for heart trouble.”

  “Are you referring to the actual heart, or love problems?”

  “The latter,” Mattie said. “See? Its shape is not of a real heart but of its symbol.”

  “Symbol of a symbol,” Niobe muttered. “I see. What about this one?”

  She pointed at the glass jar filled with fresh flowers, plump and red, their three petals dripping with nectar. “That’s for the liver,” Mattie said. “See the three lobes?”

  “And this one?” Niobe picked up a dried stem clustered with strange fruit—brown and transversed with fissures. “Brain problems?”

  Mattie nodded. “That is its signature, yes. Every plant has one. The plants with red sap are used to purify blood, the ones with yellow sap—clear out urinary infections, and so on. See, it’s easy. It’s getting to the potent chemicals inside them that is hard.”

  “I see,” Niobe agreed. “Every plant has medicine, as long as you can figure out how to get to it.”

  “That’s the tricky part,” Mattie agreed. “This is why it is essential to keep a journal and record every transformation, so if you find something you can recreate it and share it with the rest of the society.”

  “If I want to.”

  “If you want to.”

  “Are you going to buy anything?” the woman who owned the booth asked. There was no open hostility in her voice, and her face expressed carefully cultivated indifference.

  “Just a bunch of maiden’s hair and two of bladderwort,” Mattie said. She paid for her purchases. “Thank you, Marta.”

  Marta muttered an acknowledgment under her breath, and Mattie and Niobe traded looks.

  “Let’s go home,” Niobe said as soon as she picked up a loaf of bread and some olives. “I’m getting tired of all the hostility.”

  Mattie nodded that she agreed. She hadn’t realized how rigidly she had held her back, how taut the springs of her muscles were. Just being outside was tiring to her; she could not imagine how Niobe was able to hold up, with her weak flesh body. And she had been enduring it far longer than Mattie.

  Mattie took Niobe’s hand in a gesture of support.

  “Don’t,” Niobe whispered. “You don’t want to associate with me like this. It’s dangerous.” But she didn’t take her hand away.

  “I don’t care,” Mattie whispered and twined her fingers with Niobe’s, metal against flesh, springs against bone.

  The night falls, and we hear the girl calling us, and we leap over the chasms that open below our feet at the precipitous drop-offs of the roofs. We hurry, and we rehearse our story in our minds, and yet there’s hope swelling up in our hearts, subterranean. A secret hope that the girl will throw the window open, her blue porcelain face as expressionless as ours, and tell us that we don’t have to fear time any more. We suppress the hope, and we mutter out loud, no no, it’s not going to happen. She just wants to hear our story, and we will tell it to her. Listen.

  We run up the fire escapes and slither across the walls, we leap, we run, we crawl and finally we reach the high window, warm yellow light spilling from it swarming with fluttering of white moths; fireflies flicker on and off above the roof. A nightingale is starting his song in the trees nearby, and we pause for just a moment to listen to the sweet trilling.

  Listen, we whisper to the girl framed in the window. Her skirt floats wide, her waist cinched by the belt glistening with bronze rivets. It’s so small, we could circle it with one hand, and we wonder if there’s anything in her middle besides a metal joint that holds her lower and upper body together. She seems so fragile.

  There’s another shadow in the room, and we smell ripe grapes and generous red earth. The second woman gasps at the sight of us but remains quiet otherwise.

  “Listen,” the girl says before we can utter a word. “The man who fills your feeders is in danger.”

  “He is gone,” we whisper back. “He left the day you met him, and the monks are neglecting our feeders.” We feel pathetic, complaining like this, and we bite off the rest of our words.

  “Where did he go?” the girl asks, panicked.

  “He is hiding,” we say. “He’s hiding in the rafters of warehouses, in the roofs and in the gutters. The city is his cradle.”

  “The next time you see him, tell him to be careful. Tell him to come and see me when it is dark.”

  We eye the other woman, and we don’t want to talk in the presence of strangers—we feel shy and recede away from the window.

  “What about the story you started to tell me?” she asks. We take a deep breath and move closer again. “There were three boys.”

  The three boys who did not expect their lives to change, until the monks took them. We could not see them in the orphanage, for it has no windows, and only if we pressed our ears against the cold stone—dead now, cut up by human hands, dismembered and dumb—could we hear the ghosts of their voices.

  We saw them when the monks took them out for walks in the courtyard, at night, when there was no one around to see their gaunt faces and their fingers raw from hard work, the skin of their hands stripped away, oozing a clear liquid we have no name for.

  We saw the alchemists and the mechanics coming to the night courtyard, illuminated only by the blue and distant moon, and pick among the children, selecting the agile and the clever. The rest, the ones who stayed behind, were trained for other jobs. All cursed us, because we only watched—but what else could we do?

  We saw some of the smaller children—the boy who cried often among them—stuffed into small cages that would restrict their growth, keeping their bodies small and squat, bowing their legs; their arms seemed simian and long in contrast, thin enough to fit between the bars of their cages and grow free. Those children were destined for the mine-shafts, for picking out precious stones from rubble with their thin, flexible fingers.

  Of course, not all could bear such treatment, and many died. The boy who cried often wilted in his cage, and every night as they wheeled him out he seemed smaller and paler, shrinking away from the bars, not growing into them. He curled up on the floor and cried, and called for help in his animal tongue. The blind boy sat next to him, whispering unarticulated comfort.

  The beautiful boy with long hazel eyes was quick to learn the language, and both the alchemists and the mechanics who came to trade eyed him with interest. The monks asked a high price, and they came back to haggle. Once, a mechanic remarked that the boy was too beautiful to be smart; the next night he came out to the yard with his face bandaged.

  The small boy who cried often died the day before they took the no-longer-beautiful boy away. The blind boy held his hand as the small boy drew his last breath; the blind boy sensed the presence of the disembodied soul, watery and shapeless, and he cradled it to his heart until the dead boy’s soul nestled into his, like a child’s face into a pillow, like stone into our hands.

  The monks let the no-longer-beautiful boy cut off the dead boy’s hair, and when he left, his hand held firmly by a stern mechanic with a slight limp, long tangled locks slithered under his threadbare shirt.

  The gargoyles’ story stuck with Mattie, and she kept turning it over in her mind, over and over. The fact that Ilmarekh was an orphan did not particularly surprise her, but the fact that he had chosen this profession, that for him it was an act of kindness and not desperation, touched her in a way she couldn’t fully explain even to Niobe.

  She was also puzzled by the role Loharri played in it; especially the part about the dead boy’s hair—she did not think of him as a sentimental man. Even on his frequent visits to the orphanage he seemed angry
and bitter rather than pensive or distraught. She resolved to ask him at the first opportunity, but for now, there were plenty of other things to worry about, and they won over other concerns due to their urgency.

  She went to the public telegraph to check on the news and to see if Bokker had replied to her missive sent a week ago, containing the list of the missing mechanic medallions. To her shock, she found only warnings to stay at home, and reports of unrest.

  It seemed that the Mechanics increased the pace of building and introduction of caterpillars; their request for additional buggies for the enforcers and their work on the machine that Loharri had been so enthused about taxed the coal and metal mines to capacity. The Parliament, led by Bergen and his mechanics, drafted many peasants for mine work—it was fraught with danger and required more thinking capacity and mobility than most automatons could provide. Instead, the automatons were sent to the fields to replace the peasants whose labor was repetitive and simple, and where they were not likely to need to be replaced.

  Mattie shared the news with Niobe over breakfast—that is, Niobe was eating breakfast, and Mattie was sitting at the table in solidarity.

  Niobe shook her head. “They will rebel, especially with the Duke so gravely ill.”

  “How do you know?” Mattie asked.

  Niobe shrugged. “There’s only so far you can shove a person until they shove back. I’ve seen it happen before.”

  “What will happen?” Mattie whispered.

  “Riots, probably. If the mechanics are smart, they’ll send enforcers right away to quell them before they even start. Give people money, double the miners’ wages. If not… if the miners rebel and quit, the city will grind to a halt without coal.”

  Mattie was about to answer when someone knocked on the door. Only Loharri knocked with such arrogant insistence, and Mattie went to open. To her surprise, it was Sebastian.