Ekaterina Sedia - The Alchemy of Stone

“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.”