Ekaterina Sedia - The Alchemy of Stone

“I don’t know,” Mattie said. “Should I be?”

“I haven’t realized that you could… Oh, dear me. What am I saying? Of course you can. You are. This is why this bastard booby-trapped you, this is why he was so cross. He knows you love someone else, Mattie. What will happen to you?”

Mattie weighed her words. “I don’t know. I haven’t accumulated enough history to know things like that. I will ask Iolanda to protect me.” She pointed at the homunculus. “I’ll ask her to make sure that he gives me my key back.”

Iolanda did not take long to show up. She burst through the doors in a whirlwind of wild hair and flared skirts. “Mattie! Are you all right?”

Mattie nodded. “I’m fine.”

“What happened?”

“Loharri,” Mattie said. She explained the device planted in her head, and her desperate need to get her key back. She needed Loharri out of her head and her heart, she said.

Iolanda smiled at that. “Indeed,” she said. “I know exactly what you mean.” She pushed past Mattie to the laboratory, and took a step back once she saw Niobe. “Who is she?”

“Niobe,” Mattie said. “My friend. She was helping me with your request.”

“Ah.” Iolanda walked through the laboratory to her habitual seat in the kitchen, and laughed at the sight of the pile of Mattie’s dresses covered with a blanket. “How cozy! You’re sleeping here?”

“Yes,” Niobe said, showing neither embarrassment nor anger. “Mattie has no need for beds, so I have to make do.”

“A fellow alchemist then,” Iolanda said. “Thank you for helping with Mattie—I’ll pay you too.”

“There’s no need—”

“Of course there is.” Iolanda sat and played with a long strand of her curly hair. “There’s always a need for money.”

“Iolanda only employs women,” Mattie said to Niobe.

“How do they let you get away with it?” Niobe asked, visibly warming up to Iolanda.

“They don’t notice,” Iolanda answered, and both of them laughed.

Mattie did not quite understand what was so funny about hiding oneself, about being allowed to do what one pleased while no one was looking. They, the women, were like the gargoyles, Mattie thought. Respected in words, but hidden from view of those who ran the city and managing to live in the darkness, in the secret interstices of life.

“All right then,” Iolanda said and helped herself to the decanter with pear liquor. “Let’s see what you’ve cooked up for me.”

Mattie took the blood homunculus out of its jar. “Ew,” Iolanda said. “What is it?”

The homunculus seemed to recognize Iolanda with the hair coiled in its chest, and it toddled up to her and grabbed at her skirts with its stumpy fingerless hands, leaving dirty traces on the fine silk.

“We better put it in the jar.” Niobe scooped the weakly resisting creature into its glass jail and stopped the jar before it could crawl out. She handed the jar to Iolanda. “There.”

Iolanda studied the creature through the glass, her full lips twisting in disgust.

Niobe explained how to feed the homunculus, and Iolanda looked even more doubtful.

She turned the jar this way and that, but no matter how she tried to turn the blind embryonic visage away from her, the homunculus always managed to turn to face her. “I don’t even know if it’s worth it,” Iolanda said. “Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate your fine work. It’s just—”

“That’s fine,” Niobe said cheerfully. “I’m sure Loharri would pay double for it—his hair is in too, so he can command it as well as you.”

Iolanda frowned, then unexpectedly laughed. “All right,” she said. “You made your sale, clever girl. Say, would you like a nicer bed than what you have right now?”

“And what would that entail?” Niobe asked, still smiling.

“Come stay with me. No one would hassle you there.”

“What will I do?”

Iolanda shrugged. “Minor remedies. And keeping me company. Most of my servants are automatons, not nearly as clever as Mattie, and they are dreadful conversationalists. In fact, they do not speak at all, they only listen and do as they are told.”

“That may be,” Niobe said. “But what do you really need?”

Iolanda shook her head in mock exasperation. “I want you to keep an eye on this thing you just so cruelly entrusted me with. I don’t want to see it or hear it. It looks like it might bite.”

“It has no teeth,” Mattie offered.

Iolanda continued as if she didn’t even hear Mattie’s interjection. “I won’t treat you as a servant. I know how stuck-up you alchemists are. Just take care of it for me, all right? And I promise I’ll protect you from the enforcers.”

“You’re too kind,” Niobe said.

“All right then! Get your things.” Iolanda thrust the jar with the homunculus in Niobe’s hands, all too eager to get rid of it. “Come on, come on!”

As Niobe hurried to pack up her clothes and her alchemical ingredients, Mattie stood by her bench, unable to quite articulate her hurt. She did not fault Niobe for choosing a better arrangement and greater protection than Mattie could offer. She didn’t even mind that it meant that she chose Iolanda over Mattie. But she was injured to the core that these two had such an easy time liking each other and trusting each other, despite the gulf that was supposed to exist between them. That the flesh women had some secret bond that Mattie did not share, that by implication she was excluded from their thoughts like she was excluded from their conversation. She was just a machine, a clunker one only acknowledged when convenient. For a moment, she regretted betraying Loharri to them—at least, he never made her feel like she did not belong.

With Niobe gone, Mattie distracted herself with her work on stone. She had mixed blood residue with stone dust and given the homunculus a small shaving off her finger for a heart. The animating essence of the blood stirred the slow, lumbering stone, and the homunculus awakened. Mattie had just started to make an emulsion of various minerals and gemstones to feed the homunculus and prod it to talking and divulging its secrets, betraying the bondage it had over the gargoyles. She felt so close now. Then came a knock on the door.

As Mattie walked to open it—just three steps—many thoughts darted through her mind like startled pigeons. It was Niobe, she thought, who had come back to apologize and stay with Mattie despite the inconvenience, because they were friends; it was Iolanda, holding the slender shaft of Mattie’s key in her soft, manicured hands; or it was Loharri who came to take her home forever, because she could not be trusted out of his sight, not even with the traitorous gears ticking in her head, monitoring her heart for any sign of doubt in him.

She opened the door. It was Sebastian—the only possibility she had not considered because she was afraid, Niobe’s insinuations still buzzing subsonically deep in her mind. You’re in love, you’re in love, Niobe’s voice teased, and he does not love you back because you are beneath noticing, you’re nothing but a mindless automaton that can be shoved aside as soon as it starts getting in the way of what a person wants. You are nothing.

Sebastian grabbed her hands and smiled. “Mattie? You’re all right!”

She nodded and took her hands away, demurring. “Loharri fixed me.”

His face grew somber. “I’m sorry I couldn’t.”

“It’s all right,” Mattie said. “No one expected you to.”

“No.” He frowned and sat by the table, in the chair recently vacated by Iolanda. “It’s my fault. I haven’t been practicing my work in years—do you know how much you forget this way? Can you imagine not practicing at all? I couldn’t rejoin the society now if they asked me.”