Ekaterina Sedia - The Alchemy of Stone

Mattie nodded. She liked the smell of people right after they slept—it was a warm, musky smell that made her feel at home and at peace. “How much damage did they do?”

Loharri shrugged and scooped a blob of fig and pomegranate mix with his fingers. “Mmmm,” he said. “Delicious. As for the damage, I truly do not know. I don’t want to know, frankly. I don’t think the city treasury has enough money for a decent rebuilding effort.”

“You’re thinking of rebuilding?” Mattie watched him eat. Not the heart of the world, but if she could fix his heart it would be enough. “How do you know they won’t come back?”

He stopped eating. “You think they will.”

“I think they might. The enforcers kicked them out of the city this time, but…”

“I see your point.” Loharri finished his meal, stretched, and paced. “What is it they want?”

Mattie told him about the men who attacked her yesterday. “They don’t like being replaced in the fields by machines. They don’t like being forced into the mines. I can’t say I blame them.”

“We all have a role to play. Otherwise, society couldn’t function.”

“I never hear it from people with miserable roles,” Mattie said.

“Not everyone can be a mechanic. Or an alchemist for that matter, or a courtier.”

“They don’t want that,” Mattie answered. “They just want to be peasants again. Just that.”

Loharri sighed. “I better go and check on the Calculator. It was pretty well guarded, but still…”

Mattie shook her head. It surprised her how little affected by the riots Loharri appeared—he seemed to see them as a minor inconvenience; he was not able to grasp that the order of the world—or at least the city—had changed fundamentally To him, the mechanics were still in charge and business continued as usual, and the riots were nothing but a minor wrinkle in the fabric of life, easily shrugged off, smoothed out, and forgotten.

“I don’t think you understand,” she said. “They will return, in greater numbers. They will take the city over.”

Loharri laughed. “You’re over-dramatizing, Mattie. Your imagination is running away with you.”

“Look through the window,” she said. “Then tell me that everything is unchanged.”

He obeyed, nonchalant. He stared out of the window, over the rose bushes and into the streets clogged with traffic— caterpillars, lizards, men and women and children, in vehicles and on foot, most of them carrying or carting hastily assembled parcels of their belongings. Despite the commotion, the people remained curiously quiet—even children didn’t cry but remained serious and subdued. The caterpillars ground, metal on metal, and the lizards gave an occasional troubled bark—the only sounds in the street.

“Everyone has lost their minds,” Loharri observed. “They are dimmer than cattle.”

“They are not stupid. They are afraid. Maybe you should be, too.”

He stared into the street, his hand resting on the window trim. Mattie wished she could see his face when he said, “Do you suggest I run, too?”

“No,” Mattie said. “But you might want to start taking this seriously. Maybe stop scapegoating people and look for real culprits. Or listen to their demands and reach an agreement. Or maybe just find out what happened to the courtiers.”

“Who cares about them?”

“I do. Iolanda was there too.”

He shook his head without turning. “She wasn’t. I went there yesterday, but her automatons told me that she had left. I assumed she moved to the seaside with the rest of them, grew bored… but maybe she knew it was coming.”

“What about Niobe?”

“That alchemist friend of yours?” He turned around, grinning. “What, did she ditch you for Iolanda?”

Mattie nodded.

“Hm,” he said. “Apparently, there is an entire female conspiracy behind my back. What was it exactly you were doing for Io? And what does that girl have to do with it?”

“Iolanda bought perfume from both of us,” Mattie said.

He made a face. “Dear girl, you can’t possibly believe I’m dense enough to believe this foolishness?”

“But it is true,” Mattie insisted.

“I’m sure. You’re a bad liar, Mattie, and you know as well as I do that even if she did indeed buy some fragrant nonsense from you, it doesn’t form the basis of your association. Although I do appreciate your effort at at least partial veracity.” He laughed. “But you’re not going to tell me, are you?”

Mattie shook her head. He couldn’t really punish her, she thought; the days when he had enough power over her to take away her eyes so that she stumbled through the house blindly were gone now. Still, she worried that he would find another way to punish her disobedience.

Instead, he said, “Let me get dressed, and I’ll go see what is going on at the Parliament. You’re welcome to come along, of course—especially if you have any idea as to who the real culprit is.”

“I don’t,” Mattie said.

“No matter. Your leader Bokker just might.”

Mattie waited for him to get ready, listening for the soft stockinged footsteps and the rustling of clothes. Of course Bokker knew about Sebastian—of course he would tell the mechanics, to drive suspicion from the alchemists if nothing else. And they will look for him; she only hoped they wouldn’t search her house—even if he wasn’t there.

She felt a forceful pang of guilt when she thought about the last time she saw Sebastian. She had gained enough distance from the event to think about it now, but the shame and turmoil remained strong. She told herself that she had done nothing wrong, that this was what people were supposed to do when in love—and yet, he was the only one besides Loharri who had touched her secret place. She imagined what it would be like to give him her key, to let him wind her—and instead, she recoiled at the thought. If she were to get her key back, she thought, no one but her would ever touch it. She would wind herself well in advance so that she would never need to rely on another to keep herself alive.

They had to push through the crowd all the way to the ducal district, where the temple and the Parliament still stood but felt separate from the teeming life around them, like relics of a bygone era. They did not belong, Mattie thought, just like the gargoyles on the roof did not belong to the world around them. For the first time, she doubted her assignment— perhaps, she thought, she shouldn’t interfere with the natural order of things, perhaps it would be better to let the gargoyles pass into the realm of legends entirely Perhaps they were turning to stone simply because there was no place for them.

Yet, it wasn’t true, Mattie told herself. There would always be nooks and fissures where ancient things born of stone could survive. There was no reason to let them go simply because the world was changing; ushering in the new did not have to mean discarding the old. Did it?

“What are you thinking about?” Loharri said. They were approaching the Parliament, deserted in contrast to the rest of the city save for a few enforcers guarding it—it seemed that everyone was eager to get away, and Mattie doubted that the Parliament building would be open.

To her surprise, once they stepped inside they were ushered along by several enforcers. “Emergency meeting,” they informed Loharri. “Would you like to leave your automaton here?”

“No, I want her along,” Loharri said.

They didn’t argue—apparently, they had more important things to worry about, and Mattie followed Loharri to the second floor, into a darkened and plush room dominated by a large oak table. Almost the entire parliament and a few other mechanics and alchemists sat around it. Loharri took a seat, and Mattie remained standing behind his chair, close to the wall, in the shadows where she betrayed her presence with only occasional glinting of metal and quiet ticking.