Ekaterina Sedia - The Alchemy of Stone

“What happened to you?” Niobe asked. And added, in a small whisper, “I’m sorry.”

Mattie told her—she told her about how worried she was, wandering through the burning district; she told her about the assault and Loharri’s betrayal, about the death of the Soul-Smoker and the gargoyles’ transformation.

“That was very clever of you,” Niobe interrupted her story. “I’m glad that you’ve succeeded.”

“Thank you for your aid,” Mattie said. “The things you taught me were beneficial.”

Niobe nodded. “I have to say the same to you. I’ve been caring for the wounded, and I couldn’t have done it without the knowledge of plants. Thank you for teaching me.”

“I hope we will be able to teach each other again soon,”

Mattie said. She felt vulnerable now, and clung to the warmth in Niobe’s voice despite her earlier resolutions. “It is so much nicer than… this.” Her arm traced an arc in the air.

Niobe smiled at her vague gesture. “Indeed,” she said. “I think everyone is eager for the fighting to end. But I suppose it will be different.”

“They will always need alchemists,” Mattie said. “As long as people get hurt they’ll need us.”

Iolanda listened to their conversation with the impatient expression which she seemed to acquire whenever she was not talking. “This is all well and good,” she said. “But I can’t believe what this bastard had done to you.”

Mattie nodded and cringed at the clicking sound in her neck and the difficulty of such a simple movement. “I’m sure he feels the same way about me. I’ve betrayed him.”

Iolanda shrugged. “You had a better reason.”

Mattie did not feel certain that reasons mattered more than deeds themselves, but felt too exhausted to argue. After her initial burst of verbosity she seemed to have run out of words, and so she listened mutely as Niobe and Iolanda called for a mechanic again and busied themselves with rearranging the crates. Mattie’s heart groaned in laborious beats that seemed to fall farther and farther away from each other. And what did it matter? she thought. If her heart stopped, no one but Loharri would be able to revive her. And maybe as time went on he would forgive her. She could last like this, immobile, awaiting the gentle scraping of the key as it entered the keyhole, a slow turn and a click that would bring her back. Perhaps it would be better to wait until she was forgiven and things had sorted themselves out, so she could awake to a semblance of normalcy. It would be nice just to sleep the chaos away, and wake up in the world where Loharri did not hate her. Even in her pitiful state Mattie realized that it was not likely.

“Iolanda,” she said. “Please use the homunculus soon.”

“It’s not my decision…” Iolanda started.

Mattie held up her hand. “I know. You want to wait until you have control of the city. But I cannot wait that long. Get my key for me, please. Even if my heart stops. You can wind me again. Just get my key, I beg of you.”

Iolanda nodded. “I will, I promise. Don’t worry about a thing.” She looked over her shoulder and threw her hands into the air. “Finally!” she said. “About time a mechanic showed up.

As Mattie had hoped, it was Sebastian. He nudged Mattie to her feet. “Come on,” he said gently. “Come to my workshop, and we will get you fixed up.”

“My key,” Mattie whispered.

“Shhh,” Sebastian said. “Don’t worry about a thing—we’ll get you back on your feet yet.”

Mattie nodded and tried not to worry as she followed him through a wide, short corridor to another cave that smelled of metal, machine oil, and explosives.

We look at everything with our new eyes, eyes attuned to noticing flesh before stone. No longer are we paying attention to the buildings, but rather to the buzzing of the slow, overfed flies that seem to be everywhere. They smell our sweat and land on our lips and eyes, their buzzing loud and somehow unclean. We wince and wave them off our faces, but we still feel the greasy touch of their tiny claws.

And the smell… the mindless automatons are clearing the streets, but too few of them had survived the riots. Even those that did are in a poor shape—they stumble about, and some of their limbs are missing. And they collect the bodies of the dead miners the enforcers do not bother to pick up anymore. They still carry off their own after skirmishes, but we see the fatigue in their eyes, and we guess that soon they will abandon their bodies too.

There is a smell of rotting garbage everywhere, and it takes us a while to realize that it is coming from the dead bodies, stripped of their poor clothing and crude weapons by the scavengers. We recognize the scavengers too, hiding in the shadows—the light-eyed feral children let loose after the Stone Monks left the city.

We suddenly feel fearful and apprehensive, naked in our perishable flesh, and for just a moment we wish we could go back to being stone—crumbling in death rather than rotting, trapped inside an immobile prison of stone rather than reduced to immaterial souls like those that now rattled within our skulls. The moment passes. There is no point in regretting irreversible decisions—one has to live with them, and we try.

We move toward the building of the Parliament—the windows are yellow with light, even though it is morning, and we know that they have been in there all night, too preoccupied to remember to conserve oil, which is going to run out soon, just like everything else in the city.

We climb up the walls and crouch on the windowsills. They don’t see us, too preoccupied with peering inward and at each other. They seem worn now, ragged—their eyes are red and swollen, and their soft cheeks are peppered with steel-gray and dark stubble. And as we cling to the narrow windowsills, we feel the taut muscles in our legs cramping, we feel our fingers relax their grip on the window frames, fatigued, and suddenly we understand—in our bones!—how tired these people are, how vulnerable and hurt. Just like the ones fighting in the streets below, just like the ones waiting in the tunnels, just like the merchants in the market square and their skittish customers.

An explosion rocks the air, and a blast of warm and almost solid wind knocks us off our perch. We recover mid-air and spread our wings to buffet the fall, to let us land softly, with dignity and grace.

We look around, to locate the source of the explosion, but we cannot see if any buildings are missing: we would need to be higher, away from the ground. We hear a soft tinkling, and we look up, to see the shards of glass raining down from the destroyed windows of the Parliament, falling like jagged ice crystals; it is a miracle that we are not harmed.

We climb up the wall, pressing closely against it, so that the men who are now looking out of the windows—the unshaven and red-eyed alchemists and mechanics—can’t see us, but they are not even looking in our direction. They are pointing west, to the districts where the destruction has been the greatest.

We run through the layout of the city in our minds—there are houses there mostly, and the barracks of the enforcers not far from the western gate; there are telegraphs and the markets, there are factories. All of them seem like equally likely targets, and none of them matter.

It was the second time that Mattie found herself naked in Sebastian’s presence, and from his pretend lightheadedness and joking manner she surmised that he was thinking about it too. She wanted to ask him now, why did he go along with it? Why did he make love to her—was it a fetish of a mechanic enamored with intricate devices and easily prompted to express his affection the moment a device resembled a girl, or was it something else? She did not know how to ask, and her sluggish mind refused to do any more work than was strictly necessary—another self-preservation mode Loharri built into her, undoubtedly passing along the ridiculous desire to live despite one’s inevitable mortality.