Ekaterina Sedia - The Alchemy of Stone

One of the sentries posted by the door came inside. “He’s coming,” he whispered to Iolanda, and Mattie felt a small flutter in her chest at the thought of facing Loharri again. “He’s wounded,” the sentry continued. “You better come outside, it is safe on this side of the pond.”

Iolanda nodded and headed for the door; Niobe and Mattie followed, neither willing to miss Loharri’s surrender. Mattie was anxious now that her goal was so close. She could imagine the weight of the key in her hand, she could almost feel it sliding in and clicking into place, tugging at the spring of her heart, making it well again.

She saw Loharri right away, and the way he walked, stiffly and yet unsteadily, reminded her of the first time she met the Soul-Smoker. She whipped around, to look at the front of the house, and the trampled flowerbeds. There was no doubt—it was the same house where she watched Ilmarekh consume a restless spirit, the same porch from which she first saw him approach. She had a vertiginous feeling of time spinning her around and throwing her into the point where it all began; and yet, Ilmarekh was dead and the gargoyles were flesh. Loharri stumbled along, his feet slurping in the dripping pool of blood that seemed to move along with him—Mattie guessed it for the homunculus, leading him toward his bondage.

Iolanda walked up to him, and they stopped at the embankment, just a few steps away from the house. Mattie watched his face for any sign of recognition, but his gaze slid off her as if she were a fragment of an empty sky, a stone in an unremarkable wall. He looked at Iolanda only, his lips pressed together as if he was trying not to speak.

“Loharri,” Iolanda said. “I need you to do something for me. Talk to Bergen, to the other mechanics. Tell them that they have nothing to be afraid of; tell them that we are willing to make truce.”

Loharri nodded, slowly, his gaze still lingering on Iolanda’s face, a distracted smile forming on his lips.

Mattie grabbed Niobe’s hand. “Something is not right,” she whispered. It was just a vague feeling, an irrational sense of dread that descended upon her out of nowhere but refused to leave.

Niobe smiled. “What do you mean, Mattie?”

“I don’t know,” she whispered. “But let’s go.”

Iolanda shot Mattie a reassuring look, and spoke to Loharri. “Tell them that they will be spared. Convince them that they need to help us. Do what you must, but ensure the mechanics’ surrender, even if you have to kill Bergen to take his place. Now, give me Mattie’s key, and then go.”

His left hand, pale and awkward, reached for the chain. Mattie felt a wrenching anxiety as he slowly pulled the chain from under his shirt, a bright sparkling of the key sending a sense of relief. Her hands reached out without her meaning to do so.

Iolanda reached for the key, just as Loharri lost his balance and stumbled forward. His lips brushed against Iolanda’s hair, and he had to grab her shoulder to regain his feet. He straightened, slowly, and pressed the key into Iolanda’s waiting hand.

“Go now,” Iolanda said, and wriggled from under his hand.

Loharri looked at Mattie, just for a moment, but she felt her unease return as she noticed the slow smile she knew so well twisting his mouth. “Mattie,” he said. “Help me. I’m weak, and it is difficult to walk. I need you to help me along.”

“I’ll come too,” Niobe said.

Loharri acknowledged her kindness with a nod, and Niobe grabbed his uninjured arm, letting Mattie prop him on the other side. Iolanda turned toward the house, and the homunculus finally detached itself from Loharri and followed Iolanda instead, its mission completed.

They started down the embankment, toward the towering remains of several caterpillars and what Mattie presumed used to be the Calculator. But she could not help stealing glances over her shoulder. She saw Iolanda, Mattie’s key still in her hand, enter the house, and she regretted not taking it with her. Just a few yards more, she told herself, and then we can go back, and she would have her key, never to leave her person.

They were almost halfway to the barricade, when Mattie heard a commotion behind her. She and Niobe turned simultaneously, to see a blast of fire shoot through the door; a pillar of flames engulfed the house instantaneously, before the blast of solid air knocked Mattie off her feet. She clanked on the pavement and felt her fingers give under her weight, unable to withstand the force of the blow. Her face hit the suddenly close stones and shattered into a thousand pieces; she had been too stunned to cover it. She struggled to prop herself up, to see behind her a solid cylinder of fire where the house used to be. She became aware of a clinking of debris as it rained onto the stones.

“Mattie,” Niobe gasped beside her. Her face was bruised, and a long scratch on her cheekbone swelled with blood. “Are you all right?”

She nodded. “What happened?”

Niobe’s eyes flicked to Loharri. He sprawled on the pavement, face down, not struggling to get up. Mattie knew that he was alive when she heard his quiet laughter.

Niobe crawled over to the prostrate mechanic, and shook his shoulder violently. “What did you do?”

He laughed still, and did not resist Niobe’s shaking, his arm flopping like that of a rag doll in her hands. He did not have to explain—Mattie replayed in her mind his stumbling, his lips so close to Iolanda’s ear. Dead Iolanda, she realized. Dead because the man Mattie used to call her master whispered a word of command in her ear, and she obeyed, commanded by strands of her hair braided into the homuncular heart.

“How did you know?” Niobe screamed at Loharri. “How did you turn the homunculus?”

Loharri’s uninjured arm fluttered, jerking his hand up. His fingers were broken like Mattie’s, but there was no mistaking the fact that he pointed at her.

“It was the device in my head,” Mattie whispered. “I’m sorry. I did not know he had seen it.”

Niobe let go. “It’s not your fault,” she said, not looking at Mattie but at the burning house instead.

Loharri stopped laughing. “Yes it is,” he said.

Mattie’s broken fingers curled into misshapen fists. “How dare you,” she said, momentarily forgetting the burning building and the people inside it, overcome by rage. “I’ll…” Her voice gave out.

Loharri did not answer; he was not laughing anymore, but lay quietly in the spreading dark puddle—blood gushed out of his torn sleeve. It took Mattie a moment to realize what had happened.

“He’s dead,” Niobe said. She rose to her feet and prodded the inert form with the tip of her shoe. “He bled out.”

Mattie grabbed the dead man’s shoulders. “Wake up.” She gave him a forceful shake. “Wake up, you bastard! You have to make me a new key. You have to!”

He remained silent and still, and Mattie’s fists struck the pavement, chipping stone but unable to wake a dead man.

There would be time to grieve later, and Mattie would mourn Iolanda and others, whose names she could not remember and felt bad about it. Maybe some day she would be able to mourn Loharri too—if she survived long enough, that is. But for now her heartbreak was for herself, keyless and doomed. “My key was in there,” Mattie said. “It was in that house.”

Niobe looked at her with irritation. Blood trickled from her ears, drying on the skin of her neck in a beaded serpentine trail. “Come on,” she said. “Get up.”

Mattie did; she was not sure whether it was the shock from the loss of her key—forever irretrievable—or a real sensation, but her heartbeat slowed, and the image of the smoldering, charred walls swam in and out of her field of vision. She wondered if Loharri had led her away from the house to show kindness or malice, sparing her the immediate disintegration in favor of a slow, lingering demise; if his last thought was not to avenge the destruction of the city but to punish Mattie for disobeying him. It did not matter now, she told herself. There was no reason for the dead man to have such a hold on her. She should try and help, she should live out the time she had left as well as she could. Her legs wobbled, but she took Niobe by the elbow, steadying her. “It’ll be all right,” Mattie whispered, even though she knew that it wouldn’t be.