Ekaterina Sedia - The Alchemy of Stone

He patted her arm. “All in good time,” he said.

Iolanda sniffed at the vial—Mattie had found the most expensive crystal, and the slanted sunrays lit the facets with red, yellow, and blue sparks—and smiled. “Not bad,” she said. “A little bitter for my taste, but I suppose it suits. I’m pleased I have put my faith in you.”

“Did I pass?” Mattie asked.

Iolanda’s eyebrows plucked to perfect black crescents arched in pretended surprise. “Pass what?”

“It was a test, wasn’t it?” Mattie said. “You wanted to see if I could follow your orders.”

“I assumed you could do that,” Iolanda said, and helped herself to a seat. “But yes, I wanted to make sure that you are good with deadlines and feelings—I know little of automatons, and I wondered if emotions are something you understand…”

“Why wouldn’t I?” Mattie immediately worried that her words came out too defensive.

Iolanda shrugged, too languid to disguise her indifference. “You are made mostly of metal.”

“I won’t argue with the obvious,” Mattie said. “But what does it have to do with feelings?”

“You have a smart mouth,” Iolanda said, and smiled with faint approval. “I think I will work well with you. Now, I will depart, unless…”

Mattie waited politely for the rest of the sentence, but since it was not forthcoming, she saw it fit to ask, “Unless what?”

Iolanda rolled her eyes. “As I suspected, you do miss some subtleties. I was just trying to give you an opening to ask for favors.”

“Thank you,” Mattie said. She considered feverishly whether to ask about Sebastian—Loharri seemed so reluctant to speak of him and his disappearance that she felt she had no other recourse. Yet, she feared that she was becoming a part of something she didn’t understand.

“Well?” Iolanda stood and tapped her foot on the leg of Mattie’s laboratory bench. “I haven’t all day.”

“I wanted to find relatives of a… a friend. Not really a friend—a deceased colleague. Beresta.”

“Never heard of her,” Iolanda said. “What are her relatives’ names?”

“There’s only one I know of,” Mattie said. “His name’s Sebastian; he’s a mechanic, I think… from the Eastern district.”

Iolanda’s smooth forehead acquired a thin horizontal wrinkle, which smoothed out as soon as she started to speak. “You ask for interesting favors, Mattie. Surely, you understand that associating with people like Sebastian is not good for you?”

Great, Mattie thought. A second undesirable in as many days. “No,” she said. “I just need to talk to him about his mother’s papers—I’m interested in her work, not him.”

“I believe you,” Iolanda said. “But that is of no consequence. Sebastian is not welcome in the city anymore—I imagine he lives outside the walls, perhaps on a farm somewhere.”

“Or he could’ve moved on to another city.”

“I doubt it. He still keeps in touch with some people here, and there’s a rumor that he and his associates are not far away.”

“What did he do?” Mattie asked. “And what does he want here?”

“He was a mechanic,” Iolanda said. “The Mechanics cast him out. You better ask them.”

Mattie bent her neck, indicating that she understood. “I will,” she said. “Thank you for your help.”

“Don’t mention it.” Iolanda straightened her skirt and smoothed the front of her blouse. “I’ve trusted you by hiring you—it is only right for me to be straight with you. Of course, I do expect the same back.”

Mattie bowed, and waited for Iolanda, the crystal vial clutched in her smooth hands, to leave. Iolanda seemed so alien—Mattie had not considered it before, but Iolanda and her abundance of flesh made Mattie conscious of her own small, long-limbed body of metal and wood, jointed and angular. The only person she was close to before was Ogdela, old and dry like a matchstick. Then there was Loharri, but he was always there and hardly counted. But even he was long and thin, almost insectile—especially when he worked with his slow, deliberate movements that reminded Mattie of the praying mantises that populated the wild rose bushes that had been taking over the back yard of Loharri’s house.

Mattie could not decide if she liked Iolanda—she liked her words and her apparent candor. But her fleshiness made her uneasy, and Mattie felt shallow because of that. And yet, the feeling persisted.

To take her mind off Iolanda, Mattie decided to go shopping. The money Iolanda gave her was certainly welcome, and Mattie decided to stop by a bookshop near the paper factory. It carried some books she had lusted after for as long as she had been on her own, after she had ended her apprenticeship with Ogdela—small, trim books with thick paper and ragged pages, books bound in cloth and leather, books with faded drawings painted with a thin brush dipped in ox blood.

Ogdela had given her a crude book printed on pounded birch bark and containing a number of simple recipes and a list of common ingredients. It was Mattie’s treasure, even though she knew every word by heart—it was proof that she was a real alchemist; then there were others, acquired through varied means—some as payment, others bought with money she should’ve spent on other things. But she longed for the expensive books. She justified it to herself by her need to learn more arcane things—after all, to deal with the gargoyles she needed more complex potions and mixtures, new and exotic ingredients. But in her ticking heart, she knew that she just wanted the books as objects, as small solid leather-bound weights of palpable luxury.

She walked to the store; it was midday, and the streets swarmed with oxen, lizards, and mechanized buggies carrying people and goods to the afternoon markets; a few pedestrians weaved in and out of the traffic, but they grew rarer as she approached the paper factory—the sun had heated up the noxious fumes emanating from it, making the air yellow and thick.

Mattie tasted bleach and sulfur on her lips, until she passed beyond the factory, away from the river, and entered a labyrinth of narrow streets occupied by tenements and small shops selling wares both expensive and mysterious; a faint smell of polished wood and ancient fabrics hung over the area. She could see the palatial spires of the Duke’s district far in the distance, piercing the low long clouds.

As she approached the bookshop, she felt a distant rumble underground, as if a thunderclap had struck deep within the earth under her feet. The air reverberated, and the windows of the shop—wide panes of glass—gave back a high-pitched, almost inaudible cry. Mattie paused, her hand on the handle. Its tremor, just on the edge of detection, transmitted to her fingers, making them itch. She opened the door.

“What was that?” she asked the shop owner, an old woman bent at the waist at precisely a ninety-degree angle.

She looked up at Mattie and smiled. “What was what, sweetness?”

“That… noise,” she answered.

“I didn’t hear anything,” the woman said. “Want me to show you some books?”

“Do you have any books on gargoyles?”

The woman laughed. “Do I ever! Come with me, sweetness.” She led Mattie to the back of the shop, where the shelves were covered with a thin layer of dust and books towered in haphazard piles, in almost unbearable opulence and bounty. The shop owner grabbed onto one of the shelves and miraculously straightened her back, as her hands moved up from one shelf to the next, ratcheting her to verticality. She pulled a few heavy books, thick and square, from the top shelf. “Here’s something to start you with.”

We do not live in the books written about us—we crawl on the walls and we hide, but not within these pages. We do not even believe in these books.