The Alchemy of Stone (19 page)

Mattie grew anxious—there was no sign of changes, and she worried that her body, although ably patched up by Sebastian, would run out before she could see the homunculus work its dark bloody alchemy on Loharri. She needed her key, and she began to feel its absence as a dull ache in her chest.

Mattie did not know whether it was morning or night. She left Niobe to care for the sick and went to wander through the tunnels, but her heart was not in it. Instead, she went to Sebastian’s workshop. He was gone, but she found the smell of metal and oil reassuring in its familiarity. She sat on a crate and waited for the time when she would be able to go to the surface and see the gargoyles again.

There was a rustling of cloth, and Iolanda entered the workshop. Mattie smiled, and Iolanda sat next to her and rubbed her shoulder gently. She seemed so subdued now, her countenance sad, her flesh not galling anymore but merely soft and tired. Mattie wondered where her glee went, her bouncing joyfulness; she wondered if Iolanda had grown disappointed.

Iolanda smiled and sighed, and pulled Mattie’s head into her lap. Mattie resisted at first, but Iolanda took a brush with short dense bristles and a long handle out of her sleeve. “Let me brush your hair,” she said. “You will feel better.”

Mattie carefully rested her head on the soft flesh of Iolanda’s thigh and closed her eye. The brush whispered through the strands of Mattie’s hair—not really hers; she thought of the dead boy the gargoyles had told her about. She thought about Loharri, and what possessed him to save these locks for such a long time, what made him painstakingly attach them to Mattie’s metal scalp. The same thing, she supposed, that compelled the Soul-Smoker to engulf the dead boy’s soul—compassion and desire to remember. Could they really be so similar?

Soon, the repetitive strokes of the brush lulled her and she stopped wondering. Instead, she imagined the things she would say to Loharri if she saw him again—when she saw him again, she corrected herself. If nothing else, she had to see him subjected to another’s will—maybe then he would finally understand what it was like, and would stop being angry with her.

“By all rights he should be down here, with us,” Iolanda said.

“You mean Loharri?”

Iolanda put the brush away and stroked Mattie’s hair. “Yes. He has as many reasons to hate this city as any of us.”

“I don’t hate it,” Mattie said. “I’m here by accident.”

Iolanda did not seem to hear her. “I just don’t understand him. He told me he had been in the orphanage; he should be happy to see it blown up. But instead, he goes and converts the caterpillars into barricades and mounts weapons on them.”

“Is this why we’re still here?” Mattie asked. “There’s still fighting?”

“There’s fighting,” Iolanda answered. “And he, of all people, is acting like resisting the natural course of progress is the right thing to do. What do you make of that, Mattie?”

Disappointment stirred weakly—every time she thought Iolanda was growing interested in her, it was just a pretext for asking Mattie questions of interest to Iolanda. She just shrugged, her metal shoulder butting against Iolanda’s thigh. But in her mind, she thought that Loharri’s behavior was only reasonable. She knew how hard it was to achieve something, to reach a position of some influence; to give it all away would be unbearable. And unlike her, Loharri could not possibly hope to retain his power—the mechanics were the enemy, and he was too prominent to escape notice. He was not defending the city, he was defending himself. She felt close to him now that she knew what the desire to survive just a little bit longer made one do. After all, she had agreed to a duplicate key, and she was disappointed that she could not have it.

Iolanda’s fingers played with Mattie’s hair absent-mindedly. “I wonder sometimes, Mattie,” she said. “I wonder at the things we do—I wonder at myself. Have you ever done things that you didn’t expect to? Things that just . . . happened?”

“Yes,” Mattie said. “Lately, I’ve been feeling that I’ve been doing nothing but.”

Iolanda laughed.

Mattie sat upright. “Don’t forget about my key,” she pleaded.

“I won’t. I know it’s important to you.”

Mattie grasped her hand. “It’s not just important. It is everything to me, and I hate leaving it in someone else’s hands, even yours. Please try and understand.”

Iolanda shook her head. “I understand. I think maybe this is what we have in common, the desire to take one’s life into one’s own hands, even if it doesn’t work out and one is worse off in the end.”

Mattie nodded in agreement. She would be better off if she stayed with Loharri and never angered him.

Iolanda rose from her seat, smoothing her skirts. “In any case,” she said, “I cannot wait to see the sun. I hope we will get to the surface soon.”

Mattie agreed that it would be not a moment too soon.

And soon it was time to go. Iolanda was both excited and fearful, and Niobe only frowned, her lips pressed together in an expression of determination.

“We’re going to the surface,” Iolanda informed Mattie.

She did not need to bother—Mattie already had guessed it from the feverish movement that started in the morning and the endless chain of the miners and the spiders dragging out the crates with explosives and the few muskets that they possessed along with boxes of bullets. She was not sure whether the resistance of the city had been subdued, or if the miners were getting ready for their last assault.

“Did you see it yet?” Iolanda asked.

“See what?”

“If you need to ask then you haven’t,” Niobe said, smiling. “Come on, I’ll show you. Sebastian is getting it ready.”

Mattie followed Niobe through the tunnels, marveling at the ease with which Niobe navigated the maze. The beam of her lantern snatched the sparkling veins of ore on the rough surface of the walls from the darkness.

Mattie had never been this far in the tunnels—it felt different. The air grew cold and sharp, and condensation trickled down the walls. The supporting scaffolding was scarce, and Mattie guessed that these were little-used tunnels.

“Can you smell the river?” Niobe asked.

“Yes,” Mattie answered. “We’re under the city, aren’t we?”

“Not far from the paper factory,” Niobe confirmed. “The mines come close to the sewers here—this is why they were abandoned. They couldn’t dig farther without the risk of damaging the sewers or flooding the mines if they got too close to the river.”

“Can we get to the city from here?”

Niobe shrugged. “It’s possible. But first, look at this.”

She led Mattie to a large cavern where water stood ankle-deep and dripped down along the walls, through tiny channels shaped over many years. There were human voices there too, and clanging of metal, and the acrid smell of smoke. As they moved carefully, their feet uncertain on the silty slippery floor, something big started to take shape in the darkness, and Mattie gasped the moment she discerned the true dimensions of the contraption.

It was as tall as two men, broad and squat, furnished with a multitude of jointed legs, like a giant crab. The rivets of the creature’s carapace were mismatched, some dull and gray, others shining copper. In the center of the machine there was a small tower, and through its glass Mattie saw a man within. The contraption groaned and shuddered, and the gears ground heavily within it.

“What is it?” Mattie said.

“A weapon,” Niobe answered. “Sebastian built it—others helped, of course. I suspect that this is why miners tolerated our presence. They don’t like the mechanics or the machines, but if any can be used to their advantage . . . ”

Mattie circumvented the machine and found herself staring down the barrel of a short and broad cannon. She had no doubt that the contraption would be a fitting match for the mechanics’ barricades on the surface as well as the enforcers’ muskets.

“Impressed?” Niobe asked.

Mattie nodded wordlessly. She was impressed although perhaps not in the way her friend meant. Along with her fear at the machine’s formidable proportions and its obvious destructive capabilities, Mattie felt relief—there was a finality about the thing, sitting so calmly and yet boiling and shuddering with the hidden workings of its mechanism. It would be capable of ending the fighting, and it would be capable of overcoming the city’s resistance. Mattie was ashamed to realize that she did not truly care who won—all she wanted was for this to end, so she could go home and resume the making of her unguents, not before getting her key of course, but otherwise she wanted things to go back to the way they were. And it didn’t really matter who was governing the city—as long as they kept building such machines, people would bleed, and there would be work for an alchemist. Mattie proudly thought that she was a good one—after all, she was the one to free the gargoyles from their bondage, the only one to accomplish such a difficult task among those who had tried. And that had to count for something.

Chapter 19

The surface world assaulted Mattie with bright light and acrid smoke. She emerged from the newly blasted exit, climbing awkwardly up a ladder improvised from bits of scaffolding, following Niobe, Iolanda close behind. Mattie hoped that by now the fighting would be over, and she would have to witness just the consequences but not the actual bloodshed. She was surrounded by people—mostly the courtiers, but Niobe and a few miners remained nearby, reassuring.

“The city is ours now,” one of the miners said.

“Not quite,” the light-haired courtier answered. “We still need the fighting to cease and power to be transferred in an orderly fashion. We need the mechanics to formally surrender. Otherwise, the resistance will fester.”

They walked through the streets, silent and empty at the moment. There were no dead bodies and no lizards, but a low cloud of ash hung over the city, and the air smelled of gunpowder. A thin layer of dust seemed to have settled over everything—the cobbled pavements, the awnings of the still-standing buildings, the twisted remains of the abandoned caterpillars stacked in the streets.

The rumor was, the fighting was continuing by the western district still, where the enforcers and the mechanics occupied a defensive position between the Grackle Pond and the paper mill, barricaded by caterpillars and what remained of the Calculator. Mattie could appreciate the defensive quality of so much metal, and she was apprehensive when they turned west.

Iolanda carried the jar with the homunculus—she fed it well, and the creature swelled with blood, barely fitting into its jar. Iolanda frowned, worried. “I wonder if my influence will last enough time to have him do what he must.”

“Let you into the Parliament, you mean,” Mattie said. “You could’ve used explosives.”

Iolanda shook her head. “Too many valuable documents in there,” she said. “Besides, if we want people to turn to our side, we will have to take the seat of legitimate power, not destroy it.”

Mattie suspected that Iolanda was not exactly lying, but simply not telling the whole truth. The rebels wanted the support of the ruling party, however fleeting and limited. Legitimizing one in the eyes of the populace was a familiar concern—the mechanics always talked about it at their meetings, as did the alchemists, but usually such talks happened before the election. Mattie was surprised to learn that a violent overthrow was not free of such considerations either.

They did not dare to approach the Grackle Pond, where musket shots resonated among the gutted buildings, abandoned by their wealthy owners. Mattie thought that everyone who was able to had moved on by now, and only the poor and the stubborn remained behind. This is why it was so quiet—what few people still remained in the city were not venturing into the streets without acute necessity. The winners would have an empty, mutilated city to govern, and Mattie could not imagine why anyone would want that.

They stopped in the street not far from the pond, and Iolanda crouched down and shook the homunculus out of its vitreous prison. It landed on a pavement with a wet thwack, and stood on its soft boneless legs and burbled. “Go,” Iolanda commanded. “Go and bring him to me.”

The homunculus departed toward the sound of the shots and the hulking gray structure standing in the distance, on the far shore of the pond, the outlines of which Mattie could not quite make out due to dust and smoke in the air. She only tasted warm metal and tired flesh, gunpowder and crumbling stone. “What do we do now?” she asked Iolanda.

“We wait for your master,” Iolanda answered. “Our troops were instructed to let him pass through unharmed.”

The people settled on the steps of the buildings and on the pavement. As much as Mattie missed the habitual bustle of the city, she only wished to see Loharri for the last time, to get her key, and to go home. She pictured in her mind her small apartment nestled under the roof that got so hot in the summer. She missed the long bench with all of her painstakingly collected equipment, and she worried that the sheep’s eyes, pickled as they were, would go bad in the heat. She missed the constant slamming of the door in the apothecary downstairs, the squeaking of the steps announcing a client. She missed having no other concerns but missing a deadline on a potion for an important client, or hunting down an obscure recipe. There was simplicity in her life as it used to be, and she longed for its return.

We watch the spiders as they crawl through the
streets, endlessly fascinating and pitiful. We follow them, trying to reconcile the vision of the children as they used to be with the deformed creatures down below, sifting through the piles of garbage and dead bodies. With most of the automatons destroyed, they took on their jobs—sorting and cleaning, collecting what could be saved and piling the rest into heaps and burning it. Fires smolder low, bringing with them a surprising, gentle reminder of autumnal leaves and bitter fall air.

We fear that they will be forgotten and cast aside soon—they are not as useful as the able-bodied men with dark faces and pale eyes who came from the mines, their stained clothes overlaying bulging shoulders and thick arms. We fear that the spiders will forever sift through refuse, unable to do much else, and we resolve to protect them as much as we can.

We follow them through the streets that were recently abandoned by the fighters, where bodies can still be found, lying face down or face up; we prefer the former as do the spiders—they always roll the dead on their stomachs before going through their pockets and collecting things the dead don’t really need. Then they drag them to the heaps that will become bonfires soon.

The surface of the Grackle Pond is sleek and gray, just like the sky above it, just like the fortifications erected on its distal shore. It is quiet now, and it looks deserted—we almost believe the illusion, even though we know there are people crouching behind the barricades, some looking for the enemy through slits carved in metal, their hands tight on musket barrels, while others crawl away for supplies and come back with food or bullets. We know too that there are men hiding in the buildings, in every doorway along the street, waiting for an opportunity to take aim.

We notice a strange creature—similar to the one that had turned us, and yet different, for it does not smell of stone—toddle around the pond. We take positions to watch its progress, and we feel protective of it. We wonder if the mechanical girl is nearby then, if she’s among those hidden, waiting to storm the barricades. We wonder if the creature is carrying an important message, and we decide to guard it.

But it is only little, and men at the barricades do not see or pay attention to it. It climbs and flows over the barricades, and we follow. Here in the open, it is hard to hide but we slide through the shadows and the sparse bushes fringing the pond, we hover hidden by the low veil of smoke. We see behind the barricades, into a maze of fortifications and crates, people and automatons. We hover in the ash-filled fog and watch—we are not afraid that we will be seen; everyone is looking into the streets, not to the sky.

The homunculus is heading for the man lying on the ground, sleeping or resting or dead. No, not dead—he raises his head and he sees the creature. He sits up, slowly, sluggishly, and we recognize him by his twisted face. He holds his right arm to his chest with his left hand, and we see the dark right sleeve grown darker with blood. He looks at the homunculus as if he recognizes it, and he smiles.

“Come here, little fellow,” he says, and extends his injured arm. “Come here, I’ll feed you.”

The homunculus totters closer and drinks fat lazy drops falling from the man’s fingertips.

“There you go,” the man says, and he smiles with one side of his mouth. His motions are languid, as if he had just awakened—even when his eyes flicker upward to meet ours, he does not look startled or hurried. He doesn’t look away from us, but speaks to the creature. “You’ll be my friend now, yes?”

The thing burbles in the affirmative, and laps at the pool of blood collected on the ground, and it swells up, up, like a rising loaf of bread.

The homunculus swells almost to bursting as it sops up the wounded man’s blood—not beautiful anymore, we whisper to ourselves. Never again, because there is just no going back with those things.

The wounded man rises to his knees, then to his feet, pushing himself off the ground with his good arm. The injured one only gets in the way and bleeds more. The people by the barricades look up—their faces so similar now, all hollow-cheeked and half-hidden in the thatches of ungroomed beards.

“Where are you going, Loharri?” one of them says, an older man with a generous sprinkling of gray in his beard and long hair. “The alchemists are coming to take care of the wounded, they will have something to stem the bleeding.”

“Look around you,” he says. “No one is coming.”

“You’re not going to forget your mechanic’s oath, are you?” the older man says.

Loharri shakes his head. “I’m not forgetting anything. But I will go, and I will talk to them, and if you want to shoot me in the back then help yourself.”

“You have no authority to negotiate,” the older man says.

Loharri smiles and looks down at the homunculus, which is pooling around his feet, just a fat blood smear. “I have as much authority as you do,” he says. “That is, not much. But enough to see what can be saved.” He looks at the pile of metal with sadness in his eyes, the same sadness we feel when we look down at all the children of our city whom we cannot help.

And then he walks between the twisted metal bars as tall as a man, and climbs over the corrugated sheets piled on top of each other. Once he reaches the top, he stops and thinks, crouching down for stability, but we can see that it takes him a lot of effort to remain upright.

He searches through his pockets and extracts a handkerchief—it used to be white at some point of its existence, but now it is crusted with blood and dirt. He waves it in the air; his opponents are invisible, but he and we know that they have him in the sights of their muskets.

He waves the handkerchief, stiff as a board, in the air to signal his peaceful intentions, and starts his slow descent onto the embankment of the pond below.

Mattie watched Iolanda biting her lips and pacing back and forth. They made a post of sorts in one of the abandoned houses, and judging by the smell of urine and burned rags, they were not the first ones to have done so. It had once been a nice dwelling—the wallpaper, white with delicate blue flowers, spoke of taste and wealth, and the remnants of the wooden floors, now wrenched free and dragged away somewhere to build fires, were well-polished and clean. There was no furniture remaining, and the small party camped out on the floors, apparently just happy to be anywhere but an underground mineshaft. There were maybe twenty people here, mostly courtiers and a few miners armed with axes and a couple of muskets. The crates with explosives were stacked in the kitchen, well out of sight. The men with weapons guarded the entrance, even though no danger was apparent. Mattie felt quite sure that the men at the barricade by the pond were not going to launch an offensive raid.

She listened to the distant sounds of carnage wrought by Sebastian’s war machine, and wondered if the Parliament building survived. Everyone talked excitedly about how all but a few pockets of resistance had been extinguished, and that soon they could start rebuilding. They talked about returning the land to the peasants, and improving conditions in the mines. She overheard a few of Iolanda’s friends arguing in fierce whispers whether the miners and the peasants would be fit to govern, and whether they should establish a temporary council consisting of the courtiers who had abandoned their position, and what to do about the enforcers—after all, they’ve been just following orders, and once the power changes hands, they would have no qualms about serving the new government, would they? And a new Soul-Smoker would have to be appointed—too bad the monks had left, but surely they could find one. Maybe among the spiders who really couldn’t hope for anything better.

For some reason, the conversation made Mattie feel sad—she thought that things always happened around her, but without letting her touch them directly. Life flowed around her, like a stream flows around a solitary rock, which, no matter how much it wanted to, was unable to see anything upstream or downstream from it.

Mattie shook her head. After all, she wouldn’t want it any other way—she was happy to retire into a quiet corner, where she did not have to look at Sebastian’s machine attacking the barricades, crushing metal and flesh with its massive legs and shooting fire from its cannon.

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.”