The Alchemy of Stone

in her mind, like they had been doing lately. She considered Iolan-da’s semi-naked presence in Loharri’s house and her giddy excitement about the demolition; she thought of Sebastian and his words about the gargoyles, but even more so she tried to find a benign reason for him, a mechanic who had more than a passing familiarity with alchemy, to be in such close proximity to the palace. No matter how she turned it in her head, she failed, and she could not help but feel suspicious.

She passed a factory belching fire and steam, obscuring the sky. It was a bad area, surrounded by the slums where small workshops threw together crude automatons destined for the mines and factories. She had heard rumors that people worked in the mines too—they were more flexible, and could reach the more distant passages. Their fingers were also quick and precise, and if there was an avalanche or a collapsed mine, they were cheaper to replace than the automatons.

There were several caterpillars running at full speed toward and away from the factory, carrying metal from the mines just south of the wall, in the hills. The dull glint of copper and iron grew brighter in the light cast by the factory flames, and Mattie smelled sulfur and hot metal on the wind. She hurried past—she did not like the factory, and after it the sight of the slaughterhouse seemed a relief.

The butchers knew her by sight, as they did most alchemists—they waved her past the killing floor to the large wooden barrels filled with offal. She nodded to a few colleagues who were already picking through the barrels, their noses pinched shut with wooden clips. Mattie did not find the smell unpleasant, and moved leisurely. She grabbed a sheet of wax paper from the stack by the barrels, and walked along the row of barrels, looking for eyes.

She noticed a tall woman bent over a barrel, her skin a familiar dark hue. “Niobe,” she called.

The woman looked up and smiled. “Mattie,” she said. “I didn’t know you people used animal parts.”

“I didn’t know you did.”

Niobe held up a glass jar, half filled with sloshing of dark and thick blood. “We don’t. But I’ve learned some blood alchemy in my travels.” She handed the jar to Mattie.

“What does it do?” Mattie asked.

Niobe smiled still. “Come on. Get your eyeballs, and I’ll show you.”

Chapter 8

The streets in the city run like veins in a leaf, like paths in our very own labyrinth. We keep our hand on the wall at all times as we follow, unseen, gray on gray stone. We flatten ourselves against the stones, and we crawl in small and swift movements, like monstrous geckos. We follow the two women—one mechanical, the other alien to us, foreign—a child of shifting sand dunes and red earth, not of stone. Both smell of blood and hidden excitement, both carry jars filled with dark and viscous redness; it sloshes as they walk, laps at the walls of the jar with quiet hissing, and it reminds us of the ocean we’ve never seen but often imagined.

We think it amusing that lately we cannot love our children—children of stone, children that came from those who first settled in our creation; they do not seem to love us either. They have destroyed what we have built, and they think of us no longer. Our feeders are not refilled today, and we go hungry. It seems fitting somehow.

We remember another woman born of red earth on the other side of the sea. We remember her thin arms, fingers like bird claws. Her face covered in a cobweb of wrinkles, her dark-hooded fatigued eyes. Her soft, accented voice, always warmed by the elusive promise of salvation.

“Why did you turn to me?” she asked us, at a time when her hands were too tired to move and her heart was ready to give out. Why me, a plaintive cry of every lone soul in this city, alone as the day they were horn.

We cannot explain this feeling, this stirring, wistful like the smell of linden blooms in the blue moonlit night. We only feel, we feel the absence of love from the stone, from the city, we feel uprooted from our soil. And we seek salvation from all the unloved children of the world.

On the way, Niobe relented under Mattie’s pitiful stare (she extended her eyestalks for that very purpose), and confided that blood alchemy had many uses—love spells and divinations, as well as darker purposes. She told Mattie that in her homeland the blood homunculi were used to temporarily trap restless spirits, forcing them to divulge their secrets and use their incorporeal nature to peek into the time yet unwashed over the world but accessible to spirits, unmoored as they were from their physical confines.

“How far into the future can they see?” Mattie asked, fascinated.

Niobe smiled. “It’s unpredictable. Sometimes they confuse future and past, or even present—it is all the same to them. Know where we could catch a few spirits?”

“Yes,” Mattie said. “The Soul-Smoker has them all. But I doubt he’d give any of them up.”

“Soul-Smoker?” Niobe asked, frowning. “What’s that?”

Mattie explained what Soul-Smokers did for a living, and told Niobe about Ilmarekh and his sad state.

“Isn’t anyone happy in this place?” Niobe said.

Mattie considered her answer. “Some are. All are, at one time or another. I’ll bet even Ilmarekh is happy occasionally.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Niobe said but did not elaborate further. Instead, she quickened her step and sang a tune Mattie was not familiar with, swinging the blood-filled jar in rhythm with her song.

Mattie hurried after, intensely curious about the blood alchemy now. “I wonder if Ilmarekh would agree to let us trap a soul or two before he gets to them. Or maybe he’d think it’s cruel.”

Niobe laughed. “Patience, Mattie. Let me show you some simple stuff today. Besides, if I go to see the Soul- Smoker with you, won’t he steal my soul too?”

“He doesn’t steal them.” Mattie felt protective of Ilmarekh. “It’s just your soul might decide to join the rest; believe me, he doesn’t need another voice whispering to him.”

“He must be crazier than a fighting fish,” Niobe said. “You have strange friends.”

“Only strange people want to be friends with a machine,” Mattie said.

Niobe laughed. “I suppose so.”

Mattie caught up to Niobe, and looked around. They were in the part of the district she rarely visited, and she realized that there were many dark faces among the passersby. It made sense to her, she supposed, that foreigners settled close to each other—people seemed to like company of their own kind.

Niobe seemed to know many people—she constantly smiled and waved, and people smiled and waved back. The smells that wafted from the doors and windows, open on account of warm weather, set Mattie’s sensors afire with their strangeness—she recognized sandalwood and incense of some sort, fermenting bread, fresh berries, and unfamiliar cooking.

“There seem to be a lot more of your people here since I last visited,” Mattie said.

Niobe shrugged. “People move, they bring their families. They help each other too—when I first came, I had nothing with me but my bag and an address. And these people were strangers to me back home, but here they treated me like family, took me in, helped me find a place. Without them, I would never have figured out how to join the society and apply for an alchemist’s license. We have to stick together—I bet you stick together with your own kind too.”

Mattie shook her head. The vision of the automata at the mechanics’ gathering moving along the walls in a blind, shambling procession, deaf and dumb and as unaware of the world as the tables around them, flashed in her mind. She wanted nothing to do with them.

“Why not?” Niobe persisted, simultaneously making a pretend scary face at a gaggle of small barelegged children that ran through the streets with an air of great joyful purpose.

“I’m not like them,” Mattie said, “Well, most of them. There are a few intelligent automatons around; a few of them are even emancipated. But you know, nobody likes making them. And they… we don’t even like ourselves.”

“I’m surprised to hear that.” Niobe turned into a street too narrow for proper traffic, animated by just a few pedestrians. There was a low buzz in the air, a suppressed droning of a multitude of voices at a distance, and