The Alchemy of Stone

strange voice, like a child crying. Mattie had never heard the lizards utter anything but an occasional hiss before.

Mattie strained to see over the jostling bobbing heads of the fleeing crowd. She saw the slow mindless automatons snap to action—they did as they were told, and they started to clean up. They moved among the wreckage, picking up the bloody fragments of the bodies torn by the initial explosion. There was nowhere to put them, so they stacked them all in the middle of the street—bloodied limbs, charred corpses, lizard bones, the shattered wood of the carriages and torn pieces of tack. No one paid any mind to them—the street cleared, and before Mattie was swept along with the panicked crowd, she saw the gruesome pile built by the automatons growing higher, as they labored, slow and creaky and not at all perturbed. As far as Mattie was concerned, they were the most horrible thing she had ever seen.

Mattie was shaken enough by the day’s events to go see Loharri. On her way, she stopped by the telegraph, which was thronged as she expected. There were fewer casualties reported than she expected; two of the Duke’s daughters were dead. The Duke himself, along with his wife and the surviving daughter, were badly burned. The Stone Monks were caring for them, with their vast pharmacopoeia and the favor of the gargoyles. People whispered that this momentous event had even brought the gargoyles out of hiding, and that they watched over the injured, perched on the temple’s roof.

Loharri was not home, and she headed for the ducal district, expecting to find him in the Mechanics’ chambers of the Parliament. She realized the folly of her intentions as soon as she approached the Parliament, abuzz in movement, swarming with automatons and people, alchemists and mechanics both. A mechanical caterpillar stripped of its seats stood in the street, chuffing idle steam. Eight lizards harnessed double-file waited patiently in front of a low sled. Mattie guessed that the mechanics were evacuating valuables from the Parliament, afraid of another attack, and that Loharri would likely find no time for her.

She passed the open doors of the ossuary, and couldn’t resist peeking inside. The sealed sepulchers embedded in the floor offered no sight of interest, but the piles of bones stacked along the walls, the skulls in neat piles in the corners, never failed to fascinate Mattie. Loharri had told her that the bones were those of previous dukes and their wives, their courtiers and favorites, their children and servants. The skulls shone softly when the sunrays from the open doors, filled with dense clouds of motes, struck their suture-seamed yellow surfaces, the domes of the foreheads high and round, the eye sockets mysteriously dark, dripping with untold sadness and wisdom.

“In much wisdom there’s much sorrow,” Loharri used to say. Mattie thought that she agreed as she watched the skulls, their sockets seemingly following her every move from their corners. They smelled of old parchment and dry earth crumbling into dust.

Listen. A faint whisper caught her attention, and at first she thought that it was just the wind trapped inside, rattling the old bones.

Listen, again.

She stepped inside, looking through the dusk filled with remains. There were just bones, but then she caught a glimpse of movement out of the corner of an eye. And then—like in an optical trick the traveling performers entertained their customers with, where one was supposed to look at the jumble of leaves to spot a deer, a lizard, and a giant bird, and once one saw them they would not go away—she saw the folded wings and the gray skin blending with stone, she saw the heavy horned heads and slit eyes, the folded hands, the bent knees. And the mouths opening like fissures in the age-old stone to whisper to her urgent words.

Listen, they spoke in one voice, the voice of the stone the city was carved from. We will tell you a story.

There is a notion of time as an enemy, but we couldn’t tell you how fast it was passing until we heard the human heartbeats, counting the seconds as they fell into the eternity. So many million heartbeats ago, when you were not yet here and the eastern woman, the stranger, the daughter of red earth was young, there were two boys.

Three boys, maybe. We can’t remember, and we sometimes confuse death and sleep, sleep and oblivion. But in any case, there they were—feral children living off scraps and rotten fruit left in the market square after the market was over. They had forgotten how to speak and only snarled at pigeons and stray dogs if they went after the scraps the boys had their eyes on, and they spat and hissed at the passing of the Stone Monks, who were the greatest fear of all children, parented or not.

We weep often, for the Monks carry our name and everything that they do is attributed to us. But what can we do? We are weak and dying, and they fill our feeders, so we keep our thoughts to ourselves; we shove the gravel into our mouths hastily, rent with guilt, and we do not speak.

But the boys, the boys… one is raven-haired, narrow-eyed, and so beautiful, dirt and grime and lice notwithstanding; another is white-haired like an old man, and he moves on all fours, feeling his way like a crab. Yet another is quiet and small, and he cries often. He has no words, and his anguish wails and sobs through the night alleys, and we watch over them, like we watch over everyone who is marked for destruction by the grindstones of the world. There is nothing we can do but watch over them.

Mattie startled at the slamming of the door behind her, and the gargoyles fell silent, blending back into the surrounding walls. “Anyone in here?”

“Just me,” Mattie answered. “Sorry, Master Bergen.”

The old mechanic shuffled closer, his limp more prominent now, accompanied by the tapping of a cane. “Mattie? What are you doing here?”

“The door was open,” she said. “I was looking for Loharri.”

“Of course you were.” His voice was paternal, soothing, and the look of his rheumy eyes kind. “We’re a tad busy here, but he’s around. I’ll help you look if you want.”

Mattie followed him to the exit. “What’s happening?”

“You’ve heard about the Duke, of course.”

“Of course,” Mattie echoed. She decided not to tell him that she was there—she was indisposed to answer questions, to relive the fear and the disgust she felt watching other automatons, purposefully excluded from the context, gathering limbs. “Terrible, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Bergen said without much conviction. “Terrible. Only now, who’s next?”

“You’re not leaving the city, are you?”

“Dear girl, no, pox on your tongue.” He gave a feeble laugh. “What, leave and let the alchemical vultures pick apart everything we’ve built here?”

“They’re not vultures,” Mattie said, narrowly avoiding using ‘we’.

Bergen shook his head. “Perhaps I’m being too cautious in my old age. But we are just moving the archives and machinery, in case they decide to bomb the Parliament. One must be careful—dark times, dark times.”

They walked to the Parliament building, Mattie tactfully restraining her step so as not to overtake Bergen. He kept talking about the intrigues and the damn alchemists, of how things weren’t what they used to be—Mattie saw no virtue in arguing with the latter point.

Inside the Parliament building, the chaos was even more overwhelming than outside. Mattie bumped into people who ran without heed, and narrowly avoided an automaton that shuffled by with a stack of papers high enough to completely conceal its torso and face. She looked around but saw no alchemists. She cursed her cowardice—if she got the list of the missing medallions in time, maybe her society would not need to be afraid to set foot in Parliament.

“He’d be in the archives,” Bergen said. “I must be getting on now, but you should find him—check all the way up the stairs, on the fourth floor.”

Mattie squeezed through the crowd, going against the stream of people and automatons. The stone steps under her feet were worn concave, and her feet nestled securely in the depressions made by many generations of human feet, giving her comfort and a fleeting sense of belonging to the great tradition. Even though she could neither vote nor be elected, she felt a part of it.

The crowd thinned after she passed the second floor where the offices and the chambers were, and almost disappeared by the fourth. When she set foot into the echoing silent crypt of the archives, it felt like she was the only person there—no, the only person left on earth, so desolate it was.