She found Loharri at the small desk tucked away in the back, where he sorted through stacks of hand-written and printed documents and scrolls. “Loharri,” she called.
He jerked his head up, as if coming from deep sleep. “What’s the matter, love?”
“I know it’s a bad time,” she said. “But the medallions.”
He nodded. “Here you are. I copied it for you last night and set it aside. Glad you came.”
She took the proffered scroll with only a dozen or so names on it. “Thank you,” she whispered, guilt washing over her anew. “I can’t believe you remembered.”
He smiled lopsidedly. “Have I ever forgotten you? Have I ever broken a promise?”
“No,” she said. “But with everything that’s happening… I thought you’d have better things to do.”
“But you still came,” he said with a shrug and pushed away the stack of papers in front of him. “See? Great events might shake our foundations, but we still remember our little inconsequential promises. And I bet you money that everyone still carries on as normal—people eat, children wail, couples fight and fuck. These things are the true edifice of the city, not dukes or buildings, not even the gargoyles. How’s your work going, by the way? Found Sebastian yet?”
“It’s difficult,” Mattie answered. “I’m in a new territory—our formulae are all for people’s needs, not the gargoyles’. Imagine if you had to design a musket for creatures with eight arms and no legs.”
He laughed. “They wouldn’t run, and could reload much faster. But I get your point, dear girl. Stone isn’t flesh.”
“Or metal,” Mattie said. “I don’t even know how to begin thinking about it; I mean, I do, but I have no idea what makes sense and what doesn’t.”
He nodded. “I’ll let you know if anything occurs to me. Anything else you need?”
She thought of the gargoyles’ story and mentally cursed Bergen for interrupting. “Just a question,” she said. “Do you know the Soul-Smoker?”
His smile remained but changed, as if his mirth had drained away and only its ghost remained behind. “No,” he said. “Can’t say that I know the gentleman. I’ve seen him, of course.”
“Have you ever known him? When you were children?”
He shrugged. “Maybe. This city is not that big, and you know how children are, always running in packs. Why? Did he say anything?”
“No. Just wondering,” Mattie said. “He seems very lonely and very sick.”
“Comes with the job.” Loharri cleared his throat. “Now if you don’t mind…”
“Of course. You have work to do. I will see you soon,” Mattie said.
As she turned to leave the archives, she heard a weak voice calling Loharri’s name from downstairs. She cocked her head, listening. “Can you hear that? Someone’s calling you.”
“They can come here,” he answered. His former good spirits were gone, replaced by bile. “What am I, an errand boy?”
“I think it’s Bergen,” Mattie replied. “It’s hard for him walk up the stairs.”
Loharri heaved a sigh and cursed under his breath, but stood and followed Mattie down the stairs. They met Bergen halfway between the second and the third floors.
“Loharri,” the old man wheezed. “Come quick. The enforcers arrested the man who threw the bomb at the Duke.”
Mattie thanked her stars and her lucky stones that Bergen was too perturbed to pay attention as she followed him and Loharri to the jail adjacent to the Parliament building. The old man worked his cane as if it were a hoe, reaching with it in front of him until the metal-clad tip caught between the cobbles and pulling himself along, his limp pronounced but apparently disregarded. Even Loharri’s long loping strides were barely enough to keep up with the old man, and Mattie trotted behind, hitching up her skirts slightly higher than was proper, but forgivable under the circumstances.
The enforcers crowded the courtyard of the jail, their buggies clanging against each other and chuffing, the hiss of steam sounding almost identical to Bergen’s wheezing breath—a pleasing symmetry, Mattie thought, since Bergen was the inventor of these buggies, and it seemed only right that they replicated their creator’s habits in such harmony.
The enforcers, armored and menacing, looked at Bergen and Loharri with suspicious eyes through the narrow slits of their bronze helms, but let them through; Loharri grabbed Mattie’s elbow and dragged her along, without giving the guards a chance to ask her any questions or consider her admittance.
“Thank you,” Mattie whispered, his kindness a stab.
“If anyone ever hassles you,” he whispered back, “just tell them you’re mine. Damn your pride and just say it, all right?”
“All right.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.” Her heart felt ready to give, to pop the rivets that held it together and explode in an unseemly shower of metal and springs and wheels toothed like dogs.
They entered the low arch, decorated like everything around this building with carvings of gargoyles—a show of gratitude from the city, from back in the day when the gargoyles were strong enough to grow a jail at the city’s request.
They had grown it large and sturdy, with a monolithic door that required twenty men to move it aside. There were no windows or water pipes or air ducts, and the jail, one with the stone that birthed it, was cold in winter and hot in summer, and not many lasted long enough to experience both extremes—one or the other killed them before that. But that was for the prisoners condemned for serious crimes; those who were found guilty of lesser offenses were transferred to the southern copper mines, or to the northern fields, where they died slower and side-by-side with people who had done nothing wrong apart from being born to an unpleasant lot in life.
They found the prisoner just inside the jail. He was dressed in the habit of a Stone Monk, torn at the shoulder, exposing a large gash crusted over with blood. The skin of his shoulder, smooth and brown, was stained with blood and bruised, and his thick lips opened and closed in quick, gulping breaths.
Mattie noticed his hands shackled together by an elaborate brass device consisting of several metal semicircles nestled inside one another, latching onto the wrists of the man in an overlapping lattice. She also saw the depression in his side, where the robe flapped, seemingly not touching the body.
“His ribs are broken,” she whispered to Loharri.
He nodded and narrowed his eyes at her, as if to warn her to stay silent.
Two mechanics and an alchemist surrounded the man; they were inflicting no violence on him, but their taut faces told Mattie that they wanted to.
Bergen caught his breath, and addressed the prisoner. “Were you working alone or did you have accomplices?”
The man just stared, his eyes startled and wide, his mouth still straining after each shallow breath.
“The bastard can’t even speak properly,” one of the mechanics said.
“Or he doesn’t speak our language.” Bergen cleared his throat and moved closer to the prisoner. He spoke slowly and loudly, as one did with children or feeble-minded. “Alone? Were you alone?”
The prisoner gasped. “I did nothing,” he whispered.
Mattie tugged Loharri’s sleeve. He frowned and shook her hand off. “What?” he whispered with a fierce expression on his twisted face.
“That’s not the right man,” Mattie whispered. She hadn’t realized how silent the room was, until her whisper resonated, and made everyone turn toward her. “It’s not the right man,” Mattie said, louder, addressing Bergen and everyone else. “I was there, I saw. The one who attacked the procession was much bigger. And he wasn’t an easterner, he was local. I saw his hand—it was pink, like yours.” She pointed at Bergen’s hand gripping the pommel of his cane.
Tense silence filled the room, palpable, broken only by the ticking of Mattie’s heart and the ragged breath of the prisoner who watched Mattie with almost religious hope on his face, mixed with open-mouthed wonder.
“Nonsense,” Bergen said, and turned away.
The rest of the mechanics coughed into their hands and shuffled their feet, covering up their visible relief.
