We follow the girl as she walks through noisy streets, crawling with the vile mechanical contrivances that did not come from the stone. The girl walks as if blind, stumbling over the cobbles, and we hear her heart whir and whine deep inside her, creaking with tears she will never weep. We are glad that she is gone from the place of sorrow, where so many of our children have perished and so many others have behaved badly.
Content that she is on her way home, we turn and leap from roof to roof, our toes grasping shingles like steps; our wings balance us, keep us steady. We follow the inverse labyrinth of the buildings, the negative reflection of the streets between them, to a different location.
We see a small, white-haired man who used to move like a crab when he was little, but who has now learned to walk upright, with dignity and grace. He has words now, and we are proud of him, as proud as we are of any we like to follow. He moves toward the place the girl has just left, the pulsing streets converging on the ugly stone heart of the city, and we almost wish we hadn’t built it.
Everyone flees at his approach; the soulless creatures like ourselves are the only ones who are immune to his repulsive charms. We remember the time he swallowed his first soul, as we remember all the countless others, gone up in smoke and inhaled by his wide loving mouth. He is nothing but loving.
The courtyard of the jail is filled with people, but they too flee as he gets closer; they go into the jail building and wait inside. The only man left in the courtyard is the stranger—red earth, salty sea, hands bound, feet shackled, and nowhere to run.
The white-haired man, the smoker of souls, stands before him, quietly, mildly. “Are you ready?” he asks, his eyes of milk staring over the stranger’s head into the infinity of the jail walls.
The stranger shakes his head side to side, the frantic motion of a terrified child.
“Shh,” the blind man says, “shhh.” He takes the face of the prisoner into his hands, and the stranger goes limp and docile.
The blind man’s hands are soft and gentle, and he touches his lips to the stranger’s.
The stranger tries to keep his mouth closed, but it is of no use. His soul sensing the companionship of many others, presses on his lips from the inside, and he finally gives with a loud exhalation. His lips brush against the blind man’s and open, and the two men stand for a while, eye-to-eye, mouth-to-mouth, and we listen to the hissing of the escaping soul, we watch the stranger’s eyes go white and empty like the clouds, and we hear the clink of his shackles as he collapses on the pavement, formless and soft like water.
A mindless automaton enters the courtyard and approaches the blind man who is motionless, his narrow chest expanded as if by an impossibly big breath.
“You have done your duty,” the automaton says in a grating voice, uncolored by either emotion or understanding. “Write your report by tomorrow morning; someone will be by to pick it up.
We regret that he has to do it, we regret that among the souls that could not find rest there are others, to whom rest was denied in favor of extracting confessions. We know that our children are mendicant—they speak of never killing anyone, but they let buildings and the smoker of souls take the lives of those they cannot be bothered to kill themselves.
We did not want it to be like this, but what can we do? We are naught but a shadow of a distant memory, whispering in the rain gutters, clambering along the rooftops; we are nothing but decorations on the building, amusing in our grotesque bodies and webbed wings. We have heard of other cities where the buildings are decorated with statues of angels with golden wings, but we doubt that these angels were ever alive or even real. Most beautiful things are not.
We regret not having finished the story we started to tell to the girl—our understanding of time is vague, but we have a nagging feeling that it would’ve been useful to her. We resolve to tell her soon, and try harder this time, perhaps hold onto her skirts and plead with our eyes. Listen, we should say, listen.
We turn our attention back to the man and the automaton in the jail courtyard. The automaton gives its orders once again. The white-haired man nods and heads back home, the memories and the terror of the newly inhaled soul sloshing inside him heavily, like water in a bucket.
As the days wore on, Mattie noticed the troubling changes in the air—even though she rarely left the workshop these days, preoccupied with her work. She tried to get to the meaning of Sebastian’s words, of understanding the very soul of stone. For that purpose, the burners belched blue flames, and the alembics filled with ground stone were heated to a red glow.
She studied the transformation of stone. It turned the flames yellow and blue and sometimes green, it could be dissolved in Aqua Regis, and with enough heat, parts of it sublimated, leaving behind a hard and latticed carcass.
The stone was complex, as Mattie realized, consisting of many minerals so blended together that one could have no hope of separating them for individual study, and had to deduce the composition of it from its behavior during many transformations she subjected it to.
Mattie also taught Niobe—not about the blood alchemy but of the elements and their manifestations. She described the salamanders that lived in and commanded fire as golden lizards, and Undinae—as small girl automatons fashioned with webbed fins instead of arms and legs. Niobe laughed at her claims that she was able to see the salamanders, and Mattie did not really mind. She offered small sacrifices to the salamanders by burning some fragrant herbs along with stone, asking them to help her solve the riddle of the gargoyles.
But the stone alchemy was not the only thing that occupied her days and nights—having no need for sleep, Mattie felt superior sometimes at being able to accomplish twice as much in a day as any other alchemist. She worked on the stone during the day, when the light was bright enough to see the spectral colors and emanations; during the night, she practiced blood alchemy.
A deal was a deal, and she learned the new craft with dark satisfaction. She made a small homunculus from rendered sheep blood, with the heart woven from Iolanda’s and Loharri’s hair. The homunculus was still, waiting to be awakened in order to ensnare Loharri’s soul. The process took her longer than she wanted, but her learning was hindered by her inability to ask Niobe pertinent questions—she was ashamed to ask about compulsion and denial of will, and she feared that if Niobe found out about such practices, she would think poorly of Mattie. So Mattie saved the darkness for the night; night was for wounding.
During the day she helped Niobe decipher the recipes from her little birch bark book, and explained to her the properties of herbs and metals and sheep’s eyes. She showed her how to mix salves that reduced fever and unclouded the troubled mind. Day was for healing.
As the days passed, Mattie noticed a growing unease in Niobe. Mattie’s guilty conscience bounded to her mind’s surface, sending jolts to her heart and making it creak and moan faster and faster, its ticking loud and quick like the song of some demented cricket.
“What’s wrong?” Mattie asked her finally, as the two of them stood at Mattie’s laboratory bench, grinding herbs and extracting essential oils, each lost in her own private musings. “Are you mad at me?”
Niobe looked up from her fragrant aludel. “What? Of course not, Mattie. You’re the only friend I have—why
