The Alchemy of Stone

It was always so peaceful here, so quiet—Loharri had often said that he enjoyed the stillness of the air, the absence of sound, which made it easy to imagine that this house was the only place that existed, surrounded by an infinite bubble of luminous and empty space. And now Mattie realized that even if she screamed for help, her cries would be muffled by the dense hedge, and in any case, people were used to screams by now and hid and ran rather than rushed to help.

Something touched her lips—a wet, cold, and unpleasant touch tasting of blood and sulfur—and Mattie started. The familiar hissing reassured her; the homunculus clambered up her senseless form and now whispered in her ear, its voice indistinct and blurred by the gargling quality of its speech. “I can help,” it said. “Help?”

“Do you know which switch he has turned?” Mattie asked, her disgust for the creature tempered somewhat by hope.

“Yessss,” it hissed. “I see everything.”

“Can you turn it?”

The slurping sounds indicated the homunculus’s progress; there was a shifting of metal, and a sudden jolt shot through her arms and legs. She doubled over in pain, sending the homunculus splashing to the floor. “Are you all right?” she asked. “I’m sorry.”

“Yessss,” it said and burbled. “Would you like me to find you new eyes?”

“Yes please,” Mattie said. “You are a clever little fellow.”

“Of course,” it answered. “I am earth. I am stone.”

The homunculus slurped across the workshop floor, and even though Mattie could not see it she imagined the black blood trail it was leaving on its wake. She heard the sounds of rummaging, slow and laborious, and she thought that it took such a little thing an enormous effort to shift the pile of parts and rejected machines; the limitations of its size posed an almost comical contradiction to its grandiose claims, but Mattie was disinclined to find humor in anything just now. It was earth, or at the very least its essence. She wondered if the gnomi, the earth elementals, looked just like the homunculus; she wondered if it was somehow one of them, a creature that could move through solid stone with the same ease as she moved through the air. She discarded the thought as unlikely, and carefully stretched her arms and legs, awakening to life with tingling and electric jolts.

She felt around with her fingers; the layout of the workshop was familiar to her and after a few minutes investigating her immediate surroundings, she remembered how she used to navigate these rooms by touch. Often even touch was superfluous—after a day of darkness she developed new senses, which allowed her to feel when the walls were too close, and to circumvent the obstacles.

Mattie felt her way to the pile of parts and rooted through it, the shape of her eyes familiar to her—long cool cylinders with latches in the end that locked into her eye stalks. Her fingers felt gears, faces, metal plates, bits of armor, coils, valves, engine parts, and flywheels. She recognized them all and was momentarily delighted before discarding yet another disappointment.

The homunculus labored by her side, its quiet boiling and hissing always present. She imagined the mess they were making—strewn-about parts, some smeared with pungent sheep’s blood, and she felt a small pang of dark satisfaction.

Let him clean up after her, for once. When he gets back, she would be gone, hidden, on her way to find Iolanda and to beg her to speed up Loharri’s binding. And to warn Sebastian, of course.

“Is this it?” the homunculus whispered and put something in her hands. She was used enough to him to not recoil at the touch of his hands, wet like a kiss.

She wrapped her fingers around a small heavy cylinder. “Yes, this is it. Thank you. Is there another one?”

“No,” the homunculus answered.

Mattie fitted the cylinder into its socket. It was an old eye, discarded years ago, and Mattie tried to accept the dullness of her vision, the gray shroud of dust that seemed to cling to everything. “No matter,” she said. “One is fine for now, but we better get moving.”

She gathered the creature into her skirt and smoothed the white petticoat underneath—she wanted to look at least somewhat presentable, not as a crazed one-eyed automaton smeared in sheep’s blood with her skirts bundled about her waist, exposing her long, metal legs.

“Go easssst,” the homunculus said, and nestled deeper into the hammock of Mattie’s skirt. “He won’t look for you there.”

“No,” Mattie said. “North. We have to see the Soul-Smoker and warn Sebastian.”

The homunculus gave no other advice and asked no more questions, and seemed to have fallen asleep, lulled by the sound of her steps.

We walk in small numbers; we can count ourselves now with what fingers a creature has on two hands and two feet. We don’t bother, unwilling (afraid) to dwell on our diminishment. Instead, we watch the city crumble. There is fighting, and it feels like it has been going on forever—or at least long enough for us to forget what the city used to look like, before the smoke and fire, before the growing ruins and gutted buildings, before the Grackle Pond was cluttered with scorched, mutilated metal and bits of steam engines and the gears of an automaton brain large enough to make decisions but too small to predict their consequences. We forget so quickly now, our memory so dependent on our numbers; the more of us do the remembering the better the memories are.

The lizards do not drag carts behind them anymore; a few of them have broken loose and stomp the streets in blind panic. Automatons are few and far in between, most of them smashed to pieces or sent away to the farms. The paper factory, as well as all other ones, has stopped, soon after the caravans of coal stopped coming through the city gates. The air has a different quality to it—woodsmoke and clay and stone instead of metal and burning coal; we are trying to decide whether it is an improvement.

We watch the enforcers, their buggies abandoned, their armor nowhere to be seen (too heavy to walk in) head toward the city gates. They cannot possibly hope to retake the farms or the mines; they lead a prisoner among them, and we realize that they want the Soul-Smoker—one always brings a decoy, a sacrifice on such outings. Or perhaps they want to bargain with the rebels and the man walking with his head low, his clothes soaked with the rain, is their bargaining chip. We cannot be sure, but we worry about the blind boy, all alone in his cabin.

The telegraphs all over the city chatter and thrash and spew forth endless ribbons of paper covered in messages no one reads—no one has to anymore. Soon they will run out of paper, and we imagine them straining and chittering, and punching the empty air with their beaks that will have run out of ink too. We wonder how long the water will keep flowing.

The markets are quiet now, and there is little left to buy besides last year’s corn and turnips. We see hollow-eyed women cowering—how fast they learned to move in quick dashes between the buildings!—and keeping close to the corners and houses. The merchants leave the centers of the markets free too, their stands leaning sparsely against the protective walls.

The children are gone, as if they had all disappeared overnight—we know it is not true, we know that some are locked inside and others were taken by their parents out of the city; yet others were sent away to relatives in other cities, where they could be children and carefree, while the adults wait out the awfulness that befell them. But it feels to us that they ran away, abandoning the city that disappointed them, and we try and imagine what it would be like, to run away forever, turning our ridged, winged backs on this city. We imagine the sounds of the sea and the smell of red, kind earth, the smells of different spices and the taste of unfamiliar rocks, made of limestone born by the sea and not the cruel hot compressions of the earth underneath. We contemplate joining the circus, like we imagine everyone does—idly, not seriously, but wistfully. There is such temptation, such forbidden joy in abandonment.

And then the rain starts falling, black rain tainted with soot; it weeps from the ledges and mourns in the gutters, it roars as it runs through the streets, like organ pipes, like a song. We look into each other’s faces and wipe away the black rain that weeps from our hardened eyes, leaving black tracks down our cheeks. And we are suddenly not sure whether it is the sky or us who is crying.

We look around us, and we mourn ourselves, we mourn the fact that even after the city and we are gone, the rock will remain. We mourn the ruined city, the unfinished construction, the demolished palace, the gutted houses. Even if it is right for it to be ruined, we can still feel sadness at its passing, can’t we? Can’t we? And