The Alchemy of Stone

wince and wave them off our faces, but we still feel the greasy touch of their tiny claws.

And the smell… the mindless automatons are clearing the streets, but too few of them had survived the riots. Even those that did are in a poor shape—they stumble about, and some of their limbs are missing. And they collect the bodies of the dead miners the enforcers do not bother to pick up anymore. They still carry off their own after skirmishes, but we see the fatigue in their eyes, and we guess that soon they will abandon their bodies too.

There is a smell of rotting garbage everywhere, and it takes us a while to realize that it is coming from the dead bodies, stripped of their poor clothing and crude weapons by the scavengers. We recognize the scavengers too, hiding in the shadows—the light-eyed feral children let loose after the Stone Monks left the city.

We suddenly feel fearful and apprehensive, naked in our perishable flesh, and for just a moment we wish we could go back to being stone—crumbling in death rather than rotting, trapped inside an immobile prison of stone rather than reduced to immaterial souls like those that now rattled within our skulls. The moment passes. There is no point in regretting irreversible decisions—one has to live with them, and we try.

We move toward the building of the Parliament—the windows are yellow with light, even though it is morning, and we know that they have been in there all night, too preoccupied to remember to conserve oil, which is going to run out soon, just like everything else in the city.

We climb up the walls and crouch on the windowsills. They don’t see us, too preoccupied with peering inward and at each other. They seem worn now, ragged—their eyes are red and swollen, and their soft cheeks are peppered with steel-gray and dark stubble. And as we cling to the narrow windowsills, we feel the taut muscles in our legs cramping, we feel our fingers relax their grip on the window frames, fatigued, and suddenly we understand—in our bones!—how tired these people are, how vulnerable and hurt. Just like the ones fighting in the streets below, just like the ones waiting in the tunnels, just like the merchants in the market square and their skittish customers.

An explosion rocks the air, and a blast of warm and almost solid wind knocks us off our perch. We recover mid-air and spread our wings to buffet the fall, to let us land softly, with dignity and grace.

We look around, to locate the source of the explosion, but we cannot see if any buildings are missing: we would need to be higher, away from the ground. We hear a soft tinkling, and we look up, to see the shards of glass raining down from the destroyed windows of the Parliament, falling like jagged ice crystals; it is a miracle that we are not harmed.

We climb up the wall, pressing closely against it, so that the men who are now looking out of the windows—the unshaven and red-eyed alchemists and mechanics—can’t see us, but they are not even looking in our direction. They are pointing west, to the districts where the destruction has been the greatest.

We run through the layout of the city in our minds—there are houses there mostly, and the barracks of the enforcers not far from the western gate; there are telegraphs and the markets, there are factories. All of them seem like equally likely targets, and none of them matter.

It was the second time that Mattie found herself naked in Sebastian’s presence, and from his pretend lightheadedness and joking manner she surmised that he was thinking about it too. She wanted to ask him now, why did he go along with it? Why did he make love to her—was it a fetish of a mechanic enamored with intricate devices and easily prompted to express his affection the moment a device resembled a girl, or was it something else? She did not know how to ask, and her sluggish mind refused to do any more work than was strictly necessary—another self-preservation mode Loharri built into her, undoubtedly passing along the ridiculous desire to live despite one’s inevitable mortality.

Sebastian checked her joints, oiling and adjusting fiddly little parts in her knees. It hurt only a little.

“Pity,” Sebastian said. “I wish you didn’t feel it, like other automatons.” He still regretted their encounter, he still wished she hadn’t shown up to remind him.

“There’s a module in my head that disconnects the sensation,” Mattie said. “Only I don’t really know where it is exactly. And I didn’t like the last time it was used—I think this is why I’m so poorly now.”

“I won’t touch it,” Sebastian promised. “But I’ll have to check inside your head, to make sure there’s nothing broken there.”

“Last time you said you didn’t know how I worked,” Mattie said.

“I don’t. But I can still see if the gears are misaligned or if the connectors are missing or detached. Now that I’ve seen how it’s supposed to look.”

“I think I will need winding soon,” Mattie whispered, her voice giving out and then coming back again. “I need my key—make sure Iolanda gets it for me.”

“I will,” Sebastian said. His voice sounded so earnest that Mattie believed him. “I promise you I will.” He thought a bit, his hand clasping his chin absentmindedly. “Maybe I could take a cast of the keyhole and machine you a new one. I have the equipment here.”

Of course, Mattie thought. They machined keys—Iolanda and the rest had access to every important keyhole in the city. That was why they could place the explosives wherever they wanted. In her muddled state, the walls of the cave—dimly lit, just bare hints of solid matter under the gauze of shadows-reminded her of the dark paneling of Loharri’s workshop. It smelled the same, and was just as cluttered, and Sebastian became Loharri in her mind and then himself again. Perhaps that was why the thought of a second key in another mechanic’s hands scared her.

“No,” she whispered. “Just let Iolanda or Niobe get my only key—I do not want more than one, I do not want anyone but me to have it. And I don’t want anyone but them touching it.”

Sebastian smiled. “Not even me?”

“Especially not you,” Mattie said. “No offense meant.”

“None taken,” he replied. “Maybe just a temporary one? I’ll give it to you right away.”

The vexing survival module let itself be known again. “Yes,” Mattie whispered, and the shadows grew darker around her. “Just a temporary one then.”

“I will need to take a print,” Sebastian said.

Mattie nodded her consent and watched him take the glass bubble off the lamp, and heat a metal tin over the flames. When it started crackling and smelling of hot metal, he dropped a lump of wax into the tin, letting it soften but not melt. He tossed the tin down and blew on his fingers. The lump of wax had grown transparent around the edges, and Sebastian rolled in his hands, letting it cool a bit, stretching it between his fingers.

When the warm, fragrant wax touched her skin, Mattie gasped. This touch felt so alive, so gentle. The pliable wax pushed into the opening of the keyhole, and Mattie tensed, waiting for the turn of a key. None came, of course—it was silly to expect one, and yet she was so attuned to being wound that she could not completely extinguish her anticipation and excitement.

“Stay still,” Sebastian whispered. He pressed on the wax lump with his hand, and Mattie looked away. Not because she felt awkward (although she did), but because he was so mechanic-like now—his lips pursed in concentration, his eyes narrowed, he thought only about the task at hand, forgetting everything about Mattie. It struck her, in the slow, grating way her thoughts had acquired, how much like Loharri he was. She found it neither comforting nor disturbing, just odd.

Sebastian extracted the wax and squinted at it. “Son of a bitch,” he muttered.

“What?”

Sebastian shook his head. “Look.”

The wax looked like a simple narrow cylinder, devoid of any marks. “It doesn’t look like my key,” Mattie said.

“Of course it doesn’t. It’s protected, see—the outer opening is more narrow than the internal mechanism.”

“I think he told me once that it’s a complex key.”

“That’s an understatement,” Sebastian agreed. “It opens up once it’s inside and fits into the grooves. But I can’t make a print of it.”

Mattie lowered her eyes. “He didn’t want me to be able to get a copy. Even if I had thought of it earlier, I couldn’t have done it.”