The Alchemy of Stone

reason while others were watching, and he would not betray his fear outwardly.

He shot Mattie a searing gaze. “I do not see why not,” he said after a short pause. “As long is it doesn’t interfere with your other duties.”

“I’ve never taught an automaton,” Ogdela said to Loharri. “Is she up to the task?”

Loharri sighed and handed Mattie the flask. “Sadly, yes,” he said.

Mattie remained with Ogdela until the old woman decided that she was fit to go and open her own shop. Mattie had found a place just like Ogdela’s—“To be more like her,” she explained to Ilmarekh.

Ilmarekh listened to her story, his face drained of color, calm and placid like the surface of the Grackle Pond outside. The opium smoke had dissipated, and Mattie imagined that the consumed soul was done with flailing inside its flesh jail and had started to settle in its new place.

“So there it is,” Mattie said. “I studied with Ogdela… I wanted to be an alchemist because of the power they hold over others. I hadn’t realized then that not everyone is afraid of them, but I never regretted it, so it doesn’t matter.”

“The ghost… Beresta, she says she also studied with Ogdela. She will answer your questions.” Ilmarekh stammered and stopped. Large drops of sweat swelled on his forehead, and he swallowed a few times.

Mattie guessed that the opium was getting the best of him; as the darkness descended outside, she remembered the family, still waiting by the porch, too fearful to enter their own house. “Perhaps I should take you home,” she said. “You look like you need to rest.”

Ilmarekh sat upright, the empty bowl at his elbow clanging with the sudden movement. “You’d do that?”

“Of course,” Mattie said. “Why wouldn’t I?” She regretted saying it as soon as the words touched the darkened air. Of course she knew why no one ever went to the Soul-Smoker’s house, and Ilmarekh knew that she knew. To him, her feigned ignorance could only be interpreted as condescension, a feeble attempt to pretend that she did not know his disadvantage, the way people saw him. “I’d like to take you anyway,” she said.

He nodded, slowly, and rose, leaning on his cane heavily. She hooked her arm under his, and he jolted at her touch—any touch, she guessed, would be a novelty to him. “Can you see in the dark?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said.

He seemed relieved at not having to worry about finding his way and being able to use his cane for support only. His weight, small as it was, pressed on Mattie’s arm, and she wondered at the birdlike thinness of his bones, at the feverish warm coating of flesh that knotted over them.

We watch from the secret places of the city—the rooftops and rain-gutters, the awnings of bakeries and the scaffoldings rising around new buildings—as the girl and the man walk through the dark streets. She doesn’t bother finding the lit streets and cuts along pitch-black alleys and around dark ponds that reflect no stars; it is cloudy tonight. It is too dark to fear thugs or thieves, but we keep watch nonetheless.

We watch as she almost carries the frail man who seems unsure on his feet all the way through the narrowing streets, through labyrinths of dirt paths of the shantytowns fringing the city, to the gate, to the wall. There, we do not follow, but we keep watch—we watch over her as the two of them exit the gate on the distal side and walk up the hill. The rain starts, slicking the path, and her mechanical parts creak louder as water gets trapped in her joints and delicate wheel-bearings. They are just a blur now, a double shape through the gray curtain of the rain and the night. The ground is still warm from the sun, and silvery mist rises and snakes along the path, clinging low over the wet grass.

There is a house on the top of the hill—no man’s land, no-place, too steep for agriculture and too rocky for pasture, out-of-the-way and inconvenient for city dwellers and farmers both. This hill, the Ram’s Skull, the bald forehead of the once-mountain worn to a nub by time (slipping, slipping, faster and faster) is nothing but bedrock and loose stones. The house on the top sits lopsided already, its northern corner sinking with the decay of the slope under its supports.

The mechanical girl and the Soul-Smoker enter the house—we hear the long squeal of a door as it opens and a slam as it closes behind them. We do not know what is happening inside, but we can guess—there is light in the fireplace and the gurgling of a kettle, and low, guilty voices. And we think of the souls and we count them—we had known every ghost in the city, and we can recall their names. We marvel at the cruelty of their fate without having the capacity to truly comprehend it—no more than to merely recognize it as grotesque. But, like the mechanical girl, we have no souls, and we are not afraid of the Soul-Smoker, we have no reason to worry that the souls inside him will somehow lure ours away and we will fall dead on the spot, abandoned by our animating essence. We think about the nature of souls and listen to the small domestic noises reaching us from the little house on top of the hill.

We sit all along the wall like giant gray pigeons, our hands clenched under our sharp chins, our wings folded primly, our eyes narrowed, and our ears pricked up. If someone were to wander by at this wet, ungodly hour, they would believe us turned into stone, inanimate like the wall we grip with our clawed toes. Or they would wonder what the gargoyles are doing out of their caves and hiding places, why are we out and about. But there is nobody here to pry or to wonder, and we watch and we listen and we wait, and we do not know what they are talking about.

Chapter 3

The next morning, Mattie remembered that she still had to finish Iolanda’s perfume. Fortunately, the night spent talking to the Soul-Smoker taught her more about regret than, she suspected, the entire city could. She found dried wormwood in her extensive apothecary, and prepared to sublimate its essential oil—she lit the burner and cleaned the aludel, and assembled it so that the smaller vessel sitting on top of the larger one was tilted at enough of an angle for the condensing vapor to slide down the concave walls into the waiting receptacle. As the wormwood heated, she crushed the brittle spiny leaves of rosemary, downy-gray, and mixed them with extractants and solvents to pry away its properties of memory.

One did not regret what one did not remember; Ilmarekh, who remembered every moment, every twinge of hundreds of former inhabitants of the city, told her that. The opium made him talkative last night, and the souls in his possession crowded and pressed, trying so desperately to look out of his blind eyes, struggling so valiantly to move his reluctant, cottony tongue. He spoke in a hundred voices; only one of them was Beresta, but Mattie felt that it would be impolite to ignore the rest of them, and she listened to their laments and reminiscences, to their complaints about children who grew up and never visited, about the sorrow of dark alleys and the cold, wet slither of a robber’s knife.

Mattie listened, waiting for the small voice of the alchemist woman who could tell her about the gargoyles. But it was so crowded that she only had a chance to utter the name of her son—Sebastian, and the street he lived on. She didn’t say anything else, but it was enough for now. Mattie thought that she would visit Ilmarekh again, perhaps visit him often. He knew so much, and yet no one dared to ask him questions for fear of losing their own souls. He was all Mattie’s, and she was not a woman to miss her chances.

The warm smell of wormwood filled her laboratory, and she collected the few transparent, pale yellow drops that waited for her in the aludel. She blended them with rosemary and with the sage-and-myrrh concoction she had prepared last night. The musk of ambergris enveloped the rest of the ingredients in its sensual embrace, forcing them all together, the bark of the cypress and the sharp, bitter camphor softened by the gentle herbal scents.

Satisfied with her work, Mattie nodded to herself and let the mixture settle and blend. She was about to go out for a walk, and maybe pick up a few chemicals she had fancied for a while but had no means to buy until now, when a sharp rapping on the door announced a visitor.

She opened the door to see Loharri—dressed in a formal frock coat, he seemed especially thin and sharp- edged. “Busy?” he said.

“No.” She stood in the doorway preventing him from entering. The smell of Iolanda’s perfume saturated the air, and she could not risk him recognizing it later and guessing at Mattie’s connection to Iolanda. “Going out?”

“Just an informal gathering,” he said, although his clothes clearly begged to differ. “Lunch with some friends and colleagues. Would you like to come?”

“Of course,” Mattie said. He rarely asked for favors nowadays, and she saw no reason to deny him. Besides,