moving, looking fixedly at her creator’s back. The speaker—a small, rotund man of middle age whom she had met many times but whose name she could not remember, talked to Bergen—a man who looked as though pickled by many years that passed over his balding head. His dark clothes hung loosely on his desiccated body, and yet his mind was sharp; he was perhaps the only one in this gathering whom Loharri would call a friend.
“Think about it,” said the rotund man, his face filling with alarming red color. “Without the gargoyles, what will the Duke be?”
“The Duke,” Bergen replied. “Sure, the gargoyles and their sanctions might seem irrelevant, and perhaps they are. But without the third leg, this government will not be stable—we do need the court, you know. Otherwise, it’ll be nothing but our squabbling with the alchemists.”
“And that would be a bad thing?”
“Of course,” Bergen said. “I for one do not think a civil war is such a good idea, and without the Duke we might have just that. Not that we don’t have enough trouble already.”
“But the gargoyles…”
“Are our history. This city is proud of its gargoyles, and there isn’t much you can do about it,” Bergen concluded and turned away from his interlocutor. “Spiritual guidance, be it superstition or tradition, is not always a bad thing. Some people need an external compass.” His watery old eyes stopped on Mattie, and he smiled.
“Good afternoon, Messer Bergen,” Mattie said in her flattest voice.
“Hello, Mattie,” he said. “Your master around?”
She pointed wordlessly at Loharri, still leaning on the table by a cluster of brightly dressed women.
Bergen chuckled. “I don’t understand what women see in him.”
“He talks to them?” Mattie suggested.
“In any case, I need to talk to him,” Bergen said, and walked up to Loharri, favoring his right foot. Goiter, Mattie remembered. The old man had goiter.
She moved behind Loharri, to stand still and listen. Loharri shot her a quick glance and a smile, and she momentarily felt grateful for that acknowledgement. Even though he had made her, with his own hands, put her together out of joints and slender metal bones, even though he knew more of her internal workings than anyone, he still managed to really see her as a whole.
Her attention was diverted by several automatons filing into the hall, their metal feet reverberating on the hollow floor of the sepulcher. They carried bottled wine and honeyed water, trays with fruit and bread and sweets, stacks of dishes and utensils. They moved in unison, their movements measured and devoid of any indication of free will. She had seen such servant automatons before, the mindless drudges that allowed for the leisure of the city’s inhabitants. And every time she saw them she felt deep unease, a pervading sense of wrong—how could they make them like that? she thought. If they were to have a mind, they would’ve been miserable with their lives of servitude—Mattie remembered the dark sense of injustice when she was little but a maid—but at the same time they would have the choice of misery. Making them without minds removed a potential conflict, and Mattie thought of the slaughterhouses in the outskirts, the dank places that smelled of rust and iron and rot. She ventured there to buy offal that was used in some of her ointments, but sometimes she watched the animals. It was like that, she thought, remembering the panic in sheep’s eyes; it was as if they managed to create a sheep that didn’t mind being slaughtered after it was led into a dark steel barrel of a room where steaming blood stood knee-deep.
Loharri touched her hand. “What are you thinking about?” He traced the direction of her gaze and spoke softly, solicitously.
Mattie looked away. “Thank you for not making me like them.” And added, before he had a chance to respond, “You should eat something. You look pale.”
“I always look pale,” he said but didn’t smile as he normally would. “It really bothers you, doesn’t it?”
She nodded. “They never had a chance. You removed the possibility of them even questioning if it was wrong.”
He frowned a bit. “We’ll talk about it later, if you don’t mind.”
She didn’t; the mechanics continued to mingle, most of them carrying plates now, and to speak in their sedate voices. Mattie followed Loharri, listening for any mention of the gargoyles, but everyone seemed rather preoccupied with solving the transportation problem. Mattie listened just enough to conclude that the alleged problem was not a problem at all, but rather the way things had always been—the mechanics never tired of improving upon what was not broken. They felt that produce was slow to arrive from the farms, and that during the harvest the roads could barely sustain the crawling traffic of produce carts and the six-legged lizards that dragged them at a leisurely pace. It interfered with the deliveries from the mines, and during harvest the production of the factories often dropped. The mechanics, of course, thought that it called for automation of the lizards, the carts, or both. Mattie wondered if they would ever think of automation of the peasants.
“We would also need a bigger road,” Bergen suggested.
“Or merely a better one,” Loharri said.
Mattie grew bored of the conversation centering on roads and whether it was worthwhile designing a road that would move and carry stationary produce to the city, and wandered through the crowd, whirring and clicking, listening. She stopped by a small cluster of mechanics who spoke in low voices, often glancing over their hunched shoulders with a palpable air of secrecy. Mattie stopped a few steps away, far enough not to arouse suspicion but close enough to catch their whispers with her exceptional hearing.
“I know that they are up to something,” said the rotund man that she recognized from earlier, and glanced around furtively. “Mark my words—exiles never go away peacefully; they always want to get back in. Always.”
“Suppose you’re right,” said a young man, whose pimples and straight back testified that he was fresh out of the Lyceum. “What can we do about it?”
“Build fortifications,” the rotund man said.
The rest of the group snickered.
“Isn’t it a bit premature?” said one of them. “If you are concerned, perhaps some careful reconnaissance…”
“Enough of this nonsense,” interrupted the man who appeared to be the oldest and crankiest in the group. “Wait for the problem to arise, then seek solutions.”
Mattie thought that the mechanics were generally inclined to solve non-existent problems; she took a step away from the group when her leg shook and she felt faint. Her movements faltered, and she felt a fine tremor spreading through her arms and legs, while her head felt suddenly foreign and unwieldy. She stumbled and would have fallen, if the edge of the table had not presented itself to her dimming vision; Mattie grabbed onto it, her fine fingertips splintering under her weight.
She saw Loharri making his way toward her, worry on his face, and his fingers already unbuttoning the tall collar of his jacket. Before her eyes closed, Mattie saw him pulling out a thin chain and a blinding flash of light reflected from a polished metal surface. The flash grew larger and obscured the room and the dismayed faces of the mechanics, annoyed at such brazen automaton malfunctioning, and Mattie could only feel her creator’s hands— loving, repellent—tugging the dress on her chest down, exposing her shame for all to see. And then she stopped feeling altogether.
Mattie came to—at first, she didn’t realize that she was in the same room, lying on the same floor. Most of the lamps had been extinguished, and the people were gone. Only Loharri perched on the edge of the table, motionless and dark like a gargoyle in the gathering dusk.
She pushed herself up, and her hands clanged against the hollow floors, making them sing with resonance. Her fingers found the smooth window in her chest and traced its familiar oval shape. It was closed again now, secure and snug, but her heart whirred strongly behind it, all wound up and ready for another few months of labor. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“It’s not your fault.” He didn’t move, and she could not quite decide whether he looked tired or irritated. “Not the best timing, but these things do happen.”
She stood, testing her limbs. He didn’t seem mad at her for the embarrassment she caused him. She should be grateful for that, she thought, but instead she felt hurt. Violated. He exposed her heart for all to see, he wound her up with the key around his neck right in front of his friends. “I want to go home,” she said.
He hopped off the table, and the floor echoed again. “As you wish. I’ll walk you.”
“No need,” she said.
