“Do you have any books on gargoyles?”
The woman laughed. “Do I ever! Come with me, sweetness.” She led Mattie to the back of the shop, where the shelves were covered with a thin layer of dust and books towered in haphazard piles, in almost unbearable opulence and bounty. The shop owner grabbed onto one of the shelves and miraculously straightened her back, as her hands moved up from one shelf to the next, ratcheting her to verticality. She pulled a few heavy books, thick and square, from the top shelf. “Here’s something to start you with.”
Mattie stroked the page of the book in delight, quite refusing to believe that the picture in front of her was a thing of artifice—it had the appearance and the texture of something completely natural, springing spontaneously from the paper thanks to some obscure magic. The gargoyle in the picture squatted, its wings folded, its fists supporting its sharp chin, its face serene. It was just like Mattie remembered the gargoyles from the night they visited her—so gray and alien and sleek in their winged beauty, their flesh hard and cold like stone.
She read the words below the picture and soon she was enthralled in the history of them—of how they sprang from the ground, uncounted eons ago, of how they talked to the stone and grew it—at first, shapeless cliffs shot through with caves and encrusted with swallows’ nests; then, as their skill and numbers increased, they shaped the living stone whose destiny they shared—shaped it with their mere will!—into tall structures, decorated with serpentine spirals and breathtakingly sweeping walls, into delicate lattices and sturdy edifices.
The gargoyles needed no buildings, but when people came, the gargoyles built them—the Ducal palace was the first to rise from the wreckage of their former creations. They built for the joy of building while remaining elusive, hidden. And as people began to build their own houses and stores and factories, there were more places to hide. At night, the gargoyles went to the oldest of the buildings, to the palace, and they rested on its roofs and spires, haunch-to-haunch and shoulder-to-shoulder with their predecessors who had become one with the stone they had shaped. And they watched over the city as one would after a child.
Mattie closed the book and flipped through another—this one had no pictures and the words were crowded densely together, so that she had to extend her eyes a little to focus better. This book was full of dates and histories, and as far as Mattie could determine from her cursory skim, it was dedicated to proving that the gargoyles did not only grow stone but also had a power of controlling human souls, their thoughts and desires. The author argued in greatly heated and long sentences that the dynasty of the Dukes—the descendants of the first people to populate the gargoyles’ creations—were complicit in the gargoyles’ conspiracy, and that the source of their influence was not just social inertia but the hidden support of the gray creatures.
Mattie decided to get the second book as a gift to Loharri— even though he hadn’t given her the key, he was kind to her. And, most importantly, it looked like something he would enjoy, and Mattie believed that everyone should get what they wanted, just for the sake of it.
She flipped the page to read more, and then she felt another concussion of the air and the faint trembling, tingling shudder of the windowpanes. This time it was stronger, and the floor under her feet groaned, and the boards buckled, as if trying to shake her off. The bookshelves tilted and creaked, and before she could step away they assaulted her with heavy tomes, their rustling pages fanned as if in anger, and their leather bindings scraping her face. She shielded it with her hands—she liked this face well enough to protect it, and the porcelain was fragile. A book hit her hand, and something cracked, shifted, and hung limp—Mattie had to look to confirm that two fingers on her right hand were nearly broken off, two slender metal coils that remained connected to her with just slivers of metal.
The shaking and rumbling stopped, and Mattie looked around at the toppled bookshelves and strewn books, and at the owner who had fallen back into her gallows shape and now stood open-mouthed, surveying the destruction.
“I’m sorry,” Mattie said.
“What for?” said the owner. “You didn’t do this… did you?”
“No, no.” Mattie shook her head for emphasis. “How could I? I just wanted these books.”
“Then take them and maybe come back some other time,” the old woman said with a pained smile. “I’ll have quite a bit of work to do here.”
Mattie paid and headed outside but stopped in the doorway. “You have someone to help you clean up, correct?”
“Yes, yes.” The woman waved her hand helplessly. “The neighborhood kids, they always come to help. Just go now, please.”
Mattie left, her two books under her arm, her left hand cradling the injured right. There were people outside— everyone had rushed from their rumbling and shaking homes and shops, and talked excitedly. They all pointed in the same direction—west. Mattie looked too, but at first she could not discern what it was they were pointing at. She had to adjust her eyes again, and finally she discerned that blending with the low clouds a great puff of smoke and dust marred the sky, and that the spire of the palace had entirely gone from view.
“What happened?” she asked a young girl, a factory worker, to judge from her pale face and hair and chapped hands.
The girl squinted at the sky, her large, flat fingers tugging at the sleeve of her dark frock. “The palace’s gone, I reckon,” she said in a slow, thoughtful drawl. “Maybe an earthquake or maybe war.”
“Don’t be daft,” a tall stern man said to the girl, never acknowledging Mattie with even a glance. He wore a thick leather apron, and Mattie guessed him to be a shopkeeper. “There’s no war.”
“The gargoyles are taking back what’s theirs,” said an old woman, and wrung a wet shirt she held in her hands in apparent despair, or just out of habit—she must’ve been doing laundry when the quaking started. “Mark my word: they’re pulling the stones back under the ground, where they all belong.”
They stared into the sky, reluctant to move, as if any movement would upset the balance of their souls and bring the reality and its consequences crashing around them, like an avalanche of heavy books. Mattie was the first to break the spell.
She needed to learn what happened, and she had to talk to Loharri. A sickly tingling in her stomach, where all the sophisticated clockworks and mechanisms of her inner workings nestled, told her that her distress was greater than she had initially estimated. The gargoyles, she thought; the gargoyles. Had they been at the palace? Were any of them hurt?
She had almost reached home when with a wave of guilt she realized that she hadn’t even considered the lives of people inside. The Duke and the courtiers had been away—it was the planting season, and they visited the farms to bless the fields. But the servants inside… Mattie was not sure if the palace employed any human servants except the housekeepers and the overseers; they would be dead, she thought. But her heart ached more when she thought of the mindless automatons buried in the rubble, their lifeless eyes and broken limbs now just so much refuse, just guts and metal left in the wake of human need for something… she did not know what. Like the sheep who never had the chance to feel any pain or to consider their imminent doom.
On her way, Mattie picked up some gossip. She stopped by the public telegraph, a small structure painted yellow, where an ink pen on a long flexible handle endlessly recorded whatever news the operators fed it. She had no hope of reaching it to read herself—the telegraph booth thronged with people eager for the news, who shoved her aside like she was just an obstacle. Most ignored her questions, but from the snippets of their excited chatter to each other she learned the events, if not the precise details or reasons.
As she walked to Loharri’s house, the information kept replaying in her mind. The ducal palace had collapsed; there was talk of an attack from the outside, but the structure imploded and crumbled inwards, and the consensus
