The Alchemy of Stone - By Ekaterina Sedia Page 0,12
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. Gout, Mattie remembered. The old man had gout.
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