the displeased populace was thrown at them with guilty alacrity and a few constrained verbal outbursts.
Mattie was ready to turn away as the first carriages of the procession approached the eastern gates, leaving the city with a leaden finality, telegraph’s reassurances notwithstanding. It was almost as though a part of the city was detaching itself, leaving the place incomplete somehow, although not necessarily worse. There was a sense of freedom in having a piece missing, in having a void that could be filled with something new.
A man jostled past her; he was garbed in the habit of the Stone Monks, but did not move with the usual humility of the clergy—he strode through the crowd, parting it with his heavy shoulder. Mattie stepped aside, giving way, and so did a few of her neighbors.
The man walked past, and only then Mattie noticed that his right hand was deep in the pocket of his robe. Just as she thought that he was about to hurl a spoiled apple or a turnip at the courtiers and judged such behavior inappropriate for a monk, the man pushed into the street, steps away from the ducal carriage.
The object he extracted from his robe was neither a fruit nor a vegetable, but a large clear bottle filled with thick transparent fluid.
The enforcers turned the buggies toward him, screaming warnings. Some of them drew muskets and leveled them at the man, still imploring him to step back.
The man swung and threw the bottle at the carriage and ducked into the crowd just as the first shots rang out. And then all was chaos—Mattie was pushed and almost knocked off her feet as the people around her screamed and ran, as several people from the first row of the crowd fell under the musket shots. Mattie could not look away.
The bottle burst loudly with a flare of hungry fire that engulfed the side of the ducal carriage. The lizards thrashed, trying to escape the inferno, and got tangled in their tack. Their tails whipped madly, knocking over the carriage. The lizards of the carriages that followed reared up and turned away, some dragging the carriages into the crowd, others upsetting theirs.
The fire spread, engulfing two other carriages. Their passengers wrestled from under the wreckage, even as their clothes and their hair caught fire.
The crowd pushed Mattie away from the sight of the explosion, and she only saw snatches of the raging fire, of a bleeding woman, her face smashed on the cobbles into a smoldering ruin. A giant lizard, its scales glistening red, lay on its side, its broken leg a mess of red twitching meat and fragments of sharp, pink bone. It shrieked in a strange voice, like a child crying. Mattie had never heard the lizards utter anything but an occasional hiss before.
Mattie strained to see over the jostling bobbing heads of the fleeing crowd. She saw the slow mindless automatons snap to action—they did as they were told, and they started to clean up. They moved among the wreckage, picking up the bloody fragments of the bodies torn by the initial explosion. There was nowhere to put them, so they stacked them all in the middle of the street—bloodied limbs, charred corpses, lizard bones, the shattered wood of the carriages and torn pieces of tack. No one paid any mind to them—the street cleared, and before Mattie was swept along with the panicked crowd, she saw the gruesome pile built by the automatons growing higher, as they labored, slow and creaky and not at all perturbed. As far as Mattie was concerned, they were the most horrible thing she had ever seen.
Mattie was shaken enough by the day’s events to go see Loharri. On her way, she stopped by the telegraph, which was thronged as she expected. There were fewer casualties reported than she expected; two of the Duke’s daughters were dead. The Duke himself, along with his wife and the surviving daughter, were badly burned. The Stone Monks were caring for them, with their vast pharmacopoeia and the favor of the gargoyles. People whispered that this momentous event had even brought the gargoyles out of hiding, and that they watched over the injured, perched on the temple’s roof.
Loharri was not home, and she headed for the ducal district, expecting to find him in the Mechanics’ chambers of the Parliament. She realized the folly of her intentions as soon as she approached the Parliament, abuzz in movement, swarming with automatons and people, alchemists and