The Alchemy of Stone - By Ekaterina Sedia Page 0,42
want.”
Mattie followed him to the exit. “What’s happening?”
“You’ve heard about the Duke, of course.”
“Of course,” Mattie echoed. She decided not to tell him that she was there—she was indisposed to answer questions, to relive the fear and the disgust she felt watching other automatons, purposefully excluded from the context, gathering limbs. “Terrible, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Bergen said without much conviction. “Terrible. Only now, who’s next?”
“You’re not leaving the city, are you?”
“Dear girl, no, pox on your tongue.” He gave a feeble laugh. “What, leave and let the alchemical vultures pick apart everything we’ve built here?”
“They’re not vultures,” Mattie said, narrowly avoiding using ‘we’.
Bergen shook his head. “Perhaps I’m being too cautious in my old age. But we are just moving the archives and machinery, in case they decide to bomb the Parliament. One must be careful—dark times, dark times.”
They walked to the Parliament building, Mattie tactfully restraining her step so as not to overtake Bergen. He kept talking about the intrigues and the damn alchemists, of how things weren’t what they used to be—Mattie saw no virtue in arguing with the latter point.
Inside the Parliament building, the chaos was even more overwhelming than outside. Mattie bumped into people who ran without heed, and narrowly avoided an automaton that shuffled by with a stack of papers high enough to completely conceal its torso and face. She looked around but saw no alchemists. She cursed her cowardice—if she got the list of the missing medallions in time, maybe her society would not need to be afraid to set foot in Parliament.
“He’d be in the archives,” Bergen said. “I must be getting on now, but you should find him—check all the way up the stairs, on the fourth floor.”
Mattie squeezed through the crowd, going against the stream of people and automatons. The stone steps under her feet were worn concave, and her feet nestled securely in the depressions made by many generations of human feet, giving her comfort and a fleeting sense of belonging to the great tradition. Even though she could neither vote nor be elected, she felt a part of it.
The crowd thinned after she passed the second floor where the offices and the chambers were, and almost disappeared by the fourth. When she set foot into the echoing silent crypt of the archives, it felt like she was the only person there—no, the only person left on earth, so desolate it was.
She found Loharri at the small desk tucked away in the back, where he sorted through stacks of hand-written and printed documents and scrolls. “Loharri,” she called.
He jerked his head up, as if coming from deep sleep. “What’s the matter, love?”
“I know it’s a bad time,” she said. “But the medallions.”
He nodded. “Here you are. I copied it for you last night and set it aside. Glad you came.”
She took the proffered scroll with only a dozen or so names on it. “Thank you,” she whispered, guilt washing over her anew. “I can’t believe you remembered.”
He smiled lopsidedly. “Have I ever forgotten you? Have I ever broken a promise?”
“No,” she said. “But with everything that’s happening . . . I thought you’d have better things to do.”
“But you still came,” he said with a shrug and pushed away the stack of papers in front of him. “See? Great events might shake our foundations, but we still remember our little inconsequential promises. And I bet you money that everyone still carries on as normal—people eat, children wail, couples fight and fuck. These things are the true edifice of the city, not dukes or buildings, not even the gargoyles. How’s your work going, by the way? Found Sebastian yet?”
“It’s difficult,” Mattie answered. “I’m in a new territory—our formulae are all for people’s needs, not the gargoyles’. Imagine if you had to design a musket for creatures with eight arms and no legs.”
He laughed. “They wouldn’t run, and could reload much faster. But I get your point, dear girl. Stone isn’t flesh.”
“Or metal,” Mattie said. “I don’t even know how to begin thinking about it; I mean, I do, but I have no idea what makes sense and what doesn’t.”
He nodded. “I’ll let you know if anything occurs to me. Anything else you need?”
She thought of the gargoyles’ story and mentally cursed Bergen for interrupting. “Just a question,” she said. “Do you know the Soul-Smoker?”
His smile remained but changed, as if his mirth had drained away and only its ghost remained behind. “No,” he said. “Can’t say that I know the gentleman. I’ve