The Alchemy of Stone - By Ekaterina Sedia Page 0,43

seen him, of course.”

“Have you ever known him? When you were children?”

He shrugged. “Maybe. This city is not that big, and you know how children are, always running in packs. Why? Did he say anything?”

“No. Just wondering,” Mattie said. “He seems very lonely and very sick.”

“Comes with the job.” Loharri cleared his throat. “Now if you don’t mind . . . ”

“Of course. You have work to do. I will see you soon,” Mattie said.

As she turned to leave the archives, she heard a weak voice calling Loharri’s name from downstairs. She cocked her head, listening. “Can you hear that? Someone’s calling you.”

“They can come here,” he answered. His former good spirits were gone, replaced by bile. “What am I, an errand boy?”

“I think it’s Bergen,” Mattie replied. “It’s hard for him walk up the stairs.”

Loharri heaved a sigh and cursed under his breath, but stood and followed Mattie down the stairs. They met Bergen halfway between the second and the third floors.

“Loharri,” the old man wheezed. “Come quick. The enforcers arrested the man who threw the bomb at the Duke.”

Mattie thanked her stars and her lucky stones that Bergen was too perturbed to pay attention as she followed him and Loharri to the jail adjacent to the Parliament building. The old man worked his cane as if it were a hoe, reaching with it in front of him until the metal-clad tip caught between the cobbles and pulling himself along, his limp pronounced but apparently disregarded. Even Loharri’s long loping strides were barely enough to keep up with the old man, and Mattie trotted behind, hitching up her skirts slightly higher than was proper, but forgivable under the circumstances.

The enforcers crowded the courtyard of the jail, their buggies clanging against each other and chuffing, the hiss of steam sounding almost identical to Bergen’s wheezing breath—a pleasing symmetry, Mattie thought, since Bergen was the inventor of these buggies, and it seemed only right that they replicated their creator’s habits in such harmony.

The enforcers, armored and menacing, looked at Bergen and Loharri with suspicious eyes through the narrow slits of their bronze helms, but let them through; Loharri grabbed Mattie’s elbow and dragged her along, without giving the guards a chance to ask her any questions or consider her admittance.

“Thank you,” Mattie whispered, his kindness a stab.

“If anyone ever hassles you,” he whispered back, “just tell them you’re mine. Damn your pride and just say it, all right?”

“All right.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.” Her heart felt ready to give, to pop the rivets that held it together and explode in an unseemly shower of metal and springs and wheels toothed like dogs.

They entered the low arch, decorated like everything around this building with carvings of gargoyles—a show of gratitude from the city, from back in the day when the gargoyles were strong enough to grow a jail at the city’s request.

They had grown it large and sturdy, with a monolithic door that required twenty men to move it aside. There were no windows or water pipes or air ducts, and the jail, one with the stone that birthed it, was cold in winter and hot in summer, and not many lasted long enough to experience both extremes—one or the other killed them before that. But that was for the prisoners condemned for serious crimes; those who were found guilty of lesser offenses were transferred to the southern copper mines, or to the northern fields, where they died slower and side-by-side with people who had done nothing wrong apart from being born to an unpleasant lot in life.

They found the prisoner just inside the jail. He was dressed in the habit of a Stone Monk, torn at the shoulder, exposing a large gash crusted over with blood. The skin of his shoulder, smooth and brown, was stained with blood and bruised, and his thick lips opened and closed in quick, gulping breaths.

Mattie noticed his hands shackled together by an elaborate brass device consisting of several metal semicircles nestled inside one another, latching onto the wrists of the man in an overlapping lattice. She also saw the depression in his side, where the robe flapped, seemingly not touching the body.

“His ribs are broken,” she whispered to Loharri.

He nodded and narrowed his eyes at her, as if to warn her to stay silent.

Two mechanics and an alchemist surrounded the man; they were inflicting no violence on him, but their taut faces told Mattie that they wanted to.

Bergen caught his breath, and addressed the prisoner. “Were you working alone