The Alchemy of Stone - By Ekaterina Sedia Page 0,73

one that occupied most of Loharri’s workshop. Her thoughts turned to him—was he mad at her that she had left so abruptly earlier? Would he be happy to see her back unharmed?

The walls, gray stone behind the scaffolding, reminded her of the color of the gargoyles—it was sleek and cold like their skins, and Mattie couldn’t help but think that this was the stone they came from, the solid mass of rock that gave them birth. It was not so solid anymore, shot through with shafts and tunnels and mines. Maybe this is why the gargoyles are losing their strength, their power, Mattie thought. People are destroying the stone the city is built on, and what could one expect but a collapse? She felt the floor by the walls blindly, until she found a few stone slivers, and put them in her pocket. She would work and find out how this stone was different from any other, and why it held the gargoyles in such thrall. Work offered the comfort of familiarity and preoccupation with matters she could control, and which did not hurt so much.

In her laboratory, Mattie crushed the gray stones almost vengefully, and listened to the smallest crystals sigh and squeal under the slow twists of her pestle. She poured solvents over the crumbs and set them ablaze, carefully noting the blue and green color of the flames and the tiny salamanders that frolicked inside, playful and mischievous like puppies.

Mattie watched them for a while. She remembered Ogdela giving her a funny look when she had first seen the salamanders. “What are you staring at?” Ogdela had asked her then.

“Salamanders,” Mattie answered. “The fire denizens.”

Ogdela snorted. “Silly girl, you can’t see them, so there’s no point in looking for them.”

“But I do see them,” Mattie said. “Look!”

Ogdela shook her head. “Your eyes are better than mine then. Better than anyone’s.”

When Mattie questioned Loharri about her eyes, he grinned with the undamaged half of his face, and said something about polarized light and varying light sensitivity. Mattie did not understand the exact meaning, but figured that it meant that her eyes were special—something she suspected ever since he took them away from her. He did it again on a few occasions—sometimes as a punishment, sometimes for mere tinkering and improving.

“They are good enough,” Mattie had begged on many occasions when he wanted to work on her eyes just once more. “Please, don’t do this again.”

“They could be better,” he always answered. “You could see things no one else could see.”

“I already can,” she told him. “And I don’t like it when you take my eyes—I can see nothing at all then.”

The flames went out and the salamanders disappeared, and Mattie shifted idly through the charred remnants of the rock, its essence burned away in the blue and green flames, leaving behind only the most simple and most basic constituents.

She dribbled some sheep’s blood over them, added the herbs and the elements, and a small crystal of her eye to animate it, to make it listen to her. The homunculus took form, and Mattie put it in the same jar as the previous one, made from regular stone before Sebastian’s appearance interrupted her work.

The homunculi bubbled and seemed to size each other up, and Mattie quickly poured the mineral essence into the jar to feed them, and tightened the lid. She watched as the two creatures lapped up her offering and then locked arms. They struggled and wrestled with each other, and for a while it looked like neither was gaining the upper hand, until Mattie realized that their hands and arms had fused together.

Their shoulders touched and stuck, then their stomachs. Mattie thought that soon she would be in possession of a much larger homunculus, when the one made with gargoyle stone opened its mouth with slow hissing and bubbling of drying blood, and engulfed the head of its adversary. The other homunculus, headless now, thrashed, and Mattie wondered if it was capable of feeling pain.

The homunculus made of gargoyle stone devoured its fallen opponent, wrapping itself around the lifeless body and engulfing it, bit by bit.

“Hm,” Mattie said. “I wonder what that means.”

The homunculus burbled and tittered, and banged its shapeless fists on the glass surrounding it. Pink bubbles formed on its lipless mouth as the homunculus closed and opened it, as if trying to speak. Mattie hesitated—she wanted to hear what the thing had to say, but she felt disturbed by its behavior; Niobe hasn’t warned