The Alchemy of Stone - By Ekaterina Sedia Page 0,78

it?”

The slurping sounds indicated the homunculus’s progress; there was a shifting of metal, and a sudden jolt shot through her arms and legs. She doubled over in pain, sending the homunculus splashing to the floor. “Are you all right?” she asked. “I’m sorry.”

“Yessss,” it said and burbled. “Would you like me to find you new eyes?”

“Yes please,” Mattie said. “You are a clever little fellow.”

“Of course,” it answered. “I am earth. I am stone.”

The homunculus slurped across the workshop floor, and even though Mattie could not see it she imagined the black blood trail it was leaving on its wake. She heard the sounds of rummaging, slow and laborious, and she thought that it took such a little thing an enormous effort to shift the pile of parts and rejected machines; the limitations of its size posed an almost comical contradiction to its grandiose claims, but Mattie was disinclined to find humor in anything just now. It was earth, or at the very least its essence. She wondered if the gnomi, the earth elementals, looked just like the homunculus; she wondered if it was somehow one of them, a creature that could move through solid stone with the same ease as she moved through the air. She discarded the thought as unlikely, and carefully stretched her arms and legs, awakening to life with tingling and electric jolts.

She felt around with her fingers; the layout of the workshop was familiar to her and after a few minutes investigating her immediate surroundings, she remembered how she used to navigate these rooms by touch. Often even touch was superfluous—after a day of darkness she developed new senses, which allowed her to feel when the walls were too close, and to circumvent the obstacles.

Mattie felt her way to the pile of parts and rooted through it, the shape of her eyes familiar to her—long cool cylinders with latches in the end that locked into her eye stalks. Her fingers felt gears, faces, metal plates, bits of armor, coils, valves, engine parts, and flywheels. She recognized them all and was momentarily delighted before discarding yet another disappointment.

The homunculus labored by her side, its quiet boiling and hissing always present. She imagined the mess they were making—strewn-about parts, some smeared with pungent sheep’s blood, and she felt a small pang of dark satisfaction. Let him clean up after her, for once. When he gets back, she would be gone, hidden, on her way to find Iolanda and to beg her to speed up Loharri’s binding. And to warn Sebastian, of course.

“Is this it?” the homunculus whispered and put something in her hands. She was used enough to him to not recoil at the touch of his hands, wet like a kiss.

She wrapped her fingers around a small heavy cylinder. “Yes, this is it. Thank you. Is there another one?”

“No,” the homunculus answered.

Mattie fitted the cylinder into its socket. It was an old eye, discarded years ago, and Mattie tried to accept the dullness of her vision, the gray shroud of dust that seemed to cling to everything. “No matter,” she said. “One is fine for now, but we better get moving.”

She gathered the creature into her skirt and smoothed the white petticoat underneath—she wanted to look at least somewhat presentable, not as a crazed one-eyed automaton smeared in sheep’s blood with her skirts bundled about her waist, exposing her long, metal legs.

“Go easssst,” the homunculus said, and nestled deeper into the hammock of Mattie’s skirt. “He won’t look for you there.”

“No,” Mattie said. “North. We have to see the Soul-Smoker and warn Sebastian.”

The homunculus gave no other advice and asked no more questions, and seemed to have fallen asleep, lulled by the sound of her steps.

We walk in small numbers; we can count ourselves now with what fingers a creature has on two hands and two feet. We don’t bother, unwilling (afraid) to dwell on our diminishment. Instead, we watch the city crumble. There is fighting, and it feels like it has been going on forever—or at least long enough for us to forget what the city used to look like, before the smoke and fire, before the growing ruins and gutted buildings, before the Grackle Pond was cluttered with scorched, mutilated metal and bits of steam engines and the gears of an automaton brain large enough to make decisions but too small to predict their consequences. We forget so quickly now, our memory so dependent on our numbers; the more of us do the remembering