The Alchemy of Stone - By Ekaterina Sedia Page 0,80

that bore us—when we close our eyes, we see its layers and hair-thin ridges, the minuscule inclusions of black granite and crystal-bright quartz. Somehow, the creature is related to us, and we don’t know if it is good or bad, but we try to like it, as one would an obnoxious relative.

And the girl herself is not well—we can see it in her staggering, lurching step, in the dull green (where is the iridescent blue of a dragonfly’s wings?) glow of her single eye that reflects only the rain back at us.

She sees us only when descend into the street and stand like a wall in front of her, a wall of sour gray bodies streaked with black.

“I know how to help you,” she whispers.

“Shhh,” we answer. “It can wait.” (It cannot.) “Let us take care of you first. Where are you going?”

“The Soul-Smoker,” she answers.

We tell her about the soldiers.

Her fingers tighten on the soaked fabric of her skirt, and she cradles the bundle with the homunculus—a monstrous child—closer to her metal bosom. “We have to hurry then. Do you know a quick way there?”

We nod, and we pick her and her bundle up, we gather her into a protective embrace and cradle her close. She falls silent, so tired now.

And then we fly.

Chapter 17

Mattie was tired for the first time in her life. She was not built to feel fatigue, to experience exhaustion—the whalebone and metal and the springs that held them together were tireless, for as long as she was wound up properly. But now, lying in the supporting net of the intertwined gargoyle arms, she felt her sole eye retracting into her head, and her mind screaming for permission to just rest, to shut down and not have to whir along anymore. Her heart beat with an irregular tick-tock, and after every click, Mattie feared that the next one would not come.

Loharri’s digging around in her head, wrenching out the hidden device and her eyes, damaged something—something important, she feared. Even after the homunculus threw the switch, her extremities felt wrong and awkward, as if wrapped in wool. Her thoughts turned around and around, sluggish and blind, running like trapped animals in the same compulsive circle.

She was broken, she thought; and the time had come when Loharri would not fix her, no matter how she pleaded and folded her hands, how she tilted her head to look up at him shyly. He was the one who broke her, with intentional carelessness. Iolanda, she thought. Iolanda would make him do what she wants—she would make him fix Mattie and give her the key, she would make him be nice to her and forgive her betrayal. It mattered that he would.

But before she could tell Iolanda all that, she needed to make sure that the Soul-Smoker was all right. Why it felt so important, she wasn’t sure. Perhaps because he housed the spirit of Beresta, Sebastian’s mother, or perhaps because she felt responsible because it was her—no matter how inadvertently—who gave away the treasonous spirits that he housed, told the mechanics that the telegraph they gave him was used to intercept their messages, that he kept secrets from them.

The enforcers would do away with him—from a distance, so as not to endanger their own spirits, using the decoy they brought with them—and they would continue on, to the mouth of the shaft by the slope of the Ram’s Head, down into the passage that burrowed under the city . . . Mattie did not want to continue this thought, for the truth was too bitter for even her diminished capacity. “It’s all my fault,” she whispered, like a spell, without letting the meaning of the words reach her mind.

The gargoyles heard, and their arms swayed, calming, lulling. “Shhh,” they whispered as if to a child. “Shhh.”

Mattie did not dare to look down, at the streets below, and watched the low tendrils of the clouds streaking across the sky. It was so gray now, yet clear—the transparent bluish gray of a dove’s underside, the blue shine of well-polished metal. She had never seen a sky like this, unobscured by smoke and everyday city emanations.

“It is always like this,” the gargoyles whispered, barely audible above the whistling of the wind. “Up here, it is always clear and beautiful. This is why we rarely fly anymore.”

It made sense to Mattie—sometimes, one was better off not seeing, not knowing. The wind tore at her hair, the hair that used to belong to