wild rose bushes that had been taking over the back yard of Loharri’s house.
Mattie could not decide if she liked Iolanda—she liked her words and her apparent candor. But her fleshiness made her uneasy, and Mattie felt shallow because of that. And yet, the feeling persisted.
To take her mind off Iolanda, Mattie decided to go shopping. The money Iolanda gave her was certainly welcome, and Mattie decided to stop by a bookshop near the paper factory. It carried some books she had lusted after for as long as she had been on her own, after she had ended her apprenticeship with Ogdela—small, trim books with thick paper and ragged pages, books bound in cloth and leather, books with faded drawings painted with a thin brush dipped in ox blood.
Ogdela had given her a crude book printed on pounded birch bark and containing a number of simple recipes and a list of common ingredients. It was Mattie’s treasure, even though she knew every word by heart—it was proof that she was a real alchemist; then there were others, acquired through varied means—some as payment, others bought with money she should’ve spent on other things. But she longed for the expensive books. She justified it to herself by her need to learn more arcane things—after all, to deal with the gargoyles she needed more complex potions and mixtures, new and exotic ingredients. But in her ticking heart, she knew that she just wanted the books as objects, as small solid leather-bound weights of palpable luxury.
She walked to the store; it was midday, and the streets swarmed with oxen, lizards, and mechanized buggies carrying people and goods to the afternoon markets; a few pedestrians weaved in and out of the traffic, but they grew rarer as she approached the paper factory—the sun had heated up the noxious fumes emanating from it, making the air yellow and thick.
Mattie tasted bleach and sulfur on her lips, until she passed beyond the factory, away from the river, and entered a labyrinth of narrow streets occupied by tenements and small shops selling wares both expensive and mysterious; a faint smell of polished wood and ancient fabrics hung over the area. She could see the palatial spires of the Duke’s district far in the distance, piercing the low long clouds.
As she approached the bookshop, she felt a distant rumble underground, as if a thunderclap had struck deep within the earth under her feet. The air reverberated, and the windows of the shop—wide panes of glass—gave back a high-pitched, almost inaudible cry. Mattie paused, her hand on the handle. Its tremor, just on the edge of detection, transmitted to her fingers, making them itch. She opened the door.
“What was that?” she asked the shop owner, an old woman bent at the waist at precisely a ninety-degree angle.
She looked up at Mattie and smiled. “What was what, sweetness?”
“That . . . noise,” she answered.
“I didn’t hear anything,” the woman said. “Want me to show you some books?”
“Do you have any books on gargoyles?”
The woman laughed. “Do I ever! Come with me, sweetness.” She led Mattie to the back of the shop, where the shelves were covered with a thin layer of dust and books towered in haphazard piles, in almost unbearable opulence and bounty. The shop owner grabbed onto one of the shelves and miraculously straightened her back, as her hands moved up from one shelf to the next, ratcheting her to verticality. She pulled a few heavy books, thick and square, from the top shelf. “Here’s something to start you with.”
We do not live in the books written about us—we crawl on the walls and we hide, but not within these pages. We do not even believe in these books.
Not that they are untrue, but these accounts lack the immediacy necessary for understanding, and we want to tell the girl to turn away, away—these books will lead her down twisty roads, long, confused byways, away from us. We want to tap on the window, but she is bent over the pages, lost in them. Already lost to us, and we consider weeping.
And then another explosion rocks the air, and we look away from the window, startled, and at first we don’t see, we don’t understand—but there is an empty space in the clouds, a space where the tall spire used to signal our home.
Mattie stroked the page of the book in delight, quite refusing to believe that the picture in front of her was a thing of artifice—it had