The streets in the city run like veins in a leaf, like paths in our very own labyrinth. We keep our hand on the wall at all times as we follow, unseen, gray on gray stone. We flatten ourselves against the stones, and we crawl in small and swift movements, like monstrous geckos. We follow the two women—one mechanical, the other alien to us, foreign—a child of shifting sand dunes and red earth, not of stone. Both smell of blood and hidden excitement, both carry jars filled with dark and viscous redness; it sloshes as they walk, laps at the walls of the jar with quiet hissing, and it reminds us of the ocean we’ve never seen but often imagined.
We think it amusing that lately we cannot love our children—children of stone, children that came from those who first settled in our creation; they do not seem to love us either. They have destroyed what we have built, and they think of us no longer. Our feeders are not refilled today, and we go hungry. It seems fitting somehow.
We remember another woman born of red earth on the other side of the sea. We remember her thin arms, fingers like bird claws. Her face covered in a cobweb of wrinkles, her dark-hooded fatigued eyes. Her soft, accented voice, always warmed by the elusive promise of salvation.
“Why did you turn to me?” she asked us, at a time when her hands were too tired to move and her heart was ready to give out. Why me, a plaintive cry of every lone soul in this city, alone as the day they were horn.
We cannot explain this feeling, this stirring, wistful like the smell of linden blooms in the blue moonlit night. We only feel, we feel the absence of love from the stone, from the city, we feel uprooted from our soil. And we seek salvation from all the unloved children of the world.
On the way, Niobe relented under Mattie’s pitiful stare (she extended her eyestalks for that very purpose), and confided that blood alchemy had many uses—love spells and divinations, as well as darker purposes. She told Mattie that in her homeland the blood homunculi were used to temporarily trap restless spirits, forcing them to divulge their secrets and use their incorporeal nature to peek into the time yet unwashed over the world but accessible to spirits, unmoored as they were from their physical confines.
“How far into the future can they see?” Mattie asked, fascinated.
Niobe smiled. “It’s unpredictable. Sometimes they confuse future and past, or even present—it is all the same to them. Know where we could catch a few spirits?”
“Yes,” Mattie said. “The Soul-Smoker has them all. But I doubt he’d give any of them up.”
“Soul-Smoker?” Niobe asked, frowning. “What’s that?”
Mattie explained what Soul-Smokers did for a living, and told Niobe about Ilmarekh and his sad state.
“Isn’t anyone happy in this place?” Niobe said.
Mattie considered her answer. “Some are. All are, at one time or another. I’ll bet even Ilmarekh is happy occasionally.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Niobe said but did not elaborate further. Instead, she quickened her step and sang a tune Mattie was not familiar with, swinging the blood-filled jar in rhythm with her song.
Mattie hurried after, intensely curious about the blood alchemy now. “I wonder if Ilmarekh would agree to let us trap a soul or two before he gets to them. Or maybe he’d think it’s cruel.”
Niobe laughed. “Patience, Mattie. Let me show you some simple stuff today. Besides, if I go to see the Soul-Smoker with you, won’t he steal my soul too?”
“He doesn’t steal them.” Mattie felt protective of Ilmarekh. “It’s just your soul might decide to join the rest; believe me, he doesn’t need another voice whispering to him.”
“He must be crazier than a fighting fish,” Niobe said. “You have strange friends.”
“Only strange people want to be friends with a machine,” Mattie said.
Niobe laughed. “I suppose so.”
Mattie caught up to Niobe, and looked around. They were in the part of the district she rarely visited, and she realized that there were many dark faces among the passersby. It made sense to her, she supposed, that foreigners settled close to each other—people seemed to like company of their own kind.
Niobe seemed to know many people—she constantly smiled and waved, and people smiled and waved back. The smells that wafted from the doors and windows, open on account of warm weather, set Mattie’s sensors afire with their strangeness—she recognized sandalwood and incense of some sort, fermenting bread, fresh berries, and unfamiliar cooking.
“There seem to be a lot more of your people here since I last visited,” Mattie said.
Niobe shrugged. “People move, they bring their families. They help each other too—when I first came, I had nothing with me but my bag and an address. And these people were strangers to me back home, but here they treated me like family, took me in, helped me find a place. Without them, I would never have figured out how to join the society and apply for an alchemist’s license. We have to stick together—I bet you stick together with your own kind too.”
Mattie shook her head. The vision of the automata at the mechanics’ gathering moving along the walls in a blind, shambling procession, deaf and dumb and as unaware of the world as the tables around them, flashed in her mind. She wanted nothing to do with them.
“Why not?” Niobe persisted, simultaneously making a pretend scary face at a gaggle of small barelegged children that ran through the streets with an air of great joyful purpose.
“I’m not like them,” Mattie said, “Well, most of them. There are a few intelligent automatons around; a few of them are even emancipated. But you know, nobody likes making them. And they… we don’t even like ourselves.”
“I’m surprised to hear that.” Niobe turned into a street too narrow for proper traffic, animated by just a few pedestrians. There was a low buzz in the air, a suppressed droning of a multitude of voices at a distance, and Mattie guessed that they were getting closer to the market. “I would think that intelligent automatons would be valuable.”
“They are expensive,” Mattie said, “but not valuable at all. We make poor servants—one advantage automatons have is that they don’t talk back or complain. Very few tasks need an actively engaged mind.”
“And the mechanics and the alchemists have it covered,” Niobe said. “I understand.”
The market had become larger too, and Mattie regretted not visiting it more often. There were quite a few booths that sold herbs and minerals and bits of rare wildlife. She couldn’t help but stop every few steps, craning her neck at a lovely display of boars’ hooves or bottles with golden oil of uncertain origin.
Niobe followed her, asking occasional questions about the use of plants. She seemed curiously ignorant of their properties, and Mattie quite enjoyed explaining that two piles of small dried blue flowers were, in fact, quite different—one was lavender, the other veronica, and each had its own properties.
Niobe sniffed at the flowers and laughed, and told Mattie that where she came from, all plants were subdivided into blood plants and water plants, plants with yellow sap, and plants that cured nausea. She scoffed at dried salamanders and insisted that only live ones were suitable for harnessing elemental powers, she lingered over large shapeless chunks of rock, her long fingers tracing the silvery veins of precious metals and her soft voice reciting their affinities to sulfur or volcanic fire. Mattie could not remember the last time she had been able to lose herself in conversation so completely.
She lost track of time as well, and the sun was starting to tilt west when they finally emerged from the battleground of the markets, both loaded with precious ingredients and professing mutual surprise at how little they managed to spend in the face of overwhelming temptation.