“I see,” Niobe agreed. “Every plant has medicine, as long as you can figure out how to get to it.”
“That’s the tricky part,” Mattie agreed. “This is why it is essential to keep a journal and record every transformation, so if you find something you can recreate it and share it with the rest of the society.”
“If I want to.”
“If you want to.”
“Are you going to buy anything?” the woman who owned the booth asked. There was no open hostility in her voice, and her face expressed carefully cultivated indifference.
“Just a bunch of maiden’s hair and two of bladderwort,” Mattie said. She paid for her purchases. “Thank you, Marta.”
Marta muttered an acknowledgment under her breath, and Mattie and Niobe traded looks.
“Let’s go home,” Niobe said as soon as she picked up a loaf of bread and some olives. “I’m getting tired of all the hostility.”
Mattie nodded that she agreed. She hadn’t realized how rigidly she had held her back, how taut the springs of her muscles were. Just being outside was tiring to her; she could not imagine how Niobe was able to hold up, with her weak flesh body. And she had been enduring it far longer than Mattie.
Mattie took Niobe’s hand in a gesture of support.
“Don’t,” Niobe whispered. “You don’t want to associate with me like this. It’s dangerous.” But she didn’t take her hand away.
“I don’t care,” Mattie whispered and twined her fingers with Niobe’s, metal against flesh, springs against bone.
The night falls, and we hear the girl calling us, and we leap over the chasms that open below our feet at the precipitous drop-offs of the roofs. We hurry, and we rehearse our story in our minds, and yet there’s hope swelling up in our hearts, subterranean. A secret hope that the girl will throw the window open, her blue porcelain face as expressionless as ours, and tell us that we don’t have to fear time any more. We suppress the hope, and we mutter out loud, no no, it’s not going to happen. She just wants to hear our story, and we will tell it to her. Listen.
We run up the fire escapes and slither across the walls, we leap, we run, we crawl and finally we reach the high window, warm yellow light spilling from it swarming with fluttering of white moths; fireflies flicker on and off above the roof. A nightingale is starting his song in the trees nearby, and we pause for just a moment to listen to the sweet trilling.
Listen, we whisper to the girl framed in the window. Her skirt floats wide, her waist cinched by the belt glistening with bronze rivets. It’s so small, we could circle it with one hand, and we wonder if there’s anything in her middle besides a metal joint that holds her lower and upper body together. She seems so fragile.
There’s another shadow in the room, and we smell ripe grapes and generous red earth. The second woman gasps at the sight of us but remains quiet otherwise.
“Listen,” the girl says before we can utter a word. “The man who fills your feeders is in danger.”
“He is gone,” we whisper back. “He left the day you met him, and the monks are neglecting our feeders.” We feel pathetic, complaining like this, and we bite off the rest of our words.
“Where did he go?” the girl asks, panicked.
“He is hiding,” we say. “He’s hiding in the rafters of warehouses, in the roofs and in the gutters. The city is his cradle.”
“The next time you see him, tell him to be careful. Tell him to come and see me when it is dark.”
We eye the other woman, and we don’t want to talk in the presence of strangers—we feel shy and recede away from the window.
“What about the story you started to tell me?” she asks. We take a deep breath and move closer again. “There were three boys.”
The three boys who did not expect their lives to change, until the monks took them. We could not see them in the orphanage, for it has no windows, and only if we pressed our ears against the cold stone—dead now, cut up by human hands, dismembered and dumb—could we hear the ghosts of their voices.
We saw them when the monks took them out for walks in the courtyard, at night, when there was no one around to see their gaunt faces and their fingers raw from hard work, the skin of their hands stripped away, oozing a clear liquid we have no name for.
We saw the alchemists and the mechanics coming to the night courtyard, illuminated only by the blue and distant moon, and pick among the children, selecting the agile and the clever. The rest, the ones who stayed behind, were trained for other jobs. All cursed us, because we only watched—but what else could we do?
We saw some of the smaller children—the boy who cried often among them—stuffed into small cages that would restrict their growth, keeping their bodies small and squat, bowing their legs; their arms seemed simian and long in contrast, thin enough to fit between the bars of their cages and grow free. Those children were destined for the mine-shafts, for picking out precious stones from rubble with their thin, flexible fingers.
Of course, not all could bear such treatment, and many died. The boy who cried often wilted in his cage, and every night as they wheeled him out he seemed smaller and paler, shrinking away from the bars, not growing into them. He curled up on the floor and cried, and called for help in his animal tongue. The blind boy sat next to him, whispering unarticulated comfort.
The beautiful boy with long hazel eyes was quick to learn the language, and both the alchemists and the mechanics who came to trade eyed him with interest. The monks asked a high price, and they came back to haggle. Once, a mechanic remarked that the boy was too beautiful to be smart; the next night he came out to the yard with his face bandaged.
The small boy who cried often died the day before they took the no-longer-beautiful boy away. The blind boy held his hand as the small boy drew his last breath; the blind boy sensed the presence of the disembodied soul, watery and shapeless, and he cradled it to his heart until the dead boy’s soul nestled into his, like a child’s face into a pillow, like stone into our hands.
The monks let the no-longer-beautiful boy cut off the dead boy’s hair, and when he left, his hand held firmly by a stern mechanic with a slight limp, long tangled locks slithered under his threadbare shirt.
The gargoyles’ story stuck with Mattie, and she kept turning it over in her mind, over and over. The fact that Ilmarekh was an orphan did not particularly surprise her, but the fact that he had chosen this profession, that for him it was an act of kindness and not desperation, touched her in a way she couldn’t fully explain even to Niobe.
She was also puzzled by the role Loharri played in it; especially the part about the dead boy’s hair—she did not think of him as a sentimental man. Even on his frequent visits to the orphanage he seemed angry and bitter rather than pensive or distraught. She resolved to ask him at the first opportunity, but for now, there were plenty of other things to worry about, and they won over other concerns due to their urgency.
She went to the public telegraph to check on the news and to see if Bokker had replied to her missive sent a week ago, containing the list of the missing mechanic medallions. To her shock, she found only warnings to stay at home, and reports of unrest.
It seemed that the Mechanics increased the pace of building and introduction of caterpillars; their request for additional buggies for the enforcers and their work on the machine that Loharri had been so enthused about taxed the coal and metal mines to capacity. The Parliament, led by Bergen and his mechanics, drafted many peasants for mine work—it was fraught with danger and required more thinking capacity and mobility than most automatons could provide. Instead, the automatons were sent to the fields to replace the peasants whose labor was repetitive and simple, and where they were not likely to need to be replaced.