The Alchemy of Stone - By Ekaterina Sedia Page 0,1

still?”

“Just barely.” Loharri sat up and stretched, his long spine crackling like flywheels. He then yawned, his mouth gaping dark in his pale face. “What brings you here, my dear love?”

She extended her hand, the slender copper springs of her fingers grasping a phial of blue glass. “One of your admirers sent for me—she said you were ailing. I made you a potion.”

Loharri uncorked the phial and sniffed at the contents with suspicion. “A woman? Which one?” he asked. “Because if it was a jilted lover, I am not drinking this.”

“Amelia,” Mattie said. “I do not suppose she wishes you dead.”

“Not yet,” Loharri said darkly, and drank. “What does it do?”

“Not yet,” Mattie agreed. “It’s just a tonic. It’ll dispel your ennui, although I imagine a fresh breeze might do just as well.”

Loharri made a face; he was not a handsome man to begin with, and a grimace of disgust did not improve his appearance.

Mattie smiled. “If an angel passes over you, your face will be stuck like that.”

Loharri scoffed. “Dear love, if only it could make matters worse. But speaking of faces . . . yours has been bothering me lately. What did you do to it?”

Mattie touched the cracks, feeling their familiar swelling on the smooth porcelain surface. “Accident,” she said.

Loharri arched his left eyebrow—the right one was paralyzed by the scar and the knotted mottled tissue that ruined half of his face; it was a miracle his eye had been spared. Mattie heard that some women found scars attractive in a romantic sort of way, but she was pretty certain that Loharri’s were quite a long way past romantic and into disfiguring. “Another accident,” he said. “You are a very clumsy automaton, do you know that?”

“I am not clumsy,” Mattie said. “Not with my hands.”

He scowled at the phial in his hand. “I guess not, although my taste buds beg to differ. Still, I made you a little something.”

“A new face,” Mattie guessed.

Loharri smiled lopsidedly and stood, and stretched his long, lanky frame again. He searched through the cluttered room until he came upon a workbench that somehow got hidden and lost under the pile of springs, coils, wood shavings, and half-finished suits of armor that appeared decorative rather than functional in their coppery, glistening glory. There were cogs and parts of engines and things that seemed neither animate nor entirely dead, and for a short while Mattie worried that the chaotic pile would consume Loharri; however, he soon emerged with a triumphant cry, a round white object in his hand.

It looked like a mask and Mattie averted her eyes—she did not like looking at her faces like that, as they hovered, blind and disembodied. She closed her eyes and extended her neck toward Loharri in a habitual gesture. His strong, practiced fingers brushed the hair from her forehead, lingering just a second too long, and felt around her jaw line, looking for the tiny cogs and pistons that attached her face to the rest of her head. She felt her face pop off, and the brief moment when she felt exposed, naked, seemed to last an eternity. She whirred her relief when she felt the touch of the new concave surface as it enveloped her, hid her from the world.

Loharri affixed the new face in place, and she opened her eyes. Her eyes took a moment to adjust to the new sockets.

“How does it fit?” Loharri asked.

“Well enough,” she said. “Let me see how I look.” She extended one of the flexible joints that held her eyes and tilted it, to see the white porcelain mask. Loharri had not painted this one—he remembered her complaints about the previous face, that it was too bright, too garish (this is why she broke it in the first place), and he left this one plain, suffused with the natural bluish tint that reminded her of the pale skies over the city during July and its heat spells. Only the lips, lined with pitted smell and taste sensors, were tinted pale red, same as the rooftops in the merchants’ district.

“It is nice,” Mattie said. “Thank you.”

Loharri nodded. “Don’t mention it. No matter how emancipated, you’re still mine.” His voice lost its usual acidity as he studied her new face with a serious expression. There were things Mattie and Loharri didn’t talk about—one of them was Mattie’s features, which remained constant from one mask to the next, no matter how much he experimented with colors and other elaborations. “Looks good,” he