Read Online The Alchemy of Stone by Ekaterina Sedia - Free Book Online

hot . . . and dangerous.”
    “Mind your own business, clunker,” the metal rider replied.
    Mattie hurried away, her heart ticking louder and faster than her steps with suppressed fury. No one had ever dared to call her a clunker to her face, and the slur caught her off guard—like a sudden failure of her sensors, when everything tingled and then went numb. She almost fled the district, hurrying away from the glimpses of splintered stone and fine chalky dust over everything.
    Mattie realized that she was running late. On her detour she wandered far away from the eastern district and the Grackle Pond, and she had to hurry through the streets, tracing a wide arc around the pond and emerging not too far away from the house on the embankment where she first met the Soul-Smoker. A concern flared, and a memory that really, she had to visit him and to see if Beresta would talk to her again. And Iolanda had said that Sebastian would likely be outside of the city . . . perhaps Ilmarekh would know something or had heard something from his house on top of the hill.
    She passed the house of the recent death, where the funeral wreaths had already wilted and the liquid smoke had dissipated, and entered the wide streets favored by wealthy alchemists. Mattie eyed the houses, assessing the rent—this would be a nice place to live, she thought, both for the view and for the convenience. Loharri would be much closer, and the shops that sold especially exotic plants and animal parts would be nearby. And it would give her more time to work, which would certainly offset the expense; plus, with Iolanda’s financial backing . . . she stopped herself from thinking in such a manner, since her alliance with Iolanda was a new affair, and was made all the more uncertain by recent events. If the court were to be forced to move out of the city, she realized, Iolanda and her revenue would be gone. She wasn’t sure whether she should be proud of her far-sighted self-interest, or embarrassed at being so mercenary. Iolanda was right—she still had trouble knowing what the right emotion for a given circumstance was; she only hoped that people occasionally had the same problem, and Iolanda would thus be unable to catch her in a lie.
    When she arrived at the appointed place, she found twice as many people as she had expected—the shed could not hold them all, and the meeting was moved to the hothouse, which took up most of the sizeable yard of Bokker’s place. Bokker himself—a middle-aged man with white hair and no discernible neck—directed the late arrivals under the vast glass canopy. Mattie thought that it was a miracle that it still stood after the previous day’s explosion.
    Bokker nodded at Mattie curtly; even this small gesture turned his face crimson. “Haven’t seen you in a while,” he said.
    “This seemed important,” she said.
    Bokker sighed. “You know, Mattie, everyone today said this. It makes me wonder, it truly does—is a disaster the only thing that can bring us together? Are we that selfish, that embroiled in our own lives? Is there a point to even having this society anymore?”
    “Of course there is,” Mattie said, and dared to touch his purple sleeve with her fingertips, as reassuringly as she could. “We don’t have to see each other all the time to work together, do we?”
    He sighed but looked somewhat consoled. “I suppose so, dear girl, I suppose so. We’re lucky—two of our Parliament representatives came today. They’ll tell us the latest rumors at the court and in the government.”
    Mattie headed inside. The hothouse was not exactly suited for gatherings—it was a huge indoor garden, with potted and hanging plants covering benches, walls, and ceiling. Most of the plants she couldn’t even recognize—rare, exotic blooms nodded at her regally, iridescent blues and reds, and the air was thick with their cloying fragrance. She distinguished the smells of roses and orchid blossoms, of warm