The Alchemy of Stone by Ekaterina Sedia

looked around at the toppled bookshelves and strewn books, and at the owner who had fallen back into her gallows shape and now stood open-mouthed, surveying the destruction.
    “I’m sorry,” Mattie said.
    “What for?” said the owner. “You didn’t do this . . . did you?”
    “No, no.” Mattie shook her head for emphasis. “How could I? I just wanted these books.”
    “Then take them and maybe come back some other time,” the old woman said with a pained smile. “I’ll have quite a bit of work to do here.”
    Mattie paid and headed outside but stopped in the doorway. “You have someone to help you clean up, correct?”
    “Yes, yes.” The woman waved her hand helplessly. “The neighborhood kids, they always come to help. Just go now, please.”
    Mattie left, her two books under her arm, her left hand cradling the injured right. There were people outside—everyone had rushed from their rumbling and shaking homes and shops, and talked excitedly. They all pointed in the same direction—west. Mattie looked too, but at first she could not discern what it was they were pointing at. She had to adjust her eyes again, and finally she discerned that blending with the low clouds a great puff of smoke and dust marred the sky, and that the spire of the palace had entirely gone from view.
    “What happened?” she asked a young girl, a factory worker, to judge from her pale face and hair and chapped hands.
    The girl squinted at the sky, her large, flat fingers tugging at the sleeve of her dark frock. “The palace’s gone, I reckon,” she said in a slow, thoughtful drawl. “Maybe an earthquake or maybe war.”
    “Don’t be daft,” a tall stern man said to the girl, never acknowledging Mattie with even a glance. He wore a thick leather apron, and Mattie guessed him to be a shopkeeper. “There’s no war.”
    “The gargoyles are taking back what’s theirs,” said an old woman, and wrung a wet shirt she held in her hands in apparent despair, or just out of habit—she must’ve been doing laundry when the quaking started. “Mark my word: they’re pulling the stones back under the ground, where they all belong.”
    They stared into the sky, reluctant to move, as if any movement would upset the balance of their souls and bring the reality and its consequences crashing around them, like an avalanche of heavy books. Mattie was the first to break the spell.
    She needed to learn what happened, and she had to talk to Loharri. A sickly tingling in her stomach, where all the sophisticated clockworks and mechanisms of her inner workings nestled, told her that her distress was greater than she had initially estimated. The gargoyles, she thought; the gargoyles. Had they been at the palace? Were any of them hurt?
    She had almost reached home when with a wave of guilt she realized that she hadn’t even considered the lives of people inside. The Duke and the courtiers had been away—it was the planting season, and they visited the farms to bless the fields. But the servants inside . . . Mattie was not sure if the palace employed any human servants except the housekeepers and the overseers; they would be dead, she thought. But her heart ached more when she thought of the mindless automatons buried in the rubble, their lifeless eyes and broken limbs now just so much refuse, just guts and metal left in the wake of human need for something . . . she did not know what. Like the sheep who never had the chance to feel any pain or to consider their imminent doom.
    On her way, Mattie picked up some gossip. She stopped by the public telegraph, a small structure painted yellow, where an ink pen on a long flexible handle endlessly recorded whatever news the operators fed it. She had no hope of reaching it to read herself—the telegraph booth thronged with people eager for the news, who shoved her aside like she was just an obstacle. Most ignored her questions, but from the snippets of their excited chatter to each other she