Children of Artifice

by Danie Ware

  He had no idea if it knew who he was – or what he could do – but he saw it as it came for him, again, fast and deadly.

  And he was ready for it.

  Proteus had learned to fight in Ivar’s backstreets; he fought hard and dirty and completely without conscience. Whatever this thing was, he would take it to pieces. As it jumped, he moved, dropped his shoulder, spun on one heel. The beast hit the wall beside him, just as he drove one elbow, hard, into its back.

  The metal dented, the crunch palpable. Broken bits of leg and monster tumbled down the wall, and vanished back under the debris.

  They twitched, and he put his boot on them.

  Then he stood silent, breathing slowly, evenly, outwards, and checking for any further motion.

  The room was still.

  He said, ‘Lyss?’

  The word was louder now. It seemed to hang in mid-air, suffocated by the mess. The place was foul; it smelled of unwashed garments and uneaten food…

  Fear and denial rose like twin smoke-tails, coiling one around the other. With an effort, he dismissed both. Though his pulse was still thumping, he had learned long ago to compartmentalise his emotions, focus on what he had to do. It was one of the things that Austen had taught him – perhaps the hardest lesson of all – and it had enabled him to control his reactions to the moods of the city, to not unexpectedly change face and attitude in the middle of a district, or a building, or a suddenly-restive crowd…

  Not unless he needed to.

  Not relaxing his guard, he crouched down to look at the broken beastie. It was made of brass, tinged with green at the edges. It had eight crystal eyes, cold and empty, and it wasn’t new – it looked more like some over-large and intricate brooch than any kind of threat.

  But it had no gears.

  Puzzled, he retrieved a bradawl from the clutter at his feet and turned the bits over, studying them with sharp curiosity. The thing had no mechanisms of any sort – no gears, no screws, no welds, no hinges. Its legs were jointed for ease of movement, but they were hollow, perfectly smooth both inside and out.

  He sat back on his heels, muttered, ‘That’s not possible.’

  He knew the legends: how the Builders could craft the stone, could mould shapes titanic and impossible without the need for mining or tools, how they could extract pure metals, craft alloys, create creatures… all from the still-breathing rock and the living metals it contained. But such things were long gone.

  One too-curious miner, delving too deep...

  Whispers of the Builders’ abilities remained – there were a scattered few who could still manipulate the basic equations. Proteus seemed to think that house Caphen had such skills, but he didn’t know much more.

  But surely even they… they couldn’t make a living creature?

  He studied the thing for a few moments longer, but could find no artisan’s mark, nothing to give crafter or district. At last, baffled, he retrieved the patchwork coat and put the pieces in one of the pockets. He didn’t know what the thing was, but maybe, if he looked, he could find the answers.

  Lyss lived alone in her strange little house.

  The building itself was a distance from the nearest farm, but the questions had to be asked. He checked his face and hair and voice and stance and coat, ensured his Luye persona, and had a wander round to Lyss’s immediate neighbours, but they greeted him as though nothing was wrong. No, they hadn’t seen her recently, was there a problem? He congratulated them on their home brew, fed them crumbs of city gossip and left them alone.

  Instead, he came back to the house. Trying to think, he walked the scatter of ruined outbuildings, almost as if he was trying to ask Lyss’s unseen ghosts…

  But if they were there, they were as silent as the cold, as the odd fears that tiptoed across the back of his mind.

  The outer buildings were empty. There was not as much as a footprint where the wind’s debris had been disturbed. In one, a slide of books had fallen to the floor, but they were buried under piled leaf mould – they’d been like that a long time.

  Proteus found himself back at the house, standing in the front doorway and looking out at the vine flowers and the rambling and overgrown garden.

  He couldn’t afford to worry, or to make assumptions.

  He needed to stay detached.

  Somewhere, while he’d been searching, the sun had finally set. The last of the light tipped the distant edge of the crater and overhead, the early stars glimmered. Kei’s constellation was bright, a curving arch of lights. His open mouth pointed sunward, a guide to all the city; up by his head, twin spirits Hakhness and Hekhnar, irony and destiny, winked at him, laughing.

  Like Proteus, Lyss had more than human skills, though hers were focused differently. She was more fine-honed; she could track something’s origins from a touch, know who had handled it and when… ironically, the best person to find Lyss would be Lyss herself.

  Proteus found he had Caph’s dice in his hand, was rolling it thoughtfully between his fingers. It came with a sudden flash, a hot and very physical memory that he stepped immediately away from – there was no place for it, not here.

  He put the dice in a pocket, and went back inside.

  The job was a long one.

  All through the dwindling evening and late into the night, he methodically worked his way through the mess, searching for anything that might help. All the time, he half-expected Lyss’s eager-light tread on the step outside, a cry of welcome – or outrage – as she came home and found him going through her things, but there was nothing.

  The land outside was quiet, broken only by the sharp barks of the hunting tashwyn.

  Slowly and by lamplight, he tried to understand what had happened, what was missing. Why. As he dug through the wreckage, he found dirty clothing, and half-empty platters of discarded food, all rotting where she’d eaten two bites and then left them.

  Despite Austen’s example – or perhaps because of it – neither he nor Lyss had ever lived like this.

  And then, as the blue moon glimmered cold through the window, something new caught his eye.

  It was a box, long and flat, undamaged in the chaos. It had a shell-made pattern in the lid and a crafter’s mark on the bottom, a man from the artisans’ district of Rhentaka. Proteus knew him as an irritating loudmouth, boasting that he had skills descended from the Builders themselves…

  He took his bradawl, and prized the little box open.

  And stopped.

  The box contained letters. They were pressed seaweed paper – each one carefully folded and sealed. They had no water- or wax-mark, but they smelled like the air and the ocean, like they’d come from Vei herself. The covering writing was blue ink, elegant and strong, a cursive style both feminine and very sure of itself. And, opening them with a certain necessary dispassion, he found a history of Lyss’s most recent relationship – her increasing infatuation with her last and latest love.

  When he finished reading, it was late into the night.

  He laid the final letter down, and sank back against the cold wall, eyes closed. His head and back were hurting; he was hungry and chilled through. He was also tired – and it was occurring to him that he’d had almost no sleep in the last two nights.

  But he had to focus. He sat up, and read the last few letters through again.

  Lyss had had many lovers, and a long habit of tumbling from one to another, falling head-over-heels every time. She’d broken hearts without ever noticing, and lost her own with frequency and wonder. And this time, it seemed, had been no different. She’d met Sahar while walking the ramshackle street-markets of district Kier. Sahar had been a performer, a newcomer looking to make contacts, and Lyss had been happy to help. Sahar’s first letters were rich with gratitude and affection.

  After a time, they’d met up privately and spent more time together. And after that, Sahar’
s letters had begun to change.

  ‘I’m so sorry that you didn’t come to me,’ one said. ‘I waited for you, and waited for you, and my heart missed you so, so much. And every time I saw black hair, pale skin, I thought that the woman was you. I never imagined that you could leave me standing alone like that, bereft of your company and wondering if I would ever see you again… and I see you so clearly. I see you in my dreams, Lyssy, and I miss you, the scent of you on my pillow…’

  The words were gentle, as soft as a caress, but something about them left an odd chill – to Proteus, they felt tainted, more guilt trip than love letter. And he knew his sister well enough to know her softness of heart – her enhanced senses made her both exquisitely aware and incredibly vulnerable. Perhaps they were why she fell so easily, and so often.

  Telling himself not be cynical, he kept reading.

  A little later, another said, ‘I love you, Lyssy, and after last night, I can think about little else. Who could have dreamed that we could fly so high? See so much? Understand our lives in such colour and wonder? I trust you feel well this morning, and are not too grey with the loss. I am busy today, regretfully, but please come to me tomorrow, and I will show you how to soar again…’

  He lowered the paper, blinked, lifted it to read it again.

  But, cynical or not, his thought remained the same.

  To him, it read as if Sahar had led Lyss to some exultant and shared experience, and had let her crash to the ground, hollow and alone, on the far side. Yet there was nothing to fear, because Sahar would return, would pick her up again, would show her the wonder once more… and so would make Lyss completely dependent upon her presence.

  Hells.

  He read it a third time, more carefully. Proteus had no use for anything as complex or as uncontrolled, as love – but sex, he understood all too well. And this was familiar: temptation and glamour, tease and caress. Manipulation and control.

  He lay the letter down as if he’d walked in on them.

  Or walked in on himself.

  A contact made is a contact gained.

  The paper rustled at his hypocrisy, words curling like mockery and smoke. He dismissed the twinge of conscience, and read on.

  The last one, dated two days previously, asked for Lyss to come to meet Sahar, in a special place, a new place, a place of celebration. She would meet friends there, it said, and there would be new beginnings. There was no mention of where it might be.

  It wasn’t, however, the end of the story.

  In the bottom of the box lay a faceted crystal ring, oddly shaped, and a small bundle of long matches. He struck one against the cold floor, watching as the head flared yellow and green, then warmer as the wood caught light.

  And in the flare, he could see that there was one other thing – a tiny, fabric bag with a symbol embroidered on its outside.

  He stopped absolutely still, his chill increasing.

  Oh, of course there was.

  Comprehension was like a slap. The build-up, the crash-down, the mess, the need – they were suddenly so obvious.

  He lifted the bag out, staring at it in the match light. The symbol was unknown to him, but not the play it had made.

  Seemed Sahar had shown Lyss pleasure, all right. And knowing his sister’s hedonism, there would have been no resistance. She would have fallen under its temptation as easily as she had under Sahar’s expert caress.

  Proteus placed the little bag on the floor, then fished in his pocket and pulled out the pieces of the creature, laying them beside it, glittering and silent. Instinct told him there should be a connection, though he had no idea what, or how such a thing could be possible--

  The match burned his fingers, and he shook it out, struck another. Light flared from the broken creature, made shadows of the places where its gears should have been.

  He needed to get all of this back to Ivar.

  Perhaps Austen would know more.

  CHAPTER FIVE: QUESTIONS

  ‘Right now,’ Austen told him, ‘I know ‘sod’ and ‘all’.’

  The old man was sat in his workroom, a half-finished tag gripped in the vice-jaws on his desk. He held a needle-file in his long and filthy fingers, but his attention was not on his work.

  Instead, he was frowning like a man who’d seen his own demise.

  Around him, his workroom was piled high with overflowing drawers, tottering stacks of boxes and baskets, many of them latticed metalwork and as old as the city itself. The tiny sodium light on the bench made them glitter with the grimy temptation of forgotten treasure, but it left the ceiling in shadow.

  The clatter of the harbour outside seemed like a district away.

  Proteus, back in the ‘bland’ face he wore at Austen’s home, rapped a finger at the pile of letters. ‘You read them,’ he said. His voice was layered with tension and he made no attempt to hide it; it’d been a long couple of days. ‘You read these hellsdamned letters all the way through, and you tell me if I’m imagining it.’ He tapped again. ‘This ‘Sahar’ has pulled her into something, and it’s not something good. Her house was a tip.’

  The old man gazed at the pile of paper for a long moment, saying nothing. The frown deepened, recognition and worry. When he looked back up, his blood-rust eyes were huge as a nightbird’s and his work-glasses glinted with reflected light. He said, very gently, ‘You’re sure about this? It’s not just one of her jaunts? You know what she’s—’

  ‘Jaunts, my ass,’ he said. ‘You tell me who’s crafting living spiders? Who can do that?’ Beside the letters, Proteus had laid out the rest of the contents of Lyss’s box – the matches and the bag of dust, the pieces of the insect now added to the hoard. In his pocket, he’d kept the crystal ring, its weight oddly reassuring. It felt like a promise that he wouldn’t abandon her. ‘I’ve been at Lyss’s all night,’ he said. ‘And I can’t make head nor tail of all this. Why would she—?’

  ‘Because she can,’ Austen told him. ‘You know what she’s like, she can’t help it. She’s all ‘want’, all ‘now’; she’s never been one for thinking. And then she feels everything and she gets overwhelmed.’ He felt the topmost letter between thumb and forefinger, leaving stains on the paper. ‘Look, you need to go and get some rest, Ro. Leave these with me, and go home. You’re no use to me, or your sister, if you’re dead on your feet—’

  ‘Not yet.’ Proteus turned for the outer room. He said over his shoulder, his words both threat and promise, ‘Not ‘til I’ve got a place to start.’

  He paused, testing, but Austen didn’t reiterate the instruction. When the old man picked up the pieces of insect, Proteus ducked out under the doorway and returned to the main room, intending to sit with a smokereed and a glass of spirits… but the daybed was heaped with layers of newssheets, several already curling onto the floor.

  The top one bore a drawing of a man who must be Caph’s father, by his patrician features. It caught Proteus’s attention; he picked it up and moved to the window, stood looking out at the harbour, at the boats all blue and gold, at the rumble of truck and crane, at the bustle and thump and shout of the workforce. The unloading had a mechanical fluidity to it – it was rhythmic and oddly comforting, oblivious to anything but itself.

  The sun was low, its huge, red shape dazzling; the sky like fire. It was almost time for the shift-change.

  Proteus glanced through the newssheet, but it was more drama than information and he threw it back on to the bed. Instead, he rummaged for a reed, lit it, and considered his next step – what leads he could follow. Luye had walked every footstep of Lyss’s house and grounds; he’d talked to the greycoats at the Vanchar gate, though he’d decided against the council offices, the district’s bureaucratic leaders, as it would have raised too many questions. And he’d learned little, only that the messengers who’d been to the house had said it had been very quiet. But there were other routes he
could follow – Aden had different contacts, the dealers and watchers of the harbourside who saw the city’s underbelly, and who could perhaps tell him where Sahar’s powder had come from, and offer him a lead on Sahar herself.

  As for the insect…

  No, that defeated him. It was a creature impossible, moving and reacting when it had no mechanism. He knew little about the skills of the city’s metallurgists, but he’d never heard of them making anything like this…

  Though Caph might explain it.

  Austen’s voice said, ‘No gears?’

  The old man had stooped into the room, reed in mouth and the pieces of the little creature all cupped in both hands. He dumped himself in his chair, and scattered them on the table some fragmented crab dinner, leaning forward to poke at them. He still had his glasses on, and he peered at the fragments as if he expected them to get up and fuse together, or to scuttle under the mess and disappear.

  ‘No gears,’ Proteus repeated, exhaling smoke. ‘So, you going to tell me how it works?’

  ‘Nope.’ The old man coughed like a laugh, then sat back, chewing his lip. From outside, there came the long hoot of an instrument, a flat, single note. The regular clanking of the harbour stopped as if it had been shut off.

  The quiet was deafening.

  Austen said, ‘You think Sahar gave her this?’

  Proteus shrugged. ‘Would be my guess, but why—’

  ‘And no artisan mark, no nothing,’ Austen said. He slotted the bits together like puzzle pieces, let them tumble apart again. ‘Maybe this was a guard, or a watcher. Left behind to keep an eye.’ He grinned. ‘Or eight.’

  ‘And how the hells would that work?’ Proteus said.

  ‘You familiar with the Eyes of the Stone?’ The old man sat back, propped his glasses on his forehead and rubbed at his eyes, wincing. When Proteus shook his head, he said, ‘It’s a belief that some kinds of rock – calcite, amethyst, there are others – can see what the stone sees, and can hold those images. It’s how a timeglass works, it remembers the movements of the sun.’