Made Things

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  “I think we do well, being small enough to hide within your hood or shelter behind your heel.” Her voice was precise, not as high as one might imagine. She was almost shouting to make herself heard clearly. “Make us twelve inches from head to toe, we’d not stay secret long.” She sat down, one hand waving away general exasperation. “Besides, that’s an argument we don’t need right now. Arc is already full of stupid ideas about what we should apply ourselves to. And Morpo wants us to try and animate a raven body, so we don’t need to rely on living birds.”

  Morpo was made of wax, Coppelia recalled, a sagging figure who complained constantly about the summer heat, and would doubtless find the cold made him brittle. Coppelia was constantly amazed at the variety of the homunculi, even though Tef said this was but a mean sample of her home, wherever that was.

  “I could do that,” she mused. “I could make it from wax paper and balsa wood, lighter than the real thing.”

  “Don’t start!” Tef called. “Don’t encourage any of them! All very well for some Candling to say we should have a bird, but what about the newborn who wakes up to find out they are that bird, eh?” She threw up her hands theatrically. “Shallis says when will they be ready?” A thread-slender thumb jerked towards the drying mannikins. “Actually, Shallis says we shouldn’t be doing this at all, but if we are, then when?”

  Coppelia hadn’t met Shallis yet, nor was she in a hurry to, given Tef’s account of the presiding homunculus magician. “I can have one done for you when I get back from delivering this to Auntie. The other, I want to redo the knee joints. They’re not as smooth as I meant.”

  “You’ve made them different shapes,” Tef observed, on her feet again and inspecting.

  Coppelia had to lean in to hear her. “Yes,” keeping her own voice soft and low out of consideration. “One male, one female. Is that all right?”

  Tef laughed. “No, but seriously.” Then looked up at her, hands on tiny hips, body tilted back in surprise. “That’s not how it works.”

  “I . . .” Coppelia didn’t know what to say. She knew Tef was a she from Arc’s referring to her as such, but all the homunculi seemed to be entirely androgynous to the eye. “I’m sorry, I just . . .” Tef’s manner didn’t suggest she’d breached some dreadful taboo, just that they were talking about very different things.

  “I’m here!” Even as she thought through the implications, Arc bounded onto the workbench, striking a dramatic pose with his razor held high.

  “Arc, what is that on you?” Tef demanded.

  “What? I am magnificent, am I not? And the string-people she makes dance around all have clothes just like humans, and we are somewhat of a size.” Arc modelled the gauzy white gown he had apparently abstracted from Coppelia’s puppet sorceress. It should have looked absurd, but somehow it lent his self-important pomp a perilous grandeur. “We’re going with you, also,” he added, and the razor was abruptly an inch from her nose, his metal face like a tiny death mask.

  “I’m going with you, to see this Auntie of yours. To learn more about how your city works,” Tef said hastily.

  “We’re,” Arc corrected. “And also, Shallis thinks you’re going to sell us out.”

  There was an awkward silence in which Tef glowered at him and Coppelia ordered her thoughts. “I would never,” she said at last, having methodically hunted down and extinguished all of the hurt his words had sparked in her. “But I understand. Please tell Shallis I do understand. Of course you can come. And if you have questions, just ask afterwards.”

  Arc nodded sagely. “Well, I trust you, even if the others don’t.” The razor was still extended, though, and he rediscovered it with an overstated double take before folding it and slinging it into a cloth scabbard he’d strapped to his back, over the gown.

  Tef wasn’t clowning, though, or even pretending to. “Why,” she asked, “would you never?” She sounded as though it was a thought experiment or something similarly distant, not the future of her entire community.

  “We help each other, don’t we? I’m a good maker and puppeteer but only a passable thief. You’re my light fingers.” And Coppelia gave Tef a grin she didn’t feel, because the truth would make her sound mad or false: that, as a marionette maker, the homunculi were the most perfect, beautiful things she had ever seen, even though they were frightening and unnatural. The child in her, and the artisan as well, had fallen instantly in love with their workmanship. She felt fiercely protective of them, savagely proud that they had trusted her enough to reveal themselves. But that, as Auntie would say, was the crazy talking. Speaking of which . . . Coppelia took a deep breath. “Well, I’m done here, and Auntie will be wondering where I’ve got to. If you’re coming, let me get the strap and you may as well hop on.” She went and wriggled into the leather harness that sat uncomfortably under her shirt. It was time to see Auntie Countless.

  * * *

  Her real name was Magda and, like well over half the Barrio’s residents, she had come to Loretz from elsewhere because she was a half-mage and had thought this was a good place to get rich. Unlike many others, she had well and truly found her niche.

  Auntie Countless was a collector, not of anything in particular but just of stuff. The homunculi were doubtless horrified by what they glimpsed of the woman’s parlour. Coppelia understood that the basic ingredients of making were scarce, where they came from. They lived in a world on a very different scale, where even human poverty could represent an absurd largesse. Auntie lived surrounded by shelves and sideboards and occasional tables and none of them with an inch of space free from ornament. Auntie’s tastes were catholic, not confined to the sort of conspicuous consumption that the mage-lords of the Convocation might indulge in. Everything was tat, much of it was twice broken and inexpertly glued back together: wooden fretwork, macramé, porcelain figurines, music boxes with dancers caught in half-leap, there were individual items that would have fetched a thousand ducatti from the right purse, and others that a scullery maid would be forgiven from throwing out the window in disgust. At the centre of it sat Auntie, doing her level best to look ancient and frail. And probably she was ancient, but Coppelia had seen her put a crab-apple fist into the throat of a bravo so hard, the man spoke hoarsely for a month.

  Coppelia entered at her call, catching the old woman shaving, holding up a hand-mirror with an elaborately painted reverse as she moved the razor in deft strokes Arc could take lessons from. A pot of foam jostled the wooden pig family on the table beside her, the brush balanced precariously on its lip. Auntie could have kept servants, but she didn’t trust anyone enough to share a roof with them.

  Coppelia waited politely, the mannikin in her hands, aware of furtive shufflings beneath her shirt as the two homunculi crept to her collar and peered out. To her alarm, the cold metal presence of Arc began to spider his way down her sleeve, and probably he’d cut his way through the elbow if she didn’t let him out. As nonchalantly as she could, she leant against a shelf crowded with plates, feeling him squeeze past her cuff with the barest rattle of crockery.

  The sound flicked Auntie’s eyes up from the mirror, and she gave Coppelia a broad smile. Her teeth were of black lacquered wood and Coppelia could smell the enchantment off them from across the room. “Dear heart, always such pleasure,” she got out, her voice husky and low. “Come, sit, take tea with this old woman.”

  There was always tea, when Coppelia came, as though the nonexistent servants had just departed. It was a bitter brew nobody else in the city drank. She wove through the clutter and displaced a wonkily taxidermied fox to sit, then carefully poured out the steaming green liquid into a pair of mismatched beakers. Niceties done, she set the mannikin and her instructions down for Auntie’s inspection.

  Auntie Countless’s talents did not lend themselves to crafting things, or even to infusing them with magic. Whatever traditions held sway in her far-off home were a vein of magery untapped by the Convocation. In Loretz, they had made her a blackmailer par excellence. As hers
was a trade that leached only off the wealthy, was of sporadic use in the schemes of others and would allow potentially spectacular revenge if anyone crossed her, she commanded some respect in this parish of the Barrio. If she’d wanted, she could have been a thief-lord herself, Coppelia suspected. Auntie never seemed to want anything more than comfort and more stuff, though.

  The sketch and description from Auntie’s artist would be of some middling-wealthy woman, one of the merchant magnates who made a comfortable living hanging about the waist of the city: above the scum, below the true mages. Coppelia’s work had built a link between the figurine and its living exemplar, but that was as far as her own skills went. Auntie’s sorcery would let her exploit that link, influencing the woman’s actions in countless little ways, discovering secrets or, if the woman turned out to be improbably blameless, prodding her into doing regrettable things she might wish to pay money to prevent being discovered. All of which was surely very wicked, but Coppelia found that, in Loretz, sympathy was like water: you couldn’t push it uphill very easily.

  Auntie looked the work over. She tended to drop the just - a - dotty - old - woman act when she was exercising her magic, and her gaze was steely-keen. Coppelia was horribly aware that right now, Arc was somewhere at large in the room up to who knew what mischief, but so far, the metal homunculus hadn’t kicked a porcelain kitten off a sideboard or done anything else to draw attention to himself.

  “This is fine work,” Auntie Countless declared with another black-lacquer grin. “You improve, dear heart. You’ve a knack for it.” She looked past Coppelia’s poker face and her expression creased. “I know it’s not what you wanted as a trade, accessory to this old woman’s nasty habits, but follow your gifts. Momma Nasty puts food on the table still, since Poppa Nice cleaned out the cashbox and went to live with his mistress.” And she fixed Coppelia with a stare that dared her to flinch or look hurt. Auntie had been one of the first to find her on the streets after her flight from the orphanage. The old woman had seemed a cruel taskmaster at the start, for years even, but every day, she had been working to toughen Coppelia up. She’d made the girl her long-term project, armouring her fit for life in the Barrio. Now she nodded grimly. “Good for you, dear heart. And this is master-level for a little Barrionette like you.” Barrioi was the formal term, for a denizen of the Barrio, but Auntie liked her jokes. “I have some rich friends I can introduce you to, who will value your talents almost as much as I do. Once we can agree on commission, of course.”

  Then a heavy fist was pounding on the door. Coppelia jumped but Auntie just froze, one hand abruptly out of sight down the side of her chair, where some weapon must be concealed.

  “Why, I’m just painting my face, dear heart!” she called. “Whoever’s come calling?”

  “Paint it any colour you like, won’t help worth a damn!” a man’s voice barked. “Message from the Iron End.”

  “Arses and tits,” Auntie swore tiredly, rolling her eyes. “Come in, sweetling. Come tell this old woman what’s so important.” She still had her hand hidden, and the other clutched at her chair’s arm so that the blue veins stood out.

  A man stooped in, tall and rangy, wearing a leather jerkin with a lining sewn with metal plates. Coppelia knew his long, lean face: a crooked nose and ginger stubble and eyes that bulged enough to make him seem permanently furious, when in fact he was famously calm about his trade. He was Kernel, called Jointmaker, not for any work with lathe and plane but because he tended to leave his victims with more than the usual complement in any given limb. He was also chief bully-boy for Gaston Ferrulio, the gangmaster who lorded it over this parish of the Barrio. It was a testament to Ferrulio’s power and respect that he had gone through eleven years of calling himself the Iron End and nobody had ever found it funny to his face.

  Kernel eyeballed her, and Coppelia shrank back from the obvious recognition on his face. You didn’t want Jointmaker to know who you were, because he probably didn’t have many casual acquaintances, only targets.

  “Convenient,” he grunted. “Auntie, Himself wants to see you. And you can take your hand off that pig-sticker or whatever you’ve got down there. Something’s come up in your line of work.” He squinted at Coppelia again. “This your puppet-maker, this is Moppet, no?”

  Auntie lifted her chin, facing the man down with dignity. “Whatever this is, it’s no business of hers, sweetling.”

  “Oh, it is. You think the Iron End doesn’t know just who owes him? Time for her to pay rent on the air she breathes around here.”

  Coppelia was frozen, because what could Ferrulio possibly want with her? She’d have bet the gang-lord didn’t even know she existed, but probably her work for Auntie had slowly percolated up through the ranks. She was a criminal, after all, even if a petty one. A criminal living within the domain of a greater criminal. Probably this day had always been coming.

  “When, and what for?” Auntie asked, all the “sweetlings” gone from her.

  “Tomorrow. Noon. Bring an empty stomach. Himself’s partial to dining with his honoured guests.” Kernel made it sound as though they were being cordially invited to their own executions. “What for? His business. Not mine to tell.” But then he cocked a sneer at Coppelia and added, “He’s got a puppet problem, you think?”

  “Do I . . . need to bring anything? Samples, prentice pieces . . .” Coppelia couldn’t force her voice above a whisper. A puppet problem. And did that mean her secret—the homunculi’s secret—had got out?

  “Prentice . . . ?” Jointmaker’s protuberant eyes goggled at her. “Just bring your hands, girl, and hope you still have the same number of fingers when you leave.” He laughed unpleasantly—but then, he did everything unpleasantly—and slouched out of the house.

  “Arses and tits,” Auntie Countless said again. “Dear heart, it’s either go to dinner with the wolf or move out of the woods, and I am too old to pack a bag.” Her gaze took in the teetering memorabilia on all sides. “You, on the other hand . . .”

  I have nowhere to go. And the homunculi . . . Again that surge of affection for them, such tiny motes of animation in a world ready to crush them at every step. “Noon tomorrow.”

  4.

  “WHAT DID YOU TAKE?” Coppelia had felt Arc slip from beneath her shirt the moment she got up the stairs to the studio, but he wasn’t quick enough to get into the attic before she turned around. She caught him frozen in furtive flight, halfway up the shelves he and Tef used as a ladder. Under his arm was . . .

  For a moment, she thought it was actually another homunculus, but then her mind performed a brief inventory of Auntie’s cluttered parlour and she recast it as a figurine from a musical box, gold or gilded and about Arc’s own height. Tef had extricated herself by then and was shaking her head. If Coppelia had a magnifying glass to hand, then doubtless she’d see the wooden homunculus’s eyes rolling.

  Arc straightened his shoulders and placed the figure down on its feet, still rough where he’d pried it from its mounting. It was a dancer, the limbs elegantly articulated, the face one piece and locked into a cold smile. Looking at the workmanship, Coppelia had a sinking feeling that Arc had made off with the most valuable thing Auntie actually owned, because she reckoned it was gold, and the glitter in the thing’s sculpted hair and the lines of its meagre costume was crushed diamond, if she knew anything about it. There was a lingering enchantment about the figure, sharp in her nostrils, that suggested it had danced with more grace than mere mechanisms could have given life to, but right now, parted from its box, it was nothing but a diminutive trophy.

  “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” Arc put an arm about the figure companionably. “Eh? Why not, then? We need the bodies, don’t we?”

  “He,” Coppelia corrected absently. “And—”

  “She. If I finish her and give her life, then she,” Arc pointed out, as though she were stupid. The dancer was definitely crafted as a very well-endowed man, but that obviously wasn’t the point.

  “Lo
ok at its face,” Tef pointed out.

  “Well, we’ll need to give her a new face, obviously.” Arc waved away the difficulty, smiling fondly at the dancer’s fixed expression.

  “There are rods and gears in it.”

  “We’ll open her up and take them out.”

  “Shallis won’t go for it. Arc, we’re both pushing her patience as it is. This isn’t how things are done.” Tef was practically begging. Don’t embarrass us.

  Arc scowled, the expression played for comedy on his simple features, but Coppelia suspected the sentiment was real enough. “I couldn’t ever make a daughter this fine,” he muttered. “And Moppet does wood. We don’t have some tame human goldsmith or steelworker. And I want a child.” And Coppelia had to turn the situation on its head again because she’d been thinking of a man wanting a mate, but of course why should that even be a consideration for the made-people?

  Auntie will notice he’s gone, she thought. She. It. Notice that it’s gone. But even so, she said, “I’ll find somewhere to hide . . . her. While you work things out with Shallis.”

  Arc beamed. “Thank you kindly, Moppet.”

  “Don’t—” she started, and Tef said at the same time: “She doesn’t like that.” The wooden homunculus cocked her head. “What now, then? We’re all thinking the same thing about this Iron End creature?”

  “He wants to mess with us, I’ll give him my iron end,” Arc decided, the razor out for more brandishing.

  “Ferrulio is powerful. He runs all the streets around here. Nobody makes a brass tornese in this parish without his nod.”

  “Maybe we can work with him,” Arc suggested. “Maybe he wants an introduction.”

  “He doesn’t know about us,” Tef insisted. “He can’t.”

  “Maybe we’re not as clever as we think we are.” His weapon stowed, Arc folded his arms. “What’s your design, M— ’Pelia?”

  Run? But she had a living here, pieced together under the noses of the Convocation, built from nothing and held up by a scaffolding of contacts like Auntie. She made money, she had debts she could call in, and she had access to magic as she would in no city else. And this was the city that had taken her parents from her, which meant it was also her last link to them, terrible though that was.