Made Things

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Effl cackled shrilly, mouse-skull head turned to goggle at him. “I heard your words of what the humans said. Rust-head, knot-hole, what fools you are! No word of dust to a human’s knee, no word of cobwebs like thick curtains? The Maker left here hundreds of years ago, and you think this place is his?” She stalked up and jabbed Arc in the chest with her spear, tearing the gown and leaving a bright scar. “Some other mage is making puppets, fools. And think what a gift you’d make for him!”

  * * *

  Auntie sipped her tea, gazing thoughtfully at Coppelia, come to call on the old woman after sleeping on the Iron End’s request, which was to say demand, and half-expecting to find her packing her most precious of trinkets to run away. Instead, the old woman was ensconced in her armchair again, in a pensive mood.

  “The mage-lords,” Auntie said softly. “You know, some people think they’re not human—not now or not ever? That they live, breathe and shit magic; that if they wear a shirt, that shirt is big magic by the time they hand it off to the laundress?”

  Coppelia nodded.

  “You believe that, dear heart?”

  “I believe they must be great magi. But that’s a long way short of gods.”

  Auntie cackled and slurped her tea. “Back home, we had a game: how long we could keep a spy in this city.” Coppelia’s eyes widened, because this was opening doors on the old woman’s life that had been shut before now. “A city run by magicians! What’s not to keep an eye on? Until we worked out the game, and then we lost interest. Still, a good way to prepare a retirement for when the home guard changes and you need to beat feet out of town.” She gave Coppelia a sly look. “You want this old woman to tell you the secret? You’re probably as much a magician as half the Convocation. I most certainly am. Oh, there are a few who are exceptional, the old ones who’ve burrowed into that palace like grubs. Our puppeteer is like that, I’d wager. They say Phenrir really is a bigshot magus, and he keeps his fancy chair by exploding anyone who tries to take its soft cushions. Two centuries on this Earth, dear heart. You’d think he must have learned something in all that time.”

  Coppelia nodded. She could not imagine the reclusive Archmagister Phenrir as anything other than an abstract concept, any more than she could stare into the heart of the sun. He had not left the palace in a lifetime, nor even his chambers, they said, ruling all Loretz from their shadows.

  “So, maybe he’s half the mage they say he is,” Auntie allowed graciously. “But the rest . . . not talent, not personal power, but they have the stuff, dear heart. Staves, crowns and gems, enchanted spoons and querns that turn corn into bees and all that other nonsense. The good stuff, that we never see, not even Gaston Ferrulio. It’s not skill that makes them mage-lords. It’s a fat inheritance, is all. So: no different to any other city, save the nature of where the power comes from. And now some gutter-runner of our parish has gone and found a crack in the wall where the rats can get in.” She drained her cup with relish. “And this old woman’s not so infirm she can’t be a rat one more time. How about you?”

  Coppelia, who had been hanging her nose over her own cup without much enthusiasm, started at the question. “Me?”

  “You want to fall sick, rush to the bedside of your ailing grandmother, some other excuse, I’ll make it wash with the Iron End. You don’t have to go.”

  Coppelia stared at her. “What?”

  Auntie’s expression was sombre, as old as the rest of her face for once. “You’re a gifted one, dear heart, and too sweet-natured by half for the Barrio, and yet you made something of yourself that isn’t a victim. So, this old woman cares a little for you. Not a lot, but then, I don’t have so much care in me as I used to.”

  “I’m going with you,” Coppelia said, more to stop the confession than anything. Auntie was wizened and sharp as a crab apple, and that made her the person Coppelia liked to visit. Genuine aunt-like sentiment felt oddly threatening, ties that bound her. Besides, whatever this caper meant to Auntie or Shabby or the Iron End, to the Moppet it meant something important to her diminutive house guests. Hearing the thief tell over what they had found and seen, she’d felt Tef and Arc tense as they clung to the strap. Whatever the mage-lords had been attempting in that workshop, it had been akin to the tiny rituals the homunculi were about in the attic, infusing life into the inanimate.

  “I thought you might be,” Auntie said. “It’s your parents, of course.”

  Coppelia choked on the tea and spent a good minute hacking it out of her lungs. When she could stare at the woman with watering eyes, Auntie Countless was nodding sagely.

  “Taken from the workhouse, you said. Because they stole or failed to meet quota or got into fights, or because no other reason than they were taken, because who questions the Convocation? And some say they die, who get taken. Some say their magic gets drunk up by the magi, to make up for their own inadequacies. But they’re artisans, in the workhouse. They have skills the mage-lords don’t. So, maybe they get taken for other reasons.”

  “You think they’re . . . still there?” Coppelia could hardly breathe. She hadn’t thought of any of this. The idea had never occurred to her.

  Auntie shrugged and poured herself more tea from a pot that never seemed to run out. “Dear heart, this a city of magic, haven’t you heard? Anything’s possible.”

  6.

  THEY ASSEMBLED BEFORE DAWN outside the Bag of Teeth, a tavern as unsavoury as it sounded and a place that Coppelia would normally never approach of her own volition. For Ferrulio’s people, though, it was the landmark of choice that everyone knew when it came to getting the crew together for a heist.

  She had thought the Iron End himself would be there, for some reason, seeing off his valiant underlings with a gracious wave. Except staying abed until dawn had broken was probably a privilege of rank, and most likely he didn’t want to see any of them until the business was done.

  There were six of them: a large crew for a heist, even if two were only along as special puppetry advisors. Coppelia discovered that, at least as of the dinner and war council with Ferrulio, she knew all of them by sight. The thought made her obscurely proud. If she was a thief, as she most certainly was, then this was her world. It did her good to embrace it by learning the nicknames of its luminaries.

  Shabby Lilith Yarney was most definitely in charge. She wore the same monochrome palette as she had at Ferrulio’s elbow, but the cloth was all hard-wearing canvas and calfskin and serpent-belly scale, and her white neckerchief was now a scarf she could pull up to hide half her face, enchanted to keep out evil odours and poison gas. She was loose-limbed and at ease, standing there in the gathering grey and counting them off, exchanging a few grinning words with her old cronies as they pitched up, nodding with respect to Auntie, cocking an eyebrow at Coppelia.

  The girl tried to meet her gaze, but couldn’t quite. Shabby was elegant and beautiful and confident, a legend within the parish. Coppelia, Moppet, was just a kid who made dolls.

  Shabby’s confederate from her previous errand, Hamfingers Rosso, was tearing into a fresh-baked loaf for makeshift breakfast. He was a balding, broad man whom Coppelia had seen about the parish, drinking and brawling and arguing, chaos at his heels wherever he went. Here, he was very still, nodding warily to Auntie. A cudgel lodged in the belt that strained against his broad belly. His shirt was open halfway to his navel, a window onto a gnarl of greying chest hair. Incredibly, Hamfingers was the name he’d been born with, and he’d earned “Rosso” from the rosy broken veins of his drunkard’s nose. Now he inclined his head to the next comer. This was the creature that had been Coppelia’s neighbour at dinner, and she shuddered still at the sight: lipless mouth, huge circle eyes.

  “Doublet, my man,” Rosso greeted him, and the thing clasped his wrist with pallid, nailless fingers.

  “Rosso, been too long.” Doublet’s voice was a whisper. “Mik bottled it, then?”

  “Came down with a case of being stabbed on the swanny.” And that was all the requiem
Rosso had for Mik, whoever he had been.

  “There’s a lot of it about,” Doublet confirmed sepulchrally. He was dressed in dark red slashed velvet, a beret balanced rakishly on his hairless head. There seemed to be nothing of magic about the creature, and Coppelia had no idea what his purpose amongst them was.

  Last to arrive was a more familiar face. Doctor Losef was a well-known name across half a dozen parishes, invoked whenever fever, constipation or impotence reared (or failed to rear) their heads. He was also purveyor of the paint remover that Coppelia had found to be so effective in keeping off fleas, and was a source of various other forms of alchemical comfort. She hadn’t known he moonlit as a thief’s assistant, but apparently, he had many strings to his greasy bow. Sweaty Losef, as the street named him, had more than a touch of the batrachian about him: a broad-mouthed, smooth-skinned man with bulging eyes and a slight rainbow sheen to him, his collar and cuffs always sopping and stained. She was used to him in an apron or apothecary’s robe, but here he was dressed in shadow-shades like any second-storey man, brown stockings showing the spindly shape of his legs and a bandolier of pewter flasks across his chest.

  “Not keeping you waiting, was I, lords and ladies?” Losef’s voice was professionally unctuous. “All accounted, are we?” He took Shabby’s hand and moved it to within an inch of his rubbery lips but didn’t touch. His own hands were hidden in stained leather gauntlets, because Sweaty Losef was his own alchemical laboratory in times of need, and as such he avoided contact with human skin unless he meant to send a powerful message.

  Rosso had a stack of smocks, the dung-brown hue given to the menials who swept Loretz’s streets and mended gates in those parts of the city containing people rich enough to matter. Not the Barrio, therefore, but the mercantile districts this side of the palace wall saw their attentions from time to time, and most of them came from the workhouses, drawn from the host of immigrants come to find a better life in the city of the magi. These were the meanest of the workhouse crews, though, those without the skills to craft or enchant. It meant they lived in poverty, looked down on by everyone, but they probably weren’t vanished away without explanation much, either.

  Coppelia thought about that as she struggled into the ill-fitting, stained garment. The official story was that those in the workhouses should be very grateful for the chance to work with minimal pay for the city’s overlords, and that one day they would become citizens or even magi if they proved themselves. And everyone knew someone who knew someone who was a big wheel now having come from the workhouses, though nobody seemed to know that second someone directly. The story that got told round and round was how much of a privilege it was to get a workhouse place, and how it was perfectly just that those who abused the generosity of the Convocation should get taken away for . . . various fates. Exile sometimes, execution, imprisonment. Fates that meant nobody heard from those people again, and the rest of the city closed ranks to say that they had deserved it. Until the people who got vanished were your own parents and you suddenly realised that your place in the orphanage was now doubly earned because you were genuinely an orphan.

  And once her eyes were opened she worked out that the bulk of those who got vanished were promising artisans or half-mages or both. Thugs and petty larcenists of lower status might get pilloried or whipped by the Broadcaps, but they didn’t just go missing overnight, never to be met with again. And yet, no matter how obvious the conclusions seemed to Coppelia, the bulk of the city blithely went on telling the same old stories of justice and just dessert, because to do otherwise might be uncomfortable. That was another reason she’d taken to Barrio life so well: people there were less interested in propping up the Convocation with every word they parroted.

  The dung-browners certainly got to cross the palace wall to go “up top” into the Siderea, because some tasks were too menial for anyone to invest the magic to sort out, and even magicians needed to use the crapper. Everyone knew that the gates were always watched and the crew chiefs’ faces were known to the Broadcaps and marked with magic. It was no shortcut for any thief wanting access to the riches of the palace district. Probably, Shabby and Rosso had scaled the wall or some similar piece of midnight daring, but Auntie Countless was certainly not going to be hoisting up her skirts and climbing a rope anytime soon. Nobody on the crew seemed concerned, though, and Coppelia just pattered along behind Auntie, hoping that somebody had thought things through. On their way out of the Barrio, the conversation was mostly about division of spoils based on some system whereby Ferrulio would get certain choice pieces, after which everything would get broken into shares according to arcane rules of seniority and specialism. Coppelia, as puppet-inspector’s apprentice, got a half-share and didn’t feel bold enough to argue.

  Then the houses around them were of better repair, the early-morning travellers of a less-villainous and -hungover caste, and they were leaving the Barrio behind them and moving into Fountains Parish. Shabby halted them then, one thin finger raised for attention. “No more cant,” she said flatly, all business now. “We’re dung-browners on our way to muck out some mage-lord’s dunny. Look miserable, look humble. And Doublet’s our crew chief.”

  The owl-eyed creature gave a small bow. Coppelia goggled at him, because surely the Broadcaps on the gate were going to realise that this prodigy wasn’t one of their regulars. Nobody else so much as raised an eyebrow, and so she held her peace and trusted to their experience.

  Auntie must have marked her expression, though, because she cracked a black-toothed grin and said, “You watch and learn, dear heart.”

  They processed through the city, from the meanest districts to the prosperous parishes up against the Siderean wall, which would normally constitute the high-water mark of any prudent thief’s attentions. Coppelia, who had plenty of experience in slinking about beyond the Barrio’s edges and not being seen, was astounded at how unremarked they all were. Everybody knew the dung-browners. They went everywhere and they did the crap jobs, and the richer you were, the more beneath your notice they became. It was as though they were just another exercise of the Convocation’s magic, that unblocked drains and replaced paving slabs by sheer invisible sleight of hand.

  And then they were at the gate, with the Broadcaps, and that invisibility could surely not survive the glower of the Convocation’s half-mage lawmen. Their Blue House stood just on the gate’s far side, and Coppelia waited for Lucas Maulhands or one of the other regulars to stroll out and recognise her.

  Doublet waved cheerily and strolled up to the Broadcaps on duty, his chain of followers shuffling at his heels. Coppelia was tense as a drawn wire, ready for this madness to fall over so she could run all the way back to familiar streets. The Broadcaps just exchanged a few words with Doublet, though, and one even peered into his face. Then the gates opened just wide enough to admit them single file, and they were filing right on through.

  Doublet glanced back, just as Coppelia slipped in and the gates closed themselves quick enough to nip the hem of her smock. The inhuman face was gone, replaced by flat, comfortable-looking middle-aged features, complete with bushy sideburns and a prominent mole. That face met her gaze and Doublet winked one of its eyes deliberately, and still she had not a sniff of magic from him. Seeing her regard, simultaneously horrified and fascinated, he put a finger to his cheek and tugged down on it to expose his eyeball and the inside of his lower lid, a child’s gesture of defiance from the orphanage yard. Except he kept pulling as though his flesh were just clay, opening a hideous trench down from his eye, the organ itself rolling in raw red flesh. Coppelia squeaked, and then Shabby cuffed Doublet across the shoulder.

  “Stop messing,” she told him, and he let his malleable features snap back, which was even worse.

  Coppelia wasn’t sure if there were any chapels still standing within the Siderea; it was rare for the magician-lords of Loretz to pay even lip service to gods. They encouraged it in their people, while ensuring that the primates of the various sects wer
e well-enough looked after to preach the right sort of things about knowing one’s place and accepting the proper order of things. Most of the city chapels had catacombs or tombs or just capacious wine cellars, though, and the demolished Semper Chapel had been no exception. A townhouse stood there now, property of some upwardly mobile merchant at last propelled over the palace wall by the momentum of three generations of double-dealing. The sight of brown smocks and the avuncular visage of Doublet convinced the haughty-looking majordomo that they should all be instantly admitted into the cellars, where the dung-brown smocks were doffed and stowed for easier access to tools of the trade.

  “Doublet, good work, man,” Shabby told him. “Coming, staying or going?”

  “Wouldn’t miss it for the world.” The creature’s huge-eyed visage was back, thin mouth twitching in nothing much like a smile.

  Shabby and Rosso conferred briefly, and then they were opening up an already-damaged section of wall that the majordomo had probably thought them there to repair. Doctor Losef had some little clay contrivances like salt shakers, giving each a brisk flourish so that a dull red radiance guttered from their pores.

  “Patented nightlights for everyone. Good for detail, doesn’t carry. If consumed, see a doctor immediately.” He gave a liquid chuckle and shared them out. Coppelia was aware of a distinct craning movement from the two little burdens on her harness. The homunculi didn’t like fires, so perhaps Arc and Tef were intrigued at this new possibility for illumination. She managed to hook her little pot onto her collar so they could take a look at it if they wanted.

  Shabby and Rosso led the way down, from cellars to the chapel crypts, from those, past broken walls, dry sewers and one leap over a crack in the earth that seemed to go down forever, into vaulted halls that must be the palace’s own subterranean maze. Shabby was setting a brisk pace over ground already familiar to her, and soon Auntie was leaning, on her cane and on Coppelia in equal measures, to keep up.