“We are so few,” she said. “When we left the Tower, how could we know how big the world was? How everything in it could destroy us, fire and rain and humans, humans, humans. And now they know about us, and this city does nothing but consume, devour all that is precious or magical to feed those who rule here.”
Tef frowned, feeling her eyebrow and forehead pieces slide over each other. There was a thought there, if she could only grasp it. Thankfully, Arc chose that moment to come out of his funk and rejoin the discussion.
“You’re all missing the point,” he declared, flicking the razor closed and stowing it. “Both points, actually.”
“And what would you say is the point, exactly?” Shallis demanded.
“The golem,” Arc said, “was fucking brilliant.”
The adjective was not native to the Tower, but he had been around a lot of humans. Tef had thought he’d been sulking, but apparently, something else had been going on in that metal skull.
“You didn’t see,” he pointed out to them. “You complain about Moppet making bodies for us, but these humans can build. This was a whole full-sized body made like us, out of the finest materials imaginable. Back in the Tower, we’ve been paring away our resources like that cheese Moppet has, making do with as little as possible ’cos there are so many of us. But here there’s plenty, and we can be more. We can be big, or we can be fine, or we can be anything we want. You want to go make a deal with the humans? Make a human-sized one of us and get the magic to wake it. Make a thing like this golem.”
“Are you insane?” Shallis demanded.
“Beats planning to kill them, and it’s me with the razor telling you that,” Arc pointed out jovially enough. “Look, this golem thing—”
“Won’t be like us. Will be dangerous,” Effl the Scrimshander said. “Will be just a toy to the magi, a real puppet. Like they’d make of us, maybe.”
Another silence, and this one profoundly uncomfortable.
“What’s your other point?” Lief, the other wooden homunculus, broke the silence. “You had two.”
Arc waved in thanks, acknowledging the reminder. “Oh, right,” he said. “We have to go rescue Moppet.”
“What?” Shallis demanded, and Tef was thrown by this as well because Arc had kept his own counsel from start to finish.
The Scull wasn’t remotely put off by the general incredulity. “They took her. They didn’t kill her like the others,” he declared. “We heard. The golem stopped them. And she’s our friend. She’s one of us.”
“No, you see, she isn’t—” Shallis started, but Arc just bowled on.
“She made us bodies. She helped us get magic to power them. And she took us with her to that place because we wanted to go. And she got me out of there when I was about to go sever some hamstrings. Well, she and Tef did. So, I’m going back there to get her out.”
“Well, good luck with that,” Shallis said disgustedly. “As they already know about us, I suppose when they catch you like a mouse, it won’t damage the rest of us more than has already happened.”
“Not on my own,” Arc said. “Tef’s coming, too. Aren’t you.”
Tef looked from him to the rest. Am I? And didn’t she feel a bond to the Moppet, after all? Save that her thoughts were more on the golem itself, the implications of its existence. Is it like us? Was it made by the same magus?
Even as she formed the thought, a hand seized their meeting room—no, the whole building—and gave it an angry shake, a dog with a rat for just one moment. Dust exploded from every seam, and the pan floor slipped from its mountings and ended up at a slant.
They poured out, half-expecting to find an angry mob of humans tearing the house down. There were humans coming out onto the street, certainly, but they were all exclaiming to one another, as baffled and frightened as the homunculi.
Out across the Barrio, streets away, a great plume of smoke was gouting skywards. Without a word, Kyne was slithering his stuffed-cloth body for where their ravens sheltered, off for urgent reconnaissance.
* * *
“This puts things in perspective, in a way,” Lief said, after Kyne had brought the news back. At everyone’s blank looks, he shuffled uncomfortably and explained, “It doesn’t matter if you’re human-big or like us. If they want to stamp on you, they will.”
The gang-lord Gaston Ferrulio, who had exalted in the title the Iron End, was gone, as was the entire building he had taken as his headquarters, as were all his minions, petitioners, servants and casual visitors who had been unlucky enough to be present. A bolt of concentrated magic had launched into the skies from the Siderea and descended upon him with pinpoint accuracy, and now instead of a block of three-storey buildings, there was a hole that had burned the earth past the foundations, melting the ground itself into a shiny marbled patina.
We were right there, not so long ago, Tef thought numbly. The other homunculi were huddled in on themselves, gathered almost shoulder to shoulder, trying to draw reassurance from an empty well. Shallis stood apart, their leader, their own magician-lord, a scrap of paper against the storm.
“We need to get out of this city,” Morpo said, his voice shuddering. “We leave. We find somewhere else. Another town, the barrow of some king buried with his magic sword, another tower, maybe. Yes, better somewhere without humans.”
“This is where the magic goes.” Tef hadn’t expected Shallis to speak out against the idea. The Folded One was shaking softly, trembling like autumn leaves in the fall. “You saw the other colonies. They’re all asking us to send them magic, even the meanest of half-mage nonsense, because this is where it all comes to. These mage-lords, they clutch it all to them, the material that could give birth to a whole race of our kind. We will never be many enough, spread enough, unless we can dig in here.”
“Yes,” Tef agreed. “And for that, we need the humans. As allies.”
“We need Moppet back—” Arc started, but Tef waved him to silence.
“Humans? You’ve just seen what humans do when they’re angry!” Shallis hissed.
“Yes, and they do it to each other. These people here, in this Barrio place, they are poor, and they take what they need from those who hoard it. That’s what we do. We have more in common with them than they do with their leaders. And Arc and I have shown we can work with them, help each other. Profit.”
“Just what are you proposing?” Shallis demanded, although there was a giving weakness in her voice, already acknowledging that she had lost control, perhaps that she no longer wanted it.
“We know some of them now,” Tef pointed out. “And they just had their leader killed and their friends. We can go speak with them, reveal ourselves. Tell them that Moppet made us, maybe. And we can ask them for help, to save Moppet, and we can help them get revenge.”
“You’re choosing sides already.” Shallis said disgustedly.
“You’ve seen the sides,” Tef pointed out, to Arc’s enthusiastic nodding. “Was there ever any doubt which of them we’d be on?”
8.
THEY HADN’T KILLED HER. She wasn’t sure why; everything just threw up questions like a dog kicking up dust.
They hadn’t killed her, because the golem had ordered them to stay their hands. The Broadcaps had blades and bludgeons out, and she was, what, not even a real thief worthy of their time, just a child too old for the shield of the orphanage to stand between her and life. And caught there, with the robbers in the mage-lords’ sanctum. Of course they’d kill her, or at least beat her a bit before they hauled her off to stretch her neck as a warning to miscreant youth.
But the golem said stop, and they had stopped, not just the Broadcaps but the magi as well, those tall, elegant men and women with their enchanted clothes and jewellery and cosmetics. They had come to see a diversion, she thought, perhaps some misfortune visited delightfully upon a peer. They could have spent their magic and turned her to dust with the twist of a ring or the exhaustion of a bracelet. More economically, they could have had thei
r servants club her to death or cut off her ears or any number of similar fates, an exercise of power that only increased its fountainhead rather than expending it. And yet the golem had spoken and they had listened: not creators to an object or masters to a slave. Not even equals, but inferiors. Not one of them had wanted to meet its burning golden eyes.
And from there it had been a short trip to this cell. It was one of some two dozen where a high-ceilinged subterranean arcade had been subdivided over and over into little plots barely a yard and a half to a side, but high enough that a slender man ten feet tall could have stood upright with ease. The floor was hard stone with a dusting of decaying straw. There were rats, or at least a rat had chosen her cell as its final resting place, and probably others would come to pay their respects in due course. There were fleas, perhaps also in mourning for the same late rat. There was no window or skylight, not there nor in any of the cells. However, some improvisational prison architect had chanced upon a dweomered statue, so she guessed. The whim of its enchanter had it glowing a cold green-white, and the architect had broken it into chunks and set one into each little square of ceiling. Coppelia’s, by poor chance, had the face and one reaching hand up there amongst grime-obscured tiles of mosaic. She wanted to see the grotesque display as a fellow prisoner of the cell, but the unknown workman had placed the pieces to give the impression of encroaching motion, and she knew that, if she was able to sleep, she’d have nightmares and then wake to see it and have them all over again.
She found the most congenial corner of her small domain and sat there, head down, arms about her knees, and waited for the worst, knowing only that the world was not done with her yet. Perhaps her parents had done the same, in these same cells, years before.
What came next probably wasn’t the worst, although it didn’t make her day any better. The hatch in the cell door shunted open and someone rattled a cudgel in the slot to get her attention. Looking out in the statue-light, she met the eyes of Lucas Maulhands, Catchpole of Fountains Parish. Below those eyes and his sharp nose stretched a cat-cream grin that went all the way to his ears.
“Well, lookee,” he drawled. “We caught a Moppet.”
A burble of laughter from out of sight suggested he had an audience of at least one of his underlings. He fit his face into the square of the hatch as close as possible, the wooden frame denting his chin and brow, drawing as much sustenance as he could from the sight.
“Now, this is what comes of playing dress-up in adults’ shoes, doll-girl,” he lectured her. “You hadn’t run, back when I had you, you’d have some stripes on your back’d remind you what your place is, and then you’d not have come to such an end. Now . . . a waste, Moppet. You took your little nugget of talent and tossed it in the river, didn’t you.”
Coppelia felt a desperate need to have some sharp comeback, to say Maulhands was a man who’d know about little nuggets, to taunt him that, even if she was caught, he’d had no part in it, to make suggestions about the size and activity of his familial tackle, even. Except the words froze in her mouth and she choked them back down, because she was there now. If Maulhands wanted to put the boot in, then the key to her door was just down the hall. He could take his belt to her, his fists or his club, and nobody would cry out, and she couldn’t run anymore. Rosso and Doublet and Auntie were dead, and there was nothing keeping her this side of that line but the word of a made thing.
“No fine and fancy words now, is it?” Maulhands pressed. “No protestations of innocence, Oh, sir, I’m only doing puppet shows, no thief I?” Again that laugh from the others, though Maulhands himself was getting less and less amused, because she was not rising to it. “You thought you’d try your hand at the real world, did you? You apprentice yourself to the Barrio filth, and you’re surprised you end up here with the vermin.”
“They’re better than you.”
Maulhands’s eyes went wide, because now he had defiance from her but he didn’t know what to do with it. For her part, Coppelia had her hands over her mouth even though the words were flown. But she found she meant them, even though they likely weren’t true. Doublet had been a literal monster, after all. Rosso was a mean, drunken thug and Auntie had made a living out of threats and blackmail. And yet she stood up and looked Maulhands right in the eye and said, “Stealing’s more honest than what you do, Catchpole Lucas, and the only difference between them and your grand masters is that true thieves own to the name.”
She wanted the explosion of fury, to goad him just as he’d gone at her. For a moment, he was flushing red, but then he remembered their respective circumstances and an almost sunny expression came to him.
“Good, then,” he told her, as though they’d just settled the particulars of a contract between them. “Keach, go fetch the key. Moppet doesn’t need her fingers to swing from a rope, and it’s not as though she’d be making any more dolls.”
Coppelia felt the fear clutch at her, but she had no room left for it. Maulhands would open the door, and then she might as well just launch herself at him, tooth and nail, because apparently this was the worst after all, so what was there to lose?
Except there was no sound of Belly Keach sloping off at Maulhands’s order, nor even that rubbery laughter of his. Maulhands glanced about angrily, and then his face drained—paler even in that pale light—and he stepped back from the hatch. In his place, that small square of corridor went on to host the perfect gleaming features of the golem.
There was a lot of stammering and broken excuses from Maulhands, but some unseen gesture of the automaton silenced him. Instead, the creature said, “Bring her,” its tones musical, so that she pictured organ pipes and glass chimes within its chest and throat. In seconds, she was out of the cell, standing between Maulhands and his men, following the golem back down to the workshop.
And there it turned to the Broadcaps and ordered them away, and Maulhands’s face went purple a bit, but he went, not a word of argument.
She had already looked for the grate, because although she dearly wanted to learn about this gleaming construct, she wanted more to be free. It was back in place and secured by a full half dozen locks and a magic aura, though. No way out but through that richly appointed bedroom and into the cellars of the Siderea palace.
The golem regarded her impassively, and she saw that impassive was its default: its features were lovingly worked to appear as perfectly human as possible, meaning it lacked all those interlocking parts that made Tef or Arc look so anatomised. No frown would ever darken its silver brow, no smile pull up the ruby corners of its lips. The silent regard weighed and weighed on her, but at last, just as she was about to speak, it lifted one leg to plant a boot on a small stool there and stared at her expectantly. The pose was weirdly inappropriate, as though it was a mummer about to slap its thigh and make some ribald remark, but then she remembered who she was and what her skills were, for there, on the black lacquer of its boot, was the scratch from where it had kicked the grate.
A quick glance showed her the tools and materials were all at hand, and it was work well within her mundane skills, let alone her magical gifts. True, she felt a stab of rebellion as she knelt before the creature, but it was subsumed in her professional interest. Here it was, the impossible creation that commanded Broadcaps and magi alike, and apparently, she was fit to touch its boot after all.
She worked in silence for a while, and never a bootblack had such an obligingly still customer. At last, though, her curiosity dodged its warders and forced her to say, “Who was it that made you, your honour?” Mimicking Auntie’s term of address, for all it hadn’t saved the old woman.
She hadn’t necessarily expected a reply, but its pleasant, slightly artificial voice tolled back, “Made me? I made me, Moppet. That is what they call you, is it not?”
She nodded, keeping her eyes on the boot, using charms to help the new lacquer dry to a pristine shine.
“You don’t understand who I am.” It sounded as though it wanted to sound disappoin
ted, but there was no room in that beautiful voice for such an emotion.
“The work of some great magus,” she hazarded. “One the lesser magicians all respect.”
It laughed. The sound almost had her marring her work because it was not something that voice had been intended to do: not a light chuckle but a harsh sound like broken gears, the only ugly thing about it. “Fear, more than respect, but you’re right. I made me, and I am that magus, and I am all of this place, and have been since before all living memory.”
Arcantel? she thought, though the golem in no way resembled the statue of the great old magus that she knew. Before she could commit her error to words, though, the golem was on with singing its own praises.
“You know my name,” it told her. “I am the Archmagister, Shorj Phenrir.”
For a moment, she couldn’t quite understand the words: she knew them individually, up to and including the name of the chief magus of Loretz, but together and in context, they made no sense. How could this made thing be the Archmagister? A toy or pet of his, surely, or did it mean it was his mouthpiece or herald, through which the ancient mage-lord made his pronouncements?
“He made you . . . ?” She knew she was not following.
“I made me. I became me. I had this body fashioned, the work of a hundred artisans across a decade, each piece made to my exacting requirements, none of them knowing what grand work they were contributing to. For I was old, girlchild. Old already, despite all magic could do. Time is the enemy even magi cannot defeat, they say. I proved them wrong that day. Even as my mortal husk was crumbling, I stabbed the sharpness of my mind into this shell and there I lodged, eternal and unchanging.” Its voice strove for triumph, defeated by its own melodious nature, then again by that hideous crunching laugh.
Not that she hadn’t been listening, of course, but its little self-congratulatory piece of patter had given her the chance to collect her thoughts. As to the actual revelation, that Phenrir had, in times past, transmuted his consciousness into a construct and become this unliving thing, that was something she stowed to think on later. Right now, she was alone with the most powerful entity in Loretz and apparently permitted to speak, so:
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