“Master, great lord, your honour . . .” And after larding the sentence with all that, nothing for it but just to ask, “Why am I here? You cannot lack for artisans to keep your body in shine.”
It leant forwards, the jointed ankle of its boot angling to balance its weight. When she looked up, its magnificent visage was right there, not eighteen inches from her own face, eyes like twin fires.
“That is the question, is it not?” it breathed softly. “After all, the workhouses are full of half-magi. When I require repair or restoration, I simply have them brought to me. Why trust my substance to a criminal, for all I see you have performed a workmanlike job.”
I have performed a perfect job. A stab of professional annoyance, but she didn’t say it. Better to let the thing’s metal tongue run on. And of course, there was more pressing material to think and grieve over, hidden in its words, but she had to keep herself focused on her freedom and future, or else she might have neither.
“Your little toys,” the golem Phenrir told her. “Don’t think I didn’t see them. These eyes miss nothing of man or magic. Your little mannikins, that you were so concerned about.”
“Toys, great one. Only toys,” she croaked out, and then it took the scruff of her neck between cold thumb and forefinger, so precise that it told her, in that gentle but inescapable pinch, of all the untold power its metal digits could apply. She had seen it destroy Rosso’s hand, and now she felt how that metal strength was backed by an inhuman control.
“Let us not start off our relationship with lies. I am eternal, Moppet-child. I am truth, and lies are ephemeral. I will not have them in my presence.”
She looked up then, though only because its grip permitted. The golem’s face was still close, still blithely disconnected from its words and actions. Within the metal she could see the channels of its power, the wealth of bound magic that gave it life.
“Great one, forgive me. My life is spent amongst thieves. Lies are a hard habit, they come so easily. I’m sorry, your honour, sorry—”
It shook her between that thumb-and-finger pinch, ever so slightly, but she felt that it accepted her words, too. After all, if it was Phenrir, then it was one of the mighty, and the mighty loved telling each other how vile the lowly truly were.
And even then, she wondered: about the golem and Phenrir, about the patterns of the magic and just what lies might escape that golden gaze. And it struck her that a hundred mage-lords had come face-to-face with their leader’s metal visage over the years, but none of them had her experience of the inanimate animated.
And then it shook her again, less patiently, and she knew she was going to lie anyway, but she would need to season those lies with enough true salt that they would make good eating. She would need to cook those lies to exactly suit the palate of a mage-lord who had lived all his life surrounded by his power and his peers.
9.
SHABBY LILITH YARNEY had never been prone to introspection, but recent events had given her a lot to think on.
The streets of the Barrio were quiet, not just in the late Iron End’s parish but everywhere this side of the river. Probably in the Siderea, they were throwing a party about now. The mage-lords had finally set down the law as it applied to the great and to the lowly.
Life in the Barrio was always about tweaking the noses of the rich. For people like Shabby, simply existing, breathing air and taking up space in Loretz was an encroachment on the rights of the worthy and the law-abiding. Plying her actual trade was another affront, flicking the balls of the wealthy as she crept from the slums to steal their stuff. And they egged each other on, the young blades of the Barrio. They grew bold on a diet of each other’s regard and envy, until the gutters produced something like Shabby Lilith Yarney, who could slip unremarked into a rich merchant’s house, steal his magic boots and his purse of coin and his powdered wig from off his bald head, and leave the Broadcaps wringing their hands and chasing their own shadows. And still the mage-lords had not cared, not even when she started to look into the Siderea itself, where the real money was. The Broadcaps and their half-mage tricks couldn’t catch her. The city was her buffet and she ate what she wanted. And when she and Rosso had found a door into the actual palace, then why not pluck the very rings from Shorj Phenrir’s fingers while she was at it?
Now she knew why. Now she sat alone in a shadowy booth at the Bag of Teeth and stared at the bottle of wine that would never be enough to drown her sorrows. It wasn’t that Rosso was dead, though he and she had lived nine lives together, as the saying went, over their varied and breakneck careers. It wasn’t that Gaston Ferrulio was dead, because he wouldn’t have shed two tears for her, and she could only manage half a tear for him. It was the harsh reality of it: that she had gone too far and made certain assumptions about her place in the world, and the world had slapped her back hard enough to get forty-nine other people killed. The mage-lords had finally been provoked, and their reaction had been . . . what? Not to flood the streets with Broadcaps, not to hire bounty hunters or conjure demons to track down the malefactors. Just to reach out and crush, like a child with a beetle. A single discharge of their power to incinerate the Iron End and everyone under his roof. A message to Shabby Lilith that all her life to that point had escaped their monstrous justice not because she was fleet or skilled or daring, but because nothing she’d done before had mattered enough to them. And now it had, and their response hadn’t even caught her, just everyone else.
Draining the bottle, waving for another, she swung wildly between grief and rage. One moment, she was facing a life where she would never dare touch a rich man’s coin for fear of crossing that line again and bringing down the lightning on herself and those around her. The next, she seethed with supremely impotent fury that those wastrel magicians had such strength and used it so heedlessly. When had they ever known hunger? When cold, when misery, and yet when the least mote of their authority was questioned, they lashed out like peevish infants! She would go to their places and rob them blind, every one of them, take their inscribed rings and their staves of power, take that gods-damned golem piece by piece if she could. She would make them pay!
Except of course she couldn’t, and men and women like that never paid for anything. All of life was a gift to them, and they were too jaded to appreciate it.
The next bottle arrived and she dug the cork out with a stiletto, heedless of crumbs falling down the neck. She was drunk, but it didn’t seem like she could ever be drunk enough to get a leash on the way she felt right then.
Taking a deep gulp of the stuff—the worst red rotgut, but she’d never had the Barrioni’s sophisticated taste—she slammed the bottle down and slumped back in her seat, glowering out at the gloomy interior of the Bag of Teeth. A good crowd in tonight; any other time, there’d have been singing, gambling, fights. Right now, everyone was weirdly hushed, the murmur of conversation funereal. Everyone had felt the slap when the magi struck. Everyone had read that implicit message: Know your place.
There was a tiny little ringing sound, three musical taps against the wine bottle. She glowered, looking up for whoever was gauche enough to disturb her brooding. There was nobody. She heard the sound again, like someone rapping the glass with the handle of a spoon, the pitch of the notes telling her precisely how much she’d already necked. Something moved on the table—she thought it was a rat at first, which to her was a fonder experience than most because in the Barrio, the dogs tended to be fierce and the cats tended to be lunch, and so rats were a good pet for a young girl. Not a rat, though. Something stood on two legs beside the bottle, and plainly she’d drunk more—or worse—than she’d thought, because it looked like a little man. A little metal man, wearing a filmy robe and with a sword slanting over his shoulder—no, not a sword but a cutthroat razor. Shabby goggled at this prodigy, at least half-convinced that it existed only in her head.
It swaggered—genuinely swaggered—out of the wine bottle’s shadow, and abruptly she thought of the golem. This
miniature was nothing like that polished perfection, but perhaps the mage-lords’ revenge wasn’t over yet. Perhaps they had sent out this thing to cut her throat. . . .
She stood suddenly, jarring the table with her knee, upsetting the bottle. The metal man fell into a crouch, riding the motion, not even dropping his weapon. At the same time, something landed on her shoulder and a crisp voice whispered in her ear, “Easy, now. Sit back down, if you please.”
Shabby froze, staring out at the taproom, much of which was staring back at her. They couldn’t see what was on the table, she knew. They couldn’t see what was on her shoulder. And if there was another razor at the service of that little voice, then things were about to go very badly for her. Her wine-sodden mind tried to think through the fug to get to some kind of plan, the sort of derring-do she was famed for. Instead, she just sat down as she was bid, her inspiration apparently fully soluble in alcohol.
“My friend wanted to be the one on your shoulder. But we want to talk, and I thought having a blade at your throat wouldn’t be conducive,” said that damnable voice.
Shabby found one of her hands moving ever so gently, finding the bottle’s neck and righting it, for all the contents were mostly soaking into the sawdust of the floor. And there her hand remained, because she reckoned that she could bring the base down on that metal man hard enough, and worry about the devil on her left shoulder after.
“So, the mage-lords have a message for me, do they?” she asked, as lightly as she could.
“What?” the voice demanded, and the metal man on the table adopted an exaggerated pose of incredulous outrage.
“We’re no work of theirs,” the unseen shoulder-rider said. “We’re the Moppet’s.”
Shabby took a moment to process what that meant, and her grip on the bottle loosened. “You were there?”
“We were there.” A scratch and a scuttle and something spidered down her arm to the table: a doll of wood, marvellously made and moving under its own power. Its face was a jigsaw of tiny features arrayed into a bold and challenging expression Shabby had seen in the mirror more than once. “And Moppet’s still there,” the wooden figure called up to her. “And we’re going to get her back. And we want you to help.”
* * *
Doctor Losef had an elixir guaranteed to banish drunkenness and abolish hangovers, though Shabby had to virtually kick his door down to get him to sell it to her, because he hadn’t opened shop like usual. She found the froglike man sitting in his vest in the backroom where he slept and lived and did everything not actually involving perpetrating alchemy or selling it to people. His pop-eyed look to her was mournful.
“Sharp cider, Sweaty,” she told him.
For a long moment, he just stared at her solemnly, a face like some toad-cult’s Masque of Tragedy, but at last he stirred himself.
“Already with the schemes, Shabby?” he asked her. “Put it all behind you?”
“That I have not,” she told him. She swiped the proffered mug from him and drained it down to its tin bottom. The liquid tasted so vile that it routed all the drunk from her mind in an instant. The aftertaste was even worse.
“The Broadcaps are all over Sallow Chapel Parish,” Losef told her. “You know, Cup-Eater’s turf. Broke into three dens and the Royal Spoon and took away nineteen of the Barrio’s finest. Nobody raised a finger. They’d be doing it here if they didn’t think we were already beat. Everyone sees the smoke and thinks, Look at ’em funny, could be us next.”
Shabby shook her head, the sharp cider making her feel very sharp indeed. Energy was thrumming through her limbs and crackling from her fingers. “So, it would be a right fool who went and pulled the Archmagister’s nose about now, wouldn’t it?”
Losef regarded her. “So, so foolish.”
For a moment, the pair of them just looked at each other, trying to gauge mood without asking anything incriminating. Then Shabby sniffed the air and stuck her head through the doorway to Losef’s laboratory. “Big old cauldron on the boil there, Sweaty,” she noted. “Smells like someone’s cooking up an extra-large batch of Doctor Losef’s Famous Quick-Acting Laxative.”
Losef coughed. “It might be,” he said quietly, “that someone has a kitchen hand at the Broadcap barracks owes them a big favour. It might be that someone is very, very angry, despite his seemingly mellow disposition, and intends to take what petty revenge he can.” And on that word, revenge, she heard the spine in him, the iron buried down there beneath the greasy skin and saggy fat.
And then he said, “But perhaps you are about a piece of more worthy daring. It would be just like you.” And she felt such an absurd surge of affection for the misbegotten alchemist, because he had faith in her, which was more than she herself did.
“Back room of the Bag of Teeth, tonight,” she told him. “Bring your best tricks. And some of the Quick-Acting. Who knows.”
* * *
And he came, complete with bandolier and pack, laden with vials and flasks all carefully wrapped and labelled in his own alchemist’s argot. He came to find Shabby back in her finest second-storey gear, all her magical trinkets out of hock or storage, reclaimed from borrowers, stolen back from fellow thieves. Gloves, bandana, brooch of shadow, belt of chains, little pieces of Barrio mythology drained to the last crusts of their power and trotted out now one more time.
She was already playing host to a big, long-boned man whom Losef plainly hadn’t looked for. “You’re supposed to be dead,” he pointed out.
Kernel Jointmaker, chief enforcer of the late lamented Iron End, looked murder at him, but right now, that was his standard expression for anything that his gaze fell on. He had always been the mongrel hound in Ferrulio’s court, the rough edge that overambitious rogues sometimes cut themselves on. Right now, he looked as though only an extreme act of will was keeping him from a butchering spree from there all the way to the Siderea.
He’d been out on errands, he’d told Shabby. Which meant breaking legs to Ferrulio’s order. And so, he’d not been there when his lord and master, and the entire structure he’d given his life to, was obliterated by one errant exercise of power. He’d come to seek her out, though, and she thought he’d probably pitched up with the intention of making her a few new joints to punish her for surviving. Thankfully, of course, she’d had a better use of his gifts to propose.
“So, the three of us, is it?” Losef asked. “Against the Convocation?”
“Not just the three of us,” Shabby said, steepling her fingers and making the enchanted embroidery of her gloves dance. “Got a few new tricks, just, you know, little things that might help.”
10.
THE HAND HAD COME surprisingly quickly. But then Coppelia was used to working on a far finer scale, and she had the very best tools. Tools she could never have dreamt of, not long before. The finest manufacture, imbued with the most elegant enchantments, each one the work of mage-artisans of surpassing skill. They caught any of her own slips and flaws and gave her the time and chance to avoid them; they let her work metal as though it was the wood she was more used to, magnified her half-magery, allowing her to perform the feats of a master, to reach a potential that her own poor tinker’s kit back in the Barrio could never have permitted. Part of her exalted, despite everything, that she might create anything as wonderful as this, even if nobody ever knew, even if she died alone here the moment she was done. She had not thought, in truth, that she had the soul of a crafter, but now it stirred in her, wings beating with pride.
And while she worked, she could put aside all the other thoughts that were trying to invade her mind, the thoughts that had nothing to do with pride and accomplishment and everything to do with grief and horror and hate. But the moment she paused—finished at the lathe or the drill, letting a part dry, returning to the yellowing schematics she had been given—they all came flocking back. She would stop, dead still, in that underground workshop, fists clenching as she did battle with the furies inside her that cried for revenge, for justice.
But she was a thief, and what did she know of justice? Save that it was a lip-service word for the mighty to enforce their will on her.
Auntie Countless was dead. Coppelia had known her for years. The old woman had been a rogue and probably some kind of spy once upon a time, but she had been kind to the Moppet, an aunt in all but blood. Coppelia thought of her bitter tea, her shelves of mismatched ornaments, the way she had carved a unique little niche in the world of the Barrio. And now a Broadcap’s thuggish stroke had broken her head, here in this very room. Were it not for the mindless enchantments that tidied and cleaned the place every evening, the stain would still be on the floor.
And the others were probably dead, too. Perhaps the homunculi had escaped, but probably Shabby and Losef had been hunted down. Doublet had been half-obliterated, and she knew they had tortured Rosso before they hanged him, to find who put them up to the heist. She knew because Lucas Maulhands had told her, in that way of his that was gloating pretending it was righteousness. She hated him more than she hated Phenrir, really. Phenrir was inhuman, after all—not just that he inhabited a metal body, but that he was one of the Convocation whose temporal and magical power seemed to place them beyond any human empathy or connection. Maulhands was just a man, and he couldn’t even gloat honestly. He must dress his every action with the stiff cloth of law and proper conduct, unable to own up to the fact that he was as much of a mean bastard as any of the criminals he chased.
And now she was assembling the thumb. She had improved on the schematics, adding more motion to the joints to give the golem a greater freedom of movement. Possibly, that would get her killed because it wasn’t what she had been asked for. Craftsmanship had prodded her, initially: whoever drew up the plans had probably not been told the purpose for their work. They had produced something that might suit an automaton or music-box dancer, capable of certain elegant motions but not the full living range of human digits. She had found herself modifying the plan right from the outset, and all those wonderful tools and lenses had shown her how to accomplish everything she set her mind to. But then her mind had run on to self-preservation, because there had been many other artisans kept down here, to work and rework the golem’s metal frame, and they were not here now. No imagination was required to understand what had happened to them when their continued presence had been unnecessary. If she could show herself as something more than a mere replacer and maintainer, she could extend the period of her usefulness and thus her life. She would keep out of Maulhands’s wringing grasp a month longer, maybe more.
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