Made Things

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  And later had come that other thought, that led her to scrap some work and redo it, going ever further from the plan, because rebellion could not be kept down in her for long, and a slightly longer life was not, alone, enough. She would know the truth before she died, even if the only thing she could do with it was take it to her unmarked grave.

  She went back to the plans—now annotated freely in her own hand, that was cramped and ran the words together because, back home, scraps of paper were a precious commodity. Time to join the two articulated sections of thumb to the rod extending into the hand itself, but before she could submerge herself in the work once more, another wave of grief struck her. Not Auntie, this time, though that fire still burned hot. The dream that Auntie had, all innocently, given her, though. The thing that had fired her to come there in the first place, beyond any need of the homunculi.

  And she could not know, honestly, whether it was this that her parents had been taken for. There must be other mage-lords beyond Phenrir who had tasks they needed skilled mage-artisans for, whose labour went on behind closed doors, and whose silence was bought with a knife or a flash of magic when the work was done. She knew full well that plenty of people disappeared from the workhouses who were skilled at their trades and who were painted with the brush of some wrongdoing or other to excuse their absence. But some of them came there, and her parents had been of her trade, had taught her much of what she knew before they all arrived in this damned city, seeking opportunity. And when Phenrir came hunting promising candidates to polish and maintain his metal parts, it seemed inescapable that he would have looked down the lists and seen those names. And so she decided it was true, because even a little certainty, even certainty that was entirely self-crafted, was better than that great fug of not knowing. Her parents had been brought here. They had puzzled over these plans, or others from the same shelf. They had corrected the set of Phenrir’s gleaming nose or oiled the motion of his knee. They had repaired the fine filigree of the coat he wore, that was a part of him and moved like cloth even though it was fine-linked mail. Like her, perhaps they had knelt before him as they polished his boots.

  Her fingernails had left white crescents in her palms when she mastered herself again. She fought down the impulse to take one of her little whitesmith’s hammers or the crank handle for the big vice and lash it at Phenrir’s perfect metal face when he appeared. She knew it would feel fine, in that instant, to cause more ducatti of damage in a single second than she could ever have honestly earned in a lifetime. But most likely, Phenrir would catch her with his remaining hand before she even landed the blow, and then he would crush her wrist just like he had done with Rosso, and she would die soon after, but worse than that, she would never know. Because she had a thought, based on her own examination of the golem and her unique experience. She had a hypothesis she wished to test before the end.

  * * *

  In the end, the lie she had told him had been as finely crafted as any part of his body, a masterwork fabrication fit to be placed on a pedestal and taught to apprentice dissemblers for generations to come.

  “The little people,” he had demanded. “Who made them? How were they here? They were not just automata. I could see the magic in them.” Most likely because he saw the same patterns in the mirror.

  Knee-jerk, then, to say they were hers, that she built them, but that lie would out far too swiftly if he set her to duplicate the feat. And it would not give her space and time without the golem’s burning gaze hanging over her shoulder, either. She needed to thread a needle whereby she was interesting enough to keep alive but where he had other demands on his valuable time.

  “They came to me,” she had said. “In the Barrio. Because of my craftsmanship. Their master sent them to negotiate for my services. It was through them all this business came about. It was to their order that the thieves gathered, to come to your workshop.” All lies, but seasoned with just the right amount of truth.

  The golem had taken her chin between thumb and forefinger, hard enough to leave twin bruises; hard enough to just hint at the crushing power there that could cave in her jaw any time it wanted. “Who was their master?” it demanded.

  She gagged about that grip until it relented and let her speak, and then gabbled out that she didn’t know, not for sure (because it was only good thiefcraft that such a patron would act through intermediaries, and surely the golem would guess that). Even as it reached for her again, though, she babbled that Shabby had managed to trail the little things a ways, because the same question had been on the thieves’ minds, too.

  “To the Siderea,” she said. “They went up the wall. And we knew it must be one of the Convocation who sent them, for who else might enchant such wonders?” The workshops of her mind were minting sincerity in unprecedented quantities, depressing the market for years to come with their adulterated coinage. “Not knowing it was your workshop, Archmagister, we thought perhaps they came from you.” And with just enough starry-eyed awe, the gutter urchin confronted the magnificence of Loretz’s master-mage, because if the mighty craved one thing, it was validation, knowing in their heart of hearts that they were never so grand as they styled themselves; even when they were made of gold and gems.

  And that had been enough; the bejeweled fish was hooked. She had seen the other magi when they had come with their Broadcaps. She had read their expressions, she whose work was to fabricate the human face and its character. She had seen their sneers and their schadenfreude at their leader being discomfited, even as they had set their thugs on the thieves. There was neither love nor trust amongst the Convocation: united against their lessers but divided against each other. Of all the stories she could possibly have told to Shorj Phenrir, none would have been so readily believed as that one of his own close confidantes was behind the outrage. Not even the truth.

  And the homunculi were safe, at least for now. Nobody would come hunting them above Coppelia’s studio while Phenrir was trying to determine which of his underlings needed slapping down.

  * * *

  When he came back to her, she had no idea if he had settled on a target or not. It wasn’t something he was likely to discuss with her, after all. Instead, she just presented the finished hand for his approval, devoid of scratches, lovingly cleansed of Rosso’s blood and with improvements made to the joints. Now would be the test, in more ways than one. The test of her theory; the test of whether her alterations would merit punishment for deviating from his strict instructions.

  Reattaching the hand to Phenrir’s wrist was an education in itself. She had never thought much about how the homunculi themselves might deal with injury or damage. She knew they wore out—each with a lifespan dictated by experience and the robustness of its construction. If Arc lost a foot, though, could they smith him a new one and join it to him? She hadn’t thought so, from snippets of conversation between him and Tef. Injury was as real to them as to her. Except now she knew it could be done. There were certain innovations set down in the schematics that channelled and shaped the flow of magic, letting it reach out minutely from any incomplete edge of Phenrir’s body, greedy to regain perfection. She could see it flickering at his wrist as though some insect lurked there, its antennae reaching cautiously out into the air. When she brought the hand near, the magic stretched, filings to a magnet, dancing about the joints of the wrist as she slotted in the pins and carefully tightened the screws that held him together. Before her mage-sight, the magic advanced through the restored hand, joint to joint, cautiously, like Broadcaps searching a house. She held her breath as they reached the thumb, where her modifications had been greatest, but her work passed muster and the magic made a home there as readily as in the rest.

  It flexed each finger, and she could picture so clearly every joint and bevel of it, the interplay of sections sliding past one another, oiled and clean. There was nothing to be read in its stern features, but of course there never could be. Slowly, Shorj Phenrir’s golem brought the refurbished hand up to i
ts burnished gaze. And does it see, truly, with those orbs? She thought it probably did, even though it shouldn’t need to. The magic could have taken in the outside world from anywhere about its body, but it had been made by human hands, limited by human minds. How does it work for Tef and Arc? I must ask. And then the bleak understanding that she’d never have the opportunity.

  “What have you done?” Not angry, not yet. It moved each finger, each one with a little more freedom, more sideways play, better rotation at the base, more like a human hand. And then the thumb. She watched the digit hook inwards, then fold back, and further back, reclining smoothly until it was flat alongside the line of the golem’s arm, inhumanly so. Phenrir made a sound, and it was not shocked or angry or even squeamish to see its own hand twisted so, but only thoughtful.

  “I thought,” Coppelia said with a tremble in her voice she didn’t have to feign, “that I could do better. Your plans were for a puppet. Not . . .” Whatever you really are. But she turned the thought into a gesture she hoped looked admiring.

  “It is good.” It brought up its other hand, flexing the thumb through its limited, human arcs of motion. “You will do the same with the other. And the fingers also?” And the slight question there made her heart leap because it implied a need to ask. It implied that she had been promoted from disposable resource to something permitted to answer, even if that answer absolutely had to be yes.

  “I would be honoured to work on you,” she told it, and that was not entirely a lie. And then she carefully disassembled its wrist joint so she could have the other hand for modification, the tradecraft part of her mind already thinking about how she could make it better.

  “I will have food sent,” it told her. “Work well, and there will be better food, and other things you may wish.”

  She bowed and made all the right grateful noises. “And perhaps there might be other parts I could improve, Archmagister. I was wondering . . . your face is fine, but I could make it move: eyebrows, lips.”

  “Perhaps.” But plainly, such fripperies were not as important to it. She had seen with Rosso how it valued being able to get its hands dirty from time to time.

  And then it left her to the workshop, its right hand lying shorn of life and magic on the bench, and she wondered if she was right, and just what it was that looked out from that metal skull.

  11.

  THEY WOULDN’T JUST BE walking in through the front gates this time, and nobody much fancied trying the same underground access as before. An alerted Convocation had the wherewithal to put far more dangerous obstacles down there than just a few sewer predators or noxious air. And besides, they had no Auntie or Moppet to coddle, or Doublet, who had never been one for the more energetic feats of larceny. Shabby had been scaling walls as soon as she’d been toddling, and with her gloves, she could go up them like a lizard. Kernel Jointmaker’s long limbs were made for climbing as well as his hands were for strangling, and Sweaty Losef had an unguent for his fingers and toes that let him gum his way up slowly but surely. Shabby let each in turn borrow her cloak, that turned away any mundane eyes that might glance their way from the city below. Up top, if there was a scrying in place that would alert the mage-lords, well, that was beyond their control. The wall was long, though, and she reckoned they were too tight-fisted with their power to spend it so profligately. Besides, she reckoned they wouldn’t expect anything quite so mad as a second invasion from the Barrio. The den of rogues was well and truly slapped down, they’d think, what with the explosive end of Gaston Ferrulio.

  On the wall top, they were nearly discovered. A Broadcap was walking that windswept beat, bundled in his cloak against night’s early chill. Kernel was all for stuffing any alarm back down the man’s throat with the point of a knife, but they didn’t know how long their sojourn in the Siderea was going to be, and a found body and a missing man would both attract attention. She tried the cloak, casting it over the three of them in the hope the bored sentry would just amble past. Close on, he stopped, though—likely he was a bit of a half-mage himself and his magical senses were tweaking at him, telling him something was wrong.

  Before Kernel could take matters into his own bloody hands, Sweaty popped up. From the Broadcap’s expression he must have been a sight, a froggy-looking man leaping out of nowhere like a puppet devil in a morality play. He dashed a phial full of liquid right in the man’s face just as the sentry tried to call for help, and a moment later, the Broadcap was on his knees, then on his face.

  They propped him up, and before Kernel could get down to the knife work he was so plainly up for, Losef took out a flask and doused the man’s face and the front of his robe. At Shabby’s look, the alchemist smiled weakly.

  “No great tradecraft, this, just some good rum I will miss later. But this is a lonely watch; small wonder this fellow decided to knock off for a drink or five. And the rest was my Patent Insomnia Cure and he won’t remember a blessed thing that happened to him since three this afternoon, at that concentration.”

  “You don’t like killing, do you?” Kernel accused him, as though this was the worst failing imaginable.

  “I don’t like many things,” Sweaty Losef replied mildly. “Some of them are, sadly, unavoidable.”

  The other side of the wall was designed to be descended from, with grand steps every few hundred yards for when the great and the good wanted to go up for a bit of lording it over all they surveyed. Getting to the rich pickings of the Siderea was no great trick, then, but Sweaty and Jointmaker were both keen to know how she was going to effect entry into the palace, and Shabby remained close-mouthed about it, just in case it failed her. Oh, she had backup plans, in case the trick she had literally up her sleeve turned out to be worthless, but her curiosity was hooked. She wanted to see if it would work.

  The palace had many doors, but only a few familiar to the Convocation. The thieves weren’t going anywhere near those, for obvious reasons. However, even mage-lords needed to eat, and their servants and menials had to go in and out through mean little gates tucked out of sight of their masters so as not to spoil the view. Oh, there were windows up above, of course, where an energetic burglar could gain access, but that was where the mage-lords kept their chambers. They never slept, nor did their lanterns dim—even now, there was the sound of music and laughter rolling out into the night. None of Shabby’s shabby little crew would pass for magi, nor even for their menials. And though Shabby had a particular guilty fondness for those tatty romances where a young girl from the Barrio steals into the palace, to be discovered by a handsome magus who merely winks at her and lets her about her business (to lead to later assignation, the elevation of the girl’s place in society, and the shock discovery that she was some lost scion of a well-born family all this time!), she wasn’t such a fool as to believe in them.

  But here was a tradesman’s entrance, under the shadow of a balcony where the great and the good were carousing and talking about one another’s sartorial failings. The thieves had made it through a garden unobserved, with Shabby and Losef working overtime to avoid those parts of the greenery enchanted to snare those without an invitation.

  “You’re saying they don’t lock them?” Kernel asked.

  “Locked, certainly,” Shabby confirmed.

  He crouched, staring at the gilded wood, even this meagre portal adorned with as much ornament as his late master’s fondest possessions. “Magicked, too, then?”

  “Of course. Just be patient.”

  Easy enough to say that to him, but she was feeling twitchy herself. One pair of magi had already swanned past in the dark, off for a liaison in the arbour. On the upside of the ledger, that suggested the Broadcaps didn’t patrol there, but Shabby still felt taut as a viol string. She’d lost that extra weight from her sleeves a little while ago, and she could only hope that the little things she was relying on would fall out as she hoped.

  “I have some acids . . .” Sweaty started, but then there was a shimmer from the door that froze them all i
n place, waiting to see if it was the prelude to discovery. In the next breath, the door sagged in its frame, not from the lock side but off its hinges, so that Kernel lunged forwards to catch it before it fell on the three of them.

  “Subtle,” he complained, and Shabby was privately agreeing, but for his eyes she just shrugged and gestured as if to say, Well, we’re in, aren’t we?

  She felt a tug at her collar, a little form scurrying up her cloak hem like a rat and nestling in her thrown-back cowl.

  “Seriously?” she murmured.

  “Couldn’t do the lock,” Tef’s scratchy voice came in her ear. “Nobody wards the hinges, though.”

  Doctor Losef had some adhesive that sufficed to put the door back in place after they’d crossed inside, though if anyone came to try the handle, the whole business would fall on them. Still, the mage-lords probably weren’t expecting any deliveries until the small hours, and Shabby dearly hoped they’d be long gone by then.