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Thank you to my agent, Simon Kavanagh, and my editor, Lee Harris, for bringing this project to reality, and also to Red Nose, for the two reprobates on the cover
1.
COPPELIA ALWAYS GOT TOO into her performances. For an actual puppeteer it would have been a good trait, but for a thief it was terrible. Still, she was doing Simeon the Garden-Born, and that was worth doing well. She had just about tuned out her audience, no idea whether there were coins in the hat as she did the bit where Simeon the grown-thing confronts his creators for the first time, the scarecrow figure lifting its leaf-ended arms piteously and the squeaky voice she gave it denying the grim destiny fate had set out for it. When she looked up, there were a couple of Broadcaps in the audience and everyone else was either sidling away or obviously more interested in her getting a kicking than good puppetry.
She knew all three of them. Fountains Parish was her stamping ground and all the local law were familiar faces, though more celebrated in their absence than their almost-within-arm’s-reach presence. Belly Keach was a nasty brute if he got his hands on you, but he wasn’t exactly a pal for chasing you anywhere or working up a sweat. Beside him was lean, bony Lynx Soriffo—the name he was actually born with and woe betide any street scum trying to give him a new one. He was religious in that particular way that meant he took a sanctimonious pride in the whippings he doled out for petty offences, such as being poor and not running away fast enough. On the other hand, Coppelia knew of an obliging lady who laid stripes on his bony buttocks three times a week and she reckoned that this knowledge served as a shield of sorts against him truly getting into his swing.
The Catchpole in charge of them was Lucas Maulhands, though, and he was another matter entirely, shorter than either of them with knuckles like the studs on a bailiff’s club. And clever, and at least a half-mage, just like she was.
He had his arms folded, those strangler’s mitts of his half out of sight in the baggy sleeves of his blue robe. The other two had their hats on still, wide navy brims shading their faces from the heat of near-noon, but old Lucas didn’t care about the sun on his stubbly scalp, and wasn’t sweating, either, some charm of his underclothes doubtless keeping him cool. Which led Coppelia to wonder how she might abstract those items from his person or his nightstand, because if you were a thief in Loretz, then your fingers itched for the magic the place was famous for. Her parents had travelled there from eighty miles distant, looking for the city of magi that would value both their arcane and their artisanal skills.
It hadn’t worked out for them. Whether it was working out for Coppelia was a question each day had a new answer for, but she hadn’t looked back when she crept out of the orphanage window.
Maulhands had been after her back then—not a Catchpole yet, but a tireless hound in the service of the Convocation—and had never caught her, which meant she was a fishbone lodged in his throat as far as he was concerned. Just her luck to snag one of the few Broadcaps who actually burned with a need to do his duty rather than just take some coin on the side and turn a blind eye. Not that she had the coin right now.
And she was actually a thief, and this performance, through some fairly oblique means, was accessory to larceny. And if he had wanted to just run her in for no reason at all, he’d be within his rights to do that, too, because she was one of the teeming multitudes from the Barrio and that made her fair game this side of the river.
He caught her eye, did Maulhands. He had a face like an old envelope, creased and rectangular, burned manila by the sun. One of those creases was the crook of his narrow mouth; a man willing to stretch his sacred duty by just enough to get one particular guttersnipe into the stocks or to the whipping post. Or perhaps he really was as straight as he made out and just assumed she was about some piece of villainy, in which case he’d be right and it wouldn’t help her anyway.
Seeing they weren’t going to descend on her and just kick apart the opened-up box she was using as a stage, Coppelia mustered her dignity and went on with the scene. She’d spent all last night kenning the speeches, after all. She might as well make the most of them. She kept her eyes strictly on her little mannikins or the Broadcaps, because her accomplices were out there and, who knew, they might pull something out of the fire. They were a resourceful lot, and Maulhands didn’t know about them.
Oh, when he and his sauntered into Redfountain Square, doubtless he looked all around for the pocket-dippers taking advantage of her little show. Perhaps there had even been some, making themselves scarce the moment the authoritarian blue caught the corner of their eye. Nobody who had tipped her the nod, of course, like a good confederate should have done, but Maulhands probably assumed she’d pissed off her mates again. He’d received more than a few choice handfuls of sharp change from her tongue before, mostly hurled over her shoulder in headlong flight. He must guess she was short of close pals in the Barrio.
He wasn’t to know she’d made some new friends in the months since their paths had crossed last, and they were there and present in Redfountain, going about a cutpurse’s business as best they could, right under everyone’s noses.
The last speech done, Coppelia had her puppets solemnly bow before her diminished audience, and most specifically to the three Broadcaps. Lynx looked like the whole business had been lemons on his tongue, and Belly Keach tugged at the high collar of his shirt beneath his robe, where the sweat and the grime were fighting a war that would go on until cold weather ended campaigning season. Lucas Maulhands clapped precisely twice.
“Moppet,” he named her. “How about you let my Lynx here relieve you of whatever you’re holding that’s not yours, and then you can come back to the Blue House and take your stripes.”
She gave him a look as guileless as a child’s. “Why, Catchpole Lucas, you’re never telling me there’s a law against puppetry now?”
He examined the knuckles of his big right hand, one of which bore a crescent scar made by her teeth six years before, when he had come closest to snaring her. “Now, don’t let’s make this difficult—”
“But Catchpole, my business here is merely to entertain, and if these worthies feel my efforts are sufficient, then perhaps generosity may move them to deposit a coin or two as a token of their estimation.” She risked a look at the hat. Apparently, generosity was wary of getting its lily-white flesh sunburned today and was staying indoors. “Or if you’re referring to that other business you and I once engaged in, Catchpole, I’m seventeen now, too old to be returning to the orphanage.”
“Not too old for the workhouses,” Lucas said bleakly, and he must have seen and treasured her flinch. Her parents had been in the workhouses, just like any poor immigrants with magical ability. And from the workhouses they had been taken, and that had been that.
“I bind no powers here, nor work any craft. Even my little friends have naught to them but wood and rags.” She dangled the Simeon figure on the end of its strings. And Lucas had enough mage in him that he’d know she was telling the truth, if truth’s feeble ribbons were something he’d let himself be boun
d by.
His eyes squeezed almost shut with suspicion. She saw in that moment that it wouldn’t matter. He would take her up because he wanted to, and look in the mirror the next morning with equanimity, knowing himself a good and law-abiding man. She was a villain, after all, scum from the Barrio. There had to be something she was guilty of.
Her feet were telling her to start running, but her accomplices were still out there, and if she just took off without them, they’d never catch up. Rationally, she suspected they were actually quite nasty and capable of looking after themselves, but that didn’t stop her feeling protective.
Belly Keach was distracted, half lured off by the butter-salt aroma of a corn-seller doing business across Redfountains. Lynx probably imagined he was watching her with the legendary acuity of his namesake, but he was so fond of picturing himself as the keen hunter that he tended to keep sentry with his mind’s eye turned inwards on his lean calves and martial poise, rather than his real eyes on his quarry. And Lucas had just enough of the law to him to have to ease himself into taking her up, given she was just standing there, bandying words with him. When she ran, it’d be different, of course. Running was guilt, to the Broadcaps. Their few scruples got trampled underfoot mighty easily.
“Come on, Moppet,” Lucas said. “Don’t make this hard.”
In the Siderea, the high town where the wealthy few lived, people went by their own names. The upper ranks of the merchantry and the magicians themselves, all the way up to Shorj Phenrir, who had been Archmagister of the Convocation for two human lifespans and still going strong. They had family names and personal names, dynasties and immutable identities. They got to be themselves. Everyone who belonged below the Siderea got a nickname, and that nickname came to define them and would go on their paupers’ gravestones in good time. Still, Coppelia would dearly love to find out who had first coined that one for her and poke the worthy in the eye. Then she felt something run up her spine under her outsize shirt, enough to make her shiver. One, and two. Both her little friends repatriated with her, and a tiny hand knocked on her shoulder blade, also one and two. Time to go.
She gave Lucas Maulhands her sweetest smile and then bolted, just as he was waiting for her to do, the two puppets trailing by their strings after her, makeshift stage and empty hat abandoned. Behind her, Maulhands barked out a hard laugh, a man released from a residual ethical quandary, and she waited to see what devilish magics her accomplices had worked up to save her hide from the lash and her soul from the workhouse.
There was a colossal splash, unexpected enough that she skidded to an ill-advised halt and looked back. Lucas was in the fountain she’d been performing against. For a moment, she thought the carven marble nereid there was trying to drown him, which would have been the sort of working that the Convocation would hunt her for across a thousand years. Then she recast what she was seeing as something less undine and more mundane: they had laced his boots together.
Belly Keach was trying to haul the Catchpole out of the water, and doing more harm than good, but Lynx locked eyes with her and broke into what he probably thought was a dynamic and predatory lope, but looked to Coppelia more like a tuppenny mummer impersonating an elderly cat. She took to her heels over the Lancemill Alley bridge that put her three streets from the Barrio and didn’t stop running until she was in the shadow of the slum district’s leaning walls and tattered awnings. And didn’t stop her brisk walk thereafter until she was in the peeling upper room she called her studio, listening to the shouting of the family below and the bells of Beggar’s Chapel from two streets away.
* * *
Too close. No bed, and only one stool, but she had paid too much for Szorca, the live-in landlord from the ground floor, to haul up a shabby mattress, and now she collapsed onto it. There was just enough movement in the straw to suggest a new deputation of fleas had come to make demands of her, which meant she’d have to douse the damn thing with Doctor Losef’s Most Efficacious Paint Remover and leave it to stink out the street from the open window, or else spend the rest of the summer bitten by the little bastards. And Loretz fleas were a risky business. A flea that bit a magus might carry all sorts of maladies to its next repast. You heard stories, watered-down versions of the tales the doxies told, from when Convocation lords came slumming it to the fleshpots of the Barrio and left behind more than a handful of coins and a wet spot on the sheets.
“You might as well come out,” Coppelia said. The meagre burden of her accomplices had vanished from her shoulders the moment she got in, and she knew they must be somewhere amongst the woodworking tools or the paints. They didn’t fully trust her yet. She’d only been working with them a month, and their partnership was unorthodox, to say the least. Still, they’d trusted her with their existence and it had been safe so far, not another word breathed, not even to her fellow gutter scum.
There was a rattle from the workbench, one of her small wood files rolling towards the edge, and she lunged forwards to save it from the floor. They weren’t good tools, not anything her parents would have been happy with, but in lieu of that lost set she remembered from her childhood, they’d have to do. They were charity from Auntie Countless, meaning a gift that Coppelia was still repaying day to day, given to her so she could do the work Auntie needed doing. Any breakages, she’d have to make good from her own pocket.
And, of course, that displaced file was no accident, and her grab for it put her on the right eye level for her little helpers as they stood on the bench top.
There were more than two of them, of course—she reckoned at least six lived up in the attic space above her studio, and probably more by now because, of all things, they were interested in recruiting. These two were the ones who’d approached her, though: Tef and Arc.
They were very beautiful, to her eyes. They were horrible, too, but only in a way that uncanny things often are, and in Loretz, the magicians’ city, one got used to uncanny things.
Tef was the smaller, at a shade under Arc’s full six inches tall. She had let Coppelia study her under the magnifying lens, her androgynous body miraculously worked in wood down to the smallest joint, every finger articulated in miniature. Having seen that, Coppelia had been terrified of going near her for fear of clumsily damaging some part of her, but Tef never seemed to own to the fragility of her existence. She had been running about the feet of the crowd at Redfountains, in and out of their bags and up and down their legs like a veritable flea herself.
Her face was the most remarkable, for it was not just a puppet’s mask, caricaturing a stock character’s expression. Every feature and part was separate: brows, lips, eyelids, cheekbones, jigsawing together in countless ways to give her as much expression as any flesh-and-blood woman. Coppelia could not do the faces: that was work left for Tef and her people, as were the hands. The rest was within her skill, though, and that formed the basis of her peculiar arrangement with their kind.
Arc was taller, broader and considerably heavier. She had a strap under her shirt for them to cling to, and she always knew which side he took because he dragged, and dug his pointy knees in painfully. He was made of steel, and not quite as intricately as Tef. His face was still cast in a dozen pieces, but his expressions were limited. He had a straight razor folded and slung over his shoulder, which she didn’t remember him going out with. Arc was a warrior ready to take on the world. Why, once, he’d spent an hour duelling with the most monstrous rat she could imagine, so he’d told her at length, showing scratches on his metal torso as though they were battle scars.
“That was too close,” she told them candidly. She took up her real puppets, the inert ones with strings. Simeon had survived miraculously untouched, but the other one, her all-purpose interlocutor, was hopelessly tangled, and she started the long work of separating all the threads. “At least tell me you have something to show for it.”
The poise of the tiny creatures always amused her, though she’d never show it. Tef stood with her shoulders back, chest out, miniscule
hands on her wooden hips. Arc tended to hunch forwards as though he was a big man in a small room, his gleaming hands bunched into fists like knuckly nail-heads. Taken without their surroundings, you’d think they were seven feet tall each and the greatest warrior-magi in the world.
Tef was hauling a sack up, meaning Coppelia’s spare belt pouch. Upending it, she spilled a litter of junk over the bench-top: cheap-looking rings, a pendant, some coins, a quill pen, a carved wooden mouse clutching its tail in a frozen picture of rodent anxiety, a simple stuffed doll in a floral dress that was larger than Tef was. The jewellery would fence for a few coins, enough to make rent, but the rest looked like tat unless you had a touch of magery about you, like Coppelia and the homunculi both did. Enchanted stuff, nothing that would warrant a saga or a name, but worked with power nonetheless. Charms of protection, of luck, of sexual potency or relief from stomach cramps, all the little toys one could get in the middling markets of Loretz, that the city’s merchant magi exported to the rest of the world at such prices.
“Let’s dole them out, then,” Coppelia said. She wanted to lavish praise on them as though they were pets, but that would be a mistake. Pets didn’t carry a straight razor and secretly invade human cities. If anything, she suspected she was their pet more than they were hers.
But the haul was good. She’d have something to sell—maybe she could get some new paintbrushes this time—and they would have something with which to do . . . what they did. And she’d better get on with her part of that, because that meant she could put off thinking about what might happen if she and they ever parted ways. What with her being the only human who knew about them.
Tef’s jigsaw face was smiling, but Coppelia knew that didn’t have to go any deeper than if she’d carved a happy face on one of her regular puppets. She’d have nightmares about that razor, that was for sure.
Later, when the pair of them had vanished off to the rest of their kin and Coppelia had settled down to assemble the pieces of a miniscule body made to Tef and Arc’s own scale, some anonymous well-wisher pushed a note under her door. On it was a skilful sketch of a plump-looking woman along with a few spidery lines of description, telling over a life of wealth and privilege Coppelia could barely imagine. She left the little figure incomplete, because this was a paying commission from Auntie Countless, and Auntie was always in a hurry to get things done.
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