There were a few close calls along the way. At one point, a half-collapsed ceiling meant they were passing beneath the feet and noses of a trio of Broadcaps, off duty and gambling in some neglected storeroom. Their rowdy cursing and banter rang every which way, coming back in mocking echoes as though there were enemies on every side. Auntie rose to the occasion that time, twisting a ring on her finger to conjure a haze in the air that would hide their movements from the distracted men above.
Another time, they dropped down into what must have been natural caverns, twisting hither and thither where the water had run in bygone days. Then it was the turn of Doctor Losef again, spattering their path with an acrid-smelling liquid, pitch black in the red light.
“Mewclaws,” Shabby explained briefly.
Rosso chuckled at Coppelia’s blank look. “You’re thinking something like a lizard-cat-thing, right?”
She nodded cautiously.
“Well, that much is true.”
Doublet tittered, a spine-chilling sound. “You’re thinking they are adorable, girl-child? That much is not. Be glad the doctor’s ichor smells worse to them than it does to us.”
At the end of that, when they had hauled themselves up into the elegantly buttressed halls again, she pointed out that they’d not seen hide nor hair of anything like their Mewclaws, to which Losef replied that it only showed how good his repellent was, and she couldn’t tell if he was making fun of her or not.
And then they were in a tunnel scented distantly of paint-stripper, or so Coppelia’s nose could best characterise it, and Rosso was reaching up to a metal grate above, painstakingly unscrewing it from its stone mounting. Up there was only more darkness, but by some unspoken signal, everyone else seemed to know that they had arrived at the fabled golem workshop. Coppelia felt Tef and Arc crowding her collar for a look, cold metal brushing her left ear, the grain of Tef’s head against her right.
Rosso slid the grate painstakingly aside and then Shabby boosted him up: he was a broad man but he wriggled effortlessly through, a professional about a job that only taxed him slightly. Then he was reaching down and hoisting his partner, and each one of them after that, with special care and consideration for Auntie. Last as always, Coppelia half-expected to end up left down there, one more joke on the newcomer, but they were all quiet and serious business right then. Rosso hauled her up one-armed and set her on her feet in a chamber large enough that Losef’s red lamps did not reach the walls.
What they did illumine was a workbench that Coppelia was beside and goggling over without feeling she’d crossed any intervening space. Her own workbench in the Barrio was the result of years of scrimping, saving, handcrafting and outright theft, and she had thought herself quite the well-equipped artisan for her own small trade. Now she felt such a deep, deep jealousy, an envy of the soul like acid in her, because if she had owned something like this, then what might she not have accomplished?
Tef was right up alongside her neck now, hidden in her unruly hair, and no doubt the little homunculus was thinking just the same.
“Puppets, right?” Shabby said, and Coppelia started guiltily, but of course the thief meant the tools and not her diminutive passengers.
“Or something like it,” she agreed, hearing her own voice shake. She saw vices, files for wood, for metal, for bone. She saw saws and pins and little heaters to keep the paint and the glue liquid while they were being used. And that thought led to . . . “But it’s old. Not old like the walls of this place, but nobody’s used this stuff within a month at least.” Her own workspace smelled of that hot glue, the burnt odour of sawdust and sanding, the hundred little tells of an artisan at work.
Shabby shrugged, but to Coppelia it spoke volumes. Someone had invested a colossal amount in this place, all those bespoke tools and pieces, and then let it lie fallow. They had made their golem, perhaps, and then given up on the work, the consummate amateur with no need to pay rent or buy bread with the proceeds of their craft. On the heels of her envy came a fierce, unexpected hatred for whoever was behind all of this.
“No dust,” Doublet remarked.
“Charms for that,” Rosso and Auntie replied, almost in unison, and of course whatever dilettante crafter had set up shop there would never do something so menial as sweep up after themselves.
“Moppet, dear child, over here,” Auntie Countless called, and Coppelia dragged herself reluctantly from the wonderful bench to view something even more remarkable. Here was another table, set with clamps and indentations, along with lathe, drill and bandsaw that all fairly radiated magic—no ungainly crank or foot-pedal here beneath the palace.
“Larger pieces,” she identified, looking at the new toolset. Certainly larger than she’d have any use for, but if someone did want to craft a full-sized frame in exquisite detail, they’d need to work at all scales, from the minuscule to the human.
Rosso and Doublet had satchels out and were swiping anything that looked valuable—and there were wells of gold shavings there, pots of hydrargyrum, glass bottles of precious tints and colours, each one of them a year’s earnings for any artisan that might want to acquire them. Doctor Losef was prowling about the edges of the room, a red lamp held high in each hand as he hunted for where Rosso had seen the golem.
“Moppet, Auntie, get the best glimmer you can of this place, what they did here, all that,” Shabby instructed.
“They weren’t making an army, or even a load of servants,” Coppelia said quietly. Auntie watched her silently, but she sensed the old woman was of the same mind.
“What, then?” Shabby asked.
“Just one,” Coppelia told her. “Look at all these precious metals”—now vanishing into Rosso’s pack, but the point was there. “And nobody’s making any more of them, not now they’re done. Maybe they’re just doing repairs to something they made a while ago, or something they found an age ago. No team of artisans churning out magic metal people. Someone came here and made something precious. And then they lost interest.” But even as she said it, she felt it wasn’t quite right, a pat explanation to salve the professional ire she felt, but the picture of the idle one-time amateur didn’t quite sit right. The place wasn’t as abandoned as all that. The leftover scents in the air suggested a little tinkering in living memory.
“But it was in this room, Rosso saw it,” Shabby said, though there was doubt in her voice. “And I don’t see it now.” Even as she frowned, Sweaty Losef was hissing for them. He’d found a door, solid and bound with what might be polished brass or might be gold. There was a lock, but locks were Rosso’s speciality and he had it sprung in a minute of picking and thirty seconds of half-magery.
Coppelia was expecting a storeroom, a broom cupboard of enchanted brooms, something mundane to the rich yet of vast value to gutter-level thieves. What they got instead was a bedchamber.
It was immaculate, that was her first impression. She saw desk and chair, writing paper and ink laid out; there were great velvet drapes shrouding what surely couldn’t have been a natural window this far down but might have been a magic mirror or some simulacrum of a view. There were pictures on the walls, portraits of severe men painted to make them look powerful, of elegant women painted to make them look ethereal. There was a scene of a castle on a moor somewhere, stark against the flames of a volcanic sunset that shed its own burning red light across the room. On a side table, the orbs of an orrery danced without visible support.
She had eyes for none of it, not after she saw what lay on the bed. And it was a fine bed, too—a night’s sleep on it would be worth more than every material possession she had ever owned: four-posted, with drapes tied back, the bedclothes heavy and worked with gold and mercurial thread. And lying in it, arms demurely crossed over its chest, was the golem.
Silver and gold, it was, and precious metals. Its face made Arc’s steel visage look plain as the back of a spoon, so fine was the work. Its hair was a riot of moulded golden curls. Its body was perfectly in proportion, crafted not as a naked
marionette but clad in coat, breeches and stockings, enamelled in red and black and imperious purple. Coppellia marvelled at the joints of its hands as they lay on its breast. I am learning my craft just by seeing this. The two homunculi were both at her ears, peering through her hair at this prodigy, and she was terrified the other thieves would spot them.
“See the power in him,” came Tef’s tiny creak of a voice. “Our work is done here already.”
“What?” Coppelia asked. She had been lost in the wonder of the golem’s construction. She hadn’t been looking at the magic in it.
Then Rosso shoved past her, staring down at all that incalculable craftsmanship with the air of a professional with a practical problem.
“How much does it weigh, you reckon?”
Of course they were there to steal it; they were thieves. Still, a life-sized man of metal would be a challenge to abstract from the bounds of the palace wall, and every dent or scratch would rob them of more money than any of them had ever held at one time.
“Wait,” she said. Only Auntie glanced her way.
“Stretcher, bandages,” Doublet opined, rubbing at his face, which moved queasily under his fingers. “Say it got burned. Dung-browners have accidents all the time.”
“No, wait,” Coppelia said, more forcefully, because she knew the pattern there, the way the currents of power coiled and knotted within the metal frame. She knew it from the homunculi, though it was writ on such a larger scale.
“If a stretcher’ll hold it . . .” And Rosso hauled down the bed curtains and all the pillows and covers that the golem wasn’t actually weighing down, piling them on the floor.
“Rosso, no!” Coppelia got out, shaking off her paralysis to grab at his elbow. He shook her off irritably. Shabby and Doublet paid her more heed, but before either could intervene, Rosso laid hands on the thing to roll it off the bed.
It took his wrist. Rosso cursed, more startled than anything else, yanking away. And screaming then; screaming and on his knees because the golem had pinched with thumb and forefinger and separated the bones of his hand from one another, discharging magic flaring from the joints of its fingers. Above his agonised keening Coppelia heard a musical metal voice, dreadfully clear, crying out, “You dare?”
Auntie tried to stop her seeing what came next, or just tried to get her back through the door, which amounted to the same. Her eyes were fixed on the golem, though, as it swung its legs off the bed. It still had Rosso’s mauled stump in one hand, and the other was thrust at the next nearest thief, Doublet. The malleable creature was tripping backwards, stumbling over Rosso’s extended foot, and a moment later there was a flash of . . . not lightning, not fire, just magic, a raw discharge of the colossal power that made the golem go. Doublet made no sound as the top of him was just ablated away, a sharp line from waist to armpit the new boundary of that part of him which remained, the rest gone to dust and empty air.
Doctor Losef was already trusting to his heels across the workshop, having not gotten past the threshold of the door he had discovered. To Coppelia’s surprise, he paused at the grate, a thief’s residual loyalty remaining in him, for all he was a pharmacist and only an honorary villain. Shabby was right after him, sliding the last few feet and vanishing down into the space below. Rosso had been her partner for years, but she recognised a lost cause like any gutter-born urchin. Next came Auntie, trying to bundle Coppelia before her, and after her—
Coppelia saw it in Losef’s froglike face: that the feet that came after hers were metal, not flesh. His nerve failed him then, for which she blamed him not at all, and he was down the hatch and after Shabby without another glance.
A gleaming hand fumbled for her, plucking at her sleeve, and she and Auntie spilled over onto the floor of the workshop in their haste to escape its reach. In two long strides, it was between them and the hatch, kicking the grate across the workshop floor. Despite herself, despite Rosso and Doublet, Coppelia winced at the bright scar left in the onyx enamelling of its boot.
“You dare?” it said again. “You dare creep into my personal chambers, you rats?” And its golden eyes rolled wildly so that she braced for the murderous rage a human would surely fall into.
She kicked back, retreating across the floor on her backside and heels until her spine rammed up against one of the workbenches. Auntie crouched before her, hands up, surrender, let’s be reasonable, please. And the golem cocked its head in just such a way that Coppelia shivered, because the thing had been so painstakingly fabricated to resemble a man.
“Your honour,” Auntie croaked, and then there was the sound of many feet, of shouting. Broadcaps came spilling over through the bedroom and into the workshop, a dozen of them at least, and behind them men and women, richly clad, who must be magi of the Convocation or their hangers-on. Coppelia recognised their looks from the orphanage and the streets: a veneer of concern over a greed for someone else’s misfortune.
“Your honour!” Auntie shouted, hands reaching out to petition, and one of the Broadcaps just stepped past the golem and struck her in the head with his cudgel, a single, brutal motion that sent the old woman to the floor, her head haloed in blood the moment it touched the stone. Coppelia screamed, scrabbling away until a hand on her ankle yanked her back.
She’d thought the impassive regard of the golem was the worst, but then she met the Broadcap’s eyes, finding an expression of such utter disgust, as though she was vermin, no more than a human rat crept in from the sewers; human loathing won out as worse than mechanical disinterest. She tried to kick him in the face, any victory no matter how small, but he got an elbow in the way and then rammed it down on her ankle.
There was a little flourish of steel about Coppelia’s knees and then a lash of blood whipped across her cheek. For a moment, she thought it was her own, but then she saw that Arc was standing on her legs, his razor extended in a fencer’s lunge, and the weight of the Broadcap was gone from her, the man rearing back and staring at his neatly slit wrist.
She heard Arc’s tinny little challenge, a tiny steel man trying to take on the world, but there was no future in that. She couldn’t save herself, but she wouldn’t let her downfall be theirs.
She flexed her knee hard, sending him cartwheeling off her towards the still-open hatch, skidding between the golem’s very feet until he almost tilted in and fell. He was getting to his feet, though, razor still very much in his grasp. A single boot-stomp from any of the Broadcaps there would have turned him into nothing but broken parts.
“I’m sorry.” And Tef was gone from Coppelia’s other shoulder, bolting between the feet of the oblivious humans. The wooden homunculus grabbed Arc by the waist and just leapt, carrying the pair of them down into the dark.
Which left only Coppelia, the Moppet, but she felt as though she’d won something, despite it all. She’d stolen a treasure from these monstrous people who’d taken her parents and killed Auntie, and who owned all the magic in the world.
Two Broadcaps were moving on her, cautious because of the blade they thought she had. One had a cudgel, the other a proper sword; neither looked in the mood to take prisoners. Coppelia fixed the swordsman in the eye and bunched herself to spring at him, reckoning she could at least get her nails into his face before he could finish her off.
And then, “Hold,” came the cold, clear voice of the golem.
7.
“THEY SAW YOU.” Shallis’s dry, crisp voice out of Shallis’s dry, crisp mouth.
“The humans?” Tef glanced at Arc, hoping that he would let her lead the narrative. “I don’t think so, not really. We were quick, and they weren’t expecting anything like us.”
Shallis rustled, a living document impatient with circumlocution. “The construct.”
Another glance at Arc, who was sitting on the edge of the pan that was their meeting-chamber floor, cleaning his razor and sulking. No help there. “Yes.”
“That is also one of their magicians.”
“Well, it could throw power aro
und, if that makes it—”
The Folded One rattled her page-edges together, cutting off Tef’s words. Around them, the rest of the colony leant in, unusually silent. Tef tried to gauge their mood, but just because her own face was wood didn’t mean she could read meaning into the features of the others. Morpo’s sagging wax, Kyne’s button eyes, they were all simply watchful right now, still as only the unliving can be. If they’d had breath, they would be holding it.
“This is . . . problematic,” Shallis stated at last.
“It was going to happen anyway,” Tef decided. “This is a city of magicians. Even the street-sweepers know a few charms. We are creatures of magic, given life by it. Sooner or later—”
“Later, it was to be hoped,” the Folded One told her. “When there were more of us. When we could maintain more than one hideout. When there were enough of us to threaten them, if it came to war.”
“War with the humans? Are you mad?”
“If they set to eradicating us, the only way we could get them to halt would be if we had teeth. Half a dozen sad puppets in an attic? The work of a moment to destroy. A hundred of us, two hundred? When we could have a razor’s blade at any nursery window, a pipette of hemlock in any cup? Then they would have to come to terms with us.”
The silence that followed this proclamation was of a profoundly different nature. Tef glanced around and reckoned she could read them now, as shaken by Shallis’s words as she was. “Is that where your mind’s taken you? Poisoning and murder?”
“I . . . think about these things,” Shallis whispered. She made an abortive gesture towards their own newborn, Lori. “You think they would hesitate?”
“I think they would go a lot further to wipe us out once we started killing their young,” Tef said. “Shallis—” She was expecting a sharp put-down, but instead, the Folded One just folded, collapsing until she was sitting, all angular misery and jutting corners.
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