* * *
Tef rode Shabby’s shoulder for a while, because the woman had bought a map of the palace downstairs from some poor human who’d been a maidservant for the mage-lords before she’d grown too old for their eyes to find pleasing, and who’d then descended by misstep and misfortune to end up in the Barrio. Tef was only just beginning to understand what the Barrio was and what the Siderea was, and all the parishes in between, but she already felt a curious loyalty to the gutters. Nowhere in this city was her place, but the Barrio was for those who had no other place, so it was hers as well.
They were able to dodge the servants and a pair of idling Broadcaps, all the way to where stone stairs spiralled down into the earth. There were cellars of enchanted wine down there, vaults, laboratories, abandoned storerooms. And, somewhere, there was that opulent buried bedchamber and its workshop.
That, Tef knew, was where their interests were likely to diverge. Shabby knew the homunculi were there to rescue Moppet, and the thief plainly wasn’t averse to that happening, with that tenuous loyalty the Barrioi showed one another. Revenge against the magi was the grander aim for the three humans, though. Revenge for their lost comrades, their dead leader; revenge for lifetimes beneath the boot-heel. In their incendiary reprisal, the Convocation had pushed these three villains just too far. They were here to pillage, and perhaps to kill.
“Where now?” Shabby whispered, the three rogues hiding in the shadow of the wine casks.
“Wait here,” Tef told her, and hopped down to rejoin the others.
Shallis had stayed back at the colony, of course. Her magic would have been useful, but she was fragile and, besides, disapproved of the whole venture, though not enough to forbid it. Her authority was dissolving into an on-the-fly democracy where everyone had a fair say, and perhaps she was glad to shed the responsibility. Kyne and Lief had stayed back, too, with Lief’s new child Lori. As well as parental duties, he was the best crafter amongst them, and Kyne the Fabricker was their raven-handler. If all else went wrong, those four could keep the colony alive.
But the others were all there, some under protest. Tef and Arc, obviously, but Effl Ratkiller had refused to be left behind, and she was quick and fierce as her name suggested. Then there was Morpo the Candling, who was neither, but who was a better magus than Tef or any of them save Shallis herself. Morpo emphatically did not want to be there, but they needed him, and just as his wax body was mutable and soft, so was he.
Tef reached the other three homunculi, who were out across the great expanse of the cellar floor. Arc had his razor over one shoulder, but the others bore a new burden: the articulated hand that Moppet had made, which was too large for any sensible purpose.
“Have you puppets worked out where we’re headed yet?” she demanded. Puppet had become something of a fashionable insult between them recently.
“Yes,” Morpo said sullenly, and “No,” said the other two, so that Tef felt like cuffing them all but at last turned to the sagging features of the Candling.
“What, now?”
“Here.” Morpo took the outsize hand off Arc and traced designs on its palm so that the wooden fingers trembled and flexed. A moment later, the hand jumped to the ground and lay there, one finger extended towards the nearest wall.
“It’s broken,” Arc said. “Or Morpo is.”
“Shut up, rust-head.”
“Bee’s-leavings.”
Tef slapped the pair of them, leaving a dent in Morpo’s head and not discomfiting Arc remotely. “Effl, go find what’s there. A catch, the line of a door, some moving part.”
The mouse-skull head of the scrimshander cocked at her. Effl had added a ratskin cloak to her outlandish look now, with some fly-wings tied to the head of her spear like a pennant. Tef thought she’d argue, but then the Ratkiller was off, bounding across the cellar and scaling a rank of barrels with the frantic speed of a spider. A moment later, she was waving her spear in circles from the top. Found something.
“Go help,” she told the others, and ran back to the thieves to impart directions to the cavernous space of Shabby’s ear.
By the time the humans were over, the homunculi were hidden. Shabby hadn’t wanted to trust the others with their existence, not just yet. Effl had helpfully outlined part of the hidden door, leaving scratches in the stone that drew attention to it. The humans puzzled over the mechanism for a short while before it swung open. Tef saw Morpo reforming himself, down in the shadow of the casks; he had oozed his semiliquid body through the crack and found a more obvious lever on the other side. It wasn’t a very pleasant trick for him to pull, to hear him tell it, and he cast her a glowering look as she passed.
The human known as Sweaty had his reddish lamps to take them this far, but they reached lit areas soon—globes of cold fire hanging on chains from the ceiling showing that palace residents were abroad there. There were distant voices, too, and the occasional scuff of footsteps, all echoing in such a way that human and homunculus senses were constantly being tweaked and strained.
The four homunculi reached a crossroads, and Arc got out the hand again. Effl had a nub of flint palmed, for the plan was they’d leave arrows for Shabby to see now they were down there, meaning the human could pretend to be finding a path in fact laid out for her. Tef suspected the thief would have been able to find her own way eventually, but the sympathetic bond between Moppet and her creation was speeding them on their path.
“Well, it’s mostly pointing down,” Morpo observed glumly. “I told you this would happen.”
“Only mostly,” Arc said. “But a bit that way.”
“Then we’ll go that way and I’ll warn Shabby she might need to double back.” They all went still as someone laughed from down the corridor. Let’s hope it’s not that way.
“As quickly as we can, too. Go on ahead and take another reading at the next turn.”
Effl scaled the wall with her flint and scratched the arrow, even as the humans approached. It was that sound—not their soft talk, not the thieves’ soft shoes—that attracted hostile notice.
There had been a human there all along. He had been sitting in an alcove, a monstrous great shadow amongst other shadows, and they had been so intent on their business, they hadn’t seen him. That was the problem with humans. They were so big that they just became part of the landscape when they were still.
This wasn’t one of the magi, thankfully, but it was one of their servants, with the blue robes and hat, a Broadcap who had probably come down there for an illicit nap and now gawped out, first up at Effl, then forward at the thieves.
Effl went for him, as bold against the towering might of a human as she might be against a rat. The Broadcap had some magic to him, a scrap of it, like so many in this city. He was partway through sounding some alarm or launching some attack when the scrimshander’s fish-hook spear drove into his face, just below his eye.
The magic fell apart instantly, sheared through by the man’s pain. He managed a fragment of a shriek before the biggest human, the Jointmaker, lunged forwards and got a big hand about the Broadcap’s mouth, slamming the man’s head back into the wall. His other hand punched in three times, fast enough that Tef flinched, because humans were supposed to be slow and ponderous. The third time, there was a knife involved, and that was the end of it.
Jointmaker stepped back, the knife still very much in evidence, and his eyes were on Effl, who had retreated up the wall.
“What the fuck’s this?” he hissed.
“Not just that!” came Arc’s tinny bellow from the ground, and Jointmaker looked down to find his boot being rapped by the butt of the Scull’s razor.
“Remarkable,” Sweaty said, though not in any way that suggested he was happy about it.
“They’re with me,” Shabby told them. “They belong to the Moppet, Auntie’s apprentice. She made them.” Not true, but as much as any humans needed to know.
“Fuck me,” Jointmaker said, staring goggle-eyed down at Arc. For a moment, he m
ight have done anything, most likely something violent. Tef thought about how quick he was, and how a stomp of that boot would turn Arc into nothing more than broken pieces.
“Kernel,” Shabby said, warningly.
“What’s the world coming to?” the big human said. “I remember when this was simple. And now there’s little doll people threatening me with a shave. Fuck me.”
“And?”
“And fine. Though Moppet’s going to have some questions when . . .” And then something set in his face, like pieces of expression getting stuck halfway, because of course there wasn’t anyone to ask those questions, not anymore. “Fine.”
“Sweaty?”
“Remarkable,” the alchemist human repeated. “Lead on, before this unfortunate is discovered.”
“You can’t . . . dissolve the body or something? You said you had acids.”
“Not a whole bathful of them, alas.”
“Then let’s go.”
* * *
The business with the Broadcap had been a salutary lesson that the little people were not infallible. Shabby had gotten complacent, she decided. She needed to remember just how much trouble they were all walking into.
The precise form of her revenge was still taking form, but it would involve the workshop. Worse came to worst, she would have Jointmaker’s muscle and Sweaty’s acids just wreck the place beyond use, a piece of childish vandalism that would nevertheless provide considerable satisfaction. You kick us, we kick back. Jointmaker wanted to cut some magicianly throats, and possibly that would also be on the menu for the night, but Shabby decided she didn’t want to push her luck or dirty her hands quite that much.
What she really wanted was to get the drop on that golem and ruin all that lovely workmanship in the name of teaching it that Rosso, Auntie and Doublet had been worth more than all its jewels and fine enamels. What she wanted was to find a vault of other, more portable treasures in a cupboard off that workshop, that she could spread all over the Barrio at cut-down prices so that half the thieves in the city might find their art enhanced to the detriment of their betters. What she really wanted . . .
In her heart, she knew that what she wanted was to undo absolutely all of it: to reverse Ferrulio’s mission, unspeak her own words that set him on the trail, bring back lost friends, forget it ever happened and let us never mention this again to the whole of the last few days. But she reckoned even the Convocation wasn’t hiding away anything that smart, so she’d settle on breaking things to show the mage-lords that even she, even Shabby Lilith Yarney, was a human being who couldn’t be trampled on without consequence.
They were deeper down now, following the scratch-marks of the homunculi. So far, the little people had led them true, or at least they hadn’t had to go back on themselves at all. If it turned out they really were diminutive agents of the Convocation, then everything was already screwed, of course, but the ship of doubting them had well and truly sailed by now.
Even as she thought it, Tef was on her shoulder again. It was a little spooky, how they could just come and go so stealthily; Shabby was already considering just what weal a long-term partnership might bring when all this was over.
“What now?” she asked.
“We’re . . . not sure. The hand is crawling around in circles.”
“I thought it just pointed?”
“Yes.” They were approaching a widening of the ways, a room up ahead. Shabby ducked down to crouch at the doorway, seeing only more of the same. The clutch of Tef’s fingers on her earlobe felt like tiny pins.
“So?”
“It means there’s magic, active magic. The hand was made to take it in so it could move. Moppet did well there,” Tef explained. “But now it’s drawing on whatever’s around.”
“So, what is around? Are we . . . over the workshop, maybe?”
“Could be. We’ll need to scout around again. I’m sorry.”
The room ahead was lopsided, she saw, more to one side of the passage than the other. Another hidden door? As she slipped inside with the others on her heels, she murmured to Tef, “No, it’s good. Be sure.” A sudden stab of loss: talking to the little made thing as though it were a fellow rogue on a job, like she would talk to Rosso, with infinite faith in his ability to pull off his part of the caper.
She felt the little wooden creature part company with her, signalling for Kernel and Losef to halt. The big bruiser stayed on his feet, scowling about as though annoyed by the lack of warm bodies to turn cold. Sweaty sat down gratefully and took off one shoe to massage his foot.
“Who even needs this many passages?” he demanded plaintively.
“Lots of mage-lords,” Jointmaker grunted. “Give one a lab or a safe room or a kinky dungeon, they all want one.”
Shabby was about to hush them when the feel of the room changed about her. She had good senses—mundane senses, anyway—and she knew from the way the air met her ears if she was in a narrow place or a grand one, a low or high ceiling. Abruptly, the room was twice the size to her ears, and she whirled round to find that lopsidedness gone, the chamber expanded, or rather the illusory wall whisked away. Revealed were a pair of slightly in-flagrante magicians. There was a man there, and a woman, and the woman’s robe was halfway to her waist, the man’s part-hitched to his belt. They had plainly been able to see through their side of the wall, though, because neither was looking startled and the man was looking very smug indeed.
“Kinky dungeons,” he echoed disdainfully, and Jointmaker went for him without comment, knives out. He got almost precisely halfway before the magus’s beringed hands flicked out and froze him in midstep and caught Shabby and Losef as well.
She watched him approach, not even bothering to re-shevel his clothing. He was a tall, handsome man, likely not as young as he appeared, but that was magic for you. He had a square jaw touched with a neat and regular fuzz of beard, and Shabby could see the magic glare from every piece of cloth or ornament on him. Certainly, whatever trick he’d pulled had her every muscle locked, nothing moving of her save her breathing and her heartbeat. She couldn’t even look sidelong at Sweaty to see if he had anything up his sleeve.
If the magus was about to fall for her lower-class beauty and let her off with a promise of later assignations, there was no more sign of it in his handsome face than there was warmth.
“Lucrece,” he said. “I think we’ve caught some vagabonds.”
The woman was also very beautiful, all honey skin and hair like the waters of a dark pool flowing past her shoulders. She tugged her robe up and sent a look at her companion’s back that told Shabby a great deal about their respective place in the magical pecking order. It was a tired look that wanted to hate the man it was turned on but knew that she’d have that robe pushed down past her cleavage again soon enough because he had power and position she had to indulge if she wanted to keep her own. Shabby wanted to smile at her; it was a Barrio expression, even here beneath the palace. The magic stopped her doing even that.
“You’d think they’d have learned their lesson,” the mage-lord said, standing before Jointmaker. “Perhaps I should have them eat their own tongues or something.”
“Firmin, don’t,” said Lucrece, making a final adjustment to her robe, a twitch of her fingers that magically restored the wide collar’s unlikely positioning: bare shoulders and no possible mundane means of support. At her companion’s arched eyebrow, and to defend against any accusation of unseemly mercy, she added, “The Archmagister will want to see them.”
Firmin looked mulish at that but then shrugged. “I suppose,” he agreed. “Let’s have them march themselves off to Shorj and show him he can’t control his vermin problem. I’d say I can’t wait to see his face, but that’s hardly appropriate with him, now, is it?”
12.
COPPELIA WAS BACK IN her cell to sleep—whatever détente she’d worked out with Phenrir’s golem did not extend to more salubrious quarters. Still, she’d thought she could at least count on an uninte
rrupted night so she could be sharp for the work in the morning. Instead, at some time that felt like midnight, she was shocked into wakefulness by Lucas Maulhands and his cronies Belly and Lynx storming in and hauling her off the straw mattress.
“What?” she demanded. “What do you want?” Abruptly, she was convinced this was a frolic of their own and they’d decided to give her a good kicking off the record.
“Himself has sent for you” was what Maulhands had to say, though, so apparently, any kickings to be administered would be entirely in the Broadcaps’ official capacity. Still, there was a definite personal touch in the way he wrenched her arm as he hauled her out of the cell, a promise that just because it was all law and justice didn’t mean he couldn’t enjoy it.
“Why?” she exploded. “Why are you even here? Why aren’t you in Fountains Parish doing your job, Catchpole? Since when were you a turnkey at the palace?”
He rammed her back against the wall to answer, but she’d been expecting that, welcomed it almost, because it was the way the world worked on sane days, and she was short of those right now.
“I told them I knew you, Moppet,” Maulhands ground out. “I told them, she’s a tricky one, got a mouth on her, talk you through four sides of a triangle if you let her. So, maybe I ought to keep an eye, eh? Seeing as me and my lads from the parish know her. And after all, you’ve talked your way out of a whipping or a hanging already, somehow. So, I know you’re up to something.”
And, just as when he’d told her she was a thief, he wasn’t wrong, but she wasn’t about to admit anything of the sort. Instead, she had in her that true villain’s sense of outrage, that all this law could be there making her life difficult.
“Why, Catchpole? Lucas Maulhands, why?” she demanded, suddenly beyond any care about a slap or a boot in the ribs. “Why am I so much your damned business that it’s come to this?”
For a moment, he just stared at her, and she tried to interpret his expression. There was a connection between them; that was what this interest of his seemed to say. Did he harbour some qualms, that he could have kept her on the straight and narrow if he’d only got her back to the orphanage in time? Was there within him that steely bit of soul that she’d always guessed at, that believed in the virtue of doing the right thing?
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