Made Things
Page 12
Coppelia’s fingers touched something cool and slender; they knew it for what it was from long familiarity, and she had no time to find something better.
She went for Maulhands with it, bringing the point down towards his head like a mummer’s dagger. Of course, the Catchpole saw her coming. He was already swaying back to spoil her aim, shifting his weight so that instead of driving her makeshift weapon into his eye, she instead splintered it against his chest. A paintbrush, no more than that, and one of the slender ones for delicate work. The shock was enough, though; just for one moment, he thought she’d stabbed him. Kernel Jointmaker took that moment and, like a painter drawing an image from bare canvas, made it a reality, yanking the knife out from Lucas’s momentarily nerveless fingers and then ramming the blade home into the man’s armpit, unseaming his robe and then the rest of him.
There was a horrible shrieking going on. Possibly, it had been going on for a few seconds already, but Coppelia noticed it only now. It was Firmin, and at first she thought it was because he was losing. His face admitted nothing of it, though, and he was holding his ground against the golem’s assault. The screaming, the screwed-up spoiled-child expression, was nothing more than his former outrage given vent. He was howling at this made thing, this imposter, to give up and know its place. Even as his shields cracked, even as his exhausted rings tarnished and his amulets blackened, it was the sheer affront that moved him. He screamed at Lucrece to join him, but the woman was over in the corner by Shabby, the pair of them keeping well clear. The mage-lady’s expression was naked in her desire to see something happen to Firmin, and if that something was being blasted apart by a golem, she’d take it.
That was not what happened, though. Coppelia found she’d almost been waiting for it. Even as he roared his fury and sent a faintly leonine wave of fire to pounce upon the false Phenrir, a gleaming little shape appeared on Firmin’s shoulder. And, because he was who he was, Arc spent a valuable second brandishing his tiny blade at the world, the hero conquering giants in a tattered gown.
“Ah!” The golem actually staggered, seeing him there, and Firmin, ignorant, simply used the moment to push further, the force of his magic ramming the metal form back across a bench. His cry of victory came out in two pieces because Arc cut his throat right in the middle of it, no respecter of drama when it was someone else’s limelight.
The room was very quiet after that. Belly Keach was on the ground, smiling weirdly as the result of whatever Doctor Losef had stuck him with. The alchemist, Shabby and Lucrece were clumped together for mutual protection. Kernel was sitting down by Maulhands’s cooling corpse.
Firmin finally knelt before his Archmagister, albeit mostly posthumously. His lips flapped a bit, unable to give voice to his final thoughts on the matter. Then he fell sideways, waifs and strays of magic discharging from his fingers, his clothes and jewellery.
With a screech of metal, the golem righted itself. Coppelia heard a hundred little parts go rattling and tinkling down its hollow insides. For a moment, it just passed its benevolent expression across them all. Much of its enamel and painting was gone, but what was revealed was polished to a shine by the blast of Firmin’s magic. Light sprang from it, painful to look at in its beauty.
“You can none of you live,” it repeated calmly. “I am the Archmagister. I will kill the truths in you. Nobody will ever know.” Its gaze swung to Coppelia, the architect of its problems, and it extended a hand to her as though about to twirl her off across a ballroom. Power limned every joint of those fingers she had designed and redesigned. It stepped towards her; it was going to obliterate her with her own work.
With a musical clang, its other arm came off at the elbow, the handless sleeve section bounding across the floor like an eager dog.
“I . . .” said the golem, and its remaining thumb came away, and then the rest of the hand even as it reached for her, the pieces of her artifice pattering like rain. “How . . . ?” And she said nothing, wanting it to believe at the end that she had somehow engineered this betrayal, the seeds of it placed invisibly within her workmanship. It would never know otherwise. It would not know, when that entire arm parted company from its shoulder, that Tef would be crouching in the hole, busily dismantling another section.
One leg collapsed, joints separating out into individual pieces. The golem crashed to a knee, to its front. It was making sounds, but they weren’t words anymore. Then its head fell off and another homunculus sprang from the stump of its neck, brandishing a tiny spear in one hand and a screwdriver (the smallest size for the finest work, naturally) in the other.
“Fuck,” said Kernel Jointmaker, and then “Fuck!” because he’d seen Lucrece and she had not squandered any of her magic and had a throat still entirely unslit. For a moment, Coppelia thought that the fighting was about to come back for another race around the room, but then the woman shuddered and shook her head.
“Just go,” she told them. “Take things, if you have to, but get out of the Siderea. I’ll say it was all Firmin. Now he’s dead, nobody will remember they were friends of his.” Which probably meant that Belly Keach wouldn’t be waking up, but Coppelia reckoned that was what you got for dealing with magicians. Why Lucrece wasn’t just striking them all dead was another matter, but then the woman eyed Shabby and said, “You, though. You can come back, if you want.” And a wink, just like those cheap romances even a Moppet knew about. From Shabby’s expression, Coppelia reckoned the thief just might, at that.
13.
THE HAND WAS PERFECT. A bad artisan blamed her tools, Coppelia knew, and she thanked hers. They were, after all, quite literally the best money could ever have bought—and this was Loretz, where money bought magic and magic bought money in an ever-increasing spiral, so long as you already had more of both than you could ever need. And of course, the doubly late Shorj Phenrir would have made sure his personal workshop was stocked with the best so that his slave artisans could provide him with the most elegant new body for his intended everlasting existence.
It was not in seeing the golem come apart that Coppelia had felt her long-lost parents avenged; it was in taking these tools for herself, bringing them to her shoddy little studio in the Barrio.
Up on the Siderea, everything was calm, and nobody was even mentioning the extinction of the Archmagister. Nobody was naming a new one, either, and Shabby brought regular updates on the vicious political knife-fighting between various members of the Convocation seeking to take that coveted comfy seat. Several of the mage-lords had elected to leave the city to tour sites of historical interest, apparently, and sometimes that boiled down to exile, and sometimes it was just a convenient way of saying that assassin-magic had overcome protection-magic. In the meantime, the Barrioni were steadily expanding their own hold on the city, expanding across the river and ensuring the Broadcaps trod lightly and looked away when necessary. And Coppelia knew on an intellectual level that this was no great victory for justice—possibly quite the reverse—but that didn’t stop her vicariously exalting when Shabby and her fellows told the stories of what they’d got away with.
When the homunculi came down to her later, she showed them her work: four new bodies of wood, and one trial piece in metal, still not her favourite material. She had plans to wrangle some apprenticeships with other artisans, though: candle-makers, tailors, bone-workers. She had a demanding and varied clientele, after all. Or perhaps she would take on workers from the host of half-mage professionals drawn to Loretz. She was building her own little empire.
Shallis looked over the vessels, crinkling as she bent to examine the fine work. The Folded One, as the homunculi called her, still sent skitters of unease through Coppelia: that face of lines and creases looking like something mummified, that scratchy little voice so sharp with disapproval. Shallis could find nothing to disapprove of this time, though, and at last she nodded, and Lief and the others carried the little mannikins off up to the attic. All save Arc and Tef, who were on other business.
�
�We’re going out with Shabby tonight. Big job, rich house,” Arc declared. He had replaced his gown with a finer one, stolen from some merchant’s daughter’s favourite doll. The bright colours and elaborate cut made him into a barbaric warlord from an ancient age. His daughter was even finer, though. Daughter, despite Auntie’s music-box dancer being made to look male, because the homunculi had some residual concept of gender from their long-ago creator, but to them it was just a thing that differentiated parent from child, so that their generations flipped one to the other without any grander meaning than that.
“Be careful,” Coppelia warned them. Arc struck an indignant pose and even Tef waved off the warning.
“That magician friend of hers has cleared the way for us,” she called up, meaning their target was probably some enemy of Lucrece’s she was setting Shabby on. Or alternatively that Shabby was setting Lucrece on the richest plums in the Siderea. Coppelia didn’t feel she could enquire as to the full details of the pair’s new relationship.
She had thought Shabby might make herself the new thief-lord in the parish, but instead one of the neighbouring magnates had just expanded to take over the Iron End’s estates. On the surface, it all looked just like before, even down to Kernel Jointmaker at the new lord’s right hand. Except Coppelia knew that there had been some spectacular finagling accompanying the new Barrion’s coronation. The man had taken his throne only after a few clandestine agreements, motivated by discovering a razor blade at his neck one morning, as he slept in his impregnable sanctum behind all his traps and guards and magical wards. He would profit well in his new power and parish, he understood, but his hand would rest lightly there, and he would have some new lieutenants, including a master-thief, an alchemist and a girl who these days was becoming a puppeteer in more ways than one.
* * *
Above, in the attic, Shallis and the others laid out the new bodies in the Blue Lantern Chamber, which had been expanded to fit their new wealth and was already crackling with power looking for a home. Much of their takings had been exported by raven to the other colonies, a tiny countercurrent to the great acquisitive greed of the mage-lords in drawing all magic in to Loretz. They had kept plenty for themselves, though, enough for all the bodies the Moppet could turn out for them. Rings they had, and monocles, hatpins, brooches and crystals, gear-trains, lamps, lost toys and overlooked keepsakes. And at the heart of it, the pillar against which all this piecemeal hoard was shored, a metal head regarded all the clutter and the bustle of new life with fixed, beatific features.
About the Author
Author photograph © Kate Eshelby
ADRIAN TCHAIKOVSKY is the author of the acclaimed Shadows of the Apt fantasy series and the epic science fiction blockbuster Children of Time. He has won the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the British Fantasy Award, and he has been nominated for the David Gemmell Legend Award. In civilian life he is a lawyer, gamer, and amateur entomologist.
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Also by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Guns of the Dawn
Dogs of War
Spiderlight
Ironclads
The Expert System’s Brother
Cage of Souls
Walking to Aldebaran
THE CHILDREN OF TIME
Children of Time
Children of Ruin
ECHOES OF THE FALL
The Tiger and the Wolf
The Bear and the Serpent
The Hyena and the Hawk
SHADOWS OF THE APT
Empire in Black and Gold
Dragonfly Falling
Blood of the Mantis
Salute the Dark
The Scarab Path
The Sea Watch
Heirs of the Blade
The Air War
War Master’s Gate
Seal of the Worm
TALES OF THE APT
Spoils of War
A Time for Grief
For Love of Distant Shores (short stories)
The Scent of Tears (editor & contributor, anthology)
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
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2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
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12.
13.
About the Author
Also by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Copyright Page
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novella are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
MADE THINGS
Copyright © 2019 by Adrian Czajkowski
All rights reserved.
Cover art by Red Nose Studio
Cover design by Christine Foltzer
Edited by Lee Harris
A Tor.com Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates
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New York, NY 10271
www.tor.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.
ISBN 978-1-250-23298-4 (ebook)
ISBN 978-1-250-23299-1 (trade paperback)
First Edition: November 2019
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