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There is a book on the floor of Shelf Hall. Tam walks in its shadow, the spine raised above him like the ridge of a hill. His parents passed down to him the story of long ago when it held riches. The tribes had come to it from every dominion, braving the spiders of the Dusty Expanse, the rats of the Wall Paths and the fierce, infested tangles of the Bearskin Jungle, all to take their share of this fallen treasure.
Its title once read, in letters tall as Tam, On The Essence Vital And Its Uses. First they had stripped the gold from those indented characters and then begun the work of carving off the leather from the slanted slopes. The thread had been unlaced from its spine and the glue chipped off, to be taken and re-melted in a thousand pots.
These latter days, only the wood of its cover-boards remains. That and the mouldering paper within, which magicians still sometimes mine in search of legible lore beneath the rot.
Tam is not after wisdom, though. He is after gold.
High above that fallen tome is the Shelf. Craning the peg of his neck, Tam can barely see it, just a faint suggestion of form against the distant ceiling, like a cloud. He rolls his wooden shoulders and flexes the knuckles of his carven hands. He has a long climb ahead of him.
Tam can climb, though. With delicate work, he must make up in patience for the inadequacies of his rough, splintery hands. Give him a task that needs strength and tenacity, though, and he’s in his element. His fingers dig like roots into each new handhold, clawing at lichen, digging between the vast blocks of stone. He hauls himself up hand over hand, tireless and unbreathing. The interlocking pieces of his face are clenched into an expression of concentration.
The climb will take him a day.
Once, the lift platform from the Shelf passes him on its way down. He holds still in its shadow, the grimy, unvarnished wood of his body blending with the wall’s blotchy greys. The lift descends into the depths towards the floor of Shelf Hall. Tam does not look at those riding it, for fear they will feel his gaze. The Shelf is full of magicians.
Later, he sees the braided line of the lift twang and reel in, and he freezes once again as it swings past him, chased by the gaggle of shadows cast by the candelabra. The candles in Shelf Hall never go out.
And at last, after such a trial of reaching and hauling, he finds himself level with the great plateau of the Shelf itself. Towering over him is something he has only ever heard of: the goggle-eyed, tongue-sticking gargoyle, five times his height, that is the Right Bookend.
They are waiting for him when he arrives. Whether it was magic or just keen eyes on the lift platform, he cannot say.
Heaving himself onto the Shelf’s wooden plain he finds himself facing a sharp metal point. His antagonist is one of the Sculls, a man made meticulously out of metal mined from the pans of the Kitchens, his limbs and body cased in cast-iron spirals and whorls. A dozen smiths and craftsmen probably worked on this body, the child of some great rich Scull magnate, sent here to the Shelf to learn.
Tam is no-one’s well-made child. He is a rough creature of wood, fashioned from the dreams of a labourer for a life of labour, all that his parent could imagine.
The steel spear threatens him again. One solid jab will embed the tip in Tam’s body, and the Scull will lever him off the Shelf and let him fall. The Scull is stronger than he, and more skilled. Tam raises an arm in surrender. “Please,” he says.
Behind the Scull are some of the masters of this place, the Folded Ones of Shelf – few and fragile, and all of them magicians. Their intricate bodies are made each from a page of the great magical texts, painstakingly unlaced from its bindings. Each parent among the Folded Ones must puzzle out a design, crease after crease, that will turn a flat, unliving expanse into a body fit for the spark of life to inhabit. For them, creating a child is an exercise not of hard craftsmanship but of abstract logic.
One of them stalks forwards, her whole body flexing and breathing with each step. “What is your purpose here, Woodman?”
Tam bows his head, trying for respect but managing only an attitude of defeat. “Gold, Great Magician.”
“A thief!” the other Folded One exclaims, and the Scull draws back his glinting point.
“No, Great Magicians!” Tam protests. “Please. I am carving my child. I have her body laid out, every joint and rod of her. I have worked her as best I can.” Before their hostile regard his shoulders slump and he feels bitterly the coarseness of his articulation. Even the language of his body is a crude and halting thing. “I am a simple creature. My parent was a simple creature, hers before her and his before him. Each of us has trusted to what we had to make our children, and so we made them nothing more than we were. We are crude wood only.”
“As it should be,” spits the hollow voice of the Scull, but the first magician, the Folded Woman, rustles in disapproval and the metal warrior falls silent.
“And so you seek gold,” she clarifies.
“Gold is greatness.” Looking on her, Tam can see the gold leaf writing that covers every plane of her body. He has seen the great nobles of the Woodfolk, too, varnished and polished and set with precious metals. He does not aspire so high, but a little gilding would make his child beautiful. Perhaps then she could be more than he has ever had the chance to be.
“Gold is rare,” the Folded Woman says thoughtfully. “Many come to us – great steel lords of the Scullery, sandalwood-scented nobility, Waxworkers from the Candle Kings. They come seeking our learning and advice; they come begging us to take their children – to work them hard as servants if only we teach them our magic as well. They come for our gold, but we open the Casket of the Hoard for few, even though they bring us gifts from every corner of the Tower. What gifts do you bring us, Tam of the Woodfolk?”
Tam shivers when she pronounces his name, knowing that only magic can have carved it from his mind. “I bring you nothing,” he says, “for I have nothing except these two hands. I can offer only my labour: I am strong, I will not break easily. Use me however you wish, if only my child may be something more than me.”
The two Folded Ones lean close together and whisper in their dry, scratchy voices. Tam remains crouching low under the glowering metal stare of the Scull.
At last, the Folded Woman steps to the Shelf’s edge and looks over, heedless of the drop. If she falls, she will flutter and dance to the floor far below, stepping out of the air no worse for the flight. Tam, on the other hand, would shatter to pieces against the unyielding boards of the floor.
“That is a long, long climb,” she observes.
Tam can only nod.
“We have servants, many servants,” the Folded Woman says softly. “W
hen the powerful visit us, the service of their people is first amongst their gifts. We would never lack for menials. Mostly we refuse such offerings.”
Tam sags, but says nothing.
“A remarkable effort, that climb,” she adds, and then turns her creased back on the drop. “Of all our visitors, none has come to us by such a route in many generations. I admire such dedication.”
Tam is braced for the refusal, hoping at least that he will be allowed to attempt the climb down. Weighted by disappointment, he does not know if he will make it.
“You will take your child to the Maker next Source-day?” the Folded Woman asks Tam.
“I will be ready,” he confirms. “I have even scored the grooves where the gold would go, if there was gold.”
“We have many apprentices offered to us,” the Folded Woman says. “But none of your kind; none with your determination. Determination is a great virtue in a magician. Tam of the Woodfolk, labourer, we will give you gold, but in return your child will come to us when she has learned to master her body. She will study, and we will see what manner of a magician the child of Tam might become.”
* * *
Many days pass before Tam is ready for his work to go before the Source. As with the wood of her body, so he had been slow and careful with the precious gold: melting down the curved shaving the Folded Ones had given him, pouring out the molten fire into his exacting moulds and then laying each thread and line in place.
She will be beautiful, if she lives. He cannot afford varnish or polish, but each segment of her body is carved with all the care a parent can give. Every joint moves smoothly, neither stiff nor loose. Her pegs and pins fit so flush that not even the least mote of grit can creep in to trouble her. Her face will be twice as expressive as his – he traded a year of his labour to an Artificer from Long Clock in return for the plan and pattern of her features.
He is ready now, though, every piece in place, and Source-day has come around, so he lays her in his handcart and takes her on the long road to the centre of his people’s world. Nor is he alone: dozens of parents, whole families, the great and the mighty, they are all on the same journey. At first he is surrounded by other common Woodfolk, and then he makes way for the caravans of the mighty who travel with guards and in comfort. Then there come men and women from other tribes: slouching Fabrickers with serpentine lower bodies, metal Sculls, even ornate Scrimshanders, the details of their surfaces inked into fearsome designs. And they are enemies, some of these folk, or have been, or will be. And yet, on a Source-day, all the people of the Tower come together as one and remember their common ancestry, that is the magic of their Maker.
Their oldest legends speak of when their world came into being: how, in another age, he fashioned the first of them with his own hands for his own purposes. There are a hundred variations, each of the tribes claiming they came first – and ten times as many explanations for how history has unfolded since.
Tam cannot remember his one past visit to the Source. That was when the spark of life had leapt to his crude wooden body, turning him from a thing into a person. He has heard tales, and had thought he was ready. When he steps into sight of it, though, he drops the cart handles and then drops to his knees. All around him, others are doing the same. It is not a vision to leave anyone unmoved. Some cover their faces, some throw out their arms in worship. The rich climb from their carriages or rein in their tame rats and ravens. The vista would take their breath away, if any of them possessed it.
There, in the centre of the Source Hall, stands the Maker, a gigantic form that their own approximations can only mock. Tam would not quite reach the bony knob of his ankle. His face is lost far above them, and the superstitious say that to gaze into those set features is to bring a curse down on any so foolish. The Maker’s flesh body is sheathed in a robe of heavy cloth that glitters with gold thread and arcane sigils. He stands with his arms out, frozen in place within a circle laid into the floor. Brass and gold, silver and unknown woods mark out that boundary, fashioned with a craftsmanship that all there can marvel at. And it crackles and glows with magical power.
Along with all the other parents, Tam walks as close as he dares to that searing barrier. Too far away is to risk the spark not jumping to the body he has spent so long crafting. Too close is to invite destruction, the magic arcing to him and incinerating him entire. All around him, each parent is choosing how far to go before laying down the body of their new-made child. Tam keeps walking, whilst around him others reach the edge of their courage, stooping to set down their burdens.
Somewhere close there is a flash and crackle of white power; some soul bolder than he has been rebuked for it. He smells molten wax, and knows some Candle Lord has burned once and forever.
He feels the air grow tight as a vice around him and his feet stop of their own accord. Before him, the edge of the magical circle is like a flat wall of silver light. Fingers of magic writhe across the Floor towards him.
Feeling every joint tight with tension, he sets down his handiwork and then backs away, watching for the moment when it ceases to be simply an exercise in carpentry and gilding and becomes his daughter.
She is one of the last to be touched, as though even the Source respects place and precedence over craftsmanship and honest toil. At last, though, the crackling lines of power brush the grain of her body and she jerks and flails and comes alive.
Tam names her Liat.
* * *
Liat takes a year to master a mind that can understand her world and herself, far less time than Tam spent creating her body. That mind will grow and change, while her hard form will only ever degrade. Not for her the long-preserved life of a varnished magnate. She has only a dozen short years, a score at best before wear and tear and damp will split and destroy her. She must make the most of them, and she is fated to live them through trying times.
When she is ready, her father takes her to the Shelf as he promised. Not for them the arduous climb of his first visit. They stand in the lift with other hopefuls whose near-mint bodies show their youth. Many will descend just as easily, turned away after falling short of the Folded Ones’ occult criteria. Liat is different; she is sent for.
That is one more mark against her, in the minds of her fellow students of magic. Most of them are the children of the wealthy; even the gold filigree that sets off her face and form pales before their lavish construction. She is the poor one, the one whose parent has no powerful friends, no wealth or influence. She has only the body Tam gave her and the mind kindled into life by the Source’s touch.
In the first year of her apprenticeship she learns much of the Tower which is her people’s world. She learns the deep history of the Maker – what little is known. She learns about all the tribes: paper, cloth, wood, metal, wax, bone, all the rest of them, the great and the small, the famed and the obscure. She discovers that there is a formal name the Maker gave them all: Homunculi.
In her second year, her fellow students – those who have not been summarily dismissed as failures by the Folded Ones – have grown to acknowledge her patience and determination. There are many who leap past her with their quick understandings, but she catches up with them all and exceeds most. Many still resent her as an upstart, but she carves away at their prejudice until she fashions it into grudging respect. By now she is learning true magic, the manipulation of the raw power that suffuses every part of the Tower. It is the magic of her birth; the magic that animates her people’s disparate limbs. For countless years before ever the first Homunculus was crafted had the Maker dwelled in the Tower and worked his spells. Magical energy spilled over from his every working until his home and everything in it sang with invisible fire.
The story she learned from Tam – the common story all the tribes tell – is that the Maker retreated to his circle because he loved his creations and wished them to have an everlasting well of life. So he stands, frozen in mid-invocation, and watches over his surrogate children.
A few u
northodox Folded Ones have a counter-story, after studying the workings of that circle for three hundred years. The Maker is trapped, they say. There is a flaw in his work that has undone him, caught him in a world that slowed and slowed until, for every second that passes within the circle, centuries flit by outside. They say the Maker does not care or even know about the tribes of the Homunculi who steal from his goods to craft their children, and from his power to give them life.
But even those few Folded Ones claim that he would be proud if he could know. Should he ever wake, they believe he would smile upon the kingdoms and principalities that have grown up about his ankles. He would, they are sure, be a just god. Why else make the first of them in his own image?
Liat goes to the hall of the Source several times to study the magical workings there. Once, a raven-rider takes her to cross the invisible beam of the Maker’s gaze. She stares at that fleshy face, and knows it for the exemplar of her own smooth blank eyes, the simple ridge of her nose, the deft slash of her mouth. No curse strikes her down.
In her third year of study, Tam makes the long journey to visit her. Seeing his coarse form, at first she is embarrassed. The snobbery of her fellow students has worked into her grain like invisible dust. One of her teachers – the Folded Woman who met her father years before – makes a point of greeting him respectfully in full view of everyone. Liat sees her own hollowness then, and runs to him.
Tam is worn down, his joints warped so that some movements are too wild, others grinding and stiff. He has lost some segments of his fingers and there is a crack running down from the crown of his head and through his face. Time comes for all the tribes: in rust, in rot, drying out or flaking away. Tam does not have long but, when he sees his daughter amongst the magicians, his face creaks into a smile that threatens to split it open with pride.
* * *
Precious Little Things Page 1