It is in that next year that the tribes of the Tower have their world changed forever.
They have some commerce with the world beyond their high walls. Those who are bold enough take the ravens out of the high windows and forage the wooded slopes beyond. It is a dangerous life – many come back damaged, and others not at all. There is little out in the world that finds a Homunculus palatable prey, but many creatures only discover too late for their victim that not all moving things are edible.
One of these raven-riders comes to the Shelf now because, in times of great disturbance, it is always to the magicians that the tribes turn.
He is a Fabricker, and he comes to them sodden with mist, his body scarred with old rips hastily darned. One of his eyes is a red bead; the other was lost long ago, leaving only trailing threads.
“Something approaches the Tower,” he tells them through grey cloth lips. “Something new, something huge, something … I dare not say. I will be cursed.”
So there is nothing for it but that one of the magicians is flown out into the vastness of the world to see this strangeness. Liat is among those who volunteers and it is she they choose. She knows it is a final splinter of prejudice, from those amongst the Folded Ones who have never quite accepted her, but she is glad to go. She has become an accomplished magician and, like her father, she sees boundaries as things to be overcome, not lived within.
So the rider coaxes his mount into taking the extra weight, and the bird flies off through the halls of the Tower, up to the highest chamber where the windows are. Here is the great expanse of the Bed, its sheets riddled with carefully cut holes where the Fabrickers have stencilled out the patterns of their children. Liat finds the experience of flight liberating rather than frightening. The beat of the bird’s wings say freedom to her.
The Fabricker she rides behind has the coil of his lower body grasped about the loops of his saddle; she herself has been tied in behind him. She is glad of it when the bird arrows through the empty gap of the window and the wind tries to make a plaything of her. Then she is too busy taking each new thing in – and failing, for the world is too vast, even this little piece of it. There are trees and clouds, earth and rock. There is the great blue vault of the sky above, that puts all the ceilings of her home to shame. But this is not what she has been brought here to see.
“There!” the rider tells her and leads his bird down. She sees the foot of the tower, the great grey wall that seems to rise up all the way to the sky, though she was almost at its apex so short a time before. She sees a great door of wood and brass that seethes with magic wardings to her sorcerous eyes. And before the door is a fire, and about the fire are things.
She knows them instantly. She understands why the Fabricker would not name them.
They are like the Maker. They are built on the same gigantic scale. They are made of the same flesh, whose life owes nothing to that spark of power that moves Liat.
They are three. Liat sees differences between them – and between them and the Maker – but all vast, all close as kin to her blank wooden gaze.
“Land,” she tells the Fabricker. He gives her a wild glance from his single bead of an eye, but he has the raven flutter down as close as he dares. They are a long distance from the fleshy giants, from Liat’s perspective. For the enormous creatures themselves, if they spotted her, they could lunge forward and grasp her without getting up from their fire.
Liat unties herself from the saddle and drops to the ground, vanishing amongst the undergrowth. She follows the glimmer of the flames, skirting beetles and centipedes that flick curious antennae in her direction. At last she is crouched in a tussock of grass, watching the giants. Their mouths open, voices rolling from them like distant thunder. At first the words are just noises but soon she can distinguish the meanings in there, if only she can open her mind wide enough to cram the vast words in. Their language is her language, the Maker’s language.
“Tomorrow I’ll try Isomon’s Compass,” one booms out. Liat names that one Red Coat for its most prominent garment. “I felt the warding weaken today under the Persuasive Awl, and the Compass is an extrapolation of that.”
“I say we get an axe and a little protection and just hack our way in,” says another whom Liat decides will be Steel Hat.
“How are you still alive?” Red Coat upbraids its companion. “This is Arcantel’s Tower. The actual Arcantel, the greatest mage of the Grey Age. You don’t go up against that kind of magic with an axe.”
“You say it’s Arcantel,” the third grumbles. That one will be Mouse Face for, like the Maker, it has bushy growths all about its nose and mouth and chin. “I say it’s just some tower. Some hermit lived and died here, no more.”
“Some hermit with a whole barrel of magic,” Red Coat announces cheerily. “So hardly a loss either way. But let’s go careful. If the previous owner knew their stuff then we just don’t have enough protection to go in mob-handed.”
Liat calls on her own magic, little twitches of her wooden fingers shaping a lens to peer at the giants through. As their rumbling talk suggests, they have some power with them – not in their bodies, but in various objects about them. And plainly they are magicians of a sort.
“It’s going to be traps all the way up,” Steel Hat complains. “Demons and golems and phantoms.”
“Then save your axe for them,” Red Coat decides. “Now sleep and dream of treasure, and I’ll try some more tricks in the morning. Korda, you’ve got first watch.”
Korda – Liat prefers Mouse Face – grumbles even more at that, but remains sitting up as the other two lie down. Liat watches, fascinated: she had not thought that they would need to sleep like mice or ravens. It seems a ludicrous flaw in the construction of such mighty creatures.
A little magic casts a veil over her – harder to see, harder to hear and smell. She is leery of using too much enchantment – all too easy to hide herself but have the hiding spells give her away. She crosses the open ground between the grass and the giants in fits and starts, uneven and aimless as a dry leaf.
Mouse Face is staring out at the darkness, back to the fire, but those fluid eyes are looking for beasts of a size to cause these giants trouble, not for a little skitter of motion on the ground. Liat creeps about in Mouse Face’s very shadow until she reaches Steel Hat. The hat itself is beside the giant’s head and, for a moment, she pauses to regard that spectacular wealth of metal, wondering what the Sculls would barter for even a body’s weight of it. Steel Hat’s other garments are of many materials – she sees leather, bronze and a dozen different fabrics, many completely new to her. They have such riches! she thinks, amazed. About one of the giant’s fingers is a circle of gold that gleams in the firelight and she considers her own gilding, and how mean and poor it seems compared to such a quantity of precious metal.
The heat of the fire is beginning to feel uncomfortable and she moves on, keeping the great mound of Steel Hat’s sleeping form between her and the flames – and between her and Red Coat, for she is wary of the magician’s notice. She stops again at the giant’s waist, seeing there a leather band of great thickness, extravagantly ornamented with brass. There is a huge sack looped through it, and she steals forwards to examine it. It is a bag she could easily climb into.
She has with her a shard of glass knapped to an edge that can carve wood or kill rats, and with it she gently works at the sack until she has cut a slit into it. More gold meets her eyes: great sun-yellow discs such as the Folded Ones keep in their vast casket on the Shelf. She scuttles back from the sight of it, as though her covetous gaze alone might wake its owner.
By now she is so jittery that she can feel herself tremble at every point of articulation. Still, she moves round the feet of Steel Hat, that rise above her like mountains, and approaches Red Coat. The face of the giant magician is turned towards Liat, and she tries to read it, to parse the fashioning of those great coarse features. But the faces of the giants are too malleable to understand.
She is seized by a mad impulse then: to go to Red Coat and stand before those eyes and greet it, magician to magician. To welcome the Maker’s long lost kin to the domain of the Homunculi.
But that is not her choice or her place. Instead she runs back to the patient raven and its rider, and has them take her back to the Shelf.
* * *
Every magician is there to hear Liat’s report: allies, rivals, enemies, the potent and the newly apprenticed. She spares nothing, tells them all, her account concise and ordered. Then they question her: incredulous, horrified, eager, greedy, doubting. More than once she is called a liar, but the Fabricker is there to attest to much, and the rest she carries with her own words. The magicians are thrown into uproar. Their world is tottering: the giants themselves are dwarfed by the implications of their presence. They are ambassadors from a distant world that the Maker must have left to build his Tower. They are magicians, and perhaps each one of those enormous hands has the potential to craft whole new races of Homunculi. Perhaps there are countless other tribes of little people all through the lands of these giants.
And, while they talk, Liat thinks of Red Coat using its strangely named spells to test the magical warding of the Tower’s door. None of the Homunculi have ever thought about trying to open that door – the Tower is nine-tenths of their world and, for the rest, they have the ravens. Soon enough someone has a rider fly down to the tribes of the Base and the Cellar – the strange far people of stone and coal and cobweb – to tell them they may soon have guests. The raven returns swiftly, for messengers from the Base were already making the long climb of the Steps to warn the upper storeys.
And at last the Folded Ones and their fellow magicians come to a decision and call up every raven rider that will heed them. Messages go to each tribe to gather the wise and the mighty. This is no matter that the magicians can hoard like they do their gold. A new world is quite literally knocking on their door and all the nations of the Homunculi must decide how to answer.
The birds bring them in from every hall: representatives of a hundred tribes. Glass, steel, copper, wood, lead, stone, ivory, all the materials of the Tower are represented. Every one of them has a voice in the grand council, spread out on the Floor of Shelf Hall. There, the Folded Ones recount Liat’s story and the shock of knowledge ripples out through the crowd. They are no longer alone.
Speculation runs rife. Some speak of the magic these giants bring. Will they gift new life to the Tower, swelling the numbers of the tribes? Is the Source no longer the centre of their world? Others rub their crafted hands and consider the riches. What materials can be bartered for, with such founts of plenty? Or perhaps, some of the Folded Ones whisper, the giants will speak to the Maker and rouse him from the frozen moment that has held him for so long. Perhaps this is some destined final age of their world, and at last the Maker will look upon the sprawling civilization of his creations and see what they have built in his absence.
We have used his gifts wisely, some say. We have multiplied. We have carved and crafted each substance he left us, made the bodies that he has then gifted with the spark of life. He will be pleased, surely.
They talk of embassies – how they may best impress Red Coat and its fellows. Which tribe is the most splendid? Who shall speak the welcome?
By now, word has spread from the mighty to the lowly. There are a thousand competing threads weaving amongst the tribes: some of hope, others of fear. All they can surely know is that nothing will ever be the same.
All this time, the raven-riders and the magicians keep an eye on the giants as they work on the door. Red Coat tries enchantment after enchantment, and the Homunculi can see the warding weaken each time, slowly unravelling. Red Coat seems to work half-blind and fumbling, its eyes unable to see the magic as can those animated by it. More than once, someone suggests that they simply go and advise: what better way to announce their presence to the giants than with a helping hand, however tiny?
The magicians can see that another day, two at the most, will see Red Coat pick enough of a hole in the warding to open the Tower. The magic will remain, pent up in door and wall and floor, but the giants will be able to slip inside like one lifting a curtain to creep beneath it.
The great council of all the tribes has prepared its response by now. A grand delegation will meet the giants on the Steps, taking higher ground to make up for their smaller stature. They will have magicians to demonstrate their learning, beautifully crafted nobles to show their value. There remains much argument on that latter score, as to whose body will best please the eye of a giant.
Liat takes no part in these deliberations.
Liat co-opts a raven and travels to the Source. She wings past the stern visage of the Maker, caught in his eternal instant of concentration. If he knows of us, why did he not leave a smile for us? Then she has a rider fly her down to spy on the giants once more, in all their gargantuan splendour. She wonders at the sheer quantity of them, not the meat of their bodies but their tools and garb and possessions. Each one wears the makings of five hundred of her people. How we might profit from meeting them!
She watches Red Coat prying at the wardings, only half-aware of how close it has come to success. Mouse Face has gone hunting and comes back with rabbits, deftly shucking the skins off and setting them above the fire to burn as an offering. Steel Hat is in a foul mood. It has discovered the incision to its pouch and is complaining it has lost a coin – one of those sun-bright golden discs. Red Coat laughs and says there will be plenty beyond the door.
Watching them, Liat knows they are not expecting her world, nor can their homes be peopled as the Tower is peopled. They have brought no little companions with them on their journey. Beyond the door is more than the giants can ever guess at.
She flies back to the high halls and sits on the windowsill, staring out across the forested mountainside towards the blur of the horizon. Everyone knows that the world beyond the Tower goes on forever, but nobody knew how far Forever was. Now it seems there is an entire nation of Makers at some undreamt-of distance, for whom the whole world of the Homunculi is just one tower and a few trees.
She thinks of Steel Hat complaining about its pouch.
The council is still in session when she arrives on raven-back. The gleaming magnates of the Sculls and the varnished grandees of the Woodfolk are posing and strutting at each other over who should have the honour of greeting the giants.
“Hold!” She lands in their midst, the thunder of downbeating wings scattering all those shining lords and ladies. “Listen to me!”
* * *
The next day, Red Coat’s efforts finally twist the warding sufficiently out of shape that the three of them can enter. The giant magician takes the lead, Mouse Face and Steel Hat treading thunderously after it.
“Finally,” Steel Hat booms.
“What about the traps?” Mouse Face demands.
“Fizzard’s Diviner shows a truly huge concentration of magic in the upper levels, enough to stand out against all this background buzz,” Red Coat announces happily. “Fear not, valiant comrades, we’ve hit the motherlode. Get your flasks and sacks and pouches ready for filling, and step carefully.” They move into the hall of the Base, where the Steps start.
“There are candles still lit,” Mouse Face points out. “Someone lives here.”
“That warding has stood for centuries, and if you can protect a door like that, you can keep a few lamps lit,” Red Coat says dismissively.
In the candle’s shadow, Liat and her fellow magicians crouch, still as sticks and stones and other unliving things. Will Mouse Face look closer, and discover their minuscule presence?
But Red Coat does not care about candles. Red Coat is heading for the Steps, and the other two follow her.
Liat feels for the magic in the walls and the floor – in the very air of the room. The Maker dwelled here so long that there is not a mote of dust that is barren of power. Around the hall of the Base, other groups of magicians
are hidden. She feels them working, and adds her strength to theirs. Perhaps, compared to Red Coat, they are but tiny sparks, unnoticeable against the glare of the Tower itself. They are working together, though, and they are master crafters as all the Homunculi are.
She had thought about Steel Hat and the purse, and how angry the giant had been at losing even one coin. The giants are fabulously wealthy. Her parent Tam had been very poor. She understands the rich as the rich themselves – the other magicians and their patrons – cannot. She understands that the rich are not rich because they stop every day to share their wealth with those less fortunate. The polished chiefs of the Woodfolk did not come to Tam with gifts of rare timber and varnish; the aristocrats amongst her fellow students did not welcome their lowly sister with open arms.
She thinks about the Casket of the Hoard, that sits by the Left Bookend of the Shelf. Tam risked his life to win one little shaving from one coin from that Casket, the entire contents of which would fit easily into Steel Hat’s open hands.
She feels the great web of magic in the walls of the Base twitch and tighten, and knows the moment has come. Along with all the other magicians she pulls on it, twisting the flow of power around them, gathering up the strength of the thwarted warding.
“Wait!” Red Coat cries out, a hand held up, but the giant is a thing of flesh, not of magic. It can see the workings around itself only as dimly as Liat can perceive the far horizon.
Steel Hat fumbles a great edged weight of metal from its waist. Mouse Face tries to push past and get back through the door. Red Coat is calling magic, strong magic, brutal and clumsy and all too late.
The discharge of power about the Base illuminates every edge and surface of the hall, coursing through the magicians and all the families of Homunculi cowering in their homes. It incinerates all the mice and spiders and woodlice luckless enough to dwell in that room. A blaze of white fire lights on Red Coat and Mouse Face and Steel Hat and consumes them utterly, not even ashes left of their flesh and blood and bone. Their screams are vast and angry and brief.
Precious Little Things Page 2