Made Things Page 2

  2.

  ONCE UPON A TIME, there was a mannikin, a little figurine of a human being crafted by a great magician. What this first homunculus was made from, nobody knew, though Tef was personally certain it was wood, that perfect balance between durability and ease of working. And the magician, by dint of his ingenuity, exposed this mannikin to a source of magic, perhaps in one great flash of power, perhaps gradually over days or weeks or years. And when it had been sufficiently empowered, it turned its head, with eyes of paint or gems or buttons, and beheld its creator, and found within itself a mind not unlike his own.

  Tef remembered coming to Loretz that first time. At night—always at night, even though they could hide in human boots and pockets. They came in on the backs of ravens, birds from the Tower of their birth, grown tame over long generations of husbandry. At first, Shallis had wanted to guide them to where the magic was, that great palace of domes and spires which dominated the Siderea on the high ground away from the river. But night had never come to that palace, a thousand magical lamps banishing the darkness so that the beautiful, elegant humans in their enchanted clothes never quite slept, either, but drank and sang and listened to unearthly music from instruments that played themselves. The homunculi circled high above that riot of life and excess and knew that, motherlode or not, they would never remain hidden where so many lanterns were kept burning. And so they sought out other places, darker places, where the humans crept like fugitives or slept uneasily behind thin walls. And there was magic even there, of course, because this was Loretz, where the magicians lived, and even the poor had some baubles of enchantment. But stealing from those who had next to nothing was both unrewarding and less likely to go unnoticed. So, the lines of their new colony were drawn: they would live here where the sharp senses of magicians might not sniff them out, but their hunting grounds would be there, on the other side of the river, where a magic mirror or an ever-sharp knife or a pair of shoes that danced for their wearer might go missing and rouse less of a hue and cry.

  In one of the grand squares of Loretz was a statue of a man, a great magus, not quite the city’s founder but from an early generation of alumni. He had been born there, been great, the sort of magician who, the stories said, destroyed armies, rode a brass-bodied dragon across the skies, raised the Convocation’s palace from the dust in a single night; the usual. And then (though the regular story put a rather more heroic gloss upon it) he had got into some protracted disagreements with his peers about how the city should be divvied up, and in the end, he had taken his toys and gone away, never to be heard from again. There were even legends about him coming back to save the city if it was ever threatened, because the mage-lords of Loretz loved their myth-making, especially when such myths exalted their peers of ages past.

  Tef had seen that statue and known it for a good likeness, for she had looked upon the original. Arcantel, his name had been, and he had obviously grown as sick of the company of his fellow human beings as of magi in particular, for he had gone far from the haunts of his kind, to raise a tower in a far and gloomy forest, where he had worked his magic for the amusement of nobody save himself.

  And among the feats he had accomplished there, without distraction or rival, had been the creation of the first homunculus, Tef’s earliest ancestor.

  And then he had . . .

  Well, there was a growing division of opinion there. Back in Orvenizzo, the human city Tef had visited before they followed the trail of magic here, the colony leader had been a staunch orthodoctrinist, clinging to the idea that Arcantel had so loved his creations that he had rooted himself in his ritual room in his tower’s upper floor, making of himself a font of eternal power that his new children could use to infuse more of their own kind with magic, forever and forever, for that was certainly the fate of Arcantel. Barring disaster, he must stand there even now within his magic circle, staring at who knew what, hands out and fingers crooked in mid-wrestle with the powers of the universe.

  That had been the orthodoxy for generations and generations of the made-folk. The Folded Ones who kept and taught the lore of magic, the great varnished lords of the Woodmen, the polished metal chiefs of the Sculls, the most embroidered Fabrickers, the Candle Kings, all the leaders of the different tribes of homunculi had told each other that the thriving and diverse civilization they had built within the walls of the Tower had been meant; their maker’s plan.

  But now they were out in the world, that unthinkably vast place where they were the least significant things imaginable, it was hard to believe in a universe solely aimed at bringing into being such minutiae as they. Tef didn’t think it, and even Shallis, the Folded One who led the Loretz expedition, was half-hearted when she preached the creed. The world was too great, too complex, above all too human to sustain that belief in their privileged destiny. What Arcantel’s motivation had been when he first imbued his little figurines with life, Tef could not say, but she believed he had not meant to end up a fixture in his ritual room to the end of time; he had not meant a thriving culture of made-people to grow up about his frozen ankles; he had not meant any of it, and whatever meaning they could lay claim to came from their actions and not their mythology.

  Arc certainly thought so, but then, Arc had a lot of thoughts that were as far from orthodoxy as he could get.

  Hauling her sack through the cluttered attic spaces they had made their own, Tef heard Arc ahead, already bragging to the others about what they’d accomplished. Not that he’d lend a metal hand in bringing up the loot, of course. She came into the Beetle Chamber to find him in mid-poise, steel arms flexing as he pantomimed drawing the razor from the pocket where he’d found it. To Tef’s mind, Moppet’s puppets had more artistic flair, but Arc was never one to be told anything. He exasperated Tef because he was a Scull, and everyone knew that Sculls were dour and brooding and usually violent, assured of being made of stronger stuff than just about anyone else, even if they would rust for a pastime if they didn’t keep themselves oiled. Arc was not dour. Arc did not brood, although he was not entirely a stranger to violence. Arc considered himself an aesthete. On the other hand, Arc was stronger than she was, and willing to take more risks than the others, which meant that when it was time to go pilfer some trinkets, the job usually fell to the pair of them. They only had seven in their colony right now, after all. Nobody else amongst them had the temperament for larceny.

  The colonies were new. Tef had been born to the Tower, though she had passed through five human cities before coming to this one. Each such city had a tiny clutch of homunculi living in its heart now. After centuries of isolation, the little made-people were spreading themselves through the world by stealth, establishing themselves wherever they might be able to scrape together enough magic to animate more bodies. It was a ruinous thing, in a way. They had hundreds of years of history and tradition that were teetering, a tower from which the bricks were constantly being robbed to build elsewhere. The vast majority of Tef’s kind would rather none of it had ever happened. It was nobody’s first choice.

  But humans had come to the Tower, treasure hunters who had pried at the wards sealing Arcantel’s ancient doors. At first, they had been taken for demigods, kin to the beloved maker. Only at the last moment had the homunculi realised that the humans had come only to rob the place of treasure and magic.

  So opened this new chapter of their histories, because where one party of humans had come, so might others, in greater numbers and not so readily dealt with. And if the Tower fell, the entire long civilization of the homunculi would tumble with it, as though none of them had ever been. Faced with that, the magicians who guided them had decided they must go out into the world, spread their eggs from basket to basket so that if the worst happened, some might survive.

  Of course, the greatest stricture in any of this had been that they must keep themselves utterly secret from the eyes of humans.

  Arc’s clowning died a death when Shallis came in, and his audience found other things to be ge
tting on with. The Folded One glowered at the two of them out of her creased paper face, yellow-white and crossed with loops and spatters of Arcantel’s own writing, a page from his long-neglected magical texts torn out and pleated into the shape of a stylised human.

  “Let’s see it, then.” Shallis’s voice sounded like she looked, the dry rustle of disintegrating things. Folded Ones lived a long time back at the Tower, where they did not need to expose themselves to the destructive forces of inclement weather. What had inspired Shallis to hasten her own demise by joining this venture, Tef couldn’t guess. Her half-hearted lip service to the tales of Arcantel-the-Benign-Creator was probably at the heart of it. Hard to see such a stern, sour creature as a seeker of novelty and wonder, though.

  Tef proffered the sack, and Shallis’s origami hands spidered over the opening, hooking it wide so she could peer inside. She made a cracked sound, unimpressed. “And your human took the choice pieces, no doubt.”

  “An equitable division of spoils,” declared Arc grandly, which at least meant Tef escaped the Folded One’s baleful scowl. She could probably have let the Scull take all the disapproval, but that would just give Shallis more leverage to pry at their arrangement with the Moppet, which Tef was invested in. She sighed, just a little creaky noise in her throat, and waded into what was becoming a tiresomely familiar argument.

  “We got more than we would have done, just the two of us skulking around,” she told the folds of Shallis’s back. “She makes a good distraction. And there’s the making she’s doing for us.”

  Shallis rounded on her with a hissing rattle that had Tef backstepping rapidly. For a moment, the sharp edges of the Folded One’s frame were limned with cold magic.

  “Well spoken, knothole,” Arc murmured, in his hollow sotto voce that could be heard in the next room. This, of course, was the most unorthodox of unorthodoxies, and Shallis didn’t like it.

  Still, Tef planted her feet and held her ground, meeting the paper magician’s glower head-on. They had talked over it, all seven of them, once they understood what they’d found in this Loretz place. They had weighed the crutch of tradition against the rope of opportunity, and though Shallis said they’d hang themselves with it, Tef had talked the others round.

  Back in Orvenizzo, back in all the other towns and cities Tef had seen, each colony was built around a central hub. It might be a hollow in the earth beneath some floorboards, a wasps’ nest abandoned and dusty in a neglected shed, a high shelf of a locked cupboard. In Orvenizzo, they had set up in the clapperless bell of a derelict church, building downwards in an intricate spiral of ramps and flooring. The hub was where they brought the magic, though: those trinkets they had found or stolen, sniffed out by their own diminutive magicians. Tef remembered how it had been, up in the bronze dome of that bell, the meagre heap of gewgaws and tat that still held some whiff of enchantment, and beside it, a single body, lovingly crafted from scrimshaw and rare woods, with brass mountings at the joints. Tef had never seen such a well-made body, and she could follow the magic seeping into it, using the sorcerer’s skills the Folded Ones had taught her in the Tower. Seep was the word, though. Standing in the captive presence of Arcantel would bring a homunculus to life in a flash, so that access to him was carefully restricted and ritualised by long-standing tradition. That elegant shell in Orvenizzo would not stir for perhaps six months. Tef understood they’d had the new generation awake recently in Tello di’Bois, the little forest’s-edge town that the homunculi had come to first after leaving the Tower. Slow, though, so very slow.

  Here in Loretz they already had a hoard of magical bric-a-brac greater than all the other colonies put together, enough that word had spread and raven-back ambassadors were arriving with entreaties to share the wealth. Which would happen, obviously, but for now, the Loretzi colony needed to get on its feet and start birthing new colonists.

  She hauled her hoard of ill-gotten gains from the Beetle Chamber (named after the menace they’d had to evict on arrival) and into the larger space beyond, the Blue Lantern Room. The lantern itself was one of their first magical appropriations, forever glowing with a dull azure radiance. Heaped around it was their hoard, and Tef turfed out her gleanings to add to the pile.

  There was a body lying there, and soon to wake by her estimation. It was competently made, but its father, Lief, had been in a hurry. They’d brought no empty vessels here and assumed they’d have plenty of time for the work, not anticipating the bounty this city would provide. Loretz’s first new colonist would live her life under the shadow of their decision, but it was that or waste their time when every new pair of hands was invaluable.

  But the homunculi were small, and they made things slowly, taking pain over every joint and curve. They lacked the leverage and strength of a human, to master materials and swiftly bring out the latent limbs and features hiding within a block of wood or a mass of clay. Back in the Tower, a parent would craft a body over years, a labour of love to bring a child into a busy world. When the colony plan was decided, nobody had thought about the logistics of their miniature expansionism.

  Faced with an embarrassment of magic in Loretz, they had endured seven days of paralysis as they tried to work out how to make best use of it, and then Tef, always the explorer, had discovered the shabby little workshop beneath their feet, and Coppelia, the Moppet.

  3.

  THE MAGIC WASN’T IN bringing the face out of the timber. Coppelia could do that at age six, even before her parents came to Loretz. She had the woodcarver’s eye, to look at a featureless thumb of wood and see the shapes within it, what might be brought out, how the grain and contours of it might be tamed, a frontierswoman mastering an undiscovered country, until it would perform for her, taking on whatever shape her deft hands desired. Or perhaps there was a little magic in it: theirs was a talented family, in that way that made them unpopular elsewhere. The trades in most cities were governed by the guilds, after all, and the guildmasters were not magicians, and had no wish to give over their power and preeminence to those who could exceed their merely mundane capabilities. Which was probably fair, Coppelia considered, because they had children to provide for and needed to put food on the table. But at the same time, it was harsh, because those who turned up and showed any talent beyond the natural were kept from any decent commissions or just run out of town. And she had a sly suspicion that more than one guildmaster hid magical fingers within their expensive fur-lined gloves, their prejudices not truly against the arcane as much as against the outsider.

  So, perhaps there was a little magic in the way she could whittle and shape the softwood to so resemble the sketch that Auntie had sent her, but the real magic came at the end, when she laid sculpt and sketch side by side and gave of herself to let the one infuse the other. Auntie employed an artist who was similarly a half-mage, who could look at a subject covertly and then make a likeness on paper that carried some of his model’s essential nature. The sketch alone would not hold power long, though, or bear what Auntie would do to it, and so enter the Moppet, she of the abhorred nickname, to immortalise the work in wood and lend her power to it.

  In truth, she’d rather be working on her other commission, the secret one for her upstairs neighbours, but Auntie paid. Moreover, Auntie was in good odour with the Barrioni, the criminal kings who parcelled out the Barrio between them. So long as Coppelia kept Auntie happy, Auntie was her shield against the knife-edged politics of the thief-lords.

  As she was finishing up, fixing the carved head to the neck of one of her standard bodies (female, robust, suitable for comedy duchess or devoted nurse), a familiar presence impinged on her and she smiled. “Hello, Tef.”

  The little wooden figurine had been sitting with the half-made puppets and spare parts on the shelf above her workbench, as still as her unliving neighbours. Now she hopped down, feet landing with a precise tok.

  “This isn’t for you, sorry,” Coppelia said, as the homunculus walked around her handiwork, head cocked on one side and he
r intricate face thoughtful. Unnerving, yes—all those pieces made it seem as if she was feigning the flayed, musculature exposed to view—but fascinating, too. Coppelia loved to watch the expressions chase each other across Tef’s features, each one instantly recognisable despite its miniature canvas. “There are a couple almost done, though.” With her elbow she indicated a pair of figures held in clamps, drying. One male, one female, not puppets but the articulated artist’s mannikins that were always her first love, and the finest and most complex she’d ever built. Save that their wrists and necks ended abruptly, because the homunculi didn’t trust her for that work.

  Still . . . “I did a hand. Just to see. I used all my Craft.” Meaning magic that let her go beyond the limits of pin-vice and magnifying glass. Tef strolled over and looked at the result, spreading her delicate fingers to shadow it, finding Coppelia’s handiwork close on twice the size. “Hmm.” Like a branch creaking in the wind, so faint it was barely audible.

  “I’ll get better, if you give me the chance,” Coppelia told her. “Or . . . I was thinking, could you be bigger? Because there’s plenty of material. I could make bodies twice the size, or . . .”

  Tef adopted a thoughtful pose, hand on hip, hand on chin. The body language of the homunculi always seemed slightly exaggerated, as though to make up for their size or the limits of their articulation.