Made Things by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Author:Adrian Tchaikovsky
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

7.

“THEY SAW YOU.” Shallis’s dry, crisp voice out of Shallis’s dry, crisp mouth.

“The humans?” Tef glanced at Arc, hoping that he would let her lead the narrative. “I don’t think so, not really. We were quick, and they weren’t expecting anything like us.”

Shallis rustled, a living document impatient with circumlocution. “The construct.”

Another glance at Arc, who was sitting on the edge of the pan that was their meeting-chamber floor, cleaning his razor and sulking. No help there. “Yes.”

“That is also one of their magicians.”

“Well, it could throw power around, if that makes it—”

The Folded One rattled her page-edges together, cutting off Tef’s words. Around them, the rest of the colony leant in, unusually silent. Tef tried to gauge their mood, but just because her own face was wood didn’t mean she could read meaning into the features of the others. Morpo’s sagging wax, Kyne’s button eyes, they were all simply watchful right now, still as only the unliving can be. If they’d had breath, they would be holding it.

“This is . . . problematic,” Shallis stated at last.

“It was going to happen anyway,” Tef decided. “This is a city of magicians. Even the street-sweepers know a few charms. We are creatures of magic, given life by it. Sooner or later—”

“Later, it was to be hoped,” the Folded One told her. “When there were more of us. When we could maintain more than one hideout. When there were enough of us to threaten them, if it came to war.”

“War with the humans? Are you mad?”

“If they set to eradicating us, the only way we could get them to halt would be if we had teeth. Half a dozen sad puppets in an attic? The work of a moment to destroy. A hundred of us, two hundred? When we could have a razor’s blade at any nursery window, a pipette of hemlock in any cup? Then they would have to come to terms with us.”

The silence that followed this proclamation was of a profoundly different nature. Tef glanced around and reckoned she could read them now, as shaken by Shallis’s words as she was. “Is that where your mind’s taken you? Poisoning and murder?”

“I . . . think about these things,” Shallis whispered. She made an abortive gesture towards their own newborn, Lori. “You think they would hesitate?”

“I think they would go a lot further to wipe us out once we started killing their young,” Tef said. “Shallis—” She was expecting a sharp put-down, but instead, the Folded One just folded, collapsing until she was sitting, all angular misery and jutting corners.

“We are so few,” she said. “When we left the Tower, how could we know how big the world was? How everything in it could destroy us, fire and rain and humans, humans, humans. And now they know about us, and this city does nothing but consume, devour all that is precious or magical to feed those who rule here.”

Tef frowned, feeling her eyebrow and forehead pieces slide over each other. There was a thought there, if she could only grasp it.

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