Precious Little Things by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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

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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.

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