Chapter 1
Jesamin
With a sharp sizzle and the stench of burning flesh, the soldering iron burned a neat hole into my fingertip.
Cursing, I dropped the copper iron and stuck my finger in my mouth, leaving a scorch mark on my desk and the internal mechanisms of my current project unfinished.
I glared down at it. It was Artifice on a fine scale, most of the gleaming cogs smaller than the nail on my little finger, interlaced with bits of polished crystal no larger than grains of sand, and rods as fine as a spider’s web.
Even the thinnest of my soldering irons posed a threat to the delicate clockwork within; it was a project best worked on with utmost intensity and attention to detail.
But intensity and attention had eluded me yet again, as they had for the last year.
I wasn’t even sure what this piece of Artifice was meant to be.
A project to take my mind off greater woes, certainly.
Something that might be useful and fetch a good price at market?
Debatable. I’d started it a year ago, with no sense of purpose beyond the need for distraction, and had since come to refer to it as the Thing.
What the Thing did, there was no way of knowing yet. This piece was about the journey, not the destination. And the journey had been sprinkled with many burns, cuts, bruises, and on one memorable occasion, a solid six inches of hair going up in flames.
I pulled my finger from my mouth and examined it. The burn was a bright red, perfectly round mark, surrounded by other, paler marks that were identical in size and shape.
The Thing had won again. Or rather, Renaud fel Telyr won again, and I was left with yet another scar.
I turned the knob on the oil lamp, lowering the wick until it extinguished, and set my soldering iron aside to cool, looking about the room in despair.
It had once been my father’s dining room.
Now it was my shop, the expensively panelled walls bearing their own scorch marks and black streaks, squiggles of molten metal set into the floorboards, every spare corner heaped with scrap metal and tools.
Heavy velvet drapes were drawn over the windows, turning the once-bright room into a cavern.
I could’ve had my own proper shop. A year ago, I’d had the blueprints in hand, ready to move on to a grand new life as Jesamin fel Telyr, Artificer extraordinaire, wife of Renaud.
Then the Scarlet Lottery had announced its winner. I supposed some things, like beauty and immortality and heaps of swooning maidens, were more appealing than a scarred, frenetically busy Artificer.
He had come to my door, his skin like porcelain, his pupils as fine as a cat’s, his incisors sharp as knives. And when he’d given his excuses, and held out his hand for the ring I’d worn for months, the gears within me, spinning to the cycle of the perfect life I’d designed, had slipped and broken.
Sometimes my heart felt like a mechanism that failed to function, the rivets rusted over, the engineering corroded. The machinery that propelled me had broken irreparably.
Something moved in the doorway, taking a hesitant step closer.
“It’s fine, Talos.” I gestured angrily at the Thing, letting out a faint hiss as my fingertip throbbed again.
How long would it take to lose all feeling in that finger?
Would it eventually scar over so completely that all sensation was lost?
I could only hope the same would happen to the ache in my chest, and perhaps one day I could build something else in its place.
“I think I’m done for the day. I still need to adjust Papa’s chair, anyway. ”
My golem looked down at the Thing, and except for the scale of size, the two weren’t far apart in appearance.
I had built Talos myself before releasing his empty body to a sanguimancer to be brought to life; every part of his being, including the blood flowing in the core of his mechanical heart, was of my veins and my design.
Talos shook his head wearily, the clockwork gleaming through his glass chestplate whirling faster. Spinning gold and warm brass, hints of moon-bright iron—but no silver. Never silver.
“Don’t get angry with me,” I said, amused despite myself. Perhaps some of my own personality had gone into his making, and made him a mirror of me. “It’ll be…something. Someday. But not today.”
The golem’s face was an iron mask, a man’s face with the proud, noble features of Héllénic statuary: a strong nose, a broad mouth that would never smile, the faintest hint of a frown about his brow.
Despite the fact that his mask would never move beyond that expression, I could almost see him giving me the incredulous, stony glare I surely deserved.
He made a sweeping motion, as though to smash the Thing aside, and shook his head again.
“Absolutely not. Just because I don’t know what it is now, doesn’t mean its purpose won’t become clear when it’s finished. But don’t ask how I’ll know when I’m finished if I don’t know what it does. We don’t stand for those kinds of questions around here.”
Talos covered his face with his articulated iron hands, every movement carefully calibrated.
His interior was fine clockwork, but his exterior was a fortress of iron slabs and puncturing bronze nails; unlike the dainty, pretty golems popular with fashionable young ladies of taste, he was a walking fortress.
The kind of golem that told men to stay far away.
One look from that iron face hovering over my shoulder, surrounded with gilded spikes like the rays of the sun, and they would back away, mumbling apologies.
I had deliberately modeled his form on his namesake, the bronze guardian statue of the Temple of the Daystar in Hélléne.
Talos heaved his shoulders, an imitation of a sigh, and gestured to the door.
“Papa wants me?” I pushed the Thing safely to the middle of the table, lying on its bed of velvet.
He nodded urgently, and I got the sense that he’d only held off this long because I was clearly in the midst of one of my ‘sad slumps’, as I had sarcastically dubbed the sucking abyss of despair that sometimes appeared within my chest, but it was a year to the day since Renaud had walked out of this house, out of my life, the engagement ring tucked back in his pocket and a grin on his face as he ran off to his new, Jesamin-free life.
Today, of all days, I thought I deserved a little alone time with the Thing, a few red-hot tools, and a new injury. Anything to keep my mind from the screeching, rusted gears I imagined inside myself.
“For his chair?” I pulled my gold-rimmed spectacles off my nose, polished them on my sleeve, and pushed them back on my face with a frown.
Talos shook his head, more urgently still, and pointed to the door.
“I’m coming, then.” This time with a little more alacrity. Perhaps there was a customer, desirous of Artifice that had an actual purpose and timeline for completion involved.
I brushed myself off, well aware that I wasn’t dressed as a lady of stature and hoping the potential client wasn’t a lai—though it had never made sense to me that they expected their Artificers to be as dressed up as they were at all times.
Frilly sleeves and skirts were not compatible with open flames and whirring machinery, unless the loss of limbs was part of the plan.
My plain white shirt was silk, but the sleeves were hemmed to my elbows, and there were old yellowed scorch marks and soot all down the front.
As usual, I wore riding breeches of leather, the better to protect my legs from flying sparks, and my favorite worn boots.
I had a leather apron somewhere, but I’d displaced it in the midst of despondency, and my wardrobe of nice shirts was gradually shrinking.
Oh, well. No potential client could claim I wasn’t committed to my Artifice—my work was well-known across the Rivers, and had made my family a small fortune.
Perhaps I didn’t look like a lady, but my clockwork spoke for itself.
Talos was not only a fine guardian, but an excellent display of my finest efforts, and his appearance alone had netted me lucrative contracts.
I followed my golem into the hall, blinking as I left the darkness of my shop for the white-washed plaster halls of the fel Arron manor.
Gods, I really was threatening to turn into a hermit if the late noon sun, filtered through gauzy curtains, could make me blink away tears. Perhaps Papa and Talos had a point…
But no. The close, suffocating darkness of my shop was sufficient for my mood. I didn’t want the sun; I wanted to lurk in my cave and preferably only emerge once a month, if that.
Talos led me to the new dining room, which had once been a parlor until I’d taken the old dining room as my shop, and the first thing my eyes landed on was Papa, sitting at the table in the wheelchair I’d designed for him.
Unlike me, he dressed like a proper nobleman, in an emerald green velvet waistcoat with the frothy lace of his ascot spilling over his chest. I had upholstered his chair in soft, buttery leather, the wheels made of sturdy bronze and tree rubber imported from the Southern Expanse at great expense.
The spokes were engraved with both the lion rampant of the fel Arrons, and the clan Kulik swans in Mother’s memory.
Abelard fel Arron’s short hair was less blond than grey now, but his face was lined more from smiles than frowns, and I usually felt my heart lift a little when I saw him.
But there was no potential client in rich clothes beside him. Papa wasn’t smiling, but frowning, his brows clenched with concern.
Beside him sat two children, wolfing down food as fast as they could swallow, and I paused in the doorway as I took them in.