Page 64 of Inkpot Gods

“By the time Artemis killed the man from the Congress, everyone else was gone,” she continues. “There were just a few auf left, and they should have fallen apart not long after the doors were locked. I don’t know what, if anything, could have caused them to continue to operate autonomously for this long.”

“Auf are simple,” says Erin. “They don’t perform complex functions.”

“Unless they’re like Miss Cottingsly,” says Lilianne, desperate enough to contribute that she doesn’t think before she speaks.

“What do you mean by that?” asks Erin, voice dropping toward something deeper and more dangerous.

Lilianne understands using the timbre of your words to control how people think about you. Her voice trainer likes to lecture her about it whenever she gets tired of her exercises. “You don’t have to sound any one way to be a woman,” he says. “But if you want people to view you in a certain light, sounding the part is one of the fastest ways to get them heading in the right direction.” Tone and pitch matter more than most people realize. She can hear Kelpie’s distress and reluctance, but Erin’s suspicion is even louder. She talks like she’s about to open an interrogation, and it’s terrible, and it’s honest, and that makes it even worse.

“Miss Cottingsly was Asphodel Baker’s uncle’s head maid,” she says, carefully. “No one knows whether he made her or bought her from another alchemist, but the records are clear: she was with him for more than twenty years, and with Asphodel after his death. We don’t have anything to indicate that she was unraveled intentionally. Odds are good she just reached the end of her functional use and fell apart on her own.”

Erin is still watching her with narrowed eyes. Lilianne swallows.

“Miss Cottingsly was definitely an auf,” she says. “Asphodel wrote about her extensively, and she fits every qualification as we understand them today. Despite this, she was able to maintain a household and serve two different alchemists, over the course of decades. We don’t know why she was decommissioned, and she was never caught by the locals. There’s no way she could have done that if she hadn’t been capable of complex functions.”

“Was she one of Asphodel’s creations?”

“No. She was already in Boston when Asphodel’s uncle adopted her. We don’t know who made her or what they did differently than the normal approach to making an auf. I don’t think she’s important. I just … we can’t dismiss them all as incapable of complicated actions, is all.”

“All right,” says Judy. “That makes sense, and is good information to have. Thank you for providing it.”

“Those things we encountered in the lab, the etiäinen, they’re different from auf,” says Smita. “Can they manage complex tasks?”

“They didn’t start as living tissue, and they don’t have to forget what it was like to die before they can function,” says Erin. “So yeah, they’re much better for complex tasks, especially if those tasks let them break things. The alchemists didn’t figure out how to make non-violent minions until they cracked the secret of making cuckoos.”

“What was the ‘secret,’ anyway?” asks Dodger. She shrugs. “People who actually understand alchemy like to go on and on about how there are all these subtle important differences between things, and they really, really matter, we can’t even put a value on how much they matter, but we can’t possibly explain them to you. I am a cuckoo. I’d like to know how we were made.”

“You never asked before,” says Erin.

“I was a little preoccupied with my potatoes and learning how to be a person in the world, not a theoretical concept in the ether,” counters Dodger. “Everything happened so damn fast, and when it stopped happening, we were suddenly effectively gods, with a couple of teenagers to keep alive. You can forgive me for being a bit incurious while I adjusted to the new status quo. But I’m adjusted now, and I’m asking. What the fuck is a cuckoo?”

“That is a very complicated question,” says Erin, slowly. “You are, and I am, and Roger and Kelpie both are. That Winter girl who came here with her boyfriend—”

“You mean the new Winter Queen,” says Roger, half mumbling into his coffee cup, so that it swallows his words like stones.

“—she was, but he wasn’t. Cuckoos are artificial people who can embody concepts just like a natural-born incarnate would.”

“That’s not complicated at all,” says Dodger. “That’s kinda boringly simplistic.”

“I wasn’t finished,” says Erin. “Alchemists worked for centuries to figure out what we call cuckoos. Auf and etiäinen and a dozen other alchemical constructs that don’t matter right now, so I’m not going to list them off, they were all a consequence of alchemists trying to create cuckoos. They wanted to control the laws of the universe by turning them into biddable, obedient children.”

Dodger laughs, short and sharp and startled. She composes herself, then shoots a look at Roger and starts to giggle. He does the same thing, actually lowering his coffee mug in the process.

“Biddable?” asks Dodger. “They were trying for biddable?”

“Don’t forget ‘obedient,’” says Roger. They both break down giggling again.

Erin watches them indulgently for several seconds before she claps her hands together and says, “If we’re doing this, we need to be doing it with a little more focus. Can you come back to earth and join the rest of us?”

“Sorry, sorry,” says Dodger, wiping her eyes and making a flicking gesture, like she’s dismissing tears of mirth. “We’ll be serious, we promise.”

“We’ll be very, very good,” affirms Roger.

Erin gives them both a skeptical look, then resumes her explanation: “No matter what materials they began with, they never managed to make a vessel that could contain the forces they were trying to control. It seemed impossible. Several alchemists, especially among the American and European Congresses, insisted that all possible forms of alchemical life had been discovered already. There wasn’t any way to do what needed to be done.”

“So what changed?” asks Roger.

“Asphodel Baker changed,” says Kelpie, eyes on Erin. Her gaze doesn’t waver as she asks, “Isn’t that so?”