Page 71 of Inkpot Gods

“How did they die?”

“That doesn’t matter. They were dead, and once a person dies, they no longer have any right to their bodies. The flesh becomes abandoned property. Your uncle merely took what had been left for him. He built me from the scraps they left behind. Five of them, all told.”

“Why so many?”

“He wanted only the best of everything for his new helper. He chose the strongest legs, the nimblest hands, and the hardest heart, and he stitched them all together piece by piece, to make his perfect woman. Not that my womanhood matters—it was a choice solely to allow me to pass unseen in the circles he travels within. Had he built himself a manservant, people might have taken notice.” Miss Cottingsly doesn’t sound bothered by this essential unfairness. She’s just reciting the facts of the matter as she understands them. “I’m invisible when I need to be.”

“That would be an innovation,” Asphodel mutters. “Invisible auf would be enough to make the Congress agree that I’ve fulfilled my assignment, and discovered something entirely new.”

“True invisibility isn’t possible.”

“No, probably not, given the laws of physical reality as we understand them, but understanding can change. Changing the things we already understand about the world is half of what we do in our art.”

“The other half is what, scrubbing the blood off the ceiling?” Miss Cottingsly clucks her tongue, for all the world like a nursemaid chiding an unruly child. “It’s a bit disingenuous to claim that any proper alchemist handles that part for themselves. Anyone who’s gone through Congressional apprenticeship will have a helper to hand to do the cleanup, and anyone who hasn’t is a charlatan and a dabbler in things they don’t properly understand.”

“We’re all inkpot gods at the end of the day,” says Asphodel. She turns around to lean her hips against the table’s edge, resting most of her weight on her hands. “Uncle must have done something special in the making of you. There’s no other way you’d still be hanging together.”

“He built me from five women,” says Miss Cottingsly. For the first time, her voice slows, her words coming haltingly, as they might from a more ordinary auf. The constructs are just reanimated flesh attached to makeshift skeletons of whatever their makers have been able to steal, scrounge, or string together. They don’t last, not like Miss Cottingsly has. She’s been here since the day Asphodel arrived, and the only obvious sign of her inhuman nature is in the fact that she hasn’t aged an hour, much less a day.

The dead may rot, but they don’t get any older, and Miss Cottingsly is most certainly deceased.

“Does the number matter?”

“No. The sympathy is what made the difference.” Miss Cottingsly paused then, meaningful in her silence.

Asphodel frowned. Most of the auf she’d encountered had been built of and modeled after men, but that couldn’t be the only answer: if female auf were innately sturdier than their male counterparts, even the most sexist alchemist in the nation would have switched over to raiding women’s graves. There was no difference in the tissue from a biological or functional level: all the differences would be, as Miss Cottingsly said, in the sympathy.

“Most auf are made from young bodies,” she said, haltingly. “Alchemists look for strong arms and sturdy backs when they have to go shopping for components. The only auf I’ve met who weren’t made from younger people were all former alchemists who had gifted their bodies to their children for such use…” And while they hadn’t been able to match Miss Cottingsly for impossible vigor, they’d lasted longer than the norm, hadn’t they? They’d been able to hold themselves together long after the point where most auf would have fallen apart.

Asphodel’s eyes widen slightly as she focuses back on Miss Cottingsly. “Miss Cottingsly, how many of the women who were used to construct you had been parents before they died?”

“All five of them, miss,” says Miss Cottingsly, sounding pleased with Asphodel for finding the answer.

“And how many of them had children who are still living today?”

“Three, miss.” Miss Cottingsly’s face does something complicated, like it can’t figure out how to form the expression she’s trying for. Then it smooths back into its normal neutrality, the bland mask she shows the world at all times.

Asphodel frowns. “Three. The other two, their children have passed?”

“Yes, miss.”

“Any grandchildren?”

“No, miss. Sadly, they died quite young.”

“And you know this because…?”

“Your uncle was quite taken with my sturdiness. It’s rare for an auf to last more than a few years, as you’ve noted. So he asked me to keep tabs on the surviving members of my donors’ families, in case there was something in the bloodlines that was keeping me intact.”

“When those children died, did you…?”

“I did, miss. Your uncle requested the bodies, and I collected them for his use.”

Asphodel frowns. “Did that upset you?”

“No, miss. Why would it have upset me?”

“They were your—”