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The Toymaker’s Opera is an alternative-world steampunk adventure. It is a story about a poor fortuneteller, a living automaton, a mad Baron, and a city that dreams. It is a story about the price of friendship and happiness, about legacy and talent, blood and luck. But most of all, it is a story about the things that have no price.

The Toymaker’s Opera

In Which Moira Goes to See Sophia

Moira

Moira remembered the way. She remembered it so well that in what seemed like no time at all she stood on Sophia’s front step. Her linen shirt, freshly-pressed, soaked up the stray, cold droplets leftover on the grating above from last night’s storm. The alleyway running south off of Crystal Street was deserted at this time of day. Medtown wasn’t rich enough to support the installation and upkeep of a line of gas lamps but nevertheless the seers who lived in this neighborhood found ways to show their wealth.

Townhouses marched up the street, neat cobblestones paving the road before them. Each apartment rose two, some three, stories; their rock faces smoothed, tiled accents framing windows and doors. Every few yards a tall lamp post stood erect, its flat platform holding a snoozing firecat. The fiery felines watched Moira through slitted, colorless eyes, their hot souls as clear in her second sight as though she could really see them.

She had always possessed the ability to sense the wisps and tides of magic; ever since she could remember the bright colors had been there, layered over the world like a glittering blanket. And later, in her second year as an apprentice and her seventh walking the earth, when a raging fever robbed her of her sight the power remained. Sophia had taken advantage of that latent talent, honing and polishing it until Moira lived and breathed the swirling patterns all around her, until she could read the Sangrine without ever having seen their faces. But the memories of sight that she did have, however smoke-dark and indistinct or brilliant and clear, lived on unchanged by the years of darkness that came after them.

It was a normal spring morning, perhaps with the sun shining somewhere far above the Sheer. There was nothing about the empty street, not even a stray pickpocket, to make her worry. Moira chewed on her lower lip, shifting from foot to foot on the same steps where her mother had abandoned her. Before she could talk herself out of it she reached out and rapped quickly on the door. The loud sound jarred against the quietness and steady dripping all around her.

“Before you go gloating over me I want to say…” Moira trailed off, throat drying up. “No, that’s not it.” She began to feel hot and cold all over, nervousness fluttering through her breast and about her shoulders, making them prickle. In her head she ran over all the things she wanted to say, all the counter arguments and angry words from her last row with Sophia barging through and tumbled her perfectly-prepared speech to pieces.

There was nothing about Sophia’s door to distinguish itself from the others on the street except the blinding streaks of scarlet blood magic that clung to the wall and archway, as though her customers had left handprints of fear as they stumbled away into the night. Silence stretched out, uninterrupted except for the low purring of the firecats on either side of her.

Perhaps Sophia wasn’t home. Moira didn’t know whether she should feel worried or relieved, just as she equally wasn’t sure whether it would be easier than this to ask Mrs. Marshall for work in her shop in the first place. Halfway down the steps, mind not yet made up on whether she should try again later in the day, Moira heard the creak of hinges. She froze. “Hello, Sophia,” she said, remembering just in time to hold her head high.

For a long moment Sophia said nothing, the only sound the almost-imperceptible hushing of skin on skin as she crossed her arms. Moira could just see her, could imagine her brown skin and dark eyes, the sunless tumble of sable hair about her shoulders. Unlike other Verandi Sophia preferred to wear browns instead of the colorful patchwork favored by the rest of her kin; the better to hide the results of her work. Even without sight Moira could sense those eyes on her, the thin-lipped disapproval turning that strong, sensuous face into a facade of cold stone. “Where are your things?” she said at last, thickly-accented voice feigning disinterest. “If you need help moving back, of course–”

“That’s not…it.” Moira faced her, looking toward Sophia as well as she could manage. Her Keeper was still angry, that much was obvious. Their parting words hadn’t exactly been kind ones, a fault Moira knew was all her own. She could have at least left Sophia with more grace, even if the other woman didn’t think a blind girl would ever be able to make it on her own. Moira’s nails bit into her palms as her fists clenched. She wouldn’t ask for help or charity, even if Sophia was willing to give it. An extra debt was the last thing she needed right now.

“Haven’t anything left, then?” Sophia purred, and Moira couldn’t tell if she was being cruel or concerned, her tone carefully neutral.

Nevertheless, Moira flushed. She had to say something. “Sophia, I–”

The hinges squeaked as Sophia pushed the door open even farther. “Don’t just stand there, child, you’ll catch your death.”

No, she had to get this out now. Now, before she fell back into the warmth and security rolling out of that house like a pair of open arms. Moira walked up the steps and stopped just before the threshold. “I’m here on business.”

“I refuse,” Sophia said, sharp and final.

Moira felt her stomach drop to her feet. “But,” she scrabbled for words, “you have to. I’m asking you, that’s allowed.”

Without warning Sophia threw her arms around Moira’s shoulders, rocking gently from side to side. “I’ve been so worried about you!” She buried her dark face in Moira’s hair. “The things everyone has been saying; nutcrackers at your door and rumors you’d already gone to the Reach. Goddess!” Sophia said, holding suddenly her at arm’s length. “You’re thin as a rake!”

“It’s nothing.” Moira tried to stand tall but the familiar softness of Sophia’s embrace was almost as tempting as the spicey smells emanating from the kitchen. She didn’t need to see the disbelieving stare Sophia was throwing her to know that that was the expression her Keeper was wearing. “I’m just going through a rough patch is all. I can get through it. I just need some…particular help.”

“My help.”

Moira nodded frantically. “Yes. Please.”

“Come back to me, little one,” Sophia said softly, putting a hand on her cheek. “Leave off this silly notion of starving on your own. You can tell your fortunes from the parlor downstairs; this pain you give yourself is needless.”

Unsure which thought hurt her pride more; the fact that Sophia knew or the accusation that success on her own was impossible, Moira stepped back out of Sophia’s grasp. “Why won’t you listen to me? I’m not a child anymore. I can do this and I will.”

“Moira–”

“No, this is my choice to make, Sophia. I’m sorry I said the things that I did but I need to do this.” Moira plowed ahead, throwing all her eggs in one basket. “I want to change my fortune, I want my luck back. I just need your help to do it.”

Sophia regarded her in silence for a moment. “You don’t know what you’re asking.”

“I know better than any of your other customers do!” Moira retorted.

“Do you?” Sophia said, her voice low. “You know so much about blood magic then.”

“No, I didn’t mean–”

Her Keeper turned away, leaving a cold, nagging feeling in the air that Moira tried to ignore. “We shall see,” Sophia murmured. “But for now you eat–don’t argue. I won’t make a single cut if you’ve got an empty stomach. To the kitchen with you.”

Moira knew better than to disagree. She let Sophia close the door behind her and walk away into the house, leaving her alone in the grand foyer. It had been well over a year since she had left, stomping down the front steps with her cards, her clothes, her first lantern, and all her hopes piled high in her arms. Even so, she remembered the Sophia’s grand apartment as though it was still her home.

To her right a stone staircase spiraled up to the second story, merging into a balcony that circled the room. A border of tiles, each painted in the same golden pattern of the Verandi nine-pointed sundisk, followed the stairs to the next level parallel to the carved stone railing. More tiles, these decorated in a variety of geometric shapes, covered the vertical surface of each stair. If she ascended those steps the first door along the wall would lead to Sophia’s workroom, the place she would hopefully find herself in if she was accepted as a customer. Beyond that was the guestroom where the patrons would rest after their session with the sangeriest, the two rooms at the end belonging one to Sophia herself and one to Moira, when she had still lived here. On the ground floor there was another parlor, the one Moira had originally set up shop in to earn the tithe that had granted her the apartment on Charms in the first place. Then the kitchen to her left, a long, high-ceilinged room with a wooden table in the middle and an enormous cast iron cookstove at the back.

Drawn by the mouth-watering smell of smoked paprika, cayenne, and frying sausages, Moira drifted leftward. Heat thrown back by the tiled wall behind the stove rolled over her. Sizzling, scraping, and low humming told her Sophia was here.

“Eat,” her Keeper said, plunking a bowl down.

Moira sat obediently, grasping for utensils until Sophia pressed them into her hands. She ate slowly, forced to do so partially by the heat of the dish and also because to stuff herself now would do the opposite of good. Consuming food too quickly after weeks of having next to nothing would make her wastefully sick, even if her stomach did ache with hunger. Sophia must have guessed the same, for the bowl wasn’t filled to capacity in any case.

Just like the rest of Medtown Sophia generally slept during the day. After Moira had finished and pushed the bowl away her Keeper led her upstairs to her old room, forestalling any questions by saying, “When you are rested, then we will see.”

Moira acquiesced, she had barely been able to sleep between sending the nutcracker away and leaving to visit Sophia, too worried that the automaton would return with more of its kind and march her away to the Reach. She was safe here, for now. No matter what happened tomorrow, no matter what Sophia decided, at least Moira would know what choices remained to her. Even if the only alternative to losing her life was deliberately discarding her pride. Moira chewed her nails in the solitary darkness of her room, not sure now which frightened her more.

“Are you certain you want this?” Sophia asked the next evening. Something was different about the sangerist today. The other woman sat across the table from Moira, as casual and deadly as a jungle cat. Ruby energy curled around her, languid and slow. She was dangerous, not because she would lunge suddenly or do something unexpected, but rather because Sophia knew the measure of her power and could use it like a whip, deliberate and to the point.

Anyone who wanted could visit the blood witch, but only the most desperate did. All magic, all real magic, came at a price. A price, Moira suddenly worried, that she wouldn’t be able to afford.

“To change a fortune as bad as yours,” Sophia murmured, echoing Moira’s own thoughts, “to tip the scales back in balance for you. That is what you want?”

“Yes,” Moira said, certain in her conviction no matter the cost. If those words came back to haunt her later then she would handle it then; better to avoid a trip to the Reach now than to fret about what might be.

Sophia stood, the bench scraping against the stone floor. “Very well,” she said crisply. “Come with me.”

Moira rose and followed behind, up the smooth stone staircase, touching the tiles on the wall. She paused as Sophia opened the door to her workroom and went in. Waves of power rolled out to greet Moira, heady like well-seasoned port. She stopped altogether, alone on the threshold. “Sophia?”

The older woman chuckled, wry amusement deepening her already rich voice. “Have no fear, child. You are not some ignorant ninny from above the Teeth. There will be no cheap theatrics here.”

“Only what is taken,” Moira said, queasy despite Sophia’s reassurance as she made her way into the room with small, shuffling steps.

“Only what you have to give,” Sophia corrected.

Again, there was an undercurrent to her words as if there were layers and knots of meaning swinging beneath. Which was ridiculous in any case, Moira knew what she was here for. Still, she shook the clinging doubt from her shoulders and looked about in her second sight.

The sky was like stars, a thousand points of light glittering in the blackness above her. They were amplifying stones, whispering in the breeze from the open window. Moira used only a handful to assist in her reading but Sophia had too many to count. A sea of sparkling dust swirled around her as she moved deeper into the room, responding to her talent and to her as-yet unanswered request. The stones–jasper, quartz, tigerseye, jade, moonstone, lapis, malachite, and others–swung on delicate golden chains overhead, high enough that the flaxen and fuchsia lightning leaping in tall arcs from gem to gem was in no danger of coming below. Although the storm of Sophia’s carefully-tuned power walked across the stones in an impressive array, it did so silently. The thick cracking of the atmosphere was the only indication magic was going on above; to the layman everything but the rocks themselves was invisible. It was those very stones that had opened the door to her apprenticeship with Sophia in the first place.

From the entrance to the silk reclining sofa opposite, Moira remembered every inch of this room. There was honey here, the promise of all Sophia had to offer mixing with the brittle dread of all the customers before her. Moira cocked her head to the side, listening to Sophia rummaging along her workbench.

“Lie down,” her Keeper commanded, words meant to be obeyed.

Moira’s feet brushed against the first of four silver rings that were affixed to the floor. She shivered and, kneeling, felt her way forward with her hands. The rock floor had been carved wholesale from the tower in whence the apartment stood, there were no individual flagstones or slabs of slate to break up the smoothness of the well-sanded surface. None, that is, until her fingers met the silk restraints.

Wryly Moira wondered if Sophia’s last customer had been a woman, so often it was men who required that they be held down with leather instead, once the ritual was underway. She passed over the blood circle, its edges crude and inelegant when compared to the rest of the room. Moira took a deep breath and laid down inside of it, putting her back against the enormous, heart-sized rhodorite bloodstone that burned like a struck match in her second sight. The stone’s power, an extension and at the same time apart from Sophia, reached up and lay its harness over her gently.

“Sophia?” Moira called when not even her fingers would respond in movement. “I…can’t move. You said no theatrics,” she added, trying and failing not to sound pinched with worry.

The older woman chuckled, not unkindly. Tinctures and bottles along the low workbench clinked and chimed beneath her hands. “It has been a long time since you were inside the circle. Remember, and breathe. Do not fight the magic, let it listen to you.”

It was hard, harder than it should have been, hard to let go and expect someone else’s magic to catch her. Moira frowned. She knew Sophia was right but that didn’t make it any easier. Long moments passed while she tried to ignore the stone slowly heating under her spine. Not just like the bracing waves coming off a fireplace but also the door to the inferno of Sophia’s magic steadily opening. When that produced no results and she still could not move Moira instead craned her attention toward the workbench. Rust-red knives, only their edges visible in her second sight, smirked at her. Moira turned away.

“Sophia?” she asked again, and felt the stone’s power tighten all around her, a choking sensation. There was death here, under the heat, silent and still. People had died on this stone; men given up honor and women something deeper, a sense of self or certainty, Moira wasn’t sure. And she had touched that death during her apprenticeship, caressed it again and again, the dying of one chapter of a customer’s life and the rising of another; whether that death was literal or figurative didn’t matter much to the sangerist. It was the real death that frightened Moira, its hands waiting just underneath the current of Sophia’s magic, to tip the scales so far beyond recall that Moira wondered if delivering herself to the Reach early wouldn’t have been a bad idea.

A final rasping breath, staccato and sudden, cut through Moira’s thoughts. It was the sound of Sophia’s ritual knife on the sharpening belt. Her soft footsteps brought her to the head of the circle and she crouched, touching Moira’s cold cheek with warm fingers. “Breathe,” she chided. “Put your fear away and listen now, and we will see if we can turn your luck.”

Sophia’s calming caress was as familiar to Moira as the ritual itself. How often had she stood to the side, handing her Keeper her tools; seashells for collecting blood, healing powders, drugs to help the customers slip into the trance necessary for the spell to work. She had even carved into her own flesh upon Sophia’s instruction, while the older woman looked on, trying to find the barest flicker of latent blood magic. And when that well had turned up dry, Moira remembered a nearly endless procession of scryer’s tools, crystals, runes, and other bric-a-brac of common use in Medtown. Only when the Sangrine had come into her hands, a payment left to Sophia after their previous owner had stepped off the Teeth and out into open air, only then had Moira felt her second sight stir in answer. Until that point she had assisted Sophia: tying knots around jerking ankles and pale wrists, fetching water and blankets for afterward, when the magic left furrows of exhaustion behind.

No customer reacted to Sophia quite the same. Some wept, some screamed. Some begged to be untied or called the sangerist unspeakable names. Men threatened with lawyers and women with poisons, even though both came willingly. A few were silent, grim and tight-lipped, their secrets spoken only in confidence. No one asked what Sophia did with the blood she collected, not even her apprentice. Some questions were better left unanswered.

Moira flinched as the dull side of the ritual blade ran, hissing, along her arm. She could move now, but didn’t dare. No theatrics, Sophia had promised. No backstage rumble of thunder or phantom wind, no invoking the names of dead gods or terrifying white-eyed soliloquy; only the spell itself, the one part of Sophia’s power Moira had yet to experience.

The air thickened, pressing on Moira’s chest like a blanket of stones. An uncomfortable tingling traveled through her limbs and prickled on the ends of her fingers. Anxiety drove its screw into her breast, ever tightening. Moira bit down, clenching her teeth together until her head ached. She refused to cry out, holding her body as stiff as she could.

“Let go,” Sophia whispered and the cold hands of death reached up with her words, rising on the tide of her magic. “Moira, you have to let go.”

“Mm-nn.” She shook her head, eyes squeezed tightly shut. “Sophia, I can’t.”

Sophia rapped the flat of the blade against Moira’s protruding collarbone. “You must.”

Gasping moments passed, the magic around her a sea to drown in, the unfamiliar mixing with the memories of a thousand nights. Moira held on. Everything she had to lose welled up on one scale, and her slowly-dwindling options on the other. If she gave in the unknown outcome of a future she couldn’t bank on loomed over her, equally as frightening as what would happen if she gave up. And then there was the matter of paying Sophia, too; for her Keeper would come to collect as surely as Gray did, whether the spell worked or not.

Sophia took Moira’s hand in her own and gave it a squeeze. Slowly she began to speak, low and calm. No words of encouragement, no rebukes flowed from Sophia, only a description of the evening outside the workroom window. Colors Moira could no longer see spilled through the opening. Orange turned to rosy pink, to lavender, to violet, and then darkness lit only by the globes of festival lanterns and the flickering of the firecats who stalked the street looking for mice.

Moira felt the heat under her back subside as the knot of fear in her chest began to unwind. She listened to Sophia’s soothing voice, rich and purring, a voice she realized she had missed. A voice she trusted.

A sigh escaped Moira’s lips as she let go, her last worry tossed away. For a moment she felt her stomach drop as though she were really falling. The sensation didn’t last. And then she was floating, impressions and memories spiraling around her on golden thread.

Magic was metaphor, the way one thought about using it was equally as important as what they intended to use it for. For Moira her pattern was the sparkling dust that became thread as she read her cards. She could see it now, a thousand images and thoughts and tasks caught in the string of the analogy she had built for herself.

Any magic user, anyone with power, could practice their craft without symbolizing it in a particular way if they wanted an added level of difficulty. Metaphor in spell-casting or fortune telling made concrete the insubstantial, visualizing the invisible. It greased the gears for the person using that power, helping them to open the way to their end result the same way a monk might meditate on the image of a still pond or the simple sound of the wind.

As she watched the thread began to turn, rounding out, taking on the shape of a great wheel. Far away, as though it was happening to someone else, she felt Sophia make the first cut on her right wrist. The pain only made the wheel creak and groan. A second cut and a third caused the memories and motes of light on the wheel to condense until Moira thought she could see a frayed strand lashing about, unsecured.

“Leave it,” Sophia warned as Moira reached out to touch the thread. “As the seasons turn, as the earth moves, as the sun spins, so will you.”

The metaphor changed, the thread disappearing entirely, to be replaced by a waterwheel. Sophia’s power hit the boards in a rumbling waterfall from on high, demanding that they be moved. Nothing happened, the backlash slapping out like a whip.

Moira cried in pain as Sophia pushed at her luck, trying to make it move, the brute force of her Keeper’s magic slamming up against a fate that did not want to embrace the change she was thrusting upon it. Tears ran down her face. She felt that Sophia was shoving at a door that couldn’t be opened.

Before she could open her mouth and beg a stop to this, pain blossomed on Moira’s chest, wet and aching. She fell deeper inside Sophia’s magic, unable to see anything in the room at all, firmly inside the dark river of power all around her.

Sophia said nothing, her hands clasped over Moira’s heart, dripping sweat, her skin slick with blood. She rammed against the wheel over and over, silent but unstoppable. Despite the pain suffered by her apprentice, despite the absurd amount of effort, Sophia threw herself forward into the spell.

“By the eyes of the Goddess!” Sophia cursed and, gasping together with Moira, reached out into the darkness beyond the wheel.

Sickly, like the vertigo that accompanied traveling in a lift, the magic shifted suddenly. New power rushed in, a second river joining the first. The wheel growled in its rut and for a breathless second it appeared as though it would refuse to budge even now. It jerked forward once, and then stopped, shuddering. Sophia let out a hair-raising snarl, drops of blood and sweat spattering like water across Moira’s face.

The floodgates opened, a third river joining the first two. This one was a cerulean-sapphire blue, the same color as the Phage. It tumbled over a distant precipice and fell, unrelenting, mingling with Sophia’s magic.

Slowly at first, the world began to tilt. The wheel was enormous, not just the size of Moira’s current troubles, but the size of a lifetime. She felt her luck rushing back, just out of reach now but on its way soon. Whether that meant another dry spell later on didn’t matter right now, only the relief that she would live, that no matter what happened she could find a way, burned like an ache in her heart.

Quick as a shot from a rifle Moira kicked her way to the surface. She woke in Sophia’s lap, wrists in the middle of being bandaged while sobs of exhaustion wracked her chest. Her Keeper murmured soothing phrases, the Verandi words meaningless in Moira’s half-lucid state.

“Shhh.” Sophia tore off long strips of linen, fastening them across Moira’s chest and shoulders. “I’m here.”

Everything ached. The certainty that there had been a wheel and it was moving as it should began to drain away as Moira regained consciousness. She tried to scramble onto her side but her arms were dumb and her thoughts were thick, and her body would not obey her. The rim of a cool glass of water touched her lips and she drank thankfully.

“S-Sophia?” Moira asked, throat raw and cracking.

“Hush, not now.” Sophia helped her to sit up, providing an arm to lean on. “Just rest.”

It was all she wanted to do. Though she hadn’t run after a thief or shoveled coal or climbed to Sunsgate her limbs dragged and her bones felt like lead. There was a sour taste in her mouth, as though she had been racing beyond her heart’s ability to support her endurance. And her second sight was almost entirely black. Whatever had happened inside the blood circle had taken more from her than she’d expected. Still, she had to know.

“Will it work?”

Sophia sighed. Though her own skin was clammy with sweat she scooped Moira into her arms as though she weighed no more than a child. “That is for you to decide,” she chided, “it always is.”

Moira tucked her face into the crook of Sophia’s neck. She stayed quiet until she had been carried to bed across the hall and tucked in. The fussiness of her Keeper was just as well, Moira felt hardly able to keep her eyes open much less pull up the covers. “But,” she tried again, catching Sophia’s fingers before she could move away. “Your price, I should know–”

“Child.” Sophia sat on the edge of the bed and placed a cool cloth on Moira’s forehead. “That will be decided later.”

“But it will work, won’t it?” Moira forced herself to sit up despite the lance of pain across her breast. “Everything you did…” She trailed off, unable to recapture that feeling of the wheel turning, unable to see anything in her second sight except the after-image of Sophia’s magic arcing between the amplifying stones.

Sophia pushed her gently down and replaced the cloth that had fallen. “You tell your fortunes and I move the scales. You cannot make your customers choose their path, you can only show it to them. I have given you the opportunity, the rest is up to you.” She kissed Moira’s cheek, a mothering touch unexpected given their previous argument. One more squeeze of their hands, this one Moira returned. “You will do your best, I am sure, as you did today.”

Taken aback and too tired to question it, Moira let Sophia leave without another word. It shouldn’t be something to congratulate her about, stooping to asking for help. At least she felt like herself, still, no matter what she had had concerns about before. She had survived Sophia’s ordeal, whether it worked or not.

Moira curled up, one nagging thought struggling to be heard before she slipped off into dreamless, anxious sleep.

“Thank you.”

~~~

Disclaimer: As this is not the finished version the author reserves the right to change this and any following chapters in full or part; including but not limited to grammatical, editorial, stylistic, or plot-related changes. The author does not expect, however, for this version to differ vastly from the version that will be published in the near future.

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