There was a man that lived with a morrowick.
It wasn’t a particularly impressive one, and he wasn’t a particularly impressive man; clerkly, prone to wearing grey and having stubbly facial hair, quiet and withdrawn.
The morrowick didn’t mind.
It was a sort of automaton, but not a usual one; not made of brass, or steel, or wire, or onyx. It didn’t have a job, particularly, like the rest of the automatons that ticked around the city. It appeared to have been made of a hundred little household items, and at the same time, hundreds of weird artifacts, and at the same time, hundreds of antique watchworks, and at the same time, appeared to have not been made at all.
He had bought it at a rummage-sale; from an old woman who claimed it did dishes. He had purchased it to find it did nothing of the sort but sit and quietly read his magazines; a fact that irritated him more than disturbed him.
Everyone knew automatons couldn’t read.
If he had known what it was, he might have been more careful around it. He might have treated it with more respect. He might have taken the time to give it Gloveclock oil and cleaned its crystal lens, on occasion.
Instead, he would awake in the morning and totter downstairs in his sleepily efficient manner, punt the doddering bit of clockwork from his path, and brew coffee that tasted as much of alkaline as it did caffeine. The morrowick would hum and chitter to itself in mild annoyance as it saw him sit there at his floral chair, turning his cup idly on the table as he read the London Gazette. The morrowick never said anything to him.
Everyone knew automatons couldn’t talk.
After dressing, it was his habit to halfheartedly order the morrowick (though he knew not that’s what it was) to do some domestic chores; a request it sturdily denied was as possible for it to accomplish as it was a broom to attempt masonry. The man would be frustrated, comb his fingers two or three times through his stubble and storm out the glass door, into the lorry, and off to work at the bank. While he was away, the morrowick would creep to his room and quietly step into the window-seat, where it would observe the alley below and, with a hand as quick as a whip, make thousands of tiny marks on a pad of paper stamped with the Bank of England’s watermark until the paper was fairly grey with them.
Everyone knew automatons couldn’t write.
It wasn’t until he had owned the little thing for nearly two months that Jonathan Lint returned home from a day of processing the various transactions he handled at the “Various Transactions” window to find that the morrowick had done something odd.
It had painted a picture.
If he had known it was a morrowick, and not an automaton, he would have known several things. One, he must not sell the painting. Two, he must not tell anyone about the painting. And three, he must decode the clues in the painting to find the little key in the tiny apartment in the morrowick’s left leg and disarm it, or life would be as black as a nightmare.
Of course, being a clerk and not an Alchemist, he didn’t do any of these things.
The next time Jonathan Lint left his apartment, it was with a sheet over his face, the white linen stained with the blood of his ruined body. The coroner noted that he had been in a state of extreme panic when he died, marking down the cause of death to the hundreds of bulletholes that perforated his heart and head like a pepper shaker’s top. The bullets were nowhere to be found, and the holes were like he had been stabbed with crochet needles.
If someone had been careful, they would have noted that the apartment was quiet orderly, but a small trinket was missing. If they had known Jonathan well, they would have known that the trinket missing was a small good luck charm a gypsy woman had given him before her death, claiming that the the stone in it was a bit of the sky. If someone had cared to inventory his life, which no one cares to inventory the life of a lowly clerk at the Bank of England, they would have found that he had never, not once, considered purchasing an automaton. And if someone had been sitting in the room, and had remained quite still, and watched the dusty corner of his bedroom, they would have seen a plank in the floor pop its nails like a fat man’s buttons. They would have seen an odd automaton, slightly larger than the rest, emerge from the floor clutching a trinket set in pewter: a stone as blue as the sky. And if the person had been there to hear, they would have heard the click of the window latch, and a moment later, the scrabbling of metal on ceramic tiles, and then there would have been silence in the home of the former apartments of Jonathan Lint, clerk.
And this, dearest readers, is where our story begins.
