Temeraire shook his head, eyebrows furrowing slightly in thought. Something wrong with its winding mechanisms, perhaps--but there was no telling, just looking at it from the outside. The master was right; it would need to be opened up before they could tell.

He located a screwdriver and began to loosen the screws on the automaton's back, speaking as he worked. "The external chassis appears to be unaffected, as far as I or anyone else can tell; as for its voicebox, there is hardly any cause for it to have broken down so quickly. I changed its cylinders myself last week, and I certainly would not have done anything so careless as to make a mess of things."

There was an undeniable note of injured pride in his voice, as if the automaton had somehow done him wrong by malfunctioning like this, and his frown only deepened as he loosened another screw and dropped it carefully into a nearby dish.