Here’s an excerpt from Under the Poppy. Istvan is the puppeteer, the master of the mecs:

Istvan plucks a pippin apple from the bowl, reaches into his waistcoat pocket for a little white-handled knife, applies one to the other. “’Just a doll’? Some people say puppets must be possessed by spirits, that is, if the show is any good….I once knew a fellow who told me that puppets were as old as man himself. He was a slippery old bastard with a silver ring he wore on his thumb, and he claimed that the left-over makings of Adam and Eve, the dust and scrapings ignored by God, were swept up by Lucifer and breathed into a crooked sort of life, not true souls like Man and Woman but nearly as immortal, desiring to move amongst their human brothers and find love – or, denied that love, make mischief. So how different, really, is a man from a mec?”