Bone and Jewel Creatures bajc-1 Read online

  There are secrets and lairs and amazing corners within the old creature’s den as well. The cub discovers ladders by watching the centipede-creature scurry up and down them, into and out of the rafters. There are creatures that live in the rafters too: there is the vulture-creature with its dusty smelling wings, and there is the slow sparkling creature. The cub clambers up a ladder, balances across the rafters, and touches the slow creature once, but shallow bloody slices across its fingertips convince the cub of the unwisdom of that idea. The cub makes no sound—it knows better; sounds draw attention—but the red dropping from its hand brings the old creature grumbling from whatever it was that the old creature does at its benches, to wash the wound and tuck the cub into bed, on a short leash, for the rest of the day.

  After that, the cub is careful not to touch the slow creature.

  The slow creature cuts.

  But that expedition across the rafters has shown the cub something it did not know existed: a mysterious wooden hatchway.

  The cub is fascinated.

  The next day, when the leash is off, it will climb the ladder again.

  In all Messaline, there were only three individuals upon whom Brazen the Enchanter would dance attendance. One was the Bey, whose rule Brazen chose to honor because Brazen did not himself care to govern. One was the Ordinary entertainer and famed beauty Madam Incarnadine, his paramour.

  And one was Bijou.

  Brazen’s house was at the bustling heart of the city, halfway up the hill topped by the Bey’s palace and gardens. To reach Bijou’s loft—which lay on the West bank, surrounded by warehouses and inexpensive apartments—Brazen’s carriage scurried effortlessly over swarming streets and marketplaces, and danced across with the broad shallow river with great splashing and no benefit from any of Messaline’s four bridges. Spidery elegant legs seemed too frail to bear up the crystal-windowed body; narrow feet thinned to pointed needles. Those rested lightly on the cobbles, dancing between goat-carts, dog-carts, and donkey-carts; litters, rickshaws, bicycles, and flocks…schools…hordes of pedestrians; water carriers, pastry peddlers, workmen, marketing women, news-sellers, a few Ordinaries in palanquins. The street society of Messaline.

  They scarcely glanced up as the Enchanter’s carriage hurtled by surefooted, though a single misstep could have impaled a hapless bystander like an insect on a thorn. The city folk accepted the Wizards as just one more feature of the urban life of Messaline; only tourists cringed.

  The carriage never stepped on anyone.

  Ragged lines of close-packed tiled roofs—blue, red, orange, ochre—flashed in and out of the sight through crystal ports in the convex belly of the carriage. Chimneys and copper flashing broke the pattern, catching slanted morning light. At street level, Brazen would have been awash in a sea of scents and sounds and textures—the heavy sway of silk, the musk of civet, the cries of birds. The rich savor of grilling lamb, dustiness of mingled spices, sweep of a pigeon’s wings as it evaded the net. The shrieks of parrots from four continents and monkeys from three.

  Smoke and dust and confusion, but Brazen sailed above it all in the cool clean air of his sealed carriage, an observer from afar. Sometimes he missed the tang of charcoal and piss in the streets. Sometimes. But who needed a Wizard’s tower, when you could bring one with you?

  This time, Brazen had nothing to transport, and so he did not trouble to kneel the carriage. A rope ladder slithered from the hatchway once he’d drawn to a halt. He scrambled down, hair and bright-striped felt coat flaring in the hot autumn wind that had swept away two weeks of coastal chill, and grounded himself—he thought—half-elegantly. He was expected; Ambrosias awaited him in the street, reared up to head-height. It did not sway as a living creature might, so rather than glittering the jewels along its spine reflected sunlight in steady gleams.

  Coat still swirling about his calves, Brazen stopped before the Artifice. It bowed with a measuring tic-tic-tic and the shiner of its cymbal, then swept about, sudden as a mongoose, and led him to the door. Though the massive double doors were closed, the sally-port stood open, guarded by the reclining, watchful skeleton of a wolf. Brazen stepped over Lupe—its tail rattled once on the tile in welcome—and let himself into Bijou’s loft.

  The Artificer was seated by the fire for once, and Brazen was glad to see it. She didn’t rest enough, claiming that soon she would have time enough to rest forever…in the embrace of Kaalha the half-masked.

  The old have nothing to pace themselves for, she’d say. This is the final sprint. Run. Run. See how far you can get before you fall.

  The cast of her features concerned him as he came to her. It could be hard to read expression on a leathery face marked by years of sun, dark as lava rock beneath the springy gray snakes of her hair. But he had some experience. She did not look in pain, but the lines from nose-corners to mouth-corners had drawn deep and her eyes were hooded.

  Brazen stopped before her and hooked a padded stool over with his foot. He dropped down on it, sitting by her feet as of old, though perhaps with greater dignity.

  “The child?” he asked, not glancing at the trundle bed and the clean cage standing open not so far away.

  “It’s in the attic,” Bijou said. “I sent Catherine and Lazybones to watch. It should be fine. For a time.”

  With both hands on the arms of the chair, she heaved herself up. A little rocking was required to get her there, but she did not ask for help, so Brazen did not offer it. He stood, instead, and had the cane he’d made for her so long ago—during his own apprenticeship—shaken out long and ready when she reached for it. “Walk with me,” she said.

  A painful task, because her dragging steps hurt him. Still, he followed her, a little to the left, as she hobbled toward the benches among the pillars at the back of the hall.

  She said, with steely directness, “Where did you find that child?”

  “It fetched up,” he answered. “The cook has been feeding it on the steps, along with the jackals and the feral cats. When she noticed the thing was injured, she brought it inside. You were the only one who stood a chance of helping it.”

  “Because I take in strays,” she said.

  She had turned to him with that comment, a crinkle at the corner of her eye the only clue that her expression teased.

  “It wouldn’t be the first,” he said. “If it’s out running around, I imagine you helped?”

  “I had to amputate.” She lifted her free hand and tugged at the wattle along her throat, as if even slack skin had grown too tight for her. Her cane clicked on the floor, apposite to the shuffle of the foot she dragged. It was twisted almost sideways, now, the striped wool sock and straps of her sandal protruding from under the hem of her robes. She gestured to the nearest workbench. It made his own hands ache, to see how hers were twisted. “There it is.”

  The bones were clean, bleached pale, though age would eventually mellow them to ivory. Bijou had begun the process of articulating them, of building a working hand from salvaged bits and bobs. Some of the hand bones had been replaced by other stuffs: chips of whittled ivory, a block of richly banded coca-bolo wood, a hinge of silver hung on a steel pin. All around the pieces laid like a jigsaw puzzle on the benchtop were stones, precious and semiprecious jewels. From his apprenticeship, Brazen recognized moonstone and chrysoprase, silken blue and green in their luster. “You’re making it a hand. That’s kind of you—” Bijou grunted dismissively “—what’s this?”

  Its surface cool under his fingers, Brazen picked up a lidded watch-glass containing a shred of withered brown.

  “The source of the infection,” Bijou said. “So tell me, Brazen, again. Why did you bring me a child infected by Kaulas’ necromancy? Surely, you don’t expect me to believe it was coincidence.”

  “Necromancy? On the living?”

  “Dead tissue is dead tissue,” Bijou said. “The wound was packed with puss moth threads and white roses—both poisonous and significantly symbolic, I would say.” She lifted the watch
glass from his hand and tapped it with a forefinger. “The child would have died, without our intervention. And then it would have been completely under Kaulas’s sway, don’t you think? Its shade his to command, its corpse his to animate? So—if I assume for the moment that you and he are not allied in some plot far too sinister and complex for my old head to fathom—why would Kaulas, the old bastard, have put that child where we were sure to find it? Why would he have chosen a subject who mattered to your household?”

  Brazen lifted a smooth needle-sharp hook on a corrugated handle and stroked the point across the back of his hand, pursing his lips at the prickle. “As a means to bring an agent inside my door, it lacks a little something. Neither of us would be likely to keep a rotting corpse around, and he can’t have expected me to bring the child to you for treatment. There are too many variables.”

  Bijou nodded, a slow oscillation of her head that made her fat oval locks shiver against her shoulders. She set the watchglass down and shifted her cane to her other hand. “You know I do not trust him—”

  “My loyalties are not divided, Bijou,” Brazen said. “I understand that you have learned well to distrust men, but as you were my teacher, I would not betray you. I swear it by my art.”

  She reached out, as if absently, and patted his arm. Whatever comfort the gesture brought was swept away by her words.

  “I know you’re not your father, sweetheart,” she said. “Never fear you will be mistaken for him.”

  Three

  The cub hears voices below. Those man-sounds, the ones they make nearly ceaselessly when they are in one another’s company. They argue like pigeons; they cluck and coo. The brothers-and-sisters only talk when it is needful, because sound tells the enemies where you are.

  And for the brothers-and-sisters, the city is full of enemies. We are small, the cub thinks. Not in words as a man would understand them, because the cub’s words are smells and body-posture and small yips and growls and vocalizations (the cub’s speech is very handicapped, with its small flat ears and its tailless haunches) but in a wordless understanding. Nearly everything that is not prey—rats, cats, pigeons—is bigger than the brothers-and-sisters.

  That is why the brothers-and-sisters scavenge and hide and must be smarter—cannier, slipperier, more subtle—than the men and the dogs and all the big things that would kill them and not even eat them, just leave their bodies in the road. The brothers-and-sisters will eat anything that is food and they are tricky and quick. So they survive.

  The cub understands that there’s information in the man-sounds, just as there’s information in the arguing of pigeons. The cub crouches in the attic, where dim slanting light angles across the cluttered space, limning columns of dust. It cocks an ear and an eye close to a gap in the floorboards, and watches.

  It recognizes the other man, the one with the old-creature, and at first draws back in fear. That pale-streaked, broad-shouldered man in the sweeping coat was the one who caged it and who brought it here in the swaying, rattling machine-creature. It smells of oil and ozone. Pain and dislocation: a sharp pang of loss. Where are the brothers-and-sisters?

  Could it find them again?

  Whatever noises the men are making are friendly noises. Some complicated dialogue seems to be underway, involving the old creature leading the pale-streaked one from place to place around the loft, showing it things on tables and making worried noises, while the pale-streaked creature hovers as if the old one is terribly fragile. It’s interesting for a little while, and the cub watches, knees bent up beside its ears, balanced on its toes with its haunches tucked under, in case it has to move in a hurry. It doesn’t think there’s a threat in the attic, and the winged bone creature has followed it up, so there’s someone here who might be a packmate. Even if the bone creatures are not the brothers-and-sisters, the cub knows it cannot live without a family.

  Life is not safe for a jackal alone.

  Light shifts across the attic floor, and eventually the cub grows bored watching the men, and its knees grow sore in that beetly position. It comes up to all three remaining limbs, the hem of its smock twisted around its waist, and scurries off among the crates and heaps and piles of furnishings.

  There is a great deal here worth exploring. Mice, everywhere, which—if you are quiet and quick—you can kill with a blow of your paw and eat in two bites, pausing between to flick the intestines out, though the fur is not pleasant to swallow. The winged bone creature sees what the cub is doing, though, and after a few moments it too is killing mice with aimed snaps of its sharply curved beak. It does not eat them, though, but tosses them to the cub.

  So maybe the winged bone creature is a packmate.

  There are lots of mice. The cub is stuffed to belly-rounding in less time than it spent watching the men make noises at each other, and still mice flock away every time it lifts a corner of a rug or shifts a crate aside. There is so much food here; the cub has not been hungry since it came. Not once, not even for a minute. There is always food.

  The brothers-and-sisters should know about this place. Licking blood from its lips, the cub plans.

  Replete, it remains more curious than sleepy, and it wonders what other treasures may be up here. Furs and blankets that smell of camphor and make the cub sneeze. Piles of bones—too dry for gnawing, though: these have had all the flavor bleached out of them. All those things in crates. Enticing.

  Mostly, the lids on the crates are nailed down, and though the cub pries at them with long fingernails, they will not lift. The mice have taken refuge inside some crates. The cub can hear them rustling.

  Rustling is irresistible.

  One crate has a lid that shifts easily, and the cub pushes it aside—then dances back, startled, at the clatter as it tumbles to the floor. From below, the old creature makes the attention-noise, and the cub pauses. It crosses the light-dappled floor toward the hatch in a crabwise scuttle, raising more dust, and pokes its face down into the space below.

  Both men are looking up. The old creature makes a gesture with its paw, and a questioning noise, so the cub blinks back reassurance—an eye-squeeze and a drawing-taut of the lips, not enough to be a snarl. The cub isn’t sure what the next noise means, but it’s not a summoning—it has learned the summoning already, because the summoning often means food, or it means that the cub was about to do something the old creature thinks might hurt, and the old creature is often right about that—and so the cub pulls its face up through the hatch and goes back to the mysterious crate, enticingly open now.

  The mice, of course, have moved on. The cub isn’t hungry anyway, though, so that’s all right. It draws its knees up under the smock for warmth and crouches on the edge of the crate, which seems sturdy enough to bear its weight. The stump, it uses for support and balance. The remaining hand is crusty with dried mouse-blood, as is the cub’s face, but it knows the old creature and the bone creatures will bathe it when it comes down. This is another reason the cub thinks this might be a pack; the brothers-and-sisters bathed with tongues and teeth, but here, also, the creatures clean each other. The cub thinks when it is a little braver, it might sit behind the old creature and go through its matted fur for ticks and lice. The old creature might like that.

  One-handed, the cub picks through the contents of the wooden box. Some are silky-soft; some are fine-furred like pups. There is a curved thing, round and stiff and wrinkled, but made of a cloth with a texture like mole’s fuzzy skin. It’s decorated with feathers and a cloth ribbon, and a thing like a beetle, but made of shiny stones and metal, and a thing like a flower, except made of sewn-up cloth. The cub strokes the thing and sniffs it—mouse and dust, and the memory of flowers and civet. A hat. It must be a hat. There’s more under it: coats and dresses as short against the cub’s body as the smock the old creature has wrapped it in. Scarves. A bundle of dried flowers tied at the stem with a ribbon. Vials, some half-full of an amber fluid which the cub can smell through the stoppers. Those make it sneeze even harder than the du
st.

  At the bottom of the pile is a square hard thing that smells of wood pulp and dye.

  A rustle and clatter in the rafters draws the cub’s attention upwards, but it’s just the mirrored creature making its deliberate way across the rafters. It pauses over the cub, a little to the right so the cub has to lean left when it locks the three meathook claws on each hind leg around the crossbar and lowers itself with meticulous grace to look over the cub’s shoulder. The cub turns, surprised when the mirrored creature rotates its upside-down head on the bony neck and looks right back. The shape of the skull and the mirrors make it seem to have more of a face than the other bone creatures, and the old creature has given it a black enamel nose.

  Very delicately, it stretches its neck out and touches the cub’s nose with its own. The cub holds still—it does not wish for any more cuts from the slow creature’s mirrors—but when the slow creature pulls back, the cub reaches out and brushes the three dull but fiercely hooked claws on its long awkward forelimb in return.

  They stare at one another for a moment, and then the bone creature makes a strange bob of its head, like a man, and the cub goes back to the contents of the box.

  And the hard rectangular object.

  The cub has to experiment before it understands how to lever up one side of the top cover and reveal the contents, but when it does it finds inside stiff pieces of yellowed card, woven together at one side with ribbons that also bind the covers on. On each leaf are pasted more stiff rectangles of paper with patterns of grey and black upon them.

  They smell delicious, and the cub touches the corner of one with its tongue.

  Salty, slightly sweet. Not bad, but the cub is still stuffed full of mice. There is something about the patterns on the cards, that it isn’t understanding, and that makes it look harder. It bends its head closer to the book, closing first one eye and then the other.