Bone and Jewel Creatures bajc-1 Read online

They are shapes. Flat shapes like real things, tiny and perfectly detailed. Enchanted, the cub balances the open book upon its thighs and turns pages slowly, examining each card in turn. A man looks out from several, male (the cub thinks, from the coats) and pale-skinned and young and tall—even for a man—and wearing hats that make it seem even taller. Sometimes it is with a darker, raptor-faced man in heavy brocade coats and embroidered trousers, dripping with bullion. In others, there is a round-cheeked willowy man, a female, whose dark hair spikes in short locks from under a series of elaborate hats, and whose skin is only a little lighter than and just as satiny-looking as the black velvet of its dresses.

  The dresses in this crate, maybe. Or some of them. And the beads and hats as well.

  The cub turns more leaves, and there are more images. The same three men, and now a fourth one—another female man, this one unlike any the cub has seen before. Its hair in the images is as pale as the rough-surfaced substance of the leaves. It wears dresses too, beaded and glittering ones cropped short to show long legs. It shows bared teeth boldly, wearing tiny shoes like hooves with a strap over the instep. When all four men stand together, it and the other female man stand at the center, arms around each other, leaning close.

  Slowly, the cub puts the book down, open to a image of the first male and the female man embracing one another. It picks up a long coil of beads and lets them run between its fingers like tears, like stones.

  Slowly, twist by twist, it winds the necklace around the stump of its left arm.

  Moths came into the studio each night, drawn by Bijou’s work lights. They fluttered among the benches and beneath the high dark ceilings. Some beat themselves to rags against incandescent bulbs, and some immolated themselves in the fire. The remainder, in morning’s drowsiness, came to rest on the walls, where they made a pattern in white and brown, like embossed paper only more beautiful.

  Scraping across the workspace in the early morning, when grayness just began to filter in from the garden windows and the stones underfoot were slick with dew, Bijou found them bemusing. Moths were sacred to Kaalha, lady of mirrors, lady of masks. But what sort of goddess blessed an animal so drawn to the light that it would annihilate itself to obtain it?

  Bijou crouched painfully to poke up the fire and feed the coals with scraps of kindling. Lucy could have done the tending, but it was Bijou’s ritual, and she was loathe to relinquish it. Age had not yet defeated her on all fronts, though it was a war of attrition she knew she was fated to lose. As the flames licked around paper-dry reeds, she wondered—if it was so, that Kaalha blessed the moths in their suicide—which of the four Great Gods or all the myriad little ones was it to whom men were sacred?

  Heresy, of course. But she was Bijou the Artificer, and while she did not doubt the gods existed, she also thought it likely they had far more sense of humor than the mirthlessness of stern priests would indicate. She had met the Young Bey, and the Old Bey before him she had known very well. She understood that the hierarchy of officials and functionaries did not always reflect the opinions or personality of the one who sat at their titular head. Wouldn’t it be a burden to be a god, and saddled with the upkeep of a cadre of pea-counters and chalice-polishers?

  Warmth spilled across the floor. The child, in the trundle bed beside the hearth, raised its head. “Shh, Emeraude,” Bijou said, and smoothed tangled hair from its brow with a knotted hand. The cold got into her joints of a morning. She felt it all the way to her elbows. But somebody was either going to have to comb the plate mats out of the child’s slick black hair or shave it. Bijou’s hair would mat in long tidy springs, and she had worn it that way since she first walked out of the desert dust and into the still-dusty streets of Messaline.

  She had been young and straight-spined then, a girl with the height of adulthood but still the body of a boy, and she had walked twelve hundred miles—the length of the River from its headwaters in the mountains where she was born—to come to the legended city.

  The city had teemed with donkeys and camels, litter-bearers and sedan chairs and watersellers, and the first bicycles and tintypes had come in while she was still an itinerant magician, making tiny mouse-bone charms for forsaken wives and jeweled bands for forsaking husbands. There had been no airships in those days, no desert-walkers. No electric carts or autorickshaws in the streets. But there had been the father of the Bey, a ne’er-do-well younger son when they met.

  And there had been Kaulas, the Necromancer, as young and beautiful as she.

  The child had not snuggled back down into its pillow, and Bijou reached gently to tug the blankets higher about its fragile collarbones. But it caught her wrist with its remaining hand and held on lightly. The trembling must be emotion, for it could not be from effort, but it was enough to make the long strings of pearls rattle on its wrist.

  Lips pressed tight enough that Bijou glimpsed the outline of teeth behind them, it made a small, hollow, questioning sound. The first sound Bijou had ever heard it make, and she wondered if that were an indication of growing trust, or of extremity.

  She knew what boxes it had been in; knew the moment it came down the ladder festooned in swags of black and copper pearls she had never had the heart to Artifice. Too much coincidence.

  Perhaps the feral child had a Flair. And perhaps the dawn and moonset goddess had sent the child to Bijou, as surely as she had once sent Bijou to Kaulas. Unless that had been Kaulas’s god, red Rakasha, tiger-god of hunger and pestilence and searing summer, of death.

  It was said there was no coincidence in Messaline, where the four gods made their homes. Part of surviving—of thriving—as a Wizard was being aware of the patterns of intention upon which the city hung.

  Moths were sacred to Kaalha. Even the puss-moths, with their terrible venomed threads. Maggots were sacred to Kaalha, too, as were the scarabs and the shining bottle-green blowflies that birthed them; she was the goddess of transformations and borderlines, after all, and the transformation of old death to new life was the most profound transformation of all.

  “Tea, Emeraude, if you are not sleeping?” Bijou reached to pull the weighty iron kettle from the hook, but the child kept its grip on her wrist, so her gesture only served to tug it upright in the bed. “You may keep the pearls?”

  She hadn’t meant to phrase it as a question, but she wasn’t sure if that was what the child was asking, and the child’s black-brown eyes were so wide open, pushing with frustrated questions, that Bijou couldn’t look away.

  The stare held until, in a gesture of profound frustration as eloquent as a cat’s, the child lightly dropped Bijou’s wrist. It stood, bare feet arching and curling on the cold damp floor, and reached past her to lift the kettle. The weight surprised it; Bijou could tell by the startled glance and the way it dragged the child’s shoulder down. The child’s strength in turn surprised Bijou, because although it staggered and listed, it did not drop the kettle. It turned, hugging the cast iron against its left hip, and struggled toward the garden door.

  Thoughtfully gumming her lower lip, Bijou let it go. Feral children were not supposed to adapt so quickly to human care. They could not learn speech, and they could not learn to tolerate human society, or so it was supposed. Although Bijou suspected many of them were mind-hurt, too simple even for household tasks and abandoned by their parents when it became evident that they would never speak or reason or perform their family duties. Whereas the deformity leading to this child’s abandonment was apparent, and physical.

  As was the sharpness of the mind behind its earnest, hopeful eyes. And its desire to be of use. When it came back with the kettle dripping water, it bent double under the weight, nearly dragging it, and moving slowly enough that Bijou met it closer to the door than not. She might be old, but her work kept her strong, and she lifted the kettle easily from the child’s grasp.

  “Thank you, Emeraude,” she said, when the child looked up at her with eyebrows arched in canine worry. Jackal-child, Bijou thought, not for the last time. S
hould it have a Flair, after all, how to determine what it might be? How to encourage it?

  Why had this child been brought to Wizards—to Brazen and Bijou, no less, Wizards of machines and the dead—rather than one of Kaalha’s priests, if the moth-goddess, mirror-goddess wished it saved?

  The child scampered back toward the garden while Bijou arranged the kettle over the flames. A moment later, the rapid patter of footsteps brought her around again. The child came trotting, something fluttering black offered in its upraised hand. Even across the loft, Bijou could smell the rot on it. She would have thought the child had retrieved a corpse from one of the composting trays, but Bijou had placed no ravens in to rot in recent days. “Did you find something dead in the garden, Emeraude?”

  But it was not dead, Bijou saw—and even a Wizard could feel a little horror when the tragic thing stirred faintly, head questing blindly, weakly, across the child’s flat palm. Perhaps the child wanted Bijou to help it, but the bird was beyond aiding. It squirmed with those fat iridescent maggots, the eyes already consumed in the sunken face. A lot of decomposition in such cool weather, when Bijou was as certain as she could be that it had not been in the garden when she had gone out the evening before to make her devotions to the setting moon.

  Careful of the grasping beak—too weak to do much damage, anyway—she lifted the bird from the child’s palm, leaving a maggot or two behind. As automatically as one of Brazen’s Automatons, the child popped the grubs into its mouth and bit down with satisfaction. Jackals would eat anything, and Bijou had consumed her share of raw and roasted insects in her own long lonely walk from the mountains. She did not wince.

  She spread the bird’s wings, and found what she was looking for.

  The suppurating wound, dried pus caked in the feathers about it, at the joint of the left wing and the body. The bird in its final illness could no more have flown than the child could.

  Someone had thrown it over the garden wall.

  And the wound was packed with flower petals.

  “Thank you,” Bijou said, and hooked her cane over her arm so she could break the poor thing’s neck with her thumbs. A quick satisfying pop, and it was dead at last, slack in her hands. Bijou stumped toward the garden and the composting boxes. She’d write to Brazen when that was done.

  “Come along, Emeraude. You need to wash your hands before breakfast.”

  While it is true that notoriety offers certain benefits, it is not by any means confirmed that those benefits compensate for the disadvantages. Or, to put it more succinctly, Brazen found it nearly impossible to move unremarked about his city, as he might have in younger and less infamous years. His flamboyance could be concealed, of course—to be taken off again was half its purpose—and his long fair hair wrapped under a turban. His bulk and breadth—his pale skin and eyes—those were harder to disguise.

  But an inquest into the surreptitious doings of Kaulas the Necromancer was more than could be asked of a functionary, and so Brazen tugged a cloth cap tight over his twisted-up hair while his turban soaked. He drew the wet white fabric from its basin and wrung it out. One end in his teeth, he made two wraps around his head for the underturban, which would cool him when the autumn sun mounted. Though they moved from the killing summer, Rakasha’s season, into autumn—a time of birth and rebirth—still the noontime sun was a danger to the unwary, and Brazen knew he had grown soft in the decades since his own time on the streets.

  But the knowledge never left one.

  The overturban was double-width, three yards in length, a cool blue gauze the air would flow through. Once he had tucked in the trailing ends of the turban, he folded, stretched, and rolled the overturban, using the knob on a chest of drawers as an anchor. He could have asked his valet to tie it for him, but a professional’s touch would show. The man whose persona he was assuming might keep body servants, but a classically trained valet would not be on his list of priorities.

  Brazen wrapped his own turban, five wraps, and smoothed the sharp parallel lines with an ivory paper knife to make them crisp. He was out of practice; it took three tries to make the pinch in the center fall even. Still, he thought, examining his reflection—full-face and profile—it would do.

  The coat he had chosen was nothing like his usual cut velvet or silk in gaudy bird-bright colors. Rather, he shrugged into ankle-long linen, striped from collar to hem in sand and taupe. Dark brown yarn had been picked through the open weave with a darning needle, leaving the woven-in lines defined with dots and dashes.

  Brazen removed his wrist chronometer—his own manufacture, and unmistakable—balanced spectacles he was usually too vain to wear outside the lab on his nose, and stroked his chin in the mirror. It would be better if he had time to grow a beard beyond his tidy goatee, but even so his fair skin would stand out far more than shaven cheeks.

  He grunted at his reflection.

  It would suffice.

  Nevertheless, he slipped a pistol into his sash at the back and hooked a heavy dagger by his right hand. He exited by the servant’s entrance, slipping out in company of the greengrocer’s wagon. He walked alongside in socks and sandals, swinging his staff with each jaunty stride.

  This time, he was not insulated. The scent and the swirl of the streets rose with every turn of the cartwheels, every puff of dust from beneath his feet. Intoxicated, Brazen shrugged wide his arms and drew a deep breath: dung and spices and gutter-reek. Hens fluttered scolding from before a donkey’s hooves, one startling Brazen to amused outcry when it ricocheted from his knees and hurtled, shrieking, into an alley narrower than the span of his arms, where it bounced from wall to wall screaming outrage to any who would hear it. The ravens squatting opportunistically along a nearby roofline answered with harsh choruses of laughter, and the jackals slipping like black-backed shadows along the great stone blocks of leaning foundation walls.

  Even so early, the streets were full to bruising. Brazen’s size gave him some advantage with the crowds; he had his father’s height and broader shoulders and towered over most of Messaline’s population like a medieval siege engine approaching the walls of a city. Still, elderly market women everywhere were notorious for the sharpness of their elbows.

  When seeking information, it was traditional to entertain taverns. And Brazen fully intended to pass through one or two as the afternoon wore by. However, one did not become a Wizard of Messaline without a certain number of favors owed and held and traded, and it was those debts which he first meant to address.

  First, in the marketplace, where Isaak the news-seller sat cobbler-fashion on a striped rug beneath a garden-patterned awning, the horny soles of his feet upturned on thighs like ropes of noodle dough. The water-pipe beside him bubbled softly as Isaak drew a taste of tobacco sweet with intoxicating herbs and let it trickle across his ochre-stained moustache. On one corner of his rug, red and yellow thorn-flowers grew in a copper pot, already blooming in celebration of approaching winter.

  Brazen crouched in the sideways shade of the awning, one hand still upraised on the balancing staff, and tried to give no sign of how his knees protested. “Isaak,” he said, when the news-seller’s eyes swung to focus on him. “A word for an old friend?”

  Isaak offered him the mouthpiece of the water pipe, and Brazen refused it with a gesture. “Thank you, no.”

  Eyebrows rose, but the mouthpiece of the pipe went to its hook, and Isaak lifted his coin bowl. “What do you want, Michael?”

  The simplicity of Brazen’s long-forsaken human name reassured him that Isaak had, in a moment, apprehended the circumstances and chosen to play along. “Carrion,” he said, pitching his voice low. “Pestilence. Things that rot before they’re dead. What do you know about them?”

  Isaak rattled his bowl in answer.

  Smiling, Brazen dropped in two of the Bey’s silver coins and one of his self-minted gold ones.

  “Carrion,” Isaak answered, making the gold and one of the silver coins vanish up his sleeve. “You needn’t look far in M
essaline to find that. It’s the city of jackals, Michael. The city of crows. There’s carrion on every corner, and heads nailed over every gate.”

  “That’s nothing new.” Brazen settled an elbow on his knee, hunkering comfortably. “And news is what I’m paying for.”

  Isaak made a flicking motion with his fingers, as if brushing away flies beside his turbaned head. “Maybe a bit more by way of…direction?”

  Brazen glanced left, over his shoulder, aware how fugitive he must seem. But surely any number of those who visited a news-seller had reason to appear furtive. “After all,” he mocked gently, “how do we learn news for the selling if not from our earlier clients?”

  Isaak reached for the mouthpiece of the hookah and tongued it thoughtfully. He shrugged, a broad fluid gesture that brought one shoulder up to almost brush his ear and rolled the other back in sympathy. “Even my perspicacity has limits, effendi. A little assistance is all I ask. You have, after all—” that same shrug in reverse “—already paid.”

  The coins meant nothing to Brazen. But on his honor as a Messaline, he would get what he bargained for. “The Artificer,” he said. “Myself. Someone is sending us foul little gifts, courtesy of Kaulas the Necromancer or someone who can mimic his work. We are curious to uncover who is employing him.”

  “Is he necessarily employed?”

  Brazen’s spanned fingers tapped his knee lightly, the other hand still resting high on his staff. “It does seem likely. Unless he’s tossing us gangrene cases and stinking corpse-birds out of sheer Wizardly fellow feeling.”

  “One would think the Artificer would find a stinking corpse-bird homely and comforting.” Isaak let the smoke pool behind his teeth. It dripped over his lips when he spoke. The heady scent alone was enough to make Brazen’s eyes water. “Here’s a bit of news, then, that might interest you. The Necromancer—all the jackals of Messaline have a taste for carrion. The street dead have a manner of finding their way to his door.” He raised his chin, tilting his head consideringly up at Brazen. “The ones no one is willing to pay to have decently exposed, anyway.”