Bone and Jewel Creatures bajc-1 Page 5

  Messaline’s dead, the ones with someone to care what became of them, were brought with great ceremony to high towers a mile or so from the city walls, and there laid out for the condors and vultures to feast.

  “The ones that don’t find their way into jackals and feral pigs, anyway,” Brazen said comfortably. “So has the procession of corpses stepped up? Tapered off?”

  “No.” Isaak drew smoke again, tasted it, held it deep, and let it roll off his tongue. “But now, he shops for animals as well. And I have heard from witnesses that his men go among the poorest of the city’s poor, the curs and vagabonds, soliciting for employment. Offering…a great deal of money. And perhaps this summer there seem to be fewer street urchins than in the last.”

  “Is this rumor?” Brazen asked. “Or is it fact?”

  “I know a stonemason, ruined by drink,” Isaak said. He eyed the mouthpiece of the pipe thoughtfully, and hung it up again. “Who came back out of the Necromancer’s employ ruined in the lungs and eyes, as well. He didn’t live a month after.”

  “No one said anything?”

  “Wizards,” Isaak said. “Who are you going to complain to? And when he died, well, a little man came around to ask if the widow would sell his body to the Necromancer.”

  “Of course she did.” Brazen stood, the prop of the staff welcome assistance. His knees minded the standing more than the crouching, which always struck him as perverse.

  “Babies matter more than bodies,” Isaak agreed. “And babies are costly to feed.”

  Brazen nodded. “How much more gold not to share the news of what I asked for, and who was asking?”

  “No charge,” Isaak said. “That, I do for a friend.”

  “And the information?”

  The final silver coin vanished from Isaak’s bowl, proof of a transaction concluded. “Business,” he said, and held the mouthpiece out to Brazen again.

  Brazen accepted, and sealed the deal in smoke.

  The child had its own bed, but most mornings now Bijou awoke with the small thing curled upon her arm. Either that, or with the child burrowing in her covers, hungry and dawn-alert. This morning was no different, and by the time they were fed and the tea was steeping, Brazen had arrived at the door, bearing news and bread from his own kitchen.

  Food nor company much delayed work, in Bijou’s house. While Brazen watched her, Bijou bent wire. The cool tick of the dark variegated pearls the child had pulled from the attic was soothing; she stroked them, rolling their faint grittiness under her fingertips.

  The armature was almost complete. With meticulous attention, Bijou had taken the clean bones and capped the ends in silver, chased each in filigree, and hinged them strongly. Articulating the hand and fingers was more challenging; the bones needed to roll and flex complexly. But the hand of a person was not so different from Lucy’s hand—or foot for that matter—and Bijou had made more complicated things.

  While Brazen told her what he had deduced of Kaulas’s new activities, Bijou hunched over her bench, checking the knots on each silk-strung pearl, lifting moonstone and chrysoprase in jeweler’s tweezers and setting them along the back of each finger so they glittered like stacked rings. She thought the child might wear a glove on the hand, eventually, if it wished to conceal the prosthesis.

  Or, if it did wind up a Wizard, folk expected stranger things of those than a jeweled skeleton-hand.

  “However,” Brazen concluded, “none of this explains why Kaulas might go to such lengths to make certain you and I get involved. Because I’m as certain as I have ever been of anything that he sent your new apprentice”—Bijou snorted—“to my door so that I would discover what he was about. Although I flatter myself that I might have noticed eventually.”

  It occurred to Bijou, as she brushed adhesive deep within a setting, that she was taking on a responsibility she might not live to see complete. Her experience of children suggested that they had a tendency to grow. A prosthesis designed from the bones of a six-year-old would be of no use to the same child at fifteen.

  “You are going to have to make the next one for it,” she said to Brazen, without lifting her head. A snake-lock fell across her face; she stuffed it behind an ear and idly scratched her arm where the skin was dry and ashy. Palm oil tonight; she would slather herself in it, then scrape it off with the wooden paddle.

  “Excuse me?” he said.

  “The next arm.” Her gesture took in the structure laid out on the table before her. “You are going to have to construct it. You can’t take in a stray and then abandon it. It’s a betrayal of trust. Once you claim a thing, it’s yours.”

  “But—” He gestured at her, at the bed by the fire, the unused cage with the door standing open.

  Now she did turn to him, pulling her shoulders back as far as they would go against the hunch of her collapsing spine. Bijou had seen enough skeletons to have an idea what the bones looked like under the skin. What a pity she could not cut herself open, she thought, and wire in an armature to replace crumbling bone. She could build a trunk for Hawti—the elephant stood now, idly poking the fire before laying more fuel on the coals—but her own body’s failures were beyond her to repair.

  “Brazen,” she said, “I’m not going to be here.”

  He framed the denial, but he was a Wizard, and you did not become a Wizard of Messaline by denying hard truth. She saw him choose to nod and accept what she had said. All there is or will ever be, she thought. It won’t be so long until it’s you bidding the next generation farewell. This is your student, not mine.

  Yes, that was it. She rubbed aching hands and said it. “This is your student, not mine. I’ve done my raising up a Wizard. I’ve given my heir to the world. Emeraude is yours.”

  His eyebrows rose. “A crippled feral who cannot speak?”

  “The son of the man who betrayed me?”

  “Ouch,” he said, elaborately. “No son by any means but blood, I assure you. I would be my mother’s child if I could be anything, though I never knew her.”

  Bijou smiled, both because she saw the pang as he experienced it, and because she missed his mother as well. “I forgive you. But the child is yours. When the time comes for an heir, Brazen, we take what the gods provide. There are no coincidences in the city of jackals.”

  “Which brings us back to Kaulas, and what he wants from us.”

  “Oh, that’s obvious,” Bijou said. She bent the prongs down over the final stone, and nudged it to see if it rattled. The cement had set; she thought it would stand up even to a child’s antics.

  “Obvious?” Brazen rose from the low sling chair he had been occupying, and came to stand beside her. Towering over her, honestly, but head bowed and curiously diffident. Of course he had brought her the hurt thing he found, she thought, with a roll of affection. He would think she could fix anything.

  It would break her heart to disabuse him.

  “Emeraude!” Bijou called, tipping her head away from the Enchanter at her shoulder. He was taller, and her voice was feeble with age, but it was still impolite to shout in someone’s ear.

  “What’s obvious, Bijou?”

  The patter of bare feet heralded the child’s arrival at a lunge. Its face and hand were smeared with the composted and irrigated earth of the garden. Bijou decided she would be just as happy not to know what it had found to eat.

  Her own jackal years might be too far behind her after all.

  The child skittered to a halt beside her and dropped to a crouch at her feet. Both submissive, and out of easy reach for an old woman. Oh, yes, the little thing was cunning.

  “What he’s always wanted,” she said. “Our attention. Kaulas wants us to come to him,” she said. “He’s baiting us along his trail of crumbs. I’m sure puss-moth is not the only venom he has to induce necrosis, but moths are sacred to Kaalha, and the lady of moths is the goddess I follow, as much as I follow any goddess at all. He knows that; he knows she brought me safe across the desert. So he sends you a child as a me
ssage to me, which tells me both that he means to exploit our relationship with each other, and that he hasn’t forgiven either you or I for walking away from him.”

  Brazen wore an expression she knew of old, a line between the brows, one corner of his mouth curled up into the sandy fringe of his moustache. It boded ill for whoever had put it there. “So do we give the old bastard what he wants?”

  “Oh, I think if he wants us that badly, he can come to us,” Bijou said. She clucked to the child. “Come, stand up, Emeraude. I have a pretty toy for you to try.”

  Four

  It clicks. Over and over, with every tiny movement, every breath, every shift of weight. It’s a working hand, with working fingers, no heavier than the real dead arm it replaces, deft and quick. All the cub can think of is the fingers. The fingers that move, quick and fluid, that grasp whatever the cub wishes grasped, that grab and turn and rotate from the wrist to take hold anywhere.

  It’s a hand.

  And the old creature has given it to the cub.

  There’s no mistake about the gift; the cub knows diffidence, the sidelong glances that one offers to see if the present has been accepted. If the alliance has been forged. I offer you something of value to show you that I will sacrifice to make you part of my pack. You bring value; I offer value to acknowledge that. We will be a team.

  It knows from the brothers-and-sisters how this works, how the offer of a gift leads to cooperation and shared labor. The food wasn’t a gift, not in the same way. The food was charity.

  But the old creature is shy about the arm, and that means it’s an offering.

  It clicks. It sparkles. It rattles. Very faintly, but too much noise to hunt with. Which means the old creature does not think the cub will need to hunt, because the old creature is clever and would have thought of that. And so many of the old creature’s pack are decorated, noisy, strung with sparkles, ringing with bells.

  They are a strong pack. They do not skulk; they parade like lions, like returning warriors.

  The cub wants to be a part of this pack. It sits at the old creature’s feet as the old creature and the pale-streaked creature talk, and it holds the arm to its chest and rocks on its haunches. Its eyes sting.

  Every so often the old creature reaches down to stroke the cub’s hair and ears. The other cubs never had weak eyes that watered in pain, or in pleasure. Only this cub. The cub won’t whimper, but the tears leak down its cheeks in slow parades.

  It could have a place in this pack.

  It has a place in this pack.

  But it has a pack already, and the brothers-and-sisters are somewhere out there.

  There is only one solution that the cub can determine. And so, that night, when the old creature snores heavily in its warm, draped alcove, the cub eases from its bed, slides the warm covers taut as the old creature has showed it, and slowly, with great care for silence, pulls the pin with its left hand, removes the new arm from its stump, and lays it out across the bed.

  There. No-one would leave such a gift behind if they did not intend to return for it. It’s a cache, and a cache in the territory of the cub’s new pack. The old creature and the bone creatures will know that the cub is not going far, and that it will be back soon to rejoin them.

  Overhead, the slow rattle of the slow-creature’s claws among the rafters is the only sound. Even the crab-artifices and the brooch-spiders make no sound in the midnight and chill, though they leave dark tracks stirred through the dew on the floors. As the cub passes toward the side door, the enormous bone-creature with the snake on its face reaches out and strokes the cub’s hair.

  The cub slips into the side garden, and from there, over the wall.

  Bijou woke naturally, a little after sunrise, that small habit already grown foreign. For a moment she stretched, wondering why the child had not arrived to burrow her out from under the covers, demanding breakfast like a cat. Then, painfully, with Lucy’s assistance, she commenced the elaborate feat of rising from her bed.

  The chill morning had dewed the loft, but early heat was already drying the stones. Still, enough water remained that Bijou’s feet and robes smeared a trail behind her. When she pushed the drapes aside and stepped from her sleeping alcove, she noticed at once a similar trail left by the child.

  And the inexpertly-made bed, and the object glittering upon it.

  Leaning on her cane, hips and knees grinding with morning stiffness that lasted into the evening now, Bijou hobbled towards the hearth and the child’s bed. The arm lay across the covers at a perfect right-angle to the bedstead, precise as if measured. Hawti hulked in the shadows by the fire where the gray morning light did not yet reach, bone and metal limned dying red by the faint glow of banked coals. It seemed impossible that such a vast creature could huddle into such a miserable small bundle.

  “It’s all right,” Bijou said, patting the giant Artifice on one sharp-slanted shoulderblade. “It’s not in the garden, is it?”

  Hawti rocked from leg to leg, disconsolate, and Bijou thought if it had the power, it would be keening. “Shhh,” Bijou said. She stumped around the bed once, but did not touch the jeweled arm that lay, pale and hurtful, in the shallow morning light. She followed the trail into the side-garden, and there found the bent stems of rose brambles, a little blood and hair and some fibers from the child’s smock caught among the thorns. She would not have thought anyone could climb them.

  She had underestimated people before.

  As she leaned upon her cane with both hands, waiting for direct sun to creep over the wall and warm her hair, Bijou considered. One possibility was that the child served Kaulas and that it had returned to him. But if that were so, there was no reason for it to leave behind the arm. To obtain a sample of Bijou’s best and current work could only serve the Necromancer. True, Bijou might be able to trace the Artifice—but Kaulas had to assume that Bijou knew where he lived.

  The child could not speak, unless it had somehow been ensorceled to silence—and Bijou comforted herself that she retained a good understanding of the limits of Kaulas’s powers. She did not think it likely. And what good was a spy who could make no report?

  The sun had not reached her yet, but the spatter of tiny moving reflections among the curl-leafed but November-blooming roses told her it had painted the top of the arched doorway and that Lazybones hung from its hooks just within, watching over her. Or, at least, watching over her shoulder.

  She was fond of the sloth, an exotic skeleton brought back for her from a distant land. It had not proven any usefulness, unlike Lucy or Catherine or Lupe or Hawti—or Ambrosias, first and most loved of her creatures still—but it moved with such meticulous precision, and it glittered so in the light, and it always seemed so interested in anything that might be going on.

  She turned to look and it lowered itself like a geared Automaton from the rafters, dangling from awkward-jointed legs until its foreclaws swung low enough to brush Bijou’s head, if she had walked under it. It reached out a claw; she extended her hand in turn, brushing knuckles against its hooks.

  It was also possible that the child had been meant to serve as a distraction, to keep Brazen and herself occupied while Kaulas carried out his plan. That seemed likelier.

  A distraction. A diversion.

  Or a test.

  What would Bijou and Brazen do, when confronted with his handiwork? How would they react?

  Of what were they capable?

  In the back garden, something rattled hard, like a mallet thumping the lid of a box. Bijou startled, back protesting as she jerked upright. Lazybones began the incremental process of winching itself back into the rafters, and she hurried under—what passed for her hurrying, now, which might also explain the sense of kinship she felt with Lazybones. The scrape of her feet across the floor, the thump of her cane—she moved a little faster than the mirrored, rattling animal in the rafters, but not by much, and never so gracefully.

  She did not need to command her Artifices when she moved with s
uch intention towards an unidentified sound. Ambrosias scurried before her, rib-legs clattering like the rhythm sticks of her childhood. The flapping shadow of Catherine’s broad wings passed over, and Bijou could almost feel the shift in the earth underfoot as Lupe, Lucy, and Hawti came along behind, single-file to pass through the ranks of work benches and then fanning out behind and alongside.

  In the garden, the birds that sang and quarreled by the pedestal bath went still and crouched in the shadow of Catherine’s wings. The condor flew only ponderously without an updraft, but the heavy struggling passage of its wings was enough to bear it to the back garden wall. It landed on outstretched talons and turned heavily, waddling, to face the inside court again. Ambrosias was almost as swift, racing up the wall beside the composting boxes and clinging there, curved and then straight like an osteoid glyph of the letter kha.

  The hammering—frantic staccato flurries, now, separated by brief listening pauses—came from inside the box into which Bijou had placed the dead crow. “Hawti,” Bijou said, taking a step back.

  The Artifice reached a boa-constrictor-spine trunk over Bijou’s shoulder, pendant teardrop pearls and glittering marcasites sliding cool over skin as they brushed her neck. Gently, in a gap between noises, the tip of the trunk nudged the latch on the box open, and lifted up the lid.

  A stench and a bundle of flailing black plumage burst from the box, shedding feathers and globs of rotten meat. The dead bird beat for altitude, a blur of frenetic activity, rising to the top of the garden wall while Bijou was still staggering a half-step that might have landed her, seriously injured, on her back if Lucy had not caught her in a bony arm and steadied her against a massive shoulder. Bijou squeaked, a shrill girl’s noise, absolutely undignified in a ninety-six-year-old Wizard.

  The dead bird bobbed on the air for an instant, as if seeking a direction, and then Catherine struck from off the wall, falling upon the smaller creature like a stone hurled from a siege engine. The silk-and-feather wings of the condor Artifice snapped on the air like shaken dresses, and both birds hit the ground beside the path in a tangle of beaks and plumage.