Bone and Jewel Creatures bajc-1 Read online

  It stared at her as if it were a physical effort to drag its dilated eyes from the sun-stroked blades—stared at her as if it could stare through her, in fact. And then, face contracting in a wince, it uncurled the clenched fingers, dropped from among the rose canes, and bolted across the grass to throw itself into Bijou’s robes.

  “Shh.” Bijou stroked its matted hair, and barricaded it against her with the stem of her cane. “Shh, shh.”

  It didn’t weep, and it stayed silent as the grave, as always, but the weary strength with which it hugged her legs surprised her. As did the abruptness with which it pulled back, and then scampered between her and Brazen, running on all three limbs to the front door. Uncertainly, the kapikulu stationed there looked to Bijou rather than stopping it, thought it scrabbled at the bar.

  “Emeraude,” Bijou said, “wait. Wait, child.”

  The child was not quite frantic. It listened, or if it didn’t listen, at least it paused, though its small hand stayed clutched on the bar. Bijou was struck by that hand, by the delicacy of it, the way the skin stretched taut over bones and tendons defined as if carved in yellow ivory. Her own must have been that way once, if a darker version. Bijou shuffled faster, her robes sweeping abound her, brushing the legs of a pair of benches as she sailed between them. The floor bruised the soles of her feet, pressing retained fluid out of turgid flesh, and her cane thumped a hard staccato on the stones.

  Of course Brazen overtook her. And without a glance for permission, gently pushed the child aside—it bared teeth at him, but did not slap or snap or struggle—and closed callused hands as unlike the child’s as hands could be upon the bar.

  “And if it’s Kaulas’?” Bijou said.

  “Do you think it is?”

  Bijou looked at the child and gummed her lip, thinking of the way it had shivered under her touch. “No,” she said. She went to the child and held its shoulder to restrain it.

  Brazen stepped back with the bar in his hands and let the kapikulu crack the door. The child, as Bijou had anticipated, strained toward it, and Bijou tightened her grip and crooned, “Shhh. Shh.” She turned her head and called, “Lupe! Hawti!”

  The rustle of bells and the tick of bone and metal told her they were coming.

  Brazen, flanked by one of the kapikulu, leaned into the gap of the just-opened door.

  “What do you see?” Bijou asked.

  “Nothing,” he said. “My carriage. The street.” He looked up, and side to side, maintaining cover. It would be a difficult shot, with rifle or with bow and arrow. But a difficult shot was not impossible.

  “Brazen,” Bijou said, calmly, “I cannot replace you.”

  “Of course,” he said, and leaned back out of the gap, flattening his back against the wall beside the door. A kapikulu rested one hand on the door-pull, and maintained a position as sentry. “What do we do?”

  Bijou looked down at the child, thinner than when it had left, fine bones sharp through the fragile skin of its face.

  She lifted her hand. “Let it go.”

  The child jumped as if shocked at the release of pressure, and glanced up at Bijou in amazement. “You didn’t come tearing back in here just to get the door open,” Bijou said. “You want to bring in a friend who can’t get over the wall, right? Well, go get them.”

  She would never know how much of that speech the child understood—none of it, if she had to guess—but it must have grasped the tone of warm encouragement. It hared forward, head ducked, eeling through the narrow crack, and vanishing in a patter of running feet just as Hawti and Lupe reached Bijou.

  Bijou closed her eyes—despite all age had robbed her of, her ears were perfect still—and a moment later, heard the feet returning, slower now and heavier, as if the child were burdened. The sentry kapikulu jerked the door wider, still blocking it with his foot at a little more than the width of a body. The child staggered through, clutching something against its chest, cradled close in the undamaged arm and stabilized by the stump. A dog?

  A jackal.

  Bijou was reaching for it when the stench hit her, a reek as strong as when Brazen had first brought the child. “Emeraude.”

  The child didn’t answer, but it turned to her, sagging to its knees in a slow-motion collapse until it lay the jackal on the floor and slid its hand out from under. Bijou crouched across from it, the animal sprawled glassy-eyed between them, and said, “Brazen, get Emeraude its arm, please?”

  Silent as the child, he turned with short, thoughtful steps and went to the bed. He brought Bijou the child’s prosthesis.

  Bijou extended it to the child.

  There was no staring moment of doubt: the child only grabbed the arm and slid its stump gratefully into the cuff, tightening the buckles with its teeth and setting in the pin. It shook the arm, as if to seat it properly, and Bijou heard the bony fingers rattle, the stones clack against stones. And then the child reached out, right-handed, and took Bijou’s wrist and pulled her hand to the wound in the jackal’s agouti flank.

  “Hold its head, Emeraude,” Bijou said. “I don’t want to get bitten.”

  The child furrowed its brow, head cocked like a confused but urgently listening dog. Bijou gently shook its hand from her wrist and pointed to the jackal’s head. “Hold the head down. Brazen, get its feet, please?”

  Brazen’s actions seemed to give the child the clue it needed to follow Bijou’s instructions. Gently, crooning—a sound new as the first sound in the world when it fell from the child’s throat—the child laid its artifice hand upon the jackal’s neck below the ears and pressed down with all its little weight.

  Bijou sent Lucy for cloths and hot water and began to clean the wound.

  Hard experience told Bijou what she would find when she parted the jackal’s pelt. The flesh was hot and inflamed, slick with the infection, and when she smoothed a wet cloth across it the fur came away in crusted tufts. The wound was ragged, scoured by maggots. “Oh, child,” Bijou said. “I don’t know what we’re going to do for your friend.”

  “Sir,” said the sentry, and then waited for Brazen to acknowledge him before continuing, “there’s about six more of them in the street. With puppies.”

  Bijou glanced at the child, but the child had eyes only for the jackal. “By all means,” Bijou said. “Show them in.”

  The wound was nowhere Bijou could amputate, and so Bijou had Brazen lift the jackal to one of her work benches while its packmates skulked in alcoves and under tables and flitted behind lawn furniture in the back and side gardens. While the child soothed the animal and Brazen and Lucy helped restrain it, Bijou debrided the wound, placing maggots and flower petals in shallow bowls for later sorting. She hated to waste good maggots.

  It was better than it could have been. Other than in the immediate vicinity of the injury, the flesh was cool, and the maggots had nibbled uninfected muscle clean in the deepest parts of the injury. Under all the rot was something she had half-expected; a silver pellet with a soldered seam around the middle, imbedded deep in the muscle tissue. She set that aside in a dish, separate from the maggots and the puss-moth threads and flower petals. She would deal with it in a moment.

  For now, Bijou peeled back necrotic tissue around the edges and irrigated the wound with spirits of wine, which made the jackal shriek and snap and thrash, and the child—whose hands, bone and flesh, were full of struggling animal—stare up at Bijou’s face worriedly.

  But that was all it took. All she could do, other than packing the wound with spiderwebs and honey and bandaging it with clean boiled cloth. “We’re lucky,” Bijou said. “It was a fresh infection. But I don’t know if that got it out.” She glanced at the hearth, at the fire.

  She didn’t say, we should burn it out. But Brazen nodded. “We can give it opium first. If that would make it easier.”

  “Thank you,” Bijou said. “And if that’s not enough either?”

  “We have a cage,” Brazen reminded, jerking his chin towards the wheeled apparatus the chi
ld had arrived in.

  “To keep it quiet and away from the others,” Bijou said. “So we have half a chance of keeping its bandages on.”

  “And so if it wakes up dead tomorrow morning, there’s a chance of it not flying at the throat of the first one of us it sees. Do you supposed the infection is spread by biting?”

  “Like hydrophobia?” Bijou laid her tools across the bottom of an iron pot, for boiling. “No. Every sufferer we have seen has had the same foreign matter in the infected wounds. He is doing this himself. And then sending us the afflicted.”

  “So we’ll know he’s coming for us,” Brazen said. He shrugged, streaked locks moving over his gaudily-clad shoulders. “Why now?”

  Bijou, having known the Necromancer very well, once upon a time, sucked her gums and said, “Fetch me my fine-tipped pliers and the snips, please, Brazen?”

  It was decades since he had been her apprentice, but her tools still hung in the same place. In some cases, they were the same tools. He was back in only moments with the pliers, which he laid into her hand.

  She lifted the silver pellet between them. Brazen held the magnifier for her without being asked while, with the snips, she opened the pellet along the seam. As she had expected, a curl of parchment wedged inside. She lifted it free and smoothed it open, careful not to touch anything with bare fingers.

  Neat and precise in black ink, it contained a drawing of a scarab.

  When Bijou snorted, the parchment fluttered. “Of course, you old bastard. It wouldn’t be any fun if I didn’t know.”

  Bone scraped bone inside the joints, but her hand was firm as she dropped the parchment and the pellet into another shallow dish and set in place a silver lid that chimed. She lay her tools aside and stood, staring, at her own twisted fingers.

  “Bijou?”

  She lifted her chin, but didn’t manage to drag her gaze any higher than Brazen’s chest.

  “What do you know?” he asked.

  “Funny,” she said. “I was just about to ask you the same thing. What do you know?”

  “About what?”

  It was too much effort holding her head up. “About how the Young Bey’s father got to be Bey before him.”

  “Funny,” Brazen echoed. “Not much. You never did like to talk about it.”

  “Right,” she said. “Let me cauterize this wound, and then go and make some tea, and I’ll tell you all about it.”

  He laid a hand upon her wrist. “The kapikulu can make your tea tonight, Bijou.”

  When the room stank of scorched hair and flesh and the jackal slept in the child’s old cage, Brazen and Bijou sat on stools beside the fire together. The child curled on a rug with its back against Bijou’s knees. Brazen watched her hands as she spoke, because she had to keep shifting her eyes away from his.

  “Before you were born,” she said, stroking the child’s matted hair, “your father left me for a foreign Sorceress.”

  “My mother.”

  Bijou’s old face creased. “After a fashion.”

  A surge of emotion silenced Brazen, almost blinded him. Bijou, he knew, would believe it pity—and find it intolerable. So he did not touch her, even to lay a hand on her shoulder or push back the forbidding snakes of her hair.

  He held in a breath while he thought, then said softly, “You were my mother in every manner that mattered.”

  It was not a lie. She was the only mother that mattered. Any other longing he might feel was only a child’s fantasy.

  “I did not mean to provoke reassurances,” she said, without looking at him. But he saw how her chin lifted, and the small straightening of her spine. “What I meant was that she died before she could birth you. Your mother had the ear of all crawling things, every beast that creeps with its belly to the earth, and that was her power. Her name of craft was Salamander, but I knew her first-name, and she was Wove to me.”

  Her voice had taken on a sing-song quality, something of a chant such as you might hear of a storyteller from her distant long-forsaken homeland. Brazen did not interrupt her; he dared not, when she was bringing him this gift of memory. But he let his lips move on the word, the name he had never before heard.

  Wove.

  His mother’s name, and a gift of power.

  “She named me Michael?” he asked, because it was important to him, suddenly, to know.

  Bijou shook her head. “That was your father’s choice.”

  She paused, as if to give him a moment to collect himself, and now she turned her head to look at him directly. When his focus returned to her, she again looked down and spoke.

  “We were adventurers, Brazen. Salamander and Kaulas and the Old Bey, who was but Prince Salih in those days. We fought in the name of the old Old Bey, for it was not expected that Prince Salih would inherit his father’s title. He was a younger son, you see.”

  Her pause might have been to gather her thoughts, but Brazen felt the need to fill it. “I did not know that. I mean, I knew there had been a quarrel when the Old Bey came to power, because the old Old Bey’s advisors in their wisdom chose to pass over Prince Salih’s brother and give the title to Prince Salih. But I did not know—”

  “It was our quarrel,” Bijou said.

  This time, Brazen left the silence empty.

  She filled it, after a time. “Salamander and Kaulas and I stood with the Old Bey against his brother. Kaulas had spurned me to pursue Salamander, but she and I were sisters-of-decision and we had agreed that he would not come between us. When the Old Bey’s brother came against us, she was swollen with Kaulas’ child—with you, Brazen.”

  “Were you not angry?” he asked.

  She managed to hold his gaze when she looked up again. “Wove and I had decided to raise the child together.”

  Brazen’s heart shivered in his chest like a watch gear. “That’s not what happened.”

  “She died,” Bijou said. “She died, and Kaulas—he arranged things. So that you could be carried to term. Or near enough.”

  “Vajhir,” Brazen breathed. “Kaulas the Necromancer. No, he never told me. How…”

  “How did he do it?”

  “How long?”

  “Eight weeks,” Bijou said. “I stayed with her.”

  Brazen wanted to ask, as if in asking he could force her to deny the implications of what she said. As if he could rewrite history and make it somehow less terrible. “She knew what had happened?”

  Bijou smiled. “She knew she was dead. But she gave you life, my dear, and named you. She named you Harun. It was your first name, and your true name, and your father never knew it. And when you had eight years, you came to live with me.”

  She reached out and patted his hand with her dry, horny one. “I know why he’s chosen now. It’s because he and I are dying. And he’s not the sort to let nature take its course.”

  “You think he’s using what he takes from his abominations to feed his own strength.”

  “It’s the obvious thaumaturgy, isn’t it?” She gestured to the covered dishes of putrescence still set on her workbench. “It is traditional for wizards to struggle mightily once their time approaches. And I admit, I don’t like dying very much myself. But I look forward to Death herself, once the dying is over.”

  “So how do we answer?”

  Bijou smiled. “We bring the fight into the street. Unless you have a better plan?”

  She looked at Brazen. Brazen shrugged helplessly.

  “Then we do it my way,” she said.

  He squeezed her hand. “When this is over, I want you and the child to come and stay with me.”

  “But darling,” Bijou answered. “Where would I keep the elephant?”

  While the other bone and jewel creatures, even down to the scuttling crab-carapaces, dispersed upon the errand Bijou set them, Hawti helped Brazen tote another procession of chests and crates from his carriage.

  And Bijou arrayed herself for war. She bound her hair back with jeweled scarabs which sunk their legs deep in the
snaky locks, and she garbed herself in trousers and coat like a man. When she had been young and dressed as a boy, men had stared. Now, her waist bulged rather than nipping in; her buttocks were more like saddlebags than peaches. It didn’t matter; Brazen wasn’t a man to her, any more than he had given any indication that he thought of her as a woman.

  For which mercy she thanked Iashti, the patron of spring and increase, profusely—even if Iashti was not her particular goddess, or one that Bijou had ever found much use for.

  She had hoped it might be some hours before her creatures returned, but it was not to be. The crabs first, dragging a struggling, stinking pigeon between them, which Bijou had to net because she did not care to touch it. However much it fought, the bird was long-dead, and Bijou set it to boil.

  The silver mackerel-tabby alley cat Ambrosias returned with was not so lucky. Or perhaps luckier, as it was still alive when Bijou got to it, though both of its forepaws were nearly skeletonized. “Hideous,” Brazen said, but Bijou only scratched beneath its chin while he fetched her scalpels.

  It purred for her. “Who’s a sweet puss?” she said. It rubbed its cheek against her fingers.

  Brazen shook his head. “You are a strange woman.”

  “It’s not the cat’s fault. Come hold it down.”

  Brazen watched her work, and wished there were some way he could save her. The drag of exhaustion came in the first hours. As the work milled on, her hands—so firm—began to tremble. Brazen built an elevating stool for her so she could sit by her table rather than standing, and while she performed her surgeries, he was the one who wired and soldered and made tiny delicate armatures. They were not, of course, the armatures that Bijou would have constructed—hers, for one thing, would not have been built around minuscule hydraulics and infinitesimal pistons, but Brazen did not build with living things—but she did not seem unpleased by them. She reached up to pat his shoulder, rather, and grinned bravely when he showed her how they articulated.

  The smile wore hard. As if it pinched her cheeks. He imagined if she didn’t prop her face up with it she might crumble. Fingers moved gently along the incomplete, pipestem-thin brass tubes of the cats-paws until she found a place where the pressure of her thumb made the paw flex wide, and razor-fine steel talons slide from oiled sheaths.