Bone and Jewel Creatures bajc-1 Page 9

  “Kaulas,” she said, when she thought he was close enough to hear her. He was certainly close enough for the stench to carry.

  He came a few strides closer before he halted, as if to prove she could not make him hesitate. No surprise there, she thought. She never could.

  The jeweled insect brooches in her hair danced in anticipation. “Kaulas,” she said again. “Don’t pretend that you can’t hear me.”

  In defiance of the desert, Kaulas wore black: a flapping-tailed northern coat and trousers over a crisp white shirt tied at the collar in a bow. Bijou looked at his hard-planed cheeks, the sagging line of what had been a beautiful jaw. She had had one of her own, once upon a time. She might have lifted a hand to brush her wattled throat, but she would not give Kaulas the satisfaction of seeing her fidget.

  “Well,” she said, “You have my attention. For once. What did you plan to do with it?”

  “Keep it,” he said.

  One bony hand made an elegant gesture, and something came forward from the press of animate dead behind him. A woman, Bijou thought at first. Though she came walking slowly, veiled as if against the desert dust and heat, Bijou knew her walk. Though it had been a sorcerer’s lifetime since Bijou bid her farewell, she knew the tilt of her head.

  “I destroyed that,” Bijou said, as the corpse of a woman once named Wove paused beside Kaulas and lifted her veil from her moth-pale hair. “I destroyed that.”

  “I certainly let you think so,” Kaulas said. He turned his face away as if he were shutting a door. “Brazen, won’t you come meet your mother, my son?”

  He moved, of course. How could he not? She was beautiful as the day she died, her face waxen, expressionless under the powder that loaned it a semblance of the glow of life. She stared at Bijou through clouded eyes, lashes half-lowered, and Brazen first took two steps back and then, as if unwilling, one forward.

  And then another.

  His jaw worked. His voice creaked as he never would have permitted one of his constructs to creak. “Let her go,” he said. “You may own everything else in Messaline, old man. But don’t think you’re going to own me that way.”

  Kaulas rubbed left fingers against his palm as if assessing a handful of soil. When he looked up from the gesture, he smiled a little, self-deprecating. “Come here and I’ll let her go.”

  “Don’t do it,” Bijou said. She cracked the ferrule of her cane against the stones and Brazen’s head finally turned, though she wasn’t sure his eyes focused on her. His expression was terrible with yearning and rage.

  “Brazen,” Bijou said, and prayed not to the gods but to Wove that Wove, on behalf of her son, would forgive her. “She’s just bait. She’s just one of his dead things. That’s not her, she doesn’t know what he’s done to her.”

  Brazen smiled. “You told me the truth already, Bijou.” When he had spoken, he did not turn away, but kept his eyes on her face. Bijou reached to clutch his sleeve. As if she were nothing, he moved one more step towards Kaulas, using the arm she was not clutching to gesture his kapikulu back.

  “Wove,” Brazen said. He still did not take his eyes off Bijou. “What was it that you named me, before I took the name Brazen?”

  Bijou heard the fibers of his sleeve snap under her fingernails. She felt a held breath still in him, and looked up to see Wove turn her head to stare at Kaulas, waiting his command.

  “Brazen,” Bijou said, “he is only trying to own you.”

  “I know what I’m doing,” Brazen whispered. Bijou shook her head. How could he?

  “Answer your son, my dear,” Kaulas said.

  Her voice might have been huskier than when she was alive, or—just as easily—it could be Bijou’s recollection that was at fault. It was, however, still fluid and musical. The difference was that the Wove Bijou remembered was not grateful to receive orders.

  “I named you Harun,” she said. “I only told your name to Bijou.”

  “You’re her,” Brazen said, and shook Bijou’s hand from his arm as he started forward.

  Bijou knew the set of his shoulders. No argument would call him back now, from whatever he was planning.

  So she pulled the hammer from her sash and hurled it full in Kaulas’ face.

  He ducked aside. He must have been expecting it—oh, they knew each other well, the woman whose name meant Jewel and the man whose name meant Ashes—and her hammer sailed past him to vanish among the dead. But all she needed was the moment’s break in his concentration.

  Lucy surged forward to catch Brazen up and drag him back behind the line. He kicked, but it lifted him by the elbows and swung him clear, his striped caftan swirling about his ankles. Bijou feared that he would set his constructs on her Artifices, or that the kapikulu would hack at Lucy, who Bijou could not allow to defend herself. But Brazen yelled them back between curses—“We cannot fight amongst ourselves!”—then turned his wrath on Bijou.

  “Damn you,” he yelled. “Did you think me ensorceled?”

  Kaulas lifted up one gloved hand and sent his dead things forward.

  It was a matter of instants for the faceoff to become a skirmish and for Brazen’s invective to become protectiveness. He grabbed Bijou’s elbow as the bone and jewel creatures hurled themselves forward, flanked by the jackals and Brazen’s hissing constructs and the whirling kapikulu like a storm of skirted coats and swords. The kapikulu shrieked like a rising wind and the artifices rang with bells and clattered like marionettes or whistled and clanked and hissed with steam, but the dead and the jackals made no sound at all.

  The street flowed with rot and blood, with machine oil and scalding water. Bijou kept her head down, stumping backwards on her cane, letting Hawti come before her as a shield. She lost track of the others—here, Catherine’s ragged wings; there, Ambrosius clotted with gelled blood—and now Brazen seemed done with fighting Lucy. The gorilla looked at Bijou for instruction.

  “Put him down,” Bijou said, and when that was finished she motioned Lucy into the fray, though she winced to do it. She heard the clash of metal and bone. Somewhere out there, the dead were armed. And somewhere out there, her Artifices were wounded.

  She leaned on Brazen’s arm, gasping, and let him drag her into an eddy behind the combat. Before them, Hawti rattled its trunk and waded forward, laying about itself with tusks and feet. Bijou saw it totter, saw it rock and tumble sideways as the dead pulled it down. She saw limbs and gore hurled as it thrashed, rending the rotting enemy even as they levered up cobbles with which to smash its bones.

  “Emeraude,” Bijou said, realizing the child had slipped forward into the fight. “Emeraude!”

  Now it was Brazen’s turn to pull her aside. Something big rattled past them, brass and iron, thick fluid leaking from every joint. She kicked him sharply in the shins; he lifted her up on tiptoe and pushed her back against the wall. “Bijou, dammit—”

  “The child,” she said, and he turned to search over his shoulder.

  “I don’t—”

  Kaulas’ voice boomed out of the fight like a cavalry trumpet. “Bijou, call off your dogs or your little rat dies!”

  She would never know how she broke free of Brazen. Panic strength, and it didn’t matter that he was protecting her. She left rags of cloth clenched in his fingers as she staggered past him, plunging into the thick of the fight, shouting already. “Let it go, Kaulas, or I swear I’ll shoe it in your guts.”

  There’s a knife at the cub’s neck, sharp enough to freeze it in place instinctively. It knows if it twists, the blade will cut it. It knows if it fights, the enemy will slash its throat.

  And so it hangs in his grip and pretends to be helpless, and waits for its moment.

  Not too far off, the father crouches over the mother’s body, and the mother does not move. The cub feels that like a bee sting inside it whenever it lets its eyes roll that way, but the bee sting hurts and distracts it, so instead it pins its gaze on the face of the enemy. It’s a man, just an old man with a raven skeleton on its s
houlder, and it’s not even looking at the cub, or the father, or anything. It looks past the father, at something the cub can’t turn its head far enough to see.

  But the cub can hear it. Spitting like a caged lioness, lurching across uneven stones as if its weary feet never slowed it, the old creature charges into view. It checks the length of a short leap from the enemy and pauses there, still as stone.

  It snarls and the enemy makes some noise back that should sound like pleading but isn’t, it’s gloating. The other creature, the loud one with the garish colors, appears behind the old creature and grabs its black sleeve. The old creature makes a soft brief noise, though, and the loud one puffs up like it took a big breath and then lets go again as it deflates.

  The father growls low in his throat when the enemy turns towards him. The mother does not move. The cub must—really must—stop looking.

  The cub looks at the old creature instead.

  The old creature makes noises, and the enemy makes noises back. Then there is a rain of clicks and chimes, as bone creatures shed from the old one’s hair and clothing—small things, no bigger than a thumb, like beetles. They ring like coins as they fall.

  When they are done falling, the old creature comes forward. The loud one reaches after it, but it moves beyond reach of the loud creature’s fingertips with a graceful sway, a sidestep that belongs to a much younger animal.

  And then it comes up beside the enemy, and the enemy lets the cub slip from its grasp.

  The cub scrambles back, back, until it feels the mother’s fur and slack warm body brush its feet. It crouches beside the father, shivering with wrath and fear, and noses the mother.

  The scent that fills its awareness is not the scent of anything alive, and the father shakes, crouching, teeth bared in a display the cub cannot match. No matter how desperately it wishes.

  And now the old creature stands before the enemy, the enemy’s fist knotted in the snakes of its pelt. The enemy reaches up with the knife and presses it beneath the old creature’s chin. The old creature closes its eyes, but not before—

  Not before the cub sees it look across a gap of space at the loud creature and—for an instant—close just a single eye.

  The enemy makes a sound. A short sharp bark of a sound. And sways into the motion of the knife.

  Mine, Kaulas said, and Bijou felt the blade prick her throat, part flesh, glide along her skin like a caress. But the child was free, beyond Kaulas’ reach. And Bijou was not about to let Kaulas claim her as he had claimed Wove, and then inevitably Brazen. Death was no escape from a necromancer.

  Aladdin the raven watched her from Kaulas’ shoulder, turning so the light gleamed through his blue, flawed eye. If she could reach him—touch him—

  —she did not think Kaulas could keep him from her, if she were close enough to touch. But Kaulas was taller, long-limbed, and the knife held her at a distance. Even when her creatures dragged themselves up around him—she heard the rattle of Ambrosius’s legs, syncopated now that so many were broken, and the slow slow scrape of glass on stone as Lazybones hauled itself over slimed cobbles—they would not come closer while he threatened their mistress.

  But that was as it should be. And the lady of death was the lady of moths, also.

  “All this just to own us?” Bijou said, as slow blood rolled down her throat. “So be it. You’ll own nothing again.”

  She stepped forward onto the knife, and as she did, she raised her right hand and brushed the wing of the bone raven sitting like a trophy on Kaulas’ shoulder. “Aladdin,” she said. “I free you.”

  The rest of her incantation died on the knife. But she had spoken her intent, and with her blood and breath across the bird’s skull that was what mattered.

  Brazen saw her hurl herself onto the knife. He saw her hand rise. He saw the palm slide down the bones of the animate bird skeleton. He saw the mirror-sharp skeleton of the sloth shuffle forward from the edge of the ring of watching creatures to rise up behind the Necromancer and drag hooked claws as long as human fingers though his hamstrings and across his lower back, drive them through flesh and twist.

  He saw the raven turn, open its beak, and sink the beveled steel point of its hypodermic tongue into the angle where Kaulas’ jaw joined his throat, silencing him before he could speak a dying spell.

  Neither one of them screamed.

  But the Necromancer tried to.

  Bijou—

  Oh, Bijou.

  She lay in blood that first bubbled and then seeped and then stopped, and Brazen could do nothing to staunch it. The knowledge did nothing to prevent him from reddening his hands in the attempt.

  Despite anything he tried, she went quickly, the raven perched beside her on the stones, the sloth rocking worriedly beside her. When her breath had stilled and the blood stuck to his fingers rather than seeping across them, only then did he whisper, “You should have let me take care of it.”

  But then, he wasn’t sure after all that he would have been able to.

  Brazen leaned back on his heels and looked up.

  The first thing he saw was the child, crouched over one dead jackal, flank to flank with a scarred and living one. The next was the raven, wings still half-spread, cocking its one-eyed head from side to side. Still animate. Still moving.

  Brazen turned on his toes without rising from his crouch. They had come up around him, Kaulas’ creatures and Brazen’s and Bijou’s, the animate dead and the animate machines and the jeweled skeletons, many crushed and torn and missing pieces. They stood and waited, and did not judge—or if they judged, they did so silently.

  As silently as the child, who had not moved from its place beside its packmates. Other jackals slung from amid the crowd to lurk beside them, shadows on the slick and stinking stones. He wondered if the corpse of his mother was still among them.

  He thought he could find out later. And find out, too, if she still wished to be destroyed. It was a decision for another day, one which did not already hold so many terrible decisions.

  “You’ll all come home with me,” Brazen said, looking from the re-animated to the living to the never-living at all.

  The child looked up at Brazen with eyes gone huge as he rose to his feet. Whether his words meant anything to it, he did not know. But it straightened up, holding itself like a young person rather than a wild animal, and touched his hand with the fingertips of its bone and jewel one. It looked over its shoulder, where the pack had gathered around the corpse of one of their own, and made a yearning gesture.

  “I can’t,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  It shuddered all over. Brazen touched its hair. He thought the gesture would send it haring away, but it suffered the caress. Afterwards, it withdrew just beyond the length of his arm and stared up at him.

  It did not shy away, though, when the captain of the kapikulu came up through the ranks of the dead.

  “Enchanter,” he said. “What are your instructions?”

  He took a breath. Faces were appearing in windows and the corners of doorways. There was a public face to be put on this. And a hero to be remembered.

  “Lash your spears to carry the Wizard Bijou,” Brazen said. “She must be honored. Bring her to Kaalha’s House. I will await you.”

  But it turned out he couldn’t leave while they were seeing to Bijou, because he could not walk away from her. And nor would Emeraude, who flitted back and forth between Bijou’s corpse and that of the she-jackal, touching each with featherlight gestures, clawed fingers that scrabbled as if to clutch, but never quite locked on what they touched.

  When the remaining kapikulu lifted Bijou’s body, Brazen found himself beside the child. It gentled the he-jackal as Brazen lifted the female in his arms. She weighed no more than seed-puff, a fistful of feathers. So burdened, it seemed only right that he fell in behind Bijou’s bier rather than leading the way, as had been his intent.

  It was fitting that he should walk this last mile with Bijou. As her guard of honor. And it was
fitting that he should carry the jackal who had come to fight beside them, though Kaulas’ wrath had only slopped over onto her pack by accident.

  Before they started forward, however, the captain of the kapikulu stepped before Brazen, straightening his gore-soaked coat. “And the Necromancer?”

  Brazen turned away. “Leave him for the jackals,” he said, and then paused and looked back over his shoulder. “You know what? Actually, you’d better take his head.”

  “Just in case,” the captain said. “And burn it?”

  “Just in case.” Brazen smiled a smile that made his cheeks burn. “He was the Necromancer. I’d hate to take any chances.”

  The cub follows the loud creature and the loud creature follows the old creature’s body, which the men in long coats carry with as much gentleness as if she is only sleeping and they do not wish to wake her. She is not sleeping. The cub can smell the death on her.

  The cub wants to howl, but its throat tightens around the sound it would like to make. So it walks silently, the father and the brothers-and-sisters close beside it. They will not leave the cub—or the mother.

  Not yet.

  They do not go to any place the cub has been before. It might worry at being out of its territory, but the pack is there—all of its packs, both packs—and it is too tired and sad to be afraid. It is almost too tired and sad to walk, but everyone else is walking, and the cub won’t be left behind.

  Even the mirrored creature creeps along behind, scraping itself along the stones until the big broad bone creature with the hands stops and picks it up, slinging it from its chest like an infant. That comforts the cub. The cub does not think it could stand to see anyone else left behind.

  They come to a building—a man den—bigger even than the enemy’s den, and the cub thinks they will stop outside it. But instead the bearers lead them up a broad shallow set of steps and into a den built of silver-and-black stones, under a portico hung with silk awnings and strings of flashing mirrors.