Bone and Jewel Creatures

Two

In its sleep, the child jerked and shuddered. Bijou was not surprised that it slept. It had been terrified, badly hurt, and exhausted, and she had no way of knowing for how long it had been ill. The delicate ribs rose taut under tented skin, however, and there had been little flesh over the joint to cut through.

It might sleep the day away and be the better for it. Bijou could use the time to prepare a place.

Her Artifices would perform the hard work, fetching and carrying, scrubbing and hauling, but they must be supervised. Ambrosias, at least, could scuttle up the attic ladder and, with Hawti’s assistance, lift down a disassembled bedstead, sheets, feather-beds, feather-pillows, and some of the many tanned pelts stacked there. But as for the rest, well. A corner by the hearth must be cleaned (Lucy did the sweeping, while Lupe lay, silver-and-steel-shod jaw resting on bony paws, and watched with telescope-lens eyes) and the cage brought over and scrubbed shining.

Judging the child by the state of the cage was unfair; there was no telling how long it had been in there. And yet—Bijou leaned with both arms on the handle of her cane. “It’s probably not housebroken, is it?” she said idly to Catherine.

Catherine hid its head under a tattered wing.

So there was the bedstead. And there was the cage. And there was access to the side yard, which was high-walled and narrow, and Bijou thought that if the child could not be taught to work the latch, one of the smaller Artifices could be delegated as a door-thing. There remained only the matter of keeping it from worrying its stitches out. Bijou thought she could make a chased leather and metal cuff that would strap into place.

Bathed and rid of the necrosis, the child smelled better. It barely stirred when Lucy tucked it still voiceless into the small bed, where it seemed to find the warmth and softness soothing. It curled tight, pulling all but its now clean and braided hair and the one delicate hand still left to it under the covers. Bijou thought, not unkindly, that her Artifices might seem less terrible to a feral child than to one which suspected their origin.

The damp braid left a water stain on the pillow case. The hair was black, lustrous, the skin—despite the fading summer—brown as toast. It had a child’s face, still, with an undeveloped nose and chin, but Bijou thought from the angle of the bones and creased margins of closed eyes—black lashes drawing a smudged sooty line above the cheekbone—that with growth the child would prove some by-blow of the silk-and-spice traders who traveled a long cold road to Messaline each spring and summer, from the farthest East. The mother might have concealed her pregnancy under voluminous robes and given birth squatting in an alley—but how then had the child survived for six or seven years?

It would in any case probably grow up beautiful, if Bijou saw it adequately fed. She wondered if it could be taught to walk upright. She needed to consult her books.

A modicum of research suggested that outcomes were variable. The child was unlikely to learn to speak, or comport itself as befitted a human being. But if its mind were undamaged, it might learn to follow commands, to care for itself, and to perform simple tasks through demonstration. It was, in other words, no different from one of Bijou’s bone and jewel creatures, and Bijou thought that she could care for it.

Though what Brazen had been thinking, bringing an injured child to an old woman living alone, she would never know.

As anticipated, the child slept the clock around. In the morning, some of Bijou’s clients came to make preliminary inspections of the Artifices she was constructing for them. The Young Bey’s giant was nearly done, requiring only assembly—which could not be managed here, as Bijou’s ceilings were not tall enough—and dressing before its animation. The Bey’s man said he would send a send a cart and workman to move the pieces, and Bijou accepted the second third of her payment with graciousness. It had been heavy work—the giant was constructed of the petrified bones of such antediluvian monsters as eroded from the desert mudstones, with the gaps made up in elephant and rhinoceros—and intricate, and Bijou was coming to the opinion that she had not charged enough. But the Bey’s man seemed well-pleased, and soon the monumental heap of silk and wire and jewels and skeleton that crouched in one corner of Bijou’s loft like a child crammed into a shipping container would be standing guard over the city, banded agate eyes in its enormous horned skull, bony fingers curled about the handle of a spiked club taller than the Bey.

The Bey’s man did not mention the bed or the cage in the corner, and the child remained as cannily concealed as a cat for the duration of both his visit and that of old Madam Oshanka, the Northerner, who had come to collect the Artificed skeleton of her small curly dog, which Bijou had re-dressed in its own tanned, grey-muzzled skin.

Lupe had watched the process with suspicious lenses, but once it became evident that the small nervous Artifice was not staying, seemed to have accepted its presence without baring jeweled teeth. Hawti, Bijou suspected, had made something of a game of pretending to be about to step on the darting creature—but Bijou was certain that it was a game, for Hawti was perfectly capable of dodging crabs and kittens made of bone and gemstones and precious metal.

Bijou’s Artifices made old Madam Oshanka nervous, which Bijou found ridiculous, considering what she was carrying from Bijou’s loft cradled in her arms. But if a little fur and padding and glass eyes made a difference—well, so be it.

Bijou thought of Madam Oshanka as old, but she was ten years younger than Bijou. That didn’t seem significant when Madam Oshanka’s back was bent like a gaff and her hands shivered with every gesture, and she wore so many coats and rugs that if she had not been attended by her coterie of strong young servants, she would have looked more like a carpet-seller’s stall than a great Ordinary lady.

Bijou showed her out and gestured Hawti to bar the door. Restive, clattering, the elephant did so. With relief, Bijou turned back to her loft, a private space once more. Private—except for the bright eyes and strip of forehead that had appeared above the covers on the bed.

The child had awakened calm and free of fever. Its knees were drawn up, a fragile barrier. From the silhouette under the blanket, Bijou could tell it held the stump of its arm pressed hard to the ribcage, but its breath came normally, and it had been sensible enough to get its back to the wall.

It looked like it was going to live. Which meant it was going to need a name. And breakfast.

“Ambrosias,” Bijou said, “start the tea.” She tromped closer to the bed, waiting for the child to make some sound or begin to withdraw, but it only watched her approach through narrowed eyes. Lupe, which had arrayed itself beside the bed, rose slowly on paws of wired and flexing bone. The child startled.

“Are you hungry?”

The child crouched back, left shoulder raised and forward, chin dropped to the collarbones. Protecting its injured arm and throat. Bijou opened her mouth and touched her toothless gums with callused fingertips. Her paws were nearly as deformed as the one she’d amputated from the child, she thought bitterly. If still more functional.

“Eat,” she said. “Hungry?”

Just an animal response, crouched and tense, but she noticed that the child feared Lupe far less than it did Bijou herself.

From the kitchen floated the aromas of stewing couscous and vegetables sautéed in oil with saffron and almonds. The child’s head turned. It sniffed deeply and its stomach gave a long, conversational rumble.

“Right,” Bijou said. “Eat.”

She turned away, trusting that the further smells of cooking would draw the child from its bed.

It ate like a mantling falcon, awkwardly crouched over the plate with its left elbow and right stump spread wide and spiky. At first it had just shoved its face into the plate and been shocked to find the food painfully hot, drawing back with a silent frustrated cringe. But it was clever; as soon as it had seen Bijou scooping mouthfuls of couscous onto a bent lime leaf pinched in her cramped hand and blowing on them, it mimicked her actions, shoveling as fast as it could bear, no more chewing its food than would the raptor it resembled. Bijou gummed her own food slowly, appreciating the spices and the aroma of argan oil through dimmed senses.

They sat chewing suspiciously at one another, Bijou settled on fat cushions and the child huddled on the floor, shivering with a chill across its naked shoulders.

Bijou, trying potential names inside her head, wondered if there was any way to convince it to wear clothes. Well, one thing at a time. It was clever. It could learn that warmth and shade were portable.

“Emeraude,” she said aloud.

The child cocked its head at her like a listening dog.

“Emeraude,” she said, and pushed her half-finished plate towards it across the floor. She had no appetite these years.

It crouched a little lower, suspicious. She nudged the plate again. “Emeraude,” she said. “Eat.”

The leather-wrapped stump of its right arm squeezed so hard against its brown torso that the flesh paled, but the left arm snaked out long and slid the plate closer.

Not a dog, Bijou decided, watching it.

Something shyer and more fastidious, wilder and even less certain.

A jackal-child of the jackal-city.

There’s more food here than the cub has ever seen, and no-one is trying to snatch it away. The old creature hurt the cub, before, but the cub barely remembers it except in a haze. Now it brings the cub food and soft things to nest in, and none of the other strange bony creatures seem afraid. So maybe the old creature is not an enemy. It’s not very big, anyway, and it moves with deliberation.

There’s some other creature in the shadows overhead that does the same thing. The cub can hear it there, the slow click of claws on wood every few heartbeats. It might be one of the bony creatures; everything here that does not smell of food or of the old creature or of chemicals smells dusty, musty, like desert-dried bone.

The wholesome smell of food drives out other considerations. Aromas carried on steam rise as if from the entrails of a fresh kill. But it’s hotter than that, hot enough to sear, so the cub crouches over the plate wishing it dared growl and protect its claim.

The fever and dizziness are gone, the wounded useless limb no longer a dragging anchor. There’s pain, but it’s bearable pain, except the itch of healing. The cub might gnaw at the healing stump, but no matter how it stretches its neck or twists its shoulder, teeth will neither reach the wound nor penetrate the leather.

The brothers-and-sisters could do it, for the teeth of the brothers-and-sisters is sharp. The cub has never been as sharp or strong or deft as the brothers-and-sisters. It can run longer, though, and wear down prey as the brothers-and-sisters cannot.

There is enough food here for all the brothers-and-sisters. The cub should bring some back, except the food is too hot to touch, and too crumbly to carry. It might pack its gullet and then regurgitate, but it doesn’t know where the brothers-and-sisters and the mother can be found, or how to find its way back to them even if it did.

So it eats, warily, all that its given, gorging until the skin of its stomach stretches uncomfortably. Then it angles itself out on the cushions, panting, and does not protest—not even a weak whine—when the old creature takes the remains of the food away. The cub is too sleepy and warm to be afraid.

It has to roll to the other side to pillow its head on its foreleg, though. Because the useless one is missing, which is probably why it hurts less now.

When Bijou heaved herself from the nest of cushions, the child was already twitching in dreams. Its resilience amazed her; the strength of animals, not to dwell in what could have been. Instead, it adapted, accepted, and carried on.

“Watch it,” she said to Catherine and Lazybones, who peered down from the rafters. Lazybones’ round glittering head swiveled on the deceptively long neck, bent between strange arms. Light caught on the mirror-encrusted shoulderblades.

The palms of Bijou’s hands were still laced with the network of fine scars she’d inflicted upon herself with the mirrors. For all its soft deliberate dignity, Lazybones was not a creature anyone would care to stroke.

The child slept on while Ambrosias clattered close and cleared the plates away, while Bijou stomped to her nearest workbench. There, sealed in a shallow-lidded watchglass, lay the shredded petal, brown and curled at the edges. She sparked the lights over the bench and adjusted the reflectors to send brilliant light showering down.

Jeweler’s tweezers and her scalpels would do for the dissection, though she already suspected what she would find. But it was neither scientifically nor sorcerously responsible to assume the accuracy of one’s speculations.

Bijou would investigate.

Blinking in the eye-watering light, hands already aching, Bijou selected her tools. “Lupe,” she called. The wolf trotted over, toenails and bones clattering on stone. Left-handed, Bijou reached down and smoothed the copper-chased skull. “I need your eyes,” she said.

Lupe reared up, front pawbones on the edge of the bench, and cocked her head at the work surface. The light through her lenses coruscated for a moment before it focused, but then Bijou was looking at a much-enlarged projection of the rose fragment on the surface of her work bench. The projection was large enough to show every pore and vein in the petal, and make out a suggestion of the cellular structure.

Delicately, she peeled back layers of tissue, the motions of scalpel and tweezers so tiny she could only see them in magnification.

She found what she was looking for. Between the surfaces of the petal ran tiny threads as pale as moonlight. She scraped them free, returning a few to the watch-glass, and bent close to study the remainder in the projection.

The silky fibers were the protective, venomous spines of a puss moth caterpillar, and they threaded the structure of the petal as if they had grown there.

There was only one gardener in whose garden this poisoned blossom might have grown. Kaulas, the Necromancer.

Days passed, and though autumn drew down around the great city of Messaline, Bijou had no occasion to leave her home or her work. As for the child, Emeraude was surprisingly little trouble. It was fastidious, making the enclosed side garden its toilet until Bijou demonstrated the use of the squatting toilet in the rear garden outbuilding. When it saw Bijou bathing in the old tub, it wanted to play as well. Despite the frustrations of teaching it to keep its stump out of the water, it learned quickly, by mimicry, though Bijou at first despaired of making it stand up and go about on its legs. But once she—with Lucy’s assistance—taught it to recognize the benefit of wearing clothes against the sun and in the night’s chill, it mastered walking erect quickly.

Its bones were clean within a week.

Compost kept the corpse-beetles and blowfly larvae at work in the back garden warm and productive, and Bijou had clay ovens to set about for when the nights—inevitably, though only in the deepest part of winter—might dip towards freezing.

Bijou learned from the bones. As she had suspected, the deformity was not merely the result of an old injury. The bones were warped, and two fingers had had no bones at all. The child had been born with a useless limb, which explained why its mother might have chosen to expose it. How it had survived since was a story about which Bijou could only speculate.

What she could not comprehend was how it had run afoul of Kaulas the Necromancer, and what it might mean that she, Bijou, and Brazen the Enchanter had intervened.

The stitches came out the day after the bones were polished, Emeraude watching curiously while Bijou steadied its arm and Ambrosias snipped and pulled. Emeraude bit its lip once, but remained stoic, and Bijou thought if it could have gotten its head down to the end of its stump it would have licked the blood away.

The next morning, with moonstone and silver and wire, with some of its own bones and some bones that were better, Bijou began building the child an arm.

The cub climbs and explores, but it does not try to run. The old creature is gentle and like the mother, bringing food and tending hurts, and it makes a warm soft place for the cub to sleep in. It grumbles to itself and it creaks and lurches when it walks, but the cub is used to old creatures that are cranky. They’re sore and no longer strong, the cub knows, and so one pays no mind to their irritability.

And anyway, the garden wall is high for a three-legged cub to get over, at least until the cub is strong again.

But the cub can explore the garden, whose walls bound all sorts of wonders. There are the roses and the palms, the passionflowers now merely huddled vines as winter encroaches. The lemon and lime trees are heavy with fruit in the cold, and once it understands what is wanted, the cub helps the centipede-creature harvest them. It is pleased to help feed the old creature, or, as it is starting to think of it, the old-mother. The limes are stacked in baskets; the lemons salted and packed away in lemon juice to pickle.

Although the old creature makes that attention-noise—“Emeraude!”—to try to stop it, the cub nevertheless bites through the thin skin of one before it is pierced for pickling, and makes a face. This is food. This could be eaten.

But for once in its life, the cub is not hungry enough to eat things that taste bad just because they are food.

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.”