Bone and Jewel Creatures

Three

The cub hears voices below. Those man-sounds, the ones they make nearly ceaselessly when they are in one another’s company. They argue like pigeons; they cluck and coo. The brothers-and-sisters only talk when it is needful, because sound tells the enemies where you are.

And for the brothers-and-sisters, the city is full of enemies. We are small, the cub thinks. Not in words as a man would understand them, because the cub’s words are smells and body-posture and small yips and growls and vocalizations (the cub’s speech is very handicapped, with its small flat ears and its tailless haunches) but in a wordless understanding. Nearly everything that is not prey—rats, cats, pigeons—is bigger than the brothers-and-sisters.

That is why the brothers-and-sisters scavenge and hide and must be smarter—cannier, slipperier, more subtle—than the men and the dogs and all the big things that would kill them and not even eat them, just leave their bodies in the road. The brothers-and-sisters will eat anything that is food and they are tricky and quick. So they survive.

The cub understands that there’s information in the man-sounds, just as there’s information in the arguing of pigeons. The cub crouches in the attic, where dim slanting light angles across the cluttered space, limning columns of dust. It cocks an ear and an eye close to a gap in the floorboards, and watches.

It recognizes the other man, the one with the old-creature, and at first draws back in fear. That pale-streaked, broad-shouldered man in the sweeping coat was the one who caged it and who brought it here in the swaying, rattling machine-creature. It smells of oil and ozone. Pain and dislocation: a sharp pang of loss. Where are the brothers-and-sisters?

Could it find them again?

Whatever noises the men are making are friendly noises. Some complicated dialogue seems to be underway, involving the old creature leading the pale-streaked one from place to place around the loft, showing it things on tables and making worried noises, while the pale-streaked creature hovers as if the old one is terribly fragile. It’s interesting for a little while, and the cub watches, knees bent up beside its ears, balanced on its toes with its haunches tucked under, in case it has to move in a hurry. It doesn’t think there’s a threat in the attic, and the winged bone creature has followed it up, so there’s someone here who might be a packmate. Even if the bone creatures are not the brothers-and-sisters, the cub knows it cannot live without a family.

Life is not safe for a jackal alone.

Light shifts across the attic floor, and eventually the cub grows bored watching the men, and its knees grow sore in that beetly position. It comes up to all three remaining limbs, the hem of its smock twisted around its waist, and scurries off among the crates and heaps and piles of furnishings.

There is a great deal here worth exploring. Mice, everywhere, which—if you are quiet and quick—you can kill with a blow of your paw and eat in two bites, pausing between to flick the intestines out, though the fur is not pleasant to swallow. The winged bone creature sees what the cub is doing, though, and after a few moments it too is killing mice with aimed snaps of its sharply curved beak. It does not eat them, though, but tosses them to the cub.

So maybe the winged bone creature is a packmate.

There are lots of mice. The cub is stuffed to belly-rounding in less time than it spent watching the men make noises at each other, and still mice flock away every time it lifts a corner of a rug or shifts a crate aside. There is so much food here; the cub has not been hungry since it came. Not once, not even for a minute. There is always food.

The brothers-and-sisters should know about this place. Licking blood from its lips, the cub plans.

Replete, it remains more curious than sleepy, and it wonders what other treasures may be up here. Furs and blankets that smell of camphor and make the cub sneeze. Piles of bones—too dry for gnawing, though: these have had all the flavor bleached out of them. All those things in crates. Enticing.

Mostly, the lids on the crates are nailed down, and though the cub pries at them with long fingernails, they will not lift. The mice have taken refuge inside some crates. The cub can hear them rustling.

Rustling is irresistible.

One crate has a lid that shifts easily, and the cub pushes it aside—then dances back, startled, at the clatter as it tumbles to the floor. From below, the old creature makes the attention-noise, and the cub pauses. It crosses the light-dappled floor toward the hatch in a crabwise scuttle, raising more dust, and pokes its face down into the space below.

Both men are looking up. The old creature makes a gesture with its paw, and a questioning noise, so the cub blinks back reassurance—an eye-squeeze and a drawing-taut of the lips, not enough to be a snarl. The cub isn’t sure what the next noise means, but it’s not a summoning—it has learned the summoning already, because the summoning often means food, or it means that the cub was about to do something the old creature thinks might hurt, and the old creature is often right about that—and so the cub pulls its face up through the hatch and goes back to the mysterious crate, enticingly open now.

The mice, of course, have moved on. The cub isn’t hungry anyway, though, so that’s all right. It draws its knees up under the smock for warmth and crouches on the edge of the crate, which seems sturdy enough to bear its weight. The stump, it uses for support and balance. The remaining hand is crusty with dried mouse-blood, as is the cub’s face, but it knows the old creature and the bone creatures will bathe it when it comes down. This is another reason the cub thinks this might be a pack; the brothers-and-sisters bathed with tongues and teeth, but here, also, the creatures clean each other. The cub thinks when it is a little braver, it might sit behind the old creature and go through its matted fur for ticks and lice. The old creature might like that.

One-handed, the cub picks through the contents of the wooden box. Some are silky-soft; some are fine-furred like pups. There is a curved thing, round and stiff and wrinkled, but made of a cloth with a texture like mole’s fuzzy skin. It’s decorated with feathers and a cloth ribbon, and a thing like a beetle, but made of shiny stones and metal, and a thing like a flower, except made of sewn-up cloth. The cub strokes the thing and sniffs it—mouse and dust, and the memory of flowers and civet. A hat. It must be a hat. There’s more under it: coats and dresses as short against the cub’s body as the smock the old creature has wrapped it in. Scarves. A bundle of dried flowers tied at the stem with a ribbon. Vials, some half-full of an amber fluid which the cub can smell through the stoppers. Those make it sneeze even harder than the dust.

At the bottom of the pile is a square hard thing that smells of wood pulp and dye.

A rustle and clatter in the rafters draws the cub’s attention upwards, but it’s just the mirrored creature making its deliberate way across the rafters. It pauses over the cub, a little to the right so the cub has to lean left when it locks the three meathook claws on each hind leg around the crossbar and lowers itself with meticulous grace to look over the cub’s shoulder. The cub turns, surprised when the mirrored creature rotates its upside-down head on the bony neck and looks right back. The shape of the skull and the mirrors make it seem to have more of a face than the other bone creatures, and the old creature has given it a black enamel nose.

Very delicately, it stretches its neck out and touches the cub’s nose with its own. The cub holds still—it does not wish for any more cuts from the slow creature’s mirrors—but when the slow creature pulls back, the cub reaches out and brushes the three dull but fiercely hooked claws on its long awkward forelimb in return.

They stare at one another for a moment, and then the bone creature makes a strange bob of its head, like a man, and the cub goes back to the contents of the box.

And the hard rectangular object.

The cub has to experiment before it understands how to lever up one side of the top cover and reveal the contents, but when it does it finds inside stiff pieces of yellowed card, woven together at one side with ribbons that also bind the covers on. On each leaf are pasted more stiff rectangles of paper with patterns of grey and black upon them.

They smell delicious, and the cub touches the corner of one with its tongue.

Salty, slightly sweet. Not bad, but the cub is still stuffed full of mice. There is something about the patterns on the cards, that it isn’t understanding, and that makes it look harder. It bends its head closer to the book, closing first one eye and then the other.

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. Should 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 Messaline 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.”

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 message 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.”