Bone and Jewel Creatures

Four

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

It’s a hand.

And the old creature has given it to the cub.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It could have a place in this pack.

It has a place in this pack.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She had underestimated people before.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A distraction. A diversion.

Or a test.

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

Of what were they capable?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Catherine’s talons were not made for clutching or tearing. Its skeleton was that of a carrion-eater, adapted for soft, rotten meat. But that was what the raven had become, after all, and Catherine’s weight and the reach of its long neck were more than enough to pin it though it still struggled and cursed.

“Ambrosias, a cage,” Bijou said. The centipede came down from the wall like a cascade of dice, clattering and rattling, and swept past her ankles. It must have had to venture the attic, because it was the better part of a quarter-hour before it returned, the brass-barred cage—as wide in each direction as the length of Bijou’s cane—dragged behind and striking sparks off the slates. Lucy went and took it, then set it beside the raven.

Between them, they managed to get the stinking thing into the cage, where it sulked and rattled its beak on the bars and glared at them from squirming sockets. It reeked of the grave, corpse-liquor dripping from the ragged holes in its ribcage.

Bijou, who was accustomed to dead things, nonetheless shuddered. Catherine scraped its beak and talons clean in the earth beside the path.

“Lupe, Catherine,” Bijou said, “watch the dead bird. Don’t let it escape.”

Lupe gnashed its teeth and sparked the lenses of its eyes, and Bijou answered with a gentle hand across the jeweled skull. “Thank you,” she said, and went to send a message.

The cub slinks through darkness undetected. The human city is still at this hour, but that does not mean that the city itself is at all sleeping. This is the hour of the rat, of the jackal, of the moth—of all the life whose city it also is, all the creatures who share these spaces and hollows, these stone and mud-brick walls, these dew-slicked streets that echo with the drip-drip-drip of precious water into cisterns and catchments.

The wings of bats are near-silent, but they silhouette against the night—or against the windows the bats sometimes flock around, if the inhabitant sits late with a candle burning to draw the moths. The feet of jackals and cats are near-silent too, but the cub has nothing to fear from jackals and cats. Not so, the dogs that roam the night city in packs, kings of the street. Even a grown male human could find those dangerous: they have been known to break into homes, to pull down vagrants in the street. Beggars fend them away with fire: the brothers-and-sisters must use craft, the art of not being where the dogs are.

The cub is versed in those arts, and moves through the street as silently as the rats do, slinking beside thick walls that may break its silhouette. Its heart hammers sharply, breath low and quick, mouth open to amplify any sounds or smells in the chambers of its skull. Skulk, and slip, and stay alive. That is what the brothers-and-sisters are for. Moving through the cracks and connections, slipping from place to place unseen, with their black backs and their ticked tawny-gray flanks and their twig-slender limbs.

The night city smells of many things—rising bread, rotting meat, sewage, roses, winter jasmine, cold ashes, warm smoke, humans coupling in their dens. The pattern of smells is a map that draws the cub home to its own territory, to the territory of the brothers-and-sisters, all across the breadth of the city.

At the river, the cub pauses. It has not passed the river before. There are bridges, narrow, just wide enough for a rickshaw or two pedestrians, with a low lip on either side but no rail. Not that a rail would matter to the cub, for when it steps on the marble paving stones—Messaline is a limestone and marble city, which in a wetter climate would slowly melt—it hears the echo of its step bounce back from the moving water.

It skips a step back, stops, crouches. The whine rises in its throat but is not vocalized. Things that make noise get found, and things that get found get eaten.

The wind blows from across the river, bringing familiar smells of the pack’s territory. Safety. Home.

The cub sets its forelimb upon the bridge, and waits to be bitten. When no teeth snap, it edges forward. One more step. Both hindlimbs. The echoes shatter under its feet, and it pauses, confused again. It can feel its pulse in its eyes, thumping under its jaw below the ear, and it knows that anyone who cares to look can see it easily here, shuddering and exposed.

It must cross. Either walk, or swim.

Humans walk across these things. It can smell their feet, and even the feet of dogs and horses. And other jackals, though none recently.

A scurrying rat bustles past, intent on its own business, disregarding the cub. Good food, if you can catch them, but the rat seems unconcerned by the cub’s nearness. Perhaps it can sense the cub’s fear and confusion.

If a rat can cross a bridge, so can the cub.

The cub rises from its huddle and scurries—head down, back arched, scrambling on all limbs, just like the rat with one less appendage to work with—across the bridge, sliding on dew down the far slope and crashing against the wall of some human’s den at the bottom. A thump, too much noise, and the cub picks itself up, bruised, and makes itself scarce up the hill, toward the familiar smells.

It has passed through this part of the city before, though only with great haste and caution. The brothers-and-sisters are not the only jackal pack, and others do not tolerate trespassers. Because the cub is unlike the brothers-and-sisters—deformed, mangy, pale—other packs may not recognize it as an interloper. But that’s a safety the cub would prefer not to rely on.

Here the cub is familiar with the smells, and it knows how the smells have changed. And there is one new smell in particular, overlaying everything, that makes that silent whine bubble up its throat again. It is the smell of the dying raven the cub found in the old creature’s den, the smell of the dying limb that the old creature cut from the living cub, so as to make the cub better. And it’s everywhere.

Here a bat flutters past, trailing a ribbon of putrescence. There, a limping cat turns baleful eyes upon the cub, but they do not reflect the light from a nearby window. They are slick and luminescent with rot, and in their sockets the glossy soybean heads of carrion worms nod on pale bodies. Around the corner lies a derelict man, from whose pallet the other beggars have withdrawn in horror, moving their shared brazier and their fragile circle of self-protection seven or ten canes distant. The man lifts its head when the cub passes, its sunken cheeks decaying over the remains of yellowed teeth. It makes no sound, and no further gesture, the blank face only swiveling to follow the cub’s path.

The cub trots faster, to outrace the sun.

In the rising heat of her garden, Bijou boiled the raven. At first, it struggled in the pot, but the lid—with Lucy’s hand upon it—was too heavy for the dead bird to shift. At last simmering quieted the thrashing, and Bijou was left with a cloying stench of rot that adhered in her hair and nostrils and hung about her clothes like a pall. She cast frankincense and dragonsblood into the fire, which at least overlaid the scent, if it did not manage to dull it.

In the afternoon, when the sun was high, she and Lucy poured the broth through a strainer, and pulled the bones one by one from the mess of dead maggots and cooked, fetid meat. Bijou much preferred to work with insect-picked and air-dried skeletons—boiling softened the bones—but there was not time to do this the right way. And she wasn’t sure if an undead bird would ever properly rot. Under the Necromancer’s power, it might continue in its animate and moldering state until the end of the world.

She was laying out minute bones on the dark gray surface of her work table—sorting meticulously to be certain she had not missed any, while Ambrosias picked through the vile sludge one last time in search of the tiny hyoid apparatus—when Brazen finally arrived. Hawti admitted him at the front door, and he walked in with his handkerchief clutched across his nose. “Vajhir’s sacred testicles,” he said though muffling cloth. “What died in here?”

“This,” Bijou said, standing aside so he could see the damp, fragile skeleton. “The forge is heated, Enchanter. Go to it. We have work, you and I.”

He turned to obey her, but paused. “Where’s Emeraude?”

“Run off,” Bijou said, without looking up.

She could still tell when Brazen bit his lip in distress. “I am sorry.”

Bijou shrugged, and now she turned to meet his eyes. “She left the arm. Either she’ll be back or she won’t.” When he stood with hands twisted in his coat, stricken, she turned back to her bones and said, “The forge, Brazen. I mean to finish this by nightfall.”

Brazen had never seen Bijou work like this before. She was by habit meticulous, even fussy, precise and exacting and insistent upon everything done and done again until it was done just right, and she had imparted those standards upon him. Today was different. She hammered with swift, measured blows, rough shapes only, crude and effective. Metal bent to her whim. The stones she set were mismatched. She warped bones to fit them into metal, careless of the shape nature had intended. Though she cursed her own errors, they did not slow her.

She was as good as her vow. Sunset smeared the west when she was done. She had jointed and hinged the raven skeleton with tin and pewter, spotted it with moldy-looking agates, sewn a silken cover for the wings and stitched bedraggled feathers along it. She had given it a needle for a tongue, hollow steel salvaged from an ornate, antique hypodermic. She had seated a single fingernail-big flawed sapphire in one eye socket with a glob of solder, so the light caught on the milky fracture plane and made the raven look not merely one-eyed, but cataract-blind.

She would not show it—spine stiff, chin firm—but Brazen could see by the way Bijou shifted her weight that she had burned her strength entire to get it done. He steadied Bijou’s paper-frail shoulders as she braced herself with both hands against the bench edge and blew across the raven’s nostrils. “Aladdin,” she said. “That is your name.”

A silent moment, and then a scritching sound. The Artifice thrashed, beat awkward wings, and somehow flipped itself onto its belly. It lay there, keel pressed to the slate, neck stretched out before as if for the chopping block. In the mismatched feathers—some pigeon, some crow—Brazen could see a trembling.

Slowly, it raised its tiny skull, and turned to look at Bijou with the sapphire of its single eye. It opened wide its beak, displaying the silver needle of its tongue, and tossed its head. When no sound followed, it cocked its head from side to side, surprised by what it wasn’t hearing.

“I’m sorry,” Bijou said. “No voice. I can give you bells or cymbals later, if you want them. So you can make some noise.”

Tentatively, Brazen’s hand on her wrist as if he could somehow snatch her out of danger faster than she could manage herself, Bijou offered the Artifice her finger. It nipped, but gently, and ran its beak along the surface of her skin as if to lay flat the feathers she did not have. Preening.

When Brazen glanced at Bijou, he saw that a smile cracked her face. “The meat may be yours, Kaulas,” she said, rich with satisfaction. “But the bones are mine.”

Bijou carried the raven outside, its pewter-shod claws pricking the edge of her hand. Brazen walked beside her, supporting her with a hand on her elbow. We claim the dignity of age, she thought, but the truth is, age leaves us without any dignity at all.

“My house would be safer,” Brazen said.

“Let an old woman die in her home.”

He shook her elbow, gently. “Nobody’s dying except for him.”

Bijou looked across the dead bird’s back to him, giving the raven a stroke with her fingers to settle the plumage when it cocked its head. “He wouldn’t come to your house.”

“And he’ll come to yours?”

Bijou bent down to whisper in the spaces of the raven’s skull. “Go to Kaulas the Necromancer,” she said. “And bring him here to me.”

The raven twisted its skull on the bones of its neck, casting a cloudy blue reflection across Bijou’s cheek. It cawed silently and flapped its wings as if testing their strength. It paused, hopped a step, and flapped again. Two beats, three—it sprang up airborne, wobbled, shed a feather that swirled on the downdraft, and arrowed for the garden door.

Bijou stood, arms crossed, and watched after it until Brazen cleared his throat beside her shoulder.

“Bijou. You said he’ll come to your house but not mine? Why do you think so? He’s gone to such great lengths to attract our attention, and neither of us would go to him.”

“Because he hates me more,” she said, and shook the raven into the air. “That’s what all the baiting is about. He’ll come expecting a fight, you know.”

“He’ll get one,” Brazen answered, and for a moment, Bijou wondered if he knew how exactly he sounded like an actor declaiming on a stage.

“He’s not coming,” Brazen said, at sunrise, in the voice of someone who was only stating a truth long-held to be evident. Jeweled snail-shells crawled on tongues of rubberized silk along the floor. One edged along the sole of his boot. Gently, he nudged it aside. “We need a better plan.”

“We need a plan at all,” Bijou said. “Bracing Kaulas in his own lair would be foolish. We could bring it to the Bey—”

“And wait six months while his advisors argue over whether to offer us a couple of dozen men, most of whom will desert before they face a Wizard?”

“There is that,” she answered, with the complacency of age. “Perhaps rather than merely sending challenges to Kaulas, we need to inconvenience him. Thwart his plot.”

“And his plot is?”

She rested a warm hand on his shoulder. “Spreading corruption. He’s building an army of corpses. What do you do with an army?”

A rhetorical question, which Brazen answered anyway. “Revolution. If we could convince the Bey that Kaulas has designs upon his title—”

“Still six months with the advisors,” Bijou said. “Kaulas could have every man, woman, and child in Messaline rotting under his control by then. We don’t know what the plague is, or what spreads it.”

“But we know how to stop it,” Brazen said, with a sidelong glance at the silver arm still laid across the child’s empty bed.

“Yes,” said Brazen. “Amputate. Bijou…”

Silently, she stared her answer.

“If we are to make our stand here, then I am staying. Let me send for servants. And for some of my materials.”

The stare never wavered. But she licked sunken lips and nodded. “You may.”

By servants, apparently what Brazen meant was seven kapikulu—door slaves, literally; in practical terms these were scimitar-armed religious ascetics, devout followers of Vajhir who had sworn their lives to military perfection. They wore skirted coats of powder blue, buttoned down the fronts with bone buttons. They wore their heads shaved and their eyes hooded under tall crimson fezzes. They came into Bijou’s loft, nodded to her as lady of the house, laid pallets with military exactitude along the wall away from the fire, and settled in, two by each door and the seventh patrolling, so silently and with such reserved decorum that Bijou might have mistaken them for statues—for Brazen’s creations—if she had not seen them take their places.

“Who’s going to feed them?” Bijou asked.

“I’ll have dinner sent from the house,” Brazen answered. “I have more sweeping the streets for those who show signs of Kaulas’ tender medicating. What they find they will bring here.”

Unsatisfied, Bijou crossed her arms over her breast. It wasn’t cold—the fire was high, and the sun climbing to zenith. She felt a chill anyway. Hawti’s silver bells tinkled in the garden. Lupe stayed pressed close to Bijou’s calf. The kapikulu did not seem to mind them, which made a certain amount of sense for guardsmen accustomed to living in Brazen’s house. At least Bijou’s Artifices, unlike Brazen’s, had no general tendency to explode.

Brazen’s servants and apprentices—Bijou honestly could not tell them apart—continued to come and go in the carriage, carting in armloads of chests and caskets and crates, stacking them every which way about the garden and the loft.

“You’ll be sorry if those get rained on,” Bijou said, following an ant-line of steamer trunks through her downstairs with her chin.

“It won’t rain until Winter,” Brazen reminded her.

She snorted. It never did.