Bone and Jewel Creatures

Six

The cub has come to an understanding.

At first, the brothers-and-sisters are uncertain of their place here. The mother, in particular, fears for her cubs—but she can smell that the cub, who was sick unto dying, is sick no longer. And she can smell it as well, when the father begins to recover, and lift his head inside the bars of the cage.

When the father’s flank has sealed, and puffy proud flesh shows where soft speckled coat grew, when he has risen and begun to pace his cage, limping and staggering and dull-coated but hungry and determined—then the old creature comes and slides part of the bars of the cage aside. The mother’s ears come up, her eyes forward. Around her, the brothers-and-sisters lie or crouch or turn tensely, lips tight with worry across closed teeth, tails low slung or quivering just at the tip.

It could be a trap. The men are known for the traps they set, and some are very clever.

The father hesitates. He has crowded to the corner of the cage, furthest from where the old creature stands. Now, as she backs away—slowly, and with the dragging gait of the hip-lame—the father comes forward, hesitation-step, only to pause with one forepaw lifted just inside the cage. The threshold dares him; he lowers his head and flattens his ears.

The cub sidles forward, out of range of the mother’s teeth. She might warn it back, and it knows the doorway is safe. The cub has crossed it many times.

The cub leaps up, lightly, beside the father, who tilts his head at it. And then it leaps down, and the father follows, staggering a little when his weight hits weakened forelegs. But the cub is there to steady him. There is a static moment when the father wavers and the mother and the brothers-and-sisters lean forward, held back as if by chains and collars. Then their reserve snaps and the pack surges forward, sniffing and wriggling and surrounding the father until the cub has to put its bone and jewel arm around him and hold him up against the onslaught of relief and congratulations.

And the mother, though the cub does not think the old creature hears the thanks in it, lifts her head to stare at the old creature and fans her tail once, gently.

When dusk comes, the cub shows the pack some of the things it has learned. Such as where the den of the enemy is.

Though anyone could tell it for its stinking.

Days passed, and the stream of afflicted grew. In the mornings, at first light, Bijou would shuffle from her bedroom to find one of the door-warders had already set water to boil for coffee. She would stir the porridge—sometimes she had to pull the spoon from a servant’s hand to do so—and stump to the front door, the child by now usually beside her, and perhaps a jackal as well. When Bijou opened the portal, the cold morning would greet her—and, shivering upon the street before her house, a line of men and women: some with livestock, some with loved ones, some hunched over their own necrotizing injuries.

Bijou would treat them as best she could, the ones that were within saving. The ones that were not within saving could not be allowed to go free. But Brazen took responsibility for those; he went before the Bey and prevailed upon him to open the jails as quarantine, which the Bey could do without involving his advisors. There, those that died and would not lie down could be kept in custody.

This did not prevent some from dying untreated, of course, and soon Messaline fluttered with stinking pigeons and swarmed with necrotic rats. The river fouled and only covered cisterns stayed safe for drinking—though some must, perforce, drink the river water or go thirsty. And still Bijou’s bone and jewel creatures brought her more and more of the dead and dying.

Bijou’s unquiet loft hummed with people—the comings and goings of Brazen’s household, the child’s jackal wardens like ghosts about the garden, the sick. And, more and more, it was also busy with the recovering. Once healing had begun, many of those returned to assist with the still-sick. Lazybones hid in the attics so that Bijou hardly even heard it. The street before Bijou’s house, and for yards in every direction, took on the aspect of a fair.

The first treated animal to be released was the cat, new forelimbs silenced cunningly with tiny leather pads upon the toes. Bijou carried it to the back garden wall and set it down, stroking its ears when it twined her ankles. “Go on,” she said. “Be about your business.”

As if the work she and Brazen had put into it and its brethren had made them, like her Artifices, capable of understanding her speech, the cat looked at her, meowed condescendingly, looked away again, and with a smooth leap mounted the garden wall.

Two hours later, it returned with the neck of a fluttering undead pigeon gripped in its teeth, the bird shedding gobs of putrescence and pecking at its eyes.

“Oh thank you,” Bijou said. “Just what I wanted.”

As she lurched forward, Brazen burst from her loft, a parchment fluttering from his fingers like a fan. By its freight of ribbons and wax, she knew the source even before he called, “Bijou! I am summoned to speak before the Bey!”

Brazen went alone, on foot, so as to seem humble. He went with the dawnlight, Iashti’s time, for a good beginning. He went in sandals and plain robes, so as to seem scholarly, but though his turban was coarse black cloth, still he wound it seven times. And having wound it, and made his sash tight, he also divested himself of all weapons.

When he presented himself before the kapikulu guarding the Bey’s gates, they searched him as carefully as he had anticipated, but they did not demand his letter of invitation before allowing him passage. It served as a small reassurance that his star had not yet fallen irretrievably.

Such things could change very fast, when it came to politics. But it seemed that they had not changed yet.

The Young Bey sat upon a gilt platform amid silken rugs and mirrored cushions, a tray resting at his right hand upon a low cradle. Kapikulu stood like skirted statues at every corner of the room, their coats as stark as the marble floor.

Aware of their gaze, and the attention of the Young Bey, Brazen lowered himself to the stones, swished the skirts of his linen robes out from under his knees, and crept forward. He thought of the jackal-child as he slid his palms across cold marble, tracing pewter-and-black veins. When his fingertips touched the edge of the platform, he paused and touched the floor with the peak of his turban.

“Your excellence,” he said. “Your unworthy servant begs your indulgence.”

“Face me,” the Bey said. Brazen pushed himself back onto his suffering knees.

“At your command,” he said, so the Bey rolled his eyes at him.

“Come, sit,” the Bey said. “And pour the coffee. Let us set aside formalities today, Brazen, and be men who were once teacher and student.”

Though he called himself a man, the Bey’s hands were as smooth as his cheeks, or the silken pillows he rested his backside on. Those hands lay upon his knees as Brazen edged up the stairs, careful never to turn his back. He sat one step below the Bey, off the cushions, and reached to pour two tiny cups of tarry coffee. The smell rising with steam from the cups was so rich and bitter it made his eyes water. There were sweets also, layered heaps of nuts and honey and threads of pastry.

Brazen served two to the Bey and chose one for himself, lifting it on a cloth napkin once the Bey had taken a bite of his own. This was a gesture of great trust, and a subtle message. The Bey had spoken as if man to man, and taken food from his hand. This conversation was not one of a subject to his ruler, but rather one between two acquaintances.

That also implied that the Bey did not anticipate that he would be able to offer any assistance, which did not surprise Brazen at all. But first there were pleasantries to be dispensed with, and so they were. And there was coffee to be sipped, and so it was.

And finally the Bey leaned down close to Brazen’s ear and spoke softly, for his hearing alone. “You have come to beg assistance against Kaulas the Necromancer.”

“It is a formality,” Brazen said.

“My advisors will not hear of interfering in a Wizard war.”

“That is as I told my old master,” Brazen said. “Also, that Kaulas set your father in his place, and when in that service he placed the Council, he placed men loyal to himself.”

The Bey sat back, a grim smile twisting his lips. “So you will understand when I tell you that I cannot give you men, or any succor or comfort when you brace him.”

“I will understand many things,” Brazen agreed. He bit down on pastry, though it might as well have been a swallow’s nest for all the pleasure it gave him. Brushing crumbs from his beard gave him a moment to school his expression. “I understand that a man faces many difficulties in life, and he cannot always choose how he meets them.”

“It is true,” the Bey said. “True and yet a source of sorrow for all devout men. Still, a great service may be remembered with gratitude.”

“Indeed,” said Brazen. “Or disquiet, in gratitude’s failure.”

Bijou knew from Brazen’s stride, from the swirl of his robes about his ankles and the way his sandals hit the floor, that the conversation with the Bey had gone no better than anticipated. But because it was expected, she laid down her corruption-soaked tools and stepped back from the current cadaver, holding fouled hands wide. “Well?” she said.

Brazen’s sigh was gusty enough that Bijou half-thought she should feel it across the loft. He broke his stride and folded his arms, choosing to stand well back from her work table.

“He says that if we kill Kaulas for him, he’ll try not to hold the favor against us.”

“Oh,” Bijou said.

Brazen nodded. “Yes. That went about as well as I expected. So what now?”

Bijou nodded to the deliquescing carcass pinned before her. “We chase Kaulas from his den, my dear one.”

Maybe now the old creature trusts the cub to return. At least, she has made the new-creatures—the ones that carry scimitars and stand as still as doors—allow the cub and the mother and the brothers-and-sisters to come and go as they please. And where they please to come and go is to and from the stinking den of the enemy.

The cub—and the mother—understand now that the old creature and her allies are pack, or at least they are pack as one might find pack in the dry season, when the lions are lean and will hunt even jackals, if they can get them. So they do what jackals do best, and at the edge of the enemy’s territory ghost from crevice to shadow, waiting for what he will do.

The cub is most tireless of the sentries, along with the mother. The mother seems to have chosen it, to rely upon its judgment now as she did not before, and this makes the cub lift its chest with pride. If the cub had a ruff and proper ears, they would be puffed up.

Instead, it leans its shoulder on the mother’s shoulder as they crouch in the shadow of a vine-hung wall out of eyeshot of the enemy’s den, but within range by even the cub’s crippled sense of smell. The cub presses its face under her neck in submission and gratitude. The mother—warm, richly scented and soft—stretches her neck and turns her head, returning the caress. And then they wait, and try to avoid the notice of the occasional vicious dead things that shamble or flutter through increasingly-deserted streets.

And wait some more, through lingering evenings and still-sharp days.

It so happens that when the enemy at last emerges from his den, the cub and the mother are crouched under that very arbor. The enemy comes forth on the last day of autumn, which falls exactly between the equinox and the solstice, in the grey light before the sun breaks over the horizon and begins sending its red fingers seeking between the walls of Messaline. On another day, the markets would be bustling in the morning cool, but some premonition must have stolen into the stall-keepers in their beds. Because the progress of the enemy’s reeking army through the streets is met by silence, barred doors and vacant streets, and heralded only by the stench of corpses and the long strides of jackals running before him.

Bijou had never heard the city jackals howl before. Certainly the jackals of the river, the ones she knew from her childhood, were anything but silent, so she knew they must be able to yip and cry and converse. But the jackals who lived within Messaline were next to ghosts, silent as shadows. So to hear their concerted cries in the street jerked her upright in her bed. Beyond the alcove curtain, Hawti rang like a carnival as it strode towards the door.

Bijou groped for her spectacles, balancing them on her nose while struggling her feet to the floor.

She did not need to ask. She stood, rocking to her feet—perhaps the urgency of crisis was not a panacea after all. The previous day’s robes hung over her vanity stool. She shrugged them on, thrusting buttons through holes with an aching thumb, and faced herself in her mirror, where she made her face stern and empty.

Of course, he had waited for Kaalha’s season to pass, and Vajhir’s to begin. At least it was winter and not the killing summer. But he must have begun his campaign then.

Bijou stared at herself sternly in the mirror, and tucked her hammer in her sash before she went out to face the Necromancer, brushing past the kapikulu at her front door as if they were no more than cords of hanging coins and crystals.

Kaulas came with her bone raven on his shoulder, as if to prove that she could wrest from him nothing that he could not take back. But she had Brazen at her side to give the lie, and jackals glared green-eyes from every shadow. Kaulas walked, his gait crisp and unhurried, and Bijou stood with her gnarled hands on her gnarled stick and watched him walk—tall and stern and as spry as if he were not easily as old as she—at the head of his army of the dead, all of them filling up the broad boulevard that led to her front door.

Bijou had something of an army behind her, as well. Brazen and his men-at-arms and his mechanicals at her left hand. The child and the jackals at her right. Her creatures arrayed behind her—the ones she had made over years past from relicts and mementos mori, and the new ones who were still-living, salvaged from Kaulas’ creeping necrosis. Ambrosius clattered at her feet, and just behind her Lazybones dragged itself over the cobblestones with a rowing motion, scratching the mirrors on its belly but determined not to be left behind.

“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 shoulder, 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.

A rank of robed creatures meet them here, and at first the cub flinches from them. They are men, male and female, and each of them wears a mirrored mask split down the middle with a jagged line. But they part into welcoming lines to let the procession pass, and when the cub smells them they smell like simple grains and milk, like soap and dates and honey. No blood and no wrath.

As the procession passes between them, they each raise both hands to the separate halves of their masks, as if to remove them, or as if to shield their eyes from horror.

Inside the building is cool, a great echoing space of polished floors with a table at the far end on a raised platform. The table is simple wood, freshly scrubbed, and the source of the good smells. It holds bowls of cooling porridge and honey, glasses of wine.

A man stands in front of it. She wears a gleaming mirrored mask like the others, but her robes are sewn with mirrors and her sleeves of plain white linen drip from arms spread wide. She makes a greeting noise, and sweeps down the steps from the platform.

Something occurs between her and the loud creature, some conversation the cub cannot follow. She strokes the mother’s bloody ear and bows her head, which looks like sadness despite the mirrors. With gestures, she points the loud creature and the bearers to lay their burdens before the table.

And then she turns to the cub, and to the pack. She crouches before them, holds out her hand to the father. He cringes and shies back, then creeps forward on tiptoe, coat bristling, to sniff offered fingers at the full stretch of his neck. The cub does not shy so much, but neither does it lean in to sniff.

The robed man stands, and the cub realizes that everyone else has drawn back in a wide ring. It glances over its shoulder, but the path to the door is not blocked. And they must have been careful to leave it open, when there are so many.

The robed man comes forward hesitantly and the cub waits. It lets her touch its ears. It lets her touch its tongue, fingers damp with something that tastes of salt and water, although it makes a face and shakes its head, after.

The robed man draws back, sweeping everything aside with gestures like a pack-mother’s, and when it returns it carries bowls of cooling porridge from the altar in its hands. It sets them on the ground before the father and before the cub, then goes back for more, until there are bowls of food or milk or honey before every member of the pack.

Cautiously, the cub inches forward. It crouches, its elbows resting on its knees. And it watches the food and the robed man. But it does not eat, and neither does the father.

When the Eidolon of Kaalha backed away from the food she had set with her own hands before the child and its jackal friends, Brazen went forward. She sighed as he came up beside her, so he knew she’d registered his presence, but she did not turn her mirrored mask to face him until he spoke.

“Jackals are sacred to Kaalha,” he said.

She looked up. “Jackals are welcome here. But one of those is not a jackal.”

“Nor yet is it a human child.” Brazen glanced aside. The child had dabbled its jeweled fingers in the bowl before it and was studying the porridge clinging to them, as if readying itself to taste. “I will apprentice it. But—” He looked back at the Eidolon, helplessly. “As we have seen today, even Wizards must return to Kaalha.”

While his eyes were on the child, she had raised both hands to her divided mask and pressed one to each side. The reflections of her fingers hovered in the surface. He might be a Wizard of Messaline, but the prospect of the revealed face of a Goddess could still bring a shudder.

Under the mask, one side of her face would be terrible, scarred with acid since her initiation—in homage to the terrible side of the goddess’s face. The other—

“You wish me to promise the temple will see to its care when you are gone.”

Brazen found himself holding his breath. He forced some of it up his throat, to say, “Yes.”

The mask hid all expression. All he could see was her hands, his own worried expression behind them. Of course the child could care for itself. Of course, in the new and ever-stranger Messaline that would grow up from what had changed today.

He had to know, for Bijou’s sake, that the child would have safe haven.

She lifted down the left side of her mask, revealing skin blemished only by years and duty, a sparkling black eye framed by an arched brow. Revealed half-lips arched in a half-smile, showing small dry lines around the edges.

“Jackals will always be welcomed here. But Kaalha of the Ruins did not bring you a half-destroyed child for no reason. Now take it home, Brazen the Enchanter, and think of how you will raise it to become a Wizard of Messaline.”