Bone and Jewel Creatures (6 page)

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.