Bone and Jewel Creatures (11 page)

“Were you not angry?” he asked.

She managed to hold his gaze when she looked up again. “Wove and I had decided to raise the child together.”

Brazen’s heart shivered in his chest like a watch gear. “That’s not what happened.”

“She died,” Bijou said. “She died, and Kaulas—he arranged things. So that you could be carried to term. Or near enough.”

“Vajhir,” Brazen breathed. “Kaulas the Necromancer. No, he never told me. How…”

“How did he do it?”

“How long?”

“Eight weeks,” Bijou said. “I stayed with her.”

Brazen wanted to ask, as if in asking he could force her to deny the implications of what she said. As if he could rewrite history and make it somehow less terrible. “She knew what had happened?”

Bijou smiled. “She knew she was dead. But she gave you life, my dear, and named you. She named you
Harun
. It was your first name, and your true name, and your father never knew it. And when you had eight years, you came to live with me.”

She reached out and patted his hand with her dry, horny one. “I know why he’s chosen now. It’s because he and I are dying. And he’s not the sort to let nature take its course.”

“You think he’s using what he takes from his
abominations to feed his own strength.”

“It’s the obvious thaumaturgy, isn’t it?” She gestured to the covered dishes of putrescence still set on her workbench. “It is traditional for wizards to struggle mightily once their time approaches. And I admit, I don’t like dying very much myself. But I look forward to Death herself, once the dying is over.”

“So how do we answer?”

Bijou smiled. “We bring the fight into the street. Unless you have a better plan?”

She looked at Brazen. Brazen shrugged helplessly.

“Then we do it my way,” she said.

He squeezed her hand. “When this is over, I want you and the child to come and stay with me.”

“But darling,” Bijou answered. “Where would I keep the elephant?”

While the other bone and jewel creatures, even down to the scuttling crab-carapaces, dispersed upon the errand Bijou set them, Hawti helped Brazen tote another
procession of chests and crates from his carriage.

And Bijou arrayed herself for war. She bound her hair back with jeweled scarabs which sunk their legs deep in the snaky locks, and she garbed herself in trousers and coat like a man. When she had been young and dressed as a boy, men had stared. Now, her waist bulged rather than nipping in; her buttocks were more like saddlebags than peaches. It didn’t matter; Brazen wasn’t a man to her, any more than he had given any indication that he thought of her as a woman.

For which mercy she thanked Iashti, the patron of spring and increase, profusely—even if Iashti was not her particular goddess, or one that Bijou had ever found much use for.

She had hoped it might be some hours before her creatures returned, but it was not to be. The crabs first, dragging a struggling, stinking pigeon between them, which Bijou had to net because she did not care to touch it. However much it fought, the bird was long-dead, and Bijou set it to boil.

The silver mackerel-tabby alley cat Ambrosias returned with was not so lucky. Or perhaps luckier, as it was still alive when Bijou got to it, though both of its forepaws were nearly skeletonized. “Hideous,” Brazen said, but Bijou only scratched beneath its chin while he fetched her scalpels.

It purred for her. “Who’s a sweet puss?” she said. It rubbed its cheek against her fingers.

Brazen shook his head. “You are a strange woman.”

“It’s not the cat’s fault. Come hold it down.”

Brazen watched her work, and wished there were some way he could save her. The drag of exhaustion came in the first hours. As the work milled on, her hands—so firm—began to tremble. Brazen built an elevating stool for her so she could sit by her table rather than standing, and while she performed her surgeries, he was the one who wired and soldered and made tiny delicate armatures. They were not, of course, the armatures that Bijou would have constructed—hers, for one thing, would not have been built around minuscule hydraulics and infinitesimal pistons, but Brazen did not build with living things—but she did not seem unpleased by them. She reached up to pat his shoulder, rather, and grinned bravely when he showed her how they articulated.

The smile wore hard. As if it pinched her cheeks. He imagined if she didn’t prop her face up with it she might crumble. Fingers moved gently along the incomplete, pipestem-thin brass tubes of the cats-paws until she found a place where the pressure of her thumb made the paw flex wide, and razor-fine steel talons slide from oiled sheaths.

Reverently, Bijou laid the prosthesis on the bench again. Brazen pretended not to see how heavily she leaned against it, her arms bent at the elbows. “What are we going to do with them all? There’s too many.”

He looked at her, and did her the dignity of not saying,
You can’t do it alone.
“A little rest,” he said.

“There’s too much work.” Once she would have done it, too. He imagined her, in the privacy of her own head, cursing the swelling feet, the knotted hands, the age that slowed her. She had been an indomitable force of his childhood, his apprenticeship, and the rock he had leaned upon when he eventually broke away from Kaulas. He’d come to her first, to learn what he needed to know before he struck out on his own. With what she had told him, he could imagine how much it had cost her to treat him gently, as a beloved child. And if her rage seeped out occasionally—he had always known it was aimed at his father, and not at him at all.

“A little rest,” he said. “And let me send for my students.”

The arch of her eyebrows said it all, and the way the lines drew down on either side of her turtle-beak nose. “You don’t think I can manage.”

“I don’t think
I
can manage.” He laid a hand on her arm. “Bijou, sit. Rest. If you make yourself sick fighting him, he’s still won.”

Sick wasn’t what he meant, exactly, and he knew she knew it. But she frowned and sat. Sulkily, like a reprimanded child, with her arms crossed over her chest so her knobby, knitted sleeves draped lumpily from her wrists.

“The feral child has better manners,” Brazen said, gesturing to where it curled in the hearth-corner, near the cage in which its injured packmate lay breathing slow and raggedly. Under and behind the cage and bed—in the niche beside the fire and against the wall near the door to the side garden—crouched the wary shadows of the other jackals.

They were not happy, by their pricked ears and watchful eyes. But they were also not leaving.

And they had not turned aside from the food Brazen had caused to be brought for them, especially once they had seen how enthusiastically the child applied itself to the platters of grains and kitfo.

“Better manners?” Bijou glared, but could not sustain it. Her frown cracked into a reluctant smile.

He said, “Someday, when it’s a Wizard too, it can be crabby.”

“So is it to be your apprentice, then?”

He shrugged. “Who knows what it wants? Can you apprentice a child that can’t speak?”

“Can you fail to?” Bijou’s smile fell away. “But we were talking about your other apprentices.”

Brazen tipped his head. “Some of them are journeymen.”

“Whatever they are. Fetch your damned students, and let them overrun my home if that’s what makes you happy.”

“Actually,” Brazen said, “I thought we’d send the work to them. What’s the point in having an automatic carriage if I don’t put it to use? Bijou…”

She turned away, towards the open garden door. In the courtyard, Catherine settled, wings mantling whatever unfortunate creature dangled from its talons. “I’m listening,” Bijou said, pushing herself up against the table edge.

“He can keep making monsters,” Brazen said, frustrated. “But what we’re doing is as useless as building walls against encroaching dunes. Until we take control of the war, we are losing. And then there’s the question of what we are going to do with all the—” He gestured around the room, to the wounded animals, the half-assembled armatures of bone and metal and stone laid out on benches like so many blacksmith’s puzzles.

“Turn them loose,” Bijou said. “And wait for people to bring us more.”

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.