Bone and Jewel Creatures (2 page)

Lucy pulled its arms in tight together at the elbows and reached into the cage with giant, gentle hands. Bijou knew the delicacy of Lucy’s touch. There was no other among her Artifices that Bijou would trust with fragile porcelain or glass, or the egg-tender skulls of new-hatched songbirds. But Lucy—with bones as thick as a human wrist, and the ropes of baroque peach-colored South Sea pearls dripping from humerus and ulna—could perform all but the finest work.

And now, hopefully, it could catch the child without injuring it.

The cage wasn’t deep; the child batted at Lucy’s hands, swung its blanket and flailed, but it couldn’t keep the Artifice from delicately encircling its scrawny biceps. Once the gorilla’s hands were closed, the brazen clockworks inside the chest of the skeleton tick-ticked, and the powerful arms began to bend, drawing the child inexorably from the cage.

Still, it made no sound, but it snapped and twisted in Lucy’s grasp as if it were seizing. The lithe body jerked this way and that, thrashing horribly, bruising itself on the cage door. Its working hand lashed out and fastened around an upright, but Lucy continued to move it gently away from the cage and the arm stretched taut, knuckles whitening, elbow extended beyond a straight line as the arm bent back from the shoulder.

“Wait,” Bijou said. Lucy paused, angling its great-browed head so the lamplight caught a shimmer across cobalt-glass-and-gold eyes. “Ambrosias.”

The centipede needed no instructions. It rattled up the bar, levered its leg-ribs under the child’s fingers, humped its spine, and pried. Bijou’s face scrunched in sympathy as the little thing winced with effort, but its tiny fist was no match.

It kicked out, bare feet drumming against the chest plate that covered some of Lucy’s finer machinery, at least one kick hard enough to leave a smear of blood on the rubies and sapphires of her design. “I should wash you first,” Bijou said to the child. “But surgery will be enough fear for one day.”

Between them, Lucy and Hawti brought the child to the bench, liberated it from the fan collar, and strapped it down. The slate table-top was too hard under the child’s skull. Bijou sent Catherine for a blanket. While hand-span crab-Artifices clattered across the floor in swarms, Bijou made a little pillow and a brace to hold its head immobile. All this work would come to nothing if it dashed out its own brains in panic and pain.

Bijou moved to her tools. “Better if you don’t look,” she said, and selected a single-edged knife, razor-sharp, as long as the length of her hand.

Despite the maggots, the putrefaction had spread. Crimson strands threading pale flesh showed the advance of septicemia, and the limb felt hot and hard halfway up the forearm. “The elbow, then,” Bijou said, with a sense of relief.

It would be easier to disarticulate than the wrist.

The child was still watching, wild-eyed, silent, horrified. Bijou washed her aching hands and the infected arm in alcohol. The child’s skin shuddered at the cold, but Bijou was careful not to splash the moonstone-gleaming
maggots. They were only doing what they were born for.

Moonstones.

Yes, that should do well.

Bijou folded her crippled hand around the hilt of the knife and nodded Hawti forward to help restrain the arm. “Lucy, give it a scrap of leather to bite on, would you? And when you have done that, please cover its eyes.”

She didn’t know if it would be easier for the child to bear without watching. But—on the slim chance it might live—it would be better if it didn’t associate her with pain.

She set the blade against skin. Now, at last, the child began to scream, as Bijou with her crooked hands drew a slicing line across the back of the joint, so as to leave the great blood vessels intact as long as possible.

The child quickly lost consciousness, though Bijou completed her work in less than two minutes. Ambrosias humped over the little limp body to pinch arteries tight before she severed them, so while blood was lost, it did not spray violently. White cartilage gleamed smooth and beautiful in the disarticulation, and when Bijou set the knife aside to lift the soldering iron from the brazier the tip glowed an orange almost yellow. The cauterization took an instant. The child never stirred.

Bijou stretched the flap of skin she had left attached at the front of the arm across the stump and stitched it. Then she gave Ambrosias the amputated arm to carry out to the garden.

“Bathe it before it wakes,” she said to Catherine and Lucy. “Keep the stump dry.”

Catherine, who had been perched on a lamp arm overhanging, rattled the vertebrae of its long neck like a
shaken marionette.

The garden smelled faintly of rot and its high walls were well-attended by carrion birds, though none so spectacular in their size as the beast the living Catherine had been. One small bold crow buzzed Bijou’s head, cawing, as she crossed to the lidded tray that would hold the child’s arm while it decomposed. It was molting, a single feather missing from the left wing. Ambrosias reared up to threaten it, and it flapped back violently, squawking.

Bijou laid the arm on stained loam. No need to add carrion beetles, not when the maggots were already at work. With the bones of the hand deformed and probably fused, redesigning the limb would be challenging.

As she lowered her head to investigate the clawed fingers, something caught her attention. It was the necrosis itself, the bones of the palm clearly visible between busy corpse-worms.

And tucked between them, something that should not be there.

“Ambrosias,” Bijou said.

The centipede reared up beside her and poked its ferret-skull head over the edge of the bin. Telescoping feelers made of segmented wire brushed the wound, then pincers slipped forward, between the maggots, and tugged.

A scrap of something soft and pale came free. Bijou lifted her jeweler’s monocle to her eye and bent towards it.

Bloodstained and bruised, but what Ambrosias held was a tattered white rose petal.

Two

In its sleep, the child jerked and shuddered. Bijou was not surprised that it slept. It had been terrified, badly hurt, and exhausted, and she had no way of knowing for how long it had been ill. The delicate ribs rose taut under tented skin, however, and there had been little flesh over the joint to cut through.

It might sleep the day away and be the better for it. Bijou could use the time to prepare a place.

Her Artifices would perform the hard work, fetching and carrying, scrubbing and hauling, but they must be supervised. Ambrosias, at least, could scuttle up the attic ladder and, with Hawti’s assistance, lift down a disassembled bedstead, sheets, feather-beds, feather-pillows, and some of the many tanned pelts stacked there. But as for the rest, well. A corner by the hearth must be cleaned (Lucy did the sweeping, while Lupe lay, silver-and-steel-shod jaw resting on bony paws, and watched with telescope-lens eyes) and the cage brought over and scrubbed shining.

Judging the child by the state of the cage was unfair; there was no telling how long it had been in there. And yet—Bijou leaned with both arms on the handle of her cane. “It’s probably not housebroken, is it?” she said idly to Catherine.

Catherine hid its head under a tattered wing.

So there was the bedstead. And there was the cage. And there was access to the side yard, which was high-walled and narrow, and Bijou thought that if the child could not be taught to work the latch, one of the smaller Artifices could be delegated as a door-thing. There remained only the matter of keeping it from worrying its stitches out. Bijou thought she could make a chased leather and metal cuff that would strap into place.

Bathed and rid of the necrosis, the child smelled better. It barely stirred when Lucy tucked it still voiceless into the small bed, where it seemed to find the warmth and softness soothing. It curled tight, pulling all but its now clean and braided hair and the one delicate hand still left to it under the covers. Bijou thought, not unkindly, that her Artifices might seem less terrible to a feral child than to one which suspected their origin.

The damp braid left a water stain on the pillow case. The hair was black, lustrous, the skin—despite the fading summer—brown as toast. It had a child’s face, still, with an undeveloped nose and chin, but Bijou thought from the angle of the bones and creased margins of closed eyes—black lashes drawing a smudged sooty line above the cheekbone—that with growth the child would prove some by-blow of the silk-and-spice traders who traveled a long cold road to Messaline each spring and summer, from the farthest East. The mother might have concealed her pregnancy under voluminous robes and given birth squatting in an alley—but how then had the child survived for six or seven years?

It would in any case probably grow up beautiful, if Bijou saw it adequately fed. She wondered if it could be taught to walk upright. She needed to consult her books.

A modicum of research suggested that outcomes were variable. The child was unlikely to learn to speak, or comport itself as befitted a human being. But if its mind were undamaged, it might learn to follow commands, to care for itself, and to perform simple tasks through demonstration. It was, in other words, no different from one of Bijou’s bone and jewel creatures, and Bijou thought that she could care for it.

Though what Brazen had been thinking, bringing an injured child to an old woman living alone, she would never know.

As anticipated, the child slept the clock around. In the morning, some of Bijou’s clients came to make preliminary inspections of the Artifices she was constructing for them. The Young Bey’s giant was nearly done, requiring only assembly—which could not be managed here, as Bijou’s ceilings were not tall enough—and dressing before its animation. The Bey’s man said he would send a send a cart and workman to move the pieces, and Bijou accepted the second third of her payment with graciousness. It had been heavy work—the giant was constructed of the petrified bones of such antediluvian monsters as eroded from the desert mudstones, with the gaps made up in elephant and rhinoceros—and intricate, and Bijou was coming to the opinion that she had not charged enough. But the Bey’s man seemed well-pleased, and soon the monumental heap of silk and wire and jewels and skeleton that crouched in one corner of Bijou’s loft like a child crammed into a shipping container would be standing guard over the city, banded agate eyes in its enormous horned skull, bony fingers curled about the handle of a spiked club taller than the Bey.

The Bey’s man did not mention the bed or the cage in the corner, and the child remained as cannily concealed as a cat for the duration of both his visit and that of old Madam Oshanka, the Northerner, who had come to collect the Artificed skeleton of her small curly dog, which Bijou had re-dressed in its own tanned, grey-muzzled skin.

Lupe had watched the process with suspicious lenses, but once it became evident that the small nervous Artifice was not staying, seemed to have accepted its presence without baring jeweled teeth. Hawti, Bijou suspected, had made something of a game of pretending to be about to step on the darting creature—but Bijou was certain that it was a game, for Hawti was perfectly capable of dodging crabs and kittens made of bone and gemstones and precious metal.

Bijou’s Artifices made old Madam Oshanka nervous, which Bijou found ridiculous, considering what she was carrying from Bijou’s loft cradled in her arms. But if a little fur and padding and glass eyes made a difference—well, so be it.

Bijou thought of Madam Oshanka as old, but she was ten years younger than Bijou. That didn’t seem significant when Madam Oshanka’s back was bent like a gaff and her hands shivered with every gesture, and she wore so many coats and rugs that if she had not been attended by her coterie of strong young servants, she would have looked more like a carpet-seller’s stall than a great
Ordinary lady.

Bijou showed her out and gestured Hawti to bar the door. Restive, clattering, the elephant did so. With relief, Bijou turned back to her loft, a private space once more. Private—except for the bright eyes and strip of forehead that had appeared above the covers on the bed.

The child had awakened calm and free of fever. Its knees were drawn up, a fragile barrier. From the silhouette under the blanket, Bijou could tell it held the stump of its arm pressed hard to the ribcage, but its breath came normally, and it had been sensible enough to get its back
to the wall.