Bone and Jewel Creatures (4 page)

The cub climbs and explores, but it does not try to run. The old creature is gentle and like the mother, bringing food and tending hurts, and it makes a warm soft place for the cub to sleep in. It grumbles to itself and it creaks and lurches when it walks, but the cub is used to old creatures that are cranky. They’re sore and no longer strong, the cub knows, and so one pays no mind to their irritability.

And anyway, the garden wall is high for a three-legged cub to get over, at least until the cub is strong again.

But the cub can explore the garden, whose walls bound all sorts of wonders. There are the roses and the palms, the passionflowers now merely huddled vines as winter encroaches. The lemon and lime trees are heavy with fruit in the cold, and once it understands what is wanted, the cub helps the centipede-creature harvest them. It is pleased to help feed the old creature, or, as it is starting to think of it, the old-mother. The limes are stacked in baskets; the lemons salted and packed away in lemon juice to pickle.

Although the old creature makes that attention-noise—“Emeraude!”—to try to stop it, the cub nevertheless bites through the thin skin of one before it is pierced for pickling, and makes a face. This is food. This could be eaten.

But for once in its life, the cub is not hungry enough to eat things that taste bad just because they are food.

There are secrets and lairs and amazing corners within the old creature’s den as well. The cub discovers ladders by watching the centipede-creature scurry up and down them, into and out of the rafters. There are creatures that live in the rafters too: there is the vulture-creature with its dusty smelling wings, and there is the slow sparkling creature. The cub clambers up a ladder, balances across the rafters, and touches the slow creature once, but shallow bloody slices across its fingertips convince the cub of the unwisdom of that idea. The cub makes no sound—it knows better; sounds draw attention—but the red dropping from its hand brings the old creature grumbling from whatever it was that the old creature does at its benches, to wash the wound and tuck the cub into bed, on a short leash, for the rest of the day.

After that, the cub is careful not to touch the slow creature.

The slow creature cuts.

But that expedition across the rafters has shown the cub something it did not know existed: a mysterious wooden hatchway.

The cub is
fascinated
.

The next day, when the leash is off, it will climb the ladder again.

In all Messaline, there were only three individuals upon whom Brazen the Enchanter would dance attendance. One was the Bey, whose rule Brazen chose to honor because Brazen did not himself care to govern. One was the Ordinary entertainer and famed beauty Madam Incarnadine, his paramour.

And one was Bijou.

Brazen’s house was at the bustling heart of the city, halfway up the hill topped by the Bey’s palace and gardens. To reach Bijou’s loft—which lay on the West bank, surrounded by warehouses and inexpensive apartments—Brazen’s carriage scurried effortlessly over swarming streets and marketplaces, and danced across with the broad shallow river with great splashing and no benefit from any of Messaline’s four bridges. Spidery elegant legs seemed too frail to bear up the crystal-windowed body; narrow feet thinned to pointed needles. Those rested lightly on the cobbles, dancing between goat-carts, dog-carts, and donkey-carts; litters, rickshaws, bicycles, and flocks…schools…
hordes
of pedestrians; water carriers, pastry peddlers, workmen, marketing women, news-sellers, a few Ordinaries in palanquins. The street society of Messaline.

They scarcely glanced up as the Enchanter’s carriage hurtled by surefooted, though a single misstep could have impaled a hapless bystander like an insect on a thorn. The city folk accepted the Wizards as just one more feature of the urban life of Messaline; only tourists cringed.

The carriage never stepped on anyone.

Ragged lines of close-packed tiled roofs—blue, red, orange, ochre—flashed in and out of the sight through crystal ports in the convex belly of the carriage. Chimneys and copper flashing broke the pattern, catching slanted morning light. At street level, Brazen would have been awash in a sea of scents and sounds and textures—the heavy sway of silk, the musk of civet, the cries of birds. The rich savor of grilling lamb, dustiness of mingled spices, sweep of a pigeon’s wings as it evaded the net. The shrieks of parrots from four continents and monkeys from three.

Smoke and dust and confusion, but Brazen sailed above it all in the cool clean air of his sealed carriage, an observer from afar. Sometimes he missed the tang of charcoal and piss in the streets. Sometimes. But who needed a Wizard’s tower, when you could bring one with you?

This time, Brazen had nothing to transport, and so he did not trouble to kneel the carriage. A rope ladder slithered from the hatchway once he’d drawn to a halt. He scrambled down, hair and bright-striped felt coat flaring in the hot autumn wind that had swept away two weeks of coastal chill, and grounded himself—he thought—half-elegantly. He was expected; Ambrosias awaited him in the street, reared up to head-height. It did not sway as a living creature might, so rather than glittering the jewels along its spine reflected sunlight in steady gleams.

Coat still swirling about his calves, Brazen stopped before the Artifice. It bowed with a measuring tic-tic-tic and the shiner of its cymbal, then swept about, sudden as a mongoose, and led him to the door. Though the massive double doors were closed, the sally-port stood open, guarded by the reclining, watchful skeleton of a wolf. Brazen stepped over Lupe—its tail rattled once on the tile in welcome—and let himself into Bijou’s loft.

The Artificer was seated by the fire for once, and Brazen was glad to see it. She didn’t rest enough, claiming that soon she would have time enough to rest forever…in the embrace of Kaalha the half-masked.

The old have nothing to pace themselves for, she’d say. This is the final sprint. Run. Run. See how far you can get before you fall.

The cast of her features concerned him as he came to her. It could be hard to read expression on a leathery face marked by years of sun, dark as lava rock beneath the springy gray snakes of her hair. But he had some experience. She did not look in pain, but the lines from nose-corners to mouth-corners had drawn deep and her eyes were hooded.

Brazen stopped before her and hooked a padded stool over with his foot. He dropped down on it, sitting by her feet as of old, though perhaps with greater dignity.

“The child?” he asked, not glancing at the trundle bed and the clean cage standing open not so far away.

“It’s in the attic,” Bijou said. “I sent Catherine and Lazybones to watch. It should be fine. For a time.”

With both hands on the arms of the chair, she heaved herself up. A little rocking was required to get her there, but she did not ask for help, so Brazen did not offer it. He stood, instead, and had the cane he’d made for her so long ago—during his own apprenticeship—shaken out long and ready when she reached for it. “Walk with me,” she said.

A painful task, because her dragging steps hurt him. Still, he followed her, a little to the left, as she hobbled toward the benches among the pillars at the back of the hall.

She said, with steely directness, “Where did you find that child?”

“It fetched up,” he answered. “The cook has been feeding it on the steps, along with the jackals and the feral cats. When she noticed the thing was injured, she brought it inside. You were the only one who stood a chance of helping it.”

“Because I take in strays,” she said.

She had turned to him with that comment, a crinkle at the corner of her eye the only clue that her expression teased.

“It wouldn’t be the first,” he said. “If it’s out running around, I imagine you helped?”

“I had to amputate.” She lifted her free hand and tugged at the wattle along her throat, as if even slack skin had grown too tight for her. Her cane clicked on the floor, apposite to the shuffle of the foot she dragged. It was twisted almost sideways, now, the striped wool sock and straps of her sandal protruding from under the hem of her robes. She gestured to the nearest workbench. It made his own hands ache, to see how hers were twisted. “There it is.”

The bones were clean, bleached pale, though age would eventually mellow them to ivory. Bijou had begun the process of articulating them, of building a working hand from salvaged bits and bobs. Some of the hand bones had been replaced by other stuffs: chips of whittled ivory, a block of richly banded coca-bolo wood, a hinge of silver hung on a steel pin. All around the pieces laid like a jigsaw puzzle on the benchtop were stones, precious and semiprecious jewels. From his apprenticeship, Brazen recognized moonstone and chrysoprase, silken blue and green in their luster. “You’re making it a hand. That’s kind of you—” Bijou grunted dismissively “—what’s this?”

Its surface cool under his fingers, Brazen picked up a lidded watch-glass containing a shred of withered brown.

“The source of the infection,” Bijou said. “So tell me, Brazen, again. Why did you bring me a child infected by Kaulas’ necromancy? Surely, you don’t expect me to believe it was coincidence.”

“Necromancy? On the
living
?”

“Dead tissue is dead tissue,” Bijou said. “The wound was packed with puss moth threads and white roses—both poisonous and significantly symbolic, I would say.” She lifted the watch glass from his hand and tapped it with a forefinger. “The child would have died, without our intervention. And then it would have been completely under Kaulas’s sway, don’t you think? Its shade his to command, its corpse his to animate? So—if I assume for the moment that you and he are not allied in some plot far too sinister and complex for my old head to fathom—why would Kaulas, the old bastard, have put that child where we were sure to find it? Why would he have chosen a subject who mattered to your household?”

Brazen lifted a smooth needle-sharp hook on a corrugated handle and stroked the point across the back of his hand, pursing his lips at the prickle. “As a means to bring an agent inside my door, it lacks a little something. Neither of us would be likely to keep a rotting corpse around, and he can’t have expected me to bring the child to you for treatment. There are too many variables.”

Bijou nodded, a slow oscillation of her head that made her fat oval locks shiver against her shoulders. She set the watchglass down and shifted her cane to her other hand. “You know I do not trust him—”

“My loyalties are not divided, Bijou,” Brazen said. “I understand that you have learned well to distrust men, but as you were my teacher, I would not betray you. I swear it by my art.”

She reached out, as if absently, and patted his arm. Whatever comfort the gesture brought was swept away by her words.

“I know you’re not your father, sweetheart,” she said. “Never fear you will be mistaken for him.”

Three

 The cub hears voices below. Those man-sounds, the ones they make nearly ceaselessly when they are in one another’s company. They argue like pigeons; they cluck and coo. The brothers-and-sisters only talk when it is needful, because sound tells the enemies where you are.

And for the brothers-and-sisters, the city is full of enemies.
We are small
, the cub thinks. Not in words as a man would understand them, because the cub’s words are smells and body-posture and small yips and growls and vocalizations (the cub’s speech is very handicapped, with its small flat ears and its tailless haunches) but in a wordless understanding. Nearly everything that is not prey—rats, cats, pigeons—is bigger than the brothers-and-sisters.

That is why the brothers-and-sisters scavenge and hide and must be smarter—cannier, slipperier, more subtle—than the men and the dogs and all the big things that would kill them and not even eat them, just leave their bodies in the road. The brothers-and-sisters will eat anything that is food and they are tricky and quick. So they survive.

The cub understands that there’s information in the man-sounds, just as there’s information in the arguing of pigeons. The cub crouches in the attic, where dim slanting light angles across the cluttered space, limning columns of dust. It cocks an ear and an eye close to a gap in the floorboards, and watches.

It recognizes the other man, the one with the old-creature, and at first draws back in fear. That pale-streaked, broad-shouldered man in the sweeping coat was the one who caged it and who brought it here in the swaying, rattling machine-creature. It smells of oil and ozone. Pain and dislocation: a sharp pang of loss. Where are the brothers-and-sisters?

Could it find them again?

Whatever noises the men are making are friendly noises. Some complicated dialogue seems to be underway, involving the old creature leading the pale-streaked one from place to place around the loft, showing it things on tables and making worried noises, while the pale-streaked creature hovers as if the old one is terribly fragile. It’s interesting for a little while, and the cub watches, knees bent up beside its ears, balanced on its toes with its haunches tucked under, in case it has to move in a hurry. It doesn’t think there’s a threat in the attic, and the winged bone creature has followed it up, so there’s someone here who
might
be a packmate. Even if the bone creatures are not the brothers-and-sisters, the cub knows it cannot live without a family.