Bone and Jewel Creatures (9 page)

“Run off,” Bijou said, without looking up.

She could still tell when Brazen bit his lip in distress. “I am sorry.”

Bijou shrugged, and now she turned to meet his eyes. “She left the arm. Either she’ll be back or she won’t.” When he stood with hands twisted in his coat, stricken, she turned back to her bones and said, “The forge, Brazen. I mean to finish this by nightfall.”

Brazen had never seen Bijou work like this before. She was by habit meticulous, even fussy, precise and exacting and insistent upon everything done and done again until it was done just right, and she had imparted those standards upon him. Today was different. She hammered with swift, measured blows, rough shapes only, crude and effective. Metal bent to her whim. The stones she set were mismatched. She warped bones to fit them into metal, careless of the shape nature had intended. Though she cursed her own errors, they did not slow her.

She was as good as her vow. Sunset smeared the west when she was done. She had jointed and hinged the raven skeleton with tin and pewter, spotted it with moldy-looking agates, sewn a silken cover for the wings and stitched bedraggled feathers along it. She had given it a needle for a tongue, hollow steel salvaged from an ornate, antique hypodermic. She had seated a single fingernail-big flawed sapphire in one eye socket with a glob of solder, so the light caught on the milky fracture plane and made the raven look not merely one-eyed, but cataract-blind.

She would not show it—spine stiff, chin firm—but Brazen could see by the way Bijou shifted her weight that she had burned her strength entire to get it done. He steadied Bijou’s paper-frail shoulders as she braced herself with both hands against the bench edge and blew across the raven’s nostrils. “Aladdin,” she said. “That is your name.”

A silent moment, and then a scritching sound. The Artifice thrashed, beat awkward wings, and somehow flipped itself onto its belly. It lay there, keel pressed to the slate, neck stretched out before as if for the chopping block. In the mismatched feathers—some pigeon, some crow—Brazen could see a trembling.

Slowly, it raised its tiny skull, and turned to look at Bijou with the sapphire of its single eye. It opened wide its beak, displaying the silver needle of its tongue, and tossed its head. When no sound followed, it cocked its head from side to side, surprised by what it wasn’t hearing.

“I’m sorry,” Bijou said. “No voice. I can give you bells or cymbals later, if you want them. So you can make some noise.”

Tentatively, Brazen’s hand on her wrist as if he could somehow snatch her out of danger faster than she could manage herself, Bijou offered the Artifice her finger. It nipped, but gently, and ran its beak along the surface of her skin as if to lay flat the feathers she did not have. Preening.

When Brazen glanced at Bijou, he saw that a smile cracked her face. “The meat may be yours, Kaulas,” she said, rich with satisfaction. “But the bones are mine.”

Bijou carried the raven outside, its pewter-shod claws pricking the edge of her hand. Brazen walked beside her, supporting her with a hand on her elbow.
We claim the dignity of age
, she thought,
but the truth is, age leaves us without any dignity at all
.

“My house would be safer,” Brazen said.

“Let an old woman die in her home.”

He shook her elbow, gently. “Nobody’s dying except for
him
.”

Bijou looked across the dead bird’s back to him, giving the raven a stroke with her fingers to settle the plumage when it cocked its head. “He wouldn’t come to your house.”

“And he’ll come to yours?”

Bijou bent down to whisper in the spaces of the raven’s skull. “Go to Kaulas the Necromancer,” she said. “And bring him here to me.”

The raven twisted its skull on the bones of its neck, casting a cloudy blue reflection across Bijou’s cheek. It cawed silently and flapped its wings as if testing their strength. It paused, hopped a step, and flapped again. Two beats, three—it sprang up airborne, wobbled, shed a feather that swirled on the downdraft, and arrowed for the garden door.

Bijou stood, arms crossed, and watched after it until Brazen cleared his throat beside her shoulder.

“Bijou. You said he’ll come to your house but not mine? Why do you think so? He’s gone to such great lengths to attract our attention, and neither of us would go to him.”

“Because he hates me more,” she said, and shook the raven into the air. “That’s what all the baiting is about. He’ll come expecting a fight, you know.”

“He’ll get one,” Brazen answered, and for a moment, Bijou wondered if he knew how exactly he sounded like an actor declaiming on a stage.

“He’s not coming,” Brazen said, at sunrise, in the voice of someone who was only stating a truth long-held to be evident. Jeweled snail-shells crawled on tongues of rubberized silk along the floor. One edged along the sole of his boot. Gently, he nudged it aside. “We need a better plan.”

“We need a plan at all,” Bijou said. “Bracing Kaulas in his own lair would be foolish. We could bring it to the Bey—”

“And wait six months while his advisors argue over whether to offer us a couple of dozen men, most of whom will desert before they face a Wizard?”

“There is that,” she answered, with the complacency of age. “Perhaps rather than merely sending challenges to Kaulas, we need to inconvenience him. Thwart his plot.”

“And his plot is?”

She rested a warm hand on his shoulder. “Spreading corruption. He’s building an army of corpses. What do you do with an army?”

A rhetorical question, which Brazen answered anyway. “Revolution. If we could convince the Bey that Kaulas has designs upon his title—”

“Still six months with the advisors,” Bijou said. “Kaulas could have every man, woman, and child in Messaline rotting under his control by then. We don’t know what the plague is, or what spreads it.”

“But we know how to stop it,” Brazen said, with a sidelong glance at the silver arm still laid across the child’s empty bed.

“Yes,” said Brazen. “Amputate. Bijou…”

Silently, she stared her answer.

“If we are to make our stand here, then I am staying. Let me send for servants. And for some of my materials.”

The stare never wavered. But she licked sunken lips and nodded. “You may.”

By
servants
, apparently what Brazen meant was seven
kapikulu
—door slaves, literally; in practical terms these were scimitar-armed religious ascetics, devout followers of Vajhir who had sworn their lives to military perfection. They wore skirted coats of powder blue, buttoned down the fronts with bone buttons. They wore their heads shaved and their eyes hooded under tall crimson fezzes. They came into Bijou’s loft, nodded to her as lady of the house, laid pallets with military exactitude along the wall away from the fire, and settled in, two by each door and the seventh patrolling, so silently and with such reserved decorum that Bijou might have mistaken them for statues—for Brazen’s creations—if she had not seen them take their places.

“Who’s going to feed them?” Bijou asked.

“I’ll have dinner sent from the house,” Brazen answered. “I have more sweeping the streets for those who show signs of Kaulas’ tender medicating. What they find they will bring here.”

Unsatisfied, Bijou crossed her arms over her breast. It wasn’t cold—the fire was high, and the sun climbing to zenith. She felt a chill anyway. Hawti’s silver bells tinkled in the garden. Lupe stayed pressed close to Bijou’s calf. The
kapikulu
did not seem to mind them, which made a certain amount of sense for guardsmen accustomed to living in Brazen’s house. At least Bijou’s Artifices, unlike Brazen’s, had no general tendency to explode.

Brazen’s servants and apprentices—Bijou honestly could not tell them apart—continued to come and go in the carriage, carting in armloads of chests and caskets and crates, stacking them every which way about the garden and the loft.

“You’ll be sorry if those get rained on,” Bijou said, following an ant-line of steamer trunks through her downstairs with her chin.

“It won’t rain until Winter,” Brazen reminded her.

She snorted. It never did.

Five

In the height of the day, when—even in Autumn—the streets were rather empty, a scrambling in the side yard pivoted the
kapikulu
by that door on their stacked boot-heels and sent them reaching for their scimitars. Bijou tried to surge to her feet, but old bones and slack muscles could not manage; she rocked back onto her camel-saddle stool with a thump. Brazen rose beside her on the instant; she heard one of the
kapikulu
order someone to remain still, and silence in return, except the noise of leaves rustling.

That silence told Bijou everything. “Stop them!” she said to Brazen, low and pleading, and then called—“Emeraude! I’m coming!”

Brazen leaped toward the door, crying “Don’t
hurt
it!” while Bijou rocked back and then forward on her camel-saddle, building momentum to thrust herself to her feet. She got her feet under her, whining low at the pain of her gout. She shuffled to the door behind Brazen, swinging her cane, puffed-out ankles protesting every step so she muttered the pain under her breath—
ow, ow, ow
—but kept coming.

The
kapikulu
had charged into the side garden and across its narrow width. They stood against the roses on the far side, scimitars extended and crossed to make a bridge of blades. Or perhaps a barrier of blades, because the scimitars served to block the child from climbing higher.

It seemed uninjured, except the thorn-scratches in its palm and arm, but it had frozen wide-eyed against the rose canes and seemed to be wishing it could melt into the coarse-grained pink granite of the wall. Bijou let go a shaky breath, and clucked her tongue. “Emeraude.”

It stared at her as if it were a physical effort to drag its dilated eyes from the sun-stroked blades—stared at her as if it could stare through her, in fact. And then, face contracting in a wince, it uncurled the clenched fingers, dropped from among the rose canes, and bolted across the grass to throw itself into Bijou’s robes.

“Shh.” Bijou stroked its matted hair, and barricaded it against her with the stem of her cane. “Shh, shh.”