Bone and Jewel Creatures (5 page)

Life is not safe for a jackal alone.

Light shifts across the attic floor, and eventually the cub grows bored watching the men, and its knees grow sore in that beetly position. It comes up to all three remaining limbs, the hem of its smock twisted around its waist, and scurries off among the crates and heaps and piles of furnishings.

There is a great deal here worth exploring. Mice, everywhere, which—if you are quiet and quick—you can kill with a blow of your paw and eat in two bites, pausing between to flick the intestines out, though the fur is not pleasant to swallow. The winged bone creature sees what the cub is doing, though, and after a few moments it too is killing mice with aimed snaps of its sharply curved beak. It does not eat them, though, but tosses them to the cub.

So maybe the winged bone creature
is
a packmate.

There are lots of mice. The cub is stuffed to belly-rounding in less time than it spent watching the men make noises at each other, and still mice flock away every time it lifts a corner of a rug or shifts a crate aside. There is so much food here; the cub has not been hungry since it came. Not once, not even for a minute. There is
always
food.

The brothers-and-sisters should know about this place. Licking blood from its lips, the cub plans.

Replete, it remains more curious than sleepy, and it wonders what other treasures may be up here. Furs and blankets that smell of camphor and make the cub sneeze. Piles of bones—too dry for gnawing, though: these have had all the flavor bleached out of them. All those things in crates. Enticing.

Mostly, the lids on the crates are nailed down, and though the cub pries at them with long fingernails, they will not lift. The mice have taken refuge inside some crates. The cub can hear them rustling.

Rustling is irresistible.

One crate has a lid that shifts easily, and the cub pushes it aside—then dances back, startled, at the clatter as it tumbles to the floor. From below, the old creature makes the attention-noise, and the cub pauses. It crosses the light-dappled floor toward the hatch in a crabwise scuttle, raising more dust, and pokes its face down into the space below.

Both men are looking up. The old creature makes a gesture with its paw, and a questioning noise, so the cub blinks back reassurance—an eye-squeeze and a drawing-taut of the lips, not enough to be a snarl. The cub isn’t sure what the next noise means, but it’s not a summoning—it has learned the summoning already, because the summoning often means food, or it means that the cub was about to do something the old creature thinks might hurt, and the old creature is often right about that—and so the cub pulls its face up through the hatch and goes back to the mysterious crate, enticingly open now.

The mice, of course, have moved on. The cub isn’t hungry anyway, though, so that’s all right. It draws its knees up under the smock for warmth and crouches on the edge of the crate, which seems sturdy enough to bear its weight. The stump, it uses for support and balance. The remaining hand is crusty with dried mouse-blood, as is the cub’s face, but it knows the old creature and the bone creatures will bathe it when it comes down. This is another reason the cub thinks this might be a pack; the brothers-and-sisters bathed with tongues and teeth, but here, also, the creatures clean each other. The cub thinks when it is a little braver, it might sit behind the old creature and go through its matted fur for ticks and lice. The old creature might like that.

One-handed, the cub picks through the contents of the wooden box. Some are silky-soft; some are fine-furred like pups. There is a curved thing, round and stiff and wrinkled, but made of a cloth with a texture like mole’s fuzzy skin. It’s decorated with feathers and a cloth ribbon, and a thing like a beetle, but made of shiny stones and metal, and a thing like a flower, except made of sewn-up cloth. The cub strokes the thing and sniffs it—mouse and dust, and the memory of flowers and civet. A hat. It must be a hat. There’s more under it: coats and dresses as short against the cub’s body as the smock the old creature has wrapped it in. Scarves. A bundle of dried flowers tied at the stem with a ribbon. Vials, some half-full of an amber fluid which the cub can smell through the stoppers. Those make it sneeze even harder than the dust.

At the bottom of the pile is a square hard thing that smells of wood pulp and dye.

A rustle and clatter in the rafters draws the cub’s attention upwards, but it’s just the mirrored creature making its deliberate way across the rafters. It pauses over the cub, a little to the right so the cub has to lean left when it locks the three meathook claws on each hind leg around the crossbar and lowers itself with meticulous grace to look over the cub’s shoulder. The cub turns, surprised when the mirrored creature rotates its upside-down head on the bony neck and looks right back. The shape of the skull and the mirrors make it seem to have more of a face than the other bone creatures, and the old creature has given it a black enamel nose.

Very delicately, it stretches its neck out and touches the cub’s nose with its own. The cub holds still—it does not wish for any more cuts from the slow creature’s mirrors—but when the slow creature pulls back, the cub reaches out and brushes the three dull but fiercely hooked claws on its long awkward forelimb in return.

They stare at one another for a moment, and then the bone creature makes a strange bob of its head, like a man, and the cub goes back to the contents of the box.

And the hard rectangular object.

The cub has to experiment before it understands how to lever up one side of the top cover and reveal the contents, but when it does it finds inside stiff pieces of yellowed card, woven together at one side with ribbons that also bind the covers on. On each leaf are pasted more stiff rectangles of paper with patterns of grey and black upon them.

They smell delicious, and the cub touches the corner of one with its tongue.

Salty, slightly sweet. Not bad, but the cub is still stuffed full of mice. There is something about the patterns on the cards, that it isn’t understanding, and that makes it look harder. It bends its head closer to the book, closing first one eye and then the other.

They are shapes. Flat shapes like real things, tiny and perfectly detailed. Enchanted, the cub balances the open book upon its thighs and turns pages slowly, examining each card in turn. A man looks out from several, male (the cub thinks, from the coats) and pale-skinned and young and tall—even for a man—and wearing hats that make it seem even taller. Sometimes it is with a darker, raptor-faced man in heavy brocade coats and embroidered trousers, dripping with bullion. In others, there is a round-cheeked willowy man, a female, whose dark hair spikes in short locks from under a series of elaborate hats, and whose skin is only a little lighter than and just as satiny-looking as the black velvet of its dresses.

The dresses in this crate, maybe. Or some of them. And the beads and hats as well.

The cub turns more leaves, and there are more images. The same three men, and now a fourth one—another female man, this one unlike any the cub has seen before. Its hair in the images is as pale as the rough-surfaced substance of the leaves. It wears dresses too, beaded and glittering ones cropped short to show long legs. It shows bared teeth boldly, wearing tiny shoes like hooves with a strap over the instep. When all four men stand together, it and the other female man stand at the center, arms around each other, leaning close.

Slowly, the cub puts the book down, open to a image of the first male and the female man embracing one another. It picks up a long coil of beads and lets them run between its fingers like tears, like stones.

Slowly, twist by twist, it winds the necklace around the stump of its left arm.

Moths came into the studio each night, drawn by Bijou’s work lights. They fluttered among the benches and beneath the high dark ceilings. Some beat themselves to rags against incandescent bulbs, and some immolated themselves in the fire. The remainder, in morning’s drowsiness, came to rest on the walls, where they made a pattern in white and brown, like embossed paper only more beautiful.

Scraping across the workspace in the early morning, when grayness just began to filter in from the garden windows and the stones underfoot were slick with dew, Bijou found them bemusing. Moths were sacred to Kaalha, lady of mirrors, lady of masks. But what sort of goddess blessed an animal so drawn to the light that it would annihilate itself to obtain it?

Bijou crouched painfully to poke up the fire and feed the coals with scraps of kindling. Lucy could have done the tending, but it was Bijou’s ritual, and she was loathe to relinquish it. Age had not yet defeated her on all fronts, though it was a war of attrition she knew she was fated to lose. As the flames licked around paper-dry reeds, she wondered—if it was so, that Kaalha blessed the moths in their suicide—which of the four Great Gods or all the myriad little ones was it to whom men were sacred?

Heresy, of course. But she was Bijou the Artificer, and while she did not doubt the gods existed, she also thought it likely they had far more sense of humor than the mirthlessness of stern priests would indicate. She had met the Young Bey, and the Old Bey before him she had known very well. She understood that the hierarchy of officials and functionaries did not always reflect the opinions or personality of the one who sat at their titular head. Wouldn’t it be a burden to be a god, and saddled with the upkeep of a cadre of pea-counters and chalice-polishers?

Warmth spilled across the floor. The child, in the trundle bed beside the hearth, raised its head. “Shh, Emeraude,” Bijou said, and smoothed tangled hair from its brow with a knotted hand. The cold got into her joints of a morning. She felt it all the way to her elbows. But somebody was either going to have to comb the plate mats out of the child’s slick black hair or shave it. Bijou’s hair would mat in long tidy springs, and she had worn it that way since she first walked out of the desert dust and into the still-dusty streets of Messaline.

She had been young and straight-spined then, a girl with the height of adulthood but still the body of a boy, and she had walked twelve hundred miles—the length of the River from its headwaters in the mountains where she was born—to come to the legended city.

The city had teemed with donkeys and camels, litter-bearers and sedan chairs and watersellers, and the first bicycles and tintypes had come in while she was still an itinerant magician, making tiny mouse-bone charms for forsaken wives and jeweled bands for forsaking husbands. There had been no airships in those days, no desert-walkers. No electric carts or autorickshaws in the streets. But there had been the father of the Bey, a ne’er-do-well younger son when they met.

And there had been Kaulas, the Necromancer, as young and beautiful as she.

The child had not snuggled back down into its pillow, and Bijou reached gently to tug the blankets higher about its fragile collarbones. But it caught her wrist with its remaining hand and held on lightly. The trembling must be emotion, for it could not be from effort, but it was enough to make the long strings of pearls rattle on its wrist.

Lips pressed tight enough that Bijou glimpsed the outline of teeth behind them, it made a small, hollow, questioning sound. The first sound Bijou had ever heard it make, and she wondered if that were an indication of growing trust, or of extremity.

She knew what boxes it had been in; knew the moment it came down the ladder festooned in swags of black and copper pearls she had never had the heart to Artifice. Too much coincidence.

Perhaps the feral child had a Flair. And perhaps the dawn and moonset goddess had sent the child to Bijou, as surely as she had once sent Bijou to Kaulas. Unless that had been Kaulas’s god, red Rakasha, tiger-god of hunger and pestilence and searing summer, of death.

It was said there was no coincidence in Messaline, where the four gods made their homes. Part of surviving—of thriving—as a Wizard was being aware of the patterns of intention upon which the city hung.

Moths were sacred to Kaalha. Even the puss-moths, with their terrible venomed threads. Maggots were sacred to Kaalha, too, as were the scarabs and the shining bottle-green blowflies that birthed them; she was the goddess of transformations and borderlines, after all, and the transformation of old death to new life was the most profound transformation of all.

“Tea, Emeraude, if you are not sleeping?” Bijou reached to pull the weighty iron kettle from the hook, but the child kept its grip on her wrist, so her gesture only served to tug it upright in the bed. “You may keep the pearls?”

She hadn’t meant to phrase it as a question, but she wasn’t sure if that was what the child was asking, and the child’s black-brown eyes were so wide open, pushing with frustrated questions, that Bijou couldn’t look away.

The stare held until, in a gesture of profound frustration as eloquent as a cat’s, the child lightly dropped Bijou’s wrist. It stood, bare feet arching and curling on the cold damp floor, and reached past her to lift the kettle. The weight surprised it; Bijou could tell by the startled glance and the way it dragged the child’s shoulder down. The child’s strength in turn surprised Bijou, because although it staggered and listed, it did not drop the kettle. It turned, hugging the cast iron against its left hip, and struggled toward the garden door.