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Authors: Elizabeth Bear

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BOOK: Bone and Jewel Creatures
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The sun had not reached her yet, but the spatter of tiny moving reflections among the curl-leafed but November-blooming roses told her it had painted the top of the arched doorway and that Lazybones hung from its hooks just within, watching over her. Or, at least, watching over her shoulder.

She was fond of the sloth, an exotic skeleton brought back for her from a distant land. It had not proven any usefulness, unlike Lucy or Catherine or Lupe or Hawti—or Ambrosias, first and most loved of her creatures still—but it moved with such meticulous precision, and it glittered so in the light, and it always seemed so
interested
in anything that might be going on.

She turned to look and it lowered itself like a geared Automaton from the rafters, dangling from awkward-jointed legs until its foreclaws swung low enough to brush Bijou’s head, if she had walked under it. It reached out a claw; she extended her hand in turn, brushing knuckles against its hooks.

It was also possible that the child had been meant to serve as a distraction, to keep Brazen and herself occupied while Kaulas carried out his plan. That seemed likelier.

A distraction. A diversion.

Or a test.

What would Bijou and Brazen do, when confronted with his handiwork? How would they react?

Of what were they capable?

In the back garden, something rattled hard, like a mallet thumping the lid of a box. Bijou startled, back protesting as she jerked upright. Lazybones began the incremental process of winching itself back into the rafters, and she hurried under—what passed for her hurrying, now, which might also explain the sense of kinship she felt with Lazybones. The scrape of her feet across the floor, the thump of her cane—she moved a little faster than the mirrored, rattling animal in the rafters, but not by much, and never so gracefully.

She did not need to command her Artifices when she moved with such intention towards an unidentified sound. Ambrosias scurried before her, rib-legs clattering like the rhythm sticks of her childhood. The flapping shadow of Catherine’s broad wings passed over, and Bijou could almost feel the shift in the earth underfoot as Lupe, Lucy, and Hawti came along behind, single-file to pass through the ranks of work benches and then fanning out behind and alongside.

In the garden, the birds that sang and quarreled by the
pedestal bath went still and crouched in the shadow of Catherine’s wings. The condor flew only ponderously without an updraft, but the heavy struggling passage of its wings was enough to bear it to the back garden wall. It landed on outstretched talons and turned heavily, waddling, to face the inside court again. Ambrosias was almost as swift, racing up the wall beside the composting boxes and clinging there, curved and then straight like an osteoid glyph of the letter
kha
.

The hammering—frantic staccato flurries, now, separated by brief listening pauses—came from inside the box into which Bijou had placed the dead crow. “Hawti,” Bijou said, taking a step back.

The Artifice reached a boa-constrictor-spine trunk over Bijou’s shoulder, pendant teardrop pearls and glittering marcasites sliding cool over skin as they brushed her neck. Gently, in a gap between noises, the tip of the trunk nudged the latch on the box open, and lifted up the lid.

A stench and a bundle of flailing black plumage burst from the box, shedding feathers and globs of rotten meat. The dead bird beat for altitude, a blur of frenetic activity, rising to the top of the garden wall while Bijou was still staggering a half-step that might have landed her, seriously injured, on her back if Lucy had not caught her in a bony arm and steadied her against a massive shoulder. Bijou squeaked, a shrill girl’s noise, absolutely undignified in a ninety-six-year-old Wizard.

The dead bird bobbed on the air for an instant, as if seeking a direction, and then Catherine struck from off the wall, falling upon the smaller creature like a stone hurled from a siege engine. The silk-and-feather wings of the condor Artifice snapped on the air like shaken dresses, and both birds hit the ground beside the path in a tangle of beaks and plumage.

Catherine’s talons were not made for clutching or tearing. Its skeleton was that of a carrion-eater, adapted for soft, rotten meat. But that was what the raven had become, after all, and Catherine’s weight and the reach of its long neck were more than enough to pin it though it still struggled and cursed.

“Ambrosias, a cage,” Bijou said. The centipede came down from the wall like a cascade of dice, clattering and rattling, and swept past her ankles. It must have had to venture the attic, because it was the better part of a quarter-hour before it returned, the brass-barred cage—as wide in each direction as the length of Bijou’s cane—dragged behind and striking sparks off the slates. Lucy went and took it, then set it beside the raven.

Between them, they managed to get the stinking thing into the cage, where it sulked and rattled its beak on the bars and glared at them from squirming sockets. It reeked of the grave, corpse-liquor dripping from the ragged holes in its ribcage.

Bijou, who was accustomed to dead things, nonetheless shuddered. Catherine scraped its beak and talons clean in the earth beside the path.

“Lupe, Catherine,” Bijou said, “watch the dead bird. Don’t let it escape.”

Lupe gnashed its teeth and sparked the lenses of its eyes, and Bijou answered with a gentle hand across the jeweled skull. “Thank you,” she said, and went to send a message.

The cub slinks through darkness undetected. The
human
city is still at this hour, but that does not mean that the city itself is at all sleeping. This is the hour of the rat, of the jackal, of the moth—of all the life whose city it also is, all the creatures who share these spaces and hollows, these stone and mud-brick walls, these dew-slicked streets that echo with the drip-drip-drip of precious water into cisterns and catchments.

The wings of bats are near-silent, but they silhouette against the night—or against the windows the bats sometimes flock around, if the inhabitant sits late with a candle burning to draw the moths. The feet of jackals and cats are near-silent too, but the cub has nothing to fear from jackals and cats. Not so, the dogs that roam the night city in packs, kings of the street. Even a grown male human could find those dangerous: they have been known to break into homes, to pull down vagrants in the street. Beggars fend them away with fire: the brothers-and-sisters must use craft, the art of not being where the dogs are.

The cub is versed in those arts, and moves through the street as silently as the rats do, slinking beside thick walls that may break its silhouette. Its heart hammers sharply, breath low and quick, mouth open to amplify any sounds or smells in the chambers of its skull. Skulk, and slip, and stay alive. That is what the brothers-and-sisters are for. Moving through the cracks and connections, slipping from place to place unseen, with their black backs and their ticked tawny-gray flanks and their twig-slender limbs.

The night city smells of many things—rising bread, rotting meat, sewage, roses, winter jasmine, cold ashes, warm smoke, humans coupling in their dens. The pattern of smells is a map that draws the cub home to its own territory, to the territory of the brothers-and-sisters, all across the breadth of the city.

At the river, the cub pauses. It has not passed the river before. There are bridges, narrow, just wide enough for a rickshaw or two pedestrians, with a low lip on either side but no rail. Not that a rail would matter to the cub, for when it steps on the marble paving stones—Messaline is a limestone and marble city, which in a wetter climate would slowly melt—it hears the echo of its step bounce back from the moving water.

It skips a step back, stops, crouches. The whine rises in its throat but is not vocalized. Things that make noise get found, and things that get found get eaten.

The wind blows from across the river, bringing familiar smells of the pack’s territory. Safety. Home.

The cub sets its forelimb upon the bridge, and waits to be bitten. When no teeth snap, it edges forward. One more step. Both hindlimbs. The echoes shatter under its feet, and it pauses, confused again. It can feel its pulse in its eyes, thumping under its jaw below the ear, and it knows that anyone who cares to look can see it easily here, shuddering and exposed.

It must cross. Either walk, or swim.

Humans walk across these things. It can smell their feet, and even the feet of dogs and horses. And other jackals, though none recently.

A scurrying rat bustles past, intent on its own business, disregarding the cub. Good food, if you can catch them, but the rat seems unconcerned by the cub’s nearness. Perhaps it can sense the cub’s fear and confusion.

If a rat can cross a bridge, so can the cub.

The cub rises from its huddle and scurries—head down, back arched, scrambling on all limbs, just like the rat with one less appendage to work with—across the bridge, sliding on dew down the far slope and crashing against the wall of some human’s den at the bottom. A thump, too much noise, and the cub picks itself up, bruised, and makes itself scarce up the hill, toward the familiar smells.

It has passed through this part of the city before, though only with great haste and caution. The brothers-and-sisters are not the only jackal pack, and others do not tolerate trespassers. Because the cub is unlike the brothers-and-sisters—deformed, mangy, pale—other packs may not recognize it as an interloper. But that’s a safety the cub would prefer not to rely on.

Here the cub is familiar with the smells, and it knows how the smells have changed. And there is one new smell in particular, overlaying everything, that makes that silent whine bubble up its throat again. It is the smell of the dying raven the cub found in the old creature’s den, the smell of the dying limb that the old creature cut from the living cub, so as to make the cub better. And it’s everywhere.

Here a bat flutters past, trailing a ribbon of putrescence. There, a limping cat turns baleful eyes upon the cub, but they do not reflect the light from a nearby window. They are slick and luminescent with rot, and in their sockets the glossy soybean heads of carrion worms nod on pale bodies. Around the corner lies a derelict man, from whose pallet the other beggars have withdrawn in horror, moving their shared brazier and their fragile circle of self-protection seven or ten canes distant. The man lifts its head when the cub passes, its sunken cheeks decaying over the remains of yellowed teeth. It makes no sound, and no further gesture, the blank face only swiveling to follow the cub’s path.

The cub trots faster, to outrace the sun.

In the rising heat of her garden, Bijou boiled the raven. At first, it struggled in the pot, but the lid—with Lucy’s hand upon it—was too heavy for the dead bird to shift. At last simmering quieted the thrashing, and Bijou was left with a cloying stench of rot that adhered in her hair and nostrils and hung about her clothes like a pall. She cast frankincense and dragonsblood into the fire, which at least overlaid the scent, if it did not manage to dull it.

In the afternoon, when the sun was high, she and Lucy poured the broth through a strainer, and pulled the bones one by one from the mess of dead maggots and cooked, fetid meat. Bijou much preferred to work with insect-picked and air-dried skeletons—boiling softened the bones—but there was not time to do this the right way. And she wasn’t sure if an undead bird would ever properly rot. Under the Necromancer’s power, it might continue in its animate and moldering state until the end of the world.

She was laying out minute bones on the dark gray surface of her work table—sorting meticulously to be certain she had not missed any, while Ambrosias picked through the vile sludge one last time in search of the tiny hyoid apparatus—when Brazen finally arrived. Hawti admitted him at the front door, and he walked in with his handkerchief clutched across his nose. “Vajhir’s sacred testicles,” he said though muffling cloth. “What
died
in here?”

“This,” Bijou said, standing aside so he could see the damp, fragile skeleton. “The forge is heated, Enchanter. Go to it. We have work, you and I.”

He turned to obey her, but paused. “Where’s Emeraude?”

BOOK: Bone and Jewel Creatures
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