Isaak rattled his bowl in answer.
Smiling, Brazen dropped in two of the Bey’s silver coins and one of his self-minted gold ones.
“Carrion,” Isaak answered, making the gold and one of the silver coins vanish up his sleeve. “You needn’t look far in Messaline to find that. It’s the city of jackals, Michael. The city of crows. There’s carrion on every corner, and heads nailed over every gate.”
“That’s nothing new.” Brazen settled an elbow on his knee, hunkering comfortably. “And news is what I’m paying for.”
Isaak made a flicking motion with his fingers, as if brushing away flies beside his turbaned head. “Maybe a bit more by way of…direction?”
Brazen glanced left, over his shoulder, aware how fugitive he must seem. But surely any number of those who visited a news-seller had reason to appear furtive. “After all,” he mocked gently, “how do we learn news for the selling if not from our earlier clients?”
Isaak reached for the mouthpiece of the hookah and tongued it thoughtfully. He shrugged, a broad fluid gesture that brought one shoulder up to almost brush his ear and rolled the other back in sympathy. “Even my perspicacity has limits, effendi. A little assistance is all I ask. You have, after all—” that same shrug in reverse “—already paid.”
The coins meant nothing to Brazen. But on his honor as a Messaline, he would get what he bargained for. “The Artificer,” he said. “Myself. Someone is sending us foul little gifts, courtesy of Kaulas the Necromancer or someone who can mimic his work. We are curious to uncover who is employing him.”
“Is he necessarily employed?”
Brazen’s spanned fingers tapped his knee lightly, the other hand still resting high on his staff. “It does seem likely. Unless he’s tossing us gangrene cases and stinking corpse-birds out of sheer Wizardly fellow feeling.”
“One would think the Artificer would find a stinking corpse-bird homely and comforting.” Isaak let the smoke pool behind his teeth. It dripped over his lips when he spoke. The heady scent alone was enough to make Brazen’s eyes water. “Here’s a bit of news, then, that might interest you. The Necromancer—all the jackals of Messaline have a taste for carrion. The street dead have a manner of finding their way to his door.” He raised his chin, tilting his head consideringly up at Brazen. “The ones no one is willing to pay to have decently exposed, anyway.”
Messaline’s dead, the ones with someone to care what became of them, were brought with great ceremony to high towers a mile or so from the city walls, and there laid out for the condors and vultures to feast.
“The ones that don’t find their way into jackals and feral pigs, anyway,” Brazen said comfortably. “So has the procession of corpses stepped up? Tapered off?”
“No.” Isaak drew smoke again, tasted it, held it deep, and let it roll off his tongue. “But now, he shops for animals as well. And I have heard from witnesses that his men go among the poorest of the city’s poor, the curs and vagabonds, soliciting for employment. Offering…a great deal of money. And perhaps this summer there seem to be fewer street urchins than in the last.”
“Is this rumor?” Brazen asked. “Or is it fact?”
“I know a stonemason, ruined by drink,” Isaak said. He eyed the mouthpiece of the pipe thoughtfully, and hung it up again. “Who came back out of the Necromancer’s employ ruined in the lungs and eyes, as well. He didn’t live a month after.”
“No one said anything?”
“Wizards,” Isaak said. “Who are you going to complain to? And when he died, well, a little man came around to ask if the widow would sell his body to the Necromancer.”
“Of course she did.” Brazen stood, the prop of the staff welcome assistance. His knees minded the standing more than the crouching, which always struck him as perverse.
“Babies matter more than bodies,” Isaak agreed. “And babies are costly to feed.”
Brazen nodded. “How much more gold not to share the news of what I asked for, and who was asking?”
“No charge,” Isaak said. “That, I do for a friend.”
“And the information?”
The final silver coin vanished from Isaak’s bowl, proof of a transaction concluded. “Business,” he said, and held the mouthpiece out to Brazen again.
Brazen accepted, and sealed the deal in smoke.
The child had its own bed, but most mornings now Bijou awoke with the small thing curled upon her arm. Either that, or with the child burrowing in her covers, hungry and dawn-alert. This morning was no different, and by the time they were fed and the tea was steeping, Brazen had arrived at the door, bearing news and bread from his own kitchen.
Food nor company much delayed work, in Bijou’s house. While Brazen watched her, Bijou bent wire. The cool tick of the dark variegated pearls the child had pulled from the attic was soothing; she stroked them, rolling their faint grittiness under her fingertips.
The armature was almost complete. With meticulous attention, Bijou had taken the clean bones and capped the ends in silver, chased each in filigree, and hinged them strongly. Articulating the hand and fingers was more challenging; the bones needed to roll and flex complexly. But the hand of a person was not so different from Lucy’s hand—or foot for that matter—and Bijou had made more complicated things.
While Brazen told her what he had deduced of Kaulas’s new activities, Bijou hunched over her bench, checking the knots on each silk-strung pearl, lifting moonstone and chrysoprase in jeweler’s tweezers and setting them along the back of each finger so they glittered like stacked rings. She thought the child might wear a glove on the hand, eventually, if it wished to conceal the prosthesis.
Or, if it did wind up a Wizard, folk expected stranger things of those than a jeweled skeleton-hand.
“However,” Brazen concluded, “none of this explains why Kaulas might go to such lengths to make certain you and I get involved. Because I’m as certain as I have ever been of anything that he sent your new apprentice”—Bijou snorted—“to my door so that I would discover what he was about. Although I flatter myself that I might have noticed eventually.”
It occurred to Bijou, as she brushed adhesive deep within a setting, that she was taking on a responsibility she might not live to see complete. Her experience of children suggested that they had a tendency to grow. A prosthesis designed from the bones of a six-year-old would be of no use to the same child at fifteen.
“You are going to have to make the next one for it,” she said to Brazen, without lifting her head. A snake-lock fell across her face; she stuffed it behind an ear and idly scratched her arm where the skin was dry and ashy. Palm oil tonight; she would slather herself in it, then scrape it off with the wooden paddle.
“Excuse me?” he said.
“The next arm.” Her gesture took in the structure laid out on the table before her. “You are going to have to construct it. You can’t take in a stray and then abandon it. It’s a betrayal of trust. Once you claim a thing, it’s yours.”
“But—” He gestured at her, at the bed by the fire, the unused cage with the door standing open.
Now she did turn to him, pulling her shoulders back as far as they would go against the hunch of her collapsing spine. Bijou had seen enough skeletons to have an idea what the bones looked like under the skin. What a pity she could not cut herself open, she thought, and wire in an armature to replace crumbling bone. She could build a trunk for Hawti—the elephant stood now, idly poking the fire before laying more fuel on the coals—but her own body’s failures were beyond her to repair.