“It’s all right,” Bijou said, patting the giant Artifice on one sharp-slanted shoulderblade. “It’s not in the garden, is it?”
Hawti rocked from leg to leg, disconsolate, and Bijou thought if it had the power, it would be keening. “Shhh,” Bijou said. She stumped around the bed once, but did not touch the jeweled arm that lay, pale and hurtful, in the shallow morning light. She followed the trail into the side-garden, and there found the bent stems of rose brambles, a little blood and hair and some fibers from the child’s smock caught among the thorns. She would not have thought anyone could climb them.
She had underestimated people before.
As she leaned upon her cane with both hands, waiting for direct sun to creep over the wall and warm her hair, Bijou considered. One possibility was that the child served Kaulas and that it had returned to him. But if that were so, there was no reason for it to leave behind the arm. To obtain a sample of Bijou’s best and current work could only serve the Necromancer. True, Bijou might be able to trace the Artifice—but Kaulas had to assume that Bijou knew where he lived.
The child could not speak, unless it had somehow been ensorceled to silence—and Bijou comforted herself that she retained a good understanding of the limits of Kaulas’s powers. She did not think it likely. And what good was a spy who could make no report?
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.