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?”
“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.”