“It is a formality,” Brazen said.
“My advisors will not hear of interfering in a Wizard war.”
“That is as I told my old master,” Brazen said. “Also, that Kaulas set your father in his place, and when in that service he placed the Council, he placed men loyal to himself.”
The Bey sat back, a grim smile twisting his lips. “So you will understand when I tell you that I cannot give you men, or any succor or comfort when you brace him.”
“I will understand many things,” Brazen agreed. He bit down on pastry, though it might as well have been a swallow’s nest for all the pleasure it gave him. Brushing crumbs from his beard gave him a moment to school his expression. “I understand that a man faces many difficulties in life, and he cannot always choose how he meets them.”
“It is true,” the Bey said. “True and yet a source of sorrow for all devout men. Still, a great service may be remembered with gratitude.”
“Indeed,” said Brazen. “Or disquiet, in gratitude’s failure.”
Bijou knew from Brazen’s stride, from the swirl of his robes about his ankles and the way his sandals hit the floor, that the conversation with the Bey had gone no better than anticipated. But because it was expected, she laid down her corruption-soaked tools and stepped back from the current cadaver, holding fouled hands wide. “Well?” she said.
Brazen’s sigh was gusty enough that Bijou half-thought she should feel it across the loft. He broke his stride and folded his arms, choosing to stand well back from her work table.
“He says that if we kill Kaulas for him, he’ll try not to hold the favor against us.”
“Oh,” Bijou said.
Brazen nodded. “Yes. That went about as well as I expected. So what now?”
Bijou nodded to the deliquescing carcass pinned before her. “We chase Kaulas from his den, my dear one.”
Maybe now the old creature trusts the cub to return. At least, she has made the new-creatures—the ones that carry scimitars and stand as still as doors—allow the cub and the mother and the brothers-and-sisters to come and go as they please. And where they please to come and go is to and from the stinking den of the enemy.
The cub—and the mother—understand now that the old creature and her allies are pack, or at least they are pack as one might find pack in the dry season, when the lions are lean and will hunt even jackals, if they can get them. So they do what jackals do best, and at the edge of the enemy’s territory ghost from crevice to shadow, waiting for what he will do.
The cub is most tireless of the sentries, along with the mother. The mother seems to have chosen it, to rely upon its judgment now as she did not before, and this makes the cub lift its chest with pride. If the cub had a ruff and proper ears, they would be puffed up.
Instead, it leans its shoulder on the mother’s shoulder as they crouch in the shadow of a vine-hung wall out of eyeshot of the enemy’s den, but within range by even the cub’s crippled sense of smell. The cub presses its face under her neck in submission and gratitude. The mother—warm, richly scented and soft—stretches her neck and turns her head, returning the caress. And then they wait, and try to avoid the notice of the occasional vicious dead things that shamble or flutter through increasingly-deserted streets.
And wait some more, through lingering evenings and still-sharp days.
It so happens that when the enemy at last emerges from his den, the cub and the mother are crouched under that very arbor. The enemy comes forth on the last day of autumn, which falls exactly between the equinox and the solstice, in the grey light before the sun breaks over the horizon and begins sending its red fingers seeking between the walls of Messaline. On another day, the markets would be bustling in the morning cool, but some premonition must have stolen into the stall-keepers in their beds. Because the progress of the enemy’s reeking army through the streets is met by silence, barred doors and vacant streets, and heralded only by the stench of corpses and the long strides of jackals running before him.
Bijou had never heard the city jackals howl before. Certainly the jackals of the river, the ones she knew from her childhood, were anything but silent, so she knew they must be able to yip and cry and converse. But the jackals who lived within Messaline were next to ghosts, silent as shadows. So to hear their concerted cries in the street jerked her upright in her bed. Beyond the alcove curtain, Hawti rang like a carnival as it strode towards the door.
Bijou groped for her spectacles, balancing them on her nose while struggling her feet to the floor.
She did not need to ask. She stood, rocking to her feet—perhaps the urgency of crisis was not a panacea after all. The previous day’s robes hung over her vanity stool. She shrugged them on, thrusting buttons through holes with an aching thumb, and faced herself in her mirror, where she made her face stern and empty.
Of course, he had waited for Kaalha’s season to pass, and Vajhir’s to begin. At least it was winter and not the killing summer. But he must have begun his campaign then.
Bijou stared at herself sternly in the mirror, and tucked her hammer in her sash before she went out to face the Necromancer, brushing past the kapikulu at her front door as if they were no more than cords of hanging coins and crystals.
Kaulas came with her bone raven on his shoulder, as if to prove that she could wrest from him nothing that he could not take back. But she had Brazen at her side to give the lie, and jackals glared green-eyes from every shadow. Kaulas walked, his gait crisp and unhurried, and Bijou stood with her gnarled hands on her gnarled stick and watched him walk—tall and stern and as spry as if he were not easily as old as she—at the head of his army of the dead, all of them filling up the broad boulevard that led to her front door.
Bijou had something of an army behind her, as well. Brazen and his men-at-arms and his mechanicals at her left hand. The child and the jackals at her right. Her creatures arrayed behind her—the ones she had made over years past from relicts and mementos mori, and the new ones who were still-living, salvaged from Kaulas’ creeping necrosis. Ambrosius clattered at her feet, and just behind her Lazybones dragged itself over the cobblestones with a rowing motion, scratching the mirrors on its belly but determined not to be left behind.
“Kaulas,” she said, when she thought he was close enough to hear her. He was certainly close enough for the stench to carry.
He came a few strides closer before he halted, as if to prove she could not make him hesitate. No surprise there, she thought. She never could.
The jeweled insect brooches in her hair danced in anticipation. “Kaulas,” she said again. “Don’t pretend that you can’t hear me.”
In defiance of the desert, Kaulas wore black: a flapping-tailed northern coat and trousers over a crisp white shirt tied at the collar in a bow. Bijou looked at his hard-planed cheeks, the sagging line of what had been a beautiful jaw. She had had one of her own, once upon a time. She might have lifted a hand to brush her wattled throat, but she would not give Kaulas the satisfaction of seeing her fidget.
“Well,” she said, “You have my attention. For once. What did you plan to do with it?”
“Keep it,” he said.
One bony hand made an elegant gesture, and something came forward from the press of animate dead behind him. A woman, Bijou thought at first. Though she came walking slowly, veiled as if against the desert dust and heat, Bijou knew her walk. Though it had been a sorcerer’s lifetime since Bijou bid her farewell, she knew the tilt of her head.