The father growls low in his throat when the enemy turns towards him. The mother does not move. The cub must—really must—stop looking.
The cub looks at the old creature instead.
The old creature makes noises, and the enemy makes noises back. Then there is a rain of clicks and chimes, as bone creatures shed from the old one’s hair and clothing—small things, no bigger than a thumb, like beetles. They ring like coins as they fall.
When they are done falling, the old creature comes forward. The loud one reaches after it, but it moves beyond reach of the loud creature’s fingertips with a graceful sway, a sidestep that belongs to a much younger animal.
And then it comes up beside the enemy, and the enemy lets the cub slip from its grasp.
The cub scrambles back, back, until it feels the mother’s fur and slack warm body brush its feet. It crouches beside the father, shivering with wrath and fear, and noses the mother.
The scent that fills its awareness is not the scent of anything alive, and the father shakes, crouching, teeth bared in a display the cub cannot match. No matter how desperately it wishes.
And now the old creature stands before the enemy, the enemy’s fist knotted in the snakes of its pelt. The enemy reaches up with the knife and presses it beneath the old creature’s chin. The old creature closes its eyes, but not before—
Not before the cub sees it look across a gap of space at the loud creature and—for an instant—close just a single eye.
The enemy makes a sound. A short sharp bark of a sound. And sways into the motion of the knife.
Mine, Kaulas said, and Bijou felt the blade prick her throat, part flesh, glide along her skin like a caress. But the child was free, beyond Kaulas’ reach. And Bijou was not about to let Kaulas claim her as he had claimed Wove, and then inevitably Brazen. Death was no escape from a necromancer.
Aladdin the raven watched her from Kaulas’ shoulder, turning so the light gleamed through his blue, flawed eye. If she could reach him—touch him—
—she did not think Kaulas could keep him from her, if she were close enough to touch. But Kaulas was taller, long-limbed, and the knife held her at a distance. Even when her creatures dragged themselves up around him—she heard the rattle of Ambrosius’s legs, syncopated now that so many were broken, and the slow slow scrape of glass on stone as Lazybones hauled itself over slimed cobbles—they would not come closer while he threatened their mistress.
But that was as it should be. And the lady of death was the lady of moths, also.
“All this just to own us?” Bijou said, as slow blood rolled down her throat. “So be it. You’ll own nothing again.”
She stepped forward onto the knife, and as she did, she raised her right hand and brushed the wing of the bone raven sitting like a trophy on Kaulas’ shoulder. “Aladdin,” she said. “I free you.”
The rest of her incantation died on the knife. But she had spoken her intent, and with her blood and breath across the bird’s skull that was what mattered.
Brazen saw her hurl herself onto the knife. He saw her hand rise. He saw the palm slide down the bones of the animate bird skeleton. He saw the mirror-sharp skeleton of the sloth shuffle forward from the edge of the ring of watching creatures to rise up behind the Necromancer and drag hooked claws as long as human fingers though his hamstrings and across his lower back, drive them through flesh and twist.
He saw the raven turn, open its beak, and sink the beveled steel point of its hypodermic tongue into the angle where Kaulas’ jaw joined his throat, silencing him before he could speak a dying spell.
Neither one of them screamed.
But the Necromancer tried to.
Bijou—
Oh, Bijou.
She lay in blood that first bubbled and then seeped and then stopped, and Brazen could do nothing to staunch it. The knowledge did nothing to prevent him from reddening his hands in the attempt.
Despite anything he tried, she went quickly, the raven perched beside her on the stones, the sloth rocking worriedly beside her. When her breath had stilled and the blood stuck to his fingers rather than seeping across them, only then did he whisper, “You should have let me take care of it.”
But then, he wasn’t sure after all that he would have been able to.
Brazen leaned back on his heels and looked up.
The first thing he saw was the child, crouched over one dead jackal, flank to flank with a scarred and living one. The next was the raven, wings still half-spread, cocking its one-eyed head from side to side. Still animate. Still moving.
Brazen turned on his toes without rising from his crouch. They had come up around him, Kaulas’ creatures and Brazen’s and Bijou’s, the animate dead and the animate machines and the jeweled skeletons, many crushed and torn and missing pieces. They stood and waited, and did not judge—or if they judged, they did so silently.
As silently as the child, who had not moved from its place beside its packmates. Other jackals slung from amid the crowd to lurk beside them, shadows on the slick and stinking stones. He wondered if the corpse of his mother was still among them.
He thought he could find out later. And find out, too, if she still wished to be destroyed. It was a decision for another day, one which did not already hold so many terrible decisions.
“You’ll all come home with me,” Brazen said, looking from the re-animated to the living to the never-living at all.
The child looked up at Brazen with eyes gone huge as he rose to his feet. Whether his words meant anything to it, he did not know. But it straightened up, holding itself like a young person rather than a wild animal, and touched his hand with the fingertips of its bone and jewel one. It looked over its shoulder, where the pack had gathered around the corpse of one of their own, and made a yearning gesture.
“I can’t,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
It shuddered all over. Brazen touched its hair. He thought the gesture would send it haring away, but it suffered the caress. Afterwards, it withdrew just beyond the length of his arm and stared up at him.
It did not shy away, though, when the captain of the kapikulu came up through the ranks of the dead.
“Enchanter,” he said. “What are your instructions?”
He took a breath. Faces were appearing in windows and the corners of doorways. There was a public face to be put on this. And a hero to be remembered.
“Lash your spears to carry the Wizard Bijou,” Brazen said. “She must be honored. Bring her to Kaalha’s House. I will await you.”
But it turned out he couldn’t leave while they were seeing to Bijou, because he could not walk away from her. And nor would Emeraude, who flitted back and forth between Bijou’s corpse and that of the she-jackal, touching each with featherlight gestures, clawed fingers that scrabbled as if to clutch, but never quite locked on what they touched.
When the remaining kapikulu lifted Bijou’s body, Brazen found himself beside the child. It gentled the he-jackal as Brazen lifted the female in his arms. She weighed no more than seed-puff, a fistful of feathers. So burdened, it seemed only right that he fell in behind Bijou’s bier rather than leading the way, as had been his intent.
It was fitting that he should walk this last mile with Bijou. As her guard of honor. And it was fitting that he should carry the jackal who had come to fight beside them, though Kaulas’ wrath had only slopped over onto her pack by accident.
Before they started forward, however, the captain of the kapikulu stepped before Brazen, straightening his gore-soaked coat. “And the Necromancer?”