Smoke and dust and confusion, but Brazen sailed above it all in the cool clean air of his sealed carriage, an observer from afar. Sometimes he missed the tang of charcoal and piss in the streets. Sometimes. But who needed a Wizard’s tower, when you could bring one with you?
This time, Brazen had nothing to transport, and so he did not trouble to kneel the carriage. A rope ladder slithered from the hatchway once he’d drawn to a halt. He scrambled down, hair and bright-striped felt coat flaring in the hot autumn wind that had swept away two weeks of coastal chill, and grounded himself—he thought—half-elegantly. He was expected; Ambrosias awaited him in the street, reared up to head-height. It did not sway as a living creature might, so rather than glittering the jewels along its spine reflected sunlight in steady gleams.
Coat still swirling about his calves, Brazen stopped before the Artifice. It bowed with a measuring tic-tic-tic and the shiner of its cymbal, then swept about, sudden as a mongoose, and led him to the door. Though the massive double doors were closed, the sally-port stood open, guarded by the reclining, watchful skeleton of a wolf. Brazen stepped over Lupe—its tail rattled once on the tile in welcome—and let himself into Bijou’s loft.
The Artificer was seated by the fire for once, and Brazen was glad to see it. She didn’t rest enough, claiming that soon she would have time enough to rest forever…in the embrace of Kaalha the half-masked.
The old have nothing to pace themselves for, she’d say. This is the final sprint. Run. Run. See how far you can get before you fall.
The cast of her features concerned him as he came to her. It could be hard to read expression on a leathery face marked by years of sun, dark as lava rock beneath the springy gray snakes of her hair. But he had some experience. She did not look in pain, but the lines from nose-corners to mouth-corners had drawn deep and her eyes were hooded.
Brazen stopped before her and hooked a padded stool over with his foot. He dropped down on it, sitting by her feet as of old, though perhaps with greater dignity.
“The child?” he asked, not glancing at the trundle bed and the clean cage standing open not so far away.
“It’s in the attic,” Bijou said. “I sent Catherine and Lazybones to watch. It should be fine. For a time.”
With both hands on the arms of the chair, she heaved herself up. A little rocking was required to get her there, but she did not ask for help, so Brazen did not offer it. He stood, instead, and had the cane he’d made for her so long ago—during his own apprenticeship—shaken out long and ready when she reached for it. “Walk with me,” she said.
A painful task, because her dragging steps hurt him. Still, he followed her, a little to the left, as she hobbled toward the benches among the pillars at the back of the hall.
She said, with steely directness, “Where did you find that child?”
“It fetched up,” he answered. “The cook has been feeding it on the steps, along with the jackals and the feral cats. When she noticed the thing was injured, she brought it inside. You were the only one who stood a chance of helping it.”
“Because I take in strays,” she said.
She had turned to him with that comment, a crinkle at the corner of her eye the only clue that her expression teased.
“It wouldn’t be the first,” he said. “If it’s out running around, I imagine you helped?”
“I had to amputate.” She lifted her free hand and tugged at the wattle along her throat, as if even slack skin had grown too tight for her. Her cane clicked on the floor, apposite to the shuffle of the foot she dragged. It was twisted almost sideways, now, the striped wool sock and straps of her sandal protruding from under the hem of her robes. She gestured to the nearest workbench. It made his own hands ache, to see how hers were twisted. “There it is.”
The bones were clean, bleached pale, though age would eventually mellow them to ivory. Bijou had begun the process of articulating them, of building a working hand from salvaged bits and bobs. Some of the hand bones had been replaced by other stuffs: chips of whittled ivory, a block of richly banded coca-bolo wood, a hinge of silver hung on a steel pin. All around the pieces laid like a jigsaw puzzle on the benchtop were stones, precious and semiprecious jewels. From his apprenticeship, Brazen recognized moonstone and chrysoprase, silken blue and green in their luster. “You’re making it a hand. That’s kind of you—” Bijou grunted dismissively “—what’s this?”
Its surface cool under his fingers, Brazen picked up a lidded watch-glass containing a shred of withered brown.
“The source of the infection,” Bijou said. “So tell me, Brazen, again. Why did you bring me a child infected by Kaulas’ necromancy? Surely, you don’t expect me to believe it was coincidence.”
“Necromancy? On the living?”
“Dead tissue is dead tissue,” Bijou said. “The wound was packed with puss moth threads and white roses—both poisonous and significantly symbolic, I would say.” She lifted the watch glass from his hand and tapped it with a forefinger. “The child would have died, without our intervention. And then it would have been completely under Kaulas’s sway, don’t you think? Its shade his to command, its corpse his to animate? So—if I assume for the moment that you and he are not allied in some plot far too sinister and complex for my old head to fathom—why would Kaulas, the old bastard, have put that child where we were sure to find it? Why would he have chosen a subject who mattered to your household?”
Brazen lifted a smooth needle-sharp hook on a corrugated handle and stroked the point across the back of his hand, pursing his lips at the prickle. “As a means to bring an agent inside my door, it lacks a little something. Neither of us would be likely to keep a rotting corpse around, and he can’t have expected me to bring the child to you for treatment. There are too many variables.”
Bijou nodded, a slow oscillation of her head that made her fat oval locks shiver against her shoulders. She set the watchglass down and shifted her cane to her other hand. “You know I do not trust him—”
“My loyalties are not divided, Bijou,” Brazen said. “I understand that you have learned well to distrust men, but as you were my teacher, I would not betray you. I swear it by my art.”
She reached out, as if absently, and patted his arm. Whatever comfort the gesture brought was swept away by her words.
“I know you’re not your father, sweetheart,” she said. “Never fear you will be mistaken for him.”
Three
The cub hears voices below. Those man-sounds, the ones they make nearly ceaselessly when they are in one another’s company. They argue like pigeons; they cluck and coo. The brothers-and-sisters only talk when it is needful, because sound tells the enemies where you are.
And for the brothers-and-sisters, the city is full of enemies. We are small, the cub thinks. Not in words as a man would understand them, because the cub’s words are smells and body-posture and small yips and growls and vocalizations (the cub’s speech is very handicapped, with its small flat ears and its tailless haunches) but in a wordless understanding. Nearly everything that is not prey—rats, cats, pigeons—is bigger than the brothers-and-sisters.
That is why the brothers-and-sisters scavenge and hide and must be smarter—cannier, slipperier, more subtle—than the men and the dogs and all the big things that would kill them and not even eat them, just leave their bodies in the road. The brothers-and-sisters will eat anything that is food and they are tricky and quick. So they survive.
The cub understands that there’s information in the man-sounds, just as there’s information in the arguing of pigeons. The cub crouches in the attic, where dim slanting light angles across the cluttered space, limning columns of dust. It cocks an ear and an eye close to a gap in the floorboards, and watches.