Why had this child been brought to Wizards—to Brazen and Bijou, no less, Wizards of machines and the dead—rather than one of Kaalha’s priests, if the moth-goddess, mirror-goddess wished it saved?
The child scampered back toward the garden while Bijou arranged the kettle over the flames. A moment later, the rapid patter of footsteps brought her around again. The child came trotting, something fluttering black offered in its upraised hand. Even across the loft, Bijou could smell the rot on it. She would have thought the child had retrieved a corpse from one of the composting trays, but Bijou had placed no ravens in to rot in recent days. “Did you find something dead in the garden, Emeraude?”
But it was not dead, Bijou saw—and even a Wizard could feel a little horror when the tragic thing stirred faintly, head questing blindly, weakly, across the child’s flat palm. Perhaps the child wanted Bijou to help it, but the bird was beyond aiding. It squirmed with those fat iridescent maggots, the eyes already consumed in the sunken face. A lot of decomposition in such cool weather, when Bijou was as certain as she could be that it had not been in the garden when she had gone out the evening before to make her devotions to the setting moon.
Careful of the grasping beak—too weak to do much damage, anyway—she lifted the bird from the child’s palm, leaving a maggot or two behind. As automatically as one of Brazen’s Automatons, the child popped the grubs into its mouth and bit down with satisfaction. Jackals would eat anything, and Bijou had consumed her share of raw and roasted insects in her own long lonely walk from the mountains. She did not wince.
She spread the bird’s wings, and found what she was looking for.
The suppurating wound, dried pus caked in the feathers about it, at the joint of the left wing and the body. The bird in its final illness could no more have flown than the child could.
Someone had thrown it over the garden wall.
And the wound was packed with flower petals.
“Thank you,” Bijou said, and hooked her cane over her arm so she could break the poor thing’s neck with her thumbs. A quick satisfying pop, and it was dead at last, slack in her hands. Bijou stumped toward the garden and the composting boxes. She’d write to Brazen when that was done.
“Come along, Emeraude. You need to wash your hands before breakfast.”
While it is true that notoriety offers certain benefits, it is not by any means confirmed that those benefits compensate for the disadvantages. Or, to put it more succinctly, Brazen found it nearly impossible to move unremarked about his city, as he might have in younger and less infamous years. His flamboyance could be concealed, of course—to be taken off again was half its purpose—and his long fair hair wrapped under a turban. His bulk and breadth—his pale skin and eyes—those were harder to disguise.
But an inquest into the surreptitious doings of Kaulas the Necromancer was more than could be asked of a functionary, and so Brazen tugged a cloth cap tight over his twisted-up hair while his turban soaked. He drew the wet white fabric from its basin and wrung it out. One end in his teeth, he made two wraps around his head for the underturban, which would cool him when the autumn sun mounted. Though they moved from the killing summer, Rakasha’s season, into autumn—a time of birth and rebirth—still the noontime sun was a danger to the unwary, and Brazen knew he had grown soft in the decades since his own time on the streets.
But the knowledge never left one.
The overturban was double-width, three yards in length, a cool blue gauze the air would flow through. Once he had tucked in the trailing ends of the turban, he folded, stretched, and rolled the overturban, using the knob on a chest of drawers as an anchor. He could have asked his valet to tie it for him, but a professional’s touch would show. The man whose persona he was assuming might keep body servants, but a classically trained valet would not be on his list of priorities.
Brazen wrapped his own turban, five wraps, and smoothed the sharp parallel lines with an ivory paper knife to make them crisp. He was out of practice; it took three tries to make the pinch in the center fall even. Still, he thought, examining his reflection—full-face and profile—it would do.
The coat he had chosen was nothing like his usual cut velvet or silk in gaudy bird-bright colors. Rather, he shrugged into ankle-long linen, striped from collar to hem in sand and taupe. Dark brown yarn had been picked through the open weave with a darning needle, leaving the woven-in lines defined with dots and dashes.
Brazen removed his wrist chronometer—his own manufacture, and unmistakable—balanced spectacles he was usually too vain to wear outside the lab on his nose, and stroked his chin in the mirror. It would be better if he had time to grow a beard beyond his tidy goatee, but even so his fair skin would stand out far more than shaven cheeks.
He grunted at his reflection.
It would suffice.
Nevertheless, he slipped a pistol into his sash at the back and hooked a heavy dagger by his right hand. He exited by the servant’s entrance, slipping out in company of the greengrocer’s wagon. He walked alongside in socks and sandals, swinging his staff with each jaunty stride.
This time, he was not insulated. The scent and the swirl of the streets rose with every turn of the cartwheels, every puff of dust from beneath his feet. Intoxicated, Brazen shrugged wide his arms and drew a deep breath: dung and spices and gutter-reek. Hens fluttered scolding from before a donkey’s hooves, one startling Brazen to amused outcry when it ricocheted from his knees and hurtled, shrieking, into an alley narrower than the span of his arms, where it bounced from wall to wall screaming outrage to any who would hear it. The ravens squatting opportunistically along a nearby roofline answered with harsh choruses of laughter, and the jackals slipping like black-backed shadows along the great stone blocks of leaning foundation walls.
Even so early, the streets were full to bruising. Brazen’s size gave him some advantage with the crowds; he had his father’s height and broader shoulders and towered over most of Messaline’s population like a medieval siege engine approaching the walls of a city. Still, elderly market women everywhere were notorious for the sharpness of their elbows.
When seeking information, it was traditional to entertain taverns. And Brazen fully intended to pass through one or two as the afternoon wore by. However, one did not become a Wizard of Messaline without a certain number of favors owed and held and traded, and it was those debts which he first meant to address.
First, in the marketplace, where Isaak the news-seller sat cobbler-fashion on a striped rug beneath a garden-patterned awning, the horny soles of his feet upturned on thighs like ropes of noodle dough. The water-pipe beside him bubbled softly as Isaak drew a taste of tobacco sweet with intoxicating herbs and let it trickle across his ochre-stained moustache. On one corner of his rug, red and yellow thorn-flowers grew in a copper pot, already blooming in celebration of approaching winter.
Brazen crouched in the sideways shade of the awning, one hand still upraised on the balancing staff, and tried to give no sign of how his knees protested. “Isaak,” he said, when the news-seller’s eyes swung to focus on him. “A word for an old friend?”
Isaak offered him the mouthpiece of the water pipe, and Brazen refused it with a gesture. “Thank you, no.”
Eyebrows rose, but the mouthpiece of the pipe went to its hook, and Isaak lifted his coin bowl. “What do you want, Michael?”
The simplicity of Brazen’s long-forsaken human name reassured him that Isaak had, in a moment, apprehended the circumstances and chosen to play along. “Carrion,” he said, pitching his voice low. “Pestilence. Things that rot before they’re dead. What do you know about them?”