Book of Iron bajc-2

by Elizabeth Bear

  “If you ever need me,” Salamander replied.

  Both, Bijou thought, knew the other had no intention of asking.

  Maledysaunte and the bard took their leave of the others, including Prince Salih with his dishdasha draped awkwardly over the sling and cast confining his arm. Now they walked away, and Salamander stayed behind until the messenger had led them out of sight.

  Then, without a word, Salamander turned and left as well, going deeper into the palace as Maledysaunte and Riordan had walked out. Prince Salih walked beside her as if they had planned it in advance. Bijou imagined they hadn’t.

  When they were out of earshot, she had something she planned to say. But Kaulas beat her to it.

  “I wanted to make you jealous,” he said. “Do you know what you’re like? It’s like trying to hold a cloud, Bijou. Like clutching at mercury. Nothing ever touched you. Nothing ever pierces you.”

  Bijou watched Salamander’s receding back, stiffly erect as she walked beside the prince. He would see her settled, Bijou knew. When he had accomplished that task would be time enough to trouble him for new rooms of her own.

  “And you wanted to be the thing that put holes in me? How romantic you are.”

  He said, “I did.”

  She said, “You didn’t succeed.”

  She meant more than the jealousy. But Maledysaunte and her dead man were gone, already vanished down the corridor to the prince’s waiting car. She couldn’t send a significant glance after them.

  He glanced at her, sideways and down. “Not this time, my love.”

  Ten

  Bijou had expected silence from Salamander, at least for a little while. She had a sense that the other woman would prefer to nurse her grief alone, and up to a certain point she would respect that. Bijou the Artificer was not the sort to make other people’s choices for them, or assume that she knew what was best for anyone. Even, she thought bitterly, her own self.

  Because if she did, she realized now, she never would have gotten involved with Kaulas. Her own loneliness notwithstanding, she didn’t have it in her heart to be the thing he needed. And it had been unfair of her to allow him to delude himself for as long as she had.

  Unfair, and unkind.

  Knowledge was not always courage, though, and she didn’t find it in herself to move her things out of their shared room. She knew he was giving her space, hoping she would circle back to him. And she—she didn’t have the strength to sever what she was coming to think of a dead limb.

  When she sought Salamander out, it was for her own solace, not that of the white Wizard.

  The prince had made Salamander comfortable. Her rooms were airy and shady both, on the garden level and protected from the Messaline sun by a broad verandah. Bijou wondered if she’d ever be able to think of this sun as fierce again, having known the suns of Erem.

  The rooms opened onto the courtyard with a series of louvered doors. These stood open, and Bijou was not surprised to find a heavy-headed snake patterned in a dark and pale knotwork of sand colors, with beige dots decorating each joining of the darker weavings, resting in the dappled shade. She stepped around it carefully and paused in the doorway, calling out.

  Salamander sat at her desk, which she’d turned to face the bank of open doors. Not a woman you’d care to creep up behind, Bijou judged.

  The viper’s tongue flickered, but it did not uncoil.

  “Bijou.” Salamander spoke calmly. She weighted the scroll she had been studying to hold her place, then rose. “Careful. There’s a desert cobra under the foot stool.”

  “And a saw-scaled viper by the door.” Bijou had more respect for the viper than the cobra, frankly: Messaline’s breed of cobra was quick and shy, a glossy black snake that wanted little trouble with anyone. The vipers, though—a grown man bitten by one would die bleeding from every orifice, convulsing horribly and moaning with the pain. It was considered kinder to put a bullet in a man’s head than allow him to pass that way.

  “I knew you’d seen her,” Salamander said. “Wine? Unless you’d rather have tea? Will you sit?”

  “Wine would be lovely.” Bijou gestured to the low divan. “Any other crawlies?”

  “The scorpions are all under the bed,” Salamander said. “There are some spiders around somewhere, but I’ve asked them not to bite. I assume you’ll try not to step on them in return?”

  The corners of the room were already draped with intricate swags of web. And not all of Messaline’s spiders were spinners: most lurked and jumped.

  “We’ll call it even, then,” Bijou said. She settled herself while Salamander brought wine on a tray. She—or someone—had set up an ingenious arrangement of mirrors that brought cold light into the corners of the room. Salamander moved around, fussing with the focus, and came and sat beside Bijou as Bijou poured.

  They turned toward one another, knee to knee, and Bijou touched her cup to Salamander’s. The wine was cool from the cellar, sweet and tangy with the flavors of green berries and spice. The vapors made her lightheaded as witchcraft.

  Bijou sipped twice before she spoke again. The wine might not give her strength, but at least it could buy her time.

  “I’m sorry about your mother’s death,” she said, hearing the words as alien. They each had meaning, surely—I and am and sorry, about and your and mother. And death.

  Each one had a definition, a usage. Together they formed a sentence. It wasn’t the words, really, was it? It was the sentiment. Mothers. So much need. So much love. So much opportunity for misery.

  But Salamander paused, the wine raised to her lips, and set it back down untasted. “It wasn’t your fault,” she said. “She made her choices a long time ago.”

  “Still,” Bijou said. “Still.”

  “Yes,” said Salamander. “Still.”

  A silence followed. Bijou heard the wind soughing through the leaves of the date palms and pomegranates in the courtyard. The heady scents of a thousand flowers rose from the cultivated beds.

  Salamander pushed her cup aside with her fingertips and stood. “Come on. Let’s go for a walk.”

  The courtyard garden was big enough for strolling, and deserted—except for the kapikulu who dotted it like statuary. They walked along paved paths between the bowering leaves, the tangle of branches. It reminded Bijou of the jungles of the South, beyond the Mother Desert—but here it took a rich man’s will to create what nature had decreed would not exist.

  Golden tamarins—a monkey imported from halfway around the world—scampered in the tree limbs. They were smaller than a cat and far more agile. Their long tails flashed behind them like banners as they leaped from branch to branch. Behind the flowers and the shrubberies, Bijou could make out the roofline and the fluted golden pillars of the Bey’s palace defining the space.

  Salamander spoke in a low voice, encouraging Bijou, too, to hush her tones. “I had nowhere to go.”

  “Back to Avalon?” Bijou asked.

  Salamander shrugged. “Maledysaunte gave me the excuse. But I’ve been needing something different. To get away from the mistakes of the past, I suppose.”

  That pang of identity that Bijou had felt far too often in Salamander’s presence pierced her again. It was unfamiliar, that familiarity.

  “I’m sorry for how it came about,” Bijou said. “But I am glad you’re here.”

  Salamander gave her a smile. “Maledysaunte and Riordan have each other: after a few hundred years, I suppose you grow accustomed to thinking of outsiders as temporary.”

  Bijou nodded. “I don’t envy her.”

  “Or him?”

  Bijou shrugged. She’d been thinking of the bard as Maledysaunte’s familiar, she realized. As something like Ambrosias: an artifact of wizardry. But he’d had an identity before he died, hadn’t he? He’d been a person. And that person was still intact.

  So what was it? A transformation? A state change? When did he lose his own identity?

  Ambrosias, she realized uncomfortably, had had an i
dentity before she created it, too. Many identities. Cats and a ferret, although they’d all been long dead before she salvaged their bones. Did stones have minds? Did metal? She knew that across the sea and the salt desert to the East there were stones that lived, and moved, and ate other stones.

  That way lay madness, she thought, and the lives of the religious ascetics who would not wear shoes, because they were walking on the face of the Earth, and who starved themselves rather than eat a once-living thing.

  “He has something he believes in,” Bijou said. It was inadequate, but it was what she had.

  Salamander nodded. “The Hag of Wolf Wood.” Then she sighed. “It’s hard when one is alone in the world.”

  Thinking of Kaulas and of what passed for a love affair in her life, Bijou opened her mouth for the obvious comment. Everyone is alone. We come into this world alone, and so do we leave it. Then she realized it was a lie—a facile, comforting lie disguised as bitter cynicism. Did the bitterness make it seem like medicine and truth, when in fact it was a lie?

  Because no one was alone. Every action, every choice—it vibrated like a fly’s wings in a spiderweb. It shook the lives of everyone else in the vicinity, and the resulting vibrations shook other lives, and so on until the whole world was a-tremble with the shock waves of that one single choice. The world, Bijou suddenly saw, was nothing but a web of these interactions. Everything qualified everything else.

  She felt lightheaded with the implications, and wondered if this was how a precisian saw the universe.

  She had no idea how to explain what she had just comprehended to Salamander, though. So she just said, “You’re not alone, my dear. You have us. I’ll find a way to prove it to you.”

  The look Salamander gave her was serious, thoughtful. Bijou felt a warmth in her chest. A sense of sisterhood, she thought suddenly. Belonging. This was what they meant by that.

  She had made a friend.

  Eleven

  When the sun set, Bijou went into the desert. By herself, this time, except for a driver who she instructed to wait by the vehicle. Only a fool or a Wizard—or a fool of a Wizard—braved the Mother Desert alone. And having done it once didn’t make Bijou eager to try it again.

  She wasn’t going into Erem this time, but only to the edge of the erg—the shore of the sea of sand.

  No one is alone, Bijou told herself for the humor of it as she picked her way across moonlit sand. She carried a spade and a sieve and a bucket. She walked along the ridge of the dune where the sand was firmest, allowing her Wizardly intuition to guide her. She held the spade out before her like a dowsing rod.

  The car was a dim shape at the edge of the road behind her. The dunes stretched out under the single moon’s silver light, their sunlit colors of caramel and cinnamon faded to charcoal mystery.

  The sound of sand grains hissing against each other filled her awareness. The same unrelenting wind that hopped the grains one over another, walking the dunes across the desert like endless stately waves of solid earth, whipped the snakes of her hair forward, slapping her cheeks. She drew a fold of her scarf across her nose and mouth and—rather than shutting the desert out—let it in.

  The dune beneath her feet was a virtual mountain of sand. Even now, with sundown hours behind, it radiated heat through the soles of her shoes. Bijou shuffled forward, every step raising the starched-linen scent of hot sand and starting another cascade of sand grains hopping before the wind.

  The spade dipped toward earth.

  Where it pointed, she crouched down and began to dig. She reached deep with senses honed by over a decade of wizarding, and found all the things that had once been alive, buried in the depths of the dune. One in particular interested her. She let her awareness fill it, tickle it up, call it wriggling through packed sand while she, in turn, dug to meet it. A long-mummified horned viper slept beneath the sand waves of the Mother Desert. Bijou called it forth.

  As with the horses and the camel, it was only Bijou’s will that animated the snake. She felt the pressure and slip of the sand against its bones. She felt the dead snake’s rib-bones grab at that sand and pull it forward, dried sinew crackling. Magic held its bones together now, when no mere withered hide could do so.

  Eventually, Bijou saw the bottom of the pit she was digging begin to collapse in on itself and set her spade aside. Her palms were raw from the grit caught between her hands and the spade. Her fingernails bore dark crescents of dirt.

  The dead snake hunched itself from the sand and coiled stiffly. Having thrust her spade upright into the earth, Bijou used her hands to assist the viper into the bucket.

  Her workshop was separate from the space she shared with Kaulas, as was his. Wizards’ workshops were notoriously bad places for eating and sleeping, but for the time being Bijou scarcely left hers. She slept on a pile of cushions in the corner—when she slept—and she took her meals on a tray—although as often as not, she forgot to eat them before the tea was long cold.

  First the skeleton must be cleaned, which was a meticulous and painstaking process of scraping away skin and flesh that had hardened to the consistency of old leather. The bones were fragile—terribly delicate, and there were so many of them.

  Having cleaned them, Bijou soaked them in a solution that would bleach and strengthen them. While they were resting, she opened shutters and doors to clear the noxious fumes. Then she began work on the armature.

  She chose jewels the rust and brown and golden colors of the desert, the colors the snake had worn in its lifetime: tiger eye, citrine, topaz. Jasper and agates. Smoky quartz. Petrified wood. Boulder opal. Normally, she would have left the bones bare to the sight, reinforced with a delicate filigree of metalwork into which the jewels could be set. But in this case, she made it an armature of segmented brass, concealing the bones within its protective shell. It was work with forge and hammer, and with every beat of her mallet against the anvil she thought of Dr. Liebelos hammering the Book into existence, and what they had done to stop her. She sweated over the forge in the relative cool of night, and the heat made her think of Erem. She chased the scaled plates with intricate designs, and set those designs with ten thousand chips of colored mineral. Ambrosias rattled around the laboratory, fetching tools and materials as necessary, without being asked. He knew her methods.

  She re-articulated the skeleton with wire, stringing each bone as if constructing a fantastic, architectural necklace. When that was done, she slipped the skeleton into its case and fixed each rib to the metal body with tiny prongs such as one would use to set a stone.

  She sealed the two halves along an invisible seam. She set a platinum spring set with pink sapphires in its mouth to act as a tongue, and she lined its upper lip with tiny diamonds to represent the pits such snakes used to detect the warmth of living prey.

  Magic wouldn’t work without symbolism.

  In its empty sockets, where the brass opened gaps to show the bone, she set two lumps of red amber to serve as its eyes. But not before, with her jeweler’s tools, she carved the shape of a brain in gray coral and hinged it within.

  That was what she was working on when, on the fourth day, Kaulas came to the door in person. Bijou did not speak to him herself. They had an unspoken agreement. They did not bother one another during projects.

  Bijou told the kapikulu who guarded her door to turn Kaulas away. It was a measure of the courage of kapikulu that the man did as she asked, with no blanching or temporizing, even in the face of a necromancer.

  She could not turn away Prince Salih, who appeared the next day. It was his house that she lived in—or his father’s house, which would eventually be his brother’s. Not quite the same thing, perhaps, but much as she itched to be about her work it was a foolish Wizard who alienated her patron.

  And this was not, she had to admit, a matter of life and death.

  The kapikulu admitted him to her laboratory. He looked strangely at home there, standing in his good linen robes on the fire-scarred floor, among acid
-stained slate work tables.

  She had to let him in and hear him out. But she didn’t have to stop her work. Well, all right: protocol would have demanded more courtesy. But Bijou and the prince were friends.

  He crossed the room to stand opposite her, watching as she manipulated her delicate tools. You couldn’t squeeze a stone brain into an intact cranium, of course—so she’d hinged the snake’s skull, and was now making delicate attachments with gold and platinum wire to hold the brain steady within. The flashes of color veining the boulder opal caught light as she angled the stand this way and that. For a few moments, the prince simply stood, hands folded, and watched her.

  It wasn’t the first time. But she didn’t think he’d just dropped by out of curiosity this time.

  For the first time, she wondered what it meant to Kaulas that Prince Salih had privileges he did not.

  “Bijou,” the prince said at last. “Why do you work so feverishly? Nobody’s death is at hand.”

  She squinted through a loupe and twisted two fine wires together. She didn’t know how to say what she’d learned, how to express what she was missing. That thing—that human thing—that had always been a mystery to her was now laid bare, and acknowledging it had become a passion, an obsession. Like a fresh grief, it was never far from her thoughts.

  Finally, helplessly, she set her hair-fine pliers down. She reached for a soldering iron, the tip smoking-hot, and paused with it raised in her hand.

  “If I make something real,” she said to the prince. “Something tangible. Then no matter what happens, what was real is real.”

  “Are you in love with her?” he asked.

  The idea had never occurred to her. Her hand was trembling, so she did not touch the wires, even though she knew the iron was growing cold.

  “No,” she said finally, having examined her emotions. “Not in the way you mean.”

  “Then what? I’ve never seen you…” He sighed. “So engaged with anything that was not your work, or a combat, or a contest.”