Bijou’s own mother, in the distant land of her birth, had not been a faithful parent. Bijou had chosen not to become a parent at all, but this son of her best-beloved friend, whom she had raised as her own…He was, she thought, all the son she needed.
All the son, realistically, that she could stand.
The fact that he had a good deal of native charm to soften his teasing just meant that refusing to be irritated by him was easy.
She said, “And you shall never learn the answer to your question.”
She poked the sad pile of bones and paste and painted tin once more. It rattled plaintively, as if it wished she could help. There were bits of lemur skeleton in there, she thought, surveying it with the practiced eye of a natural philosopher. But not just one lemur. Not even just one species of lemur. And some monkey, too.
She stopped poking it long enough for it to reassemble itself in some sort of rational shape. A little monkey-shape on a golden chain, like the capuchins people in the market fed on dates and slices of Song orange. The armature that held the bones together was tin, or bits of it were, and some others were brass or copper. Bright enough, to be sure, but just pressed and snipped sheets of the stuff: not work-hardened and not strong. Paste jewels had cracked from various settings where they had been cheaply glued rather than set with prongs, leaving tattered foil backings that had been meant to make them sparkle like real stones. One orange stone remained in the skull, to regard her blankly as she levered herself down to crouch closer to the little thing’s disjointed level. The other socket gaped, showing a yellowish stain of poorly prepared hide glue.
“Aren’t you a mess, little monkey?” Bijou said. “I’d whip any apprentice that threw together a thing like you.”
It scrabbled at the floor with little tin mittens. Whoever had constructed it hadn’t even bothered with the fussy work of threading the finger bones together to give it usable paws. There was no spark in the gaze it gave her: not even confusion or fear. It was an animate heap of bones and trash, to be sure, but not well animated. And already falling apart, as the crudely constructed magics that had informed it were dissipating. It had been imbued with no will, no essence that would sustain it.
She looked up at Brazen. “If you brought it to me so I could put it out of its misery, I’m not actually sure it has any. There’s no consciousness in this. It’s just a…windup toy.”
“No,” Brazen said. His sweeping gesture took in the wide-open, arch supported spaces of Bijou’s stone workroom. The forge, the jeweler’s table, the racks of drying bone. The shapes of her various creations as they ranged observantly around the periphery of the room, watching the conversation with impassive, jeweled eyes and dreaming their bone-and-jewel dreams. Light from the big many-paned clerestory windows slanted in dusty rays through the slatted ribs of Hawti, the elephant; struck a sprinkle of dancing reflections from the shards of glass and mirror paving the skull of the sloth, Lazybones, from his haunt in the rafters; wavered in the translucent watered-silk pinions stretched over the enormous wing bones of Catherine, the giant condor; sparkled and gleamed in the facets of enough fine jewels to pave the temples of the Mother of Markets herself, the city of jackals, this great metropolis Messaline.
Bijou followed his gesture and frowned, but did not speak. He had a sense of the dramatic. But he was like a son to her—a middle-aged, sometimes irritating son—and she knew he’d get around to the useful information shortly.
“When was the last time you stepped outside?” he asked.
“I have my work,” Bijou answered. “I’m very busy. Also, this morning.” Surely the walled garden behind her studio counted as “outside.”
“Well, you’d better put something better on, because we’re going outside now,” he said, as if pronouncing sentence from a magistrate’s bench. “Because someone is selling these pathetic forgeries as the creations of Bijou the Artificer.”
* * *
—
Messaline was the Mother of Markets, and it was to one such market that they went. Bijou awoke the oldest and least refined of her surviving creations, the centipede Ambrosias—a creature cobbled together from the spine of a cobra, ferret ribs, and the skull of a cat. She coaxed Ambrosias to link himself about her waist as a double loop of belt, his topaz eyes glittering over her middle as if his skull were a clasp. He snuggled quite comfortably there, and looked, she thought, quite dashing. Then she draped herself in a pale-blue cloak against the gaze of the lion-headed sun of Messaline, although it did not trouble her half so much as it did the blue-eyed Northerner beside her. She herself was from the south, where the sun had enameled her birth people in shades of red-black like dark wood and blue-black like dark stone, but it never hurt to be a little comfortable.
She thought about a disguise, but who could disguise the Artificer Bijou in her adopted city of Messaline? She was as well-known here as the Wizard-Prince herself, though Bijou’s countenance did not appear on coins. She did not actually expect to find some little man in a tent along one of the many markets’ many winding ways with a string of tin monkeys glittering cheaply on a pole, singing out her name as his supplier. Her work sold to private collectors, and there was a waiting list for commissions that would stretch to the likely end of even a wizard’s life, if she were to permit it. But her pocket clicked with a fistful of paste jewels, and she thought it likely that she might be able to find out who had created them.
They stepped into the street, greeted by a chatter of brown and black songbirds.
“It’s not a very convincing forgery,” she said. “Who would pay for such a thing? With”—she snorted—“little tin mittens, no less? What good is a monkey that can’t even climb?”
“Easier to keep off the curtain rods, I suppose. Besides, it did look a little better before I broke the glamour on it.” He looked straight ahead, not admitting anything with a sidelong glance.
She sighed. Of course he had. When she might have recognized the signature of such work. Well, probably not; she hadn’t been able to make head nor tail—so to speak—of the pathetic attempt at imbuing the creature with life. Which meant the perpetrator probably was not a wizard of Messaline, because there weren’t that many, and she thought she knew them all, though people did release apprentices into the wild with alarming regularity these days, and the older she got, the harder it was to keep track of them all.
If it wasn’t a wizard, that was something of a relief. The politics would be easier, and she hated to think of one of her own debasing themself so. Also, she hated to think that anybody with any self-respect would turn loose an apprentice that couldn’t do any better.
“Well.” Brazen spoke defensively into her silence. “I wanted to see what it looked like underneath, so I would have a better idea of what to tell you.”
“Then wouldn’t they just come to me and ask me to repair it? Or take it back to their broker and do so?”
“Really,” Brazen said, shaking his head so his blond mane fluffed and settled. He understood her change of subject as forgiveness. “Would you turn up to dun a wizard of Messaline for repair of inferior work?”
“Oh, probably,” said Bijou.
He grinned and rolled his eyes. So would he, of course. Which was why he and she were wizards of Messaline, and not among the brightly garbed pedestrians in their striped linen robes and saffron dresses sweeping rapidly aside to make way.
“How many of these forgeries do you think there are?” she asked suspiciously.
He shrugged.
“So they’re not just trading on my good name,” Bijou said. “They are debasing it.”
She had begun receiving a lot more public attention some years before, after the work she did for the museum in restoring the enormous, petrified skeleton of an ancient monster called a “dinosaur.” The exhibit was still quite popular, she was given to understand, and had led to the reconstruction of th
e museum’s rotunda into a larger, taller space—to accommodate the crowds, and also to give the Tidal Titan that she had named Amjada-Zandrya more space to perform, as performing was the creature’s great delight. Especially if there were small children around.
Her reconstruction had not, in particular, helped to alleviate the academic dispute between Dr. Azar and Dr. Munquidh, the two quarrelsome paleontologists involved, but you couldn’t have everything.
“When you wish to order the miscreant’s liver roasted in the marketplace, seasoned for your pleasure, my dear Bijou…I know an excellent kebab merchant who can provide just the sauce.”
Liver kebab didn’t sound very pleasant. But food did—and, as Brazen pointed out, they weren’t in any particular hurry, and justice could be dealt out on a full belly more comfortably than a flat one.
They were entering the temple precincts where the market was most populous. A number of merchants selling spices and food clustered not far from the temple of the Goddess of Death, bright Kaalha. Bijou, happily pulling shreds of highly seasoned lamb from a shard of palm stem, supposed that funerals did tend to make people hungry. Starlings swooped overhead and darted down to snatch horrible mouthfuls from the pavement underfoot.
“The city has been infested with those things lately,” Brazen said, parrying a rose-and-black bird that whizzed too close to his mustache.
Bijou licked cumin-scented grease from her mouth and gazed around. Brazen was far taller than she was, though they both had an advantage in that the throng broke around them, creating a moving buffer where no one pushed, jostled, or shoved. They flowed through the mob as a droplet of oil smooths bubbling water, always at the center of a zone of peace enforced by the occasional more-alert friend or relation’s quick yank on a distracted marketer’s collar, cuff, or elbow.
Bijou’s heart quickened with scents, sounds, colors. Perhaps it had been too long since she had made such an excursion.
“Silks and floss are over there,” she said, steering Brazen around the distinct aroma of a picket of horses and a camel or two. The dung smell mingled foully with her luncheon, and anyway camels could spit, and mares could pee dramatically backward—and had no respect at all for the trappings of human social authority. “That fellow in the rose-colored turban has excellent wire. Drawn very smooth.”
“Excellent wire is not, today, what we’re searching for. I see a jeweler or two. Proper jewelers, though.”
They dodged the sounds of an escalating dogfight, quickly overmatched by the crueler sounds of human wagering. The cries of sellers of water, wine, and ink-black coffee cajoled them; the honey and nut aromas of cooling pastries beguiled them. Brazen gave a penny to a man who stood alone on a corner, atop a little painted pedestal, wearing a felt cap and holding a parasol over his head.
“Paste gems,” he said.
The directory raked them with a glance, gaze not needing to linger to assess fabric, cut, jewels, the quality and age of boot leather. “Surely, honored master wizard, you can afford better for such a beautiful lady than paste?”
Bijou tilted her head, long locks sliding under her pale-blue hood. “Surely, honored master directory, you are able to provide the knowledge my friend has paid you for?”
She had to admire his spunk; he didn’t even sigh. He just smiled slightly and directed them down a side street shaded by date palms, if palm trees could really be said to shade anything. Heavy with fruit, they fluttered with the wings of birds. “Look for Azif at the orange-and-blue tent,” he said.
“Look for Azif,” Brazen mocked, dawdling along. “Let us go to Song and look for a Chu, as well, and a Tsering in Rasa.”
“Well, there is the orange-and-blue tent,” Bijou said, pointing. “And the thing about common names is that a lot of people do have them.”
She had a suspicion of what she would see when they came up to the tent, but it was good that her only wager on it was a private one—because there was a shop there, and it was open for business, striped awnings propped high to shade the interior but allow the sun to sparkle on his gaudy wares. Gilded tin badges, paste jewels, cameos molded and carved into layered ceramic rather than gorgeous agate stone.
The Azif in charge was a slender man, wiry. He had the look of a Messaline native, which was less common every year in this cosmopolitan city of markets and immigrants. His buzzing presence combined with his physique to make Bijou speculate that most of his sustenance came in the form of syrup-sweet coffee. He turned when they came up, and she saw the instant when he assessed who they were, and his manner transitioned from obsequious to crestfallen. “Surely, great wizards, my poor wares cannot interest you. You flatter Azif!”
“Here now,” said Brazen, stepping up to the glass-topped display boxes that served for a counter. Tawdry treasures winked on threadbare velvet under the shadow of his hand as he spread a few flaking paste jewels on scratched glass. “Are these your manufacture, sir? Or, if not, can you name the artisan? No penalty, whatever you answer, and there may be coin in it for a helpful one.”
Azif reached out slowly, glancing up at Brazen’s face for permission. He lifted a bit of gaud that gave back flashes of copper, blue, and violet and turned it slowly in his hand. “Who made this, pardon my saying, was a careless artisan. The glass is a mix of good quality, but there are bubbles in it, and the backing, while of decent materials, was not carefully applied. See here?”
He shook his head and reached for his loupe. “I should hate to belabor any of my colleagues with such poor workmanship. And see, there is no maker’s mark applied around the girdle, here.”
Bijou took the loupe, and looked where he indicated while he sorted through the remaining gems. The narrow band around the widest part of the paste jewel was polished and smooth, without any brand.
Brazen, almost naturally, remarked, “But the quality of the materials is good, you say?”
“This looks as if it might have been the effort of an apprentice left alone with his master’s tools. The mold was a good one, but badly poured, and the facets were not polished at the correct angles.” He held out one of his own pieces for comparison, and Bijou could see plainly how superior the stone was, in sparkle and flash and evenness of edge, and how the mirrored foil backing was neatly adhered. There was skill in anything, even fakery.
“I would say,” Azif finished, “that all of these were made by the same person. And that his master is going to be displeased with the theft of materials at the next inventory.”
“How many makers of paste jewels are in Messaline?” Bijou asked. “Who use materials of this quality, and can support an apprentice or two?”
Her earlier irritation had waned, and she was starting to appreciate the humor of the situation enough to play along. When Azif named three men, however, she fixed Brazen with a steady glare and said, quite calmly, “I do hope we shan’t have to visit every one of them.”
Brazen’s sun-flushed face might have paled a little, but it was hard to tell. He said, “What if we visit Yusuf, here? He’s closest. If we get lucky, we’ll have had the shortest walk.”
Keep stalling, Bijou thought. And nodded.
* * *
—
Yusuf did not work in a market stall, but rather in a little mud-brick building that was part of a similar, single-story row along the back of a rank of much taller and better-built houses that clustered in the shadow of one of the ancient, colossal ruins that dotted the precincts of Messaline. This one, of blue-green stone that shrugged off weather and the tools of those who would disassemble it for building material, was a long, curved channel, lofted atop a series of arches that soared perhaps five or six stories into the air.
It might have once been part of an aqueduct, for the ends were ragged as if broken. Some said it had been built during the reign of the Eyeless One, the so-called Wizard-Prince of Messaline, centuries before. Others said it had been destro
yed then. Bijou’d never seen fit to research it properly.
Predictably, the neighborhood it cast its shadow on was known as the Five Arches.
Yusuf’s apprentice was not in, though Yusuf—perhaps having a higher opinion of himself than Azif, though from what Bijou could see of his work in comparison, it was not quite warranted—did not seem at all dismayed by the appearance of two wizards at his door. He was a younger man, well built, clad mostly in trousers, boots, and a leather apron, and it seemed from the items on display at the front of his shop that paste gems were more of a sideline to his business of little glass knickknacks and sculptures.
He frowned when Brazen held out the bits of paste.
“Those could be my molds,” he said reluctantly. “But that’s not my casting. Nor my polishing either.” He glanced over at the stocks of glass rods ranked on the walls, the barrels of colored powders, the rolls of foil. They were in some disarray, and Bijou didn’t think he could judge what might be present or missing at a glance.
“Your apprentice?”
“Reza.” He huffed through his nose like a snake. “He’s taken a delivery to the Museum of Natural History, if you wish to speak to him.”
“Huh,” Brazen said. “Both Bijou and I have some work on display there.”
* * *
—
Brazen stumped along, limiting his stride automatically to make it easier for Bijou to keep up. They walked in more or less companionable silence for a while. The museum wasn’t far, and they soon found themselves within sight of its sweep of low steps and the square before it, which bustled with activity—human and avian. The people moved more at random and cross-purposes than the pigeons and starlings, who flocked in great swoops and spirals and concordances of wings.
The museum itself rose opposite them, its approach flanked by a great fountain on the left and a life-size brass statue of a camel on the right. The camel was some of the work of Brazen’s he had alluded to. It was designed so that the right side seemed to show a breathing animal—nostril flared and great padded foot uplifted, head thrown back as if it had been caught in the middle of a startled response to some predator. But if you approached it from the left—the interior, the side toward the museum approach—what you found was a surgical cutaway, with every specimen organ intact and visible in its place, all differentiated in colored crystal so the lungs were violet, the heart red, the liver liver-colored, the intestines ivory, and so forth. Its limbs and torso also revealed representative examples of the bones and muscles, ligaments and tendons enameled in different brilliant colors.
The Book of Magic Page 35
