Bijou’s contribution to the museum was not visible from the outside, except in the evidence of the recently enlarged and reconstructed atrium dome. Still, she felt a little swell of pride in her breast at the sight. Academic feuds or no, that had been, she judged, a job well done.
Brazen, in his own case, paused to contemplate his camel as they came up on it. He inspected it and nodded with pursed lips, as if in retrospect he too felt that he’d done a pretty good job on the commission. The camel blinked at them languidly and shifted its dramatic pose fluidly, revealing different aspects of its construction as it turned around upon its pedestal; it had been constructed by Brazen the Enchanter, after all. Any decent sculptor could have built a startlingly detailed anatomical study of a camel. This one was interactive.
Brazen turned to glance up at the front of the museum. Its white marble façade had elements of Aezin and Asitaneh architectural styles—gold and lapis tiles, pointed arches—and managed to evoke the great universities and learning of ancient civilization without ever quite tipping over into looking like a temple to foreign gods. The designers had meant to evoke a sense of permanence and history with this edifice of scholarship. “You don’t suppose it was one of the good doctors behind all this, do you?”
Bijou shrugged. “I didn’t leave either Dr. Azar or Dr. Munquidh any happier with me than they were with each other.”
“Academic rivalries do get nasty.”
“On the other hand, neither one of them is a wizard. Or even a sorceress.”
“People can surprise you,” Brazen remarked casually, crouching down to examine the camel’s metal feet—whether to inspect them for wear or contemplate the details of his work, Bijou was not sure.
“Or perhaps,” Bijou said, dry as paper, “it’s time you admitted that this whole series of errands has been a jackal hunt you set up for me specifically, and that you’ve been deliberately spending my time.”
Brazen looked at her calmly, ingenuously. Then he sighed, and said, “What gave me away?”
“You were my student for fourteen years,” she reminded him. “And your mother was the best friend I ever had. And you are, after all, Brazen the Enchanter. You could animate a little creature like that as an automaton, which is rather different than the self-willed artifices I create but would serve as a plausible ‘forgery.’”
He made a disgruntled moue.
“So. Are you going to tell me what we are doing at the museum and why you needed to get me out of my workshop for half a day to set it— Duck!”
“What?”
“Duck,” she yelled, and grabbed his ear to pull him down.
Something small, rose-colored and black, aerodynamic, whistled over their heads. At first she thought it was a missile of some sort, but as it crashed into the façade of the building behind them, she saw that the body tumbling to the dusty street, leaving a red smear behind, was that of a starling. She’d been seeing them all day, and in the back of her mind they had become a worrying omen. Now, the chattering flock on the parapet of the building opposite lifted into the air, and Bijou said, “Does anybody want to kill you this week?”
Brazen rubbed his smarting ear. “Other than you? We’d better run.”
Bijou grabbed his hand, pulling him toward the arched façade of the museum. A few people loitered on the broad steps, but there was no other destination toward which she could run without equally endangering civilians, and the plaza itself was full of people—and of birds.
She sprinted up the steps, Brazen thumping along beside her. Her hip hurt, and the muscles beside her spine told her she’d be paying for the desperate exertion later, but at least the physical nature of her daily labor made her strong and gave her a good wind. And Brazen, while barrel-shaped, was as tough as the oaken staves of said barrel. He kept up.
Something sharp and hard struck Bijou between the shoulder blades as they gained the top step. She felt a stabbing pain, and then the sudden release of Ambrosias unclasping himself at her waist and uncoiling. She staggered. Brazen’s support wrenched her shoulder but kept her from going to a knee.
Another starling swooped by. Brazen ducked aside—it might have taken him in the eye—and there was a horrid, brittle snapping sound like green twigs as Ambrosias lunged, snatched the bird from the air, and crushed the life from it.
Bijou pitied the iridescent black rag that fell. It wasn’t the starling’s fault it was ensorceled. But who on earth might be doing the ensorceling? She did not know of any wizard in Messaline who could command animals, not since the death of Brazen’s mother, who had never had much to do with birds anyway.
The attacking flock was all starlings—but there were two kinds of starlings represented, the plain black and the ones that were black and rosy. They did not usually flock together: another mystery.
Around Bijou and Brazen, the relaxing holiday-makers were scrambling out of the way, running up the steps or down, flocking like birds themselves in their attempts to avoid the murderous starlings. Ambrosias reared over Bijou’s head like a cobra crown, fending off birds as the swarm made another pass. She could, she thought, call the creature within the museum—the Tidal Titan, great Amjada-Zandrya. In summoning it, it would come.
But in coming, it would destroy the museum’s dome, and Bijou could not even begin to guess how many lives.
She would not call.
Ambrosias was her resource now. They had been together through so much; a flock of birds was nothing, with Brazen at their side. Blood trickled down her back, under her robe. This would be a ridiculous way for two of the finest wizards in Messaline to die.
They ran for the overhang beneath the arches, but the birds circled and cut them off. They stood exposed on the steps, back to back, beneath the lion sun and the unsheltering sky. Ambrosias swatted about himself, missing, as the flock swung through again. Birds left beak- and talon-streaks on Bijou’s face; yanked and tangled at her hair. They swirled around Brazen, pecking and savaging.
Brazen dropped his grip on Bijou and threw his own arms wide, brocaded cuffs falling back from broad, hairy wrists. He made a gesture of summoning and spoke five ancient words of mystery.
Bijou covered her ears with her hands.
Bijou’s wizardry allowed her to animate her bone-and-jewel constructions, to give them a semblance of life, personality, and will. They were unique from her, once they were done, and suffered under their own personalities. She could create automata out of once-living things, but it required a constant expenditure of effort and concentration to keep them at work.
Brazen too could animate—but his artifices were machines, without agency of their own. They were made of metal and stone, and without the whispers of animating force remaining from the fled life of the creatures that provided Bijou with their bones, Brazen’s creatures did what they were told. Independently, once released—but they could not innovate as did Bijou’s creations.
They could, however, be given new orders. And Brazen, with all the barrel-chested strength in his lungs, bellowed those orders now.
The half-dissected bronze and crystal camel at the foot of the staircase twisted its head—half dopey and jaded-looking, after the manner of camels, and half skeletal—around. It focused its glass eyes up the steps. With haste, with surprising grace, it departed its pedestal.
The clattering and clangering split Bijou’s skull even through the protection of her palms as the automaton came up the stairs at a marble-chipping run. The birds wheeled and dive-bombed it, the collective beating of their wings like the piston stride on a locomotive, like the thump of marching boots. Bijou flinched in anticipation. But either the birds or whoever was responsible for their ensorcelment, had enough sense not to send them plowing into the automaton. They broke around it, surfed over it, and came on in a river, a black mass growing in numbers as more and more flocked to it from all over the plaza. All over the city,
as far as Bijou could see.
The birds were upon them, jabbing and gouging. Bijou protected her eyes, cursed as she saw the starlings turn on Ambrosias and begin picking and pecking the smaller jewels from his settings. Those were easy to replace, but if they went for his eyes, they could blind him.
He killed a few. The camel clattered up the stairs, slowed by the mass of birds swirling around it. Blinded, and picking its way.
Brazen whistled, and bellowed again. The camel accelerated through the flock, batting the starlings aside when they did not avoid it quickly enough.
“Not sure how a metal lab specimen is going to help us,” Bijou said over her shoulder.
“Hang on,” Brazen instructed, and threw an arm around her and Ambrosias both. His grip, hard and strong, pressed the centipede’s bony appurtenances into Bijou’s flesh. She yelped and heard a couple of Ambrosias’s fragile leg-bones crack. There was an impact and a yank, and they were moving fast, unevenly, pelting through a flurry of birds that struck their ducked heads and hunched shoulders and cascaded off and away around them.
With every stride, Bijou and Brazen slammed into the camel’s unforgiving flank. Bijou buried her face in Brazen’s shoulder to protect her eyes. She looked up again, though, when the camel veered. Perhaps bewildered by the storm of birds, it was being pushed back from the arches of the entryway, and its metal feet slipped on their tiny, crushed corpses. It paused, bewildered, casting about for direction, as tiny beaks scratched and jabbed at Bijou’s hands and hood and scalp.
“Go help,” Bijou told Ambrosias.
His cracked legs impeded him, tangling in their rippling neighbors. But he scrambled from his post around her body, clinking up the camel’s side and neck, to crouch atop its cast skull and lunge and snap at starlings. There was a terrible moment where Bijou thought he would lose his grip and be trampled and shattered, but Ambrosias hung on. He reared up like the cobra his vertebrae had been taken from, and struck, lightning fast, knocking cheeping, flurrying birds from the air—and, more importantly, away from the eyes of the mechanical camel.
The camel whipped its head around and spit.
Not frothy saliva, but thick black oil. The reeking stream struck a dozen or so starlings and knocked them from the air. This pause in the attacks, and Ambrosias’s protection, allowed the beast to get its bearings. Bijou braced herself as she felt the metal muscles gather, the concealed pistons creak.
It began again to run.
Bronze feet thundered onto the landing at the top of the stair, and the next Bijou knew the shadow of the portico fell over them and they were within the museum’s atrium.
Bijou heard the whittering of the angry birds in close pursuit. “They can follow us in—”
But the camel wasn’t slowing. It thundered up another flight of steps, through another scattering throng—of people, this time, rather than starlings—down a short, broad hallway, and hurdled a velvet rope to crash through a carefully lettered sign that read, “Closed for private party.”
They were under the raised and reconstructed dome. Fleet as the camel was, its metal pads were not ideal for turning—or braking—on marble, and Bijou legitimately shrieked when she felt the camel slip and begin to slide and topple. Her body tensed instinctively as she awaited the crash and the bruising agony, the snap of hers and Brazen’s bones that must inevitably follow.
She—and Brazen too—were plucked out of the air by a powerful, bony grip, as a shadow and the rippling flap of heavy cloth passed over them. A moment later, there was a terrible, clattering kebang!
Bijou looked down, and found herself embraced by the coils of a constrictor’s articulated vertebrae. The wires and jewels and tiny gears were her own work, though for the moment she stared, too stunned to really take it in.
She gasped, bruised ribs aching, as Hawti set her and Brazen down—slightly willy-nilly, as they hadn’t been perfectly aligned along the same axis when she grabbed them. They managed not to fall over, however, clutching and steadying each other and the skeletal elephant.
Before she had even properly found her feet, Bijou glanced around. The tremendous flapping sound had been Catherine the condor, flapping to the entrance, where she sealed the door against the squeaking flock of starlings with her reinforced silk wings. In the other direction, the museum’s pride, Bijou’s reconstruction of the Tidal Titan, was grinning with skeletal delight as it set the brazen camel on its feet. As Bijou watched, Amjada-Zandrya lifted the head on the mighty neck and danced a little jig.
“Somebody shut the damned doors,” said an auburn-haired woman wearing a tidy jacket and long skirt, comprising a very businesslike suit. Her manner was very businesslike as well, from her polished appearance to the click of her heels. This was Dr. Azar, the paleontologist who believed in a theory of agile, active giant dinosaurs.
She swept across the floor toward those doors, as if she meant to perform the office herself—but before she could get there, a docent leaped in front of her, bowed awkwardly to Catherine, and edged behind her wing to seal the rotunda. There was Dr. Munquidh, over there with a broom—broad and dark, she was Dr. Azar’s academic rival. She stepped in to defend the docent as Catherine pulled back enough to let them in. The birds didn’t seem interested in attacking either the docent or Dr. Munquidh, however, and when he was done, Catherine waddled awkwardly away.
Bijou reached out and patted Hawti gently on the skull. The elephant rocked in pleasure, the belled cuffs on her ankles jangling.
Brazen regarded Bijou with pursed lips and a suspicious expression. “You’re not surprised to see her here.”
Now that things were quieting a little, Bijou had the leisure to glance around the rotunda and notice tables of snacks and beverages, clusters of colleagues and old acquaintances, and the presence of—as near as she could tell—every one of those of her creations who lived with her, and quite a few of the ones she’d sold, over the years.
It was a reunion, of sorts.
She had suspected something like this as the reason that Brazen had been so determinedly leading her around Messaline and stalling her.
“I was expecting a surprise party,” she admitted. “But not a surprise assassination attempt.”
He smirked, dabbing blood from the corner of his mouth. “Well, if you expect it, it isn’t much of a surprise.”
“You chose your wizard’s name aptly.” Dourly, she shrugged out of her ruined sunrobe and let it fall to the floor. Her former apprentice dabbed at a syrupy white smear on the shoulder of his gaudy coat. “Brazen you are. Was that part of your plot to get me out of my workshop as well?”
“No,” he said. “I’m afraid my little toy mystery has grown into an actual one. But who would want to kill you?”
“Besides your father?”
He laughed humorlessly. “Flocks of starlings. Not a necromancer’s style.”
“Why the museum?”
Brazen gestured around to the glittering throng, interspersed with well-dressed humans. Even Lazybones glittered in mirrored splendor, slung on a support beneath the encircling mezzanine. “I thought a reunion of your creatures would cheer you. And the Titan is difficult to move, without tearing the entire building down.”
Meanwhile, Dr. Azar and Dr. Munquidh walked over. Bijou was shocked to realize that Dr. Munquidh had draped her arm quite affectionately around her romantic rival’s shoulders. They walked up, smiling and quite relaxed in each other’s company.
“I thought you didn’t get along,” Bijou said, which was a foolish comment, given some of her own romantic choices.
“We don’t,” said Dr. Munquidh, and kissed Dr. Azar on the top of the head.
Dr. Azar, who was quite as pale-skinned a foreigner as Brazen, despite her name, blushed a pleased crimson. “Actually, we were both so upset with you, Wizard…”
“We found things to talk about,” Dr
. Munquidh said firmly.
Bijou actually laughed, despite the shadows of circling starlings crossing the glazed windows high overhead that admitted natural light to the rotunda. “I see you’re taking fine care of your namesake.” She gestured to the Tidal Titan, which made a pleased sort of wobble with its enormous head.
“We want to apologize for tricking you, Wizard,” Dr. Azar said. “But you have refused every invitation any of us have sent you for the past ten months.”
Bijou blinked. Surely not. She looked down and counted on her fingers. “Well,” she allowed, when she had adjudicated twice and realized that the count was correct, “it was a good trick.”
Had she really been closing herself off so thoroughly? Becoming reclusive and weird? So reclusive that Brazen spent his own valuable time constructing a cheap forgery in order to lure her out?
That might be a little too much self-defense.
On the other hand, apparently somebody was trying to kill her. And had taken this first opportunity in a year to try to see it through, which argued either patience or inside information.
Not Brazen’s father Kaulas the Necromancer, for no little bird was likely to whisper secrets to him—or answer his commands, for that matter. Not Brazen himself, because he was the one person in all the world who could probably just put a knife in her back. Not Dr. Azar or Dr. Munquidh—at least not until they started having lover’s spats and blamed an old wizard for their suffering.
The Book of Magic Page 36
