Free Bone and Jewel Creatures by Elizabeth Bear Page A

tossed its head. When no sound followed, it cocked its head from side to side, surprised by what it wasn’t hearing.
    “I’m sorry,” Bijou said. “No voice. I can give you bells or cymbals later, if you want them. So you can make some noise.”
    Tentatively, Brazen’s hand on her wrist as if he could somehow snatch her out of danger faster than she could manage herself, Bijou offered the Artifice her finger. It nipped, but gently, and ran its beak along the surface of her skin as if to lay flat the feathers she did not have. Preening.
    When Brazen glanced at Bijou, he saw that a smile cracked her face. “The meat may be yours, Kaulas,” she said, rich with satisfaction. “But the bones are mine.”

    Bijou carried the raven outside, its pewter-shod claws pricking the edge of her hand. Brazen walked beside her, supporting her with a hand on her elbow. We claim the dignity of age , she thought, but the truth is, age leaves us without any dignity at all .
    “My house would be safer,” Brazen said.
    “Let an old woman die in her home.”
    He shook her elbow, gently. “Nobody’s dying except for him .”
    Bijou looked across the dead bird’s back to him, giving the raven a stroke with her fingers to settle the plumage when it cocked its head. “He wouldn’t come to your house.”
    “And he’ll come to yours?”
    Bijou bent down to whisper in the spaces of the raven’s skull. “Go to Kaulas the Necromancer,” she said. “And bring him here to me.”
    The raven twisted its skull on the bones of its neck, casting a cloudy blue reflection across Bijou’s cheek. It cawed silently and flapped its wings as if testing their strength. It paused, hopped a step, and flapped again. Two beats, three—it sprang up airborne, wobbled, shed a feather that swirled on the downdraft, and arrowed for the garden door.
    Bijou stood, arms crossed, and watched after it until Brazen cleared his throat beside her shoulder.
    “Bijou. You said he’ll come to your house but not mine? Why do you think so? He’s gone to such great lengths to attract our attention, and neither of us would go to him.”
    “Because he hates me more,” she said, and shook the raven into the air. “That’s what all the baiting is about. He’ll come expecting a fight, you know.”
    “He’ll get one,” Brazen answered, and for a moment, Bijou wondered if he knew how exactly he sounded like an actor declaiming on a stage.

    “He’s not coming,” Brazen said, at sunrise, in the voice of someone who was only stating a truth long-held to be evident. Jeweled snail-shells crawled on tongues of rubberized silk along the floor. One edged along the sole of his boot. Gently, he nudged it aside. “We need a better plan.”
    “We need a plan at all,” Bijou said. “Bracing Kaulas in his own lair would be foolish. We could bring it to the Bey—”
    “And wait six months while his advisors argue over whether to offer us a couple of dozen men, most of whom will desert before they face a Wizard?”
    “There is that,” she answered, with the complacency of age. “Perhaps rather than merely sending challenges to Kaulas, we need to inconvenience him. Thwart his plot.”
    “And his plot is?”
    She rested a warm hand on his shoulder. “Spreading corruption. He’s building an army of corpses. What do you do with an army?”
    A rhetorical question, which Brazen answered anyway. “Revolution. If we could convince the Bey that Kaulas has designs upon his title—”
    “Still six months with the advisors,” Bijou said. “Kaulas could have every man, woman, and child in Messaline rotting under his control by then. We don’t know what the plague is, or what spreads it.”
    “But we know how to stop it,” Brazen said, with a sidelong glance at the silver arm still laid across the child’s empty bed.
    “Yes,” said Brazen. “Amputate. Bijou…”
    Silently, she stared her answer.
    “If we are to make our stand here, then I am staying. Let me send for