Free Bone and Jewel Creatures by Elizabeth Bear Page B

servants. And for some of my materials.”
    The stare never wavered. But she licked sunken lips and nodded. “You may.”

    By servants , apparently what Brazen meant was seven kapikulu —door slaves, literally; in practical terms these were scimitar-armed religious ascetics, devout followers of Vajhir who had sworn their lives to military perfection. They wore skirted coats of powder blue, buttoned down the fronts with bone buttons. They wore their heads shaved and their eyes hooded under tall crimson fezzes. They came into Bijou’s loft, nodded to her as lady of the house, laid pallets with military exactitude along the wall away from the fire, and settled in, two by each door and the seventh patrolling, so silently and with such reserved decorum that Bijou might have mistaken them for statues—for Brazen’s creations—if she had not seen them take their places.
    “Who’s going to feed them?” Bijou asked.
    “I’ll have dinner sent from the house,” Brazen answered. “I have more sweeping the streets for those who show signs of Kaulas’ tender medicating. What they find they will bring here.”
    Unsatisfied, Bijou crossed her arms over her breast. It wasn’t cold—the fire was high, and the sun climbing to zenith. She felt a chill anyway. Hawti’s silver bells tinkled in the garden. Lupe stayed pressed close to Bijou’s calf. The kapikulu did not seem to mind them, which made a certain amount of sense for guardsmen accustomed to living in Brazen’s house. At least Bijou’s Artifices, unlike Brazen’s, had no general tendency to explode.
    Brazen’s servants and apprentices—Bijou honestly could not tell them apart—continued to come and go in the carriage, carting in armloads of chests and caskets and crates, stacking them every which way about the garden and the loft.
    “You’ll be sorry if those get rained on,” Bijou said, following an ant-line of steamer trunks through her downstairs with her chin.
    “It won’t rain until Winter,” Brazen reminded her.
    She snorted. It never did.

Five
    In the height of the day, when—even in Autumn—the streets were rather empty, a scrambling in the side yard pivoted the kapikulu by that door on their stacked boot-heels and sent them reaching for their scimitars. Bijou tried to surge to her feet, but old bones and slack muscles could not manage; she rocked back onto her camel-saddle stool with a thump. Brazen rose beside her on the instant; she heard one of the kapikulu order someone to remain still, and silence in return, except the noise of leaves rustling.
    That silence told Bijou everything. “Stop them!” she said to Brazen, low and pleading, and then called—“Emeraude! I’m coming!”
    Brazen leaped toward the door, crying “Don’t hurt it!” while Bijou rocked back and then forward on her camel-saddle, building momentum to thrust herself to her feet. She got her feet under her, whining low at the pain of her gout. She shuffled to the door behind Brazen, swinging her cane, puffed-out ankles protesting every step so she muttered the pain under her breath— ow, ow, ow —but kept coming.
    The kapikulu had charged into the side garden and across its narrow width. They stood against the roses on the far side, scimitars extended and crossed to make a bridge of blades. Or perhaps a barrier of blades, because the scimitars served to block the child from climbing higher.
    It seemed uninjured, except the thorn-scratches in its palm and arm, but it had frozen wide-eyed against the rose canes and seemed to be wishing it could melt into the coarse-grained pink granite of the wall. Bijou let go a shaky breath, and clucked her tongue. “Emeraude.”
    It stared at her as if it were a physical effort to drag its dilated eyes from the sun-stroked blades—stared at her as if it could stare through her, in fact. And then, face contracting in a wince, it uncurled the clenched fingers, dropped from among the rose canes, and bolted across the grass to throw