Elizabeth Bear - Book of Iron

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.”