Elizabeth Bear: Book of Iron

Bijou imagined she could smell the diesel and wind of a small aeroplane—like the one the prince maintained—still caught in their clothes and hair. She had experience with the cramped confines of the prince’s craft: the ones available for charter were supposed to be much worse.

It was only natural that foreign adventurers would seek out the local talent. That was what Bijou would have done, if an investigation had led her to…wherever these came from. Having deduced the outline of their need, she turned her attention to the folk themselves.

The man had hair the color of red metal, curling long to his shoulders. Silver streaked the copper at the temples. He wore outlandish clothes, ill-suited to the desert heat: dark-colored pantaloons stuffed into soft brown boots, a patchwork cloak in every color swept off his shoulders. It must be some mark of estate, because Bijou could see the translucent wet splotches on the shoulders of his shirt where it had rested. As he paced slowly beside the women, his stride hitched as if he had a nail in his sole. One shoe was specially constructed to cushion a deformed foot.

He bowed low as the prince entered, flanked by Bijou and Kaulas, and the flourish of his courtesy left Bijou convinced he must be an entertainer or a courtier—if, truly, there were much difference between those two things.

Beside him stood a small woman with straight hair the color of wheat straw and the sand of the deep desert, arms crossed. She had lovely features made harsh by the strictness with which her hair was dressed back into a pony tail, and she wore unfashionable clothes suited for hard traveling, though they were not as archaic as those of the man. As he bowed, she frowned and jerked herself into an unpracticed curtsey, lowering her eyes a moment too late.

The third woman made no obeisance. She was tall, and skinny as a tentpole, which only reinforced the apparent youthfulness of her features. Dark hair coursed unfettered over her shoulders. Bijou remembered from somewhere that these northerners had two words for black, dividing it into the red-black of a black horse’s hide and the blue-black of a black bird’s wing. This would be the latter, the raven-black.

Her sharp-featured face wore an even sharper expression, and she was so clad as to remind Bijou of a magpie: a white, embroidered waistcoat or bodice buttoned over black blouse and scandalous black trousers not too dissimilar from Bijou’s.

Bijou recognized the dark-haired woman as the leader, and not the sort who made obeisance to just anyone.

“Well met, Beyzade,” she said to the prince, her words exotic and sharply accented with the rough vowels of Avalon. “Your reputation is wide. Your companions must be Bijou the Artificer and Kaulas the Necromancer, then? You are the famous Wizards of Messaline—defenders of the downtrodden, avengers of the despised?”

“You have us at a disadvantage,” Kaulas said, glancing at the prince first to check his humor.

“Not for long, I’m certain,” the woman said. “This is Riordan, a bard of my acquaintance, and the Wizard Salamander. And as for me—” she smiled, and stepped forward more fully into a fall of sun. Bijou caught the sparkle of sideways light through a peculiarly colored iris. The woman had one green eye, mossy and soft—and one the hard amber of a serpent’s. The evil eye. “—I’m certain your confusion will remedy itself soon enough. Or is it possible that my reputation has not reached so far as Messaline?”

She wore a dagger in a brass-bound sheath at her hip like a tribeswoman or a barbarian, and she carried herself like a queen. That, the magpie wardrobe, and the mismatched eyes, were the clues Bijou needed to put a name to her—though in truth the young woman did not much resemble the descriptions of the storied Hag of Wolf Wood.

Well, it wouldn’t be the first thing a storyteller had gotten wrong. Or oversold for drama.

“Maledysaunte,” Bijou said, pronouncing it carefully in five syllables. Mal-eh-thuh-saun-teh. The Wizard with no Wizard’s name, no Doctor and a pseudonym, as the Uthmans did it, nor cleverly suggestive noun, as was the tradition of Messaline. The Wizard who had trained herself, without benefit of ancient customs and institutions.

The young woman’s face split with a wide, amused grin. “I guess it is rather obvious if you stop to think it through—”

“That’s a fairy tale,” Kaulas scoffed. “She’d be five hundred years old now, if she ever existed.”

“Six hundred,” Maledysaunte said. “And twenty-three. I know, I don’t look a day over a hundred twenty. I’m a sport: my brother and I both were. Neither one of us aged much past maturity. I imagine he’d still be alive, too, if I hadn’t killed him.”

That was the root of the Hag’s legend. She had been supposed to have sorcerously killed her half-brother, Aidan the Conqueror, when he would have made the tiny, sea-wracked Isle of Avalon into an empire to rival the ancient power of Danupati. That was all history, however. Most Messalines would not know that the Hag of Wolf Wood supposedly dwelt in Avalon still, secure in her cursed forest.

But most Messalines were not Wizards. And any given Wizard tended to know the history of magic, even magic of faraway lands and centuries.

“I see,” said the prince. “And what brings the three of you to the City of Jackals? And, as importantly, to my friends and me?”

The Wizard called Salamander flipped her hair over her shoulder and spoke her first words. Her voice was quick and light, wry with self-mockery. “We’re searching for the city of Ancient Erem,” she said. “We understood this was the place to start looking. And as fellow adventurers, we would like your permission to proceed.”

“You’re fools,” Kaulas said.

Bijou thrust her hands into her pockets, amused and irritated, as Prince Salih shook his head.

“Ancient Erem,” the prince said, “is not the sort of place into which one trips lightly.”

Maledysaunte paced quietly, three steps to and fro. Her arms remained folded across her bird-slight bosom. “But it is a place into which others have tripped, your highness. You and your friends, most famously.” One of her hands unwound itself from the tight, defensive wrap to gesture widely, scooping them all in. “The tale of your exploits there, and how you ran the nefarious Dr. Assari to ground and brought him back in chains, has traveled far.”

“Then so have the tales of Ancient Erem’s dangers,” Kaulas said.

Maledysaunte cocked her head. All three of the newcomers looked thin and drawn, expressions Bijou was used to seeing on the supplicants who came to seek the aid of Prince Salih’s little band. But the black-haired woman had something in her expression beyond worry and tiredness: a sense of some deep knowledge that made even Bijou wish to recoil.

She said, “We know a little of them.”

“You have a purpose beyond curiosity in going there, of course,” Bijou said. Behind her, Ambrosias chimed lightly as a breeze passed through the chamber. Bijou looked to Kaulas for support.

He did not meet her eyes, but nodded nonetheless. “Your yarn—you should spin it.”

“And see what we catch in its web?” Salamander laughed. She glanced at the bard: he waved her on. Bijou saw Maledysaunte bite her lip to silence herself. “I suppose we do. And if so, it is my tale to tell, though I will not tell it as prettily as Riordan would. We are in pursuit of an adventurer. One of the mystical sort. A Dr. Liebelos by name.”

“How not,” Prince Salih murmured, “when you are adventurers yourselves?”

Maledysaunte met his level look with a faint smile, a glance that said How well we understand each other.