Elizabeth Bear - Bone and Jewel Creatures

And for the brothers-and-sisters, the city is full of enemies. We are small , the cub thinks. Not in words as a man would understand them, because the cub’s words are smells and body-posture and small yips and growls and vocalizations (the cub’s speech is very handicapped, with its small flat ears and its tailless haunches) but in a wordless understanding. Nearly everything that is not prey—rats, cats, pigeons—is bigger than the brothers-and-sisters.

That is why the brothers-and-sisters scavenge and hide and must be smarter—cannier, slipperier, more subtle—than the men and the dogs and all the big things that would kill them and not even eat them, just leave their bodies in the road. The brothers-and-sisters will eat anything that is food and they are tricky and quick. So they survive.

The cub understands that there’s information in the man-sounds, just as there’s information in the arguing of pigeons. The cub crouches in the attic, where dim slanting light angles across the cluttered space, limning columns of dust. It cocks an ear and an eye close to a gap in the floorboards, and watches.

It recognizes the other man, the one with the old-creature, and at first draws back in fear. That pale-streaked, broad-shouldered man in the sweeping coat was the one who caged it and who brought it here in the swaying, rattling machine-creature. It smells of oil and ozone. Pain and dislocation: a sharp pang of loss. Where are the brothers-and-sisters?

Could it find them again?

Whatever noises the men are making are friendly noises. Some complicated dialogue seems to be underway, involving the old creature leading the pale-streaked one from place to place around the loft, showing it things on tables and making worried noises, while the pale-streaked creature hovers as if the old one is terribly fragile. It’s interesting for a little while, and the cub watches, knees bent up beside its ears, balanced on its toes with its haunches tucked under, in case it has to move in a hurry. It doesn’t think there’s a threat in the attic, and the winged bone creature has followed it up, so there’s someone here who might be a packmate. Even if the bone creatures are not the brothers-and-sisters, the cub knows it cannot live without a family.

Life is not safe for a jackal alone.

Light shifts across the attic floor, and eventually the cub grows bored watching the men, and its knees grow sore in that beetly position. It comes up to all three remaining limbs, the hem of its smock twisted around its waist, and scurries off among the crates and heaps and piles of furnishings.

There is a great deal here worth exploring. Mice, everywhere, which—if you are quiet and quick—you can kill with a blow of your paw and eat in two bites, pausing between to flick the intestines out, though the fur is not pleasant to swallow. The winged bone creature sees what the cub is doing, though, and after a few moments it too is killing mice with aimed snaps of its sharply curved beak. It does not eat them, though, but tosses them to the cub.

So maybe the winged bone creature is a packmate.

There are lots of mice. The cub is stuffed to belly-rounding in less time than it spent watching the men make noises at each other, and still mice flock away every time it lifts a corner of a rug or shifts a crate aside. There is so much food here; the cub has not been hungry since it came. Not once, not even for a minute. There is always food.

The brothers-and-sisters should know about this place. Licking blood from its lips, the cub plans.

Replete, it remains more curious than sleepy, and it wonders what other treasures may be up here. Furs and blankets that smell of camphor and make the cub sneeze. Piles of bones—too dry for gnawing, though: these have had all the flavor bleached out of them. All those things in crates. Enticing.

Mostly, the lids on the crates are nailed down, and though the cub pries at them with long fingernails, they will not lift. The mice have taken refuge inside some crates. The cub can hear them rustling.

Rustling is irresistible.

One crate has a lid that shifts easily, and the cub pushes it aside—then dances back, startled, at the clatter as it tumbles to the floor. From below, the old creature makes the attention-noise, and the cub pauses. It crosses the light-dappled floor toward the hatch in a crabwise scuttle, raising more dust, and pokes its face down into the space below.

Both men are looking up. The old creature makes a gesture with its paw, and a questioning noise, so the cub blinks back reassurance—an eye-squeeze and a drawing-taut of the lips, not enough to be a snarl. The cub isn’t sure what the next noise means, but it’s not a summoning—it has learned the summoning already, because the summoning often means food, or it means that the cub was about to do something the old creature thinks might hurt, and the old creature is often right about that—and so the cub pulls its face up through the hatch and goes back to the mysterious crate, enticingly open now.

The mice, of course, have moved on. The cub isn’t hungry anyway, though, so that’s all right. It draws its knees up under the smock for warmth and crouches on the edge of the crate, which seems sturdy enough to bear its weight. The stump, it uses for support and balance. The remaining hand is crusty with dried mouse-blood, as is the cub’s face, but it knows the old creature and the bone creatures will bathe it when it comes down. This is another reason the cub thinks this might be a pack; the brothers-and-sisters bathed with tongues and teeth, but here, also, the creatures clean each other. The cub thinks when it is a little braver, it might sit behind the old creature and go through its matted fur for ticks and lice. The old creature might like that.

One-handed, the cub picks through the contents of the wooden box. Some are silky-soft; some are fine-furred like pups. There is a curved thing, round and stiff and wrinkled, but made of a cloth with a texture like mole’s fuzzy skin. It’s decorated with feathers and a cloth ribbon, and a thing like a beetle, but made of shiny stones and metal, and a thing like a flower, except made of sewn-up cloth. The cub strokes the thing and sniffs it—mouse and dust, and the memory of flowers and civet. A hat. It must be a hat. There’s more under it: coats and dresses as short against the cub’s body as the smock the old creature has wrapped it in. Scarves. A bundle of dried flowers tied at the stem with a ribbon. Vials, some half-full of an amber fluid which the cub can smell through the stoppers. Those make it sneeze even harder than the dust.

At the bottom of the pile is a square hard thing that smells of wood pulp and dye.

A rustle and clatter in the rafters draws the cub’s attention upwards, but it’s just the mirrored creature making its deliberate way across the rafters. It pauses over the cub, a little to the right so the cub has to lean left when it locks the three meathook claws on each hind leg around the crossbar and lowers itself with meticulous grace to look over the cub’s shoulder. The cub turns, surprised when the mirrored creature rotates its upside-down head on the bony neck and looks right back. The shape of the skull and the mirrors make it seem to have more of a face than the other bone creatures, and the old creature has given it a black enamel nose.

Very delicately, it stretches its neck out and touches the cub’s nose with its own. The cub holds still—it does not wish for any more cuts from the slow creature’s mirrors—but when the slow creature pulls back, the cub reaches out and brushes the three dull but fiercely hooked claws on its long awkward forelimb in return.

They stare at one another for a moment, and then the bone creature makes a strange bob of its head, like a man, and the cub goes back to the contents of the box.