Elizabeth Bear - Bone and Jewel Creatures

Bijou’s fingers angled from her palms as if someone had bent them aside under great heat and pressure. She shuffled about her cavernous, shadowed workshop in parody of a bride’s hesitation step. Eighty years a Wizard of Messaline—the city of jackals, the empire of markets—had left their wear.

It was not that she grew frail. She had no opportunity for frailty when her work with forge and hammer, with wire and pliers kept her strong.

But of late all her strength must be bent to shouldering the burden of years before she could take up any other work, and each year was weightier than the last. Still, Bijou did what she did, and not one other alive could do it.

For a decade, Brazen the Enchanter had been pestering her to take another apprentice, someone youthful and broad-backed who could pump the bellows and heave the ingots, who might tend the maggots and the corpse-beetles, who would haul the ashes and stir the porridge. And each time Brazen pushed her, Bijou the Artificer would gesture round the arched spans of her loft. The sweep of her arthritic hand encompassed rustling rafters, the shifting and clattering upon the floor, the bone-tapestried walls between the tall multipaned windows, the serried ranks of dried articulated skeletons laid along her slate-topped benches awaiting the jeweler’s art.

“I have all the assistance I need,” she would say.

“Even so,” Brazen would answer. “Even so.”

He was her only frequent visitor. Sometimes Ordinaries came for repairs on their automatons or to purchase a new one, and the mews-man, the newsman, the greengrocer and the butcher and baker and dairyman all made their deliveries, but Bijou was without companionship except for the Enchanter.

Thus, when the string of silver bells over the great double portal jangled without appointment, she suspected who the caller would be. She had been engaged with a hair-fine drill, bringing a thread of platinum between the upper and lower beaks of a raven, so rather than setting her tools down, she turned to Ambrosias, which was directing the lamp.

She told it, “If that is Brazen, see him in. If it is anyone else, please take a card.”

Carnelian eyes unblinking in an ivory ferret-skull, Ambrosias humped up its rear end, set the lamp down with such great care Bijou barely heard a click, and scuttled down the leg of the bench to race to the door. Her other creatures made way: Ambrosias was her oldest surviving creation, and though it was but crudely fashioned it held pride of place and seniority. None of the others, even those fifty times its size, dared to challenge the eldest.

Many of the later Artifices modeled upon real creatures, crafted from skeletons. But Bijou had made Ambrosias in mock of a centipede larger than any centipede the waking world had seen. It was three canes in length from pincers to hind-end. Its core was the articulated vertebrae of a horse, its legs the rib bones of cats. The rough-tumbled stones set along its length were agates and jaspers, cheap jewels in crude sand-cast copper settings. The legs on the left side rippled slower than those on the right—a fault Bijou had never quite been able to tune out of it—so if it were not wary, it tended to run in circles.

But for seventy years it had served her loyally, and Bijou trusted it.

The rattle of bony limbs across the marble floor was a ceaseless accompaniment to her work. Now, as Ambrosias reared up by the door, several of its brethren moved curiously from their places. The door-answerers including her newest, giant Hawti with its chased tusks and the enormous belled bangles clashing on each ankle. In Hawti, Bijou’s mature prosperity was apparent. Though she had created the elephant Artifice simply because a corpse had become available, and not under commission from any particular client, the surface of the skull was filigreed with gold inlay and emeralds. In each eye socket lay a jewel knobby as Bijou’s fist—if Bijou still could make a fist—soaking in the available light. For the right side, she had selected a spinel, darker red than any ruby, and on the left a yellow sapphire, pale as straw.

Hawti paused behind Ambrosias, rocking from foot to foot in anticipation so the bells and bones rang and rattled and the jewels and precious metals trembled with reflections. Ambrosias, more familiar with the infrequent phenomenon of company, simply grasped the view-portal in its bony limbs and drew the metal aside. Well-oiled, the slide did not rasp.

Bijou knew the pattern of the clicks of ferret teeth, the silvery tremolo of the cymbal-coin that depended from a gold band encircling one of Ambrosias’ vertebrae. “Brazen?” she asked.

Hawti rattled in the affirmative.

Bijou permitted herself a gusty sigh and set down her drill. “Open the door.”

Even half of the giant double portal was too heavy for Ambrosias, but Hawti dragged the left one wide. There are no bones in an elephant’s trunk; Hawti’s was crafted of a portion of a boa constrictor spine.

It had not always been hard work crossing a level floor, Bijou thought, shaking out her filigree cane. She moved slower now than Lazybones, which crept through the shadows of the rafters on curved claws, sunlight sometimes glinting from the mosaic of glass chips and mirrors mortared to its skull, and never came down at all.

At least she had not succumbed to palsies—there was a little resting tremor, perhaps, but far less than one would have expected for her age—and her mind was sharp. Her work remained.

Palm-sized crab-shell Artifices scurried aside as she shuffled forward on gouty feet. In the rafters, the condor Catherine fanned bony wings stretched across with watered silk and ragged feathers, batting in startlement, shaking its spring until its gears rattled tic tic tic . Bijou hushed it, but not before Brazen had walked boldly in between Ambrosias and Hawti, dragging a tall veiled box on a little red wagon behind.

Cold wind blew past him from the gray autumn day outside. Argan and olive leaves scraped across the floor, only distinguishable from the bejeweled crab carapaces by virtue of drabness. But even Bijou’s Artifices were drab in comparison to Brazen the Enchanter. He wore velvet trousers, a silk turban, and a smoking jacket resplendent in oranges and greens. A tall, hairy barrel of a man, half Bijou’s age, he was already gray-goateed and streaked with gray through the temples and along the part of straight blond hair that swung below his shoulders.

“Brazen,” she said with her rusty voice, and teasing, added, “the Shows-Up-Just-In-Time-For-Lunch.”

“Bijou,” he cried, throwing his arms wide, the handle of the cart still in the left one, “I have brought you an equinox gift!”

Something within the draped box gave forth a rattle.

“Bones,” Bijou guessed, which was mostly a safe guess in such cases.

“It’s possible,” Brazen said, with a wave of dismissal. He turned to drag the pall to the floor, emitting as he did a terrible stench of rot. It didn’t trouble Bijou; the work of the corpse-beetles in the back garden smelled far worse.

She limped forward to peer into the box.