The child quickly lost consciousness, though Bijou completed her work in less than two minutes. Ambrosias humped over the little limp body to pinch arteries tight before she severed them, so while blood was lost, it did not spray violently. White cartilage gleamed smooth and beautiful in the disarticulation, and when Bijou set the knife aside to lift the soldering iron from the brazier the tip glowed an orange almost yellow. The cauterization took an instant. The child never stirred.
Bijou stretched the flap of skin she had left attached at the front of the arm across the stump and stitched it. Then she gave Ambrosias the amputated arm to carry out to the garden.
“Bathe it before it wakes,” she said to Catherine and Lucy. “Keep the stump dry.”
Catherine, who had been perched on a lamp arm overhanging, rattled the vertebrae of its long neck like a shaken marionette.
The garden smelled faintly of rot and its high walls were well-attended by carrion birds, though none so spectacular in their size as the beast the living Catherine had been. One small bold crow buzzed Bijou’s head, cawing, as she crossed to the lidded tray that would hold the child’s arm while it decomposed. It was molting, a single feather missing from the left wing. Ambrosias reared up to threaten it, and it flapped back violently, squawking.
Bijou laid the arm on stained loam. No need to add carrion beetles, not when the maggots were already at work. With the bones of the hand deformed and probably fused, redesigning the limb would be challenging.
As she lowered her head to investigate the clawed fingers, something caught her attention. It was the necrosis itself, the bones of the palm clearly visible between busy corpse-worms.
And tucked between them, something that should not be there.
“Ambrosias,” Bijou said.
The centipede reared up beside her and poked its ferret-skull head over the edge of the bin. Telescoping feelers made of segmented wire brushed the wound, then pincers slipped forward, between the maggots, and tugged.
A scrap of something soft and pale came free. Bijou lifted her jeweler’s monocle to her eye and bent towards it.
Bloodstained and bruised, but what Ambrosias held was a tattered white rose petal.
Two
In its sleep, the child jerked and shuddered. Bijou was not surprised that it slept. It had been terrified, badly hurt, and exhausted, and she had no way of knowing for how long it had been ill. The delicate ribs rose taut under tented skin, however, and there had been little flesh over the joint to cut through.
It might sleep the day away and be the better for it. Bijou could use the time to prepare a place.
Her Artifices would perform the hard work, fetching and carrying, scrubbing and hauling, but they must be supervised. Ambrosias, at least, could scuttle up the attic ladder and, with Hawti’s assistance, lift down a disassembled bedstead, sheets, feather-beds, feather-pillows, and some of the many tanned pelts stacked there. But as for the rest, well. A corner by the hearth must be cleaned (Lucy did the sweeping, while Lupe lay, silver-and-steel-shod jaw resting on bony paws, and watched with telescope-lens eyes) and the cage brought over and scrubbed shining.
Judging the child by the state of the cage was unfair; there was no telling how long it had been in there. And yet—Bijou leaned with both arms on the handle of her cane. “It’s probably not housebroken, is it?” she said idly to Catherine.
Catherine hid its head under a tattered wing.
So there was the bedstead. And there was the cage. And there was access to the side yard, which was high-walled and narrow, and Bijou thought that if the child could not be taught to work the latch, one of the smaller Artifices could be delegated as a door-thing. There remained only the matter of keeping it from worrying its stitches out. Bijou thought she could make a chased leather and metal cuff that would strap into place.
Bathed and rid of the necrosis, the child smelled better. It barely stirred when Lucy tucked it still voiceless into the small bed, where it seemed to find the warmth and softness soothing. It curled tight, pulling all but its now clean and braided hair and the one delicate hand still left to it under the covers. Bijou thought, not unkindly, that her Artifices might seem less terrible to a feral child than to one which suspected their origin.
The damp braid left a water stain on the pillow case. The hair was black, lustrous, the skin—despite the fading summer—brown as toast. It had a child’s face, still, with an undeveloped nose and chin, but Bijou thought from the angle of the bones and creased margins of closed eyes—black lashes drawing a smudged sooty line above the cheekbone—that with growth the child would prove some by-blow of the silk-and-spice traders who traveled a long cold road to Messaline each spring and summer, from the farthest East. The mother might have concealed her pregnancy under voluminous robes and given birth squatting in an alley—but how then had the child survived for six or seven years?
It would in any case probably grow up beautiful, if Bijou saw it adequately fed. She wondered if it could be taught to walk upright. She needed to consult her books.
A modicum of research suggested that outcomes were variable. The child was unlikely to learn to speak, or comport itself as befitted a human being. But if its mind were undamaged, it might learn to follow commands, to care for itself, and to perform simple tasks through demonstration. It was, in other words, no different from one of Bijou’s bone and jewel creatures, and Bijou thought that she could care for it.
Though what Brazen had been thinking, bringing an injured child to an old woman living alone, she would never know.
As anticipated, the child slept the clock around. In the morning, some of Bijou’s clients came to make preliminary inspections of the Artifices she was constructing for them. The Young Bey’s giant was nearly done, requiring only assembly—which could not be managed here, as Bijou’s ceilings were not tall enough—and dressing before its animation. The Bey’s man said he would send a send a cart and workman to move the pieces, and Bijou accepted the second third of her payment with graciousness. It had been heavy work—the giant was constructed of the petrified bones of such antediluvian monsters as eroded from the desert mudstones, with the gaps made up in elephant and rhinoceros—and intricate, and Bijou was coming to the opinion that she had not charged enough. But the Bey’s man seemed well-pleased, and soon the monumental heap of silk and wire and jewels and skeleton that crouched in one corner of Bijou’s loft like a child crammed into a shipping container would be standing guard over the city, banded agate eyes in its enormous horned skull, bony fingers curled about the handle of a spiked club taller than the Bey.
The Bey’s man did not mention the bed or the cage in the corner, and the child remained as cannily concealed as a cat for the duration of both his visit and that of old Madam Oshanka, the Northerner, who had come to collect the Artificed skeleton of her small curly dog, which Bijou had re-dressed in its own tanned, grey-muzzled skin.
Lupe had watched the process with suspicious lenses, but once it became evident that the small nervous Artifice was not staying, seemed to have accepted its presence without baring jeweled teeth. Hawti, Bijou suspected, had made something of a game of pretending to be about to step on the darting creature—but Bijou was certain that it was a game, for Hawti was perfectly capable of dodging crabs and kittens made of bone and gemstones and precious metal.
Bijou’s Artifices made old Madam Oshanka nervous, which Bijou found ridiculous, considering what she was carrying from Bijou’s loft cradled in her arms. But if a little fur and padding and glass eyes made a difference—well, so be it.