Bone and Jewel Creatures Read Online Free PDF

hand. That’s kind of you—” Bijou grunted dismissively “—what’s this?”
    Its surface cool under his fingers, Brazen picked up a lidded watch-glass containing a shred of withered brown.
    “The source of the infection,” Bijou said. “So tell me, Brazen, again. Why did you bring me a child infected by Kaulas’ necromancy? Surely, you don’t expect me to believe it was coincidence.”
    “Necromancy? On the living ?”
    “Dead tissue is dead tissue,” Bijou said. “The wound was packed with puss moth threads and white roses—both poisonous and significantly symbolic, I would say.” She lifted the watch glass from his hand and tapped it with a forefinger. “The child would have died, without our intervention. And then it would have been completely under Kaulas’s sway, don’t you think? Its shade his to command, its corpse his to animate? So—if I assume for the moment that you and he are not allied in some plot far too sinister and complex for my old head to fathom—why would Kaulas, the old bastard, have put that child where we were sure to find it? Why would he have chosen a subject who mattered to your household?”
    Brazen lifted a smooth needle-sharp hook on a corrugated handle and stroked the point across the back of his hand, pursing his lips at the prickle. “As a means to bring an agent inside my door, it lacks a little something. Neither of us would be likely to keep a rotting corpse around, and he can’t have expected me to bring the child to you for treatment. There are too many variables.”
    Bijou nodded, a slow oscillation of her head that made her fat oval locks shiver against her shoulders. She set the watchglass down and shifted her cane to her other hand. “You know I do not trust him—”
    “My loyalties are not divided, Bijou,” Brazen said. “I understand that you have learned well to distrust men, but as you were my teacher, I would not betray you. I swear it by my art.”
    She reached out, as if absently, and patted his arm. Whatever comfort the gesture brought was swept away by her words.
    “I know you’re not your father, sweetheart,” she said. “Never fear you will be mistaken for him.”

Three
     The cub hears voices below. Those man-sounds, the ones they make nearly ceaselessly when they are in one another’s company. They argue like pigeons; they cluck and coo. The brothers-and-sisters only talk when it is needful, because sound tells the enemies where you are.
    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