Book of Iron (8 page)

Riordan carried Dr. Liebelos’s body from the cave. Prince Salih leaned on Bijou, but he walked—and Kaulas and Salamander walked also, supporting one another. Maledysaunte went first, alone.

Bijou thought it was so she would not have to look at anyone.

“What about the blood?” Salamander asked, the only words anyone spoke as they came up out of the belly of the earth, their way lit by many electric torches now that there were no concerns about conserving the batteries.

“It summons myrmecoleons,” Kaulas answered. “Maybe if we’re lucky, we were too far underground for them to notice.”

“And if not?”

“Another fight,” Prince Salih said tiredly.

No one spoke of Kaulas’ attempt to rob Maledysaunte during the battle. No one spoke of Maledysaunte’s killing of Dr. Liebelos. For one terrible moment, Bijou had been afraid that Kaulas would offer to bring her back for Salamander—but apparently even he could read that much in the wind, and he kept silent.

Leaving the cave seemed to take three times as long as coming in, even though they simply followed their own footsteps back.

When they came out by the water, the dead stallion awaited them. Over his protests, Prince Salih was installed as the animal’s rider, as he was the most-wounded. Bijou knew it was the right choice when he slumped with exhaustion on its back, even his iron will insufficient to the task of keeping him erect.

Night had come again in the depths, or at least twilight. But against it, Bijou could see the hunched, scuttling shapes of myrmecoleons lured from their dens by the smell of something wounded. They had humped, chitinous ant-bodies and fierce-toothed cat-heads wreathed in shaggy, sand-matted manes.

“Well,” Kaulas said. “At least it’s not a manticore.”

“I’ve got it,” Salamander answered. Using Kaulas as a prop, she crouched low and scratched her fingertips across the earth at lakeside. Whatever she muttered, Bijou did not make out the words.

But the myrmecoleons withdrew, and made a ragged honor guard for them as they left.

“Nice work,” Bijou said.

Salamander stared through her, but didn’t shake off Bijou’s hand when Bijou put it on her arm, ignoring Kaulas as if he were no more than a convenient prop.

Bijou gave her a squeeze. She felt Salamander lean back.

Somehow, she didn’t think the white Wizard would be going back to Avalon with the necromancer who had killed her mother.

They trudged past the myrmecoleons and began the hasty journey back to the trail in, racing the killer light of the suns.

“Kaulas,” Maledysaunte called from the front of the line.

He went up. Salamander leaned more heavily on Bijou, now that they walked alone. Maledysaunte didn’t look at Kaulas as he walked beside her, and made no effort to lower her voice when she spoke. Bijou heard them clearly.

“There is no secret,” Maledysaunte said. “I was born this way. Perhaps my half-brother and I were the bastards of a god, as has been rumored. But if so, that god has never chosen to identify himself to me. And he has been content all these centuries to let the old King take credit for his begetting. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Kaulas said. He had the dignity not to offer a spurious apology.

“Next time,” Maledysaunte said, “I will kill you.”

He walked beside her in silence for a little, until it became obvious that she had no more to say. Then he fell back to walk with Bijou and Salamander again. Bijou let him take over: as for herself, she joined Maledysaunte with a few quick strides. Ambrosias’s cymbals chimed as he scurried to keep up.

“The Book makes me see things,” Maledysaunte said without preamble. “Usually, I manage not to look.”

Something burned by overhead, a cold streak of greenish light. A meteor, a shooting star. After a moment it was followed by another.

“You’ll be fine,” Bijou said. She heard the unspoken request for reassurance under the plain statement of fact. “You’re strong.”

Maledysaunte grunted. As they made their way toward the waiting skeletons of ass and camel, the dusty violet sky overhead was lanced with meteor after meteor, tearing down through the heavens to light the world below with fire.

Later—after the damage to the prince’s upholstery (he managed to drive, but Bijou had to sit beside him and shift); and after Kaulas abandoned his animate skeleton among the rocks; and after baths and food and sleep—later, Salamander told Maledysaunte and Riordan she would not be returning home with them. Maledysaunte nodded understanding. “If you ever need me,” she said.

“If you ever need me,” Salamander replied.

Both, Bijou thought, knew the other had no intention of asking.

Maledysaunte and the bard took their leave of the others, including Prince Salih with his dishdasha draped awkwardly over the sling and cast confining his arm. Now they walked away, and Salamander stayed behind until the messenger had led them out of sight.

Then, without a word, Salamander turned and left as well, going deeper into the palace as Maledysaunte and Riordan had walked out. Prince Salih walked beside her as if they had planned it in advance. Bijou imagined they hadn’t.

When they were out of earshot, she had something she planned to say. But Kaulas beat her to it.

“I wanted to make you jealous,” he said. “Do you know what you’re like? It’s like trying to hold a cloud, Bijou. Like clutching at mercury. Nothing ever touched you. Nothing ever pierces you.”

Bijou watched Salamander’s receding back, stiffly erect as she walked beside the prince. He would see her settled, Bijou knew. When he had accomplished that task would be time enough to trouble him for new rooms of her own.

“And you wanted to be the thing that put holes in me? How romantic you are.”

He said, “I did.”

She said, “You didn’t succeed.”

She meant more than the jealousy. But Maledysaunte and her dead man were gone, already vanished down the corridor to the prince’s waiting car. She couldn’t send a significant glance after them.

He glanced at her, sideways and down. “Not this time, my love.”

Bijou had expected silence from Salamander, at least for a little while. She had a sense that the other woman would prefer to nurse her grief alone, and up to a certain point she would respect that. Bijou the Artificer was not the sort to make other people’s choices for them, or assume that she knew what was best for anyone. Even, she thought bitterly, her own self.

Because if she did, she realized now, she never would have gotten involved with Kaulas. Her own loneliness notwithstanding, she didn’t have it in her heart to be the thing he needed. And it had been unfair of her to allow him to delude himself for as long as she had.

Unfair, and unkind.

Knowledge was not always courage, though, and she didn’t find it in herself to move her things out of their shared room. She knew he was giving her space, hoping she would circle back to him. And she—she didn’t have the strength to sever what she was coming to think of a dead limb.

When she sought Salamander out, it was for her own solace, not that of the white Wizard.

The prince had made Salamander comfortable. Her rooms were airy and shady both, on the garden level and protected from the Messaline sun by a broad verandah. Bijou wondered if she’d ever be able to think of this sun as fierce again, having known the suns of Erem.

The rooms opened onto the courtyard with a series of louvered doors. These stood open, and Bijou was not surprised to find a heavy-headed snake patterned in a dark and pale knotwork of sand colors, with beige dots decorating each joining of the darker weavings, resting in the dappled shade. She stepped around it carefully and paused in the doorway, calling out.

Salamander sat at her desk, which she’d turned to face the bank of open doors. Not a woman you’d care to creep up behind, Bijou judged.

The viper’s tongue flickered, but it did not uncoil.

“Bijou.” Salamander spoke calmly. She weighted the scroll she had been studying to hold her place, then rose. “Careful. There’s a desert cobra under the foot stool.”

“And a saw-scaled viper by the door.” Bijou had more respect for the viper than the cobra, frankly: Messaline’s breed of cobra was quick and shy, a glossy black snake that wanted little trouble with anyone. The vipers, though—a grown man bitten by one would die bleeding from every orifice, convulsing horribly and moaning with the pain. It was considered kinder to put a bullet in a man’s head than allow him to pass that way.

“I knew you’d seen her,” Salamander said. “Wine? Unless you’d rather have tea? Will you sit?”

“Wine would be lovely.” Bijou gestured to the low divan. “Any other crawlies?”

“The scorpions are all under the bed,” Salamander said. “There are some spiders around somewhere, but I’ve asked them not to bite. I assume you’ll try not to step on them in return?”

The corners of the room were already draped with intricate swags of web. And not all of Messaline’s spiders were spinners: most lurked and jumped.

“We’ll call it even, then,” Bijou said. She settled herself while Salamander brought wine on a tray. She—or someone—had set up an ingenious arrangement of mirrors that brought cold light into the corners of the room. Salamander moved around, fussing with the focus, and came and sat beside Bijou as Bijou poured.

They turned toward one another, knee to knee, and Bijou touched her cup to Salamander’s. The wine was cool from the cellar, sweet and tangy with the flavors of green berries and spice. The vapors made her lightheaded as witchcraft.

Bijou sipped twice before she spoke again. The wine might not give her strength, but at least it could buy her time.

“I’m sorry about your mother’s death,” she said, hearing the words as alien. They each had meaning, surely—I and am and sorry, about and your and mother. And death.

Each one had a definition, a usage. Together they formed a sentence. It wasn’t the words, really, was it? It was the sentiment. Mothers. So much need. So much love. So much opportunity for misery.

But Salamander paused, the wine raised to her lips, and set it back down untasted. “It wasn’t your fault,” she said. “She made her choices a long time ago.”

“Still,” Bijou said. “Still.”

“Yes,” said Salamander. “Still.”

A silence followed. Bijou heard the wind soughing through the leaves of the date palms and pomegranates in the courtyard. The heady scents of a thousand flowers rose from the cultivated beds.

Salamander pushed her cup aside with her fingertips and stood. “Come on. Let’s go for a walk.”

The courtyard garden was big enough for strolling, and deserted—except for the
kapikulu
who dotted it like statuary. They walked along paved paths between the bowering leaves, the tangle of branches. It reminded Bijou of the jungles of the South, beyond the Mother Desert—but here it took a rich man’s will to create what nature had decreed would not exist.

Golden tamarins—a monkey imported from halfway around the world—scampered in the tree limbs. They were smaller than a cat and far more agile. Their long tails flashed behind them like banners as they leaped from branch to branch. Behind the flowers and the shrubberies, Bijou could make out the roofline and the fluted golden pillars of the Bey’s palace defining the space.

Salamander spoke in a low voice, encouraging Bijou, too, to hush her tones. “I had nowhere to go.”

“Back to Avalon?” Bijou asked.

Salamander shrugged. “Maledysaunte gave me the excuse. But I’ve been needing something different. To get away from the mistakes of the past, I suppose.”

That pang of identity that Bijou had felt far too often in Salamander’s presence pierced her again. It was unfamiliar, that familiarity.

“I’m sorry for how it came about,” Bijou said. “But I am glad you’re here.”

Salamander gave her a smile. “Maledysaunte and Riordan have each other: after a few hundred years, I suppose you grow accustomed to thinking of outsiders as temporary.”

Bijou nodded. “I don’t envy her.”

“Or him?”

Bijou shrugged. She’d been thinking of the bard as Maledysaunte’s familiar, she realized. As something like Ambrosias: an artifact of wizardry. But he’d had an identity before he died, hadn’t he? He’d been a person. And that person was still intact.

So what was it? A transformation? A state change? When did he lose his own identity?

Ambrosias, she realized uncomfortably, had had an identity before she created it, too. Many identities. Cats and a ferret, although they’d all been long dead before she salvaged their bones. Did stones have minds? Did metal? She knew that across the sea and the salt desert to the East there were stones that lived, and moved, and ate other stones.

That way lay madness, she thought, and the lives of the religious ascetics who would not wear shoes, because they were walking on the face of the Earth, and who starved themselves rather than eat a once-living thing.

“He has something he believes in,” Bijou said. It was inadequate, but it was what she had.

Salamander nodded. “The Hag of Wolf Wood.” Then she sighed. “It’s hard when one is alone in the world.”

Thinking of Kaulas and of what passed for a love affair in her life, Bijou opened her mouth for the obvious comment.
Everyone is alone. We come into this world alone, and so do we leave it.
Then she realized it was a lie—a facile, comforting lie disguised as bitter cynicism. Did the bitterness make it seem like medicine and truth, when in fact it was a lie?

Because no one was alone. Every action, every choice—it vibrated like a fly’s wings in a spiderweb. It shook the lives of everyone else in the vicinity, and the resulting vibrations shook other lives, and so on until the whole world was a-tremble with the shock waves of that one single choice. The world, Bijou suddenly saw, was nothing but a web of these interactions. Everything qualified everything else.

She felt lightheaded with the implications, and wondered if this was how a precisian saw the universe.

She had no idea how to explain what she had just comprehended to Salamander, though. So she just said, “You’re not alone, my dear. You have us. I’ll find a way to prove it to you.”

The look Salamander gave her was serious, thoughtful. Bijou felt a warmth in her chest. A sense of sisterhood, she thought suddenly. Belonging. This was what they meant by that.

She had made a friend.