Book of Iron by Elizabeth Bear Page A

grains one over another, walking the dunes across the desert like endless stately waves of solid earth, whipped the snakes of her hair forward, slapping her cheeks. She drew a fold of her scarf across her nose and mouth and—rather than shutting the desert out—let it in.
    The dune beneath her feet was a virtual mountain of sand. Even now, with sundown hours behind, it radiated heat through the soles of her shoes. Bijou shuffled forward, every step raising the starched-linen scent of hot sand and starting another cascade of sand grains hopping before the wind.
    The spade dipped toward earth.
    Where it pointed, she crouched down and began to dig. She reached deep with senses honed by over a decade of wizarding, and found all the things that had once been alive, buried in the depths of the dune. One in particular interested her. She let her awareness fill it, tickle it up, call it wriggling through packed sand while she, in turn, dug to meet it. A long-mummified horned viper slept beneath the sand waves of the Mother Desert. Bijou called it forth.
    As with the horses and the camel, it was only Bijou’s will that animated the snake. She felt the pressure and slip of the sand against its bones. She felt the dead snake’s rib-bones grab at that sand and pull it forward, dried sinew crackling. Magic held its bones together now, when no mere withered hide could do so.
    Eventually, Bijou saw the bottom of the pit she was digging begin to collapse in on itself and set her spade aside. Her palms were raw from the grit caught between her hands and the spade. Her fingernails bore dark crescents of dirt.
    The dead snake hunched itself from the sand and coiled stiffly. Having thrust her spade upright into the earth, Bijou used her hands to assist the viper into the bucket.
     

     
    Her workshop was separate from the space she shared with Kaulas, as was his. Wizards’ workshops were notoriously bad places for eating and sleeping, but for the time being Bijou scarcely left hers. She slept on a pile of cushions in the corner—when she slept—and she took her meals on a tray—although as often as not, she forgot to eat them before the tea was long cold.
    First the skeleton must be cleaned, which was a meticulous and painstaking process of scraping away skin and flesh that had hardened to the consistency of old leather. The bones were fragile—terribly delicate, and there were so many of them.
    Having cleaned them, Bijou soaked them in a solution that would bleach and strengthen them. While they were resting, she opened shutters and doors to clear the noxious fumes. Then she began work on the armature.
    She chose jewels the rust and brown and golden colors of the desert, the colors the snake had worn in its lifetime: tiger eye, citrine, topaz. Jasper and agates. Smoky quartz. Petrified wood. Boulder opal. Normally, she would have left the bones bare to the sight, reinforced with a delicate filigree of metalwork into which the jewels could be set. But in this case, she made it an armature of segmented brass, concealing the bones within its protective shell. It was work with forge and hammer, and with every beat of her mallet against the anvil she thought of Dr. Liebelos hammering the Book into existence, and what they had done to stop her. She sweated over the forge in the relative cool of night, and the heat made her think of Erem. She chased the scaled plates with intricate designs, and set those designs with ten thousand chips of colored mineral. Ambrosias rattled around the laboratory, fetching tools and materials as necessary, without being asked. He knew her methods.
    She re-articulated the skeleton with wire, stringing each bone as if constructing a fantastic, architectural necklace. When that was done, she slipped the skeleton into its case and fixed each rib to the metal body with tiny prongs such as one would use to set a stone.
    She sealed the two halves along an invisible seam. She set a platinum spring set with pink