The Bone Palace Read online

  Isyllt crossed her arms beneath her breasts and shivered in her long black coat. “Where did you find her?” Her breath trailed away in a shimmering plume; spells of cold etched the stones.

  “In the Garden,” Khelséa Shar said, “in an alley just after dusk.” The police inspector lounged against the wall between corpse-drawers, a short, dark woman in the garish orange coat of the Vigiles Urbani. Frescoed vines and leaves swirled behind her—the builders had tried to make the room cheery, but no amount of paint or plaster could disguise the death that steeped these stones. “She was cold and stiff when we got there.”

  Isyllt frowned at the dead woman, brushed a finger against a lock of yellow hair. A prostitute, then, most likely. A foreigner too, from the coloring—Vallish like Isyllt, perhaps, or Rosian. Refugees from Ashke Ros crowded tenements and shantytowns in the inner city, and more and more turned to the Garden for work.

  Isyllt pressed gently on the woman’s jaw and it opened to reveal nearly a full set of tea-stained teeth. Her elbows were still stiff, knees immobile. Rigor had only just begun to fade. “A day dead?”

  “That’s our guess. It was raining when we found her, and she was soaked, but there were hardly any insects. The alley is visible from the street—she couldn’t have lain there all day.”

  “So dumped. Why call me?” The Garden was the Vigils’ jurisdiction, unless the Crown was somehow involved, or the crime was beyond the city police. And while pride insisted that the Vigils’ necromancers weren’t as well trained as the Arcanostoi or Crown Investigators, Isyllt knew they were perfectly competent. She bent over the white stone table, examining the wound. The knife had nicked bone. The killer was strong and sure-handed—left-handed. “What can I tell you about this that you don’t already know?”

  “Look at her thighs.”

  The woman’s legs tapered from flaring hips to gently muscled calves and delicate ankles. No spider veins or calluses on her feet—chipped gold paint decorated her toenails. Flesh once soft and supple felt closer to wax under Isyllt’s careful fingers. Death whispered over her hand, lapped catlike at her skin. The cabochon black diamond on her right hand flickered fitfully, ghostlight sparking in its crystalline depths.

  She ran a gentle hand between the woman’s thighs, tracing the same path as a dozen customers, a dozen lovers. But this time there was no response, no passion real or feigned. Only stiffening muscles and cold flesh.

  No wounds, no bruises. No sign of rape. No violation but that of the blade.

  “What am I—” She paused. On the inside of the left leg, near the crease of the groin, she touched a narrow ridge of scar tissue. More than one. She pressed against stiff flesh to get a better look. Old marks, healed and scarred long ago. Teeth marks. She found the same marks on the other leg, some only recently scabbed.

  Very sharp teeth. Isyllt knew what such bites felt like.

  “Do you think this had anything to do with her death?” She kept looking, but found no fresh wounds.

  “Maybe.” Khelséa reached into an inside pocket of her coat and pulled out a folded piece of silk. “But this is why I called you.”

  Isyllt stretched across the dead woman and took the cloth; something small and hard was hidden in its folds. She recognized the shape of a ring before she finished unwrapping it.

  A heavy band of gold, skillfully wrought, set with a sapphire the size of a woman’s thumbnail. A rampant griffin etched the stone, tiny but detailed. A master’s work. A royal work.

  “Where was this?” A knot colder than the room drew tight in her stomach.

  “Sewn inside her camisole, clumsy new stitches. Her purse was missing.”

  A royal signet in a dead whore’s clothes. Isyllt blew a sharp breath through her nose. “How many know?”

  “Only me and my autopsist.” Khelséa snorted. “You think I’d wave something like this in front of the constables?”

  Isyllt stared at the ring. A woman’s ring, but no woman alive had the right to wear it. She looked down at the body. A sliver of blue iris showed beneath half-closed lids, already milky. “What was her name?”

  “Forsythia.”

  Not a real name—at least she hoped it wasn’t. Not many mothers branded their daughters with a prostitute’s name at birth.

  Isyllt dipped a finger into the gaping wound, licked off coagulated blood and fluids. Khelséa grimaced theatrically, but the inspector’s nerves and stomach were hard to upset.

  Cold jellied blood, bittersweet and thin with rainwater. No trace of illness or taint, nothing deadly save for the quantity spilled. The taste coated Isyllt’s tongue.

  “Forsythia. Are you there?”

  No answer, not even a shiver. Her power could raise the corpse off its cold table and dance it around the room, but no ghost lingered to answer her questions. She sighed. “They never stay when you need them to. She might be wherever she was killed, though.” She nibbled the last speck of blood from under her fingernail.

  Gently she pushed back Forsythia’s kohl-smeared eyelids. Rain, she wondered briefly, looking at the ashen streaks, or did you have time for tears? Her reflection stared back from death-pearled eyes. She rested her fingers on the woman’s temples, thumbs on her cheekbones; the black leather glove on her left hand was stark against pale skin. The woman’s soul was gone, but memories still lingered in her eyes.

  Isyllt hoped for the killer’s face, but instead she found a sunset. Clouds glowed rose and carnelian as the sun sank behind the ragged rooftops of Oldtown, and a flock of birds etched black silhouettes against the sky. The last thing she saw was those jeweled clouds fading into dusk, then a sudden pressure of hands and darkness. Much too quick for death, even as quick a death as this must have been.

  Isyllt sighed and looked away, the colors of memory fading into the white and green of the mortuary. “She was grabbed off the street, somewhere in Oldtown. Maybe the Garden.” Death must have come not long afterward; she hoped the woman hadn’t suffered much. “What else do you know?”

  “Nothing. There was nothing but rain in the alley, and no one saw anything.” Khelséa rolled her eyes. “No one ever sees anything.” She pushed away from the wall, shaking back her long black braids. “Do you have any magic tricks for me?”

  “Nothing flashy.” Isyllt turned toward the back of the room, where tables and benches were set up for students and investigators. “Bring me gloves and surgical spirits, please. And a dissection plate.”

  The inspector opened a cabinet against the wall and removed thin cotton examiner’s gloves, a bottle, and a well-scrubbed tin tray. “What are you doing?”

  “Testing for contagion. Someone touched this before she did.” She sat down, stripping off her left glove. The hand beneath was scarred and claw-curled, corpse-white after two and a half years bandaged or gloved; she was mostly comfortable with only seven working fingers by now. She scrubbed her hands with cold spirits, then wiped down the tray and tugged on the white gloves. The ring was already contaminated, of course, but every little bit helped. It was much easier to test for transference—be it of skin, hair, blood, or energy—with a suspect at hand, but she could also tune the ring to react to the presence of anyone who had handled it recently, and even to seek them out at close range.

  Closing her eyes against the bitter sharpness of alcohol fumes, she touched the ring lightly. Tendrils of magic wrapped around the gold, resonated through the stone. Mages used sapphires and other such gems to hold energy—the cut and clarity of this one made it ideal for storing spells.

  The taste of the spirits crept over her tongue, stinging her palate as it sharpened the spell. Alcohol, like her magic, was clean of living things, anathema to disease and crawling necrophages. Against its stark sterility, any contagion should shine clear.

  Isyllt opened her eyes and leaned back, wrinkling her nose at the mingled stink of spirits and roses and death. Witchlight glimmered and faded in the sapphire’s depths. “There. Let’s test it.” She stripped off the cotton gloves and
touched the ring with her bare hand. The light flared again briefly at the familiar skin, and the spell shivered in her head. She let the essence of the alcohol erase the contamination, and it stilled again.

  “Now you,” she said, holding the ring out to Khelséa. Another shiver and flare at the inspector’s touch, and again she let the memory of it vanish. Now the stone should react only to whoever had held it before Forsythia. She found a spare silver chain in the exorcist’s kit in her pocket and slid the ring under her shirt. It settled cold against her sternum, warming slowly between cloth and skin.

  “Do you need anything else?” Khelséa asked. “You look tired.” Her tone changed with that last—a friend’s concern instead of a detective’s.

  Isyllt ran a hand over her face. “I haven’t had any sleep.” She’d been happier than was healthy when the inspector’s message had summoned her into the night—murder was better than being alone after midnight with a dark mood.

  Khelséa’s raised eyebrow must have worked wonders with guilty criminals.

  “It’s nothing.” When the eyebrow didn’t lower, she finally conceded: “The usual thing.”

  The other woman’s lips compressed. “Kiril.”

  Over the past fifteen years Kiril Orfion had been her mentor, her friend, and briefly her lover; Isyllt was still glad she wasn’t the one to say his name. “What else? He’s been withdrawn lately, secretive. More than usual,” she added to Khelséa’s wry snort. Every time she thought she was finished with grief over their broken relationship, something stirred the embers. “I worry.”

  Sympathy shone in Khelséa’s long leonine eyes, but her voice was light. “You need a distraction. A vacation.”

  Isyllt laughed. “My last vacation ended badly.” She flexed her left hand. Two and a half years ago she’d been sent to stir rebellion in the distant port city of Symir. The mission had ended in murder, chaos, and the near-destruction of the city—a success, as far as the Crown was concerned. “Work is distraction enough. I’ll go to the Garden next.”

  “Do you want company? Or backup?”

  “No. I’d rather tread lightly. More Vigils will only attract attention.”

  Khelséa snorted and tugged her orange coat straight. At least her dark skin let her wear the Vigils’ distinctive shade well. “What’s one more death in Oldtown, after all?”

  “Eight for an obol.” Their boots echoed in unison as they started for the stairs, leaving the dead woman on her slab.

  Outside, the night smelled of cold rain and wet stone, and cobbles glistened under the streetlamps. Isyllt’s breath frosted as she sighed—the wet chill of late autumn was still more pleasant than the unnatural dry cold of the vaults.

  Inkstone was a quiet neighborhood after midnight, scribes and bureaucrats long safe in bed. Shadows draped the columned façade of the Sepulcher, and the twin bulk of the Justiciary across the plaza. Isyllt felt the unblinking granite stares of the owl-winged gargoyles on the roof as she descended the broad steps. Sentinels of the Otherworld. A carriage waited in the street, the driver half-dozing, horses snorting restlessly.

  “Speaking of distractions,” Khelséa said with a grin, “I saw your minstrel friend in the Garden tonight. Maybe I should take him in for questioning.”

  Isyllt snorted. “Is that the only way you can start a conversation with a man?”

  “Better than calling them from their tombs.” The inspector unlatched the carriage door and held it open. “Let me know what you find. I’m sure it will be interesting.”

  Isyllt smiled. “This job always is.” She pulled herself into the carriage and Khelséa shut the door. The horses’ hooves clattered against the cobbles as they carried her across the city.

  The driver stopped one street from the Garden and Isyllt climbed down. She pressed a tarnished silver obol into his hand and a whisper of forgetfulness into his mind.

  The ring swayed heavy against her chest as she walked. A treat for the gossips and rumormongers, certainly, but she doubted the scandal would grow teeth. The king had been campaigning in the north since spring, and the crown prince had enough to keep him busy without visiting—or murdering—prostitutes. This was likely an old ring stolen or lost, fallen into careless hands.

  She just needed to convince herself of that.

  Nights in Elysia—or Oldtown, as it was more often called—weren’t quiet, especially in the Garden; music spilled from taverns, voices raised in song and anger and drunken confusion. Hooves and carriage wheels clattered against stone and visitors and residents still walked the streets. Some looking for fun, others going home after late shifts. Isyllt remembered the rhythms, though she’d lived elsewhere for fifteen years.

  With Forsythia’s empty eyes fresh in her mind, she noticed the differences too. More pale faces in the crowds, fair hair flashing beneath caps and scarves. When she listened to the voices instead of letting them wash over her, she heard the curious mix of clipped, heavy words and musical trills that marked Rosian, much more prominent than the usual Assari or Skarrish curses. The smell of cabbage and beets wafted from vendors’ carts and drifted from open windows—Cabbage Town was the vulgar name for the refugee neighborhood otherwise known as Little Kiva. Fifteen years ago, the sounds and scents and flavors had been Vallish.

  Her parents settled in Oldtown when she was seven, fleeing civil war in Vallorn. Not quite the slums, but as much as refugees could afford. When plague killed them four years later, Isyllt had drifted into the tenements and rookeries of Birthgrave, where an obol would buy you more than eight murders on any given night and orangecoats vanished at sundown. The majority of bodies dragged from the southern river gate came from Birthgrave. After surviving nearly five years there, she’d hardly balked at necromancy and the “good service” of a Crown Investigator.

  Climbing roses covered the Garden’s crumbling walls, worming into moss-eaten mortar. The scent of the last autumn blossoms reminded her of the Sepulcher, but it was better than the usual street stink. Light glowed through windows and leaked under doors; lamps burned on street corners. Since the Rose Council formed over a century ago, the Garden had been a safe haven for those who lived and worked within its walls. It was safer to be a whore in a Garden brothel than a shopkeeper in Harrowgate. Most nights, anyway. The flowers here had thorns, if customers presumed too far.

  The reek of death hit her when she turned the corner onto the Street of Thistles. Not a real smell, not blood and bowel, but a tingle of otherwise senses, a chill down her back. But not as strong as it would have been if someone had died here.

  News had spread; the street was too quiet for the hour. Isyllt followed the unscent to a narrow alley cordoned by orange ribbons. Her skin crawled as she faced the dark mouth. The night weighed inside her head: violence, death, and more.

  Intention. Plans, cold and cruel. Isyllt’s ring chilled.

  She walked into the shadow of the alley, boots splashing in puddles, coatskirts slapping around her ankles. The air smelled of wet stone, and even her mage-trained eyes saw nothing but black. Still no trace of the woman’s ghost. Usually the young and violently killed were more likely to linger. Saints knew Birthgrave was crawling with specters, more than the exorcists could ever lay.

  She worked her tongue against the roof of her mouth, recalling the taste of Forsythia’s blood. She whispered a word, not quite hoping for a response.

  Nothing. Wherever the woman had bled out, it wasn’t here.

  Isyllt let out an annoyed breath and turned around. And froze. Beyond the alley mouth stretched a familiar skyline. Sunset colors were long faded, only the stain of streetlamps against the low clouds to outline the buildings, but the angles were the same. Forsythia had stood here when she was kidnapped, and been returned after death.

  At least the murderer was tidy.

  A soft footstep scraped the stones behind her, followed by a quick intake of breath. “Come out,” Isyllt called as she spun. Witchlight licked her fingers, curled into a ball and hovered over her palm.
Eerie opalescent light rose along the walls.

  Another hesitant footstep, but the lurker didn’t bolt. “Come out,” she said again. “I won’t hurt you.”

  Several heartbeats later, a girl stepped around the corner. Twelve or thirteen, Isyllt guessed, skinny and tousled. Her eyes widened as she saw the spellfire. “Sorcerer.” Her voice fluttered like a ragged-winged sparrow as she dipped a curtsy. She looked closer at Isyllt’s black ring, and her eyes widened more. “Necromancer.”

  So much for not attracting attention; she should have worn another glove. “What’s your name?”

  “Dahlia.”

  Isyllt’s lips twisted. The girl was too young to work the Garden—some mothers were willing to brand their daughters. “You should be careful where you lurk, Dahlia, or we might be picking up your petals in another few hours.”

  The girl blanched, iridescent shadows rippling over her face as she ducked her head. “Do you know who did it?”

  “Not yet. Did you know Forsythia?”

  Dahlia nodded.

  “Who else knew her well?”

  Thin shoulders rose in a shrug. “Mekaran knows her. Mekaran knows everyone.”

  Isyllt gestured toward the street. “Let’s go.”

  * * *

  The Briar Patch lay just a few blocks down the Street of Thistles. A popular tavern, and open for at least another hour, but tonight lanterns dripped honeyed light onto empty tables. The clientele, never fond of Vigils, must have scattered when the constables came questioning. Now the sole musician played only for himself, a softer tune than boisterous Garden crowds usually asked for. Isyllt smiled.

  “Go find Mekaran,” she told Dahlia, closing the door behind them. The cold night breeze cut through smoky spice-thick air. As the girl scurried for the kitchen, Isyllt turned toward the minstrel sitting on the dais.