The Bone Palace

by Downum, Amanda

  She shivered. Her blood was spice and fire; the smoky air dizzied her. “You still want to show me your scars?”

  “Among other things.”

  Isyllt laughed, trying to ignore the tightness in her stomach. Too much drink, too little food. Too much old grief. She should find Ciaran, find somewhere warm….

  Spider raised her hand to his lips again, rough tongue flicking over one fingertip. She shuddered, but didn’t pull away. A fang pierced her skin. She closed her eyes, biting her tongue to stay silent.

  Spider released her. A jewel-bright drop of blood glistened on his lip. “You look sad, little witch. What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing.” She shook her head. “History.”

  He unfolded himself from the seat, holding out a hand. “I’ll help you forget it.”

  “No one can do that.” She brought her palm down on the scattered charm, hard enough to sting and rattle the cups. The music and soft murmur of voices washed over them again, deafening after their absence. She pushed past him, pride and practice keeping her pace steady when she wanted to stumble.

  She bumped shoulders with a cloaked patron on her way past and murmured a hasty apology. Pale blue eyes flashed in the shadow of a hood as the man glanced at her and she nearly swore; she would have to pass a gossipmonger like Varis Severos with her face uncovered.

  She scrubbed away a glaze of tears when she reached the top of the stairs, cursing herself for a dozen types of fool. The damp night air was a welcome relief from the haze below. Spider caught up with her before she left the alley.

  “I’m sorry,” he said softly. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “It isn’t your fault.” When she didn’t turn, his hands settled on her upper arms, cool and light. She wanted to lean into him; after a heartbeat, she did. It was foolish, worse than foolish. But his touch set her magic tingling, and maybe warm and safe weren’t what she needed tonight.

  She led him through her wards. She led him to her bed.

  Candlelight warmed his skin to the color of old ivory; shadows pooled in the hollow of his chest, the valleys between his ribs. White ridges of scars crisscrossed his abdomen where her silver blade had opened his flesh. She remembered the blows that had caused them: two before he struck—reflex at stumbling on an unexpected demon—and the third and deepest after, to drive him off. They had managed to sort the situation out before any more became necessary.

  “Dead thing,” Isyllt whispered, laying a hand over his silent heart. The scholarly portion of her mind noted the lack of function in undead sex organs, which was only sensible. The rest of her was distracted by the feather-light touch of his claws.

  “Necromancer.” He pulled the pins from her hair and its weight slithered down her back. The smell of poppy oil mingled with serpentine musk. “A good match, I think.”

  She took a hairpin from him—silver, and sharp—and pressed the tip to his breast. He made a low noise in his throat as skin popped and a dark bead of blood welled. It tasted of death and anise, bittersweet and tingling on her tongue. Spider laughed and pushed her down against the pillows.

  She snuffed the candle with a thought; his skin and glittering eyes were the brightest things in the room. She closed her eyes and let the dark take her, darkness and cold and the heat of poisoned kisses.

  Kiril came awake with a start, eyes sharpening against the dark as magic crackled around his fingers. A breeze stirred the drapes and a pale stripe of moonlight fell across the end of the bed, silhouetting the slender shape standing there. The shadow moved, and orange demon eyes sparked.

  His breath left in a hiss and his hands clenched. “Phaedra—” He rarely spoke her name; it felt strange in his mouth.

  The bed shifted under her weight. His throat closed as she settled against him. Her conflagrant perfume had faded to spice and embers; beneath that she smelled faintly of meat, and of nothing.

  “I’m lonely, Kiril,” she whispered. Not a seductive whisper, but a lost and childlike one. “So lonely.”

  Maybe it was the darkness sparing him her face, or that his defenses were still scattered from sleep. Maybe it was the need in her voice, in her fingers closing in his nightshirt. Maybe it was his own grief and guilt. His arm tightened around her.

  “I know.”

  “I loved Ferenz. For all my foolish sins, I loved him. He died because of me, and all the vengeance in the world won’t bring him back.”

  There was no answer for that save the obvious. He stroked her hair instead. So alien, the press of dead flesh. Of any flesh. There had been no one else in the three years since he broke with Isyllt. She had been all bone-thin angles and clinging sea-wrack hair, sharp-nailed and biting. Phaedra was fuller, softer, stomach and breasts ripened by age and childbirth. He couldn’t control a shudder, so strong he thought his flesh would crawl from his bones.

  Phaedra made a choked little sound. “Is it so awful to touch me?”

  “Yes. But not because… of what you are.” He wanted her close and vulnerable if he was to stop her; he pretended that was why he let the words leave his tongue. “You are the worst thing I’ve ever done. Out of a lifetime of murder and lies and schemes. You are the unforgivable deed.”

  “Do you want my forgiveness? Are you asking for it?”

  “I could never do that.”

  “No. You never would.” She buried her head in the crook of his neck; no breath stirred his skin until she spoke. “Hold me. Please. I have bad dreams.”

  He didn’t believe in forgiveness, or atonement. But he held the demon in his arms and stroked her hair until she grew heavy and still. And, eventually, after the moonlight had crawled away and died, he slept too.

  He stands on a tower of grey stone, overlooking a dizzying drop. The hands on the crenellated stone are not his, but white and slender and ringed with gold and rubies, laced with fine scars. Black hair whips around his face; the stomach beneath heavy skirts has barely begun to round.

  The dream is not his own. He knows that, even as it ensnares him. He might escape it, but perhaps he believes in penance, if not atonement.

  Far below, beneath the castle walls and the sheer plunge of cliff, the Ardos¸ River runs cold and wild. The wind tastes of snow, and slices to the bone as it rushes down the winter-dark slopes of the Varagas Mountains. Riders approach from the south, faint with distance on the winding road. They will be here soon.

  He turns, trapped in her flesh as he is trapped in her memories, to face the man standing behind them. Ferenz Darvulesti. Tall and lean and hawk-nosed, with deep-set green eyes shadowed by heavy brows. A warrior, swathed in leather and fur and mail with a sword at his hip, but his hands are gentle as they close on Kiril-and-Phaedra’s arms. He speaks, but no sound accompanies the shaping of his lips. There is no sound at all, not even the wind. Only the empty and aching silence of what is past and gone.

  The man kisses them twice. Once hungrily, pulling them close till cold steel links bite their flesh. And again, soft as a snowflake on the brow. A kiss of benediction, or forgiveness. Then he turns and strides down the frost-rimed steps, knuckles white around his sword hilt.

  Phaedra-and-Kiril raise a hand, and a cloud of ravens bursts from a lower rooftop, fighting the wind on soundless black wings to reach them. They have their own defenses to marshal, even as Ferenz readies his soldiers below. The riders draw ever nearer; this will end soon, one way or another.

  * * *

  Kiril woke to dawnlight and an ache like cold iron in his chest. He could still feel the wind’s bite, the press of rough lips on his mouth. The weight and softness of foreign limbs.

  He needed no oneiromancy to parse the meaning of it. A true dream, a memory, bleeding out of Phaedra and into his mind. Whether she did it on purpose as punishment, or whether the pain of recollection was simply too strong to contain, he couldn’t say.

  He might have asked her, but the bed was empty beside him, save for the ghost of cinnamon in the wrinkled sheets and a strand of black hair wrappin
g his fingers like a fetter.

  CHAPTER 5

  Isyllt woke alone, tired and aching, to an insistent pounding on her door. A cursory inspection revealed a dark bruise scabbing on her inner thigh—a delicate nip instead of a full bite. Only a taste taken, since she was already weak. A few stray drops of blood spotted her sheets.

  “Sand and saints,” Khelséa said when Isyllt opened the door. “You look terrible. More terrible. You did something stupid, didn’t you?”

  “Probably.” The smell of spiced meat wafted from one of several bags the inspector carried, and saliva flooded Isyllt’s mouth. Her courses always left her craving meat and greens and this was many times worse.

  “What did I tell you about that?”

  “Believe me, you don’t want to know about some of the stupid things I do.”

  Khelséa unpacked her bags, producing lanterns, rope, a map of the sewers, a small arsenal of weapons including an extra pistol loaded with spell-silver, and lunch. Isyllt fell on the food, but shook her head at the proffered gun.

  “I’m hopeless with them,” she said around a mouthful of spiced mutton and spinach. “And magic has better aim.” She stopped short of licking the last of the grease and yoghurt from the wrapping, but it was a near thing. Khelséa’s eyebrows rose in eloquent disbelief, but she slipped the spare pistol into her own pocket rather than press the matter.

  Isyllt washed and traded her dressing gown for leathers and boots—older, well-worn ones this time, since she wasn’t about to lose another good jacket to the sewers. The high collar chafed her wounded shoulder, but she stopped herself before she numbed the bite. Some things ought not to be forgotten. Last night’s souvenir, however, she was willing to ignore.

  Khelséa puttered in the apartment’s tiny corner kitchen when she emerged, and the air smelled of jasmine tea. Watching the other woman, Isyllt almost wished she didn’t live alone. She and Kiril hadn’t cohabitated since the first few days after he found her; they’d spent so much time together it hardly mattered. She hadn’t had anyone else to make her tea—or to make tea for—since she was fifteen and living with three other girls in a leaking tenement attic. They were too poor most decads to afford tea, anyway.

  A pity, she thought wryly as Khelséa handed her a mug, that she didn’t appreciate women that way. And even if she had, the inspector’s taste ran to plump and pretty and not remotely self-destructive. Her latest lover was a seamstress.

  “Do the other vigils know you’re misadventuring with me?” Isyllt asked, letting the warmth of the cup soak her hands. The sun had reemerged an hour past noon, leaking like watered honey through the curtains and pooling along the dusty baseboards.

  “This is my day off.” Khelséa grinned, a quick flash of white. “Gemma is always telling me I need more hobbies.” She leaned back in a chair and stretched her legs in front of her. “My autopsist knows—the one who saw the ring. In case we don’t come back.” She shrugged aside the possibility of death, and her wealth of braids—twisted into one forearm-thick plait and wrapped with brown yarn—rustled against her jacket. “Do you have a plan?”

  Her surname, Shar, meant “sand” in Assari, and foreign inflections still colored her vowels. Not for the first time, Isyllt wondered how a woman from the deserts of Assar ended up working for Erisín’s Vigils. One day, she resolved, she’d ply the inspector with enough wine to get an answer out of her.

  “Go back to where I was attacked and track them from there, I suppose. One of them is called Myca, but I doubt that’s enough to summon with.” Vampires, like prostitutes, were unlikely to use their birth names. And the true names of demons were nearly impossible to determine, anyway. Binding a foreign spirit to flesh, living or dead, changed both irrevocably.

  “The one who bit you?”

  “No, that would be too easy.” The bond of the wound coupled with even an untrue name might have been enough to use, but not only one or the other. “I’d almost rather search for Forsythia’s ghost first, or for someone who knows her story.”

  “But—”

  “Yes, but.” She grimaced at the dregs of her tea. “We don’t have time for that.” Stolen royal goods would always take precedence over a murdered prostitute. Part of her wanted to argue, but the calendar was against her—it was already Hekate, and the rain and chill that wrapped Erisín would be snow in the north. The king and his forces were already decamping or would be very soon.

  Which wasn’t need for so much haste that she shouldn’t talk to Kiril first. Khelséa might be better prepared than she and Ciaran had been the first time, but there were still a dozen dangers in the sewers. A dozen reasons to seek his advice. And the only reason not to was the set of his shoulders as he’d turned from her, the warmth of his hand on her skin and the chill of its absence. The foolish pain of rejection and loneliness that could still prick her to tears years later. Whenever she thought she’d finally moved past it, a touch or glance would undo her all over again. How many more years would pass before she was free of it?

  “All right,” she said, taking a last swallow of cold tea to rinse away the bitter taste in her mouth. The light cooled and greyed again, and they had little enough of it to waste. “Let’s go.”

  They didn’t enter through the Garden’s access this time, but by one in Harrowgate that Isyllt judged to be closer to the place where she and Ciaran had been attacked. It might have been easier to track the thieves from the palace crypts, but also easier to draw attention and unwanted questions. At least the trail here was fresher.

  The door shut with a metallic clang behind them and echoes scattered and sank beneath the rush of water. The sewer didn’t care about day or night—its blackness was absolute. A carriage rattled overhead, and the clatter of hooves and wheels echoed painfully.

  They kept careful counts of turns and branches, but the tunnels in Oldtown all looked the same and getting lost was far too easy. If Isyllt had brought any food, she might have trailed crumbs behind her like the children in cradle-stories. Not that the sewer rats needed more to eat, by the size of those who so brazenly crossed their path. A pity she couldn’t talk to them and save herself some detective work.

  She found the site of the attack after two wrong turns, or at least a stretch of sewer that looked promising. Isyllt drew a knife—not the kukri at her back, but a razor-honed folding blade that fit neatly in her pocket—and pricked her left wrist. A drop of blood glistened black in the pale light, and washed metal-and-seaweed over her tongue as she licked it away. Her instructors at the Arcanost would chide her for needing to draw her own blood—she was filled with it, after all—but she’d always found the spell easier with the taste of it sticky in her mouth.

  With a whispered word, light blossomed on her wounded wrist and on the damp stone ledge, a pale blue no brighter than cave lichen. From the shape of the stains she could see where the vampire had first bitten her, where blood had dripped from her shoulder and later splattered as she shook him off. The trail ended with the ledge.

  Now that she knew where to look, Isyllt could also see the shadow-faint outline of the secret door in the wall. She kept her eyes away; Khelséa didn’t lead a cohort by being inobservant.

  “This is it.” The pounding water drowned her words, and she shouted the next. “The water carried one away, and I imagine the other followed.”

  Khelséa gestured ahead with a flourish. “After you, Crown Investigator.” Isyllt read the shape of the words instead of hearing them.

  Isyllt sniffed, hoping to catch the scent of vrykoloi, but all she got was a noseful of wet shit and offal. She shook her head with a grimace and started walking.

  They followed the current for several turns, but finally came to a fork where the water rushed left and right. Isyllt sent her witchlight back and forth over the ground and along both arches; peperine bricks glittered with dark flecks of magnetite and brighter mica, beautiful amidst the filth, but she saw no sign of anything having chosen one tunnel over the other. Finally she leaned b
ack against the wall and sighed in disgust.

  “Do you have a coin we can flip?” she yelled to Khelséa. Echoes bounced off slime-slick stones.

  “I thought,” a familiar voice said from the darkness, soft but carrying, “that you were going to wait for me.”

  Khelséa spun, pistol shining in her hand, and Isyllt flung out a hand before she could pull the trigger. Her heart spiked sharp in her chest. “Don’t! He’s—” Safe was definitely not the word. “Not a threat,” she finished half-heartedly. “Are you, Spider?”

  “Not to you or yours, necromancer.” He stepped into the light and Khelséa’s breath hissed through clenched teeth. In the darkness and witchfire it was hard to believe he could ever walk the streets unnoticed, glamourie or no. Gaunt and grotesque, inhuman. Demonic.

  Isyllt realized that she’d never talked to Khelséa about consorting with demons, and if the inspector might ever condone it. Maybe that was a conversation to have with plenty of wine, too.

  “It seemed a pity to waste the daylight,” Isyllt said, stepping neatly between Khelséa and Spider. From the corner of her eye she saw the inspector lower her pistol, but not holster it. “I thought you’d be sleeping.” She blushed, and gave thanks for the darkness.

  He chuckled. “You’ve been reading the wrong sort of stories. Oh, yes,” he said when she raised an eyebrow. “I follow the penny dreadfuls.”

  “You should write some of your own, if the others are so inaccurate.”

  His grin bared his fangs, and the gaps around them that let him close his jaw. Like an animal’s. “I don’t think your citizens would like to read the truth of us.”

  Isyllt snorted. “We can discuss literature later. If you want to help us, then by all means lead on.”

  “So impatient,” Spider said. “You haven’t introduced me to your companion.”

  Khelséa stepped forward, holstering her pistol and extending her gloved hand in one smooth motion. “Khelséa Shar.” No rank or title, and Isyllt silently blessed her discretion. And from her willingness to share her name with a demon, guessed that it wasn’t her birth name.