The Bone Palace

by Downum, Amanda

  The citizens of Elysia were long used to Vigils nosing around and quickly losing interest in deaths and disappearances. Isyllt imagined that Forsythia’s body had already been shipped to a pauper’s grave on the edge of the city, to free the slab for someone with family to miss them.

  “I do,” she said, just as quietly. “Walk with me.” The girl lingered for a moment on the threshold, staring almost wistfully at the slabs of ice and dead squid and softly cursing students.

  “Do you enjoy dissections?” Isyllt asked as they maneuvered through the halls, already clogging as instructors released their students to lunch.

  Dahlia gave her another measuring look. “I enjoy learning how things work,” she said. “And what they’re good for.”

  An underclassman stumbled out of their way, wide eyes trained on Isyllt’s ring, and held the door for them. She gave him a smile for his attentiveness and nearly laughed as he blanched and scurried away.

  The day’s chill was pleasant after the bite of refrigeration spells. Brown leaves rattled over the lawns and cobbled walks, and the sun was a pale disk behind a low vault of clouds. Starlings and swallows clustered on the domes and spires, occasionally scattered by an encroaching hawk or raven. Voices rose up all around as students crowded the paths and converged on vendors’ carts for their noon meals. A protest gathered across the square.

  “Let’s find something to eat,” Isyllt said, “and you can tell me your news. What do you want?”

  Dahlia shot her a sideways glance. “Calamari?”

  Isyllt snorted. “You missed the first part of my lecture, about the uses of the ink.”

  The girl’s eyes glinted with a repressed smile. Sandy olive skin and black curls were common enough in Selafai, but her long-lashed blue eyes were striking. “No I didn’t. I listened at the door. Illusion. Distraction. Obfuscation.” She stumbled a little over the last.

  “Confusion,” Isyllt supplied, “obscuration. Hiding. Sometimes hiding in plain sight.” She licked her ink-stained finger and smeared a faint grey smudge on Dahlia’s forehead, like a temple’s ashen benediction. Her own look-away charms worked well enough, but to divert attention from two people in a busy place she was glad for the ink’s extra focus.

  Dahlia let Isyllt take her hand and didn’t flinch from the touch of her crippled fingers. After a few steps, it became apparent that the spell was working very well indeed. Some of the more perceptive pedestrians stepped around them, even as their eyes slid past, but more were entirely oblivious, and would have run them over had they not dodged. Dahlia had the grace and slightness of youth, if not a decade and more of practice, and they passed the worst of the crowd without collisions.

  Isyllt knew she was showing off, and shook her head at her own folly. From the directions she caught the girl’s gaze wending, she was also encouraging a young pickpocket.

  She dropped the spell in front of a kiosk at the edge of the quadrant, startling two young men enough to claim their place in line. The vendor hardly blinked, inured to sorcerers’ tricks. Isyllt bought two trenchers of fried calamari and dolmathes, and found a seat on a low wall beneath an alder tree.

  They ate in silence for a while, punctuated by the crunch of breaded rings. “What information do you have?” Isyllt finally asked, licking spiced salt and lemon off her fingers.

  Dahlia looked up from her nearly empty trencher, muscles working along the curve of her jaw. She scrubbed a sheen of oil off her mouth with the back of one hand. “I found someone who knew her. Who knows her name.”

  A true name, along with the lock of hair now safely tucked into her kit, might be enough to conjure with. “Will your contact talk to me?”

  “He will. But he wants to know that you’ll do something.”

  The protesters—Rosian and natives both—were yelling about justice and wrongs, about the law’s disregard; she didn’t appreciate the reminder. Some onlookers shouted encouragement, others heckled and jeered. Go home, some called, and the increasingly familiar cabbage-eaters.

  Isyllt frowned at the grease-stained bread in her hands, breaking off chunks and tossing them across the cobbles. Brown clouds of birds descended on the morsels. “I want to find Forsythia’s killer. I want to stop him. But I can’t promise you justice.”

  Dahlia laughed bitterly. “If you did, I’d know you were lying.” She devoured her bread in quick, methodical bites and dusted her hands on her skirt. “Meet me at the Briar Patch tonight, after the Evensong bells.”

  She vanished well enough without sorcery.

  The protests in Archlight weren’t the only ones. Isyllt passed more crowds on her way through Elysia—angry Rosians demanding attention, and locals trying to ignore them or shout them down. Of Vigils she saw very few.

  Civil unrest wasn’t enough to scare away the Briar Patch’s custom. The tavern was packed, and a wall of noise and heat rolled over Isyllt as she opened the door. Ciaran played elsewhere, replaced onstage by a trio of hennaed women singing bawdy songs and dancing with pantomimed drunkenness. The crowd knew all the words, or invented new ones with enough conviction that it hardly mattered.

  Isyllt slipped in just before the cathedral bells tolled. She wore a plain grey dress and dark cloak instead of her usual leathers, with soft knit gloves to hide her hands. It was a guise that would avoid certain kinds of attention, but might attract others. Luckily the drunks were far more interested in the charms of the performers than in a skinny woman lurking in the corner. Even Isyllt couldn’t look away when one dancer teetered on the edge of the stage, pinwheeling her arms and leaning so far forward that only a scrap of lace kept her breasts from spilling out of her bodice. A dozen hands stretched out to steady or grope her, but she twisted away with an almost accidental grace, stumbling into her nearest companion instead and sprawling them both across the boards in a tangle of curls and petticoats.

  Amidst the shouts and laughter she heard coughing and sneezes, sniffles drowned in sleeves and handkerchiefs. Sickness had its seasons, as with everything. Cholera and bronze fever in the warm months, influenza in the cold. Influenza had claimed the lives of more than one childhood acquaintance, but she had never loathed and dreaded it like the summer plagues. From the cholera that took her mother to the fever that claimed Lychandra and nearly Kiril with her, illness was the one thing that left Isyllt helpless and useless—she would face vampires and murderers over that any day.

  A quarter-hour after the Evensong faded, Dahlia emerged from the kitchens. Catching Isyllt’s eye, she nodded toward the back stairs. Isyllt followed, narrowly avoiding being soaked with beer when a table toasted too enthusiastically. Someone groped at her skirt and she was hard pressed not to break his wrist as she dodged.

  Dahlia unlocked a room on the second floor and kindled a lamp on a narrow table. A hard wooden chair and an equally narrow bed were the only other furniture, all grey with age. A cheap room for the night, not the sort of place to bring clients. Isyllt put her back to the unwindowed wall and waited for her contact.

  She wasn’t particularly surprised when Mekaran walked in. The peacock wore black tonight, snug leather trousers and a long silk jacket. His bootheels tapped softly on the hollow boards, nearly lost in the clamor rising from below. His face was stark and beautiful under white powder and kohl, and the lamplight glowed in his sunset hair. He closed the door behind him and turned the lock.

  Isyllt raised her eyebrows. “So you could have answered my questions when I first came round, and saved us all some time?”

  “I don’t hand out my friends’ names to necromancers, even when they’re dead. Especially when they’re dead. I’ve heard enough empty promises from the marigolds. But Dahlia thinks you really mean to help.”

  “I mean to catch Forsythia’s killer, and make sure he doesn’t do it again.”

  “Ilora,” he said after a long silence. “Her name was Ilora, though she tried hard enough to forget it. What is it you think you can do with that?”

  “Find her ghost, I hope. She
didn’t linger with her body, nor where we found it. But since she was killed elsewhere, she may not be lost beyond the mirror yet. And if I can find her, perhaps I can find her killer.”

  He cocked a painted eyebrow. “So it wasn’t that demon lover of hers? The vrykolos?”

  “No. He didn’t know who did it, either.”

  “Didn’t?”

  “He’s dead now too.”

  Mekaran’s lip curled, then tightened in a frown. “I want to say good. But perhaps I shouldn’t. Lori cared for him, as repulsive as I thought it.”

  Isyllt sank onto the edge of the bed. The sheets were clean, but still musty from a succession of too many bodies. “Tell me about her.”

  The wariness returned. “Why do you care?”

  “The more I know, the easier it will be to find her.”

  He began to pace, lithe as a caged cat. “She was Ilora Lizveteva once. From Gamayun.” Grey eyes gleamed as he glanced at Isyllt. “My mother was from Sirin—different provinces, but both sacked by the Ordozh. They met when Lori first came to Erisín. My mother asked me to watch out for her. I tried.”

  He hesitated, with the pained look of one on the verge of breaking a confidence. Isyllt waited silently, trying not to fidget as the bed frame ground into her sacrum through the narrow mattress.

  “Lori was raped on her way to Selafai. Not by the Ordozh, but by other refugees. My mother always told me how the Rosians set great store on virginity. It has power, whether kept or given freely, and hers was stolen in exchange for blood and bruises. I tried to help her, but it marked her deep. When she learned how the flowers give up their old names and take new ones…” He shook his head. “She wanted to be Daffodil, like me—thank the saints someone else was already using it. I don’t think I could have stomached that. I tried to talk her out of coming to the Garden at all, but so many of her people—of our people—end up here. The lucky ones, at least, who don’t sell themselves in filthy alleys in Harrowgate. And Lori was beautiful—all her scars on the inside. I tried to look after her.” He folded his arms across his stomach as if he could ward off his failure.

  “You’re more than an innkeeper,” Isyllt said.

  Mekaran unbuttoned one sleeve and rolled it up. Sinew and lean muscle flexed under pale skin. He held out his arm to show her the underside, and the black mark branded there: a rose, with barbed vines twining beneath it. “Do you know what this means?”

  She’d never seen the mark before, but anyone from Elysia had heard the stories. “You’re a thorn. An enforcer for the Rose Council.”

  “I thought I could help her. Keep her safe.”

  Raucous laughter rose to fill the silence.

  “Is that enough for you?” Mekaran asked. He straightened his sleeve with precise, exaggerated movements.

  “I think so. Thank you.” She stood, careful of her elbows in the narrow corner.

  Mekaran shifted his hips, planting himself squarely in front of the door. “You’re not doing this without me.”

  Isyllt’s lips tightened. “This is an investigation, not a public spectacle.” She withheld the word Crown, and so kept it from being a lie.

  “This is Rose Council business. The Roses don’t like it when their flowers are murdered, and they know better than to trust your authorities. And,” he said with a narrow smile, “if I understand your sorcery, you’ll have better luck with me here. I knew her, after all.”

  Isyllt snorted, but couldn’t dispute the truth of that. “Here?” A wave of her hand encompassed the narrow room, the noise and stink of spilled beer rising through the floorboards. “You want me summoning ghosts in your inn?”

  He didn’t budge. “You’re a professional, aren’t you?”

  She couldn’t argue with that either. “Fine. But you’ll not breathe a word of anything we hear to anyone. Not even the Roses. Neither of you,” she added, glancing at Dahlia, who had curled into the shadows of the opposite corner. The girl was very good at staying silent and still.

  Mekaran nodded slowly. “My oaths don’t require me to report all the details. If it will help find Lori’s killer.”

  Isyllt studied the room. She could cast a circle and go for theatrics, but it would be ridiculous given how the floorboards gapped. Instead she shed her cloak, leaving it puddled across the foot of the bed, and removed the exorcist’s kit from her skirt pocket. It served just as well for summonings.

  “Latch the shutters,” she told Dahlia, sinking cross-legged onto the floor between the bed and table, “and douse the lamp.” A tiny bit of theatrics never hurt.

  Darkness filled the room as the flame died, broken only by the light slivering between the floorboards and through the shutters. It retreated again as she conjured witchlight, settling in the corners thick as tar.

  “Sit facing me,” Isyllt told Mekaran. “Since you’re so eager to be my focus.” She opened the kit and drew out the scrap of silk tied around the lock of yellow hair. The cold light didn’t flatter Forsythia’s shade of blonde.

  He sank to the floor, the creases on his brow drawn stark and black. “What do I need to do?”

  “Keep still, and hold this.” She set the lock of hair on his palm, and his fingers convulsed around it. Next she laid her mirror between them, directly under the floating light.

  “Ilora Lizveteva. By flesh and memory I call you, and by the name of your birth.”

  A shiver answered; the woman’s soul wasn’t yet lost. But neither did she respond. Isyllt repeated the invocation. This time the shiver was stronger, a wordless denial. Something opposed her, something that smelled of sorcery and cinnamon, rust and copper. Blood, and blood magic.

  Despite many superstitions, necromancy and haematurgy had little in common. Blood had just as much to do with life; Isyllt’s magic began when the last red pulse slowed and cooled. But any street witch or charmwife knew how powerful blood was in spellcasting. She slipped a scalpel from her kit and stripped her gloves off with her teeth.

  The blade traced a cold line down her palm, beside the scar of the wound that had broken bone and severed tendon. Heat followed a heartbeat later, and crimson raveled across the creases of her palm.

  “Ilora Lizveteva, I call you with blood, with flesh and memory and the name of your birth.”

  She shuddered with the force of the conjury, and still Forsythia resisted. The magic and her recalcitrance were separate—the former weakened while the latter grew.

  Isyllt realized her error then, and bit back a disruptive curse. She clenched her bleeding hand and hissed as pain spread up her arm. “Forsythia. With blood and pain and the name of your heart, I call you.”

  The magic stretched like a wire and snapped. Isyllt’s head whipped back with the force of it and Mekaran hissed. The light in the mirror splintered and scattered as the ghost burst through the glass with a wail. Isyllt’s ring pulsed bright as a star.

  In the echoing silence that followed, Isyllt heard the chaos below still, imagined the cold chill that rushed down a dozen spines simultaneously. Then the song resumed, louder than ever.

  Forsythia stood in front of Isyllt, arms folded miserably across her stomach. Her ethereal form shimmered softly, pale and drained of color. Death dulled her brazen hair and turned her low-cut dress a drab shade of grey. Her slender throat was unmarred, but when she spoke it was a ragged whisper.

  “What do you want?”

  “L—Lori?” The steel had left Mekaran’s voice, replaced by grief and fear. “Is it really you?”

  The wraith turned, and the brush of her skirts chilled Isyllt’s legs to the bone. “Meka?”

  Mekaran scrambled to his feet, one hand reaching for his friend. He recoiled before Isyllt could warn him away—the embraces of the dead offered no comfort, only a sepulchral chill. “It’s me, Lori.” Tears shimmered silver in the ghostlight and left streaks of kohl down his cheeks.

  “I told you not to call me that.” She twisted away, hair coiling around her face as she tilted her head.

  Isyllt pu
shed herself backward and onto the bed. “Forsythia.” Now that she knew its power, the name rang in the air. The ghost turned to her, and her eyes were puddles of shadow threatening to spill down her cheeks.

  “Who are you?”

  “My name is Isyllt. I’m trying to find the person who killed you.”

  One white hand flew to her throat, then knotted in the neck of her gown. She shook her head, and her other hand clenched in her skirts. “I can’t. I can’t.”

  “You can,” Isyllt said. “I have to stop them, and you’re the only one who can help me.”

  Even the dead could be coaxed. Forsythia drifted closer. “I was—I was waiting for Whisper.” Her hands kept fretting with her dress, and she lowered her face and hid behind the veil of her hair. “I can’t. It’s gone.”

  “You were waiting for Whisper,” Isyllt said, low and soft. “In the alley off the Street of Thistles. It was sunset, and the sky glowed. Birds flew past the rooftops.” If the witness had been alive, she might have taken her hands and sat her down, but this memory-walk would have to be done without a soothing touch.

  “Birds,” Forsythia whispered, fingers twitching. “Birds watching me, following me for days. Whisper promised to meet me. We were going to disappear, leave the Garden and the tunnels and find somewhere safe. But he didn’t come.”

  “What happened next?” Isyllt prompted when the silence stretched.

  “Someone else came. Another vampire—his hands so cold and strong. I couldn’t see, and then he pressed a rag to my face.” She shook her head, hugging her shoulders. “It smelled awful, sharp and sickly sweet, and then there was nothing.”

  “Sweet vitriol,” Isyllt muttered. A physician’s drug, or a slaver’s. “This other vampire—you’re sure it wasn’t Whisper?”

  “Of course! He would never hurt me. And when this one grabbed me, he was taller than Whisper.”

  “Do you remember anything else?”