The Bone Palace

chapter 7

Despite her insistence on continuing, Isyllt knew she was slowing the others down. Her head swam, a slow nauseous spiral inside her skull, and every so often she had to pause to lean on the nearest wall or arm. She could ease pain, but her magic was useless to repair damage.
No one complained, but Khelséa and Spider exchanged frequent glances. Nothing like someone else’s insanity to draw people together.
It was madness, but it was also the best of her options. If she retreated now the vrykoloi would move their hiding place, and that would cost too much time.
The way back up was less perilous, if slow and painstaking. By the time they returned to the lowest level of sewers she was caked with sweat and grime, and the ache in her legs nearly dwarfed the sharp throb in her head.
Isyllt wasn’t sure when the feeling began. At first it was lost beneath the nausea and tinnitus, one more tiny unpleasantness amid the aches and bruises. If the lantern bled painful colored halos and sounds echoed queerly, that was only to be expected after a blow to the head. Then her ring began to itch—not the chill that bespoke death, but a greasy crawling sensation like she’d dipped her hand in oil. Soon after a tingle spread across her scalp and nape. Then she saw the first of the sigils traced on the walls, glowing softly to her otherwise sight: wards and warnings, designed to contain the twisted magic and caution intruders.
She wasn’t the only one discomfited: Spider’s eyes flickered back and forth and his shoulders drew up like a vulture’s. Azarné’s delicate jaw clenched and she fretted with her tattered skirts. Was mortal magic as alien to them as their glamourie was to her?
She’d felt this before—all students at the Arcanost were taken to the ruined palace early in their studies as an abject lesson of magic gone awry, and she’d helped set the yearly wards once or twice. You could still catch traces of it in the inner city if the wind shifted the right way. But it was milder above, faded by decades of sun and rain and clean air. Here the wrongness echoed from the stones.
Khelséa didn’t twitch like the others, but her frown grew the farther they went, till finally she set the lantern down and crouched to consult the map. Isyllt knelt beside her and leaned close, but the ink writhed and blurred across the page and wedged splinters behind her eye sockets. She closed her eyes for an instant and would have fallen if not for her death grip on Khelséa’s shoulder.
“Do you know where we are?” She didn’t have to shout here; the water pipes had been diverted, lest the presence of the palace taint them.
“Near the center of Elysia.” From the inspector’s pinched expression, she could have given a more precise answer.
“Can you feel it?” Isyllt asked.
“The palace?” The unhappy lines around her eyes deepened. “No. But knowing it’s there is bad enough. Can you?”
She nodded. “The stones are steeped with it. Old, sour magic.”
Khelséa’s lips thinned. “Lovely. Is it dangerous?”
“We won’t run mad or fall over dead. Probably. The wards seem to be working. But stagnant magic breeds things the way stagnant water does, and attracts little nasty spirits. And vampires, apparently.” She stood carefully and pried her fingers free of the other woman’s jacket.
Khelséa shook her head as she rose. “And they just kept building the city around it. Like it was a tree no one wanted to cut down.”
“Even dead trees have deep roots,” Azarné said. “And I can’t imagine this attracting anything sane, even demons. I would chew my own limbs off to escape this feeling.” She glanced at Spider and he nodded sharply in agreement. “I can only imagine that Myca and his accomplices hide here to avoid being found. Or because they have already gone mad.”
“Well,” Isyllt muttered, leaning against the wall. “That’s something to look forward to.” Her left hand scraped stone, feeling the sour magic through her glove. And the quiet strength of centuries, as well. Erisín had endured, and continued to endure. It would outlast the blight. Affection for the city warmed her, and she closed her eyes against a sudden prickling in her sinuses.
Saints and specters. Head wounds really were dangerous.
She glanced up to find two sets of yellow eyes and one of brown watching her, their expressions ranging from concern to the elaborate disinterest of a well-fed cat watching a wounded bird. How long had she been standing there?
“Come on,” she said, pushing off the wall. A blink cleared the glaze from her vision. “I’d rather not breathe this in longer than I have to.”
The tunnels grew quieter and quieter the nearer they drew to the ruined palace. The great copper pipes were corroded and caked with verdigris, and the sewer canals held only a low thick sludge that smelled of mud and stagnation instead of waste. Isyllt saw no rats; animals often had better sense than men. The only sound now was their footsteps and the rasp of her and Khelséa’s breath.
They stopped when the tunnel split into three equally dark and unappealing branches. Isyllt and Khelséa exchanged a glance, then turned to Spider. He gave them an articulated shrug in response.
“I thought they must be lairing somewhere near the old palace, but from here I have no more clue than you. But”—his voice lowered—“if they are here, they know we’re coming. I imagine we’ll find them waiting for us eventually.”
“So your plan is to keep going till we walk into an ambush?” Khelséa folded her arms across her chest in eloquent critique of the idea.
“It does have a certain brutal efficiency,” Isyllt said wryly. “Do you have a better idea?”
“You’re the sorcerer. Can’t you do something clever?”
She winced at the thought; even a witchlight’s worth of concentration was daunting right now. But she was the only one who could magic a solution. She leaned against the wall and slid slowly down, careful not to bump her head.
“Spider, Azarné, give me some of your hair.” She tugged her gloves off, shaking dry a film of sweat. It was hedge magic, the sort of craft children practiced and Arcanostoi disdained. But Isyllt had learned such charms from her mother, and they worked more often than not.
The vrykoloi each gave her three long strands, and she plaited dark and fair together into a slender cord nearly the length of her forearm. The hair was curiously slick against her skin, and she wondered what it would look like under magnifying lenses. “Now I need a weight.”
After a pause, Azarné untangled something from her hair and handed it over; a thick gold ring set with lapis. Isyllt nodded thanks and tied it to the end of the cord, where it swayed heavily. The trick was convincing the crude pendulum to seek out vampires other than the two closest.
The answer, as it so often was, was blood. She pulled her jacket away from her wounded shoulder, wincing as she did. Amid all her new discomforts, the bite had faded into the background. Working a corner of the dressing loose, she prodded the tender flesh until blood and lymph smeared her fingertip. The physical poison was long since cleansed, but its ghost remained and that was enough for her. She slicked the ring and tugged her jacket back into place, ignoring the way Spider and Azarné’s gazes had sharpened and trained on her.
She cleared her head as best she could, concentrating on the memory of the attack in the sewers, of the vampire’s teeth in her neck and his chill skin against hers. When she opened her eyes again her shoulder throbbed fiercely and the ring swung in a straight and steady arc, pointing toward the right-hand tunnel.
The tunnel had been a dead end once, but now a ragged hole opened in the wall. The pendulum tugged sharply toward the blackness. A faint draft breathed through, cold and stale and dry. Its touch conjured ghostlight in the depths of Isyllt’s diamond.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Spider murmured. His nearness made the pendulum twitch. “You’re in no condition for a fight.”
“Your concern is touching.”
“I need you alive if you’re to be of any use.” He squeezed her elbow as he said it. It would have reassured her, had his fingers not been cold and vising.
“You haven’t earned your use of me yet.”
She pulled her arm free, shoving the pendulum into her pocket and drawing her kukri. Opalescent light licked up the blade as she gave Khelséa a nod. Isyllt sucked in a deep breath and blew it out slowly, then stepped forward.
The echoes of their footsteps changed as they stepped from the narrow tunnel into a wider space. Lantern-and ghostlight brushed the curves of a high vaulted ceiling and the shadows of coffined alcoves in the walls—a great crypt. Doors led into darkness in all directions. Isyllt opened her mouth to question Spider when Azarné hissed, jerking her face upward.
She had an instant’s glimpse of pale shapes clinging to the stones like insects before the vampires fell on them. Spellfire cut the air in the wake of her blade, throwing shadows wild across the walls, but the vrykolos was already out of the way. Pain blazed in her shoulder, and she knew she faced the one who’d bitten her.
She swung again, too slow and clumsy. He moved faster than she could follow, sliding under her guard and shoving her against a wall. Only dumb luck kept her from striking her head again. He cracked her hand against the stones—once, twice, and on the third blow her kukri fell from useless fingers, its light fading as it clattered to the floor. Her ring still glowed, bathing half his face in eerie blue. She heard shouts and struggles around them, but only had eyes for the demon in front of her.
“Was it you?” he hissed, fangs shining. The light lined a knife-edged nose and hollow cheeks, reflected in the depths of eyes pale and crystalline as ice and agates. Grey skin glittered dully, like flecks in unpolished stone. He smelled of snakes and earth and sweet poison. Isyllt squirmed in his grasp and kicked him in the groin, but he only snorted angrily and shook her.
“Was it you?” he demanded again, dragging her up by her collar. “Did you kill her?” Her toes scraped the floor and she could barely breathe, let alone think. His eyes distracted her, flecks of yellow floating in striated irises—her own confusion, or a predator’s enchantment?
“Kill who?” she gasped.
“Forsythia!”
She clawed at his hand and annoyance cut through her fear. “Of course not. I’m trying to find her killer.”
His fangs snapped inches from her face. “Liar. Liars and schemers all of you. She was the warmest thing I ever knew, and you slit her throat and wasted it!”
“I did not!” The conversation was making her headache worse, and lack of air wasn’t helping. “I’m a Crown Investigator—I find the people who slit women’s throats in alleys. And I find idiot tomb-robbing vrykoloi too.” She clenched her throbbing right hand, letting the different pain and the press of her ring ground her.
The vampire’s grip loosened, and the balls of her feet met the floor. “If you didn’t kill her, who did?”
She kicked him again out of pique, beyond caring if she antagonized him. “That is what I’m trying to find out. Why did you rob a royal tomb?”
Confusion narrowed his strange depthless eyes. “Because—”
A sound like thunder shattered the air, pierced her ears like hot steel, and Isyllt yelped. The vampire flinched, letting her fall as he clapped his hands over the sides of his head. She felt the second gunshot, but was already deafened.
Through a haze of tears she saw Spider seize the other vampire by the neck and drag him away. She read Spider’s name on his lips. Then a bone-white blur, and cold black blood sprayed across her face.
The vampire toppled, clutching at his ruined throat. The wound didn’t pump as a human’s would, but leaked viscous dark fluid. His lips moved, but in the flickering light Isyllt couldn’t read the shape of the words. The look on his face was clear enough, though: shock and betrayal, a confused and childish hurt.
Her own confusion was enough that she didn’t realize what Spider was doing until he moved again. Her throat ached; she was shouting at him to stop, but she couldn’t hear her own words. The kukri flashed in his hand as it arced down and metal sparked on stone. The vampire’s head rolled free, tangling his long black hair. His lips continued shaping soundless accusations while the last of his unlife oozed onto the ground.
“He was going to tell me why,” Isyllt whispered, staring at the twitching body. Speaking made her cough, which made her throat ache all the more.
As she watched, the edges of the wound blackened and curled—the burn of spelled silver. Vertebrae glistened like pearls amid bloodless grey-pink meat. The corpse began to blanch even more as flesh shrank against bone; color drained away till his skin was white as ashes. Even his hair faded, paling from root to tip. When it was over he lay still, legs curled toward his chest, one arm stretching toward his missing head.
Trembling, Isyllt crawled on hands and knees to reach the corpse. The hand that had held her throat had been cold and undead, but still moving flesh. What she touched now was rough and unyielding as stone.
Spider took her arm and helped her up. Blood smeared her skin, already tacky. The lantern had gone out—the only light was the pulse of her ring. “Why?” she asked.
“I’m sorry.” Again, despite the roar in her ears, she could hear him. His tone and insouciant stance were anything but sorry. “I thought he was about to eat you.” He wiped the knife clean on the hem of his coat and handed it back to her.
She couldn’t argue with him, not when she couldn’t hear herself speak. She willed the witchlight brighter and turned to find Khelséa.
The inspector crouched beside the broken lantern and another petrified vampire. This one had not died as prettily—one silver bullet had shattered his breast and the other his skull. Azarné brooded over a third corpse like her namesake bird, her hands sticky with blood.
Khelséa looked up when Isyllt knelt beside her, her face drawn and ashen with pain. She only shook her head when Isyllt spoke, and when she pulled a hand away from one ear, a thin streak of blood glistened on her palm.
From the vaulted chamber, Azarné and Spider tracked their brethren’s spoor down a narrow corridor, up a flight of half caved-in stairs to another room. Isyllt knew the den was near before they reached the top of the steps; the musk was unmistakable.
The room reminded her of the lairs of street children she’d known in Birthgrave. Of places she’d slept herself. Torn, stained mattresses and nests of blankets wedged into corners, a single lamp on a broken wooden crate. Only the smell of sour sweat and stale food was missing, and Isyllt was just as glad the vrykoloi hadn’t brought their dinners here.
And as with orphan dens, the vampires had hoarded precious things, hiding them under mattresses and loose stones. But this treasure was more than polished stones or bits of glass, pennies or a sharp knife. Gold and gems sparkled and glittered under the erratic witchlight. Earrings and bracelets, chiming girdles, fabric stiff with gold bullion, slippers glowing with sequins and stones. Jeweled coffers and vials of perfume, statues of saints carved in bronze and sandalwood and alabaster.
But not all the clothing was the same size, nor all the colors those Isyllt remembered Lychandra to wear. How many tombs had been pilfered over the years?
Among the glitter of jewels, she found a long lock of brass-blonde hair, braided and coiled and tied with silk thread. A lover’s token, the kind sweethearts exchanged. Had Forsythia kept a knot of her vampire’s hair in return? Isyllt wished she could have asked him, and didn’t know whether to weep or curse in her frustration.
They emerged filthy and exhausted from a sewer access in Birthgrave. Not the sort of place Isyllt liked to be at midnight, but she was too tired and sore to be nervous. If anyone tried to cut their throats or purses, she would be perfectly content to let Spider eat them and throw the bodies in the river.
No one tried, though, and they staggered into a better neighborhood and finally managed to waylay a carriage. The man’s eyes widened when she showed her ring, and she shoved Khelséa into the cab before he could decide to bolt. Spider ghosted inside as well, but Azarné had vanished.
The carriage deposited them at St. Alia’s, Archlight’s own hospital—the driver didn’t wait, despite Isyllt’s promise of more payment if he did. Khelséa found a physician to inspect her ruptured eardrum, but Isyllt waved away offers of assistance. The hospital was unusually full, and she wanted sleep more than anything—dying in the night of the concussion was a risk she was prepared to take.
Spider waited for her when she emerged; the building’s wards were too powerful for him to easily pass. He didn’t offer her his arm this time and she was just as glad, though she could have used it.
“He thought I killed Forsythia,” she finally said when they reached Calderon Court. She could hear again, though her ears still rang like cathedral bells and her voice sounded queer and not her own.
Spider shrugged. “I imagine lairing there hadn’t been good for his mind. Who knows what he thought, or why?” He met her eyes unblinking, but she didn’t know his tells enough to find truth or deception in his face or stance. He wasn’t telling her everything, though, and he’d silenced Forsythia’s vampire before she could learn more. “Does it matter? You have what you sought.”
It matters to Forsythia. But that would hardly sway him. Nor could she say it had been too easy, though she knew in her gut it had.
“No,” she said at last, wrapping her arms around herself. She couldn’t stop shivering. “It doesn’t.” He was a demon, with his own agenda—she couldn’t let herself forget that for a few kisses.
He reached for her, but stopped at her flinch. “You should rest. I’ll find you again when you’ve mended.”
And he was gone, with only a cool draft to mark his passage. Isyllt lingered on the steps, watching the eastern sky pale. The moon had set, and false dawn glowed above the rooftops. The Dragon’s fire, chasing the Hounds below the western horizon. The leader of the pack was already hidden by the city skyline.
By the time the second hound had nosed beyond view, the sky was tinged with blue and her shivering had become a teeth-rattling tremble. Lights flickered to life in nearby windows. At last she turned, unlocked the door with shaking hands, and began the slow climb to her rooms.
Spider was right: She had accomplished what she needed to. The queen’s jewels were found, and would be returned to her crypt, and Mathiros need never be the wiser. The vrykoloi responsible were dead, and she had the petty satisfaction of revenge for the attack on her and Ciaran, and more knowledge of vampires than she’d had before.
But there was a dead woman moldering on a slab without justice, and Isyllt still didn’t know why any of it had happened.
Sleep claimed her as soon as she pressed her face to the pillow, but it brought neither peace nor satisfaction.