Bone Palace, The - Amanda Downum Page 0,155

couldn’t shake the maudlin distraction that fogged her wits. She might no longer be employed as a spy, but she wasn’t yet out of the game.

The driver tapped on the connecting panel. Wet wood squealed as it opened. “We’re here, effendi,” the man called. “The Çira gan Serai.”

“Thank you.” Her Skarrish was atrocious, but functional. She had money enough to ease translation.

“Be careful,” Moth said, leaning close as Isyllt opened the door. Light warmed the curves of her face, still soft with youth. Less so now than mere months ago.

Isyllt couldn’t say the same in return—prickly adolescent pride wouldn’t allow it. I always am, she nearly said, but they both knew that was a lie. “I’ll try. Send the carriage back for me.”

Her boots splashed in a puddle as she stepped down, and the wet summer night settled over her. The rain had slacked into haze. She shut the door and rapped her knuckles on the side, and the carriage rumbled into the mist and dark, leaving her alone in front of the bulk of the Çiraan.

The Çiraan Serai, the people called it, the Çiraan palace, a dour stone fortress crowning the westernmost of Kehribar’s five hills. It was one of the few buildings in the city that had never truly been a palace. At the height of the Ataskar Empire every bey and sultan and merchant prince had built one, and after its fall they had been repurposed one by one into brothels and hostels and gambling halls. The dark façade before her had only ever been a prison.

Once it had faced a courthouse—a hope of justice, or a mockery of it—but over decades of revolution and power shifts the court had been burned and abandoned and eventually razed, leaving the Çiraan alone in a wide, desolate courtyard. The closest neighborhoods were poor and mostly empty, populated with squatters and stray dogs and patrolled by the city guard. The Çiraan wasn’t isolated as many prisons were, but the guards were known for their brutal efficiency; escape was the stuff of folktales.

An old friend was inside.

Her nape prickled. Only the attention of the archers on the watchtowers, perhaps, but she thought not. A shadow had haunted her steps for decads, and she’d had no luck shaking it. Her years of “good service”—as spying, theft, and murder were euphemistically called—had won her enemies, and now she was far from home, far from her friends and allies, with no king to protect her. No one to avenge her. And she meant to walk into an Iskari prison.

Isyllt touched the diamond ring on her right hand, the briefest indulgence of nerves. Then she straightened her shoulders and strode toward the black iron gates.

He was dreaming when the guards came for him. Blue shadows beneath fir trees, the crunch of snow and clean taste of winter, the wind on his face as he ran for the joy of it—the echo of booted footsteps banished that, returning him to the dank filth of his cell. Adam was glad to wake; those dreams were worse torture than anything his jailors could do.

At first he thought it was the daily meal that woke him, but the footsteps were too loud and numerous and only one rat pressed its cold nose against his neck—they came by the dozens when food arrived. Then the lock clicked, and the door that hadn’t opened since his cellmate died scraped inward. The unexpectedness of it stunned him as badly as the onslaught of light and sound.

He lay still as rough hands seized him, though the touch of skin made his flesh crawl. The iron they closed around his wrists was easier to bear. Vermin scurried through rotten straw as the guards hauled him up. He was glad to be rid of the roaches, but he’d miss the rats.

Was he going to the headsman after all? The thought made him stand straighter, though gummy tears blinded him and he already ached from the weight of the chains. Had they forgotten him while bureaucrats shuffled paperwork? He chuckled, and the guards startled at the sound. Three of them—one for the torch and two for him. Once he might have tried those odds, but it would be suicide now. Or just pathetic.

His eyes adjusted as they led him past the row of iron doors, the row of tombs. Deep beneath the city, these cells, the bowels of the Çiraan. A place to bury murderers and violent madmen and unlucky mercenaries like him. Screams and curses