Bone Palace, The - Amanda Downum Page 0,5
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