Bone Palace, The - Amanda Downum Page 0,82
harm, unlike your necromancy. My power can make you strong again.” She wiped a bead of blood off her wrist with one finger, and raised the finger to his lips.
He caught her arm before she touched him, staring at the slick crimson stain seeping along the whorls of her fingertip. “The cost is not one I feel like paying today.” Even with the headaches, the weariness and aching joints, the tender, bruised feeling that still accompanied any use of magic? No, he told himself firmly. Even so, her offer wasn’t worth it.
“But some day. You will.” She swayed against him and he held her carefully away.
“We’ll see.” He removed his hand and stepped back.
She smiled again, then licked her finger clean and turned back to her bird. After a few more coos and caresses she opened the window, through which it vanished with a flurry of black wings. When she sat her movements were unusually heavy—almost clumsy.
“Are you all right?” Kiril asked. As much as her demon grace unnerved him, its absence was more unsettling.
“Weak,” she admitted. “Tired. I had thought to postpone it, but I need to hunt tonight.”
“Hunt?”
“Living blood regenerates. Dead blood doesn’t. I need a living source every so often, and I didn’t imagine you wanted to bleed for me.”
“So you hunt, like a vrykola. With them?” Her silence was answer enough. Her quiet journeys into the underground had intrigued him when they were at the Arcanost together. Without her work, he would never have formed his own fragile ties to the catacombs. But now her renewed involvement brought only trouble, and his unease hadn’t faded. Varis’s schemes were dangerous enough—who knew what plots the vrykoloi whispered in her ear?
“Do you stalk the slums like they do,” he asked, his voice inflectionless, “taking those who won’t be missed, or whose families have no recourse to search for them?”
“You wanted me to be discreet. Would you rather I stalk the Octagon Court?”
“I didn’t realize you were making such a habit of murder.”
She flinched, then stiffened. “Will you play games of conscience with me, spymaster? How many other women disappeared because of you? How many other murders did you clean up for him?”
“None. None like you, that is.” Dozens of murders for king and country, hundreds, but never any so personal. And thank the saints for that—he didn’t think he could have done it more than once, not for any love or loyalty. “You… He was mad for you, as I’d never seen. Whatever alchemy was between you was a powerful one.” Kiril shook his head. “But you’re quite right—I have no place to be your conscience.” He rose, simultaneously annoyed and amused that he was ever the one retreating from his own home. “Do what you must. But try not to leave any more bodies in plain sight.”
He felt Phaedra leave the house not long after. But then, she never really left him anymore. He sat awake well past the final terce, turning a glass of whiskey between his palms and turning memories over in his head. He took them out every so often to keep them polished—he was the only one who carried them now, and he felt he shouldn’t lose them. The sight of Phaedra’s bird triggered his last memory of her as she had been. The one that should have been the end of it.
No one could survive the fall, no matter how powerful a mage. Phaedra certainly hasn’t. Kiril hopes and fears that the river might have claimed the body, denying them confirmation but sparing them the sight, but they receive no such mercy.
She sprawls on the rocks beside the ice-edged water, close enough to soak her skirts. Grey and crimson splatters freeze on stone, clot and crust in the unbound darkness of her hair. Her limbs are broken twigs, neck grotesquely twisted. Birds take flight in a rush of black wings as Kiril and Mathiros approach. They made short work of her; her hands are already picked to the bone, eyes and tongue gone, lips ripped free to bare a white rictus of teeth. They even took her glittering rings, and lesser gems and gold thread from her girdle.
The sight of her bare hands gives Kiril a moment’s unease, but no trace of life or unlife lingers in her shattered corpse, no hint of a ghost.
“Leave her for the beasts,” Mathiros mutters, his voice raw and hollow.
At another time, Kiril would have shot him a pointed glare. Now he doesn’t want to look