met them near the stairs and saluted Asheris, casting a curious glance at Isyllt. The guards at the desks were local police, but his rumpled sweat-stained uniform was Imperial poppy red.
“I need the morgue key, please,” Asheris said.
“Of course, Lord al Seth.” The man turned away to fetch it, just in time to miss the startled blink Isyllt couldn’t control.
Al Seth—the royal house of Assar. That was a choice bit of information Vasilios had forgotten to share. Much more than a pretty distraction.
They left the noise and close heat behind as they climbed the stairs. The morgue was a narrow, windowless room, sealed by webs of spells to keep out heat and moisture and insects. Lamplight gleamed on metal and tile, everything polished and scrubbed, but neither the lingering tang of soap nor the sachets of incense could drown the smell of charred meat.
Isyllt rolled her shoulders, trying to ease the itch of gelling sweat, and eyed the bodies. Six of them, mostly intact. Isyllt recognized the eyeless man she’d nearly tripped over in the shop. Her ring chilled with the presence of death, but not the biting cold that meant a ghost lingered nearby.
Asheris lounged in the corner, giving her room to work. Still sleek and handsome, but all the lazy grace and charm she’d seen when they met was more purposeful now. More dangerous.
What was he doing here, she wondered, glancing at him out of the corner of her eye as she circled the tables. But she could worry about that later. The bodies in the room were of more immediate interest than the fit of his jacket over broad shoulders.
She turned her eyes back to the grisly corpses. The smell of roast pork filled her nose, with the sharper reek of burnt hair and clothing beneath it. “Were these the only dead?”
“Less than half. Some were too mangled to keep and some have already been claimed by their families.”
“You let them take the bodies so soon?”
“Wealth has ever sped certain processes along.”
She arched an eyebrow. “Wealth enough to demand retribution?”
“Oh, yes. There will be arrests.”
“Appropriate ones?”
Asheris smiled with the not-quite-cruelty of a cat cornering a bird. “As appropriate as we can make them.”
“Of course.” Isyllt leaned against a cold metal tabletop, tracing the scratches where gore or rust had been scoured away. The corpse stared up at her, face eerily whole, though his body was a shriveled crisp. She touched his stiffened arm; skin cracked, char-black flesh flaking away to reveal seeping red tissue. But his eyes, milk-clouded and sunken, were still intact, and that was all she needed.
She leaned over the dead man, laying a careful hand on his face to steady herself. The heat had singed his receding hair.
“What did you see?” she whispered.
His dying vision unfolded in his eyes, wrapped around her.
A crowded shop, polished metal gleaming in the warm afternoon sun. Dust motes spark in front of the windows, swirled by the passage of customers. Outside the market’s din blurs to a noise like squalling birds. She glances down at the lovely enameled lamp in her hands, then toward the counter. A man with long beaded braids brushes her shoulder. Muffled grunt of apology and a crystalline red gleam out of the corner of her eye as she keeps moving—no, no, turn back, look, but the vision was set, only one way to play out now—toward the front of the shop, where the tired-looking shopkeeper glances up and smiles—
And Isyllt stumbled, even the memory of the explosion enough to rock her on her feet.
Asheris caught her elbow. “You saw something?”
She leaned against him for an instant, trying to decide how much to tell him. But he’d led her this far—perhaps he could take her further still.
“Yes.” She feigned a catch in her voice, let him steady her more than she needed. His shoulder was a pleasant warmth in the chill room. “I saw the man who did it.”
“Can you show me?”
Her hesitation this time was real, but after a heartbeat she nodded. She had been trained by the best, after all.
Asheris laid a hand on the side of her face. Isyllt closed her eyes and summoned up the image of the shop, locking the rest of herself deep away where he couldn’t reach. She expected him to intrude, to search, but his presence in her mind was controlled, constrained, as if he feared to touch her.
A brief contact and a deft one, but as he slipped away she caught a flash of something