Amanda Downum - The Bone Palace

“It would make an old degenerate so proud.”

She snorted. This was a conversation they’d had a dozen times. The only way Varis had ever tried to shape her life was by encouraging her to take up sorcery, to test the fabled mysticism of the hijra. It was, to her knowledge, the only way she’d ever disappointed him; she had neither the desire nor aptitude for magic, and even less desire to remind people of the marks she didn’t wear.

“Not today, Uncle.” She shut the Phoenix Codex with a soft whump and stripped off the library’s cotton gloves.

Beneath his paints and powders, Varis looked tired. The skin around his eyes was delicate as crepe, the lines there deeper when he smiled. He had been gone from the city for much of the past year, and distant and withdrawn about his trips. Scandal was his specialty, but secrets ran in their blood.

“What do you know about vampires?” she asked, thinking of secrets.

He stilled for an instant, then plucked imaginary lint off one sleeve. “Not much, I’m afraid. Why the interest?”

Savedra smiled, carefully bright. “Some of the courtiers have started reading those awful penny dreadfuls. I hoped I could find something in here to impress them with.”

“Ah. Sadly, no. No one knows much about the vrykoloi, except perhaps a few who know better than to speak of it. A proper treatise or examination would make the Arcanost scholars’ teeth ache with envy, but none of them have the guts to go underground.” He waved one perfectly manicured black-nailed hand. “No one likes to get their hands dirty anymore.”

“Pity.” Savedra rose, shaking out her skirts, and reshelved the books. “I’ll have to settle for knowing looks and sly silences, I suppose.”

“Clever girl.” He tugged his collar straight again. “And now that your mother is gone, you can tell me about that massage oil.”

Savedra laughed and let herself be distracted, but a warning chill had settled in her stomach. That he lied only stung a little-she was used to her family-but that he lied now unnerved her.

What did he know about vampires?

Kiril had given up many of his duties over the last three years, but he couldn’t prove it by the paperwork. A single lamp burned on his desk, spilling yellow light across stacked ledgers and rolled parchment and drifts of loose paper. Legal forms scribed in triplicate and foreign news and hand-scrawled notes in private ciphers. Agents who reported directly to the king still sent him copies of their reports, and he had plenty of contacts who communicated only with him. His slow slide from favor had done nothing to lessen the tide. Fallings out might be counterfeited, after all, or damaged friendships mended.

There was nothing false in his split from Mathiros, nor did it hold any hope of reconciliation. He had seen to that himself.

He glared at the two latest missives; the words blurred less than an armspan away. Lamps were bad for his eyes, the physicians swore to him, but he made no move to draw back the curtains. The day outside was rain-washed and gloomy, the autumn afternoon already dull as dusk. Neither did he reach for the spectacles folded on the corner of the wide rosewood desk. Instead he called witchlight, harsh and white.

The simplest of spells, it should have been effortless. Instead he felt the drain of it all the way to his bones. But it was much easier to read by.

The first letter was a report from the front. The king had not seen fit to send it to him, nor had the mage who took Kiril’s place at the king’s side, but the scribe was an old friend. For such a foolish enterprise, Mathiros had acquitted himself well enough. An armistice with the Ordozh, and only two hundred Selafaïn dead to show for it. That number might be lower had Kiril been at the front, and it might not.

Which rankles more, old man? he thought wryly, rubbing the bridge of his nose against an incipient headache. That he needs you and ignores you, or that he doesn’t need you at all?

But among the dead were forty mages, and that wasn’t a number to be shrugged aside. Kristof Vargas, Kiril’s replacement and former student, was a talented sorcerer but still cocky with advancement. Selafai didn’t have scores of battle mages to spare.

That rankled most of all. That Kiril had been set aside after long service he might forgive, but for a decade he had groomed Isyllt Iskaldur to be his successor, and Mathiros had ignored her as he ignored all of Kiril’s advice these days.

Leaving her in the city to stumble over tomb robbers, and secrets he couldn’t confide to her.

He banished the witchlight and touched both notes to the coals in the brazier, breathing in the acrid smoke of burnt parchment. The warmth eased the pain in his hands more than he cared to admit. His joints had begun to ache even before his heart failed three years ago, and the rheumatism had worsened with every winter since. Now even his magic couldn’t distract him from the pain.

It would pass. He’d endured worse.

When the last corner of parchment blackened and fell to ash, Kiril wiped the soot from his hands and rose, leaning against his chair. He didn’t need strength or magic to deal with tomb-robbing vampires, only wits and caution.

He snuffed the lamp and prepared to lie to someone he loved.

Rain hissed and tapped against the rooftops of Calderon Court, streaming past the warped panes of the great octagonal window in Isyllt’s living room and rinsing the city into a grey blur. The streetlights weren’t lit till true dusk, but lamps and candles flickered in other windows, bleeding pale and gold through the gloom. Isyllt’s stomach felt as cold and watery as the glass.

Her left palm ached against her teacup. During the chaos in Symir a would-be assassin had put a knife through her hand to steal her ring. She’d reclaimed the diamond, but all the skill of the Arcanostoi surgeons hadn’t been enough to save her hand. Foretelling the weather was a paltry compensation. She swirled her tea, watching leaves twist and spiral through the dregs. A pity she couldn’t foretell anything else.

Hours remained till sunset-only a formality, with the sky the color of old pewter, but one to be observed nonetheless. She set the teacup aside and wished for something stronger. The thought of the catacombs sent a not entirely unpleasant chill up her back, and she rubbed the scar on her shoulder. She had known of the vrykoloi since she first became an investigator, but only met one two years ago, after she’d come home from Symir. The meeting hadn’t begun well, but they had sorted things out since.

Her wards shivered a moment before a soft knock fell on her door. Her magic recognized the man outside and rubbed against him in friendly greeting, even as she tensed. Isyllt forced her hands to relax as she opened the door and smiled up at her master.

Once he would have kissed her cheek; once she would have kissed his mouth. Now they settled for a brief clasp of hands, and she felt the starkness of bone through skin. His short beard was finally more white than dark auburn, his hair even paler. Students had called him “the Old Man” since his thirties, but it had never seemed like the truth before. Shadowed black eyes met hers and he smiled wryly.

“I know,” Kiril said, shrugging out of his dripping oilcloak and hanging it on a peg. “Any day now I’ll be leaning on a stick and complaining about the stairs.”

“Don’t be silly.” Beneath the clinging scent of rain, he smelled of incense and herbs, orris and olibanum and resinous dragon’s blood, and under that the lightning tang of magic. Sharp and sweet and comforting-she still wanted to lean into it whenever he was near.

She also wanted to shake him; it shouldn’t take tomb-robbing demons to bring him to her door. It had been more than a decad since she’d spoken to him, and all their visits in the past several months had been strained and brief. After fifteen years, she wanted to tell him, she could tell the difference between honest distraction and willful avoidance.