The Bone Palace - Amanda Downum [55]
“Well,” Isyllt muttered, leaning against the wall. “That’s something to look forward to.” Her left hand scraped stone, feeling the sour magic through her glove. And the quiet strength of centuries, as well. Erisín had endured, and continued to endure. It would outlast the blight. Affection for the city warmed her, and she closed her eyes against a sudden prickling in her sinuses.
Saints and specters. Head wounds really were dangerous.
She glanced up to find two sets of yellow eyes and one of brown watching her, their expressions ranging from concern to the elaborate disinterest of a well-fed cat watching a wounded bird. How long had she been standing there?
“Come on,” she said, pushing off the wall. A blink cleared the glaze from her vision. “I’d rather not breathe this in longer than I have to.”
The tunnels grew quieter and quieter the nearer they drew to the ruined palace. The great copper pipes were corroded and caked with verdigris, and the sewer canals held only a low thick sludge that smelled of mud and stagnation instead of waste. Isyllt saw no rats; animals often had better sense than men. The only sound now was their footsteps and the rasp of her and Khelséa’s breath.
They stopped when the tunnel split into three equally dark and unappealing branches. Isyllt and Khelséa exchanged a glance, then turned to Spider. He gave them an articulated shrug in response.
“I thought they must be lairing somewhere near the old palace, but from here I have no more clue than you. But”—his voice lowered—“if they are here, they know we’re coming. I imagine we’ll find them waiting for us eventually.”
“So your plan is to keep going till we walk into an ambush?” Khelséa folded her arms across her chest in eloquent critique of the idea.
“It does have a certain brutal efficiency,” Isyllt said wryly. “Do you have a better idea?”
“You’re the sorcerer. Can’t you do something clever?”
She winced at the thought; even a witchlight’s worth of concentration was daunting right now. But she was the only one who could magic a solution. She leaned against the wall and slid slowly down, careful not to bump her head.
“Spider, Azarné, give me some of your hair.” She tugged her gloves off, shaking dry a film of sweat. It was hedge magic, the sort of craft children practiced and Arcanostoi disdained. But Isyllt had learned such charms from her mother, and they worked more often than not.
The vrykoloi each gave her three long strands, and she plaited dark and fair together into a slender cord nearly the length of her forearm. The hair was curiously slick against her skin, and she wondered what it would look like under magnifying lenses. “Now I need a weight.”
After a pause, Azarné untangled something from her hair and handed it over; a thick gold ring set with lapis. Isyllt nodded thanks and tied it to the end of the cord, where it swayed heavily. The trick was convincing the crude pendulum to seek out vampires other than the two closest.
The answer, as it so often was, was blood. She pulled her jacket away from her wounded shoulder, wincing as she did. Amid all her new discomforts, the bite had faded into the background. Working a corner of the dressing loose, she prodded the tender flesh until blood and lymph smeared her fingertip. The physical poison was long since cleansed, but its ghost remained and that was enough for her. She slicked the ring and tugged her jacket back into place, ignoring the way Spider and Azarné’s gazes had sharpened and trained on her.
She cleared her head as best she could, concentrating on the memory of the attack in the sewers, of the vampire’s teeth in her neck and his chill skin against hers. When she opened her eyes again her shoulder throbbed fiercely and the ring swung in a straight