The Bone Palace - Amanda Downum [68]
Civil unrest wasn’t enough to scare away the Briar Patch’s custom. The tavern was packed, and a wall of noise and heat rolled over Isyllt as she opened the door. Ciaran played elsewhere, replaced onstage by a trio of hennaed women singing bawdy songs and dancing with pantomimed drunkenness. The crowd knew all the words, or invented new ones with enough conviction that it hardly mattered.
Isyllt slipped in just before the cathedral bells tolled. She wore a plain grey dress and dark cloak instead of her usual leathers, with soft knit gloves to hide her hands. It was a guise that would avoid certain kinds of attention, but might attract others. Luckily the drunks were far more interested in the charms of the performers than in a skinny woman lurking in the corner. Even Isyllt couldn’t look away when one dancer teetered on the edge of the stage, pinwheeling her arms and leaning so far forward that only a scrap of lace kept her breasts from spilling out of her bodice. A dozen hands stretched out to steady or grope her, but she twisted away with an almost accidental grace, stumbling into her nearest companion instead and sprawling them both across the boards in a tangle of curls and petticoats.
Amidst the shouts and laughter she heard coughing and sneezes, sniffles drowned in sleeves and handkerchiefs. Sickness had its seasons, as with everything. Cholera and bronze fever in the warm months, influenza in the cold. Influenza had claimed the lives of more than one childhood acquaintance, but she had never loathed and dreaded it like the summer plagues. From the cholera that took her mother to the fever that claimed Lychandra and nearly Kiril with her, illness was the one thing that left Isyllt helpless and useless—she would face vampires and murderers over that any day.
A quarter-hour after the Evensong faded, Dahlia emerged from the kitchens. Catching Isyllt’s eye, she nodded toward the back stairs. Isyllt followed, narrowly avoiding being soaked with beer when a table toasted too enthusiastically. Someone groped at her skirt and she was hard pressed not to break his wrist as she dodged.
Dahlia unlocked a room on the second floor and kindled a lamp on a narrow table. A hard wooden chair and an equally narrow bed were the only other furniture, all grey with age. A cheap room for the night, not the sort of place to bring clients. Isyllt put her back to the unwindowed wall and waited for her contact.
She wasn’t particularly surprised when Mekaran walked in. The peacock wore black tonight, snug leather trousers and a long silk jacket. His bootheels tapped softly on the hollow boards, nearly lost in the clamor rising from below. His face was stark and beautiful under white powder and kohl, and the lamplight glowed in his sunset hair. He closed the door behind him and turned the lock.
Isyllt raised her eyebrows. “So you could have answered my questions when I first came round, and saved us all some time?”
“I don’t hand out my friends’ names to necromancers, even when they’re dead. Especially when they’re dead. I’ve heard enough empty promises from the marigolds. But Dahlia thinks you really mean to help.”
“I mean to catch Forsythia’s killer, and make sure he doesn’t do it again.”
“Ilora,” he said after a long silence. “Her name was Ilora, though she tried hard enough to forget it. What is it you think you can do with that?”
“Find her ghost, I hope. She didn’t linger with her body, nor where we found it. But since she was killed elsewhere, she may not be lost beyond the mirror yet. And if I can find her, perhaps I can find her killer.”
He cocked a painted eyebrow. “So it wasn’t that demon lover of hers? The vrykolos?”
“No. He didn’t know who did it, either.”
“Didn’t?”
“He’s dead now too.”
Mekaran’s lip curled, then tightened in a frown. “I want to say good. But perhaps I shouldn’t. Lori cared for him, as repulsive as I thought it.”
Isyllt sank onto the edge of