The Drowning City - Amanda Downum [124]
Isyllt crossed her arms under her breasts and shivered beneath her long black coat. “Where did you find her?” Her breath trailed away in a shimmering plume; spells of cold etched the stones.
“In the Garden, in an alley just after dusk.” Khelséa lounged against the frescoed wall between corpse-drawers, her orange uniform coat garish against pale green. Vines and leaves swirled across the vault—the builders had tried to make the room cheery, but no amount of paint or plaster could disguise the death that steeped these stones. “She was cold and stiff when we got there.”
Isyllt frowned at the dead woman, brushed a finger against a lock of yellow hair. A prostitute, then, most likely. A foreigner too, from the coloring—Vallish like Isyllt, perhaps, or Rosian. Refugees crowded tenements and shantytowns in the inner city, and more and more turned to the Garden for work.
Isyllt pressed gently on the woman’s jaw, and it opened to reveal nearly a full set of lightly tea-stained teeth. Her elbows were still stiff, and her knees immobile. Rigor had only just begun to fade. “A day dead?”
“That’s our guess. It was raining when we found her, and she was soaked, but there were hardly any flies. And the alley is visible from the street—she couldn’t have lain there all day.”
“So dumped. Why call me?” The Garden was the Vigiles Urbani’s jurisdiction, unless the Crown was somehow involved, or the crime was beyond the city police. And while pride insisted that the Vigiles’ necromancers weren’t as well-trained as the Arcanosti or Crown Investigators, Isyllt knew they were perfectly competent. She bent over the white stone table, examining the wound. The knife had nicked bone. “What can I tell you about this that you don’t already know?”
“Look at her thighs.”
The woman’s legs tapered from flaring hips to gently muscled calves and delicate ankles. No spider veins or calluses on her feet—chipped gold paint decorated her toenails. Flesh once soft and supple felt closer to wax under Isyllt’s careful fingers. Death whispered over her hand, lapped catlike at her skin. The cabochon black diamond on her right hand flickered fitfully, ghostlight sparking in its crystalline depths.
She ran a gentle hand between the woman’s thighs, tracing the same path as a dozen customers, a dozen lovers. But this time there was no response, no passion real or feigned. Only stiffening muscles and cold flesh.
No wounds, no bruises. No sign of rape. No violation but that of the blade.
“What am I—” She paused. On the inside of the left leg, near the crease of the groin, she touched a narrow ridge of scar tissue. More than one. She pressed against stiff flesh to get a better look. Old marks, healed and scarred long ago. Teeth marks. She found the same scars on the other leg, some more recent.
Very sharp teeth. Isyllt shivered; she knew what such bites felt like.
“Do you think this had anything to do with her death?” She kept looking but found no fresh wounds.
“Maybe.” Khelséa reached into an inside pocket of her coat and pulled out a folded piece of silk. “But this is why I called you.”
Isyllt stretched across the dead woman and took the cloth; something small and hard was hidden in its folds. She recognized the shape of a ring before she finished unwrapping it.
A heavy band of gold, skillfully wrought, set with a sapphire the size of a woman’s thumbnail. A rampant griffin etched the stone, tiny but detailed. A master’s work. A royal work.
“Where was this?” A knot colder than the room drew tight in her stomach.
“Sewn inside her camisole, clumsy new stitches. Her purse was missing.”
A royal signet in a dead whore’s clothes. Isyllt blew a sharp breath through her nose. “How many know?”
“Only me and my autopsist.” Khelséa snorted. “You think I’d wave something like this in front of the constables?”
Isyllt stared at the ring. A woman’s ring,