Twenty-Seven #2
She closed her eyes and sent magic forth.
The first thing was the cold. Redoubling, liquid, grabbing back along the flow of her magic as if it wanted to take shelter in Moyna’s own bones.
Dimly she felt her teeth began to chatter.
The tissue was dead, dead, icy and unbalancing, like trying to find your footing on a path disrupted by tree roots.
Not painful. Just cold. A deserted city, paved not in the busyness of blood but in a cool inert solidity.
Moyna thought of Sieuxerr’s own bluestone streets in winter.
Once she had her balance, the map was familiar. She confined herself to the forearm at first: finding and deliberately naming each tendon and nerve. It was so muddy, so obscured, without life. But she could pick her way through.
“Anything?” said Jehan.
Moyna shushed him with a frown and began at Ysabel’s head. A dense clot of old blood crowded the dura beneath the cracked skull. No magic, just trauma. Enough to kill? Perhaps if the pressure was high enough.
Fractures: orbital rim, temporal bone, parietal bone. Slighter ones in the humeral head and some cervical vertebrae. Spinal cord a dead rope, but intact. Not severed by the fall. Down, down—and Moyna caught her breath.
“Magic,” she said softly. “In her heart.” A taste like sour blackberries; a prickle like cheap wool.
“Where in her heart?” asked Jehan, with the swiftness of a tutor demanding specifics.
“Can’t tell.” No function to enliven it. Think like a dissector, Moyna. A dissector working in the dark and wearing thick woollen gloves. “Perhaps . . . densest in the right atrium.”
“Arrhythmia.”
Moyna nodded. If Ysabel had had any problems with the rhythm of her heart, that might be where her treatment was focused.
Of course, if you wanted to create a rhythm problem . . .
Moyna swept the heart a few more times, getting nothing more, and then moved on.
Lungs, nothing—solid organs, not much, apart from a bleed into the spleen that hadn’t had time to get bad.
A few more fractures that would have hurt terribly if felt by the living.
Had Ysabel been alive when she hit the ground?
Would she have tensed more, broken more?
Not if her heart had stopped. Been stopped. That would be fast—though not instant. Enough time to feel it. To realise.
“Our man at the door keeps cracking it to peer back into the office,” said Jehan, after a while. “Might want to hurry it up before the other bodykeepers get back from lunch.”
Moyna realised she had no idea how long she’d been standing there.
She could barely feel her fingers and toes, and her ears hurt.
Despite that she was, bizarrely, enjoying herself.
The sensation of a new disease, a new injury, something novel and challenging, had been one of the things keeping her going through the last five years. And this was so very new.
She sped up nonetheless, doing a final sweep as attuned to magic as possible. Already the desolate city of Ysabel’s body was feeling more comfortable; nobody else walked these streets, so Moyna could swing her arms and own them.
“All right,” she said, when she was done. “No magic anywhere else. I’d do violence for some hot soup, Jehan, do you think . . .”
She stopped. Jehan wasn’t looking at her, but over her head to the door.
Walking down the chill temple of dead healers, toward them, were the bald bodykeeper and Gendarme Captain Thoury.
“Fuck fuck fuck,” Moyna puffed onto her freezing hands.
“Keep with the story?” murmured Jehan.
“Let’s see what he says. I’ll talk. Don’t improvise,” said Moyna, “please,” and the captain was there. His nose was bright red in the cold and his breath steaming. He gave Ysabel’s body a long, thoughtful look before addressing them.
“Good day, Scholars. Master Hugo here has told me a tragic story. Apparently you and Scholar Caudotte were very close indeed, Scholar Apprice.”
Fuck again. She couldn’t read this man at all. “That’s right,” said Moyna.
“Interesting. And you didn’t mention this during our initial chat because . . . ? I do recall Scholar Tixerrant raising the possibility of a jealous lover being to blame.”
He didn’t refer to his notebook. And he’d gotten Moyna’s name right instantly, this time.
“Why are you here?” Moyna asked. Jehan gave a tiny wince, but Thoury simply smiled.
“Since yesterday’s events, I’ve become more interested in Scholar Caudotte’s death.
And given that we have taken the unusual step of allowing Scholar Marcelle to roam free until tomorrow, I asked Master Hugo and his fellows to notify me at once if anyone showed an interest in the bodies of our two victims. I wasn’t expecting to see you, but your little exam group does seem .
. . close-knit. You could have your own reasons for protecting the Marcelle boy. ”
Moyna pointedly did not look at Jehan. Her thoughts spun and her numb fingers tingled with alarm.
She could keep on insisting that they were here for no more than a grieving farewell.
Thoury’s tiny smile seemed to dare her to try it.
And did he really think they had been intending to walk out of here with a pair of icy corpses slung over their shoulders?
“Notify you how?” Jehan, oddly, had brightened. “Are the gendarmerie using those distance-devices that the artificers in Jerroux developed? I heard about those.”
“All right,” said Moyna, before Jehan could improvise them down a whole other corridor of conversation.
She made a decision. “Ysabel and I weren’t lovers.
We’re not here to interfere. But we want to know what really happened to her.
” Briefly she explained what she’d been doing.
Master Hugo the bodykeeper looked taken aback at learning that someone could actually send healing magic into a dead body.
Thoury was as unreadable as ever as he listened.
“Magic around her heart?” he asked when she was done. “Could that have killed her?”
“Yes,” said Moyna.
Jehan made an aborted motion of protest. This was the decision Moyna had made, and she hadn’t made it lightly.
You didn’t tell townies, or any non-healers, that the wondrous life-giving gift of healing could potentially nudge a body just far enough in a lethal direction.
But Thoury had asked the question as if he’d long suspected the answer, and he didn’t seem surprised.
He held Moyna’s gaze in another of those long, thoughtful moments.
His bright eyes and serene charisma itched at her; she wanted to blurt out more explanations.
Not badly enough that she actually did so, but badly enough that she wanted to learn the trick of it. It put her on edge.
Belatedly she remembered that they’d added Thoury to the list of suspects yesterday. Wanting to be told if anyone tried to view the bodies—was that suspicious?
“Master Hugo,” said Thoury. “Do you have the body of Artificer Decroy here in your care?”