The House of Binding Thorns

by Aliette de Bodard

  “Not ever.” Berith’s voice was conversational.

  “You’re very sure of yourself,” Françoise said through clenched teeth.

  “And you’re poorly informed,” Nemnestra said. “But no matter.”

  Nemnestra withdrew her hands. The pain ebbed away, though Françoise was shaking, and Nemnestra could clearly see it.

  Berith’s voice was soft. “You set yourself against Hawthorn?”

  “Why not? You’ll find the time of dominance of many Houses has passed. Silverspires, Hawthorn . . .”

  “And House Astragale’s star is on the rise?” Françoise asked. Get her talking, if nothing else. Get her to say where the storm that she threatened was going to come from. “You’re very assured.”

  “With good reason. We have strength and numbers on our side. And allies.”

  Allies? Another House, no doubt. An alliance against Hawthorn. Françoise didn’t care, except that it left them exposed. And—a little treacherous voice within her—except that Berith would care, too. “I’ve been into House Hawthorn. You’d need quite something to bring Asmodeus down.”

  For a fraction of a second, it looked as though she’d managed to needle Nemnestra, but then she shook her head. “Well tried. But no. Let me assure you, though, that the day is coming when that pitiful door will no longer defend you.” She lifted both hands again. Françoise couldn’t help but flinch. “And when that happens, it will be my pleasure to take you down. Both of you,” she said, with a nod toward Berith.

  Berith’s face didn’t move. “I think you should leave, Nemnestra.”

  Nemnestra bowed, deeply, ironically. “Until later, then.” Célestin carried the corpse of the woman, and she still held the bowl.

  It was only when they were finally out of sight that the shaking truly hit Françoise. “Come away from that door,” Berith said, firmly. “Please.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t even mention it,” Berith said. “Sit down.” She all but pushed Françoise into the blue armchair. “House business is scary stuff.”

  Françoise lay back, feeling the warmth of Berith’s magic slowly suffuse her again. “It shouldn’t be our business.”

  “It always is.” Berith’s voice was sad. “And it’s not the first time someone has thought Hawthorn weak, either. Because Asmodeus has only been heading it for twenty years . . .”

  Twenty years. An eternity for mortals, nothing compared with a Fallen life span. “So you think he’ll weather this one, too?”

  “I’m sure he will.” She sounded unsure. Worried. “I’ll ask Laurent or Alexandra to carry a message to him, to let him know House Astragale is planning something.”

  Françoise opened her mouth to protest, and then closed it again. House Astragale had made it abundantly clear they wanted to kill them, and also that Hawthorn was their only protection against House Astragale. They had to make sure Hawthorn stood. There was no other choice.

  “I could go . . . ,” Françoise started, and then let it trail away. The mere thought of entering Hawthorn again, of facing Asmodeus, struggling all the while to show no anger, no feeling that he could latch onto . . .

  “I risked you once,” Berith said. “I’m not counting on anyone’s goodwill a second time.” Her hands lingered on Françoise’s shoulders, slowly massaging her back. A spike of desire arched even through Françoise’s weariness. “If worse comes to worst, we can always run away. Somewhere they’ll never find us.”

  “And leave you weak?”

  “Weak is better than dead,” Berith said. “We’ll be fine, I promise.”

  If only things were that simple.

  FOURTEEN

  Blood and Ghosts

  PHILIPPE dreamed of the dead.

  They were always with him, always close enough to touch, and yet he would reach out and find their flesh parting like water on his own skin, leaving only a cold feeling like a drowned man’s last, fleeting hold.

  They spoke, too: snatches of languages that he could almost understand, the path to bringing them back from the Christian Heaven, or their slow, tortured path through Hell, to rebirth—the knowledge they had acquired or remembered, as they tore free of the body. It was French and Viet and Chinese and a hundred other tongues that he neither spoke nor understood: constant whispers in his thoughts as he slept, as he woke.

  At the edge of his field of vision was Isabelle’s ghost, and Morningstar’s: more sharply defined, but almost drowned beneath gauzy silhouettes; masked faces, sharp teeth; mouths shaping words he couldn’t make out.

  He was going to drown, but he needed to understand what they were saying.

  Blood . . . Vermilion dreams . . .

  A door opened, in some faraway land, slammed with a sound like a crack of thunder. The dead wavered, withdrew, as he woke.

  “Child?” someone said.

  Philippe tried to speak, tasted only blood on his tongue. The words he could think of were small, inadequate, encompassing nothing of meaning.

  “I warned you. I told you, time and time again.”

  “Olympe,” he said, finally.

  She pulled him up. The basket of food she’d brought lay on the floor; and the smell of steamed rice and fried fish rose from it, a fragrance so strong and so familiar that, for a moment, it dragged him back to the real world.

  His clothes were torn, and hundreds of cuts had opened on his arms and hands. The blood was spilled on the floor, in complex, unrecognizable patterns that had dragged khi currents out of shape around them. It had all made sense at some point, he could have sworn. He was transcribing what they said. Building a ritual that would make sense, that would pull Isabelle from their midst.

  “‘Physician, heal thyself,’” Olympe said, darkly. “What did she do to you, child?”

  It was abundantly clear whom she meant. “Nothing.” The taste of blood and salt in his mouth wouldn’t go away, and his voice felt as raw as if he’d screamed for hours. “Nothing I didn’t ask for. Why are you here?”

  “Because no one has seen you for two days,” Olympe said, sharply. “You haven’t opened the door to any of your patients. Or anyone. Your friend”—she said the words in a way that made it clear she didn’t approve—“Ninon was here, too. She was worried.”

  Ninon was flippant, sarcastic, and rather unlikely to admit to worry. She’d consider Philippe an asset to her gang first, a friend second. “Friend,” he said, tasting the word like a dry, bitter gourd on his tongue.

  Olympe looked him up and down, and pursed her lips. “And, insofar as I can see, you didn’t eat for two days, either.”

  Philippe didn’t need to eat. Or, rather, he’d fasted once already, driven himself to the knife’s edge between life and death through starvation. He could do it again. He wanted to say that, but it shriveled in the face of Olympe’s disapproval. She wasn’t older than him—born in the years of the war or shortly afterward, whereas his childhood had been so long ago every remnant from that era was dust, or broken. But she acted, effortlessly, with the authority of the old, the matriarchs who ruled entire households and fractious families.

  He found himself, somehow, pulling out a chair—the one his patients sat in, not the one behind his desk—and sitting in it. Olympe set a bowl of rice flecked with dirt in his hands. He stared at it, breathing in the smell, unwilling to break the moment by actually tasting it. It seemed to be all that kept the dead at bay, though he could still hear, faintly, the words they whispered to him, and still guess at faint silhouettes awaiting him.

  “What is happening?” Asmodeus’s mocking warning; his hands tightening of their own accord as he remembered pain and crawling under the stars.

  “I don’t know,” Olympe said. “You can’t trust Fallen, Philippe. Not the House-bound, and not the others, either.”

  “I—” He swallowed, seeing Isabelle leaning against
the crooked doorway, translucent and indistinct, overshadowed by the blinding ghost of Morningstar. “I know this. I trust in their power.”

  “The kind that will eat you from within?” Olympe’s voice was withering. She leaned against the desk, and watched him for a while. “I don’t know where you come from, child. I’ve never inquired.” She made it sound like a favor, rather than a right. “But you should know better.”

  Better. Better wouldn’t bring Isabelle back. Wouldn’t lighten the weight of his failures. But Olympe didn’t, couldn’t know about that. The taste in Philippe’s mouth was almost gone. “What do you want, Grandmother?”

  Olympe sighed. “Some trust would be nice,” she said. “Failing that, some connection with us, child. You can’t live in isolation from the community.”

  He could. He had. He opened his mouth to speak, but Olympe cut him off. “Who will catch you when you fall?”

  Philippe shook his head. “No one catches Fallen angels,” he said. Only gangs, waiting to take them apart for magic. Only . . . Isabelle’s ghost raised her right hand, showing him the two fingers missing from it, the two fingers he had taken, when he was still running with a gang.

  “Fallen angels, perhaps not. But you’re not one of them.”

  “Then perhaps I don’t need to be caught,” Philippe said, softly. Or deserve to.

  “Everyone needs someone,” Olympe said. “Tell me about dragons.”

  It was so completely unrelated to anything else that Philippe didn’t process it at first. “Dragons?” he said. He used the Viet word, the one that, in context, could mean only the spirits of rain and river.

  Olympe’s face was grim. “Françoise told me.”

  He tried to remember what he’d told Françoise. All he could remember was staggering out of their flat with the dead clustering close to him in a cold wind, and before that, Isabelle and Morningstar standing in the drawing room of Hawthorn—a way to avoid thinking what had happened before that, the noose tightening around his neck when Asmodeus had raised his hand. . . . “The Seine,” he said. “Under the waters. There is a kingdom there, struggling to maintain itself in the face of Fallen magic. Don’t you leave incense sticks, to appease them?”

  Olympe’s face tightened. “Perhaps not enough anymore. Thank you, child.”

  “Wait . . . ,” Philippe said. She was already halfway to the door. “What is this about?”

  She didn’t even turn. “Trust goes both ways, Philippe. Let me know when you’re ready.”

  The rice had gone cold; the smell of it was faint, intangible. The ghosts pressed themselves close to him, and Isabelle was drowned again, out of sight, unreachable. Shadows moved, across the oiled paper that closed the eastern wall, like fish caught in a thin layer of water; they should have vanished as soon as he focused on them, but they were still here, hidden behind voices and faces and masks, a constant reminder of why Isabelle had died.

  A trail of blood upon the floor: he was kneeling, tracing words with his fingers and trying to complete a pattern that would make sense, that would make everything right.

  A startled face on the stairs: Hai, the cook with the sprained wrist, a wrapped package wedged under her good arm. She had an appointment with him, didn’t she?

  “Doctor—”

  “Come back later. I’m sorry,” Philippe said, but the dead choked out his voice.

  He was downstairs, and in the cold, watching the lights of the flats, entranced by the way they prolonged one another, fed off one another, winking on and off, with silhouettes moving behind broken windows, people jostling him: a slow, secret dance that was the voice of the city, that was the voice of the living.

  And the dead, crowding by his side, clamped on his arms and legs, blood running down his skin, staining the muddy cobblestones a deep, crimson red: patterns again, words whispered in the dark, the beginning of a spell that he could find, given enough time . . .

  He was hardly aware of leaving the street, of going deeper and deeper into the Houseless areas, the crowds going thinner as he went, trying to find an answer in the keening whistle of the cold wind, and the voices of ghosts; staggering away from the flat, into a world where nothing human made sense anymore.

  * * *

  THUAN used his spare time to go to the library.

  It was almost restful compared with the rest of what he was doing: the books weren’t bound by bamboo strips, or adorned with the elegant calligraphy of masters, but the smell of paper and glue was familiar. He’d found refuge in Second Aunt’s private library more than once, thumbing through pristine poetry volumes and losing himself in the words on the page.

  To be fair, no one would call Hawthorn’s accounts poetry, unless by “poetry” one meant sprawling, and cryptic.

  The shelves at the back were not accessible unless one could sweet-talk an archivist into getting at them: the wind from the gardens had blown in some sort of spell that covered the books in a dark, creeping fungus, one that obstinately clung to skin and fingernails. No one was sure it was contagious, but the archivists didn’t want to take the risk, either. But the account books that interested Thuan weren’t at the back, with the other arcane texts on the history of the House. They were at the front, and frequently used, if seldom by the sufferance students.

  “You all right?” Sylvain asked. The archivist had been amused when Thuan had asked for last year’s account books for a private project. “They’re not easy to read.”

  To say the least. Thuan forced a smile he didn’t feel. “I’ll be fine. Just getting used to it.”

  “Fine. Call me if there’s anything else you need.”

  A spell that magically made sense of everything would have been nice, but failing that . . . Thuan sighed, and forced himself to look at the pages again.

  The essence problem in the kingdom was thorough, and deep-rooted, impacting all levels of society from officials to farmers. In short, there was a lot of essence being transported into the Seine, and something like that always left tracks somewhere, especially if Sare was right and they’d had to buy it elsewhere. If Hawthorn was doing it, somewhere in this book was the trace of whoever had authorized it.

  Two hours later, his head was aching, his vision swimming. The account books had been tallied by different people, and one of them had absolutely atrocious handwriting.

  He closed the book, and brought it back to the desk. Sylvain had left, and the archivist in charge gave him a harried smile as she took the heavy volume from Thuan’s hands.

  The account books had an extensive tally of essence, earmarked for use by Clothilde, the House magician who was currently conspicuous by her absence. But there was something else, too: something well hidden, buried within layers of other attributions, other lines. Thuan had grown up with books, and the hunting down of obscure classical references. A feeble attempt to disguise something in account books wasn’t going to stop him for long.

  It was still earmarked for Clothilde, but the handwriting was different, and there was rather more of it. Substantially more. In fact, he daren’t take a piece of paper and do calculations, because there was a risk that it’d be found, but he’d have said easily six to seven times the amount that was “officially” acknowledged.

  Payment had been made to a Nemnestra of House Astragale, neither name meaning much to him. The double accounting, though . . .

  The double accounting suggested that whoever was doing it—the person who wasn’t entering essence into the accounts as a matter of fact—didn’t want to be caught. Plausible deniability, in case the kingdom asked to inspect the books?

  Thuan walked back to his rooms in a thoughtful mood. He had grown up away from the thick of court intrigues, but that didn’t mean he was a stranger to them. And House Hawthorn, in that respect, was very familiar. It was possible this was an attempt to ensure there was no paper trail, that Asmodeus couldn’t be accused of ruini
ng the fortunes of the kingdom; couldn’t be impugned and forced to costly concessions in the game of diplomacy.

  But the likelihood of that was small. The more likely explanation was less attractive.

  Every court, every large congregation of powerful people, had its factions and its disputes and its attempts, more or less blatant, to carve out individual little domains. So the more likely explanation? That there was a faction within Hawthorn that wanted to traffic with the dragon kingdom. Why was an open question, but if he was to hazard a guess . . . the other thing that was conspicuously missing from those account books was the money: the vast amounts of coin that should come back to Hawthorn for the sale of the essence.

  Someone within the House needed cash, and a lot of it. Clothilde, perhaps?

  He raised the subject of Nemnestra and Clothilde with Nadine at their next meal together. Leila had insisted on taking their dinner in the gardens, in spite of the rather wintry weather, with a bright, pale sun that warmed nothing, and cold that seemed to rise from the ground like an exhaled breath.

  “Nemnestra? Can’t say I’m familiar with the name,” Nadine said. “Astragale is one of the minor Houses, outside the city.” She frowned, not looking pleased. “Why are you asking about Clothilde?”

  “You’re the one who was worried about her,” Thuan said, with a casual shrug. “And you don’t sound like you’re less worried now.”

  Nadine shook her head. “I’ll be fine. Adult stuff,” she said. “Though you two are almost adults, in truth. And you don’t want to get tangled up with Clothilde.”

  “Why not?” Leila asked, her mouth full of bread. “Because she’s too important for us?”

  “That’s not it,” Nadine said, severely. “Didn’t you pay attention in class? High birth and low birth don’t apply in Hawthorn. You rise on merit.”

  Or on ruthlessness. “Then why?” Thuan asked.

  Nadine picked up a piece of bread and spread some pâté on it, carefully. “Because of who she was. There’s . . . Look, sometimes Fallen will pick mortal favorites.”