The House of Shattered Wings

by Aliette de Bodard

  “I can’t—” he started, and Morningstar shook his head.

  “This is power. Embrace it, or others will do it, and leave you gasping in the dust.”

  Philippe shook his head, or tried to. He couldn’t seem to move, and Morningstar’s presence was as suffocating as ever—lead pressing on his chest, on his fingers—until it seemed that his nails would lengthen and sharpen, becoming the claws of Morningstar’s own hands. . . .

  “Come,” Morningstar said, smiling. “There isn’t much time.”

  And he found his feet moving of their own accord, his hands reaching for the magic Morningstar was offering; he took one faltering step into the room, even though his skin was being peeled away from muscle and fat, from bones and glistening veins: one step, then another, straight into the growing maelstrom. . . .

  Philippe came to with a gasp. He was standing in a room he had never been to, though he recognized it instantly. It was the same room as in his vision, except that it had badly aged. He had vague memories of exiting the cathedral through a side door, following corridor after corridor; gradually leaving behind the more crowded areas until the House became entombed with dust, gray and bowed with the weight of its true age.

  A thread of wood; a thread of water and fire, all curled up and dormant: a vision from the past. Memories. Someone else’s memories. He hadn’t been really interacting with Morningstar; merely seeing someone else do so, in some faraway past.

  The same person who had laid that mirror under the throne, in all likelihood—someone who had admired, and feared, and hated Morningstar. Was Philippe’s reaction to Morningstar memories, too, or would he have felt the same in the actual presence of the Fallen? There was no way to know.

  The bookshelves hadn’t been maintained, and the dry smell of brittle paper rose all around him. The flowers of the wallpaper were speckled with rot, and the oaken parquet bore only the imprint of his own footsteps. The armchair was still there, its colors faded and worn; and there was a smaller chair in front of it, carved from rich mahogany, the only thing in the room that didn’t seem to have deteriorated. He could sit in here; in fact, he had sat on it, sometime in the distant past—no, that couldn’t be. That wasn’t him. He had never been in this room, and his memories stretched back centuries.

  Across the threshold was a very faint line of magic, which itself came from two small vials on either side of the frame. A few Fallen tears, sealed in glass and used for a spell, and he didn’t have to touch them to know who they’d have come from: the same suffocating presence that haunted his dreams.

  Morningstar.

  He crossed the line; a faint resistance held him, but not for long. When he looked at the room from the outside, it would waver and wriggle, trying to squirm its way out of his field of vision, out of his memory. The spell, then, was still there; obscuring the room from sight, though it had been much stronger, once.

  The khi currents in the room were stronger: roiling wood; and a burst of metal, subsuming the other three. Metal. Tears, sadness; the act of contracting, of looking backward—the past. And wood. Wood was for anger; wood was the wind, the vegetation bursting through the ice of graveyards. It wasn’t visions that he was having; no prophecies, no cryptic dreams requiring him to swear allegiance to Morningstar. They were memories. Someone’s memories, encased in so much anger they’d been preserved with the force of a storm.

  Revenge, then.

  That didn’t help much. Philippe stood in the room, staring at the stool; wondering who had sat on it, and why they had hated Morningstar so much. He’d taught them, hadn’t he—who wouldn’t be glad to have such a teacher?

  But, then, this was the West, and they’d never had the proper respect for their elders.

  Whoever it was, they had lived for a long time: he’d caught enough glimpses of enough time periods that they spanned centuries. A Fallen, then, whom the years barely touched—humans could have used magic to lengthen their life spans, but not by this much. A Fallen student of Morningstar; with a grudge.

  Was this of use to Samariel? Possibly, if he had more information—on whom it was, and what the curse was. He would only have one chance to give this information, one moment of the other’s time, so that the spell on him could be removed. He wasn’t fool enough to believe that Samariel would care for him beyond that.

  He needed more information, and he knew exactly where to find it.

  * * *

  PHILIPPE went to see Emmanuelle early in the day. He knew from experience that she’d get up at dawn and head straight to Father Javier’s Mass in the small chapel of the North Wing, before setting to work. He went, therefore, to the library, and found it already buzzing with activity. The archivists—Raoul and others he couldn’t name—were busy, carrying piles of leather-bound books from one shelf to the next and arguing about proper placement, the location of a lost volume, or the latest finds on the history of the House.

  He found Emmanuelle behind her desk, staring dubiously at a wobbling pile of books from which arose a strong smell of rot. Two children—they couldn’t have been more than six or seven years old—were kneeling on the floor, setting books aside and having an argument about which books fit where. “Emmanuelle, Emmanuelle,” the youngest—a girl with dark hair and brown eyes the color of autumn leaves—“Pierre-Alain says this one isn’t interesting—”

  The boy—Pierre-Alain, who looked enough like her he had to be her brother or cousin—scowled. “It’s too badly damaged. We should throw it away.”

  “We can fix it,” the girl said, holding the book against her as though it were beyond worth. “I’m sure we can, Emmanuelle. Please?”

  Emmanuelle knelt and gently pried the book from the girl’s fingers—carefully turning the pages in a rising smell of mold. “Mmm. It’s pretty wet. Can you get some absorbent paper from the back shelf? And put a sheet of it between every wet page?”

  “Of course! Come on, Pierre-Alain!”

  When the children were gone, Emmanuelle rose. “Market finds,” she said, with a shrug. “I’m pretty sure there’s not much worth salvaging in there, but one never knows—and Caroline loves feeling useful. Did you want something?”

  Philippe pulled a chair, and sat next to her. “You said to come to you if we had any questions—”

  “Oh, yes.” Emmanuelle pulled the topmost book from the stack—it had a stylized, naturalistic design reminiscent of the art nouveau buildings in the city—and blew on it absentmindedly.

  “I wanted to know more about Morningstar,” Philippe said. “You knew him when he was . . . here, didn’t you?”

  “You could say that,” Emmanuelle said, cautiously. “I wasn’t there for very long, though: a century, at most, and he never paid attention to me, not the way he did to others.”

  “Like Selene?”

  “Yes.” Emmanuelle set the book aside. “Selene was his student; the last among many. He was . . . different. Most Fallen don’t exude more than a trace amount of power, but with Morningstar you felt as though you stood in the presence of a furnace.”

  I know, Philippe wanted to say, and bit his tongue, lest he betray himself. “So he taught many students in the House?”

  Emmanuelle shook her head. “He taught them for the House, yes, but—” She bit her lip, uncomfortable. “The war came.”

  The war. Philippe thought of the clamor of explosions; of huddling in the doorways of ruined buildings, peering at the sky to judge the best moment to rush out; of his lieutenant in House colors, urging them to lay down their lives for the good of the city; of his squad mates buried in nameless graves, on the edge of Place de la République. Ai Linh, who had a laugh like a donkey, and always shared her biscuits with everyone else; Hoang, who liked to gamble too much; Phuong, who told hair-raising stories in the barracks after all lights had been turned off. “I don’t know what the war was like, inside the Houses,” he said, and it was alm
ost the truth.

  Emmanuelle stared at him for a while, her pleasant face almost hard. Did she suspect how he’d come to be here; what the war had been like for him? “Our magicians turned into soldiers,” she said at last. “Our students into thoughtless killers, and our best men into corpses. When the war ended, most of Morningstar’s students were dead, as were so many in the House.”

  Philippe remembered the fall of House Draken; remembered retreating down corridor after corridor, as armed mortals and Fallen overwhelmed every inch of available space, and the lieutenant breathed down their necks, screaming at them to resist, to show that House Draken died with honor; he remembered thinking that he was the House’s possession, not its cherished member, that he had no honor and no desire to acquire any.

  There had been so many corpses, by the time the House had succumbed; so many corpses in the abandonment of death; and he had not wept for a single one of them.

  “But Morningstar—”

  “Morningstar wasn’t on the front lines. He was always more comfortable manipulating people, after all. Not that it was unpleasant; people loved following his orders: who wouldn’t? It was such . . . terrible bliss, from what I have heard.” Her voice was resentful; it wasn’t clear whether she was angry at Morningstar’s behavior, or jealous that she hadn’t been singled out for that bitter honor. “Selene was lucky; he was teaching her at the time and didn’t want his efforts to go to waste before she was ready.”

  So he’d sent students to their deaths. “So they died. And were happy. And those who survived?” Philippe said cautiously.

  Emmanuelle frowned. “There were two, I think? Leander and Oris, and Selene, of course.”

  “He taught Oris?” Philippe asked. That he’d seen something in Oris—of all people—

  Emmanuelle shrugged. “Did you think Oris was always that way?” She smiled, but the look never reached her eyes. “Morningstar was . . . like living fire,” she said at last. “It can fill you up and make you shine harder than you ever did, or it can seep through every crack and burn you from the inside out.” She closed the book. “Selene . . . took it well, I think, and Leander . . .” She thought about it for a while. “Leander was always a bit odd, and it never changed him, though from time to time he’d look up and there’d be this odd light in his eyes. Cracks.”

  Were there cracks, too, in Selene’s mind? What must it be like to succeed that kind of Fallen, and forever try to live up to their image? Living fire, Emmanuelle had said.

  “I’ve not met a Leander,” Philippe said.

  “You wouldn’t,” Emmanuelle said. “He’s been dead for decades.”

  “An accident?”

  “Old age,” Emmanuelle said.

  A mortal, then. An odd choice for Morningstar, but then again, who was he to judge? What had the Fallen looked for, in his students—and what had he found? What had made someone burn with that twisted, dark anger he’d felt, when touching the mirror?

  Leander was dead, which ruled him out. And, of course, Selene was out, because she’d been in the vision.

  “You’re sure there were no other students of his who survived the war?” Taking students like commodities; bewitching them and sending them to slaughter: it was powerful and plausible motivation for someone to hate Morningstar, perhaps enough to doom his entire House in the process. But if everyone was dead or ruled out, then it left only Oris.

  Who was also dead.

  A terribly convenient coincidence, if it was a coincidence at all.

  “That’s an awful lot of questions,” Emmanuelle said. Her eyes narrowed. “Why the curiosity?”

  Demons take him; he’d pushed her too far. He couldn’t let her press further; she was perceptive enough to realize that he was hardly asking about Morningstar for the good of the House. “I guess I’m trying to understand Selene,” he said, falling back on the first excuse that came to mind.

  Emmanuelle stared at him for a while, but he’d had lots of practice staring Ninon and Baptiste down. “I see,” she said. “Don’t get any ideas, Philippe. I’m not the pathway into her mind.”

  “No,” he said, glibly, and left her staring at her book—going back to his biography of Morningstar.

  * * *

  ISABELLE found him, hours later, halfway through the book and not much more advanced. The names of Morningstar’s students were in there, all blurring together like glass on a windowpane: Hyacinth, Seraphina, Nightingale, Leander, Oris . . .

  Hyacinth had been a minor mortal of the House, a laundry servant vaguely dissatisfied with his life but not overly power-hungry: after Morningstar was done with him, he’d risen to be the personal valet of a high-rank Fallen, and, insofar as Philippe could see, had remained in that position all his life. Seraphina had been found by Morningstar himself, on a night when he was prowling the city—lying weak and helpless in the wreck of the Arc de Triomphe, and taken in tow like a child until he had grown bored with her. Nightingale had been mortal: one of the House’s minor witches, noted for her wild theories about spells and her unorthodox way of doing magic—probably what had drawn Morningstar’s eye in the first place. Leander was mortal, too, and ambitious—unlike Nightingale, he had been steadily rising through the ranks, becoming one of the House’s foremost magicians, powerful enough to rival Fallen. And Oris . . . Oris had already been an alchemist’s assistant, and after Morningstar gave up on him, he’d simply gone back to his beloved artifacts and charged mirrors.

  Without preamble, Isabelle pulled a wooden chair toward her, and sat facing him across the low table. “You owe me a few explanations.”

  “I’m listening,” he said.

  Isabelle shook her head. She wore pale clothes, which only emphasized the cast of her olive skin, and the mortar-and-pestle insignia of alchemists sat uneasily on her breast—skewed, showing large swaths of the adhesive patch that was meant to keep it in place. “I came here to listen,” she said. “Like what you were doing with House Hawthorn.”

  Philippe set the book aside, and looked up. They were alone in this section of the library—where the bookshelves were half-empty; the books torn and stained, not painstakingly put back together by Emmanuelle’s hands; and the smell of rotten, wet things rather than comforting mustiness.

  “That’s my own business,” he said at last.

  Isabelle smiled, but the expression didn’t reach her eyes. “I thought I could trust you.”

  He hadn’t seen her since the market—he’d have said she was avoiding him, but he was, too—not sure of what he could tell her.

  “You’ve changed,” he said, slowly. “What has Madeleine done to you?”

  She sat straight-backed—her skin a pale golden rather than the shade he was used to, but her bearing regal. “Madeleine? Nothing.”

  “Oris—”

  Her gaze remained steady. “I had to take Oris apart. Madeleine was trying not to cry the entire time. It wasn’t so bad for me—I didn’t really know him, after all.” She worried at the hole on her left hand; the two missing fingers—how did you scrape flesh and muscle from bone, with half a hand? Badly, he guessed.

  “But it wasn’t easy. I’m sorry.” It was rote, and thoughtless, and it was the absolute wrong thing he could have said.

  “You’re not. And don’t change the subject, please.”

  What could he tell her? He ought to lie; ought to make life easier for himself; but staring into those wide, shining eyes that still reflected the light of the City, Philippe found himself unable to twist the truth. “I’m not House, Isabelle. I’m only here under duress. You know that.”

  “So you want to escape.” There was no condemnation on her face; only an odd kind of thoughtfulness, as if she’d found a behavior she couldn’t quite explain. In a way, that was worse. “Into another House.”

  “No,” Philippe said. Anywhere but Houses. Back on the streets, or into Annam—waitin
g, as she herself had said, for a boat, for regular traffic to resume, or security on maritime commerce to grow slack. “But I can’t stay here, not on Selene’s terms. You have to see that.”

  “I do.” Isabelle’s voice was still thoughtful. “I do understand. But this can’t be the right way to go about it.”

  “Then give me another one.”

  Isabelle flinched; but did not draw back, or apologize, as she might have done once. She had changed; carbon pressed together until it became the first inklings of a diamond.

  “I can’t—I don’t know enough, Philippe.”

  “I know,” he said, wearily. “But I need a way forward, Isabelle.” He needed—freedom? The same sense of weightlessness he’d once enjoyed in Annam, in the court of the Jade Emperor; when he moved among bejeweled ladies and haughty lords, drinking pale tea in celadon cups as fragile as eggshells—a feeling that was now lost forever. In that desperate longing he wasn’t so different from Fallen, after all: a frightening thought.

  She sat still for a while, staring at him; biting her lip, young and bewildered and lost. “I—I know. But you’re playing with fire, and I can’t. I need the House, Philippe, or I won’t survive. I can’t allow you to damage it, even if I understand why you’re doing it. I have to tell Selene.”

  “No. Please.”

  He was hurting the House, or planning to—it wasn’t a bad place to be, insofar as Houses went, and the people—Laure, Emmanuelle, the kitchen staff—had been kind to him. But it was a House—built on arrogance and blood and the hoarding of magic—and its master held the keys to his chains. He had . . . He had to be free.

  “I won’t tell her it’s you,” Isabelle said. “But she needs to know what Hawthorn is doing.”