The House of Shattered Wings

by Aliette de Bodard

  As if Selene wouldn’t guess which of her new arrivals was being unfaithful. “She’ll flay me,” Philippe said, reflexively; but something within him, something older and prouder, whispered, Let her try—and the voice was Morningstar’s.

  What? No. That wasn’t—that wasn’t possible.

  Isabelle shook her head. “She’s not like that. You don’t know her—”

  Of course he knew her. She’d do anything to preserve her chosen Fallen and mortals, and let everyone else rot—and he couldn’t tell, anymore, if the thoughts were his or Morningstar’s. He teetered on the edge of the abyss where he would lose himself in a way utterly alien to him, subsumed in the unpalatable memories of a Fallen. . . .

  “Give me time,” he said through clenched lips. “Please, Isabelle. You know—”

  “That you don’t mean harm?” She was silent for a while.

  “That’s not what I mean. I don’t wish the House harm.” And it was a lie, and they both knew it. “But you have to see I’m a prisoner here.” As she was not. She was Fallen, with all the privileges this afforded her; and Silverspires was her home. It could never be his, even if it had been as welcoming as his own mother’s hearth. He was . . . Annamite. Other. “Please.”

  Her eyes shone in the paleness of her face. “I can guess what you feel. I can—” She took in a deep, shaking breath. “I feel some of it.”

  Philippe looked away, trying to avoid her gaze, or her three-fingered hand. What was it for her, the same as for him: an odd twisting in his belly; a nagging sense of always knowing where she was, a faint echo of what she felt? Affection, embarrassment? It was too weak an emotion, whatever was in her mind; and he wouldn’t understand her so easily. They moved in wholly different worlds.

  “Then—” He hardly dared to breathe.

  She didn’t move for a while. “Three days. That’s all I can give you, Philippe.”

  After she’d left, he sat in his chair, staring at the book in front of him—the past that should have had no bearing on him—breathing hard.

  Three days. He had three days before Selene was informed of what he was up to, and his life got a lot more difficult, and possibly a lot shorter. Three days to find something; that was if the memories didn’t kill him first.

  He had to find out what was going on in the House, and not entirely so he could get rid of his chains.

  No, he had to know, because it looked as though the curse wasn’t going to be content with the occasional vision from the past. If he didn’t understand it, he was going to find himself swept along in whatever twisted revenge the unknown Fallen had dreamed of, and utterly lose himself in the process.

  SEVEN

  A DARKNESS WITHIN THE HOUSE

  HOUSE Lazarus stood a few hundred meters west of the Grands Magasins, though the contrast could not have been greater. The House had cleared its own surroundings. The streets were grime-splattered, the buildings stained with the black of magical residue, but everything was clear of debris: the railings freshly painted a shade of dark green, the clock on the frontispiece on time and chiming the quarter hours, and every window of the building decorated with elegant baize curtains. There were even a few cars parked in the large plaza in front of the House—though, judging by their worn-out appearance, they were more likely to belong to minor Houses or wealthy independents. Then again, Madeleine wasn’t sure how she’d have reacted, if she’d seen one of House Hawthorn’s big limousines parked in front of the House.

  She’d taken one of the city’s large omnibuses; clutching the bag with the tools of her trade against her, enduring the suspicious gazes of her neighbors as they wondered why a House-bound would bother to take a horse-drawn, communal vehicle.

  There were no guards at the main entrance; or, to be more accurate, no one who challenged her as she made her way under the wide arches of the House’s central building. House Lazarus prided itself on welcoming anyone in need, though that didn’t mean anyone could go wherever they wanted within the House. The relaxed attitude hid powerful defenses. Every House was a fortress guarded by spells and men. They had to be; otherwise they wouldn’t last long in the city.

  The lower floor of House Lazarus was a wide, airy hall. The founder, Eugénie, had wished for it to be a place of sharing where the entire House could congregate, Fallen and mortals alike. In design it somewhat resembled the nearby Saint-Lazare station: a series of metal arches supporting a low roof, and long trestle tables where the rails would have been—each table divided in several segments where people dispensed anything from food to medical help. It was the heart of House Lazarus’s network of safe houses, the place everyone received their supplies or their attribution of beds or rooms, according to their needs. Philippe, apparently, had gone through there, too, which was unexpected; and even more unexpected was that he knew Claire. What was their relationship, exactly?

  The queues were as busy as ever—watched over by what seemed like an army of guards. As Madeleine made her way to the right—where stairs led to the more private part of the building—there was a commotion—a scuffle, a burst of magic, and a brief scream, soon cut off. Someone had tried to cut ahead, or to steal something; and now lay dead on the floor. Claire ran a tight House, where there was no place for disorder.

  Madeleine approached the guards leaning casually against the metal pillars—they tensed, slightly, when they saw her. “I’m from House Silverspires, and I need to see Lady Claire,” Madeleine said, without preamble. Diplomacy had never been her forte, and she wasn’t about to try it now.

  The left-hand guard looked her up and down. He had opened his mouth for a dismissal, when his neighbor nudged him. “She’s their alchemist, Eric. Don’t you think—”

  Eric bit back an obvious swearword, and gestured her toward the foot of the staircase. “Wait here,” he said. “I’ll send someone for Lady Claire. But she’s busy, mind you—and I’m sure she has no time for the likes of you, alchemist or no alchemist.”

  Madeleine sat down on the first step, clutching her bag. It was silly, but the weight of familiar tools reassured her. Going to another House was very much entering enemy territory, even if House Lazarus was friendly by House standards.

  She tried not to think of Oris—of his face, shrunken and distorted in death; of her hands, saving flesh and nails and blood; parting skin to reveal red, glistening muscles underneath, peeling back everything that had made him—and nowhere could she see his smile, or his infuriating habit of hovering nearby, or the way he’d had of taking tea in the laboratory, drinking the dust-covered liquid as if nothing were amiss. . . .

  She would not cry. She had spent all her tears on Elphon, a long time ago; had crawled away from Hawthorn, her wounds weeping blood. All her grieving was done, a thing of the past—or should have been of the past.

  Oh, Oris . . .

  Now, when Madeleine looked up in her laboratory, she saw Isabelle; reaching for a bowl or a mirror with a frown on her face; carrying a precariously balanced pile of books from one end of the room to the other—trying to put order in Madeleine’s things, she’d said with a smile.

  She meant well, and yet Madeleine wanted to scream at her; to shake her until she understood whose place she was taking, whose memories she was driving out. It was unfair and unkind, but she couldn’t help it.

  The walls of the staircase had been painted with a long frieze, which seemed to depict the history of the House from its founding. It was a short history, as Lazarus was barely older than the Great War, and a painful one—Eugénie had died in one of the first skirmishes, almost causing the House to vanish before it could even find its place in the hierarchy of the city. But Claire and her predecessor had worked miracles.

  “Miss d’Aubin?”

  Madeleine got up, staring at a young girl dressed in the brown and green of the House. “Lady Claire will see you now.”

  She’d expected Claire to receive her
in her salon; in rooms that would show her exquisite taste, making it clear that she might be younger than Fallen, but that she still knew exactly how to impress her visitors.

  But instead, her guide took her downward, into the bowels of the House, into a maze of unadorned, identical concrete corridors, their walls shining with moisture; the weight of the entire House seemed to be pressing down on her. Damn it, she hated enclosed spaces, and modern enclosed spaces even more.

  The corridors narrowed; the doors became thicker and thicker—and the noises that filtered from within became moans and cries and screams—petering out into utter silence. The cells, where those who had displeased Claire awaited her pleasure—and she doubted Claire was ever pleased. It was easy, in the light of day, to forget that Claire was ruthless; that it took ten, fifteen times the cruelty of a Fallen to run one of the greatest Houses in Paris when one was mortal.

  Madeleine kept her bag against her, trying not to show the emotions on her face—by her side, the young girl did her the courtesy of not saying anything; though she had little doubt everything would be reported to Claire, eventually.

  The silence grew and grew—and there was a faint smell of blood, like a charnel house, filtering through the doors—and then nothing, which was scarier than anything she’d seen or heard before. Finally they reached a door of rusted metal, and her guide gestured for her to enter. “Are you sure?” Madeleine asked, and the girl nodded.

  Inside, it was dark; the only illumination coming from an exposed bulb in the center of the room, which cast wavering shadows on the walls. The back wall was occupied by a series of square drawers; and, suddenly, Madeleine knew exactly what she was staring at. “The morgue?” she asked, aloud.

  “Good.” Claire’s voice came from behind her—she hadn’t expected that, and almost jumped out of her skin when the other woman spoke up. “You’re fast on the uptake. But then, you always were.”

  “What the blazes was that for?” Madeleine asked. “Love of drama?”

  “Partly.” Claire came into view. She wore a grubby lab overall, over a knitted woolen jacket. Behind her was a Fallen in the same kind of overall, carrying a clipboard. “I wasn’t expecting you here, Madeleine.”

  Madeleine shivered. She shouldn’t even be there; Selene’s warning was all too present in her mind. “When we last met, you dropped some cryptic warnings.”

  Claire smiled, though the look didn’t reach her eyes. “Cryptic? I thought I was being very clear.”

  “You wanted us to tell Selene about your murders,” Madeleine said, remembering what Philippe had said. “Why?”

  “Why? Why are you here, Madeleine?”

  “Because I need to know more about your corpses.”

  “Someone died at Silverspires,” Claire said. She put both hands on the wooden table in the center of the room, leaning on it as if she could drive it into the floor. “A Fallen, by all accounts.” Her face darkened, slightly. “I’m sorry for your loss. I genuinely am. But I hoped someone would follow through on my warnings. I didn’t think it was going to take a death before that happened.”

  “Oris died a handful of minutes after you gave your warning,” Madeleine said. “Even if we’d heeded your warning, there was no time.”

  Claire’s face darkened; she looked genuinely angry. “I am not responsible for his death. I couldn’t possibly have known when it would occur, or even that it was going to occur at all. Can you believe me?”

  She wasn’t sorry. Madeleine didn’t think Claire would grieve for anything or anyone that didn’t concern her. But her anger seemed genuine.

  “You know something,” Madeleine said.

  “No more than what I pick up.” Claire smiled. “But sometimes, it’s enough. Come here, Madeleine. Let me show you what we gather on the streets.”

  The box at the end of the morgue opened up with barely a noise, sliding on oiled rails; showing the face of the corpse inside, his eyes staring listlessly at the ceiling. For some incongruous reason, Madeleine found herself thinking of dead fish at the market: he had been kept on ice, but for so long that decay had settled in, bloating the shapes before her until he hardly seemed human anymore. Not that it would have mattered: she was used to corpses, so much that they were now like old friends, and she flirted close enough to death that it held no fear anymore—save that of the Resurrection, when she would have to face God and number her many sins. Pride. Despair. The vanity of second-guessing God’s plans for the Fallen, raging at their unfair abandonment.

  The face . . . The face, bloated and decayed almost past recognition.

  She knew that face. She’d seen that man—she foundered, for a moment, struggling to recall his name. Théodore. Théodore Ganimard. She’d seen him in passing, going in and out of Selene’s office at odd hours—part of the network of spies and informants that kept Selene apprised of what was going on in the city: Madeleine knew most of them—a side effect of being up at odd hours herself.

  Claire laid something by the body’s side, negligently. “He had this on him.”

  It was a heavy, polished disk of wood: a minor artifact, used for tracking down whoever bore it; except that on the wood’s surface were engraved the arms of Silverspires: the sword of Morningstar against the silhouetted spires of Notre-Dame. Madeleine had one exactly like it in her trouser pocket. “A tracker disk,” she said numbly. Once, it would have pulsed to the rhythm of magic, but the wood was blackened and charred; and the magic quite gone from it.

  “They are given to dependents of Silverspires.” Claire’s face hadn’t moved.

  “He . . .” He was dead with the disk on him, and it didn’t matter anymore whether Claire knew. “He was one of our informants.”

  Claire nodded. “I thought so.” Behind her, the assistant made a note on the clipboard—his broad face creased in thought.

  On the marbled skin of the corpse were the same marks she’d seen on Oris’s forearms: the perfect circle with a sharper wound in the center. They’d have been smudged with blood once, but now that everything had been cleaned, nothing was left but the imprint of the wound. Fangs, Aragon had said. Snakebites. But no snake had just one fang—and why strike someone repeatedly?

  She foraged in her bag by touch; found a sealed mirror, and undid the clasp while keeping her eyes on the corpse’s face. The angel breath was like fire in her nostrils; descending into her wasted lungs and wringing them from the inside out—she was bent over, gagging and coughing with the strength of it, already longing for something else the mirror couldn’t provide, for the sheer potency of angel essence. . . .

  She looked up through eyes streaming with tears. The corpse in front of her was shining. There was no other word. Every wound was outlined in a thin, scattered radiance: not the furious blaze of infant Fallen, or even the stately glow of mature ones like Selene and Emmanuelle, but faint and faded like glow worms. “Magic?” she asked. “This was done by a spell?”

  Claire, who had been watching her in silence, shook her head. In Madeleine’s new sight, she shone, or rather, the space between her breasts did. An artifact within a locket, hidden under her clothes; not a surprise, for the mortal head of a House.

  Madeleine whispered the words of a spell, willing the magic to show her how they had died. Nothing happened. For a moment she feared she’d cast the wrong thing; and then the corpse lit up like a bonfire, washing the entire room in radiance. Claire cried out, and then there was darkness again, shot through with painful afterimages.

  “Magic killed him,” she said, slowly, hoarsely, forcing the words through what felt like a mouthful of burning sand. “Like being burned. A blast of Fallen power so strong it stripped him bare.” And blasted the tracker disk, too, rendering it unusable. The human body wasn’t meant to hold Fallen magic; in the long run, people who absorbed too much angel—or too much angel essence, or both—died.

  Claire said nothing.


  “The Fallen who died in Silverspires—” Madeleine said, the words torn out of her mouth before she could think them through. “—he died when his magic was taken away from him.”

  Claire nodded. She didn’t seem surprised. She reached out, and gently folded the sheet back over the corpse. “You’ll want to see the others, too,” she said.

  She opened another drawer: a woman, with the same dead eyes staring upward at Madeleine, filmed over by the haze of death; the same mysterious circle wounds.

  Madeleine knew her, too. Hortense Archignat, another of Selene’s informants.

  Gritting her teeth, Madeleine whispered the words of the spell again, bracing herself—and felt the same blaze of magic spreading from the wounds, incinerating the internal organs and then dying down to that sickly glow.

  “Something . . .” She breathed in, willing her heart to stop hammering against her chest. “Something that kills. Humans, by overwhelming them with magic until their bodies shut down. Fallen—”

  “With the reverse,” Claire said. She threw something on the body, negligently—but of course she never did anything negligently. “She had this on her.”

  Another tracker disk—Madeleine reached out, expecting to see the arms of Silverspires, but the engraving on it was a hawthorn tree circled with a crown. “Hawthorn,” she said. Some informants made ends meet by working for several Houses, and Hortense Archignat must have been one of them. The heads of Houses might not like this state of affairs—or trust them with their secrets—but they were pragmatic enough to make use of what tools they had. “I don’t understand—” she said, hoping to hide her confusion.

  Claire looked at her, her gaze as sharp as spears, but said nothing. Instead, she gestured, and her assistant opened another drawer.

  “He was homeless,” she said, as the third body slid into view. “Slept in the ruins of Saint-Eustache. He died in the wreck of Les Halles.”

  Jean-Philippe d’Hergemont—his family, minor nobility, had been ruined during the Great War. Madeleine remembered chatting with him; giving him a charged mirror on Selene’s orders. He’d carried one of the loaves from the kitchens, awkwardly balancing it in arms full of the old clothes Choérine had pressed onto him.