“You want a conclave? You’re insane.” There had been one conclave of the major Houses, in days gone by. By the end of it, five people had died; every House had retreated, licking its wounds and vowing revenge on every other House; and the Great War had begun, swallowing everyone and everything in its maw.
“No,” Asmodeus said. “Pragmatic. It has to be one of the other Houses. With us all gathered in the same place, we’ll find out who is behind this.”
“It could be a rogue. Someone unaffiliated with anyone,” Selene said. Why did she think of Philippe, suddenly? It was absurd; the young man couldn’t be responsible for six deaths, and he hadn’t been there at Oris’s death. And yet . . . and yet, so much untapped power . . .
“No rogue has the power to do this,” Asmodeus said. “But fine; let us say it’s a rogue. Then every House will need to ally with each other to put him down.”
As if that would ever happen. “You mistake your desires for realities.”
“Desires?” Asmodeus shrugged. “I have no desire to ally with any other House. In an ideal world, Hawthorn would reign supreme, and every House would be our vassal.”
“You didn’t used to be that ambitious.”
“Don’t presume to know me.” He put his hand, almost gently, over hers; touched her on each finger as if playing some secret instrument. Bile rose in her throat.
“You go too far,” she said, withdrawing her hand.
“Or not far enough.” He moved away from her desk, and leaned against the wall, watching her: a predator through and through, a shark or a tiger or something more unpleasant still, lurking in the murk and fog, oozing out only to destroy others. “What do you say, Selene? Shall we have a conclave in Silverspires?”
She had little choice. She could have said no; which was the equivalent of admitting guilt; or worse, weakness—that the House wasn’t strong enough, not protected enough to welcome other Houses on its grounds, and to withstand their scrutiny. “It can’t end well,” she said. “You know this, Asmodeus.”
His smile was all sharp, pointed teeth. “You mistake me. Who says I want this to end well?”
* * *
WHEN Madeleine, out of breath after running from the omnibus stop, finally reached Selene’s office, she found Father Javier in the antechamber, his face dark. “You might not want to come in—” he said, but she’d already pushed past him.
Selene rose from behind her desk when she saw Madeleine. “I have other worries at the moment,” she said, and then she must have seen Madeleine’s face. “What is it?”
“We’re under attack,” Madeleine said; and in the cold, unfriendly silence that followed, told the entire tale of her expedition to Lazarus, and what she had learned.
When she was done, she looked up. Selene hadn’t moved, and her face had not changed expressions. If anything, it was even colder. “You’re late,” she said. “And you disobeyed my express orders that you weren’t to go to Lazarus.”
That was all—all she had to say? After the information that Madeleine had brought her? After she’d ventured into enemy territory on her own with only trinkets for protection—after she’d spent ages examining corpses in a dark, dank basement with the head of a rival House—all Selene could think of was whether she’d followed orders? The arrogance of it, the casual anger . . .
“I don’t understand—” she said, because the other words would have damned her.
“You don’t have to understand,” Selene said. She pulled her chair, and sat, staring at the papers on her desk—looking, for a bare moment, disoriented and panicked, an odd, disturbing expression Madeleine had never seen on her face. Then she looked up again; and the familiar cool, arrogant mask was back on. “You missed Asmodeus.”
Madeleine took a deep, burning breath. So that was why Javier had been so agitated, and with reason. The thought of him so close to her . . . She willed her heart to stop beating madly against her chest. She was safe here in Silverspires. She would be protected against him and anything he could think of. “What did he want?”
Selene’s lips contracted; a rictus rather than a smile. “A conclave,” she said. “Considering that the six deaths are linked to us, he thinks he can help us find out who did it. Or help us fall further. Or both.”
A conclave. Every child in the city knew what a conclave meant, and how the previous one had ended—too many people with magical powers, too much pent-up rage and too many grievances. The Houses hadn’t meant to start a war; they’d just thought to use the opportunity to weaken a few rivals—except that the wrong people had died, compensation had been judged inadequate; and the fragile peace of the city had fractured into magical duels and assassinations that soon escalated into ranged battles and large-scale destruction spells.
A conclave wasn’t safe, by any stretch of the imagination. “How—” Madeleine stilled the trembling of her hands. “How bad is it?”
“As you said—we’re under attack.” Selene’s smile was mirthless. “By another House.”
“But you’ll have all the other Houses coming here. . . .”
“Among which might well be the culprit. Yes. We’re invaded, and quite possibly compromised.” Selene didn’t move.
“Do you . . .” Madeleine hesitated. Selene’s wrath appeared to have abated, or to not be directed at her any longer. “Do you know who is behind it?”
Selene pushed her chair away from the desk. “No. The Houses forcing my hand for the conclave are Harrier, Hawthorn, and Lazarus, and it’s obvious that Claire is working in concert with Asmodeus. She got you where she wanted: to confirm that the bodies were all linked to us.”
Madeleine flushed. “I didn’t mean—”
“That’s why you weren’t to go into Lazarus,” Selene said, but without anger. In a way, that made it worse. “You’re an open book, and you know many of the secrets of the House. Dealing with Claire requires diplomacy and politics, neither of which you have mastered.”
Madeleine was silent for a while, and then thought of the shadow that had stalked Oris. It could have been a hallucination; it could have been induced by the angel essence—but the situation was desperate. On the off chance that it turned out to be of use, she owed it to Oris, if nothing else, to mention it. “There’s something else I haven’t told you,” she said.
Selene didn’t even blink. “Out with it.”
“Oris . . . saw something, sometime before he died. Two weeks, three weeks maybe? He came to me one night and said—there was a shadow in his room.”
“A shadow.” Selene clearly didn’t seem impressed. “Silverspires is full of them.”
Madeleine shivered; remembering what it had felt like to see it; to be touched by it. “It was . . . like wings unfolding where you can’t see them, but still blotting out the light.”
“And you think it killed him?”
“I don’t know,” Madeleine said. “I tried to look for it, but it didn’t come back, and Oris never mentioned it again. It might be unrelated. We might have been . . . imagining things.”
“Mmm.” Selene shook her head. “I don’t see how it helps us now.” She rose and came to stand by the window, staring at the spread of the plaza below them. “Anything else?”
Madeleine thought of Elphon, and then clamped the thought before it could show on her face. This could not have any connection to the matter at hand. “No,” she said.
“Good,” Selene said. “Talk about it with Javier, will you? He’ll set up security for the conclave, and it will be good if he can keep an eye out for your shadow.”
She didn’t reproach Madeleine, or consider that the hallucination might have been induced by drugs—she didn’t even ask how Madeleine had tracked the shadow. Probably she assumed Madeleine had used a potent artifact, but she didn’t even reprimand her for the unauthorized use of that.
She was worried. And if Selene was worri
ed, then Madeleine was scared out of her wits.
EIGHT
THE CONCLAVE
TWO days after Asmodeus’s visit, the Houses arrived at the conclave much as Madeleine had expected: in full force, with delegations of twenty or more people resplendent in their uniforms, wearing their insignia like a badge of honor. Selene welcomed them all, standing on the parvis of Notre-Dame: bowing gravely to the stiff countenance of Guy from House Harrier, and the freezing gaze of his wife, Andrea; the arrogant smile of Asmodeus from House Hawthorn; the expressionless face of Claire from House Lazarus—and the minor Houses, Stormgate, Minimes and Shellac and a host of other obscure names, living on the scraps the other, bigger Houses left them.
The presence of the House’s alchemist was not required—so Madeleine found herself a place from which to watch the proceedings, in a disused room on the second floor of the Hôtel-Dieu. She took Isabelle with her, though the young Fallen’s attention was half on a compact mirror she was infusing: she’d been trying to trap her breath into it for the past half hour, without much success so far.
Good. Madeleine had no need to take part in the proceedings of that nest of wasps—at least, not yet, not so soon. Though of course she was lapping it all up—pathetic, really, to want to be part of the game that had undone her already. She was no Fallen or great magician, and her competence as an alchemist did not make up for her lack of raw power.
Among the delegation from House Hawthorn was the face Madeleine had been seeking: Elphon walked next to the young woman Madeleine had already seen. He showed only the curiosity she’d expect of an infant Fallen; no spark of recognition or any indication that he had been to Silverspires before, in another life, when he still knew and cared for Madeleine. He was dead. She was sure of it—his blood warm and sticky on her hands, her holding him as the life drained out of him. And the dead didn’t come back to life. They couldn’t.
“They look like they’re from another time,” Isabelle said. She’d closed the compact mirror, and was looking at the courtyard, where the Hawthorn delegation had finished the welcome formalities. Asmodeus led his lover, Samariel, by the hand, to stand on the steps—his face turned upward to look at the sun; and, for a moment, Madeleine could have sworn that his gaze found her, impaling her like a gutted fish on a spear. Impossible. He couldn’t know, or care, that they were up there. She was safe. She was safe in Silverspires. But, at the back of her mind, there was always the same unspoken fear; that he would come back for her one day, to finish what he had started when he’d killed Elphon.
“They’re all dressed like the pictures before the war,” Isabelle said. Top hats and swallowtails and shirts pressed so earnestly they were as stiff as planks.
“You’ll find many of them are still living in a world before the war,” Madeleine said, more angrily than she’d intended. “Believing nothing is wrong with the city.”
“Emmanuelle showed me the pictures,” Isabelle said. “She said it was a golden age.”
“I’d say the gilding was rather thoroughly shattered,” Madeleine said, more forcefully than she’d meant to.
“I suppose so.” Isabelle unfolded her mirror again, and went back to her ritual of trapping her breath within. “I can’t do it,” she said after a while.
“I’ll show you again,” Madeleine said. She rose, and set both hands on either side of Isabelle’s, feeling the lambent coolness of the Fallen’s flesh, the trapped magic shimmering within. “Like this,” she added, drawing on small scraps of magic. She wasn’t on angel essence; too dangerous, with Selene on the prowl for any offense she could use—and she missed its fire; missed the ease of casting spells.
It should have been a small spell; but, senses dulled, she overreached. Something cold and vast squeezed her entire body, leaving her drained of energy. Her hands fell back limp, and it was all she could do not to fall to her knees. Instead of being dulled, the compact mirror’s surface went the black of tarnished silver, flipping fully open in Isabelle’s hands. “Oh,” she said.
“Sorry,” Madeleine said, fighting back a fit of coughing. “I—didn’t—”
The mirror was—no, not quite black, but shot through with slowly moving patterns, like magma in a live volcano—which was probably the feeling it’d leave any magician who attempted to use this much trapped power.
Isabelle closed the clasp, and then opened it again. All the blackness fled upward, straight into her nostrils. For a brief moment she was outlined in the same darkness as the mirror’s surface, and then the magic was back within her. “I see,” she said. She closed both hands around the mirror, and breathed; and this time the mirror’s surface lightly frosted over. “I see.”
She didn’t even appear out of breath. The world was unfair. Magicians and witches could only cast small spells on their own magic, or run the risk of being exhausted into a comatose state by their own workings; and here was this child with more power in her left fingertip than anyone in the whole of Paris. “Well-done,” Madeleine said, quashing the twinge of jealousy before it could overwhelm her. She had enough to do without that to bother her. “We’ll move on to nail trimmings next time.”
Isabelle closed the mirror. “Madeleine?”
“Yes?”
“You hate me, don’t you?”
What—? “Where did that come from?”
“I’m not a fool,” Isabelle said, gently. She handed the mirror to Madeleine. “It’s easy for me, but not so much for you—and I don’t age, whereas—”
Whereas Madeleine was, to say the least, far from the days of her youth. “You’ve been talking to Emmanuelle? She means well, but long life isn’t why I envy you.” She was too busy drugging herself into an early grave anyway.
“But magic?” Isabelle asked, with Selene’s knack of putting her finger on what hurt. “You envy me that.”
“No,” Madeleine said. “At least, not that way. When I see you—I do envy you, because things come so easily to you, because you’re never tired. But it’s not easy, being a Fallen. I can leave this House and wander the streets, and no one will pay me a second glance. You—”
Isabelle grimaced, worrying at the hollow of her crippled hand with the fingers of her intact one. “I wouldn’t do such a thing.”
“Not unless you had enough magic to defend yourself. And even then.” Most Fallen didn’t really go beyond the boundaries of their Houses. The fortresses ran both ways.
“And you have God’s grace,” Isabelle said.
That would have implied faith in God, which Madeleine had lost. Her God was impersonal, uncaring, sometimes outright cruel. “I guess. Shouldn’t you be asking Javier about this?”
Isabelle snorted. “Javier lost his faith. And he doesn’t like Fallen.”
Javier was . . . probably not the best help Isabelle could have found—as she said, he could be rather abrasive and snobbish. “Rather a contradictory position,” Madeleine said. “There must be other people, nevertheless—”
“Yes,” Isabelle said. “But I’m asking you.”
Oh dear. In Isabelle’s eyes was the same admiration Oris had once had for her; the same devotion that had ignored everything she was, everything she was capable of doing. She couldn’t—couldn’t be any kind of role model or giver of wisdom. Not again. And yet . . . “I don’t have answers.”
“I know,” Isabelle said. “But it’s enough that you try to give them, when you can.”
She shouldn’t. She couldn’t afford another apprentice to mother, another potential wound on the fabric of her heart. Oris had been bad enough; but Oris had been old, and canny enough to learn the basics of survival, even if he had never learned to think for himself as an alchemist. Isabelle was a child, that odd Fallen mixture of shrewd and naive and reckless; and who knew if she would learn the lessons she needed before it all killed her?
She shouldn’t.
“I’ll do my best,” sh
e said, and let her hand stray over to Isabelle, to cover the hollow place where the two fingers were missing.
Below, the interminable welcoming ceremony looked to be over, all the Houses aligned on the steps in a blur of uniforms: an image from the past, Isabelle had said, but they reminded Madeleine of nothing so much as Asmodeus’s picked men and the orange scarf they had worn, on the longest night Hawthorn had ever known. She shivered.
“Madeleine? I know you’re up there.” Aragon’s voice, coming from the stairs. “Selene wants us all for the banquet, and that includes both of you.”
Selene probably didn’t want to see Madeleine right now; but the presence of a House alchemist at a formal banquet was, sadly, not negotiable. Every asset of the House had to be put on display: an alchemist, a young Fallen, a doctor—though Aragon would probably find a way to wriggle out of the banquet before long.
“We’re coming down,” she said.
“Selene has been very busy,” Isabelle said as they rose to leave.
“Yes,” Madeleine said. She looked up, intrigued. Isabelle had sounded . . . disappointed. “You wanted to see her?”
“I’d hoped—” Isabelle shook her head. “Never mind. It can wait until after the conclave.”
Assuming they survived the conclave. Well, it wasn’t her business to pry, and she had other things on her mind. Someone was out there, killing people connected with Silverspires—like Oris. It was probably too much luck to hope they would kill Asmodeus; but what better location to strike than at a banquet, where everyone would be gathered in the same room?
* * *
MADELEINE caught up with Aragon after she’d changed into evening clothes. “Well, my lady,” he said with a gruff smile. “You look radiant.”
Madeleine hated the dress. It was an overcomplicated thing with a strapless bustier, which meant it kept sliding up at the top; the waist was positively unnaturally tightened; and the train was too long, which meant she kept tripping over it. She’d drawn the line at wearing high heels; she’d have broken an ankle for sure. Let Selene complain it was inappropriate if she wished. “You don’t look bad, either,” she said.
The House of Shattered Wings Page 14
