The House of Shattered Wings

by Aliette de Bodard

  “You know I don’t condone what was done to him,” Selene said. “We are looking into it.”

  “You’re investigating? There’s no need for investigation. The culprit was found, surely.”

  “Philippe?” Selene forced herself to laugh. Emmanuelle had been right: in the end, she couldn’t be sure what Philippe could and couldn’t do; and among the strange magics he could call on, perhaps one of them had the power to end Fallen lives. “I’m not in the habit of condemning people on hearsay. Unlike you.”

  “We’ve gone past hearsay,” Asmodeus said, gravely. He dwarfed her in size; and the power that ran through him limned him in gray light, almost drawing the outline of wings, reminding her of Morningstar at his angriest—when she hadn’t been quick enough with his lessons, or when she had forgotten the wards that kept them all safe. But, compared to Morningstar, Asmodeus was pale and insignificant, a candle to the unclouded sun. She could handle him. “Discovering an attack is not the same as being the attacker. Even so, I’ve had him confined to his room.”

  “Like a disobedient child?” Asmodeus laughed. “Not enough.”

  Selene stood her ground. After all, she’d had plenty of practice. “Until I find otherwise, that is all I will do. Rest assured that if I find him guilty, nothing in this world will protect him from my vengeance.” She said this with a lightness she didn’t feel; after all, the young man had absorbed one of her strongest spells and emerged unscathed. She very much doubted he would come meekly or quietly.

  “Not enough,” Asmodeus said. “Not timely enough. I have taken my precautions already.”

  “Precautions?”

  “You were always too squeamish, Selene. The House has far better holding facilities than rooms with guards. Confined to his room?” He snorted. “As if that would ever be enough.”

  “You—” Selene took in a deep breath, forced herself to speak quietly. “You’ve moved him to the holding cells.” They hadn’t been used in almost twenty-five years—even before Morningstar disappeared, he had been mellowing, and whatever he had been doing down there had ceased. Selene remembered, with icy clarity, going down there to clean them up; finding sharp instruments on which blood had dried like rust; and breathing in the stale odor of body fluids.

  “As I said—” Asmodeus smiled. “Your master had many flaws, but he wasn’t squeamish.”

  “Neither am I,” Selene said.

  “Then prove it to me.”

  “This isn’t a contest,” Selene said. But it was, and Asmodeus had won the first round: he had broken her authority in her own House. “And I should think you’ve done enough, haven’t you? Or perhaps you want to hop over to Lazarus, too, and see if you can improve their wallpaper?”

  Claire’s head came up sharply, but she said nothing. Nevertheless, even drunk or on whatever drugs he was on, Asmodeus was smart enough to recognize he couldn’t push things much further. “I’ll leave you to it then,” he said, bowing very low.

  Yes, leave her to it. As if she had the faintest idea what to do next.

  * * *

  MADELEINE sat by Samariel’s bedside. She wasn’t sure why, in truth—she’d gone in to talk to Aragon, and the doctor had irascibly wandered off, looking for some instrument or another; and she’d been struck, all of a sudden, by how terribly alone Samariel must be. It was exceedingly foolish: he’d had no need of her while alive and would probably have mocked her at every opportunity, and he was Asmodeus’s lover. By staying there she was making sure that, at some point or another, Asmodeus would wander back in and find her; and then she didn’t know what would happen, when the knot of fear in her belly spread to all her limbs, and she stood in front of Elphon’s murderer, of the Fallen who had turned Hawthorn into a bloodied ruin. The smart thing would have been to get up and slip away while Aragon was gone.

  But she couldn’t bring herself to do so. She sat in the chair she’d pulled up—the same chair she’d have used, in other times, to collect an entry toll—and watched the dying Fallen. It was unclear by what miracle he clung to life; the thing in the bed seemed hardly human-shaped anymore, the body slick and fluid in a way no body should be, with just the ghost of its old face staring up at her—with dark, bruised circles under his eyes and the bones of the face bulging from beneath the translucent skin.

  Nurses and orderlies slipped in and out of the room, bringing clean sheets, taking soiled cloths and charts away—coming with syringes and injecting their contents into Samariel, though it made no difference to the husk on the bed.

  Madeleine had a nascent headache, perhaps a side effect of having used Morningstar’s orb. It hadn’t been angel essence, but the sheer power that had coursed through her had been like nothing she’d felt before. In that moment, she’d been quite ready to believe Claire when she said all angel magic would kill magicians bit by bit; and now she had the magician’s equivalent of a hangover, with her tongue stuck to her palate, and a set of drummers that had taken up residence in her brain on a more or less permanent basis. Perhaps she should ask Aragon for an aspirin, though she could imagine his face if she did so.

  “Still here?” Aragon came back with a tray of scalpels, which he laid by the bed.

  “Yes,” Madeleine said. “I’m surprised they trust you with this, instead of Hawthorn’s doctor.”

  “Oh, they’ve gone for Iaris. She should be here at any moment, but in the meantime . . .” Aragon shrugged. “I’ve done business with Hawthorn, too, and Asmodeus knows he can trust me.” He ignored the slight revulsion that went through Madeleine. “All the Houses are the same, Madeleine. You should know that.”

  “I know,” Madeleine lied.

  Aragon didn’t insist. “Mind you,” he said, “I’m sure not much trust is required to leave him into my care. It’s not like I can make him worse.”

  “Do you—” Madeleine looked away from the bed, and back to Aragon. “Do you know what did this?”

  “You mean the description? I thought you’d seen it.”

  “Yes,” Madeleine said. “Shadows that move, that feel like they’re picking apart your thoughts. But that doesn’t tell me . . .”

  “What it is?” Aragon asked. “Or how it can kill that way?”

  On the arms, which hung limp and deformed, were the same marks Aragon had pointed out on Oris, the same marks Madeleine had seen on the other corpses: the perfect circles with a single dot in the middle, a livid blue against the paleness of the skin.

  “I think it’s some kind of creature, a summoning or something.”

  “Summonings are impossible,” Madeleine said. She thought of the shadows again, moving as though they were alive; of the hissing sound just on the cusp of hearing. “Aren’t they?”

  “Summonings have a mind of their own, and rules of their own, which often end badly for the summoner. But you’re right, broadly speaking. There hasn’t been a successful summoning in centuries. There are legends, of course—people who went digging into the past of the city—the Middle Ages, the Greeks and Romans, even the prehistory—who summoned up harpies and unicorns and saber-toothed tigers.”

  “And they’re untrue?”

  “I . . . don’t think so,” Aragon said. “But they’re old. Even being generous with them, the most recent one would have been four hundred years ago, and the Fallen in question spent decades just preparing his ritual. We just don’t have the power—or the level of obsession—for this anymore. They require energy beyond even what a Fallen might produce; even with artifacts, even with essence.”

  Madeleine tensed, but the words didn’t appear to be directed at her.

  Aragon went on. “It does sound like a summoning—or a trained beast. Maybe a construct, modified with magic. It’s clear that it’s not human. Not, mind you, that anything human was capable of leaving those marks.”

  A construct. That didn’t sound like a cheerful notion, either. Again, there
were tales: memories of Fallen who had survived the war and seen constructs in action. There was a reason why no one dared to use them anymore.

  “He doesn’t look the same as—” Madeleine swallowed. “He doesn’t look the same as Oris.”

  “No,” Aragon said. “Oris didn’t look as though every bone in his body had shattered.”

  “You said—you said Fallen bones couldn’t support the body.”

  “No,” Aragon said. “They’re thin and built for flight. Like a bird’s. Hollow inside.” He tapped the head of the bed, thoughtfully. “Oris died when magic was removed from him. I think Samariel’s magic was removed for a much, much longer time.”

  Madeleine would have felt sick, once upon a time. “More slowly perhaps,” she said. So he wouldn’t die all at once, but would linger for a little while. Except that no one, of course, should be alive in that condition.

  “I don’t know what the shadows are,” Aragon said. His hands tightened around the bedstead. “I don’t know, and this is . . . alarming.” His face didn’t move, but Madeleine could read the fear in the depths of his eyes; in the hands that remained stubbornly clinging to the metal frame of the bed.

  Aragon had never been afraid of anything or anyone. “You’re worried,” she said, slowly, carefully. It was . . . even worse than Selene being worried. Aragon was always detached and clinical—impatient sometimes, but certainly never scared.

  “Of course I am,” Aragon said sharply. “There is something that’s killing again and again in this House, with as much ease as a child snapping kindling sticks. I’d advise you to be worried, too.” He closed his eyes for a moment and then said, with a visible effort, “Sorry. It’s been a long night. You shouldn’t listen to my ramblings.”

  But it hadn’t been ramblings—simply the truth; the mask of propriety and impassibility lifted to show her what lay beneath. “I’m scared, too,” Madeleine said. She’d seen it, felt it, and would give anything to never see or feel it again in her life.

  “Don’t be,” Aragon said, but she couldn’t believe him anymore.

  Her gaze drifted to Samariel’s face: the eyes were closed, but no one would have mistaken this for sleep. Likely he was too far gone to even hear them. Time to leave. “I’ll be back,” she said; and turned, and saw Elphon in the doorway.

  Oh God, no.

  The thundering of her heart must have been heard all the way into Heaven. Elphon, blissfully unaware of anything amiss, walked into the room and bowed to her. “We’ve met before, I think,” he said gravely.

  Madeleine kept her voice level, but it took all the self-control she could muster. “We have met.” Not just once; every day of his life—they’d worked side by side in the gardens of Hawthorn, cut branches and tended flower beds together—how could he not remember?

  “You’re the alchemist.” His gaze strayed to the bed; he sounded vaguely disapproving.

  “Oh. No,” Madeleine said, shaking her head. “Of course I’m not here for that. Whatever happens to him, he belongs to Hawthorn.”

  Elphon said nothing for a while. “I guess that’s one way of putting it.”

  Aragon had disappeared—slipped out the door in Elphon’s wake, no doubt. Madeleine suppressed a curse. She should make her excuses and leave, too; but curiosity got the better of her. “Are there—no people from before, in Hawthorn?”

  “Before?”

  Madeleine shook her head. “I’m a refugee. Surely Asmodeus has told you that? I was in Hawthorn. Under Uphir.”

  Elphon’s face froze. “Were you?”

  She nodded. “I left the night of the coup.”

  “Oh.” She couldn’t read Elphon’s expression. “Well, I wasn’t there, but to answer your question, there are people left from that time. Not many—I think not everyone swore fealty to Lord Asmodeus.”

  Of course they wouldn’t, and of course he would ruthlessly remove them. Madeleine shook her head, trying to banish dark thoughts. Well, there was nothing for it. She might as well be honest. “You . . . look a lot like someone I used to know, once. Someone who died the night of the coup.”

  “All Fallen look alike.” His face was haughty, distant.

  “Yes, you’ve told me that before. But the thing is, he was called Elphon, too. And I knew him well, well enough not to mistake him for someone else. We . . . we worked together.” It seemed like such an inadequate way to encompass all that Elphon had meant to her; the exhilarating nights racing each other to the roof of the House; the quiet lunches that they’d had, hiding behind fountains and trimmed hedges; the night they had snuck down to the Seine, and watched the black waves lapping on the shore, trying to imagine that there, too, amid the polluted waters, there was magic and wonder. And, remembering, she measured the gulf between this other life and the one she had now. The river was dark and dangerous, like everything else in Paris: waters that would eat at your flesh, waves that would reach out, grab you from the embankments, and drag you under the choppy surface to drown. There was a power in the Seine, yes; magic and awe—not innocent wonder, but something as dark and as gut-wrenchingly terrifying as the God who had destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah—a faction as strong as any House, ruthlessly destroying anything that intruded on its boundaries. Not even the major Houses dared to tangle with it; and yet she and Elphon had sat on parapets, dangling their legs over the black waters, and thought only of fairy tales. . . .

  Kids, that was what they had been. Innocent, careless, stupid kids. “It was in another lifetime.”

  Elphon’s face was set. “I don’t remember anything. Nevertheless, if what you say is true—”

  “It is,” Madeleine said. “Why would I lie to you?”

  “Then I have no doubt Lord Asmodeus has his own reasons.”

  “Of course he has. He killed you!”

  If she’d hoped to provoke some reaction, she was disappointed. Elphon merely shrugged. “As I said—Lord Asmodeus has his own reasons, and I have no doubt he would act in the best interest of the House. It’s not my business to inquire.”

  In another lifetime, she thought, sadly. They had both changed, immeasurably; taking the bitter, salt-laden paths to this dying room, where they spoke to each other as strangers. “You’re right,” she said, finally. “Just as it’s not my business to inquire. Good-bye, Elphon.”

  She left without looking at his face; afraid of what she would see, if she turned round.

  ELEVEN

  ANCIENT HATREDS

  THE cells were damp, and cold—and the khi currents in them flowed lazily: layers and layers of metal and fire with the strength of primal screams. They seemed to be one of the few things in the House that had not decayed, and Philippe could understand why: because the memory of pain and rage and the dreams of revenge and death that had pooled between the stone walls were too strong, too vivid to leach away, even in the midst of Silverspires’ atrophy.

  It wasn’t only the khi currents, though; there was something inside him, too; something dark and angry, raging at the prosperity of the House, at the worship of Morningstar. If he closed his eyes, he would feel it roiling within him like trapped crows—a storm of claws and sharp beaks, and darkness at its heart; a hint of the shadows that had killed Samariel.

  He was linked to the curse, to the memories, and—whether because of the cells or because of the recent murder—it was rising, threatening to drown Philippe in visions of the past.

  He needed to stay awake. He needed to—he needed to meditate, as he used to do in Annam, back when he’d ascended. But what he’d told Isabelle was true: it was so far away in the past it felt like something that belonged to someone else.

  He leaned against the wall, the harshness of bare stone against his back; and tried to feel optimistic about the future. It didn’t work. Asmodeus’s face had been terrible to behold, and Philippe was pretty sure that even Samariel’s recovery—an unlikely thing, the st
uff of miracles and desperate wishes—would not assuage his anger. Asmodeus hadn’t had him brought here for his own good.

  Funny. He hadn’t thought he’d be so worried to be free of Selene’s oversight, but he would have chosen Selene over Asmodeus, any day.

  Her spell was almost gone by now: the few threads tying him to Ile de la Cité were spun thin, like fragile silk. A simple tug would snap them. He had what he wanted, except that now it was useless. He lay against the wall, and considered his options. With khi currents this strong, he could weave magic, but there was no spell that would shatter the doors of the cells. Whoever had designed them had reinforced them with enough layers of magic to be impervious, and Asmodeus’s guards had added a few spells of their own to make sure he didn’t escape. He could call for help, but he had no doubt the outraged Father Javier had gone straight to Selene after Asmodeus’s men had seized him from his bedchamber. That left . . .

  If he focused a little—no need for much drawing of khi currents, or for anything save the lightest of breaths—he could feel Isabelle, somewhere above him; worried, fearful. But why draw her into this? She’d be no match for either Selene or Asmodeus. No, if there was anyone he wanted to call for, it would have been Aragon or possibly Emmanuelle, or even Selene, but that supposed he had a plan.

  He had none.

  The door opened. Philippe rose, flowing into a stance akin to a fighter’s. He was not surprised to see Asmodeus walk in, followed by two beefy humans in the uniform of Hawthorn.

  The last time he’d seen Samariel’s lover, he had been wild, and disheveled, and with the fires of some western Hell burning in his eyes. Now he was cool, composed, the eyes behind the horn-rimmed glasses studying him dispassionately. But Philippe wasn’t fooled. The fires were still there; merely hidden under a thin layer of courtesy, like the almonds at the core of dragées: bitterness under the thinnest coat of colored sugar.

  Once, Philippe had been one of the Jade Emperor’s emissaries, carrying edicts with his official seal to the mortal spheres; he had even gone deep into a dragon kingdom, carrying the execution order of its underwater king; staring past generals with crab pincers and soldiers with fish tails with no hint of fright. He remembered the Dragon King—in human shape, his yellow robes billowing in the waves of his anger; each shake of his antlered head making the palace of coral and jade shake; the pearl under the king’s chin, growing darker and darker, the hint of an approaching storm. Through it all, Philippe hadn’t moved, had simply repeated Heaven’s will—the time and place of the king’s death and the righteous mortal who had been appointed executioner—all of it with the cool arrogance of one under heavenly orders.