The House of Shattered Wings

by Aliette de Bodard

  “It’s a pretty good reason,” Emmanuelle said. “And the . . . shadows?” Her voice caught a bit on those words. Selene shivered, remembering darkness, spreading behind them like pools of ink, the hint of claws and fangs; the overwhelming, reflexive fear that men must have felt, seeing eyes shining like beacons beyond their primitive campfires.

  “We’ve searched the House.” Selene felt weary; out of control, for the first time in decades. Where was Morningstar when you needed him? “I haven’t found anything.” Or felt anything. “But they’re still here.”

  Emmanuelle nodded. “They don’t die so easily.” She closed the book she’d been holding, carefully, as if it might break; though she was the one who looked as though she might break, if so much as breathed upon. She said, finally, “I’ve been thinking. About Philippe.”

  “You—” Selene started to say Emmanuelle should rest, and then stopped.

  “I can still think,” Emmanuelle said, with an amused smile. “I felt . . . hatred, when he touched me. A scream like primal pain. The shadows hate the House.”

  “You felt his hatred,” Selene said. “He has no love for us.”

  “No. Philippe hated Houses, but as part of a system. And Silverspires a little more, because we imprisoned him.” Emmanuelle’s voice was clinical, detached. “I don’t think it’s a House doing this, Selene. Or if it is, it’s someone with a grudge against us. A personal one.”

  “That doesn’t really narrow the field, does it?” Selene asked. “We have many enemies.” The House did what it had to do, and not always compassionately, or fairly. “I’m sure Claire and Asmodeus are part of it. They’re too well informed.”

  “But they don’t hate Silverspires.”

  She was right: they only saw the House as an obstacle to be removed; heedless of the chaos that would happen in Paris’s fragile magical balance, if Silverspires should fall. “They could be in league with the summoner.”

  “I think they are,” Emmanuelle said. “I—” She thought for a while. “Philippe came to me, back when he was still new to the House. He wanted to know about the history of the House. I think he was looking for something.”

  “A weakness,” Selene said. She didn’t blame him. No, that wasn’t quite true. She understood him, because in his position she’d have done the same; but he was the reason they were in this mess, and if he hadn’t been dead she might well have strangled him herself.

  “I—I’m not sure,” Emmanuelle said. “He sounded worried.”

  “Do you remember what you gave him?”

  “Yes, of course. I can look at the books, but it won’t tell me what drew his attention. He knew some of what was going on.”

  “And he’s no longer in a position to tell us.” Good riddance.

  “He was the catalyst,” Emmanuelle said, at last. “But no longer. The game has changed, Selene. We must find out who really is behind that spell.” She lay back against her pillows, breathing heavily.

  “You’ll exhaust yourself. Get back to sleep; and you can ask Aragon for those books tomorrow, if you want.”

  “Don’t baby me, Selene. You’ve got much better things to do.”

  Entirely too many, Selene thought, but didn’t say it: there was no point in worrying Emmanuelle. She’d save all the worries for herself, and chew on them until she choked.

  SEVENTEEN

  GRAVE MATTERS

  THEY came up in the mortal world near the Pont de l’Archevêché, where Philippe had first seen Ngoc Bich. It was night again, with the low, diffuse glow of pollution over the city, the glistening of oil on the waves that lapped at their feet.

  “We weren’t gone that long,” Madeleine said, shocked.

  Isabelle’s voice was distant. “Time passes differently there.”

  It wasn’t only time. Philippe could feel the tug of the House again now, could feel the roiling anger within him. Morningstar stood on top of the flight of stairs, limned in his terrible light—hefting, in one hand, the large sword that he always carried. Was he defending the House against them? Of course not, he was simply a vision, a memory.

  He hadn’t told Madeleine or Isabelle about the vision he’d had while Asmodeus had tortured him; not because it seemed like a fancy of his sick mind, but because he had no intention of helping Silverspires beyond healing Emmanuelle and ridding himself of the curse.

  “We’ll go around the cathedral,” Madeleine said, biting her lips. “There’s a maze of disused corridors there.”

  A maze where he’d lost himself; where he’d found himself. The world seemed raw to his senses, the light too harsh, the sounds jangling in his ears; even the touch of Isabelle’s hand on his shoulder scraped like a blade across his flesh. He longed for the dark and quiet of the dragon kingdom already, even knowing that it was but a mirage.

  You could have stayed, Ngoc Bich’s voice whispered in his ear, and he didn’t know what answer to give her.

  They crossed the small garden behind Notre-Dame: corrugated benches, skeletal trees in the midst of scorched earth; and walked toward one of the side doors of the House, a postern that gave access to the East Wing.

  You could have stayed. Would it have been so bad, to be her consort? She was smart and fierce and beautiful, and doing honor to her devastated kingdom; but then again, what wasn’t devastated, in this day, in this place? He would have ruled with her, renewed and rejuvenated daily by the khi currents. He would have found a manner of peace; and, with Annam unattainable, it was probably the closest thing to coming home.

  He didn’t deserve it. He was nothing but a disgraced Immortal, his offense so old and so papered over, it barely stung.

  The Court of the Jade Emperor was beyond him; and, as Ngoc Bich had known, there would be no return to Annam; not even if the way magically opened, not with this curse within him. Aragon was right, he ought to make a home here in Paris, in this city of murderers who sucked the resources of Annam like so much lifeblood. He ought to . . .

  And then the shadows shifted across the burned-out trunks of the trees, like blacker dapples on birches—vanishing every time he focused on them, but quite unmistakably flowing toward them.

  * * *

  SELENE felt it long before she saw it, of course. The shadows had been one thing—scurrying at the back of her mind, a blot on the power of the House that slowly sank to an annoying whisper. This . . . this was something else: a feeling that something was not quite right, that something was gnawing away at the foundations of the House’s power.

  Javier had come back with one of the search parties: they all clustered in her office, looking glum—but at least they were alive and unharmed. One of the previous parties hadn’t been so lucky: their brush with the shadows had sent a man to the hospital with a flesh wound eerily similar to Emmanuelle’s. Aragon didn’t expect him to survive the night. One more confirmation, then, that Philippe had been the catalyst; but that the shadows had a life beyond him and were, in fact, spreading faster now that he was dead, as if he had been the only thing holding them in check—his mortality the only curb to their frenzy.

  She’d have been in a better position to appreciate the irony if her House hadn’t been coming apart around her.

  “Tell me again,” she said to Javier, fighting back the urge to snap at him.

  “It’s not what you think,” Javier said.

  “I have a very good imagination.” The House, its power and reputation diminished after the Samariel “incident,” could hardly afford another emergency. And she—she needed to be the rock they all stood on, not a Fallen shattered by the sickness of her lover. It would be fine, if she focused; if she forgot the awful pallor of Emmanuelle’s face, the dark circles under her eyes like bruises, everything Aragon wasn’t saying in his silences. We’re all mortal, Morningstar would have said, and he would have smiled. Secretly, he wouldn’t have believed anything like this would ever appl
y to his Fallen. What a fool he had been, sometimes. “Now tell me again why I can’t go to Asmodeus’s rooms and ask him what is going on?”

  Javier’s face was pale. “Because you need to see this first.”

  Selene dismissed the rest of the search party with her apologies—and summoned two of her bodyguards, Solenne and Mythris; as well as the butler, Astyanax. Then she followed Javier.

  It had once been a bedroom on the first floor of the East Wing. Now its floor was shot through with . . . “Plants?” Selene asked. Whatever she’d expected, it wasn’t that.

  They were slender green shoots with long, elegant leaves: she could imagine using one of them as a boutonnière, its vibrant green in stark contrast to the dark gray of the suit, a welcome note of freshness. They didn’t sound harmful, exactly, but they were plants. Growing on dusty parquet floors.

  “That’s . . . not natural,” she said.

  “No. They’re only in this room, though,” Javier said.

  So far. “I assume you’ve tried pulling them out.”

  Javier gestured toward the nearest shoot, which grew inches from the curved legs of a low marble table. “Be my guest.”

  Selene reached out, felt the tingle of magic on her hands. Apart from that, it looked like a usual plant; though not something that would ever be found in French gardens. It was a jungle thing, blown in from Guyane or Indochina or Dahomey; longing for warm, humid weather in which to grow. That it could take root here, under the perpetual pall of pollution from the war . . .

  She tried to pull it out; and her fingers slid through it, as though it hadn’t been there. And yet . . . and yet she could feel the silky touch of its leaves on her hands; could feel the sap pulsing through the stem, the slow ponderous heartbeat of the plant . . . She reached again, this time drawing to her the power of the House, whispering the words of a spell to start a fire. Again, her hand did not connect with the plant; and the fire died without fuel to consume. It was . . . it was as though the thing didn’t exist; or more accurately, wasn’t properly part of the House.

  But it was part of the darkness. It was what she had sensed, lurking around the wards; circling, like vultures waiting for a dying man to breathe his last—for any weakness in the structure of the House.

  And now it was in—taking root in the structure of the House itself.

  That was more frightening than anything else. The wards, laid by Morningstar when he’d founded the House, should have held. It was the wards, in fact, that made the House; their slow, painstaking accretion transforming unremarkable buildings into a shelter and a source of magic, a fortress that protected them all against attacks. Morningstar’s absence would not have changed anything—they would have been flimsy things indeed, if they could not survive their creator’s leave-taking. Morningstar was no fool: he had known that most Houses survived far longer than their founders.

  But if the wards were still there, what, then, was this?

  She had no idea what was going on, but she didn’t like any of it. “Fine,” she said to Javier. “You’re right. We’re not going to Asmodeus’s room.”

  Javier nodded. “The foundations,” he said.

  There was no locus of the House, no single point of vulnerability an attacker could have used to disable the wards. Other Houses were rumored to have one: House Draken had, if the testimony of survivors could be believed; House Hawthorn, though Madeleine had been tight-lipped about it. Selene wasn’t sure if it was ignorance, or a reluctance to sell a past she would not talk about.

  Madeleine. She remembered angel essence on her fingers; Emmanuelle’s pale, skeletal face; then, as now, the nights sitting by her bedside, praying that she would recover, that the preternatural thinness wouldn’t turn out to be the beginning of a long, slow slide toward death. . . .

  No. That was a weakness she couldn’t afford. She needed to be as tough and as uncaring as Morningstar, focused only on the good of the House.

  Morningstar had been old, and clever: the wards he had made could not be easily dispelled—Selene would not even have known where to start, if it had been her stated mission. The wards were carved into the foundations; baked in the bricks of its chimneys; ground to dust, and made into the mortar of the walls. There were places, though, where the fabric that hid them was thin and translucent; where, stretching out a hand, one could almost feel the energy surging under one’s fingers.

  Selene headed for one of these: a patch of wall at the back of one of the wine cellars. She grabbed another three guards on her way with a wave of her fingers; just to make sure there was an escort in case something turned sour.

  The cellar was at the end of a long corridor, beyond more disused rooms: all empty, the dust blown under their feet as they walked, with that sense of entering the mausoleum of a king. Empty and dead; lost since the heady days of the House’s glory, though . . .

  Something was off. Something . . . not as it should have been, a feeling she couldn’t quite name. Slowly, carefully, she moved to one of the doors in the long corridor—it was ajar, and she only had to push to open it.

  “Selene?”

  Nothing but a reception room: an upholstered sofa, its flower motif tarnished by layers of dust, a handful of elegant chairs with curved legs, a Persian carpet stretching away toward a grand piano.

  “Selene?”

  “It’s nothing.” She looked again at the room, trying to see what had bothered her. Just dust, and the smell of beeswax; and a faint, familiar smell of flowers.

  Flowers. Bergamot. “Asmodeus was here.”

  Javier said nothing, though his face made it all too clear he thought she was imagining things.

  He didn’t know Asmodeus. “You do have people keeping an eye on him, don’t you?”

  Javier looked affronted. “I do,” he said. “He hasn’t left his room.”

  Or had already left it; and returned, with no one the wiser.

  Selene suppressed a sigh. One thing at a time. She had to worry about Asmodeus; she couldn’t afford not to; but, first, she had to know what was going on. “Let’s go.”

  The butler, Astyanax, opened the door of the cellar for her, the creak of the key in the lock resonating like the groan of tortured souls. “Here you go, my lady.”

  The cellar was bone-dry, and relatively clean—the wine for the conclave’s banquet had come from here, after all—but still, it exuded the same pall of neglect as the rest of the House. Why was she so sensitive to it, all of a sudden? It wasn’t as though anything had changed; but, perhaps the setback they had suffered had finally exposed the truth—as if, with Silverspires’s reputation in shambles, she had suddenly discovered that she couldn’t lie to herself anymore: the House was in decline, and it would never, ever claw its way back to its former glory; not even if Morningstar himself were to come back from whatever obscurity he had vanished into.

  If he wasn’t already dead, or worse, imprisoned somewhere. But no, if he had been imprisoned somewhere, whoever had him would have used it against the House by now. No, it was either dead or gone to some other project of his own. She’d have liked to think he wasn’t capable of such casual betrayals, but she knew him all too well.

  “There.”

  Between two of the wine bottle racks, there was a slightly clearer patch of wall: a place where the plaster had peeled off, revealing the stone of the cellar walls; nothing much, either at first or second sight, or even with magic to boost one’s darkness-encrusted eyes.

  Selene reached out, drawing for a suspended moment the scraps of magic the House could spare, from Madeleine’s deserted laboratory to the wards of the school; from the hospital wing where Emmanuelle fitfully slept, to the ruins of the cathedral and the shattered throne; from the dusty corridors and disused ballrooms to this place, here, now, where she and Javier and her escort stood, breathless and skeptical and praying that it would work, that it would still work.
. . .

  The chipped stone of the wall gradually went blank, as if a hand had reached out, melted it to liquid, and smoothed out every single imperfection from it. Light spread from its center, slowly, gradually: a soft, sloshing radiance like that of a newborn Fallen, until every wine bottle seemed to hold captured starlight; and a slow, comforting heartbeat traveled up Selene’s hands; the reassurance she’d craved for, with no hint of faltering or of weaknesses.

  The wards still held, then. The House still held.

  Javier must have seen her face. “Selene—”

  “It’s going to be fine,” she said, slowly exhaling. She withdrew her hands from the wall; but the light and the heartbeat persisted for a while yet, balm to her soul. She might have failed everything else, but not that. Never that. They still stood strong. “The wards are intact.”

  “Thank God,” Javier said. Such fervor in his voice; had he found his faith again, then? “We’re still safe.”

  Selene thought of the sour smell of bergamot in a disused room, and of the ghost plants that she couldn’t touch, or tear out. “Yes,” she said, “we’re still safe.”

  And tried to ignore the small, fearful voice in her mind: the one that knew all about lies, and the things they denied until it was too late, and all the masks and the faces beneath them had crumbled into dust.

  * * *

  NO one spoke as they walked back to the House. Madeleine kept an eye out for anyone; though Asmodeus would have left with everyone by then, surely? She hoped so; because if he found them, he would take his revenge; and it was quite unlikely he’d bother with minimizing loss of life, especially since it looked as though they were all in it with Philippe.

  Which they might well be. She wasn’t sure if she believed him; if he was merely, as he said, a victim of something he’d accidentally released into the House; or if it was part of a longer game he was playing with all of them. But if he could help Emmanuelle; if he could shed some light on what was happening . . .