The House of Shattered Wings

by Aliette de Bodard

“Then what do you want?” She knew, even before the words were out of her mouth, that they were a mistake; knew it when Selene’s face hardened like cooling glass, impossibly brittle and smooth at the same time.

  “You know exactly what I want. I’m not throwing you out of the House in your current state, which Aragon tells me is probably so poor because of your use of angel essence. But I want you gone, Madeleine.”

  Gone. Cast out from Silverspires; stripped out of her refuge, her last rampart against Asmodeus and the nightmares of the night Uphir had been deposed. Her worst nightmare coming to meet her, and she couldn’t even seem to muster any energy for fear; for anything but the sick feeling in her belly. “But—I have nowhere else to go.”

  “You should have thought of that before you got addicted to essence,” Selene said. She snapped her fingers, almost absentmindedly; and something was gone from Madeleine’s mind, a noise she hadn’t been aware of, but whose lack was overwhelming, a glimpse into the abyss. “I withdraw from you the protection of the House. Go your own way.” And with that, she turned and left—that . . . that bitch. Emmanuelle had been an essence addict, once; and she’d been allowed to clean up her act, to go on as if nothing were wrong; but Emmanuelle was Selene’s lover, and of course she’d be favored over everyone else. Of course.

  She couldn’t seem to think straight—as in the dragon kingdom, except that it wasn’t serenity that plagued her this time. Her thoughts kept running around in circles, around the gaping wound left by the loss of the House; couldn’t seem to coalesce into anything useful. But still . . .

  Still, she was damned if she’d let Selene have her way. “Selene?” She forced the words through a mouth that felt plugged with cotton.

  Selene didn’t turn, but she did pause for a moment.

  “You’re not Morningstar,” Madeleine said. “You’re not even a fraction of what he was.”

  “Perhaps not,” Selene said. “But I am the head of this House, Madeleine. And nothing will change that.”

  * * *

  PHILIPPE came out of the House under the same gray, overcast skies of Paris. He barely could remember a time when they hadn’t been thus, when he had come in from Marseilles under a sun reminiscent of the shores of Indochina, a long time ago, in another lifetime.

  He carried a basket of figs, dry-cured sausage, and bread that had been forced upon him by Laure when he went to the kitchens to say good-bye—Laure hadn’t said anything or accused him of anything, merely shaken her head sadly, like a mother whose chicks had had to flee the nest far too early. He’d tried, then; to warn her; to tell her she should leave the House before it collapsed around her, and realized that she’d lived for so long in it that nothing existed outside its boundaries. It had been . . . sobering—and made him think, again, of Isabelle and what she had become.

  He stood, for a while, on the boundary between the House and the city, by the raised parapet of Pont d’Arcole, watching the oily waves of the Seine. He had feared the river once, like everyone in Paris; but now his eyes were opened to its true nature, and there was nothing to fear. Dragons ran sleek and superb beneath the water, elegant shapes racing one another; if he frowned hard enough, he could forget the broken-off antlers, the patches of dry scales on their bodies, the dark film that made their eyes seem dull, like gutted fish at a monger’s stall. For a moment; an impossible, suspended moment, he was back on the banks of the Perfumed River; with the smell of jasmine rice and crushed garlic, and the sweet one of banana flowers, all the things he should have set aside when ascending.

  Past, all of this, gone by. There was no point in grieving for faded things.

  Aragon had said he should forget it all; that the way to Annam was closed forever; that he should accept that his new home was in Paris, and act accordingly. But Aragon, who liked to call himself independent and unbound by loyalty to any House, still lived through his services to them; still drew a salary from Silverspires, and the lesser Houses he helped. Aragon could no more envision a world without Houses than he could stop breathing.

  And Isabelle . . .

  No, he couldn’t think of Isabelle now; or of what she might have meant to him. He couldn’t afford to.

  What he was sure of was this: he would rather die, or forsake any hope of ascending ever again, than be forced into service once more.

  Isabelle might have given in, but he wouldn’t. He threw a piece of broken stone into the river, and watched the ripples of its passage until they faded away. Then he shook himself, and went to look for the nearest omnibus stop.

  * * *

  MADELEINE tried not to brood, but it was all but impossible. Her mind was an empty place; a yawning abyss opening onto the night of the coup; and now she had neither angel essence nor the House’s protection to dull the knife’s edge of memory. In her dreams she smelled blood, the thick, sluggish, sickening odor of a slaughterhouse; and remembered Morningstar’s measured steps: the fear, shooting through her, that he would pass her by, that he would leave her to die in the darkness. In her dreams she never made it to Silverspires; or she stood on the Pont-au-Change and watched the ruins of the House, with the acrid smell of magic in her nostrils. In her dreams Asmodeus laughed, and whispered that he had won.

  She lay alone in her room. She supposed Selene had given orders that no one could visit her; it would be just like her, drive home the sheer soul-destroying misery of her situation. Or perhaps no one wanted to see the pariah; to think on how their own existence within the House depended on its master’s whims.

  Aragon, when he did come, was brusque. She gathered she wasn’t the only one he needed to take care of, or perhaps it was the atmosphere of the House, finally getting through to him even though he wasn’t bonded to it.

  “I can’t do anything for you,” he said. His lips were two thin lines in the severity of his face. “Your lungs are all but gone.”

  Madeleine suppressed a bitter smile. “How long do I have?”

  “You know as well as I do. A few years maybe? Unless we’re talking some kind of miracle.”

  “Miracles never happen here,” Madeleine said, with terrible bleakness. “Not in this city, not in this House.” She had felt it; the change to the fabric of Silverspires; the worm, gnawing away at the layers of protections Morningstar had painstakingly laid out during the founding of the House. Perhaps it was better if she left; soon there wouldn’t be any refuge here anyway. But where else would she go? There was nowhere, nothing; and the thought of taking Claire’s charity in Lazarus was a draft too bitter to be swallowed.

  “You should have told me,” Aragon said, finally, as he was about to leave: the professional reserve peeled away, to reveal—what? Anger? Hurt? She couldn’t read him, never had been able to. “You didn’t have to—”

  Madeleine thought of Elphon; of blood, warm and sticky on her hands; and the ghost of pain in her hip, the acrid memory of fear as she crawled out of Hawthorn. “There are some things I can’t live with, Aragon.”

  “There are some things that will kill you, and you should have known that.” Aragon stared at her for a while. “See me before you leave. I can give you a few addresses and names. You don’t have to head into the unknown.”

  “Thank you,” Madeleine said, but she was too drained, too hollow to care. Silverspires had been her life, her refuge; and now, soon—all too soon—it would be gone, leaving only a bitter memory in her thoughts. She needed . . . a plan, something she could cling to; but nothing seemed to penetrate the gloom around her.

  * * *

  THE omnibus was crowded, but the crowd lessened as they drew away from the major attractions. They passed the empty space where Les Halles had once been, the charred trees on rue de Rivoli, under the watchful gaze of the dome at La Samaritaine: the shop, like Les Grands Magasins, had been nuked in the war, and an upstart House whose name Philippe couldn’t remember had settled in the wreckage, making grand clai
ms of restoring the art deco building to its former glory. Like most grandiloquent claims, this one had never materialized.

  Then, in the distance, the dome of Galeries Lafayette, and the roofs of House Lazarus and its counterpart, Gare Saint-Lazare—where trains had once departed for Normandy, but which hid nothing more than beggars and essence junkies. The crowd was no longer House dependents, or middle-class shopkeepers, surviving as they could; but younger, more haunted faces: children with nimble hands doubling as pickpockets, mothers carrying their entire belongings on their backs; old women smoking pipes, tobacco the only luxury they had left.

  Philippe left his ornate cloak and Laure’s basket of food to one such woman, bowing very low to her; and ignoring the puzzled, suspicious glance she threw him. Suspicious or not, she would sell the cloak: he hoped for a good price, though it was all out of his hands. Then, at the next station, he got down.

  La Goutte d’Or had been a workers’ neighborhood before the war, the hands and arms toiling away in factories, making the luxuries the Houses gorged themselves on. Now the factories functioned at part capacity only, and the workers sat on the pavement, drinking absinthe when they could afford it, or other alcohols that were much less kind on the eyesight when they could not. They watched Philippe, warily; not because he was Annamite—there were plenty of Annamites there, the descendants of those sucked in by the maw of war—but because, with his quiet, confident walk and his clean cotton clothes, he stuck out like a sore thumb.

  Philippe ignored them, except to answer when a mocking voice would greet him. He was unfailingly polite and courteous; but, nevertheless, he called fire from the wasteland around him, and held the khi element in his clenched fist, ready to finish an argument with more than good manners.

  The building hadn’t changed. It was still where he remembered it: at one of the edges of a triangle-shaped square, its limestone walls overgrown with ivy, its wooden shutters discolored and cracked. The bottom floor had once been a vendor of sewing materials, but had since long fallen into disrepair; the little drawers with cloth samples and ribbons now held pilfered artifacts and containers, anything that could be sold for a price.

  It hadn’t changed. But then, why had he expected it to?

  He waited outside until the usual crowd had all but gone, as the evening deepened around him, and the wind picked up. Then, shrugging his scarf around his neck, he walked into the shop.

  And stopped, for it was Ninon behind the counter—who watched him, openmouthed. “Hello,” he said, into the growing silence. “I’ve come back.”

  * * *

  SELENE had hoped it would get better, but it didn’t. Asmodeus was shut in his rooms, claiming to be grieving and refusing all her polite requests for a meeting. Emmanuelle was back with her, but given to odd bouts of melancholy; back to her old self, before she’d completely given up essence, grieving for something neither she nor Selene could name. Despite their intense searches, Philippe could not be found anywhere, though there had been the occasional glimpse of him on the margins of the House, like a ghost she could not exorcise.

  And Selene knew the name of her enemy now, though it did not help her.

  Nightingale.

  She had been young then, in the days of Nightingale’s apprenticeship; young and naive and self-centered, paying little attention to the things that didn’t concern her. Nightingale had given way to Oris, and Selene had barely noticed; nor had anyone within the House ever talked about the transition.

  Given away, Emmanuelle had said. Betrayed.

  How could he—? He was cold, and cruel, and ruthless, but she’d always thought he would do right by his students; that he discarded them for weaknesses, but not that he would turn them out of the House; bargain them away on shadowy things, use them as pawns in his war of influence.

  Not her. He never would have. He didn’t love her, or even feel more for her than the casual affection of a man for his pet, but he . . . He never would have—

  But, if she closed her eyes, she would see, again and again, that amused glint in his gaze, would feel again that terrible sense of oppression; that primal fear that tightened all her leg muscles at the same time, primed for fighting or fleeing—fleeing, for what else could she have done, she who had never even been close to equaling him?

  He never would have—

  And her mind paused then, hanging over the precipice, because she knew, deep down, that he was perfectly capable of it. That he had always been.

  “You can’t appease a ghost,” Emmanuelle had said, with a tired sigh. “She’s dead, Selene, and she’s been working on her revenge for decades. The dead don’t easily change their minds.”

  She knew, but still she had to try.

  While Emmanuelle was sleeping, she stole away, wrapped only in a thin cotton shawl, the cold wind on her skin like the beginning of a penance. She had put two guards outside Emmanuelle’s room, but though she wouldn’t be such a fool as to requisition them, neither would she be fool enough to go off on her own. She dropped by the mess hall, and asked which bodyguards were available. Two of the idle ones—Imadan and Luc—leaped up at the chance to follow her, abandoning a spirited discussion on the proper way to sketch the human body.

  The crypt where Morningstar had lain was all but deserted. The stone bed was still empty in its circle of power—do not think of the bed now, not of the grave or whom it belonged to—but the place had changed. Along every column holding up the ceiling, something crept downward: great buttresses like snakes, moving so fast she’d have sworn she could see them shifting; encircling the pillars so hard and tight that the stone had cracked. Selene walked closer, touched them. They were as hard as rock, but the material wasn’t rock. It was wood.

  She thought of the plants in the East Wing; of the leaves she couldn’t touch or pull out. Green things. And, like all green things, they had roots; roots which were now choking the foundation of Silverspires. If it couldn’t be stopped . . .

  Of course it could. It was silly to think that any ghost could affect the oldest and most powerful of Houses . . . But this ghost had summoned the Furies—killed Oris and Samariel and others; used Philippe as a catalyst to enter the House; and perhaps Asmodeus and Claire to wreak its havoc. This ghost had led Morningstar to sacrifice himself in order to exorcise her; in vain, for he had only kept the danger at bay, not eradicated it.

  A worthy student, Morningstar would have said; except that, of course, it was his House being torn apart, and he who had been killed.

  Selene knelt in the circle, touched her fingertips to it: nothing but cold, inert stone. Dead, all dead, and yet . . .

  She brushed her fingers against the stone bed, and, calling to her the magic of the House, pulling in every strand like a weaver at her loom, spoke the slow, measured litany of a spell.

  Something stirred, in the dark; large and unfathomable and not feeling human anymore. “I would speak with you,” she said, slowly.

  Darkness; and the wind, howling between the pillars with their weight of tree roots. “I know Morningstar harmed you, but he is gone. I—I am mistress of his House, and would offer amends in his name.”

  Amends, the darkness whispered to her, in her own voice. A cold, unpleasant feeling, slithering across her hands. Amends. There are none.

  “Whatever you desire—”

  All that you built—destroyed. All that you hold dear vanished. All that you long for—borne away by the storm.

  “What storm?”

  It is coming. Can you not hear it?

  Selene could hear nothing but it; the sound of the wind racing between pillars; the distant noise of branches bending against its onslaught; the tightness in the air, a cloth stretched taut, almost to snapping point. “Your storm?”

  There was no answer from the darkness. “What do you want, damn it!”

  She had already had her answer; had already seen what was
happening. Not a House, but something else; the foundations of a new building, a new garden, its roots in the wreckage of Silverspires.

  Never.

  It wasn’t Morningstar’s voice in her mind, but it could have been: it was that same cold, dry feeling of steel against the nape of a neck, that same feeling of unbreakable promises. The House was hers, now that Morningstar was dead; wholly hers, with none of the whispers that Asmodeus and Claire had started, none of the doubts about her ability to rule. It was hers; and, because no one else could protect it, that duty fell to her.

  “I will crush you,” she said to the darkness, her voice taking on the singsong of chants and litanies, and powerful spells. “Hack off your roots and suck the sap from your leaves, and burn your seeds before they can ever land.” The air was taut again, as if listening to her promise; but what could it know of fear? It wasn’t even human, not anymore.

  “Selene?” It was Javier, pale and untidy. His creased face had the same expression as when he had waved Asmodeus into her office.

  Her heart sank. “What’s happened?”

  “Asmodeus is leaving,” Javier said. By now, she knew, all too well, his expressions and what they meant; and could read what he didn’t say in the tightness of his clenched hands, in the thinness of his stretched lips.

  “Asmodeus. That’s not what I ought to be worried about, is it?”

  Javier winced. “You—you have to come and see. There really is no good way to explain it.”

  * * *

  MADELEINE wrapped her things carefully; not that there were many of them, of course. Isabelle watched her in silence, leaning against the doorjamb of the laboratory: she’d come in the middle of Madeleine’s packing, and had settled in her current position without a word. At last she said, “You don’t have to—”

  Madeleine winced. She’d scoured her drawers before Isabelle had arrived, and had found only one small locket with a little angel essence; nothing like what she’d have needed to take. A vague edge of hunger seemed to overlay everything she did. It wasn’t a craving, not something irresistible that would have left her in tears; merely a faint sense of discomfort that seemed to be slowly increasing. She refused to think about what it would mean for her, out there. “Selene gives me no choice.”