The House of Sundering Flames Read online

  ALSO BY ALIETTE DE BODARD

  OBSIDIAN AND BLOOD

  Servant of the Underworld*

  Harbinger of the Storm*

  Master of the House of Darts*

  DOMINION OF THE FALLEN

  The House of Shattered Wings

  The House of Binding Thorns

  The House of Sundering Flames*

  XUYA UNIVERSE

  On a Red Station, Drifting

  The Citadel of Weeping Pearls*

  The Tea Master and the Detective*

  SHORT FICTION AND NOVELLAS

  Of Wars, and Memories, and Starlight

  In the Vanishers’ Palace*

  Of Books, and Earth, and Courtship

  *available as a JABberwocky ebook

  THE HOUSE OF SUNDERING FLAMES

  Copyright © 2019 by Aliette de Bodard

  All rights reserved.

  Published as an eBook in 2019 by JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc., in association with the Zeno Agency LTD.

  Originally published in the United Kingdom by Gollancz.

  ISBN 978-1-625674-60-9

  Cover design by Dirk Berger

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Also by Aliette de Bodard

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  A note on French and Vietnamese transcriptions

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  ONE

  The Burning House

  Thuan’s day had been utterly routine: petitions from House Hawthorn members; unpleasant political maneuvering; a brief, barbed lunch with his husband and co-head of House Asmodeus, in which they compared notes about an upcoming dinner with envoys of other Houses. Nothing surprising or insurmountable.

  He was out in the gardens, halfway between his office’s open French windows and the river. The lawn, pockmarked with debris and ash, sloped down to what had been the quays by the river Seine and which was now a roiling mass of gray, iridescent water. He’d made the mistake of sitting on the grass, which meant the trousers of his swallowtail suit were completely damp, and with rather interesting oily stains.

  His other mistake, of course, had been to use his one hour of leisure in the day to be nice to overwhelmed parents.

  “Unka Thuan, Unka Thuan! She’s stolen my doll!”

  Ai Nhi had drawn herself up to the full and rather limited height of a five-year-old and pointed an accusatory finger at Thuan’s niece Camille. Her shape wavered between human and dragon, with the shadow of antlers above her pigtails, outlined in the bluish light of khi water.

  “Give it back, or I’ll tell Auntie Ly!”

  Camille’s only answer was laughter, waving the doll around in one hand and the moldy blanket she dragged everywhere in the other.

  “Now now…”

  Thuan stopped. He stared at the Seine, at the vast expanse of water beneath which hid the troubled dragon kingdom where he’d been born. Something was wrong, but he couldn’t put his finger on what. He grabbed the doll from Camille.

  “No stealing,” he said, firmly.

  Camille wailed. He ignored her, and put the doll back in Ai Nhi’s hands.

  The khi currents of water, faint lines of blue light, seemed undisturbed. They curled, lazily, along the wide paths of pockmarked gravel, around the wide trees whose trunks were flecked with fungus, and stopped at the water’s edge. Nothing wrong. Still nothing he could put his finger on. And yet…

  “Unka Thuan!”

  He forced a smile he didn’t feel. “Yes?”

  Ai Nhi’s aunt, Vinh Ly, was in Thuan’s retinue, part of the dragon court who had come with him to Hawthorn. Both of Ai Nhi’s parents had died when she was still a baby, and Vinh Ly, often overwhelmed, let Thuan take care of Ai Nhi on her behalf.

  Ai Nhi and Camille were both looking at him. In that uncanny way children had, they stood side by side as if nothing had ever been wrong between them.

  “What are you looking at?”

  Thuan shrugged. “The water. The city.”

  “The other Houses?” Ai Nhi asked. “Auntie Ly said they were… ag-gres-sive.”

  The way she detached the syllables, she clearly didn’t know what the word meant.

  Thuan sighed. “She means they want to attack us.” Before Ai Nhi could look worried, he said, “You don’t have to worry about it. Asmodeus and I have the situation well in hand.”

  Or rather, House Hawthorn was keeping its head down, and hoping the other Houses in Paris would believe them too uninteresting and too uninvolved to bother attacking. A tricky balance to strike: too weak, and other Houses would swoop in like vultures; too strong, and they would ally to take Hawthorn down. And, of course, Hawthorn itself wasn’t currently in the best of states. Thuan had only recently started to rule alongside Asmodeus, and the House was still adjusting to the merging of Thuan’s dragon magic with the Fallen magic of Asmodeus, which it had always relied upon for its own defense. Dependents were busy rebuilding wards, and the Fallen in the House—the former angels, living sources of magic—were working overtime to repair buildings and cast protective spells. Hawthorn was in no shape to get involved in anything.

  Again, that tingling in the air—something wasn’t as it should have been, but before Thuan could start weaving khi currents, someone spoke.

  “My lord. I hadn’t expected to find you here.”

  It was phrased like a reproach. Thuan turned, his heart sinking.

  “Iaris.”

  Iaris smiled. Her face was smooth, ageless—nothing close to her real and considerable age, but then Iaris was one of Asmodeus’s favorites, and her closeness to Fallen magic had stretched and slowed down the passing of time for her body. She’d been with Asmodeus from the beginning, in the Court of Birth, before the coup that had made him the head of the House, and was now the chief doctor in Hawthorn’s hospital. She was virtually untouchable, at least by Thuan, and they both knew it.

  “What do you want?” Thuan asked.

  “A word,” Iaris said. She didn’t sit down on the lawn, forcing Thuan to get up, dirty trousers and all—obviously. “This is unseemly.”

  Thuan raised an eyebrow. “Unseemly?”

  Iaris’s face did not move. “You know exactly what I mean.”

  Thuan snatched Camille up before she could go wandering off near the water, and bobbed her up and down, carrying her on one hip. Ancestors, she was heavy. Ai Nhi had turned into a dragon: a serpentine shape with the antlers of a deer that curled up around Thuan’s legs, making a deep rumb
ling noise of contentment. The cold touch of her scales through the fabric of his trousers was comforting.

  “You’re his consort,” Iaris said, dryly. “Head of the House.”

  She made it all sound like an insult. She thought Asmodeus had embarrassed himself when he’d married Thuan, and even more when Thuan had started to rule in his own name. Never mind, of course, that Thuan had to seize power from Asmodeus to do it, at a moment when Asmodeus had been on the brink of death. In Iaris’s mind, the perfect House would still be under the sole control of her own master.

  “That’s an accurate description of my position,” Thuan said, deadpan.

  Iaris ignored him. “You’re not a childminder. The Court of Birth—”

  “Isn’t these children’s family.”

  Iaris opened her mouth. She was going to ask if Thuan was family, but realized that this would cast aspersions on Asmodeus—who might have been a disaster at childcare but definitely considered Camille his niece.

  “Lord Asmodeus—”

  “I don’t know where he is,” Thuan said. “We’re not each other’s minders, either. The last time I saw him was at lunch.”

  Iaris exhaled. “You don’t understand.”

  He did. The House was changing, and Iaris didn’t like it—she clung to what she’d always known like a lifeline. She wanted a head of House who was dark and frightful, a monster to defend them against the other monsters of Paris: all the things that Asmodeus effortlessly was, but that Thuan would never agree to become.

  But understanding didn’t mean he had to indulge her.

  “Down down, Unka,” Camille said.

  Thuan reluctantly let go of her, but kept a wary eye on what she was doing. She was crouching on the grass, watching a bit of dark earth with fascination.

  He said, to Iaris, “Was that all?”

  Her lips thinned. She started to move back towards the House, but turned, slightly, towards him.

  “You’ll never be accepted if you don’t make an effort to fit in.”

  Ah, the old classics. Thuan exhaled. He let his dragon shape half-shimmer into existence around him: the antlers, the scales on the back of his hands, his fingers thinning and sharpening into claws.

  “I take care of this House,” he said. “That’s all that really matters. You want me to make myself smaller in the vain hope that the dependents will forget who I really am. We both know that’s not going to happen.”

  “Certainly not in these circumstances,” Iaris said, coldly.

  She glanced at the children, and then at the other side of the riverbank, where empty factory buildings stood against the sideline. House Harrier. One of the Houses sharing a border with Hawthorn: the Grenelle bridge, where House dependents stared at each other across the checkpoints.

  “Our neighbors have seen us in disarray, my lord. The faster they realize that we’re united, the fewer attacks they’ll try.”

  “Harrier isn’t attacking us,” Thuan said, mildly.

  Harrier was classist, separating human and Fallen and insisting on the innate superiority of Fallen. Lord Guy and his wife Andrea had cut Thuan dead at every event they’d attended. If nothing else, it had been entertaining to watch Asmodeus getting increasingly cutting and sarcastic in return.

  Iaris’s face didn’t move. Camille was wandering off again: Thuan raised a barrier of khi water across her path and she bumped into it, poked at the blue light with pudgy fingers, curiously.

  “Harrier is too busy at the moment,” Iaris said. “But make no mistake—when they see an opportunity they’ll take it. And they’re not the only ones. House Mansart and Fontenoy are emboldened by Harrier’s own internal troubles.” She ticked them off on her fingers, items on a list of issues Thuan had no doubt she carefully maintained. “House Lazarus won’t act directly but they’ll push other Houses to do so. House Shellac have always been felt they ought to be larger and more important.”

  She listed half a dozen other Houses Thuan could barely keep track of. Which was the point, of course: to show him his own ignorance and obliviousness.

  Ancestors, he was getting so tired of this. Life was harsh and short in a city still in ruins after the Great Houses War sixty years ago, and even within the relative safety of a House, all they could seem to think of was how to hurt each other, like crabs in a bucket.

  “Was that all?” he asked, again. He made his voice much colder.

  Iaris grimaced, but said nothing else. She headed back into the House with ill grace, leaving Thuan to disentangle Ai Nhi from his legs.

  The little dragon girl stared, thoughtfully, at the retreating figure of Iaris.

  “She’s not nice,” she said, with a gravity that seemed completely out of proportion.

  Thuan couldn’t help laughing.

  “No,” he said. “But you still have to be nice to her.”

  “Unka!” Ai Nhi said, scandalized.

  “Do we need to have the talk about politeness again?”

  He stopped, then. The odd tension in the air was not only still there, but now unbearably strong. He hadn’t noticed because he was too busy trying to assert himself and face Iaris down, but…

  The entire world seemed to be drawing a breath. The khi water around Ai Nhi and Camille stiffened, and flowed away—and so did every other khi element in the air.

  “Unka?”

  Thuan turned towards the river. He had no choice, because the flow of khi elements was drawing him as a fisherman’s hook, a ceaseless tug in the hollow of his chest—not straight ahead, towards the muddy mire of the flooded gardens, or the dragon kingdom that had once been his home, but towards the left, past the ruined Eiffel Tower. A plume of flame and smoke rose over the horizon: the flames pink and yellow, darkening into billowing clouds. A dull sound like a gunshot, and then another one—each burst changing the sky, briefly, to a bright green that slowly washed into trembling, dusty light.

  Fire. Smoke.

  From the heart of House Harrier. Neither wood nor stone burned that way. And the explosions—too far away for now to send shock waves they’d feel, but they would only be the start.

  He’d not fought in the Great Houses War. Sixty years ago he’d been young and sheltered, a minor and spoiled prince of the Dragon Kingdom more interested in sleeping with a succession of lovers than in the dreadfully boring business of the court—but he’d heard the stories of the fall of House Hell’s Toll, and how the armory’s fire had painted the sky green and pink. He was seeing no ordinary fire; and he had perhaps three minutes before the largest and final explosion.

  “Unka?”

  The windows were too close. The House was too close—everything would become cutting shards and wounding debris when the shock wave hit.

  He shifted into his dragon shape, as easily as slipping on the tailored clothes Asmodeus kept pressing on him. He scooped up both children, ignoring their protestations—the wriggling, screaming Camille, Ai Nhi saying she was all grown-up and too old to be carried, trying to grab her doll from Camille on Thuan’s other side—and started flying towards his office. The pressure in the air was becoming unbearable; that dreadful, unnerving calm before the storm, slowly spinning itself together. The plume of smoke from the burning House Harrier now cast a long shadow across the lawn, the trembling, billowing finger of some malevolent deity lightly resting on a wound. There was no khi water left in the air at all—Thuan felt he was swimming upriver through tar, caught in sticky air that only slowed him down. The river wavered in front of him, patches of oily sheen distorting into vague, unrecognizable shapes. An illusory safety: the dragon kingdom would not help him, would not shelter him, would not save him.

  He was perhaps halfway to the closest building when the explosion hit. A booming sound was the only harbinger of what had happened—followed, a fraction of a second later, by a wind that tore the grass from the lawn, as sharp as knives against the skin of his hands. He threw himself to the ground, raising desperate wards to protect the children, just as everything
was torn apart in a maelstrom of sounds and flying debris which hit, again and again, the wards he’d raised. Thuan curled over the children, feeling the dull bounce of the broken objects which got through against the scales of his dragon shape, just as the House’s sense of danger rose to a screaming crescendo in his mind. He had to do something to protect his people, he had to do it now…

  Silence spread over the House. Thuan pulled himself up, cautiously. The large oak tree by the side of the lawn had lost a few branches, but seemed otherwise unharmed. The French windows of his office—which he’d left open—had been torn off their hinges. Every pane of glass on the entire wing had shattered inwards. There was a distant smell of fire—something burning in the kitchens? The air was the purplish hue of recent bruises, and everything smelled too sharp, too crisp. The khi currents that normally saturated the House were all but gone.

  He caught movement on his right, out of the corner of his eye, on the edges of the riverbank that were perpetually shrouded in mist: small, agile shapes coming to crowd on the lawn, invisible to anyone else but him. The children. Not the ones he was currently minding, but the others, the House in physical shape: skeletal branches of hawthorn shaped into the vague shape of children. His flesh crawled—every time he’d seen the children he or his friends had been in grave danger—but they seemed not to pay him any attention. Their faces were turned, unerringly, to the plume of smoke rising beyond the river.

  Harrier. House Harrier. Their closest neighbor, aflame and reeling from the explosion; and they would have it even worse than Hawthorn, since they had been at the center of the blast.

  What would happen now?

  “Unka?”

  Ai Nhi stared, open-mouthed, at the devastation. Even Camille, for once, seemed to be at a loss.

  “It’ll be fine,” he said, with a confidence he didn’t feel. He threw another glance at the children of thorns, but they still hadn’t moved. That was not good, but he had so many other things to worry about first. “Come on, let’s see what’s happened.”

  He flew rather than walked over the lawn, and dived head first into his office. Or rather, what was left of it. His bookshelves had toppled—torn fragments of books lay everywhere—and the papers he’d left on his desk were probably hopelessly mangled by now. The desk itself was more or less where he’d left it, though its leather was scored in multiple places by gashes. Broken glass and splinters of wood and metal covered every surface. If anyone had been by a window when it had shattered…