The House of Sundering Flames Read online

  Asmodeus. Thuan reached out in his mind, where the dependents of the House were arrayed like candle flames—so many of them guttering, on the verge of failing—and a familiar, sarcastic presence, though diminished and far away.

  Still alive. Asmodeus was still alive; but of course the House couldn’t tell Thuan anything useful, beyond indications of immediate danger—and there were so many ways to die that weren’t immediate or merciful.

  He—

  “Down! Down!” Camille said. Thuan tightened his grip on her.

  “There’s glass, little fish,” he said, firmly.

  And, ignoring her disappointed wails, he flew further into the wing, trying not to dwell on the fear that tightened his insides like a fist of ice.

  * * *

  Inside the House, it was chaos. Stunned dependents wandered, calling for their loved ones; distant clatters of debris as people freed themselves. The smoke he’d smelled earlier was coming from the kitchen, where Koia and a few others were frantically emptying magical artifacts of their stored power to attempt to snuff out the flames that had spilled out from the ovens and hearths. Koia nodded at Thuan as he stood at the door: she had it under control, or hoped to.

  “Have you seen Lord Asmodeus?” Thuan asked, as he’d asked every other dependent on his way there.

  Koia gave a tight-lipped shake of her head. “Sorry, my lord. He doesn’t come into the kitchens that often.”

  Almost never, unless it was to frighten the kitchen hands. Thuan sighed, and pressed down his nascent worries. There was a lot of business to take care of. Other people whose safety he had to ensure. And Asmodeus would be fine. He was too smart and too resourceful to be otherwise. Thuan tamped down the little voice that kept insisting that smartness and resourcefulness meant little in such situations.

  “Find me someone you can spare,” he said. “There was a fire across the Seine, and I want to know where it’s coming from.”

  “My lord…”

  Koia gave him an appraising look; but Thuan was in full dragon form, and disinclined to argue with people who still thought Asmodeus was the center of the universe insofar as the House was concerned.

  He pressed himself closer to her, so she could see the full width of his maw, and the glistening fangs of a predator in a mouth large enough to gobble up half of her in one go.

  “Now, Koia.”

  “Of course, my lord.”

  “Thuan!”

  It was Berith, Asmodeus’s Fall-sister. She strode through the din as though nothing was wrong: silver-haired and tall, infused with the glow of Fallen magic—though it was flickering and weak—and her eyes circled with deep gray. Berith had taken grave wounds during the Great Houses War sixty years ago, and not even the protection of the House could heal her.

  “Mamma!” Camille wriggled out of Thuan’s grasp and ran, screaming, towards Berith, hugging the Fallen’s legs with a wide smile on her face. “Mamma mamma mamma.”

  Berith gave Thuan an apologetic smile.

  “Come on, child,” she said to Ai Nhi in perfect Viet. Ai Nhi shook her head, and continued to cling to Thuan.

  “Don’t worry,” Thuan said.

  He shook himself and resumed his human form, which made it easier to fit into the space below the ceiling. Ai Nhi remained on him—no longer riding on his back, but now balanced on his shoulders. He was obscurely glad someone was there to take care of Camille. Ai Nhi was five, old enough to have a modicum of self-preservation, but Camille just barreled through life as though fires and large bodies of water would somehow make way for her imperious will.

  “Françoise…?”

  “She’s fine.” Berith’s face was closed. “She was with the seamstresses, embroidering some tablecloths.”

  Some undercurrents there: Françoise was Berith’s partner, and thus related to the head of the House whether she liked it or not—and both Berith and Asmodeus thought it unseemly for her to concern herself with base servants’ work.

  A worry for another time.

  “Auntie Berith, Auntie Berith, there was a big boom!” Ai Nhi said.

  Berith smiled, brightly and with a tension even the little dragon had to see.

  “I’m sure there was. It happens sometimes in old Houses, child.”

  “Mmm.” Ai Nhi didn’t sound convinced.

  In the silence that followed, Thuan said, “No one has seen Asmodeus.”

  Berith lifted Camille to her face, up and up until the toddler squealed with laughter—with no hint of the strain it must have been to her dying magic. Then she lowered her, and balanced the small body on her hips.

  “I haven’t, either,” she said. “You should go and see Iaris.”

  Thuan sighed. He’d delayed going to the hospital because he didn’t want to know how bad it was. But he was head of the House—one of two people everyone depended on for protection—and he couldn’t afford some illusions.

  “I will. Do you have any idea what’s going on?”

  Aside from the obvious fact of an explosion. These had been commonplace during the war, but that was over: though buried spells went off from time to time, nothing should have had that large an impact.

  Berith shook her head.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Thuan said.

  They were going to find out eventually; and he had an inkling they wouldn’t like it, not one bit.

  * * *

  They were halfway to the hospital wing when the messenger caught up with them. It was one of Iaris’s underlings, out of breath.

  “My lord…”

  “Steady,” Thuan said.

  “You have to come now.” The messenger paused. “The cells… Lord Asmodeus…”

  Thuan’s blood went cold.

  “Take her,” he said to Berith, lowering Ai Nhi down.

  “Unka!”

  But Thuan was already up and running—rising, shedding his human form and flying above his startled dependents. He flowed through the labyrinth of the West Wing, corridors of cracked wainscoting streaming past, adroitly ducking so that his antlers didn’t get tangled in broken chandeliers, deftly avoiding the crossroads leading to the rooms of the various leaders of Hawthorn’s Courts, into another, even narrower complex of guardrooms and servants’ quarters, where his body twisted to weave around the crowd of people rushing towards the exit.

  When he reached the entrance to the cells, he found a pile of rubble blocking the staircase; and Madeleine, the House’s alchemist, drawing a circle on the floor, pausing from time to time to shake an errant strand of graying hair from her eyes. Thuan landed among startled dependents, and—with difficulty—kept his mouth shut while Madeleine finished drawing her spell.

  Fallen magic still wasn’t his specialty: all he could judge was the size and complexity of the spell. As he watched, Madeleine emptied another artifact of its stored magic, and it joined the piles of discarded ones on the floor. They didn’t have that many left, and they’d gone through a great number of them already—Thuan bit back the thought, which was useless. They needed to get to Asmodeus. The cells. Obviously. Asmodeus had never been part of the Court of Persuasion, but he still haunted the cells as if they were his second home—satisfying his cravings for others’ pain by interrogating the dissidents imprisoned within the House.

  “It’s just rubble,” one of the dependents said to Thuan—Mia, a no-nonsense Fallen with long flowing hair and a swallowtail jacket speckled with shining silver threads. “The cells should be intact, my lord.”

  Should be. Might be. Thuan knew better than to put faith in such statements.

  Ancestors, keep him safe.

  A scratching sound.

  Thuan’s head snapped up; so did Madeleine’s. The pile of debris that blocked the entrance to the cells was moving—shifting upwards, as if something buried within was ponderously lifting itself free. It stopped for a moment, fell back down, and then slowly pushed itself up again. Thuan’s throat felt constricted. He hadn’t even been aware he was holding his breath.


  The pile of rubble spun—became, for a brief moment, a pillar of metal and wooden shards—and then burst apart, showering everyone with debris. Mia and Madeleine threw themselves to the floor. Thuan shielded his eyes. The debris fell well away from him, as if an invisible hand was holding it off.

  When the cloud of dust dispersed, Asmodeus stood on what had been the first steps of the stairs. He wore his usual gray-and-silver swallowtail jacket, except that it was covered with dust. He had a body slung across his shoulder: someone with long hair Thuan couldn’t recognize, whose head and back hung limply on Asmodeus’s broad chest. Blood stained his white gloves, and he had multiple wounds on both cheeks. He stood, unblinking, unmoving, watching them all through horn-rimmed glasses, gray-green eyes the color of a stormy sea.

  Thuan took one, two steps forwards. “Asmodeus…”

  He didn’t move. He just stood, staring at Thuan. The smell of bergamot and citrus hung in the air: a threat, a promise. At length he shook himself; moved away from the staircase in long, graceful steps, his face still frozen in that odd expression.

  “Here,” he said, laying the body down on the edge of Madeleine’s circle: an Annamite woman whose bare arms had been sliced open, blood staining her tunic until it had turned the color of rust. “Get her to hospital.”

  “Asmodeus!”

  But Asmodeus was already swaying. Thuan flowed upwards, catching him on the back of his dragon shape before he could hit the floor.

  “Stubborn fool,” he said, not bothering to hide his worry, his anger—not to mention utter exhaustion from switching shapes three times in the same day. “Let’s get you to hospital first.”

  * * *

  In Emmanuelle’s dreams, the world was fire. Angels rose on wings of flame towards a distant, unattainable City: a concoction of mother-of-pearl buildings, enameled domes and white, eye-searing streets in which featureless shapes flowed past each other. At the top of the highest tower was the light of a burning sun—it couldn’t be watched, couldn’t be held within her field of vision without hurting her eyes or burning her face. She reached out towards it—towards Him—and everything fell apart, the flames becoming the jagged shards of a vast, unknowable puzzle raining down on her.

  She woke up, and everything hurt. She lay on her back for a while, staring at a sky that wasn’t gray—that wasn’t even the cornflower blue of Lucifer Morningstar’s eyes, or of the heavens as they had been, before the war, before the pall of pollution. It was an odd shade of purple, shading into indigo. As she watched, sounds intruded: distant clatters, and a rumble, like stones collapsing atop each other. It was hot—too hot.

  She needed to get up.

  She was lying on gravel in the ruins of a garden: the center of a classic little square with wrought-iron railings and impeccable rows of trees that still peppered the south of Paris. Except that the railings that separated the garden from the surrounding streets were bent, and the trees charred, leafless stumps, and she lay in the middle of a flat nothingness of churned earth and fragments of stone. The doors and windows of all the buildings around the square had caved in. It was not the usual gentle decay she was used to seeing in post-war Paris, more like the result of an explosion.

  What had happened?

  Emmanuelle managed to pull herself upright on trembling legs. Just as she did, a wave of nausea racked her from head to toe, and she was on her knees again, vomiting on to the cobblestones, and heaving again and again and bringing up nothing but nauseating bile, her entire being wrung as if by a careless giant.

  Where was she?

  She didn’t remember coming here, or…

  Harrier.

  House Harrier. She was in House Harrier, as an official envoy of House Silverspires. She… Presentation. She and Morningstar had been attending the First Presentation of the child-magicians—the first one Guy had hosted since his accession as head of the House. A historic occurrence, Emmanuelle’s partner Selene had said, in a tone that suggested she didn’t trust Guy one bit. Then again, with Silverspires diminished and struggling to survive, they couldn’t really afford to get into an internecine fight with Harrier. Selene was head of the House, and Emmanuelle was all too aware of the political currents.

  She…

  Emmanuelle pulled herself upright—she was shaking, shivering, and…

  Something was wrong. She raised a hand to her forehead—an absurd idea, she couldn’t take her own temperature. Her hand spasmed—she tried to hold it still, but it seized up on its own.

  Morningstar.

  Where was he? They were supposed to look out for each other. He’d promised her…

  From far away, other familiar sounds: people fighting—and getting closer and closer to her.

  Away. She needed to get away. Working everything else out could happen later.

  She stumbled away, and all but tripped over a corpse. Someone she didn’t know, in House Harrier’s blue and black uniform, eyes staring upwards at that odd, bruised-purple sky. They looked odd, but she couldn’t place how or why. Didn’t matter. She couldn’t afford to tarry.

  The earth under her shook: she almost fell, caught herself in time. Everything seemed like it was happening in slow motion. She walked towards the ruined railings, towards the nearest street, or what remained of it.

  The sound of fighting was getting closer—a growing thunder, the sound of metal on metal, the sharp crack of rifles, screams, words all jumbling together into meaninglessness.

  Why? What had happened? They… weren’t at war anymore. Peace had been gained at such a cost; and they’d enjoyed it for decades. It made no sense.

  Onwards. She had to hide.

  She reached the street, and looked left and right. The buildings gaped at her like the maws of Hell, all similarly empty husks filled with ruined darkness. No shelter. And further on were only more buildings with burned, shattered facades, and further still the unbroken dome of the Great Interior, the secluded area where Guy kept the most powerful of his trained magicians—a panicked thought in her mind, a memory of beating wings in a darkened corridor. No shelter there, either, she knew it with absolute certainty. The battle was getting closer. She couldn’t hide. She had to run.

  She did, past the ghosts of buildings in the devastated streets. Her hands seized—and her legs, too, at odd moments, sending her sprawling to the ground. She’d pick herself up, breathing heavily and fighting the blurring vision that threatened to take over her entire world. The sounds came closer and closer, resolved into voices—into grunts and threats and prayers as people hacked and shot at each other.

  “You’ll pay for this!”

  “You can’t win!”

  She couldn’t run anymore. There was nowhere to hide, but she had to.

  She was in another ruined garden, her feet on cold churned earth. Ahead of her was a building: something in a pseudo-Greek or Roman style, except that it had one good wall and three ruined ones, and half a floor, and the railings of its little garden had bent inwards, the tree by its front porch burned and shriveled. Emmanuelle reached what was left of the door, peered inside. Bodies, with blood streaming out of their eyes, limbs hanging at loose angles.

  Beggars couldn’t be choosers.

  She sat against the one wall that still held—praying that it would hold, that the world would stop shaking. And, belatedly, she saw what was wrong: the light. Shadows had played across the corpses on the elaborate tiling of the floor, as she’d looked in. A soft, sloshing light had danced over the ruined walls, moving as she’d moved her head.

  It was her.

  She was emitting the light. She raised a hand, stared at it. Her arms and legs were covered in wounds: the debris must have shredded her when the explosion had happened, but that was normal. What wasn’t normal was that her dark skin was translucent, its color still true, but she could see muscles shifting, contracting uncontrollably, sending her arm down again in a spasm. She wasn’t simply burning with fever; she was burning, full stop, her body eating itself
like a candle.

  Ablaze, in the middle of what looked like a pitched fight, in a House that was her enemy and with no idea of what had happened.

  She needed to hide her radiance: her clothes were keeping most of it contained, but her face, her hands and every patch of exposed skin shone like a torch set ablaze. The walls weren’t going to keep that contained, so she needed to cover those parts as well. If there’d been a tarpaulin or a sheet she could crawl under—no, nothing like that left in the rubble.

  But she had cloth on her.

  Emmanuelle looked down. She was wearing an elaborate silk dress embroidered with flowers and trees, and a discreet patch with House Silverspires’ insignia, Morningstar’s sword against the towers of Notre-Dame. Ceremonial clothes. Petticoats. Layers and layers of thick cloth she could unwrap to hide under.

  It took her three tries to undress. Her fingers had become fat, listless sticks, and the spasms that racked her didn’t help.

  Screams, much closer this time. The battle was so close—on the other side of the wall—and she couldn’t afford to look if she wanted to remain unseen.

  She tore her petticoats, and wrapped her hands, face and chest in them. They were a thick opaque cotton—hopefully enough to mask the light she was shedding. Then she leaned back against the wall, the words of a prayer running over and over in her head.

  Our Father, who art in Heaven, Hallowed be Thy Name, Thy Kingdom come…

  Selene would say He wasn’t there—that He’d never been there, that this was where they were all damned. Father Javier would smile, a little sadly, trying to hide that he’d lost his faith a long time ago. Emmanuelle knew it was all untrue; that God was everywhere and in everything, and—in spite of everything, in spite of her Fall—was still listening to His wayward children.

  Our Father…

  Metal on metal and a confusion of footsteps—a din that hurt her ears, too close to be processed. They had to be just outside the walls. She had to be silent. She had to be unseen.