The House of Shattered Wings Page 2

  “Here?” Javier asked, slowing.

  “Yes. Come on, there isn’t much time.” She could feel the pain and the fear, the way they were building up, faster and harder than they should have.

  Which meant only one thing.

  Someone was trying to hurt the Fallen. In her city, within her reach.

  She didn’t think. Without pausing to check if Javier was following, she strode under the dome and onto the vast stairs, vaguely feeling rubble shift and crumble under her feet. The pain and the need were within her, rising—a sharp, short stab followed by agony that would have doubled her over in pain, but her wards took the brunt of it, leaving only anger, only fear. . . .

  Magic was building within her—drawn from the House, from the city and its river blackened by ashes, from the devastated countryside that surrounded them all beyond the wastelands of the Periphérique, layer after layer of gossamer-thin spells, not as powerful as they had once been. But she was old and canny, and forged into a weapon by her master, Morningstar, and what she’d lost in power she more than amply made up in skill. The pain in her mind receded, to be replaced by white-hot anger; so that, by the time she reached the third floor and saw, among its shattered counters, the two people crouching in the unbearable radiance of a newly manifested Fallen, her thoughts were as clear and as sharp as glass blades.

  “You will stop,” she said in the silence.

  They looked up, both of them: a girl no older than fifteen or sixteen, her face coated with grime, her malnourished frame making her seem even younger; and a boy of perhaps twenty, dark-skinned, narrow-eyed—an Annamite, by the looks of him—and then she saw the blood splayed on their hands and on their clothes; and the blades they’d been using to saw two fingers loose from the Fallen’s shattered hand.

  That was the fear she had felt—waking up, fuzzy and disorientated after the Fall, still struggling to adjust to a bewildering world; and finding only pain and the slow, excruciating sawing of a knife against her hand. . . .

  “You will stop,” Selene said again, coldly. “Now.”

  The girl laughed. Her lips were stained with blood and her high-pitched voice was all too familiar, the voice of someone drunk on strange and unaccustomed power. “Or what? You’ll make me? I don’t think you can. You’re old and scarred and the magic doesn’t sing to you anymore.”

  “Ninon—” the boy said—no, not a boy. Selene had been mistaken; he must have been older, twenty-five or thirty. He was breathing heavily, his pupils dilated; but apart from the blood, nothing about him indicated he’d consumed the flesh of the Fallen. Or perhaps he was merely more experienced. Either way, she was the real danger: the leader, the hothead.

  Selene threw a thread of magic, intending to pick up the girl and fling her aside from the prone Fallen—but Ninon laughed, and the power buried itself among the shards of glass from perfume bottles.

  “Told you,” she said. “My turn.”

  What she sent snaking toward Selene was brutal, undiluted, with the potency of a wildfire, its heat as scorching as the naked sun—and somewhere in its heart was the pain and hurt and betrayal of being cast out from the City, as raw as open wounds. Selene had to take a step back while she wove and rewove furiously, knitting her wards so that the magic, instead of shattering them, was guided until it buried itself into the floors of the Galeries.

  Fallen blood. Fallen magic. Stolen magic, hacked away in a rush of pain, the same pain that was now at the back of her mind like a coiled snake.

  That upstart girl would never steal again.

  The young man was tugging at Ninon’s sleeve now, his face twisted in panic, though Selene could still hear his exhausted panting. “Please. You can’t go up against her. Not for long. She’s House, Ninon.”

  Ninon turned and threw him a withering glance, opening her mouth for some scathing retort. Selene didn’t wait. She gathered all that she could, pulling in from the ghosts of the Grands Magasins, from Silverspires and the throne where Morningstar had once sat, from the mirrors and water basins where witches strove to re-create glimpses of the City—and sent it, not toward Ninon, but toward the floor. It left her hands, a barely distinguishable tremor, a pinpoint that became a raised line, and then a rift across the faded ceramic tiles that would tear the girl apart.

  She had no pity. Not tonight, and certainly not for people who fought for the right to dismember Fallen as if they were cattle.

  Too late, Ninon saw it. She turned away from the young man and, raising her hands, tried to absorb the magic as Selene had done. But she was untrained; and the light of the magic left her face, the little flesh and blood she’d consumed burning like wastepaper in a hearth—her face twisted as she realized that she didn’t have power anymore, that she didn’t have time to find more, that it was going to hit whatever she did. . . .

  “Get out!” Ninon screamed to the young man, in the split second before the rift was upon her.

  There was no time left. None at all, and the young man was still there by her side as the rift hit, and the light flared so brightly that even Selene had to avert her eyes. She braced herself for the impact, for the wet sound of bodies twisted past endurance, for the gouts of blood to join the Fallen’s on the floor.

  Instead . . .

  It was like nothing she’d ever felt: a stillness, a quiet like the eye in a storm, a slow, delicate weaving that drew, not on the ghosts, not on the City, but on something else entirely. The rift stopped, inches from the young man, who stood with his hands open and sweat glistening on his face, his hair raised on his scalp. For a moment—a brief, sharp moment that etched itself indelibly in Selene’s mind—he seemed to hold the weight of her spell in his hands, the whole of her fury and her anger—and then he opened his hands and it was gone, harmlessly snuffed out.

  A witch, here? Why hadn’t he—?

  She had little time for introspection. Time seemed to resume its normal flow; the young man crumpled like a puppet with cut strings, lying bathed in the Fallen’s radiance. The girl, Ninon, stood for a moment, looking at him, looking at Selene; and then she spun on her heels and ran.

  Selene made no movement to stop her. Ninon was hardly worth the trouble, and in any case it was all she could do to stand.

  “You’re a fool,” Javier said gruffly, coming up behind her.

  “You felt it?”

  Javier shook his head as he moved to survey the wreckage. “Credit me with a little perception. You can’t draw on this much power and hope it’ll suffice to end fights. You usually don’t get a second chance of casting that kind of spell.”

  “With amateurs, it usually suffices,” Selene said absentmindedly. She looked at the young man again. There was nothing special about him, no tremor of recognition racing up her arms. He was clearly no Fallen. But no witch—even high on angel essence, even with the most powerful artifacts of a House at her disposal—should have been able to do anything like this.

  Her gaze moved, at last, to the Fallen. A young girl, black-haired, olive-skinned, sharp-featured, looking for all the world as if she’d just come from Marseilles or Montpellier. In the brief interval, her innate magic had had time to start healing the worst of her broken bones, though neither her wings nor the two fingers she’d lost would ever regrow. There were rules and boundaries set on the Fallen: the bitter cage of their existence on Earth that they all learned to live in.

  “I heard from Madeleine,” Javier said. “She’s on her way with a couple helpers. Should be there in a couple minutes.”

  “Good,” Selene said. “Go and prepare the car, will you?” She looked again at the young man, at the foreign features of his face. Annamites were a familiar sight in the city: they were citizens of France, after all, albeit, like all colonial subjects, second-rate ones. Emmanuelle, Selene’s lover, manifested as African; but Emmanuelle was a Fallen who had never left Paris in her life. Whatever the young man was, he w
as not and had never been a Fallen.

  “As you wish,” Javier said. “I’ll send you the helpers to pick her up.”

  Selene shook her head. “Not just her. We’ll have two passengers this time, Javier.”

  She didn’t know what the young man was, but she most definitely intended to find out.

  TWO

  ESSENCE OF LOSS

  MADELEINE d’Aubin, alchemist of House Silverspires, had seen more than her share of prone bodies brought in at the dead of the night: she slept little these days, in any case, spending her nights in her laboratory, remembering the past and what it had cost her.

  She arrived in one of the largest rooms of the admissions wing of Hôtel-Dieu, the House’s hospital: row after row of metal beds, all unoccupied save two. Two doctors in white blouses hovered by the new arrivals’ side, and her assistant, Oris, was waiting for her, leaning against the wall and trying to appear casual; though his face was sallow in the dim light.

  She nodded at Oris and went to his side, pulling a chair so she could sit. Madeleine dropped her heavy shoulder bag onto the floor, and settled down to wait in silence.

  The room was dusty and the air dry, and her wasted lungs wouldn’t take it: a cough welled up. She desperately tried to quench the trickle that was going to become a cough, but it was never enough. The bout that followed racked her from head to toe—she was going to choke to death, never finding fresh, wholesome air again.

  At last she sat back, wrung out, enjoying the sweetness of uninterrupted breath. One of the doctors—Aragon, surely—was looking straight at her with disapproval. Madeleine waved a hand, letting him know it was nothing. She’d lied about it; told him it was too much breathing the Paris air, of the areas around the blackened flow of the Seine—he’d seen so many combatants with the same problems that he’d been all too ready to believe her. She was not proud, but she was safe. The last thing that’d occur to him, prim and proper as he was, would be to question her; to realize how wasted her lungs were, and the true cause of such extensive and fast-progressing damage.

  At length, the doctors peeled away from the beds, and one of them removed his mask. Madeleine found herself staring at Aragon’s sharp features. The Fallen doctor looked, like Oris, on the verge of exhaustion, his skin pale and beaded with sweat, his graying hair slick against his temples.

  “Shouldn’t you be asleep?” Madeleine asked, after the brief pleasantries were over. Unlike her, Aragon was paid for his work, not a dependent of the House, or bound in Selene’s service.

  Aragon shook his head. His colleague had left the room already, no doubt heading for the comfort of his own bed. “For something like this? You know she wouldn’t let me sleep.” He shook his head, amused. “In any case”—he spread his hands—“I don’t have much to say. Both healthy, neither carrying horrible contagious diseases or hair-trigger spells. You can collect your toll from them.” There was something—some hint of anger in his poised demeanor?—some feeling she couldn’t quite place. But she knew enough not to ask him; he would just shake his head with infuriating politeness and assure her that nothing was wrong.

  “I see,” Madeleine said. “Thank you.”

  Aragon made his way toward the door. He paused as he crossed the threshold, looking back at the bodies on the bed, as if he were about to say something more, but then shook his head and moved on.

  Now it was just her and Oris. Madeleine glanced at the beds: a girl shining with the residual light of newborn Fallen, and . . .

  “Who’s the young man?” she asked. He didn’t look Fallen, but why would Selene ask her to take care of a human? There was no entry toll for humans, or at least none that an alchemist could collect.

  “I don’t know,” Oris said. “But Lady Selene was quite clear that you had to take care of both of them.”

  “We,” Madeleine said, absentmindedly. “You’re an alchemist as well, you know.” She still held hopes that, one day, Oris was going to outgrow his maddening shyness. For God’s sake, the boy was Fallen, with enough magic to start his own House if he had to, yet he crept through life as if he didn’t quite belong anywhere.

  She moved to the Fallen first. At least she was used to dealing with those, though it had been many, many years since she saw one so young, just hours from her first manifestation, with the scars of her Fall still visible: the ribs that were slowly knitting themselves back together, the limbs that didn’t quite seem to be at the proper angles yet, the face with its high cheekbones and features that seemed to be subtly, slowly shifting even as she looked as it. Madeleine gently turned her over. The telltale signs were there: the large V-shaped scar spread across the back, where Aragon had cleanly cut off the mangled, irretrievable wings—the scar would fade a little in time, but never completely heal—the hint of ribs below the translucent skin; and the weight, much, much lighter than a human body of the same size, with fluted bones that would take much less effort to shatter.

  By the Fallen’s side was a small tray, in which someone had set out three vials of blood that shone with the characteristic rippling, soft light; and two severed fingers, obviously hacked away by someone who hadn’t the time for finesse.

  “Lady Selene wasn’t the first on the scene,” Oris said, apologetically. “I’ve taken the liberty of setting the blood aside; I don’t know what you want done with the fingers.”

  The same thing they always did with any detached body parts. Madeleine sighed, but made no comment. “Will you see to the young man, please?”

  She had no illusions; she’d be required to point out precisely what needed to be done to Oris in a moment or two, but at least it got him out of the way. Madeleine went back to her shoulder bag and withdrew her equipment: a handful of treated mirrors, a set of sterilized scalpels, a series of containers with primed preservation spells, and one last thing: a small black box, which, at a casual glance, seemed nothing more than a woman’s private vanity, a container for some small item of jewelry like a ring or a brooch. This last she hid under the mirrors, after throwing a glance to make sure Oris wasn’t looking at her.

  Time to perform her role, then.

  She went back to the Fallen’s side and set the mirrors, one by one, by the nose and mouth, waiting until the breath had misted them over—and the glass seemed to shine with reflected light. She closed them after she was done, muttering a brief incantation to seal them, ensuring that the magic would remain trapped in them without decaying. Then she trimmed, one by one, the long, clawlike nails on the fine hands, and similarly collected the trimmings in a box which she sealed. Any stray hairs she also took, and dealt with in the same fashion.

  Madeleine worked almost without thinking; she’d done it for so many years it had become routine. The younger the Fallen, the more potent their magic—the closer their link to the City they had Fallen from and the grace of God. And this Fallen was an infant, hours from her manifestation in the mortal world. House Silverspires, like all Houses, knew the value of preserving some of their earliest leavings. Not everything; that would have been tantamount to what the gangs did, taking Fallen bodies apart before they grew strong enough to retaliate—though there were also rumors of spells strong enough to negate Fallen magic, and places where they were kept in cages or in chains like sheep or dairy cows. Silverspires was not one of those places, thank God.

  Madeleine reached for the fingers next, and for her scalpels. She carefully scraped the flesh free from the delicate bones underneath. So far, she’d done what was expected of her: preserve magic where it could be preserved.

  And, as expected of her, she sealed the flesh in one of the containers set aside for this purpose.

  That only left the bones.

  Selene’s instructions on this had been clear. Bones should be burned, nothing of them preserved. Bones could be used, with a little chemical expertise, to manufacture angel essence; and angel essence was forbidden in the House. Not because i
t was more refined and powerful than preserving Fallen’s leavings; but because—as Madeleine knew all too well—it was highly addictive, and Selene wouldn’t support junkies in Silverspires.

  Bones should be burned. Always.

  Madeleine’s hands were shaking. She thought of the heady rush of power spreading from her lungs to her entire body, a sweet, sweet sensation that made her feel that she, too, was in the City, that she was the equal of a Fallen: what did it matter that the stuff was eating away at her lungs? She hadn’t come to Silverspires for a long life.

  Madeleine threw a glance at Oris. He was still busy cleaning the young man up for her inspection, and unlikely to look up from his task.

  Good.

  Casually, in one practiced movement, Madeleine removed one of the bones from the tray and slipped it in the small box. There was enough there to last her a few months, if she was careful, if the need didn’t come on her too often . . .

  She said aloud, keeping her voice even, “I’ll go and burn the bones in the incinerators.”

  Oris nodded. He trusted her. He shouldn’t have, but he always did.

  All the way to the incinerator and back, Madeleine kept expecting something to happen: some orderly jumping from one of the other deserted rooms, some nurse taking a break in the ruined cloisters, inquiring what she was doing. But nothing happened. There was only the silence of the night; and her own conscience.

  Ah well. She’d never had much of one in the first place. Silverspires wasn’t her refuge; it was the place where she would die, and she’d known as much since the night Morningstar carried her into the House.

  If she was caught, though . . . Selene wasn’t merciful. It’d be back on the streets of a city that had grown alien to her, with no easy means of sustenance—another kind of death by inches, far more unpleasant and painful than the one she’d chosen for herself.