The House of Binding Thorns Page 4

  “Don’t look so glum,” Elphon said. “Clothilde and I have one, too.”

  “And the others?” Madeleine said.

  Elphon grimaced. “No time. This was hastily put together.”

  But not so hastily put together they’d forgotten about her. Madeleine bit back a curse, and continued walking, trying to ignore the growing pressure of the link to the House within her. At least it took her mind off the angel essence craving.

  Ahead, Clothilde had stopped. They’d reached the edge of the gardens: the grass trailed off until it hit a low, cracked wall, and the stairs that went down to the river.

  Someone was waiting for them there, by the low wall: an Annamite dressed in robes embroidered with the maws of monstrous animals, and a squared hat with two wings projecting out over each shoulder. She stood still and stiff, as if at attention. She was accompanied by attendants carrying three parasols and large red fans at the end of sticks. When she rose, they moved to hold the parasols over her. “My name is Thanh Phan. I am the grand chancellor of the Van Minh Palace, and a member of the Secret Institute,” she said, bowing. Her face was wrinkled and brown, an old woman’s, except for a patch of skin at her temple which was a pebbly gray, an odd, familiar color that Madeleine couldn’t quite place.

  And then she moved, slightly, and something shifted. Her left arm became bulkier and larger, and her hand became a pincer, and Madeleine realized that the gray was that of a crab’s shell.

  A very, very large crab, the kind that would cut you in half, given a chance. Her hand, instinctively, sought Elphon’s. But he had stepped away from her, was looking at the woman with bright, curious eyes.

  “Thanh Phan,” Clothilde said, speculatively.

  The woman looked at her, her face impassive. So much like Philippe, the Annamite who had been conscripted into Silverspires at one point. And, because she’d known Philippe, Madeleine could read the contempt in her eyes. “It will do,” the woman said.

  Clothilde raised an eyebrow. “My name is Clothilde Desclozeaux. This is Elphon, and the woman at the back is Madeleine d’Aubin.”

  “Come with me,” Thanh Phan said.

  As they walked toward her, she bent toward Madeleine and said, “Madeleine d’Aubin. The princess has not forgotten you.”

  Exactly the sort of reminder Madeleine could have done without. She forced herself to nod, and fortunately Thanh Phan appeared satisfied with this, and didn’t say anything further.

  Madeleine had expected the limestone steps leading down to the quay. What she hadn’t expected was that they didn’t stop when they reached the river. They went on, after a brief landing on the cobblestones, becoming slick and worn and covered with algae, the stones pitted in multiple places. The light, too, changed, as they descended, from the pale one of a winter sun to something deeper and bluer, shadows lengthening under their feet, and a rising smell of brine, of incense and mold, that made Madeleine’s empty stomach turn.

  At the bottom were the same steps she remembered from her time with Isabelle: thousands of dark, dull fish scales that crunched underfoot. Everything wavered and bent out of shape at odd intervals, as if the entire world were washed by a veil of rain: they were underwater, but it didn’t seem to make any difference; they breathed as easily as if they had been back on the surface. The air was cool and cold, but something had changed. She remembered a serenity, a quietness that had set her teeth on edge, something that had sought to weave its way into her thoughts and into her dreams, soothing every trace of fear and every twinge of pain, like a hand smoothing the folds of a cloth. Now everything felt unbearably sharp, like shards of glass rubbing against her skin; the link to the House a burning flame in her mind.

  God, how she hated the House.

  An offer of marriage. My marriage. Asmodeus had lost his longtime lover, Samariel, a few months ago, but even then he’d hardly been affectionate. It was, to be sure, a diplomatic alliance, but to imagine him with an Annamite, with a dragon official . . . Her mind blanked out at the possibility. There was something else going on, some power play he’d be interested in, of course.

  “You can’t possibly believe they will accept his offer,” she said to Elphon.

  The Fallen she’d known, in the Hawthorn that was now dead, would have smiled. This one didn’t even change expressions. “Later,” he said.

  They walked through hills dotted with paddies, where men and women in conical hats crouched. Was it truly rice they were harvesting, here? Madeleine threw a glance backward, and saw that they were now flanked by people in lacquered armor. “Elphon.”

  “I saw.” He didn’t appear particularly nervous. But Thanh Phan heard her. “It’s for your own safety. Have no fear: we have no plans to anger Hawthorn today.” She sounded as though all she really needed was an excuse to do so, but no one batted an eyelid.

  The city in the heart of the dragon kingdom was the same as Madeleine remembered it: huge, its gates slowly creaking open to let them through, its streets filled by a flow of people who stopped to watch their passage—men and women with fish scales, with lobsters’ pincers and crabs’ stalked eyes; carrying coral, and algae; and necklaces of pearls, all tinged with the oily shimmer that lay on the waters of the Seine, all corrupted and polluted by the fallout from the war.

  What could Asmodeus want with dragons? There were no riches here. Power, perhaps? But they would never relinquish that to him. Some artifact, something of little meaning to them, but that Asmodeus would crave to the point of striking such a serious alliance? She couldn’t imagine anything that would be worth it for him.

  Ahead of them loomed a gate with three arches, topped by a pavilion with a tiled roof; and behind, two rows of ancient statues framing a cobbled street that led to the palace itself: everything from elephants to horses to retainers, silently watching them as they drew forward.

  Thanh Phan led them through, into a palace that had changed little from what Madeleine remembered: a maze of low buildings and vast courtyards, of lacquered pillars and glazed orange roofs, curving gracefully upward as if reaching toward the surface. Thanh Phan stopped, at last, in a courtyard where an octagonal pavilion overlooked a basin filled, not with water, but with a beautiful tracing of pebbles in shades of gray and blue, with the sharp pink of lotus flowers breaking its monotony.

  “These will be your apartments,” she said, gesturing to the buildings opening onto the courtyard. “We have provided refreshments, and everything else you might expect. Should you need anything, ask.” Again, she didn’t sound happy. “You have an appointment with Princess Ngoc Bich, may she live ten thousand years, at the noon hour. I will come and collect you.”

  Clothilde’s face didn’t move. She bowed, deeply and elegantly, moving with a smoothness more reminiscent of Fallen than mortals. “There was a previous envoy to this court.” And, when Thanh Phan didn’t reply: “Ghislaine Le Guell.”

  The ambassador Asmodeus had sent to ease the way. What was wrong? Nothing had been mentioned within Madeleine’s hearing.

  Thanh Phan inclined her head. “Yes,” she said.

  “We would like to see her.”

  “She isn’t my responsibility.” Thanh Phan’s face was serene, but Madeleine knew that expression: it wouldn’t budge, and it wouldn’t give anything it didn’t have to. “Should you want to see her, I assume you have ways and means of getting in touch with her. With angel magic?” She let the words trail away in the silence. “If that is all, I will be back shortly before the noon hour.”

  After they’d left, Clothilde moved toward the largest of the buildings, and peered between two lacquered pillars. “That one has an antechamber, of sorts.”

  It was a room with a table and four high-backed wooden chairs. At the end, a door led to a bedroom. The bed was high, the bedroom small, almost an alcove, and it all looked almost too small to accommodate a normal person. The other buildings were much on the sa
me plan, except with slightly different furniture that looked drawn from other time periods, more roughly hewn, and not inlaid with mother-of-pearl.

  The bodyguards started unpacking the contents of the luggage. Clothilde had claimed the largest room for herself, and was now spreading papers on the antechamber’s table, dislodging the basket of food that had been its centerpiece.

  When Madeleine and Elphon came in, she was writing in the margins, her face creased in thought.

  “Something is worrying you,” Elphon said.

  Clothilde made a face, but didn’t answer. She finished annotating the current paper and turned it over.

  “The audience with the princess?”

  Madeleine pulled one of the chairs, wincing at the weight. They were engraved with an intricate network of sea creatures, everything from monstrous fish to long, snakelike creatures with manes and fangs, gobbling some kind of unidentifiable round fruit. The air was still tinged with that faint blue shadow. They could breathe, and move normally, but it was still hard to forget they were underwater.

  Clothilde didn’t answer Elphon. She got through the last of the papers, and put down her pen. “I can deal with the princess. No, the thing on my mind is that we haven’t seen or heard from Ghislaine.”

  “We’ve barely arrived. Give her time, surely?”

  “You mistake me.” Clothilde pulled the same mirror infused with angel magic she’d shown Madeleine and stared at it, but made no move to inhale its contents. “No one has seen or heard from her in a while. It was in the mission brief.” She made a graceful gesture with her hands, an unsettling copy of the one Asmodeus had made in Madeleine’s room. A sketch of a face formed in the air: a woman of indeterminate age, with a striking combination of dark skin and pale, almost white blond hair. “As you can see, Ghislaine is quite distinctive. Hard to miss.” She moved her hand. The sketch blurred, became a finely detailed tattoo of a dragonfly perched on a water lily. “And she has this above her left wrist. If you should see her . . .”

  “Ghislaine is hard to forget,” Elphon said, gravely.

  Madeleine spoke up. It was almost reflex. “But it will also be hard for her to hide.”

  “Indeed,” Clothilde said. “Unfortunately.” She righted the papers until they formed a neat pile once more. “Anyway. Officially, we’re here to discuss final terms. Unofficially, Lord Asmodeus is worried. Something has gone wrong.”

  Official envoys disappearing was . . . not good. Not good at all. What could have happened to Ghislaine? Had she overreached? And if so, how?

  They would receive no help. They were down here with just four bodyguards, in the middle of whatever it was that had twisted out of control. Madeleine bit back a curse. No wonder her link to the House was going crazy. It wasn’t quite immediate mortal danger, but it was the next best thing.

  “Ghislaine will turn up,” Elphon said. His voice lacked confidence; and by Clothilde’s grimace, she didn’t believe that, either.

  FOUR

  The Shadow of Heaven

  PHILIPPE’S last patient of the day was Grandmother Khanh, a strong-willed old woman whose flat accommodated five different relatives and their children. All too commonplace, sadly: the Annamite community in la Goutte d’Or was a slum among slums, poor and destitute, surviving on scraps outside the House system.

  Grandmother Khanh had caught what looked like a cold, but it was in fact pneumonia—when Philippe listened to the lungs, the noise of her breath was fast and nasty, and she kept shivering and shaking. Normally, there was nothing much that could be done for her. In the days after the Great Houses War—the cataclysm that had devastated Paris, reducing monuments to blackened rubble, turning the Seine dark with the dangerous residues of spells, and leaving booby traps that still hadn’t vanished, sixty years later—drugs were in short supply, monopolized by the Houses for their own.

  However . . . Philippe sent, gently, carefully, a burst of khi fire into Grandmother Khanh’s lungs, drawing on the swirling khi currents outside the flat, the remnants of fiery war spells. He waited until it had gone deep within her, destroying the bacteria on its way in. “There. You should eat ginger,” he said, rising.

  Grandmother Khanh snorted. “That’s never made much of a difference.”

  “Give it a try,” Philippe said. He’d been careful not to use too much fire: she would be coughing and spitting up blood for a few days, before it all went away, leaving her wrung out and weak. As a recovery, it was painful, and just this side of plausible.

  He hated it. Hated the lies and the evasion, and the pretense he had no magic. But he had to: in an environment where magic was the province of the Houses, the risks were just too high. He would get swept up again, be imprisoned again by one of the Houses seeking to use him as a weapon. And he would die before he allowed this to happen again.

  Grandmother Khanh’s daughter was waiting for him at the door: handed him, in silence, a tied-up cloth filled with white rice, the payment they’d painfully put together. “Thank you,” Philippe said.

  “It’s not enough.” Her voice was low, angry.

  Philippe shrugged. “Plenty.” He was a former Immortal, one who had risen to Heaven in Annam by starving himself to the knife’s edge between life and death. He needed food, but not as much as they did. “Don’t worry. I’ll come by in a few days to check in on her.”

  Outside, it was late: not just past daylight, but late enough that the evening queues of people headed to the Houses to offer their services had trickled down. On the pavement, a few people wrapped up against the cold—or not, depending on what they had scavenged—watched him, warily.

  He did what he could, practicing medicine on the strength of his knowledge (and a little magic, when he could afford it). It kept him alive. It kept him busy—but did not get him closer to his goal, to the accomplishment of the promise he’d made, back in the ruins of House Silverspires.

  Fare you well, Isabelle. Wherever you are. I hope we meet again.

  He had pledged to turn back time. To bring back Isabelle—the Fallen who had died because of him, because he’d taken too long to decide to help her, and found only a lifeless corpse with two holes in the chest, eyes wide-open in a bloodless, dusky face and staring at the ruined ceiling of the cathedral.

  Death was not always the end, in a city where magic ruled.

  There was a way. A spell, a ritual. He knew. He had seen it work, back in House Silverspires, bringing a dead body back to life. But no one would talk to him; or, if someone was willing, the price was too high.

  It had been months, and he was still where he had started: being a doctor to the poor, the Houseless, the desperate, and trying to convince himself, every evening, that it was all worth it, that he was merely biding his time until he could find a clue; something, anything, that would get him closer to understanding what had happened, in the House.

  With a sigh, he finally turned away, to walk back to his office and the cold comfort of his flat.

  His road took him between the railways: once the pride of Paris, the two bundles of rails that led to Gare de l’Est and Gare du Nord were now rusted and fragmented, filled with broken trains that remained where they had fallen apart; a mined junkyard where children scavenged, running just fast enough to keep ahead of the booby traps left by the war. Not his favorite place: it was always deserted, always dark, and there was something sinister about the engines strewn over the tracks, glowing with a faint red light, as if they were merely waiting for a puppeteer’s touch to set them alive again.

  He turned right, into rue de Jessaint, a raised street that overlooked the tracks just ahead of Gare du Nord. He stopped, because someone was there.

  There had been a streetlight, once. Now there was only a spike, a graceful column of metal broken off halfway in its rise toward Heaven. And a silhouette, highlighted in the perpetual twilight of nights in Paris, leaning with arms crossed agai
nst it—rising, as he walked closer.

  The khi elements in la Goutte d’Or were chaotic and unformed, awash with the remnants of uncleaned spells; but nevertheless, Philippe called fire, held it in his hand, ready to do battle. “I’m armed,” he said, quietly.

  “Philippe.” Something flickered on: a sphere of light high above the broken pillar, as if the lamp were back in its place, though its radiance didn’t illuminate more than a narrow circle around him, a perfect shape at the edges of which light abruptly gave way to the darkness of nightmares.

  And, in that light, he saw that it was Isabelle.

  She looked just as she had when she’d died, with a faint light streaming from her, limning everything like fine porcelain held up to sunlight; not washing out the olive tones of her skin, but rather sharpening them, elevating them until she seemed a model in a painting, more real and more sharply defined than the original. She wore the white shirt she’d died in: two holes in the chest, with dried blood encrusted into the cotton, but no wounds that he could see, merely the radiant smoothness of her skin.

  “You’re dead,” he said.

  Isabelle smiled, and it was the carefree, innocent expression she’d had before the House corrupted her. “Of course. That doesn’t change. Be careful, Philippe.”

  “Of what?”

  “Darkness.”

  He had darkness with him, within him, always: the remnants of unleashing a curse on House Silverspires, wormed into the heart of his being like rot among the roots of a tree. “I know about darkness.”

  Isabelle shook her head. “No, you don’t.” Her image wavered and bent, as if in a great wind, and by her side was the second of the two people who kept haunting him, the visions and hallucinations that only he could see.

  Lucifer Morningstar.

  He wore the metal wings that had been his prerogative and distinguishing sign: the wings Isabelle had taken from him, and which Philippe had buried with her corpse, as sharp and as cutting as living blades, weapons of war rather than organs of flight. His hair was so fair it was almost white, his eyes the blazing, unbearable light blue of a dry-season sky at midday, his gaze a fire that had once made Philippe want to abase himself until his forehead touched the ground. “Beware, Philippe. You still know nothing about power.” His voice was mildly amused, as if by the antics of a child.