The House of Shattered Wings Read online

  There were others; from other countries, other magics that weren’t Fallen. But he would have known, or suspected, had he crossed another former Immortal from Annam—it was something in the way they moved, in the way they held themselves, the imprint of the Jade Emperor’s Court that persisted long after they’d been cast out. “You don’t have to worry about an invasion of us, if that’s the question.”

  Isabelle snorted. “Very funny.” She pushed the baskets aside. “We’re done, aren’t we?”

  “I guess?” They both had lessons with Emmanuelle—and not Choérine and the children, because they were too old. But their next lesson wasn’t for a few hours yet. “You can come back later and ask Laure about the ovens, if you want the bread.”

  Isabelle shrugged. “Maybe. Let’s explore the House.”

  “I—” The last thing he wanted was to get more of this feeling of ants on his skin. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”

  “Are you frightened?” Isabelle’s smile was mischievous, irresistible. “Come on.”

  And he followed, because he’d promised.

  The House was huge, and most of it was deserted, or ruined. Like most buildings in Paris, it was covered with soot, the blackened streaks characteristic of spell residue. Once, it must have sheltered thousands—a natural refuge, an island only connected to the rest of the city by seven bridges, but now it lay empty and dark, and the river that had once been its first line of defense had turned wild, become a power that snapped and killed anything that came near its shores.

  “Come on,” Isabelle said, pushing a small stone door in an unremarkable corridor; and Philippe, with a sigh, followed.

  To stop, awestruck, at what lay inside.

  It had been a church, once. You could still see the columns and the beginning of the vaulted ceiling, a first row of arches gracefully bending toward one another; and the remnants of wooden benches, burned where they had stood. The stained-glass windows were broken, or absent; but the gaze was still drawn, unerringly, down the nave and to the altar at the other end—or where the altar would have been, if it hadn’t been turned to rubble long ago, and the only things remaining were the wrecks of three statues—the central one was least damaged, and had probably been a Virgin Mary carrying the corpse of Jesus.

  No, not a church. A cathedral, like the pink-hued edifice the French had built in Saigon. It was . . . like a knife blade slowly drawn across his heart: he could almost have been back home, except that it was the wrong architecture, the wrong atmosphere, the wrong setting. He could still feel the fervor of its builders, of its worshippers, swirling in the air: a bare shadow of what it had once been, but so potent, so strong, so huge.

  “Notre-Dame,” Philippe whispered.

  Isabelle hadn’t moved; her eyes were on the sky, and on the smattering of stars visible against the dark background of the night. “It’s . . . like the City,” she whispered. “So much . . . intensity.”

  “Faith,” Philippe said, though her faith wasn’t his, and would never be his. “That’s what built this up.”

  The khi elements there were quiescent—almost too weak for him to pick them out, though. . . .

  There was—a flash of something familiar: the magical equivalent of the smell of jasmine rice, a touch of something on the nape of his neck that brought him, instantly, back to the banks of the Red River, staring at the swollen mass of the river at monsoon time—breathing in the wet smell of rain and churned mud. Had some other Annamite been there?

  No, it was impossible. Merely nostalgia—he was going mad, cooped up inside this House, inside this city, that was all. He needed a way out, before he lost himself.

  Isabelle slowly moved, picking her way through the ruins of the benches. Throughout, her gaze remained staring upward. Was she praying; did she even remember how to pray—or perhaps it was like breathing, something that took hold of you when you had no other choice, when you were lost and cut off from your god?

  She stopped long before the altar, in the raised space before it, which, like the rest, was covered in debris: the black-and-white lozenge tiles riven from end to end until their pattern had altogether gone. There was a chair left there; a stone one, battered and cracked, that nevertheless exuded a quiet power, something different from the remnants of fervor Philippe could taste in the air.

  “He sat there,” Isabelle said, in the silence, her voice echoing under the broken vault. “Morningstar.”

  “Emmanuelle told you this?”

  “I don’t need to be told. Can’t you feel it?”

  And he could; there was no point denying it. Not when the urge to abase himself was so strong he barely dared to move; afraid that anything he did would be the beginning of a bow.

  “The oldest of us,” Isabelle said. Hesitantly she reached out, touched the chair with her three-fingered hand; and withdrew as if burned. “He must have known . . .”

  “The answers to your questions?” Philippe shook his head. “He would have been wise, yes, versed in everything. But if he had no memories of before his Fall . . .”

  “You’re not Fallen,” Isabelle said, turning back to him. “How come you know all this?”

  “I’ve traveled. And kept my ears open.” He crept closer to the chair. It was like approaching an ancestral altar, the air thick with reverence and the coiled, deep power of old age; and the itching, of course, getting worse and worse, as if the ants had suddenly decided to become stinging wasps. “Oldest and most powerful among you, wasn’t he?”

  “When he was there,” Isabelle said. “Now he’s dead, for all they know.”

  Or merely gone; how to tell, without a body, without any messages? Not that it mattered much to him. Morningstar probably wouldn’t have much to say to him—though it was hard to ignore the voice in his mind that whispered that age should be respected, that the oldest Fallen in existence had to be wise, had to be knowledgeable, as his grandparents had once been—in a time so far away that even the bamboo bindings of its books had rotted through.

  There was something . . . He paused before the throne, though every instinct he had was telling him to step back, to let the magic cool down to levels he could bear. But within the pinpricks of pain, there was . . . a note that shouldn’t have been there, a wrong tone in a poem, a slip of the paintbrush in a painstakingly calligraphied text.

  “Philippe?”

  He shook his head. “Not now, Isabelle.” The wrongness was coming from the throne, but not close to him. His fingers, fumbling, lingered along the delicate carvings, descended to the chair itself, the place Morningstar had been (and the power on his skin was worse, like a winter wind, like a crucible where swords were born)—probed into niches and hollows, but it wasn’t that, either. Where—?

  It was below the throne, in the slight hollow between the four squat feet that carried it—once glued to it, but now it came easily undone under his touch. It was all wrong, anger and bitterness emanating from it like the howls of the souls in the Hell of Hunger.

  “It hurts.” Isabelle’s voice was a thin thread of sound.

  “It’s meant to hurt,” Philippe said, recovering his voice from where it seemed to have fled. In his hand, it looked like a heavy object wrapped in paper; carefully, he spread the paper flat on the ground, tipping out its contents. The paper was thin parchment, translucent and covered with spiky black handwriting; and the same feeling of darkness, of hatred, arose from it. The language wasn’t French, or Viet, or anything he could read.

  “All you hold dear will be shattered; all that you built will fall into dust; all that you gathered will be borne away by the storm. . . .” Isabelle’s voice was a whisper, but there was an echo, deep within: a hint of someone else speaking the words and imbuing them with the weight of cold iron.

  “You understand it? How?”

  “I don’t know,” Isabelle said, carefully. She laid her hand on the p
aper, following the curve of the words on the page. “I think it’s a Fallen thing. The language of the City, maybe . . .”

  “I thought that was meant to be love,” Philippe said, attempting to summon some remnant of sarcasm, though it was hard, with the cloud of anger and hatred hanging thick around them.

  “The love that drowned the Earth underwater and caused Noah to build the ark?” Isabelle asked, her voice flat. “That sent us tumbling down to Earth?”

  “I don’t have answers,” Philippe said dryly. “A priest would probably tell you about atonement and forgiveness, but that’s your religion, not mine.” Not quite true: the Buddha also preached forgiveness, but Philippe couldn’t forgive. Not those who had torn him from Annam.

  “I don’t even know what your religion is,” Isabelle pointed out, carefully folding the paper. Philippe searched her face, but there was no hint of reproach or sarcasm, merely a statement of fact. Her calm was uncanny: how could she not feel the magic roiling in the air, the pressure against their lungs, the irrepressible urge to pick a weapon and—? No. He was stronger than that.

  “What was inside?” Isabelle asked.

  It was a black stone disk, polished until he could see his distorted reflection in it; and it shimmered with the same power that was all around them. “Angel breath,” he said. “Trapped in a stone mirror.” And before he could think, he had reached out and touched the cold, shining surface—Isabelle cried out a warning, and then everything went dark.

  He was in the House, but not in its ruins. Rich paintings and tapestries hung in the corridors, and the cathedral was whole, the graceful Gothic ribs arching into the vault; majestic and overwhelming, as it had always meant to be. Someone sat in the throne: a Fallen with pale blond hair that seemed to catch all the light streaming through the stained-glass windows. Unlike all the Fallen Philippe had seen before, this one had wings—not his real ones, but a metal armature that supported sharp, golden feathers, spreading out behind him like a headdress. Across his lap was a double-handed sword, his hand loosely wrapped around his handle; the sense of coiled power was almost unbearable, a pressure to abase himself, to bow down to age and power. . . .

  Morningstar. Lucifer. The Light Bringer, the Shining One, the First Fallen.

  By his side were other Fallen, other humans. He caught a glimpse of Lady Selene, though her face was smoother, more childish than the one she’d shown to him. Younger, he thought; but the words seemed very far away, moving as if through tar through his mind. And other, younger faces: Emmanuelle the archivist; Aragon—who alone of everyone appeared unchanged, prim and unsmiling—two human warlocks holding breath-charged mirrors and watches; and a stern older woman wearing the mortar-and-pestle insignia of the alchemists, whose bag bulged with bottles of elixirs and boxes of charged artifacts.

  And then Morningstar’s gaze, which had been trained on one of the stained-glass windows, turned; and fell on him.

  The pale eyes transfixed him like a thrown spear—it wasn’t so much the power contained within, as the rising interest; the slow focusing of a monstrous magic exclusively on him; on who he was; on who he could become, given enough time in which to utterly reshape him; and who wouldn’t want to be reshaped by Morningstar, to be forged into one of his beloved weapons?

  “Come here,” Morningstar said; and, like a puppet propelled by his maker, he walked up the stairs and stood in the shadow of the throne, shivering as the gaze unraveled him, picked apart his body until not even the bones remained. . . .

  “Philippe!”

  He was back in the ruined cathedral, and Isabelle was shaking him. His hand had left the mirror; hung, limp, bloodless, by his side.

  “Philippe!”

  He breathed in air—burning, painful air, but he had never been so glad for the irritation of the House on his skin. Everything seemed lighter, limned in starlight; and the oppressive anger and hatred seemed to have gone, as if the night wind had blown it away. What—what happened?

  “Philippe?” Isabelle asked.

  “I’m fine,” he said, the lie small and unconvincing to him. He could still feel the weight of Morningstar’s gaze; could still feel the magic turning, slowly focusing on him: the gaze of a gigantic cobra, annihilating his will, turning his own desires into dust.

  And something else, too, something darker, quieter—that had lain biding its time away from the light, and that now stretched and turned, sniffing the air like a predator searching for prey . . .

  A summoning. Of what?

  “I don’t know what happened. But it’s gone now. There is nothing to worry about.”

  His gaze, roaming, found the stone mirror: the luster had gone from it, leaving only a bleak darkness. “It’s gone now,” he repeated; but he knew that, whatever had been contained within the mirror, it was within him now; and that whatever had been summoned with its magic was outside—within the House.

  * * *

  IT was late at night, and Madeleine couldn’t sleep.

  By no means unusual. Nights like these, with the lambent starlight hanging over the House, brought back memories—of how she’d first come to it; of Elphon’s death, and his shimmering blood on her hands as she crawled away from the House of Hawthorn; as she prayed so very hard to a God she no longer believed benevolent to spare her, to let her go just a bit farther, to reach safety before Asmodeus’s thugs found her.

  On nights like these she took angel essence; breathed it in, and let the rush of power sweep everything from her mind; let herself believe that she was safe, that nothing like Asmodeus’s coup would ever take place in Silverspires; that even if it did, she would have the power to protect herself, to protect Oris. That what had happened in Hawthorn would never happen to her again.

  It was a good lie, while it lasted.

  An insistent knocking at the door of her laboratory drew her from her trance. Slowly, carefully, she rose, fighting a feeling of weightlessness that promised she only had to wish to take flight; the rush of power slowly settling into her limbs. In that moment, she was the equal of any Fallen, had she wished to cast spells—but of course that wasn’t why she took angel essence. It never had been.

  “What is it?”

  She’d expected many things, chief among them either Selene or Isabelle; but the one on her doorstep, his face pale with fear, was her assistant, Oris.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “There’s . . . there’s something in the House,” Oris said. “It’s after me.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Madeleine said, but then she took a closer look at him. His hands were shaking; and if she focused the magic within her she could see through his skin, could feel the panicked rhythm of his heart. Whatever he’d seen had badly frightened him. “Fine. Calm down. Tell me about it.”

  “It’s . . . I don’t know. It’s dark and angry and if I turn my head to look at it, it’s gone. But it’s following me. It’s . . .” He stopped then. “You think I’m lying.” His voice was flat.

  “No,” Madeleine said. “But Silverspires has strong protections, so unless someone within the House is working magic on you, I can’t see why . . .”

  Oris drew himself to his full height. “I don’t have enemies in the House.”

  “I didn’t think you had.” And even if that had been the case, personal vendettas were outlawed by order of Selene. “Where did you see it?”

  “First? In my rooms,” Oris said. “But it has been moving around—”

  “Then let’s start with your rooms,” Madeleine said, gently.

  The House at night was different; expectant, as if poised on the edge of something that Madeleine could not name. It wasn’t the first time she’d been out at night—a few weeks ago she’d gone to Hôtel-Dieu to examine Philippe and Isabelle—but surely things had been different?

  Or perhaps she was just overreacting. Oris was frightened, yes, but that di
dn’t mean his fear was of something real.

  His room was on the side of a cloister courtyard, in an architectural complex that must have dated back to the Middle Ages. The ceiling of the room was low and skewed, and wooden beams crossed the whitewashed walls—each of the two floors was actually larger than the previous one, creating an unnerving impression, from outside, that the entire building was going to collapse. Climbing the narrow stairs, Madeleine gazed left and right; but even with the essence in her, she couldn’t see or feel anything out of place. A few wards were set, here and there, and they were a little singed, but that happened, especially so close to the Seine and its magical outbursts.

  Inside, the room seemed almost claustrophobic, overrun with bookshelves. On a low table was a book held open by means of another, heavier one; and a small book stand that held a sheet of paper covered with a spiky handwriting: presumably what Oris had been working on. The bedsheets were rumpled, and a simple icon of the Virgin Mary lay on the bedside table.

  “Still at your research?” Madeleine asked.

  Oris forced a smile. “Of course. I found a rather interesting passage, which argued that the proper translation of ‘adelphos’ was ‘brothers,’ not ‘cousins.’. . .” Bible studies were Oris’s hobby: he begged Father Javier for lessons, and had borrowed an astonishing number of religious books from the library. Together with Emmanuelle, he was one of the few Fallen in the House who was quite confident in his faith. “We’re not here to talk about books, Madeleine—”

  Madeleine nodded, keeping a wary eye on the room. “I know. But I see nothing.” The room was bathed in gentle magic residue, the inevitable traces of a Fallen; and only in a few places could she feel the tug of a deeper, sharper fear. “I can’t see anything,” she said.

  “It was here.” Oris pointed to the book stand. “I was working on a translation, and all of a sudden it went dark, and—” He swallowed, and fell silent.

  Madeleine moved, touched the paper on the book stand. It was warm, but there was nothing wrong with it, other than that the paper seemed curiously brittle.