The Gilded Wolves

by Roshani Chokshi

  At that moment, the ground pitched forward. Séverin went sprawling as the dirt rose to meet and sting his face. His skin smarted from the slash that Roux-Joubert had left near his temple. He lay there, straining against his ropes, his cheek flattened onto the slick gravel of the catacombs. He inhaled a shuddering breath. In the end, their assumptions had been wrong.

  The Babel Fragment was here … hidden deep beneath the catacombs.

  Roux-Joubert dropped the Ring of House Kore to the ground. The Ring sank through the dirt, and lightning crackled through the ground. Then, from his jacket, Roux-Joubert removed another Ring … this one darkened by time. A cruel six-pointed star. The missing Ring of the Fallen House. It joined the Ring of House Kore, and the skeletons drifted into the air.

  “It’s waking,” said Roux-Joubert.

  Séverin lifted his gaze. The skeletons flung themselves at the Tezcat door. He knew what they were doing. They were trying to break down the barrier. And once they did, they would be there for all the world to see … for just on the other side lay crowds of tourists; the entire Exposition Universelle would witness the rebirth of the Fallen House.

  Roux-Joubert wheezed, then forced a smile onto his face. “Let’s greet your friends, shall we?”

  27

  ENRIQUE

  Midnight

  Enrique watched as a skeleton hurled itself at his face.

  He turned to Zofia, who, along with Hypnos, crouched beside him in the starless dark of the catacombs terraces. He barely recognized his own voice as he combed his thoughts for a joke. “I was so confident about my outfit, but you know, looking at it … it lacks a sort of internal rhapsody, you know what I mean?”

  Zofia fixed him with those feral blue eyes. “No.”

  Beside them, Hypnos let out a strangled cry, clutching his ringed hand to his chest. The whites of his eyes gleamed.

  “They’re waking it up…”

  The Babel Fragment.

  All this time, Enrique had thought of it the way everyone else had … as a rock, perhaps, something manageable enough to be carried. But now he could feel the power of the Fragment coursing through the catacombs. It wasn’t a rock. Maybe it wasn’t even an object, but some other force restrained beneath the ground.

  Enrique watched, his eyes widening, as blue light spangled across the stage. More bones peeled off the walls, assembling into ragged skeletons. A harsh scent cut the air: minerals and rain, singed hair and metal. A tremor ran through the earth, the terraces quivered and dirt crumbled down the walls, falling in the space between his shirt and neck. Enrique recoiled, but he didn’t look away from the scene. Tristan, teary-eyed, stood with a knife pressed to Laila. But Séverin … Séverin had been caught. He didn’t know how. They had only just arrived in time to hear Roux-Joubert gloat. To make the world anew. To reset the human race. A hard lump formed in his throat. Enrique thought of the people he’d met over the years. The dark and the fair, the ones whose languages sounded spiced. The ones kept in makeshift villages, commanded to entertain. The ones who watched and jeered or tamped down their horror. The ones who reached for hands they could never hold openly in the street. All of them. Stitches in a tapestry that had no horizon. The Fallen House couldn’t erase them. It seemed impossible … but all Enrique had to do was look at Séverin’s folded-over form to remember. Great gashes in the back of his jacket. A dirtied feather clung to his shoe. Remnants of wings he had sprouted with nothing more than Roux-Joubert’s blood against his torn skin.

  Hypnos raised his hand slowly, staring at his false Ring.

  “I thought … I thought if anything my ring might be the missing piece to keep the Fragment from waking, but I was wrong—”

  Beneath them, Roux-Joubert let out a roar. He raised his hand, backhanding Séverin. Laila looked as if she wanted to scream, but instead, clamped her lips tighter.

  “What did you do to the Tezcat?” demanded Roux-Joubert. “The doctor cannot enter!”

  Thanks to Zofia’s adhesive and the silver cloth, the Tezcat door hadn’t broken. That was one small blessing. And if the Tezcat door couldn’t open, then whoever was on the other side couldn’t come in … All this time they thought it was just Roux-Joubert and the man with the blade-brim hat.

  They were wrong.

  The skeletons hurled themselves against the obsidian glass. A fine seam appeared, chunks of it breaking and falling onto the ground. The image of Enrique and Hypnos began to malfunction. They smiled, turned their heads, smiled again. It was nothing more than a mnemo recording splayed across the silver cloth. And yet, with every tear, a new scene took form, showing the Forging exhibition in real time. When they’d left, the exhibition had been empty. But now, they saw the dark shape of a gathered crowd, silhouetted by the dim light of the room.

  Waiting.

  Waiting to enter.

  Séverin screamed as the Phobus Helmet was slammed onto his head. Hypnos leaned forward, nearly giving away their location. Zofia grabbed his wrist.

  “Séverin said not to go down there. No matter what.”

  “That was before he got caught! He needs help!” said Hypnos. “If the Babel Fragment is awake, then we have to put it back to sleep … it cannot stay like that! The entirety of civilization is at stake, don’t you understand? Can’t you feel it?”

  “Think for a moment,” said Enrique, his heart racing. “Roux-Joubert wanted the Horus Eye for something. You said that it would have an effect on the Fragment, remember?”

  “But I don’t know what effect that is—”

  “You keep saying the Fragment is awakening,” said Zofia. “It is an object. It cannot be awake. Unless you are suggesting that it’s akin to a Forged creature. In which case, it has to have a somno to deactivate it.”

  Hypnos squeezed his eyes shut.

  “The Horus Eye,” he said slowly. “What if the Horus Eye puts the Fragment to sleep?”

  Enrique swallowed hard, turning his face from the scene of nightmares below them.

  “It would explain why he wouldn’t want us to have it,” said Enrique. “He wouldn’t want anyone to stop them.”

  “What about my Ring, then?” asked Hypnos. “If he already has two Rings, then why would he have wanted mine?”

  Enrique’s mouth twisted into a grimace. He thought of the way Roux-Joubert kept hurting Tristan … he thought of Séverin writhing there … the ugly words that left Roux-Joubert’s lips to remake the world.

  “Power and greed always have appetites,” he said. “Taking your Ring would be a step toward that.”

  Hypnos’s jaw clenched. “Then we must give him what he wants. Or, at least, an illusion of it.”

  Enrique nodded tightly. He looked through the hiding place to the Horus Eye lying on the wooden table, all but forgotten. Perhaps Roux-Joubert thought he’d won and that there was no need to protect it, for it wasn’t as though anyone else knew what it could do.

  Zofia’s eyes snapped to the floor. She reached for something in the dirt, a trail of pale powder that she pinched and rubbed between her fingers.

  “Curious…”

  Hypnos cradled the fake Ring to his chest. “We were supposed to take the Horus Eye to the Order. We can’t do that now. And we can’t leave them.”

  Enrique stared at the Ring, and then at the brooches and jewels set against the rich velvet of Hypnos’s jacket. A great deal of my inheritance, Hypnos had said. Which meant that it was House-marked.

  “If we can’t go to the Order, then we can bring the Order to us,” said Enrique slowly, a plan forming in his head. “Hypnos, give us those. I want to send a signal.”

  Hypnos’s eyes widened, a smile touching his lips. “The Sphinxes.”

  Enrique nodded. The Sphinx would be able to track anything House-marked, even if it led them down to the catacombs. Plus, their eyes could record images … and the Order would have no choice but to believe the Fallen House had once more risen. Hypnos tore off the brooches. A blue light, once marked onto the back of them, flared
red. He rolled them one by one onto the ground.

  Enrique glanced at the auditorium below. The ground rippled, dirt cascading in waves.

  “It’s nearly here,” said Roux-Joubert. He grabbed Séverin by the lapels. “Tell me how to open the Tezcat. What did you do?”

  Distantly, Enrique heard Séverin’s wheezing response, “You know, for someone who wishes to play god, you’re not very omniscient.”

  Enrique looked away, but he still heard it: a resounding crack as Roux-Joubert brought his fist to Séverin’s head.

  “Hurry, hurry—” murmured Enrique, rocking on his heels. He wished he had his rosary. He needed something to do with his hands. He couldn’t just watch.

  A ripping sound blared beside his ear, the hiss of a struck match. Below, Roux-Joubert paused. Enrique looked to his side. Zofia had struck a match and was now holding it against the ground.

  “Zofia, what in the—”

  “He told me he’d leave an emergency path,” said Zofia, pointing at the pale powder on the ground. “This substance is highly flammable.”

  Enrique felt the grin spreading on his face even before he realized he was smiling. Fire in this place would buy them time. But it was dangerous … they had to work quickly.

  “Then by all means, phoenix. Light it up.”

  Zofia lowered the match to the powder.

  On the stage, blue veins of light emerged on the floor. The shape of them: nautilus-like and vast, stretched across the very walls. Enrique couldn’t see what the others were doing, but he could feel the power of the Babel Fragment. It felt like something that could level kings and twist immortality. He opened his mouth, wanting to receive it like a sacrament.

  Hypnos lunged forward, snatching Zofia and Enrique by the backs, of their collars.

  “Move!” he shouted.

  He pulled them back, just as a strong burst of wind swept through the corridors. Enrique shivered as something nameless coiled through him. He felt it at the corner of his soul. A knowing there, like a creator’s thumbprint. It was too late to stop Roux-Joubert from stirring the Fragment from its rest.

  Because it was wide awake.

  28

  LAILA

  One minute after midnight

  Laila fell to the floor as the force of the Babel Fragment hit her. Her vision fuzzed. Blue streaks wrinkled the dirt stage, like ice cracking across a lake. Light lashed through the floor, a dark expanse opening in the middle of the stage, terrible and lightless, a chasm where stars went to be unmade.

  Laila touched the floor, spreading her fingers in the hard dirt, feeling it bite into her nail beds. She had never been able to read anything Forged. Always, it was as abrupt and stark as a light turned off in a room. But this time … this time she could do more than just read the Forged power licking through the room.

  She could understand it.

  The vastness of it seized her from her own body. She was everywhere, everything, in that moment. She was at the top of a mountain, snow caught in her hair. She was on the floor of a palace, the sweet-smelling resin stinging her nose. She was clutched in the hand of a priest, placed in the mouth of a god, forged—in the old sense of the word, existence hammered into being—in a furnace of time. Points of connection mushroomed across the plane of her mind. Her consciousness scattered. She was infinite—

  Laila gasped.

  She pulled back her hand from the dirt. Points of blue blinked and dimmed on her skin. What did it mean that it called to her this way … if this was a place where stars could be unmade … what about her? Would she unravel here?

  Who was she? What was she? Her mother called her beloved. Her father labeled her blasphemous. Paris named her L’Énigme.

  “Laila?” breathed Tristan.

  Laila.

  She was Laila. The girl who made herself. This moment—shining and distant—crashed around her. Her senses rushed back to her and with them, fear. She knew it was not desperate imagination that let her see the flash of matchlight far above in the terraces. Zofia. Enrique. They were here. Séverin was still swaying, kneeling. Blood dripping down his mouth from the cut along his cheek. She could feel Tristan’s hands on her shoulders, cold and quivering. She touched his wrist lightly, letting her hair fall over her face so as to conceal the gesture from Roux-Joubert.

  The earth was not all that she had read.

  When she’d kneeled on the ground beside an unconscious Séverin, Tristan had held a blade to her. And then he forced the hilt into her hand. Please. Make it stop. The wooden hilt had dug into her palms, splinters cutting into her skin, images lancing through her mind. In her visions, she saw Tristan forced under waves of nightmares that warped his doubts and made them seem real. They’d tortured him. And then they’d tortured him with the knowledge of what he had let happen. Laila had handed him back the knife, closing her fingers around his in the stolen seconds before Roux-Joubert had arrived with his associate.

  I know what they did. It’s not your fault.

  Tristan had wept against her. He didn’t even ask how she knew, he simply trusted, and the weight of it left her aching. She would not let anyone make Tristan cry. Never again.

  “Laila?” whispered Tristan.

  She shook her head, careful not to speak. The Night Bite was cold on her tongue. She only had one chance to use it, and she needed to time the moment just right. Laila glanced up, focusing on Séverin. Even now, even bruised, he looked like a king. His gaze stern. Unflinching. But not on her.

  Roux-Joubert screamed louder. “Get that Tezcat open!”

  The man with the blade-brim hat shrank. The obsidian chips of the Tezcat had fallen off, crashing and splintering on the ever-rolling floor. But the Tezcat did not budge. On the other side, the crowd of cloaked people remained unmoving.

  The rest of the Fallen House.

  Laila shuddered to look at them … so pale … so still.

  “Sir, there’s no way … there is something blocking it,” said Roux-Joubert’s associate, removing his hat and placing it on his chest. “I … Perhaps you might use your blood? As you did before? The strength of your ichor will surely be enough.”

  Roux-Joubert swallowed, his eyes wild. He touched his arm gingerly. “I do not like to keep the doctor waiting. But I have nothing left to give.”

  Tristan squeezed Laila’s arm. She could sense his panic, the quick inhale he drew into his lungs.

  “But you…” said Roux-Joubert, turning to Séverin. “What essence lies in the veins of the blood heir of House Vanth? I was told not to spill your blood … proof, perhaps, that the doctor sees some worth in you, but I find myself tempted.”

  Laila nudged Tristan. He hesitated, and then he drew her hair in a tight fist, yanking her head forward. Laila winced. But it was part of the plan.

  “Please,” she murmured. “A moment.”

  Roux-Joubert’s eyes widened. He smiled, and the waxen skin around his lips cracked from the effort.

  “Rather devoted whore you have, boy,” he said, sneering at Séverin. “It seems she wishes to say goodbye. Why not. I always planned to be benevolent.”

  Séverin went still. His gaze burned into hers. Laila let herself be led by Tristan. Then, lightly, she touched Tristan’s wrist. She needed Séverin to know that she had seen what truly happened. That he had to trust her.

  Séverin blinked slowly. In the gloaming of the catacombs, his lashes cast spiked shadows onto his face. When he raised his gaze to her, blue glinted in those violet depths.

  Tristan shoved her forward.

  Laila didn’t wait. She grabbed Séverin’s face, fingers threading in his hair as she lowered her lips to his, memories and promises tangling together.

  We can’t do this again.

  I know.

  His eyes flew open, pupils blown wide. His mouth opened beneath hers and she could taste him. Blood and cloves. Her hand pressed into the cut of his cheek, and he winced into her mouth.

  Kisses were not supposed to be like this. Kisses were
to be witnessed by stars, not held in the presence of stale death. But as the bones rose around them, Laila saw fractals of white. They looked like pale constellations, and she thought that, perhaps, for a kiss like this, even hell would put forth stars.

  29

  SÉVERIN

  Séverin should never have closed his eyes. He didn’t even register it happening because the whole moment seemed to occur outside the scope of his reality. Of course, she would kiss him as the world unhinged around them. Why not. Logic danced at the edges of his senses when Laila brought her lips to his.

  Séverin seized her lips, felt her yield, tasted her.

  She tasted impossible.

  Like candied moonlight.

  And then something hard rolled onto his tongue. Night Bite. He remembered, in a rush, how she had tucked it into her satchel right before they had left. Logic righted itself. Whatever horizon tipped deliriously in his mind now settled, restored.

  Of course, it wasn’t a real kiss.

  They had sworn off those.

  Roux-Joubert yanked her back. “My moment of mercy is done.”

  Séverin’s eyes narrowed. “Then come and kill me.”

  Roux-Joubert’s smile gleamed manic. “If you insist.”

  He slid out a knife. Séverin waited, tensing.

  Come closer.

  Roux-Joubert held out the knife.

  And then, far above in the hidden shelves of the terraces, Séverin heard a snick of a match. A crackle lit up the air. Sulfur stamping out the stench of death. A sudden heat warmed his back, illuminating Roux-Joubert’s face as flames sprang to life in the catacombs.

  Séverin pushed the Night Bite to the front of his teeth. Just as the other man turned, he spat.

  Ink splattered everywhere. Black billowed out from his mouth, fanning across Roux-Joubert. Séverin jolted back as the blade grazed his neck. Roux-Joubert stumbled. A cyclone of ink surrounded him. The man in the blade-brim hat rushed toward him. Séverin struggled against the bounds of his rope. He tried to shuffle on his knees, moving out of the way. His knee skidded on the wet gravel, pitching him forward. Light gleamed off the blade and Séverin’s breath gathered in a tight knot—