Our Father…
Silence, outside. A dying man, begging for mercy, and a gurgling, choking sound that was all too obvious. Emmanuelle’s hands tightened on her torn petticoats. Her leg spasmed across the tiled floor, sending a small pile of broken wood from the shutters clattering to the ground.
No no no.
“Should we look for survivors?” A sharp, no-nonsense female voice.
Another silence. Emmanuelle held her breath, willing her limbs still.
“There are none.”
“They’re just buried under debris.”
“Not if they were inside. They’ll have died. Shock wave shaking their brains inside the head cavity. Or flung against walls. Take your pick.”
“I thought I heard a noise.”
Please please please.
Emmanuelle gave up on subtlety, and threw herself to the ground, drawing her petticoats over her like a shroud.
Footsteps: a vague shadow, blurred through the cotton cloth.
Please please let them pass me by. Let them turn away.
“You’re right. It’s just corpses.” A sigh of disgust. “Let’s go before they come back.”
Silence, again. Emmanuelle didn’t dare move, not until she was sure they’d well and truly gone. It was almost restful, lying on the cool floor.
Her mind wandered, the prayer no longer first and foremost in her thoughts. How had she come there? Morningstar. She’d come with Morningstar, at Selene’s behest. They’d gone to their rooms, and then—
And then there was nothing. Time skipped and blurred. Morningstar at her door, cocking his head the way he did when he was about to ask an embarrassing question. He had a burning sword in his hands, and Darrias, House Hawthorn’s envoy, was behind him.
“Emmanuelle, what’s wrong?”
There was a sound in the background, a hiss that gradually grew, as if hundreds of strips of cloth were fluttering in the wind at the same time—except it made Emmanuelle’s heart freeze, and fear tighten around her guts. She had to run, she needed to run now.
No.
None of that was possible. It wasn’t real. The sword—the two-handed monstrosity that had been Morningstar’s weapon of predilection—had been lost for twenty years. And the face of Darrias, standing behind Morningstar, kept changing, becoming that of a Harrier menial, that of a Hawthorn dragon, that of the Houseless boy with the broken arm Emmanuelle had helped home a week ago, when she’d met him on her usual runs through the city.
Her mind kept shying away from the immediate past—scrabbling, trying to fill the gap with random, incoherent images. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath. It didn’t really make anything better. The images went away, but the sound didn’t—merging with that of her madly beating heart, that she couldn’t calm no matter how she tried.
Calm down. Calm down.
She could do this.
At length she pulled herself up once again. The sound of battle was distant again, and the rumbles of collapsing buildings had stopped. Safety. She had to get to safety—wherever that was. Out of the House, if she could; though she couldn’t see the great wrought-iron gates she’d entered through, and if it had reached the stage of pitched battles in the House the gates would be one of the worst places to be.
She clung, for a moment, to the threshold of the ruined building, staring at the shape of devastation all around her. The landscape bent and blurred—nightmarish shapes, created by the light that was burning her up.
What had happened, and how was she going to deal with any of the fallout?
TWO
Sweeping the Tombs
Philippe was at Grandmother Olympe’s, with the other aunts and the children. It was almost the Mid-Autumn festival, and he’d been roped into helping Colette build a lantern. Aunt Ha’s daughter was three, and didn’t have the fine motor control necessary to put it together without crushing the delicate wooden ribs. He’d cheated, and used a hint of khi fire and khi water to create an am duong pattern in the air. Each teardrop half of the circular sign hung wreathed in colored light, and it was slowly rotating, much to Colette’s entrancement.
He’d wanted to use the khi elements to put the lantern together, too, but Grandmother Olympe had put her foot down, darkly muttering something about proper striving. Slowly, carefully, he threaded the silk paper over the last of the ribs. He’d chosen the classic five-star shape, but hadn’t realized how complicated it was. But he wasn’t about to lose face in front of Grandmother Olympe—who’d make some low-voiced and pointed comments about Immortals not knowing everything, hoping to draw him into an argument about their respective ages. She’d never quite forgiven him for continuing to call her “Grandmother” when he was, in fact, much older than her; over a thousand years old and ageless, by virtue of the ascension that had brought him into the court of the Jade Emperor. She’d chosen to ignore that he’d later been thrown out of it—though at least she wasn’t worshipping him. He had a temple in those days, a small room in a basement with an altar and people leaving offerings. “Awkward” didn’t even begin to cover how he felt about it.
His fingers slipped, sending a small wooden dowel clattering to the floor, and he picked it up with hands that seemed to be on fire. Demons take him, it was a children’s lantern—it shouldn’t be that complicated…
A distant noise like thunder. Philippe looked up, startled, a split second before the floor shook and cracks spread through the walls of the apartment.
“Colette…”
Aunt Ha was already there, picking up her daughter before Philippe could even think of moving. She gave him a dark look, as if he was somehow responsible for whatever was happening, but Aunt Thuy was already bending at the window, followed by most of the others.
“There’s smoke in the sky,” Aunt Thuy said.
A faint, sickly smell in the air—a familiar one, wasn’t it? Not fire, which happened now and again in devastated Paris; not the smoke of the pyres on which House Hawthorn burned the Houseless they slayed, calling it justice. But something older and much more dangerous… Abruptly, he was back sixty years ago, his hands splintered with the wood of his spear, pushing forward as the company he was part of entered the kitchens of House Draken, moments before it fell and the shock of its extinction sent them all reeling…
“Philippe? Philippe!”
Grandmother Olympe was shaking him, her hands smearing grit-speckled mooncake dough on his face, a cold and startling touch, like that of a drowning man.
“I’m fine,” he said, but he couldn’t quite keep his voice from shaking. “What’s happening?”
“I don’t know.” Olympe’s dark, wrinkled face was emotionless.
Philippe walked to the window—it was open in the warm weather, which meant he could see through it instead of squinting through cracked, opaque glass patched in multiple places. A plume of smoke rose from beyond the roofs of la Goutte d’Or neighborhood, its billowing darkness shot through with colored lights as if from fractured jewels. The air was saturated with that sweet, sickly smell—that of battle spells he hadn’t witnessed cast in more than sixty years, since the war had ended.
“Look look, Lippe, lightie lightie,” Colette said, trying to bend over the windowsill to catch the smoke, but Aunt Ha held her fast.
“Something is burning,” Aunt Ha said. “Something big.”
“House fights,” Philippe said, with a lightness he didn’t feel. “None of our business.”
He looked at the khi currents in the small, crowded kitchen space. They were bent out of shape, slowly draining towards the source of the smoke. Not just any House fight, but a spectacular one. What was in that direction? Hell’s Toll, Solférino, Harrier? Not that it mattered.
Grandmother Olympe was silent for a while; he could see her weighing possible consequences for the little Annamite community she was all but queen of.
“You can’t fight them,” Philippe said.
Ancestors knew he wanted to; but it was a doomed, impossible str
uggle.
“No,” Grandmother Olympe said, at length. “You’re right. It’s none of our business. And it’s not like knowing would change anything for us.” She brought both hands together. “Come on, everyone. We have lanterns and mooncakes to finish for tomorrow.”
The aunts came back from the window, and Philippe went back to his discarded lantern. But he could still feel the tension and worry in the air—the way the conversations were now terse and taut, that Aunt Ha kept glancing at Colette, wondering how much of that she’d understood. And, when he walked out of the apartment after his lantern was finished, the smoke was still rising above the buildings, now purple rather than black, the sky around it puckered and bruised, and the khi currents all bent out of shape, slowly gathering in a huge maelstrom that spun in the sky like a huge, ponderous serpent.
Sixty years. It had been sixty years since the Great Houses War. He hadn’t been there at the start, obviously—only brought in, like the aunts’ ancestors, when it had been going badly, when they had needed to drain their colonies of blood and silver in order to survive. But—he glanced, again, at the plume of smoke, stubbornly refusing to go away—he imagined it would have started much like this, once upon a time.
* * *
Philippe’s apartment was in a communal building: one of the last ones to be built before the war, its entire ground floor added after the Boulevard Barbès had been leveled downwards, the former hilly street replaced by a straight avenue, the kind that had once been marked by a row of chestnut trees on either side, a testament to Paris’s wealth and power. Now all that was left were the circles where the trees had once been—the ground blackened and filled with so much chemical residue that nothing would grow there. Philippe’s room-mate Isabelle would attempt, stubbornly, to get tomato plants to flower, but they would shrivel, barely past sapling stage. He doubted they’d be edible—poisoned, like the ground. Like the city.
No patients waited for him on the rickety stairs. In the small apartment, Isabelle was waiting for him, carefully drawing on a scrap of paper with charcoal. Behind her, the one wall giving out on the boulevard was broken, the hole taped over with oiled paper by the dockers and bakers in the Annamite community when they’d moved into their new flat. Few homes in the Houseless areas of Paris were whole—that this one had four walls and three of them were intact made it of great value.
“Philippe!”
He glanced at her drawings. “You’ve been practicing again.”
“I’m getting better.” She gestured towards the stove behind her. “I made buns. They’re almost pretty.”
She smiled, then, and it illuminated her entire face. Once—in another lifetime, when she’d been a member of House Silverspires, before she died because of him, before he found the spell that brought her back to life, not as the Fallen she’d been, but as a mortal—they’d learned to bake together. He’d shown her to handle dough, holding it to the light until it was almost translucent, shown her how to fold it into banetons, waiting for it to rise until the cream-white, perfect dough looked as though it was about to burst. These days the dough was gray, flecked with dirt and grit and Ancestors knew what else; she made buns rather than bread, and they danced around the subject of Silverspires as one would dance around barbed bonfires of thorns.
“I’m sure they’re perfect.”
He glanced at her drawings. The same abstract shapes—sweeping, phantasmagorical clouds that seemed to stretch and waver as he stared at them. Other Annamites bought them as charms. Philippe was secretly glad to have them out of the flat; he was a former Immortal, and not particularly superstitious anymore, but these gave him the creeps. The one he was staring at was shaped like a bird, but as he watched it seemed to stretch and change, until it seemed a blackened plume of smoke.
“You should probably stay inside for a while,” he said.
Isabelle’s thin, black eyebrows arched. “Why?”
He was about to say, “It’s dangerous”, when he noticed the petals on the table. They were small, perfectly heart-shaped, scattered around her drawings like decorations, their color all but drained away to the grayish-white of dirty snow, their ribs traced delicately in bluish mold.
Hoang mai. Mai vang. The flower of New Year’s Eve in Cochin China. It only grew in the South of Indochina, and there was no way anyone here could have got hold of one.
“Isabelle, where did these come from?”
“These?” Isabelle stared at the petals. “I hadn’t even noticed they were here…”
A cold wind rose through the window, seeping in through the edges of the oiled paper, picking up the petals until they seemed to dance in the breaths of air. They swirled past Isabelle and Philippe, spun, for a split second, around the battered bamboo steamers on the stove, and then came back towards the floor, between the cracked slats of the parquet. They didn’t rest on it; they still whirled in the air, turning and twisting and rising, more and more of them, with a faint, almost transparent sheet of air wrapping itself around them, like a net curtain caught in a storm. It was almost the shape of a person now—a faint, threatening suggestion of arms and legs in a figure that only barely resembled one, a flower petal face with only depressions for the eyes, and arms that whipped and stretched in the rising wind.
“Philippe…” Isabelle said.
Her hands clenched, her brow furrowed—as if she could still access the magic that had been her birthright as a Fallen.
He laid a hand on her wrist to steady her.
“Don’t,” he said.
The air was saturated with the smell of hoang mai, a soft, fruity breeze that would have been a reminder of New Year’s Eve in his home—except that he could taste the rot underneath, the earthy, moldy smell that clung to everything in Paris. A reminder that he was there, that the city was dying, and that he was part of it, trapped in it because no boats would take a Houseless back to the country of his birth.
The face sharpened; the petals faded; and a woman stood before them.
She had dark skin, with a tinge of mingled yellow and blue, and the contours of heart-shaped petals were still visible on her cheeks. Her hair was piled in two elaborate braids that formed large arches above her head. Her sleeves billowed in the wind, but so did her arms and hands, as if she couldn’t quite tell where the wind ended and where she started.
“Pham Van Minh Kiet,” she said in a voice that was the whisper of flowers shaken by the storm, the sound of petals falling over the wet earth. And then another, older name: the one he had taken as an Immortal, in the Court of the Jade Emperor.
His body was bowing—betraying him, finding again the old obeisances of the Court. He stopped it with an effort; bowed simply, without abasing the upper part of his body to the floor.
“Lady,” he said.
Isabelle was watching her warily. He’d withdrawn his hand from her wrist, but he could still feel her—could still feel her frustration, her need for immediate information.
“You’re a hard man to find,” the woman said, gracefully. She moved. Her sleeves moved with her, disintegrating into petals as she did so. “My name is Hoa Phong. I am the Censor Who Reveals the Purity of Heaven.” She held out a scroll.
It was thin, translucent paper backed on yellow silk with the entwined shapes of dragons—faint, faded tracings and frayed threads, something carefully and lovingly preserved. The message was in sharp and neat characters—Southern characters, not the Classical Chinese the court had once used. The text itself was short and terse, dwarfed by the familiar vermilion of the imperial seal at the bottom. When he rubbed his hand over it, a tingle of magic crept up his arm—a tight knot of all khi elements in perfect balance, a pointed and wounding reminder of what it had felt like to belong. And at the bottom…
“I thought it lost,” Philippe said, before he could think.
The imperial seal, the one once given by the Chinese to the Jade Emperor in Annam, had been destroyed by the Fallen at the outset of French colonization.
�
�Some things endure.” Hoa Phong’s smile was dazzling.
The text said:
It is a time when the mulberry fields become open sea, and the sea mulberry fields. Foreigners hold our treasures and our subjects’ submission. For this reason we have sent Hoa Phong, the Censor Who Reveals the Purity of Heaven, bearing the word, so that we may be saved, and we order anyone who reads this to render her whatever help may be necessary in the accomplishment of her tasks.
Be saved. Philippe breathed in a distant smell of sandalwood and lemongrass, remembered a palace of wide, impossible rooms, of lacquered chairs and silver chopsticks.
“You’re from the court.”
There was no need to specify which one.
A smile, that would have been dazzling if he hadn’t seen the flower stamen in her mouth.
“With a need.”
He didn’t remember her. He didn’t remember most of them—when he’d been thrown out of the court, lifetimes ago, the various immortals in the various ministries had cut all ties with him. It was the way it had always been. The court didn’t waste time mourning, or render pity to these out of favor.
“For a disgraced ex-Immortal?”
“You’re still Immortal,” Hoa Phong said. “You don’t age, you don’t get sick. Whereas people like her—”
“I’m here,” Isabelle said, loudly, though her Viet was nowhere near fluent enough to follow a conversation this complex, spoken in the archaic language of the court.
And, once, she had not aged either. But no, he wasn’t ready to consider the implications of that here. Hoa Phong was his immediate concern.
“I don’t understand what you want.”
Hoa Phong’s face didn’t move.
“Help.”
Philippe gestured to the oiled paper at the window, the battered table, the chairs with the broken back—the room that was too clean, too sharply tidied up, to hide what they didn’t have.
“What makes you think we can?”
The House of Sundering Flames Page 3