The House of Sundering Flames

by Aliette de Bodard

  “Because we need someone to escort us out,” Darrias said. “The North Gate is cut off by smoke, and there’s fighting at the East Gate, and guards. They’ll want to make sure that Guy doesn’t escape, so they won’t allow anyone out. Harrier’s succession line works by displaying the body of the previous head, as evidence that they’re dead. Well, what’s left of the body, anyway.”

  “As envoys…” Emmanuelle started, and then stopped.

  “They’ll want us to leave? Yes,” Darrias said. “If you can prevent soldiers or dependents from stabbing us by mistake.” Her face softened. “The stakes are too high. Their first order of business will be making sure Lord Guy and dependents of Harrier and House magicians don’t escape. Envoys dying? That’d be inconvenient, but they can always negotiate reparations afterwards. We’re not big fish. Well, most of us aren’t.”

  Emmanuelle laughed, shortly. “Selene is pragmatic. She knows Silverspires can’t afford a war with anyone.”

  Darrias looked, for a moment, horrified—and that took some doing.

  “You’re her partner. Surely…”

  Surely she’d want to level the House that killed Emmanuelle? She’d want to. But she had the welfare of her own dependents to think of, and eventually Father Javier or another one of her advisers would make her see this.

  “I’d rather leave a legacy of Silverspires alive and well,” Emmanuelle said, mildly, “than one of scorched earth, and the scant comfort that everyone fought to death to avenge me.” It was a kinder, better thought to hold on to, at any rate. She took a deep, trembling breath, and didn’t really feel better. “I don’t suppose anyone has any food—” she started, and stopped, because Jamila was at her feet, holding out a grimy bar of unidentifiable food like some great treasure.

  Darrias looked amused, though her smile had teeth.

  “You’ll learn anything you say, as one of the Fallen, is treated like a wish to be fulfilled here. Be careful what you say.”

  Emmanuelle bit back a curse. “I don’t—”

  “You do need it,” Darrias said. “Come on, eat it.” She threw something at Emmanuelle. “And take this.”

  It was a flat, featureless disk with no arms on it, carved from some smooth, translucent opal-like stone. When she took it, she felt no magic on her skin.

  “It doesn’t look like much.”

  “You’re Fallen,” Darrias said. “If it spends enough time on you it’ll light up like a bonfire. In the meantime, it’ll look like a useless trinket, which has its uses.”

  “Tracking disk?”

  Darrias shook her head. “Beacon. Tracking disks are useless, if both users aren’t bound to the same House. This just sends a burst of magic.”

  “To everyone in the vicinity?”

  “That’s the drawback. It’s not discreet and it’s not subtle. But we’re past that, aren’t we? Eat up. And then we’ll figure out what to…” She bit her lip. “Niraphanes.” She sounded annoyed. “I guess we have no choice but to see her.”

  She clearly didn’t like it. What was her relationship with Niraphanes? All bad, it seemed.

  * * *

  Aurore hadn’t expected to wake up in a large and well-lit hospital room; or to wake up at all, if she was honest with herself.

  Everything hurt. The bandages she could see were encrusted with dried blood—and when she closed her eyes she saw Asmodeus’s face, and felt the knife biting, again and again, into the flesh of her arms and chest as she strained at the restraints tying her to the chair.

  She’d thought she was going to die; and been surprised, when that thought came, that it didn’t scare her anymore. That the only thing that did was a deeper, older memory: a long, seemingly endless evening in Harrier, her and her sister Cassiopée held down and beaten, again and again, until everything fractured and bled, and the world constellated into ten thousand hurts. The only thing that had come to her in the cells of Hawthorn was a dim, distant annoyance that it was her own fault for being this foolhardy and getting caught, so she didn’t even have the satisfaction of blaming someone else for her agony.

  But here she was. Alive, and healing. Probably just a temporary respite until Asmodeus came back; though why would he bother to heal her first? The orderlies who came to change her sheets were tight-lipped, and the nurses likewise.

  She should rest. She should make the most of it; but she was exhausted and drained, and nothing made sense. Cassiopée would be worrying by now, wondering why Aurore hadn’t come back; though her sister would know the answer in her heart of hearts. They’d both survived Harrier, and they knew how fickle and bloodthirsty the Houses could be.

  In the evening, as the House fell silent—as the hospital darkened and the cracked tiles on the walls turned red in the setting sun—the door of her room opened.

  “There you are.”

  It was him. Asmodeus. The Fallen head of House Hawthorn. For a moment her memory wavered, and he stood at the door to her cell, smiling at her with his sharp, white teeth, the light gleaming on the branches of his horn-rimmed glasses, on the blade of the knife in his hands—everything trembling and unfocused, moments before the pain started.

  “I thought it expedient to continue the conversation we were having earlier. Such an enjoyable time. It’s a shame it had to end early.”

  Aurore stared at her hands, and then back at him.

  “You’re Houseless and you have no business here. Tell me why you thought sneaking into my House was a good idea.”

  He walked into the room, his pale skin lambent with magic, the smell of bergamot and citrus fruit clinging to his clothes. He was lithe and impossibly graceful: a sated cat. He pulled up the one chair in the room—a large, plump Louis XV armchair with curved legs and blood-red upholstery. He sat in it, watching her as if she were a particularly interesting problem—playing, nonchalantly, with a knife. The same one he’d used down in the cells.

  Aurore ought to be scared, but all she felt was anger. His House. His land. His dependents. Owning everything he liked, and bleeding those he didn’t exploit in another way for his own pleasure.

  She said, slowly, softly—keeping her eyes away from him, as though embarrassed, “They say… They say you have rong”—she used the Viet word, and then corrected herself—“dragons in Hawthorn. My child is sick. I thought they could cure her…”

  She let the words trail away. Every word was true, but put together none of it was. Marianne did have a fever that wouldn’t break, but Aurore already knew none of the Houses would ever help her, because they were Houseless, because they were poor and insignificant. What she’d wanted from Hawthorn was something different—a pathway to coming into her own power. But he wouldn’t react the same way to that truth. A mother trying to heal her child was pathetic and harmless, someone he might spare on a whim, his curiosity sated. A rival for his magic was another matter.

  It was foolhardy in the extreme to lie to him, but she had little to lose, anymore. She’d gone through fire and pain once and survived, what more could he do to her?

  Still… Still, in that stretched-out moment of silence when he looked at her—when he weighed her words, weighed her worth—she found that she was shaking. Fear, or anticipation? She couldn’t tell, not anymore.

  A noise, from the chair. She looked up and saw he was laughing. Not maliciously or even indifferently: simply the good-natured laughter of a parent amused by the antics of a child. The knife vanished—as it did, she saw the slight shaking of his hands.

  “A desperate mother.” Asmodeus took off his glasses, wiped them clean with an embroidered handkerchief in the gray-and-silver of the House. “Mortals can be so… disappointingly surprising, sometimes.”

  Aurore couldn’t help herself. “Because you wouldn’t do the same for a dependent? Move Heaven and Earth to help them?”

  A sharp, appraising look. “Perhaps I would. You seem very well informed.”

  A mistake. “You have to be, to survive on the streets.”

  “Indee
d. An unfriendly place.”

  Mocking her again: his kind had never seen the streets, and never would.

  Aurore forced herself to look at her hands. She said, finally, “I don’t understand why I’m here.”

  “Instead of in the cells?” His smile was wide. “There was a little… accident.”

  “Accident?”

  “The building collapsed. A large part of it. You wouldn’t remember.”

  She didn’t. Everything had been blood and pain by then, her thoughts clinging to the need to remain silent, not to tell him why she was in his House—because it was her only chance of survival and she clung to it, even when survival had become distant and unattainable.

  Then what he’d said hit her. The building collapsed. Houses didn’t just collapse. They weren’t vulnerable. Nor did Fallen shake as though with weakness when putting knives away. She wanted, desperately, to ask what happened, but that was the wrong question. It would be too sharp, too on point—and he was already suspicious.

  “Please,” she said. “I was reckless. Let me go.”

  If he freed her, she could try again. She could look for the evidence she wanted—track, again, that legend of an artifact hidden in Hawthorn, one that gave their wielder magic that didn’t need to be replenished by the Fallen. Her sister Cassiopée had only given her fragmentary evidence—a building with imprints of deer antlers on the gates, and a path to follow from it—but in her brief time in Hawthorn, she’d found neither building nor path.

  That low, amused laughter again. “I think not.”

  Abruptly, he was standing by the bed, the smell of bergamot and citrus fruit overwhelming. The knife was out again, and magic pinned her where she sat, sharp restraints at wrists and ankles and shoulders.

  “I wouldn’t move, if I were you,” Asmodeus said. “It’d only hurt more, and of course there’s the risk I might slip and slash something I hadn’t intended to touch. Like an artery.”

  Please please no.

  In spite of everything, she braced herself against the pain to come. Of course he’d never let her go. Of course he’d take what he’d started to his obvious end. His kind always did.

  He tilted her head upwards: for a moment she was staring into gray-green eyes, a widening gulf of hunger that couldn’t be sated, that would take her and use her and drain her until nothing was left—and then his gaze moved downwards, to the hollow of her collarbone, the knife’s blade rising, and nothing she could do to stop him…

  It bit, once, twice: a sharp, flaring pain spreading to the upper part of her chest. And then his other hand coming up, flat against the wound he’d opened, and the pain opened like serrated blossoms, sending shoots to every part of her body. She convulsed then, crying out, but he’d already withdrawn, to sit down again in the chair.

  “As it happens, I have need of someone expendable, and you’re perfect.”

  He smiled, watching her as he might an insect.

  The magic vanished. Aurore looked down, with some difficulty. There was… something in her chest, above her breasts. She couldn’t see it clearly. She raised her hand—felt only the harsh smoothness of wood. Engraved wood, with a pattern she couldn’t make out; it seemed fused to her skin, moving up and down as she breathed.

  “This,” Asmodeus said, “is a tracking disk. It has the arms of Hawthorn—you can examine it in a mirror, should you have the leisure.”

  His tone made it clear she wouldn’t. He snapped his fingers, and the disk contracted against her skin. It wasn’t painful at first, but then… Then something rose within her, a slow, persistent tug, a burning need to be elsewhere—as if someone had slipped a hook between her ribs and was now reeling her in.

  “It’ll get worse.” His tone was light, conversational, “Every moment when you’re not where I expect you to be, the pain will increase.”

  He was doling out information little by little—keeping her in the dark. Keeping her scared.

  Aurore didn’t have time for that, anymore.

  “Tell me what you want,” she said.

  A thin smile like a knife’s edge between blood-red lips.

  “You’ll have missed this due to being… indisposed, but House Harrier blew up. I want someone inside the House.”

  Harrier. No.

  “You…” She took a deep breath, trying to steady herself. It felt as though something was lodged between her ribs—as he’d said, not yet painful, but it was already larger than it had been, constricting her. “You must have informants.”

  “They’re out of reach.” Again, that smile that was meant to frighten her. She ached to wipe it from his face. “And I’m not sending dependents into what, by all reports, is a burning war zone. Not until I have a better idea of what’s going on. Spend a day and a night in Harrier, and come back to Hawthorn. The disk will lead you. And it’ll mark you as mine, should you meet other Hawthorn dependents within the House. You’ll help them get out, if you find any.”

  He seemed so very sure she was going to do as he asked. But of course, he thought he’d broken her, that she’d do anything to be free of pain.

  “I could die there,” she said, “and then you still wouldn’t have your information.”

  He laughed, and this time the room echoed with it.

  “That’d be such a shame, wouldn’t it? But mostly for you.” He rose, adjusting his swallowtail jacket and his tie. “You’re free to go. I’ll see to it that the guards let you pass. And I’ll be seeing you soon…” He paused, leaving space for her name.

  “Aurore.” She spat it through clenched lips.

  He was at the door, and didn’t even bother to turn.

  “Aurore. Good. See to it that you come back.”

  Harrier. The House that had cast her and her sister Cassiopée out—that had beaten them and left them for dead for the sin of failing a Fallen one time too many. Returning there, feeling again, that bone-clenching fear of putting a foot wrong when she served a Fallen’s dinner, standing at the gates, listening to the low moans of those in the flat cages, standing aligned with the other servants in the streets of the House, watching ghostly hawks coalesce from cobblestones and wrought-iron railings… hearing Lord Guy’s low laughter as they tore disobedient dependents apart.

  She couldn’t.

  FOUR

  Past Glories, Past Lies

  The Trocadéro palace was one of the great ruins of Paris. Once built for a Universal Exhibition, one of the grandiloquent, self-reassuring displays of wealth and power the Houses had so liked, it was now completely outside House territory, and falling to pieces.

  Hoa Phong had still been adamant that they were going there.

  They came up from rue Benjamin Franklin. They could have gone up from the Seine quays, but that would have been encroaching on dragon territory. Philippe had seen first-hand how they defended that, rising up dark and fanged, dripping with the oily water of the Seine, to drag pedestrians down from bridges and drown them in the river, regardless of whether they were House or not.

  The plaza was deserted, with not even the Houseless scavenging in the ruins of the roundabout. The sky was dark with the smoke, tinged a faint red with the end of the afternoon. Over them loomed what was left of the palace: one of the towers mimicking a minaret had been destroyed, and the other one looted, somehow, its roof scraped of all gilding, bricks along its length gouged out at random intervals. It gave the impression it was going to fall at any moment.

  The huge gates were torn, and the vestibule was filled with debris. Beyond the vestibule, the two large, curved wings spread out on either side. In front of them, where the huge festival hall had once been, were rows of skeletons of seats, their fittings since long rotted away. Isabelle paused, for a fraction of a second, as she clambered over broken tiles.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said.

  Below, beyond the ruined hall, the view stretched to the broken Eiffel Tower—and the ever present plume of smoke to the right, which Philippe now knew came from House Harrier. The
stepped fountain descending into a large basin was still there, but the water was oily and stagnant, a pool of rank, marshy liquid. As Philippe watched, something moved within—a flash of sheening scales, of sharp claws. Dragons? No, it had seemed too short and too small. Some other reptile, a construct or some other remnant from the war. Best be careful: anything that hadn’t been taken apart for its magic was likely powerful and not to be trifled with.

  Isabelle was still staring at the view of Paris, her eyes wide.

  “Philippe?”

  He wasn’t moved. Everything there—the gardens, the quays, the Tower—had been built by the Houses. Paid for in the blood of people like him—by Ai Linh and Hoang and the members of his former war squad, lying buried and forgotten near the ruins of House Draken.

  “Gilded splendor,” he said. And, more gently when he saw her crestfallen face, “It’s the kind of beauty people kill for, Isabelle.”

  Hoa Phong was ahead, her sleeves billowing in the wind that always seemed to follow her around—when she paused, her fingers would turn into thin strings of pale, unnatural hoang mai flowers. Philippe thought, again, of the wound he’d felt in her side, the rot glistening at its core.

  You smell of death. Of wrongness. You shouldn’t be touched by it.

  Could Immortals die of something as mundane as infection?

  “Come on,” Hoa Phong said. Her eyes were two pinpricks of light in the shadow of the stairs.

  Isabelle tore her gaze from the wrecked gardens, and followed Hoa Phong into the wing.

  It had been a museum, once. Most of it was wrecked: the window displays smashed and since long looted, with only broken, empty pedestals remaining—the whole ones had long since been taken for building materials. They crossed rooms with faded maps and labels, written in ink that had turned a pale sepia, the handwriting of wealthier days almost illegible.

  They reached a room, at last, that opened up on emptiness. Something had torn the wing in half, and scattered debris in the hole. The gardens had grown over it: twisted, gnarled trees over fallen column sections, and frontispieces engraved with idealized, plump men and women—and distant, smiling Fallen outlined in lambent stone, with the shadow of dark wings at their backs.