“I don’t understand what we’re looking for,” Isabelle said.
Hoa Phong turned to look at them.
“A box,” she said, after a long, sharp look at Philippe. “Wisdom.” And two other words in Viet.
Isabelle raised an eyebrow. “Tiger?”
“You’re teaching her Viet?” Hoa Phong’s face was disapproving.
“She asked,” Philippe said, mildly.
“Still here,” Isabelle said, stubbornly.
“You’re a foreigner,” Hoa Phong said, using not the word that fell just short of barbarian, but the one that meant colonizer.
Isabelle stared back. “Yes. But I can still learn Viet.”
She glared at Hoa Phong. Philippe suppressed the urge to separate them as he would two squabbling children. Hoa Phong had a point, but this wasn’t the place to hash out colonial politics.
“The Burning Tiger,” Philippe said, but Hoa Phong shook her head.
“It’s… You know who the tiger is,” she said. “The one who comes with the box. He’s a spirit. Dân Chay.”
An Immortal. A faint memory, from the time he’d been in the court of the Jade Emperor. “I think I remember him. He’s one of Heaven’s enforcers, isn’t it?”
“Dân Chay. Chaos,” Hoa Phong said. “The fangs that wait in the darkness. The eternal hunger that doesn’t stop, once he has tasted blood.”
“And you want this… Dân Chay to help you?” Isabelle said.
Hoa Phong walked into the garden, keeping a wary eye on the shadows—but there was nothing.
She said, without looking at either of them, “He’s our weapon. Once, man tricked the tiger, and burned him with fire until his golden fur became streaked with black. Ever since, he’s wanted his revenge on mankind. He’s the Jade Emperor’s final arbiter to mortals and other beings, which suits him. He’s from a time before justice, before fairness. Before the words of the Sage and the duty laid on us to submit to our superiors.”
She was so prim and proper, parroting the words of the Court, that it hurt. Had he ever been this naive, this conceited?
“And you need him.”
Hoa Phong said, “He will not stop. He will not relent, once unleashed. But he’s been missing for decades, since the box was stolen by Fallen. This is where is he is.”
“He’s just…” Philippe stopped. “He’s one spirit. He’s not a miracle. And you’d need to convince him it’s his fight. That he still wants to honor the old allegiance to the Emperor.”
“Of course. But we’re at the stage where anything that looks like hope would help, aren’t we?”
His face burned, and he fell silent.
Ahead was the other half of the wing: a room much like the one they’d left, except it seemed full. Hoa Phong stopped, staring at it. So did Philippe; but not Isabelle, who walked straight into it with no notion of danger whatsoever.
“Stop!” Philippe said.
Isabelle stood in the middle of the room. She turned, arms spread out.
“What?”
“The other room has been looted,” he said. “This one hasn’t. And it’s fairly accessible. So…”
“Someone is guarding it,” Hoa Phong said.
Or something.
Isabelle turned around, slowly, carefully.
At length, she said, “There’s nothing here.” She frowned. “The khi currents are weird, though.”
Beside Philippe, Hoa Phong stirred. “Where did you find her?”
In his past. He shook his head. It was none of Hoa Phong’s business. He could imagine the way she’d look at him, if she learned he’d broken the cycle of death and rebirth for a friend’s sake—for a Fallen’s sake.
“She’s my student,” he said.
An impatient, headstrong student who wanted to master everything at the same time. It would pass.
“I see,” Hoa Phong said. It was obvious she disapproved. “Shall we?”
Inside, everything lay in shadow. Light played on the intact display cabinets—on the carved statues that must have been hacked from temple ruins, on scattered jade objects that had once been a family’s wealth. As they went deeper into the wing, Philippe felt something rise—a tendril of Fallen magic that quested around them, probing insistently for a way in.
“Do you know where your… box is?” Isabelle asked.
She was frowning: she’d sensed what Philippe had. She couldn’t quite place it, but it bothered her all the same. Hoa Phong seemed indifferent: he wasn’t sure she could see Fallen magic.
There was jade, and porcelain, and statues—carvings of gods and spirits and immortals in every color of stone, bone-white porcelain, and blue flower porcelain, its blue still the sharp tint of the morning sky. Silver chopsticks and jade pendants, and wooden chairs, everything covered in layers of dust. The atmosphere of wrongness got worse and worse the deeper they got: an entire room was dedicated to statues of the Buddha, Bodhisattvas and arhats. They ought to have been comforting, but even the Quan Am statue—with spread arms around her, surrounding her entire torso like a halo—looked out of place, her eyes opened wide in surprise rather than serenity. Nothing was set right: there was an entire piece of temple in a room, an entrance flanked by statues, except that nothing lay beyond. Everything was… out of context.
“They stole everything.” Hoa Phong’s voice was low and angry.
Not even to value it—but merely to pile it here, to flaunt the obscene excess of what they had: entire rooms holding broken temples and neglected statues and altars, gathering dust with no offerings. Before, when this had still been in use, he knew, with absolute certainty, that it would only have been crowds of elegantly dressed people, gaping at the wonder of it all—at the exoticism, comforting themselves that they weren’t so primitive or superstitious.
“I know,” he said.
Isabelle’s eyes were wide. “I’m sorry.”
He opened his mouth to say she wasn’t the one who had to apologize, that she hadn’t been born—and then closed it. Because she was part of it, wasn’t she? Or had been, before she died—a Fallen, a House-bound, gathering such things to her in the name of safety.
“It’s not the time,” he said, finally.
A glint caught his eye: a room that was much smaller, a desk of orange-painted wood with butterfly handles on its two drawers. He paused at the threshold, trying to sense something—because this one looked lived in, in a way none of the others had been. A cracked porcelain cup of tea, and a book open on a table. He glanced at it: its text was faded, its paper no longer white or pristine but spotted with mold. Clothes lay discarded on a chair, and so did a small vial of make-up. All suggesting that whoever lived there only occupied this one room. The guardian of the museum? There didn’t appear to be anyone here.
He opened the drawer with a creak that must have been heard all the way into Hell. He paused, his heart in his throat, but nothing happened. Reams and reams of paper—and the word tiger caught his eye.
“Philippe! Come on!” Isabelle called.
He grabbed the entire sheaf of paper, stuffed it into his tunic, and ran out to join them.
They were at a staircase, where Hoa Phong had paused. The sense of rising magic was worse there. Philippe felt goosebumps on his arms, and Hoa Phong was disintegrating again, turning into hundreds of diseased flower petals.
“Whole,” he said, his brain finally catching up with him.
“I’m sorry?” Hoa Phong said, but Isabelle was faster on the uptake.
“Everything in Paris is broken or rotted,” she said. “Nothing here is.”
That was what wrong with the display: nothing was broken or decayed, or covered in fungus or rot. The air itself was sharp and clean, something Philippe hadn’t breathed in decades, and it felt profoundly, nauseatingly wrong.
“Of course,” a voice said, from above them. “This is a safe place. I keep it safe.”
She stood on the first landing of the staircase, beside a curled statue of a dragon—a beautif
ul piece etched in redwood, that looked as though it was going to leap and uncurl in a swirl of waves. She was Fallen, her light almost invisible—but when she moved, thin, luminous threads seemed to connect her to every step of the white marble stairs. Her face was as smooth and as translucent as the porcelain in the cabinets, her eyes a sharp, celestial blue, moving, too sharp and too feverish, to hold each of them in turn.
Her clothes were tatters, the wreck of something that must have once been beautiful: torn lace moved as she did, revealing areas of skin that were too dark and patchy to match that of her face. She had no House insignia or House colors that Philippe could recognize, and nothing in her demeanor suggested she belonged to one. She hadn’t challenged them in its name or claimed the Trocadéro as part of a territory.
“My name is Diamaras,” she said. “You have no business here.”
Philippe raised his hands to ward himself. The khi currents had been all but exhausted in the wing: now he could see how they bent around her—and broke, when she moved. She was slicing through them merely by moving.
“We mean no harm.”
Diamaras reached the midway point of the stairs, paused. Her gaze raked them all.
“Annamite,” she said, revealing sharp, pointed teeth. “You’re mortal and Houseless. Harm requires power. You have none, and neither do your friends.”
Hoa Phong disintegrated. One moment she was there, and the next flowers were streaming upwards, their edges sheening like the edge of a blade. They flowed in two sharp streams that surrounded Diamaras. The Fallen leaped back, and she now had two knives, one in each hand. Blood stained the rags she wore. She hissed, a wounded, primal sound.
The cloud of flowers landed on the stairs, became Hoa Phong again. She was breathing hard, one hand holding the side where Philippe had seen her earlier wounds.
So much for no harm. Philippe pulled the khi currents to him—it felt like trying to gather blade shards with bare hands. Instead of coming to nest, quiet and comforting, in the palm of his hand, the currents were turbulent, pinpricks of angry magic on his skin.
“Stay out of this,” he said to Isabelle.
She was trying to smooth out the khi currents to cast one of the spells he’d taught her, but they kept escaping her grasp. He didn’t have great hope she’d obey him, which meant this had to end fast, one way or another.
At least he didn’t have to worry about Diamaras: Hoa Phong had her attention. He pulled in more currents. His hands were bleeding, and nothing he did smoothed them out. Like handling a swarm of bees, they were short, jagged threads that contorted, trying to escape him, trying to remove themselves from Diamaras’s neighborhood.
“You have teeth,” Diamaras said to Hoa Phong. “But it won’t avail you.”
The threads of light Philippe had already seen flared to painful, eye-searing radiance—and Hoa Phong shimmered, the contours of flowers becoming visible on her face and clothes, as if she were a child’s trembling puzzle on the edge of being undone. He pulled at more threads: he had a bare armful, and they were stained red by his blood, quivering and trying to escape. He wasn’t going to be able to weave anything.
He walked up the stairs.
“Diamaras!” he called.
She turned, just a fraction. As she did, Hoa Phong shivered, and became flowers again; but the stream that rose to wrap itself around Diamaras was pushed back by the increased radiance around the Fallen.
Close enough.
“What do you want, little man?”
Philippe threw the entire armful of jagged khi elements into her face. Diamaras threw her hands up, but too late—the khi elements were sliced to pieces as they met the threads of light, but enough of them unfolded in the space between the threads, crowding on Diamaras’s face. She howled, clawing at her eyes.
Philippe leaped away. Behind Diamaras, Hoa Phong was reforming again, but her shape kept shifting between flowers and woman. A quick, desperate glance downstairs: Isabelle was still trying to weave a proper, painstaking spell. That was never going to happen, but at least it kept her busy and out of trouble.
Hoa Phong said, “We can keep fighting until we’re all exhausted and bloodied, if not dead. Or we could talk.”
Small, ghostly flowers came spilling out of her mouth, like breath in winter.
Diamaras looked up, her face a mask of streaming blood from eyes to cheeks. Her hands, when she raised them again, were streaked with red.
“I don’t speak with mortals.” She made it sound like insects.
The threads lit up, sharply. The stairs shook. Philippe stumbled, tried to recover his footing—and then the entire world spun upside down as he fell.
“Philippe!”
Isabelle, pulling him up, her attempt to weave khi currents scattering as she reached out to steady him. He breathed hard, to clear the wall of fog across his field of vision. Hoa Phong and Diamaras were fighting again. It was pointless, except…
Where were the threads coming from?
The stairs? No, they went right through the marble and…
The displays. They were coming from the objects in the display. She was drawing her power in a typical Fallen way—by stealing others’.
Symbolic magic. Her way to triumph was through others’ submission and humiliation: from the brash display of once-worshipped statues as curiosity pieces in a museum. Smashing the displays would slow her down; destroying the museum would end her. Even at the height of his power as envoy of the Jade Emperor, he couldn’t have done any of that.
But two could play the symbolism game.
Philippe grabbed the khi elements again, and started putting them together. He didn’t attempt to weave, because it was pointless, because they couldn’t be put together. Instead, he cobbled them together as though he were putting a broken vessel back together, pouring gold dust and resin to fill the cracks—weaving khi metal with khi water and khi fire, the metal holding the two warring elements close. Water, for old age and memories and all the deep, intimate knowledge of the value of life. Fire, for passion and love, and all the things that were so deeply cherished—a child’s favorite rice bowl, an ancestor pausing to listen to a desperate prayer for a husband’s health, the vast, encompassing comfort of a pagoda filled with worshipers on the Hungry Ghosts festival, the red and white roses on the monks’ chests shining in the twilight…
The light flickered and dimmed. Startled, he looked up, and saw that he was now holding half the threads, except that they pulsed, softly, like a living heart—the red of blood, of New Year’s envelopes.
High above, on the steps, Diamaras paused.
“You—”
Hoa Phong leaped on her from behind, and bore her to the ground. The threads folded: something unbearably large and heavy pushed against Philippe’s hands, sending him kneeling to the ground, gritting his teeth not to be crushed. He pushed upwards, gathering more khi elements as he did so—more memories of the profound silence in the ancestral chapel, of the din of firecrackers, of people laughing and reciting drunken poetry during dinners on lacquered chairs. His hands were going to give out, bones snapping like twigs in a storm…
The threads tore, with a sound like high-pitched screams—no, the high-pitched screaming was Diamaras, who was on her knees on the stairs, every wound on her face weeping tears of blood. Hoa Phong was standing a few paces from her, holding both the Fallen’s knives. She threw them downwards: they hit the tiles with a sound like thunder.
“Talk,” she said.
Diamaras was still screaming. Hoa Phong shook her, just as Philippe came up, warily watching the Fallen in case she attempted something else. His hands weren’t heavy anymore, but neither were they empty. The light of the threads filled them like liquid fire, sloshing against his skin, a slow, prickling feel that wasn’t pain-free or pleasant, but not the agony it had been before.
At length, Diamaras said, “What do you want?”
Her voice was low, and exhausted. Philippe felt not a sliver of pity: as she’d
have had none, had she defeated them.
“A box,” Hoa Phong said. “Engraved with this.”
She made a gesture with her hands, and an archaic character appeared in the air: the one for knowledge.
Diamaras smiled. “That’s all you want? A wooden box? Not lacquered?”
“Not everything Annamite is lacquered,” Hoa Phong said, mildly. She had both hands on the kneeling Diamaras’s shoulders.
“It wasn’t of value,” Diamaras said.
Hoa Phong didn’t say anything—Philippe didn’t, either. If either of them admitted its true worth, then Diamaras would never let go of it. They’d battled her to a standstill, but how long could Philippe hold the museum’s threads in his hands? He glanced at them: they were bleeding now, from a hundred small wounds like pinpricks.
Diamaras closed her eyes. Hoa Phong didn’t remove her hands, but didn’t move them, either.
“In the primitive section,” she said, exhaling slowly, carefully. “It was there.”
“Was?” Isabelle asked, sharply, from the ground floor.
Diamaras’s smile would have been malicious, had she not looked so drained.
“It was taken during the war. Two Houses came—they said they could use it to make a weapon to bring down their enemies.”
“Two Houses.”
One of them would still have it—one of them would still be imprisoning Dân Chay, or whatever the tiger spirit called himself now. It was hopeless. A lone envoy and an ex-Immortal, no matter how prepared, did not just sneak into Houses.
Hoa Phong went on, as if none of it mattered. “Who?”
“House Draken.”
House Draken was the House that had conscripted Philippe into its ranks during the Great Houses War, its agents the ones that had captured him and other Annamites in Cochin China, and loaded them like cannon fodder on a ship bound for France, where they’d held rifles and knives in shaking hands, and died one after the other in a war that wasn’t theirs.
The House of Sundering Flames Page 8