Thuan tried to think of the political ramifications—of Iaris’s and Phyranthe’s sheer glee at the way things had turned out—and felt as though someone had cut the blood from his legs.
“Disastrous” was probably too weak a word for what had just happened.
* * *
Philippe carefully bound Hoa Phong’s wounds, ignoring her grimaces as he touched suppurating skin. They looked, if anything, uglier than before: the khi elements shriveling and dying in the crevices of skin, and everything swollen and red. When he ran his hands over them he could feel waves of am: they were unbalanced, the khi stagnating and gradually strangling them.
They were back in the flat—they’d run from Diamaras and whatever was lurking in the Trocadéro fountain and gardens, all the way to Boulevard Barbès and Philippe’s house.
“Alcohol,” he said.
Isabelle handed him, in silence, the disinfectant—in reality the flask of rice alcohol they used for festivals and anniversaries. He applied as much of it as he dared to the wound, though of course it was adulterated stuff, the only thing the Houses had left them—the Fontaine and Calmette process, tasteless and still way too expensive, but all that could be found in the ruins of Paris anymore. He wove the khi fire and khi water into a loose spell, one that would force the khi to circulate around the body and promote healing—but noticed, as he did so, that the skin under his hands kept crumbling into the scattered shapes of hoang mai flowers.
When he was done, he stared at his fingers for a while—and finally ignited the khi fire in the air, burning away any contagion there might have been.
“I don’t know how to heal you,” he said.
A flash of something that might have been anger on Hoa Phong’s face, swiftly gone.
“You don’t have to.” She flowed from the chair. “I’m Immortal. I’ll heal.”
Isabelle was sitting on the table, dangling her legs over its edge. She grimaced, but didn’t say anything. Philippe pulled out a chair and sat, feeling drained.
“House Silverspires,” Hoa Phong said slowly, thoughtfully—as if considering a challenge. “Morningstar.”
Isabelle looked both fascinated and scared. She remembered, obviously, where she’d come from, enough to realize the House would never take her back in her current state. Philippe closed his eyes, remembering bones in a crypt, remembering the promise of power dragging at his being, remembering Isabelle lighting up with dreadful magic.
“He’s the worst of them,” he said. He’d been gone for a while, but now—through an unexpected, unexplained miracle—he was back in House Silverspires, ensconced as though he’d never left. “And you just can’t walk into Silverspires.”
Hoa Phong gave him a hard look. “Why not?”
Because he’d tried—or rather, because they’d kidnapped him once, taken him from the streets and kept him like a curiosity. Because he still had darkness lodged within him, a living reminder of what he’d done. Because it had only brought death and corruption, and Isabelle was only alive because of the mercy of Quan Am and a miracle. Because they couldn’t hope to do anything more sensible than keep their heads down, and make the best lives they could, out of the shadow of the powerful.
He said, finally, “Because they’ll kill you. Or take you and twist you until only a shadow of yourself remains. And because Dân Chay isn’t in Silverspires and never has been. I know how Lucifer Morningstar worked.”
He didn’t say it was because of the darkness within him, the curse of the House.
Hoa Phong raised an eyebrow.
“They held me once,” Philippe said, lightly. “It’s always better to know how your jailers work. Dân Chay was dangerous, and Morningstar wouldn’t have wanted him in his House, weapon or not.”
Isabelle said finally, reluctantly, “He’s right. Morningstar valued the well-being and safety of his House above all else. He’d have moved Dân Chay elsewhere. In the other House.”
“The other House was Draken,” Hoa Phong said.
Isabelle said, carefully, “That’s…”
“The one who imprisoned me? Yes,” Philippe said. “It’s dead.” He’d felt it die, as the other Houses overwhelmed it; had lost his squad and his friends one by one. “It’s a ruin now. But we can go there and search it.”
Isabelle’s gaze rested on him, mercilessly clear.
“It’s not a ruin, is it? It’s a grave. The grave of your friends.”
Ai Linh. Hoang. Relaxed nights in the barracks, listening to folk tales and ghost stories and trying to forget that some of them might be their own, all the conscripted natives who’d died for the good of a House who’d never seen them as more than vermin.
“I’ll deal with it.” Philippe stared at his hands, willing them to stop shaking. “It’s just a place. We’ll leave tomorrow morning—we can be back before sundown if we get an early enough start.”
Isabelle grimaced, but didn’t protest.
“Tomorrow,” he said firmly. “It’s the middle of the night. Let’s sleep first.”
Hoa Phong opened her mouth to say she didn’t need sleep—he knew it was exactly what he’d have said, centuries ago, when he’d still been part of the Court.
“You need to heal,” he said.
“You’re not—”
“A doctor? I work as one, as a matter of fact,” Philippe said flatly, using the pronoun of a superior to an inferior, a scholar to an uneducated person. “Go to sleep.”
* * *
Philippe woke from a confused nightmare of running through House Draken as it was burning—desperately trying to find an exit through corridors overrun with fire and soldiers and the smell of smoke choking his lungs—and turning a corner and seeing the crest of House Draken flutter in the wind, the wyrm at the center detaching itself from the arms and moving towards him, extending burning fangs…
He sat up for a while, breathing hard.
It’s just a place.
He repeated that to himself, over and over. It was a burned-out ruin and nothing more. He could bear it. He had to.
It’s just a place.
Just one day. That was all. It had no hold on him anymore. But nevertheless, he found himself saying the names of Manh Ba and the Earth-Store bodhisattva, over and over, a beseeching for mercy on long dead souls.
He could do this.
It’s just a place.
Hoa Phong was sleeping on Isabelle’s stained and flattened mattress. She’d undone her elaborate braids, and her long flowing hair lay beneath her like a cushion, shimmering with the faint golden sheen of flowers.
Isabelle was already up, ensconced in one of the chairs, while on the stove a saucepan simmered with steam.
“You went down to the pump?” he asked.
Isabelle didn’t answer. He realized she was reading the papers he’d grabbed from Diamaras’s office—in the confusion after they’d come back, he’d forgotten that he’d dumped them on the table while he cared for Hoa Phong’s wounds. Isabelle was reading them with rapt attention, setting each one aside after taking notes on a piece of separate paper—he wasn’t even sure where she’d found that. She’d drawn little sketches in the margins of her notes: those clouds again, those sweeping shapes that always looked as though they were about to burst into something dreadful. Except that they weren’t flowing, but jagged and angry, their lines forcefully broken in several places. She was upset.
He peered into the saucepan, and saw the buns from the day before, dried and wizened. They’d perk up, soon enough. He picked up the papers, and glanced at them. They appeared to be a journal written in multiple hands, all of them competing to be the most illegible—and to be mostly fragmentary notes and diagrams.
It appears to be impervious to fire, but not to acid. Prolonged immersion in water didn’t kill it, but it wailed when forced to swallow it, clawing at its throat and stomach—all for show, since of course it regenerated as soon as the water was gone.
All for show.
That dry, emotion
less tone; the cataloging of horrors; and then a little further on, the measurements. The charts, showing how much water and how much pain. The knives: the detailed descriptions of the cuts, of how fast they healed.
The water, of course, isn’t of much help in controlling it. But a suitable vehicle for acid could be devised…
The diagrams.
They weren’t random drawings. They were dissections. And the notes were experiments: on how much pain a body could bear, before it knitted itself together—or before it gave up altogether. They’d handily labeled the corpse, too.
“Isabelle…”
Isabelle didn’t look up. “They were trying to find out how spirits worked. We. We were trying to. My House.”
“You don’t know that,” he said.
Draken, or Silverspires. The House he’d been conscripted into—but did that make him less guilty, that he’d been blind to what was happening?—or the House that had been her home. And really, what had he expected? They were building a weapon at a time when anything and everything was justified, if it could win them the war.
And then, more quietly, “Who was it? The… person they were experimenting on?”
“It doesn’t say,” Isabelle said. “But it was more than one. The things they did…”
She looked crestfallen. He hadn’t realized how attached she still was to Silverspires—the House that had separated them, that had turned her into a distant, ruthless monster ready to pay any price for its survival.
He said finally, “It’s not your House anymore.”
“I remember, Philippe. That time isn’t magically going away. They’re my friends.”
Philippe sat down. He struggled for words. He hadn’t thought—he hadn’t been paying enough attention. A chasm opened in the pit of his stomach: a sense of never-ending danger, like a bell tolling in the distance. Bad enough when they’d taken him and made him a prisoner, but if they took Isabelle…
“They can’t be your friends anymore,” he said. “You died.”
A sharp, weighing look. “I remember that, too.”
She didn’t remember her rebirth. He hoped she didn’t—hoped she never realized that she was only mortal because he’d failed, because he’d been scared of her powers… because an ugly part of him had preferred her weak and scared, not the fey and distant Fallen who’d barely hesitated before suggesting the House commit atrocities.
He was teaching her magic because she’d asked, but also because he needed… to make things right with her, even though he knew the only true way to do that was to ask for her forgiveness. But if he told her, he’d lose her. And not only that, but she’d go straight to Silverspires, where they’d have no pity and no consideration for who she was. She’d just be a means to an end, the result of a spell they’d desperately want, no matter the cost that had to be paid for casting it.
“Isabelle.”
She made a face. “I know. I’m not welcome there anymore. But…”
He forced himself to remain still. “But?”
She was silent, for a while.
“They’re not all bad.” She raised a hand. “I know what you’ll say. Lady Selene would have me dissected in a heartbeat. But she’s not the only one in the House.”
“She’s not your friend.”
“Other people were! You’re the one who’s always going on about compassion and being kind. Is letting them think I’m dead kind?”
He’d seen her turn cruel and fey once; because he’d seen how power had eaten away at her until she’d thought nothing of harming others for her own sake. He had to try to teach her what it meant to see everyone else as people, rather than things to be used.
“No,” he said finally. The last time he’d been a parent was a thousand years ago, and he still felt inadequate now. “But it’s for your own survival.”
“So harming others is fine, then? Where do you draw the line?”
She was always effortlessly running rings around him.
“You weigh the harm you cause to others against the harm you might cause yourself. You don’t kill someone just because you can. You don’t slaughter hundreds for your own life. But in the scale of things, letting others grieve so you can live? That’s a line I can accept.”
“Perhaps I can’t. Perhaps I’d rather tell them. Perhaps I can trust some of them. Unlike you.”
“All it takes is one ruthless person learning the truth. You read these papers,” he said.
“That was—”
“You’re going to say that wasn’t you? That their subject was native?”
“No! That’s not what I meant!” Isabelle stopped, pressing her hands against her eyes, frustrated. She paused. “Laure wasn’t bad, either, in the kitchens. You know what I mean. Emmanuelle helped us.”
Only because helping them hadn’t stood in Selene’s way. But no, he was being unfair. Out of all of them, Emmanuelle was an oddity: almost as concerned with what was right as with the House.
“I know,” Philippe said. “But if you go back into the House, Selene will know. Draken is where we’re going next.”
“It could be outside the House. I could ask one of them to come here.”
Now she was really scaring him.
“No one is ever going to go into the Houseless areas. Isabelle—”
“You don’t understand.” Her face was hard. “It’s my past, Philippe. You may be happy cut off from yours, but I can’t live that way.”
“I’m not cut off by choice.”
It was a House—House Draken—that had taken him.
“Be honest. You’d left the Court of the Jade Emperor before, hadn’t you? You were wandering. You’d already left. No ties. Immortals don’t have these anymore, do they?”
She couldn’t. No one addressed him like this. Power surged in his hands, all the khi currents gathered to bring her to her knees. And then he realized: she was Western. She had no idea of the respect due to teachers. She wasn’t being flippant, or deliberately insolent.
He took in a deep, shaking breath, composing himself for a suitable answer, and was stopped by a knock at the door.
At dawn? An emergency?
Philippe got up, opened the door, and found Grandmother Olympe on the threshold.
“You never come here,” he said, shocked.
Grandmother Olympe pushed past him, into the room—just as Hoa Phong pulled herself up, stretching. For a fraction of a second as the light hit her, the outline of hundreds of flowers was superimposed on her skin, and then it faded. Philippe held his breath, but Grandmother Olympe appeared utterly unperturbed or unawed. She must have missed it.
“Other people come here,” Grandmother Olympe said. “As I see. You have a new patient, child?”
“Are you keeping an eye on who sleeps here?”
“Hardly,” Grandmother Olympe said. “I’ve come because we have refugees, and some of them are wounded and need a doctor.” She glanced at Hoa Phong. “Your other friend who’s not your assistant can come, too.”
“Refugees?” Philippe couldn’t see… He stopped, then, because he knew. “Harrier,” he said. “We can’t possibly take in House-bound…”
Grandmother Olympe’s glance suggested that she wasn’t going to let the small detail of a link to a House stop her.
“They’re not House dependents. They’re the small folk—the servants and the day laborers with nowhere else to go.” She grimaced. “They want to go to the Halles, but I’ve forbidden it.”
The Halles, the food belly of Paris before the war, now hosted a far less savory market: one where the desperate offered their services—and didn’t always come back from the tasks allotted to them, as many who cruised the market were there solely for harm and pleasure in inflicting pain.
“How bad is it?” Philippe asked.
Olympe’s carefully composed face was enough. Of course it would always be those in the most precarious positions who lost everything, even within the Houses. He’d said he wasn’t going to meddle in Ho
use affairs again—what a promise, broken twice in as many days. First Hoa Phong and the Trocadéro business, and now this. Philippe sighed, and reached for his doctor’s bag.
“We’re coming.”
House Draken could happen another day—and in truth he was half-relieved for the respite before he walked into the ruins of his old life.
Hoa Phong opened her mouth. She was going to say something about her mission and its importance to Vietnam—to the kingdom that had been, before French Indochina—but Isabelle cut her off.
“You can surely spare half a day for those who’ve lost everything, elder sister?” Her Viet was peppered with errors, but still blistering.
Hoa Phong stared from Isabelle to Grandmother Olympe. The face she made was fleeting, almost imperceptible.
“Of course I’ll help,” she said, with visible ill-grace.
SEVEN
The Past Casts Long Shadows
As the omnibus traveled the devastated banks of the Seine, it became easier to breathe. The sharp feeling pulling apart Aurore’s ribs gradually became a stitch, and then a simple discomfort. They crossed the Alexandre III bridge and Aurore found herself whispering a prayer to her ancestors as the Seine churned, oily and dirty, below them, always hungering to grab people and drag them under. The nymphs and extravagant statues of the bridge had been torn away, revealing only black and diseased stone, and the street lamps were sharp spikes pointing towards the roiling heavens.
They skirted the territory of the Houses: Solférino, Mansart, Fontenoy. As they reached the emptiness that was the Champ de Mars, the plume of smoke in the sky became a cloud that loomed over them. Just as Asmodeus’s spell eased and Aurore finally became able to breathe, the omnibus stopped.
“Can’t go any further,” the driver called. “We’ll have to turn back.”
Everyone stared at Aurore as she, alone of all the passengers, clambered down from the bus. An old woman grabbed her hand as she passed, shaking her head.
“You don’t have to, dearie.”
Aurore breathed in—smoke and burning, and the faint, distant claws of Asmodeus’s spell, a hook that had almost stopped pulling. The disk on her skin was cold, quiescent. One day, she’d have enough power to make even Asmodeus take notice.
The House of Sundering Flames Page 13