“You don’t have to tell me any of this.”
Frédérique’s gaze was sharp. “I saw your face when you said you’d been thrown out of the House. There’s more to it, isn’t there?”
Aurore stared at her for a while.
“They beat us and left us for dead,” she said finally. “I carried my sister through Paris, as I swore it would never happen again.”
“Hiding.”
“No,” Aurore said. The words came welling up before she could stop them. “I want to stop hiding. I want to be what they are.”
Frédérique gestured at the dim shape of Morningstar, striding ahead in the cobbled streets.
“Like him?”
Aurore ran a hand over her chest, feeling the disk there, remembering Asmodeus’s mocking smile.
“Power is what you make of it.”
They were cruel because they chose to be. She wouldn’t make that choice. What she found, she and Cassiopée would use to defend themselves. To keep everyone safe.
Frédérique was silent. The smoke rose in billows around them, a dense cloud that slowly obscured everything until all they could see was each other, and even Morningstar and the others seemed distant figures, though he still shone like a beacon. How could anything still be burning in there? Surely it had spent itself by now?
“Virginie!” Frédérique said sharply.
The child—a ghostly silhouette—turned and walked back to them, gradually gaining focus. She was silent and taut.
“Mum—”
“I know,” Frédérique said. “Has he said what he’s looking for?”
The light was turning towards them: Morningstar was walking back.
Virginie said, “The explosion. Whatever caused it.”
“Yes,” Morningstar said. Aurore had seen his light walk back, but even so he seemed to appear out of the smoke. “All that raw power harnessed the right way… It could have achieved so much…” He sounded almost regretful.
They were standing between two large buildings with wrought-iron gates closing the space between them—except that the gates lay twisted and destroyed, and one of the buildings had been completely razed, reduced to rubble. Ahead, in the semi-darkness, loomed pairs of long, flat buildings.
“It was the barracks.” Virginie’s voice was taut. In Nicolas’s arms, the toddler wailed again.
“We’re close,” Morningstar said.
His eyes were two pits of darkness, the cornflower blue almost dispelled. Light flowed to him. As it did, the disk against Aurore’s chest contracted into a pinprick wound—she gasped, bringing a hand to her chest. Virginie was watching Morningstar intently.
The radiance grew stronger. For a moment as Morningstar stretched, Aurore saw the shadow of sharp, great wings, and an even fainter shadow of domes and churches, and a hint of a great, golden presence, an absolute and utter certainty that all would be right, and then it was all gone and there was a wound at the heart of the world, an emptiness that nothing would ever fill.
The smoke lifted, for a moment. The ruined barracks stretched all around them: the large, squat buildings ahead, parallel to the two around the gates, one group of buildings laying diagonal to the left. And, to the right, rubble lit by the orange glow of flames.
Virginie said, in a small voice, “There was a building there. A large one, with a metal awning.”
“The armory?” Morningstar asked.
“I don’t know.”
Frédérique said, “The barracks haven’t been used since the war.”
But they’d still have stored ammunition in them. The House threw away useless things, but weapons and offensive spells were always useful: a way to deter others, a way to fight another war if it came to that.
And now it looked as though it wouldn’t be used again. Aurore stared at the flames—they pulled at her in some undefinable way, not the sharp painful reel of Asmodeus’s spell, but like a familiar, beloved thing she wasn’t even aware she’d lost. In the swirls of light a dim, elongated shape danced and turned, a memory tugging at her. She’d seen this before. But how could she have? As a child in Harrier?
“Morningstar.”
He turned, the light streaming from him merging with that of the flames.
“Is that safe?”
A raised eyebrow. “Is anywhere safe?”
“For the children?” Aurore said sharply. “They can stay here, surely.”
It didn’t look like much, but whatever was at the center of that conflagration had destroyed a House.
“She’s right,” Nicolas said abruptly. He’d put Charles on his shoulders, and was attempting to stay upright. “They’re too young. Both of them.”
Morningstar cocked his head. Aurore could have sworn he didn’t look happy.
“I can help,” Virginie said. Her face seemed sharper in Morningstar’s radiance.
“Sweetheart—” Frédérique started.
“I’m not a child!” Her face was harsh. “They teach us wardings in the Chambers. For battle.” She knelt and peered at the cobblestones, wincing as she ran her fingers on the warm stone. “The House is weak, but I can draw one here.”
“It won’t hold against the fire,” Morningstar said.
“It’ll be better than nothing, won’t it?” Aurore asked. Why did he seem to want to drag children into the most dangerous zone in the House? “Or you could draw one yourself, surely.”
A pause. It was hard to tell because the radiance obscured the features of his face, but Morningstar looked to be biting down on something.
At last he said, and it sounded like it had cost him, “Of course. My apologies. Do go on.” And, almost as an afterthought, “There’s not much I can do in the way of wardings here. I’m away from my House, and drawing protections against another House is always tricky.”
Virginie was tracing the beginnings of a circle on the cobblestones, her small face screwed up in concentration. As her fingers rested, briefly, on each stone, they left blackened imprints behind, and her clothes billowed as though in an invisible wind.
“Do you need help?” Aurore asked Frédérique.
Frédérique’s face was a study in politeness, but she clearly thought Aurore would be useless. One day. One day people wouldn’t dismiss her or Cassiopée as harmless or meek.
“It’s all right,” she said.
“I’ve got it,” Virginie said.
Aurore left them to it, and walked behind Morningstar.
He had the grace to stop and wait for her.
“Curious?” he asked, a little too sharply.
Aurore ignored the spasm of fear that seized her. She’d survived Hawthorn and Harrier and there was nothing he could do to her.
“I’d rather run towards danger than wait for it to reach me.”
“A sensible woman.” There was a faint trace of irony in his voice. “Or perhaps just a scavenger.”
Judging her?
“And why would that matter to you?” Aurore tried, unsuccessfully, to keep the sharpness from her voice.
“There’s no time for petty interests,” Morningstar said, mildly, but even the soft rebuke was strong enough to make her knees wobble.
Close by, the flames seemed to enfold the universe. The smoke was so thick Aurore couldn’t even see the ground. Everything was black and dark, and Morningstar’s spell of breathing felt like a leaden weight in her lungs, constricting every breath she took. Debris clattered underfoot—she tripped more than once when the ground seemed to slide away from her, and caught herself on sharp stone. Everything was covered with a thin layer of ash. She didn’t want to think about what had burned, though during one stumble she found herself staring into the eye sockets of a charred skull.
There was nothing but darkness and fire, and even Morningstar’s radiance paled beside that last. He knelt as he reached the flames, which flickered and bent as if bowing, and then snuffed themselves out like a blown candle.
In the center, where the fire had been, was a box. No rub
ble there: it had been vaporized in a circle about five meters wide. The box itself was an oddity: old and battered, but its surface glowed—and abruptly Aurore was five years old again, watching Mother take her turtleshell combs from a similar box. Its lacquer shimmered, not with the reflection of the fire that had snuffed itself out, but with an inner radiance from inside the box itself, and on its lid was a vaguely familiar shape, a large oval outlined in flickering light.
Paris.
It was a map of Paris, with lines radiating from the southwest, connecting Harrier to places—no, not places, Houses. These were all the Houses of Paris from Solférino to Hawthorn, from Stormgate to Lazarus, every one of them caught in a spider’s web of gently pulsing light.
On the front of the box were two faded characters, but Aurore could only read one of them. She thought at first that it was an odd scribble, and then an old script character, Chinese or Chu Nom, the pre-alphabet Southern script—and then it shifted, and became a single Viet word.
Dân.
Tiger. Not the animal, but the zodiac sign.
“Dân.” The word tasted like smoke and ashes on her tongue.
And, abruptly, the darkness around them took on the vague, shadowy form of a man.
He was dressed as an official from some faded painting: a tunic billowing in the wind, a square-capped hat with a vermilion pearl atop. His skin was tawny, with the faint outline of stripes on his cheeks; his eyes were the color of lucent amber, and his fingernails so long and sharp they had nail guards, ornate things of woven white metal with a delicate filigree pattern.
He smiled, and the teeth in his mouth were long and pointed.
“Morningstar,” he said.
He bowed, only a fraction—only for show. His gaze raked both of them. Aurore forgot, for a moment, that she could breathe when it rested on her: large, luminous eyes in which danced the heat of the flames. They promised… surcease. Rest. A time when all the world would be ashes and dust.
“What a pleasure.”
Morningstar watched the man, warily. “Dân Chay.”
Dân Chay? Aurore couldn’t tell what the second word was meant to be, with Morningstar’s atrocious butchering of the name.
“I must admit I was half-expecting you not to come,” Dân Chay said.
“I always keep my promises.”
“Do you?” Dân Chay smiled again. He knelt by the box, one hand resting lightly, on the map of the Parisian Houses on its lid. “You’ll excuse me for not thinking much of Fallen capacity to respect the treaties they pass.”
Morningstar walked, slowly, to face the man. He wasn’t smiling as broadly as he had been.
“Treaties, perhaps not. Bargains I make for the sake of friends…”
“Ah, friendship.” The box lit up briefly, enough for Aurore to see that it contained bones. “A most laudable goal. Yes. You made a bargain with me because you were worried for your little Fallen friend, and the trouble she’d got caught in within Harrier. You wanted Guy stopped before he could hurt her, and you were desperate enough to come to me in my prison, and promise me my freedom in return for helping you.” Laughter. “I did stop him, didn’t I? I burned the entire House and ground Guy’s power into dust. Is she happy now, your friend?”
Morningstar’s face was hard. “You won’t speak of Emmanuelle here.”
“Such a sweet devotion to her. You may not be willing to hurt her, but I am.”
He spread his arms wide, and the shadow of flames outlined him, and the network of red lines spread from the box to the ground. It came up against Morningstar, where it broke as if it had hit a wall.
“Never.” Morningstar’s face was set.
“Oh, I forgot. Our bargain.” A laugh. “Perhaps I’m a Fallen, too, just as disinclined to keep my word.”
Morningstar spread out his right hand. There was something resting in it: threads of light converging into the familiar shape of a whip.
“Silverspires still owns you, in the end. The old… punishments still hold sway.”
Dân Chay looked at him warily. Morningstar grabbed the whip—he didn’t even wield it, but Dân Chay’s face contorted in pain, and blood pearled up on his tunic. Morningstar walked forward, raising the whip, and Dân Chay fell back, snarling and roaring. One, two sickening thuds against flesh, and red, luminous sprays falling on the earth. Dân Chay screamed, a sound that tore at Aurore’s guts. She’d been there. She’d been the one driven back step by step until pain froze her and they did whatever they wanted with her.
Dân Chay had burned the House. He’d destroyed everything—not only Guy and his enforcers, but the lives of the servants and menials. Aurore dug her nails into the palms of her hand to prevent herself from stopping Morningstar.
By now Dân Chay was curled into a ball, and Morningstar stood over him, not even breathing hard, not even smiling—merely looking faintly annoyed.
It was too much.
“Stop,” Aurore said.
Morningstar looked at her as he would an insect that had learned to speak.
“Stop? You would tell me what to do?”
Always more heart than sense, Cassiopée had said. If only she’d had power, any power, to back up her hasty decisions. Aurore looked Morningstar in the eye, refusing to back down.
“He’s cowed. There’s no need for this.”
“Is he?” Morningstar’s smile was wide, amused once more. Behind him, Dân Chay lay in a pool of that thick, luminous blood, pouring from multiple wounds. As Aurore watched, he pulled himself to his knees—his face drawing together as he did so, changing to something huge and dark and hungry, not only the tiger in the night, but the predator at the heart of all the nights. Then it was back to that undefined, wavering middle age, the emotionless face of an elder uncle, of a trusted official.
“Tell me what you want,” he said. Every word made the earth shake underfoot.
Morningstar turned away from Aurore, and faced him again. He held the whip lightly in one hand, toying with it as though he might lash out again at any moment.
“Will you honor our bargain?”
Dân Chay shrugged—wincing as his shoulders moved.
“Free me, and I won’t touch your friend, or House Silverspires.” He smiled. “I can live with that. I noticed you haven’t tried to exempt yourself from harm.”
Morningstar’s face didn’t move. “Would you have accepted, if I had?”
“Of course not.” Dân Chay cocked his face. His pupils were two slits. “Now free me.”
Morningstar shrugged. He knelt, and laid a hand on the lid of the box. The lines on the map flared red, and his own radiance grew and grew until Aurore saw the shadow of wings at his back again. A faint song spread over the ruins of the barracks, until the ground seemed to hum with it: a distant thing of alien beauty and grace that Aurore had no hope of understanding, and for a moment only she saw him as he must have been a long time ago. Not an arrogant Fallen, not a frightful being of magic, but something that was beyond all of this. Something… sated. Content.
And then it passed, and it was just Morningstar on his knees. The box was gone: only the character for tiger remained. Dân Chay stretched. Flames played beneath his face, his fingernails, the whites of his eyes—as if all it would take for him to scatter into fire was a breath. His skin was cracked like celadon, and beneath it was the shimmering gray-red of glowing embers.
“Thank you,” he said. And laughed.
He spread his hands: between them was the lid of the box, with the map of all the Houses. He flicked them, and it was… not gone, but superimposed on the ground, and spreading, fading as it went, until the lines were the faintest of shadows.
“I’ll keep this, I think. Such a handy link to all the Houses of Paris, all the ones you and Harrier wanted to destroy, back in the war. And now…”
Morningstar rose, stretched. “You want to fight me?”
“Your… tricks will no longer work,” Dân Chay snarled.
“We shall see.” Mo
rningstar turned, and looked straight past Aurore. She turned—she couldn’t help it—and saw Virginie, standing guard beside the circle she’d drawn, the one that enclosed her mother and the others.
Dân Chay was looking at them too, intently. He laughed, and the ground danced and trembled under Aurore’s feet. She had to get away. She had to run, but where could she get to before their fight lit up the entire House?
“Using children? You’re growing sentimental in your old age, Morningstar. You think I haven’t hunted and eaten my share of them?”
“These are special children,” Morningstar said. “The House’s magicians. Raised and shaped to be living weapons. I’m sure you’re intimately familiar with the methods.”
Dân Chay moved, fluid and inhuman. Orange threads lit up under his feet. Before Aurore could even open her mouth he was standing before Virginie. The child stared at him, eyes wide. The light of Fallen magic trembled on her hands.
“Stay away,” she said.
Within the circle, Frédérique was moving—as was Nicolas, one step behind her, face twisted in anguish—but whatever Virginie had done had sealed them off. All they could do was bang their hands on an invisible, transparent wall between them like a pane of glass.
“Stay away from my family. Or I’ll kill you.”
She looked absurd. A seven- or eight-year-old, standing up to whatever Dân Chay was—and to the other monster behind Aurore, the first Fallen who’d casually destroyed House Harrier just because he could. She was small and pathetic, and there was no hope, no hope whatsoever, that she’d be a match for the magic involved.
“Virginie!” Aurore said, and started to run.
But Dân Chay was already reaching out—threads of fire climbing up Virginie’s legs and arms and chest, all the way to her neck, entangling her more surely than a spider’s web. Before Aurore could even get close, he’d tilted Virginie’s face, and was staring into her eyes.
No no no.
Something passed between them. The threads, tightening; Virginie, struggling to breathe, her mouth opening into—no, not a scream, but her entire face was stretched as though remembering something unpleasant.
The House of Sundering Flames Page 18