“They’ll just…” He started, stopped, because he had no words. How could she? After all that had happened, how could she? “They’ll just want to know what makes you tick,” he said. “You’ll be a thing to them. A curiosity.”
“Because that’s what they did to you?” Isabelle’s voice was quiet, but its edge was that of a knife.
“Not to me! Have you forgotten Dân Chay already?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Javier said with a frown. “But I’m not here to take Isabelle back. I’m simply…”
He paused, and in the rising silence Philippe heard a sound like the roar of flames. What was that?
“Javier,” he said. “What did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything,” Javier said, peevishly. “As I said, I’m here as a friend. On behalf of other friends who loved Isabelle, and who think her dead.”
In Philippe’s hands, the khi fire flared to agonizing life, burning in the palm of his hands. He threw it to the cobblestones—and watched it light up every single one of the khi currents of fire around them, surrounding them in a complex and ever-moving weave of red light. Isabelle stood frozen.
“Duck!” Philippe screamed at her.
A split second later, the world exploded.
Every single window around and above them broke in a tinkle of glass—and the breath of the explosion washed over them, sending Javier and Isabelle flying. Philippe flung the rest of the khi elements in his hands at them, anchoring them to the ground and wrapping a dome of protection around them as a storm of wooden shards and glass filled the courtyard. It didn’t protect him, but he was ready. As he started flying and his eyes snapped open with the passage of the wind, he wove the khi fire into a burning shield around himself. As he did so he felt a mild resistance from afar, and a voice, whispering in his mind.
You’re clever. As crafty as a snake, but it won’t save you in the end.
Dân Chay.
All the old jails are split open like shattered skulls. Nothing is holding anymore, in the wake of the storm. I’m coming, Immortal.
When nothing hit the shield anymore, Philippe cautiously lowered it, and found himself in the ruins of the courtyard. The tables had flown and embedded themselves in the walls, and the force of the aftermath had ripped the cobblestones away from the earth. Isabelle was on her knees, staring at the ground in shock. Javier was holding her, but he was shaking, and whispering the words of a frantic prayer.
Above them were the walls of the neighboring buildings. They’d always been crooked, but now they seemed to be bending inwards, moments from collapsing.
“We have to leave,” Philippe said. “Now.”
The café they’d come through was in ruins: one of the floors had collapsed, crushing people underneath. Tade was on his knees in the rubble, trying to dig out someone from the mass of wreckage. Philippe joined him, weaving khi wood and khi metal into unbreakable nets.
“Philippe.”
“Not now,” he said.
A few moments were the difference between life and death, for those trapped underneath.
“Philippe!”
He turned, briefly, ready to deliver a blistering lesson on why they should be helping, when he saw what they were looking at. What every single survivor of the blast was looking at.
The blast had leveled half the buildings in the small street they’d crossed, opening up a wide vista on the city. And, instead of a skyline—instead of the usual mass of lights that marked the street lamps and chandeliers of Houses, and the faint remnants of magical pollution clinging to everything in the city—there was nothing but a roiling cloud of smoke, like the one that had been above Harrier. Only this one covered the entire heavens—a black, ominous cloud that cast the entire city in darkness without end.
All the old jails are split open like shattered skulls. Nothing is holding anymore, in the wake of the storm. I’m coming, Immortal.
* * *
Emmanuelle was trying not to think of Silverspires, or of dying Houses. She’d asked her jailers to see Asmodeus or Thuan, but the guards had laughed, and said the heads of the House had enough on their minds as it was. In despair, she’d penned a note that they’d agreed to send, but she knew it would end up lost in paperwork on someone’s desk.
In the meantime, she was trying to teach herself calligraphy.
The only things of interest in the room were the food, and a fountain pen lying in a drawer. She’d been a bit surprised they’d left it, but she had to admit that as a weapon it was utterly useless, and it wasn’t as if she was going to steal it from Hawthorn.
The pen was an old thing: a pre-war artifact with a red-marbled body and a golden finial engraved with an owl and two chicks. The piston turned smoothly and easily, which meant someone had maintained it. Emmanuelle wasn’t an expert in pens, but she’d rescued her fair share of waterlogged or fungus-covered books and she knew how quickly things deteriorated in post-war Paris. It had come with a notebook and a small ink bottle: a red that had turned out to be the glistening color of blood. Obviously.
The nib wrote thick, and she was working on her descenders—coming to the slow conclusion that she preferred studying Gothic manuscripts than writing Gothic script—when a low, buzzing sound like a persistent swarm of bees filled the room.
“Asmodeus?” she asked. Was this some new sort of trickery?
She moved towards the great doors, though she already knew the wards on them were so thick she wouldn’t even be able to move them.
She never reached them.
Two things happened almost simultaneously. The first was the explosion tearing apart the room, sending her flying into the air, hitting the wall with a dull thump that sent pain flaring in her back and legs. And the second—as she hit the wall and fell to the floor with what felt like everything collapsing around her, the crumbling masonry exposing the metal skeleton underneath—was the link to House Silverspires burning red-hot in her mind. For a moment only—all the dependents of the House in mortal danger; she had to do something, she had to do it now—and then everything was snuffed out again.
She screamed, but the House of Hawthorn was fire and chaos, and no one could hear her.
FOURTEEN
The Margin Between Life and Death
After leaving Niraphanes, Aurore drifted, uncertainly, through the House of Harrier. She was exhausted. Her eyes would close, as soon as she paused, and every time that happened she’d see Dân Chay smiling again, and the firelight spilling from his mouth.
She was on the northern edges. It should have been well away from the fighting, but Niraphanes’ faction was spreading through the deserted streets. She was stopped, twice, by Fallen soldiers wearing the two-hawk livery of Niraphanes—but after a glance at her they sent her on her way. Either word had got around, or she didn’t look like a threat, or both.
The third soldier who stopped her was a small, swarthy mortal woman wearing amber bracelets on both her wrists, and carrying a rifle that was so long it dwarfed her small frame.
Aurore screwed up her courage and said, “It sounds like you’re expecting trouble.”
The soldier looked at her, frowning. “You shouldn’t be here, little fish.”
Aurore bristled at the infantilizing appellation, but realized the soldier meant well. It was an odd, uncomfortable feeling.
“Why?”
The soldier spat. “It’s not a good place to get caught between the games of the powerful. Lord Guy is coming.” She pointed in the distance.
Aurore stared. The sky was dark with the remnants of smoke. In the silence she could hear hundreds of beating wings; and the raucous cries of hawks hunting their prey.
The magic of the House. The enforcers of Guy’s justice. The birds that not only killed, but sucked away bone and muscle and fat until nothing but a deboned cloak of flesh was left. She closed her eyes—remembering a corpse hitting the floor, remembering how she’d told herself, over and over, that Jeanne had been dead wh
en the first hawk had gone through her, that the screams afterwards didn’t count. The words were out of her mouth before she could think.
“You think you’re going to lose.”
She braced herself for the soldier to grab her and give her a beating, but the soldier merely shook her head with a sigh.
“He has all the magicians of the House on his side.”
“You… You could run away.”
The gaze the soldier gave her reminded her of nothing so much as Niraphanes’.
“We could. But everything has to start somewhere.” She reached out. Aurore flinched. The soldier’s gaze sharpened. “Such as making a world where fear doesn’t dictate how we speak to each other. My name is Vida.”
She said it with an accent Aurore couldn’t place.
“Vida. I’m Aurore.”
“Pleased to meet you.” Vida handed Aurore a package. “Here. You need this more than I do. Now run.”
Aurore didn’t run. She walked away slowly. When she looked back, the soldier was still there, and she’d been joined by a couple of squad-mates. They’d put their rifles away and looked to be building barricades. She unpacked the package and ate it. It was fried pork rind, which crunched under her teeth, the taste of meat both unfamiliar and comforting at the same time.
Lord Guy is coming. She thought of Frédérique and Morningstar, of Virginie. No. She couldn’t fight every battle. She couldn’t save everyone. She had to look to her family first, and save them from Dân Chay before it was too late.
She shouldn’t be here. She rubbed, again, the disk on her chest. A day and a night in the House. She’d done that. Never mind that she didn’t have any information that would interest Asmodeus—she couldn’t dance to his tune forever.
Time to go.
The further away she got, the fewer people she saw. Live ones, that was, because the streets were littered with corpses. Some had died in the explosions—the older ones, the ones in chunks and charred bits. Others were more recent kills: those of Niraphanes’ soldiers, stabbed or hacked at or enspelled to death. She wasn’t much fazed: she’d known none of them so their deaths were abstract, things that couldn’t touch her.
They expected to die, she saw with sudden clarity—Vida and Niraphanes and perhaps even Lorcid. They didn’t think they could hold out against Guy, but they’d still try to do the right thing.
The right thing.
As if that had ever kept anyone alive.
At the West Gate—the big, massive wrought-iron edifice that was now torn scraps—she paused. The gaping holes on either side were the flat cages, lying empty and silent. Aurore wasn’t superstitious, but she felt her back tense, ready to bow to whatever ghosts lingered. She walked past them with her heart in her throat, breathing in the smell of charred flesh and the faint, nauseating one of quicklime.
Her eyes were on the cage, which was why she tripped, and caught her balance just in time. What was that? The ground had been smooth below her feet. She reached out, cautiously. Nothing. Except… a faint feeling underfoot. She touched it with her fingers. Yes: a faint thread of something that crossed the gates, and then went on.
A thread. Her blood ran cold, but she barely had time to feel fear, because it lit up: a thread with the orange-red reflections of a fire, the same ones under Dân Chay’s feet, reaching into the city. For a moment—a flash of suspended time—she saw the entire sky light up in red, as if similar lines had sprung to life everywhere in the city. And then the sounds started one after the other, like distant fireworks.
Not fireworks. Bombs. They went off, one by one, followed by a plume of blackened smoke in the sky, until there was nothing of blue or red left overhead—as if the entire world had become a pall of smoke. The wind carried the smell of charred wood, and another smell she would recognize anywhere: charred flesh and bones, and distant screams.
A busy day. The Houses. A stray Immortal. The mortals.
Explosions. All the Houses blown up by Dân Chay, as he’d said he would. There had been nothing from la Goutte d’Or, had there? Those two plumes of smoke she’d seen in the northeast were House Lazarus, and then House Stormgate. They had to be. Her community had to be safe. It had to be.
Cassiopée. Marianne.
Please.
She ran. Past the gates and away from her old House, through streets wreathed in smoke and the smell of burning. The threads of fire had disappeared, though she could still feel them underfoot. From time to time she’d stumble over something she couldn’t see, but there was so much debris, so many things crunching and squelching underfoot and some of them had been alive before it all started and she couldn’t afford to think that way. Once, twice, she had double back because streets were cut off by a mass of debris. She tried, stumbling, choking, to head north without really knowing where north was.
The pain started, then. As she veered towards what she thought was la Goutte d’Or—running across the Iéna bridge between the devastation of the Champ de Mars and the ruined Trocadéro gardens—something started burning against her skin. The disk. Hawthorn’s disk. No. She couldn’t stop—not now. This was about her family.
She climbed the slope through the Trocadéro gardens, exhausted and out of breath—no one there but ghosts, who had stopped scaring her years ago. Overhead, smoke and darkness; under her, a hundred, a thousand pinpricks of Dân Chay’s threads, except that they were now black and dull rather than a shining orange. Spent.
The hook under her ribs yanked hard, once, twice. The third time, as she stumbled on, it sent her to her knees, breathing hard and staring at devastated cobblestones. The world was blurred and refusing to come into focus, and pain grew within her, spreading through her guts, through her lungs. She needed to get up, she needed to walk, now. She needed to be in Hawthorn.
No. No. The words tasted like blood in her mouth. She didn’t care about Hawthorn, didn’t care if the whole House was blown apart and washed into the river. She pulled herself up, shaking. It was only pain. She could bear it. She stumbled on, through the debris on the Trocadéro square, away from the river—the pain eased a fraction. She could do it. She had to.
And then she realized that the only reason it had abated was because her feet had shifted—because she was now headed down rue Franklin towards La Muette and the distant House of Hawthorn.
No.
Aurore turned aside once more. She heard the distant screams—coming from the Houses, the Houseless areas, both? Ahead, people were scurrying away—not focused on her or on the devastation in the sky, but looking for shelter and food. Life went on, desperately, in the ruins.
The pain sent her to her knees again. Breathing was becoming unbearable—and the tug in her gut was a constant thing, the hook pulling at her innards until they were going to burst through her chest. She laid a shaking hand on her belly, felt the raised edges of taut muscles pushed outwards. It was going to tear her apart and not care one jot.
You’re not the master of me, she breathed, but the words were said through gritted teeth. How could she be so weak, so unreliable? She’d carried Cassiopée through the Houseless areas—on those very paths—once. She should have been able to do it again.
Once, twice. Fragmented walks—one foot in front of the other through a rising haze. One street after the other, all a shifting, harrowing blur of cobblestones. She tripped and fell on one of the invisible threads—the jolt that traveled through her calves was suddenly overpowering, a red-hot wave tearing a scream out of her.
No.
No.
Aurore clenched her fists. She stared at the warped cobblestones in front of her.
“I’m sorry,” she said to Cassiopée, to Marianne.
For this—and for the previous day and night—there would be a reckoning.
Then, she pulled herself to her knees, her mouth clamped down on further screams, one of her hands wrapped around the pain in her midriff—and walked, one curse at a time, towards the distant House of Hawthorn, and a surcease to her agony.
* * *
Thuan woke up with difficulty. He was lying with what felt like a sea of debris digging into his back, staring at the ruins of the canopy of his bed. The last thing he remembered was the blast forcing his eyes open—and clamping down on his wards before he and Asmodeus were picked up and flung away like rag dolls.
Asmodeus.
He was lying unconscious, a few meters from Thuan, thrown away from him when the blast had hit. He’d had the presence of mind, at least, to throw away his glasses. The lenses had shattered along with every window in the room, and he’d be blind if he hadn’t. He didn’t look good, though: the usual radiance of his body was muted, and…
Thuan couldn’t feel the link to the House anymore—it couldn’t be dead already, could it? He sat up, shakily—his legs barely strong enough to carry him—and closed his eyes, desperately trying to make silence in his mind. Be there. Please be there. Please be alive. Please let me still have a home.
In the darkness, all he could hear was his own panicked heartbeat, and the memory of unbearable light still imprinted on his eyelids. In, out, trying to calm himself—it was going to be all right, they were going to weather this as they had weathered everything else. In, out.
It was still there. It was weak and fluttering, like a drowning man’s last struggles, but it was still here—a hint of imperious panic, because so many dependents were dead and he had to help the others and there wasn’t much time. He took a deep breath. It was much like an old clock he hadn’t been paying attention to. Now that he heard it he could barely focus his attention on something else.
Thank you, Ancestors. Thank you. A feeling of gratitude so strong it twisted his entire chest.
When he opened his eyes again, Asmodeus was sitting up. He looked… wrong, and it wasn’t only the missing glasses and the debris scattered in his hair.
Weak. He looked weak.
Thuan clamped down on the thought before it could become hurtful. He reached out, and brushed out the debris from Asmodeus’s hair. Asmodeus reached up as well—their hands met for a brief moment, held each other tightly. He felt their entwined warmth, like a heartbeat.
The House of Sundering Flames Page 25