“I can’t see him,” Berith said, with increasing frustration.
Thuan was flying close to the ground. He noted, with distant interest, the other plumes of smoke in the sky—the other Houses were burning, too. At least they were not alone in their misery. A thought for later. He turned, briefly—the House was a mess of smoking ruins and caved-in roofs. No sign of Asmodeus. Dependents, in the gardens. He’d have to tell Lan, if she didn’t already know.
“He’s here,” Berith said. “He has to be.”
Thuan tried to focus against the song of fear in his belly. He’d always thought of Asmodeus as a force to be managed or stopped, but his husband could die. He’d almost died, a year ago. He wasn’t immune to damages. But where could he be? Trapped under a building?
They flew over a wing of the House Thuan had never seen, a small isolated building almost completely devastated by the blast, its door and a short fraction of wall remaining ludicrously open, papered over by ivy that seemed to have completely ignored the blast. There were no dependents nearby, or any sign anyone had been there in decades.
“This is pointless,” Berith said.
Within Thuan, the House had sunk back—not because there was no danger, but because it felt exhausted and stretched. Which was another scary thought.
Hang on, he thought. We’re coming for you. If only we can find you.
“He’s not here,” Thuan said. “Are you sure…?”
And as he spoke, he saw, out of the corner of his eye, mist shrouding the thorn trees by the river’s banks. He realized why they couldn’t see Asmodeus: because there was one last hidden place of the House.
“Hang on.”
He said flew down to the ground in front of the mist. It receded as he approached, but he gathered the House to him in his mind, daring it to flee from him—and the mist rose again, sweeping even the ruins aside.
When he and Berith landed, they were in the midst of a grove of hawthorn trees. The mist hid almost everything—but not the long, desiccated bodies hanging in the trees, impaled on hawthorn branches. As Berith got up, brushing mud from her dress, the arms shifted, trying to grab her. She glared at them, and swept sideways with her hands. The arms stopped as if frozen.
Thuan stared at her. “Where did you learn that?”
Berith’s smile was mysterious. And she turned serious again.
“Come on.”
Thuan shifted to human again, because the dragon shape’s bulk made it hard to avoid the trees. It wasn’t that they could actually lift him into the trees, because he was too large and too heavy, but it was annoying, and tearing himself free of them was a waste of time.
“You’re anchored in the House,” Thuan said, as they walked. Berith was dying, and she’d needed some place to hold her power. “If it’s weakening…”
A long, weighted gaze as they walked.
“You mean I shouldn’t be upright? It doesn’t work that way. Without an anchor, I can walk, at least until I can make another one. Just not very fast.”
She didn’t look weak, or in pain, but then that meant nothing. She’d always been good at hiding things. Thuan opened his mouth, closed it.
“Sorry.”
Berith shrugged. “It’s a good question, in the current circumstances.”
The current circumstances. Hawthorn, weakened, perhaps dying. The thought that he’d lose it, that he’d lose the home he’d made and all it meant to him, was a stone in his stomach. He was feeling Asmodeus through the House now—not as a dependent in immediate danger, but something he couldn’t quite place. He had a rising sense of dread, as if a candle were standing too near muslin or lace.
He all but ran through the last of the trees. The mist parted before him, and the ground underfoot was slightly springy, with bones crunching underneath. The air smelled of flowers and rot, with the faintest tinge of blood. Not the usual: the place was so saturated with magic its smell usually drowned everything else out. The khi elements weren’t there, either: the water, which should have been strongest near the Seine, was hanging in wisps around him, limning his body and tapering off. Every other element—fire included—was so still Thuan could barely see them moving. Not normal. Khi currents were the fabric of the universe: they never lay still.
Ahead, a single silhouette limned in light.
Berith said, quietly, “Asmodeus.”
He was sitting between two of the largest hawthorn trees. The one on his left held the corpse of his predecessor Uphir, a fair-haired, blue-eyed Fallen who looked almost as if he were alive, resting on the three hawthorn branches that had pierced his chest. Blood fell every time the wind shook the trees, spattering Asmodeus’s jacket and face, but Uphir himself was still. Watching.
In front of Asmodeus, in the churned area where there should have been more hawthorn trees, there was only darkness: a huge, gaping hole in the earth that looked like nothing so much as a grave large enough to bury them all.
Within him, the House was silent—waiting, curling back on itself like a wounded animal.
“Asmodeus,” Berith said again, gently.
He didn’t move.
Thuan said, finally, “This one is mine.”
“Thuan—”
“Too many cooks, remember?”
Thuan walked to sit by his husband’s side. Up close, the hole was the entirety of the world—for the first few meters the sides were tightly packed branches, fragments of bones and gray-brown soil, and beyond darkness reigned absolute. It was like dropping into night—his gaze kept being drawn into it, and his body quivered with the effort of keeping away. It would be so easy, wouldn’t it? Rest, at last. A final ending.
No. There was no rest: merely another life in a string of lives on the way to Nirvana. The House had his life already; why should it have his death, too?
“It’s peaceful, isn’t it?” Asmodeus said. “Everything, all our striving, all our struggling against the threads that bind us, leading us back to this single moment in the end.”
Not what he wanted to hear. Thuan sucked in a deep, sharp breath, and thought fast.
“I’m with Berith,” he said. “Come on, Asmodeus. We’ll get you home and you can get some rest.”
Asmodeus’s eyes were still on the hole. There was no expression on his face.
“Home?”
“Your dependents need you.”
“They don’t.” His voice was grave, utterly stripped of expression. No, not only that. It wasn’t the distance he affected, but a lack of everything. Of hope. “The House is dead, Thuan.”
“Not yet.”
“It might as well be!” A trace of anger in Asmodeus’s face. Bad. Thuan shifted halfway to dragon shape—because if he was going to have to catch Asmodeus, he didn’t want to do it as a human. It had been much easier, and less frightening, when Asmodeus had been trying to kill people in retribution for the explosion. “There’s nothing left. Look at it.”
“I see a hole in the ground,” Thuan said, trying to keep it deadpan, because the hole scared him, too. On the edges of the hole, he saw small, fast-moving shapes—the children of thorns, weaving in and out of focus. The House’s eyes on them. “That’ll close up, in time. And if it doesn’t, I’ll fill it up with enough khi water to make a pond. Things heal, Asmodeus. It’s not all lost. Nothing ever is. Come on.”
“Asmodeus.”
It was Berith, kneeling on his other side. Uphir’s corpse in the hawthorn tree moved when he saw her, its voice a hiss. “The errant brother come to rescue his brother? How touching.”
“Sister,” Berith said, her face hardening. “I know you’re dead, but that’s no excuse not to keep up with House business.”
She held Asmodeus’s shoulders, and simply rocked him from side to side, singing a wordless song—a slow rhythm slowly rising to a high, crystalline pitch. For a moment—a single, quivering moment—the ghost of something shimmered over the hole: a golden city of domes and spires, bathed in warm, sharp radiance, an even more alien place to
Thuan than the House.
“Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.”
A low, bitter laugh from Asmodeus.
“I’ve always known my measure would be blood and pain. I have no regrets.”
“Giving up,” Berith said, “is a sin. Do you want that on your tally, Brother?”
A silence. Asmodeus’s eyes were on the city—it was already vanishing, but something of its light remained in the air. Thuan slid his tail between him and the hole, coil by agonizing coil.
At length, Asmodeus laughed, and it was without a trace of amusement.
“I’m all sin, aren’t I?”
He rose, shaking. Thuan was there to steady him, cushioning his body so he wouldn’t fall, and then taking his full weight as Asmodeus all but collapsed in his embrace, cold and limp and still in a way that twisted at his heart. He’d have given anything for a quip; a wounding sentence; a shadow of the old sarcasm that had made him want to strangle Asmodeus so many times.
Berith’s face was hard. “Let’s go home.”
They turned, leaving the gaping hole in the heart of the House behind them—back to the drowned gardens, the dependents in need of help, the slow tallying of the living and of the dead—the House that lay cracked open and vulnerable to its enemies, and that Thuan didn’t know how to protect anymore.
* * *
It was an endless, nightmarish night—Frédérique, exhausted, could only remember snatches of it. The tall, elegant man with the predatory eyes, lifting Virginie’s face while she beat on her daughter’s wards, desperately trying to get through, desperately trying to understand what was happening. All sound was muffled and distorted beyond meaning, and all she saw was the man’s face shift and become jewel-hard, like a Fallen in the instant before they lashed out and beat someone to death. Except that he’d released a weeping Virginie, and turned to face Morningstar—whose body was surrounded by dazzling light. A conversation she couldn’t make out—then Morningstar lashing out, not at the retreating figure of the man, but at Aurore, whose face turned leeched of all colors, as if she’d been afraid long before he’d turned on her. She crumpled like a puppet with strings cut.
The wards collapsed. Sound came rushing back, a painful rush in her ears that made her legs wobble. She pushed herself towards her daughter. Virginie was still on her knees, her eyes widened in shock.
“Mom. Dad…”
“It’s all right,” Frédérique said, wrapping her arms around her and trying to believe it. “It’s all right.”
“What did he say?” Nicolas asked.
He’d moved Charles, the toddler, away from his shoulders, and was carrying him on his hips. He looked exhausted; wrung out. Frédérique ached to kiss him and lose herself in him—to forget everything that currently faced them.
Virginie closed her eyes. “He saw everything. He—”
“We have to go,” Morningstar said.
He towered over them—bright and overwhelming, with the shadow of wings at his back—and all she wanted to do was fold herself so small that he wouldn’t notice her. But it wasn’t just her: it was her daughter, and her husband, and a toddler who’d never asked for anything beyond safety and love.
“I don’t understand,” Frédérique said. “Aurore…”
Morningstar’s face was grim. “We don’t need Aurore.” He didn’t spare her crumpled shape another glance. “She was just here to scavenge. She’d have turned on us eventually.”
“But—”
“People are coming.”
In the distance, booted feet.
“I don’t think…” she started. “Virginie…”
Morningstar scooped Virginie up in his arms as if she weighed nothing. He must have done something, because instead of protesting her eyes rolled up, and her head lolled back as if she’d fallen asleep.
“Now!”
His light hardened around Frédérique, pushing her forward.
They ran.
Everything fractured, then. The great gates of the House, hanging askew. Threads of orange fire, slowly gathering under them until the streets were aglow with them, as if everything had been a thin mask hiding fire. They flared—walls of fire blocking their way, time and time again. Morningstar cursed under his breath, and changed directions. Nicolas was holding Charles, breathing with difficulty—but there was no time to take his load, because they were still running, and wherever they went the fire followed.
In Frédérique’s mind, the link to House Harrier—once a weak and dying thing—flared, more and more painful as they got further and further.
“Morningstar,” she tried to say, but he was striding ahead, and didn’t hear her.
Run run run. Through streets filled with fire—wall after wall after wall of it. They were being herded, Frédérique realized, chilled. Or rather, kept away from wherever Morningstar really wanted to go—away from the Houses, away from safety. Every time Morningstar looped back to a street, the wall of fire would spring up again, inexorably cutting them off. Charles was screaming in Nicolas’ arms, and then the screams sank down into frightened whimpers. In her husband’s eyes Frédérique saw the same fear of being left behind—a whip, driving them ever onwards.
Once—only and exactly once—Morningstar stumbled. His face twisted in what might have been pain, and he turned back towards the House they had just left.
“Emmanuelle,” he said, and it was almost pleading. “You were supposed to be safe.”
He remained there for what felt like an eternity, while Frédérique struggled to breathe.
And then his face was expressionless again. Whatever he’d felt, it was over.
“Let’s go,” he said.
It was Nicolas—desperately rocking Charles in his arms—who said, “Your friend—”
“My friend has taken care of herself,” Morningstar said, and started walking again.
Onwards. Again and again and again, back to the blur of featureless streets. In Morningstar’s arms, Virginie’s face was relaxed, utterly blissful in a way that was wrong. She’d wanted so much to protect her daughter—to shield her against the cruelty of the House. Only now the House was in her mind, and she could hear the beating of thousands of wings—the hawks, taking flight from buildings and doorways, making straight for her. Morningstar, she tried to say, but her voice was choked by the House, and they were still running, and she couldn’t afford to stop because he would leave her behind without compunction, as he’d left Aurore behind. She didn’t know why, but he could do that to Frédérique, too. In her mind, House Harrier was rising, a pain that obliterated everything, and she was running desperately, futilely trying to keep ahead of it.
When they finally stopped—when she saw, blurred and indistinct, Morningstar lie Virginie’s still shape on the ground—her muscles gave up. She collapsed. If he decided to move again, she wouldn’t be able to follow.
Footsteps. She tried to roll out of the way, but she couldn’t. She was staring at the sky—and all of a sudden it lit up, and the ground under her shook, debris falling all around her.
The shape of birds, in the sky. Their screams—satisfied and triumphant, as they came for her. Morningstar was kneeling by her side, one hand on her forehead. He looked… angry.
No. She tried to curl into a ball, to be as harmless as possible, but she was too tired to do more than make small, insignificant gestures.
“I should have known,” Morningstar said.
His hand brushed her forehead. Something passed from him to her—pain flared up, the birds in her mind screaming and screaming, dragging her with them.
Then it was gone. All gone, and a curious sense of loss spread through her, as if a sound she’d heard all her life, like her own heartbeat, had finally stopped. Morningstar moved to Charles, and then to Nicolas.
Finished, he sat, thoughtfully staring at the sky. On the other s
ide of him, Nicolas lay on the ground with his eyes glazed—until they finally closed, with a sigh, his breathing slow and utterly spent. Charles nestled against him: if she hadn’t known any better she’d have thought they were sleeping. Frédérique crawled, centimeter by stubborn centimeter, to her daughter, wrapped herself around her still form. Fumbled, trying to breathe through the vise of fear in her chest—and found the faint heartbeat there.
“You can’t move,” Morningstar said—to her, to the sky? “And it’s going to be… difficult.”
Frédérique curled around Virginie. Alive. That was all that mattered. How could she ever have believed he wished them well? He’d been so quiet and courteous, and she had forgotten that cruelty didn’t have to be overt and brash, with knives and whips in belts and on tables in reception rooms, always at hand to punish the disobedient. Sometimes cruelty wore a mask of smiles and thoughtful kindness, which only broke down when things no longer went as desired.
Morningstar knelt by her side. His hand brushed her forehead, again—brushed Virginie’s hair. She wanted to retch but no longer had energy left in her. Empty. She felt empty, as if he’d torn something primal and irreplaceable from her, a spring that had always been wound tight within her.
“What…?” She swallowed, fighting to keep the taste of ashes from her mouth. “What did you do?”
“He’s using the link to the House to track you down. I tore it out, but he knows where you are, now.” Morningstar sounded… amused. Weary. Vulnerable, but she dared not voice the thought, because her legs were jelly and she could barely breathe through the hole he’d torn in her world. “He’s always been a poor loser, and of course he’s got nothing left now, poor soul.” He didn’t sound sorry about it, more amused by someone’s misfortune. “His predecessor was no different. There’s something about the House that attracts them, I think—some tendency to overreach until it all crashes down.”
She was on the ground on some hard metal surface—rails, she realized, the bent shape of them going away in the darkness—and, looming over them, the larger shapes of devastated locomotives and wagons, headlights and chimneys glimmering in the darkness, with a smell of rust and congealed oil exhaled from broken wheels like a last breath.
The House of Sundering Flames Page 27