Philippe said finally, “I’ll think about it.”
In truth, he had other ideas.
Ahead of them, a circle was forming: Grandmother Olympe and the aunts were going to speak.
“We’ll talk later,” Hoa Phong said, slipping back to join Isabelle.
“You all know we are under siege.”
Grandmother Olympe was sitting in the center of the floor, with the aunts spread around her, a queen in her own court. She looked at Philippe. He didn’t want to join her, didn’t want to be the face of the community, but this was no longer about his personal preferences so he went to stand with them. Stared at faces he’d laughed with, eaten with—healed, taken food from.
“We face a fire spirit. A weapon from the Great War. And he won’t rest until he’s destroyed the city.”
A silence.
Aunt Thuy asked, “The city, or us?”
“The community. You can leave, but he may follow.”
Some of them would leave, he knew. Olympe had made it clear she wouldn’t stop anyone, but she didn’t expect a flood of people to go—mostly because she and the aunts had gone to most of the community’s dwellings, making it clear what their wishes were. Typical. He’d have found it amusing, in better times.
“Isabelle and I have drawn walls. They’re holding, for now.”
He could feel them flex: the patient, relentless digging of claws. I’m coming, Immortal. Something else had caught Dân Chay’s interest for now, but he would be back. And they had nothing, in the end—nothing but goodwill, which had never stopped fires.
“We’ll fight him.” Isabelle’s face was grim. “To the end.”
Philippe looked at Javier again. He said, slowly, carefully, “There might be another way.”
The door opened, slamming on its hinges.
“There is another way.”
A Fallen stood in the doorway. No, not a Fallen—for a moment he thought it was Françoise, but she would not come back for a community which had ostracized her. No, it was someone he didn’t recognize—not until she stepped out of the darkness. Aurore, Cassiopée’s sister—except that Aurore had been small, and diminutive, with a sense of coiled intensity. The person in the doorway was… taller, larger, the planes of her face all smooth, translucent skin taut over fine cheekbones. When she walked, light clung to her—and a sense of a deep, abiding presence that was somehow more than her, a link to something deeper and larger than herself. He’d felt such a thing once, and only once—in the bright and terrible presence of Morningstar in a crypt below Notre-Dame.
Cassiopée rose, staring at her sister. On the bench beside her, Aurore’s daughter had fallen asleep, clutching a tattered blanket.
“You did it,” she whispered. Her voice was full of an almost religious awe.
“I found a way.”
When Aurore spoke, something else spoke with her—an echo of branches bending in the wind, of distant, familiar screams. She scared Philippe stiff.
“Magical artifacts won’t save us,” Grandmother Olympe said, scornfully. “When the magic runs out…”
She gave a disturbing, alien smile. He’d seen it somewhere already—where?
“I am the magic. It will never run out.”
There was… There was something in the room with them, a shadow that moved when she did, stretching long, insectile fingers with every gesture of her hands.
She crossed the room to Aunt Ha. Hoa Phong rose, grimacing, her face shivering, on the edge of turning into flowers again. A large, oily stain had spread across her tunic.
“Fallen magic can’t heal.” Her voice was level, utterly matter-of-fact. “If you want to fight Dân Chay, go ahead. But you won’t touch her.”
Aurore stared at her, for a while. “She healed me when I walked here. Did they tell you that? I carried my sister all the way from Harrier, and she sat with us both all night because it was the right thing to do. I don’t mean her harm.”
Hoa Phong’s face didn’t move. “You don’t have to intend harm to do harm.”
“It’s not a healing,” Aurore said. “More… an exorcism.”
She reached out, and the light around her intensified. Where it touched Aunt Ha’s face her skin turned lighter, and fuzzy—no, not fuzzy. Furry, and the lines beneath it were the same orange threads as in the streets.
“See? Some part of him is trapped in her. Like a flame away from the body of the fire. It’s burning her because that’s all it’s got.”
Hoa Phong, entranced, turned her gaze away for a fraction of a second. It was all it took. Aurore’s hand snaked below her guard, touched Aunt Ha’s face.
No.
Philippe moved—too slow, too late, he was too far away.
For a moment—a moment only—Aurore was surrounded by dazzling light, and in that light Philippe saw the shadow clearly. Something small; a child, only no child had exposed ribs on their chest, and stretched, skeletal hands which ended in three fingers as sharp as claws. It stood behind her, face stretched in an emaciated face, as her skin touched Aunt Ha. Light spun between them, passed into Aunt Ha—sharply underlining her skin until every color seemed washed out. The black, charred tiger’s stripes appeared again, as Aunt Ha started screaming.
Her body arched, convulsing. Aurore had withdrawn by then, watching her with a growing horror on her face—gradually replaced by a hard, expressionless mask. Hoa Phong was frantically weaving threads of khi currents together. She reached, cursing under her breath, for khi fire, stopped, and scattered into a thousand hoang mai flowers, a wind that wrapped itself around Aunt Ha like a cloth, tightening until the convulsions seemed to take both of them together, sending flowers flying through the air in an explosion of diseased colors.
Something cracked. A bone, then another. Philippe grabbed Aurore, threw her out of the way—or tried to, because the moment he touched her something arced through him, a power that sent him sprawling to the floor, struggling to breathe. Bones continued to crack, one by one. A faint music was rising in the air—the distant sound of a flute playing an Annamite scale, even as petals fell in a shower that had no end.
Silence, spreading slow and dreadful over the inn. Philippe pulled himself, shaking, to his knees. Aunt Ha had stopped moving. As he watched, she rose, a disarticulated, boneless doll slowly putting itself back together, limbs flopping, her pose gradually hardening into a distorted version of a human being—as if some huge being had been molding clay with only a perfunctory idea of how bodies worked. Orange threads flowed from her body, as if squeezed out—and shriveled and died when they met the swirling petals. Whatever was holding Aunt Ha let go, then, and she flopped to the bench again.
The petals flowed, reformed into a shaking, shivering Hoa Phong—who bent to the nearest window and retched and retched, a process that seemed to have no end. Others looked from her to Philippe, and then back again, with a familiar dawning awe and fear on their faces. She’d be lucky if she didn’t end up with her own cult in some hastily repurposed flat—not to mention the blistering earful Philippe would get from Grandmother Olympe for failing to tell her who Hoa Phong really was.
Philippe walked to Aunt Ha. He reached her at the same time as Aurore. They stared at each other over the limp body. Her eyes swirled with Fallen light. He’d thought he’d been scared when she’d come in, but it was nothing compared to facing her. She was Fallen, and not. Wrong in a way that he’d seldom seen. He could understand Dân Chay—the rage and anger and everything the Houses had twisted and set afire—but Aurore was… not herself anymore. Something walked in her skin and talked like her, mimicking humanity or Fallenness with very little idea of what either concept meant. When their hands met, her skin was brittle, as if he could push through and touch bone.
Aunt Ha’s pulse was… thready, and weak. He felt the knots of healed bone protruding under his touch—in her fingers, at the meeting point between collarbone and sternum, at every rib. The bones felt wrong, too—too thin, too brittle. Fallen bones, only they wer
e wrong for that, too: too large and too rough.
He’d have been out there with Hoa Phong, vomiting, but if he did that, everyone would give in to their fear. There would be a stampede to reach the exit. Instead, he turned, and stared at the mass of people—at Grandmother Olympe, who gazed steadily back at him. They nodded to each other: each of them choking on fear, but hiding it.
“It’s strong magic,” Grandmother Olympe said slowly, steadily. She didn’t even blink. Her voice picked up as she did so. “But it won’t be enough.”
Aurore shook her head. “I’m more powerful than any Fallen.”
“But Dân Chay isn’t Fallen,” Philippe said.
A lingering silence.
“You have Fallen magic. House magic. The Houses lost against him.”
“They’re not dead.” Aurore’s voice was level.
And wasn’t that the scariest thought of all?
Grandmother Olympe said, with a nod towards Aunt Ha, “We’ve seen your… exorcism.” She said the word like curse, or wounding. “Will Ha get up in the morning, do you think?”
Would she get up at all? Philippe closed his eyes for a moment against a vision of something rising—boneless and shambling, held upright by magic like a puppet without strings.
A level gaze. “Everything has a price.”
And everyone had a price they weren’t willing to pay. This was his, he guessed. The other line he’d said he wouldn’t cross—the vow he’d made never to bow down to Houses again, to power, to cruelty… He’d break that vow, if that meant not beholding himself to her, or whatever she was. At least the Houses were a thing known and weighed.
In the name of survival…
Philippe said, “You can hold him at bay. For a time. But it won’t be enough.”
He looked from Aurore to Javier. Javier’s eyes were half-lidded. Of course. Not his fight. But he had gone into fire for them before, when he didn’t have to.
“Father,” he said.
A word like ashes on his tongue. Respect. Humility. Abasement. All he’d sworn never to do before Houses or their dependents.
Javier opened his eyes, looked at him.
“Will you help us?” Philippe asked.
Silence. Light streamed from Aurore’s still shape. He could have sworn he heard whispers—a hint of a voice that was the wind in the streets, the patient push of roots within the earth, the popping sound of leaves unfolding from a bud.
“Two Houses made Dân Chay what he is,” Philippe said. “A weapon for the war. Silverspires was one of them. And you’d never have a weapon without some means of control.”
A short, bitter laugh from Javier. “Does it look like we have any control over him?”
Tade said, from his table, “I have it on good authority that Silverspires still stands.”
“And you think we did this?” Javier’s face was closed, angry. “That we would countenance any of this? That Selene would ever think this was acceptable?”
“No,” Isabelle said.
“I don’t know,” Philippe said.
“You want our help, and first you accuse us?”
“Be fair.” Grandmother Olympe’s voice was cold. “Houses have done much worse in the name of power.”
Javier’s face didn’t move. “Only a monster would think devastating the city was any way to get power.”
A silence, as he chewed on his own words.
Aurore said flatly, “You are the monsters. You freed him. The House did. Morningstar did.” The words were pure venom. “He bargained immunity for the House, in exchange for the deaths of all the others.”
What?
Morningstar. Philippe stared at her, trying to process the enormity of what she’d just said. He wasn’t the only one: Javier looked as if someone had punched him in the gut and stabbed him afterwards, for good measure.
“He what?”
“I saw him.”
You’re lying. But why would she? She’d been in House Harrier. And she didn’t want them to involve Javier or any House, but why such a precise, elaborate lie?
Grandmother Olympe said, “We’re going to need more than your word.”
Aurore snorted. “More than my word against his?” She shook her head. Her long, black hair streamed in the darkness, glimmering with sparkles of Fallen magic. “What more do you need? His House still stands, unscathed. And he’s still here.”
“I don’t understand.”
“He’s immune.” She spat the word. “Morningstar bargained for safe passage for his dependents and his House, in exchange for freeing Dân Chay.”
Philippe thought back to Tade, nursing shattered ribs. To Frankie, thrown aside, with her head caved in. And to Javier, who’d gone to face Dân Chay twice, and had nothing more than the wounds he’d suffered when the inn collapsed around him.
It was…
Too much. Too big. Too monstrous, in a city of monsters.
Javier opened his mouth again, closed it. He didn’t know. He hadn’t known. But Philippe saw the moment his mask slipped on again; the moment his face became smooth and distant and expressionless.
“Morningstar is no longer the head of House Silverspires. I’m Selene’s right hand. I can tell you she’d never approve of this. Of any of this.”
“Then help us,” Philippe said. “Make it right. Please.” Another word as bitter as ashes.
A long, weighing look from Javier. That was when he was meant to offer something, he guessed. Some riches from devastated streets, from impoverished, blind and broken-fingered people. Some inducement to goodness. As if decency needed to be induced.
“Please,” Isabelle said.
“We don’t need him.” Aurore’s voice was low and angry. “You know what he brings already. What his kind always brings.”
He forced himself to be calm. Thought of Diamaras and her empty museum, and of the lines of exhausted, traumatized refugees from Harrier.
“We’re all part of the same city. But it will never be the same.” Most of the Houses wouldn’t recover. Silverspires? He didn’t know, because it had been the weakest, because it had withdrawn from the intrigues of other Houses. “You may need us, one day.”
He thought Javier would laugh. Would snap that they were Houseless, that they had nothing to offer—and he didn’t know what he’d have done, then. But the other man didn’t move. He ran a hand through his singed, blackened hair.
“We are the only other place untouched by the fire. We could simply watch you burn.”
“And then he’d come for you,” Philippe said. “The House that imprisoned and tortured him. Did you really think you’d be spared? Bargains only last as long as the lives of those who’ve made them. You have safety for now, but it’ll be short-lived.”
Another long, hard look from Javier.
“It’s not much,” Grandmother Olympe said, with that deceptive softness of hers—the one that suggested sharpened steel wasn’t far away. “What we’re asking. Hardly something we can ever turn against you.”
They were begging. Making themselves harmless and small, asking for charity. Philippe swallowed back bile.
“No,” he said. “Not much. We’re asking for an alliance. To deal with him. If we get rid of him, then you’re not going to be the next target. That’s worth something to you, surely.”
“What do you want?” Javier asked.
Philippe said, stiffly, “Respect.”
He could have threatened them—could have told them he still had Silverspires’ curse within him, that he could find a way to harm the House. He didn’t know if it was true, but Javier—who remembered—would have believed him. The time for alliances of fear between unequal partners had passed.
“Respect,” Javier said. “That’s a very abstract notion.”
“Don’t plunder from us. Don’t harm us. Don’t treat us as servants or victims. That’s not abstract to us.”
He knew how it would go: they would take what they wanted, what they needed, as they always had.
<
br /> Isabelle said, “Javier. You know what he means.”
“What I don’t know,” Javier said, with a touch of annoyance, “is what side you’re on anymore.”
Sides. Divides. Philippe wanted to say something, but he was exhausted. Dân Chay was battering, again and again, at the defenses in his mind. Aurore was glowering, but clearly Grandmother Olympe’s authority was still enough to hold her back.
“We’re on the same side. That’s the point.”
“Only for now,” Javier said, stiffly and not at all amused.
NINETEEN
How Far to Go
Outside, it was chaos. The area around the House had been leveled, the various buildings turned to shreds of wood and stone debris. As they walked on, away from Hawthorn, it got better—marginally. Buildings were still standing, except that they were hollow, their windows blown out, parts of their walls missing, their insides blown to smithereens. Bodies lying in the streets; smoldering fires from inside deserted communal flats. The Seine ran black and oily, but every bridge was a gaping wound, with pieces broken off, and only fragments of arches remaining on the water. Instead of a line of buildings and streets, it was toppled ruins as far as the eye could see, a vast sea of devastation with the occasional wasted skeleton of a tree or lamppost standing alone, striped of leaves, twisted out of shape, cobblestones torn from the streets, leaving only bloodied indentations on the ground—turned into deadly projectiles, striking walls and people with equal force.
People were trying to pull others from the rubble, calling desperately for them. Emmanuelle stopped at the first such place, but the bodyguard with Darrias—a man with spiky hair and glasses called Victor—stopped her.
“We have a mission, my lady.”
“I’m not a lady.” She wasn’t the head of the House, just her partner. “Someone—”
“Someone else will help them,” Darrias said, inexorably steering Emmanuelle back to the path they’d been picking through the rubble. “We have to see you safely to Silverspires.”
After kidnapping her and holding her prisoner.
The House of Sundering Flames Page 33