He was flying lower and lower, swerving to avoid the branches that lashed out of the water. He couldn’t keep this up much longer. They were going to catch him again, and he would be dragged back down into darkness…
Just as he thought he couldn’t take it any more—that he was going to falter and fail—the edifice resolved itself, became a wall of packed earth with a thin, small sliver of land in front of it. The invitation couldn’t have been more obvious. Thuan flew to it, shaking; and made a shabby, catastrophic landing belly down in the sand, scraping his lower half raw. For a while, he could focus on nothing but his own breathing, his muscles spasming and relaxing, still locked in that desperate effort to fly to land.
Finally, he rose, shedding the dragon shape and becoming once more the dapper, elegant human the dependents were more used to seeing: the head of the House who was Asmodeus’s consort and equal. The House’s presence was engulfing everything—almost everything—and what remained in his mind was his slow, irrevocable anger.
By the time Thuan found Asmodeus, he was running out of patience.
Asmodeus lay unconscious at the foot of the wall—which wasn’t a wall, but a mass of thorny branches pressed together until the individual branches were almost invisible.
“Asmodeus!”
Thuan shook him. He had a pulse, and nothing seemed wrong—no wound that Thuan could see, and the familiar light of Fallen magic was streaming from his face and through the thin cotton of his gloves, the pristine white now soiled with mud and earth.
“Asmodeus!”
He gave up, and sent a jolt of cold water through his husband’s chest. The body under him arched—and Thuan bent with all the weight of his dragon shape, holding him down as he struggled and coughed, spitting out water as dark as blood. His arm ached: with an effort, Thuan prevented it from healing itself. He wasn’t going to claim any magic here, not in the heart of the House.
Come on.
His hands were shaking; he didn’t have much left in him, but demons take him if he was going to lie down and surrender.
Come on, come on.
Asmodeus’s eyes opened. For a moment, they were as lambent as the rest of his skin—unfocused and relaxed in a way that was profoundly wrong, and then they focused on Thuan.
“Thuan?”
A fraction of a second only, and then they were jewel-hard again, but Thuan had seen the utter exhaustion in his husband’s eyes.
“We don’t have time,” Thuan said coldly. “How bad are you?”
“On a scale of one to ten?” Asmodeus slowly pulled himself up, fell again to one knee, slow and graceful. He was shaking; a tremor he disguised with an effort. “Eleven, I’d say. If not more.” A pause, then he said, “How bad is it?”
Too many things welled up within him.
Thuan said, “Pretty bad. The House has been killing dependents for its sustenance.”
Asmodeus’s eyes narrowed. “So not only Lan and Aerneth.”
“Seven so far. What happened to you?”
“The children,” Asmodeus said. “They came into the room when I was examining Aerneth. They made… an invitation that was hard to refuse.”
The House kidnapping its own head. How bad was it? Eleven, indeed.
Dragon-born.
He looked up. On the beach, in front of the frothing water, stood four children of thorns, staring at them. Light glistened on their bodies: they must have walked out of the lake. Their eyes were holes in the vastness of their faces, and everything about them was… hollow. Humanity drawn by someone who hadn’t quite known the blueprint, a shape assumed for their convenience. They walked towards them—and even their movements were not quite human, their hips dislocating too much with each step. Thuan’s hands tightened on Asmodeus’s shoulders: with a great effort, he took them off.
“Sorry.”
Asmodeus didn’t speak. His attention was on the children.
“Why are we here?” he asked.
One of the children stopped, its hand millimeters from Asmodeus’s face—as if to deliver a blessing, or to puncture his eyes.
You are our guests.
“What for?” Thuan asked.
A silence. The sound of the wind in branches; that slow, steady heartbeat of the House, making the ground under them thrum. Thuan forced himself to be calm. Panic would serve no one, but any moment now his self-control was going to slip, and it wasn’t going to be pretty. They were in a place of alien rules, at the mercy of beings who thought nothing of draining the magic from people to save themselves.
We are weak, one of the other children said. The dependents are not enough.
Thuan hadn’t thought his blood could go colder.
“What do you want?”
The child standing in front of Asmodeus tilted Asmodeus’s head upwards, stared into his eyes as though trying to see the answer to a puzzle. Drops of blood congregated on the tip of its fingers—Asmodeus’s blood. Asmodeus didn’t flinch. Obviously. The day Asmodeus flinched, things were very very bad indeed.
Mind you, they were bad enough already.
We mean that we require more. The odd dependent killed—
“They were ours.” Asmodeus’s voice was cold. Thuan couldn’t see his expression. “Don’t dismiss them so easily.”
The House is yours. It is your protection and your sustenance, against the barbarity of the city outside. But we cannot provide that protection anymore.
Thuan said, “What do you want?” but he already knew.
A third of them should do, the child in front of Asmodeus said. There was no expression in its voice: predators didn’t feel for the prey they consumed. It was wasteful and unnatural. Enough blood and magic to draw the wards again.
A third of them. A third of the dependents.
When Asmodeus spoke again, his voice was level, but it obviously cost him.
“Why are we here?”
Because you have a choice.
Because you would hinder us.
Because they are yours.
Their voices rose and mingled with each other until Thuan couldn’t tell which one belonged to whom. Finally—at last, at long last—they fell blissfully silent, and the child in front of Asmodeus released his face, and spoke again.
A House needs its heads. You are here for your protection.
Thuan wanted, so badly, to ask whether they had started taking the dependents, but that would have been pointless. He’d asked Vinh Ly for protections—surely they’d have something, by now. Enough to slow the children down, if need be.
You may choose the ones you need, or the ones you favor, another of the children said, cocking its head like a bird of prey, its neck bending at an almost forty-five-degree angle from its body. It was uncanny. They will be spared.
Thuan said, finally, “You can’t do that.”
Choose, the child said. Or we will choose for you.
Choose life.
Choose death.
Which meant they hadn’t started yet.
“Can we discuss this between us?” Thuan kept his voice from shaking. He was quite proud.
There is nothing to discuss.
“You asked us to choose. Or was that just for show?”
A silence. Thuan watched the water—watched the khi currents swirl in the background, arching away from the mounds of trees. Watched the wall of packed thorns, the currents over it disturbed and wild, as though over a huge, ponderous living thing, whose heartbeat was the creak of parquet floors and whose blood was the swirl of dust in abandoned buildings.
Very well. Discuss.
They withdrew, walking backwards in exactly the same way they’d walked forward, standing with their feet in the water. Thorns crawled over them—thickened them, crawled away again, remaking them with every passing moment.
As if he needed more creepiness in his life.
He turned to face Asmodeus. His husband was still on one knee, his face gray, the light of his magic almost extinguished.
�
�Well?” he asked.
“You know the answer.” Asmodeus shook his head. Thuan had never thought he’d see extreme anguish on his face—the kind that twisted his entire body out of shape. “But I can’t help you. Too… weak.”
He sounded disgusted, and exhausted. He’d always hated weakness.
“But you agree,” Thuan said. “There is no other way.”
Asmodeus’s eyes were haunted. “It could change. The House could change. We could ask…”
Thuan shook his head, gently. “It’s too old, Asmodeus.” He gestured to the roots trailing in the water, the gentle drip of liquid like blood. “And it can’t change, not this. This is entwined in its very foundations.” A bright, intense hunger—a desperate need to go on at any costs. Blood and magic and the eating of its own. “You taught it otherwise, but it forgot. It will always forget, when things get bad enough.”
“It’s… It’s not a choice. The House… I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t part of it. We can’t…” Asmodeus paused, then, stared at the wall behind them, the foundations of that alien edifice towering over them, built and mortared with blood and thorns and living beings. “They’ll bury us in there, if we lose. For an eternity of pain.”
Thuan laughed. He was surprised it came out as amused and carefree.
“When has pain ever prevented you from doing the right thing?”
A low, amused chuckle. “You seem to believe I’ve ever done the right thing in my life.”
Thuan shrugged. “There’s a time for everything.”
He bent, gently, kissed his husband’s lips—drinking in all of him, that faint trace of bergamot and citrus, the sharper tang of blood, the roiling warmth of Fallen magic, the lips tightening under his, breathing him in. He wanted this to last forever; and knew it couldn’t.
“I’ve got this,” he said, gently brushing Asmodeus’s cheeks with the index and middle finger of his hands, feeling the pleasant sharpness of cheekbones under his fingertips. “A spouse’s role is sometimes to do the things you can’t bear to.”
He rose, walking away—shifting to dragon shape as he did so, wincing as his raw belly scraped the sand.
Heads of the House. Of the place that—warts and court intrigue and all—had become his home, in the short time he’d been there. The people that were his, that he had sworn to protect. Be their rampart against the attacks of the other Houses and the devastation in the city.
It was too large and too old, and couldn’t be changed or shifted aside or sustained another way.
Behind him, he heard Asmodeus move—felt the warmth of his unleashed magic, to stop the children as they flowed towards him. But he was flying already, not towards the beach or the roots, but towards that living wall—and as he flew, he pulled on the khi water in the House. It was not his. It had never been his. It was claimed. It belonged to the House.
But he was the House.
And, in that instant of confusion when the children were still fighting Asmodeus, he called on old, old pacts, and pulled—and felt, ponderously, the khi water shift to him in an atavistic reflex. Power flowed into him, not the heady rush he was used to, but a slow and tentative cold seizing him as he struggled to stay in the air. Old, old things. They were slow on the uptake.
The House had almost died, once, because of khi ice; because of a rebel dragon and her spells.
Thuan wasn’t a rebel, but he did know how to fashion ice into killing spells.
His maw connected with the thorns of the wall, which writhed under him like a tangle of limbs. He threw all the khi water he had, like a questing spear or arrow—fashioning it into killing ice, the same ice that had almost killed the House, once before.
The wall itself screamed. A high-pitched sound which tore at the air. Thuan grimly continued fashioning ice, turning all the khi currents into coldness—into a deep and profound thing that seized the branches and the roots and dotted the length of the wall with shining crystals.
The House convulsed. The entire beach went sideways, sending Thuan flying away from the wall. Something caught him—an unbreakable vise of Fallen magic. He thrashed, trying to free himself, and felt the characteristic sharp and wounding touch of Asmodeus’s magic.
“Don’t struggle.”
The vise threw him back, arcing towards the wall. It was falling away, disintegrating into chunks of iced-over thorns—and in Thuan’s mind the House, wounded, reeled back. He pressed on, relentless. A wave of Fallen magic from Asmodeus, who was all but overwhelmed by the four children of thorns. Thuan had expected the wall to collapse, but it was the water that frothed away, opening itself up beneath each of the masses of roots to reveal graven circles on the muddy floor—written in a language that seemed hazily familiar, as if enough time spent studying it would reveal its secrets.
How dare you?
Thuan hung on, grimly. The ice traveled on, into the crevices of the letters on the lake floor—upwards, into the tangles of roots, into that dizzying, infinite wall that kept falling apart. Something within him tore—like a huge, nebulous organ he couldn’t place, leaving him dizzy and weak and in so much pain he couldn’t help but scream, his own heartbeat becoming impossibly, agonizingly loud in his chest. All the lights in his mind—all the dependents he had sworn to protect—snuffed out, each of them burning as they vanished, a sense of arching overwhelming pain. He had failed them, he had failed them all, he’d always known that he wasn’t suitable, not ruthless enough. He had to stop—he had to do something, or be forever unable to breathe.
But, if he stopped, the House would recover. And then his people would die.
At last, at long last, it ebbed away. Darkness fell across his field of vision. He lay curled on the beach, his entire body scraped raw as if he’d been scaled and filleted, and the screams of the House had been replaced by the endless sound of falling masonry splashing into the water.
There was a gaping hole in the world, in his mind. The pain had sunk to low embers, but had been replaced by a rising, absolute certainty that nothing would ever make sense again.
The House was his, and he had killed it.
Someone was sitting by his side. Asmodeus. His husband looked as raw as Thuan felt, his skin bleeding from ten thousand thorn-punctures. Behind him were the splayed-out bodies of the children of thorns, unraveling under the weight of ice. Asmodeus’s lips curled into the ghost of his old sarcastic smile.
“It’s almost beautiful, isn’t it? A death unlike any other…”
Thuan heard his raw despair—the scream that had been the House’s and that was now lodged as deep and as sharp as a shard of metal in their bodies. He curled around Asmodeus’s body, watching that impossible light falter and fade above the frozen root masses.
“Ssh,” he said, hugging his husband’s stiff, bleeding body. “Sshhh. It’s going to be all right.”
TWENTY-THREE
Everything Feared
Philippe was sitting on the ground, pulling on threads of khi water. In front of him, Dân Chay was in a similar position: cross-legged on the cobblestones with khi fire spread all around him, staring at the weave. It was almost all fire now, all of Philippe’s spells undone, a heat he could feel, physically, even from where he was sitting.
They weren’t going to last.
In the distance came a roar he couldn’t quite make out. The ground, shaking. A distant cry, like a bird of prey—an odd sound, because all the birds in Paris were in cages now, the war having purged them from the sky. Dân Chay still didn’t move. Why would he? After all, he only had to wait.
When Philippe looked up again, the shuttered door of the café was open, and Javier was kneeling on the threshold, trying to free Isabelle.
How…?
He must have gone through the back door, instead of through the street. How had he come back so fast? The cars. Silverspires’ fleet of cars, magically powered. Even navigating streets clogged by debris wouldn’t have delayed them for long.
Javier was holding some kind of knife
and was hacking, one by one, at the threads that held her. When he touched them, they turned… an odd, faded color, a maroon red with a silver sheen, and became brittle. Isabelle was pulling them off her like spun glass, her own hands a different red: that of opened wounds on her skin.
Javier looked up, and saw Philippe. He nodded, grimly, made a gesture with his hands.
Soon.
He was getting Isabelle out of harm’s way first. Philippe opened his mouth to tell him to hurry, that the community was more important, but the words shriveled on his tongue. He didn’t want Isabelle to die again. He wanted her to be safe.
Dân Chay hadn’t moved. But the moment he did—the moment he looked in that direction—he was going to see them. Philippe gave up on trying to free himself, and gathered threads of khi water, khi earth and khi wood. He flung them, like lifelines, at the weaves of the second line—in front of Dân Chay, on his side. They connected with a jolt that resonated in his entire body—and moved towards the other threads, the ones of the weave. Like called to like; except that as they moved through Dân Chay’s own threads, they ate at them like acid.
Dân Chay turned, too fluid and fast. He stared at Philippe. His face flickered; became covered with fur again, his fingers stretching into sharp, glistening things that were definitely not nails. Another heartbeat, and he was standing next to Philippe, grabbing him by his tunic.
“Do you think you do anything but prolong your agony?”
He was hanging in the air, struggling to breathe—to find again, the serenity that had suffused him when he had ascended into Heaven—but all he could see was Dân Chay’s eyes, and the fire that burned within them. Not the fire that lurked in the jungles and would take them all, but the one the Houses had lit, the weapon they had forged, the one that had forgotten how to howl in pain and only knew how to kill and kill to sate its hunger, just like the Houses themselves.
The House of Sundering Flames Page 40