The Silvered Serpents

by Roshani Chokshi

  “When are they coming?” snarled Delphine.

  “Within minutes, matriarch,” said the servant. “They plan to utilize their own Tezcat inroads, both above ground and under water. They will bring their own artisans to decorate before the annual Midnight Auction.”

  Delphine swore under her breath. Just then, Laila watched as the servants carried up baskets of treasure—books and statues, jewels dripping off platters and gleaming instruments. Her thoughts felt pulled in a thousand directions. She felt someone shoving a champagne flute into her hand. When she looked up, silver petals rained down from the ice ceiling, clinging to the blue floor. She’d always dreamed that when she got close to the book, her body would know. Maybe her veins would gleam with light, or her hair would raise up off her shoulders. Instead, her pulse turned sluggish. Time seemed to have forgotten to gather her in its momentum, slowing the room and its inhabitants around her. Doubt caught up to her. Her heart hurt for no reason she could name. And then, at last, she felt Enrique and Zofia at her side. Zofia—sweet, stoic Zofia—had tears streaming down her face. Enrique was talking too fast, and she couldn’t catch anything but one phrase, so sharp she felt like she’d broken her life on it:

  “There was no book.”

  27

  ENRIQUE

  Six hours before the Midnight Auction …

  Enrique once loved the feeling of incredulity. It was the sense that the world conspired to dazzle him. It was how he had felt when he’d first visited L’Eden, on the hotel’s anniversary when Séverin had designed the space to resemble the Garden of Paradise. A basilisk made of apples and twice the size of a dining table writhed between the pillars, twisting and snapping its jaws, perfuming the air with fruit. Topiary creatures gently grazed by silk couches. And Séverin moved among them like a well-tailored god still curating his universe. That was incredulity. That someone like Séverin could summon forth his imagination, and the world would not bowl him over but bow before him. Enrique didn’t remember consciously deciding that he wanted to work for the strange hotelier with a taste for stranger artifacts … all he knew was that he wanted to know what the world looked like from his angle.

  What he felt now was a different kind of incredulity. The kind where one has released a dream into the world, only to rediscover it on the ground, trampled and stained.

  There was no book.

  How …

  How could they have been so wrong?

  And at such cost?

  Beside him, Laila hadn’t moved. Her face was bloodless, her garnet ring sliding down her finger. Zofia stood on Laila’s other side, their shoulders barely touching.

  All around them pressed the members of House Dazbog and House Kore. The air seemed to quiver and shake with the promise of guests soon to arrive. At the entrance to the Sleeping Palace, the matriarch of House Kore fixed the lake with a haughty expression.

  “How dare they,” she said, under her breath. “They could not stand the thought of someone unearthing treasure without them. Well, that’s fine. Let them bring the Conclave here. Let them see exactly what my patronage still yields.”

  She cast a scathing glance at Enrique.

  “And you still need a haircut.”

  Enrique wanted to grumble at her like he normally did, but he couldn’t find the right words. All he felt was Laila’s hand in his … cold and still as a corpse. A warm hand gripped his shoulder, and Enrique turned to see Hypnos smiling down at him.

  “Aren’t you going to congratulate me?” asked Hypnos. His face shone with pride. “We’ve got the treasures of the Fallen House! The Order will have their infamous Midnight Auction. Séverin has his vengeance. Whatever is left of the Fallen House will never recover from this blow.”

  Enrique was in no mood to congratulate, and so he said nothing. Hypnos didn’t seem to notice. His hand slipped from Enrique’s shoulder as he pointed to the ice. Beside Hypnos, Eva appeared, crossing her arms. A challenging smile curved her lips.

  “They’re here,” she said slowly.

  Enrique’s pulse kicked up at the sound of paws scraping over ice. Hundreds of dogsleds poured across Lake Baikal’s frozen waters. As they got closer, Enrique recognized different factions of the Order and the living treasure chests that kept pace beside them. A beryl wolf let loose a mechanical howl. Eva nodded in the wolf’s direction.

  “House Orcus,” she said. “They specialize in collecting objects of torture, particularly ones used to punish oathbreakers.”

  Overhead, an obsidian eagle swooped low, its shadow stretched across the water.

  “House Frigg of the Prussian Empire,” explained Eva once more, pointing at the pale bird. “They have more of an agricultural taste when it comes to their acquisitions, particularly in tapping rubber trees—”

  “A taste for agriculture?” repeated Hypnos, his lip curling. “I’m sure that’s how those souls in Africa see it too.”

  A marble dolphin broke the surface of the ice before disappearing under the waves while an agate chamois goat and a stately onyx horse trotted beside two ornate carriages.

  “House Njord, House Hadúr, and House Atya of the Austro-Hungarian factions,” said Eva.

  Hypnos crossed his arms and let out a low whistle. “And what do we have here? Ah, even the British decided to take a peek at our wares.” He waved at a shimmering golden lion making its way slowly across the ice. Beside it, a smaller and less ornate carriage. Like an afterthought.

  “They tend to keep their findings to themselves and their museums,” said Hypnos, rolling his eyes. “But the Fallen House’s long-lost wares tempt them all.”

  Enrique felt his stomach turn as he watched the procession of the Winter Conclave. The Order thought of themselves as guardians of Western civilization, but their might was far more powerful and terrible; they were custodians of history. What they took, the world forgot. And he had helped them.

  Eva tugged at her silver ballerina pendant. “They’re going to want to see all of you tonight … the great treasure hunters who found the hidden nest of the Fallen House.”

  “I don’t want to see them,” said Enrique automatically.

  “Oh, come now,” said Hypnos. “Even I don’t like them, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be useful to us.”

  “I’m afraid none of us have any choice in the matter,” said Eva, before pausing to look around the hall. “Where’s Mademoiselle Laila?”

  It was only then that Enrique noticed a weightlessness in his palms.

  He looked down and realized he was no longer holding her hand. When he turned around, he only saw the icy archway of the Sleeping Palace. Laila had disappeared.

  “Where did she go?” asked Enrique, turning to Zofia.

  But Zofia’s gaze was fixed on the arriving Houses of the Order of Babel. Enrique looked to Ruslan and Delphine, but they had broken away to greet the other Houses.

  “And where’s Séverin?” asked Enrique.

  Eva shrugged. “The last I saw of him was an hour ago. He was supervising the transportation of treasures from out of the leviathan. They still have to be catalogued and prepared for the Winter Conclave’s Midnight Auction.”

  “Where are they keeping the objects?” asked Enrique.

  “The library, I believe.”

  “It’s nearly three in the afternoon,” said Zofia.

  Eva fixed her with a stare. “So?”

  “The leviathan only stays for an hour. It mechanically cannot stay longer.”

  “I’m not sure it has much of a choice when there’s Forged metal ropes involved,” said Eva.

  “David has been leashed to the ice?” asked Zofia, her voice rising.

  “David?” said Eva with a laugh. “We would’ve pinned that thing to the ground earlier if those ropes hadn’t taken so long to Forge.”

  Zofia glowered.

  “Excuse us,” said Enrique brusquely.

  He nudged Zofia out of the crowd, then steered them far away from Eva and the Order’s procession.
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br />   “See, this is why you don’t name mechanical monsters,” muttered Enrique as he marched them deeper into the atrium.

  “Why are we leaving?” demanded Zofia.

  “One, we have to find Séverin in the library. And two, I didn’t want you to set Eva on fire.”

  “I would not waste an incendiary pendant,” said Zofia grimly.

  As they made their way to the library, Enrique dodged planners and artisans, napping ice bears and a trio of crystal swans whose translucent feathers had been edged in silver. In the atrium, a huge podium had been erected for the Midnight Auction. Servants who had arrived early from the various Houses bustled about, carrying platters of quartz flutes filled with chilled ice wine. Once, the sight would have dazzled Enrique, but now he hardly cared. He refused to believe that everything they had seen—the handless women, the muses with their blank stares and broken objects—had been for nothing. He refused to believe that Laila had only a handful of days left to live. And he refused to believe that Séverin didn’t have another plan hiding up his sleeve.

  Inside the library, the statues of the muses gleamed. Slabs of ice tables lined the floor where there had once been nothing but empty corridor space. Treasures lay piled atop the surfaces, each of them affixed with neat, white labels for the auctioneer to read. Another time, Enrique would have stopped and marveled at the objects he glimpsed—objects which had been deemed lost by the whole of the historical society—but that was before he saw Séverin.

  In the midst of all that treasure, he looked like something out of myth, and Enrique was reminded of how deceptive myths could be. When Enrique was seven years old, he thought he’d seen a siyokoy, a merman. This man clambered to the top of a cliff, looking out onto the ocean. He wore no shirt and around his neck lay strings of pearls. On his fingers, countless rings. His pants sagged with sea rocks, and a hundred silk scarves hung through his belt loops. At the time, Enrique stood with his family on a listing paraw boat, celebrating his mother’s birthday. He’d called out excitedly, “The sea king!”

  In his mind, only a man laden with treasure could be a sea king.

  But that was not what his family saw. His father had panicked, screaming to the man to stop, to wait … His mother crossed herself, folding Enrique against her so he wouldn’t see. He pushed against her hold, desperate to see the sea king, but all he heard was the splash of water and his father’s anguished yell. It was weeks later that Enrique understood the man had drowned himself. He heard the whispers—the man’s whole family had perished in a recent typhoon. At the time, Enrique didn’t understand how a man laden with treasure could be so poor in life as to choose death. He was reminded of it now when he looked at Séverin, sitting in a room full of treasure with his eyes full of nothing.

  All this time, Enrique had suspected that Séverin wanted The Divine Lyrics as the last, crushing blow to the Fallen House … but he looked as stricken as Laila, as if he’d lost his whole life. Something about it didn’t fit right in his mind.

  Wordlessly, Séverin pointed to a heavy tome situated on the table nearest him.

  “Go ahead and look,” rasped Séverin.

  Enrique approached cautiously while Zofia trailed behind him.

  As Enrique had suspected, there was some tracing of gold on the cover, and it was certainly made of animal skin. The dimensions were quite large for a book, and there was the suggestion of buckles along the binding, almost as if it was intended to be a book that held something within. Pressed into the surface was a burned marking … like a small, slanted W. The image bothered him, but he didn’t know why he recognized it. Within the book lay nothing but empty space, with the vaguest depressions of something having been inside of it that was no longer there.

  Enrique swallowed hard, letting his fingers coast down the spine.

  “What if we’ve missed something?” he asked. “Maybe if we—”

  “There’s no point,” said Séverin. “There’s nothing left.”

  He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t even make eye contact. But the air bent around him, and it was like skittering away from a sudden opening in the world. Enrique felt his face flush red. He wanted to scream at him. He wanted to tell him that Laila would die without their help. But in the end, his promise to her kept him silent.

  Séverin rose from his seat. From the pocket of his jacket, he withdrew an envelope and handed it to Zofia.

  “This came for you,” he said tonelessly. “You can return to your sister as early as tomorrow. It doesn’t matter.”

  Zofia took it, the line between her brows furrowing.

  “Congratulations to us all,” said Séverin tonelessly. “We found one of the greatest collections of treasures man has ever known.”

  Just as Séverin made his way to the door, Hypnos appeared at the threshold looking out of breath and confused.

  “I was wondering where everyone went,” he said, turning an accusing eye to Enrique. “I thought you and Zofia would come back, but you never did. If I’d known you were going to see Séverin, I would have joined you immediately.”

  Enrique felt Hypnos’s words settle heavily inside him. Was Séverin the only reason he would have joined them?

  Séverin pushed past him.

  “Where are you going?” asked Hypnos. “We have to get ready for the celebrations later!”

  Séverin walked out the door, leaving Hypnos to groan and throw up his hands. He adjusted his suit, took a deep breath, and made to go after Séverin when something in Enrique forced him to call out, “Wait!”

  Hypnos looked at him, irritation flashing across his face.

  “What is it, mon cher? Can it wait?”

  Enrique felt a lump in his throat as he made his way to Hypnos. He felt, suddenly, foolish. The shadows of today curled darkly in his heart, and he craved the light and warmth of another person before he threw himself into examining the treasures. He thought Hypnos would have recognized that plea in his face, but the other boy hadn’t noticed. In fact, Hypnos looked ready to bolt.

  “I could use your help?”

  Even as he asked, he knew the answer.

  “I cannot,” said Hypnos quickly, his eyes going to the door. “Séverin needs me—”

  “What if I needed you?” asked Enrique. And then, softly, “Would it even matter?”

  “Séverin is the closest I have to family,” said Hypnos. “I have to go to him.”

  Pity flashed through his heart.

  “I don’t think Séverin sees it that way,” said Enrique gently. “Trust me, Hypnos … I recognize what one-sided affection looks like.” His hand fell to his side. “At least, I recognize it now.”

  Hypnos went still. In his stillness lay all the answer Enrique needed. He saw, with a weary clarity, everything he hadn’t wanted to notice. How he had reached for something Hypnos wasn’t willing to offer. How the other boy seemed happiest when he was with the group, instead of just him. Hypnos had told him from the start that this was casual, and yet Enrique had kept trying to make it … more. An ache settled behind his rib cage. The room felt larger, and he felt all the more diminished.

  Hypnos’s mouth twisted with guilt.

  “Oh mon cher, it is not one-sided, it is merely—”

  “—Not enough,” finished Enrique, looking down at his shoes.

  Hypnos moved closer. Dimly, Enrique felt the other boy’s warm fingers tipping up his chin.

  “I am quite charmed by you, my historian,” said Hypnos. “You and I … we understand each other’s pasts.”

  But a shared past didn’t make a future. And Hypnos seemed to know this too.

  “I think, with enough time, I could learn to love you,” said Hypnos.

  Enrique reached up, slowly removing Hypnos’s hand from his face. He held the other boy’s hand, then curled it into a fist, brushing his lips once against Hypnos’s knuckles.

  “Perhaps we both deserve someone who is not so hard to love,” said Enrique.

  “Enrique—”

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nbsp; “I’ll be fine,” said Enrique. “You broke no promises to me. Just go.”

  Hypnos opened his mouth as if he’d say more, but in the end, chose silence. He met Enrique’s eyes, nodded stiffly, and left the room.

  Enrique stared out the empty door. He felt hollow, as if a stray winter wind would blow right through him. Haltingly, he took a deep breath. The library smelled of paper and ink … and possibility. And that, in the end, was where he turned his attention. He needed the sanctuary of work, and judging from what he’d glimpsed of the treasures, there was much work to be done. It was only when he turned fully from the door that he realized he wasn’t alone. Zofia stood there, twirling a lit match between her fingers and eyeing a table full of treasures. She’d stayed, and he didn’t know what to make of that. She looked him in the eye, her blue eyes fierce.

  “Do you need help?” she asked.

  * * *

  AROUND THEM, THE LIBRARY seemed to take on new meaning. The caryatids of the muses had folded their hands against their breastbones, the iconography of their particular fields gleaming on their person and wrought in stone. Enrique saw the lyre of Calliope, the chief of the muses and the muse of epic poetry; the cornet of Clio, muse of history; the aulos of Euterpe, muse of music; the kithara of Erato, muse of love poetry; the tragic mask of Melpomene, muse of tragedy; the veil of Polymynia, muse of hymns; the lyre of Terpsichore, muse of dance; the shepherd’s crook of Thalia, muse of comedy; and the compass of Ourania, muse of astronomy. A shiver ran down his spine as he regarded them. Once, they had been revered as the goddesses of inspiration, but what had they inspired in this place except murder? And why were all their objects broken?