The House of Binding Thorns

by Aliette de Bodard

  Berith grimaced. “My dominion is over this flat. It would take some effort to move it elsewhere. I can tell you if we’re under siege. I can’t tell you what might be happening several hundred meters from here, on the docks or rue de Jessaint or elsewhere.”

  “You helped Philippe on rue de Jessaint. Or so he said.”

  Berith’s silver-flecked gaze grew distant. “He was in a place that wasn’t here. A little pocket of space that had been cut off from the city. And there was . . .” She paused, collecting her thoughts. “Something coming. Something rising from forgotten places.”

  Françoise withdrew her hand from the bowl. “It’s still out there.”

  “Yes. But as I said, I can protect you against it, but not much more. And only if you’re not reckless. I don’t know what it is, but . . .” She looked at the body again. “If I didn’t know better—”

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve seen someone beaten up like this, once. Except not as badly. A child who fell into a lock, just as it was filling up with water. Bruises and cuts made when their body was thrown against the walls.”

  Françoise shivered. “There are locks, behind la Villette Basin.”

  “Yes. I haven’t been to them since the war. I imagine they’re much diminished. That much less safe.”

  “The knife wounds—” Françoise shook her head. “She was attacked and someone pushed her in?”

  “I assume so.”

  “We . . . we can’t tell if she’s going to be fine,” Françoise said. “You said there were two broken ribs in the chest, but we don’t know if any major organs have been pierced. She needs a doctor.” They couldn’t afford one. And whatever had happened to the woman, it was probably already too late for medical attention. She would either pull through on her own or die.

  Berith said nothing. Magic swirled, lazily, around the chair, circled it like flames. Her eyes, when she spoke, were the golden shade of wheat in summer, in an impossibly faraway land. “Let’s ask Philippe.”

  “We can’t pay him.”

  “And we can’t let her die, either,” Berith said. “Can we?”

  Françoise shivered. She already knew the answer. There was only a single possible one. “No. I’ll ask him, when he comes.”

  They both knew that when he next came—soon, too soon—it would be to escort her into House Hawthorn.

  TEN

  Hawthorn’s Own

  MADELEINE woke up, and wished she hadn’t.

  She was lying on something hard and cold, and the smell of mold was all around her—in her hair, in her nostrils, in her chest, as if she’d been entombed within a damp cave for centuries. And, within her, the link to the House was seething so strongly she thought, for an agonizing, heart-stopping moment, that Asmodeus was standing by her side.

  She sat up, gingerly. Her chest ached when she moved: there was a nascent bruise all across her torso, by the looks of it.

  Where—

  The air rippled around her, slowly, lazily. The dim light allowed her to see only the walls of the room she was in. Even covered in algae and mold, they were vaguely familiar. The link to the House was still pressing against her mind, sharpening her thoughts to unbearable clarity: Asmodeus’s presence so vivid she could imagine his voice. Run away.

  He knew where she was, didn’t he? She patted her clothes. Her clothes had taken a rather thorough battering. The tracker disk was still in the inner pocket of the jacket where she’d left it. Instead of pulsing like a living heart, it was cold, its beating almost completely stilled. She pulled it into the light, stared at it. It had charred at the edges, and the insignia of Hawthorn was blurred, the hawthorn tree reduced to a straight line, the crown all but smoothed away. At a guess, even with her appalling talent for magic, this was not good. Not good at all.

  Run away.

  Yeah. As if she could right now.

  There was another person in the room. She crawled over there, ignoring the twinges of pain in her chest, and laid a hand on the wrist. Her finger met, not flesh, but the scabbed, barnacled surface of shell.

  It was the other Annamite: the man who had been with Véronique. What had been his name? “Charles,” she whispered. There was no answer. His clothes were torn, his chest bloodied; the eyes slightly too far apart, and the flesh shadowed with gray scales. They flaked off under her touch, leaving the imprint of her fingers in red, glistening flesh on his cheeks.

  No. She was going to do more damage, despite trying to help him. She withdrew her fingers, trying to keep them still. Where were they?

  At length, she got up on unsteady feet, and tottered, as best as she could, to the opposite wall. There was a door, but it was locked, and the sole, minuscule window in the wall, a circular oeil-de-boeuf, was plastered over with something hard, like mortared stone. No, not stone: barnacles, wedged so close together they had fused in a lumpy, whitish mass.

  Still in the dragon kingdom, then. But then, anything else would have been unlikely.

  Run away. The link to the House was insistent, like a knife cutting, again and again, at her flesh.

  She knelt, again, by Charles’s side. Her fingers brushed against something hard in the pocket of his jacket: she withdrew a small snuffbox, the kind a gentleman would keep his tobacco or aniseed sweets in. But the warmth of it, the weight of it, in her hand were all too familiar.

  Essence.

  All she had to do was open it, to breathe it in. She’d have enough power to blast the door open; enough recklessness to attempt an escape, to have the voice of Hawthorn fall to a bearable level in her thoughts.

  All she had to do . . .

  But the only thing she could think of was Asmodeus’s face; and the way he had unfolded, one by one, the fingers of his right hand, like a doctor putting on a glove before an operation. All she could hear was his voice, amused, lightly ironic. You might as well be of some use, after all, even if it’s only for a few hours of my own enjoyment.

  No. Not that.

  She took the box, and slid it in the same pocket as the tracker disk. Then she settled by Charles’s side, and waited.

  When the door opened, she jerked awake with a start. Two guards in dark orange tunics with conical hats came in, carrying peculiar weapons: a cross between a halberd and a knife, a long pole topped by a short, narrow blade tapering to a point. The blades were a dark brown with thin green streaks. They pointed them toward her, penning her as though she were an animal, an arm’s length away from the person who entered through the door.

  She was Annamite: a dragon, with the antlers Madeleine was coming to recognize as characteristic. But where Prince Phuong Dinh’s antlers had been translucent, as fine and as delicate as porcelain, these were thick: an opaque, off-white color that gave the impression the owner wouldn’t mind using them to fight.

  The woman looked from Charles to Madeleine, her face not exactly emotionless, but close. “Well. What do we have here?”

  As if she didn’t know, exactly, what it was she had captured. Madeleine bit back on an answer.

  “An essence addict, and . . .” She lifted a hand, and a cold, slimy current wrapped itself around Madeleine’s wrists, like invisible bonds that slowly started to rub against her flesh. The link to the House flared so strongly it was all she could do to remain standing, to not run, blindly, heedlessly, toward the open door and a rather dubious safety. “And a Fallen-bound. And also an addict.”

  “I haven’t touched angel essence in months,” Madeleine snapped.

  “Of course. And you could hold some in the palm of your hand and not be tempted to partake.” She sounded amused. “Not that it would matter. This room is proof against any magic you can conjure.”

  “There’s no power on earth that is capable of that.”

  “Is there? You’re not on earth.” The woman smiled. “My name is Yen Oanh. But you already guessed this.�
� She gestured, gracefully, at the guards. “Come. Let me show you my little corner of the dragon kingdom.”

  Two extra guards carried Charles with them. He hung, limp, between them, on the thin line between unconscious and corpse. “You shouldn’t move him,” Madeleine said, before she could stop herself.

  Yen Oanh’s gaze was pitying. She didn’t bother answering.

  They emerged into the same odd, rippling sunlight of the dragon kingdom, on some kind of narrow platform overlooking a vast expanse of sand. Directly below them was a small encampment, and buildings of coral and diseased mother-of-pearl, crooked and distorted, like quick, hurried sketches instead of a real construction. In the distance was what looked like a half-built wall of dark brown stones. People the size of dolls carried tools and clear green stones to it. There were several piles already, and masons reaching for them. Barely visible behind the wall was a set of stone stairs. It took an impossibly long, almost absurd time for Madeleine to realize that the stairs were identical to the ones they’d descended, to get into the dragon kingdom.

  Were they walling themselves off? The wall hadn’t been there when they’d left Hawthorn. It had to be another set of stairs, another part of Paris’s quays they were cutting off. As if that would change anything; like trying to plug a colander by blocking off one hole. Asmodeus, much as she disliked him, was right: the time for secrecy had ended, and they were now vulnerable.

  The guards still held her at arm’s length with their halberds, as they walked down the planks. Madeleine looked down. It was iron, corroded and blotched, and slippery, with the sheen of spilled oil. The door to the cell was set in a wall that must have run the entire length of the platform; but half of it was now nothing more than algae-encrusted rubble, with crabs and fish settled in the nooks and crannies, and protrusions of coral distorting every available surface like a hundred tumors. Inside, a corroded, smashed iron structure, and large basins, their surfaces covered in verdigris. It was both . . . familiar and creepy at the same time, the remnants of things Madeleine could name, made meaningless by their sojourn in the water.

  There was a cage, the edge of the platform: the guards opened it, and set Charles down inside, before closing the door. They hadn’t bothered to get rid of the previous occupant: a shrunken, barnacled corpse with a blistered, greenish black face, gazing at them with empty eye sockets, and large chunks of the lips missing.

  “You can’t—,” Madeleine started, and then found her voice again. “He needs a doctor.”

  “He’s dying.” Yen Oanh’s voice was harsh. “And, because of people like him, of their embrace and promotion of Fallen ways, other people, far more defenseless than him, are dying, too. Don’t expect me to pity him. Come.” Her face still hadn’t moved.

  When they reached the edge of the platform, the guards merely pushed her off. Madeleine had a stomach-clenching moment of terror as she floated free, before the water caught her, and carried her down. Of course. One couldn’t even trust gravity here.

  Yen Oanh and the guards were already waiting for her. Madeleine walked toward them, knowing she would be pushed and prodded if she didn’t follow. As she left the shadow of the platform, she turned, briefly, to stare at the cage where Charles lay dying, and saw, at last, what she’d been imprisoned in.

  It was the wreck of a boat. And now the copper basins and the structure made sense, because this was not a merchant boat or a seagoing vessel, but one of the old laundry barges, the ones that had dotted the Seine before the war; before the river turned dark and angry and made barges like these unsustainable. It looked as though its hull had been staved in, and then crushed by something. The hole was colonized by algae and coral formation, almost completely plugged, but its outline was clearly delineated; and the same for the cracks.

  Crushed by dragons.

  She saw, for a brief moment, a large, serpentine shape breaking the surface of the Seine, its antlers driving deep into the fragile wood, its coils wrapping around the shape of the hull and the cabins, and tightening until the entire thing snapped like twigs in a storm—and shivered. She’d thought the dragons unfamiliar, and alien, but not outright terrifying. A good thing, after all, that they were weak: who knew what they could do when they were strong?

  The cage with Charles inside was dangling down the remnants of the hull, a dark extrusion that had to be visible from a large distance. From the walls they were building, perhaps? Yen Oanh clearly meant to set an example.

  And, equally clearly, Madeleine—House-bound, essence-addicted—was the other part of the example.

  She shivered, again.

  Yen Oanh and the guards herded her toward one of the ramshackle buildings: the largest one, its walls crooked and bulging out of shape, the coral turning an unhealthy gray-blue in large patches, and the bars on the windows already crumbling into dust.

  Inside, it was dark, cool, and silent. Then, as her eyes adjusted to the shadows, she saw that the building was full. Bunk beds, three to a single space, held bodies, packed so tightly one could hardly move between them. No one spoke for a while: Madeleine watched the people moving between beds, changing sheets, taking pulses, and giving out medicines and injections.

  It was . . . a hospital? The people moving between beds looked and acted like nurses and doctors, but it didn’t sound like any healing was being done. Some people, convulsing, were strapped to the beds. Others didn’t move. Most of them were fish or crabs or other crustaceans. Some were dragons, their antlers thin and translucent, except that their clothes weren’t faded, patched silk, but rough, unadorned cotton in an even worse state of wear.

  And there was a smell, a sweet, sickly one that was somehow familiar.

  “I don’t understand . . . ,” Madeleine started.

  A stretcher was moving toward them, carrying a body. No, not a body; a corpse. Because no one could survive with half the flesh of their face sloughed off, the bones glistening below the slack, jellied red of corrupted muscles. Because no one’s eyes were that color, mottled and grayish and with the sheen of decomposing oil, or that size, revulsed and shrunken in their orbits like shriveled grapes. The same smell rose, sweet and sickly and so strong nausea welled up in her mouth—corruption, decay, mingled with something else, the acridity and warmth she knew all too well.

  Angel essence.

  Yen Oanh laid a hand down on the face, on the lips, on the chopstick held between the corpse’s teeth. She touched, gently, the antlers on either side of the face. One of them snapped off in her hand, with a crunching sound, not like bones breaking, but like cracked eggshell, coming apart with just a touch. Dust came up. It was almost the familiar taste and fire of essence, except that everything was swamped by that unbearable sweetness, traveling up Madeleine’s nostrils and her mouth and making her stomach somersault.

  Madeleine gave up, and fell to her knees, vomiting. Once, and then again and again, until she brought up nothing but bile, which swirled around her, borne by the invisible currents. But the sickening taste didn’t go away.

  “This is your handiwork,” Yen Oanh said, softly, somewhere above her. “The easy lure of magic, and the decay that overtakes us when we yield to temptation. And, as always, it’s the poor, the hunters, the peasants, the workers, who bear the brunt of it.”

  Madeleine struggled to stand up, to breathe—let alone to speak. “We don’t—”

  “You encroach on us. You weaken us.” Yen Oanh’s voice was almost expressionless, stating a fact. She should have been angry? Sad? Something, anything that would have made sense. “And now the princess thinks she will make an alliance with you. All for what? So we can have more and more people follow this way of life?”

  Madeleine dragged her voice from where it had fled. “Not everyone is an addict.”

  “And not everyone in your House is a Fallen. But you do enough damage, as it is.”

  “We didn’t ask you to consume angel essence!�
��

  Yen Oanh laughed. It was dark, and utterly without joy. “You offer rice to a man dying of hunger. Do you think he will not take it? Essence is the promise of pleasure, of power. When everything is crumbling around us, do you truly think we will walk away from it?”

  “You took Ghislaine.” Madeleine pulled herself to her feet, shaking. “And Elphon.”

  Yen Oanh smiled.

  “What—what do you want?”

  Yen Oanh didn’t even blink. “If I had my way? Your death. Publicly, messily, slowly. To show the kingdom, and the city, that Fallen magic has no power over us.”

  Like Charles, dying in his cage, with no one to comfort him and nothing to ease the pain. She hoped to God he would never wake up, never realize what was happening. “I’m not Fallen.”

  “No, but you’re the next best thing, as they say. Fortunately for you, you have value beyond this.”

  “What value?”

  “As you say, you’re not Fallen. And much as I would like to clean the kingdom of every trace of House presence . . . I would rather have your master.”

  Ghislaine had been worried about the House, Prince Phuong Dinh had said, worried enough to leave and try to warn them. And now Madeleine knew why. Because it was a trap for Asmodeus.

  In other circumstances, she would have said Yen Oanh and Asmodeus were welcome to each other, but now she only felt small, and scared, with only a worthless link to the House reminding her that she was in mortal danger. “I don’t understand.”

  Yen Oanh reached out, running a clawed hand on Madeleine’s face. Something pushed against the link to Hawthorn in her mind, again and again; like a snake’s tongue, probing for weaknesses in all the wrong places, rasping at her skin until she bled. The presence of Asmodeus flared, a brief image of a tree of thorns, and a fire, and the touch on her mind withdrew.

  “I would poison you if I could.” Yen Oanh’s voice was emotionless, as if she were merely talking about the weather. “I would break into your mind as you lay dying in agony, and use the link to your House to slip past its wards. I would shatter Hawthorn from within, into ten thousand pieces that could never be picked up.”