The House of Binding Thorns

by Aliette de Bodard

  Asmodeus readjusted his glasses on his nose, and grabbed the halberd. “There. Let’s go,” he said. Again, that slight stumble, which you wouldn’t see unless you were watching for it. “I’ve had enough of the affairs of dragons, for the time being.”

  The city grew larger and larger, from a shape on the horizon to individual buildings. They left the cliffs and the coral reefs behind, and walked in the midst of algae fields with off-white speckles and a smell of brine overlaid by rot.

  And behind them were the hunters. The riverbed was vibrating now with their advance, their voices growing more and more distinct, and they couldn’t seem to shake them off or get ahead of them.

  One step, and another, and another. Asmodeus and Valchior were in front of her now. Asmodeus was striding ahead as if nothing were wrong, his swallowtail jacket impeccable, his shoes leaving little clouds of sand on the riverbed. Nevertheless . . . as the day wore on, he slowed down. Hard to tell, because she wasn’t doing much better, just trying to put one foot in front of the other and not falter, because who knew what they’d do if she couldn’t keep up?

  He was going to falter. They were all going to falter, and then Yen Oanh’s men would catch up. She sneaked a glance behind, as the landscape became rice paddies, all deserted, with the odd rusted bicycle or rickshaw against the terraces. Their pursuers’ silhouettes were distinct, and she could almost see their faces. Not long now.

  The only thing that kept her going was the link to the House, and the memory of Charles’s body in the cage—running from one thing into an uncertain future, a monster in front of her, a monster behind her, with nothing worth choosing or reaching for. She wanted essence. Oblivion. So, so badly it was a tightening in her chest, a vise that made every breath burn in her throat.

  There should have been a smell of churned mud; but what rose, as they went deeper into the rice paddies—and as, finally, they saw crabs and lobsters and small, slight dragons tilling the fields—was the cloying smell of corrupted essence, as if her wish had been granted by an uncaring, cruel God. The paddies became dotted with small villages, and tumbledown temples, and still no one seemed to pay them anything but the slightest of attention. She knew that expression: had seen it, all too often. It was that of the Houseless when the fighting between Houses started, the prayer they all learned, outside the only safety in Paris. Please let it pass me by.

  Madeleine would have prayed with them, if she had any idea what to pray for.

  Asmodeus turned as they crested a rise, sheltering his eyes with the flat of his hand. None of the farmers appeared to do more than stare at them. And why would they get involved, in a fight that wasn’t theirs? “They’re very close. Valchior?”

  Valchior shrugged. “No more bullets. But the bayonet . . .”

  Asmodeus nodded, curtly. As Madeleine stumbled past him, he grabbed her. For a single, terrifying moment she thought he was going to throw her down the hill, and then he brought her close to him, so close she could smell orange blossom, and bergamot, except that it was all slightly off, tinged with the slight tang of mildew.

  You’re not healing, she wanted to say, but the look in his eyes stopped her. “You’re a useless fighter,” he said. “But you need this to lean against. Give it back to me before the fighting starts.” He gave her the halberd.

  There was a slight tingle like magic, something shifting within her, as if the weapon wanted to choke the life out of her. “It’s enchanted,” she said, as she stumbled down the hill. Asmodeus, for a moment, drew level with her, his face impassive, his horn-rimmed glasses glinting in the sunlight.

  “If I had a guess,” he said, “to kill Fallen, and dragons.”

  “So Yen Oanh—”

  “Wouldn’t make a weapon that would kill her with a single stroke,” Asmodeus said. “Though perhaps having her innards ripped out was more than a minor inconvenience. I imagine she’s annoyed.” He sounded amused again. “Try to keep up. We can’t afford to carry you.”

  And what would they do if she fell behind, if the hunters caught up with her? Just abandon her as so much chaff? No.

  No: he had come for her. For Hawthorn’s sake, he had said, for the information she had, which was pitifully small. Her thoughts went back, again and again, to his kneeling by her side, to his lips on hers, his magic filling her—that inescapable reef on which they shattered.

  Ahead, before the end of the road, was a gate, a small arch topped by a tiled roof, a much diminished version of the one she and Clothilde had gone under, with the outskirts of the city behind it, a scattering of skewed coral buildings. The gate was manned by three soldiers, small figures in blue and yellow uniforms, carrying bayonets, who didn’t seem to become larger, or at least not as large as the hunters behind them. As they walked toward it, some kind of commotion seemed to take it over. One of the soldiers ran toward the houses behind the gate, and came back with more people, gesturing wildly, and speaking words that the currents smothered.

  Madeleine turned again. She couldn’t help it—it was like staring into the abyss. The hunters were almost upon them. “Asmodeus . . . ,” she said, choking on sand and silt.

  She expected him to move smoothly, impossibly so, as he had when wounding Yen Oanh. But instead, the three of them came to a slow stop, and Valchior was the one who took the halberd from her. It was all she could do to stand once its support was removed.

  “My lord.” Valchior gave the halberd to Asmodeus, who hadn’t moved since he’d stopped, staring at the dozen soldiers coming at them. Faint, lambent light came from his skin, but it was weak, tinged with darker shadows, and what came from him was the smell of soured citruses, and decaying flowers.

  Madeleine, exhausted, gave up; and fell on her knees on the road. Over. It was over. She hadn’t thought there could be anything stronger than Hawthorn, but . . .

  Asmodeus didn’t move, or cast any spells. Behind them, from the gate, came the sound of booted feet, and cries in Annamite. Ahead of them, gathering, were the hunters, the same kind of soldiers that had picked Madeleine up in her cell, wearing orange clothes and carrying the tall halberds with their brown, knife-shaped blades. Enchanted to kill Fallen. She could barely feel any magic, but then, she wasn’t an Annamite practitioner.

  “Go ahead,” Asmodeus said. “You know what happens, to traitors and the disloyal. I should imagine it’s not much different from Hawthorn.”

  The leader—a woman with a pronounced snout, and a burning pearl, who reminded Madeleine of Anh Le, the unpleasantly brusque dragon at court—spoke up. “We could kill you all. Easily.”

  “Could you?” Asmodeus’s smile was sharp. “We don’t die so easily, us House-bound. And then you’d have to deal with the men behind us.”

  They stared at each other. Behind them, the voices were getting closer and closer.

  Madeleine forced herself to roll up, every muscle protesting, every ache of the journey vividly outlined in traceries of pain. Two dozen soldiers had marched from the gate, armed with rifles and swords. They were perhaps fifty or a hundred meters away. Cold currents swirled around them, so strong she could feel them, even from a slight distance.

  “You’re running out of time,” she said, turning around, slightly, so that she could see both the approaching soldiers and Yen Oanh’s men. Two of them had dropped to their knees, balancing rifles on their shoulders.

  “Do they have cages, to expose rebels?” Asmodeus said. “I wonder.” His voice was light, amused. “I was told of so many entertaining customs—death by a thousand cuts, over several days. Entire families beheaded for the sins of their fathers and brothers. Broken and flayed bodies displayed as examples, and eyes and fingernails eaten by fish and shrimp . . .”

  The leader moved then, lunging toward him, but she was the only one, her followers hesitating for one fatal moment. Asmodeus grabbed the handle of her halberd, and used it to throw her on the ground. “Run,” he sa
id to her hunters, his smile the fiery one of demons.

  The crack of a gunshot shattered the air, and another and another, and then the soldiers arrived. The path became a muddy confusion, a short, desperate battle that Madeleine couldn’t follow—metal against metal, and the sound of something breaking, and screams—and she fell to the ground, curling into a ball and trying to make herself as small as possible.

  Hands pulled her up, steadied her. It was a young dragon, her face barely old enough to have made it out of adolescence, and only a few flecks of iridescence on her cheeks to remind Madeleine that she wasn’t human. “Elder Aunt, are you all right? We’ll get you back to the palace.”

  Madeleine struggled to breathe. The world was contracting and blurring, and standing upright hurt, and she wasn’t sure what had happened—could only see the hunters running away, with soldiers in pursuit, and a cloud of dust where they had all been. “What—?” she said, trying to line up words, and failing. “What—”

  Asmodeus and Valchior were speaking to two soldiers, while two others carried the prone body of the leader. She could hear only snatches of sound, things about blood and ravings and punishments. Of course.

  I was told of entertaining customs—death by a thousand cuts, over several days.

  She shivered.

  The halberd Asmodeus was leaning on was now broken: not where Madeleine expected it to be, which would have been anywhere along the handle, but halfway through the blade, a clean break that had shaved off part of its edge. It was no longer a dark brown, but a translucent, soft green color reminiscent of the tea with the cut-grass smell they’d been served in the palace.

  “Let’s get you back,” the soldier said, pulling at her sleeve insistently. “Come on, Elder Aunt.”

  * * *

  AFTERWARD, she wasn’t sure what happened, exactly. They must have got back into the city somehow, but entire moments disappeared into a growing maw of darkness. There were only bright snatches, like lantern fish swimming out of the depths.

  A food seller setting skewers on her cart and stopping as they walked by, eyes wide, face frozen in surprise. The large, three-lobed gate with its red pillars, and the statues behind bending and twisting as if in some unseen wind. Asmodeus, walking ahead of her as if nothing were wrong; and then the slight stumble as he passed the gate.

  A gathering of guards and officials in the courtyard—parasols and feather fans, and frayed brocade, and Clothilde, running ahead of them all, her face twisted in something close to panic. “My lord,” she said. “My lord!”

  Asmodeus’s laughter, low and good-humored. “Worried for my well-being, Clothilde? I should think we’re finally safe.” And then another stumble, and his grunting, falling to one knee, catching himself on the cobblestones of the courtyard, his face pale, his bandages stained with the vivid red of blood.

  And the expression on Clothilde’s face, fear and adoration and the outright horror of one who sees her entire world overturned. “My lord. Please. Please please please . . .” As she knelt by his side and pulled away the clothes and the bandages, her eyes were wet with tears.

  No. No.

  Fear tightened a fist of ice around Madeleine’s lungs, each breath a struggle.

  Because it was her future.

  Because, once Asmodeus was done with her—once he had broken her, once and for all—that was all she would be, a puppet subsumed in mindless devotion, the only thing that he valued. Loyalty. Allegiance. Abject obedience.

  The link to the House burned within her like a naked blade, and she heard, once more, the screams of the Fallen Asmodeus had tortured, following her into the dark.

  * * *

  THERE was a grove in the gardens of Hawthorn. It lay, not anywhere near the main buildings of the House, or on the remnants of the commons that had once been surrounded by hawthorn hedges, but at the back of the gardens, near the banks of the Seine—with a broken, algae-encrusted staircase leading down to a disused quay.

  Within the grove were hawthorn trees, as far as the eye could see, a profusion of white flowers so bright they hurt the eye. And, on each tree, hung a body.

  They hung limp in the embrace of branches, thorns driven deep into their flesh, a spattering of scarlet blood falling upon the parched earth every time the wind grasped and shook the trees. Their flesh was tight over wasted muscles, mummies rather than corpses, desiccated until they hardly seemed human or Fallen anymore. The air smelled, not of blood, not of flowers, but of that peculiar sharp, acrid scent of magic, a tang on the palate that promised power, and dominion, and double-edged miracles.

  Someone walked in the grove. And, where they walked, the wind died down, and the bodies stopped shaking and bleeding, and opened up large, white eyes to stare at them.

  They reached, at length, a tree deep inside the grove. The body that hung upon it was not an emaciated skeleton with a thin layer of flesh, but something whole and plump. It could have been resting, if not for the three thin, sharp branches that impaled it. Its eyes, when it opened them, were cornflower blue; and its smile bitter, almost that of the living.

  “Is it time?” it whispered, and the visitor smiled, though the smile was joyless, and harsh, and tinged with tears.

  “Almost,” they said. “Almost, my lord Uphir.”

  SIXTEEN

  Painful Awakenings

  FRANÇOISE came back from her weekly run to the marketplace to find Berith entertaining a visitor. She didn’t worry at first: the visitor was Aunt Ha, one of the numerous mothers who hung out at Olympe’s flat, and Berith’s other chess partner. Except that neither Berith nor Aunt Ha appeared to be playing chess: the board was spread out on the table, but it was still displaying Françoise’s and Berith’s game, and neither Berith nor Aunt Ha was so much as moving a piece.

  Aunt Ha’s toddler, Colette, was diverting herself by jumping up and down on the mattress, saying, “Mommy, jump, jump,” over and over. Françoise had to stop herself from snatching her. The mattress was clean, or as clean as it was ever going to be after a woman had died on it.

  Françoise took off her coat and scarf, and dropped the basket of root vegetables in a corner of the flat. “It’s a pleasure to see you, Elder Aunt,” she said to Aunt Ha.

  Aunt Ha’s face, when she turned to Françoise, was lined with worry. “It’s you I wanted to see, child.”

  “Me?” Françoise pulled a chair and sat in it, while Berith put away the cups of tea and the dough fritters. “I’m not sure—”

  “Grandmother Olympe has disappeared.”

  “What?” She must have misheard. But Aunt Ha’s face was grave, and Berith didn’t make any comment. “That’s impossible. Where—”

  “She was at the docks by the basin,” Aunt Ha said. “Looking for something in the water, or so the workers tell me. They left her there when a ship came in with flour barrels, and when they came back, there was only a dark, empty circle.”

  “I— She—” Françoise tried several sentences, gave up. Olympe was indestructible, with that particular stubbornness of those who had survived anything. Yes, other Annamites had disappeared; other people in la Goutte d’Or had been taken, day after day, a slow, endless toll that—to be honest—had not concerned her much, because she’d known herself to be protected by Berith’s magic, and because her own ties to the dockworkers were distant.

  “How long ago did this happen?”

  Aunt Ha looked on the verge of tears. “I don’t know. Three, four hours ago?”

  As if less time would change anything. As if . . .

  Her mind was still struggling to wrap around the enormity of it all. Olympe had been infuriating, and bossy, and likely to stick her nose in business that wasn’t hers, but without her, Françoise’s life would have been very different.

  Françoise looked at Berith, who shook her head.

  “The docks are too far away.” She closed he
r eyes, and magic limned her, for a brief moment. “Something is rising.”

  “From the river?” Dragons. Rong. Stories to comfort children at night. Except, of course, that now there was no comfort left.

  “Through the river,” Berith said, reluctantly. She moved away from the stove, and kissed Françoise on the lips. The familiar warmth of power spread through Françoise; held her, unmoving, while it rose, a wave that seemed to have no end. Berith’s eyes were flecked with silver, and for a moment Françoise saw her as she must have been in Heaven, bright and beautiful and terrible enough to drive people blind, or mad, or both.

  “I love you,” she whispered, her lips moving on Berith’s warm, scented flesh.

  The wave crested, and broke. Berith pulled away. “I, too,” she said. Her eyes still shone with that otherworldly light. “And, much as I want to, I can’t keep you cooped up in the flat forever.”

  Françoise shifted. The baby stretched and kicked within her, an odd feeling above her right hip, as if it had grabbed something that bothered it. The world felt unbearably sharp and distinct, every scent magnified, the tea growing cold in the cups, the rot and mold in the wall, Berith’s skin, beaded with sweat.

  She didn’t have to go. She didn’t have to get involved, with a community that barely tolerated her, that waited, calmly, patiently, for what they saw as a disastrous affair to run its course.

  She’d never forgive herself if she didn’t do anything. “I’m not planning on risking myself.”

  “Of course not.” Berith went back to the armchair, and leaned against the worn plush back. “But you never know.”

  Françoise reached out for her coat, and her scarf. “Let’s go,” she said to Aunt Ha.

  * * *

  IT was early afternoon, and the activity on the docks was slowing down. Workers moved crates from quays to warehouses, and sat down behind the broken doors, just out of the way of the wind, to nibble on buns or bread or a little something that made up their lunch. By the boats, guards in House colors supervised, making sure that nothing was stolen.