How easily we give in, he thought, bitterly. No easy way to win, or to remain as they were. If they had ever been pure of all Fallen influences. Perhaps that had been the illusion, from the start: the idea that they could hold themselves within the city, yet separate from it and its powers.
“I might be able to help,” he said, slowly, carefully. “But I’ll need access to Asmodeus’s bedroom.”
Nadine’s head jerked back. “If he finds out—”
“I thought he’d be dead?” Thuan said, smoothly. “And he’ll blame me, in any case.”
“Not if I go in there with you.”
“You don’t have to,” Thuan said.
Nadine gave him a long, hard look. “I do.” Of course she didn’t trust him. But, at this stage, that didn’t matter much. “Why do you want to go there?”
“I saw something,” Thuan said. “When I was there. I’m not sure. . . .” He let the words trail, for a while. “But I think it could help you defend the wall.”
“An artifact?” Nadine asked. “It’s probably heavily defended by wards.”
“Maybe,” Thuan said. “But it’s worth a try, isn’t it?”
Silence, for a while. He might have pushed too hard. Might have not seemed casual enough. But at length Nadine said, “You were always too curious.” She sighed. She didn’t sound quite convinced: she would keep an eye on him in the bedroom. But she had relaxed her guard a fraction, and that was all he needed.
Thuan felt the khi currents around him, the slow, gathering strength of water, patiently waiting until everything lay quiescent and cold. He could wait, too; for the proper moment to strike.
* * *
THERE was only the wall.
It pressed down on Philippe, its shadow vast and unknowable and wrong. He wanted to claw at it, to tear it apart piece by piece, but he couldn’t. Ghosts pressed themselves against him; he hardly felt, anymore, the blood they were taking from him.
They’d been gathered in a makeshift shed, a little way from the quarry, little more than a roof over four slender sticks, and beaten earth underneath. The dragon and the Fallen who were infusing the blocks with magic had left, and now it was just a handful of dragon and crab guards, looking bored, secure in the knowledge that a few mortal Annamites weren’t going to be a threat. Olympe was having an urgent conversation with a burly female docker who looked distinctly sour, while two younger ones stared at the diseased coral and mother-of-pearl buildings with some of the wonder of seeing myths come to life. He knew them both: Hortense had come in with a broken foot after stepping on a magical trap, and Jérôme’s back, never strong, needed frequent straightening out after he’d carried crates all day.
Olympe had brought him tea earlier, watching him carefully. “You have some time,” she said. “Before Yen Oanh comes back.”
He’d wanted to tell her she pinned too much hope on what he could do, on how he could help them, but the words had remained stuck in his throat.
Philippe knelt, and traced the shape of a star in the churned earth. Ghosts ringed it, slowly filling its contours like paint sinking into paper.
There were words, on his tongue, spoken in a language that he couldn’t quite understand, burning like acid as they came up his throat. There was . . . Berith’s voice, slow and measured, reading from the pages of a huge leather book that held all the names of the Fallen, all those who had been flung down from Heaven, a hundred falling stars in the sky above the world: Lucifer Morningstar, Echaroth, Calyce, Uphir, Asmodeus, Selene, Hyacinth . . .
Isabelle.
The wall stood between them, an unbearable divide, a pain that needed to be excised. Philippe raised his eyes, struggling against the weight that bowed down his head. The line of dark stones went on and on without interruption, saturated with khi earth and khi metal—shot through with the thin, billowing shapes of ghosts—and, where Ciseis and Yen Oanh had crossed, one thin, familiar silhouette holding herself unmoving, with that familiar pent-up energy, a sense that she would never sit still if she could run or act.
I can take it down.
Brash words, Asmodeus whispered in his mind. The words of a madman. Poisoned gifts.
But he’d always known the gifts were poisoned; because Berith was Fallen, because, no matter how weak, how human she seemed, she couldn’t be trusted.
Around the star, his hands had traced words in a spidery, unfamiliar writing. He didn’t remember writing them, didn’t even remember how long he’d spent, kneeling. Olympe’s conversation had finished, and there was a faint smell of jasmine rice and fish sauce wafting from the circle where everyone else sat. She’d come to bully him into eating, soon.
No time.
He raised his eyes again. Within the wall, over the lintel of what had been the door, the white shape of the star had appeared, limned in silver. It was askew, blurred—tumbling down from its proper place, holding the white shape of Isabelle in its shadow.
He’d promised her this. In the ruins of House Silverspires—in the shambles of their friendship, forever broken—he had sworn to turn back time.
He rose and picked up the cup of tea by his side. Then he knelt within the star. It was crossing into another country: a faint resistance as he stepped over the line, thin, featureless arms that looked like branches or tentacles reaching out to embrace him, a wet cold spreading through his shoes to the soles of his feet. Berith was still speaking, in the background, her voice growing fainter and fainter.
He stood, in the dark, under the shadow of the wall, watching the star he’d traced on it grow larger and larger, and the khi currents swirling around a curious emptiness that had to be the Fallen magic. By his side were ghosts, not thin or featureless, but people. People he had known, such a long time ago in Annam, ancestors who had died: his mother and father, his grandparents, his great-grandparents, faded portraits on the ancestral altar, now standing, larger-than-life, with a hand on their descendants’ shoulders.
A smell of green papaya and coconut, and burning incense, and the wet, swollen sound of a river at monsoon time, and abruptly he was back a thousand years ago, before he ascended, before he became Immortal—when he was just a child, sneaking into the ancestral shrine and trying to grapple with the enormity of death.
Your desire cracks open the wall between life and death.
But it wasn’t a wall, not anymore. That was a Western view of it, the inviolability of the boundaries, ghosts and spirits in their proper places, science and magic neatly labeled.
It had never been a wall.
The ghosts by his side reached out, and the weight of the wall—the unbearable thing that fought to make him abase himself—receded. The wall itself, the dark, shimmering stones, faded, but where he’d expected cliffs, or the shadow of stairs leading up to the quays of Paris, there was instead a large, diffuse shadow, with a red pavilion at its feet.
A wheel. A huge wheel, not the red lacquered thing he’d imagined in the Courts of Hell, but a wooden one, the kind found on water mills, bringing up khi water into the city, every spoke loaded with ghosts. And a faint sound, a bell in a distant pagoda, every peal sending a thrill through him. He knew this place. He had not been there. He might never go there, for he didn’t age, didn’t die, but it was within him, as within all who had once been mortals.
Philippe walked up to it. Slowly, carefully, reverently, for what else could he do? In his hands, he still held the cup of tea, which now smelled different: a pungent odor tinged with just a hint of bitterness. The cup of forgetfulness, the tea of herbs that made a soul forget its previous lives, before its rebirth.
Isabelle was waiting for him at the bottom of the wheel, on the steps of the pavilion. Her face billowed in the wind like a spread cloth, not one feature remaining constant or in focus. She looked human, with nothing of the magic of Fallen about her, no unearthly light, no wings, no coiled power: just a girl from Marseill
es or Montpellier, with the olive skin of the Mediterranean. At her back, not the shadow of Morningstar, with his mocking smile, his facile, glib truths about power, but a wooden statue of the bodhisattva Quan Am draped in folds of cloth, her face creased in the benevolent, reassuring smile of one who heard everything.
“Philippe.”
Behind him, a string of ghosts: his ancestors, his compatriots lost in the war. Ahead of him, only the wheel, churning its load of water and souls into the city, and back again.
Isabelle held out her hands for the cup. Philippe stared at it, for a while. “No,” he said. “I need you to remember. Silverspires. What happened between us.” How he had failed her, time and time again, and everything they had shared, too, the kitchens and the kneading of bread, and the card games where she always lost, too earnest, too sincere.
She stared back, fey, enigmatic. “But not this.” Her hands moved, encompassed the wheel and the wall, and the growing light of the star above them. “Never this.” Gently, she took the cup from his hands, and drained it in one gulp. She handed it back to him. “You know what to do.”
And, for a single—perfect—suspended moment, he did.
He tightened his hands around the cup, crushing it into fragments. There was a single, high-pitched scream—a scream of a newborn, brought into a universe of blinding lights and unconfined spaces, where breathing hurt. And the vast, larger sound of something cracking into a thousand pieces.
The wheel was gone. Isabelle was gone, and the ghosts, and the ancestors, and the feeling that everything made sense. He was on the ground in the middle of a smudged drawing, the shards of the cup wedged into his hands. His fingers and palms were a mass of glistening, fiery pain, dripping blood on the earth.
The sound of everything cracking was still rolling in the background. He forced himself to look up, utterly drained, and saw that the cracks were spreading through the wall: the shape of a huge star, and then other cracks spreading from it, a network of fault lines that swallowed bricks and mortar in its wake. Entire sections toppled toward the ground, in a cloud of sand and silt and dust that cut off everything.
And then silence.
When he opened his eyes again, the wall still stood—barely, riven with fissures, its line dipping up and down where bricks had toppled. Except in one place: the door Ciseis and Yen Oanh had gone through, which was now open again, a hole surmounted by the shape of a star.
And in that hole . . . in that hole, curled up in a fetal position, the white, pale shape of a body.
The feeling of oppression had vanished, and his mind felt clear, for the first time in days. His body, though . . . He tried to rise, fell back, drained of everything. He couldn’t seem to heal, couldn’t seem to stop the bleeding in his hands. . . .
Ahead, at the doorway, the body unfolded. It was her, the gestures heartbreakingly familiar as she pulled herself to her feet and started, stumblingly, to walk toward him.
“Isabelle,” he whispered, through lips that had gone dry.
But, even before Isabelle reached them, he knew that something was wrong—knew, in fact, exactly what it was.
She looked exactly the same as she had, at the wheel. Her skin was dark, her hair cut short, and there was no aura around her, no oppressive light, no unearthly elegance. She didn’t walk lightly upon the ground, barely touching it; didn’t have the glazed, distant expression of newborn Fallen, or the ruthless gaze that came later, surveying all that it touched and wanting it all for itself.
Mortal. She was mortal.
TWENTY-FOUR
Weight of the Living
IN the grove, Asmodeus was kneeling, bowed under the weight of thin branches from the tree, wrapped around his arms and sinking into his flesh. Ciseis laid a hand on his forehead. It left the bloody imprint of a dozen thorn prickles. Asmodeus jerked, and tried to pull away, but the branches held him fast.
“Time,” she whispered. “Twenty years, Asmodeus.”
He opened his mouth. Twigs and berries arched from his throat, choking him from within, the House growing within his own body. His voice was almost inaudible. “Some people had it harder than you.”
“Those you purged?” Ciseis’s voice was hard. “The Seine running red with blood and ashes . . .”
“While you found refuge in a House that courted you and preserved you for its own ends? Dined and wined every night while others bled and screamed in your name . . .”
“You know nothing.” She laid her hands, not on him, but on the thin network of branches anchoring him to the tree. It started to pulse, gently, like veins infused with blood. He half rose, struggling; she pushed effortlessly, sent him back onto the blood-covered ground. “And your time is ending. From Uphir to you, from you to me, your mastery of the House is passing; your mastery of its wards is passing. . . . From Echaroth to you to me, the House is given in trust, and I am given to it, body and soul. . . .”
The tree shivered, stretched. Asmodeus opened his mouth to scream: it was filled with brambles and thorns, and only the thinnest of sounds came out. His arms went taut with the effort to resist, but the branches inexorably extended, dragging his arms with it, away from the cold earth, until his entire chest lay exposed like that of a crucified man, his folded knees centimeters away from the ground, his ankles dragging in the dirt.
Yen Oanh stepped forward. Her hand was wrapped around the hilt of the knife. The bodyguard from House Astragale lay unconscious on the ground, blood seeping from where she had stabbed him.
Ciseis was bathed in cold, red light, and Asmodeus was fading, shrinking, the skin of his hands tightened over the bones, the shape of his body warped and pressed, a network of thin, thorny branches sprouting from his mouth and nose. The tree’s boughs shook with his efforts to free himself, but he was growing weaker and weaker—as the blood left his body, the skin of his face grew translucent, outlining sharp cheekbones and the recessed eye sockets of a skull, and the branches of the hawthorn grew fatter, ruddier, their hold on him like a vise.
“It is the season of blood, the season of thorns, the season of berries that are poison. Your mastery of the House is passing; your mastery of its wards is passing—”
Ciseis stopped. She gave a strangled gasp, struggling against the hilt of the knife Yen Oanh had sunk into her side. The dragon withdrew it, stabbed her again, higher this time; and pressed down on her, bearing her all the way to the ground. Ciseis’s blue eyes were wide-open, glazing in shock, the same color as the merciless sky above. Her mouth worked, trying to speak around a flow of blood.
Yen Oanh held her down, wordlessly, as her struggles ceased. Then she moved, to stand in front of Asmodeus—knife thrust back in her right sleeve, the broken antlers around her face thick and yellowed, like ivory. Ciseis’s circle had sunk to nothing, and the network of branches holding Asmodeus had gone slack, lifeless.
“Put not your trust in dragons. . . .” Asmodeus’s voice was almost inaudible, still choked by the tendrils growing within him. He’d managed to pull his right hand in front of him, the skin of his wrist torn to bloodied shreds. His fingers—long, insectile—flexed, slowly, carefully.
“I’m not a fool,” Yen Oanh said. She shook her head. “You’re all the same, deep down. Ciseis at the head of House Hawthorn would have been no better than you.”
“And you would . . . claim . . . that dominion?”
Yen Oanh reached out, and laid her fingers on the branches holding his arms, pushing until he gasped in pain. His right hand, which hadn’t stopped flexing, brushed the skin of her wrist, withdrew as if scalded. His face was taut with more than the pain—a terrible effort to move something, anything, away from the tree’s grasp.
“You misunderstand. I have no interest in Hawthorn. None at all.”
Her hands shifted, became overlaid with gray scales the color of rot, her fingers sharpening into jointed claws. Frost climbed, from her fingers to
ward the hawthorn tree, swallowing everything in its wake, covering branches and berries and flowers with a thin layer of shimmering khi water—and from the tree to the others, locking body after body in the stillness of death. Asmodeus’s face went white, ice crystals creeping up the temples of his glasses, fogging the lenses with intricate patterns like colorless embroidery. “You would destroy us,” he whispered. The frost climbed into his mouth and sealed his lips.
“One fewer House,” Yen Oanh said. “One fewer threat.”
Asmodeus made a choked, low sound. He shifted, pulling with him the branches in one drawn-out, spasmodic movement—ice shaking on branches, thorns rubbing against his skin, drawing red, vivid blood.
“No . . .” His voice was a hiss. A faint, dying light streamed out of his skin, magic shriveling branches in its wake; but they only grew back, faster than he could burn them. Yen Oanh shook her head, vaguely amused.
“Stronger magic than yours, I’m afraid.”
The light died down. Asmodeus jerked back, his breath coming in short, spasmodic gasps, and pulled. There was a tearing sound from his right wrist as flesh parted all along the line of the thorns’ embrace, revealing the glistening shape of bone. His fingers, stretching, grabbed the hilt of the knife from Yen Oanh’s sleeve. He drew it, his mouth a thin red line of taut pain, and dragged it in one swift gesture across the right side of her neck.
Yen Oanh grabbed the blade, twisted. Asmodeus held on, grimly, pushing with all his strength, the knife slowly cutting through flesh and muscles. His body jerked and turned, branches snapping, growing again into a thicker, denser network. Yen Oanh’s face had gone white as well, as she struggled to hold him at bay. “Nothing will save the House, Asmodeus,” she whispered.
The House of Binding Thorns Page 33