Of Books, and Earth, and Courtship

by Aliette de Bodard

  "Stop," she said.

  There were four of them in the car that night: two of her usual guards, Luc and Imadan, and Javier, the Jesuit, the latest of several incongruous additions to the House. He had volunteered when Selene's chauffeur fell ill. She'd found him in the great hall, stubbornly waiting for her, his olive skin standing out against the darkness of his clothes; and had simply gestured him into the car. They'd hardly spoken a word since, and Selene hadn't probed. Like the rest of the motley band that constituted the House, Javier would open in his own time; there was little sense in trying to nudge or break him open--God knew Selene had had enough experience, by now, of what it meant to break people. Morningstar had taught her well, from beginning to end.

  "What is it?" Javier asked.

  Selene raised a hand to silence him, seeking the origin of the magic. Young, and desperate; she'd almost forgotten how that tasted, how bittersweet it all was, that mixture of bewilderment and pain that came just after the Fall.

  West, in the ruined blocks that had been the great department stores and the great hotels before the war, their names like a litany of what had been lost: the Printemps, the Galeries Lafayette, the Hôtel Scribe, the Grand Hôtel . . . West, where the House of Lazarus still stood. And if she could feel it, so could every other Fallen in the vicinity; and perhaps their pet mages, too, if they had the right artifacts or were pumped up on essence.

  Needless to say, Selene did not approve of essence.

  "We don't have much time," she said to Javier. "It's an infant Fallen, and it's in trouble."

  Javier's face was pale, but set. "Tell me where."

  "Right," Selene said. "Left at the next intersection."

  The car moved smoothly under Javier's hands--though of course there was nothing smooth about it, and the battered and old metal carcass ran as much on magic as it did on expensive fuel.

  Left, straight ahead, right, left. It was in her bones now, a dull vibration, a vague hint of something red-hot and searing, something that would overwhelm her, given half a chance.

  Ahead was the dark mass of the Galeries Lafayette: the dome had miraculously survived the war and everything thrown at it, but the insouciant crowds that had once filled the shops at the beginning of the twentieth century, marveling at hats and brocade robes, sitting in droves in the tearoom and reading rooms, were all gone. It had been sixty years, and none but the insane would enter the Galeries now.

  The insane, or the powerful.

  "Park here," Selene said, pointing to a somewhat clear space among the rubble. She glanced at the shadows; there were people there, the lost and the Houseless, but they wouldn't move unless Selene showed weakness of some kind. Which wouldn't happen. She was old enough by now to know the rules of the city, and not foolish enough to leave her car unprotected. Anyone who attempted to open it after they were gone would get a nasty shock as a warning, and incineration if they persisted.

  "Here?" Javier asked, slowing.

  "Yes. Come on, there isn't much time." She could feel the pain and the fear, the way they were building up, faster and harder than they should have.

  Which meant only one thing.

  Someone was trying to hurt the Fallen. In her city, within her reach.

  She didn't think. Without pausing to check if Javier was following, she strode under the dome and onto the vast stairs, vaguely feeling rubble shift and crumble under her feet. The pain and the need were within her, rising--a sharp, short stab followed by agony that would have doubled her over in pain, but her wards took the brunt of it, leaving only anger, only fear. . . .

  Magic was building within her--drawn from the House, from the city and its river blackened by ashes, from the devastated countryside that surrounded them all beyond the wastelands of the Périphérique, layer after layer of gossamer-thin spells, not as powerful as they had once been. But she was old and canny, and forged into a weapon by her master, Morningstar, and what she'd lost in power she more than amply made up in skill. The pain in her mind receded, to be replaced by white-hot anger; so that, by the time she reached the third floor and saw, among its shattered counters, the two people crouching in the unbearable radiance of a newly manifested Fallen, her thoughts were as clear and as sharp as glass blades.

  "You will stop," she said in the silence.

  They looked up, both of them: a girl no older than fifteen or sixteen, her face coated with grime, her malnourished frame making her seem even younger; and a boy of perhaps twenty, dark-skinned, narrow-eyed--an Annamite, by the looks of him--and then she saw the blood splayed on their hands and on their clothes; and the blades they'd been using to saw two fingers loose from the Fallen's shattered hand.

  That was the fear she had felt--waking up, fuzzy and disorientated after the Fall, still struggling to adjust to a bewildering world; and finding only pain and the slow, excruciating sawing of a knife against her hand. . . .

  "You will stop," Selene said again, coldly. "Now."

  The girl laughed. Her lips were stained with blood and her high-pitched voice was all too familiar, the voice of someone drunk on strange and unaccustomed power. "Or what? You'll make me? I don't think you can. You're old and scarred and the magic doesn't sing to you anymore."

  "Ninon--" the boy said--no, not a boy. Selene had been mistaken; he must have been older, twenty-five or thirty. He was breathing heavily, his pupils dilated; but apart from the blood, nothing about him indicated he'd consumed the flesh of the Fallen. Or perhaps he was merely more experienced. Either way, she was the real danger: the leader, the hothead.

  Selene threw a thread of magic, intending to pick up the girl and fling her aside from the prone Fallen--but Ninon laughed, and the power buried itself among the shards of glass from perfume bottles.

  "Told you," she said. "My turn."

  What she sent snaking toward Selene was brutal, undiluted, with the potency of a wildfire, its heat as scorching as the naked sun--and somewhere in its heart was the pain and hurt and betrayal of being cast out from the City, as raw as open wounds. Selene had to take a step back while she wove and rewove furiously, knitting her wards so that the magic, instead of shattering them, was guided until it buried itself into the floors of the Galeries.

  Fallen blood. Fallen magic. Stolen magic, hacked away in a rush of pain, the same pain that was now at the back of her mind like a coiled snake.

  That upstart girl would never steal again.

  The young man was tugging at Ninon's sleeve now, his face twisted in panic, though Selene could still hear his exhausted panting. "Please. You can't go up against her. Not for long. She's House, Ninon."

  Ninon turned and threw him a withering glance, opening her mouth for some scathing retort. Selene didn't wait. She gathered all that she could, pulling in from the ghosts of the Grands Magasins, from Silverspires and the throne where Morningstar had once sat, from the mirrors and water basins where witches strove to recreate glimpses of the City--and sent it, not toward Ninon, but toward the floor. It left her hands, a barely distinguishable tremor, a pinpoint that became a raised line, and then a rift across the faded ceramics tiles that would tear the girl apart.

  She had no pity. Not tonight, and certainly not for people who fought for the right to dismember Fallen as if they were cattle.

  Too late, Ninon saw it. She turned away from the young man and, raising her hands, tried to absorb the magic as Selene had done. But she was untrained; and the light of the magic left her face, the little flesh and blood she'd consumed burning like wastepaper in a hearth--her face twisted as she realized that she didn't have power anymore, that she didn't have time to find more, that it was going to hit whatever she did. . . .

  "Get out!" Ninon screamed to the young man, in the split second before the rift was upon her.

  There was no time left. None at all, and the young man was still there by her side as the rift hit, and the light flared so brightly that even Selene had to avert her eyes. She braced herself for the impact, for the wet sound of bodies twisted
past endurance, for the gouts of blood to join the Fallen's on the floor.

  Instead . . .

  It was like nothing she'd ever felt: a stillness, a quiet like the eye in a storm, a slow, delicate weaving that drew, not on the ghosts, not on the City, but on something else entirely. The rift stopped, inches from the young man, who stood with his hands open and sweat glistening on his face, his hair raised on his scalp. For a moment--a brief, sharp moment that etched itself indelibly in Selene's mind--he seemed to hold the weight of her spell in his hands, the whole of her fury and her anger--and then he opened his hands and it was gone, harmlessly snuffed out.

  A witch, here? Why hadn't he--?

  She had little time for introspection. Time seemed to resume its normal flow; the young man crumpled like a puppet with cut strings, lying bathed in the Fallen's radiance. The girl, Ninon, stood for a moment, looking at him, looking at Selene; and then she spun on her heels and ran.

  Selene made no movement to stop her. Ninon was hardly worth the trouble, and in any case it was all she could do to stand.

  "You're a fool," Javier said gruffly, coming up behind her.

  "You felt it?"

  Javier shook his head as he moved to survey the wreckage. "Credit me with a little perception. You can't draw on this much power and hope it'll suffice to end fights. You usually don't get a second chance of casting that kind of spell."

  "With amateurs, it usually suffices," Selene said absentmindedly. She looked at the young man again. There was nothing special about him, no tremor of recognition racing up her arms. He was clearly no Fallen. But no witch--even high on angel essence, even with the most powerful artifacts of a House at her disposal--should have been able to do anything like this.

  Her gaze moved, at last, to the Fallen. A young girl, black-haired, olive-skinned, sharp-featured, looking for all the world as if she'd just come from Marseilles or Montpellier. In the brief interval, her innate magic had had time to start healing the worst of her broken bones, though neither her wings nor the two fingers she'd lost would ever regrow. There were rules and boundaries set on the Fallen: the bitter cage of their existence on Earth that they all learned to live in.

  "I heard from Madeleine," Javier said. "She's on her way with a couple helpers. Should be there in a couple minutes."

  "Good," Selene said. "Go and prepare the car, will you?" She looked again at the young man, at the foreign features of his face. Annamites were a familiar sight in the city: they were citizens of France, after all, albeit, like all colonial subjects, second-rate ones. Emmanuelle, Selene's lover, manifested as African; but Emmanuelle was a Fallen who had never left Paris in her life. Whatever the young man was, he was not and had never been a Fallen.

  "As you wish," Javier said. "I'll send you the helpers to pick her up."

  Selene shook her head. "Not just her. We'll have two passengers this time, Javier."

  She didn't know what the young man was, but she most definitely intended to find out.

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  About the Author

  Aliette de Bodard lives and works in Paris, where she has a day job as a System Engineer. She studied Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, but moonlights as a writer of speculative fiction. She is the author of the critically acclaimed Obsidian and Blood trilogy of Aztec noir fantasies, as well as numerous short stories, which garnered her two Nebula Awards, a Locus Award and a British Science Fiction Association Award. Recent/forthcoming works include The House of Shattered Wings, a novel set in a turn-of-the-century Paris devastated by a magical war, and The Citadel of Weeping Pearls (October 2015), a novella set in the same universe as her Vietnamese space opera On a Red Station Drifting. She lives in Paris with her family, in a flat with more computers than warm bodies, and a set of Lovecraftian tentacled plants intent on taking over the place.

  Visit her website.