No. The past was the past. She couldn’t afford to live in it, anymore. Death and its sleep awaited: rest, at long last; and oblivion, free from the grasp of fear. She pulled herself up, shaking; forced herself to breathe until the room came back into sharp focus.
“I don’t understand,” Isabelle said.
In her hand was a sphere of gold, topped by a crown. “It was the last thing I had of him,” Madeleine said. “The last thing anyone had of him, perhaps—I don’t know who kept what in this House. But I had to—” She shook her head, dazed. “Morningstar. It was Morningstar’s magic.”
But now it was gone in a burst of power, all spent like the gift of Elphon’s breath; and how would they defend themselves, if the shadow came back?
She looked at the door, at the walls; heard and saw nothing but the usual sounds of Silverspires at night. It was gone, whatever it was. But it hadn’t been a hallucination. And—
“You said it was what killed Oris.”
“Philippe saw it, I think,” Isabelle said. Her voice was still shaking.
Madeleine took in a deep, shaking breath; thinking of bodies shriveling and burning under the assault of magic; of Oris, crushed under the weight of gravity on the floor of Notre-Dame. “It’s killed six people, whatever it is. Come on. We have to tell Selene.”
* * *
PHILIPPE ran. It was undignified, and possibly useless, but he was past caring. Doors flashed by him, indistinguishable—at one point a door opened, and he almost toppled over someone in Harrier’s uniform. “Sorry,” he said, but didn’t stop. There was a noise at his back, a hiss like ten thousand open gas taps; a shadow, slithering across flat surfaces whenever he turned his head, just enough to make a fist of ice tighten around his belly—except that the shadows were growing larger and larger, and the lights in the corridors ahead of him were dimming, throwing his own large, distorted shadow across the wall like that of some monster.
Shadows. A creature of wings and fangs and of darkness—he’d wondered, back then, what he had summoned when he touched the mirror; but he didn’t need to wonder anymore. He knew.
As he ran, he tried to gather khi currents to him. But, without the calm of his trance, it was too hard to see the few threads that would be in the House; and all he could manage was a feeble ring of fire around his hand—which did nothing much to either reassure him or light his way.
He turned one last corner, and found himself in utter darkness. The hiss had gone away, and so had the shadows. So early, so easily? Slowly, carefully, he gathered more khi currents to him, widening the ring of fire in his hand until it lit the way ahead.
It was just a stretch of corridor, going to two rooms at the end: Asmodeus and Samariel, of course, the two lovers being accommodated close to each other. There was no noise coming from either bedroom. Philippe crept closer.
It was a bad idea. He should go back to his room, forget the whole incident; and come back later. This was . . . not a good time to be there. Not . . .
There was a sound, as he approached the end of the corridor: a slight hiss like an intake of breath, already slithering away. The shadows danced, around his ring of fire—out of the corner of his eye he caught a glimpse of something folding huge wings, and sinking back upon itself, but it might have been nothing more than illusion.
The door to Samariel’s room opened easily, swinging with the tortured sound of ungreased hinges—surely it must have been heard all the way to Indochina. But no one moved, or spoke.
“Samariel?”
A slight sound, coming from the bed; a slithering of wet things from the wallpaper; a fist of shadows slowly closing around the lone light in the room. He took one step, then another and another, and approached the huge canopied bed in the center of the room.
The furniture was from another age: two bedside tables with thin, elegant curved legs, their drawer handles in the shape of butterflies; a mahogany commode with a marble top; a vase in that chinoiserie blue and white that looked even worse than the cut-rate porcelain the Chinese had foisted on the Annamite Imperial Court. His feet barely made any noise on the thick Persian rugs; and the khi currents in the room seemed to have shriveled and died around him, as if they’d been burned at the root.
His light, unsustained by any fire, shivered and died, leaving him in shadows. Another, stronger light took its place, the golden radiance of Morningstar’s hair and skin.
No. Not now. With all his strength he willed the vision to pass—it did not, but neither did it fully materialize. Instead, Morningstar remained where he was, standing by the farthest column of the canopy. He had his sword in his hand, and watched Philippe with burning eyes.
“I warned you,” he said, and his voice was like thunder, strong enough to make Philippe’s knees buckle. “I told you to seize power, or be destroyed. Do you see now?”
Philippe made no answer. There was none he could give—nothing, to this ghost of the past, this bitter, angry memory of whoever had cast the curse on Silverspires. He simply moved closer.
Samariel lay in bed, splayed like a puppet with cut strings; his legs and arms at impossible angles, curved like the corpses of eels, as if all the bones had been sucked out of his limbs. The sound Philippe had heard was the wet struggle to breathe through crushed lungs. Nausea, sharp and bitter, rose in his throat; he held it at bay, kneeling by the stricken Fallen. “Samariel?”
The skin—all that was left whole—was covered in bite marks; as if a snake had struck him, repeatedly; the same marks, by all reports, that had been on Oris’s corpse. The eyes—the eyes were still there, with that same, familiar, sarcastic intelligence. The mangled mouth opened, shaped around something—his name? “I’ll get help—” he said, but Samariel shook his head.
“What do you want me to do?” he asked; but Samariel said nothing, merely stared at him with those bright eyes; and magic rose in the room, a burning heat that picked at the strands of the spell around him, snapping them like burned matchsticks.
“You can’t—” he whispered. More and more strands were vanishing, though the strain of it should have been too much for a dying Fallen. “You can’t—”
“Seize power,” Morningstar whispered, his image wavering and bending as if in a great wind. “Seize power.”
He didn’t move as the magic wrapped itself around him, the spell unraveling moment after moment; staring into those bright, bright eyes and knowing exactly why Samariel was doing it. He had told him, all those days ago.
“I imagine it would be quite a setback for Selene to lose you. . . .”
Behind him, the door opened again; and closed, with hardly a sound. “What do you think you’re doing here, boy?”
The face of Asmodeus, head of House Hawthorn, was twisted out of shape by grief and rage. I can explain, Philippe wanted to say. Ask Samariel. I can—
But Samariel would not speak, not anymore.
TEN
OLD FRIENDS
THE night had not ended well; and the morning had not started well, either. Selene sat in her office, staring at the papers strewn on them; at the memoirs of journeys in Indochina she’d been reading, back when her only worry had been how to best use Philippe for the good of the House—in hindsight, how much simpler those times had been, such easier moments compared to the tangle that awaited her now.
A tinkle of beads announced Emmanuelle’s arrival from her private quarters. She was holding two coat hangers. One was a long black dress with straps; the other was a swallow-tailed suit with straight trousers. “Which one do you want?” she asked.
Outside the room—in the ballroom, where Father Javier was making them wait—stood the heads of every House, all with the same intent: to hear an explanation for the evening’s events, and to see what concessions they could wring out of her for failing to protect her guests. Damn this stupidity of a conclave, for putting her in that impossible situation. “Did y
ou hear anything from Aragon?”
Emmanuelle grimaced. “Samariel’s alive, but just barely, Selene. Aragon said there was nothing much to be done. Just make him comfortable—”
No miracle, then, but then, why had she thought there would be one? God seldom visited those on Fallen; the thought was so old by now that there was little bitterness left in it. She hadn’t prayed in years, not since she was Isabelle’s age, in fact. “And Philippe?”
“Confined to his rooms,” Emmanuelle said. “In any case, he can’t leave Silverspires. But I highly doubt Philippe would kill Samariel. What possible motive could he have for that?”
Madeleine and Isabelle, now both back in their rooms, had both reported to Selene about seeing the shadows in the laboratory, identifying them beyond doubt as responsible for the killings; and Isabelle had been adamant the original warning had come from Philippe. But it meant nothing—a warning moments before Samariel was attacked was utterly ineffective, and Selene couldn’t decide if that had been deliberate.
“I don’t know,” Selene said. “But he was with Oris, too. In any case, that’s not what’s most important now.”
Two things mattered now, both for the protection of Silverspires. The first, to prevent whatever it was from killing again. She had people searching the House from top to bottom; and Madeleine and Isabelle gathering the strongest artifacts and breath-infused mirrors, distributing them among the dependents of the House—whatever it was that was roaming the corridors, it had killed six people and left another one at the doors of death. Javier was coordinating search parties, trying to see if its lair lay within the House. But all of this would be for nothing if she couldn’t achieve the second thing—to placate the other heads of Houses before they took Silverspires apart as retribution for Samariel’s wounding.
“The Houses?” Emmanuelle asked. She raised her coat hangers again. “Tell me how you want to dress.”
Selene shook her head. “Not like this.” Those were the clothes of the past, the formal evening wear of the days before the war. There was no need to recall any of that today. “Bring me the turquoise dress. And the rest of the ensemble.”
After she was dressed, she looked at herself in the mirror: over the turquoise dress, she’d put on a long, embroidered silk tunic that closed at the neck with a single clasp. The tunic, made in Indochina and traded through Marseilles, was a vivid scarlet, embroidered with birds and plum flowers; and it came with a matching shawl of silk so fine it was almost transparent: like many things, a statement of wealth and power in a ruined world.
As if that would fool anyone but the weakest Houses. . . .
She let the shawl settle in the crooks of her arms, and peered critically at her reflection.
“You look dazzling,” Emmanuelle said.
“Ha,” Selene said. She didn’t feel dazzling; she felt small and frightened. “It’ll have to do.”
Emmanuelle reached out, and put a kiss on Selene’s lips. “You’ll do fine. I’m sure you will.”
She had to; there was no other choice. Squaring her shoulders, Selene went out of her office, to meet the heads of the other Houses.
* * *
THEY were all waiting for her in the ballroom, amid the cadavers of last night’s excesses: the tables lying bare without their magnificent clothes, the empty bottles and the glimmer of shattered glass, the faint smell of food and perfume, their mingling turning vaguely sickening.
Guy of Harrier, portly and his brown hair slick, with red highlights; Andrea, his wife, her dark eyes shining in the paleness of her face. Claire of Lazarus, for once without the posse of children that accompanied her—no, that wasn’t true; there was one with her, a little girl dressed in a formal suit, the vivid blue in sharp contrast to the darkness of her skin. Bernard of Stormgate. Sixtine of Minimes; and a sea of other minor Houses, yapping terriers she hardly paid attention to in normal times—save that even terriers could turn nasty, once they had smelled blood.
Asmodeus, though, wasn’t there. Should she wait for him? He was no doubt at Samariel’s bedside; praying, perhaps, though the idea of the head of Hawthorn praying for anything at all was ludicrous.
One of the faces staring at her—or perhaps all of them; it wasn’t unheard of—was responsible for this. One of them, or several, was working to undermine the House, utterly destroy it. She’d find them; and make sure they couldn’t harm Silverspires anymore.
They were getting restless, all of them; still politely waiting for whatever she had to say—again, amusing to see how courtesy still held sway, even in moments like those, when they hung poised, once again, on the edge of a feud that could lay waste to the city.
“You know why we’re gathered here,” she said. A dozen faces swung to look at her, silent, watching. “There has been . . . an incident.” She raised a hand to forestall the inevitable outcry, and said, infusing her voice with the strongest spells of charm she could conjure, “Lord Samariel is at death’s door. Something attacked him in his bedroom. We’re not quite sure what yet, but rest assured that we’re investigating. Silverspires will not tolerate this breach of the peace.”
“Won’t you?” The speaker was Claire, as impeccable as always. “There have been other deaths, and you haven’t done anything. One might think you remarkably inefficient, or insufficiently motivated, or both.”
Selene went for bluntness. “I don’t take the deaths of dependents lightly, and you know it.”
Claire did not bat an eyelid. “I’d hate to see what you do when you take things lightly, then.”
“It’s abundantly clear that you need our help,” Guy of Harrier said. “With Silverspires’ declining status—”
“We’re not dead yet,” Selene said, more sharply than she’d intended to.
Claire’s thin, self-satisfied smile was more than she could bear. It was because of the three of them—Harrier, Hawthorn, and Lazarus—that she was here now; that she had to defend her House’s failure to protect its guests, to justify why her wards and magical protections had failed to stop whatever roamed the House.
“The young man is involved, isn’t he?” Sixtine of Minimes asked. “The Annamite, the one they found in Samariel’s bedroom.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Guy said. “He’s human, nothing more. How could he do this?”
“He’s human, yes,” Claire said. “It just means he has no innate magic. With the proper artifacts, a bit of angel essence—”
This was too much for Selene. “You know we don’t use angel essence in this House.”
Claire’s gaze was frank, untroubled. “Oh, don’t you?”
She sounded as though she meant something specific, but Selene wasn’t about to let Claire catch her off balance. “I have no interest in your games.” They needed to find the means of murder. Shadows. A dearth of magic, or an excess of it, Madeleine had said; and Aragon had confirmed, once given access to the other bodies Claire had been keeping.
Not that it helped, of course. Neither Selene nor anyone in the House knew of any creature, weapon, or spell that killed that way. She had Emmanuelle digging into the archives; and of course Aragon was examining Samariel right now, trying to find something, anything that would get them out of this mess. Selene said, “If the question is whether a human could have done this—then the answer is yes. Everyone here—human, Fallen—is a suspect.”
There was silence, in the wake of her words. Then, as what she had said sank in, a babble of protestations rising to a deafening pitch: “—surely you don’t mean—” “—this is an outrage—” All things she had expected and counted on. She raised a hand and cast a spell of dampening: a cheap trick, but one that never failed to have its little effect. All sounds around her hand gradually sank to a murmur, in a spreading wave of silence.
“You came here,” she said. “All of you. You forced your way in, claiming you would help us find our attacker, and t
hen you have the audacity to complain when someone else dies. I know you. I know you all—Guy, Claire, Sixtine, Andre, Viollet.” A further shocked hush. She had them now; she had to seize the moment, while they were still cowering in fear, and gazing suspiciously at their neighbors. If she could break their fragile alliances . . . “None of you are above killing to further your plans. None of you would weep if Silverspires paid reparation for your murders, and sank into obscurity.”
Silence spread in the wake of her words. Then someone clapped: slowly, deliberately, the sounds echoing under the stuccoed ceiling of the ballroom, each one as sharp and as penetrating as a bell tolling for funerals.
“Such a pretty speech,” Asmodeus said in a slurred voice. He detached himself from the pillar he had been leaning on; and came forward, toward Selene, blowing the acrid smell of orange blossom and bergamot gone sour into her face. She didn’t flinch. One could not afford to, with Asmodeus.
Once, he’d moved like a sated cat; now his movements were still fluid, but quickened with a manic impatience. He had taken off his horn-rimmed glasses: he held them in one hand, toying with them absentmindedly, except that Asmodeus never did anything absentmindedly. The gaze he turned on Selene was still amused, but underneath it all she could guess at the controlled fury.
“You’re drunk,” she said, coldly. “Go back to where you came from.”
“My lover’s deathbed?” Asmodeus’s smile was terrible to behold, sharp and fractured and incandescent. “Let us speak of Samariel, shall we? Humans expect to die in their beds; Fallen do not. Should not.”
The House of Shattered Wings Page 17