The House of Shattered Wings

by Aliette de Bodard

  Ngoc Bich walked into her field of vision, followed by Isabelle, who looked ashen, too. “Is this how you treat your guests?” she asked.

  Ngoc Bich ignored her, and turned to Philippe. “My apologies,” she said. “I thought you needed better healing.”

  “With the dead?” Philippe’s smile was terrible to behold.

  “With my father,” Ngoc Bich said. Her voice was softer, almost pleading. “You have to see the . . . curse within you is not going away; not without help.”

  “Oh, I know, believe me. A peach-wood sword, a drum and a gong for a proper exorcism . . . You don’t have any of this, do you?” He smiled again. “It didn’t work.”

  “I saw,” Ngoc Bich said, sharply. She reached out, and touched the spikes in his wrists and in his ankles—they crumbled into thin dust, carried away by currents Madeleine couldn’t see. “I do what I can with the little I have. Like everything here, we’ve been much diminished.”

  “Indeed. I wasn’t aware dragon kings could die.”

  Ngoc Bich’s face, for a moment, became contorted with hatred. “He was the Seine,” she said, finally. “You know how it goes. The waters filled with oil, with chemicals; with spells and artifacts cast into them like so much chaff.”

  Philippe pulled himself up with a grimace of pain. “I’m sorry. I . . . spoke without thinking. What . . .” He paused then. “What do you want with me?”

  “What we always want, in the stories.” Ngoc Bich’s voice was sad. “A husband on the throne; a fair and powerful queen with a wise and enlightened king by her side . . .”

  Philippe’s laughter was bitter. “Me, a wise king? You have the wrong person. You could have asked. You could have explained.”

  “That your salvation lay with a ghost, and that the kingdom lay in disarray, with no king and no power? Would you have said yes? Would you have trusted me?” Ngoc Bich held his gaze, until he looked away.

  Isabelle found Madeleine, steadied her. “How did you find this place? I could feel the power flowing through you—what did you do?”

  “What you brought me along for, no?” Madeleine said, more sharply than she intended.

  Isabelle’s gaze rested on her—how much could she see, or guess at? “I can see that,” she said. “We need to talk.”

  “There is nothing to say.”

  “Philippe tried that one,” Isabelle said, with a mirthless smile. “It didn’t work very well.”

  What—what was her game? What did she want out of life? Madeleine made an effort to stand up straighter, and gave up as a bout of coughing racked her entire body. Everything spun and shone, slightly, with that yellow tinge that came before faints. Should have brought sugar; though sugar wasn’t going to patch up the Gruyère holes in her body. “Just stop asking questions. Please. I know you need to understand everything—”

  Isabelle shook her head. “You misunderstand me. I’m not interested in knowledge. I merely need . . . leverage.” Again, that soft, sly smile that was too old to belong to someone like her. “If you find the right place, you can move the world.”

  “And what would you do with the world?”

  “Defend myself against it.” Isabelle’s voice was low, intense. “I lost two fingers. I will not lose anything else, not if I can help it. And you—you need to think on what you’re doing.”

  “I am doing nothing but what is expected of me.”

  “Were you?” Isabelle raised an eyebrow. “What was in that locket?”

  A power you will never wield. “The most powerful thing in my laboratory. You said you wanted my help. Are you going to deny that it was useful?”

  Isabelle grimaced. “It was, but—”

  Madeleine made her voice as firm as she could. Selene would have seen through it in a heartbeat, but Isabelle wasn’t Selene. “We have more than enough worries without our being at each other’s throat.”

  “Mmm,” Isabelle said. “A truce, then, for a while. It makes sense.” But she didn’t sound wholly convinced. It wasn’t the end of it, not by far; but Madeleine was too weary to do more.

  * * *

  PHILIPPE could see Chung Thoai: the Dragon King was standing beside his body, looking faintly apologetic. “You can’t see him, can you?” he said.

  Ngoc Bich stared at the darkness by his side, in the opposite direction to Chung Thoai. “No.” Her eyes shone with tears. “I don’t speak to ghosts. The only thing I have is the khi currents. I don’t think he intended me to rule.”

  “I did,” Chung Thoai said, but she couldn’t hear him.

  “I’m sorry,” Philippe said, again; rubbing at his wrists, at the marks of the coral spikes. “But I would have appreciated a warning, all the same.” It wasn’t every day one found oneself nailed to a stone slab in a tomb, after all: some of his compatriots would have thought it bad luck, but he’d long since left all such considerations behind him.

  Ngoc Bich shrugged. “We did what was necessary. What will you do now, Philippe Minh Khiet?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “They have come to take you home,” Ngoc Bich said. “The Fallen in particular was most insistent.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Philippe said, wryly. Isabelle looked to be haranguing Madeleine, though he wasn’t clear why—knowing her, he suspected the whole trip was her idea. Madeleine was too . . . staid for such a thing.

  “What will you do?” Ngoc Bich asked again, and he had no answer. Whenever he thought of Silverspires, he thought of the darkness, of vengeful eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses, of bright and cruel and knowing smiles; of a pain that seemed to spread through his entire being, laying him flat on the ground and holding him there, as surely as coral spikes.

  He swung himself away from the slab, and found Isabelle. Her gaze met his without flinching.

  “I can’t come back,” he said.

  Isabelle shook her head. “You must. You owe Silverspires.”

  “For a cage?” Philippe said. He raised his hands—almost shocked to find that they worked, that his once broken fingers flexed, that his shattered bones held everything together; and, in answer, Isabelle raised hers, showing him the gap where two of her fingers were missing—and nausea rose in his throat, sharp and biting.

  Some things, after all, could never be healed. “No,” he said. “This isn’t that debt.”

  Isabelle’s smile was bright, terrible; the same as Morningstar’s, in the visions. She had known, or suspected. She had seen Samariel; had warned Philippe—though presumably she hadn’t had time to see Selene, or it would have been quite a different story. “You wounded Emmanuelle,” she said.

  “I—what?” He vaguely remembered running out of the room, shoving the archivist out of his way; losing himself in the darkness, crawling his way through a haze of pain. “You’re lying.”

  “She’s not,” Madeleine said. The light of the tomb played on her face: she looked terrible, gaunt and drained of all vitality, ten or twenty years older than the woman he remembered. “You left a mark on her. A circle with a dot in the center.”

  “I don’t see what you’re talking about.”

  “The dead,” Madeleine said. “The other ones. They all had the same mark.” She looked at him, angrily; and he still had no idea what she meant.

  He shook his head. “Madeleine—”

  “Never mind,” Isabelle said. “Will you come back to Silverspires, please? For Emmanuelle’s sake.”

  “By now they’ve all left,” Madeleine said. “The other Houses. Selene was seeing them all off. Asmodeus won’t be there anymore.”

  “I— Look, even if I wanted to, I can’t do anything for Emmanuelle. I can’t—” He didn’t understand what he had in him; or if he was really the only carrier. There was something else loose in Silverspires, something that went beyond his visions and memories.

  “He shouldn’t go
,” Ngoc Bich said, gravely. Behind her, the ghost of her father had spread his hands, mouthing again what he’d said to Philippe, that it was stronger than him.

  Philippe bristled. “So the alternative is? Staying here?”

  Ngoc Bich didn’t blink. “I had hoped you would,” she said. There were no tears in her eyes; she held herself with the pride of a queen. “But if you don’t want to—then I would leave, if I were you. Go home, or elsewhere; but don’t take what you have back into Silverspires. You might live, then.”

  “Should I take it back to Annam, then?” Philippe said. He’d dreamed, once, of returning home—the dream Isabelle had instilled back into him—but, alone with Chung Thoai under the mausoleum, he had tasted the darkness at the heart of the curse; and had seen that it would not go away. “Is that your idea, Ngoc Bich?” To think of Morningstar striding across the land of his birth, of his casual arrogance while watching the women bowed under shoulder yokes, the peasants in their rice paddies, the colorless imitations of Chinese porcelain sold to the ruined imperial court . . . “No. It’s not a possibility.”

  Ngoc Bich shrugged. “As you wish. But you have been warned, Philippe Minh Khiet. The thing within you—it will be satisfied with nothing less than blood, the blood of Silverspires.”

  “I don’t care about Silverspires,” he said, and both Isabelle and Madeleine winced. “It’s not my home. It’s a place where I was imprisoned and tortured and betrayed and left for dead. Tell me, where in there do you see a cause for gratitude?” It could go hang, for all he cared; could burn itself to ashes, or go to war with other Houses and be destroyed, like Draken. He owed it nothing.

  Ngoc Bich’s eyes were unreadable; the shade of mother-of-pearl, illuminated only by the lanterns on either side of the door to the tomb. “Then don’t go back to Silverspires. As I said, that would be wise. The thing within you wants blood. It might take yours.”

  “You’re just going to let Emmanuelle die.” Madeleine’s voice was low, angry; for a moment, as she moved toward him, something shifted, and she was larger than life, lit by a radiance that burned everything it touched. “She’s in a hospital bed, burning up. Like Samariel.”

  “Look, I said it already. Even if I saw her, I’m not sure what I could do! I didn’t do—”

  “You know something,” Madeleine said. “Don’t try to shift the blame. You know some, or all, of what’s going on, don’t you?” It was like watching a kitten grow fangs and muscles and venom; becoming the tiger that could eat you, if it so chose. It was frightening, and shocking.

  “If he goes back,” Ngoc Bich said to Isabelle—who hadn’t said a further word, but simply stood, biting her lip as if trying to come to a decision—“if he goes back, he will bring it back into the House.”

  “It’s already inside the House,” Isabelle said, softly. “It leaped from the mirror into the cathedral, and from the cathedral into everywhere, didn’t it?” She reached inside her jacket and held out something to Ngoc Bich. “You’re wise and old, aren’t you? Tell me what this is. Tell me how to unlock its secrets.”

  Ngoc Bich shrugged, and took it—as Philippe had suspected, it was the mirror they’d found in Notre-Dame, its malice undiminished by the atmosphere of the dragon kingdom. She turned it over, slowly, her gaze fixed on Isabelle; as if she wasn’t quite sure what to make of her. Philippe wasn’t sure, either. Her face had that terrible, ageless smile that seemed to be the province of Fallen. She scared him, even more than Madeleine did.

  At length Ngoc Bich smiled. “A sealed artifact,” she said. “I could show you how to open it”—her hands danced, for a bare moment, on its rim, in the beginning of a pattern that seemed to have Isabelle hypnotized—“but it would avail you nothing. This was the source of your curse, but as you say, it has moved elsewhere. It is now within the House, and its darkness is in its corridors, climbing up toward the light. Opening this won’t gain you anything, except perhaps the release of the last few scraps of darkness contained within.”

  “You’re lying,” Isabelle said.

  Ngoc Bich held out the mirror to her. “Why should I lie? The problems of the surface aren’t mine.” A quick showing of teeth, pointed and sharp like those of crocodiles. “I defend my territory, but I have no interest in what Houses do, above. No one can touch the river. You know that.”

  “I don’t.” Isabelle’s face was pale, resolute; as if she were really ready to take on the entire dragon kingdom by herself. Philippe found he was holding his breath, waiting for an explosion that never came. Instead, she merely took the mirror back, wrapped it in its grubby white cloth. “But I believe you.”

  “How good of you.” Ngoc Bich turned back to Philippe. Behind her, Chung Thoai watched him, his hollow gaze sorrowful—but of course the dead couldn’t weep. “You heard my words. You know I’m right, Philippe Minh Khiet.”

  Isabelle’s attention had turned back to him; her smile was wide, mocking, like the goad of a cattle driver. “Do you want to run away, Philippe?”

  He ought to—he really did. He wasn’t one of them, to think that some quaint version of honor demanded he face the enemy. He’d always been sane about this: if outnumbered and outgunned, one should run to ground, not rely on versions of honor thought of by knights in dust-covered books.

  Emmanuelle—Emmanuelle had been kind to him, in a House where not everyone was kind, or gentle—but, in the end, she still belonged to the House, to Morningstar. He’d be quite happy for the vengeful ghost to have its way, for the House to split open like a bloated corpse.

  Except . . . except the darkness was within him, too, as Chung Thoai had said; the link to the curse and the ghost he couldn’t run or hide from, that he would always carry within him. He would, in the end, have to face it; or be entirely consumed by it, ground down into dust until no trace or memory of him remained within the city.

  And there was Isabelle. Who stood, watching him; he could feel her through the link, her worry, her anger; her anxiety about the House, about him. He owed her—for finding him when he was being tortured, for coming all the way into the dragon kingdom, determined to bodily drag him back—and all he had given her so far was pain; and trouble—and two missing fingers.

  Blasted conscience. It never worked the way it was supposed to.

  “All right,” Philippe said. “I’ll come back with you. But only for a short time, mind you.”

  If he said it firmly enough, he might even believe in it himself—though Chung Thoai’s ghost, looking wistfully at him and making a gesture of blessing reserved for those in dire predicaments, would have reminded him of how insane it all was, to plan to go back to Silverspires.

  * * *

  IN the end, as she had known, Selene found herself drawn back to the infirmary; just as she had been drawn to it, years ago, when Emmanuelle was fighting her addiction to essence.

  It was a foolish idea, with Asmodeus poking and prodding, looking for God knew what in the House—a weakness, per the terms of his agreement with Claire? It didn’t take that much intelligence to guess what Selene’s weakness would be.

  A nurse—Bellay, the slender Fallen with the intricate tattoos—showed her into the room—which was awash with a surprising number of flowers.

  To her surprise, Emmanuelle was up, reading a book; with deep, bruised circles under her eyes, and lips the pallor of watered-down paint. She didn’t look as though she’d slept at all; though Selene knew from Aragon that all she did was sleep, except for rare waking moments. On Emmanuelle’s hand, the circle was still there: fainter now, ringed with other faint circles. Aragon had frowned when he saw this, had reluctantly admitted it might be a good sign; that Emmanuelle’s sleep was that of recovery, not the first step on the long drawn-out road to death.

  A good sign.

  Selene didn’t have Emmanuelle’s faith, and hadn’t prayed for many, many years; but if she’d thought it could help Emmanuelle, sh
e would have abased herself in Father Javier’s chapel, or in the privacy of her room. Except, of course, that Fallen had never been the favored of God, would never be.

  Javier would berate her if she confessed to this; though she suspected he’d lost his own faith long ago. Most of them had; or, like Madeleine, had lost the conviction that God was loving and kind. Only Oris and Emmanuelle still prayed with anything like conviction. Surely God would save the worthy, those who kept the faith when all around them faltered and fell by the wayside?

  And then she remembered—like a shard of ice driven deep into her heart—that Oris was dead.

  “Oh. Selene,” Emmanuelle said. She took one last look at her reading and closed the book. She was good; the tremor in her fingers was almost invisible. “How are you?”

  Selene breathed in through the vise on her lungs. “I should be asking you that. Bellay said you didn’t lack for visitors.”

  “If visitors’ good wishes could heal, I’d already be up and about,” Emmanuelle said, with a tight smile. She pointed to a series of smudged drawings by the side of the bed. “But it was good to see the children—even though Caroline is still as impertinent as ever.” She chuckled. “One day, the little scamp is going to give me lessons on how to run my own library. I’ll look forward to it.”

  Selene knew deflection when she heard it. “Emmanuelle—”

  Emmanuelle shrugged. “Don’t worry about me. Aragon is hopeful. How is the House?”

  Selene couldn’t help it. “Aragon hopeful? Now, that would be quite a sight. Was he smiling?”

  Emmanuelle’s lips quirked up. “He might have been. You’re right, it’s quite a sight. I should have made sure I had proof.”

  “Think of it for next time.” Selene took Emmanuelle’s hand, ignoring the trembling heat of fever that seemed to spread to her own hand. “The House is fine. Don’t concern yourself with that.”

  “Liar.” Emmanuelle’s voice was light, as if they were merely having a conversation over tea and biscuits. “Terrible one, too. Tell me what’s happening out there.”

  Selene spread her hands. Where to start? “They’ve gone. All of them, except Asmodeus. He made a pretty show of grieving, but I think we both know that’s not why he’s staying here.”