The House of Shattered Wings (10 page)

What could he make of them?

The mirror was a simple affair, engraved with the crest of House Silverspires. He'd seen the same in Madeleine's bag, and a dozen others like it on the stalls of the marketplace. Reaching out, cautiously, to the
khi
currents in the area, Philippe found them only the thinnest thread of water curled around the glass: a confirmation that whatever was inside now lay dormant or dead. There was the hint of another thread, too; a bare trace of wood and its attendant anger: a shadow of something that had once been much stronger, a watered-down image of a flame with none of its heat or vibrancy.

He didn't practice Fallen magic, but he'd learned enough about it; because he had to, because it was a matter of his survival. It had been a powerful spell, held together by a trigger, and it had completely disappeared—drained, all of it, straight into him when he'd touched the mirror; and perhaps elsewhere, if he'd only been the conduit for it.

It had summoned something, something that was loose in the House. He couldn't take the spell apart or intuit what it might do, but he could try to trace it back to its source.

He reached out, and cautiously traced the threads. They might be small and innocuous, but the shards of something this powerful could still be potent. There was . . . sorrow, and the roiling anger of a just cause. . . .

Revenge, then. Someone, somewhere, had had a grudge against Morningstar, or against the House.

Philippe touched the mirror again, following the
khi
currents. They had decayed so much he'd have been hard-pressed to put an age to them, but such decay was the work of years, decades, which meant an old spell. A Fallen, perhaps—to whom the years would be as nothing—or a human who was old by now, with the satisfaction that his vengeance would come to pass. They had left the mirror here, hidden away—never thinking that Morningstar would never come back, that the throne would gather dust and never be touched, and that their spell would only be triggered years and years after it had been put together.

He tugged at the thread of wood, gently unspooling it from around the mirror: loop after loop of thin, shimmering green light that hung on his hands, with a sharp touch like a spring breeze. Then, breathing slowly, carefully—inhale, exhale, inhale, whispering a mantra from bygone times—he withdrew his awareness from his body, and let the thread carry him where it willed.

For a while, he hung suspended in time and space; back to a serenity he'd thought lost, doing nothing but letting the world wash over him, every sensation diminishing until he was once more in that quiet, timeless place where his enlightenment took root.

Gradually—and he wasn't sure why, or how, or when—it all went away, a slow slide from featureless bliss into something stronger, darker; shadows lengthening over the House, until he stood in a room lined with bookshelves, the only furniture of which was a red plush armchair.

Morningstar sat in the chair. Or rather, lounged in it like a sated tiger, his wings shadowing the sharpness of his face. His pale eyes raking Philippe from top to bottom. “So good of you to come. Shall we start, then?” He inclined his head, and between his spread hands magic whirled and danced, a storm of power that pressed against the bookshelves, stifled the air of the room—cut off Philippe's breath until it was all he could do to stand.

“I can't—” he started, and Morningstar shook his head.

“This is power. Embrace it, or others will do it, and leave you gasping in the dust.”

Philippe shook his head, or tried to. He couldn't seem to move, and Morningstar's presence was as suffocating as ever—lead pressing on his chest, on his fingers—until it seemed that his nails would lengthen and sharpen, becoming the claws of Morningstar's own hands. . . .

“Come,” Morningstar said, smiling. “There isn't much time.”

And he found his feet moving of their own accord, his hands reaching for the magic Morningstar was offering; he took one faltering step into the room, even though his skin was being peeled away from muscle and fat, from bones and glistening veins: one step, then another, straight into the growing maelstrom. . . .

Philippe came to with a gasp. He was standing in a room he had never been to, though he recognized it instantly. It was the same room as in his vision, except that it had badly aged. He had vague memories of exiting the cathedral through a side door, following corridor after corridor; gradually leaving behind the more crowded areas until the House became entombed with dust, gray and bowed with the weight of its true age.

A thread of wood; a thread of water and fire, all curled up and dormant: a vision from the past. Memories. Someone else's memories. He hadn't been really interacting with Morningstar; merely seeing someone else do so, in some faraway past.

The same person who had laid that mirror under the throne, in all likelihood—someone who had admired, and feared, and hated Morningstar. Was Philippe's reaction to Morningstar memories, too, or would he have felt the same in the actual presence of the Fallen? There was no way to know.

The bookshelves hadn't been maintained, and the dry smell of brittle paper rose all around him. The flowers of the wallpaper were speckled with rot, and the oaken parquet bore only the imprint of his own footsteps. The armchair was still there, its colors faded and worn; and there was a smaller chair in front of it, carved from rich mahogany, the only thing in the room that didn't seem to have deteriorated. He could sit in here; in fact, he had sat on it, sometime in the distant past—no, that couldn't be. That wasn't him. He had never been in this room, and his memories stretched back centuries.

Across the threshold was a very faint line of magic, which itself came from two small vials on either side of the frame. A few Fallen tears, sealed in glass and used for a spell, and he didn't have to touch them to know who they'd have come from: the same suffocating presence that haunted his dreams.

Morningstar.

He crossed the line; a faint resistance held him, but not for long. When he looked at the room from the outside, it would waver and wriggle, trying to squirm its way out of his field of vision, out of his memory. The spell, then, was still there; obscuring the room from sight, though it had been much stronger, once.

The
khi
currents in the room were stronger: roiling wood; and a burst of metal, subsuming the other three. Metal. Tears, sadness; the act of contracting, of looking backward—the past. And wood. Wood was for anger; wood was the wind, the vegetation bursting through the ice of graveyards. It wasn't visions that he was having; no prophecies, no cryptic dreams requiring him to swear allegiance to Morningstar. They were memories. Someone's memories, encased in so much anger they'd been preserved with the force of a storm.

Revenge, then.

That didn't help much. Philippe stood in the room, staring at the stool; wondering who had sat on it, and why they had hated Morningstar so much. He'd taught them, hadn't he—who wouldn't be glad to have such a teacher?

But, then, this was the West, and they'd never had the proper respect for their elders.

Whoever it was, they had lived for a long time: he'd caught enough glimpses of enough time periods that they spanned centuries. A Fallen, then, whom the years barely touched—humans could have used magic to lengthen their life spans, but not by this much. A Fallen student of Morningstar; with a grudge.

Was this of use to Samariel? Possibly, if he had more information—on whom it was, and what the curse was. He would only have one chance to give this information, one moment of the other's time, so that the spell on him could be removed. He wasn't fool enough to believe that Samariel would care for him beyond that.

He needed more information, and he knew exactly where to find it.

*   *   *

PHILIPPE
went to see Emmanuelle early in the day. He knew from experience that she'd get up at dawn and head straight to Father Javier's Mass in the small chapel of the North Wing, before setting to work. He went, therefore, to the library, and found it already buzzing with activity. The archivists—Raoul and others he couldn't name—were busy, carrying piles of leather-bound books from one shelf to the next and arguing about proper placement, the location of a lost volume, or the latest finds on the history of the House.

He found Emmanuelle behind her desk, staring dubiously at a wobbling pile of books from which arose a strong smell of rot. Two children—they couldn't have been more than six or seven years old—were kneeling on the floor, setting books aside and having an argument about which books fit where. “Emmanuelle, Emmanuelle,” the youngest—a girl with dark hair and brown eyes the color of autumn leaves—“Pierre-Alain says this one isn't interesting—”

The boy—Pierre-Alain, who looked enough like her he had to be her brother or cousin—scowled. “It's too badly damaged. We should throw it away.”

“We can fix it,” the girl said, holding the book against her as though it were beyond worth. “I'm sure we can, Emmanuelle. Please?”

Emmanuelle knelt and gently pried the book from the girl's fingers—carefully turning the pages in a rising smell of mold. “Mmm. It's pretty wet. Can you get some absorbent paper from the back shelf? And put a sheet of it between every wet page?”

“Of course! Come on, Pierre-Alain!”

When the children were gone, Emmanuelle rose. “Market finds,” she said, with a shrug. “I'm pretty sure there's not much worth salvaging in there, but one never knows—and Caroline loves feeling useful. Did you want something?”

Philippe pulled a chair, and sat next to her. “You said to come to you if we had any questions—”

“Oh, yes.” Emmanuelle pulled the topmost book from the stack—it had a stylized, naturalistic design reminiscent of the art nouveau buildings in the city—and blew on it absentmindedly.

“I wanted to know more about Morningstar,” Philippe said. “You knew him when he was . . . here, didn't you?”

“You could say that,” Emmanuelle said, cautiously. “I wasn't there for very long, though: a century, at most, and he never paid attention to me, not the way he did to others.”

“Like Selene?”

“Yes.” Emmanuelle set the book aside. “Selene was his student; the last among many. He was . . . different. Most Fallen don't exude more than a trace amount of power, but with Morningstar you felt as though you stood in the presence of a furnace.”

I know,
Philippe wanted to say, and bit his tongue, lest he betray himself. “So he taught many students in the House?”

Emmanuelle shook her head. “He taught them for the House, yes, but—” She bit her lip, uncomfortable. “The war came.”

The war. Philippe thought of the clamor of explosions; of huddling in the doorways of ruined buildings, peering at the sky to judge the best moment to rush out; of his lieutenant in House colors, urging them to lay down their lives for the good of the city; of his squad mates buried in nameless graves, on the edge of Place de la République. Ai Linh, who had a laugh like a donkey, and always shared her biscuits with everyone else; Hoang, who liked to gamble too much; Phuong, who told hair-raising stories in the barracks after all lights had been turned off. “I don't know what the war was like, inside the Houses,” he said, and it was almost the truth.

Emmanuelle stared at him for a while, her pleasant face almost hard. Did she suspect how he'd come to be here; what the war had been like for him? “Our magicians turned into soldiers,” she said at last. “Our students into thoughtless killers, and our best men into corpses. When the war ended, most of Morningstar's students were dead, as were so many in the House.”

Philippe remembered the fall of House Draken; remembered retreating down corridor after corridor, as armed mortals and Fallen overwhelmed every inch of available space, and the lieutenant breathed down their necks, screaming at them to resist, to show that House Draken died with honor; he remembered thinking that he was the House's possession, not its cherished member, that he had no honor and no desire to acquire any.

There had been so many corpses, by the time the House had succumbed; so many corpses in the abandonment of death; and he had not wept for a single one of them.

“But Morningstar—”

“Morningstar wasn't on the front lines. He was always more comfortable manipulating people, after all. Not that it was unpleasant; people
loved
following his orders: who wouldn't? It was such . . . terrible bliss, from what I have heard.” Her voice was resentful; it wasn't clear whether she was angry at Morningstar's behavior, or jealous that she hadn't been singled out for that bitter honor. “Selene was lucky; he was teaching her at the time and didn't want his efforts to go to waste before she was ready.”

So he'd sent students to their deaths. “So they died. And were happy. And those who survived?” Philippe said cautiously.

Emmanuelle frowned. “There were two, I think? Leander and Oris, and Selene, of course.”

“He taught Oris?” Philippe asked. That he'd seen something in Oris—of all people—

Emmanuelle shrugged. “Did you think Oris was always that way?” She smiled, but the look never reached her eyes. “Morningstar was . . . like living fire,” she said at last. “It can fill you up and make you shine harder than you ever did, or it can seep through every crack and burn you from the inside out.” She closed the book. “Selene . . . took it well, I think, and Leander . . .” She thought about it for a while. “Leander was always a bit odd, and it never changed him, though from time to time he'd look up and there'd be this odd light in his eyes. Cracks.”

Were there cracks, too, in Selene's mind? What must it be like to succeed that kind of Fallen, and forever try to live up to their image? Living fire, Emmanuelle had said.