The House of Shattered Wings (4 page)

“No. I feel dough sticking to everything. You make it sound much simpler than it is.”

“Of course.” He'd learned back in Annam, baking rice cakes he'd later steam in bamboo baskets—the dough, made with a mix of wheat flour and rice flour, had been sticky and translucent—but the kneading was the same. “Try again. You did volunteer.”

Isabelle smiled, but didn't speak. For a while there was nothing but her hands, folding and stretching and turning, again and again. Philippe watched the dough. “Almost,” he said. “See how it's coming loose?”

“Mmm,” Isabelle said. “Emmanuelle's been teaching me more about the history of the House. It's the oldest one in Paris.”

And they'd never let her forget it. “You're done,” Philippe said, taking the dough from her.

“How do I know?”

He took a piece of dough the size of a ball; stretched it, gently, until they could both see daylight through it. “It holds,” he said. He divided it in half and carefully shaped his half into a round, laying it in the floured basket by his side. “Try it.” And, to answer her, “The oldest House. That's good. Old is safe.”

Isabelle shivered. “You don't really believe that, do you?”

Philippe shrugged. “It's . . . not my world.”

“No.” Isabelle paused, gently prodded at her piece of dough—which refused to tighten up into a ball. “I don't even know what it's like, where you come from.”

He started to say, “Different,” another platitude, and then changed his mind. “It functions on different rules. We . . . don't have Fallen in Annam. Didn't used to.”

“But they're there now.”

“They were,” Philippe said. Who knew what was happening in Annam and the other colonies, after the war? Had the Fallen's arrogant, brash magic finally faltered? Had the Jade Emperor finally decided to end the court's isolation and interfere in the affairs of mortals once more? “And the Fallen carried their magic with them. It's . . .” He paused then, wondering how much he would reveal to her. No more, he guessed, than what Selene would find in books. “The Fallen were powerful,” he said at last. “More powerful than any magical beings we might have had. It was . . . not pretty.” The guardian spirits of the villages had been slaughtered; the dragons, the spirits of the rain, had withdrawn to the depths of the sea, to the safety of their coral and nacre palaces; the mountain spirits had retreated to their most isolated peaks, licking their wounds; and the Jade Emperor had sealed the court, forbidding Immortals to approach mortals.

And Philippe, of course, had had no refuge.

“Emmanuelle said it was because Fallen magic was innately stronger. That it had been our destiny to conquer.” Isabelle shrugged. “She didn't sound convinced.”

She might not be, but there were plenty of others who would. Philippe said nothing. He stared at the dough, trying to ignore the memories; the powerlessness he'd felt then, watching the Fallen come and take anything they wanted—and destroy what was of no use to them. “I didn't come here by choice,” he said at last. “And it's not choice that keeps me here, either. I don't know how much you'll believe of what they teach you. But—if you can, remember that.”

Isabelle looked at him, uncannily serious for once. “I didn't come here by choice, either,” she said, dropping her piece of dough into another basket. “And I'll try to remember.”

She meant it—he could tell from the sense of stubbornness he got from their link—and yet she probably wouldn't remember. He was guessing that even Selene had started out this young, this earnest, this naive—and look at what she was now.

“Philippe?”

“Yes?” He peered at the dough, drew a cloth over both baskets. It was the kitchen's slack hour. The kitchen boys and girls had scattered, some of them playing cards in a corner, some of them listening to Laure telling a fairy tale about a Fallen who was unable to pay the price for summoning a manticore—the kitchen staff was rapt, listening to Laure's elaborate descriptions of blood, gore, and disembowelment as if their lives hung on it. Isabelle and he were alone around the large table, surrounded only by the preparations for this night's dinner.

“You're not mortal, are you?”

He'd had some inkling she was going to ask an awkward question—it was the only reason he didn't drop the cloth. His first instinct was to lie, to deny as he'd denied Selene. She was Fallen; he couldn't trust her.

But then again . . . he felt her presence at the back of his mind; her curiosity, tinged by no afterthought of greed or thirst for knowledge she could use against him.

Such a child, and the thought was like a fist of ice closing around his heart. “I was mortal once,” he said, exhaling. Now he was . . . not Immortal anymore, and not mortal, either; he hadn't aged since being thrown out of the Jade Emperor's court—some remnant of what he'd achieved still clinging to him, as did the magic he'd mastered. It probably didn't make any difference. Selene knew, or suspected, that he was no young man. “Before I ascended.”

“There are others like you?”

“In Paris?” There were other former Immortals in Annam—it wasn't as though the Jade Emperor had been particularly tolerant or compassionate. “I'm not sure, but I don't think so.” During the war, he'd caught glimpses of other creatures from French books, sphinxes and golems and chimeras—made with magic, his sergeant had said, curtly and in a tone of voice that discouraged further questions—and he'd fought colonials who weren't Fallen or witches, and yet moved a little too fast, a little too smoothly out of the path of danger.

There
were
others; from other countries, other magics that weren't Fallen. But he would have known, or suspected, had he crossed another former Immortal from Annam—it was something in the way they moved, in the way they held themselves, the imprint of the Jade Emperor's Court that persisted long after they'd been cast out. “You don't have to worry about an invasion of us, if that's the question.”

Isabelle snorted. “Very funny.” She pushed the baskets aside. “We're done, aren't we?”

“I guess?” They both had lessons with Emmanuelle—and not Choérine and the children, because they were too old. But their next lesson wasn't for a few hours yet. “You can come back later and ask Laure about the ovens, if you want the bread.”

Isabelle shrugged. “Maybe. Let's explore the House.”

“I—” The last thing he wanted was to get more of this feeling of ants on his skin. “I'm not sure that's a good idea.”

“Are you frightened?” Isabelle's smile was mischievous, irresistible. “Come on.”

And he followed, because he'd promised.

The House was huge, and most of it was deserted, or ruined. Like most buildings in Paris, it was covered with soot, the blackened streaks characteristic of spell residue. Once, it must have sheltered thousands—a natural refuge, an island only connected to the rest of the city by seven bridges, but now it lay empty and dark, and the river that had once been its first line of defense had turned wild, become a power that snapped and killed anything that came near its shores.

“Come on,” Isabelle said, pushing a small stone door in an unremarkable corridor; and Philippe, with a sigh, followed.

To stop, awestruck, at what lay inside.

It had been a church, once. You could still see the columns and the beginning of the vaulted ceiling, a first row of arches gracefully bending toward one another; and the remnants of wooden benches, burned where they had stood. The stained-glass windows were broken, or absent; but the gaze was still drawn, unerringly, down the nave and to the altar at the other end—or where the altar would have been, if it hadn't been turned to rubble long ago, and the only things remaining were the wrecks of three statues—the central one was least damaged, and had probably been a Virgin Mary carrying the corpse of Jesus.

No, not a church. A cathedral, like the pink-hued edifice the French had built in Saigon. It was . . . like a knife blade slowly drawn across his heart: he could almost have been back home, except that it was the wrong architecture, the wrong atmosphere, the wrong setting. He could still feel the fervor of its builders, of its worshippers, swirling in the air: a bare shadow of what it had once been, but so potent, so strong, so
huge
.

“Notre-Dame,” Philippe whispered.

Isabelle hadn't moved; her eyes were on the sky, and on the smattering of stars visible against the dark background of the night. “It's . . . like the City,” she whispered. “So much . . . intensity.”

“Faith,” Philippe said, though her faith wasn't his, and would never be his. “That's what built this up.”

The
khi
elements there were quiescent—almost too weak for him to pick them out, though. . . .

There was—a flash of something familiar: the magical equivalent of the smell of jasmine rice, a touch of something on the nape of his neck that brought him, instantly, back to the banks of the Red River, staring at the swollen mass of the river at monsoon time—breathing in the wet smell of rain and churned mud. Had some other Annamite been there?

No, it was impossible. Merely nostalgia—he was going mad, cooped up inside this House, inside this city, that was all. He needed a way out, before he lost himself.

Isabelle slowly moved, picking her way through the ruins of the benches. Throughout, her gaze remained staring upward. Was she praying; did she even remember how to pray—or perhaps it was like breathing, something that took hold of you when you had no other choice, when you were lost and cut off from your god?

She stopped long before the altar, in the raised space before it, which, like the rest, was covered in debris: the black-and-white lozenge tiles riven from end to end until their pattern had altogether gone. There was a chair left there; a stone one, battered and cracked, that nevertheless exuded a quiet power, something different from the remnants of fervor Philippe could taste in the air.

“He sat there,” Isabelle said, in the silence, her voice echoing under the broken vault. “Morningstar.”

“Emmanuelle told you this?”

“I don't need to be told. Can't you feel it?”

And he could; there was no point denying it. Not when the urge to abase himself was so strong he barely dared to move; afraid that anything he did would be the beginning of a bow.

“The oldest of us,” Isabelle said. Hesitantly she reached out, touched the chair with her three-fingered hand; and withdrew as if burned. “He must have known . . .”

“The answers to your questions?” Philippe shook his head. “He would have been wise, yes, versed in everything. But if he had no memories of before his Fall . . .”

“You're not Fallen,” Isabelle said, turning back to him. “How come you know all this?”

“I've traveled. And kept my ears open.” He crept closer to the chair. It was like approaching an ancestral altar, the air thick with reverence and the coiled, deep power of old age; and the itching, of course, getting worse and worse, as if the ants had suddenly decided to become stinging wasps. “Oldest and most powerful among you, wasn't he?”

“When he was there,” Isabelle said. “Now he's dead, for all they know.”

Or merely gone; how to tell, without a body, without any messages? Not that it mattered much to him. Morningstar probably wouldn't have much to say to him—though it was hard to ignore the voice in his mind that whispered that age should be respected, that the oldest Fallen in existence had to be wise, had to be knowledgeable, as his grandparents had once been—in a time so far away that even the bamboo bindings of its books had rotted through.

There was something . . . He paused before the throne, though every instinct he had was telling him to step back, to let the magic cool down to levels he could bear. But within the pinpricks of pain, there was . . . a note that shouldn't have been there, a wrong tone in a poem, a slip of the paintbrush in a painstakingly calligraphied text.

“Philippe?”

He shook his head. “Not now, Isabelle.” The wrongness was coming from the throne, but not close to him. His fingers, fumbling, lingered along the delicate carvings, descended to the chair itself, the place Morningstar had been (and the power on his skin was worse, like a winter wind, like a crucible where swords were born)—probed into niches and hollows, but it wasn't that, either. Where—?

It was below the throne, in the slight hollow between the four squat feet that carried it—once glued to it, but now it came easily undone under his touch. It was all wrong, anger and bitterness emanating from it like the howls of the souls in the Hell of Hunger.

“It hurts.” Isabelle's voice was a thin thread of sound.

“It's meant to hurt,” Philippe said, recovering his voice from where it seemed to have fled. In his hand, it looked like a heavy object wrapped in paper; carefully, he spread the paper flat on the ground, tipping out its contents. The paper was thin parchment, translucent and covered with spiky black handwriting; and the same feeling of darkness, of hatred, arose from it. The language wasn't French, or Viet, or anything he could read.

“All you hold dear will be shattered; all that you built will fall into dust; all that you gathered will be borne away by the storm. . . .” Isabelle's voice was a whisper, but there was an echo, deep within: a hint of someone else speaking the words and imbuing them with the weight of cold iron.

“You understand it? How?”

“I don't know,” Isabelle said, carefully. She laid her hand on the paper, following the curve of the words on the page. “I think it's a Fallen thing. The language of the City, maybe . . .”

“I thought that was meant to be love,” Philippe said, attempting to summon some remnant of sarcasm, though it was hard, with the cloud of anger and hatred hanging thick around them.