The House of Shattered Wings (27 page)

“Morningstar. Show me,” she whispered; and cast everything she had—not at the Fury, but at the throne on its dais—thinking of the darkness under the earth, the musty smell of the grave—willing the cathedral to give up its secrets. . . .

A thin line of light snaked from where she stood, zigzagging across the stone like a flame dancing on the edge of a paper. It passed from her outstretched hands into the throne; and then expanded outward, blossoming into a huge incandescent flower. There was a blinding light; an explosion that sent her, retching, toward the floor—as the sound of tumbling stones filled her ears.

“Madeleine?” Isabelle pulled her up—there were other hands, Philippe's, propping her up. “We have to move.”

“The . . . Fury . . .” Every word seemed to leave a trail of blood in her mouth.

“Stunned, but not for long,” Isabelle said. “We have to go.”

Where? She tried to ask; but then there was no need.

Behind the dais—where there had once been graven tombstones covered in rubble, with faded litanies beseeching God to have mercy on sinners—there was now a huge, open space gaping like the maw of a monster; and within that darkness, the glimmer of steps, leading down into the bowels of the House.

*   *   *

IT
was damp, and quiet; too quiet, like the day, ages ago, when he had crawled into the ancestral chapel and had stood before the altar, feeling the weight of the dead, of his death, like a yoke on his shoulders. There was little light, but the
khi
current of wood he had called up was enough to walk without stumbling. It wasn't the darkness of the flowing shadows, though; but rather what was left when the sun turned its face away from the world, with not a hint of fangs or claws or snakes, and only a peaceful, almost contemplative silence.

Madeleine was a sagging weight between Philippe and Isabelle, her breath going fainter and fainter as time passed; her weight a hindrance. He feared they'd both let go, and she'd tumble down the stairs to Heaven knew where.

“They haven't followed us,” Isabelle said, beside him.

Philippe shook his head. He'd half expected to see ghosts again, but even Morningstar wasn't there. It was eerily unexpected. The
khi
currents there weren't faded as they were in the rest of the House; they gently lapped at one another in a never-ending circle; and there was a vague sense of magic, nothing major. Just . . . silence. Waiting, though he couldn't have told what for. “They won't come. Not here.”

Isabelle took in a sharp breath, but did not ask him how he knew. “But they'll be waiting outside, won't they?”

“Of course.”

“Why are they trying to kill us?”

“I don't know,” Philippe said. He pushed his shoulder upward, to readjust Madeleine's weight. “I'm just the vessel, and probably even less than that.”

“But you knew what it was.”

“No, Madeleine did.”

There was silence, at those words. “Yes. She did.”

A further silence. He needed to speak up: it was now or never. “Thank you,” he said.

Isabelle turned, surprised. “Why?”

“For coming for me.”

“You mistake me.” Isabelle's voice was cold, but her hands shook. “I came because Emmanuelle needed you. Because it was the only way.”

“You're not a good liar,” Philippe said, before he could stop himself. There was no answer from her; not the explosion he had half dreaded. “You could have come on different terms. Selene gave me up, didn't she? She thought I was dead. She thought I was guilty.”

“I don't care about what Selene thinks.” Isabelle's voice was low and fierce. “I know you wouldn't—”

Wouldn't he? He wasn't sure. If it was the way forward; if it could open the way to Annam . . . He was honest enough to know he would do whatever was necessary. “I don't have your scruples,” he said, though he wasn't sure if she still had any.

“No.” Isabelle laughed, shortly and without joy. “You don't. You're fortunate.”

She was Fallen, and she would pull away from him eventually; she would take her cues from Selene and the House. And yet . . .

She had come back for him. Had argued with Madeleine for him; had casually swept aside all of Selene's suspicions and doubts as if they meant nothing; and had stood for him over standing for the needs of the House. That counted for something, surely? Surely she wouldn't turn into another Morningstar or Asmodeus . . .

They reached the bottom of the stairs, hearing their steps echo in a space that was far vaster than the little they could see. Philippe tried to call more wood to him, but there was nothing there; just that breathless, expectant pause after someone had spoken; an answer, waiting to be uttered.

“There is something,” Isabelle said. She shifted so abruptly that Philippe almost didn't react in time, and Madeleine slid down halfway to the ground. He caught her, the muscles in his arms burning.

“I can't see—” And then he didn't need to strain, because the soft radiance from her skin increased a thousandfold; not slowly like the rising of the sun, but with the speed of a shutter removed from a lamp; from darkness to light in heartbeats. He closed his eyes; it was almost too much.

When he opened them again, he was alone with Madeleine; Isabelle was a few paces ahead, moving toward the center of the room.

Like the church above, it was a room of pillars and arches; smaller and more intimate, the arches pressing down on the ground with the weight of the earth, the smell of damp and rot almost overbearing. It was not large, and most of it was filled with graves: the stones of the floor were meticulously laid out, each with a name and a prayer, and letters whose gold had flaked away with time.

In the center . . .

In the center was a stone bed, not unlike the one he'd been pinned to in the dragon kingdom—except that this one was occupied already, by an ivory skeleton lying in the darkness with its arms crossed over its chest, one hand over the other, as if protecting its rib cage from depredations.

“Isabelle?”

She didn't turn. “Can't you feel it?” she asked.

It trembled in the air: a touch of heat, a butterfly's wings of fire, caressing his cheeks; an irresistible attraction to the locus of power in the center of the room. Bones. Angel bones.

He was halfway to the stone bier before he realized he'd left Madeleine. He turned back. She was lying in shadow, on the folded edge of his cloak—at least he'd remembered to wrap her in something, to keep away the damp—and then it had hold of him again, was reining him in like an unruly horse, pulling him to the center of the room.

Power. Magic, all that he had ever wanted, with the prickly incandescence of a thornbush. It would hurt if he grasped it, but once he did so the world would be at his feet; he would dispel the pall over his heart with a wave of his fingers, would go back to Indochina in less than the time it took to draw breath; would make Asmodeus scream and writhe as he had done with a mere look. . . .

Chung Thoai's sad, regal face swam out of the morass of his thoughts.
It's stronger than you,
he said, shaking his head, his chipped antlers shining in the darkness.

The Dragon King hadn't referred to the bones, of course; but still . . . Still, a part of him stood, trembling; remembered what it had felt like to be hungry and not eat, to be thirsty and not drink; to feel power in every bone and sinew, and not use a drop of it.

This.

This was
weaker
than him.

When he opened his eyes, he stood mere inches from the stone bier, watching the bones. They looked old, though that hardly meant anything: slight and fluted, with the reinforced rib cage clearly visible; fused in odd places, a skeleton that was almost, but not quite, human, with the ridges, tapering off, that had once marked the beginnings of wings. A Fallen; but then, there had never been any doubt of that. There was no visible wound, no indication of how their owner had met his end. Merely magic, burning raw and naked, a fire he dared not touch.

“Isabelle—”

He couldn't see her face, but he could feel her: engrossed, as he was, in the power that emanated from the bones, reaching out to touch them. “Isabelle,” he said. “Wait—”

Her hand had already connected. Fire leaped from the bones into her; so that, for a moment, she stood with vast wings billowing behind her, wreathed in smoke that shouldn't have been.

A noise, like a soft patter of rain: the bones were crumbling one after another, falling onto the stone table: mere dust, not angel essence, just the remnants of something that had died long ago.

“Isabelle.”

Slowly, she turned, her lips stretching in a familiar, arrogant smile; and in that moment, looking at the power that streamed from her like water, he knew exactly who the bones had belonged to.

Morningstar.

THE SALTY TASTE OF TEARS

FOR
a moment Philippe stood frozen, looking at Isabelle. The light was already trembling, on the cusp of extinguishing itself, its persistent whispers fading into silence, its secret traceries absorbed into her skin. He tried to whisper her name, but the light held him fast—the light, and the ageless reflection in her eyes, the same storm of power he'd always seen in Morningstar's gaze, a conflagration that promised him anything he'd ever wanted.

There was something behind her, a shadow that was growing, even as the light sank down and died, even as the dust on the stone bed scattered under the breath of a wind that came from nowhere: something that wasn't wings, or light. Something . . .

And then the light was entirely gone, and there was only Isabelle, bewildered and lost, staring at him as though he could make sense of it all; and behind her, a translucent figure, like a ghost: Morningstar, arms outstretched as though to embrace her, a mocking smile on his face.

A cry echoed under the arched ceiling; mingled anger and triumph, even as the shadows deepened around them.

At last!
the voice screamed. He had never heard it, but the burden of its presence was one he'd lived with for days; and he knew exactly who it belonged to: the ghost who harried them from beyond its restless grave. Nameless, featureless, weightless—too many things he had no hold on—as Chung Thoai had said, how could he hope to fight it? Why had he come back here? It was futile.

Darkness pooled on the scored floor: the shadows, as thick as ink or tar; raising tendrils like the heads of ten thousand snakes, hissing and snapping at the air. But they never reached Isabelle: they met a circle on the floor—runes that Philippe hadn't seen in his rush to get to the bones, finely graven into the stone—a protection that seemed to be an impregnable barrier to the shadows. The tendrils thickened and merged, until they became three human-shaped shadows—except that each wore a crown of snakes. Their hiss deepened, became a voice that made the earth tremble.

Kinslayer
.

Behind Isabelle, Morningstar stretched and smiled, his serrated wings catching the light. He bowed, an old-fashioned gentleman showing his respect to ladies of good family.
Erinyes.

The floor was pulling apart: cracks appeared on the stone pavement, outlining the circle's boundary, as if burning-hot fingers were pressing down all around the circumference.

Did you think you could escape?
the Furies asked
.

Philippe's chest—it, too, felt as though it was going to pull apart, as if the storm of crows roiling within was going to break free in a welter of beaks and blood-soaked claws—but Morningstar merely smiled.
On the contrary, I knew I couldn't. There is always a price to be paid, isn't there? In blood or lives or both . . .

The circle was bending inward—the shadows at the feet of the Furies pressing it out of shape—the cracks getting wider and wider—until, with an earsplitting sound that sent Philippe stumbling to the floor, the protections broke.

The Furies surged forward; and Morningstar, detaching himself from Isabelle, walked to meet them. He was still smiling—and the smile didn't waver as the snakes wrapped around him; and their voices grew into a scream of mingled rage and satisfaction—and the light in the crypt grew so bright that Philippe had to cover his eyes.

When he opened them again, everything was silent; and Isabelle stood, watching him, by the side of the empty stone bed. She looked unharmed. “Isabelle!”

“I'm fine.”

The air had changed: no longer pregnant or oppressive, that sense of breathless waiting gone. “He's gone,” Philippe said, aloud.

And so, it seemed, were the Furies.

Isabelle shook her head, dislodging a few strands of errant hair from the tight mass wound at her nape. “What was that?” she asked; but he saw in her eyes that she knew. “He was dead,” she said, slowly.

“Not yet. But now, yes.” Dead and gone on, to wherever the Fallen went, the last trace of him removed from this Earth.

“And the . . . Furies?”

“I don't know,” Philippe said. He couldn't hear anything from the cathedral anymore; even the faint pressure at the back of his mind was gone. “They got what they wanted, I think.” Kinslayer. The Fallen who had sent his student to slaughter. Blood or life or both. . . .

And now the House, once protected by Morningstar's bones, lay vulnerable.

“He died for the House,” Isabelle said.

“Do you—” He shook his head. “Do you have his memories?”

“No. Just images. Glimpses.” She smiled wryly. “It's just as well, isn't it? I get the feeling that the full version would burn my eyes clean out of their sockets.”

Philippe forced a smile. Ngoc Bich had warned him about coming back to the House—but she had been wrong. He drew a deep, trembling breath—no, too much to expect. The curse was still there. The shadows—the Furies—had only been part of it. There was . . . something else to it, something bigger and larger that still sought the destruction of the House—the anger and rage and betrayal of Morningstar's student.

And still linked to him, obviously.

“But you have it. Morningstar's magic.” The link they shared had faded, become fainter and fainter with time; and his plunge into the death shadows of the dragon kingdom had all but killed it. But he could still feel it; the distant heat of molten metal, a sense that it would all become unbearable if he were to come closer.

Isabelle took a deep, trembling breath. “Yes. If I don't hold it in—like a wild horse, like a breath—then I don't know what will happen.”

She'd destroy the crypt, and the cathedral, and perhaps a good part of the House around them, but he didn't tell her that. Either she'd worked it out for herself and there was no point; or she hadn't, and he didn't need to add that kind of pressure to the balancing act in her mind.

Philippe walked back to Madeleine, to check on her. Her breath came in slow and deep; her eyes were closed, bruises in the oval of her face. She was shaking. No, it wasn't her; it was the ground under them. Something was moving, deep within the earth: not a quake, something far slower, far more persistent, like some kind of burrowing worm. . . . Morningstar had kept it at bay, whatever it was.

“How is she?”

“She'll live.” Philippe grimaced. “Though she'll probably spend some time in the infirmary with Emmanuelle.”

Isabelle grinned. “Aragon will be furious.”

Philippe couldn't help the smile that came to his lips as he imagined the uptight doctor's face. “Oh yes.” He rose, drawing the cloak back over Madeleine. “We should go . . . Wait.”

He walked to the circle he'd seen earlier. Now it stood like a crack in pristine porcelain, surrounded by broken pieces of the floor. It had been large, wide enough to encompass the bed; and the letters themselves hadn't been disturbed by the Furies' attack. He walked toward it; looked at the letters—a crabbed, prickly handwriting, though the writer had clearly been in supreme control: not a letter was smudged or out of place, and they all had the same expansive curves. He'd never seen Morningstar's handwriting, but he imagined it would look something like this. A scuffed noise behind him: Isabelle was kneeling on the floor, running her hands on the letters, her eyes shining with a reflection of the light that had engulfed her earlier on. “He carved them,” she said, the wonder in her voice that of a child—it had used to make him smile, but now he felt vaguely queasy—was it Morningstar that she was awed by, or was it the lure of power that, in the end, drew all Fallen?

“I know. Can you read them?”

It was an incongruous sight: crouching in a crypt and betting that his senses were right, that the Furies were gone: there were so many smarter things he could have done, starting with running away, far from Silverspires and its ghosts. . . .

Isabelle frowned. “No,” she said at last, sounding surprised. “But it's a spell. A very powerful one.”

As if anything handled by Morningstar would be pale and faint, running like old dyes. Philippe closed his eyes. There hadn't been any mark on the body; though it was hard to remember anything more but the blinding radiance that had surrounded it.
You,
he thought to the ghost of Morningstar, hovering in the room.
You never make things easy, do you?

There was no answer, but then, he had never expected one. He bent forward, letting his hands rest on the carvings, the coolness of the stone on his fingers; and the slow thrum coming from below the House, the worm that was gnawing at its insides. Something growing, ever patient, ever persistent: step after step after step, until it was all done, the House swept from the memory of men. . . .

Let it be,
he thought, savagely.
It doesn't deserve to be remembered.

He could feel Morningstar's disapproval, but with Ngoc Bich's healing it was faint, barely perceivable; not the storm that would have caused him to bend the knee in abject submission.

There were
khi
currents, clinging to the inside of the circle: wood, for spring; fire, bright, ever-expanding. Protection, warding; and the desperate love one feels for the doomed; the feeling that would seize a man on seeing a beautiful flower, a perfect sunrise, a piece of sculpted ice, knowing it was all destined to wither and fade.

He died for the House,
Isabelle had said. Had sat there, painstakingly carving all those letters by hand: there were no marks, no scuff traces, nothing to indicate that he'd done anything but sit down, and written the words of a perfect circle into the stone. A spell; a powerful one, controlled only by the ruthless force of his will; something that had kept the House safe through the long years after the war.

But even safety, it seemed, came to an end.

He rose, brushing the dust of Morningstar's bones from his trousers. “Come,” he said to Isabelle. “There is nothing left here.”

They were halfway to the stairs, carrying Madeleine between them, when he heard the footsteps—he didn't turn aside, or move; what would have been the point, in a confined space with no other exit?—and they'd almost got to the exit when the first head came into view—Father Javier, his face carefully blank as he descended, and behind him . . .

Selene.

The Lady of Silverspires wore incongruous clothes, an orderly's white overcoat tossed over embroidered silk pajamas. She must have come straight from the hospital, with no time to put on anything more appropriate. It would have been a comical sight, if not for the pressure of the magic swirling around her, gathered from every room, every corridor, every ruin of the House. She was followed by three guards, one of whom held a light.

“You—” Selene took a deep breath; her gaze pausing, for the briefest of moments, on Madeleine, though she didn't appear to be entirely happy to see her. “You will explain. Now.”

Philippe would have spread his hands, in a gesture of peace; but he would have had to let go of Madeleine. “I came back,” he said. “To see if I could—”

“Finish what you'd started?” Selene remained where she was. The light from above pooled around her head, like a memory of what she must have looked like in the Heavens; in another lifetime, centuries ago.

“You—” Philippe took a deep breath. “You bound me. You treated me like a curiosity to be dissected and discarded. Do you really think you have any kind of authority over me?”

“The authority of power.” Selene's voice was mild, but the pressure in the room had intensified; a wrong word, a wrong gesture, and it would push outward, shattering the pillars and stone bed, burying the crypt out of sight. “I thought you'd be able to recognize that, if nothing else.”

Philippe pulled fire from the ground, let it dance on the tip of his nose.

Selene's face didn't move. “Party tricks,” she said.

Party tricks that had absorbed her magic, once
. Let her try
 . . .

Javier's voice floated back to him, out of the darkness. “This place is old. I had no idea—”

“Javier. This isn't the moment.”

“Oh.” There was silence for a while; the sound of feet scraping on stone. Then Javier said, “I think you should come and see, all the same. You two can kill each other afterward.”

Selene raised an eyebrow. Philippe didn't, but he was as surprised as she. In all the time he'd been in Silverspires, he had never once heard Javier defy her. “What is here?” she asked; it wasn't clear if the question was to Javier or to him.

“A circle,” Philippe said, cautiously. “A grave.”

Her face was tight, her lips pinched to a sliver of gray. “Whose?”

“Morningstar's,” Isabelle said, before Philippe could stop her.

Selene didn't move. Her face didn't, either. It seemed to have frozen, in the exact same configuration as a moment before: the eyes unblinking, staring rigidly at the darkness, the mouth set in its thin line against the pallor of her skin. “Morningstar,” she said. Her voice conveyed some emotion, but Philippe couldn't name it.

“His bones were on the stone bed,” Philippe said. “They're dust now. The magic is gone.”

She should have asked where; if she'd been in anything like her normal state, she would have. But she still stared ahead of her with that same eerie stillness to her face, her lips the only part of her that still seemed to have life. “He's dead,” she said.

“He died for the House. He inscribed a circle. . . .” Isabelle's voice was low and fierce.

Selene raised a hand, and a wave of silence spread through the room: magic unfurling, pushing the words back into their throats with a taste like bile. “I don't want to know,” she said. “Javier?”

“Yes, my lady?”