Aliette de Bodard - The House of Shattered Wings

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.