Aliette de Bodard: The House of Shattered Wings

“Good,” Selene said. “Go and prepare the car, will you?” She looked again at the young man, at the foreign features of his face. Annamites were a familiar sight in the city: they were citizens of France, after all, albeit, like all colonial subjects, second-rate ones. Emmanuelle, Selene’s lover, manifested as African; but Emmanuelle was a Fallen who had never left Paris in her life. Whatever the young man was, he was not and had never been a Fallen.

“As you wish,” Javier said. “I’ll send you the helpers to pick her up.”

Selene shook her head. “Not just her. We’ll have two passengers this time, Javier.”

She didn’t know what the young man was, but she most definitely intended to find out.

MADELEINEd’Aubin, alchemist of House Silverspires, had seen more than her share of prone bodies brought in at the dead of the night: she slept little these days, in any case, spending her nights in her laboratory, remembering the past and what it had cost her.

She arrived in one of the largest rooms of the admissions wing of Hôtel-Dieu, the House’s hospital: row after row of metal beds, all unoccupied save two. Two doctors in white blouses hovered by the new arrivals’ side, and her assistant, Oris, was waiting for her, leaning against the wall and trying to appear casual; though his face was sallow in the dim light.

She nodded at Oris and went to his side, pulling a chair so she could sit. Madeleine dropped her heavy shoulder bag onto the floor, and settled down to wait in silence.

The room was dusty and the air dry, and her wasted lungs wouldn’t take it: a cough welled up. She desperately tried to quench the trickle that was going to become a cough, but it was never enough. The bout that followed racked her from head to toe — she was going to choke to death, never finding fresh, wholesome air again.

At last she sat back, wrung out, enjoying the sweetness of uninterrupted breath. One of the doctors — Aragon, surely — was looking straight at her with disapproval. Madeleine waved a hand, letting him know it was nothing. She’d lied about it; told him it was too much breathing the Paris air, of the areas around the blackened flow of the Seine — he’d seen so many combatants with the same problems that he’d been all too ready to believe her. She was not proud, but she was safe. The last thing that’d occur to him, prim and proper as he was, would be to question her; to realize how wasted her lungs were, and the true cause of such extensive and fast-progressing damage.

At length, the doctors peeled away from the beds, and one of them removed his mask. Madeleine found herself staring at Aragon’s sharp features. The Fallen doctor looked, like Oris, on the verge of exhaustion, his skin pale and beaded with sweat, his graying hair slick against his temples.

“Shouldn’t you be asleep?” Madeleine asked, after the brief pleasantries were over. Unlike her, Aragon was paid for his work, not a dependent of the House, or bound in Selene’s service.

Aragon shook his head. His colleague had left the room already, no doubt heading for the comfort of his own bed. “For something like this? You know she wouldn’t let me sleep.” He shook his head, amused. “In any case”—he spread his hands—“I don’t have much to say. Both healthy, neither carrying horrible contagious diseases or hair-trigger spells. You can collect your toll from them.” There was something — some hint of anger in his poised demeanor? — some feeling she couldn’t quite place. But she knew enough not to ask him; he would just shake his head with infuriating politeness and assure her that nothing was wrong.

“I see,” Madeleine said. “Thank you.”

Aragon made his way toward the door. He paused as he crossed the threshold, looking back at the bodies on the bed, as if he were about to say something more, but then shook his head and moved on.

Now it was just her and Oris. Madeleine glanced at the beds: a girl shining with the residual light of newborn Fallen, and…

“Who’s the young man?” she asked. He didn’t look Fallen, but why would Selene ask her to take care of a human? There was no entry toll for humans, or at least none that an alchemist could collect.

“I don’t know,” Oris said. “But Lady Selene was quite clear that you had to take care of both of them.”

“We,” Madeleine said, absentmindedly. “You’re an alchemist as well, you know.” She still held hopes that, one day, Oris was going to outgrow his maddening shyness. For God’s sake, the boy was Fallen, with enough magic to start his own House if he had to, yet he crept through life as if he didn’t quite belong anywhere.

She moved to the Fallen first. At least she was used to dealing with those, though it had been many, many years since she saw one so young, just hours from her first manifestation, with the scars of her Fall still visible: the ribs that were slowly knitting themselves back together, the limbs that didn’t quite seem to be at the proper angles yet, the face with its high cheekbones and features that seemed to be subtly, slowly shifting even as she looked as it. Madeleine gently turned her over. The telltale signs were there: the large V-shaped scar spread across the back, where Aragon had cleanly cut off the mangled, irretrievable wings — the scar would fade a little in time, but never completely heal — the hint of ribs below the translucent skin; and the weight, much, much lighter than a human body of the same size, with fluted bones that would take much less effort to shatter.

By the Fallen’s side was a small tray, in which someone had set out three vials of blood that shone with the characteristic rippling, soft light; and two severed fingers, obviously hacked away by someone who hadn’t the time for finesse.

“Lady Selene wasn’t the first on the scene,” Oris said, apologetically. “I’ve taken the liberty of setting the blood aside; I don’t know what you want done with the fingers.”

The same thing they always did with any detached body parts. Madeleine sighed, but made no comment. “Will you see to the young man, please?”

She had no illusions; she’d be required to point out precisely what needed to be done to Oris in a moment or two, but at least it got him out of the way. Madeleine went back to her shoulder bag and withdrew her equipment: a handful of treated mirrors, a set of sterilized scalpels, a series of containers with primed preservation spells, and one last thing: a small black box, which, at a casual glance, seemed nothing more than a woman’s private vanity, a container for some small item of jewelry like a ring or a brooch. This last she hid under the mirrors, after throwing a glance to make sure Oris wasn’t looking at her.

Time to perform her role, then.

She went back to the Fallen’s side and set the mirrors, one by one, by the nose and mouth, waiting until the breath had misted them over — and the glass seemed to shine with reflected light. She closed them after she was done, muttering a brief incantation to seal them, ensuring that the magic would remain trapped in them without decaying. Then she trimmed, one by one, the long, clawlike nails on the fine hands, and similarly collected the trimmings in a box which she sealed. Any stray hairs she also took, and dealt with in the same fashion.

Madeleine worked almost without thinking; she’d done it for so many years it had become routine. The younger the Fallen, the more potent their magic — the closer their link to the City they had Fallen from and the grace of God. And this Fallen was an infant, hours from her manifestation in the mortal world. House Silverspires, like all Houses, knew the value of preserving some of their earliest leavings. Not everything; that would have been tantamount to what the gangs did, taking Fallen bodies apart before they grew strong enough to retaliate — though there were also rumors of spells strong enough to negate Fallen magic, and places where they were kept in cages or in chains like sheep or dairy cows. Silverspires was not one of those places, thank God.