Aliette de Bodard: The House of Shattered Wings

Though, damn him, she still missed him: she’d wake up in the morning and remember that the House was hers, that he was not there to offer biting comments or advice; that he had walked out of the House twenty years ago and never come back. They’d searched for him, of course — turned the House upside down, gone into every nook and cranny, and never found anything, a body or a hint of where he might have gone — Selene didn’t even know if he was still alive or not, or if he was truly lost, truly beyond any meeting she might have dreamed of.

“Fallen have no parents,” Selene said, extending a hand toward the girl. “And no kin, beyond those that are willing to claim us. I will give you what my mentor once gave me: a name of your own.”

Morningstar had liked old-fashioned names, drawn straight from the pages of some of the obscure books he’d favored: Selene, Nightfall, Oris, Aragon; even Emmanuelle had been called Indigo before she changed her name.

Selene chose something far simpler. “Isabelle,” she said. “It was the name of a queen once. Wear it well.”

“Isabelle.” The young Fallen sat very still, repeating the name to herself as if testing it for suitability. Her gaze, for a moment, was disturbingly adult, as if Philippe had contaminated her. “It is a good name. Thank you.”

Selene nodded. “You have the run of the House. Use it well.”

She watched Isabelle leave the room. She heard voices outside, guessing that she’d be talking to Philippe. The link between those two concerned her; but if it was Isabelle’s choice, what right did Selene have to interfere?

“She’s strong, this one,” Emmanuelle said behind her.

Selene turned, only half-surprised. Emmanuelle had thrown open the curtain that lay between her office and her private quarters, and stood wreathed in the light of the lamps. “You should rest,” she said.

Emmanuelle walked into the room, and laid a hand on Selene’s cheek, briefly, affectionately. “I’ve rested enough for a lifetime. Or several of them. Have you given thought to the young man?”

“He’s no Fallen,” Selene said.

“He said he was born abroad.” Emmanuelle’s face was thoughtful. “Who knows what this might mean? There were other creatures in Annam, and other rules of magic — before the French came over and brought the word of God to those benighted shores.” Her voice was lightly ironic. Emmanuelle manifested as an African woman. Most people mistook her for a Senegalese, though they couldn’t place her in a precise ethnic group.

“I don’t know anything about Annam,” Selene said. They had people there, of course; got the occasional shipment of silk and rubber, but she hadn’t had any reason to focus her attention on the colonies. Travel after the war was slow, expensive — boats to Asia almost inexistent, and communications difficult and infrequent. Heavens, it had taken them ten years and an armed battalion to get back Calixta, and she’d only been stuck in London. Asia might have been another world entirely.

“Indochina,” Emmanuelle said, distractedly. “Once called Viet Nam. Annam is just one of the five regions, but everyone calls them Annamites anyway. Not that most French can make a difference between an Annamite and a Cochinchinese. He might just be one of the witches trained by French schools, you know.”

Witches, even Annamite ones, shouldn’t have been able to stop her magic. Perhaps younger, more remote areas retained a vitality that old, bloated cities like Paris never could recapture. Selene sighed. Either way, she would find out more about Philippe and his magic; and how best to use him for the good of the House.

ITwas a hard spell to untangle.

Back in his rooms, Philippe had sought traces of what Selene had done to him. He found, without too much trouble — Fallen magic was never subtle or hidden, especially not House magic — the magic that Selene had woven.

It stretched around his neck, an invisible collar that trailed around his entire body before earthing itself into the floor of the House — a tangled labyrinth of ten thousand threads, each of which burned like living fire when he tried to touch them. When at long last he managed to get hold of one of them, heedless of the pain it caused him, it was only to discover that it went straight into the heart of the tangle, where he lost it.

He tried severing the threads closer to the ground, to burn them with the little fire in the House, to dry them out with metal. Each time, he felt the pain of his own spell reflected back at him; until, shaking, he had to stop and suck in burning breaths, waiting for the agony to pass him by; and the threads merely re-formed, seconds after he had burned them.

Demons take Selene, she was thorough, and powerful. But then again, what had he expected of a Fallen; of one of the ruling elite of the city?

He lay on the bed, shaking, and stared at the ceiling until the wooden carvings seemed to dissolve into blurry water. He might not escape this time. He was her prisoner until her goodwill ran out; her victim after that. She had made it clear she would kill him for what he’d done in the Galeries Lafayette. It was… frightening, a prospect for which he had no name; as if he were back in the regiment during the war, prodded and poked until he ran with the rest under mortar fire, under a hail of bullets, in the midst of spells that could drain the breath out of him.

He’d survived that ; but it had been sheer luck, and nothing else. Heaven no longer looked upon him with favor, as he knew all too well. He was not Fallen, but he might as well be; exiled from the Imperial Court of Immortals, and unable to speak with his own kind; his kin long since dead, the only remnants of his blood descendants who worshipped at a distant altar.

He might not survive this. But did it matter? There was no way forward, no return to the Imperial Court. He was trapped in Paris, all the paths back to Annam closed to him — and now worse than this, trapped in a House as a prisoner.

Sometimes, on the edge of sleep, he would dream of when he had first ascended, and turned from mortal to Immortal. He was back in the cave where he had fasted, a thousand years ago — shivering with hunger, hanging on the knife’s edge of unconsciousness as he meditated — and there was a sound like the bell toll of a pagoda resonating in his bones; and the shadow of cloud-encrusted buildings and of a vast courtyard, materializing a hand span away from him; and the Jade Emperor awaiting him on the throne, congratulating him for overcoming his banishment…

Such a wishful, childish dream. There was no truth in it, not a single gram. He was stuck in France, in Silverspires; and no amount of meditation would make the Imperial Court’s power stretch to foreign shores.

The door opened. Philippe was on his feet, drawing on the few scattered hints of khi currents in the room, before he saw that it was Isabelle.

“Oh,” he said. “Hello.” After the interview with Selene, he’d walked away, back to the room he’d been assigned. The last thing he’d wanted was to talk to her — his brief apology was all he felt like extending to her. He fully intended to stay away from Selene’s prize; and he didn’t want to be reminded of what he’d done to her. But it was a small room, and there was only one exit, in front of which she stood.

She looked at him for a while, speculatively. Her brown eyes were still halfway translucent, the irises dilated and washed out, as if some of the light he’d seen resided still in her. “I thought I would find you here. We need to talk.”

“I’m not sure we do.”

Isabelle smiled. There was something primal and innocent about the look, something that seemed to set the whole room alight — but then again, she knew the power of that smile, and she was using it. Fallen all over, that curious mixture of naïveté and guile. She raised her hand; the one that was missing the two fingers, the ones he and Ninon had cut off. Demons take him, he wasn’t one to shirk away from responsibilities.