Aliette de Bodard - The House of Shattered Wings

Asmodeus had asked, “So you set yourself up as his heir, do you?”

The heir of Morningstar; but there was only one heir, and she was head of the House.

“That’s a dangerous position to occupy.”

Selene would be livid. Then again, Selene had no part in what they were now doing.

Emmanuelle said, “You got my message?”

“You know messages aren’t that clear,” Isabelle said. “Merely an intimation to come back, and that there was something here for me.”

“Yes,” Emmanuelle said. “Selene had a mission for you.”

Madeleine merely stood, and listened; everything sliding past her. The box Asmodeus had given her was warm in her hands. “It can’t be this easy—”

“Of course not. Morningstar… should provide you with time.”

“With a distraction, you mean,” Isabelle said. “Did Selene expect him to survive?”

Emmanuelle’s voice was low, bitter. “She did what had to be done.”

Isabelle said nothing for a while. At last, she said, and her voice was cold, and wholly unlike what Madeleine remembered, “Blood and revenge and death. She is truly head of the House.”

“Of course.” Emmanuelle sounded exhausted. She opened her hand: in it was a small, blackened thing. “You didn’t ask what Selene wanted of you. You will take this to the heart of the tree, and kill the curse. If it can still be done.”

Isabelle looked at it, intently. “Why are we not going through the parvis? That would be simpler, wouldn’t it?”

“Because the door of the cathedral is where we’re evacuating,” Emmanuelle said, “and we’d rather not have a fight conducted among our refugees.”

“I see.” Isabelle bit her lips. “It might work.”

“It might not,” Emmanuelle said.

“Of course it will. I will come back,” Isabelle said, carelessly. “But I have accounts to settle, first.”

With a ghost. With someone she had never known, except that this same someone had doomed Philippe; and turned the House she had always thought of as a refuge into — this.

Emmanuelle held Isabelle’s gaze for a while; at length, she nodded. “For the good of the House,” she said. She reached out into one of the drawers, and picked up a small knife. “Here. You’ll need this as well.” And as she handed the knife and the mirror to Isabelle, she added, “You’ve changed.”

“I’ve had to,” Isabelle said. She bit her lip. “Like wildfire — if I let go for even a moment…,” she whispered; and for a moment she sounded bewildered and lost, once more the Fallen Madeleine had taken under her wing. “I’m sorry, Madeleine. But you should go.”

Emmanuelle was already halfway to the door. “Madeleine?”

Madeleine remained standing where she was. She couldn’t have told what moved her now: the melody of Hawthorn within her mind, the memories of Isabelle; the pain in her hip and in her ribs that would never truly go away? “Try not to get yourself killed,” Asmodeus had said, knowing that she would be safe. She was not one for rash decisions. She—“I’ll go with you,” she said.

Isabelle smiled. “Are you sure?”

Madeleine shook her head. “No. But it’s as good as anything. But I wasn’t sure about the dragon kingdom, either, was I?”

Isabelle forced a smile. Charge in, and then see later. As if that had worked out well: the root of all their problems, Selene would have said, her voice acid.

But Selene wasn’t there, anymore; forced out of her own House and her own office by the magic of revenge. “Let’s go,” she said; and walked out of the room, refusing to look back.

THEcorridors were empty, overrun by the huge, fibrous roots Madeleine had already seen — though in places, huge chunks of them had been removed, leaving easy passage.

“Morningstar,” Isabelle said, curtly.

“You’re going to have to explain this.”

Isabelle shook her head. “I can’t really explain. He was dead, and then he was not.”

Like Elphon, Madeleine thought; and shied away from the implications. Asmodeus could resurrect his own Fallen from within Hawthorn, but surely he couldn’t…

She touched one of the cut places; sap dribbled down, wet and sticky: it pulsed with a slow heartbeat, like some huge being; and the warmth of her hand was magic. The magic of the tree; or that of the House? Behind the roots, she could see cracks in the wallpaper; no, cracks in the wall itself. “It’s choking the House,” she said.

“I know.” Isabelle’s face crumpled, became harsher, as if she were thinking of something unpleasant. “Destroying everything that is Silverspires. I–I will not stand for that. Come, Madeleine.”

They ran, in the flickering light provided by Isabelle’s skin; though, as they went deeper and deeper into the House, the light grew and grew, until it seemed to Madeleine they were moving within Heaven itself — until, between the roots, she caught glimpses of graceful tiered arches; of the golden glimmer of icons on painted domes; and the hint of music, harp and violin and voices that squeezed her heart into bloody tatters.

The City.

Bright and terrible, and wholly out of this world; the warmth around her reminding her of Asmodeus’s touch on her skin, as his passionless voice explained why he had saved her life; why he had not cared, and would never care.

Bright and terrible; like Isabelle, like Morningstar. Were all Fallen like this, with the harshness of their Fall at the core of their being? No wonder they were merciless, and cruel, if that was all they saw and remembered….

Isabelle had stopped in the middle of an intersection of corridors. The light around her was tinged with the green of the East Wing. Morningstar, or whoever he really was, was taller than her, and the humanoid-shaped hole he had left on his swath of destruction to the heart of the cathedral surrounded her like the sarcophagus of a mummy — slightly larger than her, perfectly shaped — even taking into account the shadows of wings at her back.

Morningstar’s heir.

Madeleine was already running out of breath; not that she’d had much to start with. They hadn’t seen anything so far; merely the silence of the grave; and even the tree itself seemed to have been shocked into stillness. Whatever Morningstar had done…

Selene had sent him ahead as a distraction. There was no other interpretation possible — she had known, sending him, that there was only one possible outcome to his charging in alone — even with all the magic the House could spare at his back.

“Are you all right?” Isabelle asked.

“I don’t know,” Madeleine said. She leaned on one of the descending roots to catch her breath, felt the warmth leeched from the House; and withdrew her hand.

She was Hawthorn’s now. It was no longer her business.

There was a sound around them; a huge tightening of something, so hard that the walls audibly cracked. “What was that?” Madeleine asked.

“Something that has no right to happen,” Isabelle said coldly. “Come on, it’s this way.”

The cathedral had changed. Instead of pillars, a host of fluted trunks; and an impassable canopy of branches and leaves masking the view of the Heavens. Here there were few or no cuts from Morningstar’s wings; but also enough space for them to wend their way through the maze of roots and trunks and green leaves. The smell of a tropical jungle became overpowering: loamy earth and the peculiar sharpness that comes after the rain. Madeleine’s hands tightened around the box; should she inhale its contents? No, she wasn’t going to give Asmodeus that satisfaction.

Over the altar was the largest trunk of them all, covering seemingly everything from the throne to the entrance to the crypt. But Madeleine had no time to take it in, because the trunk was halfway open; and someone stood there, bending over a body.