Каарон Уоррен - The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2018 Edition

And still no mention of whatever was causing the evacuation—no one who’d dared ask, either. Thuan fell in line behind two gaunt men in white bourgeons and blue aprons, Leila and Kim Cuc following a little behind. His neighbor was one of the House’s dependents, a middle-aged woman with a lean, harsh face who didn’t seem inclined to make conversation. She held a magical artefact in her clenched hand, but by the faint translucency of her skin she’d already inhaled its contents. Bad enough for everyone to be prepared for magic, then.

He still felt, under him, the spikes. They were moving, slowly weaving a pattern like snakes as he stepped over them, pushing upwards to trap his ankles. Their hold easily snapped as he stepped away, but it kept getting stronger and stronger. How far away were the gardens, how much time did they have? And what would happen, if he faltered and stopped? Something was trying to invade this part of the House, was trying to find a weakness, but he couldn’t see anything or anyone.

He glanced behind him. A small, skeleton-thin girl in a torn hempen dress had stumbled, and one of the dependents, cursing under her breath, was trying to help the girl up. Magic surged through her chest and arms, a light that threw the girl’s cheekbones into sharp relief. “Get up,” the dependent said, and the girl stumbled on.

So he wasn’t the only one, then. And it wasn’t only people with magic, Fallen or dragon who were feeling this.

Something moved, at the back. For a moment Thuan thought it was a child who’d gotten left behind, but it was too small and agile, and its joints didn’t seem to flex in the right way. Its eyes glittered in the growing shadows. And then, as swiftly as it had appeared, it vanished.

A child. The shape of a child. And—Thuan’s memory was unfortunately excellent on details like this—not something made of flesh and muscles and bones, but a construct of parquet wood, prickling with the thorns of brambles.

Of hawthorns, he thought, suddenly chilled.

When he turned to look again, the shadows had lengthened, and there were more of them, trailing the group, here one moment and gone the next, flickering in and out of existence like lights wavering in the wind. He scanned the crowd. Most Houseless appeared oblivious; but, here and there, people stared with growing fear. The House dependents didn’t appear to see the children of thorns at all.

That wasn’t good.

But, as they moved forward—always driven, always following the elusive light of Sare’s magic, following a corridor that twisted and turned and seemed to have no end—Thuan couldn’t help looking back again. Every time he looked, the children of thorns were more solid, more sharply defined. And not flickering in and out of existence, but more and more there.

The shadows at their back lengthened, until the light of the dependents’ magic seemed the only safety in the entire world. And the spikes—the branches, weren’t they?—grabbed his ankles and slowed him down, and more and more people stumbled, and they weren’t making good enough time, they were going to slow down and fall…

Someone grabbed Thuan’s hand. And it was definitely not human, or Fallen, or dragon—a dry, prickling touch like kindling wood. Thuan fought the urge to grab his hand away. “What are you?” he asked, and—where its breath should have been coming from—there was only the loud creak of floorboards.

It whispered something that might have been a name, that might have been a curse, but didn’t let go. “Stay,” it whispered. “Or the House will fail you as it failed its children.”

Thuan’s feet felt as though he was stuck to the parquet floor. With his free hand he called up khi water—it came slowly, agonizingly slowly—and wove it into the pattern Kim Cuc had shown him, throwing it over the spikes like a blanket. The currents smoothed themselves out. He lifted his feet, trying to stamp some circulation back into them, but he couldn’t get rid of the hand in his.

“Enough,” Sare said. She turned, ahead of them, to face the group. Light streamed from her face, from her arms beneath the grey and silver dress she wore—a radiance that grew steadily blinding, a faint suggestion of wings at her back, a halo around her fair hair.

By Thuan’s side, there was a sharp, wounded sound like wood snapping, and the hand withdrew from his as if scalded. He didn’t wait to see if it would come back, and neither did his companions. They ran, slowly at first and then picking up speed—not looking back, one should never look back—leaving the darkness behind and heading for the end of the corridor, door after door passing them, dust-encrusted rooms, rotten paneling, broken sofas and torn carpets and burnt wallpaper—and finally emerged, gasping and struggling to breathe, in the grey light of the gardens.

They stared at each other. Leila was disheveled and pale, breathing heavily. Thuan was still trying to shake the weird feeling from his hand. When he raised it to the light he saw a dozen pinpricks, already closing. He’d never been so happy for dragons’ healing powers.

Sare stood on the steps of the wing, eyes shaded to look at the rest of the House. “Just this wing,” she said, half to herself. She gestured to one of the dependents. “Get a message to Lord Asmodeus.”

“He said—” the dependent started, with fear in her voice.

“I know what he said,” Sare said. She sounded annoyed. “He’s grieving and doesn’t want to be disturbed. But this is an emergency.” She breathed in, a little more calmly. “No, you’re right. Iaris. Get Iaris. She’ll sort this mess out.”

Thuan showed no sign he’d understood what was going on. From his briefings he knew that Iaris was the House’s chief doctor, and Asmodeus’s right hand, seconding him in his work of ruling the House.

Sare turned back to Thuan and the others, huddled on the steps, struggling to catch their breath. “We’ll find you some food until this gets sorted out.”

Of course. They weren’t going to be allowed to leave, were they? Just in case one of them turned out to be responsible for whatever had happened.

Leila withdrew something from her pocket: it was soggy and broken in half, and left trails of chocolate in her hand. “They’d have tasted great,” she said, forlornly.

“We can always do them later,” Thuan said. And then he stopped, as his brain finally caught up with him. “Where’s Kim Cuc?”

She. She wasn’t there. He hadn’t seen her since the hand had grabbed him in the corridor. A fist of ice was squeezing his innards into mush. Where. Where was she?

He moved, half-running across the steps, gently shoving people out of his way—a gaunt girl with the round belly of starvation, an older man from the factories, his clothes slick and stained from machine oil—no Kim Cuc, no other Annamite, not anywhere. “Older aunt!”

She wasn’t there. She wasn’t anywhere. She… he stopped at last, staring at the Houseless on the steps, at the grey, overcast sky, so unlike the rippling blue one of the dragon kingdom under the Seine. Gone. Stuck inside. With the children of thorns and the floorboards and whatever else was going on inside.

Stay.

No.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Sare, towering over him, with the remnants of the magic she’d used to extricate them from the wing, a dark, suffocating presence far too close for comfort. Within him, the khi water rose, itching for a fight, for anything to take his mind off the reality. But he couldn’t. Even if he’d been the most powerful among the dragon kingdom, he couldn’t take on a Fallen within her House.

“My friend,” Thuan said.

Sare was quick on the uptake. Her gaze moved, scanned the crowd. “Not here. All right. Is anyone else missing?” she called out.