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

She might as well have been pushing on thin air.

“Where we all go,” the rightmost one said. “Into darkness, into earth.”

Thuan opened his mouth to ask why they’d taken her, and then closed it, because it wasn’t what mattered.

“Show me,” Sare said.

A slow ponderous nod from both of them, perfectly synchronized, and two hands extending towards her.

“Sare, wait—”

But she was already moving—before Thuan could grab her away, or even finish his warning—extending both arms to clasp them.

There was a sound like cloth ripping, and then only shadows, extending to cover the corridor where Sare had been.

Thuan gave up, and used all the colorful curses Second Aunt forbade him to utter in her presence. It seemed more than appropriate.

He didn’t know how long he remained there, staring at the darkness, which stubbornly refused to coalesce again into anything meaningful. But, gradually, some order swam out of the morass of his thoughts, a sense that he had to do something rather than succumb to despair. He was—no matter how utterly laughably inappropriate this might seem—their best chance at a rescue.

Where we all go.

Into darkness, into earth.

Sare was right: there were other wings with a spring, and a water room. But this was also the wing where the House received the Houseless. Which meant the expendable one. And—if he was to hazard a guess—the one least protected by the wards.

And Asmodeus, the head of the House and its major protector, was shut in his rooms, grieving and not paying attention to what was going on within the House. An opening, for something that had lain in wait for years? An attempt to seize a weak and unprotected part of the House, or to weaken Hawthorn?

Demons take them all. He didn’t want to help the House, didn’t want to involve himself in its politics. But, if he didn’t, Kim Cuc wouldn’t come back.

Thuan closed his eyes, and sought out the spring again. It was muzzled, bound by layer after layer of Fallen magic—wards that would singe him, if he so much as thought of touching them. It flowed, steadily, into the House, giving it everything it had, the diseased, polluted waters of the Parisian underground, sewage no one would have thought of drinking before the war and its devastation.

The House will fail you as it failed its children.

The only thing Thuan wanted the House to do for him was to forget he existed, and not look too closely. He hardly expected any protection, or wanted to pledge it any allegiance. Not that Second Aunt would let him, mind you. She’d carve out chunks of his hide before she allowed this to happen.

A comforting thought: there were things scarier than unknown children of thorns with shadowy agendas.

Thuan walked downwards, towards the spring.

There were two children waiting for him outside the corrugated doors of the water room. They didn’t appear, or fade: they were just there, like guards standing at attention. By their size, the human children they were mimicking couldn’t have been more than five or six.

“What are you?” he asked, again.

He hadn’t expected an answer, but they both bowed to him, perfectly synchronized. “The Court,” they said.

“The Court.” Thuan’s voice was flat.

“The Court of Birth.”

Thuan was abysmal at a number of things, but his memory for details was excellent, and he’d been briefed on the history of the House before being sent there. Before he became head of the House, Asmodeus had been leader of the Court of Birth.

Children. The Court of Birth was in charge of the education of children and young Fallen. In charge of their protection. “There is a Court of Birth,” he said, slowly. “In the House.” Not here, in this deserted wing filled with thorns and shadows.

There was no answer. Thuan grabbed the doors, and pushed.

He didn’t know what he’d expected. It was a low room with several rusted pumps, their steady hum a background to his own breath. The air was saturated with humidity, the tiles on the walls broken in numerous places—repaired so many times they looked like jigsaws, with yellowed grouting running at odd angles through the painted windmills and horse-drawn carts.

In a corner of the room, Sare was fighting children of thorns—small, agile shapes who dodged, effortlessly, the spells she threw at them. The pipes lit up with magic, showing, at intervals, the flow of water going upwards through the pumps.

And, in the center of the room…

Thuan walked faster, his heart in his throat.

It was an empty octagonal basin of water, the khi currents within it all but extinguished, except where Kim Cuc was. She wasn’t looking at him, but kneeling, her hands flat on old, cracked mosaics. The khi water within her, the currents running in her veins and major organs, was slowly spreading to cover the entire surface of the mosaics. Her green bracelets were fused to the floor, the light from them spreading across the mosaics. She—

She was taking root in the basin.

This wasn’t good.

“Big sis—” Thuan started. He didn’t get to finish his sentence, because someone else spoke up first.

“So you’re her friend.”

Thuan turned around, sharply, hands full of khi water—or rather, they would have been, if all the water within the room hadn’t been either extinguished or claimed. There was nothing in his palms but a faint, pathetic tug, as if he held a dog on a distant leash.

The being of thorn who stood in front of him was tall; taller than Thuan, and rake-thin. When it bowed, the gesture wasn’t like that of the others, smooth and synchronized and in no way human. This was elegant and slow, with a hint of mockery, as if the being couldn’t quite disguise amusement. It reminded Thuan of…

In fact, it reminded Thuan of nothing so much as Sare’s demeanor. “You don’t have wings,” he said—a stab in the dark, but given where he was it could hardly get worse.

“No.” The being straightened from its bow, stared at Thuan. The face wasn’t just branches arranged to have eyes and nose. This was someone’s face, carefully sculpted in wood and thorns: plump cheeks, and a round shape, someone who must have been pleasantly baby-faced and young, except that now not a single muscle moved as it spoke, and the eyes were nothing but pits of darkness, like the orbits of a skull. “We don’t keep them, when we Fall. As you well know.”

“I don’t know,” Thuan said. He pulled on khi water, and found barely anything that would answer him. Not good at all. “You were alive once, weren’t you?”

The being cocked his head, watching him like a curiosity. “You ask the wrong questions,” it said, at last.

“Fine,” Thuan said, exhaling. “Then why are we here? Because the House failed you?”

He thought the other was going to make him some mocking answer about following his friend in harm’s way, but it merely shook its head. “The House didn’t fail me.”

“You make no sense.” Thuan said.

The being was still watching him. It made no move to seize or stop him. “She was willing.”

Thuan took in a deep, burning breath. Willing to do what, and what questions had it asked, before binding Kim Cuc to the basin’s floor? Words had power here, which was good, because they seemed to be all he had to bargain with.

He hesitated—every instinct he had telling him not to do such a stupid thing—but then turned his back on the being, to look at the basin. Kim Cuc’s eyes were closed, her breathing slow, even. “Big sis. Big sis.”

He wanted to shake her, but he wasn’t a complete idiot. She’d put her hands in the basin, on the mosaics, and it had seized her. She didn’t need Thuan caught in the spell, either.