The House of Shattered Wings

“Yes,” Selene said. If Philippe wouldn’t talk, and if she couldn’t analyze his magic, she’d find another way to discover what he was. “Tell me.”


Emmanuelle closed her eyes—gathering her thoughts for a recitation. When she opened them again, she spoke without hesitation. “What do you know of the beings who ruled the world before the Fallen?”

Beyond Europe, before the mad rush to colonize other countries and bring their wealth back to the motherland, there had been—other beings, other Houses: the nahual shape-shifters of Mexico, the jinn of Arab countries, the Jewish shedim and nephilim—and once, a long time ago, the demigods and heroes of ancient Greece and ancient Rome—long since vanished and crushed by newer magics, their creatures cannibalized to form the constructs of the war, or buried so deeply in the earth they required a painstaking and dangerous summoning that no Fallen would dare undertake. The other beings in other lands, too, had either yielded to Fallen rule, or been killed. “Much. But not about Annam.”

“Annam . . . is a land of spirits,” Emmanuelle said. “Magic is tied to the land—there’s a spirit for each village, for each household—for mountains and rivers and rain.”

“Rain,” Selene said. “Really.”

“Don’t laugh,” Emmanuelle said. She held up one of the books, where an engraving of a huge, serpentine animal circled text—all the way to the maw, which was huge and fanged, like that of tigers. It had a mane, too; like a lion’s, and deerlike antlers—and it looked . . . wrong, as if bits and pieces of animals had been jumbled together by a creator with little common sense. “They call them rong. Dragons. They live in clouds, or at the bottom of rivers and seas.”

Not the dragons of Western lore, then—not that anyone had summoned one in centuries, too dangerous. . . . Even the one on House Draken’s arms had been a fiction; a mere statement of power without substance. “I take it they’re not friendly.”

“No.” Emmanuelle laid the book back on the desk. “But they’ve withdrawn now. According to the books, they haven’t been seen in several decades.”

“Mmm,” Selene said. “And you think . . . Philippe is a dragon?”

Emmanuelle laughed. “No, of course not. They can take human form, but they always have scales somewhere—or a pearl below their chin, in some of the more . . . dramatic drawings.”

“I see,” Selene said. She didn’t; or, more accurately, she felt she knew more, but not enough to help her. “Was there anything else?”

“There are other spirits,” Emmanuelle said. “Flower fairies”—she raised a hand to forestall Selene’s objections—“they’re not cute and small, trust me. Also, fox spirits, in Tonkin; and Immortals, though no one has ever seen these. Apparently they all live in something called the Court of the Jade Emperor—who rules over all the other spirits—and they never come down to Earth.”

That didn’t sound very promising, either. And she had other preoccupations, too—with the market coming to Silverspires, there were things she needed to go over with Javier and Diane, the head of security for the House. . . .

She was about to dismiss Emmanuelle and go back to her reports, when something else happened. At the back of her mind—where the dependents of the House were all lined up like lit candles—a light flickered, and went out.

“Selene?”

Selene closed her eyes; felt for the shape and heft of the missing dependent. Théodore Ganimard; one of the informants who kept her apprised of what was happening in other Houses, and in the rest of the city. “Someone just died.”

“Oh.” Emmanuelle said. “Is it . . . bad?”

Selene shook her head. Being an informant was a dangerous business; and in a bad year she would lose half a dozen men and women. But still . . . it was odd, that she’d never even felt that Théodore Ganimard was in danger—as if he’d died so quickly and brutally that it had never had time to register with the House’s protections. Like many dependents of Silverspires, he had a tracker disk; but all it told her was that he had been out in the south of Paris, near the ruins of Hell’s Toll.

The market was arriving the next day, and there were other things requiring her attention; but she wasn’t about to let the death of one of her dependents slide past.

“I don’t know how bad it is. Can you get me Javier? I’ll ask him to look into this.”

*