The House of Shattered Wings

Emmanuelle spoke up. “Madeleine could—”

“No,” Selene said. “Madeleine will act as this House’s alchemist, and strip the corpse, and wait for further orders. There is no way”—her eyes were cold—“I will let a witch untrained in House politics walk into Lazarus. The potential for diplomatic incidents is too high.”

“You could have some trust,” Madeleine said, stiffly, but it was pointless. Selene had already made her decision; and it probably meant Madeleine would be stuck with Isabelle, too. Not that she had anything against Isabelle, but it was the imposition of her that galled.

Madeleine bowed her head. “Fine. I’ll strip the corpse.” She’d known this was coming, of course. First and foremost, she was House Silverspires’ alchemist, and it was the duty of an alchemist to see that no fragment of Fallen magic was lost. “And I will await further orders.”

Selene appeared not to notice the terrible irony in her words; she was apparently deep in thought, possibly planning the next step in her relations with House Lazarus. “Come,” she said to Emmanuelle. “There is no time to be wasted.”

Aragon and the nurses followed them out of the room—Pauline lingering for a moment, making a gesture that reminded Madeleine the drinks were still waiting for her in the nurses’ office, cold comfort for after she was done.

And now, she was alone with Oris.

Strip the corpse. Such casual words, for such a routine thing, for part of her trade—she thought of knives taking flesh apart, of hair saved in small boxes, of bones scraped clean and burned in the incinerator—of her work, now so sickeningly empty of meaning. Later, she’d go back to her room and get high on angel essence; feel the surge of power within her, strong enough to obliterate grief.

But for now, there was only the cold: the merciless clarity rising from her wrung-out lungs; the sharp, biting awareness that she could trust no one but herself.

It had been her fault, from end to end. And she might be dying, she might be weak and incompetent in House politics, as Selene had said; but she knew exactly where her responsibility lay.

She would go to see Claire at House Lazarus, and get what she needed to make sure that Oris was avenged.

*

IN the end, as he’d known he’d have to, Philippe crept back into the cathedral—because it was the only way he would understand what was going on in the House, and fulfill his deal with Samariel.

The place was as bad as ever; the magic swirling within strong enough to make him itch all over. If anything, it seemed to have gotten worse since Oris’s death, though that was absurd. There’d been nothing but the usual Fallen magic on Oris’s corpse, and that would have been recovered; the body scraped clean by Madeleine until hardly a trace remained. Unlike former Immortals—who lived long but died, in the end, the same as any mortals, rejoining the eternal cycle of rebirths and reincarnations—Fallen never left much of anything on Earth.

Nevertheless, Philippe gave the blood-spattered stone floor at the entrance a wide berth, before walking closer to the throne.

It stood limned in sunlight, its edges the warm, golden color fit for an emperor; and somehow, even timeworn, even broken, it loomed over the entire cathedral, made his breath catch in his throat—as if, for a moment, a moment only, he had stepped back in time and stood in the cathedral of his visions, and Morningstar still sat in the throne with the easy arrogance of one to whom everything had been given—power, magic, the rule of a House that was the first and largest in the city, destined to stand forever tall and unbroken.

He crept rather than walked, fighting a desire to abase himself; to crawl on the floor as if he were in the presence of Buddha or the Jade Emperor; and when he reached the throne, and touched it, the warmth leaped up his arm like an electric shock, leaving a tingling like that of blood flowing back into emptied veins.

The mirror and the parchment were still where he’d left them, tucked under the throne. He took them out, and laid them in the sunlight.

What could he make of them?