The House of Shattered Wings

Selene pushed her chair away from the desk. “No. The Houses forcing my hand for the conclave are Harrier, Hawthorn, and Lazarus, and it’s obvious that Claire is working in concert with Asmodeus. She got you where she wanted: to confirm that the bodies were all linked to us.”


Madeleine flushed. “I didn’t mean—”

“That’s why you weren’t to go into Lazarus,” Selene said, but without anger. In a way, that made it worse. “You’re an open book, and you know many of the secrets of the House. Dealing with Claire requires diplomacy and politics, neither of which you have mastered.”

Madeleine was silent for a while, and then thought of the shadow that had stalked Oris. It could have been a hallucination; it could have been induced by the angel essence—but the situation was desperate. On the off chance that it turned out to be of use, she owed it to Oris, if nothing else, to mention it. “There’s something else I haven’t told you,” she said.

Selene didn’t even blink. “Out with it.”

“Oris . . . saw something, sometime before he died. Two weeks, three weeks maybe? He came to me one night and said—there was a shadow in his room.”

“A shadow.” Selene clearly didn’t seem impressed. “Silverspires is full of them.”

Madeleine shivered; remembering what it had felt like to see it; to be touched by it. “It was . . . like wings unfolding where you can’t see them, but still blotting out the light.”

“And you think it killed him?”

“I don’t know,” Madeleine said. “I tried to look for it, but it didn’t come back, and Oris never mentioned it again. It might be unrelated. We might have been . . . imagining things.”

“Mmm.” Selene shook her head. “I don’t see how it helps us now.” She rose and came to stand by the window, staring at the spread of the plaza below them. “Anything else?”

Madeleine thought of Elphon, and then clamped the thought before it could show on her face. This could not have any connection to the matter at hand. “No,” she said.

“Good,” Selene said. “Talk about it with Javier, will you? He’ll set up security for the conclave, and it will be good if he can keep an eye out for your shadow.”

She didn’t reproach Madeleine, or consider that the hallucination might have been induced by drugs—she didn’t even ask how Madeleine had tracked the shadow. Probably she assumed Madeleine had used a potent artifact, but she didn’t even reprimand her for the unauthorized use of that.

She was worried. And if Selene was worried, then Madeleine was scared out of her wits.





EIGHT


THE CONCLAVE

TWO days after Asmodeus’s visit, the Houses arrived at the conclave much as Madeleine had expected: in full force, with delegations of twenty or more people resplendent in their uniforms, wearing their insignia like a badge of honor. Selene welcomed them all, standing on the parvis of Notre-Dame: bowing gravely to the stiff countenance of Guy from House Harrier, and the freezing gaze of his wife, Andrea; the arrogant smile of Asmodeus from House Hawthorn; the expressionless face of Claire from House Lazarus—and the minor Houses, Stormgate, Minimes and Shellac and a host of other obscure names, living on the scraps the other, bigger Houses left them.

The presence of the House’s alchemist was not required—so Madeleine found herself a place from which to watch the proceedings, in a disused room on the second floor of the H?tel-Dieu. She took Isabelle with her, though the young Fallen’s attention was half on a compact mirror she was infusing: she’d been trying to trap her breath into it for the past half hour, without much success so far.

Good. Madeleine had no need to take part in the proceedings of that nest of wasps—at least, not yet, not so soon. Though of course she was lapping it all up—pathetic, really, to want to be part of the game that had undone her already. She was no Fallen or great magician, and her competence as an alchemist did not make up for her lack of raw power.

Among the delegation from House Hawthorn was the face Madeleine had been seeking: Elphon walked next to the young woman Madeleine had already seen. He showed only the curiosity she’d expect of an infant Fallen; no spark of recognition or any indication that he had been to Silverspires before, in another life, when he still knew and cared for Madeleine. He was dead. She was sure of it—his blood warm and sticky on her hands, her holding him as the life drained out of him. And the dead didn’t come back to life. They couldn’t.