What she did or didn’t do. Yes, that was what it boiled down to, in the end. To her conscience; Fallen shouldn’t have had one, especially heads of Houses, and yet…
“You’re right,” she said at last. “I can’t.” Sheer foolishness, Morningstar whispered in her mind. How will you ever be a good leader for Silverspires, Selene?
She didn’t have an answer for him. She’d never had one. She’d loved and respected him, but had always known that, ultimately, he had been disappointed in her, just as he had been disappointed in all of his students: Hyacinth too unambitious, Seraphina too needy, Oris too fearful, Nightingale too careless, Leander too disobedient; and Selene, of course, too squeamish. If he’d lived longer, he would have turned from her, as he’d turned from each of his students. She didn’t hate him for it: he’d been a force of nature, and every one of them had been bound to fall short; to shrivel next to his forceful presence — to crack like flawed porcelain in the oven.
“We have to find something to give Asmodeus,” she said. “I can’t leave this hanging—”
A knock on the door; Father Javier, bowing. “Excuse me,” he said, but Aragon pushed him aside. “Selene,” he said. “You have to come down now.”
One look at his face was enough for Selene. “Samariel?”
“He’s dead,” Aragon said. “I need you down there with the corpse, to help with the last rites—”
“No, you don’t,” Selene said sharply; and got up, pushing back her chair. “Where is Asmodeus?”
“I left him with the body,” Aragon said. He looked puzzled. “Left him time to… compose himself. I expect he’ll be waiting for you. Why?”
Because he wouldn’t stay with the body; not right now. He grieved, of course; but, with people like Asmodeus, anger and revenge always came first. “We need to get down to the cells. Now.”
But when they got there, the door was open, faintly creaking on hinges that hadn’t been oiled in decades; and the cell lay empty — Philippe vanished, without a trace of where he might have gone.
“Now what?” Emmanuelle said.
Selene took a deep breath. “We—” She breathed in again, trying to keep panic at bay. They could search the House, but it would take them hours if not days: too many places where one could hide, too many nooks and crannies she wasn’t familiar with, and of course he wasn’t one of her dependents, didn’t have a tracker disk or anything she could use to find him… “I don’t have a clue where he is.” She breathed in the smell of mold and old terror from the cell’s walls. “We need to find him, and fast.”
* * *
THERE had been no warning. One moment Philippe was sitting in his cell; the next two of Asmodeus’s thugs had come in, one of them reaching out for something he couldn’t quite see — pain spiked through his eyelids, and he fell forward.
He woke up in a chair. Or rather, secured to a chair; and no matter how hard he pushed, the ropes wouldn’t give way. There were other restraints, too, pressing down on him, not like Selene’s intricate network tying him to the House, but a rough spider’s web of large threads — not very elegant, but certainly effective in keeping him confined to the chair.
Alone. And with Selene nowhere that he could see or feel. This was not good. This…
“Glad to see you’re awake,” Asmodeus said. He was sitting in another chair: an armchair with faded red plush, and why did Philippe have the feeling he’d seen it before?
Then he felt the khi currents in the room, roiling, the dreadful presence pressing against his skin. Oh no. Morningstar’s teaching rooms. “How do you know about this place?”
Something contracted around him, squeezing his hand until he thought his fingers would break — he bit his lip so as not to cry out.
Asmodeus’s voice was cold. “I ask the questions here.” His eyes were different somehow. It took Philippe a moment to see the redness around them; the mark of tears.
“He’s dead, then. Samariel.”
Again, the squeezing feeling — something popped in one of his fingers, sending a wave of pain up his arms. When he bit his lip again he tasted blood.
“You forget already. I ask the questions. And you will answer them. Tell me what you were doing with Samariel.”
The khi currents. He needed to — somehow, if he could get hold of them, if he could… He said, “It doesn’t matter. It was all a game for him — a power play in Silverspires—” Pain again, squeezing his entire body, and it was all he could do to breathe — bands of red-hot iron were slowly tightening around his chest.
He needed to — he needed to find the trance. He needed Selene, because she was the only one who would be able to help. But Selene wasn’t there, and he wasn’t part of the House — not truly, not one of her dependents and not tied to the magic of the House; there was no way he could reach her…
Isabelle.
He forced himself to think through the pain. He was tied to Isabelle. Flesh and blood and bone, the sweet taste of power on his tongue — her blood, his guilt, a tie stronger than any wards Asmodeus might have devised. He needed…
Isabelle could find Selene.
“You think I cannot do worse?” Asmodeus asked. “Tell me what you were doing with Samariel. Tell me.”
Bands of red-hot iron around his chest; the sickly sound of ribs cracking. He couldn’t admit to being in league with Samariel, or Selene would cast him out.
Isabelle.
He felt her, somewhere infinitely far away; a faint presence, as if she was resting or sleeping; separated from him as though by a pane of glass. Isabelle, please. Please, please, please.
“Darkness,” he whispered through the haze of pain. “There was darkness in the room, shadows that slid across the mirrors and the crystals. They killed him.”
Asmodeus laughed — for a moment the pain lifted, and he saw the Fallen’s eyes, as hard and as black as scarabs’ wings. “Fairy tales. And lies. You haven’t answered my question.”
Because he couldn’t. Because he couldn’t afford to, not now that he had picked his side, or rather that his side had been picked for him. He took in a burning breath, and said, “I’m telling the truth. I had nothing to do with Samariel’s death—”
“You will not speak his name! You will not sully it with your voice.” The mask of sanity was cracking; that boundless energy, that madness, barely kept in check—
Then there was pain again. The world tasted like blood and salt, and he couldn’t feel his hands anymore; each knuckle of each finger seemed to have burst.
He tried to close his eyes, to find again the serenity of immortals, but they were gummed with tears. He tried to call the khi currents to him, to talk to Isabelle, but nothing would leap into the broken mess of his hands — but there was only Asmodeus’s overwhelming presence, the growing pressure on his mind, a raging fire battering at his defenses until he thought his brain was going to explode.
He needed… he needed…
He’d done this before. He needed to focus, to find the sound of a waterfall in a land that was so far away it might as well be dead; to feel the wet tang of the air in the mountains at dawn, when the whole world was spread beneath his feet, tinged with the pink of clouds in the light of the rising sun — to ignore the sucking of wet breath in his lungs, the waves of red-hot pain in his arms, the frantic beating of his heart. He needed to — Serenity always remained frustratingly out of reach. He couldn’t think, couldn’t focus on anything but the pain.
But there was something else — the familiarity of a vision, a memory — a pain in the back of his mind that wasn’t his. There was the memory of knives against flesh; of straining against restraints that only burned deeper into his skin; the bleak, hopeless despair that knew only death would end the agony, that no one and nothing was coming to save him, because they had already given him up….