Ngoc Bich shrugged. “We did what was necessary. What will you do now, Philippe Minh Khiet?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“They have come to take you home,” Ngoc Bich said. “The Fallen in particular was most insistent.”
“I’m not surprised,” Philippe said, wryly. Isabelle looked to be haranguing Madeleine, though he wasn’t clear why — knowing her, he suspected the whole trip was her idea. Madeleine was too… staid for such a thing.
“What will you do?” Ngoc Bich asked again, and he had no answer. Whenever he thought of Silverspires, he thought of the darkness, of vengeful eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses, of bright and cruel and knowing smiles; of a pain that seemed to spread through his entire being, laying him flat on the ground and holding him there, as surely as coral spikes.
He swung himself away from the slab, and found Isabelle. Her gaze met his without flinching.
“I can’t come back,” he said.
Isabelle shook her head. “You must. You owe Silverspires.”
“For a cage?” Philippe said. He raised his hands — almost shocked to find that they worked, that his once broken fingers flexed, that his shattered bones held everything together; and, in answer, Isabelle raised hers, showing him the gap where two of her fingers were missing — and nausea rose in his throat, sharp and biting.
Some things, after all, could never be healed. “No,” he said. “This isn’t that debt.”
Isabelle’s smile was bright, terrible; the same as Morningstar’s, in the visions. She had known, or suspected. She had seen Samariel; had warned Philippe — though presumably she hadn’t had time to see Selene, or it would have been quite a different story. “You wounded Emmanuelle,” she said.
“I — what?” He vaguely remembered running out of the room, shoving the archivist out of his way; losing himself in the darkness, crawling his way through a haze of pain. “You’re lying.”
“She’s not,” Madeleine said. The light of the tomb played on her face: she looked terrible, gaunt and drained of all vitality, ten or twenty years older than the woman he remembered. “You left a mark on her. A circle with a dot in the center.”
“I don’t see what you’re talking about.”
“The dead,” Madeleine said. “The other ones. They all had the same mark.” She looked at him, angrily; and he still had no idea what she meant.
He shook his head. “Madeleine—”
“Never mind,” Isabelle said. “Will you come back to Silverspires, please? For Emmanuelle’s sake.”
“By now they’ve all left,” Madeleine said. “The other Houses. Selene was seeing them all off. Asmodeus won’t be there anymore.”
“I–Look, even if I wanted to, I can’t do anything for Emmanuelle. I can’t—” He didn’t understand what he had in him; or if he was really the only carrier. There was something else loose in Silverspires, something that went beyond his visions and memories.
“He shouldn’t go,” Ngoc Bich said, gravely. Behind her, the ghost of her father had spread his hands, mouthing again what he’d said to Philippe, that it was stronger than him.
Philippe bristled. “So the alternative is? Staying here?”
Ngoc Bich didn’t blink. “I had hoped you would,” she said. There were no tears in her eyes; she held herself with the pride of a queen. “But if you don’t want to — then I would leave, if I were you. Go home, or elsewhere; but don’t take what you have back into Silverspires. You might live, then.”
“Should I take it back to Annam, then?” Philippe said. He’d dreamed, once, of returning home — the dream Isabelle had instilled back into him — but, alone with Chung Thoai under the mausoleum, he had tasted the darkness at the heart of the curse; and had seen that it would not go away. “Is that your idea, Ngoc Bich?” To think of Morningstar striding across the land of his birth, of his casual arrogance while watching the women bowed under shoulder yokes, the peasants in their rice paddies, the colorless imitations of Chinese porcelain sold to the ruined imperial court… “No. It’s not a possibility.”
Ngoc Bich shrugged. “As you wish. But you have been warned, Philippe Minh Khiet. The thing within you — it will be satisfied with nothing less than blood, the blood of Silverspires.”
“I don’t care about Silverspires,” he said, and both Isabelle and Madeleine winced. “It’s not my home. It’s a place where I was imprisoned and tortured and betrayed and left for dead. Tell me, where in there do you see a cause for gratitude?” It could go hang, for all he cared; could burn itself to ashes, or go to war with other Houses and be destroyed, like Draken. He owed it nothing.
Ngoc Bich’s eyes were unreadable; the shade of mother-of-pearl, illuminated only by the lanterns on either side of the door to the tomb. “Then don’t go back to Silverspires. As I said, that would be wise. The thing within you wants blood. It might take yours.”
“You’re just going to let Emmanuelle die.” Madeleine’s voice was low, angry; for a moment, as she moved toward him, something shifted, and she was larger than life, lit by a radiance that burned everything it touched. “She’s in a hospital bed, burning up. Like Samariel.”
“Look, I said it already. Even if I saw her, I’m not sure what I could do! I didn’t do—”
“You know something,” Madeleine said. “Don’t try to shift the blame. You know some, or all, of what’s going on, don’t you?” It was like watching a kitten grow fangs and muscles and venom; becoming the tiger that could eat you, if it so chose. It was frightening, and shocking.
“If he goes back,” Ngoc Bich said to Isabelle — who hadn’t said a further word, but simply stood, biting her lip as if trying to come to a decision—“if he goes back, he will bring it back into the House.”
“It’s already inside the House,” Isabelle said, softly. “It leaped from the mirror into the cathedral, and from the cathedral into everywhere, didn’t it?” She reached inside her jacket and held out something to Ngoc Bich. “You’re wise and old, aren’t you? Tell me what this is. Tell me how to unlock its secrets.”
Ngoc Bich shrugged, and took it — as Philippe had suspected, it was the mirror they’d found in Notre-Dame, its malice undiminished by the atmosphere of the dragon kingdom. She turned it over, slowly, her gaze fixed on Isabelle; as if she wasn’t quite sure what to make of her. Philippe wasn’t sure, either. Her face had that terrible, ageless smile that seemed to be the province of Fallen. She scared him, even more than Madeleine did.
At length Ngoc Bich smiled. “A sealed artifact,” she said. “I could show you how to open it”—her hands danced, for a bare moment, on its rim, in the beginning of a pattern that seemed to have Isabelle hypnotized—“but it would avail you nothing. This was the source of your curse, but as you say, it has moved elsewhere. It is now within the House, and its darkness is in its corridors, climbing up toward the light. Opening this won’t gain you anything, except perhaps the release of the last few scraps of darkness contained within.”
“You’re lying,” Isabelle said.
Ngoc Bich held out the mirror to her. “Why should I lie? The problems of the surface aren’t mine.” A quick showing of teeth, pointed and sharp like those of crocodiles. “I defend my territory, but I have no interest in what Houses do, above. No one can touch the river. You know that.”
“I don’t.” Isabelle’s face was pale, resolute; as if she were really ready to take on the entire dragon kingdom by herself. Philippe found he was holding his breath, waiting for an explosion that never came. Instead, she merely took the mirror back, wrapped it in its grubby white cloth. “But I believe you.”