But it was part of the darkness. It was what she had sensed, lurking around the wards; circling, like vultures waiting for a dying man to breathe his last — for any weakness in the structure of the House.
And now it was in — taking root in the structure of the House itself.
That was more frightening than anything else. The wards, laid by Morningstar when he’d founded the House, should have held. It was the wards, in fact, that made the House; their slow, painstaking accretion transforming unremarkable buildings into a shelter and a source of magic, a fortress that protected them all against attacks. Morningstar’s absence would not have changed anything — they would have been flimsy things indeed, if they could not survive their creator’s leave-taking. Morningstar was no fooclass="underline" he had known that most Houses survived far longer than their founders.
But if the wards were still there, what, then, was this?
She had no idea what was going on, but she didn’t like any of it. “Fine,” she said to Javier. “You’re right. We’re not going to Asmodeus’s room.”
Javier nodded. “The foundations,” he said.
There was no locus of the House, no single point of vulnerability an attacker could have used to disable the wards. Other Houses were rumored to have one: House Draken had, if the testimony of survivors could be believed; House Hawthorn, though Madeleine had been tight-lipped about it. Selene wasn’t sure if it was ignorance, or a reluctance to sell a past she would not talk about.
Madeleine. She remembered angel essence on her fingers; Emmanuelle’s pale, skeletal face; then, as now, the nights sitting by her bedside, praying that she would recover, that the preternatural thinness wouldn’t turn out to be the beginning of a long, slow slide toward death….
No. That was a weakness she couldn’t afford. She needed to be as tough and as uncaring as Morningstar, focused only on the good of the House.
Morningstar had been old, and clever: the wards he had made could not be easily dispelled — Selene would not even have known where to start, if it had been her stated mission. The wards were carved into the foundations; baked in the bricks of its chimneys; ground to dust, and made into the mortar of the walls. There were places, though, where the fabric that hid them was thin and translucent; where, stretching out a hand, one could almost feel the energy surging under one’s fingers.
Selene headed for one of these: a patch of wall at the back of one of the wine cellars. She grabbed another three guards on her way with a wave of her fingers; just to make sure there was an escort in case something turned sour.
The cellar was at the end of a long corridor, beyond more disused rooms: all empty, the dust blown under their feet as they walked, with that sense of entering the mausoleum of a king. Empty and dead; lost since the heady days of the House’s glory, though…
Something was off. Something… not as it should have been, a feeling she couldn’t quite name. Slowly, carefully, she moved to one of the doors in the long corridor — it was ajar, and she only had to push to open it.
“Selene?”
Nothing but a reception room: an upholstered sofa, its flower motif tarnished by layers of dust, a handful of elegant chairs with curved legs, a Persian carpet stretching away toward a grand piano.
“Selene?”
“It’s nothing.” She looked again at the room, trying to see what had bothered her. Just dust, and the smell of beeswax; and a faint, familiar smell of flowers.
Flowers. Bergamot. “Asmodeus was here.”
Javier said nothing, though his face made it all too clear he thought she was imagining things.
He didn’t know Asmodeus. “You do have people keeping an eye on him, don’t you?”
Javier looked affronted. “I do,” he said. “He hasn’t left his room.”
Or had already left it; and returned, with no one the wiser.
Selene suppressed a sigh. One thing at a time. She had to worry about Asmodeus; she couldn’t afford not to; but, first, she had to know what was going on. “Let’s go.”
The butler, Astyanax, opened the door of the cellar for her, the creak of the key in the lock resonating like the groan of tortured souls. “Here you go, my lady.”
The cellar was bone-dry, and relatively clean — the wine for the conclave’s banquet had come from here, after all — but still, it exuded the same pall of neglect as the rest of the House. Why was she so sensitive to it, all of a sudden? It wasn’t as though anything had changed; but, perhaps the setback they had suffered had finally exposed the truth — as if, with Silverspires’s reputation in shambles, she had suddenly discovered that she couldn’t lie to herself anymore: the House was in decline, and it would never, ever claw its way back to its former glory; not even if Morningstar himself were to come back from whatever obscurity he had vanished into.
If he wasn’t already dead, or worse, imprisoned somewhere. But no, if he had been imprisoned somewhere, whoever had him would have used it against the House by now. No, it was either dead or gone to some other project of his own. She’d have liked to think he wasn’t capable of such casual betrayals, but she knew him all too well.
“There.”
Between two of the wine bottle racks, there was a slightly clearer patch of walclass="underline" a place where the plaster had peeled off, revealing the stone of the cellar walls; nothing much, either at first or second sight, or even with magic to boost one’s darkness-encrusted eyes.
Selene reached out, drawing for a suspended moment the scraps of magic the House could spare, from Madeleine’s deserted laboratory to the wards of the school; from the hospital wing where Emmanuelle fitfully slept, to the ruins of the cathedral and the shattered throne; from the dusty corridors and disused ballrooms to this place, here, now, where she and Javier and her escort stood, breathless and skeptical and praying that it would work, that it would still work….
The chipped stone of the wall gradually went blank, as if a hand had reached out, melted it to liquid, and smoothed out every single imperfection from it. Light spread from its center, slowly, gradually: a soft, sloshing radiance like that of a newborn Fallen, until every wine bottle seemed to hold captured starlight; and a slow, comforting heartbeat traveled up Selene’s hands; the reassurance she’d craved for, with no hint of faltering or of weaknesses.
The wards still held, then. The House still held.
Javier must have seen her face. “Selene—”
“It’s going to be fine,” she said, slowly exhaling. She withdrew her hands from the wall; but the light and the heartbeat persisted for a while yet, balm to her soul. She might have failed everything else, but not that. Never that. They still stood strong. “The wards are intact.”
“Thank God,” Javier said. Such fervor in his voice; had he found his faith again, then? “We’re still safe.”
Selene thought of the sour smell of bergamot in a disused room, and of the ghost plants that she couldn’t touch, or tear out. “Yes,” she said, “we’re still safe.”
And tried to ignore the small, fearful voice in her mind: the one that knew all about lies, and the things they denied until it was too late, and all the masks and the faces beneath them had crumbled into dust.
* * *
NO one spoke as they walked back to the House. Madeleine kept an eye out for anyone; though Asmodeus would have left with everyone by then, surely? She hoped so; because if he found them, he would take his revenge; and it was quite unlikely he’d bother with minimizing loss of life, especially since it looked as though they were all in it with Philippe.