Claire laid something by the body’s side, negligently. “He had this on him.”
It was a heavy, polished disk of wood: a minor artifact, used for tracking down whoever bore it; except that on the wood’s surface were engraved the arms of Silverspires: the sword of Morningstar against the silhouetted spires of Notre-Dame. Madeleine had one exactly like it in her trouser pocket. “A tracker disk,” she said numbly. Once, it would have pulsed to the rhythm of magic, but the wood was blackened and charred; and the magic quite gone from it.
“They are given to dependents of Silverspires.” Claire’s face hadn’t moved.
“He…” He was dead with the disk on him, and it didn’t matter anymore whether Claire knew. “He was one of our informants.”
Claire nodded. “I thought so.” Behind her, the assistant made a note on the clipboard — his broad face creased in thought.
On the marbled skin of the corpse were the same marks she’d seen on Oris’s forearms: the perfect circle with a sharper wound in the center. They’d have been smudged with blood once, but now that everything had been cleaned, nothing was left but the imprint of the wound. Fangs, Aragon had said. Snakebites. But no snake had just one fang — and why strike someone repeatedly?
She foraged in her bag by touch; found a sealed mirror, and undid the clasp while keeping her eyes on the corpse’s face. The angel breath was like fire in her nostrils; descending into her wasted lungs and wringing them from the inside out — she was bent over, gagging and coughing with the strength of it, already longing for something else the mirror couldn’t provide, for the sheer potency of angel essence….
She looked up through eyes streaming with tears. The corpse in front of her was shining. There was no other word. Every wound was outlined in a thin, scattered radiance: not the furious blaze of infant Fallen, or even the stately glow of mature ones like Selene and Emmanuelle, but faint and faded like glow worms. “Magic?” she asked. “This was done by a spell?”
Claire, who had been watching her in silence, shook her head. In Madeleine’s new sight, she shone, or rather, the space between her breasts did. An artifact within a locket, hidden under her clothes; not a surprise, for the mortal head of a House.
Madeleine whispered the words of a spell, willing the magic to show her how they had died. Nothing happened. For a moment she feared she’d cast the wrong thing; and then the corpse lit up like a bonfire, washing the entire room in radiance. Claire cried out, and then there was darkness again, shot through with painful afterimages.
“Magic killed him,” she said, slowly, hoarsely, forcing the words through what felt like a mouthful of burning sand. “Like being burned. A blast of Fallen power so strong it stripped him bare.” And blasted the tracker disk, too, rendering it unusable. The human body wasn’t meant to hold Fallen magic; in the long run, people who absorbed too much angel — or too much angel essence, or both — died.
Claire said nothing.
“The Fallen who died in Silverspires—” Madeleine said, the words torn out of her mouth before she could think them through. “—he died when his magic was taken away from him.”
Claire nodded. She didn’t seem surprised. She reached out, and gently folded the sheet back over the corpse. “You’ll want to see the others, too,” she said.
She opened another drawer: a woman, with the same dead eyes staring upward at Madeleine, filmed over by the haze of death; the same mysterious circle wounds.
Madeleine knew her, too. Hortense Archignat, another of Selene’s informants.
Gritting her teeth, Madeleine whispered the words of the spell again, bracing herself — and felt the same blaze of magic spreading from the wounds, incinerating the internal organs and then dying down to that sickly glow.
“Something…” She breathed in, willing her heart to stop hammering against her chest. “Something that kills. Humans, by overwhelming them with magic until their bodies shut down. Fallen—”
“With the reverse,” Claire said. She threw something on the body, negligently — but of course she never did anything negligently. “She had this on her.”
Another tracker disk — Madeleine reached out, expecting to see the arms of Silverspires, but the engraving on it was a hawthorn tree circled with a crown. “Hawthorn,” she said. Some informants made ends meet by working for several Houses, and Hortense Archignat must have been one of them. The heads of Houses might not like this state of affairs — or trust them with their secrets — but they were pragmatic enough to make use of what tools they had. “I don’t understand—” she said, hoping to hide her confusion.
Claire looked at her, her gaze as sharp as spears, but said nothing. Instead, she gestured, and her assistant opened another drawer.
“He was homeless,” she said, as the third body slid into view. “Slept in the ruins of Saint-Eustache. He died in the wreck of Les Halles.”
Jean-Philippe d’Hergemont — his family, minor nobility, had been ruined during the Great War. Madeleine remembered chatting with him; giving him a charged mirror on Selene’s orders. He’d carried one of the loaves from the kitchens, awkwardly balancing it in arms full of the old clothes Choérine had pressed onto him.
Another of Selene’s informants.
“He didn’t have a tracker disk,” Claire said. She was still watching Madeleine, and Madeleine struggled not to show her rising anxiety. Someone was killing Silverspires informants. Someone was…
She couldn’t afford to show weakness. She couldn’t afford to reveal said weakness to Claire — Selene would have her head, not to mention the disastrous effect this would have on the House.
She took a deep, trembling breath; hiding her confusion beneath a forced cough. One good thing about having wrecked lungs was that she could fake one quite easily. “He died like the others, didn’t he?”
“Of course,” Claire said. She smiled, like a grandmother amused by one of her grandchildren’s tricks; except there was no warmth in the look whatsoever. “Look at the next one, will you?”
Madeleine braced herself — tried to prevent her hands from clenching, aware all the while that Claire probably read her like an open book. But she had to try. If there was a chance, any chance, she could hide how flustered she was — what she knew, the secrets she couldn’t afford to share…
The next corpse was a man again, much younger and with an arm missing — and she knew him, too. Jacques Rossigny, one of the ravagers on the banks of the Seine, living off what he scavenged from the angry river; and on his work as informant to Silverspires.
By now Claire’s smile was as sharp as that of a tiger sighting its prey — filling Madeleine’s entire field of view, quenching the breath in her lungs.
“I don’t know him,” she said, forcing the words out between clenched lips.
Claire’s gaze didn’t waver; but she didn’t produce a tracker disk, or anything that looked as though it might bite. Her smile abated a fraction, but it didn’t make her less worrisome. What was she up to? How much did she know?
“Here’s the last one,” Claire said, as her assistant opened the last drawer.
And the last… the last was an older woman; a Senegalese-French, Marie-Céleste Ndiaye, the owner of a bookshop in the southwest, near Hawthorn — who usually came in toward the end of the night, carrying one or two tattered books as if they were treasures.
Claire didn’t bother to throw the tracker disk this time; she merely handed it to Madeleine. “Harrier. Infused with Guy’s rather distinctive brand of magic,” she said, casually. “Do you see, now?”