There was no answer. Thuan grabbed the doors, and pushed.
He didn’t know what he’d expected. It was a low room with several rusted pumps, their steady hum a background to his own breath. The air was saturated with humidity, the tiles on the walls broken in numerous places—repaired so many times they looked like jigsaws, with yellowed grouting running at odd angles through the painted windmills and horse-drawn carts.
In a corner of the room, Sare was fighting children of thorns—small, agile shapes who dodged, effortlessly, the spells she threw at them. The pipes lit up with magic, showing, at intervals, the flow of water going upwards through the pumps.
And, in the center of the room…
Thuan walked faster, his heart in his throat.
It was an empty octagonal basin of water, the khi currents within it all but extinguished, except where Kim Cuc was. She wasn’t looking at him, but kneeling, her hands flat on old, cracked mosaics. The khi water within her, the currents running in her veins and major organs, was slowly spreading to cover the entire surface of the mosaics. Her green bracelets were fused to the floor, the light from them spreading across the mosaics. She—
She was taking root in the basin.
This wasn’t good.
“Big sis—” Thuan started. He didn’t get to finish his sentence, because someone else spoke up first.
“So you’re her friend.”
Thuan turned around, sharply, hands full of khi water—or rather, they would have been, if all the water within the room hadn’t been either extinguished or claimed. There was nothing in his palms but a faint, pathetic tug, as if he held a dog on a distant leash.
The being of thorn who stood in front of him was tall; taller than Thuan, and rake-thin. When it bowed, the gesture wasn’t like that of the others, smooth and synchronized and in no way human. This was elegant and slow, with a hint of mockery, as if the being couldn’t quite disguise amusement. It reminded Thuan of…
In fact, it reminded Thuan of nothing so much as Sare’s demeanor. “You don’t have wings,” he said—a stab in the dark, but given where he was it could hardly get worse.
“No.” The being straightened from its bow, stared at Thuan. The face wasn’t just branches arranged to have eyes and nose. This was someone’s face, carefully sculpted in wood and thorns: plump cheeks, and a round shape, someone who must have been pleasantly baby-faced and young, except that now not a single muscle moved as it spoke, and the eyes were nothing but pits of darkness, like the orbits of a skull. “We don’t keep them, when we Fall. As you well know.”
“I don’t know,” Thuan said. He pulled on khi water, and found barely anything that would answer him. Not good at all. “You were alive once, weren’t you?”
The being cocked his head, watching him like a curiosity. “You ask the wrong questions,” it said, at last.
“Fine,” Thuan said, exhaling. “Then why are we here? Because the House failed you?”
He thought the other was going to make him some mocking answer about following his friend in harm’s way, but it merely shook its head. “The House didn’t fail me.”
“You make no sense.” Thuan said.
The being was still watching him. It made no move to seize or stop him. “She was willing.”
Thuan took in a deep, burning breath. Willing to do what, and what questions had it asked, before binding Kim Cuc to the basin’s floor? Words had power here, which was good, because they seemed to be all he had to bargain with.
He hesitated—every instinct he had telling him not to do such a stupid thing—but then turned his back on the being, to look at the basin. Kim Cuc’s eyes were closed, her breathing slow, even. “Big sis. Big sis.”
He wanted to shake her, but he wasn’t a complete idiot. She’d put her hands in the basin, on the mosaics, and it had seized her. She didn’t need Thuan caught in the spell, either.
She shouldn’t have needed Thuan at all, demons take her. She should have been in charge; fighting, like Sare, trying to figure out the riddle that had Thuan stumped.
“We asked her to help,” the being said, behind him. He’d still made no move to take Thuan. And though Sare was fighting, she wasn’t harmed, either.
Magic. Fallen magic. That was why they seemed summarily uninterested in Thuan, or in any of the other Houseless: Thuan’s magic was invisible to them. But they hadn’t taken Sare, or the other House dependents. He’d thought it was something dark, something the House couldn’t keep at bay, but…
But when Sare had pushed against the children of thorns, Thuan had seen nothing, in the khi currents.
And none of the House dependents had seen them, or been threatened by them.
He breathed in, slowly. It was as if they were part of the House, weren’t they. Ghosts or spirits or constructs that hadn’t been made by any magicians. And they hadn’t taken Sare or the other House dependents, because theirs was a power already bound to the House. As Kim Cuc wasn’t.
“You’re the House,” he said.
“A small part of it.” Its smile would have been dazzling, if it hadn’t been made of branches and twigs.
“Willing. You asked her if she wanted to be part of the House,” Thuan said, slowly. “That’s why she’s here.”
The voice that answered him was mocking. “Was there any need to ask? She was there, taking the tests.”
In order to enter the House, not to become subsumed within its foundations. But he doubted the being would know, or care about the difference. “She’s not House,” he said, carefully. A glance upwards: Sare had dispatched one of the two children, but it was already reforming.
What did he have, to bargain with? Not the kingdom: even if he’d been willing to expose and sell it, it’d have no value to a House of Fallen and magicians. Not his magic, for the same reasons. Sare, possibly, but how did you bargain with something the other already owned? “You don’t need her,” he said, slowly.
“In ordinary circumstances, no.”
“Because Asmodeus is grieving for Samariel? All grief passes, in time.”
“The grief of Fallen?” The being’s voice was mocking again. “That could last an eternity.” Thuan found a word—a name—on the tip of his tongue, forced himself not to utter it. The being wasn’t Samariel any more than any of the children of thorns had been flesh and bones, or real children. They were all just masks the House wore as a convenience. “And meanwhile, our protections weaken.”
“He’s head of the House,” Thuan said. “He won’t leave you undefended.”
It was going nowhere. He couldn’t negotiate from a position of weakness, and he couldn’t share his only strengths for fear of being caught out. “If you start taking people, they’ll tear the wing apart stone by stone.”
“Would they? They’re Houseless,” the being said. “Not likely to be much missed, in the scheme of things.”
Spoken as only a House-bound could.
“What you take, they could give freely.”
A low, rumbling noise mingling with that from the pumps. Thuan realized it was laughter. “No one ever gives freely. There’s always an expectation of being paid, in one currency or another.”
“You’re…” Thuan fought a rising sense of frustration. “You’re the House. All you do is take!” He pointed to Sare, flowing in and out of combat with unearthly grace, her pale skin lit up with the radiance of magic, the white shape of bones delineated under her taut skin. “Do you think she’d be as useful, if you shut her in the foundations of the wing?”
A silence, then, “One day, when she’s spent almost all the magic she was given when she Fell, that might be her only use.” A low, amused chuckle. “But this isn’t how dependents are rewarded.”