The House of Shattered Wings by Aliette de Bodard

get more of this feeling of ants on his skin. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”
    â€œAre you frightened?” Isabelle’s smile was mischievous, irresistible. “Come on.”
    And he followed, because he’d promised.
    The House was huge, and most of it was deserted, or ruined. Like most buildings in Paris, it was covered with soot, the blackened streaks characteristic of spell residue. Once, it must have sheltered thousands—a natural refuge, an island only connected to the rest of the city by seven bridges, but now it lay empty and dark, and the river that had once been its first line of defense had turned wild, become a power that snapped and killed anything that came near its shores.
    â€œCome on,” Isabelle said, pushing a small stone door in an unremarkable corridor; and Philippe, with a sigh, followed.
    To stop, awestruck, at what lay inside.
    It had been a church, once. You could still see the columns and the beginning of the vaulted ceiling, a first row of arches gracefully bending toward one another; and the remnants of wooden benches, burned where they had stood. The stained-glass windows were broken, or absent; but the gaze was still drawn, unerringly, down the nave and to the altar at the other end—or where the altar would have been, if it hadn’t been turned to rubble long ago, and the only things remaining were the wrecks of three statues—the central one was least damaged, and had probably been a Virgin Mary carrying the corpse of Jesus.
    No, not a church. A cathedral, like the pink-hued edifice the French had built in Saigon. It was . . . like a knife blade slowly drawn across his heart: he could almost have been back home, except that it was the wrong architecture, the wrong atmosphere, the wrong setting. He could still feel the fervor of its builders, of its worshippers, swirling in the air: a bare shadow of what it had once been, but so potent, so strong, so
huge
.
    â€œNotre-Dame,” Philippe whispered.
    Isabelle hadn’t moved; her eyes were on the sky, and on the smattering of stars visible against the dark background of the night. “It’s . . . like the City,” she whispered. “So much . . . intensity.”
    â€œFaith,” Philippe said, though her faith wasn’t his, and would never be his. “That’s what built this up.”
    The
khi
elements there were quiescent—almost too weak for him to pick them out, though. . . .
    There was—a flash of something familiar: the magical equivalent of the smell of jasmine rice, a touch of something on the nape of his neck that brought him, instantly, back to the banks of the Red River, staring at the swollen mass of the river at monsoon time—breathing in the wet smell of rain and churned mud. Had some other Annamite been there?
    No, it was impossible. Merely nostalgia—he was going mad, cooped up inside this House, inside this city, that was all. He needed a way out, before he lost himself.
    Isabelle slowly moved, picking her way through the ruins of the benches. Throughout, her gaze remained staring upward. Was she praying; did she even remember how to pray—or perhaps it was like breathing, something that took hold of you when you had no other choice, when you were lost and cut off from your god?
    She stopped long before the altar, in the raised space before it, which, like the rest, was covered in debris: the black-and-white lozenge tiles riven from end to end until their pattern had altogether gone. There was a chair left there; a stone one, battered and cracked, that nevertheless exuded a quiet power, something different from the remnants of fervor Philippe could taste in the air.
    â€œHe sat there,” Isabelle said, in the silence, her voice echoing under the broken vault. “Morningstar.”
    â€œEmmanuelle told you this?”
    â€œI don’t need to be told. Can’t you feel