Rook

by Cameron, Sharon

  “I will secure the prison and the Red Rook,” he said aloud, “and then I will deal with the Hasard family.” He’d left Claude in charge of the gendarmes around the building, not only keeping the rioters out but keeping the Hasards in, leaving the flat under siege. “I will take them to the Razor. One by one.” He clutched the pendant around his neck. “One each day, and Madame and Émile shall be the last …”

  The landover slowed, and LeBlanc looked out the window. They were passing a whole row of Allemande landovers, going fast in the opposite direction, their window curtains closed. But it was a mob of rioters in masks that were slowing his progress, blocking the way to the Seine Gate with a dead woman held high above their heads. LeBlanc leaned out the window.

  “Run them down!” he said. And the landover did, causing a stampede of fleeing people. Shouts and screams overcame the music, the wheels of LeBlanc’s landover bumping over a drunken man who had been sitting on his knees, obliviously playing a flute.

  Sophia dropped into the dust beside her brother, chest contracting so hard she thought she might suffocate. She had failed. All this, and she had failed the one person who was counting on her the most. And it was because she had been stupid. So, so stupid. And that had cost Tom his life.

  She yanked off the knitted cap and grabbed two handfuls of her pinned hair. Grief for Tom rolled right through her, incapacitating in its strength, too much to be held inside. She let her head fall back and she screamed, a shattering noise that echoed through the stacked bones.

  “Did you hear a scream?” René asked, running down the passage. Spear turned his head.

  “What?” The noise of the gathering mob was falling through the drains above them. It must be nearly highmoon.

  “Like a …” René shook his head. “Perhaps they are already killing people.” He paused, holding up the lantern they’d taken from the lift, peering at a tunnel that veered upward. The numbering of the prison holes in the Tombs had no logic. “I do not think it can be this way,” he said.

  Spear leaned over, hands on legs to catch his breath. “And why do you think it can’t be that way?”

  “Because she will have had it put somewhere deep, and in the center, to bring it all down.”

  Spear hesitated, but only for a moment. Then he nodded, and they both began to splash and sprint down the lower corridor.

  “At least we know one thing, Hammond,” René said, holding up the lantern to look at the numbers on the empty prison holes. “Sophia Bellamy is not in this prison.”

  It was supposed to be her, Sophia thought, letting her scream fade. She should have been shackled in this prison, not Tom. She put a hand on Tom’s shoulder and hair, and then leapt back as if she’d been burned, nearly screaming once more. A muscle beneath her fingers had twitched.

  Tom raised his head just enough to turn it to the other side, blinking in the lantern light that was too bright for him. “Blimey, Sophie,” he said, voice rasping. “Why do you have to go and wake a person up that way?”

  Spear held up the lantern, trying to see the faint numbers in the light. They had hit a row of cells in the five hundreds. A few more steps, and he threw open the door to prison hole 522. This cell was a bit higher than the others, relatively dry, and there were stacks of barrels marked pain plat everywhere among the sacks and filth.

  “Where would she have put it?” Spear panted. The moon had to be sailing almost directly overhead.

  René had already dashed inside, careful to set the lantern well away from the barrels as he turned a circle, surveying the room. “Where she thinks I cannot find it,” he replied.

  “I didn’t think you’d find me,” Tom said. “And careful, Sophie. My ribs are broken on that side.”

  Tom was upright now, and Sophie had her arms around him. He was dirty and thin, and had a full beard, but other than that, he was Tom. He kissed her once on top of the head. “I assume you have your picklocks?”

  Sophia let her brother go and nodded, coming back to herself. She wiped the wet off her cheeks and stripped off her gloves. There was no time. None at all.

  “Hurry!” René said. Spear pried open a barrel that was full of Bellamy fire and nothing else, threw down the lid, and went to another one, but René said, “Wait! We should listen.”

  Spear went still and they stood in the prison hole. The silence beat down on their ears. “If we are about to die,” said Spear, his tone matter-of-fact, “I want to tell you I was not informing LeBlanc, no matter what he told you.”

  “And neither was I. No matter what he told you.” René was running his eyes over the cell, trying to think what he would have done in Sophia’s place. He looked up to the ceiling in sudden inspiration, but there was nothing there.

  “But I would forge that document again,” Spear continued. “To keep her from you.”

  “It is good to have no regrets.” René kicked the floor. Hard stone.

  Spear was shaking his head. “I’d do it again.”

  “I will kill you for it later, then, after we …” René grinned suddenly. “We cannot hear. That is just so, is it not?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you not see? We cannot hear the clock. She has buried it!” René ran a hand through his hair, then cursed a Parisian streak that made Spear’s brows rise. “The barrels, Hammond! She has put it in a barrel! Where we cannot hear. No need for the fuse …”

  Spear frowned, then raised his brows again, this time in recognition of the truth.

  “Quick!” said René, spinning on his heel. “Were any of these barrels open already?”

  “There was one …” They both looked around the room at the mass of barrels that had now been pried open.

  “Which? Which!”

  “Just start putting your hands in!” Spear yelled. “She wouldn’t have had much time, maybe she didn’t get it buried too deep …”

  René shoved his hands into a barrel of coarse black powder, certain he was about to die. But he was still grinning. Sophia Bellamy was such a clever, clever girl.

  Sophia worked frantically on Tom’s ankle restraint with the picklocks. “Have you gotten Jennifer?” he asked.

  “Yes. Everyone is away except for us.” She hoped it was true. If no one had found the firelighter, then this place was going to explode just like the rest of the Tombs.

  “What do you mean, everyone?”

  Her fingers fumbled with the picklocks. “We’re the last ones left.”

  “LeBlanc knows you’re the Red Rook, Sophie. He knew you were coming …”

  “Yes, I know it,” said Sophia, cutting him off. There was no time to feel, and she wasn’t ready to spill out her misery to Tom. She thought she’d better save their lives first. His shackle gave, and she started on the next one. “Where else are you hurt?”

  “Nowhere much. Do you have water?”

  She shook her head. “When was the last time you ate? Or drank?”

  “A while. But I don’t know when now is.”

  “How fast can you move? Because we …”

  Her voice trailed away at the direction of Tom’s brown eyes, still darker than the skin of his dirty face. They had moved to beyond her shoulder, where the entrance to the chamber was. And she knew what it meant.

  She kept working the picklocks, and the shackle around Tom’s ankle clicked open just as the voice she had been anticipating said softly, “So. Fate has finally brought the Red Rook to me.”

  Sophia met Tom’s eyes. She slid the picklock she had been using into his hand, and the ring from her forefinger. “Bury that,” she whispered. Then she stood slowly, and reached over her shoulder to draw her sword.

  Sophia turned with the sword in front of her while Tom stayed exactly where he was on the ground. It was only LeBlanc, she was surprised to see, with his disgusting secretary shrinking near the wall of bones, holding another lantern. No gendarmes. Maybe LeBlanc had thought they wouldn’t be needed; maybe he was going to be wrong about that.

  Le
Blanc also drew his sword. He was not quite himself, Sophia thought. His usually sleek hair was ruffled, the cold, colorless eyes a little wild. She wondered just for a moment what could have been happening at that party after she slapped René. LeBlanc circled to her right, but she kept her feet planted in front of Tom.

  “I am glad to find you here,” he said, “among those that have accepted Fate.”

  “Accepted it or been a victim of it, Albert?” she said.

  He smiled. “You realize, of course, that you have already lost.”

  “Have I?”

  “Yes. You have. But, then again, you always were going to lose. You lost before you were born, because Fate has determined it.”

  LeBlanc’s slow smile curled at her, and again she matched it. Reckless, that’s what René would have called it. She was probably going to die here, if not from Bellamy fire, then from a knife or sword in her back from that rat Renaud. But either way, she would try to take LeBlanc with her. She felt the tiredness drain away from her bones, replaced with the tingle of hate.

  “Sophie,” Tom said, a soft warning. But she was spoiling for the fight. And in any case, she needed to keep LeBlanc distracted while Tom worked the picklock on his other shackle.

  LeBlanc took a quick step forward and she turned her sword to defend, but he did not strike. Instead he circled left, and she went with him, staying between him and Tom.

  “Tell me, Rook,” LeBlanc said, “where are my gendarmes?”

  Another quick step and this time his sword came at her, but she merely moved her body to the side. He backed away again as she said sweetly, “Your gendarmes? Have you lost them?”

  “I have not lost them. They seem to have lost themselves. As has every criminal and traitor in the Tombs!” His last word echoed around the yellowing bones, as did the clash of steel as Sophia blocked his next attack.

  “Don’t be sad, Albert. You still have us,” she said. Her smile widened. The landovers must be away, then. He hadn’t arrived in time. That must have been a surprise to him. She blocked him again, then twisted her hilt over his sword and got in a quick slash to his upper arm.

  LeBlanc gasped. It had been a glancing blow, but the sleeve was cut, blood already beginning to stain from underneath. LeBlanc wasn’t smiling anymore. Instead he had his head tilted to the side as he again began to circle her, the ends of his robes leaving trails through the thick brown dust.

  “It took much to convince me of your true identity, Miss Bellamy. And yet I was skeptical, and had to ask Fate. I was unsure whether a woman had the physical …”

  This time she came on the attack, and LeBlanc blocked, but only just.

  “… and mental capabilities for the strategy and …”

  She came in again, and put a scratch on his hand.

  “… swordplay.” LeBlanc glanced at the small cut, an analytical appraisal. “I think you must be an aberration, Mademoiselle. Something … unnatural.”

  “Is that what you think?”

  He came at her, this time across the body. She stepped out of the way and just missed cutting off his hand. They both went back on the defensive, and he watched her movements carefully, again with the look of analysis.

  “I am curious,” LeBlanc said, “how often a woman will choose to attack or defend.”

  “I think, Albert, that it could have quite a bit to do with how much a woman wants to live, and how much she wants you dead.”

  She came after him again, fast. He blocked her first and second, and then she caught him on the shoulder. Blood wet the robes. “Fascinating …,” mused LeBlanc.

  Sophia bit her lip. LeBlanc was not acting like a man who thought he was about to explode, or even a man who had an execution planned at highmoon, which had to be upon them. Did he doubt her ability to blow up his prison? Or had the firelighter already been unset? She shook her head. She was dealing with a lunatic, and needed to stop requiring any of his actions to make sense. If she could kill or maim him, or get his sword to Tom, then maybe they could still get out before the blast.

  She watched LeBlanc’s feet and his sword arm carefully. He might be insane, but she was no better. Why did she keep hoping against all reason and every shred of her common sense that René had not unset that firelighter? That he had not betrayed her? Especially when leaving it set meant they were all about to die.

  “Hammond!” René yelled. His hands were gray and stained with powder, but this time he had hit something hard inside the barrel. He felt carefully and realized it was the lid, a few inches of the black powder concealing it. Spear came running. “She has made a space beneath,” René said, his fingers scrabbling at the edges of the lid, where she had left it tilted inside.

  “Try not to spill it,” said Spear as René lifted the lid away. The firelighter was beneath, nestled in powder, the burlap sack Sophia had carried now arranged beside it, the edges exactly where the flame would come. Spear put his hand around the machine and swiftly pushed the knob back in.

  René set down the powder-covered barrel lid, sweat dripping from his face. “What time was it set for?” Spear picked up the firelighter and looked at the back.

  “Highmoon,” he replied.

  And then, in the quiet of the empty prison, they heard, very faint, the sound of the highmoon bells falling down through the drains.

  René laughed, and then Spear laughed with him.

  LeBlanc felt his cheek, bleeding from a small cut, and chuckled once. “Tell me, Miss Bellamy, do you consider yourself clever? Did you do well with your schooling?”

  “She seems clever enough to beat you in a sword fight, LeBlanc,” said Tom from behind her. But she wasn’t beating him, not quite. LeBlanc was covered in blood and sweat, but he was on his feet. She could cut him, but not incapacitate him. Or at least not yet. She was sweating as well, one small prick stinging on her forearm. And she had lost sight of the rat Renaud. She hoped he had run. She hoped Tom had gotten the lock picked on his other ankle. She grinned at LeBlanc.

  “Have you happened to notice that your own Goddess is female, Albert?”

  “Of course! And being female, she naturally prefers the male, which is much to my advantage.”

  This line of reasoning was so daft that Sophia dismissed it.

  “I have noticed that more women beg beneath the Razor than men, especially when their children are climbing the scaffold next. Why do you think that is, Miss Bellamy? Will you beg, do you think?”

  “And will you beg, Albert, when Allemande finds out your bloody prison is empty?”

  He came after her again then, and the chamber flickered in the lantern light, loud with the clash of steel. She blocked again, and again, three times, and then LeBlanc was in close, trying to push her sword out of her hand. She knocked his arm away and kicked hard with her boot heel, catching him in the middle and knocking him into the dust. He tried to raise his sword but she got a foot on his arm, her sword tip at the base of his throat.

  LeBlanc laughed against the pointed end of the blade, an eerie sound, especially in a place full of death. And then Sophia heard a yell behind her. Her head whipped around. With a glance she took in the fact that Renaud had a knife to Tom’s throat, and that the picklock she’d given Tom was now sticking out of Renaud’s leg. She pressed down with her boot, stopped LeBlanc’s arm from squirming, and made sure the very tip of her sword was piercing his skin.

  “Call him off,” she said to LeBlanc.

  “No,” said LeBlanc, his smile curling.

  “Kill him, Sophie! We’ll die anyway if you don’t!”

  She leaned closer to LeBlanc’s bloody face. “Call him off, or I will carve you up bit by bit, just the way you like to do to others.”

  “Whatever you do to me,” LeBlanc said, “will be done to your brother. Won’t it, Renaud?”

  “Kill him, Sophie!” Tom yelled. “Quick!”

  Sophia pressed the sword in a little harder, and then a voice from the chamber entrance said, “I would not follow that suggestion,
Miss Bellamy. I really would not.”

  Sophia looked up to see a very small man in the doorway, neat in his spectacles and city-blue suit, surrounded by gendarmes. She wouldn’t have known the face if she hadn’t seen it on a coin, but she had. It was Allemande.

  Gerard mopped his head. The Rook couldn’t have been more mistaken about those tickets to Spain. He would gladly take the tickets, but as soon as Madame Gerard was safely on board, he would be trading his for one to the Commonwealth. Now that he’d thought it all over, he was more than reconciled to going. The bells of highmoon still seemed to echo in the air, the mob shouting loud and impatient in the prison yard on the other side of the empty warehouse. The last landover had arrived, and there was only himself, the twin gendarmes, and the boy they called Cartier left to get in it. They would be away to the coast with the flick of the horsewhip. But none of them would go. Or let him.

  Gerard tried to speak, but one of the twins jabbed him with the hilt of a sword. They seemed to enjoy that. Gerard shut his mouth and mopped his face again while the other three put their heads together and conferred. When they were done, Cartier trotted out to the street and opened the door to the landover. Gerard sighed with relief. He hurried inside, the twins escorting him one on each side, as if he now had a wish to stay and face LeBlanc.

  Cartier shut the door behind them, and when Gerard looked back he saw the boy standing in the rubbish-strewn street, watching them escape.

  “Well,” said Allemande, eyeing LeBlanc as he got himself up out of the dust. He was covered in dirt and blood. “We cannot have any escaping, can we, Albert?” Allemande turned to the soldiers who were holding Sophia. “Search her,” he ordered.

  And they did. Thoroughly. Sophia stared up at the shadowy darkness while they removed her vest, her gloves, her boots—she had stashed tinder, flint, and steel in the newly hollowed-out heel, and the steel could have been used as a file—the knife strapped to her thigh, the one beneath her shirt, the document from beneath her shirt, and the wire she’d threaded into her hair. They even took out the rest of her hairpins, which was a shame, because she could have picked a lock with those as well, in a pinch. There was some sort of commotion going on with Tom that she could not see, and she assumed he was being searched again as well. She hoped he’d buried the ring well enough that they would not find it. Perhaps LeBlanc did not yet know they’d been forging passes, and the landovers could get away.