“I am surprised, Albert,” Allemande was saying. His voice was soft, oily-slick as he wiped his glasses on a lace-edged handkerchief. Sophia wondered if Allemande was imitating LeBlanc’s voice, or if LeBlanc had been imitating Allemande’s. Or maybe they were just two of the same species of evil. “You are usually so punctual. When the bells rang, I thought perhaps you had become overzealous in your devotions again.”
Sophia saw LeBlanc’s pale eyes widen, and he snatched up the pendant from around his neck and flipped it open. “But … it’s not …”
“Oh no, Albert. Depending on technology? That is such an imperfect system. One can be executed for things like that.”
Sophia closed her eyes, knowing what this must mean. It was definitely past highmoon. The firelighter was not going to ignite anything. René had turned it off.
René finished laughing, head in hands as he leaned on a cask, Spear looking no less relieved. Then he looked at the firelighter, still in Spear’s hand.
“It is an interesting thing, is it not, that we can use a machine like this to control the time?”
“I suppose,” Spear replied.
“And Sophia has done an excellent job of ridding this prison of its occupants. It is quite empty, yes? And she has gotten herself away as well.”
“Yes. So?”
“Do you not think that after reinventing her plans with such success, it would be a shame to leave the best of them undone?”
Spear stared down at the firelighter, his eyes narrowed.
“What I mean to say, Hammond, is that I think we should blow this hole to bits. We have the time right here, in our hands.”
“Yes,” Spear nodded slowly. “I think you’re right. For Sophie. What time do we set it for?”
It didn’t matter what time she had set it for, after all. René would have found it too soon. The ache this knowledge caused was so strong it almost made the groping hands of the still searching gendarmes go away. Why did that tiny little sliver of hope keep dying only to be reborn? Then she took note of LeBlanc. He was staring down at his clock, an expression of frantic, hysterical disbelief on his face, a complete contrast to the clinical calm when she’d been slicing him with her sword.
“It is past highmoon?” LeBlanc looked at their faces, his voice rising to a shriek. Renaud took a step back. “We have missed the execution! The time that Fate herself decreed!”
Allemande pushed up his glasses, the gendarmes paused their further explorations, and then LeBlanc picked up his sword by the blade and inexplicably struck Renaud in the head with the hilt. Renaud crumpled, the picklock gone from his leg, Sophia saw, and then LeBlanc walked toward Tom, now with the proper end in his hand, blade out.
Sophia moved before the gendarmes knew she’d left their slackened grip. She barreled into LeBlanc with a yell, knocking him sideways before they were on her again, dragging her up by the arms.
“This is unseemly,” said Allemande. He waved a casual hand at the gendarmes. “Sit both the Bellamys down and use those chains. And Albert. Calm yourself and stop striking things.” Renaud picked himself up from the dirt, a small wound on his head.
“I will kill her,” said LeBlanc. He was shaking, a dirty, bleeding mess, and almost completely out of control. “I will kill them both!”
“Yes, yes,” said Allemande, “of course you shall. Albert, you look rather worse for wear. Am I right in thinking that you have arrested the wrong man … person?”
Sophia watched a spasm of genuine fear flit across LeBlanc’s face as she was thrown back against the stone pedestal. She glanced at the little man with the glasses. What must Allemande be if a monster like LeBlanc could fear him? LeBlanc struggled to smooth his cut and filthy robes.
“I … I can assure you, Premier …” His softness returned. “… that the Red Rook will soon die, and that the people will know it. And these red feathers that fight in the streets will be crushed.”
“Can you promise me that? Can you really? You know I take my promises seriously.”
LeBlanc nodded, eyes on the ground.
“And no more mysterious disappearances from the prisons, to keep you begging and consulting your Goddess? Can you promise me that as well?”
Sophia blinked as her shackle clicked shut. Allemande doesn’t know the Tombs are empty, she realized. He must have come straight down the lift and into … whatever this place was. And LeBlanc, she saw, hadn’t realized that Allemande didn’t know it, either. His hands worked in and out, clenching and unclenching as Allemande came and stood close to his back, head barely reaching his shoulder. Allemande spoke so softly it was difficult to hear.
“How, exactly, do you expect me to put stock in any promise you make, Albert? You did not even arrest a person of the correct gender. You know I do not tolerate disorder. This mob you have created is serving its purpose, but that will soon be done with. I do not care for your revenge, or your Goddess, or which Bellamy the people think is the Red Rook. As long as they see the Rook climb the scaffold and place his or her head on the block. We must be seen to be doing this properly. That is the essential thing. But you know what I like to do when it cannot be seen, don’t you, Albert? What I like to do when I am … disappointed in my friends.”
Sophia watched LeBlanc shake. Allemande pushed up his glasses, put his hands behind his back, turned, and started across the round room of bones. Then the spectacled eyes swiveled back to Tom. “Can that one walk?”
“Yes,” LeBlanc replied slowly. “But not well.”
“Be certain that he can make a decent show of himself on the way to the scaffold. Both of them. Are we clear on this?”
“Yes, Premier,” said LeBlanc. “But … we are agreed that this one limps, yes?” He indicated Tom, though his eyes slid over to Sophia.
“Yes, Albert, we are agreed on that.”
Allemande gathered his gendarmes while LeBlanc moved close to Sophia. LeBlanc’s voice was every bit as soft as Allemande’s, his breath in her face. “Tell me where the prisoners are, and I will spare you pain until your execution.”
She looked back at him and whispered, “I don’t think Allemande would approve.”
LeBlanc smiled. “There are many kinds of pain, Miss Bellamy.” Then his hand struck like a snake and Tom gasped. The picklock that had been in Renaud’s leg was now in Tom’s. Tom put a hand on Sophia’s arm, squeezing, not with pain but in warning. Allemande craned his neck as she leaned forward, getting even closer to LeBlanc’s face.
“That was unintelligent,” she hissed. “Because now I am going to tell Allemande that his prison is empty. In fact, I wrote a letter yesterday telling him so. It was my fate to rescue all the prisoners, so therefore I’d already done it, don’t you see? It should have arrived with the night post. So what to do, Albert? Keep him from his desk, or get there before him?”
She watched many things flit through LeBlanc’s manic eyes. Murder, loathing, the desire to hurt her, the desire not to lose his life.
“He’s waiting,” she whispered.
LeBlanc got to his feet, oozing blood everywhere. “One moment more, Premier,” he said loudly, “and I will personally escort you to my rooms, where we can discuss all that you wish, and make you comfortable until the proper time.”
Allemande watched as LeBlanc hurried around the pedestal. Sophia tensed at LeBlanc’s presence behind her, ready for a picklock or something else to pierce a part of her body she did not immediately need, but LeBlanc only ran his hands over the stone basin above her head, humming. She glanced sideways. Tom was grimacing, eyes shut, hand still squeezing her arm.
LeBlanc’s humming changed to a murmur as he chanted his question to Fate. Sophia caught the words “Bellamy” and “die,” followed by the clank of a casting piece on the stone bottom of the pedestal.
“Dawn,” LeBlanc said.
“Dawn,” said René. “The Tombs will explode at dawn.”
Spear turned the wheel of the firelighter and pulled out the knob.
“They will die at dawn,” said LeBlanc. “The Goddess has spoken.”
“I appreciate a deity with a proper sense of my schedule,” Allemande commented. “We won’t even have to change the bells. Now, if you are ready, Albert? I have some questions I’d like to ask you.”
Cartier slipped unobtrusively through the torchlit crowd. He’d like to have asked directions, but he was hearing sounds that sealed his mouth. Screaming, yelling, and the clash of metal. He turned the last bend in the cliff road and saw a small war at the Seine Gate. Men and women in masks of black and white against others with red paint on their cheeks, a melee of swords, bows, clubs, bricks, and broken bottles. Fate against feathers.
Cartier ducked as someone in a mask went over the cliff edge, down to where the fogs were beginning to roll off the river. He’d never heard such noise, even in the prison yard. But the best thing the red feathers could do for the Rook, Cartier thought, was let him through and show him the fastest way to the flat of René Hasard. He darted forward, fast, avoiding an ax, slid his thin body through the boundary fence, and fled into the Upper City.
“I think we will need another route,” René commented. They were far below the Seine Gate, walking the zigzagged road. They couldn’t see the fighting, but they could hear it. “How are you at climbing?”
Spear paused, hands in pockets, and shrugged. “Not as bad as you’d think.”
René led the way back down the road, through alleys that were empty and quiet, down streets with their lights out, doors barred, until they came to a strip of no-man’s-land along the edge of the Lower City, behind a row of slanting wooden shanties. Bare dirt was sprinkled with blades of grass, and an immense composting rubbish heap was piled to their right, pushed into a mound that was higher than Spear’s head. The stench was unbearable even with the wind blowing in the other direction. Spear looked up at the rising cliff face, glowing in a light now on its way to nethermoon.
“It is an easy climb at first,” René replied. “After that there is rope to the top.”
“When was the last time you checked the rope?”
“It is tested once a week.” René smiled at Spear’s expression. “It is not always convenient to use the Seine Gate. Have you not found it so?”
Spear got a handhold on the rough, tumbled rock at the bottom of the cliff and started up.
“Do you not want me to show you the way?”
“No.” Spear’s long arms and legs had him nearly a third of the way to the rope.
“To your right!” René called. When he saw Spear grab the rope, René took another look around at the bare and empty yards, the fogs tumbling off the river. He started climbing, moving fast on a course he knew almost by feel. If the fog got too thick, he would have to know it by feel, because neither of them would be able to see the cliff face.
Sophia felt for the wound in Tom’s leg that she could not see, pressing her fingers against it in the dark, trying to stop the bleeding. They were alone. The leg beneath her hand was thin, and she could hear the weakness in his voice.
“I’d hoped he was going to forget he’d done it,” Tom was saying, “and leave the … blasted thing in my leg. A picklock would have been dead useful about now.”
“I’m sorry,” Sophia whispered.
“Sorry that I don’t have a picklock in my leg?”
“I’m sorry about everything.”
He didn’t reply right away. “I don’t think you have anything to be sorry for, my sister. How did you leave Father?”
He was talking like he’d just sat down to have a chat on her window seat in Bellamy House. But now it was her turn not to respond immediately. She wondered if it was for the same reason: because they were both telling lies. “He was fine.”
“And you got Jennifer out? Was she all right?”
“She’s out, but she was … very sick. I’m so sorry, Tom.”
“Sophie,” he said, pulling her over so she could put her head on his shoulder. “Tell me what you have to be sorry about.”
And just like that, the inner mechanism that had been propelling her forward sputtered and seized, its ticking stopped, and all that had been held at bay came flooding out, spilling pain and remorse onto Tom’s filthy shirt. She told him everything, unable to see his face, and she thought maybe that was best, because she wouldn’t be able to see the condemnation there. When there was nothing left she said, “I was just … so stupid.”
Tom stroked her head and said, “Sophie, do you trust Spear?”
“What do you mean?”
“Because …” Tom hesitated. “It’s just that I know he has other motives.”
“I saw the denouncement, Tom,” she whispered, trying to suppress the memory of René telling her almost the very same thing on Spear’s steps, his mouth and jaw so angry in the dark. She took a breath of bone-dusted air. “And I know about Spear.”
“Did he tell you?”
“No, or not at first. René told me. I don’t know how he knew …”
“Sophie, everyone knew about Spear and you. Except for you.”
“Then why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because it was Spear’s business to, not mine. What did you say to him?”
“That I thought of him as my brother. And that I was going to marry René Hasard whether there was a marriage fee or not.”
“I see. And what did he do?”
“Knocked over some furniture.” She could feel Tom’s breath coming shallow in his chest. She should make him stop talking. But how long did they have before they would never talk again?
“I don’t know what Hasard is, Sophie, except that he’s been raised to be excellent at what he does. But I do know this. Spear is a good man, but when he gets something in his head, there’s … there’s just no getting it out again. And if he thought he was doing what’s right … Well, he could be ruthless.”
“Ruthless? That doesn’t sound like Spear.”
“Doesn’t it?”
This was just like Hammond, wasn’t it? René felt the vibrations traveling down his rope as he climbed. A knife. And he was hanging halfway up from a smooth piece of cliff, nothing to clutch on to, nowhere to go but down. René sighed when he felt the rope slacken to nothing beneath his hands. He pushed his feet against the cliff face, spread his arms like wings, and fell backward, the cold night air whistling past his head.
A draft blew cold through the bones, a weird noise in the dark. Sophia shivered, wondering where it had come from. “Are you in pain?” she asked.
“I’m so thirsty I don’t think it matters,” Tom replied. “Are you in pain?”
She could feel the blood from the scratch LeBlanc had given her trickling down her arm. She shook her head.
“So who’s out there, Sophie? Any chance someone will come to find us?”
“I told Cartier to get on the last landover whether I came or not. And Spear will think I’m on a landover, too. He’ll be leaving the city by now.”
“And what about Hasard?”
Sophia closed her watering eyes. “He’s exactly where he wants to be, Tom.”
René kept his eyes closed. He hated landing in the compost heap. It might not break bones like the ground would, but it did knock the wind out, which was useful only for avoiding a few moments of the stench. He supposed he should thank Uncle Émile for making him take this fall so many times. Tonight it had saved his life. But he was too angry for justice at the moment. He waited for his air to return, and when it did and his temper had settled, he opened his eyes.
The clouds had cleared and the night was glowing with the north lights. Green, hazy edges tinged with purple, but there was also a stripe of yellow. A streak of fire, he realized. Like what he had seen on the A5 from Bellamy House. And now he saw that there were dozens of them, fine, thin lines racing across the sky. What were they? Pieces of stars? Or pieces of Ancient machines still flying? He wished he could show Sophia. He wondered, impractically, if they were for the Rook. If they were for her.
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He rolled himself out and slid down the stinking pile, toward the cliff face and the next set of ropes his uncles kept for climbing in and out of the Lower City. He was going to be sore from that fall. He walked slowly, thinking about Sophia, and all the different ways he might like to kill Spear Hammond.
Spear ran down a back street of the Upper City in the dark, glad he had killed René Hasard. He didn’t like killing people, but if that was what it took to protect Sophia from herself, then so be it.
A woman far above on an air bridge was calling to another about the sky. He looked up and saw the north lights beginning, but there were also tiny yellow streaks, trails of sparkling fire. Like the chapel walls of his childhood. He wished he could show Sophia. Then he was approaching two wooden doors on the ground floor of a building, relieved to see they had not been broken into or torn down. He put a key to the padlock.
Aunt Francesca’s landover was right where she’d left it, now with his things loaded in. If the horses he’d stolen last night were still there, and if the forged pass for the Saint-Denis Gate he’d kept back still worked, then he would be out of the Sunken City well before dawn. He would find Tom and Sophia at the coast, and Sophia was going to be so happy that he’d reset the firelighter and blown up the prison. Everything would be just as he’d said. They would start over together. And with Hasard gone, she would turn to him. He knew she would.
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