There was no question who the Sunken City belonged to. And it was time to make sure that everyone, especially the Red Rook, knew it.
“They’ll come for us soon,” Sophia whispered.
“I know,” Tom replied.
“What do you wish you were doing right now?”
“Running. Or talking to Jennifer Bonnard.”
“Do you really?”
“Yes. And what about you? What do you wish?”
“That I could wake up on the day of my Banns and realize that none of this had ever happened.”
“Do you really wish that?”
Sophia thought for a moment. “No. I don’t. I suppose what I really wish is that the real parts had never happened, and the parts that never really happened were the ones that were real.”
Far away in the darkness of the cavern, they heard the creaking of a metal door. Tom took her hand. At least they would do this together.
René marched with his uncles and their friends as a troop, but they had to stop blocks away from their goal. The streets were thronged. It was the coldest, darkest part of the night as the moon sank, the north lights nearly gone, no fire in the sky. But the execution of the Red Rook was keeping the entire Lower City out of its bed.
They pushed their way through, insistent but careful not to start a fight, and when they finally reached the prison yard René felt his jaw clench tight. The Razor, its ugliness undisguised by the flowers and ribbons, towered above a mass of torchlit humanity. But the mood was not what he’d expected. More grim, and less mocking. The blue of gendarmes was everywhere, at least ten forming a pack in front of the prison door, some of them shoving and beating back the crowd.
“Get everyone into position, and I will try another way in,” René whispered. “We will get nowhere if this mob turns against the gendarmes.”
Spear entered LeBlanc’s office building with a crisp walk and approached the guard at the desk. He brandished a piece of paper. “Long may Allemande rise above the city,” he said.
“Your code?”
“One three four.”
The guard nodded, tilting his head toward the stairs. Spear started to climb, and as soon as the guard was out of sight he took them two at a time, smiling at the luck of meeting Renaud in the street.
Renaud approached the Saint-Denis Gate. He saw an Allemande courier climbing back onto a horse as he handed his papers to the guard. The guard was unkempt, and a little drunk, but he looked at the pass carefully, as if he was having trouble reading it.
“Step down, Monsieur,” the guard said.
They could search all they wanted, Renaud thought. His mind was on sea foam, and birds, and the clean, free air of the coast. Two more gendarmes approached, but instead of searching him, one took his arms, quickly twisting them back, and the other put a knife to his throat. Renaud’s smile went away.
“Be advised,” read the guard from another document, his speech slurring, “that no official … permissions have been given to pass … any gates … out of the City of Light. Any such pass … passes … shall be considered a forgery, and the … the bearer … subject to immediate … execution.” The guard swayed just a little on his feet. “Sorry, friend,” he said to Renaud. “You ran a little … late.”
Renaud had only a moment to wonder why luck had abandoned him before the knife bit into his throat.
The ropes cut into Sophia’s hands as she and Tom were escorted through the dusty maze and onto the lift. Two young gendarmes, who had been wide-eyed in the bizarre cavern, were half carrying, half dragging Tom. She wondered how long they would live after this. They all crammed into the lift, LeBlanc rang the bell, and then he spent the entire ride examining her face from just a few inches away, as if he could ferret out the source of her abnormalities. She just glared at him.
They stepped out of the lift, this time into the small, lantern-lit lobby of LeBlanc’s office building, where the night guard sat at a desk. She caught a glimpse of a large blue-jacketed officer just disappearing up the stairs before she and Tom were taken stumbling out the door and to the back of a haularound. The bed of the haularound had a railing built like a fence around it, two posts at either end. Men were lighting short torches attached along the edges, the orange flames showing an entire troop of escorting gendarmes, swords and crossbows at the ready. A large sign on the back of the haularound read, LE CORBEAU ROUGE.
LeBlanc smiled, took one of Sophia’s red-tipped feathers, and stuck it securely into her tangled hair, patting her cheek when he was done. Then she was pulled up and into the haularound, her bound hands tied tight to the post. She looked back over her shoulder, where Tom was being tied to the other post, closest to the driver. She hadn’t yet seen him in such strong light. He looked terrible. Gaunt, dirty, bloody, and exhausted. But he smiled at her, even though his lips were cracked, and it made her stand straighter.
“The mob may do as they like,” LeBlanc was instructing their escort, “but they may not remove the prisoners or …”
“Give my brother water,” Sophia said. “Or he might not be able to stand.”
LeBlanc went on. “… or we will remove them to the Tombs. Allow no one to impede your progress through the streets. Only the driver knows the route …”
“And what will Allemande say if he can’t walk to the scaffold?” Sophia shouted.
LeBlanc turned his pale eyes on her, and then he smiled. Something about that smile made Sophia wish she’d never drawn his gaze. “There is no Allemande,” LeBlanc said. He turned back to the gendarmes. “Shoot anyone who attempts to deny the will of Fate.”
The haularound started forward with a jerk.
The lift jerked, and Spear paced inside it, waiting through the long, slow journey down the building and into the cliff. He’d used Renaud’s keys to unlock LeBlanc’s office, finding nothing but the dead, contorted body of Premier Allemande lying on a sofa, then used the same keys to open LeBlanc’s private lift. He was so angry. Angry to be back here. Angry that he’d thought they were safe when they weren’t. Angry that he had blood on his hands. Why had everything in his life gone wrong since he’d heard the name Hasard?
When the lift finally reached bottom, he used the smallest key on the empty rivet hole to open the false back, just the way Renaud had described, unlocked the second false door, snagged the lantern from the lift, and hurried down the dust-thick stone steps into the cavern of bones. He took one moment to stare, and then he yelled, “Sophie! Tom!”
He would unset that firelighter again if he could. But he would get Sophie and Tom first this time. And if the rest of the world exploded, then it exploded.
René looked up at the sagging brick structure that covered the entrance to the Tombs. He didn’t really care if it exploded. He cared for nothing but getting Sophia out. The window he’d climbed through before had been boarded, guards now in front of it. And he could not get in the main door, either, no matter what story he told. No one without black robes and a white streak in his hair was coming in, not without a fight.
But it wasn’t him those gendarmes needed to be worrying about, René thought. There was something moving through the mob, a subtle shift in current after the night’s violence, an increasing hostility to the uniforms of the city. Perhaps his uncles had chosen the wrong disguises. Benoit had assured him again and again that when Sophia and Tom came out through that door, there would be enough gendarmes that weren’t really gendarmes gathered and ready to take them. If Allemande’s control was developing fault lines, would the mob help, or hinder them?
He looked up to the edge of the cliffs, where LeBlanc’s office building perched, and where he knew there was a lift. The moon was gone, the sky just beginning to pale in the northeast. He wondered if he had time to climb.
Spear wondered if he should try to climb the stacks of bones and see the layout of the paths from above. Probably his light wasn’t bright enough even if he could. He kicked the pyramid of skulls in front of him, putting his foot through one.
He was lost, and furious, and beginning to be afraid that Sophia and Tom were not even in this godforsaken grave. He studied the hole he had made in the skull, fourth one from the corner, near the floor, and took off at a run down the next narrow path.
Sophia wondered if she would have time to climb the fencing, slip her bonds over the top of the post, and perhaps set fire to the haularound before they could catch her. But her hands would still be tied, and there would still be Tom. So she looked straight ahead, ignoring the shouts and stares, and the people standing along the streets and in the doorways of their shanties. News in the Lower City traveled much faster than a haularound, and she could see the crowds gathering farther down the road.
There had been fighting here. Smoldering wood and rubble, and doorways with something black nailed on, announcing a death. And the sign of the red feather. And now that she was listening, some of the shouts were not the mockery she had expected. “Red Rook” came at her from all sides, but they were shouts of encouragement, and there were men and women who stood in respectful silence as the haularound passed. And then she heard her name.
“Sophie!” She turned her head, scanning the crowd until she saw a young, bearded man with his hair cropped short. “Sophie!”
“Justin!” Tom called.
Sophia felt a smile break over her face. She leaned as close to the edge of her rolling wooden prison as the ropes would allow. It was Mémé Annette’s son. “Justin! How is Maggie?”
“Five children!” he said as the haularound passed, his face falling as they all three remembered they were not actually having a reunion.
“Tell her we love her!” Sophia called. “And the children!”
He nodded, and Sophia watched a small crowd form around him, asking questions and listening to his response. “Justin!” she yelled suddenly. “Can you get Tom water? Do you have a flask with you? Please!”
She watched Justin patting his shirt and pants, as if he might discover water, others around him doing the same. She wondered how many would remember Sophie and Tom from Blackpot Street, the children who spent their summers selling an old woman’s oatcakes and romping around in the mud and grime of a Lower City market, Tom’s hair tucked up in a cap.
She heard a thump behind her and turned her head to see a leather flask at Tom’s feet. He slid down the post and got his hands on it, the gendarmes around them seeming inclined to do nothing. She sighed in relief. So there was still goodness somewhere in the Lower City. It made her stand straighter as they drove the twisting streets, all the way to the turn into the prison yard.
There was a mob there the size of which she’d never seen. An ocean of bodies and faces packed into the square, the Razor rising up like an illuminated island of black and white flowers in its midst. She looked up at the sky. Surely they were early; there was only the barest lightening of the dark on the northeastern horizon. She met Tom’s eyes, and he shook his head. If there was anyone in that crowd who wanted to rescue them, she didn’t know how they could possibly do it. The numbers were unbelievable, overwhelming. She felt the loss of hope solidify, rock hard inside her. And then, as the people caught sight of them, one by one, the mob went silent.
Spear had gone silent, no more yelling. They weren’t there. There was no one there, nothing but death. He found the steps to lead him out of the cavern, ran straight through the lift and out into the prison. There was no one there, either, no guards. No Sophia. No Tom. Dread settled on him, like the bone dust that was covering his face. He turned right and dashed down the stairs and into the stinking tunnels, feet splashing in the quiet. Surely it couldn’t be dawn yet.
René turned at the strange, growing silence of the mob. Surely it couldn’t be dawn yet? And then he saw a haularound, lit with torches, bright at the opposite end of the prison yard. The sight set his fear on fire. The haularound snaked a path through the mob and now he could see Sophia in the back of it, hands tied and head up, her brother too weak to stand at the other end.
He looked around, trying to control his panic. Benoit, Émile, his uncles, Cartier, and their recruits from the party guests were a short distance away, crowded around the prison door, where they’d thought Sophia was going to come out. They were cut off. René launched himself into the sea of people, swimming into the crowd, but there were many hundreds of bodies between him and the scaffold.
LeBlanc looked down on the hundreds of faces, indistinct in shadows and torchlight, and smiled beatifically. He was seated in the viewing box, his streak straight and robes perfect, all wounds discreetly covered. And he was in Allemande’s chair, from where his new power would flow. The other ministres had not seemed quite confident in his story of Allemande’s death by armed rebels, LeBlanc had thought. But they all knew who the gendarmes were taking their orders from. And so the ministres were around him on the scaffold, one or two yawning with the early dawn, seated in their velvet chairs, waiting to witness the death of the Red Rook.
LeBlanc opened his pendant. Its black hand pointed to dawn, and though dawn was looming, it had not precisely arrived. But the haularound had. LeBlanc sighed. This was inconvenient. And Renaud was missing, leaving him no one to blame or complain to. That was aggravating, as was the thought of training a new secretary. They could take so long to break.
And then there was this odd silence. Not the way a Lower City mob ought to behave when presented with the gift of the Red Rook’s head, and her brother’s. He had seem them beg for blood that was worth much less. But now they were merely standing aside, making a path for the haularound to approach the scaffold.
Sophia looked up past the torchlight to the huge, heavy blade already pulled high and hanging in the air, ready to end her life. The executioner and his team stood next to the rope, his only job now to trip the lever and let the blade fall, then pick up the head from the bloodstained basket and show it to the crowd. The Razor crept closer, and she wondered vaguely if she and Tom would go one at a time, or if they would lie down on the block and die together.
She felt curiously detached, as if this moment were happening to another Sophia Bellamy, a girl who had lived a thousand years ago and already knew the end of her story. But at the same time, little things were sharpened into importance, things that held meaning only for her. A knitted blue skullcap just like Mémé Annette’s, someone who had their child sitting on their shoulders, a woman with a red-tipped feather painted on her cheek, reaching out a hand in the dim and eerie silence. And then the haularound stopped.
The gendarmes came and cut her rope from the post, pulling her down and toward the steps of the scaffold. Evidently it was to be one at a time, and she would be first. She heard a whisper of talk trickle through the mob, a current of sound running just beneath the quiet.
“Tom!” Sophia yelled suddenly. “Tomas Bellamy, do not look. When it’s time, do not look! Swear it to me!”
She caught a glimpse of him over her shoulder, standing up straight now despite his injuries. He nodded once. She was satisfied. “Let me go,” she said, yanking her arms free of the gendarmes. “Let me go! I can walk on my own.”
She was getting angry now. That was good. She moved just out of the guards’ reach, and walked up the scaffold steps. That gendarme who cut her bonds did it a little too well, because they were loose around her wrists now. She stopped and planted her feet in front of the viewing box, bright with torches, tilted up her chin, fixed her gaze on LeBlanc, and smiled.
Somewhere far away in the crowd, someone was calling her name.
LeBlanc stood, his pale gaze on Sophia Bellamy. She looked young and small and very defiant standing down there with a bloody sleeve and a smile on her face. He could not wait to see her die. He pulled out a long roll of official-looking paper with a flourish.
“By order of the government of LeBlanc,” LeBlanc shouted, voice reverberating against the surrounding buildings, “I, your most gracious premier, find Sophia Bellamy, also known as the Red Rook, guilty of crimes against the City of Light …”
“Sophia!” René yelled, using his elbows and body to fight a way through the crowd. The people had gone stiff, muttering. They’d been expecting Tom Bellamy to be the Red Rook, not this slim, small girl. And they’d thought their premier was Allemande. René pushed them all aside, screaming himself hoarse.
“Sophia!”
“For the removal of criminals fairly condemned of treason, and circumventing the laws that have condemned them …”
Sophia had stopped listening to LeBlanc. She was hearing the swelling confusion of the mob behind her, and the voice that was calling her name. She let LeBlanc keep on talking, turned from the viewing box and the solemn ministres of the Sunken City, and walked away, dropping her loose ropes onto the stolen stone altar as she passed. She approached the Razor and straddled the board, but instead of lying facedown, she chose to lay on her back, placing her neck in the stained, curved groove, chin up and facing the blade. She closed her eyes.
“Sophia!” The people in the crowd were beginning to part, to let him through, making his progress faster. “Listen to me!” René shouted. “I did not lie to you. It was not a lie! Sophia! Open your eyes!”
She opened her eyes and saw a sky of translucent blue, the kind that comes just before the dawn, and the giant wedge of metal that was the Razor, its sharpened edge glittering with the torchlight. She knew the voice. She’d known it all along. It was taking the steel from her anger and melting it into nothing. LeBlanc was still talking, but she wasn’t listening. Not to him.
Rook Page 35