by H. G. Parry
It was work that had brought him to Paris from Versailles, but his meeting with Camille was more social than business. Until the meeting of the Estates General, Robespierre hadn’t seen Camille since they had both been students at Louis-le-Grand. His school friend was little changed: dark-eyed and fragile, boyish and quick-witted. He had grown his black curls long and loose, as was becoming the fashion among the young radicals; as he spoke, he would push them back from his face in a manner that suggested he was not quite used to having them there. Robespierre, with his perfectly powdered wig and neat black uniform of the Estates General, felt ruefully like an accountant dining with a poet.
“The National Assembly of Magicians,” Camille was saying from the other side of the table. “It’s all everyone can talk about, you know.”
“It’s only a name, as yet,” Robespierre said, in his usual role as cautious, indulgent elder student. He couldn’t really muster much conviction. On this day, when the sky was high overhead and he sat in the midst of revolutionary fervor, he couldn’t help but believe that anything was possible. “The king won’t acknowledge us as a new form of government.”
“The king doesn’t have to. Nor do the Aristocrats.” Robespierre had become more familiar with his friend’s scrawled handwriting over the years than his voice; he had forgotten how pronounced his stammer could be, or it had become more so. When he was excited, his thoughts leaped too fast for his tongue to catch up. He was excited now. “They only have to fail to stop us. And they will. As they failed to keep you out of the Estates General.”
Robespierre struggled to hold back a smile at that. Only three weeks ago, the king had reacted to the Commoners’ demands that the Bastille be dismantled by closing the doors to the Third Estate. It had seemed to be the end of negotiations and of their dreams. He and his fellow delegates had, unanimously, refused to accept it. Assembling instead in a nearby tennis court, they had renamed themselves the National Assembly of Magicians and vowed never to disband until the rights of Commoners, both magical and mundane, were served by the powers that governed the country. The court had been hot and close, packed with the bodies of 577 Commoners; sun streamed through the windows overhead, and the air was thick with shouts. It had been the sweetest moment of his life.
“We had numbers on our side that day,” he said. “They couldn’t stop us.”
“We’ll always have numbers on our side. That’s what the other Commoner magicians need to understand. They can’t take us all. There are only a few thousand Templars of note in Paris; the number of Commoner magicians, braceleted or rogue, is in the tens of thousands, perhaps the hundred thousands. The Aristocracy know this. That’s why they’re so invested in the myth that Commoner magicians are rare; that’s why they keep us ashamed of the bracelets, so that the true numbers are never revealed. One act of illegal magic, the bracelet sings, and the Templars are on them like dogs on a fox. But tens of thousands of bracelets, singing out at once… They could never stop that.”
He broke off with a sharp intake of breath; his knife fell to the side of his plate as his right fist clenched tightly.
Robespierre winced. “Camille…”
“It’s all right.” Camille shook out his hand impatiently, as one did to ease a bee sting, and picked up his knife again. His bracelet peeked from behind his cuff, glowing molten gold. Magic was coursing strongly in his veins; it always had when conversations became too heated. The burning metal must have been excruciating, yet beyond a flush of color to his cheeks and a brightness to his eyes, he didn’t show it.
“I know how you feel. I do. But please try to calm down.”
“This is no time for calm. This is the time for action.”
“We are acting. You should have been there, that day when the king closed the doors. The tide is rising. The waters are churning. But it’s hard to know when it will overflow.”
Camille laughed. “That’s your problem, Maxime. It’s not a tide waiting to rise. It’s a powder keg, and it’s waiting for a spark.”
Robespierre always thought it strange, afterward, that it should have been at that moment that the news came. But perhaps it wasn’t. The Revolution was all anyone really talked about these days. If it hadn’t been that moment, it would have been another equally fitting.
“Camille!” The voice belonged to a man about their own age, plump and well dressed. He pushed his way through the tables, receiving annoyed looks from diners as their wine sloshed. “Have you heard?”
Robespierre didn’t recognize the man, but clearly Camille did. He knew all sorts of people, most of them less than reputable. “What? What’s happened?”
“The king has given the Templars discretionary power to arrest and hold any Commoner suspected of illegal use of magic, without trial,” the man said. “The official decree came down only minutes ago.”
“The Assembly asked for leniency for illegal magic!”
“They don’t care what the Assembly wants,” the man said. He was pink with indignation. “The king won’t listen to us. It’s a message to that effect.”
“It’s more than that,” Robespierre started to say, but the man had already moved to the next table. He was brimming over with his own news and had no room for more.
“What more is it?” Camille asked.
Robespierre turned to him instead. “Without a trial, they don’t have to prove use of magic at all. They can—”
“—arrest anyone, for any reason,” Camille finished. His eyes had widened. “Dear God.”
“It’s because of the riots.” Robespierre heard himself sounding very calm; inside, he was burning. They would suffer for this. He would see to it. “They want to be able to use illegal-magic charges to dispose of the worst of the dissenters. It’s as if every Templar in the Order has been given a lettre de cachet—a countless number of them. They’re afraid.”
“They should be afraid!” Camille looked more furious than Robespierre had ever seen him, even when they were children. “They don’t realize yet just how afraid they should be.”
Before Robespierre could react, Camille leaped onto the table: his shoe narrowly missed Robespierre’s plate, and the cutlery rattled. Not that it mattered. Breakfast was over. Neither of them had touched a bite.
“My friends!” he called to the café and to the streets.
“Get down from there!” Robespierre whispered, but without real conviction. A thrill raised the hairs on the back of his neck.
Camille, of course, ignored him. “The National Assembly of Magicians has asked for the Bastille to be dismantled. Word has just come that the king has awarded the Knights Templar powers to arrest and hold any Commoner magician without trial, as they see fit. Could our wishes be more insolently flouted? Could they show any more clearly their desire to see us dead before they see us free?”
It took Robespierre a moment to realize why his friend’s voice sounded unfamiliar. For the first time in all the years he had known him, his stammer was gone; he had, somehow, outpaced it, or been carried above it. Without it, his voice was clear as the ringing of a bell.
“And what do you propose we do?” someone called from a table.
Camille’s head turned toward him. “March on the Bastille! It’s only stone and magic, after all. Tear it down, before they have a chance to use it against us ever again. Free those who have languished inside it for too long.”
Most in the café were turning to look at him; a few from the path outside were stopping in their tracks. It wasn’t enough: only Camille Desmoulins on a table, saying things they had heard before. Some were even beginning to look away. Robespierre saw Camille take a deep breath and square his shoulders. Then he let his magic loose.
Robespierre had often seen Camille scorched by the magic in his blood, but he had never seen the magic itself. He knew his friend could call shadows—that had been the incident that had nearly seen him in the Bastille as a child. He hadn’t realized Camille was a fire-mage as well, and he hadn’t realized that he w
as quite so powerful. The shadows around him swirled, gathered, not quite manifesting but casting the Palais-Royal into shades of soft gray. Sparks crackled from his fingertips, bouncing from the tables in glints of red and gold. The bracelet at his wrist glowed and then chimed, the endless, ear-piercing scream designed to bring Templars running. The braceleted magician was meant to be immobilized with pain by that point. Camille stood straight and tall.
Commoner magic, in broad daylight, on the streets of Paris. Robespierre, unexpectedly, felt tears spring to his eyes. They blurred Camille’s face and transformed the tendrils of flame about him to flickers of light.
My God, he thought. It’s beautiful.
“This is our birthright!” Camille said. Everyone was looking at him now; the patrons of the café, for the first time in Robespierre’s memory, had fallen into utter silence. The only sound was the high, shrill wail of Camille’s bracelet. “This was what was given to us by blood. If they want to take it from us, then I say we give them blood in return.”
Quietly, without giving himself away, Robespierre let his own mesmerism flow, intertwining it with Camille’s words and sending it through the crowds. It burned in him as usual, hot and fierce, but this time he sensed it was not needed. Some other, darker influence was already at work. For a moment, he could feel it like a touch on his shoulder.
“If you’re wearing a bracelet,” Camille said, “let it scream.”
Robespierre never quite believed it was going to happen until other bracelets started to chime in conjunction with Camille’s. The shrieking notes were eerie. They mingled with the voices of the crowd and the stamping of feet. They were the sound of stifled torment finally being heard.
But it was more than that. The sound was only a reaction to what was really taking place: scores of Commoners, all releasing magic that most had never used in their lives. Fire-mages, weather-mages, mesmers, metalmancers—the air hummed and throbbed with power. Fire, wind, and storm clouds raged under the bright July skies.
In that moment, Robespierre wished more than anything that he had been caught and braceleted as an infant—not for his necromancy, for which they would have killed him, but for his then-latent mesmerism. He would not have been able to use it in secret then; he would have had little chance of saving France. But he longed to be a part of that crowd.
Camille stood above them, the lights from his magic dancing on his face. “Come. Let’s go free our people.”
They moved through the streets in a giant wave, and as they did so, more rose and followed.
The first Clarkson knew of it was when he emerged from his hotel in the early afternoon, having arrived midmorning and retired to his room to breakfast late and refresh himself from the long, hot journey. The streets were seething with people, all crying out in either fear or excitement—possibly both. The city had been in a state of high alert when Clarkson had arrived, and riots had been breaking out among the Commoners for weeks, so at first Clarkson assumed it was another such outburst. As he listened, though, picking up a few scattered words from the babble of French dialect, he began to realize it was something more serious. A tiny thrill shot down his back before he was quite sure why.
“Excuse me,” he said to a man plucked at random from the crowd: he seemed a little calmer than some, and had an open, honest face. Fortunately Clarkson’s French was good. “What’s the reason for this commotion?”
“You haven’t heard?” the man said, in what Clarkson thought was surprise rather than scorn. “They’re taking the Bastille.”
“Who?” Clarkson knew about the Bastille, of course, the Parisian version of the Tower of London, which housed magical criminals in even more infamous conditions than its English counterpart. But news had been intermittent on the road, and he had not heard of any threat to it. “Who’s taking the Bastille?”
“The army of the Assembly of Magicians,” the man replied, and he certainly wasn’t calm now. His voice rang with triumph and with pride. “A thousand Commoner magicians have surrounded the place. They’re going to release the prisoners and seize the armory. They’ve just moved into the courtyard. Didn’t you hear the bracelets screaming earlier? And the gunfire?”
Clarkson hadn’t. The Bastille was some distance from his hotel, and he hadn’t known to listen for it. Now, though, he thought he could discern the distant crack and boom of artillery, amid the shouts and cheers. When he looked in the direction the people seemed to be moving, he saw with a start that in the clear summer sky a mass of gray storm clouds was swirling over one specific spot. Weather magic. He felt the tiny thrill spark and catch fire. This was it. The Commoner magicians were indeed rising up.
The Bastille was an old fourteenth-century fortress, made impenetrable by ancient charms and good stonework, and it stood darkly in the heart of Paris. It was a formidable sight, more so than its English counterpart. The Tower of London, with its four elegant spires and white stone, had an ornamental look about it, as though one might easily call there for tea. France’s prison for magicians was a great gray behemoth: eight solid towers linked by curtain walls, topped with crenellated battlements, and surrounded by fortified gates. It represented the stranglehold of the king and the favored Aristocracy over Commoners and unpopular Aristocracy alike, and for a long time there had been a growing sense that, sooner or later, it had to break.
It was breaking now—or at least, from where Robespierre was standing, it was being broken. The riot from the café had swept through the streets like a river after a storm. He had been pushed to the back in the chaos: Camille, in front, had been lost to him. They had come by a long, meandering path, halted every now and again by an onslaught of soldiers or Knights Templar, stopping to gather arms and supporters. But they had reached the prison.
They were no longer a riot. They were an army.
Around Robespierre, the army of the Assembly of Magicians—the Commoners of Paris—flooded the undefended courtyard and laid siege to the castle. Many simply opened fire with rifles or flung themselves at the closed drawbridge with axes and truncheons, but still more battered it with magic. The Bastille was reinforced with magic as well as stone: on the ramparts, there were Templar magicians working their own abilities to the breaking point in defense of the fortress. Fireballs flew freely; lightning from the swirling clouds above struck the battlements; the iron of the gates flexed and creaked under the touch of competing metalmancers. Gunfire blazed from above; some rioters cried out and fell as they tore at the walls. A young woman fell to the ground in front of Robespierre, her head a bloody wound; his necromancy stirred, and he knew he was in the presence of death. But the mob was growing louder. Their anger was a pulsing mass about him. It filled his senses, overwhelming them, so that his own sense of identity felt very fragile in its midst.
Robespierre had a pistol, but he didn’t use it. He was not a man of great physical courage, and he knew this about himself. If it were not for the magic in his blood, he would not have been near the riot at all. But his benefactor’s power blazed from him in hot, luxurious waves, aching to be used. Mesmerism was of little use in battle, really, but he did what he could. He pushed with it, sometimes to halt a soldier about to fire from the Bastille, equally often to push their own people through fear to fury. He had never used so much magic before, so indiscriminately. His head swam.
The sun was low in the sky when the attackers had a brief moment of triumph. One of the Commoners, a metalmancer, finally fought his way close enough to the main door to manipulate the great labyrinth of locks and chains keeping it closed. It was a momentary breach: the door was open for only seconds in total. In that time, one of the Knights Templar on the battlements flung his telekinesis, and the door swung shut once more. The metalmancer fell with a bullet to the neck. All in all, twenty-seven Commoners managed to slip inside the fort.
Almost by chance, Robespierre was one of the twenty-seven.
He had been near the prison wall when it happened, fighting to steer clear of the swinging
weaponry around him. He had felt the rush of wind from the open door; on pure reflex, he surged forward with the others around him and found himself on the opposite side of the door right before it swung violently shut at his back. And then he was inside. Trapped, perhaps, but he could not feel it that way. In that moment, all he could feel was sudden awe.
This was the Bastille. This was where they had brought his mother, twenty years ago, to wait out the last days of her life. The imposing hall was lit by lamps, but after the sunlight outside, everything seemed a blur of shadows. He wondered if it had been sunny on the day his mother had come. Perhaps her first look at the prison had been clouded, as his was, by her second-to-last look at the sky.
This passed through his head in a fraction of a second. Soldiers were already coming down the corridor toward them; shots resounded in the dark. One of the Commoners in front of Robespierre cried out and fell. Robespierre cocked his own pistol and raised it. His heart was pounding. He was right at the back of the group now. There was almost no chance such a small group could get farther than they already had. But if they could…
Downstairs, his benefactor said.
It was the first time he had ever heard the voice in his waking thoughts. Perhaps it was because he was so faint and dizzy; perhaps the moment was so important that dreams and reality were beginning to merge.
He shook his head. “What?”
Go downstairs. There’s a door to your left. Quickly.
There was indeed a door to his left, bolted but not locked. He ducked back from the crowd and opened it: in a glance he made out a curving row of steps that did, indeed, lead down. That quick glimpse was all he had. The soldiers were upon them. For an agonized beat, he saw his fellow revolutionaries raising their pistols and clubs, and he knew he should be with them. Then, in one swift movement, he slipped through the crack and pulled the door shut behind him.