by H. G. Parry
It was utterly dark, and so the smell that hit him was like a physical blow: the same fetid fog of sweat, straw, and urine that had permeated the corridor, but stronger, and laced with undertones of decomposition. Unexpectedly, his necromancy uncoiled like a serpent inside him. Bile rose in his throat; the sudden quiet after long hours of battle made him stumble against the walls. He felt incapable of supporting himself without a swell of bodies and noise. On the other side of the door, he could hear the sound of gunshots, and of screams.
So many gunshots over the course of the day. And so many screams, as so many had fallen, and all from his side. Not enough to stop them yet. But enough.
Downstairs, the voice repeated.
“In a moment,” Robespierre managed. “I just—”
This is the moment. You haven’t much time. Downstairs.
The commotion outside the door was quieter now. Almost certainly, the people who had entered the prison in front of him lay dead on the ground. Firmly, he swallowed, fumbled in his pocket for a match, and struck it on the prison wall.
Good, his benefactor said.
At the bottom of the stairs was a row of cells, like others in the prison. All were empty but one, in which a woman, pale and emaciated, lay in a wooden cage. Robespierre picked his way down, careful of the slime underfoot.
Her clothes were tattered rags, and her hair, gray streaked and brittle, hung over her face. The cage, like the cell itself, was not locked. That told Robespierre all he needed to know, without needing to turn her face to the light and feel for the beat of a heart. He did both anyway.
“I came too late,” he said aloud. “You were right. This woman—she’s dead.”
She is dead, his benefactor said. And you are a necromancer.
That was all that was said: his benefactor didn’t tell him who the woman was, or why he should wake her from her final sleep. But his magic was raging, reaching out its tendrils of grief, and he needed no further prompt to let it go.
He had never used his necromancy on a human being before. That night months ago didn’t count, that night that he tried never to think of. What he had poured into that man had not been his power, but something else. This time, it was pure, and it was right. He felt his magic stream through his hands into the frail body he held in his arms, and he felt the body start and gasp. The woman opened her eyes. They were blue.
He didn’t expect her to be able to speak. When she did, his heart almost stopped, but with awe, not with fear.
“Who are you?” Her voice was soft, with a country lilt. “Where am I?”
“You died,” he said. There was no other way to say it. “I’m so sorry. It must have happened recently, before they had time to take your body away. You’re still dead, really. This isn’t you. This is—I think the books describe it as the last burning ember in a pile of ash. I’ve stirred it to flame again. But the fire’s gone out. What’s your name?”
“I don’t remember.” She said it with wonder. “How can I not remember?”
“I’m sorry,” he said again. “Madame—” (The term might not have been correct, but he wanted to call her something.) “Madame, my friends and I are trying to bring down the prison.”
Her blue eyes drifted upward, where the sounds of battle bled through the ceiling. “The prison…”
“Can you help us? Our spells can’t penetrate the walls. We’re so close. I don’t know what you can do. But if you can—”
He stopped. Her eyes had fallen back to look at him, a flicker of purpose in their depths. Without knowing why, he felt a shiver down his spine.
“Help me to the wall,” she said.
Robespierre bent down beside her and slipped his shoulder under her raised arm. He barely noticed her weight as he stood, and her bones seemed as frail and insubstantial as those of a baby bird. She was very cold, and her body was stiffening with rigor mortis. Yet she walked.
The woman pressed her free hand to the wall; then, as Robespierre moved away at her nod, her other hand as well. She melted against the dank gray stone, and her thin ribs expanded and contracted as she drew a sigh.
“You should go now,” she said. “Thank you.”
It took Robespierre a moment to put the pieces together—the cage and the stone and the sigh. It took him a moment longer to realize what was about to happen now. This wasn’t a lifeless husk, like the thing he and his benefactor had made. This woman was alive again, if only for a short while, with her sense of self intact. Her magic was intact too. The magic that had led her to be imprisoned not merely in the Bastille, but in wood, away from the touch of the walls. He nodded.
“Good luck, Citizen,” he said quietly.
By the time he had closed the doors behind him, the walls had already begun to tremble.
Less than a minute later, there was a surge of green light and a groan like thunder. And then the top of the southernmost tower exploded.
To the crowd outside, it seemed loud enough to rock the world. Screams split the air; Clarkson ducked instinctively from what he expected to be falling rock. But his fears were groundless. There was no falling rock. The top of the Bastille shattered instantly into a fine, dry powder that clouded over the sky but left no debris larger than a pebble. The prison itself shuddered, and some of the walls crumbled and fell.
Stone magic. It was rare; Clarkson had never seen it before, although he’d read about it at Cambridge. There had been no true explosion; the masonry itself had been agitated until the stones had split apart into dust. None of the Bastille guards would have done that, and surely if so powerful a magician were among the hordes storming the castle, they would have acted before this. Which could only mean…
“My God,” somebody said next to Clarkson. “The prisoners are free.”
Clarkson looked at the fortress split open, the dust in the air falling like snow to settle amid the rubble. As he watched, he saw a flag rise from the shattered battlements, waving its three colors triumphantly through the smoke.
Clarkson had spent the last few weeks in a fog of hopelessness. The verdict at the House of Commoners seemed to make clear that nothing would ever change. Now hope burst through. It hurt, after so long, but the pain was sweeter than any pleasure he had ever felt.
Robespierre found Camille by what was left of the walls, as the attackers flooded the city. He was deathly pale, and there were tears on his face; he looked, like Robespierre, dazed and exultant and exhausted in one stroke.
“Oh… oh good,” he said vaguely when he caught sight of Robespierre. His stammer was back, worse than usual. “You came. I—I wasn’t sure…”
“You did it,” Robespierre said. Part of him was just a little jealous that it was Camille, and not him, who had led the crowds. But only a small part. It didn’t matter.
“I should have done it years ago. But it’s done. It’s finally done.” Camille sat down very suddenly on the rubble.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes. No. One of the two. Ow!”
Robespierre had gently taken Camille’s wrist. Under his bracelet, the skin was scorched raw; charred black flesh peeked out from beneath the metal, and blisters bubbled at the edges. “Dear God. Camille…”
Camille curled his arm to his chest protectively. “Don’t,” he said. “It’s all right.”
“It’s not all right. You need to get it seen to,” Robespierre said, as though they were back at school and Camille had scraped a knee. Through his weariness, he felt a surge of guilt that his own ability was so unfettered. “Discreetly, I suppose, so the Templars don’t arrest you, but you won’t be the only one. Honestly, I don’t know how so many of you stood it. The magic that was flying—”
“It was their fault. The Templars. They keep the bracelets too sensitive, so they burn us all the time. It’s meant to be a warning. The truth is, we’ve all got used to it. This wasn’t really too much worse. The burning stopped after a while too. So did the screaming. I didn’t know they ever stopped.”
R
obespierre hadn’t noticed, until that moment, that the bracelets were indeed silent. “Perhaps someone stopped them. The Templars all have the power to silence the spell once an arrest has been made—perhaps one of the Templars wanted to prevent the dissenters being identified. They’re not all on the side of the Aristocracy.” He frowned as a shape against the sky caught his eye. “What’s that?”
Camille gave it a fleeting glance. “It’s a head on a pike. One of the guards’. There are more being waved about. Did you miss it?”
“I must have.” He looked at the ghastly thing; from this distance, he couldn’t see a face, only a hard, round globe on the end of a spike trailing ragged hair. He should have been horrified, he thought, but he felt nothing. It was too divorced from a human body; his senses were too flooded. Perhaps later he’d have nightmares, and not even remember what had caused them. “Did you tell them to do that?”
“Possibly.” Camille laughed a little, breathlessly. “Or someone told me to. I need to sit down.”
“You are sitting down.”
“That’s convenient.” He brushed his hair out of his eyes with a shaking hand. “God. What a day.”
Robespierre looked at the Bastille, lying in dust on the streets as the mob swarmed the courtyard. The early evening light gave it the distant gloss of a landscape painting. His green eyes glinted.
“The first of many,” he said.
It was nearly dawn before Clarkson retired to bed. Already, the deep black of the sky was cooling to blue, and the horizon bore the first signs of the long summer morning. His body was protesting its exhaustion at the strain and excitement of the day, and the mattress at his back felt blissfully soft.
His mind, though, was still whirling, and he knew that he would not be able to settle properly to sleep for some time. Instead, he left the candle by his bed burning, and pulled out some of the documents from his traveling box. Rubbing the heaviness from his eyes, he began to read.
He didn’t know how he came to be walking the streets of Paris. He woke to it so gradually that it was a while before he even thought to wonder: the cobbled street outside his hotel, the cool night air, the shapes of buildings in the darkness. It was a far darker night than the one in which he must have fallen asleep, and the sky hung cloudy and starless overhead. It was deserted, too, and a thick mist shrouded the pavement in front of him. A cold wind was blowing, and with it came the sounds of steel striking and voices crying out and the faint iron scent of blood. Logically, Clarkson supposed he was dreaming, but he had never felt more wide-awake in his life. Besides, the textures and sensations were too real for that. He was beginning to feel chilled, and the uneven ground bit the soles of his feet.
“Thomas Clarkson,” a voice came.
“Yes?” Clarkson replied with a frown. He squinted into the mist but could see nobody. “You have me at a disadvantage. Who are you?”
A laugh came. “I hope you shall not be disadvantaged for long. In fact, I think we can help each other. You came to consult with the abolitionists over here, and you’ve wandered into a full-fledged revolution.”
“Yes,” Clarkson replied. “It’s more than we could have hoped for.”
“You think so?”
“Of course. This is only the start. There are people coming into power here who might be able to do something—really do something. They won’t have to wade through parliamentary sludge for years in vain like us. They don’t even have to wait any longer for their king to grow a spine. They’re bringing about change as we speak; they can bring about this change as well.”
“They can,” the voice agreed. “They won’t.”
“You don’t know that.” Clarkson shook his head, anger flaring momentarily in his breast. “I don’t even know who you are, for God’s sake. How can you know that?”
“I know that the new order here will be sympathetic to your aims, but that they won’t dare destabilize their economy and anger their merchants and sailors for some wretched souls tucked away thousands of miles out of their sight—any more than their king would. I know that of the six men you’ve arranged to speak with, two are paid spies for the French slave merchants. I know you’ve already begun to receive death threats from many less subtle.”
“Begun?” Clarkson said with a snort. “It’s not a recent development, you know. I’ve been receiving death threats for the last three years; they’re just not usually in French. Two years ago I was nearly beaten to death at the docks in Liverpool.”
“And eight months ago William Wilberforce was stabbed outside Westminster Abbey, around the corner from his town house.”
That stopped Clarkson short. “Wilberforce? Do you mean that he was attacked? To prevent the bill from reaching Parliament?”
“Exactly so,” the voice replied. “Did you not suspect it?”
Clarkson shook his head, not entirely in denial. “I suspected something more than he told us. He was too ill too quickly. But…”
“He probably doesn’t know the motive for the attack,” the voice said. “Not for certain. But I do. It was to prevent him speaking out against the slave trade in the House of Commoners.”
“Well, they failed on that count,” Clarkson retorted. “But for all the good it did, they may as well have left poor Wilberforce alone. We all may as well have. The House won’t listen. They never will. The people will; that must be our hope.”
“But they won’t be able to do anything.” Clarkson thought he could almost see the figure the voice was attached to now, through the darkness and the mist. It was a tall figure, about his height, but lightly built. “Even if they want to. They won’t do anything here either. They’ll listen, and they’ll nod, and they’ll agree that what you say is good and just and principled. They’ll say what a shame it is. Some will even say it very loudly and angrily. But they won’t act. People are dying, and suffering worse than death—hundreds of thousands of people. I know they weigh on your soul. Words won’t save them. Somebody, somewhere, must actually do something, and it must be you.”
“Oh, must it?” He said it sarcastically, but it was reflexive sarcasm. Inside, the tide of despair that he had struggled to keep at bay since the House of Commoners had made their ruling was breaking through. It poisoned his blood. “Why must it be?”
“You know it must be,” the voice said. “You’ve known it ever since that day when you stopped halfway between Cambridge and London, your essay in your pack, and realized that if what you had written was true, it was time some person should see these calamities to their end. You knew that it must be you.”
And he had. The moment came to him, as it often did in times of despair, and as always, he clutched at it. It had been only four years ago, but already it was beginning to seem so very far away. His essay on the question of human slavery had just won the Latin Prize at Cambridge, and he had been returning to London, as the voice had said. He had begun the essay as an academic exercise; he had expected to enjoy writing it. He had not expected to be overtaken with grief and horror at what his research was telling him, nor to spend his increasingly sleepless nights racked with nightmares. As he had ridden that day, despite the blue of the sky overhead and the summer’s heat rising from the fields around him, he had been unable to settle. At times he had stopped his horse and dismounted to walk off his uneasiness. Over and over, he had tried to tell himself that what he had written could not be true: the trade could not possibly be so evil as that. By the time he had reached Wades Mill, where he meant to stop, he felt half-desperate.
And then, as the voice had said, it had come to him. Somebody had to do something. It was as though clouds had parted and a difficult and dangerous road had been revealed to him that was nonetheless indisputably going in the right direction. It had been the most important moment of his life.
“What are you?” Clarkson asked. “What do you want from me?”
The figure stepped out of the mist and introduced himself.
PART TWO
REVOLUTIONS
June 1791
Maximilien Robespierre, in his cramped lodgings at the unfashionable end of Paris, was dreaming uneasy dreams.
They started at the Louis-le-Grand. He was seventeen, dwarfed by the magnificence about him. He had been at the school for six years; he would be there another six yet, reading intently, studying fiercely, earning the law degree on the scholarship for which he had already worked so hard. On this day, he stood at the head of five hundred boys at the school gate, speaking aloud the oration that he, of all of them, had been chosen to deliver to the honored visitors. It was raining: a summer rain, hard and vicious and unrelenting. His borrowed clothes were soaked through, and he was chilled to the bone. He spoke on, conquering his chattering teeth and aching back, trying to keep his head and shoulders set proudly. The students had been waiting for hours.
The newly crowned king of France and his wife, Marie Antoinette, sat in their carriage as he welcomed them. They did not get out; he could not tell, through the veil of rain, if they looked at him at all. When he had finished, the carriage rolled away. Robespierre watched, and wondered, with a mixture of annoyance and anticlimax, what he had expected. He had the beginnings of a sore throat, either from the speech or from the weather.
Little Camille—fifteen, precocious, impossible—ran to catch up to him as they filed back inside. His voice, with its familiar stutter, had an underlying sympathy. “Strange behavior from visiting royals.” He flicked his wet fringe out of his eyes. “It’s almost as if the king thought you were there to see him, rather than the other way around.”