by H. G. Parry
Robespierre had to swallow before he could speak. “Camille.”
The crowd had gone so unnaturally quiet that his whisper carried. Camille was staring at the undead, his own face pale as death, but he shook himself at the sound of his own name. He raised his hand.
“I bind you to the service of France.” Where his cuff pulled away from his wrist, Robespierre saw the puckered scar left by his old bracelet. “From now on, you will obey any order given to you by the government of the French Republic of Magicians.”
The undead stood quiet. There was no sign that it had heard, or that it had not.
Camille nodded at Robespierre. Robespierre cleared his throat, steeled himself, and spoke.
“Step down.” He could hear the strain in his own voice, but he was satisfied others would not. “Stand aside and await further orders.”
There was one heart-stopping moment, between the words reaching the creature and its obedience, when Robespierre thought it was not going to obey at all. It seemed too ghastly to even hear the words of someone like him. Yet it did obey. It turned, stepped down from the scaffolding, and stood beside the guillotine. The crowds drew away, even those who were nowhere near it at all.
The next prisoner was brought forward. It was easier the second time.
Afterward, he collapsed back in his room. He felt desperately weak, not so much drained as gutted. Magic and energy had departed and left nothing inside him, not even his heart. The world around him was cold and dark and full of shadows.
Charlotte, for once, won the tussle over who would take care of him. She met him and Camille in the Duplays’ courtyard and took Robespierre’s arm protectively before Madame Duplay could.
“It’s our bloodline,” she said, and Madame Duplay nodded. Perhaps, Robespierre thought dully, she would no longer be so eager for his blood to marry into the family. That would hurt, when he had time to feel it, if it were true.
The Duplays hovered anxiously at the bottom of the stairs while Charlotte helped him to his bed. He lay shivering; across the room, he heard Camille’s quick tread pace the floorboards.
“My God,” his friend said. His stammer was stronger than Robespierre had heard it in a long time. “What did we just do?”
Robespierre forced himself upright. “What do you mean, what did we do? We destroyed France’s enemies, and we made her stronger.” He paused. “When your shadow mingled with my magic, did you feel anything?”
“Of course I did. Everything. I was inside your head for a moment. Just in glimpses. And then I was inside that corpse. Part of me still is, even though I’ve given control over to the Convention.”
“You mean the shadow is. Your magic is.”
“It’s not that simple. You’re a magician too; you know it isn’t. Magic both is and isn’t part of you—that shadow is both something pulled from the ether and a fragment of my soul. I can feel it like a ghost limb. That was dark magic.”
“You knew that before you did it. I told you it was.”
“I know. I didn’t really believe in dark magic, I suppose—I thought it was something the Knights Templar made up, because they were fools. They are fools, but it wasn’t. I’m not blaming you for it; I’m not even saying it’s wrong. But I’ve summoned shadows before, Maximilien—I’ve never felt them contort like that.”
There was nothing he could say to that. He understood too well what he meant. His own necromancy trembled inside him as though it were hurt. “Seven undead soldiers,” he said instead. “It’s a start. Soon it will number in the thousands.”
“Can you manage that? I’m not sure I can. And you look half-dead.”
The choice of phrase made him want to laugh. He conquered it, knowing that if he started, he would never stop. “You won’t have to do every one. There are other shadowmancers, after all. And me—it will get easier all the time. With practice.”
“Practice.” Camille ran a hand through his curls. “I’m not squeamish about violence, Maxime. You know I’m not. I could have shot those traitors myself, and not lost a moment’s sleep—unless I lost it out celebrating their deaths. But this—I’ve never seen anything like this.”
“Of course you have. Under the old regime, you saw men hung from ropes, gutted alive, and torn apart by draft horses. You saw rape, murder, and corruption on a daily basis. You saw people thrown into prison without trial, never to see the light of day. You saw children dead in the street. You called for that violence to be revisited on our oppressors.”
“I did,” he said. “And I meant it. I suppose—I never saw anything like this from you.”
He couldn’t argue with that either. Every discussion he had ever had with Camille about the barbarity of capital punishment had already argued against him. He had quoted scores of philosophers and thinkers in those days. Now he could only quote himself. “Terror is nothing more than speedy, severe, and inflexible justice.”
“Perhaps.” Camille drew a deep breath and managed to laugh a little as he released it. “Look at me. I’m actually trembling. I must be getting old. Danton will be downstairs by now. Shall I go fetch him?”
Robespierre nodded. “Please. We all need to talk.”
When Camille closed the door, Robespierre gritted his teeth and with a surge of effort pulled himself to his feet. He remembered the day the Girondins fell, when Camille had stretched out his hand and warmed him through with the flicker of his magic. His friend had no strength left to share this time.
Charlotte watched him. She must have noticed his condition, but she said nothing. “What did it feel like to you?” she asked instead. “To bring them to life?”
“It felt necessary.” It was a nonanswer, and they both knew it. “We’ve come too far to go back now.”
Robespierre ran a hand across his eyes. At the edges of his vision, shadows were dancing. He couldn’t explain it. Perhaps he was imagining them; perhaps, as he suspected, a fragment of the shadow he had taken inside himself hadn’t left. He felt more than empty. He felt haunted.
“Do you believe in what we’re doing?” he asked Charlotte.
Charlotte had been short enough with him in the last few weeks. He knew she resented his distance from her since the Duplays had taken him in, and he, swept up in the tides of private and public wars, had not been able to make it up to her. But in that moment, he reached out to her, pleading, and as always, she could not resist.
“You’re my brother,” Charlotte said. “I’ve known you all my life. You frustrate the life out of me, but I’ve never seen you do a cruel deed. If you say this horror is needed, then it’s needed.”
He nodded. “Thank you.”
She kissed his forehead, as she had not done since they were children, and smoothed back his hair. If it cost her anything to do it, after what she had seen, she gave no sign. “I’ll get you another blanket. You’re still cold.”
It was only after she left that he let himself cry, and then not very much.
The skies hung cloudy above London that night. Back at Old Palace Yard for the opening of Parliament the following day, Wilberforce had for once managed to get to bed before midnight, but his sleep had not been kind. Slave ships and shadows had twisted through his dreams. When a servant came to rouse him to tell him that the prime minister was downstairs, he was more relieved to be woken than not.
“Do you just enjoy the prospect of waking me up if something occurs to you in the middle of the night?” he asked Pitt by way of greeting.
“Well, you enjoy the prospect of waking me up if something occurs to you in the middle of the morning,” Pitt said. “It’s all relative. I really am sorry to disturb you.”
“It’s really no matter.” He yawned and rubbed his eyes. “Just please tell me there isn’t another undead in Westminster Abbey. Or the Tower of London, or Kew Gardens, or any other major landmark.”
Pitt laughed, but briefly, as if out of breath. “Not exactly. You might remember we managed to smuggle a daemon-stone into Paris?”
“I don’t think I was supposed to know about it, but yes. I remember.”
“We have two there now. The Downing Street daemon-stone just received a message from one of them. It was humming loudly enough that it woke me two doors away. This evening, Robespierre and Camille Desmoulins animated an undead in front of a crowd in the Place de la Révolution.”
It took a few moments for this to penetrate his sleepiness. Then he was wide-awake. “An undead. Like the one from Westminster Abbey?”
“Exactly like.”
Desmoulins summoned shadows—that was well known. “Robespierre is a necromancer.”
“A necromancer who knows the method for raising the undead,” Pitt said. “The one we’ve been trying to find since that night in Westminster Abbey. We’ve found him. And he happens to be the head of the French Republic of Magicians.”
France
The Reign of Terror
France needed corpses. Many of them, strong ones, and quickly. The people were happy to oblige.
Marie Antoinette came first, though her tortured body was really too frail to be of any use. It was a ritual sacrifice, a way of cementing the new world order with the death of yet another royal. Her hair had turned to white, and her soft face had hollowed and aged during her long imprisonment. She ascended the steps to the scaffold with an air of buoyancy, even relief, and stepped on the foot of her executioner on the way.
“I’m sorry,” she said to him, the last words she would ever speak. “I didn’t mean to do it.”
The twenty-two Girondins who had been detained and arrested since June were killed in October. The trial dragged on until Robespierre cut it short with the proposal that all subsequent trials would last no more than three days; after that, if the Committee felt they had enough to convict, they would do so without waiting for evidence. A trial of conscience, it was called, and it became the standard for the Republic. It made things quicker, and less dependent on fact.
“Anyone who trembles,” Robespierre said, “is guilty.”
Most of the so-called evidence given in the courtroom came from Camille’s publications; in particular, the vicious satire of Brissot, who had once insulted Camille in public and been justly punished in print. The article had been a mixture of half-truths, clever allusions, and cruel lies, but it had been very funny. Brissot had been one of the witnesses at Camille’s wedding.
Camille himself was in the courtroom as his words were read aloud and brought to life in front of him, like an author at opening night of a grotesque play. Those near him watched him turn paler and paler. When at last the sentence was read and the twenty-two Girondins sentenced to death, he covered his face with his hands.
“Oh my God,” he whispered. “I killed them. I actually killed them.”
“Are you all right?” asked a man sitting near him.
He shook his head, in one quick movement. He was swaying. “I need to get out. I can’t breathe.”
There was no way out. Too great a crush of people had come to see the last of the moderates fall; they were pushing, jostling to get closer, and Camille was too close to the barricades. He fell to the floor in a dead faint.
Not many noticed him. They were distracted by the greater drama in the dock. Charles Valazé, one of the convicted, had smuggled a knife into the court. Upon hearing the verdict, he had stabbed himself in the heart. He had no desire to be an undead.
There were too many magicians among those arrested. The Bastille was the only building with cells charmed to dampen magic, and it had been destroyed. And so bracelets were brought back, for those the Republic imprisoned. The spells on them burned hotter than they had even under the old regime: the first prisoner to test its boundaries, a young laborer suspected of giving shelter to Girondin sympathizers, fell into a fit from the pain and never woke up. They guillotined his limp body, and a shadow entered it.
Madame Roland was executed a few days after her friends. Her husband had escaped to the country, but after learning of her death would kill himself in a ditch outside Rouen. She met her death proudly, as so many did. Turning to face the statue of Liberty that presided over the executions, she declared “Liberty, what crimes are committed in your name!” before placing her head beneath the blade.
Dunkirk was a fortified seaport on the coast of France, and that autumn it was under siege. British troops had held the beach for weeks, under the command of the Duke of York and supported by Austrian, Hanoverian, and Hesse-Kassel troops. The coast was dotted with thirty-five thousand men, all ready to take possession of the town. When the British had first landed, the French had fled. It had seemed that their victory would be easy.
Magic had as yet done France little good in the heat of a battlefield, but they found many uses for it in causing discomfort to the Allies. Four days ago, water-mages had flooded the trenches across the dunes, leaving the Allied soldiers knee-high in water ever since. The weather-mages kept them stewing in a miserable localized fog of rain and heat that mingled sweat and water on the skin. Already, half the men were shivering with what they had termed Dunkirk fever. The rest were plagued with mosquitoes, lice, rashes, and boils; their food rotted, and so did their teeth. At least the protective charms they had placed along the lines stopped fire magic from ripping through the trenches and gutting them in one stroke. It was difficult to be too grateful to the English ministers for these charms, though. The ship that had brought them was supposed to bring heavy siege guns and reinforcements; it brought none of the former, and too few of the latter. Because of this, the troops struggled to hold their ground, and the town remained in French hands.
This, by the way, was Dundas’s fault, and it was Pitt’s. It was also Pitt’s fault that the troops were on the beach at all, when he had been advised by other field officers that they would be better spent reinforcing the main invasion of France through Valenciennes. He was still inexperienced in war, and too used to achieving everything he wanted. In his defense, he was doing the best he knew how. In this case, his best was not enough, and that was his responsibility to bear.
In the early hours of a September morning, after an uneasy lull in the fighting, the British troops sighted movement on the horizon. Too small to be a battalion advancing, too many to be a single scout, too far in the distance as yet for rifles to pick off. Superior officers were woken quickly; the men were instructed in whispers to arm themselves and wait. Tense, poised, aching, cold, they waited.
A line of fourteen soldiers advanced over the dunes. They looked like men, from a distance: ordinary men, of different shapes and sizes, wearing French uniforms and carrying rifles. As they came closer, the gray light glinted on their chests, and those in front could see they were each wearing an iron breastplate, of the kind knights had worn on much older battlefields. The British soldiers with a strain of metalmancy felt the tug of their magic; the one or two who knew anything about their own Inheritances guessed that the breastplates had been fused shut by magic and charmed to repel all but the strongest assault. It would take a very powerful metalmancer to rip them apart. And yet the rest of their uniform was standard, open, vulnerable to attack. There was nothing to prevent a straight shot to the head, not even a hat.
As the soldiers drew nearer, the reason for this became apparent. They had no heads. Above their collars, black smoke swirled in an ever-shifting globe: the faces of shadows, which looked without eyes at the British troops. They wore the human corpse as a ghastly suit.
Word of France’s army of the dead had not reached the British troops at Dunkirk. They had no idea what they were seeing. Some had read enough history to make the connection, or been told enough stories of the Vampire Wars; most had not. But every last one of them felt a rush of pure horror.
The order came to fire; many rifles were already cracking. The shots struck the advancing undead: legs, arms, insubstantial heads, armored breastplates. The undead twitched at the impact, over and over. They did not slow. Human hands gripped guns and swords, human feet marched on the sands
, but they were animated by pure shadow. They could not feel pain, and they could not be stopped—except, of course, by a wound through the heart, and their hearts were locked away.
They entered the trenches a few minutes later. There was more rifle fire then, and swords flashing, and a good deal of screaming.
“Really, Robespierre,” his benefactor said. “Is this so very terrible?”
Clapham
Autumn 1793
At Clapham Common, the sun was shining, albeit through a wall of iron-gray clouds. It gave the grounds a cool, watercolor tranquility that was completely at odds with its occupants. In the years since Wilberforce had come to live there, the area had grown from a quiet little patch of greenery not far from London to what resembled the world’s friendliest, busiest, highest-achieving lunatic asylum. The rapidly growing collection of evangelicals and social reformers flitted in and out of each other’s houses without bothering to knock, borrowing books, trying on ideas, and sharing knowledge. Wilberforce, he freely admitted, was the worst offender of all: he not only was in other people’s houses with the best of them, but found it even harder than most to get out of them once he was there. Conversations tended to run away with him; or rather, he ran away with them, and took everyone else with him.
When Pitt came to call, he was instantly absorbed into the lively discussion taking place in the library of Thornton’s house, Battersea Rise. Wilberforce tried to extricate him, knowing what he had really come to talk about, but was singularly ill suited to the task. He found what was being said too interesting.
“But, if I may ask, where are the magicians to come from if Britain does break the Concord?” Hannah More pressed him. “Only a relatively small portion of the army is braceleted. Would the government begin mass conscription of magicians, as France has?”