Rook(101)

The execution team had arrived to prepare the Razor, torches sputtering to life all around a scaffold that had become a shrine. Ribbons and black and white flowers, like in the cemeteries, trailed along the bloodstained wood. There was a stone altar set up on the scaffold now, too, the sort you saw in Upper City chapels, and above it hung a gigantic flat wheel, painted half black, half white, made to be seen from the farthest reaches of the prison yard. They were going to spin it, Claude supposed, so Fate could choose the two out of three. That should be interesting. And was further proof that no gendarmes should have been dismissed from the Tombs that night. How would they get so many to the scaffold with only Gerard? It made the situation obvious. Gerard must be in league with the Red Rook.

Claude stood and stepped deeper into the dark outside the torchlight. A few dozen people had gathered since he’d arrived, sitting on cloaks and bits of blanket, saving their places for the best view of blood. He thought of Gerard’s finger beneath his knife, and allowed the man a grudging bit of respect. He’d probably already let the Red Rook out of the prison, and if the Rook had Gerard, then there would be others.

He moved down an alley, circling the warehouse Gerard had entered, sidling up to the muddy lane that ran along the other side of the building. And there, lined up in a row, were Allemande’s landovers, many of them, lamps lit, taking the people of the Lower City up to La Toussaint. He watched groups of twos and threes being shuttled into one of the landovers, the window curtains drawn, another pulling up to take its place when it was full. If there was one thing Claude knew, it was the look of prison dirt when he saw it.

He turned and jogged back down the alley, then broke into a run. LeBlanc was at a party tonight, he’d seen something about it in the Observateur. One of his cousins, it had said, was marrying the sister of the Red Rook. A man named René Hasard. And the newspaper had given the address.



René opened the door from the back stairs of his building onto the alley just beyond the boulevard, Spear behind him. Broken glass crunched beneath their feet. The door was metal, which was good, because every window in the back alley was broken—not just the glass but the wooden panes as well, beaten and splintered inward. The stable doors had been hacked down, the horses gone, and there was shouting in the distance, not very far away. They heard Benoit drop the heavy iron bar into place behind them, the pavement sparkling in the moonlight.

“Follow me,” René said. He stole down the alley, Spear behind him, away from the clamor. But the noise increased again before the next street, more shouting and destruction, but this time with music. They stopped short, in the dark of a door beneath an overhanging balcony.

A mass of people and torches was moving past, shouting, singing and laughing, breaking whatever was breakable, having a small parade all their own to the whistle of a flute. They sounded drunk. Some wore finery that had obviously come from a looted home or shop; all wore the masks of the Goddess. And they had a woman, also in a mask, her body held up high by many hands.

Spear made a move toward the street, but René put out an arm. The woman’s masked head was on a pole, separate from her body. They stayed motionless in the shadows until the music faded and the little mob had gone by, leaving splinters and blood and a trail of black and white flower petals in their wake. René quickly tucked his hair beneath the plain black jacket he’d changed into, buttoning it to the top and flipping up the collar to hide its length. Spear did the same.

“Wait here,” Spear said suddenly, turning back down the alley.

“Where are you going?”

“Masks,” he hissed over his shoulder.

René waited against the alley wall, his hand on his sword hilt. “Watch him,” Benoit had said. It had been good advice, though hardly needed. René glanced up again at the high-hanging moon, thinking of standing in this alley as a child, watching the jugglers and the fire-eaters go by for La Toussaint. Now all he could hear were sounds of violence, and not very far away. What had happened to the world? And what had happened to Hammond? There was no time. He nearly drew his sword as a figure came running down the alley, but it did not take long for the figure to become Hammond, two masks and one club in his hands.

René said, “Should I have the bodies removed?”

“I left them breathing.” Spear thrust a mask at him. René took it, then held out his hand for the club. Spear just smiled. “You must be having a laugh.”


René ran a sleeve across his forehead before sliding the mask onto his face, watching through narrow eyeholes as Spear looked left and then right, slipping down the dark street toward the gates. No, he was not laughing. And he was not allowing Hammond behind him with that club, either.

They followed the slant of the streets downward, crossing a bridge over the Seine as it rushed to its waterfall, and in only a few blocks they arrived at the fencing around the cliff edge. The tall iron gate was open, the space between thronged and loud with landovers and people traveling in both directions. A gilded chair seemed to float by over the heads of the crowd, an inlaid table following it, part of an assembly line of looted goods that were being passed hand to hand down the road into the Lower City.

Any gendarmes at the gate seemed to have long since fled, except for one, a grim young man with a determined face and a tiny mustache, pulling on his uniform jacket and running for all he was worth to the Upper City. René looked to Spear, and Spear’s mask nodded. They put their heads down and melded with the uncontrollable crowd, going down into the chasm of the Lower City under the light of a rising highmoon.