Rook(102)

Sophia pushed back the sweaty tendrils of hair that were creeping out from beneath her knitted cap. She wished she could see the moon. She was working fast, pushing the pins inside the lock one by one, already on her second attempt, having guessed wrong on which way the key would have turned. She heard the click, felt the lock give, and jumped up. The back of the lift swung silently toward her, showing another metal door behind it, and another empty rivet for a keyhole.

She bit her lip, knelt down, and started again, quelling impatience. But this time, the lock gave quickly, and the door creaked inward, pulled by a draft. She pushed it open. The lantern shone on stone steps, descending into darkness.

Sophia tucked her picklocks back into place, slid on her gloves, grabbed the lantern, and stepped through the hidden door.



“You should ask … the Goddess if she will find him,” LeBlanc said, frowning down at the coin on his palm. “Because she will … not, and then … you will know …”

Renaud used a handkerchief to wipe the perspiration from his brow.

“More wine?” émile offered.

“No!” said LeBlanc, causing a few heads to turn as his voice carried over the music. “Ask her … the Goddess … if she will find him. Before … highmoon.”

“Of course, Albert,” émile replied. “Goddess, will she find him before highmoon?”

LeBlanc flipped the coin.





Sophia hurried down the stone steps, lantern held high, going lower and lower into the belly of the Sunken City. She was in some sort of tunnel roughly carved from brown stone. Mines, most likely, like all the Tombs, but whether this tunnel was new or Ancient or something in between she couldn’t tell. It was absolutely silent, thick dust gathering on the sides of the steps, though the middles were relatively clear. At least she knew someone had been coming this way.

She could see an open doorway at the bottom of the stairs, not rough like the walls but carved into an arch. Intricate, intersecting lines ran in relief around the stone. She stepped through, held up the light, and her free hand jumped to her mouth, the glove stifling any noise she might have made.

She stood in a kind of curving corridor, walls soaring to heights well beyond what she could see with her light, but the walls were not made of stone or rock; they were made of bones. Stacks and stacks of them in precise, undulating patterns, diamonds of arm bones and femurs crisscrossed in rows, dotted with skulls and surrounded by delicate inlays of fingers. The pattern rose and fell in waves as the walls went on, somehow beautiful and yet so horrible it made something inside her shudder.

She walked forward in a thick brown dust that covered her boots, skirting quickly around a pyramid of skulls in the center of the walkway, trying not to think of the sheer numbers of the dead that surrounded her. There were variations in color, she noticed, the flowing patterns of straight, stacked bone ends on the lower walls more yellowed, and more fragmented. Then these must be older, with the newer stacked on top. Could she actually be looking at the remains of people who had seen the Great Death? She stared into the empty eye sockets of a passing head, wondering if that man or woman had called this city Paris. If they could have really known the kind of technology that made voices travel from the other side of the world, or pictures move. If they had died from the want of those things when they were taken away.

Sophia looked around and realized she was at a crossroads. A pillar soared upward in front of her, lines of skulls twisting round and round so that they tricked the eye. There were three paths she could take. Left, right, or straight.



“Which way, Hasard?”

They were both breathing hard, boots caked with mud, leaning against the back of a tilting wooden shanty. Spear pulled off the mask to dab at his lip, which now matched the split lip Sophia had given to René. The people of the Lower City were rioting, the trail of looted goods coming down the cliff road leaving bodies along the way. And both sets of their clothes were still too fine for anonymity. René looked up. The moon rose defiantly in the night sky, and they were only halfway to the Tombs.

“No more trying to hide,” said René. “Do not use a sword if you can avoid it, but we have to go faster. There is no more time.”



There’s no more time, thought Sophia. None. She’d taken the right turn, which gently curved, came to another crossroads with an identical skull-spiraling pillar, and then, inexplicably, ended up back at the first one. The flowing patterns of the bones were disorienting, and so much alike that it was impossible to tell one place from the other.

She gave up trying to hide. If the place was full of gendarmes, they would just have to come. “Tom!” she called. “Tom?”

Her voice echoed and died in the brown dust, though it gave her a sense of the enormity of the space. A massive cavern empty with darkness and full of death. She cursed softly, drew the sword from her back, and thrust it through the forehead of a skull in the pillar, gouging a wide and gaping hole. Now there was a black, mismatching speck in the twisting pattern. Her place marked, this time she went straight.



“Go straight!” yelled Spear, as René ducked under the random swing of a fist. This was easier said than done in the Blackpot Market, where the mob seemed to have turned on itself. Throngs of people were gathered in guttering torchlight, fighting over the food and riches coming down from the Upper City. And it looked as if the beer had been flowing freely as well. René had acquired his own club, catching a patched gray square of shirt in its middle before the arms that were attached could break a chair over his head.