Rook(104)

“Do none of you know what is happening outside?” he yelled. He met with blank stares. Then he staggered straight to LeBlanc.

“The Tombs are empty!”



“They are all empty,” said René. They’d found a lamp still lit in a lift, discovered a straight stairway covered in rook feathers, leading downward and leaching stink, and now they were in their first cell tunnel, the doors of the prison holes swinging in the draft, floor awash with drainage and filth. One or two red-tipped feathers floated in the scum.

“Did you ever ask her what it was like?” René said in the silence.

“No,” Spear replied. He had his shirt collar over his nose. “But it changed her, the first time she came out.”

“Yes,” said René. “I would think it would.” But he was smiling, his gaze on the rows of swinging, open doors. “She really is quite a girl. We are looking for cell 522, Hammond. And we should run.”



Sophia ran. The left turn had been a dead end, only a round, chapel-shaped chamber made of bones at the end of it. She passed the pyramid of skulls and took the other branch, kicking up a cloud down a similar curving path that also ended in a round chamber. But this time there was a kind of stone pedestal in the center, a waist-high table with a surface hollowed out like a bowl. And at the base of the pedestal, someone lay chest down in the dust.

“Tom!” Sophia said. “Tom!” she screamed.

But Tom Bellamy did not lift his head.



LeBlanc did not raise his head until he was finished vomiting onto the floor of the landover. He gathered up his robes and slid to the other side of the seat, smoothing his hair as well as he could while the landover swayed. Renaud sat silent and shrinking in the opposite corner. The moon was nearing its height behind rolling clouds, and so was LeBlanc’s rage.

“I will secure the prison and the Red Rook,” he said aloud, “and then I will deal with the Hasard family.” He’d left Claude in charge of the gendarmes around the building, not only keeping the rioters out but keeping the Hasards in, leaving the flat under siege. “I will take them to the Razor. One by one.” He clutched the pendant around his neck. “One each day, and Madame and émile shall be the last …”

The landover slowed, and LeBlanc looked out the window. They were passing a whole row of Allemande landovers, going fast in the opposite direction, their window curtains closed. But it was a mob of rioters in masks that were slowing his progress, blocking the way to the Seine Gate with a dead woman held high above their heads. LeBlanc leaned out the window.

“Run them down!” he said. And the landover did, causing a stampede of fleeing people. Shouts and screams overcame the music, the wheels of LeBlanc’s landover bumping over a drunken man who had been sitting on his knees, obliviously playing a flute.



Sophia dropped into the dust beside her brother, chest contracting so hard she thought she might suffocate. She had failed. All this, and she had failed the one person who was counting on her the most. And it was because she had been stupid. So, so stupid. And that had cost Tom his life.

She yanked off the knitted cap and grabbed two handfuls of her pinned hair. Grief for Tom rolled right through her, incapacitating in its strength, too much to be held inside. She let her head fall back and she screamed, a shattering noise that echoed through the stacked bones.



“Did you hear a scream?” René asked, running down the passage. Spear turned his head.

“What?” The noise of the gathering mob was falling through the drains above them. It must be nearly highmoon.

“Like a …” René shook his head. “Perhaps they are already killing people.” He paused, holding up the lantern they’d taken from the lift, peering at a tunnel that veered upward. The numbering of the prison holes in the Tombs had no logic. “I do not think it can be this way,” he said.

Spear leaned over, hands on legs to catch his breath. “And why do you think it can’t be that way?”

“Because she will have had it put somewhere deep, and in the center, to bring it all down.”

Spear hesitated, but only for a moment. Then he nodded, and they both began to splash and sprint down the lower corridor.

“At least we know one thing, Hammond,” René said, holding up the lantern to look at the numbers on the empty prison holes. “Sophia Bellamy is not in this prison.”



It was supposed to be her, Sophia thought, letting her scream fade. She should have been shackled in this prison, not Tom. She put a hand on Tom’s shoulder and hair, and then leapt back as if she’d been burned, nearly screaming once more. A muscle beneath her fingers had twitched.

Tom raised his head just enough to turn it to the other side, blinking in the lantern light that was too bright for him. “Blimey, Sophie,” he said, voice rasping. “Why do you have to go and wake a person up that way?”



Spear held up the lantern, trying to see the faint numbers in the light. They had hit a row of cells in the five hundreds. A few more steps, and he threw open the door to prison hole 522. This cell was a bit higher than the others, relatively dry, and there were stacks of barrels marked pain plat everywhere among the sacks and filth.

“Where would she have put it?” Spear panted. The moon had to be sailing almost directly overhead.