Rook(109)

LeBlanc smiled. “There are many kinds of pain, Miss Bellamy.” Then his hand struck like a snake and Tom gasped. The picklock that had been in Renaud’s leg was now in Tom’s. Tom put a hand on Sophia’s arm, squeezing, not with pain but in warning. Allemande craned his neck as she leaned forward, getting even closer to LeBlanc’s face.

“That was unintelligent,” she hissed. “Because now I am going to tell Allemande that his prison is empty. In fact, I wrote a letter yesterday telling him so. It was my fate to rescue all the prisoners, so therefore I’d already done it, don’t you see? It should have arrived with the night post. So what to do, Albert? Keep him from his desk, or get there before him?”

She watched many things flit through LeBlanc’s manic eyes. Murder, loathing, the desire to hurt her, the desire not to lose his life.

“He’s waiting,” she whispered.

LeBlanc got to his feet, oozing blood everywhere. “One moment more, Premier,” he said loudly, “and I will personally escort you to my rooms, where we can discuss all that you wish, and make you comfortable until the proper time.”

Allemande watched as LeBlanc hurried around the pedestal. Sophia tensed at LeBlanc’s presence behind her, ready for a picklock or something else to pierce a part of her body she did not immediately need, but LeBlanc only ran his hands over the stone basin above her head, humming. She glanced sideways. Tom was grimacing, eyes shut, hand still squeezing her arm.

LeBlanc’s humming changed to a murmur as he chanted his question to Fate. Sophia caught the words “Bellamy” and “die,” followed by the clank of a casting piece on the stone bottom of the pedestal.

“Dawn,” LeBlanc said.



“Dawn,” said René. “The Tombs will explode at dawn.”

Spear turned the wheel of the firelighter and pulled out the knob.



“They will die at dawn,” said LeBlanc. “The Goddess has spoken.”


“I appreciate a deity with a proper sense of my schedule,” Allemande commented. “We won’t even have to change the bells. Now, if you are ready, Albert? I have some questions I’d like to ask you.”



Cartier slipped unobtrusively through the torchlit crowd. He’d like to have asked directions, but he was hearing sounds that sealed his mouth. Screaming, yelling, and the clash of metal. He turned the last bend in the cliff road and saw a small war at the Seine Gate. Men and women in masks of black and white against others with red paint on their cheeks, a melee of swords, bows, clubs, bricks, and broken bottles. Fate against feathers.

Cartier ducked as someone in a mask went over the cliff edge, down to where the fogs were beginning to roll off the river. He’d never heard such noise, even in the prison yard. But the best thing the red feathers could do for the Rook, Cartier thought, was let him through and show him the fastest way to the flat of René Hasard. He darted forward, fast, avoiding an ax, slid his thin body through the boundary fence, and fled into the Upper City.



“I think we will need another route,” René commented. They were far below the Seine Gate, walking the zigzagged road. They couldn’t see the fighting, but they could hear it. “How are you at climbing?”

Spear paused, hands in pockets, and shrugged. “Not as bad as you’d think.”

René led the way back down the road, through alleys that were empty and quiet, down streets with their lights out, doors barred, until they came to a strip of no-man’s-land along the edge of the Lower City, behind a row of slanting wooden shanties. Bare dirt was sprinkled with blades of grass, and an immense composting rubbish heap was piled to their right, pushed into a mound that was higher than Spear’s head. The stench was unbearable even with the wind blowing in the other direction. Spear looked up at the rising cliff face, glowing in a light now on its way to nethermoon.

“It is an easy climb at first,” René replied. “After that there is rope to the top.”

“When was the last time you checked the rope?”

“It is tested once a week.” René smiled at Spear’s expression. “It is not always convenient to use the Seine Gate. Have you not found it so?”

Spear got a handhold on the rough, tumbled rock at the bottom of the cliff and started up.

“Do you not want me to show you the way?”

“No.” Spear’s long arms and legs had him nearly a third of the way to the rope.

“To your right!” René called. When he saw Spear grab the rope, René took another look around at the bare and empty yards, the fogs tumbling off the river. He started climbing, moving fast on a course he knew almost by feel. If the fog got too thick, he would have to know it by feel, because neither of them would be able to see the cliff face.



Sophia felt for the wound in Tom’s leg that she could not see, pressing her fingers against it in the dark, trying to stop the bleeding. They were alone. The leg beneath her hand was thin, and she could hear the weakness in his voice.

“I’d hoped he was going to forget he’d done it,” Tom was saying, “and leave the … blasted thing in my leg. A picklock would have been dead useful about now.”

“I’m sorry,” Sophia whispered.

“Sorry that I don’t have a picklock in my leg?”