Rook(111)

A woman far above on an air bridge was calling to another about the sky. He looked up and saw the north lights beginning, but there were also tiny yellow streaks, trails of sparkling fire. Like the chapel walls of his childhood. He wished he could show Sophia. Then he was approaching two wooden doors on the ground floor of a building, relieved to see they had not been broken into or torn down. He put a key to the padlock.

Aunt Francesca’s landover was right where she’d left it, now with his things loaded in. If the horses he’d stolen last night were still there, and if the forged pass for the Saint-Denis Gate he’d kept back still worked, then he would be out of the Sunken City well before dawn. He would find Tom and Sophia at the coast, and Sophia was going to be so happy that he’d reset the firelighter and blown up the prison. Everything would be just as he’d said. They would start over together. And with Hasard gone, she would turn to him. He knew she would.



She would come back to him, René thought. He knew she would. He stood looking up at the tall, narrow shaft of the water lift. He was aching and tired, but he’d gotten one look at the gendarmes around his building and taken to the sewers, then to the cellar and the water lift. René used the hook hanging beside the cistern to snag the rope and pull it toward him. Up onto the edge, and then he was climbing, swinging gently over the pool of water.

He had to get to the coast, catch Sophia before she sailed. He remembered the look on her face, right before she had hit him with LeBlanc’s ring. She was clever, and beautiful, and as hard as burnished bronze. Or at least she pretended to be. Beneath the shiny metal, Sophia Bellamy was very breakable indeed, something Hammond had somehow failed to notice. But more than rage or even pain, what he had seen when she hit him was betrayal. And after she had been so afraid to let herself believe in him. He would have taken a dozen falls not to have seen her looking that way at him.

René climbed the rope faster, glad there was no one at the top to cut it. Would she know she could believe when she saw the ships anchored on the coast? And if Sophia was there, Hammond would be, too, that much was certain. He would make Hammond pay for that trick at the cliffs, make him tell her the truth, at the point of a sword if necessary, and she would believe it. She had to. Because it was.

He paused his climb at the second floor. It was the Espernazos’ flat, and the water-lift door was partway open. René got a toe beneath and pushed. The Espernazos had probably fled the city, anyway. He made his way out of their empty flat and took the lift to the top, the bellman looking at him rather askance, opening the door of his own flat to find chaos. Crates and boxes were all over the floor, his uncles, the staff, and some of the party guests hurriedly packing them. One of the violinists was taking down paintings from the walls. Uncle Andre left a pair of candlesticks on the settee and came hurrying over.

“Where have …” He wrinkled his nose. “René, did you fall off the cliffs again?”

“What is happening? Where is Benoit?”


“Our cousin knows he was drugged and we will be arrested soon, that is what,” Andre said. “We are besieged from below, but LeBlanc has put the greatest idiot of all gendarmes in charge, and the man has forgotten the air bridges. We have all the plastic out and away and plan to do the same for ourselves, but Adèle does not wish to leave anything behind for your cousin to …”

“René!” Madame Hasard called from the window wall. “There you are. What have you done to yourself? This boy came by air bridge. He is asking …” The group around Madame Hasard, including Madame Gagniani—who had set aside her turban—the boy Louis, and the dark-skinned singer, parted to let Cartier push his way through.

“None of them will tell me where Mr. Hammond is,” Cartier said quickly.

“I would guess that he is leaving the city,” René replied.

“Leaving? Are you sure?”

“No. But should you not be gone as well?”

Cartier pressed his lips together. There was several days’ worth of fuzz on his upper one. “I want to talk to you alone, then.”

René looked at his mother and uncles, who did not move, so he pulled Cartier away, to the far end of the room, where the display cabinet stood empty. Though Enzo, he noted, was making sure Cartier was still in sight.

The boy leaned forward. “Swear to me that you mean Miss Bellamy no harm. Because if you do, I’ll come after you myself.”

René did not smile. The boy was dead serious. “I can swear it without fear of my soul, Cartier.”

He took a deep breath. “Right, then. Miss Bellamy didn’t come out of the prison. And neither did her brother.”

“What? That cannot be so.”

“She didn’t come for the last landover. She told me to go if that happened, but I didn’t. Plan B was the haularound with the coffins. But they’re still there, and the Tombs are crawling with gendarmes. There are tunnels under the walls, but you have to get out of the Lower City first …”

René was shaking his head. “No. You are mistaken. I was in the prison with Hammond. We went through every hole. The Tombs are empty. We …”

Then he turned. There had been a sound from their front doors. Not a knock but a hit. He looked around the flat and saw weapons coming out from every side, people taking up positions on either side of the doors, behind furniture and on the gallery. There was another hit, and another. Benoit swiveled on his heel, sword in hand, and caught René’s eye just before the splintering of wood.