Rook(115)

Renaud approached the Saint-Denis Gate. He saw an Allemande courier climbing back onto a horse as he handed his papers to the guard. The guard was unkempt, and a little drunk, but he looked at the pass carefully, as if he was having trouble reading it.

“Step down, Monsieur,” the guard said.

They could search all they wanted, Renaud thought. His mind was on sea foam, and birds, and the clean, free air of the coast. Two more gendarmes approached, but instead of searching him, one took his arms, quickly twisting them back, and the other put a knife to his throat. Renaud’s smile went away.

“Be advised,” read the guard from another document, his speech slurring, “that no official … permissions have been given to pass … any gates … out of the City of Light. Any such pass … passes … shall be considered a forgery, and the … the bearer … subject to immediate … execution.” The guard swayed just a little on his feet. “Sorry, friend,” he said to Renaud. “You ran a little … late.”

Renaud had only a moment to wonder why luck had abandoned him before the knife bit into his throat.



The ropes cut into Sophia’s hands as she and Tom were escorted through the dusty maze and onto the lift. Two young gendarmes, who had been wide-eyed in the bizarre cavern, were half carrying, half dragging Tom. She wondered how long they would live after this. They all crammed into the lift, LeBlanc rang the bell, and then he spent the entire ride examining her face from just a few inches away, as if he could ferret out the source of her abnormalities. She just glared at him.

They stepped out of the lift, this time into the small, lantern-lit lobby of LeBlanc’s office building, where the night guard sat at a desk. She caught a glimpse of a large blue-jacketed officer just disappearing up the stairs before she and Tom were taken stumbling out the door and to the back of a haularound. The bed of the haularound had a railing built like a fence around it, two posts at either end. Men were lighting short torches attached along the edges, the orange flames showing an entire troop of escorting gendarmes, swords and crossbows at the ready. A large sign on the back of the haularound read, LE CORBEAU ROUGE.

LeBlanc smiled, took one of Sophia’s red-tipped feathers, and stuck it securely into her tangled hair, patting her cheek when he was done. Then she was pulled up and into the haularound, her bound hands tied tight to the post. She looked back over her shoulder, where Tom was being tied to the other post, closest to the driver. She hadn’t yet seen him in such strong light. He looked terrible. Gaunt, dirty, bloody, and exhausted. But he smiled at her, even though his lips were cracked, and it made her stand straighter.

“The mob may do as they like,” LeBlanc was instructing their escort, “but they may not remove the prisoners or …”

“Give my brother water,” Sophia said. “Or he might not be able to stand.”

LeBlanc went on. “… or we will remove them to the Tombs. Allow no one to impede your progress through the streets. Only the driver knows the route …”

“And what will Allemande say if he can’t walk to the scaffold?” Sophia shouted.

LeBlanc turned his pale eyes on her, and then he smiled. Something about that smile made Sophia wish she’d never drawn his gaze. “There is no Allemande,” LeBlanc said. He turned back to the gendarmes. “Shoot anyone who attempts to deny the will of Fate.”

The haularound started forward with a jerk.



The lift jerked, and Spear paced inside it, waiting through the long, slow journey down the building and into the cliff. He’d used Renaud’s keys to unlock LeBlanc’s office, finding nothing but the dead, contorted body of Premier Allemande lying on a sofa, then used the same keys to open LeBlanc’s private lift. He was so angry. Angry to be back here. Angry that he’d thought they were safe when they weren’t. Angry that he had blood on his hands. Why had everything in his life gone wrong since he’d heard the name Hasard?

When the lift finally reached bottom, he used the smallest key on the empty rivet hole to open the false back, just the way Renaud had described, unlocked the second false door, snagged the lantern from the lift, and hurried down the dust-thick stone steps into the cavern of bones. He took one moment to stare, and then he yelled, “Sophie! Tom!”

He would unset that firelighter again if he could. But he would get Sophie and Tom first this time. And if the rest of the world exploded, then it exploded.



René looked up at the sagging brick structure that covered the entrance to the Tombs. He didn’t really care if it exploded. He cared for nothing but getting Sophia out. The window he’d climbed through before had been boarded, guards now in front of it. And he could not get in the main door, either, no matter what story he told. No one without black robes and a white streak in his hair was coming in, not without a fight.

But it wasn’t him those gendarmes needed to be worrying about, René thought. There was something moving through the mob, a subtle shift in current after the night’s violence, an increasing hostility to the uniforms of the city. Perhaps his uncles had chosen the wrong disguises. Benoit had assured him again and again that when Sophia and Tom came out through that door, there would be enough gendarmes that weren’t really gendarmes gathered and ready to take them. If Allemande’s control was developing fault lines, would the mob help, or hinder them?