Rook(15)

“Mrs. Rathbone mentioned something about a few unexpected duties that had come her way,” Spear said. “Five of them, I think.” He grinned, a thing of beauty and symmetry in the firelight. “And she mentioned old Mr. Lostchild. You did hear that he was no longer with us?”

“Yes, and I’m sorry for it,” Sophia replied. Tom had assured her that Mr. Lostchild’s death appeared to be from natural causes; he’d been very old. But the fact that she’d said his name to LeBlanc three days beforehand did not sit well with her. “Such a nice man,” she continued. “Always a cookie to spare when we were children. But I had hoped Mrs. Rathbone might come. She was telling me the oddest story at the Banns, about how the Bonnards had escaped prison on the very night of their execution. Was there anything about it in the newspaper, Tom?”

“I’m not certain.” Tom was frowning now.

Spear leaned his large frame back into the chair, his white shirt crisp and unblemished. “I saw something about it. They say it was the Red Rook. Isn’t that what they call him?” This last had been to Tom, but Tom did not respond.

Sophia said, “Yes, I’ve heard of him. He’s done things like this before, hasn’t he, Spear?”

“I believe so. The Parisians seem to think he’s some kind of ghost.”

“They say he is a saint sent by God,” said René unexpectedly. “Or at least those who do not believe that Allemande is God say it.”

Sophia blinked once before she said, “Mrs. Rathbone said he was the talk of the Sunken City. If he’s not a ghost or a saint, then who do you think he could be, Tom?”

“Whoever he is,” Tom replied, eyes on his book and his words measured, “I think he is getting too bold.”

Spear winked at her conspiratorially, but Sophia looked down at the board, supposedly to move her rook, really to absorb the shame brought on by the remonstrance she’d heard in her brother’s voice. It was one thing to give in to temper in the sitting room after dinner; it was another thing entirely to disappoint Tom. St. Just whined, stretched his back, and exchanged Sophia’s slippers for René’s buckled shoes. What a little traitor.

“Do you believe that?” René asked. Sophia’s eyes darted up, but he was speaking to Tom. “Do you believe Le Corbeau Rouge grows too bold? Do you think he will be caught if he tries his tricks again?”

Tom lowered his book, his brown eyes regarding René with interest. “I’m sure I don’t know. But if Allemande would stop murdering his own people, then I suppose he wouldn’t have to.”

“You are against the revolution, then?” René said, moving a chess piece with barely a glance. “You believe the rich have the right to fund technology and build their own machines?”


Sophia met Spear’s eyes, frowning a little. LeBlanc had asked her something very similar in the lane, whether or not she was a technologist. Tom folded his hands across the book in his lap.

“I’m not against the building of machines, Hasard, if that’s what you’re asking. Spain has broken the Anti-Technology Pact, as has China, and the Finnish Confederate. The loss of trade with those countries is crippling the Commonwealth. But I suppose that whatever your city does about technology is not really any of my business.”

“But you are a student of the Time Before,” René countered. Sophia looked up sharply from her queen. René’s voice had lost just a bit of its Parisian sophistication. “Do you not believe that machines made the people weak, that the Great Death, as you call it, came about because the Ancients were dependent on technology, and did not know how to survive when they lost it? That making heat and light, traveling, fighting, that these things were impossible for them, because of their dependence?”

Tom tilted his chin. “There is some truth in that, though I could argue that the wealthy of both our cultures are becoming weak and idle without any machines at all. But I believe the Great Death was caused by shifts in our planet just as much as technological dependence. Did you know that in the Time Before, north was what we would now call northwest? That has been proven with archaeological finds. At the university in Manchester they teach that when the magnetic poles of the earth shifted, the protective layer around the earth was damaged, allowing the radiation of the sun to destroy the technology that the Ancients depended on. What I think, though, is that this same solar radiation caused the first wave of the Great Death. Sickness killed the people first, technological dependence second, that’s what I believe.

“But that was more than eight hundred years ago, and the Anti-Technology Pact our two countries signed has far outlived its time. I think it more than possible to use machines without making the mistakes of our ancestors. That we could build a clock or a mill or play a piano without losing our ability to survive without them.”

René leaned forward and spoke, still in the lower, less Parisian voice. “And the fact that your Parliament has taken the license for the printing press, does this affect your opinion?”

“The entire South Commonwealth would be better off if the Bellamys still had the license to print. We were putting books in every chapel and school. Instead Parliament reserves that power for themselves, controlling everything we read and driving one more industry to the undermarkets.”

Sophia knew her brother thought Parliament was actually hoarding technology, using a much larger, more complicated printing press than was allowed by law. They were producing too many newspapers, and too quickly.