Rook(2)

“Go!” he bellowed. The three gendarmes in the doorway wore matching stares. “Seal the doors, you fools! Quick!”


They ran. The Razor thumped and the mob in the prison yard chanted again for the Bonnards. Fear seeped into Gerard’s chest, like the blood traveling down the scaffold, pooling in the cracks of the paving stones. There would be no promotion, and LeBlanc was not going to be impressed. LeBlanc was going to have his job. Or an ear. Or maybe his head.

Gerard took three steps to run for the messengers, to have the tunnels and the muddy streets of the Lower City searched, the gates blocked, and the roads watched. But his boot brushed a bit of color, something alien in a world of stench and rot and stone. He bent down. A single black feather lay in the straw, its tip a brilliant red.

And then there was an explosion in the prison yard.



Sophia hunched down in the seat of the haularound, the holy man’s hood obscuring her face, and handed a stack of papers to the gendarme in charge of the gates. The horses’ sides were heaving, their flanks dark with sweat. She held the reins loose in her hands. Behind her was the steep, zigzagged road cut into a leaning cliff face, the only way up and out of the chasm that was the center of the Sunken City. Behind the gendarme rose the gates, part of the miles of barrier fence running along the edge of the cliff tops, encircling the enormous hole, keeping the tall, stone-carved buildings of the Upper City safely away from the mud and shanties of the Lower City far below them. There were explosions somewhere down there, beneath the reek and fog, bright flashes of color and short, sharp pops—like the bedtime myths mothers told of guns. Sophia took no notice of them, and neither did the gendarme in charge of the gates. He was drunk. He tossed back the papers with barely a glance.

“This delivery will be searched,” he slurred, beckoning to the other guards.

Sophia glanced behind her, putting a hand on the small lump that had squirmed once beneath the robes. Thirteen large sacks, bulky and tied with string, lay in the open bed of the haularound.

“Is it necessary?” she asked in Parisian. She made her voice raspy, full of stones. “I need to be on my way before nethermoon.”

But two gendarmes were already climbing over the wooden rails and into the haularound, swords glinting in the light of a bonfire. Before Sophia could protest further, one of them raised his arms above his head and thrust his sword straight down into the nearest sack, piercing the thing inside it with an audible snick.

Sophia turned away, smoothing the voluminous black robes while the gendarme grunted, twisting, trying to pull the blade back out again. The other guard stabbed sacks with abandon, ripping at the coarse cloth. When they had finished their search thirteen sacks lay in shreds, and the bed of the haularound had become a sea of rolling potatoes.

The more sober guards were at the cliff’s edge now, pointing down into the fuming hole, the people of the Upper City doing the same from their balconies, dark figures many stories high, calling to one another across the air bridges. The iron gates swung open. Down in the chasm, a fire bell tolled.

“Long may you rise above the city,” Sophia said in the voice of the holy man, smiling at the swaying gendarme as the haularound rattled through the gates.



LeBlanc leaned back in his chair, a slow smile curling the corners of his mouth. Gerard had not screamed. LeBlanc was impressed.

He gave the man a moment, in case he should retch, but Gerard merely panted, leaning over the puddle of blood on the table. The end of Gerard’s forefinger now lay several inches from the rest of his hand. Two of the gendarmes released their tight grip on his arms while the third, a man with a wispy brown mustache, thrust a bloody knife back into his belt. LeBlanc twirled a black-red feather between a finger and thumb, his voice soft, almost pleasant.

“Do you know rooks, Gerard? Survivors of the Time Before, a symbol of those who have lived and overcome. The divine spirit who took the form of a rook during the Great Death, leading the sick and dying to the safety of the hidden catacombs beneath the city. The rook that became a streak of light, flying across the night sky to light their way. Surely you were told that story as a child? We all were. But do you know the true story, Gerard? That the light was only what was called a satellite, a machine of the Ancients, burning and falling to its ruin near the entrance of the catacombs, the emblem of a bird still visible on the metal of the wreckage. Fate struck down the satellite, Gerard, so that what would be would be, to show her strength as a Goddess, and in so doing she showed her mastery over the weakness of technology. Those with wits enough to use the Luck that Fate sent found their way to the underground and survived. That is how the world works. But the people now, Gerard, they think only of the myth. Of the benevolent, saintly rook leading them from death into life.”

LeBlanc tsked, his eyes on the red-tipped feather. “Forty-eight we have lost to this thief, this ‘Red Rook.’ Forty-eight prisoners who rejected our revolution, refused the oath of Allemande, and are subverting his justice. And now the Red Rook makes fools of us again, this time with fire and noise. The people in the streets are talking of magic, and the divine power of the saint. But revolution replaced the holy man as well as the government, Gerard. Allemande is in charge now. The Goddess Fate has decreed it.”


LeBlanc discarded the feather and stood, sighing as he went to stand before a tall stone window. The nethermoon lit the odd streak of gray running pale through his hair, and beamed light down every story of the white stone building, all the way to the cliff edge, through its fencing, and straight across the flat expanse of fog stretching over the massive chasm that was the Lower City. The spreading fog looked almost like the land that must have once been there, when the city was Paris and on one level, before the streets collapsed and sank into the tunnels and quarried caverns beneath it. Now lamps and candles twinkled yellow from Upper City buildings on the encircling cliffs, some too distant to be seen, while beneath the cloud bank one place pulsed with intermittent splashes of lurid green. The Red Rook’s fire, still exploding in the Lower City. It mirrored the green of the north lights, swirling in multicolored swaths around the stars and moon. LeBlanc turned on his heel.