Rook(73)

She must have stiffened, because René said near her ear, “What is wrong?” His voice was even more rough with sleep. She sat up, startling Spear from his reverie.

They were driving through the cemeteries that lay outside the gates of the Sunken City, but she was not seeing what she’d expected. Mémé Annette had told her all about the one day a year the gates opened, how she could leave the Lower City and go to the cemeteries for the last day of La Toussaint, decorating the gravestones with feathers and ribbons and autumn flowers; she saved all year for those flowers. Mémé had even whispered to her once, while tying a La Toussaint ribbon of satiny yellow into the long, wild braids she’d worn as a child, that some people would slip away from the cemeteries and never come back again. The gates would close on them forever. Sophia had made her promise never to do that, and Mémé had said she wouldn’t.

But the last day of La Toussaint had not come, and yet the cemeteries had been decorated. Hundreds upon hundreds of blooms of white and black—were they dyed, or had someone actually grown a black flower?—and swaths of dark and light cloth. Masks with dual faces, one side ecstatic white, the other an anguished black, had been set up on poles among the tombstones, as far as the eye could see, ribbons trailing from beneath them and dangling in the wind, looking horribly like the staked heads the mob sometimes paraded through the Lower City.

“The answers of Fate,” René said. “Yes and no, life and death.” He sat back on the cushion of the landover. “Have either of you noticed that my cousin is a lunatic?”

This actually pulled a faint smile from Spear, which was saying something. But Sophia sat forward, watching the violated cemeteries pass in a rolling black and white sea, grave after grave, mask after empty-eyed mask. There was something ghastly about it, a wrongness beyond the obvious that she couldn’t immediately put her finger on. And then she knew. It was because this stark world LeBlanc was trying to create was a lie; there was a spectrum of color between black and white, and many, many layers of choice between yes and no.

The nethersun was dipping low when Benoit rapped twice on the roof from the driver’s seat, letting them know they were approaching the Saint-Denis Gate. Sophia pinned on her hat, René straightening his cravat and sleeves as the landover rolled to a stop. They should only have to show their papers through the window, but he was preparing to make as much of a commotion as possible. Spear didn’t move, even for his papers. René looked out the window and frowned.

“Benoit is talking with the guards,” he said. “The baggage will be searched, I think.”

Sophia sighed. They had anticipated the possibility. Spear ran a hand over his face, and finally started reaching for his things.

“And here they come,” said René.

A gendarme with an eye patch and the blue and white uniform of the Upper City knocked once on the window and then opened the door. “You will please step …”

But René had already leapt out before the man finished speaking, formally extending his hand. “Please! Step carefully, my love!”

She took his hand. She had a knife in her bodice, just in case, but it was the firelighter that required some particular maneuvering as she made her way down the folding steps. Familiar buildings of carved stone rose seven, eight, and even nine floors high behind the walls of the Sunken City, lamps and candles beginning to twinkle in the windows. But as she raised her eyes to the rooflines, she saw that some of them had new construction on top, metal-lattice towers narrowing like pencils as they pointed to the sky, most only half-finished.

Spear crawled out of the landover—he had as much trouble getting his shoulders through the door as she did her skirt—and Sophia handed her papers to the guard with the eye patch while Spear asked him about the towers on the roofs.

“Lights” was the guard’s terse answer.

Sophia looked up again. The City of Light. She wondered if Allemande thought the lights above would blind everyone to the ugliness going on below.

The gendarme handed back her papers and examined Spear’s. They were their usual false ones, just in case LeBlanc had a mind to make the entry to the Sunken City difficult, but the forgeries were excellent. She was counting on fooling the guards without fooling any reporters that might be present. Not as tricky a business as one might think, given the general intelligence of reporters versus gendarmes, and the Hasard habit of putting money in the right pockets. The guard handed Spear his papers, stepped up into the landover, and began patting down the cushions while another searched the contents of their luggage. René stood over this one, complaining about what the damp air would do to both his fiancée’s health and the starch in his shirts with equal vexation.

Sophia laid a hand on Spear’s arm. Not only were they being very thoroughly searched, their landover was the only one waiting to enter the Sunken City, while a huge line of vehicles stood on the other side of the gates, queuing up for permission to leave. And the guards were sober, alert, two on inspection, three keeping watch on the perimeters. Not the outer perimeter, she saw, but the inner, guarding against a threat from within.

“Spear?” Sophia whispered.

That was all she needed to say. He nodded and strolled over a few feet to speak with one of the gendarmes on watch. René’s argument with the other guard was taking on a more insistent note, some sort of objection to the handling of his fiancée’s underthings. And if there wasn’t a reporter here to recognize him and write that down, Sophia thought, the Monde Observateur had missed a golden opportunity for the gossip page.