Rook (15 page)

LeBlanc pulled the heavy wooden door of Jennifer Bonnard’s prison hole shut, listening to it echo in the Tombs. An unfamiliar shudder traveled down his limbs. It was unthinkable that this was fear. The girl must be lying; what she had said wasn’t possible. It was inconceivable that he, Albert LeBlanc, could have made such a mistake. And if he had? Surely Fate had not removed the blessing of Luck from him?

He dropped to his knees, disregarding the filth and his pressed suit, and drew a hasty circle with his finger in the sandy, torchlit dirt. From his pocket he removed a coin and a small stoppered vial, then pulled the cork from the vial, hands shaking, and tossed Jennifer Bonnard’s blood across the circle. He held the coin between two clasped hands, bowed his head in supplication, and flipped it high into the air. The coin turned, LeBlanc watched, breathless, and then the coin landed, the bronze relief of Allemande’s profile looking up at him from the blood-spattered dirt. Face. Fate’s answer was yes.

LeBlanc dropped to his elbows in the bloody, dusty grime. Luck was still with him; his mistake was not insurmountable. But he would need to retain the Goddess’s favor. From now on he would be careful. He would inquire often. And he would take Bellamy blood as well, so that such a misstep could never be repeated.

He shuddered again as he stared at the coin. Fate was not a merciful Goddess. But if he moved forward with his plans to honor her, to give her all the Sunken City as her own, with victims and destinies to choose, if he brought the Red Rook to her altar, then surely Fate would not fail to bless him further still.

Perhaps she would even give him Allemande.

S
ophia
set one of her black boots and a knife on the low square table in Spear’s sitting room while Orla settled in front of the fire. Orla was sewing up the gash in Sophia’s vest, the bloodstains washed out, while Sophia worked on sawing off her boot heel. Her boot heel would be a good place to stash something useful, she’d decided. And it would keep her hands busy and mind occupied while Spear went for the post.

Before breakfast, Spear had knocked on her bedroom door, insisting on taking her up the hill behind the house. A short, easy walk, he’d said, too early and foggy for anyone to be about on his land. Orla had given her a scolding for it. She was supposed to be resting and therefore healing. But she’d been so afraid Spear would be angry after their conversation the night before, was so relieved when he’d sought her out, that she’d taken one look at his faultless smile and done as he asked.

And the view had been worth it. The hills were rolling green and autumn orange-brown; treetops still blushed with color, floating in a bed of white mist in the lower glens. She’d smiled, St. Just had leapt about and barked like mad, playing at being a wild fox, and Spear had been very pleased. But now she was alive to things she would have previously missed. Spear had wanted her to see those hills, this new, aware Sophia realized, not because she would enjoy them, or even think them beautiful. It was because he wanted her to love his farm. Because he wanted her to live there. With him.

For always being so assured of her own cleverness, Sophia Bellamy—she was discovering—could be extraordinarily stupid. She had always, always thought of Spear as a brother. He was fearless. Like Tom. And handsome. Like Tom, though in a colder, cut-marble sort of way. He was loyal to her. Like Tom. Her cohort in crime. Like Tom. And she had thought his feelings on the subject of her wedding were the same as Tom’s, too. Indignation, a general wish for her future happiness, the desire for Bellamy House to go on as it had been.

But last night had changed all that. There had been nothing brotherly in the plans Spear had suggested to her. And now she was remembering certain comments dropped here and there by Mrs. Rathbone, their neighbors at the Banns, and even Tom, words she’d taken as silliness and teasing and never thought of since. Evidently she was the only person in the county who hadn’t been looking on Spear Hammond as her right and natural suitor. At least before her engagement. Even René had realized. The whole idea left an uncomfortable, uncertain place in her middle.

She’d tried to think it through all night, pacing the wooden floor, staring up into the spidery shadows around Spear’s ceiling beams. René made her uncertain, too. But for being the same word, “uncertain,” the two feelings couldn’t have been more dissimilar. Nothing about René was remotely brotherly. But by the time the sun rose she’d been able to draw only one conclusion: Neither Spear Hammond nor René Hasard needed to know what she felt about anything. One because it would hurt him, the other because it would give him the power to hurt her. René was much too good at the game, and there was too much at stake to be playing games with anyone. She ran a hand through her hair, pushing through the tangle where she’d felt René’s words moving the curls near her ear in the sanctuary. And he wanted her to think he didn’t lie.

“Is that cut difficult, Mademoiselle?”

Sophia bit her lip, absorbing her start of surprise. René’s tall boots and brown breeches were standing right beside her, and she’d been staring aimlessly at a window too filmed with salt spray to be seen through, her knife halfway through a boot heel.

“That’s not what our Sophia is finding difficult, Mr. Hasard,” said Orla, pulling a long thread.

“I’m being punished,” Sophia said quickly, in case the all-seeing Orla had a mind to elaborate. “For walking too much when I was supposed to be resting. I have to sit still until highsun.”

“Or I’ll take my hand to her,” Orla stated.

“I envy you, Madame,” René said, folding himself into his chair from the night before.

Orla snorted once with laughter. Sophia was about to express her righteous anger in some clever way she’d yet to devise when René held up a hand.

“Can we have peace? For a short time? I have brought you news.” He tossed a newspaper onto the table, the
Monde Observateur
. “Benoit has just brought it from Bellamy House. I have been having them sent on since I came.”

Sophia snatched up the paper, and then paused. “Did he speak with Nancy?” She was asking about her father, but realized instantly that it was a nonsensical question; Benoit did not speak Commonwealth.

“He went to see himself,” René said. “There is no change.”

Sophia nodded, and unfolded the paper as Spear came down the passage, filling up the doorway to the sitting room, a steaming mug in one hand. Sophia read aloud, the Parisian falling quickly from her lips, occasionally pausing to translate for Orla, who had left her sewing in a forgotten pile. The entire first page was about the execution of the Red Rook. Sophia looked up, wrinkling her forehead.

“Sixteen days from capture? Why do they wait?”

“Keep reading, Mademoiselle.”

She did, her eyes widening until she raised her head again. “He’s insane. LeBlanc, Allemande, they’re both mad!”

“Yes, they are mad. The whole city is mad,” René agreed. “But they are also clever.” Sophia could hear the anger again. He leaned forward in the chair. “First, they take advantage of the unrest in the Lower City. They promise bread, and equality, and an open gate, and that technology will never return to replace the tradesman. They point to the Upper City and say these are your oppressors, these are the ones who look down from their high flats, they lock you in, they fund machines, feeding the hatred with lies until they have a revolution and the hatred feeds itself. Then they use the mob like a weapon, bring down the premier, seize the government and the chapels, anything with power. They kill all who oppose them, man, woman, and child. All in the name of revolution, and justice. But they cannot keep the mob rioting forever, and the list of traitors who have not fled the city grows short, yes?

“So now they say this revolution has been decreed by a Goddess, that Fate has chosen new recipients for her blessings. And the poor will follow, because Allemande has promised them all they wish to have, and because now those promises are backed by a deity. But even if they do not believe, they will follow, do you not see? They will follow out of fear of the Razor, and they will follow because there is no responsibility. For anything. All can do as they please, because all is as Fate has willed. There is no wrong. It is madness!” He threw up a hand. “A very clever madness.”

Sophia watched him, mesmerized. Just a few days ago she would have bet Bellamy House that there weren’t any such ideas in René Hasard’s powdered head. Now it was as if he’d been possessed by Tom.

“Allemande will only take now,” he continued, “as the Goddess decrees, with LeBlanc as his ‘holy man’ to make her wishes known. He will keep himself in the chair of the premier, hold the poor of the Lower City exactly where he wants them, and execute Jennifer Bonnard and the Red Rook in a ceremony of thankfulness to the Goddess.”

No, they will not, Sophia thought. She glanced down at the newspaper. “And they will draw lots from the prison. Fate will choose one out of three. One to live …”

“And the other two will die,” René finished. “Two-thirds of the Tombs will lose their lives on an altar. The gutters will run with the blood.” The fire settled, the weight of this news doing the same in Sophia’s mind.

“La Toussaint,” Spear said from the doorway. He’d been so quiet Sophia had almost forgotten he was there. “Sixteen days from Tom’s arrest will be the end of the festival honoring those lost in the Great Death.”

René sat back, thoughtful. “That is so.”

“La Toussaint is also when the saint in the form of a rook led survivors to the underground, before the city sank,” Spear continued. “That’s why they wait to execute Tom. LeBlanc has shut down the chapels, but Sophie has been leaving rook feathers. He wants to disprove the story.”

“Hammond is right,” René said, showing only the slightest surprise.

Sophia thought of that rumbling thunder, and the streaking ball of fire she’d seen moving across the sky the night she’d gone to the Holiday. The same as the iconography on the chapel walls. “It’s also the night the Seine gate will be open, so the Lower City can visit the cemeteries,” she mused. She’d never been in the city for La Toussaint. They’d always returned to Bellamy House by the equinox. But she knew there were coffins, and music and a parade, and that the graves were decorated with flowers. And feathers. She looked again at the paper. “Allemande will provide free landovers, hundreds of them, so that all may come to the Upper City and attend …”

“He is turning the mob loose on the Upper City,” Spear commented. “No one is going to put on a parade down the boulevard, much less show up for one.”

“And two out of every three will die …,” Sophia whispered.

“The gutters will run,” René repeated.

Orla picked up the vest again and started sewing. “Allemande is not mad,” she said. “He is evil.”

“I believe he is both, Madame,” René answered. “Every day the execution bells ring, and if I raise the windows of our flat, I can hear the noise of the mob echoing out of the Lower City, chanting while families are put to the blade. Half the children I went to school with are dead, along with their families, their property given over to supporters of Allemande or the ones that denounced them. When you live in the Sunken City, you look evil in the face.” He paused. “But you, Mademoiselle …” The blue eyes lifted until they found Sophia’s. “You can see the … possibilities?”

“It will be chaos,” she said thoughtfully. Her mind was already humming.

“Sophie,” Spear said. “We can’t delay. We should go as soon as the twins get the number of Tom’s cell, do it as we’ve done before. If we’re ready to go when the information comes, we could have both Jennifer and Tom, and even his mum …” He jerked his head at René. “We could have them out in two days.”

René kept his gaze on Sophia’s face. “Take your best chance, Mademoiselle.”

“Can Tom wait that long, Sophie?” said Spear. “And how long will Jen last?”

“They are sacrifices now,” René countered. “They must walk to the scaffold. And if you go before you are ready, perhaps you will not be able to stop them from walking to the scaffold. Or the Razor from coming down for their heads.”

“If you wait two weeks, you leave no room for mistakes, Sophie.”

“That wound must heal, Mademoiselle.”

Orla picked up her sewing, keeping her opinions in her head, while Sophia stared down at the printed words of the newspaper. Death for two out of three. What would LeBlanc do? Draw lots? Number them randomly? René leaned forward again, elbows on knees, almost coming out of his chair.

“Take your best chance and I swear that I will help you. Do you believe me?”

She met his eyes again. Whatever else he might be, she did believe that he would help her in this, especially where it concerned his mother. But René could not know that in the past ten heartbeats, her thinking had changed.

She got up and went to the hearth, running a finger along the steel girder, a part of some long forgotten, Ancient building incorporated into the new. But what she was seeing was cell number 1139. Not only had the Bonnards been there, blinking and starving and dazzled by her dim lamp, but a teacher who would not repeat the oath of Allemande, a smith who had taken five francs to repair an undermarket clock, along with four of his grown children, who had apparently done nothing at all, and a set of grandparents unlucky enough to have raised their children in a moderately nice flat near the top of an Upper City building. A flat someone else wanted.

Sophia felt her anger rise, a pressure cooker of rage that had been simmering inside her every day since the first time she entered the Tombs. Now it was turning her resolve into something diamond hard. She hadn’t been able to turn the lock on the people of cell 1139, and she would not leave two-thirds of the prisoners to their deaths this time, either. It might kill her. It probably would. The land would be gone, there would be no respite for her father whether he got better or no, and nothing left for Tom. The Bellamys would be undone, but she wasn’t sure that mattered anymore, not in the light of LeBlanc’s planned bloodbath. What was the point of emptying three small cells? She was going to walk into the Sunken City and empty every stinking hole in the Tombs. Let LeBlanc’s Goddess explain that to the mob.

“Spear,” she said slowly, “when was the last time you went to Mainstay?”

“Yesterday. For supplies. Why?”

“Then we’d better go into Kent. Is the woman who forges our paperwork still in Brighton?”

“As far as I know. But, Sophie …”

“Would you be able to go to the undermarket? I’ll have a list, and I can’t run into Mr. Halflife. We’re supposed to be in the Midlands.”

Spear’s shoulders sagged just a little. “Yes, I can go.”

She turned to René, and again met his gaze. She had a feeling his had never left her. There was a grin beginning to show on one side of his mouth. “Do I remember that you have a ship, Monsieur?”