Rook (35 page)

René looked to Benoit. “What does Uncle Émile think he is doing?”

“Keeping LeBlanc busy while we get back the signet ring. There has not been time to enlighten him further. He has been busy questioning Fate. We will give you as much time as we can, but in any case, I think LeBlanc will miss his scheduled highmoon execution. Madame and I will take care of the gates. Are we agreed?”

The silence confirmed it. And then the people of the room scattered, moving quickly to their assigned tasks. Spear caught René’s arm and said, very low, “One wrong move in that prison, Hasard, and I will kill you.”

“Take your hand from my arm,” René replied, “or I will kill you now.”

LeBlanc looked at Émile’s hand on his arm, at the coin he was trying to place back in his palm. His glassy stare had become wary. Like the way he was eyeing the table and the twinkling candles.

“More wine?” Émile asked.

LeBlanc shook his head.

“Oh, come, Albert,” Émile said, smiling. “You are quite safe here. Ask the Goddess whether the Red Rook will live beyond the dawn.”

Renaud still stood at his post, a respectful distance from the settee, feet aching and sweating profusely, not daring to interfere. The dancing had begun again; the partygoers just danced around him. Émile glimpsed Peter flitting out the front door dressed in the blue cloak of a city courier. He raised a brow, and then Andre walked by the settee and gave Renaud a little bow.

“Oh,” said Émile suddenly, “that is your pendant, Albert, is it not?” He leaned down beside LeBlanc, where the cushion met the back of the settee, and held up the symbol of Fate. “Your cord has frayed, I think.” Andre had done an excellent job of fraying it.

LeBlanc’s pale eyes widened and he snatched the pendant, instantly flipping it open to the little clock. “Just past middlemoon,” he said, stumbling on the words. “We should have time.”

Renaud glanced nervously at the full moon shining from high in the sky behind him. LeBlanc tied the pendant around his neck and reached for the coin, holding it to his lips in an attitude of prayer. Émile gestured to Andre, who came to the settee and put his elbows on the back of it, as if to watch LeBlanc. Émile leaned close.

“Tell René that if he does not come out here and explain to me what is happening, I am going to slash his gold brocade coat to ribbons and perhaps also his throat.”

“You had better queue up,” Andre replied. “He was busy dueling with that big brute from the Commonwealth until Adèle dumped water on his head. I believe his little fiancée is in trouble.” Andre’s voice dropped to almost nothing. “Did you know our nephew is engaged to the Red Rook, Émile?”

“Goddess,” LeBlanc was saying. “Will the Red Rook live beyond the dawn?” He flipped the coin onto the table, the clink of metal on glass adding to the music of the violins.

Sophia shoved Gerard out into the prison yard and shut the door behind him, the clink of the turning lock the only sound in the Tombs. She was eerily alone, running down the corridor toward LeBlanc’s lift. Tom first, she had decided. She would get Tom into a landover, come back, and then deal with the firelighter. And if she didn’t find Tom, she didn’t care if the firelighter went off or not. Not for herself. Maybe the highmoon crowd would disperse if there was no execution. Maybe they wouldn’t. She paused in front of the first stairwell that led down into the Tombs, pulled a small bag from her vest, and upended it. Red-tipped rook feathers floated, scattering over the stinking stones. Then she ran again, skidding to a stop before LeBlanc’s private lift.

This was nothing like the lift to the Hasard flat. A plain wooden box with a simple bell pull, large enough for three or possibly four people. Gerard had said that sometimes the lift came down, but no one was in it. So if he wasn’t lying, where was LeBlanc getting off the lift? On an upper floor? But if so, why would the lift come down, if LeBlanc had rung the bell to get off somewhere else? It made no sense. Unless there was another way off the lift.

She stepped inside. A lantern hung from the ceiling, still lit, though the oil was getting low. She ran her fingers over the planks of wood that formed three sides of the lift, smooth with use, the corners braced and riveted with strips of iron. Nothing seemed loose, or wished to slide. The ceiling was too far over her head to reach, but a panel in the ceiling did not seem reasonable, either. The lamp would have to be removed, and how to put it back? There was a straw matting on the floor, but she could find nothing beneath that but dirt, and something that looked suspiciously like dried blood.

She took a deep breath, willing away panic. She had to be calm if she wanted to find Tom. She started over again. There had to be something she’d missed.

Sophia ran her hand again over the wood, and then over the iron bracing and the rivets. She did notice that the two front pieces of bracing were actually one piece of iron each, bent into an L-shape to create the corners, while in the back, the bracing was made of two pieces of iron, a tiny gap in the angle. She looked at this more closely, sliding her fingers down the gap all the way to the floor, where it continued beneath the matting, running horizontally, separating the floor from the back wall, continuing again as high as she could reach on the other vertical side.

She ran a hand down the iron, quickly, this time along the rivets, stopping at about halfway down, where a rivet was missing. The missing rivet left a small, round hole. She stuck her finger in and smiled. The back of the lift was a door, and this was a keyhole. She knelt down in front of the hole in the iron and began peeling off her gloves, where she’d sewn in her picklocks.

Claude knelt in the shadows, watching Gerard scurry across the flagstones of the prison yard and bang on the locked door of the empty warehouse opposite. A building where no one should be. The door opened, shutting again as soon as Gerard had entered. Claude fingered his small mustache.

The execution team had arrived to prepare the Razor, torches sputtering to life all around a scaffold that had become a shrine. Ribbons and black and white flowers, like in the cemeteries, trailed along the bloodstained wood. There was a stone altar set up on the scaffold now, too, the sort you saw in Upper City chapels, and above it hung a gigantic flat wheel, painted half black, half white, made to be seen from the farthest reaches of the prison yard. They were going to spin it, Claude supposed, so Fate could choose the two out of three. That should be interesting. And was further proof that no gendarmes should have been dismissed from the Tombs that night. How would they get so many to the scaffold with only Gerard? It made the situation obvious. Gerard must be in league with the Red Rook.

Claude stood and stepped deeper into the dark outside the torchlight. A few dozen people had gathered since he’d arrived, sitting on cloaks and bits of blanket, saving their places for the best view of blood. He thought of Gerard’s finger beneath his knife, and allowed the man a grudging bit of respect. He’d probably already let the Red Rook out of the prison, and if the Rook had Gerard, then there would be others.

He moved down an alley, circling the warehouse Gerard had entered, sidling up to the muddy lane that ran along the other side of the building. And there, lined up in a row, were Allemande’s landovers, many of them, lamps lit, taking the people of the Lower City up to La Toussaint. He watched groups of twos and threes being shuttled into one of the landovers, the window curtains drawn, another pulling up to take its place when it was full. If there was one thing Claude knew, it was the look of prison dirt when he saw it.

He turned and jogged back down the alley, then broke into a run. LeBlanc was at a party tonight, he’d seen something about it in the
Observateur
. One of his cousins, it had said, was marrying the sister of the Red Rook. A man named René Hasard. And the newspaper had given the address.

René opened the door from the back stairs of his building onto the alley just beyond the boulevard, Spear behind him. Broken glass crunched beneath their feet. The door was metal, which was good, because every window in the back alley was broken—not just the glass but the wooden panes as well, beaten and splintered inward. The stable doors had been hacked down, the horses gone, and there was shouting in the distance, not very far away. They heard Benoit drop the heavy iron bar into place behind them, the pavement sparkling in the moonlight.

“Follow me,” René said. He stole down the alley, Spear behind him, away from the clamor. But the noise increased again before the next street, more shouting and destruction, but this time with music. They stopped short, in the dark of a door beneath an overhanging balcony.

A mass of people and torches was moving past, shouting, singing and laughing, breaking whatever was breakable, having a small parade all their own to the whistle of a flute. They sounded drunk. Some wore finery that had obviously come from a looted home or shop; all wore the masks of the Goddess. And they had a woman, also in a mask, her body held up high by many hands.

Spear made a move toward the street, but René put out an arm. The woman’s masked head was on a pole, separate from her body. They stayed motionless in the shadows until the music faded and the little mob had gone by, leaving splinters and blood and a trail of black and white flower petals in their wake. René quickly tucked his hair beneath the plain black jacket he’d changed into, buttoning it to the top and flipping up the collar to hide its length. Spear did the same.

“Wait here,” Spear said suddenly, turning back down the alley.

“Where are you going?”

“Masks,” he hissed over his shoulder.

René waited against the alley wall, his hand on his sword hilt. “Watch him,” Benoit had said. It had been good advice, though hardly needed. René glanced up again at the high-hanging moon, thinking of standing in this alley as a child, watching the jugglers and the fire-eaters go by for La Toussaint. Now all he could hear were sounds of violence, and not very far away. What had happened to the world? And what had happened to Hammond? There was no time. He nearly drew his sword as a figure came running down the alley, but it did not take long for the figure to become Hammond, two masks and one club in his hands.