Rook (42 page)

“And why will the Tombs explode at dawn?” Francois asked, pulling off his shirt. It must have been a very good question, because Uncle Francois never spoke otherwise.

“Just trust me that they will,” René replied. “I will try to get inside and turn off the firelighter, but …” He turned his head at a call from his mother. Madame was standing unaffected by the bedlam around her, a uniform in her hand. She beckoned him over.

“I suppose you must go get her?” she asked, leaving behind her usual brash tone.

“Yes, Maman.”

“Then, here.” She pushed the jacket and breeches into his hand. “I chose one that will fit.”

“Thank you, Maman.”

“And go wash or they will smell you coming.”

“Yes, Maman.” She patted his cheek once, and then turned to walk away. “I will see you at the coast,” he added.

She smiled with both sides of her mouth, and it was a grim, hard thing. “See that you do, René.”

Spear stood behind a smoldering barricade, where he’d ditched the landover, wondering if any of them would ever again see the coast. Why hadn’t he killed Hasard before he’d gotten talked into setting that firelighter? And those bells, who were they for? He was afraid he knew the answer to that. The same one who had always been scheduled to die at dawn. And now he was the one who would have to rescue them. He would have to unset that firelighter and bring them out.

This area was quieter than the neighborhoods near the cliffs, but it was still dangerous. Spear put out the lantern and jerked off his jacket, exchanging it for the blue and white of an Upper City officer, the one he carried in his suitcase. He glanced up once at the setting moon and cursed Albert LeBlanc.

Allemande cursed Albert LeBlanc as he foamed and choked on the contractions of his own throat, his glasses fallen to the floor. LeBlanc breathed in satisfaction, then opened his pendant and checked the progress of the moon, wondering what could have happened to Renaud.

He strolled into his office, shutting the unpleasant writhing and gagging away behind the door, snapped his pendant shut, and rang the bell for the lift. He’d sent Allemande’s soldiers to wait at the bottom. But they weren’t Allemande’s anymore, were they? Because LeBlanc was premier now. The destiny Fate had ordained had been achieved. As he’d known it would be.

There was no question who the Sunken City belonged to. And it was time to make sure that everyone, especially the Red Rook, knew it.

“They’ll come for us soon,” Sophia whispered.

“I know,” Tom replied.

“What do you wish you were doing right now?”

“Running. Or talking to Jennifer Bonnard.”

“Do you really?”

“Yes. And what about you? What do you wish?”

“That I could wake up on the day of my Banns and realize that none of this had ever happened.”

“Do you really wish that?”

Sophia thought for a moment. “No. I don’t. I suppose what I really wish is that the real parts had never happened, and the parts that never really happened were the ones that were real.”

Far away in the darkness of the cavern, they heard the creaking of a metal door. Tom took her hand. At least they would do this together.

René marched with his uncles and their friends as a troop, but they had to stop blocks away from their goal. The streets were thronged. It was the coldest, darkest part of the night as the moon sank, the north lights nearly gone, no fire in the sky. But the execution of the Red Rook was keeping the entire Lower City out of its bed.

They pushed their way through, insistent but careful not to start a fight, and when they finally reached the prison yard René felt his jaw clench tight. The Razor, its ugliness undisguised by the flowers and ribbons, towered above a mass of torchlit humanity. But the mood was not what he’d expected. More grim, and less mocking. The blue of gendarmes was everywhere, at least ten forming a pack in front of the prison door, some of them shoving and beating back the crowd.

“Get everyone into position, and I will try another way in,” René whispered. “We will get nowhere if this mob turns against the gendarmes.”

Spear entered LeBlanc’s office building with a crisp walk and approached the guard at the desk. He brandished a piece of paper. “Long may Allemande rise above the city,” he said.

“Your code?”

“One three four.”

The guard nodded, tilting his head toward the stairs. Spear started to climb, and as soon as the guard was out of sight he took them two at a time, smiling at the luck of meeting Renaud in the street.

Renaud approached the Saint-Denis Gate. He saw an Allemande courier climbing back onto a horse as he handed his papers to the guard. The guard was unkempt, and a little drunk, but he looked at the pass carefully, as if he was having trouble reading it.

“Step down, Monsieur,” the guard said.

They could search all they wanted, Renaud thought. His mind was on sea foam, and birds, and the clean, free air of the coast. Two more gendarmes approached, but instead of searching him, one took his arms, quickly twisting them back, and the other put a knife to his throat. Renaud’s smile went away.

“Be advised,” read the guard from another document, his speech slurring, “that no official … permissions have been given to pass … any gates … out of the City of Light. Any such pass … passes … shall be considered a forgery, and the … the bearer … subject to immediate … execution.” The guard swayed just a little on his feet. “Sorry, friend,” he said to Renaud. “You ran a little … late.”

Renaud had only a moment to wonder why luck had abandoned him before the knife bit into his throat.

The ropes cut into Sophia’s hands as she and Tom were escorted through the dusty maze and onto the lift. Two young gendarmes, who had been wide-eyed in the bizarre cavern, were half carrying, half dragging Tom. She wondered how long they would live after this. They all crammed into the lift, LeBlanc rang the bell, and then he spent the entire ride examining her face from just a few inches away, as if he could ferret out the source of her abnormalities. She just glared at him.

They stepped out of the lift, this time into the small, lantern-lit lobby of LeBlanc’s office building, where the night guard sat at a desk. She caught a glimpse of a large blue-jacketed officer just disappearing up the stairs before she and Tom were taken stumbling out the door and to the back of a haularound. The bed of the haularound had a railing built like a fence around it, two posts at either end. Men were lighting short torches attached along the edges, the orange flames showing an entire troop of escorting gendarmes, swords and crossbows at the ready. A large sign on the back of the haularound read,
LE CORBEAU ROUGE
.

LeBlanc smiled, took one of Sophia’s red-tipped feathers, and stuck it securely into her tangled hair, patting her cheek when he was done. Then she was pulled up and into the haularound, her bound hands tied tight to the post. She looked back over her shoulder, where Tom was being tied to the other post, closest to the driver. She hadn’t yet seen him in such strong light. He looked terrible. Gaunt, dirty, bloody, and exhausted. But he smiled at her, even though his lips were cracked, and it made her stand straighter.

“The mob may do as they like,” LeBlanc was instructing their escort, “but they may not remove the prisoners or …”