Rook (45 page)

Spear dropped his eyes from the ceiling drains, got to his feet, and went stumbling deeper into the Tombs, looking for prison hole number 522.

Sophia swayed on the narrow framework, high above the crowded prison yard, muscles tensed to keep her balance.

“Shoot her!” LeBlanc was shouting, but she couldn’t think of that now. René was staring up at her, angry and with his jaw clenched.

“I did not lie to you,” he said.

She gripped the rope in her hand. She thought she could see the cut she had put on his lip.

“Do you believe me?”

“Why should I?”

“I do not know.” Then René actually smiled, while she was standing on the Razor and he was on the scaffold and a dozen arrows were probably trained on the both of them. He said, “Because you choose to.”

And just like that, she believed him. She chose to believe because she knew what was real. It didn’t matter what name a paper said, or what role he’d been playing. He had shown her who he was. He was showing her now. And that just … was. She met his eyes, blue even from her height, and they understood each other. He knew that she believed, and the pull to him was like gravity, nearly toppling her from her perch, and then together they looked to the sky.

The last of the night had brightened, though not with dawn. This light was white and glaring, every face and stone in the prison yard jumping into stark clarity. The air rumbled, the white light flashed, and Sophia shielded her eyes from a sudden ball of flame, a small sun streaking so low and straight across the sky that she felt the need to duck from her high place on the Razor. Sound popped in the air, a clap of thunder that brought some screams from the mob, and a trail of fire and smoke traced a pale line across the sky.

The rumble faded as the ball of fire flew from view. Sophia watched it go, and instead of death and a mob and LeBlanc, she thought of hope, a path marked out for her in the sky. The translucent dark came down again, though not in the northeast. That part of the night was blushing pink. The mob had gone dead silent.

“Shoot her!” LeBlanc screamed. “Gendarmes, shoot her!”

René turned to the crowd and lifted his hands. “Are you the playthings of Fate, or can you make your own choice?” The slow, shouted words echoed in the silence, bouncing between the buildings and cliffs. “And if you can choose your answer, does that not answer the question already? Fate has no power when the people choose!”

“Shoot him! Now!” ordered LeBlanc. Men in city blue filtered forward to the scaffold, crossbows raised. One arrow came, but it was halfhearted and flew wide. René pointed at the viewing box.

“Did LeBlanc become premier by the will of a Goddess, or did he choose to rid himself of Allemande and seize the Sunken City?” The ministres stirred in their seats, the prison yard a mass of still bodies. Indecision hung like smog. René yelled, “What do you believe?”

LeBlanc leaned out of the box. “Look at him! Look at how the rich of the Upper City try to protect their own! If you do not leech out their blood, they will leech the life out of you! As they have always done!”

The mob stirred at this, a few murmuring agreement, and then someone shouted, “But she’s Commonwealth!” The words released a small storm of noise, and Sophia heard “girl,” and “Tom,” and “Blackpot Street,” and a woman shouted, “She wasn’t leeching then!”

Sophia looked down on the restless mob, wondering when the arrows were going to knock her from her perch. LeBlanc appeared to be wondering the same. René caught her eye. The look had been a warning, but for what she didn’t know. He walked to the edge of the scaffold, pointing up to LeBlanc.

“Then let him prove it to you!” René shouted. The mob settled back into an agitated listening. “He wants to rule the Sunken City. Then make him prove it. Make LeBlanc prove whether Fate is a Goddess!” He looked back at the box. “Are you willing?”

LeBlanc leaned forward until Sophia thought he might fall out of the box. “I need to prove nothing! I am the premier!” He sounded like a maniac.

Sophia’s eyes darted to the base of the scaffold. Tom had gotten free of the post, but his hands were still tied, and between weakness and his bad leg, he was hobbling up the steps, unhelped, and yet unimpeded by the guards. René ran over and grabbed Tom’s arms, pulling him up onto the platform. “Prove it!” Tom shouted at LeBlanc. “For your divine right to rule them!”

The mob had gone truly quiet again, such an odd silence spreading far and wide below her. René stretched his arm up as high as it could reach, something glinting in his hand. It was a coin. Sophia let out her breath. She knew what René was about to do.

“I will spin this coin, and ask the Goddess Fate to reveal herself and answer the question, ‘Are you real?’ ”

But wasn’t René’s coin weighted to fall to face? Wouldn’t that make the answer yes?

“If the Goddess is real,” he continued, “then LeBlanc rules. He can put the Red Rook, her brother, and me to the Razor. If she is not real, then the Red Rook will destroy the Tombs.”

Sophia felt her mouth open just a little. She turned her head carefully to look over her shoulder toward the prison entrance, then back to René. He hadn’t disabled the firelighter; he had reset it. It was a strange time to feel that little rush of happiness, but joy did not think logically. What time had he set it for? Then she looked out at the rosy half-light spilling from the northeast. It was almost dawn. And the prison yard was packed with people.

“The Red Rook is not a spirit and she is not divine!” LeBlanc was shouting. The people were murmuring again, some looking up to the path of smoke still hanging across the sky. “She is nothing but a woman! A girl! She cannot destroy a prison!”

“She has already emptied it!” Tom shouted, but his voice was weak.

René turned again to the crowd. “The Tombs are empty! Fate was to have two out of three in the prison, but she cannot. The Rook has led them out, on La Toussaint, because their city, because he …” René pointed at LeBlanc. “He would put them to death! Not Fate!”

“Enough!” said LeBlanc. He spread out the black arms of his long hanging robes, the streak in his hair bright in the dim. “I am the premier of the City of Light, and the instrument Fate has used to make her will known!” His voice was authoritative and sure as it echoed. “The Goddess has decreed that the Red Rook dies. It is already done!”

“And who did Fate decree should die at highmoon?” Tom shouted.

René shouted it louder. “And who was supposed to die at highmoon? Did anyone die?”

“Gendarmes! Remove these men and let Fate’s will be done …” The gendarmes did not move. It was as if the entire prison yard had been cursed with doubt. Except for Sophia, who had never been more certain of anything in her life. René was here, he was real, and he knew what he was doing.

“Let the Goddess speak!” she cried out. “Spin the coin. If the Goddess is real, she will tell us. But if not, then I will destroy the Tombs, and the people of the Sunken City will choose their next leader, Upper and Lower together. Do you accept the challenge, Premier?”

LeBlanc leaned out the window of his box, looking up at her on top of the scaffold like a fly he wished to swat. She could see his hands shaking. She could also see two or three of the ministres moving quietly down the steps of the viewing box and away. Like rats from a sinking ship. Then LeBlanc’s face became suddenly serene, and he raised his arms again.

“I accept! But we will toss the coin, not spin. The toss of the coin is the proper way to speak to the Goddess!”

Sophia’s heart banged hard in her chest. René was good at flipping that coin. But she had only ever seen him purposely catch it on face, and they needed it to say facade. He looked up at her, and smiled with half his mouth. Sophia smiled back. “Move the people away from the prison!” she yelled, looking down. “Move them away from the prison building!”

To Sophia’s surprise, a group of gendarmes near the prison doors obeyed and began scooting people forward, shifting the crowd, a remarkably silent process.

René held up the coin again. “Who will witness the toss?”

The executioner and his men seemed to have slipped away as well, but a man with the arms of a metal worker or a liftman climbed the steps. He had a mask of Fate swinging by its strings around his neck. “I will witness.”

The mob was still shifting, making room for those trying to move away from the prison building. Sophia looked up at the sky. The torches almost weren’t needed now. She concentrated on her balance, legs aching from the strain as René went to stand behind the stone altar, the man with the mask of Fate with him. Tom had sunk down to sit on the scaffold, still trying to work his hands free.

“Are you ready, Albert?” René yelled. “Will you call the toss?”

The two ministres still left in the box sat forward. “Face is yes, and facade is no,” LeBlanc shouted. “That is the proper way!”

“Face yes, and facade no,” René repeated for the crowd. “Then ask her!” he said to LeBlanc, holding the coin aloft. People were still finding places to stand, some crawling up onto the scaffold itself, eager to see the truth.

“Ask her, LeBlanc!” said Tom.

Sophia held her breath.

“Goddess!” LeBlanc cried, his eyes closed. “Answer the Sunken City! Are you real?”

René flipped the coin and it went sailing into the air, glinting in the first ray of the dawn that came shooting over the cliff edge and between the buildings.

Spear stood in the stinking dark of cell 522, the firelighter in his palm, the wheel in the back pointing to the symbol of the rising sun. The soft
tick
,
tick
,
tick
and his thoughts were all he could hear. He’d pushed the knob in. There would be no explosion, and now there was nothing. He could not cry; he could not even feel. Sophia was gone, and probably Tom, too, by this time. And what was he without them? Nothing. Just like what he felt. Nothing.

Why hadn’t she told him what she’d set out to do? Why had she never, ever looked to him? It didn’t matter, in the end. He’d driven her down this path. It was his fault she had died, as much as if he’d thrown the lever. Had she been frightened on that scaffold, he wondered? Or had she stood her ground? Both. Sophie had done both. And she had come so close to achieving the impossible.

Suddenly, Spear smiled. And so he would do this for her now. He would give her the last thing he could. Spear set the firelighter back in its barrel and pulled out the knob. Then he sat down on the floor, still smiling, surrounded by Bellamy fire, and closed the cool blue of his eyes, letting the mechanism
tick
,
tick
,
tick
…

The coin turned, and turned, and turned again in the air, flashing gold in the dawn light. Sophia gripped the rope, LeBlanc leaned out of his viewing box, the man with the mask of Fate tracked the coin with his eyes. René stepped back and Tom had his head in his hands. The people of the city waited. The coin hit the stone of the altar with the tiny echo of a clink, and there came a muffled
BOOM
from somewhere deep below them.

The Razor trembled, making Sophia sway for balance on its top, four more booms in rapid succession, and then one mighty explosion that rocked the wood beneath her feet. She swung out on the rope before she fell, hearing screams and panic and a roar that made her turn her head to the prison even as she spun crazily through the air. The building that squatted over the Tombs hovered for just a moment, and then it was falling, collapsing in on itself, sinking down and inward as if the earth had opened its mouth and swallowed, exhaling a thick, rolling cloud of dust.