Текст книги "Rook"
Автор книги: Sharon Cameron
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Текущая страница: 20 (всего у книги 27 страниц)
Sophia hurried down the stone steps, lantern held high, going lower and lower into the belly of the Sunken City. She was in some sort of tunnel roughly carved from brown stone. Mines, most likely, like all the Tombs, but whether this tunnel was new or Ancient or something in between she couldn’t tell. It was absolutely silent, thick dust gathering on the sides of the steps, though the middles were relatively clear. At least she knew someone had been coming this way.
She could see an open doorway at the bottom of the stairs, not rough like the walls but carved into an arch. Intricate, intersecting lines ran in relief around the stone. She stepped through, held up the light, and her free hand jumped to her mouth, the glove stifling any noise she might have made.
She stood in a kind of curving corridor, walls soaring to heights well beyond what she could see with her light, but the walls were not made of stone or rock; they were made of bones. Stacks and stacks of them in precise, undulating patterns, diamonds of arm bones and femurs crisscrossed in rows, dotted with skulls and surrounded by delicate inlays of fingers. The pattern rose and fell in waves as the walls went on, somehow beautiful and yet so horrible it made something inside her shudder.
She walked forward in a thick brown dust that covered her boots, skirting quickly around a pyramid of skulls in the center of the walkway, trying not to think of the sheer numbers of the dead that surrounded her. There were variations in color, she noticed, the flowing patterns of straight, stacked bone ends on the lower walls more yellowed, and more fragmented. Then these must be older, with the newer stacked on top. Could she actually be looking at the remains of people who had seen the Great Death? She stared into the empty eye sockets of a passing head, wondering if that man or woman had called this city Paris. If they could have really known the kind of technology that made voices travel from the other side of the world, or pictures move. If they had died from the want of those things when they were taken away.
Sophia looked around and realized she was at a crossroads. A pillar soared upward in front of her, lines of skulls twisting round and round so that they tricked the eye. There were three paths she could take. Left, right, or straight.
“Which way, Hasard?”
They were both breathing hard, boots caked with mud, leaning against the back of a tilting wooden shanty. Spear pulled off the mask to dab at his lip, which now matched the split lip Sophia had given to René. The people of the Lower City were rioting, the trail of looted goods coming down the cliff road leaving bodies along the way. And both sets of their clothes were still too fine for anonymity. René looked up. The moon rose defiantly in the night sky, and they were only halfway to the Tombs.
“No more trying to hide,” said René. “Do not use a sword if you can avoid it, but we have to go faster. There is no more time.”
There’s no more time, thought Sophia. None. She’d taken the right turn, which gently curved, came to another crossroads with an identical skull-spiraling pillar, and then, inexplicably, ended up back at the first one. The flowing patterns of the bones were disorienting, and so much alike that it was impossible to tell one place from the other.
She gave up trying to hide. If the place was full of gendarmes, they would just have to come. “Tom!” she called. “Tom?”
Her voice echoed and died in the brown dust, though it gave her a sense of the enormity of the space. A massive cavern empty with darkness and full of death. She cursed softly, drew the sword from her back, and thrust it through the forehead of a skull in the pillar, gouging a wide and gaping hole. Now there was a black, mismatching speck in the twisting pattern. Her place marked, this time she went straight.
“Go straight!” yelled Spear, as René ducked under the random swing of a fist. This was easier said than done in the Blackpot Market, where the mob seemed to have turned on itself. Throngs of people were gathered in guttering torchlight, fighting over the food and riches coming down from the Upper City. And it looked as if the beer had been flowing freely as well. René had acquired his own club, catching a patched gray square of shirt in its middle before the arms that were attached could break a chair over his head.
Spear was just ahead, forging a path, and René turned in time to see a flash of metal, a sword arm in midswing, ready to curve an arc straight into Spear’s back. René caught the man’s arm from below with the club, the sword flying upward with an audible crack. Spear looked over his shoulder. The man with the broken arm was crumpling to his knees.
“Go!” Spear yelled. “We’re almost there!”
Claude thought he must be almost there. Then he knew it was so when he saw a troop of gendarmes beating back a crowd in front of a gray-and-white stone building that was very elegant. If those gendarmes were protecting the building, then LeBlanc must be inside it.
He whistled and got one of the gendarmes’ attention, straightened his jacket, and smoothed his tiny mustache. Then he pushed his way into the crowd. In the Upper City, his uniform was respected, would guarantee him safe passage. But Claude quickly found that he was mistaken.
Sophia bent over in frustration, staring at the hole she’d carved in the skull. She’d been mistaken. It shouldn’t have been a left turn. She would have to start again. Yes, that was all. Start again when she couldn’t find Tom, when the prison could explode. She took off at a run down the path of bones, wondering how high the moon was.
René slowed his run, wondering how high the moon was. They were beneath a passing bank of fog, the sky lost to them. He stopped in a small space between two shacks, across the street from a dilapidated warehouse just outside the prison yard. Spear jogged up behind him, sliding the mask from his face.
“Look,” René said. “Allemande’s landovers.”
“And there is Cartier,” Spear whispered. “How many drivers did he bribe?” They watched as one landover driver slapped the reins and drove away, the next one taking its place, three bedraggled people rushing inside just as soon as it had stopped. The window curtains jerked closed from inside. Cartier turned to usher in the next group, his head swiveling right and left in the mostly deserted street. The riots in the marketplace were keeping this area quiet, at least.
“Hurry,” said René.
They darted down the street when Cartier’s back was turned, only for the purpose of avoiding explanations they had no time to give, skirting the buildings that formed a loose square around the prison yard. People were gathering there, joking and jeering, a peaceful crowd compared to the others they had seen that night. René swore when he saw the Razor in its new finery, and the chapel altar with its wheel.
“Walk as if you have a reason,” he told Spear, striding purposefully across the flagstones, toward the brick building that sat over the entrance to the Tombs. There were no gendarmes in sight, so they circled to the back, where the building met the cliffs. There was a window there, not far from the ground.
Spear lifted his club, ready to smash it in, but René put out a hand and pushed upward. The window slid open. “He relies on his guards,” René commented, “otherwise, there would be no window here at all.” René paused. “I suppose it has occurred to you, Hammond, that if we do not find the firelighter, we may die in this prison?”
“We nearly died in that marketplace.”
“The prison seems more certain at the moment.”
Spear tilted his head in agreement.
“You might wish, then,” René said, “not to come inside.”
“Maybe that’s what you want, too, Hasard.”
René sighed and swung a leg through. “I hope she is not in here,” he said.
She shouldn’t be here. She should have been with the landovers by now. And she should have reset the firelighter. Sophia knew all these things, so she ran with the lantern down the path of bones. The way was so narrow compared to the unbelievable height of the stacks that even though the cavern must be immense, Sophia felt almost claustrophobic, her need to find a way out beginning to resemble panic.
She passed the second twisting column of skulls at a crossroads, where the path branched into three. She put a hole in a skull with the sword, and this time went straight. Immediately she found a short stair going up, and then came to another pyramid of heads. But instead of a crossroads, this pyramid marked a fork, one way veering to the right, the other left.
“Tom,” she called, letting her voice echo. “Tomas!”
The cavern settled back into silence. She chose left and ran down the path, wiping the grit of bone dust from her mouth.
LeBlanc wiped his mouth with a napkin, frowning down in confusion at the coin on the table. Émile frowned as well, not concerned with the prediction but by the look of lucidity that was returning to the colorless eyes of his cousin-in-law.
“More wine?” he asked.
“No, Émile, I think I have had quite enough.” LeBlanc felt for the pendant at his chest, brows drawing even closer together as some memory came to him. “Renaud!”
Renaud scuttled forward, the front of his shirt damp.
“Renaud, where is the moon?”
Enzo and Andre hovered a little closer, and then the door of the flat burst open, making music fly from the violinists’ stands. LeBlanc turned, and then stood, a little shaky, catching his balance on the arm of the settee. The sudden quiet stretched, every eye on Claude, who had an eye swelling and blood spattering the front of his uniform. He surveyed the clean cloth and lace, the tall hair and made-up faces.
“Do none of you know what is happening outside?” he yelled. He met with blank stares. Then he staggered straight to LeBlanc.
“The Tombs are empty!”
“They are all empty,” said René. They’d found a lamp still lit in a lift, discovered a straight stairway covered in rook feathers, leading downward and leaching stink, and now they were in their first cell tunnel, the doors of the prison holes swinging in the draft, floor awash with drainage and filth. One or two red-tipped feathers floated in the scum.
“Did you ever ask her what it was like?” René said in the silence.
“No,” Spear replied. He had his shirt collar over his nose. “But it changed her, the first time she came out.”
“Yes,” said René. “I would think it would.” But he was smiling, his gaze on the rows of swinging, open doors. “She really is quite a girl. We are looking for cell 522, Hammond. And we should run.”
Sophia ran. The left turn had been a dead end, only a round, chapel-shaped chamber made of bones at the end of it. She passed the pyramid of skulls and took the other branch, kicking up a cloud down a similar curving path that also ended in a round chamber. But this time there was a kind of stone pedestal in the center, a waist-high table with a surface hollowed out like a bowl. And at the base of the pedestal, someone lay chest down in the dust.
“Tom!” Sophia said. “Tom!” she screamed.
But Tom Bellamy did not lift his head.
LeBlanc did not raise his head until he was finished vomiting onto the floor of the landover. He gathered up his robes and slid to the other side of the seat, smoothing his hair as well as he could while the landover swayed. Renaud sat silent and shrinking in the opposite corner. The moon was nearing its height behind rolling clouds, and so was LeBlanc’s rage.
“I will secure the prison and the Red Rook,” he said aloud, “and then I will deal with the Hasard family.” He’d left Claude in charge of the gendarmes around the building, not only keeping the rioters out but keeping the Hasards in, leaving the flat under siege. “I will take them to the Razor. One by one.” He clutched the pendant around his neck. “One each day, and Madame and Émile shall be the last …”
The landover slowed, and LeBlanc looked out the window. They were passing a whole row of Allemande landovers, going fast in the opposite direction, their window curtains closed. But it was a mob of rioters in masks that were slowing his progress, blocking the way to the Seine Gate with a dead woman held high above their heads. LeBlanc leaned out the window.
“Run them down!” he said. And the landover did, causing a stampede of fleeing people. Shouts and screams overcame the music, the wheels of LeBlanc’s landover bumping over a drunken man who had been sitting on his knees, obliviously playing a flute.
Sophia dropped into the dust beside her brother, chest contracting so hard she thought she might suffocate. She had failed. All this, and she had failed the one person who was counting on her the most. And it was because she had been stupid. So, so stupid. And that had cost Tom his life.
She yanked off the knitted cap and grabbed two handfuls of her pinned hair. Grief for Tom rolled right through her, incapacitating in its strength, too much to be held inside. She let her head fall back and she screamed, a shattering noise that echoed through the stacked bones.
“Did you hear a scream?” René asked, running down the passage. Spear turned his head.
“What?” The noise of the gathering mob was falling through the drains above them. It must be nearly highmoon.
“Like a …” René shook his head. “Perhaps they are already killing people.” He paused, holding up the lantern they’d taken from the lift, peering at a tunnel that veered upward. The numbering of the prison holes in the Tombs had no logic. “I do not think it can be this way,” he said.
Spear leaned over, hands on legs to catch his breath. “And why do you think it can’t be that way?”
“Because she will have had it put somewhere deep, and in the center, to bring it all down.”
Spear hesitated, but only for a moment. Then he nodded, and they both began to splash and sprint down the lower corridor.
“At least we know one thing, Hammond,” René said, holding up the lantern to look at the numbers on the empty prison holes. “Sophia Bellamy is not in this prison.”
It was supposed to be her, Sophia thought, letting her scream fade. She should have been shackled in this prison, not Tom. She put a hand on Tom’s shoulder and hair, and then leapt back as if she’d been burned, nearly screaming once more. A muscle beneath her fingers had twitched.
Tom raised his head just enough to turn it to the other side, blinking in the lantern light that was too bright for him. “Blimey, Sophie,” he said, voice rasping. “Why do you have to go and wake a person up that way?”
Spear held up the lantern, trying to see the faint numbers in the light. They had hit a row of cells in the five hundreds. A few more steps, and he threw open the door to prison hole 522. This cell was a bit higher than the others, relatively dry, and there were stacks of barrels marked pain plat everywhere among the sacks and filth.
“Where would she have put it?” Spear panted. The moon had to be sailing almost directly overhead.
René had already dashed inside, careful to set the lantern well away from the barrels as he turned a circle, surveying the room. “Where she thinks I cannot find it,” he replied.
“I didn’t think you’d find me,” Tom said. “And careful, Sophie. My ribs are broken on that side.”
Tom was upright now, and Sophie had her arms around him. He was dirty and thin, and had a full beard, but other than that, he was Tom. He kissed her once on top of the head. “I assume you have your picklocks?”
Sophia let her brother go and nodded, coming back to herself. She wiped the wet off her cheeks and stripped off her gloves. There was no time. None at all.
“Hurry!” René said. Spear pried open a barrel that was full of Bellamy fire and nothing else, threw down the lid, and went to another one, but René said, “Wait! We should listen.”
Spear went still and they stood in the prison hole. The silence beat down on their ears. “If we are about to die,” said Spear, his tone matter-of-fact, “I want to tell you I was not informing LeBlanc, no matter what he told you.”
“And neither was I. No matter what he told you.” René was running his eyes over the cell, trying to think what he would have done in Sophia’s place. He looked up to the ceiling in sudden inspiration, but there was nothing there.
“But I would forge that document again,” Spear continued. “To keep her from you.”
“It is good to have no regrets.” René kicked the floor. Hard stone.
Spear was shaking his head. “I’d do it again.”
“I will kill you for it later, then, after we …” René grinned suddenly. “We cannot hear. That is just so, is it not?”
“What do you mean?”
“Do you not see? We cannot hear the clock. She has buried it!” René ran a hand through his hair, then cursed a Parisian streak that made Spear’s brows rise. “The barrels, Hammond! She has put it in a barrel! Where we cannot hear. No need for the fuse …”
Spear frowned, then raised his brows again, this time in recognition of the truth.
“Quick!” said René, spinning on his heel. “Were any of these barrels open already?”
“There was one …” They both looked around the room at the mass of barrels that had now been pried open.
“Which? Which!”
“Just start putting your hands in!” Spear yelled. “She wouldn’t have had much time, maybe she didn’t get it buried too deep …”
René shoved his hands into a barrel of coarse black powder, certain he was about to die. But he was still grinning. Sophia Bellamy was such a clever, clever girl.
Sophia worked frantically on Tom’s ankle restraint with the picklocks. “Have you gotten Jennifer?” he asked.
“Yes. Everyone is away except for us.” She hoped it was true. If no one had found the firelighter, then this place was going to explode just like the rest of the Tombs.
“What do you mean, everyone?”
Her fingers fumbled with the picklocks. “We’re the last ones left.”
“LeBlanc knows you’re the Red Rook, Sophie. He knew you were coming …”
“Yes, I know it,” said Sophia, cutting him off. There was no time to feel, and she wasn’t ready to spill out her misery to Tom. She thought she’d better save their lives first. His shackle gave, and she started on the next one. “Where else are you hurt?”
“Nowhere much. Do you have water?”
She shook her head. “When was the last time you ate? Or drank?”
“A while. But I don’t know when now is.”
“How fast can you move? Because we …”
Her voice trailed away at the direction of Tom’s brown eyes, still darker than the skin of his dirty face. They had moved to beyond her shoulder, where the entrance to the chamber was. And she knew what it meant.
She kept working the picklocks, and the shackle around Tom’s ankle clicked open just as the voice she had been anticipating said softly, “So. Fate has finally brought the Red Rook to me.”
Sophia met Tom’s eyes. She slid the picklock she had been using into his hand, and the ring from her forefinger. “Bury that,” she whispered. Then she stood slowly, and reached over her shoulder to draw her sword.
Sophia turned with the sword in front of her while Tom stayed exactly where he was on the ground. It was only LeBlanc, she was surprised to see, with his disgusting secretary shrinking near the wall of bones, holding another lantern. No gendarmes. Maybe LeBlanc had thought they wouldn’t be needed; maybe he was going to be wrong about that.
LeBlanc also drew his sword. He was not quite himself, Sophia thought. His usually sleek hair was ruffled, the cold, colorless eyes a little wild. She wondered just for a moment what could have been happening at that party after she slapped René. LeBlanc circled to her right, but she kept her feet planted in front of Tom.
“I am glad to find you here,” he said, “among those that have accepted Fate.”
“Accepted it or been a victim of it, Albert?” she said.
He smiled. “You realize, of course, that you have already lost.”
“Have I?”
“Yes. You have. But, then again, you always were going to lose. You lost before you were born, because Fate has determined it.”
LeBlanc’s slow smile curled at her, and again she matched it. Reckless, that’s what René would have called it. She was probably going to die here, if not from Bellamy fire, then from a knife or sword in her back from that rat Renaud. But either way, she would try to take LeBlanc with her. She felt the tiredness drain away from her bones, replaced with the tingle of hate.
“Sophie,” Tom said, a soft warning. But she was spoiling for the fight. And in any case, she needed to keep LeBlanc distracted while Tom worked the picklock on his other shackle.
LeBlanc took a quick step forward and she turned her sword to defend, but he did not strike. Instead he circled left, and she went with him, staying between him and Tom.
“Tell me, Rook,” LeBlanc said, “where are my gendarmes?”
Another quick step and this time his sword came at her, but she merely moved her body to the side. He backed away again as she said sweetly, “Your gendarmes? Have you lost them?”
“I have not lost them. They seem to have lost themselves. As has every criminal and traitor in the Tombs!” His last word echoed around the yellowing bones, as did the clash of steel as Sophia blocked his next attack.
“Don’t be sad, Albert. You still have us,” she said. Her smile widened. The landovers must be away, then. He hadn’t arrived in time. That must have been a surprise to him. She blocked him again, then twisted her hilt over his sword and got in a quick slash to his upper arm.
LeBlanc gasped. It had been a glancing blow, but the sleeve was cut, blood already beginning to stain from underneath. LeBlanc wasn’t smiling anymore. Instead he had his head tilted to the side as he again began to circle her, the ends of his robes leaving trails through the thick brown dust.
“It took much to convince me of your true identity, Miss Bellamy. And yet I was skeptical, and had to ask Fate. I was unsure whether a woman had the physical …”
This time she came on the attack, and LeBlanc blocked, but only just.
“… and mental capabilities for the strategy and …”
She came in again, and put a scratch on his hand.
“… swordplay.” LeBlanc glanced at the small cut, an analytical appraisal. “I think you must be an aberration, Mademoiselle. Something … unnatural.”
“Is that what you think?”
He came at her, this time across the body. She stepped out of the way and just missed cutting off his hand. They both went back on the defensive, and he watched her movements carefully, again with the look of analysis.
“I am curious,” LeBlanc said, “how often a woman will choose to attack or defend.”
“I think, Albert, that it could have quite a bit to do with how much a woman wants to live, and how much she wants you dead.”
She came after him again, fast. He blocked her first and second, and then she caught him on the shoulder. Blood wet the robes. “Fascinating …,” mused LeBlanc.
Sophia bit her lip. LeBlanc was not acting like a man who thought he was about to explode, or even a man who had an execution planned at highmoon, which had to be upon them. Did he doubt her ability to blow up his prison? Or had the firelighter already been unset? She shook her head. She was dealing with a lunatic, and needed to stop requiring any of his actions to make sense. If she could kill or maim him, or get his sword to Tom, then maybe they could still get out before the blast.
She watched LeBlanc’s feet and his sword arm carefully. He might be insane, but she was no better. Why did she keep hoping against all reason and every shred of her common sense that René had not unset that firelighter? That he had not betrayed her? Especially when leaving it set meant they were all about to die.
“Hammond!” René yelled. His hands were gray and stained with powder, but this time he had hit something hard inside the barrel. He felt carefully and realized it was the lid, a few inches of the black powder concealing it. Spear came running. “She has made a space beneath,” René said, his fingers scrabbling at the edges of the lid, where she had left it tilted inside.
“Try not to spill it,” said Spear as René lifted the lid away. The firelighter was beneath, nestled in powder, the burlap sack Sophia had carried now arranged beside it, the edges exactly where the flame would come. Spear put his hand around the machine and swiftly pushed the knob back in.
René set down the powder-covered barrel lid, sweat dripping from his face. “What time was it set for?” Spear picked up the firelighter and looked at the back.
“Highmoon,” he replied.
And then, in the quiet of the empty prison, they heard, very faint, the sound of the highmoon bells falling down through the drains.
René laughed, and then Spear laughed with him.
LeBlanc felt his cheek, bleeding from a small cut, and chuckled once. “Tell me, Miss Bellamy, do you consider yourself clever? Did you do well with your schooling?”
“She seems clever enough to beat you in a sword fight, LeBlanc,” said Tom from behind her. But she wasn’t beating him, not quite. LeBlanc was covered in blood and sweat, but he was on his feet. She could cut him, but not incapacitate him. Or at least not yet. She was sweating as well, one small prick stinging on her forearm. And she had lost sight of the rat Renaud. She hoped he had run. She hoped Tom had gotten the lock picked on his other ankle. She grinned at LeBlanc.
“Have you happened to notice that your own Goddess is female, Albert?”
“Of course! And being female, she naturally prefers the male, which is much to my advantage.”
This line of reasoning was so daft that Sophia dismissed it.
“I have noticed that more women beg beneath the Razor than men, especially when their children are climbing the scaffold next. Why do you think that is, Miss Bellamy? Will you beg, do you think?”
“And will you beg, Albert, when Allemande finds out your bloody prison is empty?”
He came after her again then, and the chamber flickered in the lantern light, loud with the clash of steel. She blocked again, and again, three times, and then LeBlanc was in close, trying to push her sword out of her hand. She knocked his arm away and kicked hard with her boot heel, catching him in the middle and knocking him into the dust. He tried to raise his sword but she got a foot on his arm, her sword tip at the base of his throat.
LeBlanc laughed against the pointed end of the blade, an eerie sound, especially in a place full of death. And then Sophia heard a yell behind her. Her head whipped around. With a glance she took in the fact that Renaud had a knife to Tom’s throat, and that the picklock she’d given Tom was now sticking out of Renaud’s leg. She pressed down with her boot, stopped LeBlanc’s arm from squirming, and made sure the very tip of her sword was piercing his skin.
“Call him off,” she said to LeBlanc.
“No,” said LeBlanc, his smile curling.
“Kill him, Sophie! We’ll die anyway if you don’t!”
She leaned closer to LeBlanc’s bloody face. “Call him off, or I will carve you up bit by bit, just the way you like to do to others.”
“Whatever you do to me,” LeBlanc said, “will be done to your brother. Won’t it, Renaud?”
“Kill him, Sophie!” Tom yelled. “Quick!”
Sophia pressed the sword in a little harder, and then a voice from the chamber entrance said, “I would not follow that suggestion, Miss Bellamy. I really would not.”
Sophia looked up to see a very small man in the doorway, neat in his spectacles and city-blue suit, surrounded by gendarmes. She wouldn’t have known the face if she hadn’t seen it on a coin, but she had. It was Allemande.
