Lady Clare held the paperweight lightly in her fingers, testing its balance. The blade curved in traditional cavalry fashion and the handle was bound with gold wire. Before it had been Lady Clare’s, it had belonged to a minister called Pierre Nexus, and before him it had been the property of the Prince Imperial himself. A perfect copy of a sabre worn by Napoleon the First during his Cisalpine campaign, back in the days when he was a simple general.

Slipping the tiny sabre into her coat pocket, Lady Clare double-checked the wooden shutters and locked her study door against possible looters. The wide marble steps down to the entrance hall were black with dirty footprints and slick with condensation, but Lady Clare made her way safely, one frail hand clutching at the stone balustrade, her other holding a battered army-issue hurricane lamp. The whole Hotel Sabatini felt as empty and lifeless as a restaurant that had gone out of fashion and seen its patrons go elsewhere.

The city was black, buried under darkness. No stars could break through the heavy layer of cloud, few lights showed, and when they did it was as flickering shards through closed shutters and tightly drawn curtains. Firelight or lamplight, not electricity, not for days now. Passing over the pedestrian-only Pont St-Louis, Lady Clare entered Île de la Cité and tramped her way through the mud of what had once been a huge rose garden. Even the spider’s-leg flying buttresses on the south side of Notre-Dame were almost lost to Lady Clare in the rain as she turned into the Place du Parvis ND, edging nervously round the granite plinth of Charlemagne.

Puddles had spread to the size of small lakes, the river changed to a swollen slug of black water. Lady Clare navigated by instinct, stepping where years of being Parisian told her that roads, bridges and pavements should be, cutting between l’Hôtel Dieu and the Préfecture to reach the Quai de l’Horloge and finally Pont Neuf, the oldest bridge in the city.

She ducked at the thunder like some Stone Age primitive, counting off the seconds until lightning flared as she tried to work out how far away the storm was. Not far enough. Not nearly far enough away for the Ishies to upload what they were seeing. Alsatians didn’t bark from inside the locked préfecture de police. Sodden feral cats didn’t crouch spitting beneath deserted police trucks, there wasn’t even the slightest scuttle of a swimming rat or the heavy flap of a grey owl’s wings as it swooped low over the quai. It was as though only humans were left — and not too many of them, judging from the rain-soaked silence...

Lady Clare bent her head into the wind and headed west towards the Tuileries. She’d been protected from the worst of the storm by the buildings, more or less, but now she was face on to the howling wind, alone among the darkened deserted colonnades of the Rue de Rivoli. No one else was stupid enough to be out.

There were guards at the gate of the Palais Impériale, though. Tall boys wrapped tightly in sodden military-issue oilskins that did nothing to keep out the rain. One of them carried a Browning, held barrel-up to the open sky.

“Reverse it,” she told the startled boy, stepping out of the darkness of the Place de Palais. While he was still deciding whether to challenge her, Lady Clare leant forward and grabbed his rifle, swivelling it round until its barrel pointed at the cobbles. By the light of his single hurricane lamp, the boy could see water trickle from the muzzle and spread in an oily rainbow over the puddle at his feet.

“We don’t need guns that explode in people’s hands,” Lady Clare said tartly. “We’ve got problems enough already...”

The boy recognized her then, snapping to attention and saluting fiercely.

“Madame, I’m sorry...”

So was she. For much more than the child could begin to imagine.

Lady Clare patted his arm in passing, and took herself inside to the Prince Imperial’s study. She’d remembered where she was meant to meet the General. It was here, but there were things she needed to do first.

“My dear.” The Prince rose from his leather chair and clasped Lady Clare’s hands. She had the fingers of a corpse, Lady Clare realized, looking down at them. As cold and as grey as those of any drowned woman.

She was only a quarter of the way into his room and already she’d left a trail of mud across a Persian carpet. Water was gathering in the hem of her coat and then splashing into a puddle on the floor. Her shoes were rotted, her short hair was an unruly halo of dark spikes. Rain had even gathered in what was left of her plucked eyebrows, dripping like tears onto her cheeks.

Over the old man’s shoulder, backed by two bodyguards, Lady Clare could see the new Minister for External Security dressed immaculately in a suit cut from black Florentine wool. A balloon of pale liquid was clutched in one hand, though God knew how he’d found cognac in this city. She’d thought the Prince had drunk it all. Lazlo looked at Lady Clare and smiled, softly.

He was good, Lady Clare had no trouble admitting that. The man wasn’t gloating — at least not obviously — and he wasn’t pushing himself forward to take control, not yet. But his gaze let her know that Lazlo realized the depth of her defeat and savoured it. And it was a defeat, just being in the same room as Lazlo was proof of that.

“Minister,” the Minister for External Security bowed slightly. “Can I offer you some Courvoisier...?”

Instinct made Lady Clare almost refuse, but instead she nodded and tried to smile, watching Lazlo tip up the broad-shouldered bottle. The brandy stuck to the side of the glass as Lady Clare swirled it round to release its scent, pulling alcohol vapour deep into her lungs until welcome fire spread through her sodden body.

For a second, with the huge glass in her hand, watching Lazlo swirl and sniff his own cognac, Lady Clare could almost imagine the world was the same as it ever had been, but inside her head Lady Clare knew the world was anything but.

“What terms can we get?” Lady Clare asked Count Lazlo. The Prince put up one hand in protest but Lady Clare made herself ignore the bleak-eyed old man and kept her gaze firmly on the Minister for External Security.

Count Lazlo glanced towards his hired thugs. With their black tunics, cropped hair and practised scowls they looked like members of the Black Hundreds, or as alike as it was possible to get without wearing the enamel triple-headed eagle. Lady Clare wondered just how many more of them there were, men like those, waiting in her city.

“Guard the main door,” said Lazlo abruptly and waited while they stamped out into the hall, taking up position just inside the entrance, leaving the rain and darkness to the boys still standing outside.

Lazlo didn’t want the main door guarded at all, Lady Clare realized. He just didn’t want his men to overhear what he was about to say. She found it reassuring somehow that Lazlo was still a duplicitous bastard, even when it came to dealing with his own side.

“You agree Paris should surrender, then?” Lazlo said once the study door had swung safely shut again.

“Do we have an option?” Lady Clare wanted his answer. More than that, she needed his answer and needed it badly. Without it she would never be able to give a shape back to her life.

No trusted servant from the secretariat sat in the corner of the study, fingers flying. No tiny Aerospatiale K11 spun up near the ceiling, recording every word, duplicating with voiceType what was already being taken down on the keyboard.

But Lady Clare still wanted Lazlo’s position on record, at least inside her head.

“No,” said Lazlo, “we ran out of options a week ago.”

“So you think we should surrender?-

“Of course I do. You know what I think. Surrender’s the only way to ensure the city’s health. That’s been my view since the start.”