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.

René said, “Should I have the bodies removed?”

“I left them breathing.” Spear thrust a mask at him. René took it, then held out his hand for the club. Spear just smiled. “You must be having a laugh.”

René ran a sleeve across his forehead before sliding the mask onto his face, watching through narrow eyeholes as Spear looked left and then right, slipping down the dark street toward the gates. No, he was not laughing. And he was not allowing Hammond behind him with that club, either.

They followed the slant of the streets downward, crossing a bridge over the Seine as it rushed to its waterfall, and in only a few blocks they arrived at the fencing around the cliff edge. The tall iron gate was open, the space between thronged and loud with landovers and people traveling in both directions. A gilded chair seemed to float by over the heads of the crowd, an inlaid table following it, part of an assembly line of looted goods that were being passed hand to hand down the road into the Lower City.

Any gendarmes at the gate seemed to have long since fled, except for one, a grim young man with a determined face and a tiny mustache, pulling on his uniform jacket and running for all he was worth to the Upper City. René looked to Spear, and Spear’s mask nodded. They put their heads down and melded with the uncontrollable crowd, going down into the chasm of the Lower City under the light of a rising highmoon.

Sophia pushed back the sweaty tendrils of hair that were creeping out from beneath her knitted cap. She wished she could see the moon. She was working fast, pushing the pins inside the lock one by one, already on her second attempt, having guessed wrong on which way the key would have turned. She heard the click, felt the lock give, and jumped up. The back of the lift swung silently toward her, showing another metal door behind it, and another empty rivet for a keyhole.

She bit her lip, knelt down, and started again, quelling impatience. But this time, the lock gave quickly, and the door creaked inward, pulled by a draft. She pushed it open. The lantern shone on stone steps, descending into darkness.

Sophia tucked her picklocks back into place, slid on her gloves, grabbed the lantern, and stepped through the hidden door.

“You should ask … the Goddess if she will find him,” LeBlanc said, frowning down at the coin on his palm. “Because she will … not, and then … you will know …”

Renaud used a handkerchief to wipe the perspiration from his brow.

“More wine?” Émile offered.

“No!” said LeBlanc, causing a few heads to turn as his voice carried over the music. “Ask her … the Goddess … if she will find him. Before … highmoon.”

“Of course, Albert,” Émile replied. “Goddess, will she find him before highmoon?”

LeBlanc flipped the coin.

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.