“It is past highmoon?” LeBlanc looked at their faces, his voice rising to a shriek. Renaud took a step back. “We have missed the execution! The time that Fate herself decreed!”

Allemande pushed up his glasses, the gendarmes paused their further explorations, and then LeBlanc picked up his sword by the blade and inexplicably struck Renaud in the head with the hilt. Renaud crumpled, the picklock gone from his leg, Sophia saw, and then LeBlanc walked toward Tom, now with the proper end in his hand, blade out.

Sophia moved before the gendarmes knew she’d left their slackened grip. She barreled into LeBlanc with a yell, knocking him sideways before they were on her again, dragging her up by the arms.

“This is unseemly,” said Allemande. He waved a casual hand at the gendarmes. “Sit both the Bellamys down and use those chains. And Albert. Calm yourself and stop striking things.” Renaud picked himself up from the dirt, a small wound on his head.

“I will kill her,” said LeBlanc. He was shaking, a dirty, bleeding mess, and almost completely out of control. “I will kill them both!”

“Yes, yes,” said Allemande, “of course you shall. Albert, you look rather worse for wear. Am I right in thinking that you have arrested the wrong man … person?”

Sophia watched a spasm of genuine fear flit across LeBlanc’s face as she was thrown back against the stone pedestal. She glanced at the little man with the glasses. What must Allemande be if a monster like LeBlanc could fear him? LeBlanc struggled to smooth his cut and filthy robes.

“I … I can assure you, Premier …” His softness returned. “… that the Red Rook will soon die, and that the people will know it. And these red feathers that fight in the streets will be crushed.”

“Can you promise me that? Can you really? You know I take my promises seriously.”

LeBlanc nodded, eyes on the ground.

“And no more mysterious disappearances from the prisons, to keep you begging and consulting your Goddess? Can you promise me that as well?”

Sophia blinked as her shackle clicked shut. Allemande doesn’t know the Tombs are empty, she realized. He must have come straight down the lift and into … whatever this place was. And LeBlanc, she saw, hadn’t realized that Allemande didn’t know it, either. His hands worked in and out, clenching and unclenching as Allemande came and stood close to his back, head barely reaching his shoulder. Allemande spoke so softly it was difficult to hear.

“How, exactly, do you expect me to put stock in any promise you make, Albert? You did not even arrest a person of the correct gender. You know I do not tolerate disorder. This mob you have created is serving its purpose, but that will soon be done with. I do not care for your revenge, or your Goddess, or which Bellamy the people think is the Red Rook. As long as they see the Rook climb the scaffold and place his or her head on the block. We must be seen to be doing this properly. That is the essential thing. But you know what I like to do when it cannot be seen, don’t you, Albert? What I like to do when I am … disappointed in my friends.”

Sophia watched LeBlanc shake. Allemande pushed up his glasses, put his hands behind his back, turned, and started across the round room of bones. Then the spectacled eyes swiveled back to Tom. “Can that one walk?”

“Yes,” LeBlanc replied slowly. “But not well.”

“Be certain that he can make a decent show of himself on the way to the scaffold. Both of them. Are we clear on this?”

“Yes, Premier,” said LeBlanc. “But … we are agreed that this one limps, yes?” He indicated Tom, though his eyes slid over to Sophia.

“Yes, Albert, we are agreed on that.”

Allemande gathered his gendarmes while LeBlanc moved close to Sophia. LeBlanc’s voice was every bit as soft as Allemande’s, his breath in her face. “Tell me where the prisoners are, and I will spare you pain until your execution.”

She looked back at him and whispered, “I don’t think Allemande would approve.”

LeBlanc smiled. “There are many kinds of pain, Miss Bellamy.” Then his hand struck like a snake and Tom gasped. The picklock that had been in Renaud’s leg was now in Tom’s. Tom put a hand on Sophia’s arm, squeezing, not with pain but in warning. Allemande craned his neck as she leaned forward, getting even closer to LeBlanc’s face.

“That was unintelligent,” she hissed. “Because now I am going to tell Allemande that his prison is empty. In fact, I wrote a letter yesterday telling him so. It was my fate to rescue all the prisoners, so therefore I’d already done it, don’t you see? It should have arrived with the night post. So what to do, Albert? Keep him from his desk, or get there before him?”

She watched many things flit through LeBlanc’s manic eyes. Murder, loathing, the desire to hurt her, the desire not to lose his life.

“He’s waiting,” she whispered.

LeBlanc got to his feet, oozing blood everywhere. “One moment more, Premier,” he said loudly, “and I will personally escort you to my rooms, where we can discuss all that you wish, and make you comfortable until the proper time.”

Allemande watched as LeBlanc hurried around the pedestal. Sophia tensed at LeBlanc’s presence behind her, ready for a picklock or something else to pierce a part of her body she did not immediately need, but LeBlanc only ran his hands over the stone basin above her head, humming. She glanced sideways. Tom was grimacing, eyes shut, hand still squeezing her arm.

LeBlanc’s humming changed to a murmur as he chanted his question to Fate. Sophia caught the words “Bellamy” and “die,” followed by the clank of a casting piece on the stone bottom of the pedestal.

“Dawn,” LeBlanc said.

“Dawn,” said René. “The Tombs will explode at dawn.”

Spear turned the wheel of the firelighter and pulled out the knob.

“They will die at dawn,” said LeBlanc. “The Goddess has spoken.”

“I appreciate a deity with a proper sense of my schedule,” Allemande commented. “We won’t even have to change the bells. Now, if you are ready, Albert? I have some questions I’d like to ask you.”

Cartier slipped unobtrusively through the torchlit crowd. He’d like to have asked directions, but he was hearing sounds that sealed his mouth. Screaming, yelling, and the clash of metal. He turned the last bend in the cliff road and saw a small war at the Seine Gate. Men and women in masks of black and white against others with red paint on their cheeks, a melee of swords, bows, clubs, bricks, and broken bottles. Fate against feathers.

Cartier ducked as someone in a mask went over the cliff edge, down to where the fogs were beginning to roll off the river. He’d never heard such noise, even in the prison yard. But the best thing the red feathers could do for the Rook, Cartier thought, was let him through and show him the fastest way to the flat of René Hasard. He darted forward, fast, avoiding an ax, slid his thin body through the boundary fence, and fled into the Upper City.

“I think we will need another route,” René commented. They were far below the Seine Gate, walking the zigzagged road. They couldn’t see the fighting, but they could hear it. “How are you at climbing?”

Spear paused, hands in pockets, and shrugged. “Not as bad as you’d think.”

René led the way back down the road, through alleys that were empty and quiet, down streets with their lights out, doors barred, until they came to a strip of no-man’s-land along the edge of the Lower City, behind a row of slanting wooden shanties. Bare dirt was sprinkled with blades of grass, and an immense composting rubbish heap was piled to their right, pushed into a mound that was higher than Spear’s head. The stench was unbearable even with the wind blowing in the other direction. Spear looked up at the rising cliff face, glowing in a light now on its way to nethermoon.