“Well, this wasn’t a city of any proportion, Censeur. You might say the same of Montmagny or Sur-Mer.”

“At least at Montmagny there are temples.”

“The churches here—”

“Aggrandized peasant huts. Their theology is impoverished, too. Like a line drawing of Christianity, all the details left out.”

Well, Demarch had thought as much himself. He nodded.

The cavalcade wound through Beacon Street and back to the motor hotel the Bureau had appropriated as headquarters. The chauffeur parked and stood outside without offering to open the doors. Demarch moved to get out, but Bisonette touched his arm. “A moment.”

He tensed now, waiting.

“News from the capital,” Bisonette said. “Your friend Guy Marris has left the Bureau.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. With three fingers missing.”

Demarch stiffened. Three fingers was the traditional penalty for stealing Bureau property. Or lying to a hierarch.

Bisonette said, “I understand the two of you were close.”

Nauseated, weightless, Demarch could only nod.

“Fortunately you have other friends. Your father-in-law, for instance. He’s fondly remembered. Though very old. No one would want to insult him or his family. Not while he’s alive.” Bisonette paused to let this wisdom sink in. “Lieutenant, I assume you want to keep your fingers.” He nodded again.

“You have the forged papers Guy Marris gave you?” They were in his breast pocket. Demarch said nothing, but his hand strayed there.

“Give them to me. No more need be said. At least for now.”

Demarch caught and held the Censeur’s eyes. His eyes were a mild blue, the color of a hazy sky. Demarch had wanted to find something there, the apospasma theion, or its opposite, the antimimon pneuma, a visible absence of the soul. But he was disappointed.

He took Evelyn’s pass papers from his breast pocket and put them in the Censeur’s ancient hand.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Bisonette’s visit was more troublesome than Delafleur had expected. It distracted his attention from the situation developing in the military barracks.

Two militiamen had been caught trying to bluff past the checkpoints out of town. Questioned, they admitted that they had heard the town would be burned with the soldiers still in it; that the Proctors had decided they were expendable.

Which was true but not for public consumption. It was a dangerous rumor and needed to be stopped. Today three more militiamen had disappeared on routine patrol: perhaps killed or captured by townspeople, more likely on the run.

All this would be taken care of in less than twenty-four hours, but a lot could happen in that time. If the soldiers rioted it would make everything problematic. Delafleur had taken over City Hall as his quartier general and made the basement storage rooms, into a kind of stockade; Lukas Thibault was down there, but Lukas was not the only font of this poisoned water.

Delafleur moved restlessly through what had once been the office of the mayor, with its commanding view of the town. The town was deceptively still. Motionless, except for the wind and the falling snow. The trouble was subterranean, but for how long? And the weather was a problem in itself. Would snow postpone the bomb test? He listened to the chatter on the radio monitor the military men had installed for him, but it was only technical caquetage. The countdown hadn’t begun.

Delafleur wished he could hurry time onward, push the hours until they tumbled over.

There was a knock at the door. Delafleur said, “Come in!” And turned to see a soldier waiting.

“The woman you wanted us to pick up was out, Censeur,” the man said.

“I’m not a Censeur,” Delafleur said irritably. “Call me Patron. It’s in your handbook, for God’s sake.”

The soldier ducked his head. “Yes, Patron. But the boy. We found the boy.”

Delafleur looked past the soldier and saw the boy in the waiting room: a nothing-in-particular marmot wearing spectacles and a rag of a shirt. So this was Clifford Stockton, Lukas Thibault’s nemesis.

“Lock him downstairs,” Delafleur said.

Perhaps the rumors could no longer be contained. Maybe it was too late for that. But it couldn’t hurt to try.

He shooed out the soldier. Then he picked up the telephone and called the military commander, Corporal Trebach, and told him to keep his troops confined to quarters today. There had been gunfire from the townspeople, he said, and he didn’t want anyone hurt. It was a lie, of course. Two lies: no gunfire, at least not yet, and he didn’t care who got hurt. Whether Trebach was fooled… who could say?

It was strange work, Delafleur thought, like plugging holes in a dike until the dike can be destroyed.

“It’s tomorrow,” Evelyn Woodward said. “I don’t know what time. Probably around noon. I heard him talking to Delafleur on the phone. There are some problems with the soldiers, so no one wants to wait.”

Dex nodded. Evelyn had shown up at his door for what he supposed was the last time, bearing this final nugget of information. She looked cold, he thought; gaunt, though there was no doubt plenty to eat while she was under Demarch’s wing. Her eyes took in the room without expression; she never smiled—but why should she?

He promised he would pass on the news. Then he said, “You can come with us, Evie—there’s room in the car.”

He had told her about Linneth, about his escape plans. She had not seemed jealous and Dex supposed she didn’t have the emotional capacity for it, after so much else. She had only looked at him a little wistfully. As she looked at him now.

She shook her head. “I’ll go with the lieutenant,” she said. “It’s safer.”

“I hope so.”

“Thank you, Dex. I mean, really—thank you.” She touched his arm. “You’ve changed, you know.”

He watched from the window as she walked into the falling snow.

Shepperd came by later with essentially the same information from a source of his own: D-Day was tomorrow; the convoy would begin an hour before dawn. “Bless you if you aren’t ready, but we can’t wait; everybody just head west up what used to be Coldwater Road and pray for luck. And carry that damned pistol! Don’t leave it lying on your kitchen table, for God’s sake.”

Dex offered him the use of the scanner, but Shepperd shook his head. “We have a few. Useful items. Check the marine band, though, if you’re curious, and a signal up around thirteen hundred megahertz—we think that’s coming from the bomb people. Mostly it’s incomprehensible, but you might pick up a clue. Mainly, though, don’t worry about that. Set out on time is the main thing. I would like us all on that corduroy road westbound by daybreak. You have a car, I gather.”

He did, an aging Ford in a basement lot, the car he used to drive to work on days when the weather made walking a chore. He had already stashed a couple of jerricans of black market gasoline in the trunk.

Shepperd offered his hand. Dex shook it. “Good luck,” he said.

“To us all,” Shepperd told him.

Linneth came before curfew—AWOL, though nobody cared anymore; the guards had been posted elsewhere. There was no question of sleep. She helped Dex carry supplies down to the car; he filled the tank with acrid-smelling American petrol.

Three hours after midnight they ate a final meal in Dex’s kitchen. A granular snow was still gathering and blowing in the street. The wind rattled the casements of the window.

Dex raised a glass of tepid water in a toast.

“To an old world,” he said. “And a new one.”

“Both stranger than we thought.”

They had not finished drinking when they heard the sound of distant gunfire.