Rook (38 page)

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.