Lune and the Red Empress

An argosy slid under the stars and for a moment the two of them paused in their skating. Lune wondered if she recognised the heavy-bellied craft, with its dull-droning engines and gaslit gondola. It was rare to see an argosy these recent years; still rarer to see one flying and not be aboard it herself, in the service of Madame Bezile.

“It’s not ours,” Soutine said quietly, as if he’d read her thoughts.

“I thought she might have left early. When she called me to her room it was full of suitcases and crates. That always means she’s about to leave Paris.”

The wavering lamplight caught Soutine’s nod. “I was told it wouldn’t be until tomorrow evening. It’s no coincidence that she’s sent you out tonight, though. She wants that egg to take with her.”

Soutine was right; it took only a second glance to verify that this was not their mistresses’ machine, but simply the modest transport of some middling merchant or privateer, coming or going from some other part of Free France.

So she had not been left behind.

“We should separate now,” Soutine declared. “I shouldn’t have come with you at all tonight. You know the way from here, of course. Keep your eyes peeled for churchmen.”

“I thought it was the Aftmen I needed to worry about.”

“Them too.”

“I can take care of myself now. Thank you, Soutine.”

“See you back at the Château. Hopefully you’ll have a nice fat prize when you return.”

“I’ll try.”

She watched Soutine skate away around the end, out of sight. He skated proficiently but with a lingering stiffness in his right leg. He had broken his ankle after parachuting from the old argosy, the night it burned. Already Lune was faster, nimbler, more elegant in her moves. Soutine was seven years older and had been her mentor and instructor from the day she began to be trained. Like Lune, he’d been born poor in one of the filthier quarters of Paris and soon indentured into Madame Bezile’s service. He also took his duties to their mistress with the utmost seriousness. She was stern but fair, and she treated her boys and girls with kindness except when they were stupid or indolent. Beyond that, they both knew that they were doing good work, perhaps the best of all.

Alone now, Lune resumed her journeying. For a little while, as she took bends at speed, and jumped walls and obstacles as if she had wings, she travelled down empty streets, past unlit windows. But then her course took her into a busier quarter and she had no sooner passed the theatre than a squadron of Aftmen began to follow her. There were four of them, wearing blackflame cloaks and masked in accordance with city law. They were not in hard pursuit but it was clear that she had drawn their curiosity.

This was not good.

Wishing Soutine had stayed with her a bit longer, Lune dodged back behind the awning of the theatre, weaving through the hissing torches that illuminated the beer garden, and then out onto the back channel. She did not turn for the main river, but instead headed quickly for the maze of passages that snaked around the Quai. Her heart hammered, and she skated so hard that a fall would have brought certain catastrophe. If she hadn’t dawdled to look at the argosy, then she’d have passed the theatre earlier, when there was every chance that the Aftmen would have been preoccupied with other business . . .

But after a few more minutes she convinced herself that the Aftmen had given up on her. When she slowed to take a bend, she heard only the whisk of her own skates, no others. That didn’t mean that she wasn’t just as likely to run into another squadron, somewhere else. There were a lot of them abroad, as if they had an inkling that something was going to happen.

Her little theft? She doubted that very much.

All the same, maybe it was still too dangerous tonight. Perhaps she should go back to the Château and explain to Madame Bezile that she couldn’t have her egg right now.

That, of course, would not go down very well. Lune could imagine the scolding reprimand she’d be likely to receive: all the more stinging, given that she had disappointed Madame Bezile on so very few occasions in the past.

“She likes you,” Soutine had told her, not long before she’d been invited to ride in the new argosy for the first time, to see Paris from the air, laid out at night like a jewelled courtesan.

Lune stopped at the foot of the steps that lead up to the island; she bent, slid off the blades, and was left in her ice shoes. She dashed up the steps, keeping close to the shadows, and took stock. Here there was no ice on the street, just bare stone. Chalked onto the ground under her feet in scratchy, half-smeared lines was a weblike design, which she assumed to be part of some pavement game. Lately she’d seen figures like it elsewhere in Paris, scrawled in odd corners and alleys, sometimes on walls. But there were no children around at this hour.

Beyond the nearest row of houses, the ice-locked river shimmered in the torchlight. The bulk of the Cathedral rose beyond, its upper reaches blacker than the sky itself. The mansions along the river were dim, with only the occasional meagre flare of light. A murmur of voices, a burst of bitter laughter, carried across the ice from the Left Bank. A moving blue flicker betrayed the lit epaulettes of Aftmen, as they raced after some other hapless victim.

Lune pulled the mottled cape further over her head and ran down the alleyways towards the Cathedral. She crossed a short, icebound bridge with low, worn parapets, then traversed a narrow winding street, and was finally by the cathedral’s soaring flanks.

The huge doors were bolted; she could not remember the last time that they had been opened. Perhaps in her childhood? The bulk of the cathedral loomed above her head, the golden struts of the roof catching the light of the torches and sending it back, wan gold against the snow.

Madame Bezile had sent her to retrieve the egg tonight, but the planning had begun weeks ago. You didn’t just walk into the Cathedral, especially when you had intentions of theft. It had taken days to find the right document in the bibliotheque, and even then she had not been sure that she was on the right track. Breathing in dust and age and the smell of ancient books, she had carefully unscrolled the parchment, heart thumping in her chest, so loudly that she had half expected the librarian to come bustling up with a complaint. And there was regret, too: in another age, this kind of learning would have been her right, and her life. Instead, she was indentured to Madame Bezile. She looked down at a map, of the Isle, with the cathedral depicted in circle and rectangles in the middle of it. A faint dark line angled beneath: an old sewer, perhaps, or a way in to the cellars.

Not sure, but now she had to try. Around the back of the cathedral, to the delivery vaults which serviced the cafes and bars. Some were now closed for the deep winter, but others remained open. Lune took out the picklocks, found the door indicated by the map, hoped she was right.

It took a minute or so to break the lock and she expected the breath of an Aftman, a flicker of flame cloak, down her neck at any moment. It did not come and she slipped inside, into sudden dankness and damp.

The wall was slimy beneath her gloved hand. She sparked a small flare and saw that the vault extended deep under the street. The passage, if it still existed, was at the back. She closed the door softly behind her and clambered over the massed barrels. Salt fish, from the smell of it, carried down in the icebreakers from the North Sea. She wondered how long this had been here. At the far end of the vault, wooden pallets had been stacked against the wall. She tore them aside, and at the end of the wall was a small open space, barely large enough to squeeze through. But she did so and found herself standing in a passage. Lune, not tall, had to duck her head but there was enough room to walk down it. She followed it, twisting and turning, and at last came to a further door. Hard to keep track of the twists—she hoped she wouldn’t end up in someone’s cellar. Out with the picklocks again, a harder task this time due to the rust, and the door creaked open. It sounded hideously loud in the confines of the passage. She stepped cautiously through into a narrow space between tall stone walls. Someone was watching. Lune jumped, before she realised it was a statue: Notre Dame D’Hiver, Our Lady of Winter, wearing her white and silver gown and clasping a branch of olive, symbol of a spring which would never now come, unless you believed.

She crept past the Lady’s downcast gaze and into the dimness of the Cathedral. She had expected priests, but there was no one. Light flickered from the tiny candles lit by the faithful during the day and a shaft of light came from somewhere in the height of the vault, making dust motes dance in its beam. She’d heard they kept what she was looking for in its own shrine, towards the back. She went up between the huge pillars, a small swift shadow.

The shrine was locked behind a grille, but she could see it now. It sat on a small stand on the altar. Its jewelled sides glinted in the candlelight, sparking green, gold, a deep shining black. Scrolls and filigrees of silver and gold, impossibly fine and delicate, wrapped around the jewelwork. There was a thick metal band around the middle, and in the middle of that was an ornate ring, enclosing a kind of spiralling motif. The egg was smaller than she had been expecting, but at the same time more delicate, more visibly precious in appearance. She opened the grille. There would be an alarm, surely, electricity or hidden tripwires. But she could see nothing to prevent her taking the egg. She cast a coin across the floor, it skittered and rattled to a stop. Nothing moved, nothing sounded.

Lune stepped into the shrine, and for long moments it was all she could do to slow her breath. It was one thing to break into the cathedral, another still to stand this close to the egg. Caught now, she could always claim that she had only come to admire the fabled thing. But to hold it, to take it in her hands, to smuggle it out of the shrine: There could be no excuses then.

Lune reached out and hefted the egg from its stand. It jerked up, as if she had made to lift a goblet in the expectation of its being full, only to find that it was empty. She knew then that the expedition had been in vain, for the egg could not possibly be authentic. It felt no more substantial than if it had been made from layers of papier maché, a cleverly-done fake to fool the gullible and the ignorant. Which surely made sense: The egg in the shrine must be a decoy, with the real one—if it even existed—cloistered somewhere much more secure. No wonder there were no priests to guard this fake: It wasn’t worth anyone’s bother. Bitterness flooded into her mouth: She had failed Bezile, failed the debt that she owed her, failed the mother who had left Lune beneath Bezile’s dark wing. The feeling that now she would never be free brushed over her skin like moths.

But then she felt the cold, even through her gloves. The chill reached her fingers and stayed there, like the first tingle of frostbite. This was more than just the coldness of something that had been kept in a dank vault for a long time. It emanated from the egg itself, a fierce, ever-renewing coldness.

And who had ever said that the eggs were heavy, anyway? Now that she gave the matter due consideration, Lune thought it likely that she had assumed this detail herself, rather than being told it by anyone who might have known better.

She fingered the ring set into the egg’s waist-band, and felt an edge of metal, like a tiny sprung lever. The lever budged against the pressure from her finger, and curiosity compelled Lune to push it all the way. She heard a tiny metallic rasp and saw the spiral motif reveal itself to be a shutter, whose elegant curved blades retracted to expose the dark faceted red of a ruby, or a stone very like it.

She released the lever. It sprang back, and the shutter snapped closed again. It was only then that she felt the second lever, set under the ring. It did not yield when she applied pressure to it. Perhaps the first lever had to be held back first, or perhaps the second lever was jammed with age.

Nervous—conscious that she should have resisted the urge to tamper with the egg in any way—Lune swaddled it into the pouch under her cloak. Immediately she felt its cold insinuate its way through the fabric, into her belly. How, she wondered, could something so cold bestow warmth and light and power, when used properly?

She had not even retraced her steps past the statue of Our Lady of Winter when the priest emerged from the gloom, blocking her way.

“You did well, child, to get this far.” He was a young churchman, barely old enough to shave, but his face was so drawn—and the shadows so deeply accentuated by the gloom—that there was something grim and skull-like about his countenance. “Well, but not well enough. I take it you were sent by the Château, to steal what is rightfully ours? To prove yourself, I don’t doubt?’ His eyes flashed with avaricious interest: She wondered how long it had been since this young acolyte had seen a woman, or anyone from outside the cathedral.

“It meant nothing to you,” Lune said. “You weren’t using it, just keeping it locked away down here.”

“Because it is holy. Because it is not a thing to be ‘used,’ or made into a gaudy spectacle.” He was blocking her exit. Although the priest appeared unarmed, she thought little of her chances of overpowering him. The Château had not given her a weapon: not even a dagger, let alone a discharge pistol. Soutine carried one; he’d let her fire it once, in the Château’s courtyard, just so she knew how it would one day feel to be trusted with that power. But the point of this errand—as the priest had rightly deduced—was to prove that she could take the egg by wit and stealth alone, not force of arms.

Well, on that score she had failed miserably, hadn’t she?

But Lune remembered something the Madame Bezile had said, in their last moments alone in the Château, before she had put on her skates and run the gauntlet of the Aftmen. “If you are trapped, my good Lune, and the egg is in your possession, you are never without an ally.” She had paused to wrap another layer of fur around her body, against the chamber’s cold. “But call on that ally sparingly. The light of creation can never be put back, once it is loose in the world.”

Lune had only been half listening, preoccupied as she was with the task ahead. Her mistress was fond of cryptic utterances, and it didn’t pay to dwell on them all.

“Give me the egg,” the priest said. “Do it now, and you will be treated with leniency.”

“I came for it,” Lune said. “I’m taking it.”

At last she recognised the apprehension in the churchman’s face. It wasn’t just that he was worried about her dropping or damaging the egg. Something else: the same apprehension he might have shown if she held a blade against his throat.

He moved. Lunged toward her, reaching out to snatch for the egg. But Lune was faster. She brought the egg out of the pouch. Cradling it from underneath with her right hand, she used the forefinger of her left hand to work the lever on the shutter: this time pointing the ruby at the priest. With the thumb of her right hand, she pressed hard against the second lever, the one that had felt stiff before. This time it moved, but only grudgingly, like very old clockwork that had nearly seized into place. Yet as she worked it back, she felt other things—subtle geared mechanisms—click and whirr inside the egg, moving within layers invisible to the eye. Each successive movement seemed to trigger another, deeper and deeper into the egg’s heart. And from the ruby eye in the middle of the ring came light. The needle of brightness that skewered the darkness of the underground chamber was whiter than anything she had ever imagined, without the slightest tint of pink or red. Lune nearly dropped the egg in surprise. The priest raised his hands to his face, but he was not nearly fast enough. Lune doused the rapier of light across his eyes, the priest screaming, and then released the two levers. The shutter snapped tight, and inside the egg mechanisms unwound hastily. The light was gone, though the memory of it was seared across Lune’s vision.

The priest had fallen to the floor. He was clutching hands to his eyes, almost like a man trying to gouge his own sight away. And he was moaning and wriggling, as if in the grip of some grave palsy.

Lune stepped over him and continued on her journey.

She hardly dared pause when she reached the outside world. The egg was still giving off its chill, a cold that seemed to leech energy and resolve from her between one breath and the next. It was still an arduous journey back to the Château. But she was out, and there were no Aftmen waiting to detain her. Lune put on her skates and set off along the streets that bordered the black ribbon of the frozen river, trying to push all thoughts of the blinded priest from her mind, at the same time reassuring herself that what she had done was right and necessary.

The eggs had been made by men, in ages past, as an insurance against this long and deepening winter. Fire had been poured into them. Bottled for centuries, it was a gift from the dead. Though the eggs were rare, and rarer still with each passing generation, their fire was all that stood between the world and slow freezing death.

“What we do will seem wrong at times,” Madame Bezile had explained. “It will seem harsh, and it will involve deception and cruelty. The Aftmen will dog our every step, thinking that they act for the greater good. We will make enemies of decent men and women, the pious and the misguided, the brave and the foolish. The churchmen are not wicked, but their scripture has led them badly astray. They revere the eggs so highly that they would sooner see the lights go out than waste a drop of holy fire. But we serve science, not superstition. Across Free France, even beyond its margins, children shiver and starve for want of the energy a single egg can bring. My argosy carries life to those who most need it. Our mission is truly sacred.”

If there had been few travellers abroad before, there were even fewer now. The beer gardens and theatres had finished business for the evening. Lit windows and lantern-decked alleys were now dark. The occasional illuminated mansion or civic building served only to emphasize the nightly gloom that had settled on most of the city. Some of these places ran on gas or other contrivances, but as always fuel was scarce. And even gas or torchlight offered only a feeble defence against the night and the cold. Only the eggs could truly push back that chill, and even then only until the pure white light had stopped pouring from their hearts. That same light could make ancient machines turn again; it could send icebreakers to the Northern Wastes and propel fliers and argosies to the ends of the Earth. It could energise weapons potent enough to slice a tenement in half, or make the frozen river boil again. Lune had seen something of that light now, as she turned the egg against the priest.

How much had she spent: a hundredth, a thousandth, of the egg’s capacity? As her skates flashed along the ice, she wondered if Madame Bezile had some means of evaluating what portion of an egg had already been depleted, and whether some sanction would be forthcoming against Lune for squandering that which was precious beyond measure . . .

She heard the whisk, whisk, of another skater coming up behind her, moving with effortless, confident rhythm. A scissoring noise like knives being sharpened against each other. Lune did not look back. She maintained her pace, neither hastening nor slowing, until the road forked ahead. She took the rightmost turn, braking sharply, and sped down a narrowing, meandering alley away from the river. She knew the city well but not this winding passage. Old, sagging buildings, three or four storeys tall, leaned in on each other, trapping a thread of star-flecked sky between their jagged rooflines. The ice was rough and rutted and she had no choice but to slow down. A black cat, or rather a cat-shaped absence, dashed across the ice ahead of her, almost losing its tail under her blades. Lune drew breath sharply, but as the cat disappeared between barrels stacked at a doorway, it occurred to her that the other skater was not on her heels. Lune smiled at her nervousness. Any other night, she wouldn’t have thought twice about another traveller catching up with her from behind.

The alley terminated in a set of rising steps, glazed with treacherous ice. She risked a glance back the way she had come, and thought for a moment about returning to the main thoroughfare, where the going would be easier. But no, she wasn’t chancing it. Lune removed the skates again and climbed the steps, taking particular care now that the egg was in her care. If her mental map of this district wasn’t failing her, she had an idea where this alley ought to come out.

She had nearly reached the top of the steps when the figure loomed over her, blackflame cloak rippling and billowing as if stirred by some hidden breeze. Aftman, Lune thought to herself: almost immediately followed by the realisation that she had failed; that in fact this was worse than merely failing because now she would have to answer to more than just the authority of the Mademoiselle. Then something steely and sharp glimmered in the Aftman’s hand, and she recognised the curlicued barrel of a pistol.

“Come with me,” the Aftman said. “I think you have something I want very much. You have just come from the Cathedral, haven’t you?”

Lune’s heart roared. She couldn’t see the Aftman’s face, only the cloak and the pistol. The rest of him was lost in shadow. Strangely, he stood next to a patch of wall marked with the same chalk design she had seen before entering the Cathedral.

The chalk marks bright, unsmeared by rain or passing hands—as if they’d been made very recently.

“You mean this?’ she asked, innocently enough, and began to bring the egg out of the pouch, cradling it as she had done before.

“If you’re intending to blind or stun me, it won’t work,” the Aftman said, and—by dint of leaning towards her—his face revealed itself, along with the black globes that he wore on his eyes. “Besides, it would be a shame to waste any more of that power, wouldn’t it? Not when you’ve gone to so much trouble to steal it.”

There was something wrong, Lune realised. The man looked like an Aftman, but he wasn’t speaking like one. Aftmen didn’t normally travel alone, either. Usually in pairs, or threes, the better to overwhelm their prey. And that pistol: It was strangely ornate, agleam with baroque ornamentation. Not the weapon of civic militia, but of a privateer, or a rich playboy . . .

“Who are you?’ Lune asked.

“Oh,” he said, mocking. “Isn’t that obvious?”

“I think you’re bluffing,” Lune said, and once more took the egg from its pouch, once more touched the lever.

The same light as before shot forth. She saw it echoed in the Aftman’s lenses, a flash like black fire, as though the light of the egg had reflected from something deep within the iris itself.

“Ah!” cried the Aftman, but it did not sound as though he had been wounded, nor did he fall. Rather, it was a cry of triumph. Lune stepped back, but she was too slow. A cone of light snapped from the Aftman’s left eye, expanding outwards until she was enveloped in an aura of shifting colours: magenta, vermilion, ebony black. She batted at the lines of colour, fighting a dark rainbow, but though her hands went straight through, the colour held her. Black expanded, held, was all there was.

Later, Lune woke. There was a gritty sourness in her mouth and a pungent smell, not unpleasant, filled her nose. It made her sneeze. She blinked, but the darkness around her was all-enveloping: She could not even see her hand in front of her. But the surface beneath her bound hands was velvety soft.

“It would be an idea not to move,” a voice said from the darkness. It sounded amused, and this annoyed Lune.

“Why not? Will you shoot me?”

“Oh,” the voice said, and now she felt sure it was the Aftman, or whatever he might be. “If I’d wanted to do that, now, I’d have done it some time ago. I took quite some trouble to bring you here.”

“And where is ‘here’?”

“I’ll show you.”

Light, dim and grey, began to creep into the room. Objects swam gradually from it: a table, spindly chairs. Lune found that she was lying on a black velvet chaise longue, trussed like a chicken for the pot, but when she looked down at her hands, she could see nothing that bound them. An experimental tug. No result. The room was grey, pallid drapes, a grey carpet. All monochrome, with one spot of colour: the egg, which rested on a small velvet cushion on the table, glowing with a faint crimson fire.

Across the room, the Aftman sat on a fragile armchair. His ornate weapon rested across his knees. He wore a belt with an ornate buckle, set with gleaming studs. Without the hood, and the lenses that had hid his eyes, he was revealed as young, a pale, gaunt face, all sinews. His eyes were silver grey. He looked as though he had been carved from shadow. Lune had never seen anyone like him before.

“Who are you?”

“My name is Arquelle. I am from a place called Courtrai.”

“Never heard of it,” Lune said. It was the truth, but it sounded like a put-down.

“That,” Arquelle said, “is no surprise. It’s in Belgium, not Free France.”

Lune waited for a further explanation, but none was forthcoming.

“So,” Arquelle went on. “You stole an egg. Very enterprising.”

He sounded as though he approved. Lune said nothing.

“But why should you do such a desperate thing?”

“Isn’t that obvious?”

“Humour me. I’m not from round here.”

“Power.”

His pale eyebrows rose. “For yourself?”

“Of course not. For all of us. The church seeks to keep the power of the eggs for itself, secretes them away, keeps them hidden in a holiness which is no use to anyone.”

“Use,” Arquelle mused. “And you would use it?”

“I know those who can. For the good of society, for the benefit of ordinary people.”

“You work for someone. A woman who calls herself Madame Bezile. She finds eggs, gathers them unto herself, and bestows them on the poor and the needy.” He said this with a mildly sarcastic lilt.

“If you know,” said Lune with contempt, “then why question me?”

“I wish to see if you believe in what you’re doing. I don’t know, you see. Do you have the interests of others at heart?’ He waved a long hand. “Young, idealistic, full of glorious notions?”

“I am not a fool.”

“Or simply a mercenary, a thief for hire, a cynic?’ Arquelle went on as if she had not spoken. He spoke as if musing, his gaze fixed upon the air.

“I am not that, either,” Lune said, hotly. “Madame Bezile took me in, when no one else would have me, when my mother was dying. I owe her a great debt.”

“Yet you know what she is?”

“She is my mistress,” Lune said, stubbornly, forcing down the long-held doubts. Bezile commanded more of her loyalty than Arquelle, after all.

“So, neither a thief nor a fool. The egg likes you, you know.”

Lune gaped at him. “The egg—what are you talking about?”

“Because,” Arquelle remarked, “if it did not, you’d be dead. Letting the fire out like that . . . Now come with me. There’s someone I’d like you to meet.”

Lune found that she could rise. The invisible restraints had melted away. At once, she began to make plans: snatch the egg, and run—but the moment the thought entered her mind, a tightening about her wrists warned it away.

“Tedious, I know,” Arquelle said, although his back was to her. “But necessary until you’re able to make an informed decision.” He reached into his coat and pulled out a long black strap. “Here. Buckle this around your waist, and make sure it’s tight.”

Lune took the object warily. She could move her hands provided she kept thoughts of flight from her mind. “A belt?”

“More than a belt. Don’t fiddle with the buckle once it’s on, or you’ll bash your skull on the ceiling.”

It was the same as the one Arquelle already wore. She fastened it around her waist, flinching when the belt seemed to tighten of its own accord. It stopped just before it became uncomfortable.

Away from the grey, elegant room, the building was more typical of the city: ancient blocks of stone, a smell of the damp and the river. They walked past a wooden-shuttered window, through which orange light betrayed the coming of dawn. Lune only felt as if she had been unconscious for minutes, when in fact it must have been hours.

“I must get back to the Château.”

“In time,” Arquelle said.

He led her into what must have once been a stairwell, before the stairs crumbled to dust. Now it was a circular shaft, its windows shuttered. They stood on a creaking wooden platform with gaps in the floorboards. “Your belt is slaved to mine,” Arquelle said, touching one of the studs on his buckle. “If you need to know how it works, I’ll show you later. That’ll depend on the Captain’s view of your usefulness.”

The belts emitted a dual rising whine, a sound that quickly passed the threshold of audibility. Lune gasped as the floor dropped away from her feet. There was a feeling in her belly like falling, but instead of plummeting she was rising smoothly up. The cold stone walls slid by, the circular platform dropping away with increasing speed. Arquelle had his thumbs tucked into the belt, as if this was the most normal thing in the world. He was grinning.

The discharge pistol, the stunning weapon, the restraining mechanism—these were all old-world technologies, vanishingly rare. But Lune had heard of them. The belts were something else. These were functioning relics from an even earlier time, when men and women strode the skies like gods.

Things that no one was really sure had ever been real.

It was as if Arquelle had read her thoughts. “We use the belts sparingly. There’s only a finite charge in their power packs, about ten thousand ascents per unit, and they can’t be re-energised once they’re dead. You might say we’d be better off putting stairs back.”

“Why don’t you?”

“The Captain has many enemies. At least this way no one can get to him without going to some considerable bother.”

Lune hardly dared look down, but by the time they reached the wooden landing at the top of the shaft, it was clear that they’d come up the equivalent of ten or twelve stories in a normal building. The landing was semicircular; as they reached its level Arquelle touched another belt stud to make them slide sideways, until their feet were only a sole’s thickness off the flooring. He cut the power and Lune felt her weight return. She edged away from the drop.

“You can keep the belt on for now,” Arquelle said. “You wouldn’t get very far with it, even if you tried.”

He opened a heavy wooden door and she followed him into what she judged must be the very top of the building. It was a half-octagonal room, with doors leading off it into what must have been other parts of this garret. There were no windows as such, merely narrow, glass-filled slits. Through the nearest slit she made out the four iron stumps of the Old Tower, clawing at the dawn sky like four attenuated fingers.

Above her head was another level, a metal platform reached by a black spiral staircase, and above the platform was a circular window, facing all the quarters of the compass and surmounted by a dark-fretted iron ceiling.

Some kind of apparatus sat on the platform, a contraption of mirrors and lenses whose function was at first unclear.

Lune paid it little heed beyond that first glance. Paris was full of strange things that no longer worked properly. What had her attention were the clocks.

There were hundreds of them, all manner of clocks filling the walls, crowding in on the window-slits. A relentless ticking filled Lune’s hearing, summed from innumerable tiny pendulums and cogs. Across a wide table, clocks lay in various stages of disrepair.

“You’ll realise why I’ve brought you here,” Arquelle said, “Once you’ve met him.”

“Met who?”

It was only when the figure made the tiniest of movements that Lune registered that they were not alone in the room. The gowned and hooded form sat, or rather slumped, at a worktable, leaning so far forward and with its head so low that it was at first almost hidden by the larger clocks. The figure might have been presumed to be unconscious, or even dead, except that the black gloved fingers of its right hand were moving, poking slender instruments into the open gearwork of a clock while the left hand supported the instrument’s square-framed chassis a few inches off the table.

She understood now the purpose of the mirrors and lenses situated on the high platform. Between one moment and the next the Sun must have pushed a splinter of light above the horizon. The apparatus gathered that sunlight, concentrated it, and marshalled it into a bright spot where it was most needed. The open clock was transfixed in a golden beam of intense brilliance, beautified like a saint in one of the time-faded paintings Madame Bezile kept in the Château’s long corridors.

From the clock issued delicate picking and scratching sounds. The figure was silent, giving no indication that it was aware of Lune’s presence. Of its face she could see nothing, but from the hood of the gown protruded a dozen or so brassy tubes, all pointing in the same direction. As she stared one of the tubes clicked and retracted, as if in response to some hidden stimulus. Another whirred out to replace it, thicker this time. The fingers continued their work.

“I have her,” Arquelle said, raising his voice as if to address a crowd. “And I have the egg.”

“A moment.” The reply was impossibly hoarse, barely a voice at all. “I’ve waited hours for the light, Arquelle. Let me make the most of it.”

Lune stood still. “Who is it?” she asked.

“My master,” Arquelle answered in a low tone. “I mentioned him already. Captain Pallas. Does that mean anything to you?”

“I’ve never heard of this man before tonight.”

“Bezile wouldn’t have seen any need to educate you. That doesn’t mean she isn’t aware of the Captain. They’re in approximately the same line of work, after all. The acquisition and exploitation of eggs, for the betterment of Free France and whatever humanity lies beyond it. Isn’t that what she tells you?”

The hooded form made an irritated grunt and lowered the clock to the table, withdrawing its tools. “You know I need absolute concentration, Arquelle.”

“You also wished to be informed the moment she was in our custody,” Arquelle pointed out. There was just enough insolence in his reply to suggest that he had little fear of reprimand or dismissal. “Or did I misunderstand that bit?”

“No,” the hooded man said, his rasp of voice managing to soften itself. “You did not, of course. Well, I suppose I should see her, and the prize. It is the one we hoped for, isn’t it?”

“It’s real enough.”

“You know this?”

“Damn right I know it. She tried using it against me.”

“Resourceful, then.”

Arquelle shrugged. “Or cavalier.”

The seated man raised his slumped form slightly and reached up with his gloved hands to push back the hood. He had on a kind of mask, strapped around what appeared to be a bald, skull-shaped head. The mask was made of metal and leather, and covered most of the front of his face, except for his chin, mouth, and the very tip of his nose. The skin that she could see was old: raw and leathery in places, sagging and wrinkly in others, veined through like marble, dotted here and there with scars, colourless lesions and bubbling growths. A fuzz of beard around the chin was pure white. Of his eyes, nothing showed. The metal front of the mask was as complicated as any of the gutted clocks on the table. The brass tubes were lenses, set into swivelling mechanisms. Fine tubes, black and flexible, ran from the base of each lens around the back of his head, where they braided together into a single bunch and vanished into the hood and down the back of his neck.

“What do you want with me, Captain Pallas?” Lune asked. “Because if it’s nothing important, I’ve work to be doing.”

“You have spirit, girl, I’ll give you that. But do you have enough? That’s the question.” Slowly, Captain Pallas reached up and began to undo the leather fastenings of his mask.

“What do you want with all these clocks?” Lune asked, not sure if she wanted to see what was behind that mask.

“It’s about being prepared,” Captain Pallas said, undoing the last of the straps. “A back-up policy. We live in a world where things work a little less well each year. One day, sooner than we realise, there won’t be power to run the argosies and icebreakers, or light our buildings, or keep us warm as the ice closes in.” Slowly, he pulled the mask away from his face, before pushing it back over his scalp, where he allowed it to rest, with the lenses pointed at the ceiling. “Then, we’ll be back to fire and wood and metal. Things that work by muscle and wind and water, like clocks. I have no illusions that I will play any role in that world—I am old enough now, older than you probably realise—but I cannot turn my back on the changes that are coming. When the last egg has given up its fire, perhaps one of these clocks will serve some useful function, somewhere in the city. I’m hoping for something better than that, you understand. But it pays to take precautions.”

Lune was looking at a blind man. His face wasn’t as bad as she’d feared—there was no hideous disfigurement there, nothing that moved her to pity or revulsion. You saw worse every day, in the lines of beggars on the approach to the Quai. But it was certainly the face of a very old man. And his eyes were a sightless milky white, staring at her and yet not at her, as if they only remembered where she had been standing.

“What happened?” Lune asked, sensing that there was more to it than just age.

“An egg burned my vision away. I caught a glimpse of the holy fire, and this is the price I paid. The strange thing is that even now, I cannot say that it wasn’t worth it.”

“But you must see, to be able to repair the clocks.”

“In a manner of speaking.” He touched a glove to the lenses on his scalp. “Machines. Camera eyes, of varying focal depth. Recovered from the close-prox hull sensors on my ship, after I crashed near Anvers. You’ll have noted how the outputs converge and run together, down my back. A good neurosurgeon could have wired them straight into my skull, but where do you find a good neurosurgeon these days? Rhetorical question, of course.”

“So how do you see?”

“Beneath my clothing, strapped to my back, is an array of actuators. Again, it was recovered from my ship: Its original function lay in the active cushioning mechanism of an acceleration couch. With some assistance, it was adapted to enable me to see. When the cameras transmit a picture, it is converted into a pattern of stimuli across my back. My skin receptors detect the pattern and transmit nervous impulses to my brain. It took some while before I was able to perceive those impulses in terms of a coherent image, but eventually the necessary adjustments took place. Having no input from my eyes, my brain craved visual stimulus. It soon latched onto the nearest substitute.” Captain Pallas gave a ghastly, skull-like smile, his lips parting to reveal a grim assortment of ancient, yellowing teeth. “The peculiar thing is that it still feels like vision. The image is crude, but because the sensation of seeing is synthesized in the visual processing centre of my brain, it feels perfectly normal, as if my eyes are still working.” He paused, not smiling now. “Alas, the lenses do not all function as well as they used to, and the actuators are losing their potency. Pixel by pixel, line by line, I am becoming blind again. But while I have something, while I can still see enough to work, I let no moment go to waste.”

“Then I am sorry to be such a burden on your time,” Lune said sourly. “Who made you look into the egg?”

“No one but myself. I did it deliberately, in the full and certain knowledge of what it would do to my eyes.”

“Then you are insane.”

“Now, possibly. Then—not in the slightest. Greedy, perhaps. Insanely inquisitive, almost certainly. But foolish, or unaware of what I was doing? Not at all. I understand exactly what the egg would do to me. And I submitted willingly.” He paused, reaching up to lower his mask back into place, the lenses turning on her with the gleam of scrutiny in their glass ends. “That’s better, Lune. I hope I didn’t disturb you, but you needed to know what I am, what I was.”

“You mentioned a ship. Did you come from the Northern Wastes?”

“No, not from the Northern Wastes.” Captain Pallas stared at her for long moments: she had the sense that she was being measured, judged, evaluated. “It was a spacecraft. A void-crosser, one of the last. Atalanta in Calydon. I hadn’t picked up the signature of another ship anywhere near here for centuries. Not for parsecs out, in all directions. Zero return. I think they were all gone, except for me.”

Disappointed, Lune said: “Only children speak of such things. They sing about them in nursery rhymes.” Although at the back of her mind was the thought that children also said that men and women had once been able to step through the sky . . .

“Which doesn’t make them untrue, merely forgotten, distorted,” Captain Pallas said. “Until a thousand years ago, this city was the centre of an empire infinitely greater than Free France. A realm of trade and exploration that reached far beyond Earth, out into the galaxy. Settlements, commerce . . . worlds of wealth and marvel beyond imagining. It lasted five thousand years, Lune. Then it ended. Not at once, but in slow, painful degrees: just like the world is ending now. We don’t remember it, most of us, because we choose not to. The memory of what we once had would be a cold slap in the face from reality, every waking moment. So we buried it, along with everything else.” With an effort, he made to stand from the table, the chair scraping back on its wooden feet. “You realise, of course, that I mention all of this only as preamble. The eggs are the crux. The eggs are what matters.”

“Then why did you waste one, by letting it blind you?” Lune asked.

“I would like you to do something for me,” Captain Pallas said, sidestepping her question. “That is, you must make a choice. It’s easy enough.”

“What kind of choice?”

“To go back and work for Madame Bezile, and do her bidding, or to go back and work for Bezile and do mine instead. In other words, I want you to betray her.”

“And if I say no?”

“Then you’ll have made an enemy of me, and my enemy is also Arquelle’s. He’s very good, Arquelle. He found you once, Lune. It won’t tax him to find you again.” He softened his tone. Above them, the contraption of lenses and mirrors clicked and moved by the tiniest of degrees, tracking the Sun’s ascent. “But it’s not my intention to threaten you; I’d far rather convince you we are on the side of right. You will return to her, as she expects, and you will have an egg. Not the one you stole from the chapel, but a close copy, although nearly depleted of fire. It will suffice to convince Madame Bezile that you have done what she asked of you.”

“While you keep the other one?”

“It hasn’t been completely wasted, so yes.” Captain Pallas examined one of his tools, fingering it as if making the acquaintance for the first time. “But there’s another egg that’s much more useful to me. It’s called the Red Empress, and its fire is unusually . . . potent. Have you heard of this egg?”

Lune shook her head, then thought to add: “No.”

“That doesn’t surprise me. It’s what powers her argosy. You’ve been aboard, we gather?”

Lune prickled. How well did they know her? “She takes me on her errands, when I’m of use to her.”

“That’s what we thought. Our intelligence tells us that she’ll be leaving the city very shortly, on another ‘errand’”. He stressed the word as if it had some double meaning lost on Lune. “You’ll do what you can to be aboard, Lune, and then you’ll do something for us. Or not, if you choose otherwise. It’s up to you.” Captain Pallas put down his tool. “I’ll leave her in your hands now, Arquelle. Tell her what she needs to know, and make sure she grasps the importance of her decision.”

“That shouldn’t be too difficult,” Arquelle said.

Paris-below, so different from Paris-above, and yet with tinges of the same, even in daylight: darkness, shadows, the damp and the cold. Arquelle and Lune made their way swiftly through a maze of cellars, tunnels, runnels, passages and sewers. Once, they used their suspensor belts to leap across a terrifying black pit, a hole into the bowels of the Earth itself, and when a grinning Arquelle paused to toss a stone into the abyss, Lune had stopped counting before she heard its distant impact.

Her guide moved with such confidence that Lune wondered if he had been raised here—such things were known—or had lived here for a long time. But when she voiced this thought, a whispered mention, he said only, lightly, “Ah, I’m just someone who dances well with the dark.”

“You’re from Earth, though. You didn’t come down from the stars, like Captain Pallas.”

“No, the Atalanta came down near Anvers—it’s just a shivering little hamlet now, but it used to be a great city—and I wasn’t born very far away, in an even smaller and more shivering little hamlet. When he passed through on his way to Free France, I became one of his followers.”

“Are there many of you?”

“Enough.”

And then he stopped, before a carved oak door, so old that it felt as hard as metal when Lune ran a wondering hand over it. Arquelle spoke a word, raised a small device with whirling spirals, that flashed red and blue in the shadows and caused a ripple to run down the surface of the door. An answering shimmer seemed to run inside Lune’s mind. She gave a little cry.

“What—”

“Hush.” He reached out a hand and pulled her inside to sudden warmth. “Don’t speak, Lune. Don’t make another sound.”

He led her up a narrow, twisting flight of stairs. The heat was stifling: Lune had never felt anything like it. It made her skin itch and her eyes prickle. Dryness caught the back of her throat like sudden sandpaper. She had to struggle not to cough. It grew darker as the heat increased, until she found, to her shame, that her fingers were clutching Arquelle’s hand with a grip that must have hurt. She felt him gently free his fingers, then take her by the shoulders until he could pass her in front of him. They were in an enclosed space. Her fingers brushed smooth hot stone. A chink of light caught her attention and Arquelle breathed, “Look.”

Lune bent her head. In the stone, there was the smallest slit, vertical and precise: not some natural configuration of the blocks of the wall, but something that had been created. Curious, she looked within.

A woman was reclining on a couch, amid brightness and lightness and warmth. Not the day’s paltry brightness, magnified by mirrors and lenses, but something artificial. The room was filled with hot house flowers: orchids, jasmine, huge unnatural blooms in every shade of golden and crimson, scarlet, sapphire, silvery-white. Lune blinked: The colours were so intense as to be distressing. The woman herself wore nothing except a chain around her waist, rubies flashing red fire against her pale skin. Her hair was red-gold, and long, cascading over the velvet edge of the divan. She held a glass in one hand, turning it up to the light so that its contents glowed and gleamed. And as she did so, Lune saw her face.

It was Bezile. Amongst all this colour and heat and splendour and waste—Bezile the ascetic, the prim. Bezile, lying here in languor in an artificial tropic. Bezile, who had been Lune’s mentor for so long.

Bezile, who wanted an egg.

When they were safe again, lying low on a flat-walled roof within sight of the Château, Arquelle said: “She’s a liar and a con-artist, not really any better than the churchmen. She doles out the odd egg now and then to the poor and the needy, but it’s really just a smokescreen. She keeps the powerful ones for herself, and a handful of wealthy clients spread across Free France—or as far as her argosy can reach, which is about the same thing. Nimble-fingered boys and girls like you keep her operation running. She brings you up as thieves, trains you to steal eggs and steal them well, and you think you’re doing the world some good. But she doesn’t give a damn about what the power in those eggs can do for anyone else, so long as they keep her warm at night.”

“You could have tricked me somehow, made me see what wasn’t there.”

“I suppose,” Arquelle said, as if the thought had never really occurred to him. “Still: ask yourself—did it make sense? She’s rich, Lune—you don’t need me to tell you that. Do you think she got that wealth from a lifetime of charitable deeds?”

“Captain Pallas wants me to steal an egg. How does that make him any different?”

“Because he knows what the eggs really are. Or what they really were, until they fell into our hands.”

Lune spoke as if reciting some text burned into her brain so long ago that she had forgotten the origin. “Before the world turned cold, and the energy began to run out, the wisest men and women of that golden time scooped fire from the ailing Sun and bottled it in the eggs. They did this so that we, their descendants, might hold the winter at bay. It was their gift to us, across the numberless ages.”

Arquelle tilted his head. “Well, that’s one theory. I’ll tell you another. The eggs are a lot older than that, and they weren’t made for our benefit.” He put a finger under Lune’s chin and gently forced her to look to the sky. “If it were night, what would you see?”

Her answer was sullen. She was still thinking of Bezile, the red rubies against her pale skin. “Stars.”

“A few thousand, at the most. But each of those stars is a sun like our own, with its own little family of worlds. You can’t even begin to imagine how many more stars there are beyond the small number we can see at night. A great whorl of them, the galaxy we call the Milky Way . . . hundreds of billions. More stars than there are people who have ever lived on Earth, let alone Free France. But even that isn’t the end. Our galaxy isn’t the only one, not by a long margin.” He reached down and pinched a piece of windblown grit from the edge of the roof, where it met the low wall that offered them some shelter. “Think of all the other pieces of dirt, in all of Paris . . . and you’ve got some idea of how many galaxies there are out there.”

“And you would know this, would you?”

“It’s what Captain Pallas tells me, and I have no reason to doubt it. Nor to doubt the fact that all those galaxies, all the stars and worlds they contain, once had an origin. The universe is not infinitely old, Lune. It’s not even three times as old as this world we’re sitting on now.”

Lune thought of the statue she had seen the evening before. “You sound like a churchman now, preaching of God and Genesis.”

“The origin I speak of isn’t the same as theirs. But they’re right about one thing. There were Gods in the old days. Just not the kind they tend to go on about.”

Lune shifted. The Sun was up, though now cloud-veiled, and the roof was still cold.

“There’s another?”

“When the universe was young, very young, it was smaller and hotter than it is now. Unimaginably small and unimaginably hot: all space and time bound into a bubble the size of my fist. Everything we now know grew from that one seed. Matter and energy, space and time. Galaxies. Stars. Worlds. Cities. You and me.”

“This is nonsense.”

“Would that it were, then we could both do nothing and go home with a clear conscience.” He shook his head sadly. “I’m afraid we can’t do that, Lune. We have an obligation. A duty.”

“To the eggs?”

“They aren’t eggs,” Arquelle answered carefully. “They’re lifeboats.”

She answered this with an uncertain laugh. “You make even less sense.”

“When the universe was younger than a heartbeat, it was very different. It was unimaginably hot and dense, a tiny seething realm of fire and light. We couldn’t have survived then, even if we were small enough to fit inside: There were no worlds, no atoms, no matter as we understand it. But there was life. Creatures of the quark-gluon plasma, Captain Pallas called them. They hadn’t just formed in that fire; they were fire. Millions of them: thinking beings, angels with the wisdom of gods. They had no choice but to be wise. They’d survived countless aeons, endured the rise of fall of kingdoms and empires beyond recall. And all this in less than a heartbeat since the first flash of creation. All human experience, Lune, every word ever set to paper, every thought, every dream, is just a childish scribble compared to that vast and luminous pageant. Of course, it had to end. But it wasn’t through foolishness or hubris. The universe was changing as it grew older. It was poised on the brink of a transformative event—Captain Pallas called it a phase of superluminal acceleration—when it would suddenly become much bigger and much colder. Without that event, creatures like you and I could never exist. But it was death to the fire beings, and there was nothing they could do to stop it from happening. Except, that is, for a very few who found a way to survive, to ride out the transformation.”

“The eggs,” Lune guessed.

“The wisest of the fire beings found a way to cocoon themselves, to create little pockets, in which they could endure. They would be cut off from their fellows for the rest of time, or until external conditions returned to a state that they could withstand—but it was better than ceasing to exist. So they wrapped themselves in armour and survived the expansion phase, and even as the universe swelled and cooled and atoms gathered into stars and galaxies and then worlds and people, they stayed alive. Billions of years passed, and the eggs spread through the cosmos like seeds on the wind.”

“Until we found them, I suppose.”

He gave her a smile. “We weren’t the first, not by a long stretch. We humans aren’t the first thinking creatures to climb out of the mud. Ours wasn’t even the first stellar empire in the Milky Way. There’d been many before us. The eggs had been found and examined. They’d passed through many alien hands before we humans chanced upon them. Nor were we the first to discover that the eggs contained energy. But that wasn’t the point of them. When we crack open and egg and send its fire into furnaces, we’re killing a being as old as creation itself. Madame Bezile isn’t just wrong to use the eggs for herself. She’s a murderess.”

Lune remembered what she had seen earlier that evening, when Pallas removed his mask. “Even if that was the case, your captain’s no better. He told me himself. It was an egg’s fire that blinded him.”

Her own voice sounded hollow, as though she tried to convince herself, force down old doubts and new. A memory of the library floated, unbidden, into her mind: thoughts of a time of peace, when she would have been allowed to study books, to think, to follow her own will. A time that was long, long gone. She blinked back tears which she did not want Arquelle to see, and turned away.

“That’s true,” Arquelle allowed. “But he also told you that he considered it a price worth paying. Did it occur to you to wonder why?”

“Mad old men say strange things.”

“That’s also true. But Captain Pallas isn’t mad, at least not as I understand it. The egg blinded him, yes. But it did more than that. It reached into his head and changed him. The creature in the egg died, in one sense. But in another it survived. It passed its essence, its wisdom, its memories, into the head of Captain Pallas. His eyes were the window into his soul, until the fire burned them away.” Arquelle waited, as if he expected Lune to dismiss his words.

But instead she remembered the priest who had blocked her escape from the Cathedral, the way he had twitched on the floor.

“I blinded a churchman this evening. Did the fire change him as well?”

“That would depend,” Arquelle answered carefully. “If the fire’s too bright, then it just burns. And even if the fire’s not too bright, if the contact’s too brief, there won’t be enough time for the essence to cross over.”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s like sending a code, but only getting half the message through. Or not even half. You’re left with something that doesn’t make sense.” He paused. “Half a mind, or less than that. But you needn’t worry. By the time you stole that egg, I doubt there was enough of the fire being left to cross over.”

“It was different for your Captain.”

“He endured the fire, and the contact was prolonged. Since then, Captain Pallas has what you might call a . . . different view of things. He remembers what he used to be, but it’s as if he sees his old life through a dirty window. And his priorities aren’t the same. He understands that we have a very clear choice. We can use the eggs to keep the night at bay, for a little longer. When the last egg is cracked, though, we’ll be no better off than when we started. There’s another way, though. It’s harder, and it won’t bring us much comfort against the cold, at least not to begin with. But what we need now is wisdom, not more fuel for our furnaces. We can shiver a bit more, but be wiser. And in being wiser, we’ll stand a better chance of doing something that will last.”

“You are saying we should let the eggs blind us.”

“Their wisdom is wasted, if it’s left inside the eggs,” Arquelle said. “For the fire beings, they’re in a kind of prison. Our lives may be short, our minds tiny. But the fire beings would rather a few years of bright existence than a billion more years of limbo. They’ll gladly accept to help us, if we let them.”

“Who would choose to be blinded?”

“There are those who are willing. Around the city, even now, they’re waiting for the right time. The moment. The hard part isn’t looking into the fire, though. It’s not dying in the process. Captain Pallas was lucky, but only a fraction of an egg’s fire did that to him. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a way, but we need the Red Empress to make it happen. That’s where you come in. We’ve infiltrated Bezile’s organisation in the past, as she well knows, but we’ve never come close to the Empress.”

“It’s not like I can just walk anywhere I want to, open any door.”

“You can now.” He dug out the charm he had used on the carved oak door when they had been on their way to spy on Madame Bezile. “I’m assigning this to you. It’ll work on anything, including the doors in her argosy. Those doors may be cross-wired to her bridge, though, so once you open them you’d best not dawdle. You’ve handled eggs before, so you needn’t be afraid of the Empress. I’ll show you how to remove it safely, and put a second egg back in its place before anyone notices the power interruption.”

Lune frowned. “Won’t you also be killing the second egg?”

“It’s too late for that one. Once a certain amount of energy is drained from the egg, they can’t survive. There won’t be much fire left, though. You’d best get off the argosy as quickly as you can.”

“And I suppose you have a plan for that, if we’re already up in the air.”

“Of course.” And Arquelle tapped the suspensor belt that Lune was still wearing. “There’s a loading hatch in the argosy’s belly. You can drop through with the egg.” There’s a tracking device in the belt, slaved to mine. By the time you touch down, we’ll be waiting for you.”

“It’s that simple.”

“It’s that simple,” Arquelle confirmed.

But he must have known that nothing was ever like that. He left her on a quiet street corner, the city only just beginning to wake up around her, the egg back in her possession. He had given her instructions on the night’s work as if it was a transparent and obvious given that she would do his bidding, and thereby turn against Madame Bezile after years of willing loyalty. As if, in her head, was a mechanism that could be adjusted as easily as some gear or ratchet in a clock, turning her from servant to traitor. Perhaps that was how it worked in Captain Pallas’s world of clocks and mirrors and lenses, of suspensor belts and void-crossers.

Not Lune’s.

She had expected to arrive back at the Château when it was still night, but now it was day and she fully expected to be quizzed on her lateness. As she approached through the scrawl of ever-tightening side-streets, Lune imagined the difficult questions she might now expect, the lies it would be hard to sustain. The argosy was attached to the Château’s highest tower, straining at the mooring lines as its engines stirred the air, eager to propel the fat-bellied machine across the rooftops and beyond the margins of Paris. Men laboured in the high airs, loading provisions into Madame Bezile’s swollen craft.

“The safest lie is the one closest to the truth,” Arquelle had told her. “You crossed paths with a priest. Say that you blinded him, but before he was down he managed to knock you out.”

“With what?”

“You don’t have to say. Just that you came around in a dark part of the cathedral, and the priest was still unconscious—or however you left him—and that it took you a while to find your way out again.”

When Lune was ushered into Madame Bezile’s presence, this was the story she gave. Yet instead of doubting her, Madame Bezile put down the gold-clasped box she was holding and ushered Lune closer. “Let me see your face, child. The churchmen did this to you?” Her eyes were narrowed, not with skepticism but with sudden interest.

Lune did not know what to say. “I don’t remember what happened. I had the egg, and then I was trying to get out. It was still dark. Then something happened. I think I remember a priest, but I’m not sure. I woke up, but I was confused.” She scanned Madame Bezile’s face, searched for a clue as to how readily this concoction was being swallowed. “When I reached the outside it was light. I came back as quickly as I could.”

“If you were knocked out, you must have gashed your face as you fell. Or they cut you.” Madame Bezile reached for a hand-mirror and offered it to Lune. “Here. Does it hurt? I would send you to one of the local physicians, but there is a good man in Holdenheim; when we land tomorrow he can look at it. I’m afraid there may still be a scar left behind.”

Lune reached to touch the hard-ridged scab on her cheekbone. There was no pain, not even a tingle. It was as if a dark red caterpillar had been glued to her skin.

“I didn’t even know it was there.”

“If the churchmen had caught you, you’d have got off a lot less lightly than that. Which does not excuse the crime. Oh, Lune. My Good Lune.” Madame Bezile skimmed the wound with the back of her hand, so gently that Lune barely felt it. “That settles it, of course. You must come to Holdenheim. We leave after sunset, and now you must rest.”

Lune brought out the prize. She left the other things in the bag. “Soutine told you I made it back with the egg.”

“Yes. I never doubted that you would, but it’s still good to see it with my own eyes.”

Madame Bezile took the green-glinting egg, cupping it between both hands. Her mouth was open. She let out a tiny little exhalation. Lune had heard that sound before, and always mistaken it for admiration. Now she understood exactly what the gasp meant.

Even if she hadn’t, it was there in Bezile’s eyes. The avaricious gleam Lune had seen a thousand times before, and never recognised.

Not fascination, not even gratitude.

Lust.

“My Good Lune,” Bezile said softly. “How well you’ve done.”

They cast off after sundown.

Aboard the argosy, Bezile had continued to be fulsome in both her congratulations and her sympathy for the wound Lune had suffered. Lune, for her part, had been obliged to act and pose as they got underway. Yet it was not all insincerity. Long bonds still held—gratitude, an eagerness to please, simple fear. She could not escape from the thought that Bezile could read her mind, study her face like one of the books in the ancient library and see what lay beneath her words, her stammering thanks. But Bezile had shown no signs of suspicion, had expressed a grave and sorrowful regret for the risk that Lune had run, had placed a thin white hand upon her head in benediction and murmured a brief and apparently heartfelt prayer. As she did so, the memory of Bezile’s creamy languid form among the orchids had welled up in Lune’s mind, bringing revulsion in its wake. She had closed her eyes and bent her head in apparent piety, and Bezile had glided on.

Once she had done so, Lune went to the small porthole in the wall of the argosy and looked out, as if the sight could scour her clean. Beyond her scabbed reflection, Free France lay below, a spangle of dark and bright. She could dimly make out the towers of the churches, and the curve of the river. How strange, to think that once men had sailed from this city to the stars . . . Lune peered upwards, but the night was clouded. Her mouth tightened. Bezile, Arquelle, Pallas spun through her thoughts like skaters taking the bend of the river, small as toys. The prospect of her own betrayal was rancid in her throat, as though she had eaten something sour. But hadn’t Bezile betrayed her in turn, from the very beginning? Lune knew that it was so, and yet, and yet . . . She looked down again, concentrating on Paris and the future. Arquelle’s charm lay heavy in her pocket, as weighty as she had once imagined the eggs to be, and then, checking that she was unobserved, she made her way to the power room.

The charm worked on the door as effectively as he had promised. The same red and blue flash, the same ripple in the door’s fabric, the same answering shimmer in Lune’s head. This was old and arcane technology, and she did not care to be near it for any longer than necessary.

Yet it functioned. The door admitted her and she stepped over the raised gold threshold, pausing only to close the door behind her. The room was smaller than she had imagined, and it was obvious from the first glance that no one was in attendance. The mechanisms in here were as dependable as an old pair of skates, needing little maintenance or adjustment. The room’s curved and bolted gold walls were blank of windows or ornamentation, with the only significant feature being the gold plinth on which the Red Empress sat. The egg rested within a spherical cradle, suspended under a counterpart of the plinth which instead projected down from the ceiling. The cradle was the only complicated thing in the room, but Lune was not daunted. Arquelle had told her what to expect, and nothing she saw gave her cause to doubt his instructions.

There were no locks or traps on the cradle, since anyone entering the room was deemed to have authority to approach the Red Empress. Lune worked the delicate catches and clasps, until all that remained was the golden apparatus feeding the egg’s fire into the argosy’s furnaces. The many-jointed and knuckled pipes gave off a faint brassy heat, but when her fingers touched the metal it was strangely cool. Arquelle had told her that it would be safe to disconnect the egg for several seconds, but that she must take care to close the screening shutters before she did so. Hardly daring to breathe, she worked the little mechanisms that operated the inner and outer screens, robbing the furnace of its energy source.

She stood for a moment, straining to hear some alteration in the argosy’s engines, some telling hesitation in the throb of the floor plates. But there was no change.

She removed the Red Empress from the cradle, slipped it into the bag, and replaced it with Arquelle’s egg. The new egg was a little smaller, its ornamentation plainer, but the cradle had obviously been designed to accommodate many varying sizes and styles, and the spring-loaded clasps fell back into place without complaint. Fixing the pipes into position was more nerve-racking, if only because there could be no error. But the egg’s eyelike iris mechanisms were similar enough not to cause difficulties, and when Lune reopened the shutters, the outer and then the inner, there were no catastrophes. The argosy powered on. Her work was nearly done.

She opened the door, exited the power room, and used Arquelle’s charm to secure the place as she had left it. Then she made her way back through the iron guts of the argosy, avoiding attention, and once more using the charm to open doors that would not willingly submit. She wondered how long she had, before the new egg gave up the last of its fire and the furnaces began to cool. How long again, before anyone would think to check on the power room, and how long still before the crime would be linked to Lune?

She was nearly there. The deck plates under feet whistled with the passage of night air. Ahead was a twist in the corridor, and then the last door, the one that led to the belly hold, and to freedom.

And to Charleroi Soutine, who now stood before her in the doorway. Lune’s instructor was as surprised as she herself but Lune was quicker. She brought the pistol up, two-handed, and unwavering. She saw Soutine swallow.

“Lune?’ His voice was uncertain.

“I don’t want to shoot you,” Lune said.

“Lune, what are you doing?”

“I saw her,” Lune said. She found that her voice was urgent, wanting to convince. Soutine had always been kind to her, of all Bezile’s young men. “Last night, on the way back from the Cathedral. They took me to see her. She speaks of sacrifice and duty, but I saw her in a winter garden, among a thousand flowers. The power it must have cost . . .”

She did not expect him to believe her, but she saw his glance waver and fall and then she realised that he already knew. He muttered something.

“Soutine?”

“I—she asked me to do something, there in that garden. A guest, someone on the city council whom she wanted to impress. She said—but I couldn’t. And then she made me.”

Lune thought of Bezile’s white form, the glitter in her tigress eyes; of squandering resources. Including, it seemed, human ones. She lowered the pistol. “Soutine. It doesn’t have to be like this. It could be different.”

She had no proof, but with rising hope, she saw that she did not need it. He wanted to believe. He nodded, once.

“Go. I have not seen you.”

And, choosing to trust, she did.

Lune knelt by the floor hatch and pulled on the lever. The hatch was stiff. She tugged harder, and the hatch moved a little in its runners, exposing a rectangle of open air. The night’s cold touched her face, howling between the gap. It was wide enough to push a hand through, but certainly too narrow for escape. She risked two hands on the lever and tried again, grunting with the effort. The hatch budged again, doubling the gap, but then jammed resolutely. She couldn’t move it any wider, no matter how hard she tried. It felt as if there was metal wedged in the runner, not just grease and muck.

Paris slid under her. Tenements and houses, roofs and towers, cupolas and garrets, the moonlight glittering back from pale skate-scratched alleys and streets. She made out one or two dashing figures, but there were few people abroad at this hour. The cobalt flicker of an Aftman patrol, epaulettes lit as they went about their nocturnal business. No other fliers or argosies below her.

The gap still wasn’t wide enough. It wasn’t even close. She knew what she was capable of squeezing through, and that narrow aperture wasn’t it.

Curse Arquelle, and his plans. Curse his certainty that there was a means for Lune to escape.

But the Red Empress could fit, even if she couldn’t.

She thought about it for a few moments, hoping that there would be a catch, something she’d missed. Lune had already risked much to get this far, but always on the understanding that there was a way out. She’d hardly been enthusiastic about the idea of leaping from the argosy, even with Arquelle’s suspensor belt to convey her safely to ground. But she would much sooner have done that than face Madame Bezile when the theft came to light. As it surely would, once the egg died and the engines faltered.

There was another possibility, wasn’t there? She still had the charm, and no reason to assume that it wouldn’t let her back into the power room. She had swapped the eggs once; she could swap them a second time. Put things back the way they were; return the Red Empress to her golden throne. Get back on with her miserable life, and let Captain Pallas make other arrangements. There was hazard in returning to the power room, but she would gladly take that risk rather than submit to Madame Bezile’s inevitable wrath.

But she had said she would do this thing. And besides, there was that memory of Bezile, among the flowers . . .

Lune unbuckled the suspensor belt and removed it from her waist. Remembering how Arquelle had adjusted the load-dial, she turned it to its minimum setting and pressed the activator. The belt emitted a rising whine and tried to lift itself from her grasp, but she was stronger. Feeling as if she was wrestling a snake, she stuffed the still humming belt into the bag that already held the stolen egg. She added the charm and the discharge pistol.

Lune tightened the drawstring and hefted the rattling bag above the deck plates. She let go, and watched it settle to the floor as if lowered by an invisible thread.

That would suffice, she judged.

Lune took the bag and pushed it through the gap in the floor. The wind chilled her wrist. Dropped from this height, the bag could end up almost anywhere. That was Arquelle’s problem, though.

Not hers. Not now.

Lune made to stand. She had no plan in mind, beyond going about her business as if nothing had happened. Perhaps, if she was extraordinarily lucky, the argosy would make landfall before evidence of her crime came to light. She dared not put much hope in that, though. And even then, where would she go?

There was a sound behind her. Lune turned to face the opening door, almost relieved that she was going to be spared the need to pretend that all was well. Soutine and Derain were there, filling the doorway, faces thrown into diabolic relief by the lantern Soutine held aloft. “Step away from the hatch, Lune,” Derain instructed.

She paused before answering. “Nothing’s wrong. What do you want with me?”

“You don’t have any business down here. Even if you did, you’d need to explain why that hatch is open.”

“It was like that when I got here.”

Derain’s smile was a quick twitch of his mouth. “We saw that the hatch had been opened from the bridge. There’s a circuit. If you knew about electricity, you’d understand what I’m talking about.” He nodded at Soutine. “Close it. And bring her to Madame Bezile. I’m going to check on the power room.”

She tried to read Soutine, tried to tell if he’d gone against his promise, or had been powerless to act in any other way once her escape attempt had come to light.

She couldn’t decide.

By the time she was brought into Madame Bezile’s presence on the argosy’s bridge the evidence of Lune’s crime was supremely obvious. The egg had died, robbing the furnace of life. A reserve egg had been installed, but the fire was feeble and with its engines reduced to idle, the argosy could do little but hover, barely able to counter the prevailing winds. Derain had already conveyed the dead egg to his mistress, verifying—though this was obvious enough from its appearance—that it was not the one they had set out with.

“It was nearly inert,” he told her, while Lune looked on. “Just enough power in it to feed the furnaces for a few minutes.”

“You’ve searched thoroughly?” Madame Bezile turned the dead egg over and over in her hands, staring at it with a peculiar and lingering revulsion, as if it was some kind of large dry turd.

“There’s no sign of the Red Empress?”

“If she’s hidden it, then she knows the argosy better than any of us. I think there’s a more straightforward explanation. We found her by that open hatch. She could have dropped the egg easily enough.” Derain nodded at Lune as if she was a piece of meat. He had strapped her into one of the bridge’s skeletal metal chairs while her fate was decided.

“A spectacularly pointless gesture, wouldn’t you say? Not to mention risking half of Paris, if the egg had broken.” Madame Bezile held the dead egg before her. “Here. Take this useless thing and destroy it.”

Soutine took the egg, but with as much wariness as if there had still been energy inside it. Lune understood. It was very hard to accept that the egg had given up all its blinding fire.

“Someone must have helped her get into the power room,” Derain mused. “If they went to that much trouble, then presumably they already had a plan for getting the Red Empress out safely.” He hesitated. “There are any number of individuals who covet eggs that badly, but very few with the wherewithal to steal one from under our noses.”

“Pallas had the means,” Madame Bezile said slowly. “And we know how badly he likes his eggs.”

“Do you think he got to the girl?”

“Someone obviously did. She hasn’t the wit to have put this together on her own.” Having relieved herself of the egg, Madame Bezile had moved to stand at one of the large, down-facing windows, her hands clasped behind her back. “Pallas is no fool,” she said in a low murmur. “If she dropped the Empress, then he had a means of recovering it.”

“The hatch wouldn’t open all the way,” Derain pointed out. “Perhaps she was meant to go with the egg.”

“And survive that drop?”

“There are ways and means. We’ve searched her, and there’s nothing on her but the clothes she’s wearing. But we don’t know what she might have brought aboard.”

“How long has it been now?”

“An hour since we found her. We can maintain this altitude for a few more hours, but we won’t last the night. Our reserves were for emergencies only; they don’t have enough fire to enable sustained flight.”

“Never mind the eggs. I want to know what Pallas is up to. An hour’s a long time. If he was fast, he could have had my egg for nearly all that time. What do you suppose he’s going to do with it?”

“Nothing is a distinct possibility,” Derain said. “Merely owning the Red Empress may be sufficient for him.”

“That’s not how Pallas works. Other than its value as a commodity, the only useful thing about the Red Empress is the fire it contains.”

“If the egg is on the ground, and he turns that fire on us . . .” Derain did not need to complete his sentence.

Madame Bezile dismissed his point with a curt shake of her head. “No; it won’t be that simple. Pallas already had access to discharge weapons, and he was never so gauche as to use them against me directly. Whatever he means to do with the Empress, it won’t be that.”

“Are you sure?” Lune asked from her chair.

Madame Bezile’s attention snapped onto her. “What?”

An egg’s fire was lancing from a garret, scribing a line through the air, reaching across the rooftops and to the city’s white-hemmed margins. Though the line of fire seemed to Lune to be as bright as the Sun, it offered no illumination to the streets below.

“That,” Lune said.

Madame Bezile’s fingers dug into her forearm like talons. Lune yelped as she was dragged to the argosy’s window, brought to her knees with her face mashed against the glass.

“Did you imagine that you were cleverer than me?” Madame Bezile said, her breath warm against Lune’s ear. “Even for a moment? Did you imagine that you might go so far as to triumph?” She let out an appalled little laugh. “If it’s any consolation, you were not the first to cross me. I doubt that you’ll be the last. This pitiful little world may be running low on resources, but there never seems to be any shortfall of fools. My only regret is that I thought slightly better of you, at least for a while.”

It was hard for Lune to speak, with her mouth squashed against glass. “You’ve lost the egg.”

“Your point being?”

“If I’ve failed, then so have you.”

The line of fire was turning, sweeping across different quarters of the city.

“If that egg was the last in the world, do you think I’d have entrusted you with its recovery? There are more out there, Lune, and still more in my possession. Its loss is disappointing, and it will complicate my short-term plans. But in the longer term, it merely delays the inevitable. That’s not to say that it doesn’t pain me to see it squandered in such a fashion.”

“Rather than squandered keeping you warm, while the rest of us freeze?”

That earned Lune a smack against the glass. Something crunched in her nose, and she felt a sudden gush of warm wet fluid spill into her mouth. “I’m sorry,” Madame Bezile said, with unctuous insincerity. “I didn’t mean to get your blood on my window. Here, mop yourself up.” She was pushing a handkerchief in Lune’s face.

Despite herself, Lune took it. It was very fine, with the slippery, eel-like nap of an old-fashioned textile.

“You’ve still failed.”

“I don’t think so.”

Lune pressed the handkerchief to staunch the blood. “You wanted me to see this, but it’s you who needs to understand. I knew that Pallas wasn’t going to waste that egg.”

“Then you appear to be labouring under a misapprehension, child.”

“I’m not,” Lune said. “Watch, if you doubt me.”

At last the egg’s fire had found its target. From the garret where the egg had been opened, to the distant cupola far across the Seine, must have been thirty minute’s hard skating, three or four city quarters at least. Now that the alignment was made, though, the beam appeared to lock into position, as if its path through the air had always been ordained.

“Nothing is happening . . .” Madame Bezile started to say.

Lune cut her off. “I said watch.”

Two lines of fire emerged from the distant cupola in opposing directions. They searched the night and then found their own individual targets: two more buildings, higher than most, in what Lune judged to be the second and ninth quarters. From these buildings emerged two more pairs of sun-bright lines, redirected back across the city. These in turn found their marks and created still more beams. The process continued, the lines of fire now multiplying too rapidly to track. It was as if a spider had begun to weave a fiery web across the city, a web that was at first simple and then increasingly demented and complex.

“What,” Madame Bezile uttered. It was a command, not a question.

Lune answered in the sure and certain knowledge that nothing she now said or did could endanger Captain Pallas’s work.

“The fire’s too bright for anyone to look into. Those who have done it, most of them ended up mad.”

“And blind,” Madame Bezile said.

“The blindness wouldn’t matter, if they could end up not going mad at the same time.”

Madame Bezile gestured with an unsteady hand at the fire-webbed city. “And this? What does this have to do with it?”

“Mirrors,” Lune said carefully. “Mirrors and glass. Captain Pallas made them, so that the egg’s fire could be split up, redirected, shone into more than one mind at a time.” She swallowed. “With each doubling, the fire’s intensity is lessened. It’s still bright enough to blind, but there’s much less chance of madness.”

“They?”

“The people at the ends of those beams. Acolytes of the captain. Volunteers, who’ve agreed to open their eyes to the egg’s fire.”

There was scorn in her voice now. “So that the fire can burn out their minds?”

“Captain Pallas says they won’t go mad—most of them, anyway. There’s still a risk.”

Madame Bezile seized Lune’s hair. “Speak sense to me, girl. If they don’t go mad, what happens?”

“The eggs are alive. The fire in the egg isn’t . . .” Lune trailed off, smiling at her own inarticulacy. “It’s not really fire. It’s the living essence of something much older than us. When the eggs are opened, the fire leaks. The beings inside the eggs perish. After billions of years, they just fade out and die.” She paused. “But there’s another way. If the fire’s shone into another mind, a human mind, then not everything is lost. Some of the wisdom of the eggs . . . the wisdom of the beings trapped inside . . . it crosses over.”

“Captain Pallas put this nonsense in your head?”

“The fire touched him, a long time ago. He survived, obviously. The egg blinded him, and left him . . . changed. Some would say mad, I suppose. But not so mad that he couldn’t make this happen.”

“The fire’s fading,” Madame Bezile said, relinquishing her hold on Lune’s hair. “Look, you can see it dying away. The egg’s spent its power. Wasted on glass and mirrors, when it could have done some good for us all.”

“You’re wrong.” Lune dared to pull away, dropping the blood-soiled handkerchief from her face. “The fire touched the acolytes. It’s done what Captain Pallas wanted it to do.”

The fire-web was indeed guttering out, line by line, but for a moment the memory of it was seared into Lune’s vision like a brand. Then it was just the rooftops and the icebound streets and cold dark ribbon of the Seine, and it was as if the egg had never been opened.

“How many?”

“Twenty,” Lune said firmly. “Twenty people with the same will and determination as Captain Pallas. Twenty people who understand that the world doesn’t have to be like this. That it doesn’t have to end in ice and darkness.”

“Fools.”

“Perhaps. But you feared Captain Pallas, and there was just one of him. Now there are twenty more.”

“Assuming none of them went mad.”

“That’s true. You’ll just have to wait and see, won’t you?”

After a moment Madame Bezile said: “When you helped them steal that egg from me, you must have known there’d be consequences. Or were you so stupid as to imagine otherwise?”

“No,” Lune said. “I knew what I was doing. I knew what you were, and I knew what you were capable of.”

Madame Bezile nodded gravely. “Then what’s about to happen won’t come as any great surprise. That’s good. This late in the game, I’d hate for there to be any misunderstanding between us.”

“I’m sure there won’t be,” Lune answered

With genuine regret she said: “I gave you everything. I took you as a child, took you from the piss-stinking sewer of your life, made you something. I had hopes for you, Lune. You were quick and clever and you showed uncommon courage. I dared to think that one day you might inherit my mantle. I see now that my investment was wasted. A foolish whimsy, nothing more. You’re no better than the rest.”

The floor lurched. “We’re losing control,” Derain said urgently. “We should attempt landfall now, or abandon the argosy.”

“Let it crash,” Bezile said, as if the flying machine was of no more consequence than the soiled handkerchief. “I’ll find another one, as I did before. Tell the crew they may leave, and ready my own parachute. I’ll be at the door in a few moments.” When she had finished speaking, she reached into a secret pocket and withdrew a tiny gem-encrusted discharge pistol. For a second or two she marvelled at it, as if it had been years since she last set eyes on the dainty little weapon.

Then she flicked an arming stud, and caused lights to glimmer along the involute barrel.

Lune backed away.

“It’ll be quick,” Bezile said. “I said you were my favorite, and I meant it. Only the best for my good Lune. But I can’t let this treachery go unrewarded.”

She aimed the vile thing at Lune’s face.

“It’s over,” Lune said. “Don’t you realise? It’s over.”

“Yes, it is.”

But it was Soutine who had spoken, not Bezile. And in his hand was another discharge pistol, the one he had sometimes let her handle, against the day when she might be allowed to carry one herself.

Now he pointed it at his mistress, his hand trembling, but not so badly that the shot wouldn’t be fatal, were he to squeeze the trigger. “You were right, Lune,” he said softly. “It doesn’t have to be like this.”

“Charleroi,” Bezile said, astonished. “I thought better of you.”

“Go to the parachutes,” he told Lune. “There’ll still be one left for you.”

“What about you?”

“I’ll be there shortly.”

She did as she was told, as she had always done, whether it was Madame Bezile or Arquelle or Captain Pallas. When she reached the parachutes, three parachutes remained on the rack. She took one of the black, pillow-sized packages in her hands, bewildered by its dangling straps and obscure fastenings. She had never been shown how to use the parachutes. Why would she? No one had seriously expected the argosy to come to grief, and if it did, she had never imagined that she would be among the last to leave.

The floor lurched sickeningly. The exit door was wide open. No problem stepping through that, except now she didn’t have the suspensor belt. Another lurch, as the argosy lost still more power, and she had to grab a handhold to stop herself sliding along the deck plates, to the door’s hungry night-black aperture.

Even if she succeeded in wearing the parachute, she had no idea how to use it, how to control her descent, how to select a landing spot, in the confusion of streets and buildings below. But she thought even less of her chances of surviving the argosy’s fall, when at last it succumbed to gravity.

“Slip your arm through that hoop. Yes. Now the other one.”

It was Soutine, still holding the discharge pistol, steadying himself against a bolted wall strut. “Now the belt. Tight as you can. That’s good.”

“I don’t know how to work it.”

“The ripcord is that yellow tag. Pull it when you’re clear of the argosy’s engines, and not a moment sooner. That’s blackflame silk, and it won’t rip, but it still won’t thank you for being tangled in the propellers.”

“Where will I land?”

“With the wind as it is, you’ve a good chance of hitting Bestiary Park. But only if you go now.”

She hesitated. “Shouldn’t you be wearing yours?”

“I’m not going, Lune.’ His hand tightened on the pistol. “I’m afraid there’s still work to be done here.”

“Leave her. She doesn’t need you. She’s . . .”

“Nothing. I know. And I should follow you. But what you said, about things not having to be this way? You were right. It is over, for her. But not just Bezile.” As the floor tilted again he redoubled his grip. “I saw what happened down there, Lune. It was beautiful fire. Whatever happens after tonight, whether or not your Captain Pallas was mad or sane, it won’t be the same Paris, or even the same Free France. Because there’s an idea loose in the world that wasn’t there yesterday, and that changes everything. An idea that maybe it’s better to be wise than warm.” He jogged the pistol at her, not with the threat of violence, but urging her to go. “She made me what I am, Lune. I knew what she was long before you ever found out, but I didn’t have the strength to turn against her. And if I couldn’t make that change then, I can’t make this one. I don’t belong in the future you’ve just made happen. But you do. Now jump.”

“Soutine . . .”

This time, for an instant, she thought he might well fire the discharge pistol.

So she jumped. Through the door, into the cold-clawed wind, into the air above Paris, her Paris, her city.