Lune and the Red Empress
Liz Williams & Alastair Reynolds
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.