“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?”