“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.