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.”