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.”