stone, and she knew from Ruth’s perspective she vanished as if she had walked into the wall. But she felt nothing, not even a tingle, as she passed.
“Careful,” she called back as she found her footing on the raw clay floor of a catacomb. On every side, skulls stacked like fruit between the layers of a torte composed of cords of human arm and leg bones glowed warmly in the filtered radiance of the torch. “There’s a step.”
A moment later, Ruth’s head leaned in the ragged gap that could be seen quite plainly from the inside. “Illusion,” she said, as if one encountered that sort of thing every day. “It won’t hide our scent.”
“I was relying on the sewage for that.”
The Ulfhethinn leapt lightly down. Her nose wrinkled. The scratches on her face had crusted, the edges pink already with healing.
“It will help,” Ruth admitted. “The sewers connect to the catacombs?”
“All under Paris, there’s a labyrinth,” Mary said.
Ruth reached out and gently brushed the back of her nails against a dead man’s bony cheek. “A labyrinth has only one path through.”
“Like life,” Mary answered. “No matter how many twists and turnings it takes, you can’t retrace your steps, and it always leads to the center.”
“Yes,” Ruth said, as they started forward again—through a columned gallery, “I’ve been thinking about that.”
Conversation was paused by a brief squeeze that had them on their bellies. Water dripped down Mary’s neck, and she dreaded to think what the damp was doing to her hair. She rolled her eyes at herself: whatever damage it might have caused, the plunge in the river had already anticipated. And it wasn’t as if Ruth looked any less a fright.
On the other side of the squeeze, rising to a crouch, Mary said, “Please continue.”
“I don’t want to go to South Africa.”
“Ruth,” Mary said. “The Russians—”
“I’m not suicidal,” Ruth said.
“Good,” Mary said. “Because the Prussians are packing. And even if I hadn’t come to be fond of you, for saving my city you deserve to live.”
“Fond of me?” Ruth asked.
Mary snorted.
They came to a set of Brobdingnagian stairs, a dozen or so waist-high slabs which they climbed as much with their hands as their feet.
The silence must have weighed on Ruth far more than it did on Mary. “If what I did was right, I shouldn’t have to flee like a…like a criminal. And if it was wrong…” Ruth’s breath sounded as if she were crying, but Mary smelled no tears. “I should not fear judgment.”
“Really? And here I just spent the last twenty-four hours of my life killing myself to keep you away from the bloody Russians. Are you ready to throw that away?”
“No,” Ruth said. “What I owe you, I owe you, too. But…the hour and the place of my demise are determined. It’s upon me how I meet it.”
“Hah.” Mary clambered up another stair, this one slumped and angled. Gravel skittered from her feet over the edge to vanish in the blackness below. It plinked like water, which made her realize that the echoes of the water were now only a distant hiss. She transferred the torch to her other hand, extending the right one to Ruth.
Ruth accepted the assistance gratefully. Ulfhethinn or no, she was still a recovering invalid. Mary burned fuel; she would need to feed when this was done with, but she did not become weary. Ruth’s near-white hair hung in grimy strings; her breaths came slowly, but heavily.
“Spoken like a true Ulfhethinn,” Mary said. “At least that’s where I assume you get the Norse fatalism.”
“The Norse don’t have a lock on fatalism,” Ruth answered. She leaned down and put her hands on her knees. “How much further?”
“Less than half as far as we’ve come,” Mary replied.
“Oh thank God.”
“Yes.” Mary seated herself on the edge of the next higher step. “Do you believe in God?”
Ruth shrugged. “Ask me again in a year.”
“Fair enough. So if you’re not suicidal—”
“I’m not suicidal.” She straightened, pushing her hands into the small of her back. “But I killed seven men, Mary. And I’d have killed more if I could have laid hands on them.”
“How much blood did those men have on their hands?”
“That’s irrelevant,” Ruth said levelly. That amber-red flame glossed her pupils again. “I can make excuses, and be no better than they are. Or I can trust in the law to judge me, and live or die as a…it sounds stupid, even inside my head.”
“A righteous woman,” Mary said.
Thin-lipped, Ruth nodded.
Mary pinched the bridge of her