Rather than turn toward the village square when he left the guinguette, Sebastian walked downhill, to the abandoned gypsum quarry that lay at the foot of the butte. Thousands of the Revolution’s victims had been buried there in hastily dug mass graves. But the only sign of that now was a simple black cross that stood above a pile of rubble and weeds. The rest of the open mine was a sun-blasted stretch of white rock with, here and there, the burned ruins of the site’s old kilns and red-tiled sheds.
Even before the mass deaths of the Revolution, the ancient Church-affiliated cemeteries of Paris had been filled to overflowing. Les Innocents, the huge graveyard beside the central marketplace known as Les Halles, was said to have been so full that the ground level rose more than six feet above the surrounding land, and the area perpetually stank of decay. By the early 1780s, Louis XVI decided something had to be done about it. His solution became known as the catacombs.
But Paris’s catacombs were not originally constructed as ossuaries. The remnants of ancient limestone quarries and tunnels that honeycombed the ground beneath the Left Bank of the city, the old forgotten tunnels had begun collapsing in the late eighteenth century, occasionally taking houses and people with them. After a particularly spectacular cave-in, the King named a commission to inspect, chart, and shore up the old mines, and that project was already underway when a house next to the teeming Innocents cemetery collapsed beneath the weight of the centuries of bulging burials behind it. A macabre nightmare of bones, grinning skulls, and half-decomposed corpses spilled out of the fetid earth.
In response to the public outcry, the city’s old cemeteries were closed and interments within the city itself forbidden. But the question of what to do with the millions of bodies already overflowing the old burial grounds remained. Then someone got the clever idea of combining the two problems by emptying the contents of the city’s cemeteries into the old mines. Every night, caravans of black-cloth-covered wagons filled with bones converged on the catacombs. Sebastian had heard it took two years to empty the worst of the city’s old cemeteries. Some of those closed burial grounds were temporarily reopened during the Revolution for the victims of the guillotine and the various bloody journées. But many of the decapitated corpses were simply brought here to the abandoned gypsum quarry, dumped, and covered with quicklime and earth.
Much of the old gypsum quarry had been a surface mine, and the hole gaped like a vast open wound in the midst of a blighted landscape. Like the kilns and sheds on the quarry floor, the houses and workshops that had once clustered around it had been burned by the Cossacks, the broken stone walls now quickly disappearing beneath mats of weeds and festoons of vines that draped the yawning doorways and empty windows. The place was utterly deserted except for a black-and-white goat nosing a pile of refuse at the base of a jagged cut and a gray cat that ran off, tail held high, when Sebastian’s foot rolled a loose stone.
The cry of a hawk circling overhead drew his gaze to the hard blue sky, where small puffs of white clouds were forming on the western horizon. So much death, he thought; so much death and heartache, terror and disaster, resentment and fury, had gripped this troubled land for more than twenty-five years. And he had a sick feeling he could not shake that it wasn’t over yet; that they were simply stumbling through a deceptive interval of peace that could be shattered at any moment.
Sliding down one of the rocky slopes, he went to stand beside that single forlorn black cross. He’d heard that many of the mass graves from the Reign of Terror were now being emptied, with the guillotine’s victims joining their ancestors in the catacombs below the city. Just that past January, Marie-Thérèse had had the remains of her mother and father exhumed from a mass grave at the Madeleine cemetery and transferred to the royal vaults in the basilica of Saint-Denis. But looking at this mound of rubble now, Sebastian found himself wondering how the remains of the King and Queen had truly been identified from amongst those thousands of decades-old, quicklime-doused headless corpses.
The faint sound of stealthy footsteps was barely perceptible, but Sebastian’s hearing was abnormally acute—his hearing and those other senses that no one had ever adequately defined. He slipped the dagger he always carried in his boot from its sheath and turned.
Three men were sliding down the steep edge of the quarry toward him. Two were dark, their hair showing the first touch of gray, their clothes the rough trousers and coats of workmen. The third man, younger and fairer, wore the sun-faded shako hat and tattered white trousers of a French infantryman, his blue coat sporting a crowned “N” for Napoléon on the turnback. A fourth man, noticeably better dressed than the others, remained standing above, just at the edge of the quarry’s cut, his hat pulled low and his back to the brightness of the sun so that Sebastian could not see his face.
“Gentlemen,” said Sebastian in French, his eyes narrowed against the harsh sunlight glinting off the quarry’s shattered white gypsum. “I take it you have something you wish to say to me? An unusual setting to choose for a conversation.”
“Un gros malin,” said the younger, fairer man in a low voice to his companions. A smart-ass.
He carried a long, sturdy length of wooden tamping rod with a broken, jagged end. One of his companions held a knife half hidden in the folds of his ragged coat hem, while the third gripped a stout cudgel.
“The choice of location was yours, monsieur.”
“Oh? I wasn’t expecting company.”
The young ex-soldier shifted his grip on the long wooden rod. “Life is strange that way, yes?”
The ex-soldier charged him then, running ahead of his companions, the tamping rod held up and back like a long, narrow cricket bat.
Sebastian stood his ground, the blood coursing through his veins as he let the man run at him. The Frenchman’s eyes were a soft blue, his rawboned face darkened to a nut brown by the sun, his lips curled away from his teeth in a determined, focused grimace.
“Salaud!” swore the man, the rod whistling through the air as he threw all his weight behind it, aiming at Sebastian’s head.
At the last instant, Sebastian ducked and stepped into his rush.
The momentum of the missed swing carried the Frenchman’s body around, opening his right side. Sebastian thrust his knife in deep, then quickly jerked it out and danced away.
The ex-soldier’s eyes widened, his knees crumpling beneath him, his hands spasming open, dropping the rod. Sebastian heard it clatter on the rocks as he pivoted around to smash his bootheel into the man’s face, sending him flying back so hard that the breath left his body in a whoosh when his backbone slammed against the quarry’s rock floor.
Swooping down, Sebastian jammed his bloody dagger back into its sheath and snatched up the rod, gripping it in both hands. “Stop,” he said to the two men still advancing on him. “Just stop.”
“Sac à merde,” hissed the one with the knife, and charged. He was a pace or two ahead of his companion, and Sebastian ran straight at him, the tamping rod held like a cavalry lance.
Gritting his teeth, he rammed the rod’s jagged end straight through the man’s chest. It made an obscene popping noise, the Frenchman’s jaw sagging, his mouth opening to send dark blood pouring down his chin as he toppled backward.
Sebastian yanked his dagger from its sheath again, his gaze meeting the remaining man’s startled, frightened eyes. “Give it up,” said Sebastian, his hand clenched around the knife’s grip, his breath coming hard and fast. “I don’t want to kill you.” There’s been too much killing in this land already.
The Frenchman’s gaze slid sideways to where the young ex-soldier was trying to lurch to his feet, one hand held to his bloody side, his face a dusty mask of pain. “And Baptiste?”
Sebastian squinted up at the rim of the quarry. The watching gentleman had disappeared. His blood still pounding in his ears, Sebastian said, “Take him with you.”
Dropping his cudgel, the man sidled over to his fallen companion to loop the ex-soldier’s arm over his shoulders and help him to his feet. He cast a quick, anxious glance at Sebastian, but Sebastian simply shook his head and said, “Go on. Get him out of here.”
The two men staggered awkwardly away toward a path that led up the quarry’s steep side.
Sebastian swiped a forearm across his hot, grimy face and let them go.