Shana Abe - The Treasure Keeper

Basile's mouth twisted into a smile. Vive le Roi.

The place was enormous, acres and acres of fountains and statues and hedges and trees. He'd lose her if he didn't hurry, so he stepped inside, melting at once into the gloom.

There were no torches lit along the neat rows of chestnuts and gravel before him, but he could nearly make them out anyway, the heavy black strings of trunks, the paler paths of crushed rock raked between them. He couldn't see the abandoned palace from here, not even a hint of the roof. There were no torches for it, either.

He stopped to listen. Trees creaking, almost no wind. The city past the walls strident enough, but quiet inside here, an unnatural hush. There would be insects at least, he thought, but heard none.

However—he did hear footsteps. Up ahead, to the right. Light, uneven.

He followed her as silently as he could, and that was very silently indeed.

One of the reflecting pools shone like a flat pewter disc through the nearest break in the trees. Basile found his gaze flicking to it again and again as he stole carefully forward, his eyes repeatedly drawn to that sole slick of light. He avoided a drift of withered leaves by a bench only at the last second, and just as he was inwardly cursing himself, dancing sideways to save himself from that one fateful loud step, a hand closed hard around his throat.

In front of him. And there was no one there.

He brought up both his hands to clutch at it. He felt the air squeezed from his larynx, trapped like a bubble tight inside his chest.

He was lifted high, entirely off the ground. His feet kicked out and met resistance: cloth, a great deal of it, like the skirts and petticoats of a gown. Basile rolled his eyes downward. It was a gown, taupe satin. It stood in the path without a body, without support of any kind. He could see clean down inside it. And beyond that, just beyond—a hat and coat against the base of a chestnut, tossed nearly out of view. A single dropped glove, still on the path.

Spots began to color his vision, bright light at last. He tried to cry out but only managed a wheeze; the grip on his throat did not loosen, but his boots hit the gravel again.

Beyond the spots—orange, blue, yellow—there was now a face gazing up at him. A beautiful face, more beautiful than he'd ever seen. A face from a nightmare, perfect and wintry calm, surrounded by locks of silky, silvery white.

"Good evening," said the demoiselle in a stroking voice. "Were you looking for me, sir?"

Basile wheezed some more, and the young woman nodded, serious.

"Perhaps I've been looking for you as well."

She had an accent. The slightest, slightest accent, not local at all—

He gave up clawing at her hand and took a swing at her instead, but she only leaned back, avoiding his fist. Yet her hold did loosen, just a bit, and he was able to suck in a fiery raw breath. The spots began to pop and fade.

The woman's eyes were absolutely black. The pupils and irises both, and then more, all of her eye, both of them, all black and shining and liquid like the pool, but infinitely, ominously more deep ...

Basile wet himself. He couldn't stop it. He felt the warmth trickle down his leg to his boot.

Voices. There were voices all around them, words he didn't understand, foreign words, English perhaps, and then words he knew: exchanges from earlier tonight, Nadette with the baby in her arms, shrilling don 't come home without livres, Emile hailing him from across rue St.-Honore,come on, some wine, a little billiards, good fun, we'll find that girl at Cafe Caveau, she likes me you know—

"No," said the demoiselle abruptly, and dropped him to the ground. "You're not the one I want,

after all."

Basile had crumpled to a heap at her feet, but only for a second. As soon as he was able, he scrambled away from her, gasping and staring, his fingers gouging deep into the gravel. The woman gazed down at him without expression.

No, not a woman,he thought frantically, over and over ,not a woman, not a woman, a demon, a monster—

"Still," she continued, sounding thoughtful, "it's not good for your soul to steal, is it? That is what you were planning. I think, Basile Cote, it's time for you to find a more laudable profession."

She walked away from him, moving nimbly now to the coat and hat she'd discarded before, gathering them into her arms, finding the lost glove too. She threw him a final glance from over her shoulder.

"Perhaps I'll be watching to see what you're up to, Basile. You never know."

And the monster walked off through the king's trees.

* * *

The Palais des Tuileries was known throughout certain quarters of Paris as the Grand Squander. It had been a royal residence once upon a time, but that was nearly a century past, and today it was merely an elaborate, empty reminder that the aristocracy could waste anything they wished, even a palace. The king and queen and their courtiers resided just outside the city in sparkling Versailles; Tuileries, with its vast drafty chambers and dim, dark-paneled hallways, was considered old-fashioned and unnecessarily dreary.

It was very nearly vacant. There were a few retainers still living on the lower level, along with a handful of retired court officials who no doubt felt the sting of their banishment very sharply. Royal soldiers still patrolled the grounds, but it was monotonous, tedious work, and more time was spent furtively hunched over dice than actually walking about. After all, who would want to break in? The most lively occupants of both the gardens and the palace were the rats.

Curiously enough, however, the rats were hard to find lately. They had fled, in droves, in the pit of the night not quite one week before, along with all the ravens that had been roosting in the trees and the wild geese and ducks nesting in the grasses. And the mice from the stables. And the colony of rabbits that had dug generations of warrens beneath the western amphitheatre and its verdant slopes.

There were no animals of any kind left in Tuileries, in fact, except for two. One were the humans.

The other was creeping softly up the servants' staircase in the far southern segment of the left wing of the palace. The stairs were dusty, remarkably so, but there were no windows to illuminate the flight, and thus no easy way for anyone else to see her footprints. Still, she carried her shoes in one hand, hitching up her skirts and coat with the other, careful with the hems.

The silver-haired demoiselle emerged cautiously from the doorway that opened to the uppermost floor, easing around it soundlessly, although she knew the corridor before her was deserted. The entire wing, in fact, from top to bottom, was deserted; it was the main reason she had chosen this place.

The lack of human distraction.

Her eyes closed a moment; she tested the area, inhaling deeply, drawing the air over her tongue, using every sense she could, just to be certain .

No. No people. Only dust, and her.

With the skies so overcast there was no moonlight to reflect off the walls and mottled green tiles of the long hall ahead of her, but that was fine. Zoe knew her way by now. Her feet in their stockings padded without noise along the marble. There had been a runner here once, but it had been removed, along with all the paintings and pedestals and even the chandeliers. No one, however, had bothered to strip the coved ceiling of its frescoes of hunters and horses and golden-crowned kings. There was even a panel of a dragon—dead on its back, with a knight standing over it and a sword angled through its neck.

Zoe didn't bother to glance up at it as she passed. She kept her gaze on the center tiles that stretched before her in a straight pale arrow, smoother and cleaner than everything else.