Read Chapter 28: The Debt Collector's End

The rat made off with half a heel of bread before Étienne could snatch it back. He let it go. The thing had earned it, scavenging the same filth he now called home.

The sewer tunnel stank of rot and limestone, of the city's unending digestion above them. A few oil lamps guttered along the walls, casting the revolutionaries who'd claimed this stretch into half-shadow. They watched him. Not with suspicion anymore, but with something closer to devotion, which was worse.

Étienne pressed his palm to his shoulder. The wound had gone from angry red to a sickening purple-green at the edges. The heat of it radiated through his shirt like a coal left too long in the pocket. He'd stopped counting the days since the barricade.

He was counting the francs he didn't have instead.

"You look like hell, Monsieur Vasseur."

The voice came from the tunnel mouth where the light couldn't quite reach. A figure stepped forward, unhurried, the soles of his boots echoing against the stone. Faubert. The moneylender wore a greatcoat that had cost more than Étienne's entire wardrobe, and beneath it a waistcoat of bottle-green silk that showed no stain from the sewers. He carried a leather satchel across his chest like a soldier's kit.

"Faubert," Étienne said. "You found me."

"Finding people is my trade. Collecting from them is my art." Faubert stopped ten feet away, close enough that his breath fogged in the lamp's glow. "You owe me four hundred francs. Principal and interest. The interest, I should note, has been compounding while you've been playing hero."

"I've been playing journalist. There's a difference."

"Not to my ledger." Faubert's smile was thin and precise, a blade in a velvet sheath. "Four hundred francs. You don't have it. I can see it in your face—which, forgive me, looks like a man who hasn't eaten properly since before the barricades went up. So. How do you intend to pay me?"

Étienne's laugh came out cracked. He lowered himself onto a crate that had once carried wine and now carried his weight and little else. The movement sent a spike of fire through his shoulder, and he bit down on the sound before it fully escaped.

"Four hundred francs is nothing to what I can offer you," he said.

"I'm listening."

"The story. The full story. The conspiracy behind the revolution. The Prussian army, the royalist agents, the ledger, the whole damn apparatus." Étienne gestured vaguely at the damp walls around them. "You run a paper too, don't you? Little sheet called *The Ledger's Mirror*? Circulation of maybe two thousand?"

Faubert's eyes narrowed. "Three thousand. And how would you know that?"

"Because I read every paper printed in this city. It's my job. And I know you're not just a moneylender. You're a man who understands information. You lend money, yes, but you also buy secrets. You sell them. You're a broker of the intangible."

"I'm a businessman."

"You're a man who wants the story before anyone else has it. Before the government can suppress it. Before the royalists can burn the presses." Étienne leaned forward, and the movement cost him. He steadied himself on the crate's edge. "I have that story. And no one can print it. The presses are watched. The printers are compromised. But you—you have a basement, don't you? You told me once that you kept a press for your own pamphlets. A flatbed, hand-operated, hidden from the tax inspectors."

Faubert's face went through several expressions in quick succession. Interest. Greed. Caution. Then interest again.

"You want to borrow my press."

"I want to use it. To set the full account of what I know—who orchestrated the riots, who profited, who ordered the army into the streets—and print thousands of copies. I'll write it. I'll set the type myself if I have to. You get the story as your exclusive from the inside. You get the credit. You get to say you sheltered the man who exposed the conspiracy."

"And the four hundred francs?"

"I'll owe you more than that by the time it's done." Étienne met his gaze. "But the story will make you a great deal richer than any debt I could repay."

Faubert was silent for a long moment. Somewhere above them, distantly, came the crack of musket fire. The revolution was still eating the city, and the city was still fighting back.

The moneylender reached into his satchel and pulled out a brass key, worn from years of pocket wear.

"When the revolution came," he said slowly, "I suspected the republicans would seize the banks. Confiscate the property of known royalists. I thought—if I could be useful to the new powers, whoever they were, I could survive." He turned the key in his fingers. "But I couldn't decide who would win. So I planned to be useful to all of them. Or to none."

He tossed the key. Étienne caught it one-handed, his bad arm pinned against his side.

"My basement," Faubert said. "Rue des Blancs-Manteaux. Number twelve. The press is in a hidden room behind the wine racks. There's paper, ink, type—everything you need. I'll expect the story to run with my name as the publisher of record."

"Done."

"Done." Faubert turned to go, then stopped. "And Monsieur Vasseur? If you die before you pay me, I'll find your corpse and bill your estate."

He disappeared the way he'd come, his footsteps fading into the dark.

The sewer revolutionaries gathered around Étienne as he stood. One of them—a red-haired woman with a scar across her cheek—took the key from his hand and examined it.

"Rue de Blancs-Manteaux," she said. "That's near the old municipal guard post. You'll need an escort through the tunnels."

"I'll manage."

"You won't." She pocketed the key. "I'm coming with you. So's Marcel." She nodded at a boy who couldn't have been more than seventeen. "The rest stay here. Hold the tunnel."

Étienne didn't argue. He didn't have the strength to.

They moved through the sewers in near-darkness, Marcel holding a lantern shuttered to a sliver of light. The water ran ankle-deep in places, and Étienne felt the chill of it creeping up through his boots. His shoulder throbbed in time with his heartbeat. He could feel the fever rising again, in waves, like heat off a forge.

At Rue des Blancs-Manteaux, they surfaced through a storm grate into an alley that smelled of wet horse and garbage. Faubert's building was a narrow thing squeezed between a chandler's shop and a crumbling tenement. The key turned in the lock without complaint.

The basement stairs creaked under their weight. Faubert's wine racks crowded the space, bottle necks winking in the lantern light. Marcel found the catch—a loose stone behind a barrel—and the racks swung open on silent hinges.

The press was beautiful. A flatbed iron handpress, gleaming with fresh oil, surrounded by cases of type and stacks of clean paper. Ink barrels in the corner, sealed and ready.

Étienne touched the Crank's handle. It was warm, as if someone had been using it recently.

"Set the type," he began, "we'll—"

The door above them crashed open.

Boots came down the stairs. Many boots. The lantern caught the glint of bayonets as the wine rack flew aside and soldiers poured into the hidden room.

Marcel shouted something, lunging forward with a knife that was nothing against rifle barrels. A shot rang out. Marcel went down without a sound.

The red-haired woman grabbed Étienne's collar and hauled him backward, but there was nowhere to go. A hand seized his shirt, and then Faubert's voice rang out from the stairs.

"Wait! I have him! I brought you here—I delivered him—the bounty is mine!"

Étienne turned, numb with disbelief, to see Faubert descending the stairs behind the soldiers, his face set in ugly triumph.

"You think I make deals with wanted men?" Faubert said. "The police offered five thousand francs for you. Five thousand. I'm a businessman, Vasseur. It's nothing personal."

The soldier holding Étienne laughed and raised his pistol's butt to strike.

Faubert's smile was still frozen on his face when the second shot cracked through the cellar. The moneylender's chest flowered red. He looked down, puzzled, then crumpled sideways down the stairs.

The soldiers spun. From the upper doorway, a figure blocked the light—a woman in fire brigade coat, rifle smoking in her hands.

"Run!" Bouchard shouted. "All of you, run!"

The soldiers scrambled for cover. The red-haired woman seized Étienne's good arm and shoved him toward the wine rack gap. Marcel lay dead on the floor, his blood spreading across the stones, but Étienne couldn't stop for that.

They fled through the back route Bouchard had revealed—a servant's passage that led to a second cellar, vacant and silent. Bouchard joined them at the exit, bolting the door behind her.

"The press," Étienne said. "The press—we can't leave—"

"The soldiers will have taken it or destroyed it." Bouchard's face was grim in the light leaking from the street. "They'll be watching for you above ground. Go back to the sewers. Wait for word."

"The story—"

"Wait." She pressed a folded paper into his hand. "This is what Faubert was carrying. He was coming to you anyway when the soldiers found him. He was always coming to you, regardless of the bounty." She was already disappearing into the dark. "I found this on his body."

Étienne unfolded the paper.

It was a police telegraph, dated three days ago. Addressed to the prefect's office.

*Moneylender Faubert in our employ. The journalist Vasseur has been located in the sewers beneath Île de la Cité. Proceed with capture at full force. Vasseur's death is authorized by order of the Committee of Public Safety.*

Étienne read it twice.

Then he looked at the paper again. The Committee of Public Safety—that name had been dead since 1794. To see it revived meant one thing: someone was resurrecting old terrors to justify new ones.

He shoved the paper into his coat and began the long crawl back through the sewers.

He had no press. He had no story printed. He had a dead moneylender, a dead boy, and Bouchard's rifle still echoing in his ears.

And he had the name of the committee that had ordered his death.

That, he thought as the fever surged through him again, was going to have to be enough.