Aurorarama (46 page)

“We have lost enough time,” he said nervously to Blankbate and Lilian. “We should hurry to the Blazing Building. Please, Mr. Blankbate, let the Inuit go home, and send a few men with them to make sure nothing happens on their way back.”

He turned toward the Inughuit:

“Consider this place as yours.”

Uitayok looked around the dome.

“This place? he said, with a barely hidden irony.

“The city,” said Brentford, almost bristling with emotion at this historical moment.

Uitayok seemed dubious, but thanked him politely.

Canals were the fastest way to reach the Blazing Building. The unlikely little army of Sophragettes and Scavengers ran to the embankment, where
chasse-galleries
and gondolas waited for them at the mooring posts. Brentford found himself wishing that everything in the city were as well organized as this upheaval had been so far.

A large icebreaking scow opened the way, and the overcrowded crafts followed it, like ugly ducklings, in a ruffle of feathery rifles. The city seemed tranquil enough. The crowd, impressed by the Scavengers, had scattered and gone home. A few shots cracked out from time to time, celebratory or lethal, Brentford could not guess, lowering his head all the same. He could not control everything, could he? They glided past the distant smoking ruins of the N.A.N.A., which made quite an impression, more of melancholy than of glory, but the city could use the space, after all. Build another greenhouse, maybe. Or a two-hundred-foot snowman. Everything was possible, that much at least was true.

At one point, Brentford thought he glimpsed a man leaping from rooftop to rooftop, but he had barely turned toward Lilian to point out the phenomenon when it disappeared. Stranger still, he was persuaded that it had been Gabriel.

As they approached the corner of Nicolo Zeno Canal, they saw a group of soldiers building barricades on the embankment in front of the Naval Academy. A thrill ran through the crowded gondolas, and rifles were cocked, ready to fire. However, the sailors saluted the gondolas with cheers, throwing their berets skyward. These were Navy Cadets, Nobles of the Poop, as they liked to call themselves. All rifles were lowered. A young officer in white spats and a navy blue uniform with little silvery snow
crystals on his collar ran to meet them, followed by a constable with a cumbersome Colson telephone round his neck. Brentford recognized the young man who had punched him during the recording riot. It was the first time in his life that he felt like offering the left cheek. So to speak, that is.

“I am Ensign Paynes-Grey. Are you Brentford Orsini?”

“I am,” said Brentford, almost flattered by his new celebrity, though, after all, he was the only one here in civilian clothes, and could be easily singled out.

“Captain-General Mason just told me that, from now on, if I were to disobey anyone, it had to be you.”

Brentford laughed.

“Then do not encircle the Hôtel de Police under any circumstances,” said Brentford, indicating the building on the other side of the barricade. “This is an order.”

The young ensign nodded.

“As a free man, I have no choice but to disobey you,” he answered, “and, as a matter of fact, we have already started.”

“How is the situation?”

“Under control. Just a few skirmishes. The Gentlemen of the Night are not soldiers, you know. Unless they’re ten to one, they’d rather take it out on defenceless people. I think they’ll just wait to see which side is winning before taking a stand.”

The other Cadets had approached, very curious about the Sophragettes. Brentford saluted and gave the signal to shove off before the fraternization became too incestuous. There would be plenty of time for that.

The ships pushed off again, and it was hard for Brentford not to think that their procession was not becoming a ceremony. He remembered his grandiose childhood dream, and for a while actually felt like the doge who would marry the Lincoln Sea. The Council, obviously, had relied on symbols more than on sheer firepower, and now that they had sawn off the branch
on which they had been sitting, their strategy showed its limits. The Subtle Army was out of the game, the Gentlemen of the Night were contained by the Navy Cadets for the time being, and there was little chance that the people of New Venice would risk their skins for the Councillors, especially now that John Blank had promised to publish photographs of the Seven Sleepers’ desecrated coffins on the front page of tonight’s
New Venice News
. But do not let it go to your head, Brentford admonished himself. This was not over yet: there was still the Varangian Guard to be reckoned with—a dreaded body of well-seasoned warriors—and, of course, the Council itself, from whom the worst could be feared.

They landed at the dock before the Blazing Building. Brentford’s first idea was that the Sophragettes should not be endangered.

“Blankbate, stay with me! Ms. Lenton! To the rear of the building!” he ordered, hoping he sounded credible as a commanding officer. But he saw Lilian gracefully raise her hand, and instead of obeying his orders, the Sophragettes stopped in their tracks.

“Sorry. I was so thrilled by the sheer virility of your tone of voice, that I did not pay attention to what you said,” explained Lilian with a smile. He could see her little canine tooth, slightly but charmingly unaligned.

Brentford hemmed and corrected himself.

“Ms. Lenton. Would you please be so kind as to make sure the rear of the building is safe from any intrusion?”

“Be sure I’ll gladly see to that,” she said, with some obscure irony that totally eluded Brentford. “Ladies, if you want to follow me. One half with me this way, the other half with Ms. Lovelace to the other side of the building, if you please.”

Brentford watched them go, in a colourful and determined rustle, almost losing his train of thought at the spectacle.

“We should go,” Blankbate said.

“Yes.” said Brentford, nodding. “Yes. Of course.” He had, he discovered, a slight case of stage fright.

Brentford and the Scavengers passed through the gate to find the gigantic Varangian Guards silently lined up in a row, their barbed halberds pointed at the intruders, and quite impressive in their shining armour plates and morion helms. Of course, the Scavengers fanned out around Brentford were armed with guns, but he could well sense their own hesitation. Under fire or not, the guards were close enough to charge and, should they go berserk, to make a carnage out of it. Brentford did not feel like taking the risk: besides the fact that he was on the front line again, he had seen enough blood for today.

His mind racing in search of a speech that would end up in fanfare and confetti, Brentford was suddenly startled when a door screeched from behind the guards. Though no orders had been given, their line gaped in the middle and Reginald and Geraldine appeared, dressed in burgundy velvet. Though they looked quite tiny amongst these well-built Scands and Finns, the guards simply stared at them as they walked majestically through their ranks. It was one of the twins’ most salient traits that their appearance usually provoked silence.

While Geraldine held her chin high and kept her eyes planted unflinchingly on the awestruck guards, Reginald handed their commanding officer a roll of parchment. Lieutenant Lemminkaïnen, as Brentford remembered he was called, unrolled it and read it silently, first frowning, then casting bewildered looks at the twins.

“This,” he announced to his men in heavily accented English, “bears the official seal of the Council. It announces that
we should now pledge allegiance to the new rulers of New Venice, Geraldine and Reginald Elphinstone.”

“In other words, said Reginald, haughtily,
“we
are now paying
you.”

The Varangians looked at each other and one by one took off their caps. Lemminkaïnen was the last one, but he went down on one knee with a chivalrous abandon, nonetheless remaining as tall as the twins.

Geraldine turned toward Brentford.

“Ah, Mr. Orsini,” she said, with the mock-tone (or so Brentford hoped) of a princess speaking to a servant, “we almost have been waiting for you.”

Shivering from that damned upward wind still blowing through the corridor, Brentford pushed open the heavy door of the Council Chamber and started in fright when he saw the Phantom Patrol standing around the table where the Councillors should have been.

“It’s always a pleasure to see an old friend,” said Doctor Phoenix with, Brentford was relieved to hear, a different, familiar voice, one with a slight German accent.

“Hardenberg, is that you?” Brentford asked in a cold sweat, his heart banging like a madman begging to be released from his padded cell. He wished he had been warned of that plan. You really had to wonder who was in charge, here.

“It is but me,” Hardenberg reassured him. “Not dead yet and with little desire to die today or ever. Your little adventure out in the wilderness gave us this idea for a disguise. A masked ball is a fairy tale in itself, after all. How is your revolution going?”

“The restoration, you mean. Well, you tell me,” said Brentford. “Did the Council escape?”

“Very much so. But not in very good shape. I am afraid that Baron Brainveil has gone through too many emotions today.”

The anarchists started to peel off their false flesh and tattered rags. This was almost as horrible to behold as the real Phantom Patrol had been. They had an atrocious smell, like rotten seal flesh, so strong as to make the Scavengers pass for white-robed virgins with baskets of rose petals.

“You mean you just … scared … them?”

“That was the point of our disguise. I have often noticed that people who detain some power are prone to superstition, as if they were afraid their little secret, which is nothing but luck, could be easily discovered and reversed.”

“You had no problems with the guards?”

“We never even saw them. The twins took us through a passage known only to the Seven Sleepers that passes beneath the canal and then straight up into this room. Needless to say that their knowledge of this shortcut greatly helped them to convince the Council of their identity.”

“You mean the twins were recognized as legitimate?”

“Certainly. They made quite an impression. It was as if the Councillors knew they had it coming. They knew the Calixte prophecy very well, as a matter of fact, and interpreted it exactly in the way that your friend Gabriel predicted. The Seven did not question for a single moment that the twins were d’Ussonville reincarnate, protesting against the desecration of the Seven Sleepers’ coffins, nor that the Phantom Patrol were the instruments of Nixon-Knox’s revenge for their having had him expelled from the Council and for “prostituting the Pole.” It was a huge spoonful of a bitter medicine, but they swallowed it in one gulp. They were, anyhow, in such a hurry to get away that they signed their surrender without reading the small print that establishes you as Regent-Doge of the city until the twins’ majority.”

“I never asked for that,” protested Brentford.

“This is our little surprise for you. We added it ourselves. You know, the last minute inspiration, just to make it more
formal. But you can very well go back to your plough, if that is what you prefer.”

Brentford looked around him, at the marble and the jasper. Hardenberg, the anarchist kingmaker, had truly offered him the keys of the city.

“Where are the Seven now?”

“Trying to save their wrinkled skins, I would say. Tiptoeing away like Old Man Winter. Gnawing at each other’s skulls in some icy circle of hell. Why, you wanted them to kneel in front of you?”

Brentford sighed. He felt light-headed and burdened, happy and prostrated. Things had gotten out of hand, and yet they were in hand—in his hands.