Conflagration (31 page)

Argo was facing the entrance to the café, and this afforded him a clear view of the lobby. It was already busy with hotel guests from the Kennedy party making ready for the upcoming parade. The plan was that Jack Kennedy and his retinue, of which The Four were a part, should ride with full ceremony from Jutland Square down Whitehall to, once again, the Palace of Westminster, although this time their destination would be the chamber of the Provincial Parliament, not the Great Hall. Streets would be closed to traffic for the event, and, if all went according to plan, lined with enthusiastically cheering crowds. The parade was designed to demonstrate Norse/Albany solidarity, and confound all those who opposed it, and came with the full trappings of horses, military escorts, and proudly marching brass bands. The Four were not needed at the assembly point for more than an hour, and had no part in the arrangements, but he could see Jane Tennyson holding a clipboard and conferring with a half-dozen officers from the London Metropolitan Police. The day was plainly underway, and that meant, very shortly, he would have to face Raphael. Right at that moment, Argo did not want to think about facing Raphael, or the strange culmination to the previous night. They had drunk too much, taken too many of the new Norse drugs. All of that was understandable. The bizarre and erotic encounter orchestrated by Anastasia de Wynter, on the other hand, could not be shrugged off as high spirits or boyish excess. Since they had become members of The Four, he and Raphael, and Jesamine and Cordelia, for that matter, had been subjected to a variety of strangeness, but the episode in the turret room surpassed any deviant behavior that they had engaged in during their training or after. All he could hope was that he and Raphael would both do the gentlemanly thing and pretend that what had happened had, in fact, never really occurred, and, if it had, they’d both been too messed up to remember.

As it turned out, the first of The Four to enter Argo’s day was not Raphael at all, but Jesamine, who, in total contrast to his hungover misery, positively radiated a happy and beaming energy. Argo could only assume that her rumored night with Jack Kennedy had been everything that she had desired it would be. She, too, was dressed and ready for the parade, and, when she spotted him, she came directly to his table and sat down. She inspected his hunched form and grinned. “You look really terrible.”

“I feel really terrible.”

She pointed to his breakfast. “Are you going to eat that?”

Argo shook his head and drank a little more gin. “I don’t think so.”

She pulled the plate to her and grimaced. “You put catsup on your eggs?”

“You don’t have to eat it.”

But Jesamine had already picked up a sausage, and Argo knew from experience that she hated to waste food. She looked at him again as she chewed. “So what happened last night to put you in such a wretched state?”

Argo sighed. “Benodex and Madame de Wynter.”

“That Madame de Wynter is really something.”

Argo nodded. “So we discovered.”

“We?”

“Raphael and me.”

“Jack Kennedy thinks very highly of her.”

Argo didn’t say anything. The last thing he wanted to talk about was the previous night. Fortunately, Jesamine didn’t notice, having news of her own to impart. “Did you know that Cordelia’s gone missing?”

Argo blinked. “Missing?”

“I went to see if she was up, but her room was empty and her bed hadn’t been slept in.”

“Should we be concerned about that?”

Jesamine did not appear bothered. “Maybe, if it wasn’t Cordelia. The odds are that she went off somewhere with that Colonel Windermere. She was totally after him.”

Argo tried a piece of dry toast. “The last time I saw her, she was in a hot and heavy embrace with that Harriet Lime woman.”

Jesamine raised an eyebrow. “Cordelia’s gone back to girl fun?”

Argo avoided looking Jesamine directly in the eye. “I think she was close to paralytic drunk.”

“Yes, well, we all know Cordelia.” It seemed as though Jesamine was going to say more but then she looked across the café. “Shit. He looks as bad as you do. Maybe worse. What the hell did you two do last night?”

Raphael had come into the café and Jesamine was right. He did look awful. He hesitated for a moment, and then made his way to the table. Argo took a deep breath as Raphael sat down. Was the whole story going to come out? Raphael also seemed uncertain. He was silent for a moment and then asked, “So how are you two this morning?”

Jesamine beamed. “I feel great. More than ready for a parade.”

He turned to Argo. “And you?”

“Lousy.”

“Did we have too much fun last night?”

Argo half smiled. “I think we may have. I’m damned if I can remember much about the end of it.”

Raphael nodded. “Me neither.” Argo began to relax. The gentlemen’s bond was intact. Raphael looked round the room. “Can you get a drink in here at this time of day?”

“They brought me a gin.”

Raphael smiled through his obvious pain. “Good.” A fresh thought occurred to him. “Have either of you seen Cordelia this morning? I ran into Windermere and a blonde called Harriet Lime. They were both looking for her.”

Argo and Jesamine looked at one another. “Then who the hell did she go home with?”

CORDELIA

The smell was the first sensation to filter through the pain; brine, with a hint of fish and wet wood that made no sense at all. Next came sounds that were other than in her head: footsteps overhead, the lapping of water, an occasional loud flapping, and a continuously repeated creaking. Cordelia did not want to open her eyes quite yet, fearing she might learn more than she needed to know, and yet crucial curiosity about where she was, and what had happened to her, could not be held at bay forever. She would have preferred to lapse back into her previous unconsciousness, but that did not seem to be possible. She was also becoming aware that, beyond the throbbing in her head, and the lurch of nausea in her stomach, something hard and cold across her ankles was making it impossible for her to move her legs. She also could feel a regular, side-to-side, rolling motion that she decided was external and not a part of her general malaise. She finally looked, very quickly and tentatively, and found to her surprise that she was in a close semidarkness. A little light leaked through what she could only identify as some kind of overhead hatch, but it was enough to show her that she was lying on a narrow bunk in an oddly shaped, asymmetrical room. She was in her underwear, and a dirty, coarse-woven blanket had been thrown over her. This first inventory of her situation was enough to convince her that she was in trouble. Just how much trouble would require further exploration.

She found that she could move her arms, and, after this discovery, Cordelia decided that she needed to sit up. The move would require effort, and she was going to make it slowly and with a great deal of care. Before attempting to rise, she reached up and felt how much headroom she had. Even at full stretch from a prone position, her extended fingers encountered nothing solid, so she eased her upper body forward. Sitting up, the rolling motion was much more noticeable, and Cordelia’s subconscious must have been processing the painfully gleaned information much faster and more efficiently than her thinking mind. Realization came to her fully formed and on the half-shell. She was at sea. She was on a boat at sea. Her voice became small with the forming horror that was driving out the pain in her head.

“I’ve been fucking press-ganged.”

The boat was not a large warship like the
Ragnar
. The roll was too pronounced and there was no all-pervading throb of engines. From the smell and the general accouterments, it also wasn’t any kind of pleasure craft. Cordelia was becoming increasingly frightened. She threw the blanket to one side and moved her hands down her bare legs and found that heavy shackles had been locked around her ankles and secured to a metal ring at the foot of the bunk. Her heart sank, and she felt even more unwell than she had previously.

“I’m on a boat and I’m in irons.”

Fighting down panic, she very slowly lay back down and turned on her side to think about what to do next. As things stood, her options were exceedingly limited.

RAPHAEL

The banner on the scaffolding tower read
Biograph News,
and two men on the platform were operating a large camera of wood and brass, mounted on a sturdy tripod. One man peered through an eyepiece and adjusted the lens while the other cranked the handle that wound the celluloid film through the shutter. By the following day, flickering images would be projected on screens in moving picture theaters across the entire Norse Union. This parade was a very bold piece of diplomacy, and receiving saturation news coverage, even though it was really only the prologue. The full pomp and circumstance would be wheeled out when the King himself followed Jack Kennedy in a few days, and the two of them met with President Inga Sundquist in Stockholm to map out the final phase of the war against Hassan IX in the Americas, which they hoped would have the full popular support of the Norse people. Raphael sat stiffly in the open horse-drawn carriage as they passed the camera. The carriage in which they were traveling was either seventh or eighth in the parade. It was designed to hold six, but, in fact, it was currently only carrying five. Argo, Jesamine, and Jane Tennyson faced forward, while Raphael and a plainclothes policeman looked back in the direction from which they had come. The empty seat was intended for Cordelia, but Cordelia had not arrived at the Asquith in time to join the parade at its start, and now appeared to be missing it altogether. Cordelia’s failure to show had prompted both concern and tightlipped anger on the part of Commander Tennyson, and although the remaining three had attempted to cover for her by making light of it, they too had started to worry. Cordelia might be headstrong, thoughtless, and have her little ways, but she had also been trained from birth to turn up for official functions, and her nature was such that she would never miss a moment in the spotlight. Once there, she might behave outrageously, and say what was inappropriate, but she would never absent herself from the focus of attention.

Biograph News
had set up their camera at the approximate halfway point on the procession route. The parade had started in Jutland Square, with its huge statue of Horatio Hamilton, the legendary poet and Sea Lord, on its tall pedestal, the famous lion fountains, and, on the East side, the Temple of the Goddess-in-the-Fields. They had proceeded into the wide street called Whitehall that ran south between imposing government buildings, as though they were passing through a manmade canyon of gray Portland stone. The procession was led by a formation of Metropolitan police motorcyclists, and then the pipes and drums of the Black Watch. The pipers and drummers were in turn followed by a detachment of Lifeguards, mounted on their large black chargers, and arrayed in plumed helmets, gleaming steel breastplates, and scarlet coats. Behind them marched a company of the Asgard Division of Viking infantry, and only then came the leading and most ornate carriage, which carried Kennedy and Governor Branson, along with their personal bodyguards. Next was a formation of Roper’s Light Horse, in their khaki uniforms and wide-brimmed hats, with carbines at the ready, and horses on a tight rein. At that point the rest of the carriages followed, open landaus, one after the other, in order of their occupants’ diminishing importance, with twin protective files of the Scotts Grays and 17
^th
Lancers riding on either side of them. As everyone in the Kennedy party had hoped, Whitehall was lined with cheering crowds, with flags of the NU and Albany being waved and flourished, although lines of uniformed policemen and foot soldiers kept the public enthusiasm safely confined to the sidewalks. Those in the carriages had, however, been warned they would encounter a knot of protesters just before they reached the Palace of Westminster, but they should pay them no mind since the police had them effectively contained.

The Four’s carriage was so far behind Kennedy and Branson that even those looking forward were unable to see them, and the sound of the Black Watch pipers was faint and distant, and sometimes even snatched away by the brisk spring breeze. If those who opposed the Norse/Albany alliance wanted to kick up a commotion, they would do it as the Prime Minister and the Governor passed them, and it would most likely be all over once The Four reached that spot. As far as Raphael was concerned, they were scarcely in the parade at all, except, when the first shots rang out, the sounds were wholly unmistakable as anything other than gunfire, and The Four certainly shared with the rest the sense of shock and alarm.

CORDELIA

Footsteps thudded across what was, to Cordelia, the ceiling of her prison, but could only be the deck of what she had now firmly decided was a boat at sea. Applying a worst-case scenario, she had to assume that she had been kidnapped from the party at Deerpark, either by Zhaithan or some other Mosul operatives. It was not a happy assumption, but Cordelia was hard-pressed to think of any other reason why she should be making an ocean voyage chained to a bunk in her underwear. She might, of course, have somehow fallen victim to random white slavery, but it seemed highly unlikely, and all that remained to be seen was whether the others had also been abducted, but were being kept in isolation, or whether she alone had been singled out for kidnapping. She knew that, in due course, the details of who exactly had lifted her would probably be revealed, but she had already decided that, ultimately, only Jeakqual-Ahrach could be behind the outrage. The illogical part was the style of her capture. It seemed unlike their foremost adversary to resort to methods that were so crude and physical, and this discrepancy made Cordelia furious, and prompted her to issue an angry if maybe rash mental challenge. “What’s the matter, you withered bitch? You couldn’t find a way into my mind? You had to use drugs and strong-arm tactics?”