Aurorarama - Jean-Christophe Valtat [148]
“Let us not delay these gentlemen any longer.”
The day had darkened, and the cold had become stinging. As if working under some invisible whip, and without so much as a word, the servants of the Seven hurried, passing luggage from hand to hand, cramming it and piling it into the carriages. The Councillors themselves stepped down to lend a hand, except Brainveil, who, reduced to some sort of puppet with tangled strings, was carried into the leading sleigh and wrapped inside a fur blanket.
“What is your destination?” Lilian asked Surville, who still avoided her eyes.
“It is a secret. The farthest away from here we can get, I hope.”
“This at last is a hope we have in common.”
Eventually the sleighs were loaded and the Councillors installed. They did not seem to care that their equipment or clothes were not quite fit for a ride in the wilderness, or for the cold night that was about to fall. Lilian almost felt like asking the girls to fetch some extra blankets, but renounced the idea for some reason. This ain’t the time to go maudlin, she said to herself, clasping her hands behind her back. The Sophragettes weren’t at their service, were they?
“Well” said Guinevere de Nudd, watching at her side, “you certainly got carried away.”
“Did I? Oh yes. Very far away,” she answered pensively, “or maybe a little too close.”
The sleighs started to move, vanishing one by one into the dusk with a ghastly jangle of bells. However much she hated the Councillors, Lilian could not help feeling their departure was sad, lacking in dignity. She felt, with a distant pang, the cruelty of the situation. So what? She had not made this world, had she? Brainveil had. Or people like him. And she was not like them, or, well, she had been just a little today, to beat them at their own game. But not tomorrow, she promised herself, as the last sleigh disappeared into the night, not tomorrow.
“The aurora, the aurora,” Gabriel muttered.
EPILOGUE
The Not So Serene Republic
… The old impossible Haven ‘mid the Auroral Fires Fiona McLeod, The Dirge of the Four Cities, 1901
It was around midnight, and the city was quiet. The cold, the uncertainty, and the Scavengers had sent people home with little resistance, and the Navy Cadets had done the rest. Brentford could be sure that Venustown was well under their control tonight.
News had come that in the afternoon and evening the Inuit had looted some of the arcades, but Blankbate and Hardenberg had advised him to forget about it. Brentford did not mind the poetic justice. He merely worried about how he would make it up to the looted shopkeepers. Now, at any rate, only a few people prowled the streets and the canals, out of curiosity and excitation—some of them, Brentford had heard, wearing carnival outfits. This, too, seemed apt.
A kind of celebration had broken out in one of the reception rooms of the Blazing Building. Maybe Hardenberg was right: a city was just a petrified party. But this “feast of all firsts” was a portent of the difficulties to come. Brentford had never seen such a motley community, if it could even be called that. It looked like some mirage that would vanish with the dawn. Scavengers were flirting with Sophragettes in a hall-of-mirrors staging of Beauty and the Beast. The Inughuit were trying to joke with Varangian guards twice their size, playing around with their halberds as if they were harpoons. Anarchists clinked (many) glasses with Navy Cadets. He could even see the Ghost Lady walking among the living, who did not perceive her as she glided past them, but still they shivered and hushed, and looked about with a worried frown at some empty space in the room.
And then the kaleidoscope rotated again, showing new scenes Brentford found equally unlikely.
The sight, which had at first gutted him, of Sybil following Tiblit everywhere with amorous eyes, her slender jewelled arms around his fur-clad muscles, was now starting to make a little more sense, if only as an allegory of the days to come. It was better than poor Phoebe, who had fallen in love with a masked Scavenger,