Aurorarama - Jean-Christophe Valtat [54]
He returned upstairs to fill a Poirier packsack with clothes and toiletries, a bit haphazardly, and gathered all the money he could find. Just before leaving, in a last flash of lucidity, he realized that at this very moment Stella would still be at the Trilby Temple for tonight’s show with that magician of hers. While reflecting that he thus still had some time on his desperately empty hands before meeting her, he tripped on a book and recognized the Sommer edition of the Arthurian romances. Getting down on one knee, he turned over the book to look at it. It was about Lancelot. Le chevalier a la charrette who had preferred his love to his honour. Of course. Gabriel relished the coincidence but was not that surprised; more astonishing things had happened. Books knew more than you did, as a rule. But who had told him about Lancelot today? He remembered Brentford’s story. The dead woman in a coffin on a sled. Now that he was the Knight of the Cart for good, he might as well spend the remaining hours on that quest. With a little luck it would distract his mind and belly from Stella, while he waited to see her again.
He left the flat, and in New Boree Street jumped into the first eastward jitney taxsleigh that happened to cross his path, not knowing when he would come back, wondering if he ever would.
CHAPTER XV
The Blazing Building
“You are in a spot,” said a friend, who chanced to be near at hand, “which occupies, in the world of fancy, the same position which the Bourse, the Rialto, and the Exchange, do in the commercial world.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Hall of Fantasy, 1843
The Blazing Building, home to the Council of Seven, was located at the end of the Cavendish Canal. Its golden dome, which always seemed freshly polished, had a peculiarly blinding, almost white sheen that seemed to radiate from itself rather than from the reflected daylight. It was especially spectacular when it contrasted—as was now the case—with a dark cloudy backdrop of afternoon skies that looked like an emanation from the black airship above.
“Snow clouds,” thought Brentford, as his gondola, crunching pancakes of thin ice, approached the mooring post. He was paying no small amount of attention to meteorology these days, as if some part of his mind were always computing, in a more or less idle way, the chances of his making it to the pole by way of ice yacht. It also diverted his thoughts, doubtlessly, from the gnawing concerns of city poletics. But as he jumped onto the embankment and headed toward the colonnade that marked the entrance, he readied himself to face them again.
Though it was not his first visit to the Blazing Building, such occasions were sufficiently rare to keep him in awe, even if he did not like to admit it. Behind the rather sober, classically designed exterior, which paled a little in comparison with, for instance, the Arctic Administration Building, the place displayed a grandeur and a certain craziness that was as pure an expression of New Venetian spirit as one could hope to meet.
The entrance archway opened onto the vast rotunda of Hyperboree Hall. Its floor was a circular map of the polar regions, where the Arctic seas were made of white marble and the islands were cut-out slabs of polished granite decorated with little figures in minute mosaics, drawn, if Brentford remembered correctly, from the Olaus Magnus and Nicolo Zeno depictions of the North. It mixed almost accurate cartography with phantom islands, mythological monsters, and imaginary people, among whom New Venetians were prone and proud to count themselves.
In the very center of the Hall, the North Pole was represented by a fountain rising from a basin of snowflake obsidian;