Aurorarama - Jean-Christophe Valtat [63]
“It’s rather cold in there,” warned Blankbate as he opened the lock with a jangling of keys.
It looked like a fabric shop, with long tables and shelves up to the ceiling, but it had been used, Blankbate explained, as a storeroom and workshop for maintenance purposes. It was now something else entirely: a cave of wonders or, rather, the den of the Forty Thieves. This was where, Gabriel understood, the Scavengers piled up their “loot” of outmoded, discarded objects. Strange machines with forgotten or absurd functions, baby cribs, sleighs, skis and snowshoes, stuffed animals, worn-out hides and moth-eaten furs, ships in bottles, sextants and other Navy paraphernalia, Eskimo objects and weapons, and faded paintings and mutilated statues from all places and periods rose up from the floor, flooded the tables, and scaled the shelves, appearing and disappearing with the passing of the lamplight like the exhibits of a spectral World’s Fair.
“We call this place the Arcaves,” said Blankbate, just as Gabriel wondered if there really was a profit to be made from these second-hand or last-chance objects. It was, then, in its own, dusty, stifling, desperate way, a Memory palace, a crumbling and frail monument to all the anonymous lives that the city had forgotten about. It was preserved there, smelling of shipwreck and ruin, patient and melancholy, crouching in the dark, biding its time, perhaps.
“Of course, if someone ever wants something we’ll retrieve it.”
“For a profit?” asked Lilian, who was much less shy than Gabriel.
Blankbate turned his beak toward her.
“Depends on who asks for what. The less you need it, the more it’s going to cost you.”
Somehow, that seemed logical to Gabriel.
The door at the other end led to a cold-storage room. It chilled Gabriel to the bone as he entered it, and the lamp that Blankbate held, trembling as it did, did not make the place any cosier. The mysterious sled Brentford had told Gabriel about was in the middle of the room under an oiled tarp that Blankbate lifted up with one swift, powerful gesture of his black-gloved hand, revealing the glass top of the copper cylinder. The lady’s face, that of an almost old woman, was not unknown to Gabriel, but he could not quite pin it down.
“So?” asked Blankbate, who seemed now to be in a hurry to be done with it all.
“No means of identification whatsoever?”
“There is one thing,” said Chipp. “There. At the back.”
Blankbate moved the lamp down, revealing a coat of arms. Very simple. Gabriel had never been much of a heraldry fiend, but he knew he knew this one, and then recognized it for good. Sable three snowflakes argent. He remembered the motto by heart. Nix super Nox. This was incredible.
“Nixon-Knox,” he said. “Isabella Nixon-Knox.”
“Like the former Councillor?” asked Lilian.
“His wife. Her maiden name was Isabelle d’Ussonville.”
“Like … the Sleeper?” Lilian whispered.
“His daughter.”
“But the Sleepers weren’t supposed to have children,” she said.
Gabriel knew the story from his father, from the time when he had been Portcullis Pursuivant of the City’s Civil Registry Records at the House of Honours and Heraldry. It was a story that his father liked to tell a little bit too often and it was he who had started spreading the rumour around various bars and shebeens until he had been deemed a nuisance and “put on ice.”
“They were not supposed to. It was part of their oath. So that there would not be any dynastic complications to their promised collective ‘return’ from cryogenic sleep. But, even if d’Ussonville learned it too late, his wife was pregnant before the oath and could not be persuaded to go away from the city. She was to be the only exception to the rule. The daughter would be married to a councillor and that councillor would make sure that she did not bear children, so that the family line would