• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 592 0

had a hunch that neither Arkansky nor the Council of Seven should hear about it: first because everything connected with the Seven Sleepers made the Council grow even more threatening than they usually were, and then because, sooner or later, some way or other, this secret might turn out to be a trump card in the game Brentford was playing against them. Anyway, because Arkansky had cheated him as well by not telling him at the Greenhouse what he had done with or, as Brentford preferred to phrase it, to Sybil, he had no tactical regrets, only sentimental ones, and those were hard enough to live with for the moment. So, good-bye to the circus. He did not know whether Sybil would miss him, or even notice his absence, and he did not want to know. He had simply taken his French leave as soon as, coming back from her sleepwalking, she had entered the studio with the Cub-Clubbers, whose name seemed now strangely prophetic in light of the recent hunting frenzy of the Council.

For there was of course another side to the matter, one that went beyond personal grudges. They were all—Sybil, Arkansky and he—part of a wider picture, whose monumental size Mason had revealed to him. It was no less than the city that was at stake, and they were all, in this, nothing much more than pawns believing themselves to be either tricky knights—like Arkansky—or dependable rooks, like Brentford. But Brentford wanted to play a different game, a game of icy-cold draughts, a game of dames, as the French called it: he now hoped that if he went to the edge of the checkerboard he could compensate for losing Sybil by “crowning” himself with Helen and, with her help, moving backward with a vengeance. He was aware that this was a rather fuzzy scheme, but he saw no other options. He just hoped it would not pass, even in his own eyes, as a flight from trouble.

That would have been unfair, really. Trouble was as much in front of him as it was behind. Passing under the narrow archway that cut through the ramparts of the glacial fringe and heading toward Mushroom Point, he was now entering the hard, hummocky, hillocky stretch of his trip and he could feel the Kinngait snort and vibrate unpleasantly on the uneven ice. The carbon-arc searchlight at the bow showed nothing but a landscape that was about as easy to skate upon as the broken lumps of a gigantic sugar bowl.

But Brentford had a secret weapon upon his nose: Second Sight goggles. They allowed him, through some cutting of their Iceland-spar lenses, to foresee obstacles before he arrived at them. It only worked, however, if a few bothersome conditions were met: continuous scanning of the surrounding area (hence the half-circular windshield of the ship and the serious risk of a stiff neck), as steady a speed as possible (no mean feat in itself), and, the most mysterious and exacting of them all, possession of at least one quarter Highland Scottish blood.

Brentford Orsini had plenty of that fluid, being related through his mother (though he had inherited from her more insight than Second Sight) to the Mackays of Anticosti Island, the very house of the Nova Scotia baronetcy. By some fold in the fabric of things, Anticosti had always been known to the native Innu as Notiskuan, “the place where bears are hunted,” and this was where his mother had indeed met and made herself bearable to a polar Orsini. His mother’s mother was a Matheson of Cape Breton, and Matheson meant “son of the bear,” exactly what the Orsini heir apparent, then, was to the second power. There was some transcendence in such coincidences, no doubt, and Brentford liked to think about them, or would have liked to, if he had not had to steer, “by his strong arm,” as the Mackay motto boasted, the ship away from the ice boulders that jumped up in the searchlight. The Matheson motto was Fac et Spere, “Do and Hope,” and seemed good advice for the time being.

The Second Sight goggles were useful but exhausting to use. After hours of searching and finding roundabout ways through the messy maze, Brentford often had to slow down, stop, and take a few