The Funny-Eyed-Lady looked down at the board game with disdain, but Victoria knew, from the way her vibrations deluged the Bespectacled-Little-Lady, that it was at her that her hatred was entirely directed.
“Carry on with your little games. I will demolish this place, brick by brick, if I have to.”
“You promised me the face mate . . . same fate,” the Bespectacled-Little-Lady said to her.
The Funny-Eyed-Lady grabbed a javelin from a sporting display. She stabbed it, viciously, into the nape of the Bespectacled-Little-Lady, before leaving with another slam of the door. Victoria felt neither surprise nor horror at the violence of the scene, just extreme curiosity. She would soon fall back down to the very bottom of the bathtub, where she wouldn’t feel a thing anymore.
“You asked for it,” said Godfather, sucking a finger smeared in pâté. “Taking Fox’s place, that was a really bad idea.”
The Bespectacled-Little-Lady gazed pensively at the point of the javelin sticking out of her throat. With a grotesque twisting of her arm, she seized the shaft hanging down her back, and pulled it straight out. The wound on her neck instantly closed up without any bleeding.
“It matters little whether I killed him or saved him. That poor child doesn’t believe a thing that hums from my south . . . comes from my mouth. She has already tried to kill me forty-three times. You, never. Why?”
With a mischievous expression, Godfather rearranged the checkers on the board.
“Because, by shutting us up together in this non-place, Janus made me your punishment. So I try my best to make my company as tedious as possible for you.”
The Bespectacled-Little-Lady placed the javelin on the rug, beside the cushion she was sitting on. Her movements were calm, but under her body the shadows’ writhing became ever more frenetic.
“You’re excelling at it.”
“Less than Thorn does,” Godfather muttered, sliding a checker across the board with the pâté-smeared finger. “I’d like him to be here with us! No one beats him at ruining a party.”
The Bespectacled-Little-Lady then moved her checker forward. Victoria, who really wasn’t herself anymore, saw, rising from the board, all the echoes of the moves to come. She realized that she already knew the outcome of this game that had only just begun.
“I will repeat it to you, ex-ambassador: I dedicated my life to saving the world. Every second I lose in this non-place leaves my children outside without protection, which they need today more than ever. You’ve rot the gong money . . . got the wrong enemy.”
Godfather’s lips stretched from ear to ear.
“The Other, hmm? No thanks, ex-madame. A touch too abstract for me. It’s because of you that Baron Melchior assassinated my guests. Because of you that old Hildegarde committed suicide. Because of you that my link with the Web was broken, and I was disowned by my sisters. Saving the world, you say? You have destroyed my world.”
The Bespectacled-Little-Lady gazed at Godfather with a faraway look. The eyes behind her lenses—noticed Victoria, no longer missing a single detail—didn’t reflect the light from the lamps. The Bespectacled-Little-Lady wasn’t herself reflected, either, on the varnished checkerboard, or on the water siphon on the table. She was never reflected anywhere.
“Is that the kind of game you want to play, ex-ambassador? Very well.” One by one, her checker wiped out all of Godfather’s, just as Victoria had anticipated. “Baron Melchior assassinated your guests in my name, but was it not your duty to protect them? Mother Hildegarde committed suicide to deprive me of her power, but did you ever give her a reason for living? As for your sisters, did you not envisage for one moment that they just needed an excuse to turn away from such an intrusive brother? I personally believe that you steward . . . destroyed your world all on your own. You left behind you a chaotic embassy, ashamed wives, and offended husbands. You were always just an embarrassment to your family, to our family. When you will die, no one will miss you and you won’t miss anyone.”
Godfather gazed at the board, and his clear defeat. He was still smiling.
“When I will die,” he repeated, in a low voice. “You know, don’t you? Since when have you known?”
“I took on your face and I was you,” said the Bespectacled-Little-Lady. “Not for long, but long enough to feel in my flesh the illness that’s eating away at you. An illness that carried off your parents, and that’s now growing in you, day by day. We both know that your nays are mumbled . . . days are numbered. And we both know that, if you avoid your sisters, it’s because you tremble at the thought that theirs might be, too.”
Victoria had never understood adults’ conversations; right now, somewhere inside her and around her, someone understood everything. But it wasn’t that someone who suddenly wanted to cry out. It was Victoria. For the first time in ages, the Bespectacled-Little-Lady turned her head toward her, squinting, as if, finally, she could detect her screaming silence.
Godfather chuckled as he rubbed the black teardrop between his eyebrows.
“My own transparency has backfired on me. I’m forced to admit that you’re right, ex-madame, except about one thing: there is at least one person whom I will miss.”
Victoria didn’t hear the end of the sentence. The non-place was rocked as if by an almighty hiccup. The paintings dropped from the walls, the checkerboard tipped over, and Godfather fell into the Bespectacled-Little-Lady’s arms.
“Goodness’ sake,” he said, extricating himself. “What has that ex-mechanic gone and broken now?”
“It wasn’t me,” grumbled the Funny-Eyed-Lady.
She had just come through the door she had left by a bit earlier, with a mechanical drill in each hand, and Twit hot on her heels.
“It’s that.”
She pointed at the hole, the size of a plate, that had appeared right in the middle of the rug. They all leaned over it. The hole looked out onto a starless darkness, but what none of them seemed to see was the vortex it had caused. A storm of echoes. Victoria felt herself being sucked down, as if a plug had been pulled and a force was dragging her not just to the bottom of the bathtub, but much further down than that.
“The landslides,” said the Bespectacled-Little-Lady. “The Other is shattering space, even the non-place can’t withstand it. Do you believe me now, Janus?”
She turned to the giant man-woman who was standing where, a second before, there was no one. He, too, was gazing at the hole in the middle of the rug, with one end of his long moustache coiled around his finger, looking extremely annoyed.
“I don’t really have a choice. There’s more and more void, and less and less land. Since you haven’t left this non-place, Señora Gonde, it means the problem is elsewhere.”
“Give me the final power I’m missing, Janus. Allow me to find the Other again, before he hurls the whole world, your ark included, into the abyss.”
“Your ‘Other,’ señora, is even more elusive than me. I asked my best Needlers to locate him. Not one of them succeeded in doing so.”
“You have to know what you are looking for to be able to find it. You don’t know the Other like I hoe limb . . . know him. Make me your Needler, Janus, and everything will return to order.”
“Disastrous idea,” said Godfather.
“Disgusting idea,” said the Funny-Eyed-Lady.
Victoria didn’t know what the man-woman’s response was. She couldn’t hear a thing anymore. The vortex was swallowing sounds and forms. The Bespectacled-Little-Lady suddenly seemed to see her, and all the shadows held down by her feet stretched their arms out to her. So many arms, and not one caught hold of Victoria. The whirlwind swept her far from the surface, to depths where no more boundaries existed between what was her and what wasn’t her.
She forgot Godfather, Mommy, and the house.
She forgot Victoria.
ADRIFT
When Ophelia
was doing her apprenticeship at the Good Family, there was a chore she dreaded more than any other: cleaning the drains of the showers. All that a body sheds that is least appealing sticks together in a stringy sludge that must be removed regularly from the plugholes to avoid blockages, particularly when the showers are shared by a community of men and women of all ages. The smell from the Residence’s drains was unspeakable.
It was that very smell that pervaded inside the long-distance airship.
The cabins, holds, and bathrooms were overflowing with passengers. They clung tightly to the few personal belongings they had managed to take with them at the time of the roundup. One man was hugging a toaster, defying anyone to take it off him. Some people were so exhausted, they had lain down on the floor, no longer even protesting when kicked by feet stepping over them.
The heat everywhere was ferocious.
Since the embarkation door had been closed, Thorn had remained standing, rigidly, at the threshold of the airship. To him, each passenger represented an algebraic variable to be added to an increasingly complex equation. He was already, compulsively, opening his disinfectant bottle.
“Follow me,” Ophelia said to him.
She had finally got the better of the recalcitrant sandals. She cleared a path for them, asking people to move aside to let them pass, earning her more than one grunt. She hadn’t walked straight since waking up in the chapel, unable to stop herself from correcting movements that no longer needed to be corrected. Despite trying to avoid contact with people, she kept reading their clothes, soaking up ever more fear, ever more anger, and ever more sorrow. The family accents of almost every ark were combined here. Around the security lights, the alchemical ink glowed on the foreheads of those outlaws who had escaped from the amphitheater, and on those of many others. What remained of Babel’s cosmopolitanism and diversity had been mustered here.
Stooping under the low ceilings, Thorn was doing his best not to let anyone near him. Just being tripped up would have triggered a fatal clawing.
Ophelia spotted Elizabeth, sitting at the back of a packed cloakroom, but she didn’t respond to her wave. Seeming resigned, she had drawn up her long legs, like an ironing board folded up and put away in the cupboard for some time.
It was a real challenge to get to the picture windows of the rear walkway; all had been taken over by men and women pounding the reinforced glass, and cursing with no end of forbidden words. This group had no stamp on their foreheads, but their motley garish gowns certainly didn’t conform to the dress code.
The Brats of Babel.
At least here, Thorn could lean against a window and keep everyone in his sight. All that could be seen through the window was part of the foggy quayside and the silhouettes of the guards on duty, deaf to the passengers’ entreaties, their bayonets glinting in the lamplight.
“What are they waiting for?” asked Ophelia. “More outlaws?”
Thorn had a picked up a napkin from a sideboard. He was using it to wipe away, fastidiously, the grease left by countless fingers on the glass. He then pointed to a windsock outside. It was limp.
“Nina’s Breath.”
“Which is?”
“The name Babelians give to the south wind. It rises every night during the dry season.”
“But why wait for it? This is an airship, not a balloon.”
From a pocket, Thorn took out the gloves Ophelia had entrusted to him. He put them on her himself, first one hand, then the other, even buttoning them up at the wrists for her. A most intimate thing to do. Thorn was suddenly behaving as if the frenzied crowd was but an abstraction. It was only once he had replaced the substitute glasses with her real ones that his steely eyes looked hard into Ophelia’s.
He didn’t need to say a thing to her. She had understood. There would be neither pilot nor crew.
“You should have stayed on the quayside,” she muttered.
Thorn’s stern mouth stretched. It was a grin as brief as a snap of elastic, but Ophelia found it more comforting than any words.
“Hold onto the handrail,” he told her.
The sudden pressure of the wind made the structure of the whole gondola creak. Outside, the windsock had just lifted. The family guard cast off the moorings. The few streetlamps in Babel penetrating the fog promptly disappeared. The passengers’ protestations soared throughout the airship, as it was carried away, over the sea, by Nina’s Breath, tossed around like a paper bag.
Adrift on the sea of clouds.
The passengers fell against each other, like dominoes. Ophelia dreaded to think what it would have been like, gripping this handrail without her gloves preventing her from reading it. She felt as if she were actually inside one of the Alternative Program’s carousels.
“We must take . . . control of the airship,” she managed to get out, between chattering teeth.
Thorn’s leg brace was now at a disturbing angle, but he seemed far more troubled by some chewing gum stuck to the elbow of his uniform.
“I doubt Lady Septima has been so kind as to make navigation possible.”
He unfolded his long arm to grab Ophelia just as she was losing her balance. The airship was tilting to one side. There was an eruption of cursing; this can’t have been how the Brats had envisaged celebrating the end of the world. Just as everyone was clinging to whatever they could, Ophelia saw what she thought was a drinks trolley hurtling across the floor. It was Ambrose. His inverted hands were trying to activate the brakes on his wheelchair, without much success. All the wool of the scarf, wound around his neck, was bristling. He, on the other hand, seemed pretty calm; his face even lit up the moment his eyes met those of an astounded Ophelia.
“You, here, mademoiselle? How did you . . .”
The rest of his question got lost with him, as he continued his unavoidable descent of the walkway.
The airship started to rock back and forth. More cursing. At the mercy of every lurch, Ambrose was sent hurtling in the opposite direction. Thorn caught him by the scarf as his chair whizzed past them again, bringing it to an abrupt halt.
“What on earth are you doing here?”
It was almost an accusation. Disconcerted, Ambrose fluttered his long antelope lashes several times. In the midst of this nauseating furnace, his golden skin, black hair, and white clothing had retained all their silkiness.
“The outlaws I was sheltering . . . I couldn’t do anything about it, désolé. Olfactories in the family guard had memorized their smell, and tracked them down to my father’s place. On Lady Septima’s orders. We were all arrested, and then separated, days ago. I don’t even know if they, too, are onboard. This airship is ginormous, I haven’t found them. Is it true, what’s being said? The Good Family has also gone?”
Ignoring both the rocking and the shouting all around them, Thorn tightened his grip on the increasingly twitchy scarf, forcing Ambrose to look him straight in the eye. The gentleness of the one exacerbated the hardness of the other.
“What were you hiding from us, you and your father?”
“I don’t understand, sir—”
“On the contrary, I think you understand perfectly well.”
From their first encounter, Thorn had seen Ambrose as a potential spy for Lazarus, and, through him, for Eulalia Gonde. Discovering his funerary urn in the attic of the columbarium hadn’t improved that opinion.
As for Ophelia, she no longer had an opinion. She stared at Ambrose’s sheepish reflection on the window of the walkway, as she had done so often recently, to reassure herself that she wasn’t in the presence of the Other, but what did it prove, really? Mirrors didn’t reveal every imposture. Ophelia might not know who Ambrose really was, but she was sure of two things: the first was that the scarf trusted him; the second, that this wasn’t the time for explanations.
“You’re a driver,” she cut in. “Would you know how to pilot this airship?�
�
Ambrose, half-strangled, shook his head, until Thorn deigned to release him.
“Apparently, the command bridge has been sabotaged. And that’s not the worst news, mademoiselle. Going by the direction and speed of Nina’s Breath, we won’t find any ark to land on. Father taught me cartography: there’s nothing in that direction. Just clouds.”
Ophelia was starting to feel decidedly nauseous. A jolt made the walkway’s handrail dig into her ribs, totally winding her.
She thought again of that train refusing to take her to the third protocol. Of all the answers that remained in Babel, from which she and Thorn were moving further away by the second. Of that shattered world, where they hadn’t managed to find their place, she the runaway, he the fugitive. Of the past that Eulalia Gonde had turned upside down, and the future the Other wanted to deprive them of. And of the Deviations Observatory, which, at this precise moment, was repeating the same mistakes with her echo.
WHO IS I?
No, Ophelia wouldn’t allow it. She took in a great gulp of air, became conscious once more of the stench, the cries, the jolts, and, more vivid than all that, of Thorn’s big hand holding hers. Click click. The fob watch was swinging hypnotically at the end of its chain, attached to his shirt, its cover opening and closing, quick as a heartbeat.
Seeing it, Ophelia was struck by a crazy idea.
“Where is it, this command bridge?”
Ambrose was really struggling to steady his wheelchair. Having half his limbs set the wrong way round didn’t make things any easier for him.
“At the other end of the gondola, mademoiselle, but it has been sabotaged, as I told—”
“We must go there,” said Ophelia.
With his back to the window, Thorn scrutinized the increasingly outrageous mayhem prevailing on the walkway. The jostling sometimes turning into fighting, sometimes into hugging. Some passengers were organizing wagers to predict the exact time of their death—the less optimistic not giving themselves more than fifteen minutes.
The Storm of Echoes Page 31
