“Yeah,” he said, turning to her. “I can get you in.” Leon grinned. “But you’d better know what you’re getting into. That bitch was armed and dancing — knife, molyblade, hotkeys, grenades... You don’t tool out with stuff like that if you don’t intend to use it.” Leon’s smile was getting wider by the second.
“You know the first law of salvage?” Leon asked LizAlec.
LizAlec shook her head: of course she didn’t. Thermodynamics, primogeniture, negative capability, yes... Even Salic law. But salvage?
“The first ship on the scene claims the lot.”
Looking at him, LizAlec could almost see Leon try to work out how much The Arc was worth as scrap.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Carthage Burns
“Tell Lazlo I want a meeting...”
Lady Clare was standing in her study, leaning against its vast carved overmantle, swaddled in a vast black coat that had once belonged to Prince Sabatini. She was still frozen to the bone and probably beyond. A black teak Buddha, two wooden doves from a gilded Thai temple carving and a copy of Twenty Years After now burned fitfully in the grate, flames dancing like unwilling ghosts then fading as smoke backed up in the sodden chimney.
Her mahogany chess table and Prince Sabatini’s battered Jacobean stool had already been sacrificed that morning to the ash. Lady Clare would have used just the books, but they refused to burn properly, merely smouldering like badly dried slabs of peat.
So instead she’d started breaking up the Hotel Sabatini’s priceless collection of wooden furniture. Later, if there was a later, history would hold their destruction against her, no doubt along with greater crimes. Not that it mattered now... Money had no value when there was nothing worthwhile to buy. And all Lady Clare really wanted was to stay warm, that and keep up her faltering courage. Because what came next would not be easy.
The General had gone, though Lady Clare didn’t remember where. He’d told her but she’d forgotten: her attention span as brittle as her bird-boned body, which trembled every time it moved. How the half-starved boy standing in front of her managed to stay at attention, Lady Clare didn’t know. She couldn’t have managed it.
It was the same Imperial Guard who’d woken her two days earlier and before that had been waiting for Fixx and her at the shuttle. That was, what...? Lady Clare tried to count back but got lost. It seemed forever ago, but it probably wasn’t really that long.
She had food left and if she were kind...
“Here,” Lady Clare said, pushing one trembling hand into the coat’s pocket. She extracted one of the General’s biscuits. “Eat it slowly.”
The gratitude in his eyes gave way to suspicion. If she had one biscuit, how many others did she have? Maybe she had a houseful of food? Maybe all the Imperial Ministers did...
“I had two left,” Lady Clare told him. “Now I have one.”
She didn’t mention that she was saving her last biscuit for her meeting with Lazlo. That it was her tiny reserve of strength and courage. God help her.
“Tell Count Lazlo I wish to discuss surrender,” said Lady Clare bleakly. “Go now, tell him to meet me at the Tuileries.” She hunched forward, pushing frozen fingers further into her pockets, trying to ignore the chill that slid in through the rotting window frames. Half-decent glazing could have reduced the invading cold to nothing. But it was too late now, and besides, Lady Clare had spent nearly eighteen years restoring the Hotel Sabatini to its original glory, wood sash-windows and all.
If she’d wanted comfort, she’d have lived in a purpose-built total-control complex somewhere like Lille. But she didn’t want comfort. All Lady Clare had ever been after was elegance and everyone knew nothing came colder.
The boy was disappointed in her. He’d been expecting Lady Clare to fight, to die: somewhere inside his empty head he’d probably seen himself standing guard over her fallen body as he fought hand-to-hand with Black Cossacks. And now she was ordering a lieutenant of the Garde Impériale to help her betray His Highness.
“Do it,” she told the boy firmly, some of the old fire coming back into her voice. If the flame didn’t reach her eyes that didn’t matter, he was looking at the floor anyway. Saluting coldly, the boy stamped out of the room and slammed the study door behind him. Lady Clare smiled: that was probably going to be the one truly defiant gesture of his short life, poor child.
It was time to see Count Lazlo. On her way out of the study Lady Clare paused at a marble-topped table to pick up a tiny model of a cavalry sabre that rested on top of a pile of damp papers. Hand-written data she’d calmly ignored ever since it had arrived a week before. At a certain point of catastrophe, additional information no longer made a difference. Memoranda become the irrelevance they were. The idea had a certain appeal. Particularly if your job was to leave no traces.
Lady Clare held the paperweight lightly in her fingers, testing its balance. The blade curved in traditional cavalry fashion and the handle was bound with gold wire. Before it had been Lady Clare’s, it had belonged to a minister called Pierre Nexus, and before him it had been the property of the Prince Imperial himself. A perfect copy of a sabre worn by Napoleon the First during his Cisalpine campaign, back in the days when he was a simple general.
Slipping the tiny sabre into her coat pocket, Lady Clare double-checked the wooden shutters and locked her study door against possible looters. The wide marble steps down to the entrance hall were black with dirty footprints and slick with condensation, but Lady Clare made her way safely, one frail hand clutching at the stone balustrade, her other holding a battered army-issue hurricane lamp. The whole Hotel Sabatini felt as empty and lifeless as a restaurant that had gone out of fashion and seen its patrons go elsewhere.
The city was black, buried under darkness. No stars could break through the heavy layer of cloud, few lights showed, and when they did it was as flickering shards through closed shutters and tightly drawn curtains. Firelight or lamplight, not electricity, not for days now. Passing over the pedestrian-only Pont St-Louis, Lady Clare entered Île de la Cité and tramped her way through the mud of what had once been a huge rose garden. Even the spider’s-leg flying buttresses on the south side of Notre-Dame were almost lost to Lady Clare in the rain as she turned into the Place du Parvis ND, edging nervously round the granite plinth of Charlemagne.
Puddles had spread to the size of small lakes, the river changed to a swollen slug of black water. Lady Clare navigated by instinct, stepping where years of being Parisian told her that roads, bridges and pavements should be, cutting between l’Hôtel Dieu and the Préfecture to reach the Quai de l’Horloge and finally Pont Neuf, the oldest bridge in the city.
She ducked at the thunder like some Stone Age primitive, counting off the seconds until lightning flared as she tried to work out how far away the storm was. Not far enough. Not nearly far enough away for the Ishies to upload what they were seeing. Alsatians didn’t bark from inside the locked préfecture de police. Sodden feral cats didn’t crouch spitting beneath deserted police trucks, there wasn’t even the slightest scuttle of a swimming rat or the heavy flap of a grey owl’s wings as it swooped low over the quai. It was as though only humans were left — and not too many of them, judging from the rain-soaked silence...
Lady Clare bent her head into the wind and headed west towards the Tuileries. She’d been protected from the worst of the storm by the buildings, more or less, but now she was face on to the howling wind, alone among the darkened deserted colonnades of the Rue de Rivoli. No one else was stupid enough to be out.