Fearless, sitting astride the radio set, considered her for a long time in silence, and then threw back his head and let out a howl of laughter. All the glass in the frames shattered to pieces.
“Did it not occur to you that it would be vrrraiment simpler to set my tiger on you? I am Fearless-and-Almost-Blameless! Where does the ‘Almost’ come from, in your opinion?”
“But I thought . . . Mother Hildegarde . . . Doña Imelda,” stammered Ophelia.
“But seriously, what were you expecting? That I open my arms to you, crying ‘the friends of my friends are my friends’? Grow up a bit, little girl.”
Fearless had lost all his bonhomie. He eyed Ophelia with a scorn he didn’t attempt to conceal. At this moment, he was no longer the great rabble-rouser with a tenor’s voice. And neither was he an insignificant-looking little balding man. He was a third individual, an entirely different one.
A wild beast who had made fear his ally.
From an inside pocket of his tunic, he pulled out some tickets to his cabaret. “You came to me because I accepted that you do so. I was hoping for someone else, if truth be told. Your charming colleague, for example. Mademoiselle Mediana. There’s a girl who’s incapable of minding her own business, no? Being predatory runs in her blood! If, one day, she were to enter the ranks of LUX, she would make a formidable adversary for me.”
Fearless observed a silence during which Ophelia had ample time to hear her heart, and that of Blaise, pounding.
“In one hour,” he continued, “everything will have disappeared: the sign, the tables, the stage, the equipment in my dressing room. Not because you advised me to do that, little girl, but because it’s my way of life. The cellars of Babel offer infinite possibilities and it’s me, only me, who decides where I go and who comes to see me.”
Fearless got up and his tiger copied him, with a muscular stirring of fur.
“I won’t kill you. I don’t attack lambs, only wild beasts interest me. Merely convey the following message to Mademoiselle Mediana.” He lowered his voice until it was reduced to the sound of distant thunder. “He who sows the wind shall reap the storm.”
THE COMPASS
“Are you . . . used to that sort of thing?”
Those were the first words that Blaise managed to utter, once back at ground level. He had leant against one of the ancient baths’ ruined columns, breathing in deeply through his nose, under the disdainful gaze of the fruit sellers. His pantaloons, soaked in sweat, had lost all their fullness.
Ophelia went to the closest fountain to get some water for him to drink. The searing heat of the bazaar, buzzing with people and flies, offered a stark contrast to the catacombs.
“I’m sorry,” she said, handing a beaker to Blaise. “Really sorry.” That was all she could say, again and again. All that she’d experienced in the Pole—the Clairdelune dungeons, the Knight and his hounds, Farouk’s tantrums, the countless assassination attempts, not to mention her encounter with God—had hardened her to intimidation. But that was part of her own life, not Eulalia’s.
Blaise looked at her, goggle-eyed. “Any more and my heart would have packed up. Mon Dieu! It’s him, isn’t it? It’s him who killed Mademoiselle Silence?”
“I don’t know.” And that’s what exasperated Ophelia. Had she met him in other circumstances, Fearless could have taught her a great deal. “Will you be alright?” she asked, concerned.
Blaise nodded, but that head movement alone made him regurgitate all the water he’d just swallowed. “You . . . you must find me very emotional, Mademoiselle Eulalia,” he said, shamefully wiping his mouth. “The truth is, I have a cat phobia. That one was . . . particularly large.”
“I’m really, really sorry,” Ophelia muttered, as the bazaar gongs rang out. “My leave is coming to an end. I must return to the Good family, and deliver my message, and . . . and . . . ”
“And claim my compensation,” she thought to herself. Much as she wanted to stay with Blaise, the need to know what Mediana had to tell her about Thorn, that was urgent.
“We’ll have to do this again,” she tried to joke. “Without the saber-toothed tiger.”
As she returned his turban, now like an unraveled ball of wool, Blaise contorted his lips into a grimace that was probably meant to be a smile. “Eh bien, another time, maybe?”
“So sorry, again.”
Ophelia would have liked to add something more intelligent, but once more, the words escaped her. She crossed the bazaar at a run, tripping on carpets and bumping into passersby. She was sure this meeting with Blaise would be the first and last. She was equally sure that it was best that way.
So why couldn’t she bear the thought?
With every stride, anger made her blood boil. Mediana had deliberately put her in danger. She hadn’t hesitated to make use of her most intimate secret, to play with her most fragile hope to satisfy her own curiosity. Now that Ophelia had fulfilled her part of the deal, she had an ominous feeling about it.
He who sows the wind shall reap the storm.
“If Mediana has lied to me,” she thought, clenching her jaws, “if she’s made it all up about Thorn, I’ll make sure that I myself become that storm.”
As though reflecting her inner state, the sky became increasingly oppressive. A miasma of clouds lowered above Babel, but it was a storm without lightning, or wind, or rain. Ophelia struggled to catch her breath as she went up the slope, fringed with umbrella pines, that led to the belvedere; those daily laps of the stadium hadn’t yet made an athlete of her.
She sighed with relief when she saw she’d arrived just in time. The birdtrain coaches were in the process of landing on the platform tracks, carried by the powerful beating of the chimeras’ wings. Soon, passengers were pouring out of them. Ophelia boarded one, inserted her card in the ticket machine, and looked for a seat. It wasn’t easy: the students of all the academies spent their Sundays in town, and always waited until the last birdtrain to return to their lodgings.
Barely had Ophelia sat down when she heard, on the other side of the window, a mechanical clicking that made her jump up. A wheelchair, maneuvered by an adolescent with dark skin and white clothes, was moving off along the platform, in the midst of the passengers who had just alighted. Ophelia rushed to the nearest door and leaned over the step.
“Ambrose?”
He had heard her. Ophelia knew that from the way his shoulders had shuddered at the sound of his name. He had heard her, but he continued on his way without turning around.
Ophelia never shouted. But she couldn’t help the imploring cry that burst from her lungs: “Ambrose!”