Salamander Read Online Free PDF

was the city of Pressburg. This seemed a good omen, although the Count’s ship, at his first glimpse of it on the Thames dockside, dampened his enthusiasm for the adventure and gave him his first doubts.
    He closed his eyes, exhaustion plunging him swiftly towards sleep. Through the halls of his dreams stalked a red-haired young woman in a white shift. He followed her down a tunnel lined with sphinxes, while all around them some vast hidden engine rumbled and throbbed.

    He awoke to find his mattress shuddering beneath him. Fearing some calamity – an earthquake, a flood, a peasant revolt – he parted the heavy crimson curtains. His chamber, if there had indeed been one, had vanished and his bed was moving along a curving passageway into a spacious hall, gilded and corniced, lined on one side with deep window alcoves pouring ice-light. From a vaulted firmament of cloudscape and cherubs hung a chandelier, a bloated glass spider. A tall pier glass stood between each alcove, and in the sudden bedaz-zlement of reflected brilliance Flood did not at first see the elderly man in an old-fashioned campaign wig and hussar’suniform, sitting at a table giving orders to a small group of liveried servants. The old man glanced at Flood’s bed arriving and clapped his hands twice sharply.
    The assembly broke up. Servants and their wavering mirror-twins hurried towards one another and then all these moving bodies, both real and reflected, vanished with a ripple as concealed doors silently opened and closed like the valves of some giant undersea creature. The old man, alone now in the centre of the great hall, beckoned to the printer, who still had not emerged from his refuge behind the bedcurtains.
    – Good morning, Mr. Flood. Welcome to Hrad Ostrovy. I trust you slept well. No need to be alarmed. All is functioning as it should. Come, join us for breakfast.
    Flood ducked back behind the curtains, searched frantically, and then stuck his head out again.
    – Your Excellency, I haven’t got my clothes.
    The Count raised a finger.
    – Yes. Just a moment.
    A panel in the ceiling above Flood’s head slid open. A wicker basket was winched down to him by unseen hands. He took the basket off the hook from which it hung and found inside it his clothing, discarded in a heap at the foot of the bed last night and now cleaned, pressed, and perfumed. By the time he had hurriedly pulled on his shirt, waistcoat, breeches and stockings and had climbed cautiously down from the bed, the Count was hunched over the table, busily attacking his breakfast.
    Irena had joined him, Flood was alarmed to see. And a man somewhat older than himself, strikingly handsome, wearing the skullcap and black cassock of a cleric, his long raven hair tied back in a queue.
    The Count greeted Flood this time with a hearty grunt and offered him a less opulent and noticeably shorter chair than his own.
    – I gather you were still asleep when the shaving machine stopped by your bed. That would have been … six-forty-five, by my reckoning. You didn’t hear the bell?
    – The bell? I –
    – You’ve met my daughter, the Count said.
    – Good morning, Mr. Flood.
    – And this is the Abbé de Saint-Foix, from Quebec.
    – Of course, Flood said, startled, the name immediately familiar to him before he knew why. The writer of –
what was the book called?
He had never met anyone quite this famous, and all at once found himself red-faced and groping for words.
    – All Europe, he tried, is talking about your novel –
how do you address an abbé?
– Monsieur.
    The Abbé acknowledged the compliment with a smile and a barely perceptible nod of his head.
    – Have you read the Abbé’s book? the Count asked Flood.
    – Not yet, Excellency.
    – Well, I have. I never read made-up stories, as a rule. They are, to my palate, mere concoctions of spun sugar, but since the Abbé’s
conte philosophique
speculates on ideas of interest to me, I made an exception.
    The printer sat down,