But now I really must leave you gentlemen. My bride is waiting for me.”

With much ceremonial bowing, the ministers departed. Pritanez set off at speed to the Palace Hotel, where Coltor’s emissaries were waiting anxiously to know whether the King had signed or not. The favourable news was like a galvanic charge to their cold Norlandian blood. They shook Pritanez’s hand warmly, and decided to celebrate the happy occasion with an expensive dinner later that evening. Then they talked over the final details of the down payment.

Pritanez left the hotel in a buoyant mood. His life’s great work had come to a successful conclusion, and he would be a rich man. He was filled with an ecstatic sense of well-being. Everything in the world was wonderful: the ladies in horse-drawn carriages promenading under the palm trees in Montanhagol Avenue, the little coffee houses and their customers sitting outside on the pavements taking their ease, the clouds in the sky … for the first time in his life he noticed the clouds.

In that instant something utterly revolting smacked into his face. Something brown, moist, and excessively putrid. He recognised it from the smell: something horses were wont to leave behind them on the roads of that pre-war age.

Like thunder after lightning, this bull’s-eye hit was followed by a loud yell; then a rotten egg came flying towards him, an onion, and sundry other objects. Confronted by the fact of his unpopularity, Pritanez ducked his head this way and that. But a crowd was advancing towards him with menacing gestures. He barely had time to leap into his car.

He was driven home, filled with disgust at his person and his clothing, which still retained the distinctive smell of each individual greeting in its ripe particularity. His house was a few steps away from the Palace Hotel.

But as they turned into the street where he lived, the chauffeur suddenly braked.

“Look, Your Excellency!”

An already substantial crowd was waiting outside the house, brandishing little flags and yelling. They too had no doubt equipped themselves with projectile materials. A chill went down Pritanez’s spine.

The chauffeur did not wait for instructions. He reversed rapidly, and only after making his three-point turn did he ask where to go next.

“The Royal Palace,” came the reply.

 

Gradually darkness fell. Huge crowds were milling around in the streets, faces never seen before in the capital. The plain-clothes security men had simply given up and melted into the throng.

In the general stir and bustle no one noticed the twenty conspirators making their way one by one towards the palace down various streets. There was a servants’ door opening onto a neglected part of the park, used by delivery men during the day. This was where they broke into the building.

No force was actually needed. They knocked and gave the password of the day: The Ides of March. The door opened and a lieutenant of the Twelfth Regiment, armed to the teeth, admitted them one by one. It was not actually the fifteenth of March but the eighth. However, they rather liked the chilling reference to the great conspiracy that ended the life and sway of Julius Caesar.

A soldier led them down a series of dark corridors into the basement area, where they regrouped. An officer was waiting for them in a sort of hall, where he checked that all were present and immediately left.

Sandoval and Delorme were among them. Sandoval knew most of the others, either personally or by sight. They included a couple of rather wild, desperate characters—a newspaper delivery man famous for his strength, and an intensely evil-looking waiter. But the great majority seemed not too grimly aggressive, grim aggressiveness not featuring much in the Alturian character.