Serpents and Stairways

Chapter II - Part 3

To get to the Grand Hotel Imperial he took a tram. The sun had almost caught on the sharp peaks towering over Gebal and was about to deflate like an exhausted balloon, sinking behind them as if behind the bed—sunsets in mountains were fleeting.

The main entrance was decorated with statues of winged women in dresses with chaotic slithering folds. Georg threw back his head, peering into their faces; there was something predatory about them. "Too pompous for my taste." He decided, and trying to keep out of women's sight, left in search of a service entrance.

The result was disappointing. Georg circled the building once and found nothing. Circling around it the second time yielded the same result. No matter how many circles he inscribed the hotel into—again and again he returned under the cover of the porch, with its swaggering red carpet, decorated with interweaving of golden antlers.

"Come on!" Georg addressed Fate, as he had often done before, "What's with this petty spite?" Fate, as she does, gave no response, at least not a verbal one; but when Georg had once again circled back to the main entrance, he could swear he heard her laughter in the air.

"Fine," he sighed "so be it."

He waited for one of the porters to come outside to help a guest with rolling in their suitcases, and, as if accidentally, Georg bumped into him as he passed. "A thousand crowns for the uniform," he whispered, "I'll wait around the corner."

Around the corner turned out to be a dreadful place. The lower the sun sank, the stronger the winds grew, and hiding from the gusts, while still remaining in sight, didn't seem possible. Georg buttoned up the jacket: too short, too tight in the shoulders. He squinted and waited, as wind's icy fingers tickled his ribs. The porter wasn't coming. Time passed.

"I wonder, who was the person who had lost this wallet?" He thought, "And what did this loss cost him?"

Not once in the last four years he had accumulated in his hands priceless ponds of diamonds, which inevitably ran through his fingers; Became an owner of impenetrable mysterious manors, only to lose them on the next day. He burned, he won, he lost and spent uneven stacks of assignations only to spend the same night in someone's attic, wrapped in a stinky horsecloth. Yes, to some extent Georg was used to life without price tags, in which numbers were but a shorthand for a raise of stakes. This could have led, in someone else, to a mental inflation, to the devaluation of the idea of Material itself.

But someone like that did not become a Chevalier of Fate.

And that folded one-too-many-times piece of paper in the wallet—Georg could feel its thickness between two fingers—was probably nothing more than a shopping list. Could it lead him to the owner of the jacket? Perhaps so.

And what did that money buy anyway—a thousand crowns? Georg had no idea how much it was. In his travels he rarely relied on the exchange rates, issued by the central banks, but rather went by the way people winced or widened their eyes when this or that number was mentioned, as well as by some other hints. Like, judging by the place where he'd discovered the jacket, by its darned pockets and frayed elbows, he could be confident this money wouldn't buy him an airship. But what if the wallet was worth something much more valuable—a trinket for a kid, new boots, or a bag of honey-cakes from a tradeswoman?

He was already reaching for it, but stopped himself. No. Fate was counting exactly on that. He'd abandon everything, he'd look for the wallet's owner and the millstones of providence would once again grind him into ash and dust. The pendulum of adventure would swing, and he would never be able to come back around this corner, where he had just got with so much effort, fighting against the resistance of time, determinism and winds.