The Demi-Monde: Summer Read Online Free Page A

are my enemies.’ She looked around at her audience. ‘So I say to you that in this, the most uncertain of worlds, there is one precious certainty: the word of the Doge IMmanual. Follow me and I will bring you safe to Rapture.’
    De Sade waited for the applause to die and to ensure that the Lady had finished her speechifying, then made an announcement of his own. ‘His Highness, Selim the Grim, Grand Vizier to the court of His HimPerial Majesty Shaka Zulu, comes to honour Doge IMmanual on the day of her coronation.’
    And with that the great villain Selim strode into the hall, flanked by a veritable crowd of flunkies. He halted in the middle of the audience chamber. ‘Doge IMmanual, I bring greetings from His HimPerial Majesty Shaka Zulu.’
    ‘Welcome to my Court, Grand Vizier Selim, and please convey my felicitations to His HimPerial Majesty. But I would ask, has His Majesty considered the proposition I put to him through your good offices?’
    There was a buzz of conversation around the hall, the fools in the Council having obviously not realised that Doge IMmanual had been preparing to take office for weeks. The ‘proposition’ she was talking about was the result of many hours of long – and very secret – negotiations between her and Selim that had followed their first meeting in the Galerie des Anciens.
    ‘I am commanded to convey to you word that the army of NoirVille is ready to stand shoulder to shoulder with the fighters of Venice in their struggle with the Beast, Reinhard Heydrich.
    ‘And in exchange I will deliver to NoirVille, by the last day of Summer, the secrets of how Aqua Benedicta is manufactured.’
    There was another flurry of excited conversation. The formula for Aqua Benedicta was one of the nuJus’ most closely guarded secrets. Getting his hands on a supply of the anticoagulant was the only reason Shaka had agreed to the establishing of the nuJu home in NoirVille, as having exclusive access to the additive had made NoirVille pre-eminent in the Demi-Monde with regards to the trading of blood. If Doge IMmanual was to reveal the nuJus’ secret then Shaka would have no further use for them … she would be condemning the two million of them living in the JAD – the nuJu Autonomous District set in the middle of NoirVille – to death.
    ‘I take it your holy men have overcome their antipathy to NoirVille being aligned with a Sector ruled by a woman?’ Here she looked to the figure of His HimPerial Reverence the Grand Mufti Mohammed al-Mahdi, NoirVille’s holiest Man, skulking behind Selim, but he refused to meet her eyes, preferring that Selim spoke for him.
    ‘His HimPerial Majesty Shaka Zulu demanded that our priests go into conclave to consider this spiritual question. This they have done, and they have come to the sage conclusion that as you are the Messiah, you transcend gender and hence an alliance with Venice does not violate the tenets of HimPerialism.’
    Very neat
, decided de Sade. According to them, the Doge IMmanual
wasn’t
a woeMan, but rather ABBA-made Solidified Astral Ether. He stole a glance at the Doge and struggled not to laugh. Standing there clad in her transparent robe, he had to marvel that any man – zadnik or otherwise – could summonup sufficient intellectual or religious flexibility to deny that she was all woman.
    Doge IMmanual nodded. ‘I am pleased to hear these words. I am a great admirer of His HimPerial Majesty Shaka Zulu, who has welded the disparate people of NoirVille into one tribe. Now, Venice and NoirVille must bring the
métèque
– the Outsiders – to heel. And in acknowledgement of his loyalty I, as the Messiah, will throw my cloak of invulnerability about his HimPis. They are now the chosen of ABBA.’
    The Doge waved to a steward standing to one side of the chamber, who strode forward holding before him a golden sceptre surmounted by the entwined runes of
laguz
sinister and
laguz
dexter. ‘This sceptre is a symbol that the HimPis of