Lord tophet, p.23
Lord Tophet, page 23
part #2 of Shadowbridge Series
She stepped down onto the stage of the theater . . . and nearly fell through it into the trap room. Half of the floor, including the part where the puppet booth had stood, was gone, burned away, and the edges around the gaping hole were charred and blistered. The back wall and two of the balconies had been destroyed, leaving one of the doors to the wings standing inside a frame without a wall around it. Gone, too, was one of the uprights supporting the roof, and most of the thatch overhead, which now leaned precariously to the side. Given the damage she could see, it was a wonder the whole place hadn’t burned down. The stink of smoke still tainted the air although the fires were long cold. The remaining floor of the stage had buckled. Boards had popped up or split, probably from a combination of intense heat fought with buckets of water. Standing puddles remained under the last two rear balconies, causing her to think somewhat incongruously that the stage must not be level.
She looked down into the trap room below, full of unidentifiable debris. She saw no bodies, no sign anyone had been on hand when the fire began. The blaze had done its worst damage where the booth had stood and she couldn’t escape the conclusion that it had begun in the booth—the lantern, perhaps, falling off its hook, spilling oil and flames all in a moment. Had it already happened before Diverus came back? It must have, else the embers would still be glowing. After all, it had been only a day since they’d parted company. Surely he was near.
After circling the hole, she walked to the rear and around the surviving door into the back wing. The various screens there had been raised high to avoid the fire, a move that had probably saved them. She walked through the crossover hall to the side of the theater left intact. The floor creaked underfoot. The heat had warped the boards.
The opposite wings, redolent with smoke, looked to have been saved. She turned to climb the stairs at the back, and there stood Orinda at the top. They saw each other in the same moment.
“Oh, thank Edgeworld for hearing my prayers!” cried Orinda. She flew down the stairs as on wings and clutched Leodora to her, saying, “You’re alive after all,” by which time she had burst into tears. “We thought you would never find your way back. Diverus didn’t know how to go after you.”
“He couldn’t. He gave me the phial. But what happened? How did the fire—”
“There’s much you need to hear, and none of it good, I’m afraid. The fire is the least of it. Come with me, he needs to see you.”
“Who?”
“Soter. He hoped you would return in time. I think his conscience would never be clear if anything had happened to you.”
“A lot has happened to me, but his conscience wasn’t involved. It wasn’t his doing. Why do you say—what do you mean in time?”
They came to one of the rear rooms in the hallway, one she hadn’t seen before. It was, by comparison with the small chamber she had occupied, opulent. There were racks of costumes, a shelf lined with wigs, with shoes and boots, with makeup and mirrors. Bois and Glaise stood at the back of it, looking worried until they set eyes on her. Then both of them beamed with rapture and jumped to her. She hugged them, but even as she did she was turning to see what lay around the corner of the room that they had been guarding.
He lay on the bed. The top of his head faced her, his thin hair pushed up by the pillow, and even from that view she recognized him.
Soter rested with his eyes closed and his breathing shallow.
“Oh, no,” she said, though she’d had sufficient warning to guess. “The fire?” she asked.
“No, dear heart,” Orinda replied. “He started the fire—in the hope of escaping.”
“Escaping. I don’t understand.”
“Who is that?” Soter asked. His voice creaked like dried-out leather.
“It’s me,” answered Leodora. She pushed around Orinda to circle the side of the bed.
Soter’s feeble gaze followed her. Tears ran from his eyes. “Oh, you’re all right then.”
She sat on the edge and reached to take his hand. She noticed only then that his arm, lying straight by his side atop the covers, was as chalky white as the Coral Man.
“I don’t understand,” she said again. “How did this happen in a few days? Where’s Diverus?”
“It’s not been a few days,” Orinda explained. “Before Diverus returned, a month passed. We’d exhausted every effort to find you. Bois and Glaise traveled to other spans, we’d interviewed the stilt walker you spoke to and the tunnel seigneur as well, who swore you’d never crossed from here to Sacbé. Hamen and Pelorie and the rest all scoured the piers to learn if a ship had sailed you away. There wasn’t a trace.”
“There wouldn’t have been. We didn’t tell anyone, we didn’t know we were going. But a month?”
“Diverus said the same—only a day to you,” Soter rasped, “an eternity to us.”
She looked from him to Orinda. “Where is Diverus?”
“My dear,” he said wearily, “you have to listen to me now.”
“First, tell me what’s happened to Diverus?”
“They took him.”
“Who did?”
“Soter.” Orinda said his name anxiously.
“Orinda, my time is short now whether I speak or not. Better that she know everything than wonder ever after.” His rheumy eyes met hers. “The truth was kept from you for your own good as well as mine. If you’d never wanted off that damnable isle—if you’d had Tastion and married and had babies and become part of their village . . . but I should have known that wouldn’t happen. Not with your family history. I cursed Gousier for all this, but maybe it had to be. You’d never have lived inside anybody’s proscriptions.”
“No, I wouldn’t, but—”
“Give us a drink then, and I’ll tell you what you need to know, everything of Bardsham and Leandra. And Diverus.”
There was a tray on the floor with a clay pitcher. She poured him a cup of wine. When he didn’t take it from her, she realized he couldn’t move the stony arm. She reached under his head and pulled him up enough to drink from the cup. As he tilted up, the cover slid down and she saw that the paleness of stone colored his chest, blending back to flesh just beneath the collarbone. The most important thing, Shumyzin had tried to tell her, so long ago atop the tower of another span that it seemed like a memory of a dream. The sun that gave him life had been pushed aside before he could finish. And here it was, the demigod’s petrifaction but a harbinger of this moment in time, like an echo thrown ahead of the sound that made it.
He drank and then pressed his head back. Seeing the look of despair and recognition in her eyes, he wheezed, “Hardly any of me left, is there? Another day in your Pons Asinorum, you’d have missed me altogether.” He smiled, as if acknowledging that his approaching death were mere japery. “Now listen,” he said, “and afterward you can hate me as you see fit.”
SOTER’S TALE
“I hated your mother, Leodora. I hated her and did all I could to be rid of her. That’s the truth and now there’s no point in keeping it from you. I’m your friend, whatever you may think. I’ve always looked out for you. Always, child. More’n your uncle ever did or would have done. But I believe I share with him that hatred for his sister.
“I’d had Bardsham to myself for so many years, you see. There were hundreds if not thousands of indiscretions, assignations, and peccadilloes in that time, on every span probably. Bardsham and women . . . you wouldn’t have thought it to look at him, scarred and rawboned as he was, but he had such charisma, such presence, that when he spoke to you, it was like the gods were gifting you with his attention. Like you were the only one in the world who caught his eye.”
Leodora swallowed and said, “You were in love with him, weren’t you?”
Instead of answering directly, he replied, “He always came back to me. Asked his dearest companion to dust him off, dry him out, and protect him from the woman who’d mistaken a dalliance for a proposal. As it was with that woman on Vijnagar who’d have left her husband for Jax, and you not even encouraging her—that’s how it was all the time with your father. In love with him? Pathetic, I suppose. But nobody gave a toss about Soter except him. Nobody else scraped the dirt off and saw the lonely wretch below. He loved me and I loved him and that’s how it was.
“Until she came along.
“Whatever his power, Leandra gave it right back. He wanted his little affair. She turned him down. He plied her with gifts, jewelry, costumes. He tried to seduce and tempt her. She said no, and sent the things back untouched. His performances began to flag. Audiences noticed when he cut back to two tales, and then one, and they actually stopped coming. Stopped paying. They thought it was ego. He didn’t really notice. I’d never seen him like that. Nobody’d ever shaken him up, not in all the years we’d traveled. He was like your emperor in that kitsune story you like so much.
“Leandra had been nicely accommodated by somebody. She didn’t need gifts to get along. She had come to the show and found what Bardsham did to be exquisite, that’s what she said and the way she said it I knew she felt the same as me. She’d come back again and again. And she’d seen him beguiling the barmaids and the patronesses. She knew what he was like—more Meersh than little thief. And she had that about her, too. Cut from the same cloth, they were, neither one conforming nor obeying the rules. She knew better than to give her heart to him or he’d be after the next conquest before she could roll over. Turned out she was a skilled dancer. She’d trained, that lithe and supple beauty, with that flame hair you inherited. So I made her a proposition and hired her on as a dancer to entertain between acts, because I couldn’t think of another way to fix it so he’d go back to work. I hoped at close quarters they would discover they hated each other and we could move on. Though I didn’t get my wish, he did start performing again then. He had a reason to now. The audiences came back, filled the halls and theaters again. Soon enough I knew how it was going to be. The Red Witch and the World’s Greatest Puppeteer. He never looked at another woman again. I think he stopped seeing ’em. He stopped seeing me, too. Didn’t need me now to protect him from himself. I was just another member of the troupe, with Tahman and Grumelpyn. Well, I bore it, didn’t I? And nobody so much as asked if I could.
“That was our sea change as a troupe. We moved on, and one day Leandra was pregnant and the dancing between acts stopped once it became obvious. I thought a baby would keep her away, in the wings, and I’d have him back. A little. Was that so much to ask for? He doted on you, though you don’t recall, and he coaxed your mother into working herself into shape again for the dancing. Fuller hips but no one complained about those. She danced barefoot between tales, she took to doing some of the voices in them, and to the world we must have seemed the happiest family on all of Shadowbridge. The troupe what had everything.
“Your mother never stopped trying to get rid of me. Anything went wrong, any place didn’t have our lodging ready, she went after me for it. Only fair, I guess, since I did the same with regard to her, trying to make him see her for the petty, jealous creature I thought her. She’d been a kept whore when we found her, hadn’t she? I could always remind her of that, and make her twist with anger. Our war, hers and mine, because we both loved him. Ain’t that laughable. I think it was the two of us drove him into his cups most of the time. Him and Tahman and that elf, they’d sit and drink and watch the two of us go at it like we was the married couple. Like it was a show put on for them.”
“But what happened?” asked Leodora. “What happened in Colemaigne?”
“The story changed is what. We’d come to this very theater and the crowds were huge. Your father’s ego, it must have been as big as the sun resting on the horizon. Gods, but he was revered.
“And then one night I noticed a couple of creatures in one of the boxes out there, watching us. They were hairless, humorless things, like you’d get if you bred the moons Saphon and Gyjio together. Orinda and Burbage conveyed the hearsay that they was archivists from the Library itself, and didn’t that inflate your father’s ego still more. Nobody knew then or now what the rumored archivists look like, see. It made a good story. Bardsham’s reputation had brought them—that we had no doubt of. They carried with them a glorious jewel they called Tophet’s Eye. It’s the sort of thing you’d call a spectacular jewel . . . at least one that had brought bad luck, Tophet being a far-flung name for the god of Chaos.”
She asked, “Why don’t I know the stories of him?”
He winced as if pain stabbed into him. “You don’t know the tales because I kept those from you. I replaced Chaos in every story with some other god or demigod’s name. I didn’t want you to know that name ever. It was never to be spoken on Bouyan. Your grandfather, your uncle and aunt, I was shielding them, too. What they didn’t know, they couldn’t ask after. It seemed then the only way to be safe.”
She nodded with understanding, and he went on.
“Third night there was five of them in that box, all of ’em as pale and cold as marble, and by then the chatter that the Library was come to canonize Bardsham was irrepressible, all over Colemaigne. After our performance they appeared backstage, immediately approached Bardsham, and announced they represented a great and powerful lord on another spiral who would pay an unimaginable sum for us to come and give an exclusive performance for him. The entire troupe had to agree—they were quite specific about that. Well, we’d done the like before, and for far less coin than this secretive lord was offering. It was too good to be true and I said as much. Of course, Leandra and I were fighting, so if I said it was a bad idea, she was bound to say it was brilliant and we must leave at once. Bardsham, drunk on booze and himself, didn’t need coaxing anyways. At that point his vanity was as wide as the Adamantine Ocean. I’m sorry, child, and that’s the whole truth of him.
“He was for it and that was that. Now, you, a baby, weren’t going to make no voyage like that. Or maybe it was your mother having a premonition of what waited for us. She already had a nurse looking after you—Bois’s sister, I think it was. You stayed here with her and Orinda. We sailed willingly off the edge of the world.
“I suppose we sailed for a week or more. Went right past spirals and beneath spans, and soon we were far outside anyplace we knew or had ever heard of. Mostly those Agents kept to themselves, but more than once I saw one of them with that blue jewel, holding it up as if trying to peer through it to see Leandra where she sat. Then one morning we woke up and the ocean was a darker color as if it was full of wine, and the look of those places we sailed beneath was dark and silent, ’cept for the birds perched about, watching us. It was like we’d sailed into another world or into the past, to the places in that tale of Chilingana’s you tell, before any people had come. Whole spirals seemingly awaiting their tenants, that’s how it looked. Then finally we hit this sargasso of dead calm, a whole surface of violet and black weeds that should have tangled us all up but didn’t somehow. My misgivings had grown all the while, as had Grumelpyn’s, although our hosts had given us no cause to worry. They’d fed us well and let us be, and more importantly they kept Bardsham merrily lubricated. Tahman, too, when he wasn’t seasick. Always smiling they were, those hairless things, but not a drop of humor in it. Too late then even if everyone else had agreed with me and been willing to turn back. We didn’t know it but we had passed into some other place.
“We reached our destination that day. It was a great curving span near the end of a spiral. The span and the whole spiral as far as we could see in either direction was gray and dead. Not a soul in view save where we anchored, and then they were like our hosts, cold and somber. Pale as skulls. The span itself was in worse shape even than Ningle, as if neglected for centuries. The Dragon Bowl of it had broken apart, and the beam and one little curved slice of that bowl just hung there in the air.
“They hauled the cases up for us, onto the surface of the span, and save for a coterie of staff, there was nobody about, just hundreds of statues in various positions, many of them crumbling, old like the buildings. His palace though was low and long and gleaming, and it ran half the length of the span. More dour, pale people greeted us, led us to our rooms, left us.
“By then even Bardsham admitted this was a mistake and not worth the money. What foolishness. He proposed we give our performance, collect our treasure, and leave as soon as possible. We still didn’t know who our benefactor was, or what he was. We were still hoping he was just a demented recluse. But in order to pretend that, you had to deny that the world looked and smelled wrong, you had to pretend not to see that the birds flying past were not a kind of bird you knew, and most of all you had to overlook that the creatures waiting on you weren’t terrified out of their wits.
“We set up the booth in a great hall of the palace. That night Bardsham performed Chilingana’s tales, and the Fatal Bride, and finally ‘How Meersh Lost His Toes.’ The lord was delighted by the stories. He sat across the hall from us, in an enormous carved throne with an odd drapery hanging before it that kept him in the shadows. When he emerged, one of his attendants always stood before him, bearing a pole on the end of which was a huge mask—of hammered gold, and bigger and broader than a human face, with a serene expression. So we never saw his true face, even as he proclaimed the first performances captivating. His fingers, though, were so long and slender that they looked like they had extra joints, and his hands were the same color and substance of that jewel the Agents had carried with them, as if it had been cut from him. He insisted on having his own personal musician play along with Tahman. It was an old blind man who sawed with a bow upon some wretched stringed instrument with a long neck and one peg in it. He was in fact quite good, provided you liked the one song he knew. He played while your mother danced between the tales, over and over and over, the same tune, slow, fast, whatever was called for, but always the same. I’ve only heard that tune once since then: the first time Diverus played for me. You remember that? That was why I raged at him. It was the most vile thing I could have heard. How could I think it was an accident? I thought Tophet must have sent him after me. I know that’s not true—I know it now.
