by Dave Duncan
“That’s insane!” Dolm said, and suddenly laughed shrilly. Everyone glared at him, even Eleal. “And three tried with Olimmiar, one after the other?” His eyes flicked inquiringly to Uthiam.
“Two.”
“So a total of eight—”
“We need not discuss sordid trivia,” Ambria Impresario proclaimed. She strode majestically across the big chamber toward Trong, one hand extended, the other sweeping Olimmiar Dancer along beside her. “Some of the men became violent in their distress, but the priests stopped them before there was any serious damage. Now you know. The matter is closed.” She stepped into her husband’s embrace.
“No it’s not!” Dolm was grinning and quite unabashed by her anger. Eleal had never seen any member of the troupe defy Ambria openly like that, but then Dolm had been bubbling like a kettle since he came in, and a reaper certainly need not fear an aging female actor.
Ambria whirled around in wrath. Olimmiar looked up in astonishment, revealing a puffy swelling around her eye. K’linpor’s mouth was hanging open.
“It’s a miracle!” Dolm jeered. “A holy miracle! Of course we must discuss it. Were they all old, fat factory owners?”
Ambria’s ivory cheeks flamed scarlet in a way Eleal would never have believed possible. “No they were not!” Echoes rang. “In my case, as I remained unchosen, the priests went out and found a twenty-year-old quarry worker who has already fathered two children. Does that satisfy your prurient curiosity, Dolm Actor?”
He sniggered. “Did it yours? Well, now what happens? Are we free to depart from Narsh, as Ois has apparently no use for us?”
The big woman seemed to shrink slightly. “No. We are summoned to the temple at dawn. The priests will seek an oracle to discover the Lady’s will.”
Even Dolm Actor flinched.
There was a moment’s silence, and then he said softly, “All of us?”
“All of us.”
Everyone turned to look at Eleal Singer.
When times were good, the troupe was one big happy family. When times were otherwise, which was more frequent, it was still one big family, and rarely too unhappy. Everyone was related to everyone else in some contorted fashion. Old Piol Poet was the brother of Ambria’s first husband and thus Uthiam’s uncle. Even Klip Trumpeter was a stepbrother of Gartol Costumer, who was Trong Impresario’s cousin. Everyone was family except Eleal Singer. Although she could recall no trace of her life before the troupe took her in, she was the outsider, the waif, the stray.
Normally she never thought about that distinction. Certainly nobody ever mentioned it, not even Olimmiar at her most catty. That evening Eleal could smell it. She was the only one who had not been to the temple of the Lady. She was the last hope. All other efforts had failed, so in the morning they would take her there and she would be unmasked as the cause of the trouble. It was obvious.
Perhaps Sister Ahn’s lunatic babbling had been true, and the gods were staging some great cosmic tragedy that involved little Eleal Singer.
Wives clung to husbands. Olimmiar Dancer had attached herself to Halma, her sister. Old Piol fussed around, preparing a meal in tactful silence. Trumpeter soon went up to his room and came down muffled in llama fleece. He announced briefly that he was going out for a walk, and vanished rapidly through the door into a near-blizzard, followed by a puzzled frown from Ambria, a glare of outrage from Trong, and a sardonic smile from Dolm. Young Klip knew an opportunity when he was handed one.
He might be heading for a disappointment, though—he did not know that Dolm had been lying about going back to the temple.
Every time Eleal risked a glance in Dolm’s direction, he was directing his sardonic smile at her. She wondered about her chances of living through the night. No one ever spoke of reapers; to denounce one was probably suicide. To denounce Dolm Actor would be an act of rank madness. The others would just assume that the stressful day had unhinged her mind—he was Ambria’s cousin’s husband, one of the family! The only evidence Eleal could hope to produce was that black garment hidden in his pack and she was certain that it would have gone elsewhere by now. Even if it could be produced, he could always claim that it was an old stage costume and then accuse her of having stolen something.
Maybe it was only an old costume, although she could not imagine any audience tolerating a play with a reaper in it. Maybe she had imagined the loathsome ritual. Maybe she had gone crazy.
As the evening dragged on in quiet confidential whispers, she realized that everyone was planning to head off to be alone very early. Actors were night birds by profession, but tonight wives wanted to be alone with husbands and husbands wanted to be alone with wives.
Larger and larger in her mind grew an image of her cubicle door, with its heavy lock and its thick iron bolt. Not even a reaper was going to break through those without waking everybody!
Then Dolm himself stretched his long arms overhead and yawned.
Eleal realized that she must leave before he did, or she might find him waiting for her in her room.
“G’night!” she snapped, jumping to her feet.
She scampered across the room to the stairs—Clip, clop.
“I’m very sleepy,” she explained, racing up them two at a time.
Clip, clop… “See you in the morning,” she shouted back as she tore along the corridor.
She dashed into her room—took a hurried glance around to make sure it was unoccupied—closed the door. It creaked loudly, but at the last minute she slowed it so it would not slam. She turned the key gently, wrestled the bolt over, and flopped down on the floor, panting as if she had run over Rilepass carrying a mammoth.
The window was barred. The walls were solid stone, the floor and ceiling thick planks. If anywhere was safe from a reaper, this was it. As an afterthought, she took the big key out and tucked it in her pack. She stuffed a sock into the keyhole.
Preparing for bed was never a lengthy process in chilly Narsh. She donned her woolly nightgown, rolled up her second-best dress to be a pillow, and laid her llama fleece coat on the pallet as a cover. Then she knelt and took hold of her amulet to say her prayers.
The amulet was a little golden frog that Ambria had given her a long time ago, as soon as she could be trusted not to swallow it. It looked like gold, but it left green stains on her chest. It seemed a very frail defense against the god of death, whom she had probably offended mightily by spying on his sacred ritual.
The wind rattled the casement hungrily. Her usual prayers seemed grievously inadequate this night. She extemporized a long addition, addressed to Kirb’l Tion, asking for his aid in letting the troupe travel to the Tion Festival in safety. Shivering with cold, then, she whispered an apology to the Man for spying on holy ceremony in his shrine. After all, the shrine itself had not been specifically dedicated to Zath…she could not speak that name.
At last she snuggled in under the heavy fleece. Cockerel with no liver, alpaca white outside and black inside, a reaper on a mammoth and another in the troupe, men stricken impotent by the Lady…She would not be able to sleep a wink!
But she did.
16
NIGHTS IN HOSPITALS ARE MUCH LONGER THAN DAYS. EDward Exeter had discovered this truth during his first term at Fallow, when the unfamiliar diseases of England had made him a frequent patient in the san. He rediscovered it in Albert Memorial.
A nurse came around with a light, checking on people.
“Where am I?” he asked.
She told him.
“What happened?”
“You had an accident. Do you want another needle?”
“No. I’m all right.” He did not like the silent music the drugs brought.
“Try to sleep,” she said, and went away.
Trouble was, he seemed to have been sleeping for weeks. The shock was wearing off, he decided. His leg lashed him with a sickening be
at of pain, he was stiff with staying in the same position so long. He kept trying to remember, and when he did remember, he didn’t want to. His recollections were very patchy and most of them must be nightmares.
When he did sleep, he was tormented by those same nightmares. He would wake up in a state of shivering funk, soaked with sweat and remember nothing of what had so frightened him. For the first time he began to wonder what on earth he had done to himself. Not playing rugby at this time of year. Train accident? There was a bandage around his head and his leg was in splints.
Yet the strangest dream that came in that endless night was amazingly sharp and memorable, so that in the morning he was to wonder whether it had really been a dream at all.
Light was shining in the door, and the room was a mass of confusing shadows. This time he seemed to have just wakened naturally, not frightened. His leg throbbed with a regular pulse that seemed to go all the way through him. He studied the ropes holding it up and then turned his head on the pillow. There was a window there with no curtains, and the sky outside was black. He rolled his head over to the other side to look up at the man standing there.
“Behold the limpid orbs,” the man said, “reflecting the sense within, the very turning of the soul. Prithee, then, this maiming of thy shin, it does not pain thee o’ermuch?”
Edward said, “It’s not too bad, sir.” It wasn’t, really.
“To dissemble thus becomes thee more than honesty.”
The visitor was an odd little man—quite old, with a fuzz of silver curls and a wrinkled, puckish face, clean-shaven. He was stooped, so his face stuck out in front of him. His overcoat had a very old-fashioned Astrakhan collar and seemed slightly too large for him. He was holding an equally antique beaver hat in one hand and a walking stick with a silver handle in the other.
“We have not come into acquaintance beforetimes although ink in veritable tides has flowed between us. I am your worship’s servant, Jonathan Oldcastle.” He bowed, clutching the topper to his heart.
“Mr. Oldcastle!” Edward said. “You’re…You’re not what I expected, sir.” In the way of dreams, Mr. Oldcastle’s appearance seemed perfectly acceptable for an officer in His Majesty’s Colonial Office. Yet none of the letters he had written to Edward in the past two years had read like Mosley Minor’s atrocious efforts to extemporize Shakespeare.
The little man chuckled, beaming. “I fain perfect attainments beyond expectation. This council needs be consummated with dispatch. Pray you, Master Exeter, being curt and speedy in response, avise me what befell, what savage circumstance contrived this havoc upon thy person and thy fortunes. Discover to me the monument of thy memory that we may invent what absences the dickens may have wiped thereof.”
He had a broad accent, which Edward could not place, and his speech would certainly have been unintelligible had this not all been a dream.
“I don’t remember much, sir. I went…I went to the Grange, sir, didn’t I? To stay with Bagpipe.”
Mr. Oldcastle nodded. “I so surmise.”
“Just for a few days. They said they didn’t mind, and I was welcome. I’m planning to enlist as soon as mobilization starts of course, but until then…”
There hadn’t been anywhere else to go. Words caught in his throat and he was afraid he was going to start piping his eye.
“Comfort thyself!” Oldcastle said soothingly. “I think someone approaches. Tarry a moment.”
Edward must have drifted off to sleep again, because he jumped when Oldcastle said, “Now, my stalwart? What else lurks in thy recollection?”
“Dinner? I didn’t have any proper togs. It’s all very vague, sir.”
Mr. Oldcastle breathed on the silver head of his cane and wiped it on his sleeve. “And after that?”
“We turned in. The general was going to be reading the lesson in church next morning.”
“Yes?”
A curious smell of mothballs was overpowering even the ever-present stink of carbolic.
“Then Bagpipe came and said did I feel like some tuck, and why didn’t we raid the larder.”
“And you did. And what then befell?”
Screaming? Long curly hair? Porcelain sink….
“Nothing!” Edward said quickly. “Nothing! I can’t remember.”
“Be not vexed,” Mr. Oldcastle said, matter-of-factly. “Oftentimes a wounding of the head will ruptures cause upon the spirit withall. Thou cannot fare hence upon the morrow, good young coz. Dost peradventure know by rote the speech of bold King Harry before Harfleur?”
“ ‘Once more into the breach,’ you mean, sir?”
“The same.”
“I should. I played the king when Sixth Form did Henry V last Christmas.”
“Be it that, then. No bardic fancy ever better nailed the spirit of a man. Now mark me well. Here are you well cosseted and I shall set a palliation about thee, but if thy foes evade my artifice and so distrain thee, do thou declaim that particular poesy. Wilt keep this admonition in thy heart?”
“Yes, sir, I’ll remember,” Edward said solemnly. In the way of dreams, the instructions seemed very important and logical.
“I wish thee good fortune, Master Exeter.”
“Goodnight, Mr. Oldcastle. I’m very pleased to have met you at last, sir.”
He slept better after that.
17
A CLICK FROM THE BOLT WAKENED ELEAL. THE LOCK turned, making much less noise than it had for her. In utter darkness, all she could see was the window, a lopsided patch of not-quite light, distorted by clinging snow. Yet somehow there was enough light for her to know how the door swung open, with not a hint of its usual squeak.
He glided in, blacker than black, making no sound. The door closed, equally silent. Moving like smoke, he approached. He stopped at her feet and she supposed he was looking down at her, but she could see no face, no eyes, only a pillar of darker dark.
All she could hear was her heart.
“You saw.” It was a whisper, but even a whisper had resonance when it came from Dolm Actor.
The words were not a question and she was incapable of answering anyway.
“Normally that would seal your fate in itself,” said the whisper.
Normally? Was there a shimmer of hope there? Would she die of terror before she found out?
Obviously he knew she was awake. “You are an incredible little snoop. I always wondered if you would ransack my pack one day. I would have known, of course. It is given to us to know when we are detected. Then I should have had to send your soul to my master. I hoped it would not be like that, Eleal Singer. We do have feelings, you know. We are not monsters. We mourn the necessity.”
Pause.
Not quite a chuckle…yet when the deadly soft voice spoke again, it held a hint of amusement. “I thought I was the problem, you see. I thought it was my master’s print on my heart that had displeased the Lady. Yes, my master is he whom you call Zath—the Unconquerable, the Last Victor. I reported to my master, as you saw, seeking guidance. I was told that it is you who are the problem, not me.”
She wanted to scream, Why me? and her mouth was as dry as ashes. Her nails were digging into her palms and her insides were melting to jelly. Her teeth continued to chatter.
“The Filoby Testament…but you will not have heard of that. Never mind. The gods have decreed, Eleal Singer, that you shall not journey to Sussland. That is all. Your presence there might change the world. I was instructed to ensure it does not happen.”
She thought of the priest and Sister Ahn. She could not even scream.
The reaper sighed. “Please believe, the necessity distressed me. I am not evil. I am not vindictive. I honor my master with the gift of souls—that is all. True, he grants me great rapture when I perform this service, but I would rather offer strangers, really I would.”
Dolm, who was alw
ays so jovial…
The reaper moved. Without exactly seeing, she knew that he had knelt down at her side—within reach.
She could not hear him breathing. Did he breathe when he was being a reaper?
“But here tonight I learned that it will not be necessary. Holy Ois knows who you are and how to stop you. She has the matter in hand. I was told I need not meddle within her domain. In the morning she will do what she wills, whatever that may be. You will not be journeying to Sussland.”
That did sound like Eleal Singer was not going to die now.
The morning could look after itself.
“Is there anyone you wish to die?” the reaper inquired softly.
Eleal’s teeth chattered.
“Well?” he asked. “Answer!”
She stuttered, “N-n-no!”
“Pity. Because if you wish to see someone die, Eleal Singer, then you need only tell that person that I am a reaper. I shall know, and they will die. Is that clear?”
She nodded in the dark, and knew he knew that.
“If by any chance Holy Ois does allow you to go to Suss, then of course I shall have to act.” Dolm sighed, and floated erect again. “And I must go and act now. Act? Actor?” He chuckled drily, as Dolm did when he was about to make a joke. “Ironic, is it not? That rare performance you saw had but one spectator, yet she does not have to pay. Others must pay, strangers must pay. An expensive performance! He will want two at least, perhaps three if they are not young. Sleep well, little spy.”
The blackness drifted toward the door. Then it stopped.
“I only came,” said a whisper more definitely in Dolm’s usual offhand tone, “because I thought your remarkable curiosity had earned an explanation.”
The door opened, closed. The bolt slid. The lock shut.
Eleal drew great sobbing breaths of icy air. She was going to live through the night. Compared to that, nothing else mattered, not even her wet bed.
