Ink in the Blood

by Kim Smejkal

  Someone she could know if they pulled this off.

  “Lovely,” Lupita mused. “Describe exactly what he looked like.”

  “A plague doctor with wings,” said Anya, practical and succinct to the point of absurdity. “Maybe he’s supposed to be Gemello?”

  Celia nodded, scanning the crowd. How had he vanished so quickly?

  “Maybe,” she said. Gemello was the attractive rogue of the Commedia Follia, the disreputable charmer. But if the plague doctor had started with that particular stock character, he’d made it grow wings.

  Celia gave up her search and slid over to Lupita’s side, taking over his description. “Black as night, with shimmering tears woven into his cloak. Hard everywhere, except where he’s soft. Wild and dangerous and playful. You’ll yearn for his wings, and he’ll take off from under your hand.”

  She described his act, his persona, and Lupita whispered, “That’s better. I can see him perfectly.”

  If I can draw a picture of the illusion, Celia thought, maybe I can figure out a way to tuck Anya and me softly into it.

  Just like hiding initials in a swirl of ink.

  * * *

  When the curtain rose, Celia recognized the first act immediately. Two players in identical costumes swept onstage to a chorus of Rabble Mob singers. The character Passion was one person divided into halves: purity and defect, potential and reality. They danced together and laughed, they shoved each other and argued. Always touching, two representing one. Two possible paths—​the sinner and the saint—​housed in one body.

  Rovers normally stayed far away from religion, politics, or opinion. Even their stage language was universal: gibberish sentences as long as they were loud, but sounding enough like language to make sense. Exaggerated body movements became punctuation and emphasis. Masks embellished character. No matter what nation they traveled through, the crowds understood.

  But the Commedia had originated in Illinia, and Passion’s tale was heavily inspired by Profetan lore. Celia supposed that Passion opened the Asuran show that night to pay homage to Profeta’s hulking presence there.

  The short play ended with Passion’s death, as always. Flanking Passion, a row of angeli beckoned from one side of the stage, a row of diavoli from the other. In every adaptation Celia had ever seen, Passion immediately accepted the embrace of the angels, and then the curtain fell.

  But this Passion hesitated.

  The music had died with her. The afterlife hung silent and heavy.

  “Where does she go?” Lupita’s breathless words tickled up and down Celia’s spine.

  Yes, where would she go?

  To heaven or hell?

  How does her story truly end?

  Celia glanced at the mistico and Ruler Vacilando. No doubt they were there as theater lovers—​the Commedia was almost as old as their thousand-year-old religion, the regular story lines as benign and universal as the air they all breathed—​but how would they react to an irregular story line?

  Licking fog bloomed over the side of the stage toward Passion.

  “Where does she go?” Lupita needed her answer.

  The fog took Passion without giving one, her uncertain fate disappearing into infinity.

  “Dia . . .” Anya’s fingers had sunk into Celia’s arm so deep they touched bone. “To either, neither, or both.”

  Celia’s nerves hummed as she looked around, appraising the crowd’s reaction. This new ending to Passion’s tale thrilled her. If you still didn’t have a clear fate after the Divine’s guidance and Diavala’s trickery, then all their guidance and trickery didn’t matter.

  The Rabble Mob had disguised a clever snub to Profeta right in the opening act, and Celia never appreciated theater more.

  The curtain fell, and the crowd erupted in cheers, reacting as if to a charming show rather than something skirting close to sacrilege. The mistico and Ruler Vacilando clapped politely, though some head shaking and frowns accompanied their applause. Celia imagined them thinking, I misunderstood. Surely they didn’t do what I think they just did.

  “Lupita,” Celia whispered, “your Rovers play dangerous.” She spent every act whispering into Lupita’s ear, seeking out each performer’s illusion and coaxing it to life through words. Through fire, panting chests, flamboyant costumes, music made with voice boxes and stomping feet and clapping hands, and full-faced masks, Celia turned fantasy into reality and reality into fantasy for blind Lupita. Like Passion, each act disguised a subtle defiance to Profeta, something that wouldn’t be noticed unless you knew Profetan doctrine intimately.

  By the end of the show, the crowd was wild with appreciation, but Celia noted that Ruler Vacilando and some of the mistico had stopped clapping.

  Lupita panted hard as she yelled, “Brava! Brava!!”

  The performers came onstage for the curtain call, holding hands to create long, ribbonlike rows of flowing color, bowing through wide smiles.

  Celia hooted extra hard for Passion.

  But someone lurked in the shadows of the stage. Even from where she stood, Celia could have sworn she smelled cloves and lemon.

  The other performers paid no attention to him as he wove through their forms, his pale needle beak threading his darkness through their light. At center stage, he rose above them, hovering and looming, spreading his wings. A flicker of purple flame bloomed near his chest.

  The unsuspecting performers still smiled and clapped, congratulating one another and the audience on such a marvelous show.

  Lupita must have sensed the fragmented breathing of the people around her, including Celia. “What’s happening?” she asked.

  With preternatural grace and calm, the threat hovered. Slowly, deliberately, every move calculated, the plague doctor shook his head. The white beak of his mask sliced through the air to the left, to the right, and again. No. Not good enough. I demand better.

  Every set of lungs around Celia gasped as flames erupted in a blinding flash of purple and blue. They vaulted from the plague doctor’s dark chest and blazed around the stage impossibly fast, laying waste to everyone and everything. Performers succumbed to the flames, falling, some disappearing completely. The crowd surged backwards, crying out in alarm, Celia nearly taken down by the panic.

  Just as fast, the plague doctor pulled his power back.

  The world settled into some new reality. As one, the crowd straightened and stared, still holding its collective breath inside clamped lungs.

  Only one remained unharmed on that stage. His raven wings expanded up and out to a languid beat, as if shaking off ash, before he tucked them back against his darkness. Unhurried, he spread his arms and surveyed the world before him. Then he bowed to a deathly still audience.

  He performed the entire finale in silence. He weighed the evidence, he judged, he executed.

  All with a smile dancing on his lips.

  “Celia!” Lupita hissed. In the stillness, her voice lured the plague doctor’s gaze straight to them.

  He cocked his head.

  A shiver rolled down Celia’s spine, invisible fingertips touching each vertebra. The one onstage, staring at her, had wiped everything away. The veil between fantasy and reality seemed stretched impossibly thin, the plague doctor reveling in the confusion his destruction caused. She whispered to Lupita, “The Rabble Mob showed us life—​our desires, our fears—​and at the end . . .”

  It always ended with him.

  “Death.”

  Chapter 5

  “We can’t do that,” Anya moaned. “Nothing like it. Not even close.”

  The main event had turned into a party. Celia and Anya wove with Lupita through the glamour and revelry, searching for the one who had the power to change their lives. “We can’t eat fire,” Anya said. “Fly up in the air, dance and tumble, create thumping music with our feet, and make everything look exactly like lust. The three on stilts? Taller than trees but flipping their backflips with no problem. Let’s go home, turn in our quills, and let the wra
th of the mistico fall. Zuni will probably keep our skulls as pets. It’s as good an end as any.”

  “Since when are you so melodramatic?” Celia shook her head absently, her imagination sprinting in a hundred different directions. “But you’re right, copying their show is definitely impossible. It’s fine, though, because their show is already being done.”

  Anya cocked an eyebrow. “Your flask is bone-dry, isn’t it?”

  Celia blinked in surprise. She’d forgotten about it. “We need to find something different to impress Kitty Kay. I have ideas percolating, dear friend. The hive up here”—​she tapped her temple—​“is abuzz.”

  Anya smirked. “Your head’s full of bees?”

  “Exactly. And usually quite disorganized. But I’m queen tonight.”

  Anya laughed. “You’re in charge for this part. You speak their language.”

  A couple, holding hands and laughing, blazed passed them, their euphoria nearly knocking Celia over.

  Amazing, the switch in the crowd.

  It had taken time for everyone to recover from the grand finale. After the plague doctor ended the show with his spectacular reminder of finality and futility, he’d vanished. And somehow, the last thing Celia had seen was his smile, as if he’d etched it into her memory.

  No one had dared move. Like mosquitoes in amber, the crowd had waited for a cue. The Mob had trapped them, and only the Mob could release them.

  Finally, the performers, including the plague doctor (the flirty, fun version from the beginning of the night), had come out for the true curtain call. That time, the Rabble Mob’s bows had been an invitation.

  Music soared loud, the audience split the melody with their cheers, and dancing erupted around Celia as if scripted. People pushed past her, rushing the stage, wanting to swing and sway with the creatures who’d stolen their hearts. The plague doctor moved from partner to partner, pressing his black, shimmery, playful danger against anyone who was willing.

  And, Celia noted, everyone was more than willing.

  Everyone wanted his judgment.

  Some of the Mob now milled through the crowd, giving hungry eyes more acrobatics and fire and costume to feast upon. The interactive part of the night—​more festival than theater—​was alive with levity and cheer.

  “Lupita Longoza!” a deep voice called. “I’m over here, you old fool!”

  “Kitty!” Lupita exclaimed.

  Celia’s confident words to Anya moments before vanished like mist. The mind bees she’d hoped to tame squirmed and tripped over one another. Like some cosmic joke, her top hat slid to the left.

  Arm in arm in arm, Lupita, Anya, and Celia swiveled toward the sound.

  Behind them came, “No, not that way. Over here!”

  They swiveled again.

  And it went on like that for longer than Celia cared to admit.

  Rumbling laughter from the stage pierced her. The plague doctor danced as if he owned the stage, his partner stroking the feathers on his back the way he would pet a kitten. When the plague doctor looked down, fully in control of the long mask, the beak pointed right at Celia, he cocked his head again and nodded, once. Yeah, I’m laughing at you.

  The confused hive in her head exploded, the bees not only disorganized but full-on panicking. These people had the preternatural grace of fairies, and Celia and Anya had to convince them that they had something to offer? If Celia put on a mask like the plague doctor’s, she’d impale whoever came close.

  Kitty Kay, when she finally stopped with her hilarious game, materialized in front of them just as the plague doctor had earlier. Her long, orangy-red hair, highlighted with veins of a shocking white, swished against her form like a waterfall. Her sunset-bright orange gown, beaded with diamondlike glass, made the air around her sparkle.

  She looked like a phoenix, not a hen.

  After she and Lupita had a brief reunion of hugs and cooing, Anya spoke up. “I’m Anya Burtoni. This is Celia Sand.”

  Kitty Kay’s face lit up with a sardonic smile. “A sprite and a changeling! A mouse and a lion! A stump and a sapling!”

  Celia stood straighter, cursing that her boots didn’t have heels. Stumpy-sprite-mouse might be accurate, but she loathed that it was Kitty Kay’s first impression of her.

  Kitty Kay grabbed Lupita’s arm and threaded it through hers as they huddled under Lupita’s umbrella. Kitty had wrinkles on her neck and age spots on her hands, but a regal posture and an unlined face. Her breasts didn’t seem to have a problem with overexcited swinging, yet her voice had that underlying breathy rasp of age. Everything about her was so opposite, Celia got faintly dizzy trying to size her up.

  Following the ringleader behind the organized pandemonium, Celia and Anya clung to each other. “You do have a plan, right?” Anya asked worriedly. The same couple tore past them again, chasing their ecstasy to another spot. A pair of fire-masters tossed flaming bolts between them, casting waves of illumination, then shadow, over awed faces. “These people are . . . different.” They’d never seen any Commedia troupe open the field like this after their show, inviting people closer.

  It fed Celia’s glimmer of an idea even more. If they fumbled their way through this conversation well enough to buy some time, that idea might just grow sparkly enough to become something Rabble Mob–worthy.

  “It’s okay,” Celia said. “We can do this.”

  They approached a dimly lit wagon set back from the activity in the field. It wasn’t as ornate as the others, but it was larger: two stories, extra-wide, ladders crisscrossing the outside, leading from balcony to balcony. A glass dome covered the second floor, providing a view of the stars above, living quarters built to make perpetual life on the road a little more comfortable. There weren’t four wagon wheels, but eight. It must’ve needed at least six horses to pull it.

  Anya saw the same thing that Celia did, but she decided to ramble about it. “It must only go in straight lines. Look at how the axles . . .”

  Celia almost laughed. Anya could take in contortionists, unearthly costumes, and fire-masters with barely a blink, and it was the engineering of the wagon wheels that unstuck her tongue?

  “It’s okay,” Celia repeated, patting her arm. “Trust me.”

  Kitty Kay turned a crank so the back stairs descended. She walked up the cantilevered steps slowly, gripping the handrail. Lupita followed, the stairs wobbling under their movement, her nose an inch from the rump in front of her.

  Celia squeezed Anya’s hand again. Anya smiled back, and they followed the pair into the wagon.

  Calm down, precious bees, the queen’s got this under control. Maybe. Hopefully.

  Probably not.

  Celia straightened her top hat, and it slid to the left.

  * * *

  The inside of the wagon looked eerily similar to the shisha lounge Celia had gotten kicked out of the night before. Fabric, color, flickering light. A green glass hookah peeked out from one corner.

  “So.” Kitty Kay settled herself into a mass of pillows. “We’ll be here for a week and three days minus two.”

  “Eight days.” Anya said, bravely sitting beside Kitty Kay.

  “No, not eight days.” Kitty Kay threw her a coy smile. “One week and three days minus two.”

  Celia choked down a startled bark as Lupita laughed. “Stop messing with them, Kitty. Anya is especially literal. But that doesn’t mean they don’t have exactly what you need.”

  “Yes—​about that. What do I need? Lupe wouldn’t give me any clues, no matter how much I tried to coax them out of her.”

  Celia grabbed a blue-and-gold pillow for something to hold on to and shoved it into her lap. “We’re not singers, dancers, acrobats, fire-masters, or diviners.” She paused for effect, trying to tame the urge to vomit. “But to tell you what we are would do our act an injustice. It needs to be seen to be believed.” You like the element of surprise, after all.

  Anya nodded, playing along. “We’ll reel in your fans so they truly don
’t know up from down.” No one else but Celia would notice that Anya’s normally even voice trembled or that the swirl of desire had flushed her cheeks.

  Kitty Kay hummed, processing the information.

  The wagon swayed under clomping footsteps on the stairs, saving Celia from spewing out more vague words. A performer, painted white with rose-colored lips, poked his head in. “Ah! Vincent!” Kitty Kay proclaimed. “Our famous Palidon!” Vincent froze with his mouth open, mortified. Mimes didn’t speak, and he’d been seconds away from breaking character. He snapped his mouth closed and bowed.

  Kitty Kay nudged Lupita with her foot. “You could take lessons in decorum from the Palidon.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means you’re a loud, crass old prune.”

  Lupita smiled wide. “Oh, you know I’ll be much louder before the night is done. I’m not nearly drunk enough yet.”

  The Palidon, still in his deep bow, began a slow backwards retreat. His light eyes had fallen to the pillow in Celia’s lap, making her realize that she’d wrung it like the neck of an unfortunate chicken. His lips pressed together tight, as if holding back a grin.

  “I’ll find you after this meeting, Vincent. Go, fill up your dance card. Have fun.”

  The last remnants of tension left the room on Vincent the Palidon’s white coattails as he nodded, swiveled, and left—​as quiet as a whisper. Kitty Kay paused to dribble some absinthe down her throat. “Here’s what we’ll do. For Lupe’s sake, for the sake of those treasured years we spent together, I’m willing to give you a chance.” With her finger in the air, Kitty Kay shook her head at their exclamations and thank-you’s. “I’ll give you free rein in the costume house. I’ll let you meet the crew and arrange for any props you need. I’ll instruct them to help you with their full effort. On our last night—” She paused, swinging her gaze lazily toward Anya. “And when will that be, changeling?”