by Bill Adams
His coldness to your too-loved sister, and
The cruel punishment from which she died
—but is willing to keep silent about it. Marriage to a father’s widow, though no blood kin, might strike some as incest—but she knows Manfred is above such scruples.
At this offer, there is a creaking sound, as of metal under stress, from the vicinity of the hidden armor. Hearing it, Manfred toys with Bel-Imperia, sending her seductive offers and squirming advances to new heights of outrageousness. But in the end, Manfred throws her out with brutal contempt.
Scene Three. The Carbonari enter, expecting to be executed for treason—a dozen men, including Theo and the saintly Abbot Father Jerome [Ishigara, playing old age with great skill]. Manfred introduces himself, to Theo’s surprise and mortification, plays political cat-and-mouse, then gives the reformers leave to go—for now. He climbs the stairs to his study, to find the spell that will give him access to Ahrimanes’s conclave.
For the rest of the scene—Theo trying to lobby the departing Carbonari, and the long byplay between Theo and Bel-Imperia that follows—Manfred sits hunched over a grimoire in the study above, dimly lit but in plain sight of the audience.
Not a bad alibi. I would have eight minutes.
Chapter Twenty-two
Normally I took the tower stairs slowly, but tonight I ran them, not even pausing when I dropped my Manfred cape and picked up its replacement; the magic cape’s wire frame made it bulk like a human body on the stair, easy to find.
Quickly, Evan. Reach the blacked-out study fifteen or twenty seconds before the light cue, and pull its little desk a half meter farther from the audience. Remove the plastic bust of Larkspur, already prepared with stage makeup, from the magic cape’s lower carry-all—a large object to have concealed, but not as large as the birdcages these capes were designed for—and place it on the edge of the table, where your head and shoulders would be if you sat behind the table in its normal place. Prop a book in front of it, put the chair behind it for additional support, then drape the cape to suggest a body; the wire frame will help. Finally—should have done this first, damn it—pull two last things from within the magician’s cape.
Arn’s handgun and the fractal silk robe—the blackest of all night-prowling outfits, its own pockets stuffed with goodies. Get the robe on, gun in pocket, hood up and hanging over your face, now it’s time to give them the cue, and—
Where are the blasted matches?—here. Now kneel and try to stay outside the audience’s windowframe view, just your hand showing against the desk to one side of the bust—apparently the bust’s hand, a Chinese magic trick—as you light the match near the candle and immediately snuff it out—
Because the stage light you cued has kicked in to impersonate a dimmer candlelight that keeps audience focus on the floor below, and it’s time for you to crawl for the stairs, keeping as low as you can. The audience’s angle of sight and the windowframing will help. And you’re out.
The first hurdle passed, I checked my wristcomp. Seven minutes and change left.
The top part of the circular stairs was at the rear of the turntable, out of audience sight, and concealed from the wings by the inner shell of Scene Six’s waterfall. I quickly climbed down the metal framework of the papier-mâché shell—plenty of hand- and foot-holds, no problem.
The few meters of stage between the waterfall opening and the elevator entrance in the back wall were unlit except for a few tiny red safety bulbs. Should anyone happen to look this way from the wings, I’d only be a blackness on near-black. I plucked Theo’s mountain-climbing rope from the prop rack behind the cottage/castle room; waited for Ivan to hit the loudest part of his ranting about Manfred’s tyranny and Theo’s thwarted hopes; and slipped Manfred’s dagger between the elevator door and its upper frame, moving along the crack until I found the car-arrival trigger that opened the doors.
I knew everything I needed to know about the elevator, having been present for the whole renovation. Its car was currently three stops up, on the office floor above the theater, where Julia would be waiting for her grand descent at the end of the act. Opening the doors would lock the car there, but no one would know, as the bell that would have rung an alarm was the same one that signaled each passing floor—silenced for the performance.
I tied one end of the rope to a projection on the door-opening mechanism strong enough to take my weight and began the climb down the empty shaft. I couldn’t check the time on my wristcomp very often, but the memorized lines of the play were running in my head like a clock.
Theodore’s bitter soliloquy is interrupted by Bel-Imperia, who arrives through the secret passage from which she has eavesdropped on the meeting. She introduces herself and confesses her attraction to such a natural leader.
This climb was not nearly the piece of cake I thought it would be. The next door down was a sketchy rectangle of light-leaks in pitch blackness, and while I clambered blindly for a foothold and got one hand free to trigger the doors, my rasping breath echoed up and down the hollow shaft like a dozen men in a terminal ward. But the next risk was the worst, and unavoidable.
Malatesta knew someone might come after him. The best place for him to station Gregor was down in the subway. But if he was in the corridor I was about to enter instead…
The doors wheezed open—
—and no Gregor. An empty hallway, inexpensively carpeted in green, with rows of offices on either side.
I closed the elevator doors manually, as quietly as I could; more seconds spent, but I didn’t want noise from this floor leaking through the open doors upstairs.
Theo, with his usual talent for secrecy, immediately tells Bel-Imperia that he is at least half of royal blood, the Emperor’s other son, and she begins to work her wiles on him.
From one of the robe’s utility pouches I removed the dish for the gyal-wa mask and screwed it open. A moment later, the mask was off and stored safely in dish and pouch; the gun was in my hand, and a gel capsule from the dressing-room makeup kit was in my cheek. Pushing the black hood back to fully expose what was also the Pretender’s face, I left the robe on; it was at least imaginably something the Pretender might wear, while the costume under it would be a dead giveaway. Besides, it had extra pockets in the rear, big enough to hold the handgun.
Bel-Imperia reveals what monsters both the Emperor and his son have been. The son committed incest, but the Emperor chose to punish the daughter, whose virginity he’d planned to sell in a political marriage. It was on the back stairs from Astarte’s chamber that the Emperor took his mysterious and fatal fall…
Only one door showed light at the bottom, and as I got closer a moan of pain issued from it as well, followed by words from Van Damm, too weak to make out. Good; as I’d remembered, these offices had neither soundproofing nor locks. I was nearly there; a low interrogatory rumble from Malatesta sounded like he was not too close to the door. Now.
It’s good to have the clock’s razor hand sweeping just behind you—five minutes and change. No time to think, no time to fear, no time to pray that Malatesta is smart enough—but not too smart—for this to work.
Loud and clear, I said, “I don’t know what Gregor thought he was doing, but I want to hear Lew’s side of this first. Put the gun down, Chris…Chris?—”
I fired the pistol into the floor with a bang, then slipped it into one of the robe’s back pockets—
—and crashed the door open, both hands empty and in plain sight, body painfully arched as if shot in the back. Biting down on the gel capsule, I screwed up my Pretender’s face as if in pain and stunned incomprehension, not only for whatever had just happened in the corridor, but for what I saw in the room. “Ch—ris?”
Malatesta already had me covered with a long-barreled EM pistol, most of his own crouching form shielded by the large worktable where Van Damm’s red-striped, naked body was bound. But the triumphant look on the mercenary’s face faded as I coughed up the capsule�
�s load of stage blood and fell on my side just within the doorway, my uppermost hand clutching behind me as if for a wound—in fact, retrieving the pistol. I lay with unfocused eyes, breathing irregularly, hoping Malatesta would think and move fast.
He did.
“Sly?” he called out to the corridor behind me. “Ah, shit…Sly? Don’t panic, we can do a deal.” He came out from behind the table in a careful rapid crawl, the pistol barrel trained on the empty doorway. “This is much bigger than you know, but you can still take the Boss’s place. I need his face to lead the raid. Your buddy’s told me about the mask. We can put it on the Boss’s face—maybe your plan anyway, hunh?—and together we can sell whatever story we want about what just happened.”
He was next to me now, reaching for the arm I’d flung out along the floor, then feeling along it for my wrist—he didn’t want to take his eyes from the doorway—and still talking: “You don’t know how big this is, Sly—the Tribunal’s nothing next to this.”
And when he lifted my hand to take the pulse, the hand kept going and grabbed his gun arm, while my other hand swung up and around to plant its pistol barrel in the side of his neck.
“Drop yours,” I said.
And the ceiling began a strange booming and drumming: the cynical laughter of the audience above us, as
Bel-Imperia retools the previous scene’s seduction speech to fit Theo.
But it was no good; I could see it all in his face. He’d known I might be coming. He’d learned about the mask, had probably imagined me impersonating the Boss, trying to order him around—
And yet, because of a little skit-writing, a little stage-acting, he’d let me fool him anyway.
I could see the red fury boiling into his face and knew he couldn’t control it, and as the weird, godlike laughter above us reached full flood, he exploded into motion before I could pull the trigger. I let go and recoiled clear of him just in time to get off three fast shots as he brought his gun to bear—and only the last one saved my life, because it caught his forehead.
He fell flat. As I stood, I was amazed to see bullet holes in the wall next to me; electromagnetic acceleration is that silent.
“You killed him,” Van Damm wailed. “I was going to kill him. I was going to kill him a thousand thousand times.”
“Could have used him alive,” I said, untying Van Damm’s limbs and looking around the large office, trying not to step in the blood and urine on the floor.
“They’re going to raid…Scandia. Did you know that?”
“Are you going to be okay?”
“Like I told you yesterday,” he said. “Maximum pain but minimum…damage. Keeps the subject’s strength up. Just cuts and burns, but…I need drugs.”
“Hang on.” Military-style briefing maps hung on the walls, but what I was looking for turned out to be next door: neat rows of duffelbags and backpacks full of cold-weather gear. I returned to Van Damm with two combat medical kits and four-plus minutes to go.
As Bel-Imperia’s embrace knocks Theo’s hairpiece awry. He explains “It is a wig, my mother’s hair—and fair, / Unlike my brother’s, hence a mask as well.” Without it, Bel-Imperia notes, the only thing that keeps him from being a dead ringer for Manfred is his “peasant sunburn.” And she knows of a magic balm, a gift from Manfred to Astarte, that restores a regal pallor to the skin.
I used an alcohol pad to get the stage blood off my chin. Van Damm picked his drugs and dosed himself—displaying a suspiciously refined discrimination, for a seltzer drinker—and showed me where to inject him.
“Will that keep you in action for a few hours?” I asked, spraying skin sealant on a few wounds he couldn’t reach.
“Even if I’d lost an arm,” he said, already sounding stronger. “The navy knows its stuff. What’s next?”
“You’ll have to go out the subway exit. Is Gregor there? I came another way.”
“No problem. I was here when they planned the ambush. I even know…the recognition signal. See, we don’t need Malatesta.”
“Good. You can have both the pistols. Put on one of these uniforms and go to the subway stop. You’ll have to walk the tracks to the next stop that’s open. Then take a train to Ventura Spaceport. Bay 120. There’s a little troop transport there. If it’s a standard sunplunger, can you get it up?”
“I’ve had the class…on emergency escapes. Launch and sunplunge are pretty automated. But the only thing I remember about landings is…they’re too hard.”
“All you have to do is sunplunge for Scandia—it’s probably already loaded into the system. If not, go for any other world in the data bank under direct Column control. Once you’re in sun orbit on the other side, radio for help; let the authorities bring you in.”
He sat up straight, pulling himself together so heroically I could almost forget what a rabid little weasel he was. “Guards?”
“None. There’ll be locks, but I assume the Tribunal also has a class in these?” Not without regret, I handed him my skeleton coder. “That should get you through the door.”
“If I get that far. Spaceport police might not like my looks. Subway conductor might think I need a doctor.”
“If all else fails, here’s the universal solvent,” I said, filling his hands with currency. “Bribe your way through.”
“This is…thousands of ducats! Did you rob a bank?”
“No, I won the lottery. Fifth place—the last Calamari number sold today. You’ll need good luck, too, passing the defense satellites at sun orbit. But you’re not an external threat—they’ll hesitate to blast you without information. So the sooner you get out there the better.”
“What about you? Aren’t you coming?” he asked.
“If I can get back on that stage in the next few minutes, my cover’s still good.” I headed for the door. “Of course, if they took you alive again—”
“I know, I know, I talked. I would talk again, I know that now. I know what it’s really like. I’ll kill myself first.”
“That’s the spirit,” I said, stepping over Malatesta’s corpse.
In the last few minutes of the scene, Bel-Imperia urges Theo to impersonate the Prince; the terrified Carbonari would quickly sell out to a new, more ruthless Manfred. Only the Abbot seems incorruptible, and if Theo were absolute ruler, some other churchman would consent to wed him to Bel-Imperia. Theo wants to sleep on this offer. Not with her, she mocks; but if he has the guts to return the next day, she will give him the magic balm.
◆◆◆
A moment before the tag rhyme (“ointment” and “appointment”), I crouched behind the chair in the tower study, still breathing hard, with a final trick yet to perform. I had to make Manfred stand up.
Anyone watching the dim figure closely would have seen a puzzling flicker, but no more, as I threw the fractal silk over the bust in the instant I stood into view behind it, wearing the cape I’d retrieved on the staircase. Then the audience saw me put the book away and start down the stairs as the cloud effect was used to pass the castle offstage without a blackout, to audible gasps from the audience.
Act Two, Scene Four opens on a deep and almost empty stage awash with dry-ice mist, the far wall showing stars as in the play’s opening. A few columns and arches hang in midair, something like firelight rippling across them, and this is the Hall of Ahrimanes.
[It was pure luck that I happened to look down and see the blood in the last second before I stepped on stage: a crimson handprint across the front of my white shirt. I instantly remembered Van Damm grabbing me to pull himself into sitting position, but I wouldn’t have thought his hand had passed through the opening of the silk robe. Now I had no choice but to button my tunic all the way up to my throat, as if against the night air, when I stepped out into the mist.]
Spirits and witches begin to appear out of the blackness, dancing in a circle. A throne rises in the center, and then a globe of fire fills the throne—Ahrimanes in person.
The spirits fawn over their god unt
il Manfred interrupts them. Is Ahrimanes truly worthy of worship? Does he have the power to raise Astarte from the dead? Ahrimanes agrees to try. During the long and fearful invocation, Manfred and the spirits wait for Astarte to rise up, but to their surprise, she descends from heaven instead—the elevator effect at last.
Nor can Ahrimanes make her speak—a second indication that she is beyond the infernal powers. But Manfred is still afraid she is damned, and begs pitifully to hear the sound of her voice.
Say that you hate me not—that I do bear
The punishment for both—that you will be
One of the blessed—and that I shall die.
O voice that was my music—Speak to me!
But she says very little except, “Manfred! Tomorrow ends your earthly ills!” and some plaintive farewells.
Manfred pulls himself together, thanks Ahrimanes coldly, and departs. “Tonight he leaves. Tomorrow he is ours,” Ahrimanes says—and the curtain falls.
◆◆◆
A short six-minute intermission. A little more hubbub backstage. I heard Julia saying, more than once, “It was over so fast—I had more lines as the witch!” and then suddenly the Pretender was in front of me, his face full of some strong but unreadable emotion, and I had an instant to wonder where I had slipped up, what evidence I’d left behind, before he said in a low, passionate voice:
“Great job, boy, you’re doing magnificently, don’t change a thing, but I did happen to wonder why the bleeding hell you’re pissing around with your costume. Do you have a chest cold all of a sudden? Did you receive some artistic revelation that Manfred would look better wearing his jacket like a fucking doorman?”
“Boss, I’m sorry,” I said, opening up my tunic to show him. “Nervous nosebleed at the last second—hasn’t happened to me in years. Thought I’d stay buttoned up till the fight scene, and then when I get hit in the chest—”
“Stop, I get it, and it stinks. Renfrew! We need Ivan’s understudy shirt, on the double. Chris, you’re a fine actor, but if you value your life, don’t let me catch you improvising.”
