by D. J. Butler
“Talking through his dried-out…fertilizing apparatus. Which is in his throat.”
“The dissection seemed to bear that out.”
“Right.” Indrajit took a deep breath. “I’m going backstage.”
The women onstage were in full song, one throwing a high descant over the harmony generated by the other two as a fourth person came onto the scene, dressed all in black, face again covered by a mask. How was Indrajit going to figure out which actress was Ilsa without Peer if everyone in this production wore masks? The backing Imperial harps shifted mode and rhythm to something jarring, jumpy, and harsh.
Indrajit exited into the lobby, smiled at the ticket-taker, and then exited the Palace. Outside, the glow of sunset began to pink the inward-leaning spires of the five temples on the Spike, the rock peak above the top of the Crown, as well as some of the tallest of the Crown’s buildings, including the Palace.
Holy-Pot’s contract was about to start. Time to find Ilsa without Peer.
Indrajit straightened the cloak where it hung over his forearm. He circled the Palace at a jog, and in an alley behind, found what he was looking for: the tradesman’s entrance. Breathing harder than he needed to, he rushed up to the nondescript wooden slab and banged on it. He was rewarded with a prompt opening, and a wide pink face, blinking hostility.
“The play is in progress,” Pink Face said.
Indrajit panted, pretending to catch his breath. “First act?”
“I suppose.” Pink Face squinted quizzically.
“Then I’m…in time!” Indrajit held up the cloak, keeping it carefully out of Pink Face’s reach. “For Ilsa…without Peer! Second act!”
Pink Face frowned. “You’re a tailor?”
Indrajit shook his head. “Errand boy.” And wasn’t that the truth? Everything was for sale in Kish, including Indrajit Twang. He’d become distracted from his real purpose, and instead tried to merely make a living.
Pink Face reached for the cloak and Indrajit yanked it away. He took a deep breath and steadied himself. “I was told only to put it into Ilsa’s hands. On pain of beating.”
Pink Face frowned.
Indrajit leaned in to whisper. “Is it true she’s a werewolf?”
Pink Face sucked his teeth, then came to a decision. “Leave that pig sticker here at the door.”
“More of a pig chopper, really.” Indrajit unbuckled the knife with a little unease—he hated to go unarmed in a city where people wore swords even to the opera—and handed the weapon to the doorman. “Which way?”
Pink Face, whose body was wrapped in blue-dyed leather, pointed down a hallway toward a narrow staircase. “Up those steps and left. You delivered here before?”
“No.”
“You read?”
“No.”
“Picture of the sun on the door. She might still be inside there, so knock first.”
Alcoves lining the hallway rang with sonorous declamation as spear-bearers, swordsmen, nobles, courtesans, and magicians with stars spangling their robes paced up and down, hurling their lines at each other. A heavy bald man, tattooed on every inch of his body below the clavicles, stood weeping as a tailor adjusted his purple tunic. Two carpenters and a painter worked feverishly at what seemed to be a banyan forest.
A short man, so narrow as to appear almost to be a pole, dark red in color and bearing four walrus-length tusks in his mouth, so huge that the tips of the upward-pointing tusks rose over the bald crown of his head, strode toward Indrajit. As he walked, he bellowed scene numbers and names. “Act one, scene four! Stoolish! Katrang! Yatterino! Act one, scene four!”
Opposite the bottom of the stairs opened an alcove containing wooden racks. Costumes hung there: capes and mock weapons, robes, and long tunics. Ducking behind the racks, Indrajit climbed into a brown tunic, threw a gold cape over it, and grabbed a long brown spear. The weapon was so light, it must be made of balsa; the tip was painted with bronze, to appear to be a spear head.
It felt like low art, all this costume-craft and scenery. Cheap makeup on an ugly harlot. An audience paying attention, an audience that cared, would know from the dialogue and from the skilled gestures of the performers what clothing and scenery and props to imagine. A true performer could travel and perform naked, and astound.
Indrajit hung the red cloak on the rack and climbed the stairs.
What would he say if spotted? The cast of the opera seemed large enough that most people involved could probably not look at him and say for certain he was an interloper, but if he hung around Ilsa too much, he would attract attention.
He should take the costume with him after the play, and sneak back in disguised as a cast member again the following night. It had been surprisingly easy so far.
In the meantime, he and Fix would have the problem of following Ilsa without Peer around and keeping an eye on her during her night and morning.
But at the moment, he needed to find her and start his watch.
On the second story, the hall went left and right. To the right, Indrajit saw red curtains at the end of the hall, which must be the wing of the stage. He found the door Pink Face had indicated, marked both in brushscript and in bannerscript with several words and a neat little sun-glyph.
There were no alcoves on this floor, but there was an open door with an empty dressing room behind it, so he stepped in.
Pots of face paint huddled before an ornate bronze mirror, and several costume changes hung on a bronze rack against one wall. Against another stood a reclining couch, the sort decadent upper-class Kishites used at their eating-smoking-drinking-and-vomiting parties. There was a word for such parties, but Indrajit had forgotten what it was.
He was not invited to such events.
The actor—a man, guessing by the size of the boots standing behind the door and by the breeks hanging on the rack—must be on stage. Indrajit closed the door most of the way and stood in the room, facing so that someone passing by might think he was conversing with the room’s occupant.
Thanks to his wide peripheral vision, he could still see the door to the dressing room of Ilsa without Peer.
“Act one, scene five! Ilsa without Peer!” Walrus Tusk bellowed in the hall. Apparently, Ilsa was special enough to get additional notice, because Walrus Tusk then rapped on her door and cried again, “Act one, scene five! Ilsa without Peer!”
Walrus Tusk disappeared. Indrajit tightened his grip on his spear, but forced himself to retain a relaxed stance.
Ilsa’s door opened, and she emerged.
Ilsa without Peer was hideous.
Chapter Five
She had eyes as big as Indrajit’s palms, perfectly round, with ice-blue irises. They appeared to have no eyelashes or lid, but nictitating membranes that slid up from the underside of the eyes to moisten them. Ilsa’s forehead rose a thumb’s width above the top of her eyes and then turned back at a ninety-degree angle, becoming the perfectly flat disk that was the top of her skull. She had fewer hairs than she had fingers, each coarse and white and reminding Indrajit of wire. Her mouth was wide and lipless, her nose mere slits. Her fingers had one more bone than Indrajit’s, and each bone was longer, which made her hands resemble large nets, or the wire scoops Indrajit had seen used in Bonean variants of Rûphat. Her skin was pale, so pale it almost seemed to shine.
With great effort, Indrajit caught the involuntary gasp that came erupting out of his stomach, grinding it to death between his teeth.
There were a thousand races of man, and Indrajit had seen his share. Many were stranger-looking than Ilsa without Peer, so it wasn’t ugliness in an absolute sense that stunned Indrajit.
Rather, it was relative ugliness. He had been expecting great beauty, and instead encountered a creature that looked like a wide-mouthed troglodyte lizard.
Ilsa swept past, trailing a train and shoulder cape the color of lightning, and leaving behind a sweet scent.
Indrajit caught his breath. What was that smell?
Some flower, and it
provoked distant memories of paddling in the warm waters of a calm sea, catching eels with his bare hands, and lying on a warm rock at sunset, basking in the sun’s strength. Deep in his heart, Indrajit felt he was waiting to hear the voice of his mother, calling him home.
When the sensation faded, Ilsa was at the end of the hall, beside the red curtains. Cursing six or seven random divinities—carefully chosen impotent godlets from the Epic, and certainly not any of the city’s cobbled-together pantheon—Indrajit rushed after her.
Two burly stagehands wrestled a crowned helmet over the singer’s head. Not only did it hide her features, it made her a cubit taller, transforming her flat-domed stump of a noggin into a temple of spires and buttresses, with filmy cloth of gold covering a projecting cone over Ilsa’s mouth.
Ilsa moved to the edge of the stage between two red curtains as a round of polite Kishite applause—stomping and whistling—erupted from the audience. The stagehands, one a burly Xiba’albi with his hair in a topknot and the other a bright red fellow with a lower half like a crab, came toward Indrajit. The sight of the stagehand’s crustacean-like legs scuttling across the hard wood toward him reminded Indrajit that he hadn’t eaten in two days, and the last horngrass he’d chewed to numb his stomach had been three hours before going to the Blind Surgeon.
He was starving.
“No spear carriers this scene,” the Xiba’albi said.
Indrajit shrugged. “I was told to come stand right here and wait for my cue. Something about Sigil Hoazza not liking what he saw, last time.”
Whether conjured by the name of the Lord Usher or out of indifference, the stagehands shrugged.
“Don’t get in the way,” Crab Legs said.
Indrajit squeezed himself forward to the edge of the stage. From here he had a clear view of the entire stage, and he also found a fold of curtain within which to stand, where he was invisible to the rest of the backstage area.
Ilsa without Peer drifted gracefully to the front of the stage. The footlings stared up at her, mouths open, eyes gaping.
From where he stood, Indrajit could smell the flowery scent again. What was that? Some rare Bonean flower, or a Pelthite fragrance, but it reminded him of warm times and safe joys. He felt that a place of beauty and safety waited for him just around the corner, if only someone would show him the way.
Ilsa without Peer began to sing. Her voice was loud, and the amplifying cone built into her mask raised its volume even further; her tone was sweet, her vowels open and golden, her vibrato subtle and erotic. Indrajit staggered from sheer surprise, and almost sat down.
She was without peer.
Her voice was enough to make him forgive the harsh racket of the Imperial harps that accompanied her.
The footlings swayed back and forth together, eyes closed, as Ilsa sang of love and forgiveness. Across the stage, a man in a green costume and mask, surrounded by four actors in green loincloths with green skin-paint (or skin) and green swords hanging from their belts, took up the other half of the duet, lamenting the necessities of statecraft and praising the lord wise enough and strong enough to make the sacrifices his people called for in ringing stentorian tones.
Indrajit shook his head, dragging himself out of the spell of the story. It was slow and dull and shallow compared with the Blaatshi Epic, anyway.
Then he noticed that Gannon’s Handlers were no longer among the footlings.
He scanned the audience. The stage was lit by oil lamps and candles set into reflective silver dishes, but the audience was darkened. Still, he thought he would notice a big yellow frog-woman in a gray tunic, if she were out there.
He didn’t see her.
He couldn’t see Fix either, though his fellow jobber was much more nondescript.
They would need a name, if they were going to form a jobbing company. The Fixers had a kind of ring to it, but it did rather imply that Fix was the company captain.
Also, it sounded a lot like the Handlers.
Where were the Handlers?
The green singer knelt center stage, bellowing a series of high, leaping notes that were surely very hard to sing, and which Indrajit found annoying. Behind him, his five green swordsmen drew their weapons and raised them in salute, chanting a bass line underneath the lead’s tenor.
Only…hadn’t there been four of them?
Indrajit looked closely: four of the men had matching long, straight blades, painted green.
The fifth man’s weapon was leaf-bladed, and glinted like steel.
Indrajit sprinted onto the stage.
The audience gasped in delight.
The man with the leaf-bladed sword darted forward, swinging for Ilsa.
Indrajit was too late—
But the swordsman’s aim was too high. His weapon sliced neatly through Ilsa’s mask, scattering all the horns and buttresses and possibly slicing off a few of her wirelike hairs, but not touching her scalp.
Then the attacker stopped, looking at Indrajit with a delighted expression.
Indrajit stabbed the man in the forehead with his spear.
It was only after he thrust the weapon at the man’s face that he remembered that he was holding a balsa-wood prop, and not an actual killing implement. The painted spear head and the top third of the shaft shattered, snapping into half a dozen bits of wood that exploded out in all directions.
The force of Indrajit’s charge still carried him forward, so as the would-be assassin raised his arms defensively, a stupid expression on his face, he sprang forward, twisting and channeling the energy into his shoulder.
The swordsman was shorter than Indrajit. Indrajit’s shoulder slammed into the man’s nose and sent him flying into the footlings.
Indrajit caught himself at the edge of the stage. He flapped his arms wildly, as if they were wings and by sheer force of motion he might be able to take flight, and managed to regain his balance. He shook his head, clearing it of persistent memories of the sunlight on the sea and mild breezes, and looked up to see a Luzzazza in a gray tunic, charging toward him across the front of the stage. The man’s flopping blue ears would have been comical, if he weren’t a head taller than Indrajit and attacking.
The yelling from the audience was no longer an indication of delight.
The actors stood still, stunned and uncertain. From behind the curtain came yelps of surprise and anger.
The Luzzazza had a long straight sword in one hand. Catching Indrajit’s gaze, the slate-blue man slowed, raising his arms to the side in a pacific gesture.
He was still armed, though.
Indrajit saw the leaf-bladed sword at his feet. Kneeling, he picked it up, and pointed it toward the Luzzazza, tip low.
“You’re one of Mote Gannon’s Handlers, right?” he asked.
“Step away from the actress,” the Luzzazza said.
“Right, you’re here guarding her,” Indrajit said. “So am I. Didn’t you see that guy?” With his left hand, he pointed down into the mass of the footlings. He was afraid to look for the assassin, keeping his eyes fixed on the advancing Luzzazza. The man had a sprig of some flower worn on his clavicle, bright green with a splash of yellow, hanging from a short string.
The Luzzazza sheathed his long sword and spread his arms wide. “I mean you no harm, Twang.” He stepped closer.
“Good.” Indrajit raised the tip of his sword, pointing it at the Luzzazza’s sternum. “So just stop right there.”
The Luzzazza nodded and smiled.
“Hey,” Indrajit said. “How do you know my name?”
An unseen power slapped the leaf-shaped blade aside and the Luzzazza swept in. Trying to stab but with his weapon abruptly out of place, Indrajit lurched forward, and an invisible force grabbed him by his tunic, raising him off the floor and drawing him in close to the Luzzazza.
With one hand, the Luzzazza seized the wrist of Indrajit’s sword hand, pinning it. With the other, he drew his long sword again.
Over the Luzzazza’s shoulder, Indrajit saw th
e two Grokonk come lumbering along the stage. The female really was enormous. He grabbed at the force gripping his tunic, patting it and finding it was shaped like two hands. The hands flowed into wrists, which became arms, which seemed to be attached to the Luzzazza. The blue man had a second set of arms, right underneath his first set, and they were invisible.
“What in frozen hells?” Indrajit muttered.
“I seek the path.” The Luzzazza’s face was calm, expressionless. He raised his sword over his head, angling his point down as if he planned to skewer Indrajit through the neck.
“Hey!” Indrajit squirmed and kicked, but the Luzzazza was stronger than he was. “Hey, I was rescuing her!”
At that moment, Ilsa without Peer, her theatrical helmet dangling around her head in a splintered ruin, darted forward. She had to jump to do it, but she flung herself upward and grabbed the sprig of flowers at the Luzzazza’s neck.
The string broke and the flowers came away in Ilsa’s hand.
And the Luzzazza froze.
His face, serene and expressionless a moment earlier, was taken over by a glazed, vaguely ecstatic expression. He breathed deeply and smiled.
His heart hammering in his chest, Indrajit again felt warmth and smelled the salt sea. But he also saw the blade hanging over his head.
With a grunt and a heave, he managed to swing his knees up and get his feet between him and the Luzzazza. The Luzzazza resisted, but only barely, as if he were half asleep.
Indrajit kicked, and he flew away from his attacker.
The Luzzazza staggered back, crashing into the female Grokonk.
Indrajit fell to the stage. He landed hard, lost most of the air in his lungs, and found himself staring up at Ilsa without Peer.
“There’s something about you,” he murmured. “I just want you to…I just want to know…”
