Lord Tophet

Lord Tophet - By Gregory Frost

I

THE BLIGHT OF COLEMAIGNE


ONE

“Everything has its own vortex,” said a deep male voice.

Whoever spoke must have been right at her back. Leodora glanced behind herself but saw only a great expanding gyre, a white-scorched tunnel stretching all the way back to the span of Colemaigne—to the hexagonal Dragon Bowl on which she stood . . . still stood, surely. Diverus and Soter must be there even now, and all of this a dream. Someone else’s dream that had scooped her up and carried her off. “Wake up,” she said, but nothing changed, and she wondered if anyone could hear her.

She had no sense of motion; she hadn’t taken a single step, and yet the Dragon Bowl shrank until it was like a pinhole at the far end of the gyre, so she had to be moving, carried, transported . . . somewhere. She looked down at herself—at her legs stretched a thousand wyrths down the tunnel, as long as a full spiral’s length from one coiled end to the other, which was farther even than she had traveled with Soter from Bouyan to Colemaigne. She kicked her feet but they were so distant in this dream that she couldn’t see them, or her ankles. The view of her impossible legs fascinated her.

The disembodied voice spoke again, solemnly, beside her now. “The Traveler thro’ Eternity has passed that first Vortex. She enters another.”

She glanced up, facing the source, but once again no one was there.

As if cooling, the tunnel surface lost its white-hot glow, and the duller orange light left in its wake revealed the walls of the structure: intricately linked geometric shapes in a state of constant flux. She rushed along beside the bright geometries, diminutive satellites whirling in interlocked orbits. “I’m past the world,” she said.

“Thus is heaven a vortex passed already,” replied the voice.

“I must get back,” she told it.

“You haven’t been anywhere yet,” the voice answered her.

“And where is it I’m going?” She thought she sounded remarkably calm.

The voice didn’t reply. Behind her now the tunnel appeared to have no end point, unspooling forever. Her legs, however, had come unstuck from the distortion and had returned to their proper proportions. At least I am myself again, she thought.

Slowly, a vinegary stink stole upon her, a foulness as of a few unwashed bodies that grew until it was like the stench of a crowd, as if a mob coated in filth pressed in against the glowing tunnel. Her eyes watered, it was so noisome. She put out a hand as though to repel the odor, and her palm penetrated the spinning geometries and brushed something solid, moving. Alive. Another’s hand tried to grasp at her fingers, but she snatched them free of the greasy grip. This motion propelled her away from the stink and the unseen thing and through the tunnel wall of spinning stars and globes, triangles and trapezoids, which washed over her body without sensation, passed through her like ghosts—like the bizarre phantoms that had paraded with her across the span of Hyakiyako and toward the end of time, the end of everything.

It had never occurred to her before to wonder what the end of everything might look like, how different it might be from the infinite bridge spirals of Shadowbridge. Perhaps that was where she was now, and this wasn’t a dream. Had she, perhaps, died?

Outside the tunnel, separated from it, she stood on solid ground and watched it twist snake-like, as if alive, away from her. The glow of its spinning geometries dimmed like a cooling ember, until it was a golden thread of beaded sparks that finally flickered out, much like the red lamps on the black, silent ship that had passed hers on her way to Colemaigne and so terrified Soter. She must remember to ask him about it, when she returned. Or woke up. Or . . . where exactly was she?

A thick fog swirled out of the blackness to enclose her. Beneath her bare feet lay an unseen and uneven ground of hard rough stones. It was cold, and she wished that before she’d started walking through Colemaigne she’d put on her boots or the sandals Tastion had given her back on Bouyan.

The putrid stench still hovered, near but less intense, blended as it was with an odor of food, of something meaty frying with onions. And distantly, or else close but muffled by the fog, she heard a rhythmic knocking noise of something hard upon the stones, getting louder as she focused on it, a clop-clop-clop-clop that drew her to it, louder and louder every second and behind it, beneath it, a growing roar. The noise swelled, almost on top of her. She raised a defensive hand as a monstrous dark shape erupted out of the fog, giving her not even time to scream as it bore down on her. In that instant something grabbed hold of the hood at her neck and yanked her to one side. The fog roiled where she’d been and a huge creature with a great snout and a black glass eye surged past her so closely that she could see the sheen of its coat. Behind it came a large black carriage with curtained windows and skinny, wiry wheels thundering over the rough ground. Animal and carriage swept by and were swallowed in the fog as quickly as they appeared.

“Do you want to be squished?” asked the voice as Leodora’s hood was released.

She turned about. The figure stood behind her. He was tall, and the fog abstracted his features until they were smudges, like the features of the Coral Man that lay in her puppet case back on Colemaigne.

“What was that thing?” she asked.

“Your demise if you don’t learn to get out of the way. Standing in the middle of the road is never a good idea. You can be knocked down from both directions. As for what that was—surely you know.”

“A palanquin, yes, but what monster led it?”

“Oh, no monsters here. Then again, here is itself monstrous to you. We’re quite the world apart.”

“This is Edgeworld, then?” Briefly she glimpsed wet gray paving stones under her feet.

“I think it most unusual that you’ve transported here. That’s not how it’s done generally. Seems your gift wasn’t determined. I can’t recall the last time that happened . . . at least, not at our particular terminus. Who can say what’s gone on in Babylon? May-my, that could be a song title.”

She tried to steal nearer the speaker. “Do you write songs?”

“I’m thinking about taking it up. ‘Oh, what’s gone on in Babylon,’ late Enkidu inquired. ‘For I’ve been dead,’ is what he said, ‘and missed . . .’ Drat, I have no idea how to complete that rhyme.”

“I would offer to help, but I don’t know the story.”

“Don’t know it? How Enkidu died and the hero Gilgamesh went into the underworld and brought him back?”

She shook her head, then realized he probably couldn’t see the gesture any better than she could see him. “No,” she replied.

“Well, there’s a wonder. What are they teaching you in . . . where were you just now?”

“Colemaigne.”

“Oh. Never mind, then, they don’t teach anything there. Others build moments, minutes, hours. Not Colemaigne, not ever. Land of honey and surfeit.”

“What happened to it?”

“Hmm? Oh. Not surfeited anymore, is it? Blighted by Tophet, was Colemaigne. He, in the guise of Chaos, placed one hand upon the wall of a building, and from his imperishable fingers spread the web of decay. Sum and substance cracked and spilled out bitterness, in shoals of torment.”

“Who is Tophet?”

“More like, what is Tophet, if you’re going to ask. He’s done away with the who. For Colemaigne, he was the Destroyer, come from the far side of the world seeking vengeance.”

“But he didn’t destroy all of it.”

“Yes, and lucky the span was, too. He became distracted. Else it would have been a silent place forever.”

“What distracted him?”

“Something. Something to do with you, it was. Something to do with death.”

“Me?” She edged still nearer. “But it happened before I was born.”

“True. And false.”

She puzzled at that. “You know, though, don’t you?” she said.

“Goes without saying, dear heart, goes without saying.”

“Then why can’t you explain it clearly?”

“Why? Because. It’s necessary for you to find the answers to the larger puzzles of life yourself. They can’t be handed out, providing information that would change the pattern you have to walk. The maze. The labyrinth. It’s yours, I can’t go about altering its shape just as a courtesy. Your mettle is to be tested and no one’s to interfere in that. Besides, you won’t remember a thing I say.”

As he spoke, gesturing with caped arms, she stole ever closer, and before he noticed she’d slipped up beside him. When he looked down, she saw him clearly.

It was Soter’s face.

“Taking a peek at eternity, are you?” he asked, amused.

“You’re—”

“No, I’m not. This is a false body, an incrustation over my immortal spirit.” He winked. “For your benefit, I should add.”

From deeper in the fog came wailing, as if a chorus stood beyond the limit of her vision, responding to his words, answering or lamenting.

“Terrible time, this, terrible. But then what time isn’t, hmm? We all wear the mind-forged manacles in this world to bring forth your own.”

“I don’t understand at all,” she answered.

“Stories—yours and others’—they’re the products of disenchantment. Without it, no telling would be necessary. All would be harmony. But it never is, save in memory where the disharmonious is excised as with a scalpel, and ‘Oh, for the Golden Days of Old’ becomes the Song of Delusion, when no such days ever have been or will be. Joys impregnate. Sorrows bring forth.”

Leodora shook her head. His words danced along the edge of comprehension, as if his meaning, like the chorus, lay just outside the wall of fog, attainable if only she could penetrate it. To delve into the fog, however, meant to move away and lose sight of him, which seemed to her a great risk.

The chorus sounded again, in doleful harmony with her dilemma. They were nearer, right behind him, as if they or the street were moving, sliding.

The rhythmic clop and clatter of another carriage approached, and this time she drew back as it neared, well before his hand grabbed her, so that this time she pulled him away. The fog parted as though fleeing her, and there stood the chorus in a half circle around a low stone wall upon which perched a large, long-haired cat. The cat’s fur ran through a rainbow of colors, as bright as if a beam of sunlight were somehow penetrating the fog bank and striking the creature. One of the members reached out and ran a grubby hand the length of the cat, smoothing its fur. Its mouth opened, and a weird music floated out. The chorus listened to the notes and then as a group repeated them. Their dissonant chants had nothing to do with her songwriter after all.

“Beast knows all the tunes,” he said.

She became aware that the latest coach had slowed and come to a halt behind them, and she turned back.

“It’s for us,” said the songwriter. His hand at her elbow gently impelled her. His gaze—Soter’s gaze—was benign.

“Where are we going?”

“That I cannot say. It’s your journey, and you must tell the carriage where to go, when to stop.”

In the mist behind him, the cat lit up in colors and let forth another musical refrain of gliding notes that the crowd tried to emulate immediately, producing a caterwaul of conflicting voices. Had she been any nearer, she would have winced.

“How can I know where to stop when I can’t see anything?” she asked him.

“Perhaps,” he suggested, “it’s not something you do with your eyes?”

“I’m not used to this. I’m not ready.”

“No one ever is. Nor will you be here long enough to adapt. Not that you’d want to. The stink of old Londinium would win in the end. The blackened churches, the sighs like blood running down the walls. Not for you.” He held open the door of the carriage and reached out, his palm up. “Come into my hand,” he said, which she found stranger even than what he’d said previously.

She took his palm and let him lift her forward and up into the carriage, which rocked back and forth as she took her seat. He got in behind her and closed the door. Then, with a walking stick she hadn’t noticed previously, he rapped twice on the ceiling.

The carriage lurched, and he said, “Off we go.”

She studied him now. In the shadowy confines of the carriage she could make him out more clearly than in the fog. It was Soter’s face, all right, but with a thick shock of hair wild about his head, and much less dissolution across the terrain of his cheeks—a Soter who hadn’t drowned his every trouble in tuns of wine.

Under her scrutiny, he commented, “The maiden forgets her fear.”

She sat back. “How is this my journey?” she asked.

“You walked the pattern, although it wasn’t visible any longer. That’s an impressive enough feat for almost anyone. You traveled though you never left the spot. Now you choose the thing that returns with you, which might be important, or superfluous—but you do choose it.”

“Does everyone?”

“Does everyone choose? May-my, yes, everyone who comes here, though none—including you—remembers. Nothing I’ve told you will you remember.”

“Diverus, then. He chose his gift.”

“I assume that is the name of someone who came before you? If so, then yes. I didn’t meet him, but what are the odds of two who know each other arriving in my care in my moment? Surely astronomical. Your look tells me that you remain confused, which is as it must be, and no matter, for you’ll lose this conversation shortly. The ride, the smells, the caterwauls, the beast that draws us—all will fall away. For now . . . you have but to choose.”

“But what am I choosing?”

“What everyone chooses. What your Diverus chose.”

Frustrated, she folded her arms. He shifted on the seat and his forehead furrowed, giving her the impression that if he had known more, he would have told her, but the larger picture was as obscure to him as it was to her.

She asked, “How do I make the choice?”

“You say stop. The carriage stops. You pick your prize, whatever it might be, and this all comes to an end.”

Leodora said, “I see,” although she didn’t. His explanation explained nothing. She was to decide without knowing. How could Diverus have chosen when he had no mind to think with? And yet he had—had chosen the divine gift of music. There really wasn’t anything she wanted, except perhaps shoes for her feet, which had almost gone numb on the pavement. If Diverus had taken this same carriage ride, how would he have known when he’d arrived at the thing he wanted? Or had they healed him first? There seemed to be no point in asking if she wasn’t going to remember the answers anyway.

She closed her eyes and listened to the carriage, the creak of wood and leather. The roll and jounce traveled through her, the steady rhythm of the hooves of the beast pulling her down into reverie or dream, a senseless state that was neither alertness nor slumber.

Then all at once she cried “Stop!” and the carriage drew to a halt so fast that she lurched out of her seat and back again.

Her companion, his eyes half lidded, remarked, “Excellent choice.”

“What?” She had said stop. She had come alert. But she had no idea what had provoked the response.

“Go,” he said, and opened the carriage door. “Quickly now. Once you choose, you’ve only a brief time to retrieve.”

“Don’t you—”

“No, I do not,” he answered as if he had known her question before she even spoke. “I give you a golden string, but I await you here.”

He gestured with the stick, and she climbed down from the carriage. The humid fog was as thick as before, the bricks of the street slick and fetid. She stepped up onto a raised walk, which proved smoother underfoot. Crossing it, she came upon wide steps going up and, beside them, a smaller set that descended beneath the level of the walk.

Up or down? She’d called out, chosen this spot, but didn’t know why nor how to proceed. Up or down? It would matter. It must. Yet how was she to proceed when she didn’t know what had prompted her, what compelled her now? Up or down?

She stared at the arrangement of the stairs, railings, the wide blank doors just visible at the top of the steps. Uncertainly, she started up, her hand on the cold iron rail. She looked over the side of it. The lower stairwell curved beneath the steps, leading to a doorway that was upside down as she viewed it. The arrangement reminded her of the inverted world she’d glimpsed under Colemaigne and of the underworld of Vijnagar. There were secret worlds enfolded in her world. And Diverus was from the secret world, sent to it after he’d stood upon the Dragon Bowl. These thoughts, notions, observations interlaced, although why they should she couldn’t say. She had to operate on instinct and nothing more. Instinct instructed her to descend, just as it urged her to hurry.

She ran down the lower steps, which were black and worn as from a thousand years of use. Inset in the wall to her right was a window, its other side framed in lace. She peered in upon a chamber beneath the sidewalk where a rose-red lamp glowed warmly. Farther back in the room were people—a family, two parents and three children. They looked happy, contented, affectionate, oblivious of her presence, though she must have blotted out the light as she pressed to the glass. Tenderness for them consumed her—a longing to be in that room, part of that family, to be so loved. The ache of that desire drove her from the view and down the last two steps.

She stood before a door, surely the door that led to that room, that family. It was green, wet with mist, and embellished with a large brass knocker in the shape of a lion’s head that held the knurled ring in its mouth.

Leodora reached up, grabbed the ring, and swung it hard against the door. The sound of it thundered, echoed as along endless hollow corridors. The lion’s brass head opened golden eyes and stared down at her.

“The choice is made!” said the voice of her companion, and she jolted upright in her carriage seat, then glanced about herself in disorientation.

Across the carriage, Soter-but-not-Soter leaned toward her and said, “What is now proved was once only imagined.” He offered her his walking stick, and the head of it was the lion’s head of the door knocker. Had it been thus earlier? She hadn’t looked closely enough. But she closed her fingers over it.

“Good-bye, Leodora,” said the songwriter, and through her hand, between her fingers, the geometrics she’d stepped through before came swirling. They spun about her, twisted into a cylindrical blur that drew her upright and held her with her arms extended to the side, fingers skimming the patterns as she descended, flowed through the dream, sliding down the golden string, which settled her gently back within the hexagonal bowl. As her toes touched, the bowl reignited with so bright a light that it seemed to burn straight through her as though she were no thicker than the hammered skin of a shadow puppet. She looked at her hands glowing red from the blood within, and then all at once brighter still. In a burst that consumed her, she became light, and as the blaze faded all that remained was the thread of gold, which she followed downward into darkness.


Diverus maintained that he had slept through the visitation of the gods to the Dragon Bowl in which he’d been chained. He’d gone to sleep an idiot and waked a whole and reasoning being with no memory of the event that linked the two, which presumed that the event had been a visitation—that gods had descended in the night, driving mad all who saw them. Now that he had stared into the milky wasting eyes of soul-drinking afrits and been transported to some other place or time at acute cost to his life, he could well imagine being driven mad at the sight of beings divine and horrible.

Whatever he had envisioned of that missing time, it had been dark and subtle, nothing like a flash of light bright and powerful enough to knock him down in the sea-lane, dazzling him where he sprawled. His senses returned, a moment or an hour later. Along the rail and the bollards beside him a bluish fire scurried, crackling like grinding glass. It edged the building behind him, too, and sparked off Soter, who still lay stretched out in the lane. Rising up, Diverus saw his own hands, arms, and torso defined by the dancing fire, like an illusion, with no hint of sensation. As he got to his feet, this flame flickered and leapt as if willfully to the rail, abandoning him and merging with the glow there as though it shunned anyone conscious. Beam and Dragon Bowl both pulsed with the blue fire. The bowl stood empty. Leodora had vanished.

Now people appeared, out of doorways and from between buildings. People in cloaks and vests and some in careless dishabille looked, saw, came running along the narrow lane. Wherever they brushed the blue glow, it sparked and crackled but seemed to harm no one. They ran to him, to Soter, to the space in the railing where the dragon beam projected.

Soter climbed unsteadily to his feet and had to be held up. His head had a gash, a crooked line of blood over one eye. With a dull expression, he focused on Diverus, and his eyes went wide. “Lea!” he said, and with sudden ferocity he wrestled free of helpful supportive arms and hands while Diverus, already panicked by the sight of the empty bowl, plunged onto the dragon beam ahead of him.

The length of the beam had been repaired. Before the blast of light, the retaining walls had been nothing but crumbling remains. Now they were smooth and waist-high on both sides of a brown-tiled walkway. So, too, the wall around the bowl, sparking with blue fire, had been rebuilt. It shone hard and glossy. People in the lane were crying, “Lookit, lookit!” but only one or two were willing to step onto the beam so long as that blue fire burned.

The beam curved around to the outside of the bowl, entering it, as was the tradition, from seaward. Diverus ran, looking, seeing only an unoccupied bowl. With each step his anxiousness swelled.

The brown tiles continued as a motif into the refurbished bowl, circling it in a pattern that Diverus recognized immediately as a maze. And lying in the depressed center of the maze was Leodora, on her back with her red hair fanned out like blood around her head.

He ran across, unheedful of the maze pattern: He wasn’t entering the bowl to capture the gods’ goodwill; he didn’t care.

He slid to his knees beside her. Her face was flushed or sunburned. He touched her, and she was warm as with a fever. Warm, which meant alive. He rejoiced, at the same time trying to recall if he had been similarly affected, but all he could remember of it was confusion upon awaking.

Behind him at the entrance to the bowl, Soter collapsed—peripherally Diverus saw the old man spiral into a heap like a broken puppet clinging in anguish to the wall. Soter’s crust of pomposity fell away and revealed his true concern for Leodora. With a sharp stab of pity, Diverus said to him gently, “She’s only sleeping.” Soter glanced sharply up. The agony in his expression was slow to allow hope.

“It lit up,” he said, “the gods—”

“The gods have favored her,” Diverus replied, adding, “At least, if they haven’t driven her mad, they have.” He recalled that not one of the others who’d been in the Dragon Bowl with him had walked away sane.

“And if they have?” Soter asked, clinging to his misery.

Diverus had no answer for that, saying only, “We should move her off the beam before that crowd comes out here and picks her apart. They will, as soon as the blue fire dies, and they won’t be reasonable.” Already the strange fire was dwindling.

Soter cast him a peculiar look, and it was only then that he realized he was explaining situations, giving orders. Where the information came from, he had no idea. There had been no blue flame when he’d been in the Dragon Bowl of Vijnagar. Why would he possess such authority and foreknowledge? Right now there was no time to ponder it.

Quickly, then, they each took one of her arms and placed it over their shoulders, supporting Leodora between them. Diverus, as he did this, saw a chain dangling from her loosely closed hand. He tugged gently upon it, and a gold object slipped from between her fingers. In the same instant her eyes opened and gazed blankly at him, closing again almost as fast. Soter could not have seen it. He took a step up the bowl, but Diverus cried, “Wait!”

“What is it?”

“I think we have to walk the pattern out of here.”

Soter seemed to consider the maze for the first time. “Did she walk it coming in?”

“I don’t know. But I think we have to if we’re to take her out, to protect her. The gods embedded it, we have to assume it applies.” He glanced toward Colemaigne; the blue glow along the rail was flickering out. “And we’d best hurry.”

Supporting Leodora between them, they walked the brown-tiled maze from the center out, around and around the bowl, out to the edge but looping in closer to the center again. Finally, on the fifth tier of lines, they arrived at the lip where the brown tiles led onto the dragon beam. Before they could even step onto the beam, the first and most daring of the citizens blocked their way, not menacing but anxious. “Is anything in the bowl—she have anything on her?”

“No,” Diverus lied. “But the pattern has appeared, you see?”

“Then . . . oh, my.”

“You should walk it,” Soter suggested, but the man wasn’t staring into the bowl. He was gaping at the view beyond it, at the span itself. Soter and Diverus craned their heads to follow his gaze, discovering that the row of buildings lining the sea-lane, all of which had been ruins before the blast of light, now stood whole and gleaming, newly formed.

“The gods did come! We’re blessed again!” the man cried, and leapt past them into the Dragon Bowl. Disregarding Diverus’s advice, he charged into the center of it across the lines of the maze.

Soter and Diverus wasted no more time, but carried their unconscious friend along the curved beam. So narrow was the space that they had to crab sideways with her. As others started out onto the beam, Soter snarled, “Back, back, the lot of you, or I’ll stamp you flat!”

Diverus smiled at the effect that threat had on the crowd. They skittered timidly off the beam. Then he happened to glance off to the side, and he saw in the darkness beneath the span’s surface what he took at first to be a reflection of the new buildings above, cast upon still water . . . until a door opened in one of them and a figure walked out upside down, went to the rail, and stared across right at Diverus. Above, upright in the newly recast lane, there was no corresponding figure. The upside-down man, as blue as lapis, lifted one hand, and it seemed that he waved, and Diverus answered with a wave of his free hand, swinging the gold chain and, on the end of it, a medallion in the shape of a broad face.

When he looked up again, the man had turned and gone back inside the impossible upside-down house. They were nearing the end of the beam then, and the edge of the span gradually cut off the vision. One of the citizens, unable to wait, jumped up and perilously walked the retainer wall to get around them. He glowered at Leodora and Diverus as he edged by and then leapt onto the brown tiles and ran, crying out, “Gods, I’m here, your devoted servant is here!” With raised hands, he rushed into the bowl, turning in circles, face to the sky, until the one who’d preceded him struck him down from behind. It’s starting, Diverus thought, and quickly pocketed the medallion.

They reached the end of the beam, and the people there opened a space, not from courtesy so much as to get them out of the way. The moment Diverus stepped down, the nearest ones knocked him aside in their surge up the curving beam.

Someone asked, “What did she get, what did she see?” and Soter replied, “We don’t know, do we? She’s unconscious yet.” A few eyed her as she was carried past, obviously weighing the desire to wait and find out what had happened to the girl against the immediate lure of the Dragon Bowl itself. They all chose the latter. Some slid by. Others touched her reverently as she was carried past. When from one jarring movement her head lolled, someone said, “Why, she’s dead,” and Soter growled, “No, she’s not, you fool. The gods dazzled her, the same as they would have anyone. Same as they will you.” That acted as an invitation to the speaker, who bounded toward the beam.

“They were really here? The gods really came?” asked the next man. Behind him a veiled woman with aristocratic poise reached forward and touched the man’s shoulder. She silently directed his attention to the front of the house beside him—to the hard, slick coating that edged it. The man licked a finger and reached across Leodora to run the finger along it. He licked his finger again. Then he covered his mouth with both hands and hurried toward the beam, all but knocking Diverus off his feet.

That left the veiled woman, their two undaya cases, the satchel full of Diverus’s instruments, and their wardrobe.

Behind the woman, two tall thin men with oddly shallow features beneath their cowls waited stiffly like servants. She, dressed in an embroidered ocher chemise and green overtunic, pressed a finger to Leodora’s sunburned cheek. “Oh, my. She was in the bowl when it happened?”

“Yes,” Soter replied with what seemed to Diverus an odd inflection of uncertainty.

“A blessing or a curse then, when she awakens.”

Diverus frowned at her air of mystical superiority. “Sometimes it’s both, and sometimes not worth anything to anyone,” he said, holding her gaze to make her understand that he spoke from experience.

Rather than being intimidated, the woman raised her head. He could feel her considering him.

“Diverus, can we lay her down on one of the cases?” Soter asked. “I can’t hold her up any longer.”

They lifted her onto the nearest undaya case, where she lay as if napping. Soter collapsed beside her. In setting Leodora down, Diverus noted the veiled woman’s gold sandals, her painted toes.

“You’re a troupe, are you not,” she said, and Soter nodded without looking up. “And what do you do?”

“We tell stories,” Diverus replied, still annoyed by her superior airs.

“Well,” she said, “it appears you’ve now become a story. At least, in Colemaigne.” She pointed to the crowd in the Dragon Bowl, many of them with their arms raised, some jumping up and down, others reciting, others jostling.

Just then another group edged around them in the lane and hurried to the crowded beam.

“Yes, quite a story,” the woman muttered. “You are performers. In the manner of Bardsham, no doubt.” Soter’s brows arched, but he said nothing. “If so, coming here may prove difficult for you—at least I would have said so until today, as there is a law here that bans all such theater. Did you not know?”

“What?” Soter looked up at her. “That can’t be! This was the greatest venue—”

“Not since Bardsham’s final performance have any been allowed here. He was the last. Disorder followed so close upon his heel that the one became tied to the other. He got off this span, but we could not. So either you don’t travel this spiral of the Great Bridge very often, or you were last here with him.”

“How are those two things of necessity mutually exclusive?” asked Soter, and Diverus thought, He’s angered by her, too.

Overlooking Leodora, the woman replied, “I very much doubt they’re different at all.” She raised her face, and through the veil Diverus caught a glimpse of her features: austere, handsome, and hard, though her eyes betrayed some tenderness. “She needs somewhere to rest, and I expect you do, as well. Please come with me—bring her with you, and my men will carry your puppets.”

Soter’s brow furrowed. “How do you—”

“A long story, dear sir, which I’ll willingly relate to you later—after you’ve settled in.”

“Settled in?” Diverus and Soter exchanged a look.

“I own a theater. Like so much of Colemaigne, it was long ago blighted. Yet this very day and, I suspect, with thanks to this girl, it has been resurrected. If there’s to be a performance, you will of course make your debut there.”

“Who are you, madam?” Soter asked, clearly troubled. Diverus likewise could not figure out the cause of his own ire.

“For the moment, your benefactress. Please, bring her.” She turned with a dramatic flourish and led the way back along the cramped lane. Her servants stepped aside to let her pass.

Soter and Diverus lifted Leodora from the black case. She was indeed as limp as if dead. Diverus wrapped his arms around her legs and led the way.

As they shuffled clumsily past, the servants melted into the shadows of a doorway, standing strangely still. Soter slowed to stare at them until Diverus almost pulled Leodora out of his grip. Ahead, the woman had rounded a corner and disappeared.

Hastily, they hobbled after her.

Soter said to Diverus, “How long did you sleep when it happened to you?”

“I don’t know,” Diverus replied over his shoulder. “I was asleep before, and never did awaken till after. I don’t know how long was the time between. Hours, I thought, but it might have been days. I was very confounded.”

“Mmmm.” Soter huffed along a moment before asking more quietly, “What was the thing you found in the bowl?”

Diverus glanced back. “A pendant, on a chain. It was beside her, in her hand. It might be what they gave her, the gods.” As he spoke he was recalling all the containers strewn in the bowl on Vijnagar when he’d awakened, and the madness they had seemed to induce in those who handled them. Of course the scrambling magpies in that Dragon Bowl so long ago might well have been mad already. He kept the woman in sight and tried not to worry that Leodora might never be herself again.

The woman led them to a wider avenue that angled away from the seawall lane and into the center of Colemaigne. Odd spade-shaped trees grew in pots along the middle of the avenue. The area bustled with life. There were carts and strollers, and outdoor tables; but the throng had gathered loosely in the avenue in front of certain buildings. They stared up, gestured, as if at holy shrines.

All the buildings were well appointed—not just the ones at which people gawked. The façades looked freshly polished, ornamented with colorful bright new awnings, umbrellas, and penants. Some had half-round balconies above the shops, of which every variety was represented—markets, tailors, boot makers, drapers, cafés, and more within the short distance Diverus and Soter walked. The woman soon turned into a narrower street.

They were moving deeper into the core of Colemaigne. Unlike the few spans Diverus had known so far, here the buildings were packed tightly together, with the result that a state of perpetual dusk hung over the street. The tight intersecting alleys looked darker still.

The woman led them toward the end of the street and a building distinct from the others they’d seen. For one thing it was round. And immense. A wide door, barred and locked, faced the street, but the woman walked past this and into the shadows beside the building.

Diverus scanned the walls, which rose up for two stories before opening into what appeared to be a roofed gallery—at least in the front. Farther back, the gallery became a third story with small windows. As with the buildings on the main thoroughfare, it looked as if it had been painted and polished just this morning. An adjacent blind alley in the rear led into a still-darker space, and that was where the woman directed them. It smelled vaguely foul, the closed-off space no doubt trapping vapors from out of the sewer grates instead of allowing them to disperse. There, at the very back of the circuit, the woman unlocked a chain and flung open a small and insignificant door. She waved them inside. A different smell—like the fusty odor of old clothes—unfolded from the interior, and it was a compelling and welcoming scent, as if the old place had been awaiting them. Despite doubts traded in glances, they carefully lifted Leodora through the doorway and inside. The two servants arrived soon after and pushed through with the cases and instruments, walking immediately deeper into the darkness while Soter and Diverus gathered their breath and waited for the woman to tell them what to do next.

Diverus’s eyes adjusted slowly to the dim bluish light, most of which came through a row of tiny windows and bathed the interior in what seemed like moonlight.

A long broad table occupied the center of the room. At the far end he could just make out the black recess of a hearth large enough to stand in. Open doorways bracketed it on both sides. One of the odd servants who’d carried the undaya cases knelt before the hearth with a bellows and began pumping air at the ashes, which soon glowed.

The woman spoke from behind, startling him. “This is my home,” she said. As he turned about, she closed the door through which they’d entered. She stood in front of a full rack of clothing that appeared to run the rest of the room’s length and even along the far wall. She said, “Put it on the table, Bois,” and Diverus glanced back to see the servant place a small oil lamp on the table beside the undaya case he’d set down there. The lamp was shaped like a slipper with a curled toe.

“Go on, then,” said the woman. “I know you both want to explore.” The two servants nodded vigorously and without a word went through one of the doors by the hearth.

“Explore?” asked Soter.

“Yes,” she replied. She removed her veil and picked up the lamp. “Follow me and we’ll put your friend somewhere she can rest, meanwhile.” She crossed to the doorway on the far side of the hearth. It led to a flight of steps.

The stairwell proved difficult to navigate with Leodora between them, as they couldn’t all three fit on a step together, and Diverus in the lead with her legs had to go up one step and wait for Soter before moving up another.

“It might be easier if one of you simply slung her over his shoulder,” their hostess suggested. She was probably right, but now in the stairwell they could only crab their way up as they’d begun. “Explore,” she explained as if Soter had asked again, “because until an hour ago the theater wall we circled coming in here did not exist. It collapsed years ago, after . . . after the calamity.” She turned and stared down past Diverus at Soter as she said it.

Out of the stairwell, she led them a short way down a corridor with more doors on either side. She opened the first one and said, “Put her in here.”

It was a small room, hardly larger than the narrow mattress on the floor. The ceiling slanted, a dormer. They lowered Leodora onto the bed, and Soter banged his head as he stepped back. Diverus knelt with her and carefully slipped the pendant out of his pocket, tucking it underneath her.

“The rear of the theater is full of tiny chambers like this,” the woman was saying.

“It’s where the players change,” Soter stated.

“Where they used to, yes. Your friend may sleep for days, you know. Or never wake up at all.”

“Never wake?” asked Diverus, as he stood. The possibility hadn’t occurred to him. It was a matter of when, not if.

“In stories, on occasion,” she reassured him. “She was touched by gods, and that hasn’t happened here in so long that no one’s going to recall what is supposed to happen.”

“He should,” Soter said as he stepped out of the room. He pointed at Diverus. “He’s been touched, himself.”

“That is gratifyingly improbable,” she answered. “You will both surely be hungry. Let me have something prepared for you. Bois!”

When nothing happened, Soter said, “You sent them off to explore, madam.”

“Well, that was ill planned, then.”

Footsteps sounded at the far end of the hallway, and a servant entered from one of the side doors there. He came up beside Diverus and stopped, awaiting her orders. While she directed him what to prepare, Diverus got his first close look at her manservant.

He had a hard, chiseled face, and eyes that seemed almost painted on. Bois, sensing the scrutiny, turned his head and Diverus shyly lowered his gaze . . . and saw Bois’s hand. The fingers were articulated, each joint hinged, very much like Leodora’s shadow puppets.

Soter seemed utterly unaware of the strangeness of Bois. He was too intent upon ensuring that there would be wine to drink with their meal.

Bois shambled past them and clumped down the stairs they’d come up. Staring after him, Diverus missed the next thing the woman said, coming alert only to Soter’s reply of “By all means.” The two—Soter and the hostess—started off along the corridor. Diverus glanced in again at the sleeping Leodora, attempting to convince himself that she was safe and that the oddness of this place, much less of the whole span itself, was not a threat, or at least no more of one than the parade of monsters had been on Hyakiyako. They’d come through that just fine, hadn’t they?

He made up his mind that he could leave her, and turned just as Soter and the woman exited through one of the doorways up the hall. Hurrying after them then, he found that the doorway led to a short descending ramp ending in a curtain, which wasn’t quite closed. Light spilled through the center seam. He hastened down the ramp and stepped through the curtain into daylight again.

He stood in an open balcony. Drapery hung on each side, ornately decorated with flowers and vines. Cushions had been strewn about the floor, but Soter and the hostess remained standing at the rail, overlooking the circular theater. Diverus moved quietly up beside them.

It was magnificent. Below, a broad, bare stage projected out and wide to either side of the balcony. The remaining servant walked about on it, pausing, opening his arms as if declaiming, but never making a sound; then setting off again, he suddenly struck a regal pose, sprang from it, capered, stopped and stood humbly, demure and shy, trying on one character after another before a nonexistent audience.

The theater was empty. The main floor—deep enough that the stage stood at waist height above it—contained huge semicircular benches layered in amphitheater fashion away from the stage. The curved rear walls comprised a series of niches, of draped private boxes similar to this balcony. Overhead, thatched roofing extended to perhaps the first row of seats.

“It’s a wonder,” said Soter.

“Indeed, it is,” their hostess replied. “A miracle. Only yesterday this and the two balconies to our right were misshapen holes in the wall, the floorboards below were rotted, the drapery in tatters. The interior walls across there with the boxes for patrons—those had all fallen in, a heap of crumbled stucco and stone. No glassine upon any of it at all. The thatch of that roof was black and rotten, a home for vermin, and had been thus for more than a decade.”

“This is because of Leodora, all this change?” asked Diverus. “But you can’t even see the Dragon Bowl from here.”

“Nevertheless, look about you and marvel,” she replied.

“And what is he doing?” Soter asked her, with a nod to the stage.

“Glaise is remembering. Reenacting. Once, we had a company, and they played to a thousand people in a night. Do you remember?” she asked carefully, looking sidewise at Soter, and he tensed, his face pinched as at some unpleasant recollection.

“I . . . of course I do.”

“I thought perhaps the gods had snatched away your past, Soter, as happened to so many others.”

He twitched when she said his name and responded in kind. “No, not the gods, Orinda. No gods came for me.”

A brief smile crossed her lips at the mention of her name. Diverus eyed them both warily, attempting to fathom the meaning interlacing the words. “He died, you know, right after.”

Soter rubbed his hand along his jaw. “I recall he was ill. He kept it from us but even so, I knew. Bardsham saw it first, the way he winced when he stood. He was a grand actor but sometimes in the pain, he would forget, his expression failed him, or else it was too excruciating to mask.”

She nodded solemnly. “It spared him having to endure the ruin of the theater for so long. That would have destroyed him just as certainly, but it would have worn him to nothing first.” She slid her arm along the railing and covered Soter’s hand with her own. “How did you lose the tips of these fingers?”

“Storyfish bit ’em off,” he quickly replied; it was the same response he’d given Diverus when he’d asked.

“Of course,” answered Orinda, and Diverus could tell she didn’t believe him. “That child, then—she’s Bardsham’s daughter.” When he didn’t reply, she said, “How fitting that she should repair our span.”

“She is her mother in spirit.”

“And will she bring destruction upon us, too? That was a gift you left Colemaigne.”

Although Soter didn’t move, it was as if his body twisted tight before Diverus’s eyes. He said finally, “They don’t know about her.”

“If they learn of her here, history will rerun its course.”

Squirming even more, Soter shifted the subject. “I must tell you, I’ve hardly a real recollection of you, Orinda. No solid memory beyond . . .”

“You would have dealt with him,” she answered, taking no offense. “I was busy with our troupe. What would the play have been, I wonder. It was the end of—Cardenio, yes, they were rehearsing Cardenio. Never performed it. It’s lost to the ages, along with its author.”

“I’m sorry for both. But surely now you can revive the troupe?”

“Revive. What an appropriate word. I would have to. Revive them, that is.”

“What, they’ve all died?”

She leaned farther over the glistering balcony. “You don’t know, do you? You’ve no idea what happened here.”

Soter looked fearful. “Apparently not,” he answered.

Orinda glanced back at Diverus, who could only express his own puzzlement. As if to him, she replied, “What they did to punish us for harboring Bardsham. The horror they wrought. Not just the buildings suffered. You understand?”

Diverus, without knowing details, comprehended the enormity she implied. He’d seen enough pain dispensed in his short life. He nodded, and the woman brushed his cheek tenderly.

She continued to focus upon Diverus as she asked, “Did they ever catch you, Soter?”

Beyond her fall of hair, Diverus could see Soter’s awful face, the eyes looking inward, at what horrible memory he couldn’t imagine. Softly, Soter replied, “They found us.”

She rubbed the tips of his foreshortened fingers. “I thought as much. No one ever heard of Bardsham again, anywhere.”

Soter tilted back his head and sighed. “But you, your husband—Colemaigne never harbored us. We’d no idea that trouble came here. We thought you’d been spared. We’d moved on, after all, far away. A different spiral. That’s what a traveling troupe does.”

“It was what we maintained, as well, but that wasn’t what they wanted to hear. What they wished to believe. When your captors have an answer in mind, it doesn’t always matter that you tell them the truth.”

“I . . . no, I suppose not.”

“Innocence was not one of our choices.”

“So it would be better if we left, then.”

“Left?” she asked incredulously. She dropped her hand from his and turned. “If that girl has a mote of the talent her father had, she must perform for us. Here. This theater—this span—needs its stories back.”

“She’s better than him,” said Diverus. Soter glared at him. “Well, you told her she was.”

The woman regarded them both in apparent disbelief, until Soter with strange reluctance said, “It’s true.”

Diverus found himself watching the figure on the stage. Suddenly he put the performance together with what she had said. “Was Glaise a member of your troupe?” he asked. When both Soter and the woman regarded him in surprise, he added nervously, “I mean, he’s not human, is he? Neither of them. They’re—”

“Pinottos. Both of them, yes.” The admission appeared to pain her. At her back Soter fumed with anger as though Diverus had committed the most terrible violation of etiquette. As if the answer had slammed the door on discussion, Orinda stated, “Your meal will be ready by now,” and walked back through the curtain.

Soter scowled and, shaking his head, went after her, calling, “Orinda, please!”

Left alone on the balcony, Diverus muttered, “No one tells me anything, and then they blame me when I have to guess.” Finally he decided that he wanted something to eat, too, and parted the curtains again.

The mute pinotto continued to perform for the emptiness.