Lord Tophet

TWO


The Druid’s Egg was followed by the tale of “How Chilingana Brought Death into the World,” although here in Colemaigne his name was Sparrowgrass and he shared certain ignoble traits with Meersh, and sometimes even replaced Meersh in stories. All of this Leodora had learned from Orinda.

At the end of the performance she stepped past Diverus and went out to take her bows. He, still in his trance, set down the wooden fish drum he’d played at the end in imitation of the rattling of Death’s bones, and then lay upon his side between the santur and the drums. When she returned, she found him softly snoring, which struck her both as amusing and oddly endearing, reminding her of the gulf of unvoiced emotion between them. She didn’t disturb him. The puppets lay strewn about, but there would be a second performance tonight and she would put things in order later. She had a few hours now, and at the moment what she wanted most was to speak to the one entity that must tell her what she wished to know. She left Diverus asleep on the floor.

She went to her tiny room and scooped up the Brazen Head.

Before she could ask it anything, Bois was at her door and gesturing furiously. Someone, it seemed, had come calling for her specifically. When she asked who, he made as if to stroke a huge plume coming off the top of his head, which she finally translated as someone of importance, at least in their own opinion, and from that arrived at the identity of the visitor: the governor of Colemaigne. She was wanted downstairs.

“All right,” she said, “but in a minute.”

Bois nodded and went off, his task complete.

When he’d gone, she dashed up the hall and through one of the balcony doorways, making sure no one saw her.

At the bottom of the ramp, before parting the curtains, she crouched low and waddled onto the balcony. It lay in shadow, the only light coming from the sconces around the theater below.

Sitting cross-legged on the floor, she held the pendant up by its chain. Its eyes were already open, staring back at her.

“You heard my question already, did you?”

“A shout can wake even the dead,” the lion replied.

“Don’t misdirect me with one of your riddles. Tell me true. How do I find Pons Asinorum?”

“Symmetry is the answer,” it replied as though that explained everything.

“How so?”

“Looks to and fro, inside and outside, true and false. At once forward, at once backward.”

“What looks to and fro?”

“Why, what you seek. That was your request.”

“Why is it you can never just say Go see Vorparal the Vintner and he’ll have your answer? Why is every answer a challenge?”

The lion yawned.

“Don’t you dare go to sleep on me, you. I picked you and you have to counsel me.”

“Just so. Then be warned that the thing that unites also divides.”

“No clearer, beast.”

“You stand on but one side of a reflection, yet exist on both sides together.”

“That’s no answer, either.”

“Perhaps, but it frames the most important question.” Then, infuriatingly, the lion waited for her prompt.

She withheld it as long as she could, but clearly the lion could outwait her. With a loud sigh, she said, “All right, what would the most important question be, then?”

Smiling, the lion answered: “From the other side, can you see yourself before your reflection? From the other side, does the mother see the daughter?”

“I don’t understand. Do you mean does my reflection see me? Or something else entirely? Who’s the mother?”

“It’s a question of time. Time—”

“—is that which ends,” she interjected angrily. “Yes, I know!”

The lion’s brow lowered. “Not what I was going to say at all.” His eyes closed, and he was inanimate once again.

“What were you going to say? Tell me!”

She shook the chain, but the lion didn’t wake. She had a petulant urge to fling it at the wall, to smash it. But destroying it was hardly the way to get what she wanted. It would gain her nothing.

“I’m sorry,” she told it. “I didn’t mean to be impolite. Really.” But of course she had; she’d responded as she would have with Soter. Unlike him, the pendant didn’t have to abide her rudeness.

She understood that it had told her the truth in its fashion, and that she had to decipher what it had said. The head would argue, of course, that it wasn’t being perversely elusive, it had to answer that way, just as she was compelled to prove her cleverness.

When she’d coaxed and cajoled further to no avail, she gave up and put the pendant back around her neck. Maybe it would wake again before she took it off for the next performance. For now the governor of Colemaigne awaited an audience with the redoubtable Jax and had been kept waiting long enough.


The huge table at the rear of the theater lay buried beneath silver trays, copper tureens, bottles, earthenware mugs, wicker platters, and assorted cutlery, all lit by a circle of tall candles and outside that circle another formed of servants. It was obvious the governor had brought his celebration with him. He sat at the far end of the feast. When Leodora entered the room, he looked to Orinda and asked, “Is it she?” and Orinda replied, “Yes,” and he rose, beaming, as if Leodora in her gray tunic were royalty herself. He wore a powdered wig cascading in ringlets, and an embroidered salmon-colored coat with silver buttons down the front.

“I marvel,” he said, “I marvel. The hands that work the rods.”

Leodora flushed and lowered her eyes, embarrassed and thrilled, but he wasn’t having any of her modesty. He came around the table and extended both his hands to take hers. His fingers flashed with a dozen rings. She obediently held hers out to him. He cupped them on his palms and then busied himself studying them; brushed his hands across her palms, felt her wrists, peered at her short nails. “Clearly, the hands of a young woman, so you are no ancient, accomplished crone in disguise. I can feel the strength here in the wrists, but truly the calluses at your fingertips offer the only definite clue to your craft.”

Orinda, looking amused, explained, “M’lord is a student of hands.”

“Palmistry, is it?” Soter guessed.

“Not at all,” replied the governor, keeping Leodora’s hands clasped in his. “Palmistry is absurd, mere physiognomy focused upon the hands. The idea that how you are shaped reveals your deep nature is ridiculous. Should we say that if you’d been born without hands you cannot live because you lack a lifeline or heartline to chart? Of course not.

“No, this is the art of observation. I look, I touch, I discover. It tells me what you do but it cannot tell me how well you do it, do you see? Your skill, that is not apparent beyond a certain equipoise, a balance to both hands. No, to know your skill I would have to see the performances themselves, which as it happens I’ve done now thrice. Your gifts, m’lady, are extraordinary and were I not chaste in my vows I would certainly chase you.”

“Thank you,” she said uncertainly.

He released her hands to roll up the sleeve of his coat so that he could reach across the mounds of food for a pastry that had caught his eye. “The burning question addressed to both of us is always, How is it done? Your craft looks like magic to we who lack the talent, exactly as my conjecture from observation looks like magic to those who don’t notice how it’s brought off.” He waved his treat in the air. “Of course no one sees the hours of practice, trial, and error that go into the final performance, hey? They see only the culmination. The rest can but be inferred . . . can be nothing else, just as all of our citizens hear my judgments but cannot discern to what extent I have anguished over them, weighed discourse and debate to arrive at my answer.”

Behind him Orinda was covering a smile. His servants were looking mildly embarrassed, too. Leodora intuited that, whatever the topic, he invariably brought the focus back to himself. She took a seat.

“The interdict on performance must have been a terrible burden, then,” she said.

“Ah, before my time, that, and enacted by a body of jurists in any case. Mind you, I was on hand to witness the blighting itself.”

“You saw it?”

His eyes looked inward for a moment, and he shuddered at the memory. “I was standing in the doorway of my house, no farther from Tophet than you are from the end of the room right now. I remember him huge and bright.”

Tophet—it was a word the pendant had spoken. So it was a name. “Who was he?”

“A fiend. Tophet the Destroyer, the god who drinks life. He came from the other side of the world—at least that’s what my father said. From a part of Shadowbridge where death reigns. He has drained the life from whole chains of spans, drunk their lives.”

“Bright,” she repeated. The image of him conjured by the governor was nothing like bright.

“Oh, yes,” said the governor. “So bright that you couldn’t look at his face, couldn’t make out his features at all, as if his face was a great shining mask of metal lit by the sun. And the blight, now, that unfolded in front of me. It literally spread along the street right before my doorway. The stones crumbling, the figs on the trees shriveling up, the people . . .” He closed his eyes. “Had I stepped out into the street for a better look, I would have been turned to stone along with them. That is how those distant spans died. He simply willed it and it was so.”

Leodora thought of Meg, pointing to the statue behind her: That’s me dad. She imagined him, below the street, oblivious to the events above, to the decay sweeping inexorably toward him. Did he realize at the last moment? She doubted it. His petrified pose was of someone reaching to take hold of something. Life had changed that fast. It did, after all, didn’t it? Outside of stories. Stories always painted the bigger pictures, showed you the terrible transformation approaching so that you, watching, listening, knew what was coming. It was more compelling that way, more horrible, really. People in the audience had been known to stand up and cry out warnings to characters—to the little thief in the Griffin’s Egg tale, to the vagabond who spent the night with the woman known as the Fatal Bride. They knew what the characters, embedded in the story like insects in amber, could not perceive.

She realized that she had been sitting in silence too long. She said to the governor, “It must have been very hard for you, then, to reverse the ban.”

“Indeed. The memory of that day haunts me still. But Tophet never returned. Neither he nor any of his ghoulish Agents has been seen since that day. Nor is the cause of his wrath present among us any longer.”

It took her a moment to realize that he was referring to her father.

“Still, yes, difficult,” he said. “I had to wrestle with the question of what was best for us all. All of Colemaigne. I decided that we’d hidden in the grayness of fear long enough.” He beamed at her again. “And now that I’ve witnessed your art, I know I chose right. So please, no more darkening the night with reflections of the Destroyer. Come, sit, and tell me how many stories you know. That is the real secret everyone wants to hear.”


For the second show Leodora and Glaise propped Diverus into a sitting position, handed him the shawm, and hoped for the best. He moaned and complained in a sloomy way, but was too slurry-witted to do more. With his head down, his eyes closed, he muttered her name, but she had already taken her position beneath the lantern and Soter was already making introductions to the audience, and she didn’t hear him. He barely heard himself. He sagged in defeat, his bones seemingly going soft. He had time for one final coherent thought—This is how Soter goes through life—before the tale was announced: “The Dream of Fortune.” Immediately his comprehension of his surroundings evaporated. Then the spirit invaded him. He acquiesced—not that he could have fought against it, which would have been like fighting against an undertow. He let it have his arms to raise, his lips to shape around the reed. It was as if he were observing himself from outside his own body, as though the source of his skill wanted nothing to do with him in his disgraceful, besotted state.

Then he blinked and the sensation of separateness collapsed. He became bound to the song, living but a fraction of a second ahead of it, his fingers guided to the holes of the shawm as if born to it, flowing eerie trills to shiver the bones. Music filled his mind to the exclusion of everything else. He became forged of music.

When it ended, the tale, he collapsed in a gray slumber, insensate, out of which he arose only when the succeeding tale was announced. His conscious self didn’t even hear his name, but his body took over, reached for the hourglass drum, which he could flex with his knees as he played.

Somewhere in the middle of that tale he began to sober up. An edge of self-awareness flowed through the movements as he drummed, as he picked up a guiro and scraped a stick along it to imitate the clacking of bones. I am Diverus, he repeated in his head. I am Diverus, and Leodora— He couldn’t finish, wasn’t even sure what it was he had intended to say. No, he wasn’t all that sober after all. Besides, he had no idea what she thought of him now, and it didn’t matter, not really. When he’d slept some, he would leave. If he was lucky, he would wake up in the middle of the night and nobody would miss him until he had gone far enough that he could begin as someone else, someone with no past, no name. He yearned to be the idiot that the gods had unmade, the simple creature that only felt things in a dumb way and didn’t have to think them.

When the performance ended he sank down again, aware as at a distance of applause, of cheers and shouts. They were happening somewhere else to someone else. He drifted into unconsciousness beneath the roar of waves pouring over him. Back into the water, came the thought. Let it pull him under for good and let sea creatures feast on him, turn him into a new coral man.

He considered it a fitting end, imagining himself as the creature in the case, down below the puppets, and like the case his mind grew dark and silent.


It was while Bois and Glaise were carrying Diverus up the steps to his room that the copper coin fell from his pocket, bounced on the step, and came to rest on Leodora’s bare foot.

In the light of the lamp she carried, she couldn’t tell what it was, just something shiny. “Wait a moment,” she called to the woodmen. She bent down and picked up the coin. Holding it up to the light, she muttered to them, “Go ahead, sorry, it fell from his clothes.” The distorted face on the coin seemed to be leering at her. She was certain she’d never seen it before.

Up the stairs then while she held the coin between thumb and forefinger, she’d almost caught up with Bois and Glaise when idly she turned the coin to see the other side, the second face.

She stopped.

The two woodmen reached the hallway, where they waited for Leodora to catch up to them with the light. When she didn’t arrive, they turned, but Leodora barely noticed them. She was hearing the lion as clearly as if it had just then awakened, saying to her: At once forward, at once backward. She flipped the coin over and over. “To and fro,” she whispered.

When she looked up, Bois and Glaise at each end of the drooping body of Diverus faced each other like mirror images, almost identical in stance, in shape. But, she thought, nothing like the coin. It couldn’t be that obvious and simple—the coin wasn’t pointing the way to them. In any case, they had tried to show Diverus the Pons Asinorum and failed. They wanted to help but had admitted that they didn’t know how. They knew only the stories that everyone else had heard. Yet viewed another way, perhaps they hadn’t failed at all—not at their true task, which had been hidden even from them.

She sprang up the steps and then led the way to Diverus’s room. The two men placed him upon his pallet. Leodora held up the lamp and showed them the coin. “Have you ever seen this?” she asked. They shook their heads with looks of apology. “It’s all right, don’t apologize. Now you go on, I’ll attend to him.”

Bois crossed his arms over his chest and looked farcically affectionate.

“You’re wrong,” she insisted. “It’s nothing like that.”

Glaise rolled his eyes as if to say he didn’t believe her, either, and followed Bois out.

“I’m simply going to wait here,” she said to no one.

She stood over him, the lamp held waist-high. Her hand holding the coin shadowed his face, and she lowered it. He winced as if the brighter light penetrated his sleep, but she didn’t move to shield him again. His black hair was tousled and matted, his face shiny with sweat. Drink made him look feverish. Shortly, he began to snore.

She knelt to brush back his hair, and her hand touched his cheek. He needed to shave soon, or else grow out the hair on his jaw and chin. He couldn’t remain in this median state between boy and man anymore. The paidika had cultivated the child in him, but that life was behind him forever. No one owned him any longer. His shirt, unlaced, showed his naked breastbone, the hollow of his belly almost to his navel, the rhythm of his breathing. He was, she thought, very like the puppet of the little thief who stole the Druid’s Egg and defeated the wizard. And won the princess.

A sharpness cut within her, and her nostrils flared. She knew what that tender sensation meant. Her heart suddenly had an edge. Each beat tore it loose. Each scored her. She put her hand to her throat. It slid down and grasped the pendant. Where was the counseling for this?

She could not remain here beside him or the pain would swell until it drove her to action. Looking at him in that moment, all she wanted was to lie beside him, with him.

She got up and backed away from her desire.

At the doorway, she pressed to the wall. Would there ever be a time when they could express such feelings, either of them? What sort of troupe would they be, then? She didn’t know, only knew that now wasn’t that time. Both of them were confused. Confusion had driven Diverus to drink. If only he had said . . . but the kiss had said it, hadn’t it? He’d lost his words but had still expressed what he felt.

Realizing that, she suddenly understood him better. He was afraid of rejection, afraid that his were the only feelings in play, and so to avoid that pain he’d drowned his sensibility with drink. “Oh, Diverus,” she whispered. He didn’t stir. She fled the room.

In the hall she stood against the wall awhile, eyes closed, hand over the sleeping pendant. In all the time she had lived on Bouyan, she’d never felt anything like this for Tastion, although he’d wanted her to, and maybe he had felt thus himself.

Finally she slid down into a sitting position with her heels tucked close. The lamp rattled against the floor as she set it down, and she stared at it as if unable to recall what it was doing there. What she was doing there.


She must have dozed, because she came awake at the sound of a floorboard creaking in front of her, opened her eyes to see two legs that sprang past even as she raised her head. It was Diverus running.

“Wait!” she called and hobbled after him. Her left leg had fallen asleep and she pounded on her thigh to make the blood surge as she half stumbled down the stairs behind him. “Diverus!” she yelled, fearing as she did that she would awaken the whole of the Terrestre and the street outside as well; but when he threw open the door, she saw that it was not so dark, but the gray of early dawn. Diverus stopped abruptly in the doorway. She caught up and saw why.


Soter, wearing a green shawl, stood outside, blocking his way.

Diverus retreated inside, his head down, as if sure it had been a trap they’d planned for him. Soter, at his heels, looked at the two of them and asked, “What are you playing at, hey?”

Glum Diverus didn’t answer. Leodora said, “What are you doing awake this early? I thought after all the celebrating you did last night, you’d be sleeping forever.”

Soter didn’t want to change the subject but felt compelled to defend himself. “In the first place, for all the celebrating, I in fact did very little. The governor talked incessantly and on every imaginable topic, and damned if he didn’t repeatedly ensnare Orinda with his prattle. It was all I could do to keep him from running his hands under her clothes right in front of us. Other than that, you wouldn’t notice, but I sleep very little these nights. Very little. Seems to be my nature, unlike some drunken louts.” He stared accusingly at Diverus. “And now before you elude me altogether, I will ask once more. What are you two about?”

“We’re off to look at something with two heads,” she told him, and Diverus glanced at her from under his brows, an uncertain look that she attended with her own. The silent exchange did not go unnoticed by Soter.

“Listen to me, Leodora. You won’t like what I’m going to say, but then you never do. Do not tangle yourself up with this boy, do you understand? No good ever comes of these affairs.”

“Like Leandra and Bardsham?” she said.

“Exactly like—” He clamped his lips so tightly that the color drained from them. “That’s not at all what I meant.”

“Of course not, seeing as I’m the no good that came of that particular affair.”

“I’m trying to warn you about something.”

“Then you’ve done your job. I’m warned. Just as I have been by everything you’ve taught me. And one day, you are going to stop giving me warnings and tell me the truth about what lies behind them. Clearly that’s not today.” She pushed herself around both of them. “We’ll be back later. Come on, Diverus.” At least the boy had the decency to avert his eyes from Soter as he made his more tentative exit behind her.

Soter didn’t watch them go. He didn’t have to. He already knew what was developing between them, even if they still didn’t admit to it. From the moment the gods had deposited her in that Dragon Bowl, Diverus all but mooned over her, and her quick defense now only proved to Soter that there was partiality on her side of it as well. It was their secret that wasn’t a secret to anyone with eyes. He suspected that even Orinda had worked out why Diverus had been brought home drunk.

Fine, then, let them have their secret for the moment. Let them gambol about Colemaigne, collecting stories and kissing in alleys while he worried for their safety. He hadn’t told them the truth, either, about why he wasn’t besotted, why he hardly slept; but to explain his fear to them he would have had to tell them everything, including more about that no good union of Bardsham and her mother. There was no piece of it he could tell and not be forced into revealing all. That was Leodora, cut from the same cloth as her mother—not about to let anything go without an answer.

What they were up to could keep for now. He would find a way to address the problem of Diverus later—hire someone to get rid of him if no other methods worked. More pressing now was the very real need to come up with an excuse for leaving Colemaigne before history repeated itself, which it would surely do if, as Orinda and the governor claimed, they were drawing an audience now from four spans in either direction. Word was spreading here faster than it had on the other spans, faster even than it had in Bardsham’s time. Soon her name would stretch the length of this spiral, and only the gods knew how far that was, how many spans. Sooner or later, word would reach the one person who mustn’t hear of her. He feared that had already happened, and that death was on its way even now. You’ll be found, the Coral Man had told him in his dream on Hyakiyako as a tentacle gripped his arm, and he suspected that statement would come back to haunt him wherever they went, no matter how many times he put them in a boat and sailed to another strand of spans, until he’d sailed them around the world and back again. It wouldn’t matter. It was Fate the Coral Man had warned of. Inescapable Fate.

He looked at the fading mark on his wrist, the round red suction scar that told him it had been no dream, no illusion. It was a reminder ensuring that he didn’t change his mind.

Soter hardly dared drink more than a cup anymore, certain that if he did that damned coral monster would return to gloat as it twisted his entrails with terror. If it was Bardsham’s shade, then that shade was far crueler than its corporeal self had ever been. He mustn’t lose control, because if he did that Destroyer would strike again. Destroyer—it certainly suited. Soter’s whole life and livelihood had been destroyed.

He glanced out the door. “If he finds you, you’ll wish those fishing folk in Tenikemac had drowned you,” he said to the long-gone Leodora. “And so will I.”

From there, Soter wandered through the darkened theater like a lost man, along the halls and then out onto the stage, where he strode boldy into the booth. He lifted the puppets out of one undaya case, pulled up the false bottom, and stood the case on end. Then he dragged Leodora’s stool before it and sat down.

“Go on, then,” he told the Coral Man. “Come out, emerge, manifest right here. Stride out of your box and scare me. Threaten me with doom.” The figure did nothing, lifeless, all but faceless. Soter finally let go of his lingering terror. “No, I thought not, not when I’m watching, you can’t. You know you can’t scare me now, not compared with the fate that looms out there across the water. Why, you bastard? Why did she have to inherit your skill? Why could she not have been clumsy and stupid? Want me to admit that I thought I could minimize the attention she would get? Fine, I admit it. And it’s not even enough that she’s skillful, she has to be the favorite of the gods. Does nobody want her to live a long life? They’ll come, you fool, the same as they did for you and that red-haired witch of yours. And this time, he’ll obliterate this span, turn it into one of his sterile palaces, and she’ll end up joining her mother in whatever abyss she’s been consigned to. So come on, burst into being again and terrorize me, if you’ve anything left at all.”

The Coral Man didn’t move. It was as lifeless as rock, and nothing took shape in the darkness of the booth. Soter got up. “I’ll go and sleep now, I think. Come and invade there, if you like, show up when I’m helpless to resist you. I’m tired of the burden of guilt. I’m tired of being responsible for your absence, and for the witch, too. It was me you should have confided in. Who’d been with you longer? Who cared for you? If you’d just given her up . . .”

There was no more to say. He could not make history revise itself. And anyway, the coral figure wasn’t going to do anything, was it? He’d jettisoned Leandra’s ghost on Bouyan, and now he would deny this one, too, its assaults upon him. The threats it had leveled in the past would not have a hold any longer. It was a piece of detritus, a shape fashioned by dead sea creatures. If anything of Bardsham lingered beneath that crusted surface, it didn’t matter. Bardsham wasn’t the danger to him. Bardsham had done his damage already, long ago, to himself, to them all.

“And you stop haunting your daughter at night, too,” he added. “It’s enough that you inveigled your way into her life just so you could travel the spans one more time on her back. Leave the living alone, you chalky wretch. You hear me? Leave us alone!”

The figure stood as if at attention as Soter exited the booth. He glanced at it once more, then drew the cloth closed and stormed into the wings.