I followed, head down, one hand touching the trailing fabric of her dress so I didn’t lose her in the throng, but we had gone only a few steps when a bell rang. Dahria hesitated and I almost walked into her, stepping back as the crowd began moving en masse. The performance was about to begin.
Dahria made one last push to reach the dowager, but we were swimming upstream. I got a look at the great lady as she drained her glass, looking flushed and slightly ill at ease in spite of her expansive smile, and then she was steaming into the auditorium.
Dahria scowled after her. “We’ll have to catch her between acts,” she said. “I have a feeling she’ll want to bask as publicly as possible.”
We took our seats in the center of the dress circle. As I massaged my throbbing feet as best I could through the cramped shoes, Dahria scanned the gilded hall and eventually located the dowager in a side box. She had muted the brilliance of her necklace still further, and I could no longer see it at all. Around us, those wearing luxorite jewelry were doing the same, closing tiny shutters around their pendants, placing earrings in cases or rotating finger rings till the stone could be placed safely in laps. When the gaslights were turned down, there were only a few pools of light that had to be hastily doused, and only one that required the intervention of a deferential but firm usher. When the stage was bathed only in the pearly glow of the gas-fueled footlights and the above-stage chandeliers, an orchestral prelude swelled from the pit. Then the warmer ambience of aging luxorite torches shone through directional lenses flooded the stage, and with the entrance of the actors, the opera began.
Dahria was only partly right. For all the spectacle; the lavish, spangled costumes; and the opulent glow of the performers, the performance was wooden, dull.
But the music!
Where Lani music is all heart and gut, this was head and soul, and it sounded like the voices of angels, barely within the realm of human possibility. It was high and carefully fitted together like the workings of a pocket watch, but it was also air and spirit and water, remote and beautiful so that tears started to my eyes because I knew that like all good and wonderful things, the sound would eventually stop. In that remote and unearthly music, I felt all that made me different from the people who now employed me, and I felt it like sorrow, like loss. Again, my thoughts went to Rahvey’s baby, to Berrit, and to Papa, and I had to dig my fingernails into my palms to keep from weeping.
So I was almost relieved when, after twenty minutes, Dahria nudged me with her leg. Up in the curtained box, the dowager had risen from her seat and seemed to be ducking out.
“Too much wine,” Dahria whispered.
I got hurriedly to my aching feet and, ignoring Dahria’s hissing protests, excused myself and pushed through a dozen pairs of outraged, well-dressed legs until I was in the aisle and making for the exit, leaving behind a ripple of indignant muttering.
It was strange to be in the lobby now that it was deserted, and with the lights dimmed the looming statues had a new air of menace. I moved to the stairs closest to where the dowager had been seated, pushing past the red velvet rope and climbing a flight of wide, carpeted stairs to the upper gallery. There was no evidence of movement, but there were signs to the LADIES’ FACILITIES. I followed them.
Another flight of steps, marble this time, and the sound of echoing movement ahead of me.
I moved lightly, trying to decide what I would do or say when I met the dowager. I could hardly play the society lady merely interested in the necklace, dressed as I was. I would need to be direct and trust that she would want to help solve the death of a Lani boy. It didn’t feel promising, and I hesitated on the stairs, catching the slightly fusty aroma of perfume in the stale air. Perhaps it would be better, less intrusive, if I didn’t corner her in the bathroom itself…?I dithered. Everything about the place and the people in it crowded in on me, made me feel like a rat in an elegant kitchen, or a siltroach frozen in the light of a lamp.
You do not belong here. You cannot do this.
I balled my fists and tried to think, and in that instant, I heard something from the restroom below, a kind of strangled gasp that was almost a cry.
My body took over. In three vaulting strides, I had reached the foot of the stairs and was bursting into the well-appointed sitting area, which gave on to the bathroom itself. There was no sign of anybody here, and I kept moving, slamming through the swinging door into a bright, white-tiled room of sinks and toilet stalls. One of the doors was wobbling on its hinges. On the floor beside it, purple-faced and wheezing, was the dowager, sprawled on her belly like a stricken rhino, panting, her eyes wide with shock and terror.
I grabbed hold of her and tried to roll her onto her back, but she was too heavy. I took her right arm and pulled till she shook off some of her paralysis and pushed herself over and up on one elbow. The pendant was gone, and the spot where it had hung at her throat was pink and inflamed.
“Came from above,” she managed, her eyes flashing back to the toilet stall with something like horror.