The applause was deafening.
The show paused for intermission. The audience would be mingling in the gigantic foyer of marble and gilt, sipping drinks and discussing the Specter twins as a dance troupe undulated on the stage to music played by minstrels.
We were not there.
Taliesin’s stagehands cleared the props away, and the three of us and Oli labored to move our gimmicks into their proper places. In actuality we should have had another stagehand or two, but Maske did not want to hire anyone he did not trust.
We stepped back once everything was in place, panting with effort. It was almost time.
Maske cleared his throat. “No matter the outcome, I want to thank you. Without you, I’d still be moldering in that little theatre. If I lose this time, I’ll know I gave it my all, and had the best help possible.” He sniffed. “But Lord and Lady Above, I really want to win.”
He drew us into a hug in a rare gesture of physical affection. I returned the hug fiercely. Anisa was in my pocket. Just in case.
Christopher Aspall came through, folding his hands in front of him. “The show will begin in five minutes. I wanted to tell you personally.” He clasped hands with Maske. “It will be a privilege to see your illusions on stage once again.” His face twitched in the semblance of a smile.
“Thank you, Mr Aspall,” Maske said in his stage voice, deep and mysterious. “We will endeavor to entertain you as best we can.”
And then it was our turn.
We took our places and the curtains fell away.
I flitted behind the scenes as the puppeteer pulling the strings of the hidden wires and contraptions. Oli helped me when needed, and he proved to be an apt assistant. I gave him a smile and he nodded back, straight-faced and anxious.
“Maybe I can change callings, be a full-time stagehand, eh?” Oli said, tying a knot tight around a belaying pin.
“If we win, maybe.”
He shook my hand. I smiled and nodded my thanks as the show began.
Like the Specter twins, we created a story to twine the acts together. And, through the lens of theatre, it was Maske’s tale. Drystan, who went by the stage name of Amon Ayu, played the young magician studying to be a scientist who stumbled upon a book of magic. After performing a brief, furious flurry of legerdemain, with scarves pulled from sleeves and a dove flying from beneath his coattails as it had in my vision at Twisting the Aces, the audience laughed at his unabashed surprise and delight at this new magic.
He learned more, and the tricks grew more elaborate. He set out to impress a lady magician, Cyan, who went by the stage name of Madame Damselfly. At first, they flirted through magic. I smiled to myself as I watched them from behind stage. The illusions were Maske’s, but we had all helped with the storyline. He gave her a bouquet of flowers from thin air, which she turned into a shower of glitter and confetti. He levitated her above his head, with me above stage in the gridiron manipulating wires, and she tilted her head down for a kiss.
That bit I didn’t like so much.
Reaching toward Cyan smoothed my doubts. Cyan was not even concentrating on the kiss. She was thinking about the next trick and the way she’d have to move
just
so to get it perfectly. In that brief brush of her mind, I felt the heat from the lamps and the stares of countless pairs of eyes. I lingered within her mind, as it was the closest as I would get to the stage that night. Cyan knew I was there, and it was as though she wrapped an arm around me, drawing me close to watch the show.
When Drystan lowered her, he gave her another kiss on the cheek, and when he moved away a small jewel remained where his lips had rested. Cyan planted the jewel into a pot and a tree grew from it before the audience’s very eyes, which bore tiny apples. She cut one in half and gave him back his jewel from the core to more applause. The Jeweled Arbor was one of my favorite tricks – another perfect blend of science, magic, and story to enchant the audience.
Drystan became more powerful. His illusions grew darker. He disappeared into the spirit cabinet and bats flew out of the empty interior when Cyan went to look for him. He appeared in the audience instead, striding back onto the stage.
He needed more power. Cyan produced a little mechanical butterfly and it fluttered over to catch his attention. Drystan set it aside and turned back to his books.
“Am I not enough?” she asked.
He ignored her. The answer was clear.
Cyan deflated, moping in a corner, causing lights of candles to extinguish and rekindle.
After a short time, Madame Damselfly packed her bags and left. It was only after that the magician realized how much he loved her. He tried to call her back, with and without magic. She resisted him at every turn, and then with sleight of hand showed him a new, very large engagement ring. She turned to leave and he grabbed her. Cyan struck him. Drystan yelled and took out a gun and fired at her, point blank. The same trick as the Taliesin twins, but in a different context. Cyan paused, almost as if she’d been struck, and then she spat the bullet from her mouth, which skittered to the floor. She claimed she would never see him again. After she left, a flurry of black crow feathers floated through the air, settling silently on the stage.
The light dimmed and darkened. The magician regretted his actions. He held his head in his hands. The orchestra beneath the stage whined. But the loss of his love could not deter him. To prove he was the master of magic, he raised the ghost of a Chimaera.
It had not been easy. Behind a drawn curtain, Oli and I raised the clear plate glass, angling it toward the audience. Down below the stage was a smaller level, like an extra orchestra pit. Down there, all was dark, with Oli swathed head to toe in black velvet. The only objects in the second stage were a moving platform, angled so that a figure standing on it would tilt at the same angle as the mirror, and an oxyhydrogen spotlight that would illuminate the ghostly apparition.
I jumped down and threw the costume of a patched and ragged coat over my black clothes and stuck a pair of antlers on my head. I stood on a platform brandishing a curved prop sword. Oli made some last minute adjustments before lighting the oxyhydrogen spotlight so my reflection showed on the stage. I went through the rehearsed feints and stints so that it looked like Drystan fought a Chimaera ghost. He vanquished me and I fell to the floor and Oli dimmed the light so I faded from view.
Once it was safe, I sat up and took the antlers and costume off and let out a tentative sigh of relief. We were almost done, and so far all had gone according to plan.
I couldn’t help but smile ruefully as well. In the circus, I had dressed as a girl for the pantomime, and nobody knew, save Drystan, that I had actually spent the first sixteen years of my life as a girl. Now, I played a Chimaera ghost, and none of the audience knew that I was sort-of Chimaera and hid a Phantom Damselfly in my pocket.
Drystan began the finale, saying he did not need Madame Damselfly and that he could create the love of his life.
“But can I do it?” he asked himself. “Is my magic strong enough?”
Just as in practice the other day, the gauze curtain behind him fluttered. Drystan pulled it away to reveal the automaton on the podium. The audience gasped and whispered. Through Cyan’s eyes, I looked up at the box where Doctor Pozzi sat with the Princess Royal. He leaned forward in his seat.
Drystan muttered and gestured as he began the “incantations” to bring the automaton to life. I looked around for Oli, as I didn’t see him under the stage and I wanted him around in case I needed help with the star trap. Cyan was changing hurriedly in a dressing room.
Micah
, I heard her say, frantic.
I think something’s happened to Oli. I can’t sense him. I can’t feel him!
What?
Go check on him. I sensed pain. Can’t get much more
–
too many people around. And something weird. My ability is fluctuating. I can only reach you because I’m “shouting” as loud as I can.
I heard footsteps behind stage.
I’ll check
, I said, but I didn’t know if she heard me. Biting my lip, I guessed I had about ten minutes before I needed to be by the star trap. I sprinted behind the stage and then stopped. Oli lay sprawled across the floor, half-dragged behind a box of props. I heard a rustle of movement and crouched into a fighting stance.
A large man, bald and muscle-bound, crept toward the stage. I took a step and a floorboard creaked. The man stared at me. Distantly, I heard Cyan yelling in my mind. I rushed him.
The man grabbed me and threw me across the backstage as though I weighed no more than a doll. The back of my head exploded with pain. With a grunt, I rushed him again, dancing out of his reach and landing a punch into his kidneys. His breath left in a
whoosh
of pain but he stayed standing. “Was only meant to be one runt back here, not two,” he growled.
I darted out of his grasping arms and grabbed a nearby skein of rope. But I was too slow – he grabbed me and threw me again, harder. I hit the wall and slid down it, all my breath gone from my lungs. With a sickening lurch, I remembered Bil had thrown Aenea much the same way in the circus. I stayed still until he turned away. With painful slowness, I sat up. Knowing I had but moments, I scrabbled about desperately. My hands found a spare belaying pin, a long, rounded metal spike used to tie ropes to. I threw it at him with all my strength, hitting him on the back of the head. He fell with a thump. I panted, my ribs screaming with pain, but I felt a brief glow of triumph.
That glow faded when someone grabbed me from behind and then put their hands around my neck and
squeezed
. All the terror of Bil’s attack returned in a rush, and for a moment, I couldn’t move. I pretended to fight against the man, making my movements weaker, and then I went limp. The hands loosened. Slowly, I drew more air into my lungs and saw who had attacked me.
It was Pen Taliesin, and in his hand – a hand that had just strangled me – was an Eclipse, the Vestige artifact that would cause all other Vestige in the immediate vicinity to stop functioning. It would turn the automaton from the finale to a frozen statue.
I tried to rise, but my battered body wasn’t quick enough. At the movement, Taliesin craned his head toward mine, his lips pulled back from his mouth. I felt the snarl mirrored on my own features.
Gritting my teeth against the pain, I knocked Taliesin to the floor. If I hadn’t just been thrown across the room and half-throttled, it wouldn’t have been a fair fight. I was young and lithe, far stronger than I had a right to be, and he was so fragile he might as well have been made of old bone and dry leaves. But I hurt, and I was slower. He managed to give me a glancing blow across my cheek, his fingernails scratching my skin. But I pushed him from me as hard as I could. He unbalanced and the Eclipse tumbled from his gnarled hands. I scrabbled for it.
Though he was a weak ruin of a man, he was on Lerium. With a last burst of strength he punched me in the face. For a moment, the world around me wobbled, and he tried to grab the Eclipse. I recovered and wrestled him to the ground, using my entire bodyweight to keep him down.
“I won’t let him win,” Taliesin wheezed. “Even if he wins today, I’ll do everything in my power to make him suffer. He ruined my life. He ruined me!”
“And you ruined his life, too. You were both stupid and hurt each other, but now let it go.”
His hand fumbled and he grasped the Eclipse again. “I’ll make him sorry.”
“Not today, Taliesin,” I said, rapping his head smartly against the floor. Power flooded through me, heady and strong, as I held him down. He could not fight back. From far away I could tell that Cyan had “heard” what was happening. Her presence batted at the edges of my consciousness, but I pushed her away.
Taliesin glared at me with his yellowed eyes, his breath smelling of decay and the cloying spice of Lerium. And then the leer subsided and he was only a pathetic man gasping for breath, his face purpling. I realized how easy it would be to kill him. To make sure he never tried to harm Maske. Immediately, I skittered away from that thought, horror growing within me. Was that my own thought, my own bloodlust, or was it Anisa’s emotions feeding into mine?
With a shaking breath, I forced my fingers to loosen. Taliesin took great, shuddering gasps, his eyes rolling in his skull. With his henchman subdued and without the Eclipse, Taliesin was no threat. Not truly. We possessed the skill and the magic. Our chances of winning were as good as they could be. If we won and he still attempted to tamper with us, we had the Collective of Magic to petition to, and proof he had attempted to cheat. Taliesin had failed.
“Come on,” Taliesin rasped, a last plea. “Let me just press the button. I’ll pay you for it. Enough to set you up for life.”
“If you go now, I won’t tell everyone out there” – I jerked my head toward the audience – “what you tried to do. And your grandsons won’t need to know you didn’t think them talented enough to win on their own.”
His eyes widened.
I let him go and stepped back, bending down to clutch the Eclipse, never taking my eyes off of him.
“Get away,” I said, my voice hard and sharp. He stumbled off the stage, barely able to walk without his cane.
I watched him go. The henchman had awoken, skulking off from backstage. He paused and turned, meeting my angry eyes, taking in the Eclipse in my hand. He must have thought it was a weapon, for he held up his hands.
“You go too, or I’ll call the policiers after the show,” I bluffed. Cyan whispered his name in my mind. “I know your name, Jarek Lutier. And where you live. Trouble me again and you’ll regret it.”
“How do you know my name?” he asked, blood draining from his face.
“I know more than you could ever guess. Go.”