Page 37 of Play of Shadows

Jario looked dubious, but he dipped his head before panting his way back up the aisle to write out more tickets.

Shoville turned to me. ‘Well, lad, you certainly left an impression on the great Houses of Pertine. What took place within these walls tonight will be the talk of the town within the hour.’ He patted my shoulder, adding cheerfully, ‘By every saint and every devil, I pray you have something equally compelling for us tomorrow.’

‘Don’t suppose there’s any chance we’ll be getting a proper script, then?’ Teo asked, still visibly irritated at having to improvise the guard role that had been thrust on him in the midst of my. . . what? Vision? Seizure?

He stalked over to me, still scowling as he asked, ‘Or are you just going to make it up as you go along again, leaving the rest of us looking like fools trying to catch up?’

‘Ah, stifle your whingeing,’ Beretto boomed. He turned to the rest of the cast, glowing with pride. ‘Brothers and sisters,thatwas acting: no script to hide behind, no endless rehearsals that reduce us to moving like gears in a clock. I swear, for an instant it was as if we were really there, upon the edge of that forest in the middle of nowhere.’

‘It was outside a fortress,’ I said absently.

‘Even better!’ Beretto thumped me on the back. ‘Perhaps we’ll take the actioninsidethis fortress of yours tomorrow, yes? Or a battle scene– swords drawn, sides chosen, as glorious love and tragic destiny hang in the balance?’

‘I. . . I don’t know. I had no idea what I was doing,’ I confessed, unwilling to deceive the cast and crew whose lives I’d thrown into chaos. ‘Honestly, I’ve no inkling what happens next.’

‘Perfect.’ Beretto raised his arms and bellowed, ‘Knights of the Curtain: together we came, united we fought, as one we triumphed– so now let’s all get fucking drunk!’

Cheers of approval rose up from the cast, even the perpetually sullen Teo. Hands clapped backs and pinched backsides, bawdy suggestions were made– and accepted– as the Knights of the Curtain strode from the theatre, heads high, singing as if they were warriors fresh from the battlefield rather than penny players headed for the nearest tavern.

No one noticed that I had stayed behind.

Can this really be the same stage where I stepped into another world entirely, as real as this one, where a woman named Ajelaine looked upon me with such adoration as I’d never imagined possible?

Once word spread of my performance, the citizens of Jereste would demand to know what other lies filled their history books.If Prince Pierzi wasn’t the hero the legends made him out to be, what did that say about the dukes whose right to sit the throne owed to a now-suspect bloodline? What did it say about his descendant, Firan Monsegino, the man who’d commanded this new play and yet could lose his crown over it?

What game are you playing, your Grace?

The thud of heavy footsteps drew my gaze and I realised too late that one member of the cast remained, waiting in the shadows of the curtains. The feral look in his heavy-lidded eyes suggested he’d already been drinking heavily and, I suspected, contemplating the cause of his decline in status.

‘My Lord Abastrini,’ I mumbled, trying to back away but already up against one of the prop trees, ‘truly, I never meant for any of this—’

Before I could proceed further with my awkward apology, Abastrini’s meaty fingers grabbed me by the collar and lifted me until I was on the tips of my toes.

‘Please, Abastrini, can we not discuss this like civil—?’

But the actor held me there a second longer in silence, then, without a word, let me drop. He strode off the stage and out of the theatre.

I was reaching up a hand to adjust my collar when my fingers brushed the surface of something hard and metallic– something that hadn’t been there before: a tiny silver actor’s mask with narrowed eyes and a mouth shaped like a key.

Chapter 18

The Actors’ Brawl

Midnight had come and gone by the time I finally stumbled out the stage door of the Operato Belleza. The rest of the Knights of the Curtain were long gone, and like an idiot, I’d completely forgotten the centuries-old tradition followed by rival companies when an actor wins a role to which they deem him unworthy.

‘Saint Forza-who-strikes-a-blow!’ I swore as the door latched behind me.

There had to be a hundred actors crowding the alley. Fully half the Lords of Laughter had shown up to deliver the ritual beating, along with almost the entire Fellowship of Grim Jesters. The Red Masques, a tiny company with hardly more than half a dozen players– and no prospects whatsoever of holding dominion over a theatre as grand as the Operato Belleza– had come in force, wearing the outmoded lacquer masks portraying the gods and devils from their old-fashioned mythic stage plays.

‘Ill-met by moonlight, Laredo,’ I called out to one of them. ‘Did you really think I wouldn’t recognise you beneath that silly mask of Argentus when you were at my door not three weeks ago, begging a meal and a bed for the night after your show got cancelled.’

The big-bellied brute, his face hidden beneath the grinning, avaricious features of the God of Coin, spun what looked suspiciously like a sock filled with stones round and round. ‘That was before you made yourself famous slandering the city’s most beloved hero and embarrassing the rest of us. So the question now is, will anyone recogniseyouafter we’re done?’

‘Thought you could get away with pretending to be a Veristor, did you?’ asked Pink Mol, leader of the Grim Jesters. The voluminous woman had earned her name from the colour of the ‘magical’ make-up she’d bought from a travelling pedlar which had, in what everyone agreed was a rather magical way, stained her cheeks a permanent bright rosy pink.

‘Look at him, wearin’ that Veristor’s mark on his collar,’ said Gin Bruti of the Lords of Laughter, pounding a beefy fist into his palm. At nearly seven feet tall and wide as a horse cart, he wasn’t so much a beast of a man as just a beast. ‘The Bardatti got rules about posing as one of the sacred actors. Them as break ’em gotta pay.’

Murmurs of assent followed his verdict, but a small voice piped up to offer a dangerously cavalier dissent. ‘Like any of you lot would recognise a true Bardatti if they were bashing your brains in with a lute.’

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