Page 41 of Play of Shadows

The director smiled at me as he shouted, ‘Aye. Cleaning up after actors, running petty errands, being yelled at and– only on those rare occasions where pity overtakes my senses, mind you– playing a modest part here or there on the stage. You’ll eat with the crew before each performance and share the props room with the boy at night.’

There was a pause.

‘Five copper tears a week.’

‘A salary?’ Shoville shouted, incredulous. ‘You expect asalary?’

Her brick dropped to the ground and shattered at the director’s feet. A moment later she’d swung herself out onto a rusty drain pipe and slid down.

‘I’m an actor now,’ she informed Shoville. ‘A member of the esteemed Knights of the Curtain. You think players of our calibre perform for free?’

‘Why, you larcenous guttersnipe!’ Shoville began, but the rest us were roaring with laughter, Abastrini loudest of all.

He grabbed the director’s shoulder. ‘Take her five coppers from my salary, Hujo. I want her for my assistant.’

‘You’re not the star of the show any more,’ Shoville reminded him.

The drunken Veristor shrugged. ‘Doesn’t change my contract, which means you pay me whether I play the lead or stand at the back of the chorus farting all night.’

‘Actors!’ Shoville declared, and stormed off into the night. He was followed by Abastrini, leading the whole company in a rousing chorus as they made their way back to the tavern.

Beretto lingered a moment. ‘Here,’ he said, handing me a second gold jubilant he’d extracted from a groaning Lord of Laughter. ‘You’ve earned a bonus for your own bruises.’

I studied the coin, still baffled by the beautifully raised relief of the orchid on one side and the crest of Pertine on the other. ‘Something’s not right here, Beretto. Actors hired tocrippleother actors? Bands of thugs minting their own currency? The duke commissioning a play that can only hurt his already fragile reign? What does it all mean?’

‘It means, brother’– Beretto paused to raise the battered stein to his lips, found it empty and promptly hurled it at one of the stirring Grim Jesters, who moaned in response and slumped back to the cobbles– ‘that this city of ours may be in deeper shit than we ever imagined.’

I’d come to that conclusion myself. ‘Question is, what are the two of us going to do about it?’

The big man scratched at his beard. ‘Well, we’ve already beaten up enough actors for one night. There’s not much we can do about the Orchids, and I doubt Duke Monsegino’s of a mind to answer our questions. That leaves just one avenue of investigation.’

‘Which is?’

A thick forefinger poked me in the chest. ‘You.’

‘Me?’

‘What happened to you on stage tonight is almost certainly connected to why you fumbled the herald’s lines last week. There’s no point denying it any further, Damelas. You’re a Veristor.’

Until Beretto had said it out loud, I had been clinging to the faint– admittedlyveryfaint– hope that this was all some bizarre series of coincidences. But the memory of Ajelaine, standing on that cool, wet grass outside that fortress, the sound of her voice, the scent of her hair. . . I knew I– or at least some part of me– really had been there with her.

‘Come, brother,’ Beretto said, laying a heavy arm across my shoulder and leading me away from the theatre district, ‘let us investigate this wondrous gift of yours.’

‘How do we do that?’

Beretto grinned. ‘By consulting the sort of oracle to whom allwise men flock when seeking answers to life’s great mysteries. A naked woman.’

Chapter 19

The Divine Heraphina

Despite having lived in Jereste my entire life, not once had I crossed the infamous Ponta Mervigli until that night. Located in a part of town even more riven by violence and crime than where Beretto and I lived, the inaptly named Bridge of Marvels spanned a waterway that hadn’t existed for a hundred years or more.

The canal had dried up more than a century ago, leaving a wide channel whose only virtue was that it provided a vast swathe of theoretically unowned real estate. Instead of muddy waters, it was now a mile-long maze of dilapidated shacks and shops held together by desperation and whatever splintered wood, rusty metal and frayed rope its denizens had managed to scrounge. Property in Jereste was prohibitively expensive, but since by law no one could own a waterway, a strange, endless bazaar had been allowed to spread along the erstwhile watercourse like a fungus.

And thanks to some obscure law to do with dawn duels fought across them, bridges were by tradition consideredregia negate, or free from legal oversight. And as no magistrate had ever envisioned the need for regulations, nothing had prevented a bridge no longer over water being converted into a combinationbar, brothel, drug den and– if Beretto was to be believed– the place where one could find arcane answers only a true Bardatti could provide.

‘A stripper?’ I demanded, shouting over the raucous revelry, boisterous applause and occasional outbreak of drunken fistfights filling the crowded common room of the infamous Tavern-On-The-Ponta. ‘You brought me to astripper?’

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