Window Wall (15 page)

Cade knew, in his secret soul, that he was first amongst equals in Touchstone. But the notion that Rafe, Jeska, and Mieka were there only to do as he told them—

Kearney said it out loud. “The rest of Touchstone exists to serve
your
vision.”

He gave a short, cynical laugh. “I can just imagine how well that would play with them!”

“But it’s true. You’re the one with the ideas and the words, and the magic that makes it all into art.”

“I could do it just the same with any other glisker, fettler, and masquer, you mean?” He thought he was saying it just to see what Kearney would reply.

“Not
just
the same,” the nobleman said at once. “But perhaps it might be even more yours. If you didn’t have to do battle with them over every little thing …” He finished with a shrug.

But those jeering, sniping, shouting battles honed his ideas. Made them better. Made
him
better.

All the same … not having to fight over the wording of a speech, the intensity of a sensation, the scenery and pacing and emphasis and—

To work without Rafe? Without Jeska? Without Mieka?

Kearney was wrong. The rest of Touchstone didn’t exist solely to serve his work. They were an essential part of the work. Whenever he wrote, he kept in mind their talents, their strengths and limitations, their styles of stagecraft. He wrote
to
their gifts, and because those gifts were prodigious, they were in effect challenging him to make it better before they even heard about the piece. Simply put, he was writing for the best masquer, glisker, and fettler in Albeyn.

He tried for an instant to visualize others in their places—Sakary, for instance, as his fettler, or Lederris Daggering of the Crystal Sparks as his masquer—and shied back like a scalded cat.

Whatever their battles with each other, Touchstone was a thing greater than the four of them. They were each a part of something worth being part of, as Mieka had said years ago. Or as Cayden had phrased it in “Doorways”:
This life, and none other.

* * *

C
ade saw at once that there were no ladies in the audience at Fliting Hall for the Continental group’s performance. Touchstone had walked over with the Shadowshapers, and as they found their seats, he nudged Sakary with an elbow and gestured round. Sakary whispered to Chat, who leaned over and murmured, “Women aren’t allowed in their theaters, so I’d be betting they refused to perform if women were present tonight. They’ve no Mieka Windthistle to overset their boring old traditions.”

“Gods in Glory,” Cade whispered back, “don’t mention that anywhere near him!”

“Oh, no fear of it, old thing,” Mieka said at his other side. “Enlightening them would mean another trip on a ship with a yark-bucket slung round me neck!”

“By the bye,” Chat said, “I have the answer to our puzzlement over who exactly owns the Shadowstone Inn. I asked the Human couple about it, and he said they were hired about thirty years ago, and the ones who had the pleasure of the place before them had been there at least forty years. Mistress Luta is indeed the owner.”

Sakary turned to his partner with a frown. “But why does she need someone to pretend otherwise?”

“Who knows why a Troll does anything?” Chat countered.

“How old is Mistress Mirdley?” Mieka asked suddenly.

“It’s awfully bad form to inquire as to a woman’s age,” Cade chided with a wink.

Somebody two rows ahead of them turned with a terrible scowl, and was about to reprimand them for making noise when everyone hurried to stand for the arrival of King Meredan. He was accompanied by Prince Ashgar and Archduke Cyed Henick and selections from their assorted retinues. Cade saw his father’s gaze find and dismiss him as smoothly as if he hadn’t been recognized at all, and felt his lips twist wryly with the thought of sending Zekien Silversun a gift in gratitude for so reliably ignoring him.

The King planted his plump posterior in the chair specially placed for him in the exact center of the front row. Everybody else sat down. The curtains slowly opened, and the play began.

The basics were easy, and required no words. The lead character was a learned man, his learning signaled by the setting, which was a library thick with books (shelves and volumes painted on canvas; not a bad attempt, Cade thought, but not all that convincing, either). He paced the stage, lighting candles and drawing chalk patterns on the floor. Soon enough, with a clap of thunder (Cade grinned to himself, recalling Chat’s story of stolen thunder), a being appeared from a truly amateurish gout of smoke.

So far, so boring. All this masquer had to work with was the physical appearance of the being, identification by way of costume: red robes swirling round a very tall and thin body, red close-fitting hood shadowing the face, and a three-tined hayfork. A theater group in Albeyn would have added noxious smells and a tang of fear, the better to indicate that this was Mallecho, a spirit bent on malicious mischief.

Evidently someone had taught the players enough words to get the salient points across, for Mallecho asked in perfectly understandable Albeyni, “Who summons me?”

“I am Vaustas,” replied the scholar, “and I want all goods of the world!”

Now, this could be interpreted as wanting nothing but good
for
the world, or as a desire to possess all the good things the world could offer. It was only when Mallecho answered, “All riches are yours!” that the meaning became clear.

Cade would have done it with conjurings onstage—Mallecho summoning up gold coins stacked halfway to the ceiling, a score of beautiful women, a dozen barrels of fine wine, and so on—to which Vaustas would have cried, “Yes!”

But these players had no magic, and very few Albeyni words.

“How long?” asked Vaustas. And Mallecho held up one hand, fingers spread. “More!” cried Vaustas; the other hand, to make ten. “More!” Both hands fisted and opened again: twenty. Eager and greedy, Vaustas shouted, “More!” but this time only the left hand was held up. “More!”—and the thumb curled into the palm. Vaustas was evidently no fool; he nodded, and Mallecho drew a scroll from inside his robes, and Vaustas signed it in his own blood. It was a nice little trick, Cade thought, with the masquer pretending to prick his own thumb and let the “blood” drip into a bowl which was then used as an inkwell; the drizzle of red liquid came from a vial hidden up his sleeve.

A skeletal finger pointing at Vaustas, Mallecho cried out, “Now mine!” and the stage went dark.

The audience shifted restlessly. This was, of course, nothing like what they were used to. Neither was the next bit of stagecraft, which Cade appreciated for its imagination in getting round limitations. The lights went up again, directed specifically to what looked like a large, rectangular painting in the middle of the stage. In Albeyn, painters who used magic—such as the one who’d done the mural on the wall of the Kiral Kellari—could make the scene change with a spell. Having no such ability, this scene changed with the turning of sections of the painting. Eight panels, when locked together, gave at first a rendering of a large, fine brick house; then an interior of silk furnishings and beautiful carpets, gold fittings and a table laden with delicacies, at which Vaustas sat enjoying his meal. Finally there was a landscape of a gray castle on a green hill, with black tiles roofing its many graceful towers.

Gods, how easy it would have been for him and Mieka to do so much more! He pitied these players the inadequacies of their craft.

Darkness again, and the sound of the changeable painting being rolled away out of sight. Someone in the audience snorted scornfully. Light came gradually to the stage this time, in a pretty demonstration of a skill with lanterns no group in Albeyn would ever need. The scene was the interior of the gray castle, walls covered in mounted shields and tapestries, with a wide, frost-rimed window to the left. Three people were now onstage: Vaustas, and a man and woman finely dressed in yellow velvet and white fur cloaks, with small coronets to indicate noble status. The woman pouted and sulked; the man gestured to the iced over window. The woman pulled the fur more closely around her, shivering. Vaustas smiled, bowed to the lady, and waved a hand at the window. Cade bit his lip against laughter as one panel of painted scenery slid from the window to reveal a sunshine day “outside” and a view of green hills. It wasn’t the masquers’ fault that the frost window got stuck for a moment just at the bottom, and someone had to yank it down out of view.

Clumsy, clumsy
, Cade thought. Some of the audience thought so, too. There were sniggerings throughout Fliting Hall. Touchstone, or the Shadowshapers or the Crystal Sparks—or Hawk’s Claw or even Black fucking Lightning—would have done it all in a soundless instant, and added birdsong and a growing warmth inside the castle as well. Hells, it could all have been done in an exterior scene, a garden mayhap, where with one flick of a withie the snow would melt, the grass would turn lushly green, flowers would bloom, and fruit would burgeon on the trees. One obviously needed magic to simulate magic.

The lady went to the window and flung it open—there was another painting just beyond it, of the same blue skies and summertime glory. She clapped her hands with pleasure and threw off her fur cloak. The lord grinned and nodded like anything, and Vaustas folded his arms across his chest, smugly satisfied.

Now what?
Cade thought.
And what does any of it have to do with selling his soul to Mallecho for twenty-four years? And why twenty-four?

He came nearer than ever to laughing aloud as a grapevine came slowly into view. Where Mieka would have sent it sinuously twining round the window, the vine thickening and the grapes purpling to ripeness, all that happened here was somebody below and behind the window slid an artificial assemblage of leaves and bunches of grapes higher and higher.

Vaustas reached into his pocket and produced—flourished, actually, to make sure the audience saw them—a pair of gleaming silver sickles. He gave both to the lord, gesturing him over to where the lady caressed the vine leaves. When each held a sickle, Vaustas said, “Choose and cut grapes. But only when say I—when I
say
,” he corrected himself swiftly.

The lord and the lady, half-hidden now by the growing grapevine (which the masquers had not quite unnoticeably pulled around their necks and across their shoulders), selected bunches of grapes and positioned their silver sickles. Vaustas laughed softly and said “Now!” But before they could slice off the grapes, the “illusion” vanished (through the simple expedient of the person behind the wall yanking the fake plant down—the lady was nearly throttled when the vine was momentarily stuck around her neck) and it was seen that they were about to lop off each other’s noses.

“Illusion!” Vaustas cried, laughing uproariously as the pair flung away the sickles and backed hastily away from each other, the lady screaming in little gasps all the while. “All illusion! Magic is all illusion from which all evil comes!”

The lord snatched up his sickle and made for Vaustas with murder in his eyes. Vaustas only laughed louder, and fled stage right. Darkness again descended on the stage, and Cade wondered if this was the ending. Evidently not; Vaustas’s laughter kept echoing through Fliting Hall, until Cade began to worry for the masquer’s voice. There was a rustle of garments, and a single light illumined Mallecho in all his fiery red finery.

A huge clock appeared on one side of the stage, its hands moving to count off the first hour. On the other side was a large rectangular painting of a river meandering through green hills, an apple orchard nearby and tall mountains beyond. This scene’s outlines stayed the same through a series of other paintings, stacked like playing cards one behind the next: the apple tree in bloom, and then the fruit heavy on the boughs, and then the trees bare of both fruit and leaves, and then snow covering everything. As the hour hand moved, marking off the quarters, these four scenes kept succeeding each other.
Oh
, Cayden thought.
That’s why the twenty-four. Each hour is a year. Or something like that.

Vaustas walked onstage again, visibly older—gray in his hair, his posture a bit stooped. But his clothing was, if anything, even more luxurious, with many golden chains and the glisten of jewels at his neck and fingers and on the buckles of his shoes. Mallecho pointed to the clock, which showed barely a quarter of an hour left in the day, and then to the painting of winter.

“More—please!” Vaustas begged.

Mallecho laughed and brandished the parchment with Vaustas’s signature in blood. He flung a heavy black chain around the scholar’s shoulders and started towards the darkness to the left side of the stage, a darkness in which a single red light burned. The pathway to all the Hells? Probably.

All at once two people arrived stage right—the same masquers who had played lord and lady, but clothed this time in the blue and green of the Lord and the Lady. There had been no attempt to translate the words they and Mallecho flung back and forth; there was actually no need. They battled for Vaustas’s soul. What Cade would have done with flashes of light and wild imagery, they did with tone of voice and gesture. He had to admit it was effective.

Infuriated, Mallecho flung back his hood. As one, the audience gasped. In the tales of Albeyn, Mallecho was merely a very naughty Elf, a rascal and a troublemaker to be sure, but not really malevolent. On the Continent, evidently, he was no Elf at all. His height and especially the large pointed ears marked him as Fae.

Vaustas writhed on the floor, on his knees in penitence, hands reaching to the Lord and the Lady in their cool blue and green robes. Mallecho waved the parchment contract, shrieking incoherently. Stalemate.

Cade’s lip curled in derision as an entirely new character walked out from the wings. The other four froze in place as he took center stage, settled his black robes, and said in very careful Albeyni, “The bargain struck. Though twenty-four hours is as twenty-four years to a Fae, likewise a mere turn of the hourglass for a breed that counts life in centuries. And thus Vaustas was given over to the Fae for that length of time—a brief taste of Hell before the Lord and the Lady in their mercy claimed his soul for their own.”