Now even Tasslehoff looked worried.
Daev pointed at the bare stage. “Kela, paint the backdrop. Samael, help me with the sets and the costumes. We’ll do the effects last. Frenni, your job is to print the book, bind it, and run it from house to house.”
Samael shook his head, frowning. “But I want to help print-”
“Frenni’s a specialist,” Daev assured Samael. “No more proofing,” he added firmly.
“He can do the book,” said Frenni. “I could work on the special effects!”
“Finish the book, Frenni, and you can help with the special effects. Now go.” Daev tugged on Samael’s sleeve, dragging him off to work.
The alchemist resisted. “Can’t I just proof it one more time?”
“Name of the gods, let it go. It will be fine.” Daev said with only a hint of bitterness, “I’m sure that, like everything you do, it will be wonderful and perfect.” He called back to Frenni with more asperity than was necessary, “Set up the print trays on the table and start running copies. Double time.”
“All right,” Frenni said sulkily. He watched the humans leave to work on the scenery.
“They don’t appreciate my hidden talents,” he muttered as he moved the trays of print and stacked them on the table. “I may not write, but I can sure improvise. You want a dragon? I can do a dragon.” He spun around, ducking and weaving from an invisible dragon, and set another tray down.
“You want magic? I can do magic-which is in very short supply nowadays.” He set one of the trays on the end of his hoopak and spun the tray, walking with it to the table. As the tray spun and wobbled, he slid it dexterously on top of the others.
Carrying the last tray, he kept up the griping. “Double time he wants, double time he’ll get. All the more time for special effects later on.” He wasn’t watching where he was going, tripped on a tree root and fell sprawling against the table. All eight trays of set pages slid down, letters and words raining down like stones in an avalanche.
Frenni dusted himself off and looked in dismay at the mess. The set pages had gaps interspersed throughout, ingredients and instructions and sometimes titles missing.
He thought of what the others would say when he told them what happened and sighed. Some days working with humans just wasn’t as much fun as he’d thought.
Scene 4. A Road at Night
Sharmaen: I fear my father’s thunder.
Amandor: Gentle sweet,
his love is tropical, his anger chill,
Such men mix hot and cold; their troubled air
will cloud and draw their lightning. Fear them not,
Saving your terror for the icy men
Loveless, unsummered with a wintry heart.
A hand crawled desperately on the road dust, as though trying to escape the body attached to it. The pulse throbbed visibly in the wrist.
The crawling slowed-became intermittent-and the hand twisted upside down, fingers quivering in the air like the legs of a dying spider.
Tulaen regarded the hand with as close to regret as he would ever show. “If only you had known more,” he said to the corpse. “You could have said so much more. You might have lasted till morning.”
He stood, the cold night wind stirring his beard. Tulaen slept very little.
“You traded a haying wagon to a man, a kender, and a girl on the road. They gave you a stack of books. You said the girl sketched you.” He tugged at his beard, thinking. “I wonder, now-does she sketch the pictures for the books?”
He looked at the blood trail behind the corpse. It was three times the length of the body and could have been so much more. “Well, there’s no use asking you. At least you knew where they were going.”
While waiting until morning, he tied a log to a rope and slung it from a low hanging limb. He set it spinning in the faint light and chopped it with his broadsword, ducking with practiced ease. For the next log he put a patch over one eye and led with his left. For the last he tied his feet together, and still the spinning log never hit him.
By dawn he had an impressive pile of splintery tinder and kindling. He cooked a quick breakfast and began his walk toward Xak Faoleen.
Scene 5. A Stage, in Xak Faoleen
Sharmaen: Crisis pursues, and crisis we pursue Mid-scene in madness, endings overdue.
The stage was nothing but boards on sawhorses, with stairs at either side and a second level to stand in for hills and balcony scenes. The theater was row on row of planks on upright logs. The backdrop was painted cloth-beautifully painted by Kela, a neighborhood scene, but only cloth and paint nonetheless. The few pieces of scenery-suitably minimalist-were some upright crenellated boards for a castle, three torches in stands for a hallway by night, and two standing branches for a wood.
The whole effect, Daev reflected, was much like magic must have been. Already they felt the distance, like an invisible wall, between the world of the actors and that of the audience.
Daev, Samael, and Kela had toiled until nearly dawn, when the kender stumbled up, panting, and announced that he had delivered the last of the books to the prepaid customers. His face showed disappointment that most of the work was done, the special effects all prepared. But after a day and a night of steady work, they had finished and were ready to face a waiting audience.
Frenni stepped onstage. Actually he shuffled, hampered by wearing a bass drum, a light drum, cymbals, a hunting horn, and a hand-cranked bullroarer, which made a noise like a spinning hoopak. Daev had been quick to see the comic possibilities of strapping every available musical instrument to a kender and watching him try to play them all at the same time.
After Frenni performed the overture, to great applause, the rest of the cast marched on and bowed.
Daev kept his expression but frowned inwardly. Something was off about the applause. The rhythms were sporadic, and some audience members were tapping lightly while others were pounding their fists on the benches.
The kender stepped back. Daev moved forward, arms raised, and spoke the prologue.
He made eye contact with the audience and faltered. They looked entirely normal until Daev looked closely at their eyes.
Some of them did look fascinated. Some of them were leering at everything, including the dog and the kender. Some of them looked furiously angry, deeply insulted by a play that hadn’t been performed yet. Some were quite clearly already in love, and one person was in tears for a tragedy that wasn’t on the bill.
Elayna, dead center in the front row, looked gorgeous but also strangely imperious. When approached by admirers-and far too many of the men who had purchased love potions felt free to approach her while the performance was on-she came dangerously close to striking them.
Daev finished the prologue, stepping back before bowing, and led the others backstage. Kela saw his face and said, “Is something wrong?”
“Your book, Samael,” he said quietly. “Perhaps I should have let you proof it a fifth time.”
Frenni clanked up, shrugging out of the band gear noisily. “It’s a best-seller. I only have one copy left,” he said proudly.
Samael opened it and froze. “Wrong font?” Frenni asked worriedly.
“No, no-but. .” Samael thumbed back and forth frantically. “These aren’t my recipes.”
“They are too,” Frenni said self-righteously. “Every word you wrote is in that book.”
Samael loomed over the kender. “Not in the order I wrote it.”
“Mostly in the order.”
Daev looked on interestedly. “What are the differences?”