Boy decided to watch the grand finale from the front of the theater, but not with the audience. He had a special place, and he wanted to be as far away as he could when Valerian came offstage.
He made his way past the painted canvas scenery drops and ropes and wires that cluttered the world just beyond the view of the public, pushing past hands and other performers. Briefly, he glanced at Snake-girl, who sat braiding her hair in a corner, then rounded a corner and bumped straight into someone.
It was Willow, the girl who helped Madame Beauchance, a rather fat singer, into her costumes. Willow was just like her name, thin and wan. Madame had joined the theater about a year ago, and Willow had immediately been made her servant. Boy had only spoken to Willow properly once, though. Madame had been screaming for hot water in her dressing room, and Boy had given Willow a freshly boiled jug he was taking to Valerian. Afterward he didn’t know why he’d done it, and he’d got in trouble with Valerian over it too.
“Can’t you look where you’re going?” Willow said, then saw who it was.
“Oh, it’s you,” she added, and rushed past before Boy could say anything. Fetching something for Madame, no doubt. Her mistress was difficult, though nothing like Valerian was to him. No one was like Valerian.
“Sorry,” said Boy, but she had gone.
Boy moved on. He had other things to worry about. He knew something was going on. Something with his master. Valerian had always been erratic, sour-tempered and unpredictable. Violent.
Now he was these things, but something else as well that Boy had never seen before. He couldn’t quite put it into words, but if he had really thought about it he might have realized that Valerian was preoccupied. Worried. Maybe even scared. But it would never have occurred to Boy that Valerian could be scared. It was Boy who did the being scared and the worrying-always waiting to get a hiding for any slight mistake he made.
He headed for the stairs, where a group of musicians blocked the way.
“You all done for tonight, Boy?” asked the violinist, an oldish man with a bent nose.
Boy didn’t answer, but forced a smile and squeezed past.
“Poor monkey,” he heard another of them say as he made his way to the secret gallery in the “gods” above the highest row of boxes. A tiny staircase led almost up to the roof space and opened onto a tiny corridor. He wasn’t really allowed in the box. No one was. It was a secret place that only Korp, the director of the Great Theater, was supposed to know about, though in fact everyone knew it was there.
The door was locked, but Boy took a piece of metal from his pocket and flicked the three tumblers of the lock in no time at all. He had learned one or two things from Valerian in their time together. In fact, apart from what he’d picked up living on the streets, most of what Boy knew about anything had been taught him by Valerian.
He dropped down the couple of feet into the box. There was the little stool covered in red velvet and the small hollow table inside which Boy knew was a bottle of the director’s favorite schnapps. In the front of the box was a small window. Boy carefully lifted the blind that covered the glassless hole, and peered forward. The glow from the footlights sparkled in his eyes.
Boy knew a lot about Valerian’s tricks. He helped perform many of them and helped assemble others. But the grand finale was something very different. So spectacular was this illusion that Valerian was known throughout the whole City for it. It was probably for this trick alone that the Great Theater was still in business.
The theater lay in the heart of what had once been the most glamorous part of the City, the Arts Quarter, now fallen into decadence and ruin. The other acts that performed there were by and large terrible. The crowds would eat and drink and talk and laugh throughout the evening, paying little or no attention to what passed onstage. They had come for one thing: the Fairyland Vanishing Illusion. Many came night after night. Others, new arrivals in town, travelers from distant parts, were about to see it for the first time.
Boy knew nothing of the workings of this trick. He had seen it a thousand times, maybe more, and still marveled every time. He supposed that it was too valuable, too extraordinary or too complicated for Valerian to tell anyone how it worked.
By the time Boy got up to the box, Valerian was already well into the piece. Boy craned his neck so that his nose was projecting a little through the view hole.
The Illusion featured a short and frankly stupid play about a drunkard who stumbles across a gathering of pixies dancing on the mountainside. They disappear back to fairyland, but the man overhears their secret words and follows them. He captures one of the little people and brings him back to the human world, determined to make his fortune with the fairy.
Valerian was reaching the climax of the show. He moved to the mouth of a cabinet built into a tree trunk, stage right. Stage left was an identical affair. He was acting without joy or passion. He knew he didn’t even have to try to inject any excitement into the audience. They were already beside themselves with anticipation.
Boy watched him carefully. Something was wrong- Valerian seemed even more uninterested than usual. He was impatient, eager to get it done with. A note had been delivered to Valerian just before the show. Did his strange mood have anything to do with that? Valerian had grown somber as he’d read.
Onstage, Valerian spoke the lines as he had many times before.
“What did those little people say?” he asked, staring at the ceiling, addressing no one in particular. “Aha! I have it!”
He stepped into the tree-trunk cabinet.
“Ho! And away to fairyland!”
And he vanished. No more than half a second later there was wisp of smoke from the second tree trunk and he reappeared, holding a tiny humanlike figure cupped in his hands. It seemed to be alive. It wriggled in his hands and you would swear you could hear a little voice coming from it. It appeared to be dressed in leaves and flowers. It could have been male or female, but it was certainly a fairy.
Then, just as Valerian, playing the drunkard, appeared to have achieved his goal, there was a double flash of lightning, for a split second the fairy seemed to grow to the size of a man and then both the fairy and Valerian vanished, back to fairyland.
The crowd erupted into huge cheers and shouts of delight.
Boy sat back on the red velvet stool and felt something dig into his back. He looked round and jumped out of his skin. Valerian sat behind him, glowering.
“You, Boy,” he said, “have let me down.”
2
“Name the five principles of Cavallo,” Valerian snapped.
They hurried through the dark streets of the City-the vast, ancient City that sprawled away into the darkness around them in all its rotting magnificence, a tangled mess of grand streets and vulgar alleys, spent and decrepit. Fat houses squatted on either side of them like wild animals lurking in the gloom.
The City. Once it had been the capital of a powerful empire, which now only existed in the peculiar mind of Frederick, the octagenarian Emperor, shut away somewhere behind the high walls of the Palace.
The Emperor’s warped memories were utterly unknown to Boy. His world began and ended with Valerian. As the two of them made their way along a particularly horrid street called Cat’s End, the midnight bells began to strike. The twenty-seventh of December had begun.
Valerian strode a pace ahead of Boy, but held his coattails to pull Boy half running, half stumbling along behind. And he was testing Boy in mind as well as body.
“Well?” he barked.
“Mystery,” Boy panted as they sped along. “Mystery and preparation and… sorry.”