She felt a tremor in her resolve that frightened her but gave her hope at the same time. She had to wait for autumn. For the lock of a dead man’s hair. The book was breathing at the back of her head, at the back of her neck, even though she had locked it up in the rolltop desk in Caliph’s bedroom.
She shivered. Not from cold.
Tonight was the debut of a local writer’s opera that would run concurrently with Er Krue Alteirz, alternating weeks to finish out the season. The Herald had proclaimed it a stunning success for a first opera and avidly encouraged attendance. But then, the Murkbell Opera House owned part of the Herald and independent publications had been noticeably less flattering.
The Byun-Ghala headed inland, crossing Bragget Canal, mooring at an over-elegant spindle of steel and stone. The spindle poured down like molten slag into a nexus of canals where lamp-lit gondolas set out for a luxurious fifteen-minute cruise through the baroque darkness of Murkbell’s upper south side.
Discreet operatives, along with the High King’s elite personal guard, secured a moving perimeter around the king and his mistress.
Some were discreet.
The musclemen ruthlessly accosted or otherwise blocked pedestrians with chemiostatic nightsticks, giving no explanation when they either turned people away into side streets and detours or when they suddenly let them pass again as the perimeter moved on.
Caliph and Sena glided down the lapping black canals, passing buildings of fantastic age, sliding under fabulous bridges carved with winged things. Through inundated avenues and drowned forgotten alleys, the gondolier poled them. Floating. Lost amid a dizzying agglomeration of decayed fantasy in brick.
Square mooring columns jutted like blackened fingers from sloshing boulevards smeared with nighttime reflections of distant, multicolored lights. The blue and orange lanterns on the boat cast their halos over stone, blazoned cheerful glimmers along dreary piers and culverts.
Wind bothered them.
It rocked the lanterns and swung the light through tunnels, up massive pylons of stone and steel cladding. It illuminated brown monochromatic graffiti.
Suddenly they emerged from the extravagant squalor as from between artificial cliffs. The boat scudded spryly out of a flooded byway onto a lake behind the opera house.
The huge gabled building startled Sena. It loomed like some gray-caped hulk with orange-magenta eyes, lights on for elitist guests who gossiped and smoked and drank champagne in thickets by the doors.
Gas lamps and streetlamps clustered like magic wands, bundles of glass bulbs throwing abalone light across the cobbles, utterly defiant of the metholinate shortage.
Caliph grumbled when he saw the waste and made a mental note to bring management into line. As the gondola touched the pier, a body of guards was already waiting. They held the curious rich at bay. Vhortghast was among them, looking winded. His pale skin glistened. Caliph wondered where he had run from.
Political icons and others who routinely basked in the illustriousness afforded them by the High King’s sodality were of course let through. Clayton Redfield was among the few who strode confidently past the sour-faced wall of bodyguards.
Caliph intensely disliked the sense of profound segregation, the illusion of elevation—the utter pomposity. He wanted to call out to the ogling nobles, What are you staring at? I shit just like you!
The guards moved as the High King moved, shifting the perimeter as if by smell. They were no less attuned to his movements than a cloud of flies circling the eyes and mouth of a cow. The wealthy parted in gleeful tides, calling out as he and Sena passed, complimenting his choice of apparel—the same mundane black he always wore—as if it had been the newest style.
Caliph waved graciously and made sure Sena managed the stairs in her heels. She smiled and pinched his arm.
The Murkbell Opera House enfolded them.
It was a sea of formal attire. Perfume and pomade. Awash with red lights and the smell of whipped coffee. Perfectly dim. The atmosphere exuded opulence and a frenzied exchange of erudite artistic sensibility.
Gorgeous paintings and draperies soaked in the costly incense of exotic tobacco while men exchanged brand names, prices and offered each other cigars.
After Clayton Redfield had finally agreed to enjoy the show for the third time and summarily faded into the crowd, Zane Vhortghast led the High King to his private box.
A blushing young woman handed Sena a pair of opera glasses despite the box’s nearness to the stage. The girl informed her that she could use them to examine the superior craftsmanship of the costumes or the precise expressions on the actors’ faces as she chose.
Caliph raised his eyebrows incredulously and studied the program that had made its way into his hand.
As the mournful sounds of violins being tuned wafted from the orchestra pit, two huge men positioned themselves just without the High King’s box. They scrutinized and menaced the hall. Their twins lurked inside but hung discreetly back, watching the theater with mechanical attention. Vhortghast himself monitored surveillance from a straight-backed chair that gave him a wide view of the audience below as well as the boxes spaced around the elaborate walls.
Most of the women in the audience and not a few of the men used opera glasses to snatch better glimpses of the royal couple. Girls with fishnet pantyhose and feathered tails and bras distributed fanciful drinks in impossibly tall glasses or whisked empty ones away.
Below the royal box, in aisle three, a soused nobleman groped his friend’s wife and fell over a row of chairs, creating a small fracas. He promptly disappeared in the arms of three burly ushers and the tittering waves of conversation resumed as though nothing had happened.
“I liked the Minstrel’s Stage better,” whispered Caliph.
Sena smirked indulgently. The preceding weeks had been hard on both of them.
At first, Caliph had chuckled when he read the note drawn out of the hawk’s tiny canister. Then he had reread it. Then he had reread it again, disbelieving. Finally he had begun to shake and whisper and pace the floor and scowl. What could it mean? he thought. Fallow Down has disappeared.
By fast horse and private zeppelin, the adventuresome had already gone out and returned with firsthand accounts of the devastation. There was no keeping it a secret.
The fickle papers had minted every kind of lie and theory they could dream up. Laws passed under the old Council ensuring freedom of the press remained unchallenged though barbs enough to fill a dozen quivers had been hurled at Caliph by several fearless periodicals offering special biweekly editions (or seditions as those loyal to the High King liked to call them).
Caliph had juggled all kinds of meetings with military personnel and worried burgomasters and journalists who constantly overstepped their bounds.
He wanted to go out and see the thing for himself but his advisors forbade it. Round trip, it was nearly seventy-five miles out of the way, and those were precious hours to and from Tentinil better spent in Isca directing operations from a central seat of power.
Caliph had departed on the fifteenth for Queen Guerrian’s funeral (the prince’s mother had died in her sleep) and returned late the same night by zeppelin. He leapt off the Byun-Ghala, and dashed to a late-night meeting like the operator of a mad machine racing to throw switches in an effort to regain control.
Then came the second blow, more devastating on a personal level to Caliph’s reign and even more confusing to his supporters than the news that Fallow Down had disappeared. It brought the castle down to a deathly hushed still as the staff read the Iscan Herald with utter disbelief.