TWO

 

Their performance of “The Emperor’s Tale” that night proved so afflated that it was to the audience as if two demigods had manifested inside the booth to render the story. Diverus plucked a delicate tune underneath Jax’s prologue, then switched to a small flute to represent the fox-empress, inventing a bittersweet theme for her on the spot. Even Leodora, in the midst of depicting the story, found her throat constricting with emotion. Every note was the perfect complement to the shadow figures on the screen. During an interlude, when she could glance back at him, she saw that his eyes were closed and his head was swaying as he played, as if while his body sat with her his spirit ventured into some other realm to bring back a music that no one had ever heard, yet all knew the instant it was played that it already lived in their bones, threaded through generations. Wherever he channeled it from, he was playing music that had formed the moment the story was first told—the music of the story’s origin. She knew, even before she took her bow afterward, that they would be weeping as they applauded. She made Diverus come out, too, with his flute, and presented him to them. The ovation doubled. “Kitsune Jax!” someone yelled, and coins rained upon them. If Soter had an opinion of the musician at that moment, he didn’t express it, but gestured, redundantly, to them both as if the audience needed instruction in where to direct their acclaim.

The next morning, with a mist hanging over the span, she and Diverus went back to the park, but the kitsune and his brethren weren’t there. The benches on which the players had sat the day before were empty. No one played go¯ today. The strangely cut and shaped flora seemed different, too, but Leodora couldn’t be sure if it was her imagination or if the topiary had been changed. She didn’t remember the one cut like a huge bird with a fan for a tail, nor the one that looked like a giant depiction of her Meersh the Bedeviler puppet—and surely she would have noticed that one if it had been there the previous afternoon. Who was it cut these bushes, anyway?

People strolled through the park in leisurely fashion; some passing nearby stared at her curiously. Diverus noticed this first and pointed it out to her, and the two of them watched people watching her as they passed. Then one woman, rather than just watching, approached her. With her face hidden behind a small fan that she fluttered, the woman asked, “Would you sell me, young woman, some of your hair?”

“My hair?” She self-consciously touched the fall of it at her neck. She wore it unbound today, enjoying the freedom of anonymity.

“Enough to make a wig for me. I’ll pay you well.”

“I’m sorry, but no.”

The woman made a slight bow of disappointment, then fluttered away.

Diverus said, “They must never have seen hair like yours.”

“But it’s just hair!”

“To us. We might want to leave this park, though, before she finds someone who’s willing to take it from you.”

“Take my hair?” Clearly she found the idea absurd.

“In the underspan of Vijnagar, if someone liked what you had, they took it. If you disagreed with them, there was usually an argument, sometimes a fight. Sometimes a murder.”

“You saw this?”

“Not every day, no. Own nothing to feed someone’s envy and you’ll live a good long time. Otherwise, you have to be willing to fight.”

“You had something to steal?” she asked, thinking that he wasn’t merely reciting but spoke from personal experience.

“No,” he answered. “I had nothing, less than nothing, so I was left alone.”

They continued to wander idly through the park, which appeared larger than possible. Beyond the benches and up a few steps the way was blocked by a stand of bamboo grown so thickly together that when they at last located a meandering path of small stones among the stems, they had to walk single-file along it, weaving through an increasingly impeditive forest, so dense that the clogged air hung motionless, while in branches overhead unseen birds chattered shrilly. The world became green, crepuscular, and claustrophobic.

When it seemed the forest could be compressed no further and remain navigable, the bamboo began to thin, until they were catching glimpses of the world beyond it again. Soon only a single, random row of stems stood between them and the outside. The path ended at a few steps, leading down a slope to a circular pond. In the center of the pond, water trickled over an odd pile of stones that seemed to have been arranged to produce the most noise possible—the trickling and burbling drowned out even the birdsong they’d left behind. Orange fish with large sleepy eyes suggesting a jaded intelligence swam lazily near the edge of the pond and followed them as they walked around it. There were benches at intervals, but no one sat. This whole portion of the park stood deserted.

The path led to a broad oval of sand, ringed by rocks. A solitary figure stood in the sand, his face hidden beneath a low conical hat. He held a small rake and, as Leodora and Diverus came upon him, he was carefully creating a series of crosshatches. The sand had been worked elsewhere into swirls and nautiloid patterns. In silence they watched him perform, and Leodora felt as if she were watching the creator himself, making the world. He paused to consider what he’d done, standing idly with one foot on his thigh and his weight upon the rake. He seemed then like a statue, as if she had only imagined his movement. Quietly she and Diverus crept past him. If he was aware, he didn’t show it. He didn’t move at all. On the far side and bordered by short conical trees, a few steps led down from this strange plateau and across another area of exotically shaped bushes, and to a set of polished wooden trellises that served as gates. Beyond them, people moved past randomly, as if unaware of this enigmatic park.

Exiting through the gates, the two found themselves on a secondary boulevard that paralleled the one they’d taken upon arriving on the span the day before. Looking back, they found that they had walked beneath the oddly canted central tower without noticing and viewed it now on the far side of where they’d begun, halfway to the end of the span. “Maybe the bamboo forest hid it,” suggested Diverus, as if reading her thoughts, but even to himself he sounded unconvinced. He added, “Maybe we want to walk back on the road instead.”

“There certainly wasn’t anyone to ask for stories,” said Leodora.

“I think it won’t be the same going back anyway.” She looked at him questioningly, and he explained, “I think it’ll have become another park.”

What struck her as the most odd about his observation was that she both understood and agreed with him.

This entire span seemed to be alive with elusive magic.

They walked along the avenue toward the center tower, passing other pedestrians, fruit and vegetable stands, pedicabs, and shops. The shops on their right hid the park from view, and when they did catch a glimpse, all they saw was a stone wall.

The two of them had only just entered the shadow under the middle tower’s swaybacked crossbeam when a procession cut across their path.

It was nothing like the parade of monsters from the previous night. The people—for they all looked human this time—wore white garments: robes, pants, shirts, all white. Only one woman, near the front, wore color—a bright red scarf upon her head. In the middle, lying upon a board but held up above their heads on a series of poles, lay a body. It, too, was wrapped in white, from head to foot.

Leodora turned and started after them. When Diverus didn’t tag along she turned back to him. “I have to see this,” she told him. “I don’t know why, but I have to.”

The street ran directly to one of the canted uprights supporting the swooping beam overhead. The street widened to circle the upright, and the procession flowed around it like water around a stalk of bamboo. On the far side the split road opened even wider, into a crescent at the span’s edge. The funeral group spread out to fill the crescent. Leodora and Diverus remained on its fringe, slightly separate from the others so as not to intrude. They didn’t know how they might be regarded.

The woman with the red scarf began a recitation: “There are two hundred levels to the universe. The higher we ascend, the hotter it becomes. The realm of the spirits would scorch us, and even they cannot reach the level of the fire and water gods, but are connected to it only by rays, as the sun connects to us.”

A woman standing beside her and clutching the hands of two children began to wail. The children took their cues from her and added their voices to the anguish.

Diverus moved off from the clustered group, to the rail at the edge of the span. Leodora trailed after him, curious about his response. She could still hear the priestess’s recitation, but the talk of levels made little sense to her. Through thin mist the other wing of the span was visible, separate but close enough that Leodora could make out the shapes of people in the nearest lane. As she approached the rail, she could see below them the darkness of the land that sloped out from under the surface of the span. A hillside. She leaned over and peered down into a deep valley that ran between the avenues. Houses on stilts dotted the lower slopes, and the ones at the very bottom stood in water, in a narrow stream that snaked through it. The course of the stream led back to a waterfall in the gray distance. On each side of the stream, the land had been flooded—a system of small gates and channels allowed water to be diverted from the stream, enough to cover the valley floor. Some sort of crop grew in the spread of water, and people worked there with hoes and other implements, with baskets slung over their shoulders, standing ankle-deep.

The funeral recitation had ended, and the body—still on its plank but now fastened to ropes—began a steady descent over the edge. She had to lean out over the rail to see where it was going.

The hillside below was cracked open, and inside the opening, directly beneath the descending body, lay a grotto. The sides of it were jagged; down in its depths lights flickered, like candles sparkling off faceted gems, revealing more white-robed figures. They stood awaiting the body, reaching up eagerly while it descended toward the open mouth of the hill.

Diverus said suddenly, “My mother died and they dropped her down into the sea.” She glanced sidelong at him. He seemed calm, almost entranced. “There was no land under Vijnagar. Just water. They wrapped her up like that and then they sent her under the water.”

“Diverus—”

“I came to believe she’d become a mermaid and lives now in a city at the bottom of the sea.”

She found she could watch the descent of the body by watching his eyes. He tracked it until it was taken by the figures in the hole.

“It’s the same, though, isn’t it?” he said.

The priestess recited: “After the Storm of Raruro, comes a reuniting, and all spirits join. Shukkon and fukkon will join. Until that day he must remain separated from us—that is the order of things.”

Diverus pushed away from the ceremony and through the many figures in white. Leodora followed after him. He didn’t go far but sat down against a wall where a cart had been standing earlier—a few cast-off vegetables lay scattered there. He rested his face on his fists. As she came up to him, Leodora thought he looked like a little boy. She knelt, and then sat beside him.

“It’s strange,” he said immediately. “I can remember it all, but in the way you remember the stories you tell, the way I remember the story that fox told us yesterday. It never happened to me, but I can recall that emperor and his fox-wife now—as if I was there.”

She said nothing, but considered that awhile. Idly she picked up a long-necked gourd and a taro potato and began toying with them, dancing them about. There seemed to be no answer, really. Diverus had been present, and yet from what she gathered, the Diverus seated beside her hadn’t existed then. He was a creation of the gods. A Dragon Bowl had made him.

Meanwhile the funeral procession was returning from the burial. The wails of the two children at the rear of the group reached them well before the children passed by.

Without looking at him, Leodora said, “It isn’t as if you could have saved her, Diverus. Any more than I could have saved my parents. They both died before I could talk.” She met his angry eyes and held his gaze. “You think she died on your account.”

His eyes widened with surprise and betrayal, and she knew that she’d guessed right. She spun the gourd around, then waltzed it to the potato. “There isn’t a day when I don’t miss my aunt Dymphana. I can’t see her again, maybe ever.” Her throat tightened and her face flushed. She’d thought she was saying this for him, not to express her own pain. She wanted to stop but had to go on. He had to understand. She willed herself not to cry. “It’s not my fault I can’t see her. I didn’t make it this way, my uncle did. He made the rules, and what I’ve done…is because of that.”

People were walking past now. She lowered her head, unable to look at him or anyone else, knowing that she might burst into tears if she did—and how stupid and pointless that would be—but she couldn’t help it. She focused on the vegetables, on making them waltz about and pirouette upon the stones.

The crying children came abreast of her but she didn’t look up, even when their noise was right on top of her. And then suddenly the crying stopped.

At that she raised her head slowly. The children stood directly before her. They were watching her hands in fascination. They might have been twins, both with black hair and almond eyes. Above, holding their hands, their mother, the widow, met her gaze and made a pitiful attempt at a smile, ruined by grief. Her tears had etched trails in the thick powdery makeup on her cheeks. The thought came to Leodora: All of us are here on account of death.

The rest of the funeral party moved on, but the mother couldn’t work up the energy to order her children away, and so she stood there as if expecting Leodora to read her a future.

Quietly, Diverus suggested, “Tell them a story.”

She glanced over at him. He seemed to have forgotten his despair. His eyes shifted from her to the children and back again.

She spoke what she’d been thinking. “We’re all here on account of death,” she said, and she spun the long-necked gourd about, as if it were turning to face the children. “Death is everywhere, but do you know that once upon a time Death didn’t exist? No? Let me tell you, then, how Death came into our world.” She raised her eyes to the widow. “I think you should sit down to hear this. It’s not a long story, but it isn’t short, either.”

The mother knelt, and her children sat beside her.

“Now, does anyone here know who Chilingana is?” asked Leodora.

One of the twins said, “He dreamed Shadowbridge.”

“That’s right. He was the original dreamer.” She walked the taro potato forward and hid the gourd from sight, then leaned over and picked up a small cluster of enoki and set it aside. She said, “One day a different dream came to him.”

 

 

HOW DEATH CAME TO SHADOWBRIDGE

 

In those times the sun was called Lord Akema. He was a warrior god, terrible to behold, who would blind all those foolish enough to seek for his features. That’s why there existed the second—the false mask of Akema—Nocnal, upon which everyone might safely gaze, and which they could petition when they wanted a favor from the war god. Behind the mask of Nocnal, the warrior would listen and sometimes answer.

It was under Nocnal’s aegis that the fisherman Chilingana dreamed the bridges of Shadowbridge into place. Each night more bridges appeared—covered in structures, in houses and towers, in parks and alleys, but all of them were empty, lifeless, and still. Soon his dream stretched far across the world, and Nocnal observed it all as it unfolded.

By day, beneath the burning face of Akema, Chilingana’s life persisted as flat as bread. He fished, he ate, and he dwelled with his wife, Lupeka, in his stilt house. Although he could have stepped across the gap onto the first bridge he’d dreamed, he didn’t. He talked about going, almost every day, but each time he came to the edge of his own small world he hesitated, peered down the empty way until his eyes ached, and then gave up. He could not go traveling out upon these spans. To do so would have invited the unknown, and Chilingana, for whom everything had ever been the same, feared the unknown. He didn’t understand that the unknown needed no invitation.

One night while he lay upon his seaweed mat, a chill wind called loneliness came floating down the empty spans of the bridges he had dreamed. It swirled about his house. It slipped into the sleeves of his clothing and fluttered the cloth against him. His mouth filled with it and he rose and went out and stared off into the distance, across the near-black sea. He looked for what he knew not.

Chilingana thought his wife was asleep inside, but she lay awake. The wind had filled his house, and she had breathed it in as well as he.

She was aware of him outside, yet did not call him. No distance had ever existed between the woman and the man before he dreamed the bridges. They stretched into infinity like the lives of Chilingana and Lupeka. This new distance touched her with longing. She wondered: When had she come to be, and who had built her house? She assumed Chilingana had done it, but he never said. She had never before thought to ask. The two of them wanted for nothing: All the food of the world swam through the ocean beneath their house. Why, then, create such things as bridges? What purpose could they serve?

Fear gnawed at her then, that her husband wished to travel away from her into an unknown so vast that he might never return. The distance opened like a pit beneath her, and her breath caught in her throat.

The wind of loneliness heard her and was surfeited.

She arose and crept out the back of the house onto the balcony that surrounded it on all sides. She gazed out across the sea away from her husband. Her eyes followed Nocnal’s bright stripe upon the swirls and waves until she made out, just above the horizon, the black edge of a bridge’s line, and in the middle of it the black spire of a tower, and her fear frothed and foamed. She knew in wordless fashion that these spans connected to some other place, although she knew no other.

Her fearful musings disturbed Lord Akema’s rest, prodding the face of Nocnal to call down, “What troubles you, lady?”

“Well,” she answered, and then fell silent before the immensity of what she wanted to say. What was still emerging inside her soul had no words. She’d never known anything but herself; how could she express something so much larger? She kept silent. If Nocnal had to ask, then he didn’t understand.

Yet he continued asking her till finally she retreated inside where the walls were near, the territory small and safe. When her husband came in later and lay down beside her, she rolled over to clasp him and he held her tight. “I know,” he said.

“What?”

“Something is coming.”

The certainty in his words terrified her more than her own inexpressible unease. “What is? What’s coming? Tell me.”

“When it arrives, I’ll know it.” He couldn’t tell her more, and they lay like that, tightly bound in unshared fear, too conflicted even to remember shared desire.

 

Chilingana tried to forget what he’d told Lupeka. He continued fishing as he had always done, but with uneasy glances over his shoulder, down the length of the adjoining spans, across the ocean to where they vanished over the horizon.

One afternoon the face of Lord Akema was particularly fierce. Chilingana lay on the shadowed side of his house as people still do to escape the god’s fury, and he happened to glance up to find a stranger walking up the next span.

The fisherman who had created the world leapt to his feet. Other than his wife, this was the first person he had ever seen. Whatever he’d dreaded for so long, this had to be it.

The stranger was tall and gaunt. He wore robes that we would say belonged to a mystic. They were deep red and glittered with powerful designs woven with silver thread, thick as fishbones. The hood of his robe kept the stranger’s features in shadow. All Chilingana could determine was that this traveler was very dark indeed.

The stranger came to the place where the dreamed bridge ended and stepped across the gap onto the balcony encircling the stilt house. The stilts groaned beneath him as if he weighed as much as the world. He walked right up to Chilingana, who huddled shivering in the shadows. It took all the fisherman’s reserves not to cry out and flee inside. He stared into a face of sharp cheekbones and high polished brows, looked into bottomless eyes. “Who are you?” he asked.

The traveler replied, “I am Death.”

“What sort of name is that?”

Death laughed. “One new to you even though you’re the Dreamer. Your bridges have grown to encompass the world, reaching even as far as the land of the dead, which is a barren and uninhabited place I was happy to leave. Your creation invited me to walk the world, and I set out directly to find you.”

The fisherman raised his shoulders. “You aren’t making sense.”

“I think you’ll see that I am, once you’ve come inside me.” Death opened wide his robes, and Chilingana saw a place so cool and inviting that the harsh rays of Lord Akema couldn’t find him there. He must have fallen into those robes, for he had no memory of walking. Once he was inside the cool place his mind tumbled with memories. The robes that had been held open closed, and at the core of the darkness within them lay a red glow of life out of which came discordant noises he’d never known—crackling energies and devices that rang and then spoke, the barking of dogs, the canister rumble of machines as they rolled along an empty boulevard, the clicking of a metal thing that unfurled strips of paper covered in indecipherable symbols, and the voices of people—more people than he could hold in his mind—all speaking at once and shouting through objects in the sky that were nothing like Akema, lifeless creations, but spraying chatter out and down like rain in a million different tongues drowning him under their flow. He saw impossible blue-glass buildings across which clouds slid like oil, and lighted things that were not fish but traveled far beneath his perfect sea, and he knew that all of these things, however they were new to him, were also ancient, long gone, dredged up out of a collective silt of memory, from some other time and place before he and his wife had arrived. And he knew torment, for in all his new recollections, his birth was nowhere to be found.

He sank to the stones before the traveler. His head hung, too heavy for his neck to lift. Death spoke. “Now you know mortality. Now you’ll live and age and cling to what memories you have, because you will always be falling away from them.”

Then Death left the fisherman there and entered his house. Chilingana tried to crawl after him, to shield his wife from this terrible conjurer. Why should she have to know these things? She hadn’t done this—she hadn’t made the bridges. But she couldn’t be spared, else gaze down upon a mortal man whom she no longer would recognize as her husband.

Death did not leave, but when the fisherman dragged himself feebly inside, the traveler had gone, and his wife lay upon the bed, naked and open to him. She had been made fertile, able to bear children. Thus did Death plan to people his realm.

Nearing her, Chilingana recovered his strength, and they folded together and slept, safe so long as they touched.

In the morning, when he awoke, he was alone and certain that he had dreamed the traveler. He stretched, to find that his body ached unfamiliarly.

As he stood, he kicked something from the mat. It clattered across the floor. It was a silver object, small enough to lie in the palm of his hand.

Grooves threaded the length of it; at the top was a large single slot. He had brought it back from the realm within Death’s cloak.

When he stooped and lifted the thing, Chilingana dropped to his knees with his fist closed, and began to weep because now he could remember his entire life and he recognized that each day would hereafter be different from the last, and farther away than the land of Death itself.

Time upon Shadowbridge had begun. Life had arrived, carried by Death.

 

Leodora laid down the taro and the enoki. The gourd she’d already hidden in one sleeve, and she let it roll slowly out. It came to rest sitting up, its “head” canted as if toward the children. For them it had become the figure of Death; and for their mother, as well. She smiled at the storyteller, and now that smile was proof against grief. Her tears had dried and those of her children. “Thank you,” she said.

Some members of the funeral procession had stopped when they found the widow missing, and had wandered back. They’d clustered close enough to hear the story, and complimented Leodora by dipping their heads in an informal bow. The widow turned to her people and then folded the children back in among them, but the two kept glancing over their shoulders at Leodora and the gourds as they were drawn away, and then lost from sight.

She got up, weary, her legs stiff from all the walking followed by sitting awkwardly while she performed the tale. She saw the expression on Diverus’s face. “What is it?” she asked.

“I—I’ve no words. I stand amazed.”

Blushing, she lowered her eyes. “You’ve no call to be. You have a far more remarkable talent than mine.”

“No,” he said. “Mine was a gift from the gods.”

“How do you know mine isn’t?”

“But—” He stopped, thought. “You’ve never even set foot on a dragon beam—you said as much.”

“Is that the only way one is granted gifts?” Her voice teased now.

The question being too enormous in implication, he could only laugh with her. “I don’t know. I don’t know much of anything, do I?”

A cloud passed over the sun, and the empty street became suddenly dusky and vaguely ominous. At the crescent, where the body had been lowered, nothing had been left to mark the spot. Every building appeared to be deserted. Leodora gathered herself up.

Diverus asked, “How did you know what story to tell them?”

“I had three vegetables. The tale of Death was the first thing I thought of with three characters.” She faced him as a look of doubt crossed his face. She let it go. She didn’t want to explain herself, didn’t want to answer how stories found her or how she’d looked into the faces of those children and their mother and known what they needed to hear. She would have to admit that she didn’t understand how it happened, either, as he didn’t know where his songs came from. “Right now I’m famished. We have a long walk ahead of us still, and I wouldn’t care to have to join that parade of monsters again—they might not let us go this time.”

She offered her hand and drew him to his feet, and they walked off together.

 

 

 

After their performance that second night, Soter informed Leodora and Diverus that they would be journeying on following the third performance. “We need to spread your reputation far and wide, can’t be falling into the trap of staying in one place too long, even if the audiences are respectable.”

“Respectable?” Leodora all but laughed at the word he’d chosen. The central garden had been filled. People had crowded into all three entrances to see the performance.

Soter pretended not to hear the sarcasm. He rocked back and forth on his feet as though the matter they’d spoken of was closed. Judging by the look on her face, he could not have infuriated Leodora more.

“I understand none of this,” she said. “We stayed on in Vijnagar even when the mistress of the theater very nearly exposed us by trying to have her way with Jax, even after I complained of it to you. We were going to stay on even when I told you we needed to go. In fact we would be there still if it weren’t for your encounter with that elf.”

“Grumelpyn.”

“What did he say that has you pushing us along now, before we’ve even set down our belongings and drawn a breath? Even when we thought Uncle Gousier might come after us, we didn’t flee where we had an audience. In fact, on Merjayzin you were willing to risk letting him catch up with us at the thought of a paying house. We stayed there for two full weeks!”

He’d stopped rocking on his heels by then, and focused on Diverus as if he might appeal to the musician and the two of them outvote her. “Those were early days,” he explained. “We needed the reputation to build, to fly ahead, to do the work for us so that by the time we arrived upon the next and the next span, they had already heard the rumors of you and I could haggle over a larger percentage of the take for us than if we’d just come in off the street like two vagabonds who hoped to swindle them a bit before climbing out a back window and making off with our loot.”

Before Leodora could respond, Diverus asked, slowly and thoughtfully, “So by the time she found me, her reputation had grown enough that now you don’t need to worry whether the next span has heard of her, yes?”

“I—” Soter hadn’t been prepared for that question. Why couldn’t they just do as he asked for once, instead of requiring a more thorough explanation of why he expected them to do as he wished? The little musician was as bad as she was. “Of course we need to have her reputation spread. Of course we do.” He tried to laugh, to make it all light and unimportant that they might not wonder at the tension that underlay every word he spoke—the tension of fearing that he might have to give up more than he wanted. “But you know, there are infinite spans, infinite peoples and tales, and don’t you want to see more of them?” He knew, even as he spoke, that he’d taken a wrong turn, because the question itself offered her the power to decide—the very thing he wanted to avoid.

“I do want to see them all,” she said, “but I also want to learn every story, and I can’t do that if I leave each span so rapidly that I haven’t time to find the stories, hear them, add them to what I know. You said my father did the same.”

“Yes,” replied Soter, knowing there was no other answer, and no way to distract her from what she would say next, which he heard as if it were an echo preceding the sound that made it.

“I want the time to collect the stories.”

“Lea.”

“No, don’t grease your words to me. Don’t make promises and don’t explain my behavior to me when you can’t account for your own.”

“All right then.” He hung his head. It was the only option left him. “How long do we stay?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes, and that is because it’s not your responsibility to know,” he insisted, but carefully.

She shook her head in frustration.

“Three nights?”

“Longer,” she said.

“Five then.”

“I don’t know.”

He sighed. “Once again, Lea, it is my part, my role, to ascertain the best venue, and how long we can rely upon the people to attend, and who will pay us the most. This is a job I do well. I’m certainly no puppeteer, but without me, you would have no way to prove that you are.”

She leaned forward then and said, “All right. Five nights on this span.”

He nodded, and said, “Done!”

She got up heavily, as if the argument had worn her out. “I’ve two hours before the performance. I’m going to rest.” The courtyard seemed to tremble at her passing.

Left behind, Diverus fidgeted, stealing glances at Soter as he commented, “I’m new to human interactions, but I wonder that anybody understands anybody.” He, too, took his leave of the garden.

Alone, Soter toasted himself and, after downing the small cup of liquor, said, “Five, then. I can live with that. For now.”

 

 

 

The next three days, Leodora collected stories. Each day she checked the park before looking elsewhere. On the first day she did find a group playing go¯ there, but it wasn’t the fox and his friends, who never did reappear. “Maybe it takes a long time to go to the end of everything and come back,” said Diverus.

“But they invited us to come back the next day.” Even as she argued, she guessed the explanation, and before Diverus could say it she countered herself: “Days and nights aren’t the same to the demons in that parade.”

“That’s what I think, too,” Diverus replied. “What I meant.”

She roamed the entire span, eventually crossing onto the split on the far side of the valley of stilt houses, seeking groups, clusters of people at leisure whom she could chat up and ask for a story. She even came across the same palanquin bearers she had used in explaining story collecting to Diverus, and as she’d told him they did indeed serve up a plethora of salacious stories about their mistress. None of these could be performed, but they contained images and ideas and moments she might borrow, retool, and fold into some unrelated telling to make it unique.

She received stories such as the tale of the priest who was so lonely that he created an artificial friend, but got the spell horribly wrong so that his friend wanted most of all to eat him—a story she performed the same night, provoking both laughter and gasps.

The courtyard filled earlier each night. People declined to take dinner until afterward in order to get close to the booth.

The final performance in Hyakiyako, she concluded with a repeat rendition of “The Ghost of Nikki Danjo.” While the puppet of Masaoka pressed against the side of the screen and bit into her arm to keep from screaming, her son died in agony of poisoning. She dared not cry out, as the audience knew, else give away that she had discovered the identity of the real villain of the piece—Nikki Danjo himself.

 

 

 

Soter sat off to the side of the booth, both to watch Leodora’s skillful performance and to mingle with the crowd. Once again the courtyard was full to overflowing. Mutsu would be deliriously happy, almost as happy as he had been furious when Soter told him that they could not stay beyond five nights.

The crowd booed when the evil regent Nikki Danjo slid onto the screen again. The body language of the puppet implicated him as he crept across the room to advise his lord, and the puppet of Masaoka, behind him, equally betrayed her fear. Soter, though he was used to Leodora’s craft, found himself swept up in the tale. The puppets became real people. He could see the room that surrounded them rather than the shadow of doorways, screens, and lanterns. He heard not Leodora’s voice, but the voices of the overlord and the woman and the evil Danjo. He shook his head as if he’d begun to fall asleep, and blamed the many cups of rice wine he’d consumed. It was powerful stuff, and he wasn’t used to it. Plus, he conceded—if only to himself—Diverus’s music made her voice seem to change, adding weight and depth to the male voices. Soter drifted into it, his head nodding.

He straightened up on his stool, then rubbed his eyes while glancing around himself at the crowd, all so riveted by the performance that not one met his gaze. He found himself similarly drawn back to the pale screen, glowing lightly red now as the story neared an explosive climax. She had learned to increase the colors subtly, slowly, so that the audience hardly noticed that it had gone from white to crimson by the end of the play. Gods, he was proud of her! She had no idea how proud. Why didn’t he tell her? He ought to tell her.

Then, as he stared at the screen, it seemed to draw him in, growing darker the closer he came.

When he looked up, the courtyard had turned the color of blood, as if the light from her lantern had become liquid and smeared every surface. Soter dragged the back of his hand across his eyes. He looked first at the starlit sky above to confirm that it was still in place; but when he glanced down again the audience had transformed into puppets—giant, articulated puppets, their profiles translucent, features sharply drawn. He yipped and craned away in his chair, only to find that he was leaning into more puppets. The closest one swiveled its leathery head and gave him a nettled glare. He stared at the booth then, straight at the screen where Leodora performed. He clung to the identifiable shadows, denied the room. The performance continued, the story unfolded. In her fiction lay his truth. Without daring to glance away, he reached to the small table behind him and patted about for his wine cup.

A moist hand closed over his wrist and held it.

He stiffened. He sat paralyzed.

Close behind him a voice said, “So here we are at last.” It was Gousier’s voice and it was all Soter could do not to leap away screaming. Instead, denying the hive of panic whirling through his belly, he made himself slowly turn around, outwardly calm, his mouth fixed in a ghastly smile. Even that little resolve deserted him the moment he saw the speaker.

Behind and above him stood the Coral Man. It glowered down at him—he knew it though there were no eyes in its head, no distinct features at all. The grip on his wrist was some sort of clammy tentacle extending from beneath the table, as gray as the figure but alive and slick.

“Soter,” it said, the voice no longer Gousier’s, but distantly familiar—a voice from a void deep inside him that he wanted to deny. “Soter, you’ll be found. Make no mistake. Found wanting.”

He could not bear the force of the scrutiny, which seemed to split him open. It was as if all the wriggling creatures that had once lived in the pores of that chalky coral were burrowing into the wound and feasting their way through him. Soon he would be nothing but bones, enveloped completely, a husk. He had to break away, face the performance, the red screen—he trembled with the effort of dismissing the apparition—turning in time to see the fitting end of Nikki Danjo, haunting it was, yes, and Remember the story, he urged himself, it was a puppet ghost, but somehow he was in the story now, seated among puppets with a ghost of his own looming in their midst. He stared so hard at the red light and the shadow figures that his eyes burned with tears from not blinking. He squeezed them shut, then jolted upright in his seat again. His arm, twisted behind him, ached horribly and he moved it, clutching his cup. His hand slid freely upon the table. Only then did he blink and glance around, wiping again at his eyes, this time with the meat of his palm. He opened one eye while he covered the other, warily peeking at his neighbor who, sensing his movement, grinned at him and said, “Very good, yes?” A normal face—bad teeth, certainly, but a normal face, not one of her puppets. Soter knew before he’d twisted around on the stool that no Coral Man would be hovering at his back. Everyone wedged into the courtyard looked normal, joyous with recognition of the masterful storytelling they’d just witnessed. They raised their hands and applauded—a burst of noise that made him jump.

“I slept, that’s all it was. I dreamed. Bardsham—” He rolled his wrist and saw it then, the one perfect circle, the sucker mark, purple where it had bruised him. Everyone else was clapping and cheering.

The screen had gone dark, the lantern extinguished. Instinct took over and Soter leapt to his feet, walked forward, clapping his own hands and calling, “Jax, my friends, the artistry of Jax!” while the crowd shouted and pounded their cups on the tables, and someone broke out a flute and began to play a frenetic melody above the din. The cheering flowed to follow and then accompany the flute, becoming a song.

After a minute Leodora stepped through the side of the booth, her head cowled, her face masked, and the song dissolved into a roar. She had played their stories and won their hearts. This was how it had been with Bardsham. The impeccable skill of a genius had overwhelmed the crowds. The energy of their pleasure flowed right through him to the artist. It was wonderful. Behind her, Diverus came out—it was becoming a routine now—and waved the shamisen he’d been playing; the audience cheered for him, too.

Here was everything they sought and he was making them leave because he was afraid. And the Coral Man had stood right there and told him it would do no good. Run to the next span, he would be found. If you wanted to remain hidden, you could not have great talent. Talent made noise; people would notice you, remember you. Jax—they would be speaking of the master puppeteer from one end of the span to the other tomorrow. A few more days and news of these performances would overtake the stories Grumelpyn had heard, louder now and more certain, the way it had been with Bardsham. “You’ll be found”—he muttered the warning.

Why, he asked the air, why did she have to be brilliant? Why did she have to shine so brightly? Why had she made them leave the damned backwater of that island? He blamed her, knowing full well that she wasn’t to blame. He made his smiles to the crowd. Then he realized she wasn’t wearing the band that restricted her breasts. She’d forgotten to put it on after the performance. Someone would see, someone would fathom the truth. He thought to move, to step between the crowd and the object of their adoration.

Then Leodora did the unthinkable. She pushed back the cowl and drew her braid free.

Watching the crowd for any sign that they’d recognized her womanliness, he only glimpsed the flash of her hair. “No,” he said, more in disbelief than as a warning, but no one heard him over the din of the song they were singing.

He faced her then, crying, “Don’t you dare!”

But she’d already reached a hand in front of her face, and she pulled the black mask up and away. The crowd yelled louder. She tugged loose the cord binding her hair then shook it all free, a shining red fan, a copper waterfall around her. They simply went mad then.

She shouted her name and they gave it back. Cries of “Leodora!” drowned out “Jax!” Coins flew through the air and rained all around her.

Soter wanted to sear her with a look the way the Coral Man had crushed him with its regard, but her stance defied him, denying him the right to hide her any longer. It’s too late, said her pose, you may dictate the dates and the venues and the spans, but you’ll not control my identity any longer. He knew this story; he’d told it to her: How had he thought it would have a different ending this time? “Bardsham,” he despaired.

Something broke inside him. He could not oppose her, he had no will any longer, no strength for the battle any longer. Chaos was coming after him, bearing down upon them all, and it would find him whether he hid her or not. It was what the Coral Man had been saying. He stared at the mark on his wrist.

There could be no going on to the next span now. No simple passage through a tunnel would disguise her identity, her name. That would travel, too, now: the skill of her father and the shape of her mother, the name so close.

She had unleashed herself, and now they had to flee.