"The assignment is simple." The following morning, Viola delivered the briefing inside the carriage in the tone of someone reading a death sentence. "The Golden Iris Opera House, afternoon performance. We enter as an engaged couple. That is our cover; Archives has prepared false documents. You observe. I make certain you return alive to write the report. Any objections?"
"One," Sharlo said. "An engaged couple attending the opera would speak to each other. What do you intend to call me?"
Viola glanced at him. "Mr. Vane."
"We are engaged, Miss Raven."
"...Mr. Sharlo."
"That's what my landlady calls me when I owe rent."
Viola was silent for three seconds. Mustering every ounce of good breeding, she uttered the word:
"...Darling."
"Perfect," Sharlo said from the heart. "Only the expression needs work. At present, you don't look as though you're going to marry me. You look as though you're going to dissect me."
"Those things are not mutually exclusive."
Resigned to his fate, Sharlo opened the false documents prepared by Archives. They had done conscientious work.
He was "Charles Vincent," an assessor for a harbour insurance company. She was "Vera Vincent, maiden edition"—or, as the papers themselves had it, Vera Reynolds, daughter of a silk merchant.
Introduced by a matchmaker, engaged three months, wedding date undecided.
"An assessor and a silk merchant's daughter." Sharlo slipped the documents into his inner pocket. "Archives has a very modest imagination."
"Very well, I'll supply the rest. We met at a church charity bazaar. I understood none of the lace at your stall but pretended I did and bought six lengths. My sincerity moved you—note, sincerity, not taste."
"That won't be necessary," Viola said. "No one will ask."
"They will. The usher at the opera, the girl at the cloakroom, a lady making conversation in the box—idle people love asking young couples how they met."
"It's a universal opening gambit. The half-second in which you cannot answer will be louder than any other flaw."
Viola looked at him for two seconds, then exhaled in surrender.
"Charity bazaar. Lace. Six lengths. Anything else?"
"Yes. You must remember what you love about me." Sharlo adopted a solemn expression. "If they separate us for questions, the answers must agree."
"I propose: you love that I 'never lie to you.' The advantage is that you've verified it personally."
Silence held inside the carriage for a moment. Viola turned toward the window.
After a while, she said, "And you? What do you love about me?"
"You hardly sleep," Sharlo replied without thinking. "Saves candles. Mr. Assessor's foremost requirement in a wife."
Viola gave the faintest of snorts.
The sound was so brief it scarcely existed, but Sharlo would have sworn upon his pocket watch that it was the closest Agent Raven had come to laughter in three days.
The carriage stopped on Iris Street.
By daylight, the Golden Iris Opera House had lost some of its nocturnal gloom. Its white stone glowed honey-coloured beneath the dark-red sun, and a queue for the matinee had already formed beneath the portico.
Sharlo linked his arm through Viola's—her forearm felt like a steel cable wound taut—and joined the crowd.
He soon discovered that "observation" meant something different for him than for anyone else.
The opera-house foyer teemed with people. To Sharlo, a sparse haze of amber glimmers floated over their heads.
Most bore nothing. Above a few hung one or two lines so faint they could barely be read—【Tonight he will weep for someone unworthy】【She will go on waiting for a letter that will never come】—like a thin mist inscribed with fate.
"You ordinary people are very fortunate in the way you see the world," he murmured to Viola.
"Be specific," Viola said. "A verbatim account of everything you see goes into the file."
"A layer of writing, floating over people's heads. Most of it is faint and concerns small things—someone cries tonight, someone waits for a letter tomorrow."
"It's as if..." Sharlo considered his phrasing. "Every person wears a coat made of script. Most people's coats are very thin, only a sentence or two."
"And Lightbearers?"
Without drawing attention, Sharlo tipped his chin toward the eastern side of the foyer.
Two uniformed churchmen stood there, golden-thread armbands of the Church of the Daystar on their sleeves. The writing above them was far denser, like two pages filled from edge to edge.
"Their coats are thick. Much thicker," he said. "The more light they borrow, the more words they carry."
"Director Grey was right. It isn't a coat. It's a costume that grows tighter the longer you wear it."
The bell for the performance rang.
* * *
The Nightingale told an ancient story: a poor singer fell in love with a sailor bound for distant seas; the sailor died upon the ocean; the singer sang at his grave until she became a nightingale.
The plot was old enough to have lost its teeth, and the scenery was hardly of the first rank.
But when Juliet Orlando opened her mouth, nothing else existed in the theatre.
Sharlo knew nothing of vocal music. In his previous life, his musical education had ended with the accompaniment playlist for student-club performances.
Yet when that voice rose from the stage, he and the two thousand people around him were pressed into their seats together.
The voice was not ornate. Its technique could not even be called elaborate.
It was simply precise—terrifyingly so.
Every note fell, neither too much nor too little, upon the tenderest point in your heart, as if someone had taken the ledger of your life and begun reading it aloud, entry by entry.
Sobs rose all around him.
The elderly gentleman to his left wept. The wealthy lady in the row ahead wept. Even an usher in the aisle leaned against the wall to wipe her eyes.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Viola did not cry.
She sat perfectly upright, though her pupils had widened slightly. Her six-year-wakeful eyes stared unblinking at the stage, and her fingertips dug into the velvet armrest.
"There is something in her voice," she breathed. "Something moving. Like a net beneath the water."
Sharlo did not answer.
He was watching something else.
He saw the song move across the audience like an invisible tide, washing over every bowed head.
He saw the faint amber writing above some of them rise gently in its wake. The line 【Tonight he will weep for someone unworthy】 was gathered away little by little, tenderly, like broken shells collected from the sand as the tide receded.
Those whose words were taken wept harder, then gradually fell quiet.
An airy expression came over their faces, as though some burden had been lifted.
When they left, they would say: Hearing the Nightingale lightens the heart.
Sweat slowly gathered in Sharlo's palms.
At last he understood how the accounts of men like Thomas came to balance.
It was not robbery.
It was not theft.
It was song.
One line at a time, she sang away the painful loves and burdensome attachments people carried.
Those stripped by her left in grateful tears and spread the word that the Nightingale of the Golden Iris was the gentlest benefactor in the city.
During the pause before the second act, Sharlo used the pretence of rubbing his eyes to survey the theatre again.
This time, he studied the building rather than the people.
The auditorium of the Golden Iris was horseshoe-shaped, five tiers of boxes stacked in concentric curves. Faded mythic frescoes covered the dome, from whose centre hung a crystal chandelier bearing twelve hundred candles.
To ordinary eyes, it was magnificence.
But the longer Sharlo looked, the more familiar it became—the narrowing arc of the horseshoe, the tiers of boxes sloping inward, the opening in the centre of the dome.
He had seen a similar structure in physics class in his previous life.
Not a theatre.
A bowl for gathering sound.
A stove.
The entire Golden Iris was a cauldron aimed at the stage. Two thousand spectators sat along its walls, while the Nightingale's voice burned at the bottom.
"Raven," he breathed, "who designed this theatre?"
"We checked the archive. It was rebuilt forty years ago, funded by an importer who died of illness twelve years ago."
Viola did not look away from the stage.
"The architect's name is blank in the record. There is one note: plans supplied by the commissioning party."
"Plans supplied by the client." Sharlo nodded slowly. "Excellent. We're sitting inside an apparatus built forty years ago."
He looked toward the opposite side.
On the third tier, directly facing the stage, a box hung with gold curtains stood half-concealed.
An elderly man in formal dress sat within it, the golden-thread emblem of the Church of the Daystar pinned to his breast, a brass opera glass raised in his hand.
Since the performance began, those glasses had scarcely pointed at the stage. They had swept slowly across the audience, row after row, as though taking a count.
Several neat amber lines hung over the old man's head. Most were illegible at that distance.
Sharlo narrowed his eyes and deciphered only the brightest:
【In seven days, he will recover for the church that which belongs to a god.】
"The gold-curtained box on the third tier," he whispered. "A churchman. He has opera glasses, and he's counting heads."
"The performance inspector." Viola's voice chilled. "Routine supervision of a licensed production. By regulation, the inspector attends only the premiere. This is an ordinary matinee."
"Then why is he here?"
"For the same reason we are," she said. "Reconnaissance."
Sharlo settled back into his seat.
Onstage, the second act had reached the Scarlet Queen's confrontation with the gods. The chorus built harmony upon harmony, solemn and flawless.
Suddenly the theatre seemed to him like a vast mouth caught halfway through closing: the Dirge Society fed the fire beneath the cauldron; the church poised a ladle over its rim; the Vesper Bureau crept along its side; and two thousand people sat inside applauding.
Only the woman onstage stood where the fire burned hottest, singing.
Then he raised his gaze past the orchestra pit to the woman singing at centre stage.
Sharlo's breath stopped.
There was no amber writing above Juliet Orlando.
What hung over her was an entire passage of scarlet, flame-like words.
The script was ornate as calligraphy on an obituary, line after line arranged in the shape of a poem.
Above the red passage, a larger line floated alone, like a title on a playbill:
【Time until final curtain: seven days.】
* * *
At the interval, a round-faced gentleman in a burgundy evening coat appeared at the door of their box, all affable smiles.
His card entered before he did: Bassoon, artistic agent, honorary director of the Golden Iris.
"I don't recognise you," Mr. Bassoon said, his smile smooth as butter, "yet you sat attentively through the whole first half. Few young people can do that nowadays."
"Forgive the question: are you in the profession, or true connoisseurs?"
"My fiancée is the connoisseur." Sharlo took his hand. "I merely accompany her."
"Mr. Bassoon, forgive my asking—why are tickets for Miss Orlando so difficult to obtain? We're booked for the premiere in three weeks, The Scarlet Queen of Desire, yet we managed only side seats."
As he spoke the title, he looked earnestly into Bassoon's face while fixing his peripheral vision above the man's head.
The amber writing above Mr. Bassoon was so dense it had darkened.
The instant Sharlo spoke the words "The Scarlet Queen of Desire," one line within that mass brightened gently, like the corner of a ledger page lifted by the wind:
【On the night of the premiere, he will harvest the entire house.】
"The premiere," Mr. Bassoon said with an ever more benevolent smile. "All Kandelburg will attend."
"The Scarlet Queen of Desire, a mythic drama licensed by the church, the summit of Miss Nightingale's ten years upon the stage. Young man, that night will be written into history—I promise you."
"I don't doubt it," Sharlo said.
* * *
During the second half, Sharlo stopped watching the stage and devoted himself to the house.
He soon discovered the ushers' secret.
The Golden Iris employed more ushers than most theatres—two in every aisle, each carrying a little seat lamp, their service faultlessly attentive.
But there was something wrong with the rhythm of their rounds.
At other theatres, ushers watched those who whispered, ate, or dozed. At the Golden Iris, they watched those who wept.
The more deeply someone wept, the longer a seat lamp paused beside that row number—only half a beat.
Then the usher's fingers moved rapidly inside a cuff.
Sharlo watched three times before he made it out: they were cutting a mark into a tiny copper ring worn at the base of a finger.
Those who wept hardest would "happen" to wait longer at the cloakroom after the performance, where another kindly attendant would present them with a small gilt card and whisper congratulations.
Miss Nightingale cherishes those who understand her. She wishes to offer you a standing ticket for next month's premiere.
Free tickets.
For those who wept most deeply.
"Do you see it?" he breathed.
"I see." Viola's voice was cold as an icicle. "Fishing season. Today's performance casts the net."
"Those who cry are the fish within it. At the premiere, they haul it in."
"More than that," Sharlo said slowly. "Look at the people they choose."
"That lady just now—her jewellery is genuine, but her shawl is old. A family in decline."
"The apprentice in the front row has indigo beneath his nails; he works at a dyehouse, and he soaked two handkerchiefs."
"Raven, they are selecting people who 'love deeply and live hard.' Exactly like Thomas. The deeper the love, the richer the cut. The harder the life, the easier the signature."
When he finished, the ice he had carried in his stomach from the wick shop seemed to sink another half-inch.
Every night this theatre presented the highest art in the city, and in every aisle, someone walked with a lamp, judging the fat on two thousand hearts.
After the second half ended, Sharlo used the smoking room as a pretext to make his way alone toward the backstage passage.
He intended nothing, only wanted a look at the layout of the performers' entrance.
Scenery flats stood stacked in the corridor, where paint and dust mingled in a smell so familiar it made his heart ache.
The backstage of his student theatre had smelled the same in his previous life.
"So you're the one?"
A voice came from behind him.
Low, hoarse, and tired, nothing like the golden voice from the stage, yet unmistakably belonging to the same woman.
Sharlo turned.
Juliet Orlando stood in the dressing-room doorway with half her makeup removed, an old woollen cardigan over her shoulders and an unlit cigarette between her fingers.
Seen closely, she was thinner than in the posters, her eyes deep-set enough to harbour shadows.
The scarlet writing above her burned in silence, making her look as though she stood within a soundless fire.
"Act Three," she said. "Aria at the Grave. Two thousand people in the house, all of them crying. One man in a side seat on the second tier was laughing."
"...You have excellent eyesight."
"From the stage, one sees everything."
Juliet raised her chin and studied him with her shadowed eyes.
"Ten years. That song has made kings weep. What made you laugh?"
Sharlo considered, then decided to tell the truth.
No one ever believed his truths anyway.
"I was laughing at the playwright," he said. "The singer turns into a nightingale at her lover's grave—what lazy writing."
"She's still alive. She has an entire city left to live in. The playwright didn't know what to do with her, so he turned her into a bird. She flies away, the curtain falls, problem solved."
He paused.
"You sang it too well. So well that everyone believes it is a happy ending. That is the most frightening part."
Juliet Orlando was silent for a long time.
Someone at the far end of the passage called her name, summoning her for the final bows.
She tucked the unlit cigarette behind her ear. Before turning away, she gave Sharlo a long, searching look.
"The gentleman in the side seat," she said. "Come to my Scarlet Queen on the night of the premiere. Then tell me—"
She smiled.
It was unlike any expression she had worn onstage: brief and dry, like a match struck in the desert.
"—how the playwright means to be lazy this time."
She went.
Sharlo stood in the paint-scented passage, watching her receding back and the scarlet countdown above it, his throat suddenly tight.
【Time until final curtain: seven days.】
The premiere was on the seventh day.