On opening night, the Golden Iris Opera House shone like a sugar sculpture on fire.
All two thousand seats were filled. The boxes glittered with silk and jewels; the stalls were a sea of wool coats and starched collars; in the standing gallery at the top, apprentices and factory girls who had saved half a month's wages pressed shoulder to shoulder. From the vaulted ceiling hung the crystal chandelier, twelve hundred candles burning upon it—the Golden Iris's proud tradition, and the greatest blaze in the city outside the Sun-Kindling Rite.
Wearing the evening clothes provided by the Vesper Bureau, Sharlo stood at the far end of the second-tier promenade, from which he could overlook the entire stalls.
To his eyes, the theatre wore another aspect tonight.
Above two thousand heads, amber words floated in a thin mist. Within that mist, four hundred places lay dark—four hundred people with almost no writing above them, distributed evenly among every price of seat like four hundred knots in a net. Thomas sat on the east side of the stalls, eleventh row.
Cheryl was beside him. Sharlo had arranged that: two tickets, reimbursed by the Vesper Bureau, after an hour spent wearing down Accounts.
"All teams report." Viola's voice sounded close against his ear. The Vesper Bureau's communication candles came in pairs sharing the same wick; one was pinned inside his collar, the other in her hand, carrying speech across the distance. "Stage left, in position."
"Ceiling, in position," said another voice.
"Belowground, in position. Wax vault located beneath the orchestra pit. Quantity..."
The voice paused. "More than four hundred. Every candle is linked to a fuse-wick."
"Consultant in position," Sharlo murmured. "One addition: the Sacred Flame Knights have men at the main entrance and all four emergency exits. They're dressed as ushers, but ushers don't keep one hand on their belts."
"Seen them," Grey's voice replied through the candle, as steady as if he sat before his own chessboard. "Remember: the bell is the signal. Nobody moves until it rings. Let them sing."
In the quarter hour before the curtain, Sharlo looked over everyone who mattered.
In the gold-curtained box on the third tier, the performance censor had brought two more men than last time, and one opera glass had become three. The old man himself had taken his seat early. An elegantly bound copy of the Daystar Canon lay open on his knees, though he did not turn a page from beginning to end.
The book was a prop. The man was a bell, waiting for a certain hour.
In the VIP stalls, Mr. Bassoon played the host tonight. Dressed in spotless white evening clothes, he greeted arrivals at the door and exchanged pleasantries with every important guest. Sharlo noticed one detail: whenever Bassoon shook hands, he had a habit of lightly resting his left hand on the back of the other person's.
Each time, the little amber words over that person's head quivered, like water brushed by a fingertip. He was confirming something—or rather, taking inventory. After counting the seventeenth guest, Bassoon raised his head and, across the full breadth of the hall, lifted his glass slightly toward Sharlo on the second-tier promenade.
Sharlo returned the salute. Across the clamor of two thousand people, the two men smiled at each other like gentlemen who had settled the hour of their duel.
On the east side of the stalls, Thomas and Cheryl entered. Thomas wore his finest suit—the same one, judging from the photograph, that he had worn on the day of their engagement. Before sitting, he dusted Cheryl's seat with his handkerchief, every motion meticulous.
Cheryl wore no hat tonight. Her handbag rested in her lap, her left hand upon it. Thomas's right hand lay on the armrest, one inch away.
Watching that one-inch distance, Sharlo said silently: Remember what I told you, Miss Hart.
The lights dimmed three times, the signal for the performance to begin. The noise ebbed like the tide. The breathing of two thousand people gradually fell into a single rhythm. In the darkness, Sharlo checked the communication candle inside his collar one final time and discovered his palms were sweating—not with fear.
It was the sweat before stepping onstage. Before every performance in his last life, he had stood in the wings just so: palms wet, heart racing. Then the curtain rose, and everything settled into place.
"Ladies and gentlemen," he murmured to himself in the darkness, repeating an old theatre benediction, "have a good show."
The curtain rose.
* * *
The Scarlet Queen of Desire was grander than Sharlo had expected, and more sinister.
The outer garment of sacred drama was seamless. The scenery depicted the ancient age of gods. The chorus wore robes approved by the Church.
Every line of the libretto came from public scripture. It told how, in the age of the Seventeen Gods, the Scarlet Queen abandoned herself to every sensual pleasure, how the other gods cast her out, and how she died on the night she fell in love with a mortal. It was the Church's standard version, its moral that "the wanton must perish."
Touring companies had performed it thousands of times in country towns over the years. No one had ever seen anything wrong with it.
The danger was in the music.
Sharlo knew nothing of musical theory, but he could see. Whenever Juliet's aria reached certain phrases, the four hundred dark spaces over the stalls took on the faintest grey glow at the same instant, like four hundred candlewicks plucked by an invisible hand. At the end of the passage, the glow subsided. With the next, it rose again, brighter than before.
They were not staging a play. They were beating time. The entire production was a gigantic machine: the libretto its gears, the musical phrases its chains, the four hundred people who had sold their love debts its fuel bunker. Every beat conveyed more fuel toward the mouth of the furnace.
"Raven," Sharlo whispered. "The harvest isn't at the finale. It's gradual. It has already begun."
"The bell hasn't rung." Viola's voice was stretched tight. "Chief, the bell hasn't rung."
"I hear you," Grey replied, still calm. "Wait a little longer. The stoker won't show his hand until the furnace is burning. I don't want four hundred candles. I want the hand that lights them."
The first act ended. Intermission.
The crystal chandelier brightened, and two thousand people surfaced from the play to breathe. In an instant, the promenade filled with silk and perfume. Waiters bearing silver trays of fruit wine threaded through the crowd, while box doors opened and closed. Holding a glass he had no intention of drinking, Sharlo made a slow circuit of the second tier and counted every hand the "ushers" kept pressed to their belts at the emergency exits.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
Mr. Bassoon was waiting outside the smoking room at the bend in the promenade.
"My gentleman in the side seat." The round-faced man saluted him from afar with his wineglass, his smile freshly pressed. "A side seat on the third tier last time, a place on the second-tier promenade tonight—you've risen in the world. When a young man's luck arrives, not even a mountain can stand in its way."
"May your kind words prove true." Sharlo raised his own glass. "The production is superb, Mr. Bassoon. Especially the chorus—not one idle word. I counted. Even every breath falls on the same beat."
"A connoisseur." Bassoon narrowed his eyes. "No more than five people in the house could have seen that."
"The other four, I presume, are all on your distinguished guest list."
Three paces apart, they smiled at one another. Voices thundered through the promenade, the sweetness of fruit wine hanging in the air. Sharlo saw with perfect clarity that, within the mass of amber writing above Bassoon's head—so dense it was nearly black—the uppermost line burned steadily:
【He will light the fire in Act Three.】
At the same time, Mr. Bassoon's appraising eyes weighed him inch by inch. After a moment, the round-faced gentleman stepped half a pace closer and spoke gently, low enough for Sharlo alone to hear.
"A word of advice to a young man, in honour of your eye. Tonight's play was written many years ago. The dead wrote its words, the dead composed its music, even the row where each audience member sits was arranged beforehand. There is only one wise way to sit through such a play."
He patted Sharlo's shoulder with a soft, warm hand. "Sit upon your own ticket stub and do not move. Move, and you add a scene. Those who add scenes never come to a good end."
"I stand instructed," Sharlo said. "But Mr. Bassoon, I spent several years in the theatre, and I have a saying from the trade to offer in return—"
He leaned half a pace closer, his smile sincere.
"The part the audience remembers is never the part that was planned."
The curtain bell rang. Mr. Bassoon gave him a long look, then turned toward the VIP box, his white evening coat a floe of ice in the crowd. As Sharlo returned to his place, Viola's voice immediately reached him through the communication candle.
"Why did you goad him?"
"To confirm two things," Sharlo murmured. "First, the time of ignition: Act Three. It's written over his head. Second—and more important—he doesn't recognize me. The way he looked at me was the way one looks at an unforeseen variable that came from nowhere. Raven, the Dirge Society doesn't know what happened in the dead-end alley. Sweet-voice died before he could report. This card of mine is still face down."
The other end of the communication candle was silent for a heartbeat. Then Grey's voice came, low and slow.
"Good. Keep it face down until the end. Consultant, from this moment forward, unless I order otherwise, you are merely a man watching a play."
Halfway through the second act, the Scarlet Queen met her mortal onstage.
Sharlo watched Juliet. Her form tonight was preternaturally good. Her voice was silver tempered in flame, and her whole body burned upon the stage—literally.
The scarlet writing above her head had spread to her shoulders and streamed down her arms, dressing her in a burning wedding gown. A countdown hung above it all:
【Until the curtain falls: tonight.】
Then Sharlo noticed something that chilled his palms.
As Juliet sang the aria in which the Scarlet Queen fell in love with the mortal, she kept her right hand pressed to the left side of her chest. It was not part of the director's blocking—the movements of the chorus were all mirror-symmetrical; hers was the only extra hand. Beneath the lining of her costume at that spot was a thin, square outline.
The outline of a letter.
She had brought onstage the letter she had not dared open in ten years.
"She knows," Sharlo murmured. "She knows everything. She expects to die tonight, so she has brought her most precious possession with her—like a traveller carrying money for the road."
The gong sounded for the beginning of Act Three.
The change came in the dying reverberation.
In the front of the stalls, an elderly gentleman suddenly rose. His movements were tranquil, his face serene, yet within seconds his eyes faded to ash-white. Then came a second: a lady in the seventh row.
A third: a young man in the upper standing gallery. It was like a field of wheat in which stalk after stalk laid itself down. The four hundred dark places above their heads kindled grey at once.
This time the glow did not subside. It drew out through the centres of their brows—four hundred strands, fine as spider silk—and merged in midair into a shining grey river that flowed toward the space above the stage.
The auditorium erupted. Some screamed, some shoved, while more still believed it part of the performance and applauded.
In the eleventh row on the east side of the stalls, Thomas Ophir's fingers slipped from the armrest.
It took two heartbeats for grey to spread across his eyes. His back straightened, his breathing remained even, and his expression looked pressed flat by an iron. The Thomas of ten days ago had returned, taking possession of the body the letters had warmed inch by inch. He turned serenely toward Cheryl and said with formal courtesy, "Miss, may I ask who you are—"
Cheryl Hart did not scream.
She seized the hand that was already withdrawing, with both of hers and all the strength in all ten fingers. Her nails dug into the back of his hand, leaving white crescents.
"Thomas Ophir." She spoke one word at a time, her voice shaking almost beyond recognition but her eyes fixed fiercely ahead. "The umbrella was lake blue. The third rib was bent. You stood on my left when I laughed. You wrote me six letters, and I know every one backward—I dare you to forget. I'll stand right here, before two thousand people, and recite them to you one by one!"
The grey eyes regarded her with mild confusion.
But the hand did not pull away.
—At that same moment, the swords of the Sacred Flame Knights cleared their scabbards at every emergency exit. Gold-red lines of fire flared along the blades and struck the grey wax sealing the doors. The wax split at the blows, only for fresh wax to pour from the cracks and heal faster than the swords could cleave it.
The captain of the knights spun and roared toward the VIP box, his voice battering through the chaos. "Bassoon! The Church's license said nothing of this—"
"The license." In his box, Mr. Bassoon smiled with pity. "My lord, even now you still believe the Church is the one licensing us."
"The bell—"
Grey's order never left his mouth. Every door in the theatre slammed shut in the same second. Grey wax seeped through the seams and hardened at once. The flames of all twelve hundred candles on the crystal chandelier turned ash-white in unison, and the entire theatre took on the light of a graveyard under the moon.
Mr. Bassoon rose in the VIP box, his evening clothes snowy white and his smile amiable. He spread his arms to the whole house like a director taking a curtain call.
"Ladies and gentlemen," he said, not loudly, yet his voice rose above every scream, "thank you for the devotion you have shown our nightingale these past ten years. A small alteration has been made to the final act tonight—"
He snapped his fingers.
The grey river abruptly accelerated. The last love debts were torn out by the roots from the four hundred faded souls and poured into its current. And the river's destination was none other than Juliet, centre stage.
Grey light flooded into her like a waterfall. The scarlet writing over her head surged, and the burning wedding gown became a burning torrent—
"Change of plan!" Grey's roar exploded through the communication candle. "The Sacred Flame Knights have moved—they're seizing the crown! Raven, the ceiling is yours! Consultant—"
The old inspector's voice paused.
"Consultant, your stage is clear. Can you improvise?"
Sharlo was already running. He vaulted the promenade rail and descended by the ledges of the boxes—all the rough tricks from stage-combat classes in his last life, stage falls, table vaults, box jumps, put to use at once. When he dropped into the shadows of the wings, pain numbed his knees.
Two Dirge Society enforcers barred the backstage passage, only for a black shadow to put them down first. Viola sheathed her baton one-handed and pressed two brass whistles into his palm with the other.
"I'll cut the fuse-wick in the ceiling. The woman onstage is yours." She fixed him with eyes made terrifyingly bright by six years without sleep and the theatre's ash-white light.
"Don't die. Addendum: that is an order, not concern."
"Understood, darling."
Sharlo charged out of the wings.
Onstage, the aria of death had already begun. Wrapped from head to foot in scarlet writing, Juliet stood at the centre of the spotlight and opened her mouth to sing the Scarlet Queen's final line. The whole theatre's grey light converged upon her.
Bassoon leaned from his box, smiling. The Sacred Flame Knights' golden tracery burned at every door. From high inside the ceiling came the muffled sounds of Viola fighting someone.
The script hung in midair, its final line burning like an open wound:
【Love will unmake the Scarlet Queen.】
Sharlo drew a deep breath, straightened his bow tie, and strode out of the wings into the spotlight.
Two thousand pairs of eyes, together with an unknowable number of unseen eyes in the darkness, fell upon him.
He cleared his throat and, before the astonished house, made the formal bow of a theatrical apprentice.
"Pardon the interruption," he said. "The playwright sent me. This scene has new lines."