by Melanie Rawn
“You don’t approve?”
Evidently he hadn’t quite kept all the sarcasm out of his voice, for she made a disgusted face and replied, “Nobody has the right to an opinion but you tregetours, is that it? Well, it so happens I do approve. Only what I want you to do is craft a performance for people who are deaf. If you’re going to do it anyway, why not do it so it’s actually some use? I have a friend whose sister is losing her hearing and nobody can figure out why. All the physickers just shrug and say, ‘Something in the blood,’ meaning of course that they’ve no idea and want to blame her ancestry. Who knows but what they’re right—but the point is that she wants to go to a play. She reads all Tobalt’s articles about Touchstone and has copies of all your placards. So we’ll come as boys to a show sometime this spring, I’m not sure when, but why can’t the deaf go to theater performances meant just for them?”
The magic that produced visuals and sounds was on a different order from the magic that seeped into people’s senses to provide taste and touch and smell and emotion. None of it was real, but making pictures and noise was distinct from techniques used to touch the other senses and evoke feelings. It was where glisk had originated, in fact. Plenty of magical folk could conjure up visual and auditory images. It took real skill and subtlety and training to be a glisker.
“But would it be possible?” he asked aloud. “To put the sounds directly into someone’s head—I mean, it might be a similar process to how we do taste and scent and all that, but—I don’t think I’d know where to begin.”
Blye was shaking her head. “Not cause someone deaf to actually hear, but leave sounds out altogether. Base the experiencing of the play on everything except sound.”
“But what about the words?”
“Ah, now you’ve pierced him right where he lives!” Blye laughed.
“It could work for the blind, too,” Jed offered. “No images at all.”
“Mieka won’t like that,” Cade mused.
“Consider what it would be like,” Jed went on, “being blind from birth and never having seen anything. And then all at once there are all these shapes and colors and things confusing your head—you wouldn’t know what to do with it, would you?”
“It would be terrifying,” Blye said. “Like when Bompstable was a kitten, and he’d never heard thunder.”
Jed nodded. “He didn’t come out from under the bed until the next day, poor little thing.”
His sister suddenly grinned. “And how do you know he was under the bed all night? By the time you were married, he was a grown-up cat!”
With all the absolute—and absolutely spurious—innocence of their brother, Jedris said, “She told me, of course.”
Cade shared an eye-roll with Jinsie, then said, “At Master Emmot’s Academy we had to learn how to organize things inside our brains. That’s what we do with sight and sound when we’re infants, I suppose—learn to recognize patterns and such. It’s the same with music, or learning to read. Finding out what the letters mean, and how they go together to make words, and—”
Jinsie interrupted. “I’d love to hear your theories of learning—some other time. Will you at least think about it? When Mieka said you were mulling over doing a play that leaves out one of the usual aspects—” She shrugged delicate shoulders. “I’ve been writing to some scholars at Shollop about it, who’ve been investigating causes of deafness. Leaving aside cases of accident, of course—something to do with the structure of the ear, tiny bones that grow together or something. It’s all too complicated for me. When you’re at Shollop next summer on the Royal, why don’t you look them up?”
“I think I’d like that. Beholden, Jinsie.”
“Now you’re here, Cade,” said Jedris, “would you have a look at my plans for the frames for your glass baskets?”
Mieka had been complaining recently that because all glisker’s benches were different, setting the baskets atop them constituted a clear and avoidable danger. So Jedris had proposed a set of wooden supports. Cade spent a fascinating hour discussing the designs, suggesting changes, and deciding that combining wood and nails into a useful object was rather like combining a story and words and magic to produce a play. Everyone had his own tools. Tomorrow, he vowed, he’d polish up his particular set and get to work with renewed determination.
When he got back home, a letter was waiting for him. “Tobalt doesn’t fribble away any time,” he remarked, and explained Tobalt’s proposal to Derien and Mistress Mirdley.
“Will you go?” Derien asked. “Who’ll be there?”
“I won’t be within five miles of the place if he invites Thierin Knottinger.”
“All the more reason to be there,” Dery urged. “Betwixt you and Vered and Rauel, he’ll be demolished. There may be some bloodstains left on the brand-new stage, but demolished all the same.”
“They can have a fine time doing it without me.” He made as if to toss the invitation in the kitchen fire.
Dery reached out a hand to stop him. “You have to be there, Cade. It’s good advertising. And nobody will read the article if you’re not in it.”
He laughed and ruffled his brother’s hair. “What makes you think I’ll get a word in sidewise? Vered and Rauel will both be there, competing for attention!”
“And column inches,” Mistress Mirdley observed.
In the event, Knottinger didn’t show up. Many apologies, many regrets, many excuses—Tobalt read the note aloud, said, “Oh, that’s too bad,” and everyone promptly forgot all about Black Lightning.
The new Downstreet was indeed a marvel. Cade thought briefly about the Archduke’s proposed theater, and decided he could do much worse than this. Mieka Windthistle, in fact, might have been the advisor regarding the bars at either side of the wide lobby, sparkling with mirrors (Blye’s work) and expensive glassware (not Blye’s work)—expensive because Touchstone wouldn’t be shattering it. Reflected in the mirrors were dozens of square, squat, colorful bottles of brandies, dozens more tall green bottles of wine, and half-barrels of various beers and ales. As for the theater itself, there were two levels of seating and the stage was huge. Hanging from support beams were three large branch-lights like upside-down trees, brass polished to gleaming gold—nothing for Touchstone to shatter there, either. The beams were painted black in contrast to the eggshell color of the ceiling, which angled upwards to allow for the upper rows of seats. The swagged stage curtains were off-white velvet, as was the covering of the glisker’s bench. A table set with silver plates and fine crystal looked terribly lonely in the middle of all that polished oak planking between the curtains.
“Welcome all!” Tobalt sang out from the front of the stage. “Come in, step up, sit down!”
When Cade arrived, Vered and Rauel were already present, strolling down the middle aisle to the stage steps. Trenal Longbranch was—most professionally and quite unnecessarily, for he’d have the chance well before Hawk’s Claw played the Downstreet—pacing off the distance between the back doors and the front rows. Mirko Challender of the Crystal Sparks slouched in a few minutes after Cade, looking elegantly bored.
When they were all seated, dinner was served by a pair of teenaged boys whose hands gradually stopped shaking with the excitement of being in the presence of so many celebrated players. The food was excellent, the sweets especially good: lemon custard flavored with clove, and elderflowers simmered in honey and poured over bread pudding studded with berries.
Like Vered, Cade drank very little—not because, like Vered, he was especially susceptible to liquor, but because Tobalt was making note of every word said. He remembered only too well other times he’d been drunk and Tobalt had had pen and paper to hand. And tonight there was no Mieka here to distract everyone with his clowning.
Mieka would have been welcome, Cade mused. Everyone seemed rather edgy. Each man present was aware of the others as competing playwrights, and even more aware that they were expected to say fascinating, startling things, unsure if they were to b
e baited like bears in a pit or encouraged to dance like lapdogs in ruffled collars. So all through the meal nobody said much of anything except for polite conversation about wives and offspring and the latest in fashionable boots and shirts. Several toasts were raised to the new little Prince, born a few days ago, named Roshlin for his grandmother Queen Roshien.
Tobalt started them off, once the dishes had been cleared and they were left with bottles of brandy. “I hear from my sources,” he said with an arch smile at Vered, “that your new play is so long that it’ll take up a whole evening. Not even a break in the middle for a drink?”
Vered wore a Wouldn’t you like to know? expression. “I never listen to rumors.”
Rauel wore his most charming, wide-eyed smile. “Changing theater is what we do, isn’t it? The Shadowshapers, I mean—though I’m sure all the rest of you are talented innovators as well.”
Cade had known both of them long enough to know they were each in a mischievous mood. He settled back in his chair, sipped brandy, and prepared to enjoy the show.
Trenal Longbranch, a good-looking youth with the shoulders of a dockworker—or mayhap a Troll—and just a bit too much chin, was taking everything much too seriously, including his drinking. He filled his glass yet again and said, “It takes the Shadowshapers to get away with it. Any of us others, we change so much as a line in one of the Thirteen and we’re booted off the stage. Except for Touchstone, of course,” he added hastily, with a glance at Cade, who acknowledged him with a gracious nod. “It’s the Stewards and the nobility who want everything just as it’s always been. You take something new to anyplace outside Gallybanks, and they eat it up with a spoon.”
“While the nobility sneers,” said Mirko, “and compliments itself on its superior taste. The Sparks, we never introduce anything new at Trials. We wait until we’re out on the Circuit, and by the time word gets back here about how good it is, the highborns have been outwitted.”
“You’re assuming they have wits to be outed of,” said Cayden. “My mother’s one of them, I ought to know.”
“So’s my cousin,” Longbranch admitted. “A right pain in the netherparts, is His Lordship. Keeps reminding me who paid for my first withies.”
“No objections to your profession, then?” Rauel asked, fully aware of Lady Jaspiela’s attitude. Cade had whined to him often enough about it in the old days.
“As long as it keeps me away from his daughter,” Longbranch said with a cross between a grin and a grimace, “he’s thrilled.”
“Ah!” sighed Mirko. “The lovely Lady Lellia Longbranch!”
Trenal responded with a laugh—a trifle forced, in Cade’s opinion—and a warning finger like a threatening arrow. “You stay clear of her, too!”
Tobalt was uninterested in gossip. “Why is it that some people are so opposed to any alteration in how things have always been done?”
“We all resist change,” Cade heard himself say. “One way or another, most of us want things to stay as they are. Familiar. Comforting.”
“Society intends us to resist it.” Vered ran a finger round the rim of his glass. “Wouldn’t do to have everybody questioning why they have to do what’s always been done, would it?”
“But in theater,” Tobalt said rather desperately, “your introduction of two masquers at the same time, in ‘Life in a Day’—”
“That wasn’t innovation,” Vered told him with a shrug. “Plays started out with one actor, changing characters with actual masks. Color was used as a prompt, as well—physickers always wear green, f’r instance, and Mother Loosebuckle’s always in a red skirt. Then they added another actor, and then another—until some brainy little git thought of putting magic into it, so we only need one person onstage.”
“After that, all the old plays—the really old ones—were probably rewritten back to their original forms,” contributed Rauel. “Undoing the changes—”
“Bloody Hells!” exclaimed Mirko. “You mean we’re not just doing old stuff, we’re doing the oldest versions of the old stuff?”
“Yeh—gruesome, ain’t it?” Vered grinned. “So what we did, putting a second masquer onstage—nothing radical about it, not at all.”
“And yet,” said Longbranch, “it’s truer to your vision, and moves theater in a different direction. Cayden’s right, we cling to what we’re leaving behind, and making the changes is often painful—”
“But sometimes it’s the necessary choice,” Cade murmured.
“To turn back,” he went on eagerly, “to forsake change—that’s a betrayal of what we know we need to become.”
“But why must it be painful?” Rauel asked, his big soft eyes honestly forlorn.
“You only know you’re growing when it hurts,” Cade told him, hearing Mistress Mirdley’s voice in his head, and his own voice telling Mieka the same thing. And in Rauel’s next words he heard echoes of what he knew Mieka would reply.
“But what about being happy? Doesn’t that have anything to teach us? Can’t we learn from contentment, from laughter?”
Vered shrugged. “If you have to ask yourself whether you’re happy, most likely you’re not.”
“Gods!” cried Mirko. “You two would depress the Angels!”
“Talking of Gods—and the Lord and Lady and so on,” Vered went on wickedly, “let’s do discuss how theater is the communal experience that Chapel is supposed to be.”
Cade laughed and shook his head. “I’ve stumbled down that road before, my friend.”
“And now,” Rauel announced, “he’ll draw the difference between the emotions and the intellect, and how rational belief is superior to instinct, and—”
Vered interrupted him. “It’s no good kindling emotions just to see the pretty flames. That’s religion at its worst. Using imagination in the theater to stir up the fire—that’s just encouraging illusions.” He smiled again, and in him Cade could suddenly see not Wizard or traces of Elf or Goblin but deliberate malicious Fae, intent with not-quite-innocent glee on making as much trouble as possible. “Of course, the first plays were based on tales from The Consecreations, so maybe it’s all one and the same: imagination, illusion, religion, theater—”
Tobalt gulped audibly. This portion of Vered’s remarks would not make it into any articles. Dancing close to blasphemy, he was. “But the emotion created by the imagination, by a tregetour and glisker in a play, is just as real as any other.”
“Which wouldn’t be so bad,” Vered went on, “except that most people are scared half to death of their own imaginations—and their own emotions. So they feed off ours!” He toasted Cade with his brandy glass. “And we’ve had this talk, too, you and me. Bleedin’ Vampires, players and audiences alike!”
He felt it then, an Elsewhen hovering closer, closer, and resisted it. There was no danger to giving in, not when he was safely seated amongst friends, but he had no intention of arousing their curiosity or their alarm by turning all blank-eyed and distracted, and then having to explain himself somehow. Besides, if what he saw and heard was even half so horrific as some of the other Elsewhens had been… he was no masquer, to contrive a convincing face and manner on the turn of one word in a play.
Vered was still talking. “I read somewhere that there’s actually something immoral about imagining yourself into different times and places—”
“That musty old book of Chat’s?” Rauel asked. “From someplace on the Continent,” he explained to the others. “The point of it was something like, ‘You are who and what and where fate and fortune placed you, and imagining yourself as something or someone or somewhere else is an offense against the All Mighties—’ ” He shrugged and smiled. “Whoever and Whatever they might be. I’m not terribly clear on their religion.”
“Which only makes Vered’s point,” Cade said, “about theater doing what religion used to do, or is supposed to do.”
“We make people feel, and we’re supposed to feel guilty about it?” Mirko scoffed. “They come to us for exactly wha
t we give them!”
Again the Elsewhen nagged at him; again he pushed it away.
“Not all of them want the same thing,” Trenal remarked. “Some want to be taken by the hand and led through the whole thing, with signposts along the way.”
Mirko nodded agreement. “Everything explained on the instant, everybody’s background and motivations given right up front, and when the villain shows up, they want him to be wearing a great big placard written in bright red letters—I’m the frightful nasty person come to fuck everything up.”
This was a bit much for Tobalt. “But don’t people trust the playwright to know what he’s doing?”
“You might,” Rauel said glumly.
The slamming of a door to the lobby turned all their heads. “This is a private event!” Tobalt called out.
“But Vered and I have no secrets.”
The woman’s voice was high and light and what Cade could only describe to himself as pinched, as if each word had been constricted like glass blown into a mold. Vered’s dark skin rarely showed a blush, so it was the widening of his eyes that gave him away. He leaped from his chair and down the side steps of the stage, heading into the dimness of the theater aisles. Rauel, for his part, shut his eyes briefly and drew in a controlled breath, then smiled for all he was worth.
“You said nine,” she went on, loudly enough for the rest of them to hear. “It’s almost ten. I was lonely.”
“Bexan?” Mirko whispered to Trenal.
“Bexan,” Trenal whispered back.
Before Cade could ask who Bexan was, she and Vered were back. Shaking out her heavy black skirts, she sat in his chair and picked up his brandy glass and turned to Tobalt with a look that expected nothing, revealed nothing. She was little and dark, pretty in a moody sort of way, with plenty of crisp curls and a faint bluish cast to her very white skin that spoke of Piksey in her blood.
Rauel played the well-bred gentleman and fetched the chair that had been set aside when Thierin Knottinger hadn’t shown up. He was still smiling a trained masquer’s smile. If Vered noticed, he didn’t care. He took the seat his partner had brought him, filled Bexan’s glass, and only with difficulty took his eyes off her and introduced her all round.