by Holly Lisle
“I’ll see you tomorrow, then.” Her smile seemed special to him. Personal, deeper than the smile of an employee.
When he got his life in order—when he solved the problem of the person or people who were having him followed—he needed to think about Loour. About possibilities. He’d spent long enough mourning his foolishness.
Down in makeup, Wraith told Brenjin, who did makeup for several of the secondary characters, that he needed to be a convincing woman for the evening. Brenjin brayed, and then flushed bright pink when he realized that Wraith was serious.
“Gellas, I think I could make a great girl of you—but is there something you haven’t been telling us? I mean, we all just assumed that you were avoiding women because you still hurt from Velyn. None of us really considered that you might …” Brenjin leaned in and whispered, “If any of us would interest you, I promise you’d have a line waiting to proposition you come morning. And I’d be at the head of it.”
Wraith hadn’t even considered anyone wondering why he might want to dress as a woman for the evening—nor had he considered that he might know people who would consider that a good sign. He shook his head. “Everyone was right about me—this is just for a trick I’m playing on an old friend. Make me as convincing as you can, will you?”
Brenjin sighed. “You have no idea how you gave me hope there for a moment. Certainly. Thin and fine-featured as you are, I can make an excellent woman of you. Pity you’re so tall—that will ruin the illusion a bit, but you aren’t impossibly tall for a woman. We’ll just make you wonderfully beautiful, and hide your larynx—gods-all, you have enough of that for two men.”
Wraith sat in the chair, and Brenjin started applying makeup. “Have you been in to see Kervin about a costume yet?”
“No.”
“You’re going to need big breasts to offset your shoulders—it may take him a while to make some for you that hang right. Let me call him in, and he can measure you while I do your face and hair.”
Breasts. Wraith thought this was going to turn into a fiasco. He’d hoped for a bit of makeup on his face and a good wig, and something voluminous and vaguely female that wouldn’t require a great deal of effort. But he did want to be convincing. He wanted to be … perfect. And for that, he was going to need breasts.
He sighed. He hoped he would be able to get Jess to open the door for him.
The makeup and costuming took far longer than he’d anticipated. It tied up two of his best people from their work for the better part of an afternoon. But when they stood him in front of a mirror—barely breathing because of the thing they’d cinched around his waist and ribs—he couldn’t believe what he saw. Brenjin and Kervin had given him auburn hair, voluminous breasts, a tiny waist, an outfit that showed off curves the two of them had created out of some amazing materials. He couldn’t believe how pretty his face was, nor how completely the illusion obscured the truth. He would be able to walk out the door and down the sidewalk and take an aircar to Jess’s home without having to worry about anyone connecting her with him. He might have to worry about men trying to pick him up—he projected a definite air of moral laxity. But perhaps, he thought, it was because he looked very much like Velyn had looked when she’d been younger. Had Brenjin done that on purpose?
“What do you think?”
Wraith looked over at Brenjin and said, “It’s perfect.”
“No, dear. It isn’t. You open your mouth and that voice comes out, and you’re going to ruin the whole thing. Let me see you walk.”
Wraith walked.
“No. No, no, gods, no! Women walk with one foot directly in front of the other. They pivot from the waist. They don’t swing their arms so wide. You want to think small. Try to take up less space. Long strides are fine if you can keep your feet lined up and watch your arms.”
Wraith tried the walk.
“Still not it.” Brenjin sighed. “Watch me. I’m good at this.”
He walked across the room. Wraith would have sworn that a woman’s soul had just reached out and possessed Brenjin’s body.
“How did you do that?”
“Years of practice, Gellas. Years and years of practice. I didn’t get this job because I had theater experience. I got it because I can turn myself into a girl even prettier than you—and in about half the time.” He grinned.
Wraith was shaking his head, disbelieving.
Kervin said, “It’s true. We got these jobs together because we had so much experience with costumes and makeup and creating illusions—we just didn’t admit at the time where we got that experience.”
Wraith pitched his voice softer and throaty, and didn’t try to raise it too much. “I know true magic when I see it.”
He walked across the room, turned to the two men who watched him, and asked, “Better?”
“Much.” Brenjin tipped his head to one side and studied Wraith for a long, intense moment. “And the voice was acceptable, too. Try not to talk too much, try not to walk too much, and stay out of bright, harsh lights.”
“Why? Will my face melt off?”
“No. But any little bit of beard stubble might show through the makeup.”
“Ah.” Wraith winced. “I’ll stay out of bright light. And now I must go. Luck with the rest of the evening—I’m sorry to take you away from your real tasks.”
Brenjin and Kervin grinned at each other, and Kervin said, “You jest. You were a wonderful challenge. If you decide you’d like to keep that look, let me know. I know someone who could do some fabulous outfits for your height and build and … figure.”
Wraith smiled thinly. “Thanks. I’ll keep that in mind.”
He heard Brenjin and Kervin laughing behind him.
Wraith strolled into the theater, and waited until the intermission— when the curtain fell and the bell sounded and most of the theater’s patrons rose from their seats. He rose with them and followed them into the lobby, but unlike most of them, he continued outside.
The boy at the door said, “Shall I mark your ticket, stolta? You won’t be able to enter unless it bears tonight’s mark.”
“Not at all,” Wraith said, a bit shaken by being addressed as “stolta.” “I have to leave early tonight.”
He stepped to the curb and waved a hand, and an aircar dropped down and the rear door opened for him before he had stood there half an instant. He tried to recall ever getting such quick service and couldn’t. Perhaps the driver had not had a good night and was desperate for a fare.
“Where to, stolta?”
Wraith gave the address.
“Show not to your fancy?”
Wraith started, realizing the driver was speaking to him, and then had to try to figure out what the man was talking about. Drivers usually wanted to complain to him about their last passengers, or regale him with the racing scores, or the details of their last gambling spree, or their philosophies of life and beer; they never asked him questions.
But this driver kept turning around and smiling at him. And then it snapped into place. The driver was smiling at the woman in the backseat. Asking her questions about herself, because she was a woman. Wraith sighed. “The play was good. I got a call that a friend of mine just had terrible news; I need to go see her, and I decided not to wait.”
“That’s a shame.” The man concentrated on his driving for only an instant. “Then I don’t suppose you’d want to stop off for a little drink at this charming place I know. I’m buying.”
“If I was in too much of a hurry to watch the rest of the play, I’m certainly going to be in too much of a hurry to stop off for a drink.”
“Maybe after?” He evidently caught the look on Wraith’s face, for he shrugged and turned around.
Wraith couldn’t believe this. Did women have to put up with this sort of nonsense all the time? Was just getting a driver to take them from pick-up to destination always an ordeal? Probably not for the plain ones. He thought if he let Brenjin and Kervin turn him into a woman again, he’d make sure
they made him as homely as possible.
The aircar left him in front of Jess’s house. But Jess didn’t come to the door when he knocked. Some man did—a tall, heavy-boned, bovine-faced young man with thick lips and unnervingly shrewd eyes.
“I’ve come to see Jess Covitach-Artis about a matter of great importance. It’s an emergency.”
The man leaned against the door and said, “Sweet lady, you could have come to tell her that the world would end on the morrow, and I would not wake her from her sleep. She was gray with exhaustion, and if you’re any true friend, you’ll tell me whatever message you have to pass on and then be on your way.”
“I can’t tell you,” Wraith said, dropping his voice so that he no longer sounded like a woman. “I’ve risked my own life to come here, and if I tell you, then you’re likely to die, too. If I don’t get this message to Jess, she’s likely to end up working in the mines.”
The man stared at him for a long, shocked-silent time. “You’re a man.”
“Only way I could get past the people who were watching me without being followed. It is … it is life-and-death. If you care about her, and I have to believe you do, wake her.”
The man licked his lips, glanced out into the empty street, and then nodded. “Get inside. Sit in the kitchen—pull the blinds. I’ll go get her for you.”
“Thank you.”
Wraith had never been in Jess’s house. It didn’t seem to have much of her in it—at least not the her he’d known. It had a somber feel to it, all muted colors and carefully placed furniture and expensive pieces of artwork that lacked much in the way of character. The front room, the great room off to the left, the broad arched hallway that led off into an office and an atrium … He walked in the direction her friend had pointed him in and suddenly found the kitchen. Unlike the rest of the house, it was truly Jess. Fish everywhere—little statuettes, and hand-painted tiles on the counters, and fish peeking out from behind forests of coral on the hand-painted walls. It looked like her room in Oel Maritias had looked, back when the two of them were children. The rest of the house had left him unmoved, but this nearly tore his heart out. He missed their childhood. He missed the hope for the future that it had held.
He sat at the table, looking at two little painted carvedwood fish that were holding hands and dancing. They had sweet faces—they smiled at each other as they danced, and he could almost imagine them laughing and carrying on a conversation. He held them up to see if the artist had signed them.
“They’re clever, aren’t they?”
Wraith jumped. He hadn’t heard Jess coming up behind him.
She was smiling, but it was her polite, distant business smile. “Patr told me there was some emergency. For him to have gotten me out of bed, it must have been impressive … and I didn’t catch your name, stolta.”
“Wraith,” Wraith said.
Jess’s mouth dropped open and her eyes went wide. Wraith would have accused any of his actresses who gave such a broad reaction of over-acting. In Jess, the reaction was right, but comical. She put her hands up to her breastbone and shook her head slowly. “Oh … gods … what happened to you?”
Wraith said, “I’ve had people following me. If you come to the meeting you scheduled tomorrow, they’re likely to follow you. It … it might get you killed. I’m not sure who they are, but I have potential trouble from two different sources that I know of, and might have offended someone I don’t know about. Any meeting to discuss business needs to wait—it simply isn’t worth the risk.”
“The meeting wasn’t to discuss business,” Jess said. “That was a cover to let me get to you without raising suspicion. Everything I’m doing on this trip was a cover for my visit to you.”
Wraith felt suddenly cold. “What’s going on?”
“There are rumors about you that could get you killed,” Jess said.
“Rumors?” He smiled a little. “I have worse problems than rumors.”
“I don’t think you do. You see, these are the rumors that I’ve heard: that you’ve acquired or created a private army, that you are using magic to control the minds of your audiences and to force them to work for you as traitors to the Empire, that your actors aren’t truly human but are sub-human creatures that you’ve costumed to hide their monstrous natures. That you aren’t who you appear to be, but someone else instead. Perhaps a Strithian agent. Perhaps something even more insidious.”
Wraith sat in the kitchen, listing to Patr moving about down the hall in one of the other rooms. Wraith breathed in and out a few times, hampered by the tight contraption that compressed his ribs and forced his waist into an inhumanly tiny shape. “That’s not good,” he said at last.
“It sounds to me like you have a traitor. I mean, none of the things I’ve heard have been exactly correct …”
“But none of them have been exactly wrong, either,” Wraith finished.
“Yes.”
Wraith started to rest his chin in his hand, remembered the makeup all over his face at the last minute, and stopped himself. He would hate to be a woman, he thought. At least one who caked this itchy slop all over her face all the time, or wore ludicrously uncomfortable clothing just to alter her appearance. What a miserable pain it was not to be able to sit comfortably, to have to think about face paint, and the hang of clothing, and the way each foot had to go to make hips swing correctly, and … pah! Life was too short to be hampered and caged and constricted by such nonsense.
He leaned back, making himself as comfortable as he could, and said, “I cannot imagine who might be spreading these rumors. I have good people. Truly good people. I screened all of my employees carefully before I hired them, I’ve been careful never to mix my private goals with my public persona, or to have people who know me in one capacity also working with me in the other. I have been careful.”
“It doesn’t matter. Perhaps there’s money involved. Blackmail. Sex. I could think of a dozen reason why people would turn on an employer. Two or three that would encourage them to turn on a friend.”
He nodded. “So can I. I just don’t want to believe that someone I trust could be capable of such treachery.”
“Just so long as you do believe….”
“I believe. But it adds another question to the identity of the person or people who hired those investigators to follow me.”
“You sure they didn’t follow you here?”
“They would have had to recognize me. I left in a small crowd, and I didn’t look like myself.”
“True.” Jess had been fidgeting with something over by the window. Now she turned and sighed. “Wraith, you need to have friends around you right now.”
Wraith stood up. “That’s exactly what I don’t need. You haven’t done anything wrong, Jess. You’ve had no part in any of this; you don’t know who’s involved, you don’t know what we’ve done, you don’t know what we plan to do. And that’s the way I want it. If I have a traitor somewhere in my organization, the last thing I want is for him or her to make a connection to you. So go back on your tour, and stay away from here for a while. Keep up with the nightlies; if you hear anything about me, figure that at least you’re safe.”
“I know a few things. I know about the Kaan … and the Warrens—”
“Shut up.”
“What?”
“Shut up. You don’t know anything. Leave it at that.” He leaned toward her and in a whisper said, “Whoever is watching me has placed magical listening devices around my house … and my office. I’ve left them in place because as long as I know where they are, I don’t have to try to find ones that are better hidden. But … you don’t know who might be listening to us or watching us right now.”
“That’s … silly. Why would anyone be watching us? Why would anyone have placed listening devices around my house?”
“Because you made an appointment with me. If the traitor has access to my appointment calendar—and I must assume until it is proven otherwise that he does—then you have crea
ted a fresh connection from you to me. And since you were a childhood friend of mine, you’re going to have raised some suspicions anyway.”
“No. I refuse to live my life thinking that the world is such a devious place.”
“Don’t be stupid.” Wraith stood up. “Think about everything you know of the Hars. Of magic. Of the Warrens. Have you gotten so careless or so soft—or so trusting—that you could think that the Masters of the Hars would quibble over crushing someone as insignificant as you?”
Jess winced. Wraith felt like a fiend for being so harsh with her, but she’d spent too long feeling secure, popular, and loved. She’d managed to move herself away from her dark origins and the horror that she knew to be truth. It was easy to do that; the past burned so horribly, the present comforted so completely.
“I’m sorry,” Jess said. “You’re right, of course. I don’t know, and don’t need to know, what you’ve been doing. I only felt that you were in danger and I did not want to let the danger come to you without warning.”
Wraith nodded. Jess had turned around and was staring out the window again. Wraith could see the tension in her shoulders, the way her body had gone rigid, the way it used to back when she was a little girl, when she was afraid.
“I still love you,” she added.
“I’m sorry,” Wraith said. “I’m sorry we never worked out. I was young and stupid, and now that I am older and wiser, I can look at you and see what I missed. Only now I can’t have you because I don’t dare have you near me.”
“Do you think you could love me? Someday?”
Wraith did not want her to keep hoping he’d someday find his way to her. If she could let go of that hope, she could find love elsewhere. “I still love Velyn,” he said, putting misery into his voice. Not too difficult, that. “As much as I wish I were free of her, I don’t think I’ll ever be.”
“Ah. She never deserved you.” Jess turned back to face him, and Wraith saw the tears streaking her cheeks. He didn’t dare touch her—the ruin of his makeup could prove fatal to him, and anything that revealed his true identity too soon could prove fatal to her. He needed to be well away from this place before he stopped being the woman in silk and became Gellas Tomersin—Gellas, Master of the Theater.