by K. J. Parker
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2020 by One Reluctant Lemming Company Ltd.
Excerpt from The Last Smile in Sunder City copyright © 2020 by Luke Arnold
Excerpt from The Mask of Mirrors copyright © 2020 by Bryn Neuenschwander and Alyc Helms
Cover design by Lauren Panepinto
Cover images by Shutterstock
Cover copyright © 2020 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.
The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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First Edition: August 2020
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2020933510
ISBNs: 978-0-316-49867-8 (trade paperback), 978-0-316-49865-4 (ebook)
E3-20200709-JV-NF-ORI
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Act 1
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Act 2
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Act 3
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Discover More
Extras
Meet the Author
A Preview of The Last Smile in Sunder City
A Preview of The Mask of Mirrors
Also by K. J. Parker
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Oh, the man who can rule a theatrical crew,
Each member a genius (and some of them two) […]
Can govern and rule, with a wave of his fin,
All Europe – with Ireland thrown in!
W. S. Gilbert, The Grand Duke
The history of how the City was saved, by Notker the professional liar, written down because eventually the truth always seeps through.
Act 1
1
It wasn’t going well. He was polite enough – he was always polite – but I was losing him.
“It’s a fantastic story,” I said. “There’s this man – Einhard would be amazing in it. It’s the part he was born for.”
A little ground regained. Einhard was hard to find parts for, and under contract. “Go on,” he said.
“There’s this man,” I went on. “He’s a nobleman by birth but fallen on hard times. He’s begging in the street.”
“That’s good,” he said cautiously. “People like that.”
“And one day he’s sitting outside the temple with his hat on the ground and his dog on a bit of string—”
“No dogs. We never work with dogs.”
“With his hat on the ground, when who should walk up but the lord high chamberlain and the grand vizier. In disguise, of course.”
“But we know it’s them.”
“Of course. And they point out that the man bears an uncanny resemblance to the king. Yes, the man says, he’s my umpteenth cousin umpteen times removed, that’s why I grew the beard, because it’s embarrassing sometimes, but what can you do? And then the grand vizier says, we need you to do a job for us, and you’ll be well paid. And it turns out that the king’s been abducted by traitors in the pay of the enemy, who want to start a war, so we need you to pretend to be him, just long enough so that—”
He raised his hand. “Let me stop you there,” he said.
Oh well, I thought.
“It’s a great story,” I said.
“I agree. It’s a fantastic story. Always has been. It was a great story a century ago in The Prisoner of Beloisa. It was even better in Carausio, and The Man in the Bronze Mask—”
“A hundred and sixteen consecutive performances,” I pointed out.
“Still a record,” he conceded. “It’s one of those stories – well, a bit like you,” he said with a smile. “Starts off really well a long time ago and just keeps on getting better and better, no matter how many times you see it, up to a point, but after a while—” He shrugged. “Best of luck with it,” he said, “but I don’t honestly think it’s for us, thanks all the same.”
“There’s a siege in it,” I told him. “And a love story.”
He hesitated. “Sieges are good,” he said. “Tell you what. Why don’t you go away and rewrite it with just the siege, and forget about the other stuff? Sieges are going down really well right now.”
Which is bizarre. Seven years into the great siege of the City; that’s real life, for crying out loud, surely the last thing you go to the theatre for is real life. But (he explained to me, when I objected) what the people want is something that looks at first sight like real life, but which actually turns out to be a fairy tale with virtue triumphant, evil utterly vanquished, a positive, uplifting message, a gutsy, kick-ass female lead and, if at all possible, unicorns. Also, I told him, what they want is something that looks new and completely original but is actually the same old story we’ve all known and loved since we were kids. Exactly, he said. But, knowing you, what you’d give them would be something genuinely new and original disguised as the same old same old; and if I were to put that on in my theatre, after a night or two the actors would start to feel terribly lonely.
So I went away. As it happens, I wrote him a positive, uplifting piece of shit about a siege where virtue triumphed, evil was vanquished and Andronica looked stunning in slinky black leather as she kicked enemy
ass from one side of the proscenium to the other. It ran twenty-six nights and more or less broke even, so that was all right.
Virtue triumphant, evil utterly vanquished, a positive, uplifting message, a gutsy, kick-ass female lead and, if at all possible, unicorns. I have to confess I’m no scholar, so for all I know there may be unicorns, in Permia or somewhere like that, so maybe one component of that list does actually exist in real life. Wouldn’t like to bet the rent on it, though.
2
I left the theatre and walked down Fishtrap Hill into Paradise. Curious thing about this man’s city. All the really horrible bits of it have absolutely charming names. Like the Old Flower Market, which at one time must have been a place where you could buy flowers, but not in my lifetime. It burned down in that big fire about five years ago and nobody’s missed it; the inhabitants moved out and separated strictly on Theme lines – all the Blues went to Old Stairs, all the Greens to Paradise – with the result that there’s no longer anywhere in town where Blues and Greens can be found living side by side. No great loss. Theme-related murders are down about ten per cent since the Flower Market went up in smoke. It’s so much easier to tolerate your deadly enemies if you never see them from one year’s end to the next.
A respectable professional man like me has to have a reason for setting foot in Paradise; not something you’d do frivolously, or unless you absolutely had to. I walked down a couple of alleys, with that dreadful twitchy feeling you simply can’t help, like painfully sore eyes in the back of your head, then stopped at one of twenty or so identical anonymous soot-black doors, wrapped a bit of cloth round my knuckles and knocked three times. The door opened, and this woman stood there staring at me.
You wouldn’t put her on the stage. You wouldn’t dare to. Stereotypes and caricatures are all very well – our life’s blood, if the truth be told – but there’s such a thing as overdoing it. So, if you want an obnoxious old hag, you go for two or three out of the recognised iconography: wrinkles, hooked nose, wispy thin white hair like sheep’s wool caught in brambles, shrivelled hands like claws, all that. You don’t use them all, because it’s too much. Which is why you don’t get much real life on the stage. Nobody would believe it.
“Hello, Mother,” I said.
She gave me a sour look. “Oh,” she said, “it’s you.”
“Keeping well?”
“Like you give a damn.”
You don’t stand talking in doorways in Paradise. “Can I come in?” I asked.
“Why? What do you want?”
She loves me really, but I’m a great disappointment to her. “I haven’t been to see you for a while,” I said.
“Six months and four days. Not that I mind.”
“Can I come in, please?”
My mother owns her own spinning wheel, which in Paradise makes you aristocracy. She’s also the widow of a Green boss, so nobody’s stolen it yet. And that’s not all. She spins high-grade coloured yarns for the daughters of the gentry, who sit doing embroidery all day; the difference being, my mother gets paid. She’s practically blind, but she’s still very good at what she does, very quick and never any problems with the quality of the product. I once figured out that she’d spun enough silk thread to stretch from here to Atagene and back. I told her that. She has no idea where Atagene is, and couldn’t care less.
“Is it money?” she asked.
Hurtful. True, very occasionally I’ve been obliged to borrow trifling sums, but not recently. Not for at least six months. “Certainly not,” I said. “I just wanted to see you, that’s all. You’re my mother, for crying out loud.”
She sat down on that ridiculous looking low chair, put her foot on the treadle and picked up her clawful of yellow frizz, all hairy, like a fruit with mould. The wheel started to hum, as it’s done all my life. I told her what I’d been doing, or an artistic version thereof, in which virtue was triumphant and evil utterly vanquished. She pretended she couldn’t hear me over the noise of the wheel. Like I said, I’m a disappointment to her. She wanted me to be a murderer and an extortionist, like my father.
A man can take only so much of the bosom of his family, so I steered my narrative to an aesthetically pleasing conclusion, told her to take care and left.
Back up the hill, and fortunately the wind was from the sea, so by the time I emerged into Buttergate I’d left the smell of home behind me. There was a line in a play I was in once: home clings close. Which is true, but only if you let it.
From Buttergate I headed uptown. I had a paying job; private after-dinner entertainment in a fashionable house in the Crescent. Impersonations of leading figures of the day, needless to say, and as I turned the corner into that magnificent example of early Mannerist architecture I was desperately trying to remember which side my hosts were on. I hoped they were Optimates, because I can do Nicephorus and Artavasdus standing on my head (literally, for two thalers extra; goes down very well, but makes me dizzy), whereas the Populars are a bit too nondescript for easy mimicry. The house I was looking for was the third from the south (more fashionable) end, with a blue door.
I heard this whirring noise. It was just like the whir of my mother’s wheel, but it couldn’t be, could it, in context. I listened to it for maybe three heartbeats, and a shadow passed over my head and put me in the shade for just a split second, and then there was that impossibly loud thump and a big cloud of dust where the house with the blue door used to be.
There’s almost always a moment of dead silence, before all hell breaks loose. When you’ve been around as long as I have, you know what that moment is for. It’s the Invincible Sun giving you just enough time to choose: do I charge in and help and get involved, or do I discreetly turn round and walk away?
When the bombardment first started, about eighteen months ago, nobody thought about choosing. Didn’t matter who you were, when one of those colossal slabs of rock fell out of the sky and flattened something, you didn’t walk, you ran to help, do whatever you could; even me, once or twice. I remember the dust blinding me and coating the inside of my mouth with cement, and ripping off two fingernails scrabbling at a chunk of stone with a man half under it – his eyes had been squeezed out of his head by the pressure, but he was still alive. I remember my fellow citizens jostling me out of the way in the rush to get there first.
But that was eighteen months ago. Since then, we’ve settled down into a sort of a pattern. The enemy secretly builds a new super-trebuchet, capable of reaching over the walls; they haul it up to within range at first light, spend the day setting it up and loose their first ranging shot around dusk. It takes them six hours to wind it up again; only by then, our intrepid commandos have darted out through a sally port, punched through the lines, smashed up the trebuchet beyond repair and rushed back to the safety of the walls, sometimes with fewer than sixty per cent losses. So the enemy go away and build a new one, and so it goes on, pointlessly and catastrophically, like the siege; and once or twice a month, a house near the wall gets smashed (because you can’t lob a stone over the eastern end of the wall and not hit something) and that’s just life. Occasionally, there are dire personal consequences to ordinary people like me, who would have been paid good money for performing to a select audience in what’s now a mess of smashed bones and rubble. That’s real life, in this man’s town. You can see why nobody wants any more of it than they can possibly help.
I used my moment of absolute quiet sensibly. I turned round and walked back the way I came, quickly but without breaking into a run.
I’m not a writer (as you’ll agree, if you read this book). I only reach for the pen when times are hard, business is slow and nobody wants me. Then I write a part for myself – a flashy cameo, usually – and a play to go with it, and tout it round the managers until one of them is gullible enough to accept it. Because I’m better at writing for other people than for myself, my fellow actors generally like my stuff; and what the big names in the profession like, the managers like, and what the managers like,
the bit players and the small fry like. In fact, everybody likes my stuff, except for me (and the public, but they don’t like anything) and as often as not we break even. Since three out of five plays in this man’s city close inside of a week and make a loss, that makes me a bankable proposition. But I’m not a writer, and I don’t want to be one.
Nor do I want to do what I mostly do for a living, which is impersonations. However, Destiny or the Invincible Sun or someone like that doesn’t really give a damn about what I want, which is why I was born and grew up looking totally, absolutely nondescript, and why I have this uncanny knack of imitating other people. Protective mimicry, possibly; or the basic actor’s urge, taken to extremes.
Not that I’ll ever be a proper actor, let alone a great one – for which I’m profoundly grateful. There’s an immutable rule that only jerks and bastards can be really fine actors. Take Psammetichus, or Deuseric, or Andronica – loathsome, arrogant, self-centred as a drill bit, and the rest. It’s easy to explain. If you spend most of your life being Psammetichus or Andronica, think how wonderful it must be to be someone else, for three hours every evening. I can imagine no greater incentive for mastering and perfecting your craft. And doing matinees.
It’s not quite like that for me. Mostly the people I impersonate are serious public figures: politicians, generals, the occasional actor, athlete or gladiator. Most of them are profoundly unpleasant people, and on balance I’d rather be me than them. Actually, there’s a remarkable paradox here. Nobody in his right mind would pay good money to see me, when I’m out of character. And nearly everybody in the City would pay very good money for a guarantee that the First Minister or the Leader of the Opposition would never been seen or heard of again. But when it’s me pretending to be the First Minister or the Leader of the Opposition – well, there aren’t exactly queues stretching down the street, but a steady trickle each night, enough to pay the rent and a very modest profit. Make of that what you can. I regard it as rather more curious than interesting.
Brick dust all down my sleeve and in my hair, and an unexpected, unwanted, free evening. I put my hand in my pocket and dredged up what at first sight looked like a promising catch of shiny silver coins; but half of them turned out to be that week’s rent, a quarter were what I owed to various friends with an unhappy knack of being able to find me, and the residue was food and a new pair of second-hand boots – not a luxury, in my line. You go and see a manager, first thing he looks at is your feet. If you’ve been walking around a lot lately, you’re probably unemployable.