Part 8 (1/2)

The Trapdoor Daemon was puzzled by Eva.

His protegee sat aside as usual, Reinhardt hovering guiltily while paying overdone attentions to Illona. Eva was calm and in control again, different from last night. It was as if she'd never seen his true form. Or maybe she'd found the strength in herself to accept what she had seen? Whatever the case, she wasn't concerned this morning with the monster she had met last night.

A few of the chorus girls had been prattling about a murder outside the theatre. The Trapdoor Daemon knew nothing of that, except that he'd eventually be blamed.

As Malvoisin, he had written about evil, about how attractive it could be, how seductive a path. When he began to change, he had thought that he had himself succ.u.mbed to Salli's temptations, as Diogo Briesach in Seduced by Slaanes.h.i.+ had to his own private daemons. Then, as he became less bound by human thinking, he came to recognize there was no more evil in him when his shape changed than there had been before.

In a sense, he'd been freed by his mutation. Perhaps that was the laugh line of Tzeentch's jest at his expense, that he could only be aware of his humanity once his human form was buried in a mora.s.s of squiddy altered flesh. Still, he realized that for others warpstone was a polluter of the soul as well as the body.

Watching Genevieve, who was herself watching Detlef with a new attentiveness, the Trapdoor Daemon wondered whether a warpstone shard had been shot into his protegee.

Eva Savinien had changed, and she was changing still.

He had allowed the company to break up for lunch, and told them they did not have to come back until the evening's performance. The Strange History of Dr. Zhiekhill and Mr. Chaida was rolling of its own accord now, and Detlef was almost at the point when, even if everything else were not falling apart, he would have been prepared to let it alone. Long run shows develop by themselves, finding ways to stay alive. He was even grateful to Eva Savinien, whose unpredictable luminescence was prodding everyone in the company in unexpected directions.

Illona, for instance, was suggesting that she might have the makings of a tragic heroine as she slipped into the age range for roles like the Empress Magritta or Ottokar's Wife.

In Poppa Fritz's rooms, he found Genevieve surrounded by unscrolled maps, weighted down at the corners with books and small objects. She was with the stage-door keeper and Guglielmo, trying to make sense of the diagrams of the tunnels under the theatre.

'So,' she said, 'we're agreed? This one is a deliberate fraud, to be found by the enemies of someone taking refuge.'

The older-looking men nodded.

'It's too clearly marked,' Guglielmo said. 'Obviously, it's designed to get anyone who relies on it hopelessly lost. Possibly even to lead them into traps.'

'What are you three conspirators up to?' Detlef asked. 'Plotting to join Prince Kloszowski's revolutionist movement?'

'I'm going to try to find him,' Genevieve said.

She was dressed in clothes Detlef had not seen her wear in years. In Altdorf, she was usually found in subdued but elegant finery: white silks and embroidered Cathayan robes. Now she wore a leather hunting jacket and boots, with st.u.r.dy cloth trews and a man's s.h.i.+rt. She looked like Violetta, disguised as her twin brother in Tarradasch's Hexenachtabend.

'Him?'

'Malvoisin.'

'The Trapdoor Daemon,' Poppa Fritz explained. In the gloom, the old man looked like a crumpled parchment himself.

'Gene, why?'

'I think he's suffering.'

'The whole world is suffering.'

'I can't do anything about the whole world.'

'What can you do for this creature, even if he is Bruno Malvoisin?'

'Talk to him, find out if he needs anything. I think he was as frightened as Eva by what happened.'

Poppa Fritz rolled up the fake map, and slipped it into its tube, coughing in the dust that belched from it.

'He's some kind of altered, Gene. His mind must be gone. He could be dangerous.'

'Like Vargr was dangerous, Detlef?'

Vargr Breughel had been Detlef's stage manager and a.s.sistant. A dwarf born of normal parents, he'd been with the actor-playwright-director since the beginning of his career. In the end, he'd turned out to be an altered thing of Chaos and had killed himself rather than be tortured by a stupid man.

'Like you were dangerous?'

Detlef had been born with six toes on one foot. His merchant father had remedied the defect in early childhood with a meat cleaver.

'Like I am dangerous?'

She opened her sharp-toothed mouth wide and made play-claws of her hands. Then, she dropped her monster face.

'You know as well as I do that warpstone sometimes just makes a monster of you on the outside.'

'Very well, but take some of our bruisers with you.'

Genevieve laughed, and crushed a prop candlestick into a squeezed ball of metal.

'I'd only have to look after them, Detlef.'

'It's your life, Gene,' he said, wearied. 'You do what you want with it.'

'I certainly intend to. Poppa Fritz, I'll go in here,' tapping a chart, 'from the stalls. We'll have to break open this old trapdoor.'

'Gene,' he said, laying a hand on her shoulder. A child sometimes, she was also ancient. She kissed him, quickly.

'I'll be careful,' she said.

Reinhardt Jessner knew he was being a fool, but couldn't help himself. He knew he was hurting Illona, and would be hurting their twins, Erzbet and Rudi. In the end, he was hurting himself most of all.

But there was something about Eva.

She was in his blood like snakepoison, and it couldn't be sucked out with a simple bite. Since the first night of Dr. Zhiekhill and Mr. Chaida, the bane was creeping through him. He had known it at the party afterwards. One or the other of them was always going to make a move. It had been her, but it could as easily have been him.

He felt physically sick when he was away from her, unable to think of anything, of anyone, else. And when he was with her, there was a different kind of pain, a gnawing guilt, a self-disgust, an awareness of his own foolishness.

The more he loved Eva, the more certain he was the girl would leave him. He could do nothing more for her. He was a stepping stone, half-sunk in the stream. There were larger, st.u.r.dier stones ahead. Eva would go on to them.

They had s.n.a.t.c.hed a few hours together away from the theatre in the afternoon, rutting in the hot dark behind the drawn curtains of her upstairs room. She had already outpaced and outworn him, slipping into an easeful sleep while he, exhausted, lay awake next to her in her narrow bed, mind crowded and uncomfortable.

This was not the first time, but it was the worst. Before, Illona had known but been able to bear it. The other girls had not lasted, could not last.

He had half-thought Illona had encouraged him to be unfaithful, and they had been better together afterwards than before. Theatrical marriages were difficult and usually foundered. Little diversions gave them strength to carry on.