Page 14 of Play of Shadows
With perfunctory menace, the duke’s soldiers ushered me out of the theatre and into a sturdy black carriage with barred windows. Midnight had come and gone hours ago and the streetlamps had long since exhausted their oil. Silence had replaced the evening’s usual raucous revelry. The stumbling drunks had been escorted home by their more sober friends, or left to the disputable mercy of pickpockets and other less savoury malefactors.
I sat in darkness. The guards had ridden ahead on horseback and whoever was driving the carriage refused to answer when I banged on the roof. I twisted sideways on the stiff wooden bench and grabbed the blackened iron bars on my right, knowing I had as much chance of prying them open as I had of turning into a hummingbird and flying out between them.
‘Only an amateur tries to escape through the bars,’ said a quiet voice opposite me.
I nearly jumped out of my seat. My fists instinctively came up to protect my face. I don’t count myself much of a pugilist– no one else does either, for that matter– but when I was a boy, my grandmother had insisted I familiarise myself with the hand-to-hand techniques employed by the Greatcoats.
‘Show yourself!’ I demanded.
The figure in the shadows sat so still that even now I wondered if I’d really heard anyone speak, or if this was a phantom come to ferry me to the Afterlife.
‘Shall we engage in fisticuffs?’ she asked. The woman leaned into the meagre moonlight slipping through the bars. A black veil covered her face, but the fabric was gossamer-thin, revealing high cheekbones and a wide mouth. Her smooth skin gave her face the appearance of an exquisitely cast copper mask. When she spoke, however, the smile that came to her lips was all too alive.
‘I have my doubts as to your chances,’ she observed, covering my pale fist with her much darker hand. ‘Your knuckles feel far too delicate for such blunt violence.’
‘My Lady,’ I stammered, so relieved to find that this wasn’t the Vixen come to demand her duel from me that I struggled to compose myself. My grandfather, however, is a notorious flirt, and his own lessons were as rigorous in their fashion as my grandmother’s had been.
The merest brush of the lips, Damy– quick enough to entice her if she likes you, not so long as to embarrass her if she doesn’t. And no slobbering!
I quickly turned over my travelling companion’s hand and kissed the back of it before saying, ‘I present myself to you as Damelas Chademantaigne, a Knight of the Curtain, player in the company of the Operato Belleza, and now your servant.’
The woman’s smile grew. ‘A knight? A player? A servant? I suspect you are none of those things.’ She turned my wrist and kissed the back of my hand as I’d done to hers. ‘But I do admire your spirit.’
Her lips had been soft on my skin, but her grip on my fingers was disturbingly strong.
‘Might this poor spirit learn your name?’ I asked.
She let me have my hand back and sat up straight to gaze out the window. ‘I fear you wouldn’t have time to make much use of it.’
My attempts at nonchalance were chased away by gnawing dread: the alluring features, the dark skin, the preternatural stealthiness and even the unexpected courtesy she’d shown me. . . I was dead certain I knew who was occupying the seat opposite.
For months, rumours had swirled around the city that Firan Monsegino, only recently elevated to the ducal throne of Pertine, had made it his practice to have his enemies assassinated by a beautiful, mysterious woman who would engage the victim in a brief, altogether charming conversation prior to sending them to their gods. The joke– which didn’t seem all that funny now– was that while a new and untested duke couldn’t afford to be merciful, Monsegino was nonetheless determined to be gracious to his guests, no matter how short a time they enjoyed his hospitality. If there was one person in all of Jereste to fear more than the Vixen, it was surely the woman sitting across from me at this very moment.
The Black Amaranth,I thought miserably.The duke sent the deadliest assassin in the country to execute me for screwing up my lines in a damned historia?
‘An especially warm autumn we’re having, don’t you think?’ she asked, dipping her fingers through the bars to feel the night breeze.
Watch those hands,I told myself, determined that if this was to be my end, I wouldn’t go down without a fight– no matter how brief my defiance turned out to be.
Any defence I might have contemplated was overtaken by a strangled cry from outside the carriage. I peered through the bars and saw, in the streets beyond, a fellow in tanner’s leathers curled up on the ground, arms covering his head as a trio ofthugs took turns beating him with wooden cudgels and lengths of chain, all the while jeering at him. Even in the near-darkness, I would have sworn I caught the glint of polished grey brooches on their collars.
The Iron Orchids were at it again.
‘Emzy!’ the injured man called out to me. ‘Emzy mi! Emzy mi!’
The words were foreign, but while I didn’t recognise the language, their meaning was plain enough.
‘Stop the carriage!’ I called out, pounding my fist on the ceiling of the carriage. The driver paid me no heed and the horses continued their unhurried clop-clopping along the street. ‘Stop, damn you!’ I shouted a second time. ‘We’ve got t—’
‘The driver will not halt the carriage until we reach our destination,’ the Black Amaranth informed me. ‘He does not work for you.’
‘Thenyouorder him to stop!’ I yelled, momentarily forgetting that this was not a woman I should be provoking.
Sounding untroubled by my outburst, leaning back in her seat, she said, ‘The driver does not work for me, either.’
Outside the carriage, not ten yards from us, the Iron Orchids were proceeding with their beating of the tanner in the same leisurely fashion as the bloody horses kept plodding along.
‘Does the duke care nothing for his subjects, then?’ I asked.
