Page 38 of Play of Shadows
Seventy-seven Hells and a thousand screaming demons!
‘Zina, get out of here!’ I shouted.
Ignoring my command, the girl climbed up to join me on the steps and jerked a thumb in my direction. ‘Damelas is too a Veristor!’
‘I’m really not,’ I said, desperate to placate the crowd before things got out of hand. ‘This is all just a big misunderstanding.’
Usually, the ‘rivals’ blessing’ was more a ceremonial hazing than an actual drubbing: a few players would come by, deliver half a dozen smacks to the head, hold you down and maybe–maybe– piss on you as a reminder of your proper place in theuniverse. Avoiding it only made it worse later on, so it was best to get the ritual over with and suffer the indignity with as much good humour as one could muster. Tonight, the mood felt very different.
I really wished Zina wasn’t there. Nobody was laughing at me; instead, the palpable antagonism in the air chilled me to the bone. I couldn’t run back into the Operato Belleza, either; as the last person out, I’d set the door to lock behind me.
‘Look, friends,’ I said soothingly to the mob, ‘you really don’t want to do this—’
‘Oh?’ Pink Mol was spinning a bludgeon around and around on its chain. She sounded distressingly sober tonight. ‘Why’s that, then?’
‘Because eighty against one are staggeringly unfair odds. It makes you a miserable bunch of villains and me the hero of this story. You don’t want to makemethe hero of the story, do you, Mol?’
That set them laughing, but still no one was backing away. Apparently, appealing to their sense of dramatic irony wasn’t going to work.
Why is everyone so damned furious with me for something that’s not my fault?
‘So what’s the plan?’ Zina asked, no longer sounding quite so confident. She was clutching my hand.
Had I thought it would do any good, I might have pleaded with Pink Mol to let the girl go, but I doubted there was even a copper tear’s worth of compassion in this crowd tonight. I would need to come up with a different ploy.
‘You go low,’ I whispered to Zina. ‘Sneak under their legs and then run as fast as you can. Find Beretto, tell him what’s happened. He’ll likely be with the rest of the cast and crew at the Lucky Liar on the corner.’
Zina was eyeing the approaching mob dubiously. ‘What canBeretto do?’
‘Bribe the city guards to break up the fight before things get out of hand.’I hope.
‘What are you going to do in the meantime?’ she asked.
As I’d done many times before, I reached deep inside myself, searching for a scrap of my grandmother’s daring– that reckless yet cunning swashbuckling spirit that had served her so well as a Greatcoat and a duellist. I didn’t find it, though. I never had. So instead, I summoned my grandfather’s irreverence and pasted a hopefully convincing madman’s grin on my face as I replied, ‘Me? I’m going to go high.’
I vaulted from the top step, leaping as high as my legs would take me, before landing on the heads of our would-be assailants and scrambling as fast as I could over them, kicking at the angry hands grabbing for me. It was like trying to swim over a mass of wriggling, screaming eels.
‘Damn it to all Hells!’ one of the Grim Jesters swore after my boot had caught his jaw. ‘Somebody grab that bastard!’
Hands were awkwardly swatting at me, trying to find their grip, but I just kept clambering over the mass of bodies as fast as I could, praying a hundred silent prayers that one saint or other would assist me to magically reach the other side and get a running start out of the alley.
‘You’re letting him escape, you idiots!’ Gin Bruti shouted, knocking his neighbours aside with those mallet-like fists of his. ‘Get out of my way!’
‘Ow, damn you!’ Pink Mol bellowed back. ‘You nearly broke my fucking nose!’
There was a lot of shouting, and this time, not all of it was directed at me. With so many trying to assault me, I took plenty of jabs, of course, but these were mostly glancing blows. When a solid punch at last caught me on the jaw, I felt an odd sense of relief; after the constant tension and unfulfilled threats of deadlyviolence I’d endured over the past week, toactuallybe getting my arse kicked felt weirdly reassuring.
I spared a glance for Zina, but she was no longer on the steps, so hopefully, she’d run home to safety. Things were going to get considerably worse any moment now; while half a dozen fights had broken out between members of the mob– actors always remember their long-running feuds when blood runs high– cooler heads were now taking charge.
‘Get his arms and legs,’ Pink Mol shouted above the rest. ‘Don’t try to take ’im down yourself– just grab whatever you can and hang on!’
Within seconds I was pressed against the alley wall, all four limbs restrained, and the debate had turned to who got to punish me first.
‘I’m the one got us the contract,’ Laredo of the Red Masques complained.
Contract? Someone’s paying these fools to beat me up?
‘And part of that deal was we were to keep our damned mouths shut about it,’ Pink Mol warned, pairing her words with a hefty backhand that nearly knocked the mask off Laredo’s face.
