Lord Tophet

TWO


Leodora awoke. The space around her was dark and sounded fearfully close; for a moment she imagined she was inside one of the undaya cases, transformed into a puppet, locked in with the Coral Man. She reached up with both hands and swept them back and forth through the air. Her fingertips touched nothing and she realized she was in a larger space, a room. The sound of it might have been dull and tight, but it was not a puppet case.

Something was poking at the ribs of her right side. She reached under herself, fingers digging, snaring a length of fine chain. As she tugged at it, the chain made a slithery sound, uncurling against something else metal that was vaguely oval, its surface a symmetrical raised design. Her fingertips couldn’t identify what the design was, but it was nothing she owned, nothing she knew. It forced her to try to remember where she’d been last before awakening here.

She had walked—yes, that was right—walked out onto the decrepit dragon beam of Colemaigne. She’d done it on a dare, as a taunt to Diverus. She must have gone into the bowl itself, but squeezing her memory brought forth only a view of inverted buildings that might have been a reflection in a rain puddle, some odd music that tinkled like glass breaking, a few other disjunct and incoherent images, a few swirls of clarity in a fog bank of forgetfulness and beyond that, nothing. She might be anywhere save in the belly of a ship, for the room wasn’t rocking in the slightest. That wasn’t much, but it was some small knowledge. Diverus and Soter must surely be near.

“How do I choose?” she heard herself ask. The words seemed to die as they left her mouth. She said it aloud again to hear her voice, dry and muffled against the close walls: “How do I choose?”

In the darkness beside her, a different voice answered, “That is a challenge without more information about the choices proposed.”

Leodora sat up. The voice spoke from so near that the speaker must have been right at the edge of the bed. Her eyes strained the darkness for any hint of a shape, a body, a face. Finally she let go of the pendant chain and reached out. Her splayed fingers found nothing.

She wondered for a moment if she might be hearing the voice of the Coral Man. She had heard it, she thought, in dreams, though they seemed so removed now that she couldn’t be certain he’d ever spoken, nor could she recall now anything he had said—just the sound of it, like humming. This voice didn’t resonate in her head. It was separate from her, the voice of someone else, even if that someone else proved to be a phantom.

“How do I . . . get more information?” she asked.

“You could simply get up and leave the room,” the voice suggested.

“Will that work?”

“If it’s not as dark as a crow in a mine everywhere else.”

“Is it that dark everywhere else?”

“Oh, my, yes. Just now it is. It’s night outside, and cloudy, and moonless, so there’s no cast light, either.”

“You’ve been outside.”

The voice didn’t answer.

“How do you know what it’s like outside if you haven’t been outside?” she asked, slightly peeved by its reticence.

“It’s just something I know.”

“Who are you, then?”

“I? I can’t say.”

“Why not?”

“No self-awareness,” the voice explained.

She could not help laughing. “That’s absurd.”

The voice said nothing, and she was sure she had offended the person behind it. “You can speak to me, but you don’t know that you exist? You’re a figment, then. I must have made you up. Otherwise how can you talk to me and have no self-awareness?”

“I’m a counselor. You ask. I counsel.”

“A ghost counsel. You’re certainly not the one who visits me in my sleep.” Upon the last word she lunged and waved both hands in the air this time, all around. She touched nothing until she strained so far that her fingers brushed a wall. No one was there. She realized that she would have sensed movement, heard a rustling if the other had moved. She’d heard nothing. It really was a ghost.

Now that she’d touched one wall, she rose. She sensed the slope of the ceiling just before her head brushed it. Close to the wall, everything smelled musty. She slid her palms down the slope to the vertical wall and along it, around a corner and on, until her hands brushed against a door. It rattled slightly and she snatched her hands back, afraid to make noise. Then with care she touched it again, patting as lightly as a butterfly, down until she felt against her wrist a cold bar, the handle. It was small, and she felt all around it, trying to picture what she was feeling, an image in her head of the mechanism. The bar was on a spring, and a pin projected from it that she could pull on to slide it back. Slowly she drew it back; the door swung toward her as on well-oiled hinges.

She glanced outside. Like the room, it proved to be featureless, dark, but some distance away on her left, a hint of illumination—no more than a dull glow—suggested an opening. She stuck her head back into the room and whispered, “Will you come with me?” but the voice of the counselor didn’t answer. “Can you hear?” she asked, to no avail. He had apparently evaporated, and she shook her head as if to rid herself of the notion that it had been anything other than imaginary, her befuddled mind’s creation after the . . . the events.

Out of the room again she moved toward the wan light, her hands out and to the sides. Her fingers brushed against walls on each side as she shuffled cautiously along. It was a narrow hallway. As she went, her balance seemed to tip, the light ahead wanting to tilt. She turned, pressing both palms to one wall, to a rough, solid coolness that anchored her and stabilized the hall. She hung her head and breathed deep lungfuls of air. She realized what must have happened in the Dragon Bowl.

Like Diverus she had no memory of it, but that didn’t shake her belief; rather, it reinforced it. Sounds, smells, where she’d gone or what had come to her—these things lingered in the back of her mind, tantalizingly unreachable. She knew no more of them than of where she was at this moment. Had she been transported? Could she even now be in Edgeworld? Instinct maintained that she wasn’t, although she could hardly express why.

She needed to find Diverus. She thought that if she insisted he try to remember Edgeworld, anything he might recall would help her to recollect her own experience—assuming that they were in the same place.

Pressed to the wall, she shuffled along. The nearer she got to the light, the more details she saw in the corridor: other doors, sconces for lamps, and finally an oval of lighter color where the wall had been patched but not painted.

The light shone through a split curtain. Behind it lay a short ramp that ended in a second, heavier drape below. She crept down the ramp to the drapery. With two fingers, she eased one side of it open, revealing a balcony railing that overlooked a large theater space.

She could see tiers of curved benches beneath a distant wall lined with similar small enclosed balconies. The source of the light remained out of view below the balcony, but it threw shadows that moved, accompanied by soft footfalls and a creak of floorboards.

She pushed her head through the curtain and discovered that hers was one of three balconies projecting from the back wall of a stage, each with elaborately wrought moldings. High above the balconies, a large thatched roof covered the stage area, held up by a framework that must have been attached from above. A higher, larger box-like balcony projected out beneath it.

On the stage below, two figures dressed identically in brown vests and trousers strode the boards. They faced each other and gestured as if in a pantomime of declaiming, of demanding. Transfixed, she watched the curious performance. After a while one of them gestured as if putting on shoes while the other mimed the act of writing on a small tablet. “It’s ‘The Tale of the Two Brothers’!” She thought she said this only to herself, but the twins halted their enactment and turned to look up at her. They didn’t move after that. They seemed to be waiting for a response from her.

“I know your story,” she called down.

One of the two took a few steps toward her, gesturing excitedly for her to come down to the stage.

She raised her hands. “How?” she asked.

He pointed a finger around the rear of the stage, through the balconies, directing her back into the hall and beyond the room from where she’d emerged, then effected jagged movements signifying stairs. She nodded that she understood and then retraced her steps back into the dark corridor, where she felt her way along the wall. As he’d indicated, stairs began but a short distance beyond her room.

From then on she navigated by instinct, approximating the location of the stage and feeling her way in search of an entrance. She touched a heavy curtain and, pushing it aside, entered a dark area to one side of the stage, hidden from the audience, but with part of the stage itself visible.

The two figures had stopped their pantomime and awaited her, still as statues. Leodora walked out onto the stage. Four of the lights along the front of it had been lit. Past them she could see the empty theater space that threw back echoes of her footsteps.

Drawing nearer, she found that statues was not an unreasonable comparison to the two men. They were like clockwork creatures that had wound down. Bodies motionless, they watched her approach. Their eyes were alive, though shallowly set; but their mouths were painted on, their chins defined by vertical lines as though separately inserted and hinged. So, too, their fingers had three distinct joints.

Looking from one to the other, she asked, “Am I still in Edgeworld?”

The two faced each other, their expressions changing to show confusion, their painted mouths pursing. Then together they turned back to her and shook their heads. “I’m in Colemaigne, then?”

This time they nodded without prior consultation.

“So my companions, they’re here, too? In this theater?”

One figure nodded; the other pressed his hands together and placed them against his cheek, closing his eyes.

“Yes, I understand,” she said with relief. It was night. They were asleep. Everything would be fine. Until they awoke, she was in no position to learn what had happened to her, so she might as well explore on her own.

The two inhuman men waited for her to say something.

“I know the story you were performing. I perform it, too. I’m a shadow artist.” One of them pressed his thumbs to his fingertips and moved his hands up and down independently as if raising and lowering something. “That’s right—puppets on rods, that’s how I tell stories.” He placed one hand to his own chest and the other on his twin’s shoulder. Again, she understood his intent as clearly as if he had spoken. “I could—if you want—recite it while you perform. If that’s not presumptuous of me.”

His eyes widened and without warning he clasped and hugged her. When he let go, she said, “Well. I didn’t expect that.” He pretended to be shy then, lowering his head. She laughed at his clowning, and he brightened again. His twin shook his head as if disapproving, but glanced her way to see if she was watching. It was all part of their repartee.

“So,” she said, “I will go sit over there beside the lights and tell the story as if to the audience behind me, and you’ll perform it for them.”

They both nodded their accord and shook hands with each other. She walked to the front of the stage, and they strode off into the wings to await her beginning. She sat cross-legged and for a moment gazed up at the roof, which was like an awning overhead. This is as strange as the parade of monsters, she thought, or the Ondiont snake. The thoughts wanted to drift her into daydream, but she banished them, flexed her spine, and placed her palms on the floor. She inhaled deeply and began.