Chapter 6 - part the second

Three days passed between her spotting the ochre fire at play on the Apsiam, marooned with Opho on the gondola, and her returning to the little theatre. During this time, she had done enough research to learn the rather unusual history of the theatre, as well as the type of acts that it produced for select members of the public.

It had originally been a Coal-House, one of many such storage facilities for the folk living in the affluent canal districts. It had been purchased and converted seventeen years prior under the auspices of an auction: the Archers had confiscated it and all other properties of the previous owner – a magnate who sold the keys to spies who wished to use the highly flammable house as a tinderbox for an arsonist attack. Oddly enough, the fire had been set within, and should have sparked a conflagration that would have taken days to put out – but by some miracle, it never got off. All the conditions were right for disaster, but it was like some unseen force had pinched the burning fuse to put it out.

History aside, the most curious thing about its current operations that Amos had discovered to date was how the manager of the odeum – a man named Carl who was playfully, or sometimes regretfully also referred to as the Caul – made his discerning choices on which clients he chose to admit within. He did not wish nor allow the performances he had put on to be seen by a general audience, and so there was some mysterious process by which he apparently auditioned the guests he admitted past his doors.

The easiest and most evident criterion was naturally the price of the tickets, which were limited, and ludicrously priced. This did not mean that they catered only to the rich, because there always many members of more underpaid classes – mostly professors, tutors, and alchemists of certain perspicuity, if not prestige – invited to the shows as the preeminent guests of the House.

How Carl met, chose, or communicated with these people, no one ever knew or found out. There was an air of complete secrecy and indeed deep solemnity about the business of the odeum.

Of the shows, Amos gleaned only that they were demonstrations of magic.

The fire that had never been set within the old Coal-House now burned within her. She thought of nothing else since that day on the river than of finding a way into the theatre, because she remembered what the Wizard in the Cave had told her – that she would meet another of his order, and she would fall in love with him. The memory of the Wizard had never dimmed with the passing of years, and in many ways she had grown to love that man that she'd met in the dark of Aulo Phonox, the bloody bourne of all those sacrifices of the power-hungry Harzia.

That Wizard had saved her from being one of their victims; and he had with but a little magic opened her to her self, and her path. She was now, secretly, a magician of sorts – an uncelebrated saviour of so many that might have perished were it not for the ink, the tattoos, that made red blood out of blue.

To now be at the brink of fulfilling part of the prophecy he'd given her, the first and most important verse of all the Nine Stanzas, Amos was filled with an excitement that is ascribed usually to the young alone, but which any person of advanced age can attest is in no way exclusive, for it is the very core and seed of Love.

The theatre however was exclusive to the extreme, and Amos found, much to her growing infuriation, that any attempt to bribe, buy, or bully her way in was merely an exercise in frustration.

At last, she found a ticker-holder who agreed to pass her off as her daughter, who was sick and could not attend anyway. As they handed their tickets over at the door, however, they found that the usher had been somehow alerted to the counterfeit. He took the tickets and discarded them, barring both women from returning to the odeum – ever.

Her disappointed benefactrix left her on the steps, as an autumn rain began to fall, and Amos, in a state of desperation, decided to draw on a struggle with the excommunicating usher, who was stronger that his scrawny frame belied. She pushed, and he pushed back; and whether it was because of her foot slipping on the rain-slick steps, or due to Amos' innate clumsiness, the two of them fell together, and the baffled man ended up right on top of her.

At that moment the manager, Carl, manifested in the dimly lit doorway. He looked down at the sodden duo and in a nonplussed but bemused sort of tone, he said, “Folo – get off the poor woman. Simply because you have some sway over our clientele, does not mean you get to have your way with them.”

The usher leapt to his feet and began gushing apologies.

Carl – a fat, bald-pated man with spectacles, brushed off the unwarranted words, and said to his errant employee: “Do help her up, man! Can't you see she's in need?”

Folo did so, and then bowed apologetically to her.

Amos ignored him, because she was transfixed by Carl, who pulled his clay pipe from his mouth and exhaled a dragon's puff of smoke as he spoke:

“And as for you, my dear – anyone who can overpower my good man Folo deserves to be asked, What can I do to help you out, so you may have your way with me?”

Amos smiled, and this was how she was admitted backstage.

Once she'd satisfied Carl in his office, he asked her why she was so determined to get into the odeum.

“I'm supposed to meet someone here,” she answered simply.

“Who, pray tell?”

“I don't know.”

“So you've come to receive enlightenment, as well as to give it,” Carl chuckled; then,in any she didn't get his meaning, he said, “I was beginning to feel like I had a pair of cannonballs between my legs! But they feel much lighter now.”

The bald man winked at Amos through the mirror into which she gazed. She wiped her chin and smiled, then continued to straighten herself out.

“I'll tell you what, since you asked so succulently,” Carl oozed. “I'll bring you onstage for the next act. That should allow you to find who it is you've come for.”

Amos turned, her face pale. “Oh, no!” she said. The idea of going on stage frightened her more than anything – not because she would suffer any shame, but because she had grown up in hiding, a fugitive, and guarded her secrets very closely in order to avoid the plots of her countless and cruel enemies. “I couldn't!”

“Don't be shy,” Carl said with a sigh and a shake of his head. “You weren't embarrassed with me.”

“Someone might recognize me,” Amos protested.

“Ah, so it's not that don't want to be embarrassed,” the manager said, and pulled a scanty little dress all covered in twinkling sequins of red and purple. “Then there's only one way to go – bare-assed! Don't worry, my dear – once I've put a disguise on you, your own mother wouldn't you know you once you appear on stage. And trust me, it won't be your face they'll be looking at!”

Amos rolled her eyes. It looked as though she was going to have to give yet another performance before she found what she'd come for.

As she dressed – in full view of Carl of course, who had not a modest bone in his body – he explained a few things to her. “If you don't spot who you're here for, then the Wizard will be able to tell you no doubt the identity of this mysterious [man].”

“Wizard?”

“Yes, my dead. You'll be acting as his assistant for one of the tricks. He's onstage right now. Don't worry – it's a very simple routine, you can't possibly mess it up! He is very uncanny, and he knows a great many things that most of us can't perceive. I'm sure he can tell you who you're looking for – but first he'll have to take an interest in you.”

“How do I do that?” Amos asked, perfectly ready to do anything at all.

“Well, lift this boa from your bosom, for starters! He loves titties all fresh and perky like these! Also, he'll want to see the spark in you. That's what this place is all about, my dear – helping people to see the light, not out there, and not even in here, but within.”

Amos flushed with happiness. She hoisted her breasts up a little higher, and looked at herself in the mirror now. Carl was right – adorned with a blonde wig, big, shining bangles, and this harlot's outfit, she looked nothing like herself.

“Are you all set?” Carl asked, admiring her figure now that most of her was revealed. “Come along, then – it's this way.”

As she trotted out of the office in the ridiculous get-up, Carl swatted her mostly bared bottom, like a sleazy uncle who's niece, much to his delight, has finally come into her own.

In the wings offstage, Amos was given a carved box of wood with no apparent hatch or opening. It was hollowed, and she could see where the panels fit together, but the trick to getting whatever was within to come out was beyond her. She hefted it to test the weight, guessing at the contents, which were heavy.

“Careful now, my dear!” Carl cautioned her in a hushed tone. Her threw a purple satin cloth over top of the box. “Now listen to my instructions. They're very simple. If you follow them to the letter, then you won't miss a thing. When I give you the signal, walk out to the Wizard out there, and hold up the box. That's all. If he wants you to do any little extra thing, he'll let you know – but this is a very routine trick. Once he replaces this cloth, carry it and the rest back here to me.”

“Sounds simple enough,” Amos muttered. She was peeking through the heavy drapes, trying to catch a glimpse of the figure giving his performance to a full house.

“And don't forget to wiggle your bottom. They'll eat it up!”

“Right,” Amos muttered, not even listening. “Carry box, wiggle bottom; got it...” She had no more heed to give the fat man and his bawdy jokes; as well, she had already given him as much head as she planned to. Her attention now was riveted on the well-dressed Wizard striding across the stage, flooded in light.

She stayed like this for several minutes, watching the Wizard perform five or six magic tricks, receiving applause when each one was perfectly executed; then he announced that next would be what is known as an extraction.

“This is it,” Carl whispered in her ear, but stayed her with a meaty hand on her pale shoulder, in case she mistook his words and went onstage before her cue. “In just a moment,” Amos heard him mumble, and she could feel his breath on her neck, smell the wine he'd been guzzling in his office while he'd sat back, and she'd swallowed what he gave her.

Amos was trying to see the Wizard's face, but he was always facing the audience. He spoke with a funny accent, the likes of which she'd never heard before; and he had a neat, trimmed beard. She knew she'd never met him before, yet there was something very familiar about him; she felt drawn to him, and if Carl weren't holding her back, she probably would have run out to him.

He spoke to the audience, his 'r's trilling oddly, and his 'w's sounding a bit like a 'v'.

“An extrrraction, Ladies and Gentlemen, is vhen you pull something out of one vorld and brrring it into another – or, in this case, vhen you grrrasp something frrrom another dimension, and pull it into this one! Have no fear, for I have done this many times before – but be warned that what I am about to produce here for you, has no place in our Universe!”

“Okay!” Carl removed his hand and pushed her out onto the stage. “Off you go. Pussy-cat!”

Amos came trotting out onto the stage even as the Wizard gestured in her direction. She carried the box in arms that now shook nervously. She nearly tripped, but caught herself; she almost lost the covered box, but she recovered it.

Come on, Pussy-cat! She told herself. Now is not the time to be a klutz!

She had in the past played many different parts. Working for Sevo Sala, she had donned innumerable disguises, told so many lies, and led so many men to call her by names that were not her own. She knew how to do this. She put Amos aside for the moment, and became exactly what Carl wanted her to be – a libidinous flirt, a sassy stagehand, and an alluring piece of eye candy.

What she hadn't counted on, however, was that the Wizard was also playing a part. The beard was false; the accent was affected; the whole persona was an act.  When he turned to her, she saw immediately through his disguise and recognized him as the man she'd met in the caves beneath the wrecked sky-ship, the ancient and derelict Azot.

He had sent her to find himself, years later.

Amos staggered when her eyes met his, and the box came crashing out of her hands, smashing to pieces on stage. Pieces of whatever had been held inside came skittering out across the flat stage, to the magician's polished shoes. The purple satin sheet drifted over to the horn-players in the little orchestra pit.

The Wizard's smile never wavered; he didn't miss a beat.

“And luckily, and extrrraction vorks both vays – ve can send vhat ve no longer want or need to another vorld, vhere it might find some trrrue rrrelevance!”

He made a gesture at the flabbergasted girl and a puff of smoke went up at her feet. To the audience, it appeared as if the Wizard had sent her into some other dimension for sure; but Amos really found herself falling through a trap door that had been triggered, toward a padded cushion waiting below stage.

It all happened so quickly, and so naturally – as though this had been the real trick they had planned all along, a silly gag, and the bumbling girl had been brought in, unbeknownst to all, just to be the butt of their joke.

She barely noticed any of this. She didn't seem to feel the big cushion as it broke her fall. She was lost, still falling – lost in the Wizard's eyes, and falling in love.