The stylus had been transformed into stone along with Baloyd.
“Thus we’re reminded that the gods are capricious, and that it’s unwise ever to make demands of them when instead we should be thankful for what we do have.”
She faced the twin actors. Throughout the recitation her attention had been focused upon them, upon their movements and gestures—how one jumped behind the other and back again to represent speeding across the span of Kakotara; how one would appear to write on an invisible tablet and the other would become the thing he’d called into being, the birds, the carriers of the conjured palanquin, the fig trees. At the end as she spoke, one of them lay upon the stage with arms bent and fingers curled, as skeletal as he could be, while the other had wrapped his arms about himself and bowed his head, and had slowly sunk down to his knees as his sandstone shape was worn away.
The applause that followed her recitation surprised her, and she jumped away from the edge of the stage even as she peered into the depths of the theater. The two wooden men arose as one and faced the sound. They leaned forward at the waist as if they might stretch themselves toward it.
From out of the dark recesses a figure flowed toward the stage—tall and slender. Drawing nearer the light, it took shape as a woman in a green embroidered brocade nightgown. She was smiling broadly as she approached. “That is the first performance upon that stage in more than a dozen years,” she said. “I had given up hoping there would ever be another.” She rounded the front of it and came up the steps at the side. “You gave them the story so well, it was as if they became your puppets.” She drew up before Leodora and added “You are certainly your father’s daughter. No one could doubt it.”
Leodora blinked up at her. “You knew my father?” she asked.
“He played here. On this very stage, a rare occasion. Because of the size of the theater, we stretched a great screen across the front of it and mounted a lens between that and the screen in his booth so that the shadows were cast in giant proportion—quite the extraordinary contrivance that was, but we drew from four spans for the audience. Can you imagine? Four spans! They traveled that far to see the incomparable Bardsham. They knew he was only here for a short run before sailing off to another spiral, another world. He was covering Shadowbridge then, and every span on every spiral would come to know him by rumor, by legend. That was his goal, you see, which he proclaimed with enormous pride and, well, not a little hubris.” Her expression softened as if to say, It was a forgivable fault, but Leodora wasn’t concerned with her father’s ego.
“And my mother?” she asked. “Did you know her, too?”
The woman’s express delight buckled. Her gaze clouded, and it was clear she was recalling something troubling. “You could be her sister.” She turned sharply to the two players. “Glaise, Bois, go off with you now. It’s near morning and will be light soon. Our guests will want their breakfast.”
They clapped their hands and bowed, then arm in arm they marched off in matched step.
Watching them depart, she continued, “My husband ran the theater then. It was, well, just as you see it now. A wondrous place. Magic flowed from here and out across those rows, those benches, all the way up into those boxes every single night.”
She focused beyond Leodora on nothing that was there, and Leodora knew that she was peering into her past. “Having Bardsham pick our theater for his venue. It was—we thought we had realized our dream.”
The melancholy bound up in her words prompted Leodora to ask, “He didn’t perform well?”
“Bardsham? Oh, my dear, he was a genius. The shadows came to life. They danced, they strutted, even flew . . . It was so grand, so smooth, so elegant that you forgot there was an agency at work behind them.” She stared at Leodora. “Soter wants to convince me you are his equal.”
She blushed, suddenly shy. “I don’t know. I never saw him perform.”
“Of course not. You were a fat little thing when your mother . . . when they left here.”
Leodora’s eyes went wide. “I was—I was here?”
The woman made a stiff, uncomfortable smile. It was clear that she wasn’t certain where the boundaries lay.