and ever since there had been a line outside the entrance to the theater. Sometimes it wound past the fig trees and as far along the boulevard as anyone could see; and as a result, Orinda had insisted they perform both matinees and evening shows the next day and the next. Although Leodora had complied, even repeating the same tales at each performance—which he’d never seen her do before—it was clear to Diverus that she was reluctant to remain in the booth once she’d set down the last puppets. For her the space was haunted. She said nothing, but she didn’t have to. He knew her routine too well, and knew when she’d deviated from it.
Now at each performance audiences flooded the theater, clogged the aisles—and praise the gods there’d not been a fire or some other incident, because no one would have reached the exit alive.
The first night had been the maddest celebration he’d ever witnessed, far more frenetic and dizzy than anything that had ever happened in the paidika. Upon emerging from the booth, Leodora was immediately surrounded by a crowd that rushed the stage to get near her, to touch her, to shout her name. They sang toasts to Meersh and his penis, to Jax and her skills, and it had gone on almost until the sun came up. Leodora had finally thrown off the effects of whatever had happened to her in the booth and joined in the celebration, drinking and cheering with the crowd. Soter, well lubricated much earlier, even went so far as to embrace Diverus, calling him “my dear boy!” as if he were some long-lost nephew. That familiarity evaporated the following day as if it had never been, but the next audience was already hammering at the doors for the upcoming performance and there was no time for reflection. For the matinee they had to stretch awnings over the stage from the highest projecting balcony, out past the thatch, to keep the sun from ruining the shadows, and then they unleashed Jax on another penny-paying crowd. Orinda might have been charging nearly nothing in those first days, but even so they were making more money with each performance than they had on Vijnagar or Hyakiyako.
It seemed to him that they’d been doing nothing but preparing for or recovering from performances, and if anything the crowds were getting larger.
Diverus ought to have been asleep; nor did he particularly want to be awake, but now that he was, he couldn’t help but brood over what had happened that first night in the booth, what was haunting his only friend. What had Leodora seen? She would not say, but he knew, or thought he knew. The Coral Man, who haunted her dreams, had appeared to her, beside her. She’d called the apparition “Father” and then she had done the thing that truly terrified him. She had begun to cry. In an instant she had transformed from the enigma he all but worshipped into a child, a simple girl devastated by loss and loneliness, and while he had no words to explain himself, his heart ached with love for her the more because of it. His goddess was human, and she had turned to him for comfort. Even Soter, the cursed old bastard—even he had seen that. But the question—the real question—was what had she seen and what did it signify? The phantom hadn’t reappeared since, but that proved nothing, did it? Standing behind her the first night, he hadn’t detected any apparition in the booth. The statue in the bottom of the puppet case was just rock. Soter was terrified of it. She was haunted by it. Yet Diverus, who’d slept in the booth on top of the very case, had experienced nothing. His dreams . . . his dreams contained apparitions of another nature altogether.
Diverus drew back from the window and sat cross-legged on his bed.
The sphinx came to him in his dreams. Most of the time he didn’t recollect the dream itself, but awoke with the image of her lingering in his mind, receding even as he recognized the desolate surroundings of his waking life and knew that she had come again. A few times it had been one of Bogrevil’s milk-eyed afrits instead, descending from the cracked ceiling of the paidika to suck the life from him. But those dreams he remembered vividly. Those dreams jolted him awake. They weren’t real. The afrits weren’t real, but recalled.