more he smelled her as she pressed against him, and this time he let it stir him, and closed his eyes and fell into the memory and the sweet smell and the slick, sweaty feel of her. Gods, he loved the smell of her. For how long, he couldn’t say, but eventually he became aware that he was standing with his arms curved, his hands pressed against a back that wasn’t there, and he lowered his arms and sighed long and heavily.
He trudged to the rear of the booth and pushed his hands through the gap in the curtains beside the corner pole, emerging on stage. One of the wooden men, standing at center stage, jumped with mute surprise at the sight of him.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you,” Diverus said, and the wooden man pantomimed fluttering his hand as if to express that his heart was racing. Did they have hearts now that they were wood? He didn’t know. Bois or Glaise—Diverus couldn’t tell them apart, though Leodora seemed able to. Then the other one entered from the back of the stage and came up beside his partner. They shook hands as if they’d been formally introduced by someone, then both faced Diverus expectantly.
He thought it strange that he could understand them so well.
“Do you believe in ghosts?” he asked.
They looked at each other, then back at him. In unison, they gravely nodded.
“Have you ever seen one in this theater? I mean, a real one, not part of some play.”
One of them shook his head immediately. The other gazed toward the ceiling while tapping one finger against his chin before he, too, shook his head. He then spread his hands in query.
“Leodora thinks she saw one in the booth, the first night we performed.” One of them pointed at the puppet booth. “Yes, in there. I just wondered if the theater was known to be haunted. Orinda, the way she speaks of her husband, I thought maybe . . .”
Again they shook their heads, with obvious sadness this time.
“Well, there’s my answer, then. Good morning, gentlemen.” They bowed and he started to leave, but stopped after a few steps.
“I know. I’ve one other question. Are you acquainted with an upside-down span?”
This time they nodded in the affirmative.
“Is there a way there? Can you take me?”
They gestured back and forth at each other then, finally reaching some agreement, stepped up beside him, each with an arm slung over his shoulders, and impelled him to come along with them. They climbed down off the stage and walked up the center aisle of the theater, then down the ramp to the main doors, which were barred. One touched a finger to his lips and the other charily lifted the bar and opened one of the doors.
Outside, a few dozen people sat or lay dozing in the dark street. Diverus and the woodmen stepped quietly among them. Posters pasted on the wall, already ragged and torn, proclaimed jax! in great squid-ink-black letters. Diverus supposed that was all anyone needed to say now. Her name had become a promise of a cornucopia of delights.
From the small street the trio strode up the boulevard only a few blocks before turning and entering a street Diverus hadn’t been on before. It made a wide curve, and he supposed it must direct them around the far side of the theater and back toward the sea-lane that ran past the Dragon Bowl.
In the distance ahead, above the rooftops, the top of the bridge tower across the southern end of Colemaigne was cast golden by the early sunlight, its pennants flying languidly, dotting a parapet above an arcaded passageway that ran like the top of a wall the full width of the span.
The curving street did at last empty into the lane that ran along the sea edge of the span. This was the opposite end from where they’d arrived, though, with the Dragon Bowl a distant feature back the other way, a cup riding on the horizon.
The whole of the lane glistened in the light of dawn, the surfaces of the buildings reflecting like polished glass. The tower leg ahead was cylindrical, rising into a fluted turret on that end of the tower face. Unlike the few bridge towers he had encountered so far, the wall of this one appeared to be fully habitable across its length. Three rows of round windows lined it, interrupted in the middle by the archway of a great gate. Some of