them, all of the sharp features crinkled with friendship, smiles split wide to display teeth as white as clouds on a clear day. Nowhere was there a member of the court not expressing unbridled joy or radiating pleasure. It enticed, caressed, soothed, and he could not help immersing in it as in the pool where he’d swum. Yet beneath the camaraderie lay something undisclosed, something he was sure he would recognize were he only able to clear his head and distance himself from them enough to deliberate. It was a disquiet he could not even express to Leodora. Something essential was being stifled.
She, like a cat, stretched out before the fire, her eyelids heavy, her smile soft and smug. She took the tall-stemmed glass of wine when it was handed to her, sipped, and then said, “Tell me stories, then. Lots and lots of stories.”
“Aeternalis,” promised the king. The alien word reverberated through the columns; and despite being on his guard, Diverus sank back and gave himself up to their stories.
“She’s dead,” Soter bemoaned. He clutched his head in both hands. His ring of hair stood up in tufts and swirls, making him look mad. He sat on a wide settee painted so as to seem feathered, a prop he’d dragged from one of the Terrestre’s storage rooms to a spot beside the puppet booth. “It’s from a play,” Orinda had told him, “about a young queen who is sent to her doom by a jealous adviser.”
“I would prefer to find no irony in that,” he’d replied.
Beside the settee stood two small blue faience amphorae, most of their former contents now residing inside Soter. “Everything I did to protect her . . . all for naught. Lost.”
Orinda sat facing him. In the light from the lamps at the front of the stage she appeared both regal and grave in her long robe and gold sandals. She had been forced to cancel that night’s performance because of his unraveling. She didn’t begrudge him the crumbling of his will. He was right to worry.
In the week since Leodora’s disappearance, the audiences had fallen off appreciably, and she suspected that word had spread that the great Jax had vanished and left her troupe to cover for her. A night or two without a performance would not harm anything—the citizenry was too desperate for stories now—but if it continued much longer than that, who knew what would happen, or if the theater could open again.
“What about the street performer?” she asked. “Surely that was a clue.”
“The stilt walker?” He pushed his hands over the top of his head, his chin almost against his breastbone, and looked at her through his brows. One of Hamen’s people had stumbled upon the stilt walker at a street fair two days earlier. “She claims only that she spoke to the two of them, but that when she went out to tell everyone in the street that the famous Jax was among them, Leodora didn’t follow her. She went back into that tunnel.”
“The one to Sacbé.”
“And they just disappeared there. Never came out.”
“But surely that means they’re on Sacbé.”
“So one would surmise, yet nobody there that Hamen’s folk spoke to ever saw her or Diverus emerge at the other end.” His eyes closed. “No one. Whatever happened to her, I tell you it happened in that tunnel. In darkness. Has to have done.” He grabbed for his cup of wine. “Gods, I am cursed!” Then he slumped sideways on the divan.
“That’s not so, Soter.”
He came alert angrily. “It isn’t? The gods paired me with Bardsham, didn’t they? I was doing all right on my own. I could spot a mark half a span away, size him up before he set eyes on me. I could tell you how much his purse would have and reel him right in. Practically had to stop him from handing it to me, every coin.”
“You were a thief?”
“Thief? I was an artist. I could convince princes to offer me the jewels right out of their crowns.”
“How?”
“By promising them more. Always more.” He drained the cup. “Everybody always wants more.” He lifted the nearest blue amphora and tipped it. When nothing came out, he grabbed the one beside it, which also proved to be empty. He glowered sullenly a moment, but then pointed at them and gave a mad laugh. “You see? My point exactly, isn’t it?”
Bois was standing across the stage. Orinda gestured toward the empty jars, and he nodded and scurried off.