that world between worlds. Pons Asinorum. Fool’s Bridge. It’s a good name for it. But now I won’t have Diverus to shield me. I wonder if they’ll trick me again? Of course, I have to find that out, don’t I? There’s no choice. I have to go back.”
Leodora talked on of nothing and everything, the way Yemoja had when she’d arrived. She babbled, soothed by the sound of her own voice, not telling a story this time, just talking about anything. Eventually the talking lulled her to sleep, where the Coral Man appeared to her in a dream as he had on so many nights; but this time his figure appeared less well formed. She recognized that as his song floated across the oceans, his body was wasting away, and she perceived a glowing knot in his chest, something orange and pulsing.
During the last story performance Soter had Diverus packing the puppets in the cases—all but the few he was using, and those he handed off one by one. The booth, they would have to abandon. “Perhaps we’ll come back for it later,” he told Diverus, “but leaving it standing might give us time to get away.” What they were getting away from remained unspecified, but Diverus didn’t argue.
Soter presented a Meersh story and the audience howled at the trickster’s foolishness. Then, in the midst of their laughter, Soter swung about and gestured for him to pick up the piba and play something. “Don’t put them to sleep. Make it lively,” Soter whispered. “See if you can send them all on their way.” Diverus nodded and closed his eyes. He plucked the first note and then his mind went blank.
When he next opened his eyes, Soter was patting him on the shoulder and saying, “Excellent. That was just what we needed.” He turned from Diverus and lifted the lantern from its hook, but didn’t blow it out as Leodora always did. He set it down beside a bottle of oil, and Diverus thought, What an odd time to fill the lamp. The undaya cases stood on the floor beside him, fastened and ready. Soter said, “We need to make certain Orinda’s gone. Will you go and look? If she’s still here, then you force her out. The same with those woodmen. Get ’em out, lad. Be sure they’re all gone—it would be too terrible if they remained. Then you come back, we’ll take the cases and go. All right?”
“Where?”
“For now, down under Colemaigne with those carters. We’ll get a boat. Has to be a way down somewhere.”
“I know a way. Through the leg of a tower, at the end of the span.”
“Good, good. All right, you go. Stay to the shadows, though, out the back and don’t let a soul out there see you.”
“There’s someone out there? I thought you said—”
“Please, Diverus. Go.”
Yet even as he pushed through the black fabric out the back of the booth, Diverus knew Soter was getting rid of him. He crept into the wings, and then scoured the back hallway behind the scrims and backdrops, finding no one, as he’d expected. Dutifully, he climbed the stairs and searched the rooms on the second floor, too. He entered Orinda’s L-shaped room, which he’d never seen before. It was full of costumes and wigs, makeup and props, but deathly still. The Terrestre was empty.
Finally, he picked a ramp to one of the curtained balconies, walked down it, and with great care parted the drapes. He peered out. The pit and all the benches stood deserted. Whatever he had played on the gourd-shaped piba, it had driven the crowd away. Music contained stories, too, he thought. It could take people out of themselves the way stories did. It could transport listeners to rapture or to tears. It could . . . he shuddered then with the memory of what he’d done in order to rescue Leodora. He wanted to tell her what he realized about songs and stories now—how he grasped the power they both shared, how he needed to say to her I love you because he’d done something so terrible that the reason couldn’t go unspoken between them any longer. But mostly he wanted to hold her, to tangle his fingers in her hair. To say to her . . .
A movement caught his eye, so subtle at first that he wasn’t sure he’d seen it. Then out of the darkest recesses at the back of the theater, something flowed: four pale gray ovals, hovering