we wanted. Grumelpyn had mapped the palace for an escape route to the quay below. Nothing was secured—they weren’t used to having to guard things. We found our boat, loaded with bags of silver. Bardsham dumped most of that into the harbor to lighten our load. We were away and gone within half an hour.
“Then it was sailing halfway round the world and us not knowing where we was going for most of it. We’d stop on a span and ask where we were, use the silver we’d kept to provision the ship and buy anyone’s silence—at least we hoped as much—and then we sailed on. I suppose it should have come as no surprise, but we were surprised to encounter a few people on those nearer spirals who’d fled the spans that Tophet had taken over. Whether they recognized the silver coins, or maybe just our furtiveness, I don’t know. They told us he’d been moving across the face of Shadowbridge slowly, for centuries, like a great devouring juggernaut. A sucking louse in no hurry to kill what it lives off. No one knew where to run to next. Maybe they prayed he would just go away.
“We sailed on and never saw pursuit, but they’d no idea which way we’d gone and neither did we, and they thought we would be drafting deeper, slowed by the weight of our abandoned fortune.
“Eventually we reached familiar waters, the Adamantine and a span we’d played on, and from there we were able to make our way back to Colemaigne, coming into Sacbé, one span below it, at night, in case the Agents were there ahead of us. They didn’t know about you. We collected you right away along with what belongings we had, bid Orinda farewell, and sailed on to a span called Remorva, way down the far end of another spiral, well away from our usual circuit. After we’d hidden there a couple of weeks, there was no sign of anyone coming. We thought maybe we were safe. Just to make sure, though, we put two more spirals between us and Remorva before we tried performing again, settling in Emeldora. That copper-faced kingdom had never seen our like before. They had pantomime but no tradition of puppets, and Bardsham was a wonder to ’em. Leandra, though, stayed hidden. She didn’t dance any longer, and Bardsham performed simple, unembellished stories, the way Peeds had taught them to him when he was a boy. That’s what he called himself there, too: Peeds. It was a small place. You couldn’t have packed but a dozen people into it. Two weeks we were there and no hint anyone was hunting us. It looked like we’d rid ourselves of them.
“Then one night while Bardsham was performing ‘The Armless Maiden,’ I went outside and they grabbed me. Tugged a bag over my head and when they removed it, I was on board a boat and in front of me was one of those hairless gobshites holding up a gold mask on a pole. This one didn’t look serene, either. It was a mask of rage, of fury, and I knew who was sitting in the shadows behind it.
“ ‘We had a bargain,’ his voice buzzed at me, ‘and I’m going well out of my way to allow you to fulfill your part of it.’ He suddenly closed the distance between us and took hold of two of my fingers. It didn’t last but a moment, but I cannot describe how much it hurt, the two fingertips turning to stone in his gelid grip. Pain sliced right into my bones, all up my arm like you’d run a blade to split my marrow. I thought I must have screamed so loud the sky cracked. What this feels like now, creeping up me like a vine, is nothing compared with that pain from him directly. He pushed the fingertips he’d taken onto the floor and leaned past the mask, so close that I could see every wriggling snake of his face, all the shifting hollows around his eyes. ‘You’ll get her for me this time,’ he said. They’d already come to Colemaigne and destroyed half the span looking for us, though we didn’t know that then. He’d drunk up half the lives there, finally settling on Burbage’s theater. But Burbage was dying from something else already and so Tophet’s threats didn’t move him. Instead he had his Agents torture those two decent fellows standing at the end of my