The Element of Fire | Page 8

Grandier's house like pitch and refused to spread to the ready tinder of the other old buildings. As much as he might wish to, Thomas couldn't see it as a gesture of defiance. He only wondered where, in what corner of the crowded city, the word had passed to watch for a sorcerous blaze in the night, and what to do then.
Chapter Two
"DOES THE MASK fit?" Anton Baraselli looked up at the young woman who sat on the balcony railing, her feet swinging under her tattered red skirt.
Gray eyes stared back at him from the pale features of the distorted half-mask. "It fits. Do I have the part?"
Baraselli sat at his table on a balcony overhanging the main room of the Mummer's Mask tavern, where his acting troupe made its home. He was middle-aged, his dark hair wispy on his nearly bald head, but his plumpness and the newness of his clothes reflected his troupe's recent prosperity. He could barely hear the woman's deep voice over the shouted conversation, drunken arguments, and the competing strains of mandolin and viola that rose up from the rowdy crowd on the tavern's main floor below. The wealthier patrons were drinking in the small private rooms off the second-floor gallery, the shutters propped open so the music could reach them clearly.
"Well, you've no troupe to recommend you," Baraselli said, leaning back. He didn't want to pay her as much as she might ask. His last Columbine had run off to be married, leaving without a backward glance yesterday morning.
Baraselli had come to Ile-Rien from conquered Adera years ago when all forms of the Aderassi theater were despised and confined to back alleys and peasant festivals. Now the war with Bisra was over and Ile-Rien's capital was more cosmopolitan and free with its money. Vienne was a jewel of a city in a rich setting, standing on temperate plains roughly in the center of the country, with rolling hills and olive groves on the warmer coast to the southwest, rich forested midlands, and black-soiled farmland in the terraced valleys of the high country to the north. Baraselli had liked it, and now that Commedia and other foreign theatricals were popular he liked it a great deal more.
The woman took the mask off and tossed it onto the table. Her hair was dirty blond and her narrow face with its long nose and direct eyes was plain, too plain to ever play the unmasked heroines. Her faded red dress was old and well-worn, better than a country woman's but no bawd's false finery either. Whatever the rumormongers thought, whores made terrible actresses.
She looked toward him with a grin. Smoke from the candles and clay pipes below reached up to touch the tavern's high beamed ceiling and spread out like a cloud behind her. It was an interesting theatrical effect, but there was something about the image that Baraselli found faintly disquieting. She said, "I'm not here to make my fortune. I'll take what you paid the last one."
She had good teeth, too. "All right, you're our Columbine. But on sufferance, mind. We've got an important engagement, a very important engagement. It happens when you attract the crowds and praise we have. If you don't give a fine performance, you're out. If you do, well, it's one silver per fortnight and a fair share of whatever they throw onto the stage."
"That's well, I agree."
"Anton! Look out the window." Garin, still wearing the gray beard from his Pantalone costume, came pounding up the stairs.
"What? I'm busy."
Garin pushed past him and threw open the shutters of the window behind Baraselli's table.
"Damn it, you'll let the night air and the bogles in, you fool." Baraselli stood abruptly, jarring the table and slopping wine onto the stained floor.
"But look at this." Garin pointed. The Mummer's Mask stood in a huddle of taverns and old houses on the side of a low hill commanding a good view of the River Quarter. Lying before them were the narrow overhung streets of the older and poorer area, which eventually led into the vast plazas and pillared promenades surrounded by the garden courts of the wealthy. Farther to the west and standing high above the slate and wooden roofs were the domes of churches, the fantastic and fanciful statues ornamenting the gables of the fortified Great Houses, the spires of the stone-filigree palaces on the artificial islands on the river's upper reaches, all transformed into anonymous shapes of alternating black and silver as clouds drifted past the moon. But now, against the stark shadowy forms of the crowded structures of the River Quarter, they could see the bright glow of fire, a harsh splash of color in the darkness.
"Down near Cross Street, I think," Garin said.
More of the troupe had drifted up the stairs in