by Cameron MacLeod
in Issue 154, November 2024
Anton kept his breathing heavy and let his body attend to itself. His mind came unstuck from physical burdens. This allowed him to focus on his daughter, who lay some few feet away, his brother’s dagger protruding gaudily from her chest. By ritual he summoned grief, anger, a love suddenly frozen in place and held to the light, a hatred etched deep in his heart. All were momentarily dispelled when Mirosh clapped him on the shoulder.
“Just remember your lines, my boy. And keep to your mark, of course. Nirellius will take care of the rest. No nerves for him, eh?”
Pausing only to take a swig from his wine flask, the company patron strode backstage, chuckling to himself. His exit was marked by the murdered daughter, who had allowed one eye to stray open.
“He doesn’t pay us enough to laugh at those.”
“He pays us enough to stay in character, Ava, my dear,” Anton replied. Ava dutifully reassumed the role of murdered daughter, her features arranged not so much in peaceful repose as in irritation.
Anton eyed his mark with distaste. Mirosh had told him that the overlapping stars, the runes in the negative space and the enclosing rings had all been daubed in wine, the better to soak into the boards of the stage. Anton chose not to challenge the claim. A simple ‘X’ would have served him but it would not serve Nirellius. He shuffled across the polished boards to the centre of the mark and sighed and tried to ignore the guttural hissing emanating from beneath the stage, waiting for the curtains to part once again. His breathing struggled to find its settled rhythm. Amidst his carefully cultivated medley of emotions, anger crept to the fore.
The curtains parted. Breath and anger both were swept aside as the world beyond dulled to a grey-green haze. A cold gush of horror ran down from his scalp and for a moment his daughter was truly his daughter, lost forever beyond the veil. A moan escaped his mouth. Chill, vaporous arms clutched a misty skull and Anton followed the movements, his flesh all but helpless to resist the ethereal gravity of Nirellius’ shade. He made a keening sound, foreign to his own ears. Then, with an effort, he drew his quivering lips shut and forced his gaze beyond the veil to his audience.
Most folk assumed the challenge to lie in working with the shade, for how does one convincingly wear a ghost? They were wrong, however; the challenge came when forcing himself apart from it. Nothing came easier to Anton than the belief that he, too, was dead and broken. He had felt so before, no less than twice a day for the past month, and that only counting the company’s residence in Valingrod, where Nirellius was born and where he played his anguish most profoundly.
Man and shade fell to their knees. Anton felt the stage push back against him and the pulsing in his arms, which still clutched his scalp. He read faces in the crowd – worried, human, like his own. Carefully, carefully he mastered himself. The lines presented themselves easily, being twice over memorised and twice recalled and galvanised by twin voices. He parted his lips and let the words haunt the air.
“All is shattered. All is bled. Brother, you have pierced beyond mine fair daughter’s heart. Truth she held within her. Love she held within her. We might seek beauty to the ends of the earth yet none shall know it now. So be it for peace. So be it. So be it, brother. My Katrin…”
Tears made steady tracks down his cheeks, their cold descent a trickle in the torrent of sensation. He felt suddenly drawn to the audience, leaning. His arm reached out, wreathed in death, then fell heavy by his side as his senses returned in a rush. The shade was gone.
Silence held for a breath. The applause followed on cue, booming even as the onlookers mopped dewy eyes and gasped oaths of warding. Anton stayed true to the scene in Nirellius’ absence, until he chanced to see a pair of crystalline blue eyes. The soft lamplight made a portrait of the woman; the artful glistening of tears in the corners of her eyes, a slender hand raised to still her racing heart, lips ever so slightly parted in awe. As the curtains closed on the second act, Anton felt suddenly quite alive.
The third act was enduring and far-reaching in its popularity for the simple fact that blood ran through its every page; the blood of two vengeful brothers and their unmourned armies but also that of Nirellius. His pen and his performances and now his death were all inextricably tied to the play. Audiences had ever since been pleased to revisit the intertwined tragedies at the cost of a single ticket. Anton attacked his final scenes with a newfound vigour, observed most keenly by his on-stage brother during their climactic duel. His dramatic efforts were directed not inconspicuously in the direction of the young woman who had seemed so moved by his talent.
The effort was not wasted. When the time came for taking bows, Anton was warmly received. The young woman applauded most enthusiastically. By standing arrangement with a member of the company’s wagon team, a rose was thrown from the crowd and landed at Anton’s feet. He wasted no time in stooping to gather it and proffering it to the young woman, who accepted it not with a blush but with a bold grin. Anton found himself smiling in kind, until the familiar hissing stirred beneath the boards.
Moments later, Nirellius appeared for his final bow, a solitary, billowing wraith wearing a slack-featured mask of the legendary actor. He loomed statuesque, unbowed, expressionless. The applause redoubled. Men and women shouted his name, professed their love. Entire bouquets began to assemble around the crimson glyphs which bound Nirellius to the stage, the flowers stirring the mist of his body as they passed through it, moving the shade as much as he could be moved when not cloaked in another man’s flesh. Anton stepped nobly aside and smiled and applauded a dead man, as he had done no less than twice a day for the past month. He reflected, as he often did at such times, upon his own considerable talent for acting.
Once Nirellius departed and the curtain fell, actors and audience alike were dispelled near as quickly. As the stagehands emerged from their wagons to ready the next day’s performances, Anton savoured the evening air outside the city walls.
“Nice night for it.”
Anton turned and smiled to see the young woman from the audience strolling his way, her verdant dress and golden hair a striking defiance of the dusk. He affected an air of surprise.
“A nice night for what, exactly?”
She shrugged, not to be outdone for nonchalance. “Being alive.”
“I know a place or two in the city where there is yet more life. Would you care to join me?”
“I would.”
They linked arms as though by appointment and left the theatre behind.
Past the bustle and beggary that emanated from the gates, they wended their way arm-in-arm down the broader, less odorous, more affable streets of Valingrod. They kept south of the river, eschewing both the grandest taverns and the mausoleums that kept them grand. Lamplight kissed the cobbles and skirted by the shuttered windows of artisans’ homes and chased away all potent shadows. Folk walked by sedately, often in pairs, patiently deliberating over their preferred establishment. As though by chance, Anton and his new companion were ushered to a candlelit table placed beside a cosy-looking wine shop. They were given no opportunity to graciously decline a complimentary carafe. The proprietor, of course, was appreciative of the arts.
They tried the wine and let the evening settle around them. Anton found both to his taste. The woman smiled at him over the rim of her cup.
“You haven’t told me your name.” He observed.
“You haven’t asked.”
“May I have the pleasure?”
The woman grimaced and took a sudden interest in the contents of her cup.
“It’s Katrin.”
Anton could not help but smile.
“Familiar. Named for the tragic daughter?”
“My father was fond of the play.”
“Well, it was generous of you to come and see it.”
“Thought I’d best see what the fuss was about, if people are going to the trouble of raising the dead for it.”
“Mm.”
Anton took his turn at studying the wine.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing at all, my dear.”
“Ah. Do I sense a shadow looming over us?”
Anton shrugged. “He does tend to follow me around.”
“I imagine so. You’re the only person I’ve ever known to have touched a shade, let alone worn one like a cloak. No one here has ever seen a shade outside of the mausoleums and those hardly measure up. No talking, no moving. Just phantoms, conjured at their appointed times, fainter than memory in most cases. I fear people would be rather fascinated with the deceased portion of your cast even if it wasn’t Nirellius.”
“Probably. Though I’m not sure Mirosh would have tried it for anyone else. Our patron, you understand. Probably soaking up the contents of one of the neighbouring establishments as we speak. Anyway, it was his idea, his money. He has enough of it to break certain conventions within the necromancers’ guild. The investment seems to be paying itself back. Lucky Mirosh.”
Katrin had a musical laugh that washed over Anton like warm water. Through small acts she inflicted upon him the utterly alien sense of being tolerably upstaged.
“And Nirellius himself?” Katrin asked, resting her chin on her upturned palm. Anton blinked and attempted to gather himself.
“I assume the body was acquired through similar means. With the family’s blessing, I’m sure.”
“But why go to the trouble? It strikes me that they have some perfectly good actors to hand.”
Anton took a long sip of wine and let his thoughts linger on the words ‘perfectly good’, then he lowered his glass and sighed.
“Talent is more common than one would think. I’ve known many fine actors who would lately be grateful to caper for pennies on a street corner. Nirellius was talented, of course, though by the time he’d made a name for himself I imagine it barely mattered whether his performances were truly captivating. He was familiar. Every script, every performance, a classic from the moment they were born, and the classics sell the best. The man has surpassed the constraints of talent by such a distance that he needn’t even breathe, much less act, to be adored.”
Katrin regarded Anton through piercing blue lenses, scanning slightly as though watching the air about him settle. She smiled and sipped her wine modestly. She did not look away from him.
“Was that how you started? Pennies, street corners?”
Anton grimaced. Over his shirt, his hand traced the long, slanting scar that ran from his chest to his right shoulder. He pictured a damp stone cell, a night so cold that the memory still chilled his blood. Rich experiences to draw upon, he’d told himself then. He was past the solstice of his years now. He preferred to experience the cleaner wine shops.
“I played many roles before I auditioned for Mirosh. He took a liking to me, said I had a certain affinity with Nirellius. Now I am here.”
“Did you know him?” Katrin asked.
“Not in life, no.” Anton murmured. He had been briefly distracted by the plaintive calling of a begging woman whom he could see over Katrin’s shoulder. She cut a forlorn figure as she shuffled from tavern to tavern trying to cajole a few coins, receiving little for her efforts. He looked back at Katrin in time to register a flicker of disappointment at his answer and so indulged his instinct for improvisation.
“Though I dare say we have come to know one another. Scarcely avoidable, given our, ah, intimate collaboration.”
Katrin brightened instantly. “What’s he like?”
Like breath freezing solid in the throat, Anton thought. Like a man falling, forever. He searched his soul for the admiration he’d borne the man in his childhood and those earliest days of acting. Distant feelings, almost vanished. He had walked a long path. Nirellius, on the other hand, had come from rarer stock. He leapt to the fore of his trade, if one could leap from prominence to fame. He wrote no plays on life in the gutters, so Anton played his princes and lords with a borrowed nobility. Twice the work, half the acclaim. Even now. Katrin raised her eyebrows. Anton sighed and smiled, as though suddenly distracted from fond reminiscence.
“Nirellius is a very dedicated actor in the moments we share, very passionate about his craft, as I’m sure he always was. I do discern though, from time to time, a sort of encouraging nod, as though to say: Good show, Anton. I rather think he enjoys the work. He certainly enjoys the applause still.”
Their laughter was cut short. They were not alone.
“Please, help a mother in her grief. Pieter. That was his name, my boy. A few coins, so I can see him again. Please.”
With merited confidence Anton quickly judged the woman to be no sort of actor. Her shoddy, loose-fitting garb was the uniform of honest destitution. The wear in her voice and the grey in her stringy hair and the hollowed pits that held her eyes summed the affliction of long desperation. Remembering a time in his life he wished to forget and reckoning a generous man to be more desirable than a miser, he reached into his purse and retrieved a few coins. To his surprise, a slender hand caught at his own as he attempted to pass the coins across the table.
“It is a terrible loss, and we are sorry for you, but you must look to the living for comfort.”
Not for the first time, Anton found himself remeasuring Katrin, who at once spoke with an almost regal adamance while staring wide-eyed and regretful at the poor woman stood before her, as though pleading. The stranger began to tremble.
“No, please, they say they will burn the body if I don’t give them the coin. Please.”
A barkeep appeared at the woman’s shoulder and began to usher her away, a task of scant physical demand. His mutterings spoke more of a weary familiarity with his duty than of urgency.
“Pieter is at rest now,” Katrin soothed. “Let him lie.”
Though easily herded from the wine shop, the woman would not be pacified entirely. Katrin’s words drew a feeble sort of anger from her like a spark rooted from ashes.
“He’s a little boy! He needs his mother!”
Finding herself already harried several strides down the street and her remaining resolve spent on that last profitless exchange, the woman stumbled into the evening, adrift in her grief. Katrin watched her go for a little while and shook her head sorrowfully. She stretched a grimace at Anton before at last releasing his hand. He felt his heart quicken as her soft fingers slid away.
“It was a generous gesture,” Katrin said. “But not a kind one. Necromancers don’t work cheaply, as I’m sure you know. Perhaps she will find the money to summon her son’s shade this month – she spends none of it on food, I’m sure – but there will soon come a time where she cannot pay, and they will burn the body as she says, and what then for her? For a living woman, maybe even one with living children yet? She is far from the first I’ve seen to beggar herself through grief, for a shade that cannot speak or scarcely move. Who knows if the boy could even see or hear her?”
Anton blinked, then drank to avoid sitting paralysed in the wake of her words. Katrin glanced away from him as though abashed, wishing she had said less. This gave Anton the footing he needed to steady himself.
“It seems we’ve both been paupers, at one time or other. I am sorry, for whoever it is you lost – your father? Mother?”
“Both. My father’s heart gave in one night. Very sudden. He was barely cold when the necromancers came calling, like they could smell death on the air. It’s not a difficult job, selling resurrection to a grieving widow. They took the body and I never saw it again. I went with my mother to see his shade, once. He didn’t look like much. Certainly didn’t look happy. Mother didn’t agree, talked to him as though he was really there. On it went, until the money ran out. She didn’t last much longer. It’s a tired old story, I’m afraid.”
Anton gave a deep sigh.
“It saddens me to hear it. The dead have gained favour over the living, since the guild took root. Though I must say, you appear to have survived it all rather handsomely. I suspect you have more than a few hidden talents, Katrin.”
Katrin smiled. She looked away from the street and fixed her blue eyes on Anton’s once more.
“I sold what I could. Sang for my supper. I used to travel with a theatre company, once upon a time.”
The mystery of the woman resolved itself with a near audible click. Anton hid repressed laughter behind his wine cup. He sank back into his chair with a relief he’d once felt as a journeyman, remembering lines that had seemed beyond recall just as they were needed.
“Well then, perhaps I might be able to stir some forgotten feeling in you. Would you care to see behind the stage, my dear?”
“I would.”
Anton linked arms with Katrin once more and guided her toward the gathering night. He left behind a half-full cup and the sort of gratuity that an actor of his prominence could afford.
Mirosh’s travelling theatre protested its grandeur from the shadow of the city walls. It comprised a ring-fenced enclosure divided into two by a stage. The rear half housed wagons, tools, workers, cooks, actors and sundry other reminders of the toilsome intervals between performances. The other half held romance, tragedy, comedy, betrayal and, more empirically, a paying audience, at the proper times. Now it held only Anton and Katrin. They lingered in the stalls awhile with only the stars for performance. Anton always savoured the setting. The dead do not rise in the night here, he thought. Katrin shivered.
“Cold?” Anton asked, winding an arm around her shoulders.
“I was imagining how eerie it must be to tread these boards with a corpse lying just beneath.”
“Oh, he doesn’t trouble me much down there. No one ever so much as sees the casket.”
Katrin chuckled.
“The star of the show always demands his privacy,” she said.
Anton’s smile faded. In his early years with Mirosh’s company, when his first plum role had been followed, astonishingly, by a second, when he gave his profession at the city gates as ‘actor’ without mitigation or pause, Anton had seized the chance to become a new man. The new Anton had always been successful. He had always dressed sharply. His hair had always possessed that natural sandy hue.
Knowing from eternal experience that even the finest actors had their critics, the new Anton had negotiated with himself a private contract covering critique of all natures. Faced with effusive praise, he would naturally demur. Faint praise he would politely ignore. Rejection, contempt and any other mild criticism was to be borne with the most dignified humility. At the foot of this imagined pact, penned in blood-red ink and thrice underlined, lay the final covenant, one which brooked no bargaining in its interpretation:
Anton is the star of the show. Not Nirellius.
He rose smoothly to his feet.
“Nirellius hasn’t demanded anything for some time now. Would you care to see him?”
Katrin sighed. There was a shake to it which Anton savoured, feeling once again the master of his circumstances. He felt a flicker of concern for the mood of the evening, then reassured himself there would be plenty of time later to offer the lady comfort.
“I would.”
Anton led them to the back of the stage and through a locked door. It opened onto an adjoining cabin cluttered with costumes and props, some so brightly coloured they seemed to illuminate themselves, others glittering fitfully in what little moonlight filtered through the slats in each door. The night made each of these artifacts curiously foreign to Anton. He unlocked the back door of the cabin and stepped through briskly. He led Katrin not to the trap room door at the back of the stage, but to an ornate panelled wagon some distance away, soaked in the inviting aura of a small oil lamp.
“My humble abode.” Anton smiled, sweeping an arm toward the wagon. “Now. Kholov, our necromancer, is a very dear fellow, though I’m afraid he is very selective about whom he permits in the trap room. Naturally I have the run of this place, yet I fear you will not, my dear. Not yet, eh? Do make yourself comfortable, and allow me to improvise for a moment.”
He let a hand linger on her shoulder for a moment and strode to the trap room door. Though every board and bolt of the theatre would need to be disassembled and loaded on wagons by the end of the season, though every pound of material could mean another costly delay to the company’s ponderous migration, the door to Kholov’s realm was a deep and murky slab of oak, the planks so tightly seamed that they might have grown in place, secured from the inside by a heavy iron bolt. Anton raised his hand to knock, then paused, then shut his eyes, then knocked.
Anton imagined a hundred strangers awaiting his performance from the other side of the door. Those stakes were familiar and preferable to reality. He imagined that Katrin might already have taken shelter in his wagon, might already be stretched out upon the bed. Then came the clean jolt of oiled metalwork. The door swung soundlessly inward. The broad silhouette of a hooded man occupied the void.
“Why are you here?”
Kholov had the voice of one who spent near every night with no company but a corpse in a locked, unlit chamber. Anton had the errant thought that it was this unique huskiness which had led the man to such a vocation.
“Kholov, my dear man, how the devil are you this fine evening?”
Kholov said nothing. Anton cleared his throat.
“Well, I daresay you’ve perceived that I am here not only for the pleasure of your company. Our benevolent patron sends his apologies, along with a most urgent request for your presence in the city. No doubt you’ll find him at the Reed and Fisher.”
Though not moved physically, Kholov was at least moved to speech.
“The corpse needs tending.”
“Quite so! As fortune would have it, I have understudied many a role in my career and stand ready to relieve you in your hour of need. Mirosh’s suggestion, of course.”
A breeze ruffled the sparse grasses that had so far survived the company’s residence and the dry months of summer. It lifted the lapels of Anton’s coat and chased the regimented flow of his hair. It fluttered to the threshold of Kholov’s domain and through consultation of its own unreckoned senses decided to flutter no further. If time could reach the necromancer in that lifeless portal, it did not concern him greatly.
“Touch nothing.” Kholov said at last, before striding into the night.
Anton let out a breath he had been unconsciously holding. He headed for his wagon and found Katrin perched on its step, oil lamp in hand. By unspoken consent they made for the trap room.
There was no sign within of the levers or hatches or instruments that filled the bowels of ordinary theatres. The sickly lamplight brushed against tousled bedding and an iron-bound chest, chained and locked even while the necromancer himself had remained locked and isolated in his sanctum. The coffin lay closer to the centre of the chamber. Anton fancied he could have found it even without the lamp; he knew where his mark was.
They approached the smooth stone casket and saw graven upon its lid the word NIRELLIUS, laid out in a practical script that might on any other container have read: COSTUMES. Looking down upon his predecessor, Anton gave mortality its perfunctory consideration before addressing the more significant matter.
“Not what you’d expect for a leading man, I fear.”
Katrin neither looked at Anton nor seemed to hear his remark. She had retreated to stand half a step behind him and stared ahead at the coffin.
“What do you think it’s like for him, when he’s not a shade?” She asked at length.
“I imagine he takes a much needed rest.”
“Why not let him rest forever, then?”
Anton glanced at Katrin who had stretched forth the arm holding the oil lamp, then back at the coffin upon which she remained fascinated. He sighed, weighed down by the darkness and the sharpening sense that Nirellius had found a way to stand between him and a woman, and he wondered. Twice a day, when the curtain fell on the third act, there was a name on the lips of the audience that was not Anton’s. There had been time, in the derelict evenings and in a snow-mired wagon trapped between cities, for him to wonder whether he wore the shade or the shade his flesh. He had never seen the casket before. He had still not seen what remained of the body though it lay at his feet. He imagined that it would burn easily enough if an oil lamp happened to catch it. He imagined his name on countless lips. He imagined standing tall and solitary at centre stage as the roses piled at his feet.
He imagined himself capering for pennies on a street corner. He remembered a damp stone cell.
“Alas, I fear the good people of Valingrod would miss him terribly,” Anton murmured.
“We would.”
There was time for Anton to feel the pressure of the blow and the rattling of his teeth and the cold dirt against his cheek when he fell. There was little time for pain; his senses dulled quickly. There was darkness for a moment and stars within the darkness. He began to recognise certain sensations from his scenes with Nirellius; he worked his limbs feebly, as though from a great distance. After a time he recognised the sound of scraping stone and with ponderous difficulty turned his head to see Katrin push the lid from the casket. She bent low and gently laid the lamp inside the coffin. The light flickered across her tearstained cheeks.
“He wants to rest. He wants to be with his wife.”
Anton watched the inside of the coffin glow bright and brighter still and wished to feel some fraction of its warmth on his skin. Time passed irregularly. Katrin was gone but the glow lingered for a while. He dreamed of grander stages, royal commissions. He was loved by nations. Katrin was very supportive and hadn’t, in fact, meant to hit him on the head. When he opened his eyes again it was dawn. The smell of burning flesh lingered. His limbs were his own again, his head heavy and almost audibly throbbing. He was not alone.
“Mirosh? Kholov?”
The necromancer closed the door, casting the room into darkness. Anton heard footsteps. He heard a rattle of chains and the hinge of an iron-bound chest.
“All is shattered. All is bled.”
The audience were rapt, slack-mouthed, dewy-eyed. The bright young man who commanded the stage wore another’s face, another’s voice, another’s death. He delivered lines they both knew. The monologue ended. The shade was dispelled, until the time came to take his bow.
When the curtains parted after the third act, Anton did not bow. To stand above his peers required neither movement nor sound. A misty constellation of the living cheered his name, never knowing if he screamed to hear it.
©November 2024, Cameron MacLeod
Cameron MacLeod works as a software developer in Leeds, England. He labours toward fulfilment in the alternating roles of lazy writer and short-sighted birdspotter, supported with infinite patience by his lovely wife. His last story, “Junk”, was published by In Another Time magazine. This is his first appearance in Swords & Sorcery Magazine.
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