Love Poison No. 13 Page 5

  *

  Chapter 8

  Cauda’s dazed, departing admirers were oblivious to the stagehand who needed to pass through them, heading in the opposite direction in his urge to complete some urgent task.

  Forisimo almost smiled: he had seen Cauda have this effect on her worshipers on numerous occasions now.

  He controlled his urge to smile, however – it would only draw attention to him, and he wished to avoid any possible complications.

  As it was, Guilfo’s guards stared at him questioningly, if not actually suspecting him, wary of a stagehand descending towards the dressing rooms at a time when the area was reserved for the performers and their admirers.

  He waved and dangled the mock Egyptian earring he had picked up after Cauda had deliberately dropped it by his feet earlier. (He had been both amused and yet also startled that she had seen through his disguise, fearing that he had made a mistake anyone else might detect.)

  ‘Mistress Cauda dropped this,’ he breathed heavily, adopting Delfaris’s painfully growling delivery as well as he could. He made as if to hand the earring to the nearest sentry, saying with all the hints of an order, ‘Give it to her when–’

  ‘Hand it to her yourself, you old waster!’ the man snapped, refusing to accept what could be interpreted as a command from the ancient stagehand. ‘I’m not here to do your job for you!’

  Forisimo sighed miserably, like this was all too much trouble for him.

  With a resigned shrug of his stooped shoulders, he made his way towards Cauda’s door.

  His knock seemed regular enough, yet it contained a soft, secondary beat, a signal both he and Cauda had long ago agreed upon.

  ‘Come in,’ Cauda shouted out, controlling her excitement, keeping her tone bland and uninterested; just yet another dance she had learned to master.

  *

  The letter from Master Caputo lay on Guilfo’s desk, only cursorily read.

  It simply stated that Caputo had agreed to accept the impresario’s task: something that Guilfo had already taken as a given, unless this ridiculous manufacturer of potions looked forward to having his reputation shredded by whatever scurrilous rumours could be concocted.

  Besides, Caputo’s ridiculous idea of producing a love poison became increasingly irrelevant to a triumphant Guilfo. Indeed, the only thing about the letter that had taken Guilfo by surprise was the manner of its delivery: a cobweb-strewn Delfaris claiming he had found it in his pocket, without having the slightest idea as to how it at ended up there when he had spent most of the evening ensuring the smooth running of the theatre’s scenery changes.

  Guilfo, however, was far too distracted to give even this oddity anything but his most fleeting consideration.

  It wasn’t, of course, that his mind was on the brutal murder of Forisimo’s servant. Neither was he concerned that his original plans – or rather, his spur of the moment idea – to frame Forisimo for the murder had had to be instantaneously changed almost as soon as he had thought of it.

  He would quite naturally have preferred an inept dumping of the corpse, one that would have led to it being reasonably quickly discovered; but they had had to leave the servant’s body behind once Guilfo had curiously lit the machine’s flame and been astounded by Cauda’s magically abrupt appearance within the room.

  No matter: he had already put into motion the means to ensure the correct people in authority heard that screams of what could only be a man being murdered had been heard coming from the Lane Without Name. As for the suitably well-bloodied knife, that had been hidden in a place where Forisimo wouldn’t come across it by chance, yet any half decent investigator would almost certainly uncover it and presume the panicked murderer had secreted it away in what had seemed a plausible hiding place.

  Guilfo’s interest was fixed purely upon the machine his men had managed to steal away from Forisimo’s workshop. It had quite conveniently split into two pieces on the simple removal of a few bolts, and had been just as easily put back together.

  The lit flame once again projected a life-like image of a dancing Cauda against the wall, an image so lifelike that Guilfo wished to embrace her, to congratulate her on the incredible beauty of her dance.

  As he had when he had first seen her so miraculously and suddenly appear within Forisimo’s room, he walked over to the wall to more closely inspect this remarkably realistic semblance.

  He could pass a hand through her, as if she were ghostlike: as if this were her very spirit that Forisimo’s ingenious device had captured. Indeed, he could even walk through her dancing image, even dissipate her incredible beauty a little by letting the image shine over him rather than against the plain wall.

  And yet in every other way, she could now actually be here, dancing in his room for his enjoyment alone. Indeed, he could dance a little with her, his own moves being regrettably far less fluid than hers.

  Unfortunately, this was as far as any interaction between them could be extended.

  Still – it was a truly unbelievable contraption.

  What else could it do, Guilfo wondered, striding back towards the machine to more carefully scrutinise the series of levers he had noticed earlier but had been loath to tamper with, fearing their effects.

  For the first time, he suffered a twinge of regret that he had ordered the killing of Forisimo’s servant.

  Sometimes, he had to admit, he was too impetus for his own good.

  They should have forced more information out of that pathetic little worm before despatching him so prematurely.

  What if there were some other machine?

  One, this one, might only project the captured images.

  Some other machine, one still lying hidden somewhere within Forisimo’s workshop, might be the device specifically constructed to actually capture the images.

  He cursed his bad fortune.

  Tentatively, he pushed on one of the levers, the most prominent amongst them, fearing even as he pushed harder and harder against it to make it move that he might be making one more dreadful mistake.

  The lever clicked into another position.

  With a whirring of displaced weights, of tightly wound springs, there was a shifting of wooden framed lenses, of otherwise firmly pinioned crystals.

  It was an elaborate dance in its own right.

  But then the flame went out.

  And the dancing Cauda vanished from the room.

  *

  Chapter 9

  Cauda sat before her mirror, wiping away the tear-stained makeup, wiping away the face that was Cleopatra and replacing it with the one that was her real self.

  It was as Cleopatra, of course, not herself, that she had greeted and embraced Forisimo.

  And it was as Delfaris, the old stagehand, that Forisimo had taken this false Cleopatra in his arms and kissed her.

  It seemed so so long ago that they had last held each other as themselves, rather than in the guise of others.

  So long ago, too, when their meetings had been something far more than these brief, elicit encounters they had to both pretend they were satisfied with.

  Beneath it all, of course, it was the real Forisimo, the real her. And yet how much longer could she go on without seeing the real Forisimo’s face and still continue to remember it accurately?

  How much longer must she go on tenderly caressing a face that wasn’t that of the one she loved?

  At one time, despite the disguises, his eyes at least had nakedly exposed the true Forisimo, sparkling with the love and longing he held for her: yet Guilfo could recognise those eyes too, and so now even the liveliness of his gaze had be veiled behind Seneore’s more elaborate skins.

  It was Forisimo she held in her arms, she kissed, she whispered her longings to; and yet it wasn’t him at all.

  Even so, she resented most of all how brief these already inadequate, unfulfilling embraces had to be.

  How long could the stagehand Delfaris stay in her room before suspicions were raised?

/>   And so he had left after they had spent nothing but a few minutes together.

  She began to reapply a fresh layer of make up.

  This was her own elaborate disguise.

  The skilful, well-practised creation of a simulacrum of a happy, contented face.

  *

  As Master Caputo followed Cauda’s secretive lover, he couldn’t fail to recognise the canals they were heading down; for this was undoubtedly the preferred route of people furtively making their way towards the Lane Without Name.

  As he had ordered, the gondolier of the boat he had hailed maintained enough distance between the two gondolas to ensure they wouldn’t be seen. Like the boat ahead, they had also doused their lanterns.

  The city’s gondoliers who put themselves up for hire had become accustomed to slyly following other boats, and had become expert at it.

  Despite this, Caputo had the impression that Cauda’s lover had hailed his own gondola because a rendezvous with a waiting boat had failed to materialise. On leaving the theatre – disguised it seemed as some ancient stagehand – the man had made his way down narrow alleyways towards a less frequently used part of the canal, only to wait apparently aimlessly here for ages before turning to head towards a more populated branch of the waterways, where gondolas for hire were still operating.

  The man’s disguise had almost fooled Caputo, despite the potion maker’s familiarity with Seneore’s masks.

  Having managed to pull himself out of the stupor Cauda’s endearing manner of speaking had appeared to put him under, Caputo had briefly slowed his pace a little, watching with interest as the old stagehand had fought against the flow leading away from the dressing room door. He had timed the stagehand’s ‘returning’ of the earring, wondering with a knowing grin what might be keeping such an old man so long.

  He had decided to dawdle a little longer in the corridor, deftly flicking the end of his long silk scarf towards the spreading branches of a soaring bouquet of roses, ensuring it became tangled amongst the thorns.

  He momentarily feared that Cauda’s visitor would turn to head the other way down the corridor when the stagehand at last reappeared: and when this fear proved to be unwarranted, he suffered the brief anxiety that his ploy of catching his scarf amongst the rose thorns might attract the swiftly retreating man’s attention, particularly as one of Guilfo’s sentries had kindly offered to free him.

  Fortunately, this lover was too caught up either in reveries of his all too brief encounter with Cauda, or in flattering himself at his own cleverness.

  He didn’t really seem to be according the people in the corridor any significance, doubtlessly believing his disguise was so perfect that they were paying him no interest.

  Even so, Caputo suffered a third pang of anxiety when, seeing that there was no light in the man’s eyes, as he had expected, as he had been looking out for, he might have misjudged the situation.

  And then the man smiled dreamily.

  And Caputo knew he had his man.

  Presenting the still entangled scarf as a present to Guilfo’s sentry as a reward for his help, Caputo began to follow the man at a distance, grateful that if Seneore’s masks had one inherent, irritating problem, it was that the layers of extra skin inevitably affected the wearer’s hearing, as well as preventing a sudden, full turning of the head to check on what is happening behind you.

  The secondary skin didn’t, however, prevent this particular wearer from breaking into a faster pace, a more straight-backed gait, once he believed he was clear of anyone who might think his behaviour odd.

  It was further proof to Caputo that he had the correct man, an assumption entirely confirmed when the man stopped by a wall and pulled open what would otherwise have been an invisible door.

  Caputo waited a while before stepping through the door after the man. He had no idea how straight the tunnel running beyond it would be, and even the briefest flurry of light within a dark tunnel was enough to warn a pursued man that the door behind him had been opened once again.

  Fortunately, the tunnel ran close to the wall, and so, like the general structure of the theatre, curved in upon itself as part of a great circle. Caputo had to listen for the man’s footprints to work out which way he had gone, sighting at last what must be the dim oily glow of a lantern, in all probability one the man had picked up on first entering the otherwise incredibly black corridor.

  Peering intently after the rapidly vanishing light, Caputo judged the moment when his prey seemed to step to one side for a moment, the signs perhaps of him stepping into a branching corridor. Not a corridor that, however, sprung off tangentially but, rather, going by the way the dim light flickered against the walls, one that began to steeply descend.

  When Caputo came to the slender alcove in the corridor’s wall that formed the landing of the precariously inclined staircase, he cautiously paused. The oily glow, dimmer than ever, barely illuminated another landing, the light from the lantern apparently emanating from somewhere a little deeper down yet another offshoot of this maze of tunnels.

  The lantern didn’t appear to be moving anymore.

  Caputo could also hear voices, the sounds of a conversation.

  No, not a conversation; it was just one man speaking. It was more like an incantation rather than any regular form of speech.

  ‘…turn left, walk twenty steps and, on your right, there will be a door. Once you open this, you will come out on the stage-level corridor.’

  It was a set of directions.

  Who was giving them? Who receiving them?

  ‘Turn to your right, towards the back of the stage. Walk another thirty steps. Then you will be fully awake. You will recall making your way here after taking a lost earring to Mistress Cauda. One she had dropped after exiting the stage.’

  As the precisely delivered instructions came to an end, the flickering light of the lantern began to shift along the walls, moving away from the pursuing Caputo once more.

  Caputo waited only briefly before continuing his descent of the stairs. Only halfway down, however, he came to a jolting, shocked halt as the man he was chasing appeared at the bottom of the stairs.

  The man was nothing much more than a shadowy figure, barely lit by the gloomy light of the swiftly vanishing lantern, but there was enough of a glow coming back from the walls to allow Caputo to recognise that this was indeed the stagehand. Fortunately, if a little strangely, the man seemed unaware of Caputo’s presence: indeed, he seemed to be totally unaware of his surroundings, walking in a daze, his face blank of expression.

  Rather than turning to ascend the steps, the man continued on his way, crossing the staircase’s bottom, heading off down yet another branch of the tunnels.

  This must be a man whose identity Cauda’s lover has briefly stolen, Caputo realised. Breaking into a swifter yet still cautiously quiet descent of the stairs, Caputo turned after the retreating man, slipping into the dazed stagehand’s pocket a letter prepared earlier while seated in the theatre’s box.

  Then he had returned to his chase of the masked man, following as closely as he dared as his prey stepped out through a small, narrow door into a street that was relatively light compared to the solid darkness of the tunnels, despite it now being late evening. The man, of course, still sought out the darkness, dousing his lantern and heading off down the narrower ginnels running between the tightly packed buildings.

  Even now, with the theatre left far behind them, Caputo’s prey still refused to light any lantern that might help them navigate the slender canals threading this less salubrious part of the city.

  He knew his way around this area, obviously.

  Amongst all the different shades of darkness surrounding Caputo, something of a slightly lighter tint appeared in the water beside his gondola.

  Caputo thought nothing of it at first, believing it to be the pallid face of one of the corpses that regularly turned up in the canals: but this was a face he recognised.

  He reached out
for it, fishing it from the water. As soon as it touched his hand, the gossamer thin mask clung to his fingers, such that all definition in the face immediately vanished.

  His prey had shed his disguise; which could only mean that he felt safe – that he was almost home.

  *

  Chapter 10

  Guilfo gasped in agony as his love so abruptly vanished from his room.

  He quickly reached for his flint, intending to relight the doused flame of Forisimo’s machine once more; but the machine hadn’t stopped moving.

  The oiled wick sank into the body of the machine, taking with it a crystal lens that appeared to focus its light – then, with the whir and click of a moving wheel, of a ratchet, another similar composition of wick and crystal moved into its place, this fresh wick rising up into the spot originally taken by the dancing flame.

  Guilfo breathed out a sigh of hope as he eagerly reached forward and lit the new wick. Soaked in oil, the wick effortlessly erupted into a beautifully flickering flame.

  But there was no Cauda dancing across the walls.

  Stranger still, there wasn’t even any hint of projected light; the wall remained almost perfectly dark, the only illumination being that coming from the flame light echoed by the more reflective objects decorating he room.

  Guilfo desperately inspected the machine, seeking out some other lever that might reverse the changes he had made. He wondered, of course, if he had to simply pull back the lever he’d already pushed forward: yet he also naturally feared that it wouldn’t be so simple, that such a move might make any damage he’d caused completely irreversible.

  He couldn’t understand, in particular, why the series of lens wasn’t at the very least projecting the flame’s light upon the wall, like so many other of Forisimo’s elaborate theatre lamps. He waved his hand in front of the lens, his shock more intense than ever when he saw that not even the slightest glimmer of light was coming from the contraption, his palm remaining dark and entirely unilluminated but for the dim light reflected from around the room.

  And yet…as he moved his hand, the flame flickered and cavorted, far more than he would expect even if it had been caught in any draughts caused by his waving arm.