'They must go back for miles,' he said.

Guglielmo was by his side, with a sheaf of floor-plans and diagrams, shaking his head.

'Nothing is marked, but we've always known these were approximate at best. The building has been remodelled, knocked down, rebuilt, refitted a dozen times.'

Genevieve was nearby, waiting. She was in one of her siege moods, as if she expected a surprise attack at any moment. Stage-hands were out looking for Eva.

Illona was trying to look concerned for the girl.

'And this part of the city is rotten through with secret tunnels and pa.s.sageways from the wars.'

Detlef was worried about tonight's performance. The audience was already arriving. And they were expecting to see the discovery of the season, Eva Savinien.

There was no time to deal with this.

IX.

The new host stood up, the Animus settling on her face. Scheydt was writhing at her feet, scrabbling with his hand at her leg, trying to pull himself up.

'Give it back,' he shouted through his pain.

It was easy to shake him off.

The Animus was intrigued by the cool, purposeful mind of Eva Savinien, and by the recent blot of panic that had been scrawled across the hitherto perfect page of her thoughts. This was the vehicle which would get it close to Genevieve and Detlef. Close to its purpose. It would have to be more circ.u.mspect now.

Like Scheydt, this host had her needs and desires. The Animus thought it could help a.s.suage them.

She spread and fisted her fingers, feeling the pull and push of her muscles as far up as her elbows, her shoulders. The Animus was conscious of the perfection of her young body. Her back was as supple as a fine longbow, and her slender limbs as well-proportioned as an idealized statue. She spread her arms, heaving her shoulders, stretching apart her b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

The screaming man at her feet was attracting attention. There were crowds in the street, and they pa.s.sed comment. Soon, someone would intervene.

Scheydt had denied himself everything, and, with the Animus in his mind, had exploded. Eva was more in accord with herself, but there were still things the Animus could do for her. And she welcomed its presence, feeding it the information it needed to proceed towards its purpose.

Detlef and Genevieve were both in the building, but it would stay its killing blow for the moment. The revenge had to be complete. It would be cautious not to wear out this host as fast as it had Scheydt.

'Eva,' said a male voice.

The Animus allowed Eva to turn to the man. It was Reinhardt Jessner, standing in the doorway. He was an actor in Detlef's company, a buffoon but a decent one. He could be of use.

'What's wrong?'

'Nothing,' she said. 'Stage fright.'

Reinhardt looked unsure. 'That's not like you.'

'No, but one shouldn't be like oneself all the time, don't you think?'

She eased past him into the theatre, and darted up a small, hungry kiss at his bewildered mouth. After only a moment, he responded, and the Animus tasted the actor's soul.

The kiss broke, and Reinhardt looked down at Scheydt.

'Who's this?'

'A beggar,' she explained. 'Overdoing his act somewhat.'

'His leg is broken. You can see the bone.'

Eva laughed. 'You should know the tricks that can be done with make-up, Reinhardt.'

She shut the door on the still-kicking cleric of Solkan, and let Reinhardt take her back to the stage.

'I'm perfectly all right,' she kept saying. 'It was just stage fright just an accident just a panic'

'Curtain up in half an hour,' Poppa Fritz announced.

Eva left Reinhardt, and made her way back to her dressing room. The Animus remembered the thing the host had seen beyond the mirror. There was no time to take account of it.

'Poppa,' she told the hireling. 'Get me a new mirror, and whip my costumier into action.'

Below the Vargr Breughel, underneath even the fifth level of the bas.e.m.e.nts, there was a salt.w.a.ter lagoon. A hundred years ago, it had served as a smugglers' den. It had been abandoned in haste; chests of rotted silks and dusty jewels stood stacked haphazardly on the sh.o.r.es. This was the Trapdoor Daemon's lair. His books swelled up with the damp like leavened bread, but the water was good for him. He could drink brine, and needed to immerse his body every few hours. If his hide dried out, it cracked and became painful.

But not as painful as the heartache he now felt.

He had known how it would end. There could be no other outcome. As a dramatist, he must have understood that.

But Collapsed on the sandy slope, his bulbous head in the water, its ruff of tentacles floating around it, he was alone with his despair.

Everything had been a futile attempt to put off the despair.

He heard the constant drip of water down the walls of this dungeon, and saw the rippling reflection of his lanterns on the water's surface.

Sometimes, he wondered if he should just cast himself off, and let his body wash through the tunnels to the Reik, and then to the sea. If he were to throw away the last of his humanity, perhaps he might find contentment in the limitless oceans.

No.

He sat up, head breaking the water, and crawled away, leaving a damp trail behind him.

He was the Trapdoor Daemon. Not a spirit of the sea.

There were age-eaten wooden statues of G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses around the wallsof Verena and Manann, Myrmidia and Sigmar, Morr and Taal. They had been ship's figureheads. Now, their faces were vertically lined where the grain of the wood had cracked, and greened with masks of moss. Slowly, they became less human. When the Trapdoor Daemon had first found this placethe marks of his own change barely apparent to anyone elsethe faces had been plain, recognizable, inspiring. As he had become monstrous, so had they. Yet they retained their human faces underneath.

Underneath his skin, he was still a man.

The Trapdoor Daemon stood up. On two legs, like a man. The water had washed away some of his pain.

Lanterns burned eternally in his lair. It was as richly appointed as a palace, albeit with furniture rescued from the scenery dock.

The boatlike bed where he slept looked like a priceless antique from the Age of the Three Emperors, but was in fact a st.u.r.dy replica constructed for a forgotten production of The Loves of Ottokar and Myrmidia. Nothing was what it seemed.

Somewhere above, the company would be preparing for the curtain. He had not missed a performance yet. And he wouldn't break his habit tonight. Not for something as inconsequential as a heartless actress.

From a hook, he hauled down a cloak intended to be worn by a mechanical giant in one of the old melodramas.

He wrapped himself up, and slithered towards his trapdoor.

The crowds outside the theatre treated him as a madman, and kicked him into the street. The newly broken bone in his leg sawed through his flesh. On his knees, his hand pressed to his stump, he threw back his head and screamed.

The world spun around him. There was no such thing as a fixed point. A sundial is only useful if the sun is out.

Clouds gathered in the night sky, obscuring the moons.

Bernabe Scheydt yelled, and people hurried away from him. His face had been torn away, and he felt as if he were smothered with a mask of hungry ants, a million tiny mandibles dripping poison into his flayed flesh.

Up in the sky, a speck appeared. A black, flapping speck.

His scream ran out, and he just let the pain run through his whole body. His throat was torn and bleeding inside.

The speck became a bird, and he fixed his eyes on it.

An officer of the watch came near, his club out, and he stood over Scheydt, prodding him with a polished boot.

'Move on,' the watchman said. 'This is a respectable district, and we can't be having the likes of you.'

The bird was coming down like a rocket, beak-first, its wings fixed as if it were a missile.

'I am a cleric of the law.'

The copper spat, and kicked him in the knee, sending a jolt of pain through his body.

The bird still came. The watchman heard the whoosh as the hawk sliced like a throwing knife through the air, and turned around. He raised his club, and fell backwards, away from Scheydt, stifling his own yell.

The hawk fastened on Scheydt's head, beak gouging for his eyes, talons fixing about his ears. The bird had razor-edged metal spurs fixed to its ankles, and it had been trained in their use.

There was screaming all around.

'Warhawk, warhawk!'

The beak prised Scheydt's skull open and dug in expertly. It didn't feed, it rent apart. A gush of warmth expelled from the cleric's head, and dribbled down his face.

Then the pain was gone, and the bird was flying away.

Scheydt collapsed in the street, an unrecognizable, torn, broken mess. The clouds pa.s.sed, and moonlight streamed down on the corpse.

X.

'There's been a murder,' Guglielmo announced. 'Outside in the street.'

'What!'

Every new development was like a punch to his head. Detlef couldn't keep up.

Eva was in a corner, trying to rea.s.sure everyone that she was all right, that she could go on tonight. She was dressed and made up for Act One, turned into the bedraggled, painted Nita.

Guglielmo had a burly guard placed in Eva's dressing room, but the actress didn't want protection. She'd changed completely, and Detlef wondered if her earlier panic had been an act. If so, she'd fooled him completely. And he couldn't think of any reason for the performance. His own dresser draped Zhiekhill's robes around him, pinning them up. Cindy, the make-up a.s.sistant, set the trick wig under his cap. He felt like a baby, fussed over but ignored, an object not a person.

If a play lives through the first week, it can run for an age. Detlef wondered if the players could live through this first week of The Strange History of Dr. Zhiekhill and Mr. Chaida.

Poppa Fritz reported that there were protesters outside. They'd been hired by Mornan Tybalt, and come to picket the lines of theatre-goers. Now, having come to stop a play and stayed to witness a murder, they were on the point of rioting.

'It was another Warhawk killing.'

Detlef couldn't move his face to react as the special greasepaint was laid on.

The watch were on their way.

He had lost track of Genevieve, but could trust her to look after herself. He hoped he could trust her to look after him too.

'It has nothing to do with us,' Guglielmo said. 'A beggar was the victim.'

In her dressing room, Illona Horvathy was loudly filling a bucket with her dinner, as she'd done before every performance of every play she'd ever been in. Cindy stood back and judged her handiwork pa.s.sable. Outside, he was Zhiekhill. Inside, he didn't know He heard the first notes of Felix Hubermann's overture.

'Places, everyone,' Detlef shouted.

Feeling the cold, she made her way down the narrow pa.s.sage, knowing the floor was likely to give way under her. It was dark, but she was at home in darkness.

Genevieve knew the Vargr Breughel was connected with the labyrinth of tunnels that criss-crossed under the city. Altdorf had suffered too many wars, sieges, revolutions and riots not to be worm-holed through with secret ways. There was a drip of slime from somewhere, and the Box Seven smell was strong in the confined s.p.a.ce. It was a surprise, however, to find the body of the building itself so extensively undermined, as if the theatre was a stage set, backed not by solid walls but by painted canvas.

From the pa.s.sageway behind the ladies' dressing roomsto which, equipped as they were with one-way mirrors, the management could have charged admission and secured quite a substantial income from the city's wealthier devotees of female fleshshe'd pa.s.sed into a hublike s.p.a.ce, from which tunnels led off to all the points of the compa.s.s. There were also trapdoors in the ceiling and floor, so she supposed this knot was one of the secret junctions, a nodal point in the labyrinth.

There were few cobwebs, which suggested these paths were travelled often. In an alcove in the wall at the junction, a small bowl of matter burned, giving off a glow and a smell. It was longbane, a wood known to burn slowly, sometimes for up to a year.

This was an inhabited lair.