What's in a Name (ch2.2)

[igenlode]

And the final chunk -- which turns out to add up to the original estimate of 7500 words after all. Evidently I enjoyed the Persian much more than I did struggling with Mr Nameless murdering people :-p

Now I need to decide whether I'm going to submit this as one chapter, or two (3300 and 4100 respectively)-- I thought I had an extra two days, but in fact it's got to be edited and finalised by tonight!

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Up ahead he could see some kind of pot-house, a momentary haven of warmth and cheap liquor for those who lived in this benighted quarter. He ducked inside, more out of instinct than with any coherent plan, and had to smother a cough at the thick reek of hot lamp-oil. But no heads turned at his entry; no eyes narrowed in suspicion at the mask that perforce hid his face.

The place was little more than a single low-roofed room, rough-hewn wood from the walls to the floor with a scatter of stools around the tables at the back. The lamps had burnt low and been left untrimmed and only a few fallen mugs gave any evidence that customers had been and gone. Somewhere close at hand, a clatter of pots bore witness to the existence of human habitation, but the sole occupant of the room was a single disconsolate figure sprawled across a table in the darkest corner, hooded and cloaked despite the heat as if awaiting some assignation too long delayed.

A trap. Danger shrieked from every instinct, wrought up to a fever-pitch alert. Yuri was brighter than he’d thought, had guessed his every move in advance— The strangler’s cord taut between his fingers, he sprang across the floor with the speed of a striking snake, twitched the hood aside and jerked the loop tight with a lethal snap.

Fair hair spilled limply across the table; a young face, still creased from sleep, with a gold earring and a crooked nose. It seemed he had been truly asleep and not feigning after all, which made him either criminally careless from his employer’s point of view, or, more likely, innocent of any involvement. Still, it had been best to make sure.

A more pressing question was whether disposing of the stranger had made things safer, or had proceeded to make them even more dangerous — and that, he concluded, would depend almost entirely on how long the death took to be discovered. Mind racing, he let the body fall to a crouched huddle and tugged the hood forward in natural-seeming folds that hid the young man’s face.

But a pile of corpses was to be avoided. The small boy who burst in through the street door a moment later, unheralded and with a great clatter, had no inkling of just how close he, too, had come to death in his turn.

“Erik! Erik?” The boy glanced round the room quickly; settled on the upright cloaked figure who had straightened sharply at his arrival. “Are you Erik, sir? I’m to say Miss Darya sent me, and the boat’s waiting. There’s a horse, and you can get clean away out of the city. Miss Darya says you’re to hurry...”

He was to receive a miracle, apparently. A miracle doubtless intended to fall upon the young man who’d died waiting for the messenger to arrive, but then the heavens had a habit of smiling not upon the virtuous, but those who made their own luck.

“Yes, I’m Erik.” He came swiftly to the door, keeping his face in the shadows of his cloak. “Did you say there was a boat?”

“I’m to take you there.” The boy was dancing from foot to foot with urgency. “But be quick...”

Five minutes later, ensconced in the stern-sheets of a small boat with the boy chattering away nineteen to the dozen beside him, he still could not believe his luck. The boatman had clearly been paid to keep his mouth shut, rowing out steadily across the dim grey expanse of the Volga without questioning his passenger’s identity, and out on the water Yuri Black-Hand’s word held no sway. Best of all, none of those involved in the escape —save, presumably, for the absent Darya, who must have her own reasons for funding the whole— appeared to have met Erik before, or to see anything untoward in the idea that a man on the run should prefer to conceal his face.

And at this very moment, he thought, watching the roofs of the receding shore, Yuri’s men might well be bursting into the pot-house, eager to wreak their revenge on the man who’d taken refuge there. If their blood was up and he himself was very, very lucky, they might even smash in the skull of the figure with its face hidden, huddled cowering in the shadows, and hack away in their zeal before they even knew the victim was dead. After all, none of them had actually seen beneath the mask, and they believed his reputation was built on mountebank’s tricks.

Regretfully, he set aside that fantasy. The chances were that his escape would soon become known, and the only thing to do was leave the city. It was not, after all, as if he had any great desire to remain.

If the citizens had been less tight-fisted when it came to true art, he would never have fallen foul of Yuri and his mob in the first place. He had no ambition to demean his talents to those of a common crook.

The main concern was to make sure he avoided any encounter with this Darya woman, and any tearful farewell she might be intending. The far bank of the river was finally approaching. He leaned forward and tapped the boatman on the knee.

“Here. Stop here. At the steps.”

A big steamer had just come upriver and was lying docked at the pier twenty metres or so along the bank, lights reflecting on the surface of the water, and there was a bustle of unloading at the quays that would serve very well to cover the arrival of a small boat. He found a couple of one-rouble pieces in a pocket and slapped one down on the thwart beside the boatman, who rested on his oars for a moment to examine it and pocket it with a grunt. With a couple of swift strokes he had swung the boat around and brought them alongside the steps.

The boy was protesting.

“But mister Erik, the horse! Miss Darya has everything waiting—” He did not quite dare to pluck at his passenger’s coat to hold him back, but trailed up the steps in his wake still bleating in dismay.

Galloping off on horseback was a form of departure more feted in fiction than in reality. Besides, the girl might very well be there in person, which would be disastrous.

“Tell Miss Darya I could not possibly take any further advantage of her generosity.” He found inspiration and gathering eloquence. “Tell her I owe more than I can possibly say, and cannot endanger her further. Tell her that for her sake I choose to leave the city here, now, at once, without a backward glance, but with her image forever in my heart. Tell her the gratitude of her Erik will be eternal, from depths of devotion beyond imagining.”

As well to paint her a nice vivid picture of Erik safely on his way, to forestall any awkward enquiries as to his fate.

“And for you...” He palmed the other rouble piece, sent it spinning high in the uncertain light from the pier, and conjured it forth from the child’s ear to present it with a flourish.

The boy stared at the coin wide-eyed, clearly unable to believe his own good luck, then darted away into the maze of streets beyond at top speed as if the donor might at any instant change his mind. His footfalls faded swiftly, blending with the lapping of the river and the sounds along the waterfront... and a sudden unheralded patter of applause.

“Most excellently done! A trick worthy of those tales that entertained the Shah-en-shah: the vanishing of a young lady’s inconvenient affections, while leaving her heart entirely whole. A masterly feat, and one deserving of the fame of that fabled masked magician, the Voice of Angels, the Faceless One who holds a legion of demons in his sway...”

“Show yourself!” Foolish, foolish beyond belief, however fraught the course of the day, however great the fleeting sense of accomplishment, to drop one’s guard for so much as a minute — to have taken the indulgence of that stupid trick with the coin, quite out of character for that fair-haired oaf of an Erik! If Yuri had left men to patrol the docks—

But the voice was foreign in its tones; the mockery and the silhouette in the dim light too sophisticated for any local bully-boy. He spun round, grasping, far too late, for the reassurance of the noose in his pocket, and tugging forward the cloak that must have slipped and betrayed him. “Whatever business you claim to have in this place — show yourself!”

The other came forward, unhurried, with a courtier’s grace, a lithe dark man dressed for travel after the Eastern fashion. “No need to hide that mask of yours on my account, young man, when it has spread your fame from Samarkand to Mazenderan — unless, as report would claim, it truly does conceal a demon’s visage?”

“Oh, believe me, it does!” The words were jerked out between clenched teeth. “And if you have no more mockery and condescension to bestow—”

Time was ticking away. He needed to be out of the city, and soon.

“Truly? The Shah will be delighted. He has a great fondness for... demons.” An almost imagined hesitation of distaste. “As for condescension — forgive me. In the court of princes, one learns the courtly fashion of speech. I have been sent a long way to find you, and to bring you back at any price. Name it, and my master will pay. He is in need of diversion, and your feats at the Fair of Nizhny-Novgorod have reached even to the great palaces of Persia.”

“Persia? You want me to go to Persia?” He could almost have laughed aloud, visions of wealth opening before him: a royal court, a prince’s capricious favour, casual gifts of jewels and silks, perhaps a house and servants of his own — all the things he’d dreamed of in his travels, but glimpsed only at a distance, from the dust and hardships of the road. Yuri Black-Hand and his kind, who had loomed so large in his life this morning, would be of no more account than the flies on a dead dog’s carcase.

“As soon as your business in this city is complete, oh Masked Master of Magic... or Erik, if I may.” The Persian spread his hands with a smile that somehow robbed the words of offence. “We may as well get on travelling-terms — and you will hear honorifics enough and to spare at the court of the Shah-en-shah, I promise you that.”

One more name acquired at random, as foreign as the rest; he had belonged in the country of his birth no more than in any of those through which he had passed, after all. He considered for a moment, with an inward shrug. ‘Erik’ would serve at least as a memento of tonight, and a reminder that luck could always change.

He swept a bow, with the showy gesture he used in his performances. “If what you say is true, Erik has no business in Nizhny-Novgorod more urgent than the wishes of such a sovereign.”

“And a certain eagerness to leave the city at once, without a backward glance?” The wry smile showed again. “I think we understand each other. No doubt something can be done.”

~o~

Persia, it turned out, was everything that had been promised... and worse. But his friendship with the Persian Daroga of Mazenderan proved oddly persistent, and with it the name of Erik. It was not until many years later —when he had long since tired of tyrants, tried mundanity and found it tedious, and found refuge at last amid the music and stagecraft of the Paris Opera— that he had cause to think of himself again by any other. He was Erik even in his own mind by then, and when a snatch of conversation smote oddly on his ear, at first he had scarcely any understanding as to why.

They were speaking of the new singer, a pallid nobody fresh from the Conservatoire whose talent, if any, was a well-hidden secret. Her name was Christine — awkward to the tongue, unfashionable.

Somewhere in the eavesdropper’s memory, as swiftly forgotten, there stirred the ghost of a small boy named Chrysostome.