He finished and someone else began singing, but the spell of attention had been broken and many in the audience were talking or laughing out loud. I couldn’t figure it out at all, but as I wondered why such a poor singer should be trotted out in front of the nobility of Hell that way, I was distracted by a late entrance in the upper boxes. A hush fell over the crowd and some poor soprano’s aria was suddenly less important than everybody turning around to see who was being seated in President Caym’s box.
The late arrival didn’t look the same as the last time I’d seen him, but I still knew him instantly. He was dressed in a beautifully-cut white dress uniform, the kind of thing you’d expect to see at a royal funeral in some old newsreel, except that the white fabric was so artfully splattered with arterial splashes of scarlet that I had no doubt it had been designed that way. The only question was whether it was real blood or just dye. I thought I could guess.
Grand Duke Eligor looked less human than he did on Earth, but for the moment he also looked less demonic than the monstrous form that had overtaken him as he dangled me by my neck a couple of feet above his office carpet back in San Judas. His blond hair was shaved very close to his head, and his facial features were bonier and older than on his Kenneth Vald persona. Less like a California billionaire and more like the fascist dictator of some imaginary Northern European country, a creature of hard angles and fierce, unyielding principles. But it was definitely him, Eligor the Horseman, my least favorite demon. My hackles went up. I was relieved I was in shadows, that my treacherous, underwhelming disguise wasn’t visible to him, even from this distance.
Only as I (and most of the other patrons) sat staring at Eligor settling into his seat did I have a moment of wondering where Caz was. That only lasted a moment, because once the grand duke had seated himself, one of the guards at the back of his box opened the door, letting in a gleam of pure white gold.
That was Caz, of course.
twenty-four:
fickle
MY HEART felt as though it had stopped, literally stopped, and would not start again. Caz’s face was rigid, blank as a mask. She wore a long red dress whose spatters and splashes of white made her a mirror of her master, an even clearer mark of Eligor’s ownership than the guard who seated her next to the grand duke and then stood behind her chair like a jailer.
Oh, God, my heart. Everything came back in a moment, our desperate nights together, the months of longing since, and it was all I could do not to climb out of my seat and run toward her. The crowd, many of them still whispering, had turned back to the action as the emperor stepped up to sing again, but I couldn’t look away. I can only imagine what my face must have looked like. Finally, Vera’s elbow applied briskly and with obvious anger to my ribs brought my attention back to the stage, but I could think of nothing else for a long time. I snuck a few glances at Caz, but she was never looking at me or anyone else in the audience, not even looking at the performers. Instead she sat like a frightened schoolgirl, eyes downcast. Eligor ignored her, watching the action below through a pair of opera glasses.
The snickering and jeering resumed as the singer with the bulging throat laboriously climbed the mountain of his aria, looking more than ever like someone who desperately wanted to be somewhere else. The catcalls got louder; then, as he strained for and badly missed a high note, something came hurtling out of the lower galleries and past his head. He did his best to dodge it and suffered only an unpleasant stain on his tunic as the clot of mud or excrement bounced off him.
For a moment, as I watched what looked like a small riot beginning in the seats below us, I almost forgot Caz, so tantalizingly close. I assumed that whoever had tried to assault the performer was being caught and hustled out, but it quickly became clear that the ruckus was more general. Something like anarchy broke out on the floor of the Dionysus Theater, and before a few more bars of the aria had wavered by, a heavier projectile hit the emperor right in the gut, knocking him to his knees. Something else struck his head. Blood coursed down the side of his face and onto his white imperial tunic. For a moment he cowered as more missiles hit him, arms wrapped around his head for protection. The jeering grew louder and a whole cloud of rocks and rotten food and less pleasant things arced out of the crowd, seeking out the cringing singer as though he were the condemned at a public stoning.
The music played on but the singer was on his hands and knees now, bloody and weeping. The crowd shrieked at him, an animal sound that seemed to grow louder by the second. Then they quickly, if not uniformly fell silent, and all eyes turned again to the grand president’s box. Caym was standing at the rail, and the contortion of his crowlike face showed he was furious, but instead of berating the unruly crowd, he leaned out and pointed a long, clawlike finger at the performer.
“Get up, you tub of mischief! Who do you think you are? You have been brought here to sing, and sing you will!”
The actor looked up, his face bloody, his throat sac deflated and hanging over his chest like a dirty bib. “Please, Grand President, please . . . I cannot!” A rock hit him in the shoulder and he almost fell. “It hurts! It hurts me so!”
“Shut your mouth, you pathetic ingrate. You wanted to sing, and sing you shall. And what better role for you than your own wretched life?”
For an instant even Caz and my hated enemy Eligor fell out of my thoughts as I finally realized what was going on. This was Nero himself! The emperor who had tried to cheat Hell, singing the story of his own wretched life for the amusement of Hell’s high rollers.
Like I’ve said before, nobody can carry a grudge like a demon.
Order was restored, but it only got worse for Nero from there. Time and again he would begin to sing and be pelted by garbage and shit or knocked down by stones, some of them big as a baby’s head. I distinctly heard one of them break his arm, but Caym wouldn’t let him stop, although it was harder and harder to distinguish his singing from shrieks of pain and terror. I kept sneaking looks at Caz. Her face showed no emotion whatsoever, but Eligor was clearly enjoying the spectacle, laughing and whispering with Caym. At last, nearing what seemed to be the middle of the opera, a thunderous barrage of larger missiles, great jagged things that might have been broken paving stones, crushed Nero to the stage, and though he struggled to get up it was hopeless. At this point things went completely mad. Members of the audience leaped up on stage and began to kick him and beat him with the largest pieces of stone. Nero offered no resistance—it all had the feeling of a ritual enacted many times. Even with the musicians still playing gamely along, it sounded like someone jumping up and down on a barrel of eggs.
As Nero was reduced to a bloody wet tatter I looked up to see Eligor saying goodbye to Caym. Caz was already gone.
“That was his best performance yet,” a man said in a loud, braying voice behind me. “Folded him up before they even got to the part about Seneca.”