Prince of Fools (The Red Queen's War 1)

I had found three of the little bastards cowering in the tiny utility room where the buckets are stored along with assorted brooms and mops. And that was the payoff—another hiding place to add to my list.

Racing along the same corridor now, with Alain and friends a corner or two behind me, I stopped dead, hauled the closet door open, and dived in. The thing with closing doors behind you is to do it quickly but quietly. That proved a challenge whilst trying to disentangle myself from various broom handles in the dark without the teetering bucket towers crashing down around me. Seconds later when Alain and his heavies clattered down the corridor, the hero of Aral Pass was crouched amongst the mops, hands clamped to mouth to stifle a sneeze.

I managed to hold the sneeze back almost long enough, but no man can be in complete control of his body, and there’s no stopping such things sometimes—as I told the Duchess Sansera when she expressed her disappointment.

“Achoo!”

The footsteps, fading at the edge of hearing, stopped.

“What was that?” Alain’s voice, distant but not distant enough.

Cowards divide into two broad groups. Those paralysed by their fear, and those galvanized by it. Fortunately I belong to the latter group and burst out of that closet like a . . . well, like a lecherous prince hoping to escape a beating.

I’ve always made a close study of windows, and the most accessible windows in the opera house were in the aforementioned communal privies, which needed them for obvious reasons. I pounded down the corridor, swerved, banked, and crashed through into the fetid gloom of the men’s privy. One old gent had settled himself there with a flagon of wine, clearly feeling that breathing in the sewer stink was preferable to a seat closer to the stage. I ran straight past, climbed onto the rear throne, and tried to jam my head between the shutters. Normally they were propped ajar to offer sufficient ventilation to prevent the place exploding if one more overfed lordling passed wind. Today, like everything else since I got up, they seemed to be against me and stood firmly closed. I shook them hard. They weren’t latched and it made no sense that they wouldn’t give. Fear lent strength to my arm, and when the damn things wouldn’t open I ripped out the slats before thrusting my head through.

For a half second I just stood with that cool, slightly less fetid air on my face. Salvation! There’s something almost orgasmic about getting out from under a heap of trouble, winning free and thumbing your nose at it. Tomorrow maybe that same trouble will be waiting around a corner for you, but today, right now, it’s beaten, left in the dust. Cowards, overburdened with imagination as we are, spend most of our attention on the future, worrying what’s coming next, so when that rare opportunity to live in the moment arrives I seize it with as many hands as I’ve got spare.

In the next half second I realized that we were on the third floor and the drop to the street below seemed likely to injure me more grievously than Alain and his friends would dare to. I should perhaps puff myself up, brazen it out, and remind Alain whose damned father’s opera this was and whose grandmother happened to be warming the throne. No part of me wanted to bank on Alain’s common sense outweighing his anger, but an ankle-breaking drop into the alley where they flushed the shit . . . that didn’t appeal either.

And then I saw her. A tattered figure in the alley, bent over some burden. A bucket? For one ridiculous moment I thought it was another of those little boys lugging water for the tank. A pale hand lifted a brush; moonlight glimmered on what dripped from it.

“Jalan Kendeth, hiding in the privies. How appropriate.” Alain DeVeer, banging open the door behind me. I didn’t turn my head even a fraction. If I hadn’t taken care of business at the start of the intermission I would have rapidly filled the privy I was standing on by way of both trouser legs. The figure in the alley looked up and one eye caught the moonbeams, glowing pearly in the darkness. My shoulder ached with a sudden memory of the masked figure I’d barged into. Conviction seized me by the throat. That had not been a man. There had been nothing human in that stare. Outside the blind-eye woman painted her fatal runes, and inside, amongst the lords and ladies, hell walked with us.

I would have run headfirst into a dozen Alain DeVeers to get away from the Silent Sister. Hell, I’d have flattened Maeres Allus to put some space between me and that old witch. I’d have put my foot in his groin and told him to add it to the debt. I would have charged right at Alain and his two friends but for the memory of a fire on the Street of Nails. The walls themselves had burned. There had been nothing left but fine ash. Nobody got out. Not one person. And there had been four other fires like that across the city. Four in five years.