folds of my cloak in pleasant contrast to the gold of my hair immediately attracted attention even at a distance, but I remained long unnoticed by any of the society of shadows. They were too engrossed in what the torch-bearer, Charlo, was saying to them. Or rather, he wasn’t speaking at full voice, but addressing the crowd in a hissing, almost inaudible to the human ear, but I could hear him and his companions all right.
«Why are we slow?» Charlo gestured for the crowd’s attention to his greasy, gypsy-black hair, and its curly tips parted against the stand-up collar, framing his narrow face in some unearthly black flame. The abyss in his deep-set eyes was even blacker than the night. «What should we wait for? Why hide from every retired soldier who passes by, why sit in back alleys, waiting for the smallest guard to march past. Why should we fear the King’s Guards or the cantoned cavalry, their guns, their swords, his majesty’s signed arrest warrants? We are an army ourselves. Why should we hide? We could have ruled this city long ago. Our lord says his teachings are the only right ones, he has revealed his secrets to us and we are now his favorites because we believed him and followed him, and he puts all dissenters at our disposal.»
Charlo tried to flaunt his education and eloquence and wanted to look like an orator, but instead he resembled a hissing viper who had grown bold enough to try to climb up the hill instead of crawling over rocks and sand.
I was surprised that most of the assembled audience listened to him with interest, and if their pale, porcelain faces were not so impassive one might even say with participation.
«Up to now we’ve only lived by catching people in night alleys. They had neither revolvers nor the support of the law to defend against us,» Charlo continued, out of breath. «Somehow their knives, sharpened to piss off the wandering strangers, didn’t frighten us. Good thing there was a war recently, and we had a goodly profit in the pockets of deserters and marauders we caught. Then we had only the midnight robbers at our disposal. Look, instead of seizing Viniena at our complete disposal, we are cleansing its quarters of criminals. We have no other means of subsistence than what we have extracted from the robbers’ purses. And if we only plunder at night one of these magnificent rich palaces, which contain more trinkets than the owners need, we will be hunted down by the very guarding companies from which we have so cleverly hidden so far. It can’t go on like this forever, can it?»
«Of course it can’t,» hissed a woman I recognized as Priscilla from the crowd. Her barely audible exclamation in the crowd of shadows was deafeningly loud. No one but the woman had dared to raise her voice to interrupt Charlo’s speech.
«What do you suggest we do?» Royce, always brash after her statement, immediately stepped forward.
«I told you,» Charlo straightened up. «No more delays, no more excuses. I think the hour is at hand. The chime is about to strike, but there are worse noises to rouse the most watchful of watchmen before the chime strikes. Let us do what we set out to do! It’s today or never!
Charlo pointed defiantly with his hand, clutching the shaft of the torch, toward the king’s palace. The triumphant cry, accompanied by that simple but eloquent gesture, resounded ominously through the night. But even if the sleeping townspeople heard something, it seemed to them to be no more than the long cry of a hoopoe or a cormorant, which on the coast foretold trouble to sailors, but who knows how it had come to be here in the town square.
«Go to the palace! You’ve gone quite mad,» Klovis, less impulsive but more judicious, folded his arms across his chest and rested his shoulder on the railing of the wooden staircase that led to the palace. A sneer flashed in his calm aquamarine eyes. Or rather, his eyes were different colors, one entirely aquamarine and the other three-quarters blue. I could see it even from this distance. Different colored eyes are a sure sign of someone who promises to be a capable sorcerer.
«That pretty girl was right to declare you insane,» Klovis grinned at the corners of his lips. Light and nimble, he could turn on anyone who contradicted him. «Our charming Shadow Infanta is not, as you told us, a pretty little thing, but… not only clever, but wise and perceptive. She was the first one to notice that you were mad, and we weren’t sure whether to believe her or not.»
«You’re just captivated by her doll face,» Charlo said impertinently, stepping back just in case there was enough distance between him and Klovis to make a run for it. «We don’t need a lover here. We should be thinking of our future, of prosperity, of success, not correcting grammatical errors in your love canzonets. Better get out of here while you’re still in one piece, there’s no room in our ranks for the cowardly and the cowardly. Cowards sooner or later become traitors. We don’t need such a nuisance. Go serenade the dragon’s mistress under her window. You could have been one of the lords of the world with us, but instead you prefer to be her servant. Get out of here! Go to your sweetheart and pray that her protector doesn’t scald your face with his fiery breath.»
«Shut up!» Klovis gritted through his teeth. The taunts had hit their mark. He was so angry that he tore the lapels of his cloak with his nails. The silk lapels on the sleeves were now nothing but scraps, but Klovis somehow decided it was better than leaving one tattered carcass from his recalcitrant counterpart.
«Eye for an eye,» Sharlo grinned evilly. «That pretty girl really hurt your feelings.»
I was going to get even with him for calling Rose a dragon’s minion, but I wasn’t sure what he would say. It was curious, to learn of the enemy’s secret plans from his own lips.
Without the mediation of spies, I could learn far more than they would have told me. Charlo persuaded the crowd with such zeal and such fervor. He had no idea that the dragon was watching him, not through a keyhole, but standing nearby, in plain sight and not even trying to hide around a corner. And still I was still a creature who had entered this world through a narrow tunnel not used by humans, connecting two worlds. I continued to feel like a spy, peeking at the gathering in the square and all of humanity in general from the tiny keyhole in the door that separates one world from the other.
«I won’t listen to an honest girl being insulted,» Klovis shook the invisible debris from his coat, turned on his heels and was about to leave, but Charlo’s menacing shout stopped him.
«Don’t you dare say anything to our illustrious Monseigneur Dragon, or the prince will rip out your tongue.»
Clovis turned and clenched his fists so that his knuckles whitened. He would have liked to challenge him to a duel or even a scuffle, but he knew that he could easily avoid the challenge by claiming that he was now a republican and had no intention of tolerating aristocratic habits, and that a fist fight would have been a distant prospect. Could anyone compare to him in running speed?
«What could you possibly have learned from a downtrodden noble family except prayers, swordsmanship, and philosophy?» Charlo grinned mockingly. «You prefer words to toil, slowness to lightning speed. You value long hours of leisure more than the swift path to glory and advantage. We cannot be lazy like you. Why did we come to the square under the cover of night, when everyone is asleep and there is no one to hinder us. This is the most direct path to the palace. We will come silently, swiftly and unexpectedly. No one will be able to resist us. Have you not sneaked up behind the dark ones we’ve robbed and disarmed them? You yourself acted like a thief in the night, and now you’re trying to play the moralist.»
«And you suggest that we storm the palace without even getting an order from the prince to do so. It’s better to wait for the lord’s command than to act on our own. At least that way we can count on his support. Where is he now? From which roof is he watching us and laughing at our foolishness?
