Thunderhead (Arc of a Scythe #2)(66)

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Scythe Anastasia was ready for her performance.

Mercifully, her part was just a quick walk-on. Caesar was to be stabbed by eight conspirators, of which she would be the last. Seven of the blades would be retractable and squirt fake blood. Citra’s blade would be as real as the blood it would bring forth.

To her chagrin, Scythe Curie insisted on attending the performance.

“I wouldn’t dream of missing my protégé’s theatrical debut,” she said with a smirk—although Citra knew the real reason. It was the same reason she had been present at both of Scythe Anastasia’s other gleanings: She didn’t trust that Constantine could protect her. Scythe Constantine seemed to have a crack in his veneer of aloofness tonight. Perhaps it was because he had to shed his scythe’s robe and wear a tuxedo to blend in with the crowd. Still, he couldn’t abandon his persona completely. His bow tie was the exact same blood-red as his robe. Scythe Curie, on the other hand, flatly refused to be seen in public without her lavender scythe robe. It was just one more reason for Constantine to be furious.

“You should not be out in the audience,” he told her. “If you insist on being present, it should be backstage!”

“Calm down! If Anastasia isn’t a sufficient enough lure, then perhaps I will be,” Scythe Curie told him. “And in a crowded theater, even if they succeeded in killing me, they wouldn’t be able to end me. Not without burning the entire place down—which, considering the presence of your forces, is highly unlikely.”

She did have a point. While Caesar could die by blade, not so for scythes. Blade, bullet, blunt force, or poison would merely render them deadish. They’d be revived in a day or two—and perhaps with a clear memory of their attacker. In that case, a temporary death might actually be an effective strategy for catching the culprits.

But then Constantine gave them a reason for his edginess.

“We’ve received a tip that there will, in fact, be an attempt on your lives tonight,” he told Scythes Curie and Anastasia as the audience began to fill the theater.

“A tip? From whom?” Scythe Curie asked.

“We don’t know. But we’re taking it very seriously.”

“What should I do?” Citra asked.

“Do what you’re here to do. But be prepared to protect yourself.”

Caesar was to die in the first scene of act three. The play had five acts, and in the remaining acts, his ghost appeared to torment his killers. While another actor could perform the part of the ghost, Sir Albin Aldrich felt it would lesson the impact of his gleaning. It was, therefore, decided that the play would conclude shortly after Caesar died, robbing an irritated Brutus of his famous “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears” speech. No one would cry havoc and release the dogs of war. Instead, the lights would come up on a stunned audience. There would be no curtain call. The curtain, in fact, would never close. Instead, Caesar’s very dead body would remain on the stage until the last of the audience left. Thus, Aldrich’s final moment of acting was to be marked by an inability to act in any way whatsoever.

“You may steal my physical immortality,” he told Scythe Anastasia, “but this final performance will live forever in the annals of the theater.”

As the house filled with theatergoers, Scythe Constantine came up behind her as she waited in the wings.

“Do not be frightened,” he said. “We’re here to protect you.”

“I’m not frightened,” she told him. In truth she was, but her fear was overwhelmed by her anger at having been targeted. She had a little bit of stage fright, too, which she knew was stupid, but she just couldn’t shake it. Acting. What horrors she had to endure for her profession.

? ? ?

It was a packed house, and although no one knew it, more than twenty were members of the BladeGuard in disguise. The playbill proclaimed that the theatergoers would witness something never before seen on a MidMerican stage—and although people were a bit dubious of the claim, they were also curious as to what it might be.

While Scythe Anastasia waited backstage, Scythe Curie took her seat on the aisle in the fifth row. She found her seat uncomfortably small. She was a tall woman, and her knees pressed against the seat in front of her. Most of the people near her held their playbills in a death grip, horrified to spend the evening sitting near a scythe, who, for all they knew, was there to glean one of them. Only the man sitting beside her was sociable. More than sociable, he was chatty. He had a caterpillar of a moustache that twitched when he spoke, which made it hard for Scythe Curie not to laugh.

“What an honor it is to be in the company of the Granddame of Death,” he said before the lights went down. “I hope you don’t mind me calling you that, Your Honor. There are few scythes in MidMerica—nay, the world—who are as celebrated as you, and it does not surprise me that you are a patron of mortal-age theater. Only the most enlightened are!”

She wondered if perhaps the man had been sent to end her by flattering her to death.

Scythe Anastasia watched the play from the wings. Usually entertainment from the Age of Mortality was emotionally incomprehensible to her, as it was to most people. The passions, the fears, the triumphs, and the losses; it made no sense to a world without need, greed, and natural death. But as a scythe, she had come to understand mortality better than most—and she certainly had come to understand greed and lust for power. Those things might have been absent from most people’s lives, but they seethed in the scythedom, moving more and more from the dark corners and into the mainstream.