The Masked City (The Invisible Library #2)(67)
It took fifteen minutes to circle round to the back of the opera house and find the stage door. It then took several coins from the money that Silver had given her to bribe her way inside.
The backstage corridors were functional rather than beautiful, and full of people - the chorus, stagehands, guards, runners, and two men carrying a stage dummy on a stretcher with a dramatic bloodstain over the chest. It was no place for a bystander, and Irene made her way to the front of the house as quickly as she could. It was all marble and expensive wood here, a far cry from the more pragmatic backstage. She could see a wide staircase and a brightly lit foyer with paintings and frescos, but she stayed in the shadows.
She’d been able to hear the music quite well backstage, well enough to recognize that they were into the first act, but not that far in. She needed to get a sense of the place’s layout. And if she happened to overhear guards talking about incoming deliveries of dragons for an auction at midnight, so much the better.
The back of her neck prickled: someone was watching her. She turned slightly to glance unobtrusively over her shoulder, and saw that a man was indeed coming down the corridor towards her. Wait, not just any man. He’d been one of the people at the stage door when she came in, loitering there along with half a dozen others.
Over twenty years’ experience kicked in as she began to stroll casually down the corridor away from him. This was not a coincidence. She’d been spotted, which suggested that he’d been at the door to watch for her in particular. This was very definitely not good. She needed to get rid of him - either lose him or get him alone in a dark corner, knock him out and slip away - then change her appearance as much as possible and stay out of view.
The corridor ahead branched to right and left. Irene chose left at random, turned and nearly bumped into another man. ‘Excuse me,’ she murmured in Italian, ducking in a quick curtsey.
‘Grab her,’ the man from behind said, his voice pitched just loud enough to reach them, but not the boxes or the auditorium. He had an unpleasantly professional tone.
Damn. Irene converted her curtsey into a straight punch into the closer man’s stomach, stepped past him, kicked the back of his knee as he bent over off-balance and ran for it as he went down. This was too public a place to stand and fight.
She heard the sound of pursuing feet as she ran down the corridor, mentally plotting the quickest route round to the backstage passages. Left and down should work. She grabbed the door frame as she swung into a turn, her shoes skidding on the marble floor. There were no convenient doors to lock, no tapestries or carpets to throw in her pursuer’s way.
In desperation she snatched the packet of nuts from her pocket and threw it behind her. ‘Nuts, burst!’ She heard a noise like tiny fire-crackers going off, as fragments of sugared nuts sprayed in all directions, and a curse as the steps behind her stuttered. Even if they hadn’t done any damage, having a packet of nuts go off at ground zero must have startled him.
The passage bent further left and she saw a stairway just ahead of her. Almost there.
Then Sterrington stepped into a doorway to her right. Irene recognized her business suit, and the mask she’d purchased yesterday. She was holding something in her right hand, but it was too small to be a gun and too dull to be a knife. Irene decided to keep running, until the screaming jolt to her muscles took her completely by surprise. She went down in an uncoordinated lump and stayed down, her whole body spasming with shock.
Oh. Right. A Taser. Sterrington must have come from a world which has that technology. Irene’s mind framed curses, but her tongue and mouth were numb.
‘Pick her up,’ Sterrington said to the two pursuers, who had caught up with them. ‘Carefully, please.’
‘Do we need to get her identity checked?’ the professional-sounding pursuer asked. ‘The werewolf said he’d confirmed her smell, but if we take the wrong person to his lordship, he’ll be annoyed.’
‘No need,’ Sterrington said. ‘I can confirm her identity, even with a new mask. Bring her this way.’
Irene hung like a doll between the two men as they draped her arms over their shoulders, supporting her between them. She was unable to raise her head as they trailed Sterrington back along the corridor, and Irene’s feet scraped along the floor.
Sterrington was heading towards the entrances to the boxes, rather than backstage. So I’m being handed over to someone. Irene’s stomach sank. She tried to remember how long recovery from Taser-shock took, and wished it was faster.
She could hear the music again. A tenor and a soprano were singing a duet, the tenor swoopingly romantic, the soprano allowing herself to be convinced. It was almost incendiary in its intensity. Irene vaguely remembered that La Fenice had been burned down once or twice in some alternates, and wondered if this one had also gone up in smoke and been rebuilt.
It would make such a good story, after all …
Sterrington paused outside the door to a box. She reached across to touch Irene’s chin, tilting her face so that Irene could see her clearly. ‘You do understand that this is all professional?’ she said politely. ‘Nothing personal, Clarice.’
Really, on the whole, it was one of the nicer things that had been said to Irene when she was drugged, Tasered or otherwise unable to reply. But her inability to reply prevented an angry response, rather than the polite Of course, I quite understand, which Sterrington seemed to expect.