Casket of Souls Read Free Page A

brothel, with whom Alec had once spent a night. Seregil was not the jealous type, particularly since he’d taken Alec there for that very purpose. She waved to them when her partner for the evening wasn’t looking, and Seregil blew her a kiss. Alec shyly waved back.
    Nyanis spotted them and shouted over, “We’re going gambling after this. You must come with us!”
    Seregil gave him a noncommittal wave.
    “I haven’t been to the theater in weeks. I hope these players are all you claim, my lady,” Alec was saying to Kylith.
    “And that we don’t go home with fleas,” Seregil muttered, scratching at a persistent itch in the crook of his left arm.
    “Count yourselves lucky to be under a roof, my dears,” Kylith replied. “Until recently, this company was performing in the streets of the Lower City. They’re refugees from Mycena. They barely escaped with their lives when the Plenimaran army overran Nanta this spring.”
    Mycena had always been the battleground when Plenimar and Skala went to war. Those who could fled north up the Folcwine, or south to Skala. There were Mycenian enclaves up and down the northeastern shore, and quite an alarming number had found their way to Rhíminee, thinking to make their fortune here. Most were quickly disillusioned. The tenements around the Sea Market and Temple Square were crowded with families eking out a living any way they could, with the unluckiest driven into the abject poverty and degradation of the south Ring—that no-man’s-land between the inner and outer city walls.
    This troupe of players seemed to be among the lucky few to advance their fortunes, having attracted the attention of people like Kylith, who’d heard of them from her seamstress. Like Seregil, she never allowed rank to get in the way of anything that might prove amusing.
    “What’s the play called?” asked Malthus.
    “The Bear King,”
Kylith told him. “Have you heard of it, Seregil? I never have.”
    “No, but I’m no expert on Mycenian theater. I have heard it can be a bit dull.”
    “Not this play, apparently.”
    Just then the sound of a drum began backstage, slow and deep as a heartbeat. An imposing, red-haired man with a long, solemn face stepped onto the stage, dressed in what appeared to be a poor approximation of ancient noble garb cobbled together from some ragman’s cart. His eyes, outlined in black, seemed to look to some far-off vista as he raised a hand for silence.
    “Long ago, in the time of the black ships, a caul-shrouded babe was born deep in the wilderness of the eastern mountains,” he intoned, his voice deep and resonant. On the stage behind him, a girl in a tattered gown and veil writhed and cried out on the boards, then pulled a painted doll from beneath her skirts, its face covered with a veil.
    “There aren’t any eastern mountains in Mycena,” Alec whispered.
    “Dramatic license,” Seregil murmured back with a smile.
    The narrator continued. “And when the caul was lifted,eyes like gems of ice did steal the very breath from his mother’s lips before she could give suck.”
    The girl expired with a groan. Someone offstage did a credible job mimicking a baby’s crying. Then an older actress draped in a fusty bearskin shuffled out and gathered up the doll, rocking it in her arms.
    “A she-bear found the babe and suckled it as her own until a huntsman struck her down.”
    An older man with grizzled grey curls leapt onstage with a crude lance and mimed running the bear through. When she expired, the man peeled the skin off her and wrapped the doll in the edge of it.
    “The huntsman wrapped the child in the pelt of the she-bear that had nursed him and took him back to his wife,” the narrator went on. There was no chorus, but he already had the crowd spellbound.
    Despite the raggedness of his costume, the tall narrator commanded the stage as well as any player Seregil had seen at the Tirari this season.
    The hunter walked around the edge of the stage, while the