Stone's Throe, page 20
To my relief, I laughed: I had not known if laughter was in me tonight, the final night of Josephine's performance as Cleopatra. "I strove for discretion there, Khan. I will take your response as meaning that I succeeded."
"You have been," he said with great gentleness, "very discreet, Amelia. Tonight is her last performance."
For the third time, I said, "Oui," but because we both knew that a question lay within his statement, Khan waited on what more I had to say. "You said it very well, mon ami. We are not shadows of one another. We each cast too much light, and might illuminate each other, but...she cannot be Amelia by day and myself Josephine by night. Our lives are too different, and neither of us will give up that which we thrive upon. For Josie, it is the stage, for me..." I opened my hands, releasing the fabric and displaying the old bruises and faint scars upon my knuckles. My nails were not as elegant as Khan's: even polished, they showed the nicks and chips that came from my way of life.
Khan covered my hands with his own, warmth pouring from his skin to mine. I met his solemn gaze, then smiled in gratitude as he murmured, "I am sorry, Amelia."
"La belle et la bête," said another familiar, friendly voice, and Khan and I both stood to greet my mother as she stepped, smiling, into our box. "Khan, Amelia. You are a fairy tale together."
"Pas du tout, madame," Khan disagreed. "Fairy tales are built of the dangers in the night and the fear of power, especially powerful women. I should say that together Amelia and I are what fights the fairy tales."
Maman pressed a hand against her chest and smiled through a shine of tears in her eyes. "A much better story. Besides, as the old lady I would no doubt be cast as the crone or wicked queen, and prefer to be only the brave heroine's mother. Thank you for inviting me tonight, Amelia. I've wanted to hear Josephine sing on stage."
"Bien sûr, Maman. I'm glad you could join us. That dress," I added in admiration, and, just as I had done, Maman spun in pleased delight, showing the flare of a kick-pleated skirt and the swing of a low-cut back that showed her figure to great effect.
Khan caught her hand to steady her when she wobbled too far, and her "Merci" was for both of us as she sat on my far side. "And where is our fourth?"
"Here, signora." Bernardo Viccini, stupendously handsome in a short-waisted, long-tailed tuxedo, his over-long hair tucked into a tidy curl at his nape, stepped into the box as well. "Madame Stone," he said to me, nervously, "I'm afraid I'll embarrass you here. I've never been to the Opéra. What if I fall asleep?"
"Then I shall kick you," Maman replied serenely. "You won't fall asleep, Bernardo. No one could sleep through a Baker performance."
"Signora," Viccini said ruefully as he took his seat beside Maman, "the truth is I don't think anyone could sleep though any adventure your daughter is present at."
"I am not dressed for adventure," I told them in a tone that could not be dismissed. "There will be no adventures tonight. There have been quite enough of those for one brief performance run."
"Speaking of performance," Viccini said, leaning forward that he might see Khan clearly, "your suggestions to improve the engine's performance were just what I was looking for. The new metallic compound has always been superior to the heavy steel of older bikes, but..." He carried on, and though on nearly any other night I would eagerly attend to the design and development of a new, faster, lighter motorcycle, tonight my gaze drifted again to the filling audience.
A dead man did not sit in the box across from ours; nor did his youthful doppelgänger enter the theatre, though I looked again and again for those familiar features. L'homme had indeed delivered Signor Panterello to the authorities; the thieving fascist was now imprisoned for endangering the public with his races and soon would see charges of fraud, for the race's investors had all demanded their money back, only to find it had disappeared. Panterello would not see the light of day as a free man for a long time, if ever; l'homme had fulfilled his task well. I prayed he would also do as charged and live a good man's life—and en vérité, that he was not at this, Josephine's final performance in La Reine du Nil, boded well on that account. I could not say why I had, even so, hoped to see him.
Attuned as I was to the slightest motion on stage, my gaze was first to the curtains amongst those in my box seats; the curtains shivered and rose, and for the next hours we were captives of Josephine's voice, myself most of all. I watched her, memorized her, burned each motion and vocal triumph to memory, and if I wept at times, I was not the only one. Even Khan was not immune to her talents, and Viccini most certainly did not sleep. From time to time, Maman clutched my hand, and I held hers just as strongly, understanding the envy and admiration that had to consume her.
But it was all nothing to the final aria; as that song began, it was as if Josephine had not even been present until then. For all of her strength, all of her power, all of her presence up until the last piece, she might have been a child singing rhymes on a street corner, compared to the raw emotion, stripped free of any pretense, that came into her final song.
This, the last performance of her dying aria, was not sung for her voice master, nor for le Monstre, the creature her voice master had truly been. It was not sung for the people of Paris; it was not even sung for herself, when it might well have been, a triumphant finale in which her own glory was paramount.
No, it was sung for me, to me, a farewell, and she made no pretense of it being otherwise. The aria was not presented fully to the theatre, but instead she turned toward me, made each dying gesture to me, for me, and for all the people in the opera house, the song was for my ears alone.
I did not know that I had come to my feet until my fingertips brushed the box seat's railing; I did not know at all that hundreds of eyes were on me, enraptured by a song of love and loss even as they wondered at the story Josephine truly told with her voice. I did not even know that a quick-thinking stagehand had directed a spotlight onto myself and dimmed the rest of the lights, so that we were in truth alone in pools of light in the darkness; to me it was that way anyway, Josephine Baker the singular light in my world, her song all the sustenance I might need.
Its ending was a shock, the reverberations of her voice leaving a most perfect silence: no sound from a stunned patronage, no music from the awed orchestra, no song from Baker's lips. She waited; oh, she waited, knowing with flawless certainty how long she could hold them in the silence, and in the moment before it broke, she spoke a single clear word—and spoke it in French, to be certain her audience would understand: "Adieu."
Then I knew I stood in a pool of light, because the stagehand killed it, leaving me in darkness, leaving Josephine the sun for all the patrons, and as she turned back to them, her hands raised in glory, such sound burst through the theatre as to shake its very walls.
I fell a step back, a marionette with my strings sliced, and even so, a breath of laughter escaped me at the perfection of her performance. No one could ask for a more magnificent farewell; no farewell, so staged, could be taken as anything other than final. Nor could any ordinary mortal hope to overcome the depths of emotion displayed by such a goodbye; it had been a gift, a terrible gift, for it had confirmed where her strongest affections would always lie. I had known, bien sûr, but I was left now with no pretense to survive upon.
I pressed my hand against Khan's shoulder as I left the box, assuring him that I was well; then, alone in the theatre halls, hurrying through opulence to leave this place before the audience swept out to find the woman to whom Josephine Baker had sung, I took from my bodice a vial. Rose pink, sweet smelling liquid sloshed within; the very vial I had taken from Josephine in the catacombs, knowing it then for what it was and seeing greater use for it in the future than in the fight at hand.
I did not breathe it in, but drank it, so that its powers might imbue my very being, and upon the curving steps of the Paris Opera House, like a glittering glass slipper, I left love behind, transformed forever to an abiding fondness. Fondness softened the edges of regret, and if I dashed tears away, so too did I smile at the memories of the past two weeks, and smiled more broadly yet as I struck out into the Parisian night with one certainty in mind:
Adventure awaited!
EPILOGUE
Dying lights spat along the ceiling, illuminating tubes and cords that twisted amongst each other like lovers. They overlooked wreckage when they shuddered to life: cabinet upon cabinet of fallen glass, their contents spilled into indistinguishable browns on the blood-slicked floor. Laboratory equipment ranging from tables to beakers lay broken and overturned with bodies flung across them in haphazard ways.
A dying man shuddered on the floor, then heaved into consciousness with a cry. His fist, gloved in leather, slammed against his chest; a vial shattered there, driving glass through the fine silk and linen of his suit. The pain was nothing; the pain was unnoticeable beside the pierced agony of his belly. What mattered was the scent that rose up, like honey and steel, sweet and unbreakable. It saturated his lungs and filled his pores: will, Indomitable Will, the most precious elixir he had ever extracted. It had come from a woman—from the woman, his partner, his nemesis, his love. Never in all the years of his life had he encountered such will; he had carried a vial of it by his heart for all the years since it had freed her from him and it would now drive him beyond the possible, beyond death's grasp itself.
He could not move: every part of him knew that, but the Will pounding through him demanded that he move anyway. One hand twitched, then clawed at the blood-drenched floor. It found purchase: a man's leg. He grasped it, pulled himself over onto his belly, and found himself gazing into his own face, wretched with agonizing demise. A roar burst from him and he crawled rapidly over that body, over another. Over a third, this one a girl, his daughter, whose face was a rictus of surprise even now. She had killed him; that knowledge fueled his Will, and he dragged himself onward. Past the laboratory tables, past the broken cabinets of elixirs that no longer mattered. Only the will to survive mattered; that, and one other thing.
The wall was seamless; it took knowing the precise location to apply pressure to break it open, and that could not be done from the floor. He lay on his belly, bleeding, gasping, and thought he could not do it; her will sneered and drove him to his knees and then, hoarse with ragged screams, to his feet so bloody fingers could lean heavily against the catch.
He fell when the door opened; fell through into darkness that flickered once or twice as low lights over the bed began to respond to his presence. He could hardly see, blackness taking his vision, pain and blood loss taking his strength, but he didn't need to see. The bed lay three paces from the door; the whole of the room had been designed as a small, contained space. Elbow over elbow he pulled himself forward, finding the bed by falling into it, for he had always known that if he needed it, he might not be able to crawl up to a height; better to have it on the floor, where, once in its confines, he could roll onto his back through force of will. Her will. He threw the mask away, threw the wig away; he would not need them after this.
The nodes were difficult to place, with bloodless trembling hands, but like everything in this room, they had been prepared for the worst imaginable scenario. They did not have to be perfect; they only had to stay attached to his burned and terrible skull, and the sticky paste within them made certain they would. With the nodes in place, he allowed himself something like a rest: his hands fell, but they fell to the switches he must pull—even the need for a moment of recuperation was planned for, allowing him to continue with the inexorable change as his ability to carry on failed. He pulled the switches, tensing his slashed belly to do so, and cried out.
Her will was fading now; even indomitable will could do only so much with a dying body. But above him shone a single vial of silver liquid, freshly filled: the prize above all, the thing he had begged her for, had tricked her into giving him in their last moments together. Without it, all would have been lost; without it, the last monstre, here in its lonely chamber, could not be commanded into life, could not accept the full transfer of a lifetime of emotion and memory that had even now begun. He had to wait, to wait, to wait, until his own sense of self was so faded he could hardly remember who he had been, who he was no longer. Then, and only then, did he trigger the draining of the final vial, the vial of Commanding Presence, newly minted from she whose will drove him on, and with that surge of power, in dying, he shouted a single phrase: "Now you are le Monstre aux Yeux Verts!"
* * *
Within the chamber, green eyes flew open. A gasp steamed the air, but could not cloud the window made a mirror by light within and none without. A face long forgotten in its perfection was reflected in that mirror: soft black hair growing long and free, thickly lashed green eyes, a deep-set seductor's gaze above a straight nose and cheekbones of razor sharpness. The full mouth curved in a hungry smile, and an intimacy, a promise, a name, shaped the beautiful lips: "Amélie..!"
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Acknowledgements
I came to reading pulp fiction late, having been inspired to read A PRINCESS OF MARS shortly before John Carter arrived on the big screens.
Early in that first book, having arrived safely upon Mars, John Carter discovers the Martians are telepathic. There is a magnificent moment where, with no further ado, the text reads, "Likewise, under Sola's tutelage, I developed my telepathic powers so that I shortly could sense practically everything that went on around me."
Like, that's it, lads. "I, too, developed my telepathic powers." No more worldbulding than that. No more explanation. Just a flat, blanket statement. 'I developed my telepathic powers.' As you do.
It was the most amazing thing I'd ever read. I fell madly in love with pulp fiction in that moment. I wanted SO BADLY to write something like that.
And then Evil Hat came along and asked if I'd like to write a pulp fiction novel for their Spirit of the Century gaming line.
HOO BOY DID I.
STONE'S THROE is the result of that offer. It is, I feel, reasonably honorable to its pulpy ancestors; I certainly tried, and I hope you enjoyed it!
I'd like to thank Tara O'Shea for the amazing, pulpy cover art that I love so much, and most particularly Fred Hicks for giving me the opportunity to write this book. And, of course, all my love is due to Dad, and Ted, and Henry!
-Catie
About the Author
According to her friends, CE Murphy makes such amazing fudge that it should be mentioned first in any biography. It's true that she makes extraordinarily good fudge, but she's somewhat surprised that it features so highly in biographical relevance.
Other people said she began her writing career when she ran away from home at age five to write copy for the circus that had come to town. Some claimed she's a crowdsourcing pioneer, which she rather likes the sound of, but nobody actually got around to pointing out she's written a best-selling urban fantasy series (The Walker Papers), or that she dabbles in writing graphic novels (Take A Chance) and periodically dips her toes into writing short stories (the Old Races collections).
Still, it's clear to her that she should let her friends write all of her biographies, because they're much more interesting that way.
More prosaically, she was born and raised in Alaska, and now lives with her family in her ancestral homeland of Ireland, which is a magical place where it rains a lot but nothing one could seriously regard as winter ever actually arrives.
She can be found online at mizkit.com, @ce_murphy, fb.com/cemurphywriter, and at her newsletter, which you should definitely sign up for because it's by far the best way to hear what's out next!
THIS BOOK WAS MADE POSSIBLE WITH THE SUPPORT OF...
Michael Bowman and a cast of hundreds, including
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