Dispatch from a Colored Room

The Blue-Roofed Room

I think everyone here has been onstage or in the seats at the Blue-Roofed Room; but perhaps you don't know that it was abandoned until perhaps a decade ago, the legendary cerulean ceiling falling out in chunks, mice nesting in the wells that held its tiny embedded lights. The green felt seats were in no better condition, nor the brown stage with its green carpet rolled up in the rear. I enter as a member of the audience; Elias and Sim wait on the stage in a classic pose, child on man's lap, knife pricking throat. 

"You have the contract?" Elias says.

"Is Sim hurt?" I ask.

Elias laughs wetly at that. "What if he is?" he says. "Hear that, Sim? Your mother only wants an undamaged son. Otherwise she'll just send you back."

"Sim," I say, meeting his eyes, "we would never leave you with this man. I just want to know if we should take you to a doctor afterward. But your great-uncle doesn't care enough about your well-being to let me know..."

"The boy's fine," Elias snarls. "I'll have what's mine now."

I look at the wings without moving my eyes. I can't tell which side he'll come in from, but I know I need to get Elias to the proscenium. "Bring Sim here," I say, "and we'll make the exchange."

"Why?"

"You were military," I say. "How do I know what traps you've set between here and where you are?"

His face loses its belligerent confusion for a moment and becomes oddly soft, almost wobbly, before setting back into a snarl of scorn. His hand moves over Sim's chest in a way that sickens me. "Traps?" he says. "I was in the 7th Ashview, you depthless cunt. I've had enough of traps to last a lifetime. If you can call it a life, what I've had since the Hoofstone."

"You were paid for what you suffered at the Hoofstone," I say, trying to sound like I think suffering can be paid for with money. 

"You think that's what I want?" Elias says. "Table scraps from tax takings, and a blind eye from the fat-fuck greycoats too craven to fight the battles that need it? I'm fed up with hush money—"

"You still take it, though, don't you?" I say. "You and Jesson Desrosiers and the rest of the 7th."

"When I get my share of what's mine," says Elias, "I'll be able to turn it down on principle."

"That's not how principle works," I say.

"Spoken like a bank flunky from the central second," he says. "I'm done talking. Bring me the papers or lose the boy."

I shrug, heart in my throat, and hop the stage, and that's when I get what I need: A flash of green, dull in the dark, from stage left. As I walk to Elias and Sim I list slightly to my own left, drawing his gaze. I can smell him from farther away than I'd like, and I can see the whites of Sim's eyes all around his irises.

That was my first taste of stagecraft, that afternoon in the Blue-Roofed Room, for an audience of one. I can't imagine I did it well. I see the suspicion mounting in Elias' eyes as I approach, the minutest angle off true that I can muster without tripping his sense of something wrong—these soldier types have it, I know that, a fallible but real sixth sense that nags at the base of the brain when a situation is about to erupt in some unknowable disaster. I even see the dread mounting in Sim, who's not sure to be more terrified that I don't have something up my sleeve or that I do. I take out the papers as I draw near and make myself wait to fumble them, because I know I won't do it naturally and so I'll only have one chance, to occupy his eye and hand with one instinctual reaction before his sixth sense screams. 

I'm close enough to kiss him, the smell scraping the back of my throat with every breath. He's planned a lot, but I see with hope and smug pleasure that he hasn't planned this moment, the one where he needs to restrain Sim with one hand, keep the knife at his throat with another, and somehow sign the papers surrendering half of Greyking Books to his custody. He curses and fumbles; eventually he's got his left arm across Sim's chest, his knife in his left hand at the side of the boy's throat, and his right hand free, beckoning for the quill. 

Things happen slowly now. I move the quill near Elias' hand, which begins to close in anticipation.

Sim, all fear and flopsweat, feels the iron of Elias' grip relax. I see this in his eyes, the trapped rat's flash of insight, and think Don't.

I twist the quill a bit so it bounces off Elias' fingers.

Elias begins to lunge, but Sim ducks his head to slip Elias' grip.

Elias roars and drives the knife. 

I move as quickly, as strongly, as I can and feel a spray and hear a scream.

There's a thump on the stage like a sack of rocks. There's a little body in my left arm, wailing and sobbing and leaking from all over, blood on my upper arm and tears into my shoulder and sweat into my mouth as he frantically headbutts me for comfort from the pain. In my right hand there's the thick wrist of a limp arm.

The scene finally crystallizes. Sim is bleeding and weeping in my arms, but I can tell his neck wound is superficial, bloody but not arterial. I've got my right hand around Elias' right wrist, although his fingers have gone limp and he's dropped the knife, which is bloody only at its tip. I drop Elias' arm like I would a rotten egg. He's crumpled on the ground like the sack of rocks he sounded like when he fell, twitching and making indistinct vowel noises in his throat.

Behind him, shrouded in the dark theater's gloom, is the Dandelion Knight, staff in one hand, an empty syringe in the other.

Even better, he's brought bandages and ointments. Sim is scared to see him at first, but I talk quietly to him and eventually he consents to sit on my lap, my arms wrapped around his elbows to block any sudden flailings, while Aurcryn-Jon bandages his neck.

Sim is wounded and his blood is on my clothes; there's no way we're getting to St. Nox's without attracting the attention of the gendarmerie. So I find a gendarme and tell him more or less the truth, including the fact that Sim's mother is at St. Nox's and he really ought to see her. We're separated, of course, and I'm questioned in a number of degrading and insinuating ways, but at day's end I know the evidence is in my favor: Sim's blood is on my clothes, but also on Elias', and only Elias has touched the knife. The gendarmerie don't fail to notice the syringe wound in his neck, but I spread my hands and say "Who knows what he was taking, or when?" and at that point they're enough in my corner that they just grimace and agree.