The man muttering to himself was none other than the poet Luke. Holding his cloak, he looked around, then slipped behind a house’s wall and quietly hung it among a row of laundry. It looked as though it had originally been hanging there, so it blended in well enough. Its suspicious smell of sweat, however, might make someone pause.
“By the way, our captain’s popularity is at its peak. Ashabel was right. You can’t compare him with actors.”
Muttering with no one to listen, Luke drew a bucket from a nearby well, washed his face, and poured the remaining water over his head. Water dripped from his hair and clothes as he walked, but by the time he left the alley and turned onto the canal-side path, his shoulders were already dry.
Following the canal, he reached the Crystal Road and began making his way through the crowd. It divided according to its destinations, moving like dozens of intertwined strands backward and forward. Luke crossed them with practiced ease, for he had walked this road countless times and knew where each branch began, joined, and split.
The Crystal Road was the main highway dividing Delphinad east to west. They said it extended south as far as Epherium, and west to the border of Feraan, the dwarven kingdom. More accurately, Delphinad stood along the middle of the Crystal Road.
Main highway though it was, it was not always broad. In the southern mountains, there were places where one could barely follow its traces. Within Delphinad, it grew wide enough for three or four carts abreast. Even so, the city’s widest road was not the Crystal Road but Helos Avenue, which began at the harbor. Regardless of size, however, the Crystal Road had always been regarded as the most important route. It had existed even when Delphinad was merely a well-placed port. As if to show that the city had grown along it, the Crystal Road now connected all of Delphinad’s most important institutions: the library, the Pantheon, the royal palace, the governor’s residence, and the place Luke had now reached.
Luke looked up at the spire rising from the hilltop and rubbed his eyes. The sun was just passing above it.
“It’s been a long time.”
The hill before him had originally been a mountain, probably once a natural wall around the small port of Delphinad. In other words, what had once been the city’s outskirts was now a hill within it. The summit had disappeared into stone quarrying, and the slopes of what had been a mountain had been carefully cut into rows of fine high-class houses.
Below them, following a ridge that still retained the old slope, a vast fan of seating spread out. Arcanum, usually called the Grand Theater of Delphinad, was truly the largest theater on the continent. More than a century earlier, it had once held eighty thousand people at an assembly to judge the usurper Beos. It was also a place of venerable history, expanded four times, repaired on a major scale five times, and surviving even three fires and two wars.
Below the seats stood a round stage. Behind it, a three-sided backdrop rose, lined with ornamented columns and silver-plated statues. The resonating plates surrounding the lighting towers on either side of the stage and the audience seats made performances at the Grand Theater distinctive. Bronze pipes embedded among the seats had once been installed to make sound resonate, but now the resonating plates had taken over their role.
Luke too had once longed to stand in this place, where poets, actors, singers, and musicians from the entire continent dreamed of appearing even once. He had imagined taking a bow amid brilliant lights and the crowd’s cheers, as though in a dream. That was before he came to Delphinad. In the years he had actually lived here, that passion had slowly faded. Not because he had lost hope. Rather, because it had been fulfilled, though in a different form than he imagined.
Luke’s greatest success, The King of Mea, had been staged here no fewer than eleven times, to full audiences. It had been an unprecedented success, earning a place in the Grand Theater’s all-time rankings. Few people achieved such success twice. Perhaps Luke would be no different. A sense that his best days were past, fear that he could write nothing more, the meaninglessness of the life remaining: such anxieties might have suited a man who had won that much success.
But Luke had never gone onto the stage to take a bow. The man who bowed in his place was the promoter Leonis. At the time, Luke had sat in the front row, staring up at Leonis as he babbled with sweat and tears streaming down his face. And he had thought, It is nothing.
Afterward, Luke wrote scripts and won such success again. But he no longer put any meaning in it. He still lived in a cramped rented room, still hurried to finish manuscripts, still walked unrecognized through the streets. Whatever money came into his hands was spent eating and drinking with his friends. The modestly extravagant habits that followed his fees made the money disappear faster than his manuscripts accumulated. He still owed the Blue Peacock café, but Lavinia erased the debt in return for reading a few pages of his manuscript before Leonis.
He lived that way. It had never occurred to him that his best days might pass. Perhaps ironically, by being denied the glory he should have enjoyed, Luke was free of those torments. The success of The King of Mea had not changed his life. Success for a work that did not satisfy him was merely like winning a lottery ticket someone else had bought. And Luke was still young. In a box full of manuscripts slept a masterpiece of his own, built up little by little over the years.
With his hands in his pockets, Luke smiled at the Grand Theater, crossed the Crystal Road, and entered a three-story building. He greeted the young woman he met on the first floor.
“Hello, Bella. Is Leonis inside?”
Bella’s eyes widened, and without a reply, she ran into an inner room. Soon a thunderous roar sounded.
“Tell him to get in here at once!”
Without waiting for Bella to return, Luke slipped inside and tilted a finger in greeting at Leonis, who had leaped up from behind a desk piled with pistachio shells and five bundles of scripts.
“You seem to have gained more weight.”
“And why have you grown so thin? I heard the Shadowhawk went bankrupt. Did he starve you?”
As expected, Leonis knew exactly where Luke was. Luke shrugged.
“He’s not bankrupt. His house simply disappeared. The Shadowhawk doesn’t put his savings in a bank. If you imagine him standing in a queue before a bank counter, you’ll see quite clearly why.”
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