The management of the community-run theatre was reluctant to put on Thom's new show. He underwent a discouraging interview with the woman in charge. She had avoided him for days but when he finally tracked her down she told him with evident bad grace that their audiences were tired of magic shows. She said that the last magician who performed at Il-Palazz had been released from his contract halfway through the week's run.

Thom knew the magician she was meaning a conjuror of the old school, whose repertoire consisted entirely of tricks with playing cards, handkerchiefs and lighted cigarettes but Thom's enthusiastic pitch that he had devised an exciting new illusion was to no avail.

Later, he went around to see the editor of the newspaper and invited him to visit his rehearsal room to see a performance for himself. The man's memory of the brief correspondence in his letters column had faded, so Thom had to remind him several times of the intrigue that so many people had expressed.

The elderly editor, a true Prachoit who had made his career reinforcing the cautious views and outlook of his readership, missed his first appointment and sent a trainee reporter to the second, but did manage to turn up after Thom had gone to even more lengths to persuade him.

Rullebet, now exotically clad in the glittering costume she and Thom had chosen for their performances, clambered up the special rope he had imported from Glaund, and at the sound of Thom's mystic incantations disappeared into thin air.

'Do that again,' said the ageing journalist, as the smoke of her disappearance drifted through the large room.

'A good magician never repeats a trick,' Thom replied.

'Where the devil did she go? And where is she now?'

'You have seen her disappear. For that reason alone I could not repeat the illusion.'

Grudgingly, the man said, 'All right. It is astonishing.'

'Thank you.'

Thom clapped his hands loudly. Rullebet ran lithely from the cloakroom at the far end, her arms spread wide, a beaming smile on her face. She bowed deeply to the editor, then without saying a word hurried back to the cloakroom.

Thom had to restrain the man from going after her. He wanted to interview her, wanted to know how she felt about being transported invisibly from one part of the room to another, but Thom led him firmly to the door.

'Sir, do you agree that what you saw just now is amazing?'

'I suppose.'

'Then if you were to write a review of what you have seen, pleading perhaps with the management committee of Il-Palazz, maybe our townspeople might have a chance to share the experience? This is only one of many illusions I can perform.'

'I'll see what I can do,' said the editor, but not encouragingly.

12.

The write-up did not appear until two weeks later, just as Thom was beginning to despair of the whole matter, but once the article was in print it could not have been better worded. It spoke of mystery, skill, amazing impossibilities, a dazzling young lady, a fiendish sorcerer, one shock and stunning sight after another.

Thom was about to hurry around to Il-Palazz with a cutting of the article, and plead with the woman manager to change her mind, when she appeared in person at his door.

Not long afterwards, luridly coloured posters appeared all over the town: An Evening with Thom the Thaumaturge! A month later Thom enjoyed his triumphant opening night.

He was given the two prime spots in a programme of general varieties. He closed the first half before the interval with a series of relatively straightforward illusions, and he came back at the end of the second act for the finale, saving his vanishing trick with Rullebet for the climax. The shows went well all through the week.

Once he was inside the building and using it regularly, Thom felt less happy with the physical state of the theatre. The auditorium itself would have benefited from a general updating and redecoration, but much more concerning to him was the condition of the theatrical machinery. In particular he discovered the electrical wiring was antiquated. Most of the stage lights appeared to work, but there were worrying intermittent flickers whenever the main spots came on. Touching the microphone stand during a technical rehearsal, Thom received an electric shock afterwards, one of the tech crew wrapped some insulating tape around the stand and declared it to have been made safe, but Thom could still feel a tingle of static whenever he touched it. He did so as infrequently as possible after that.

One of his illusions in the first half of the show required the use of the stage trapdoor, but during technical rehearsals it jammed several times. Again, the tech crew came to his rescue and quickly claimed to have solved the problem. Watching them work, Thom came to the conclusion that these apparently keen technicians were the cause of many of the small problems. Most of them were unpaid volunteers, enthusiastic enough, but that was the best that could be said of them. There were two men in charge of the gang who said they had worked in theatres all their lives, but they were both elderly and every day the marginally younger of the two was drunk by mid-afternoon. After the trapdoor was allegedly repaired Thom could still not make it work reliably, so he dropped that particular trick from his repertoire.

As un.o.btrusively as possible he went through the rigging loft and checked the hemps and lifts. No magician should ever leave anything to chance. His first technical rehearsal cast him into gloom because so many things went wrong, but the second one was better.

Then the week of performances began and all was well. There was a good audience on the first night, a smaller one after that, but as the week went by the numbers steadily increased.

After the first few variety acts a television comedian who had been famous some years earlier, a chanteuse, a troupe of dancers, some piano duettists his simple but puzzling tricks went down well. He began with card tricks, then performed a trick known as the Pejman Illusion. This involved a curtained litter, pushed on to the stage on wheels with its compartment concealed by drapes. When the curtains were opened it was shown to be empty, but as soon as Thom closed them again, they would be thrown open from inside and Rullebet sensationally appeared. He then carried out a series of acrobatics-c.u.m-legerdemain stunts on his unicycle, and finished with a more complex illusion which involved an escape from a metal cage under the threat of an array of deadly-looking knives poised to fall across him.

The main attraction was of course the illusion with which he ended the show.

For this, Thom a.s.sumed the ident.i.ty of a sorcerer and appeared on stage in a flowing gown, his face painted to make it seem sinister or inscrutable. When he moved about the stage he did so with a sinuous gliding motion, keeping his arms folded and his head tilted back.

After some exaggerated descriptions of the wonders of ancient magic he would reveal his main prop: a large basket placed in the centre of the stage. From this Thom pulled out a length of thick rope. Two members of the audience would be invited on to the stage to examine the rope, and they would, inevitably, confirm that it was in every way normal. It was not, of course: it was the technologically sophisticated hawser he had imported from a specialist marine industrial supplier. The rope, reinforced with metal and carbon fibres, undetectable by the untrained eye, had a self-rigidifying property when it was used in a certain way it would become as strong and solid as a steel rod.

With the volunteers departed from the stage, Thom embarked on what was for him the most difficult and physically demanding part of the illusion. He threw the rope upwards towards the rigging loft in such a way that it would self-rigidify. He had rehea.r.s.ed this for weeks and could count on a successful throw at least two times out of three. Even so, for effect he always contrived to get it wrong a few times. This would underline the 'normal' properties of the rope, as well as providing the theatrical spectacle of a heavy rope collapsing down on top of him, apparently with great hazard to himself. Finally, though, he would succeed and the rope would magically stand upright. What the audience could not see was that the base of the rope was mounted securely inside the solidly constructed basket, so that once the rope was erect it would not again collapse until he wanted it to.

Rullebet was of course concealed inside the basket throughout all this. He would magically cause her to appear, and she would rise like a beautifully plumed bird from the basket. Thom would place her in what seemed to be an intense trance, and she climbed the rope towards the top. Not to the very top, but as high as possible so that she could be seen by everyone in the audience.

Once she was there, Thom would cause her to vanish, with many flashes and loud bangs, and the rope, now secretly controlled by Thom from below, collapsed down on to the stage again, most of it falling into or around the basket.

After the audience had been given the time to marvel at what they had seen, Rullebet would mysteriously appear in some other part of the auditorium, and she and Thom would take their final bow.

They performed this six times during the course of the week, and all went well. Then came the final performance.

13.

The house was not full on the last night, but every seat in the stalls was taken. Latecomers were moved to the upper circle. Word of mouth about the show was positive and people were curious to see Thom's act.

In the afternoon he and Rullebet rehea.r.s.ed the illusion once more, adding small flourishes wherever possible to enhance the effect.

Just before the show began Rullebet told him that her father was going to be present. He had been determined to find a seat as close as possible to the stage. Thom experienced a feeling of disquiet for a performer the belief that an audience is anonymous can enhance the illusion of rapport. Knowing people in the audience could be a distraction.

When the show began Thom watched the early acts from the wings, trying to get a feel for the audience. They were responsive to the performers, which had a mixed effect on Thom. Prachoits made undemanding spectators, but their generous laughter at the comedian's unfunny wisecracks was disappointing. Thom had worked hard on his act and wanted to feel that any applause he received was properly earned.

Then it was his turn. His sequence of tricks to close the first part of the show went without a hitch. When Rullebet appeared unexpectedly inside the Pejman cabinet the audience clapped loudly he saw Rullebet's father standing to applaud them. Thom then escaped dramatically from his deadly cage of knives, and that was the end of the first part. The applause continued after the main tab had come down, signalling the interval.

During the break Thom noticed that two of the tech crew were working on one of the junction boxes this sent power to the winch that raised and lowered the main curtain. The two men were making hasty repairs. One of them rushed away, returning a few moments later with a roll of insulating tape.

Thom wandered over.

'Anything wrong?' he said.

'Nothing that affects you.' The man was struggling to get the tape around a section of exposed cable. 'Leave it to us. We had to lower the main curtain manually at the finale, but we've fixed it now. Is that all right with you? We know you're the expert.'

Feelings between him and the tech crew were already strained by his earlier criticisms, so Thom backed off. He went to his dressing room, sat alone and thought for a while, then started to apply the heavy sorcerer make-up for his big illusion. He knew that Rullebet would also be preparing, along the pa.s.sage in her own dressing room.

At last it was time. While a close-harmony quartet sang before the front curtain, he made sure that his basket was positioned correctly on the stage, that it was secured properly and that the mechanism for the rope stabilizer was working. He went about the stage and placed the explosive caps which would be detonated remotely for effect. Then he helped Rullebet lower herself into the cramped s.p.a.ce inside the basket and made sure she was safely in position before the trick began.

The music swelled up, the curtains swept back, the lights picked him out. He launched into his sorcerous speech more confidently than ever before, being sure every now and then to address the more distant faces he could dimly see in the upper circle.

He brought out the rope, handled it expressively to show that it was as flexible as any normal rope. The volunteers from the audience were found, they came on stage, they convinced themselves of the rope's conventional type, they returned to their seats. Thom made the first attempt, deliberately bungled, to throw the rope into a vertical position. It collapsed down on the stage around him.

When he picked it up, coiling it around his arm, he was disconcerted to feel the faint irritant of a static electrical charge. He pushed the thought to the back of his mind. He glided across the stage from side to side, declaiming about wizards and necromancers of the past who had tried and failed to make this illusion work, how dangerous it could be as well as difficult. The faint tingling sensation continued whenever he touched certain parts of the rope.

He threw it up a second time again it fell back to the stage. He tried again, this time intending to make it work, but his luck was out. The rope fell alarmingly around him.

When he collected up the rope he felt the burr of static electricity once more. It seemed harmless, because the only electricity used in the illusion was in the rope stabilizer and he had wired that himself, double-checking its insulation. He braced himself, concentrated on the broad swing necessary to elevate the rope to its full height, but also into such a position above the basket that the dozens of tiny rigidifying relays buried inside the fibres would click into place and hold the rope stiffly.

It was his fourth attempt and this time it worked. The musicians in the pit picked up the cue with a triumphant chord.

The rope stood stiffly vertical, swaying slightly from side to side. Applause broke out spontaneously from the audience. With sorcerous arrogance, Thom ignored this reaction and instead strode disdainfully about the stage, throwing violent gestures towards the pyrotechnic capsules he had placed. Each one exploded as designed: bright orange and white and yellow bursts of sparkling flame, loud bangs and plenty of smoke.

Within this swirl of smoke and diffused lights he went to the basket and raised Rullebet magically from within. Another exultant chord from the pit orchestra. The spotlights found her and her dazzling costume sparkled brightly. She ran prettily around him and acknowledged the audience.

Adopting his most fearsome and villainous look, Thom placed Rullebet in a trance. Soon the young woman was standing before him with her head leaning forward, her arms dangling limply at her sides. Thom mimed an instruction for her to climb the rope. Rullebet turned, clambered up on to the lip of the basket's opening, then with her familiar easy grace shinned slowly towards the top.

She paused twice during her climb. Holding on to the rope with a hand and an entwining lower leg she allowed herself to turn around the rope, her free hand waving aloft, slowly slipping down just a little. Two thirds of the way to the top she repeated this both times the audience applauded her loudly for her skill and poise.

At last she reached the top and once again she balanced herself away from the rope as the audience applauded her.

Thom braced himself to make his magical gesture, to cause her to vanish, or at least to appear to vanish. He raised his arms, tilted his head back. He was immediately beneath her.

As the music became louder, more urgent, Rullebet raised her hand again, and in the instant of that moment disaster struck. There was a terrible blue-white flash and a hissing explosion. Rullebet's body jerked in agony, her back straightening in an extreme reaction, her grip on the rope lost. In her spasm of involuntary motion she flung out her hand and another flashing discharge of electricity consumed her.

She fell.

Thom leapt back in panic as Rullebet landed violently on the stage beside him. He realized she must have touched something in the loft, most likely an uninsulated cable. She fell heavily on her head and shoulder, but other than the crash of her body against the stage boards she made no sound. What he could see of the skin on her hands, her arms, one leg, the back of her neck, flared an angry red. A thick miasma of smoke was about her. A panicky instinct made Thom look upwards.

A black spiral of smoke showed the trace of her horrific fall.

The music from the pit orchestra died. Many people in the audience had risen to their feet in shock. Thom glanced desperately towards them, then knelt beside Rullebet's contorted body. He tore off the ridiculous head-dress he had been wearing, pushed the voluminous sleeves of his robe up his arms. The house lights came on, flickering. An alarm bell was ringing. Three men dashed on the stage, one carrying a chemical fire extinguisher. Everyone seemed to be shouting.

Thom leaned over Rullebet, laid a hand on her face, tried to turn her head so that he could see her. She had fallen so that her head was somehow too far over, curved at a horrible angle towards one side of her chest.

He felt no breath from her on his fingers. Her flesh was crisp, hot to the touch, charred. The men who had just arrived pulled him backwards and away from her body, yelling at him to move out of the way, give her s.p.a.ce to breathe. They struggled to resuscitate her. One of them rolled her forcefully on to her back, began palpating her chest. Her head lolled back, rolling as if it had become loose on her neck. Her eyes were opaque, unfocused.

One of the man's legs, thrusting out behind him as he punched Rullebet's chest with increasing force, caught the edge of the illusion's basket. The rope above, still until that moment erect, swung to the side. The hidden relays relaxed. The heavy rope came tumbling down, fell across them all, an unyielding deadweight, an immobile black serpent.

Thom was struck hard on the back of his head by part of the rope. He half crawled, half staggered away, then fell forward, lying face-down next to Rullebet's body.

14.

'It was an accident,' Thom said, in desperation. 'The theatre is responsible. There must be an uninsulated power cable above the stage. No one warned me about it. The building is not maintained properly. Ask the management to show you their safety certificates, their fire certificates.'

'Be quiet. You're under arrest.'

Thom was standing in the centre of the stage, facing the auditorium. The remains of his illusion apparatus lay on the stage behind him the rope sprawled across the boards, partly covering the basket. Thom had removed the outer layers of his costume, the sorcerer's gown with its huge sleeves and baggy trousers, and these lay on the floor in a heap. Thom stood in his stage underclothes: an off-white vest, pants held up by braces. His face still bore the vivid blue and bright-green flashes of the sorcerer's make-up.

Most of the audience had hurried away out of the theatre after Rullebet's body was removed, but more than a hundred people remained, cl.u.s.tering near the orchestra pit, close to the stage. Rullebet's father was among them. He stood against the low, curtained wall of the pit, his face distorted by fury and pain. There were others Thom recognized too, but who in the urgency of his situation, and because of the waves of unhappiness and sorrow that were flooding through him, he could not properly identify. They were people from the town, his neighbours, others he must have seen from time to time, some perhaps he had spoken to during his years in Beathurn, or even longer ago, in his days as a traveller. They were anyway a blur on the edge of his ability to comprehend what was happening.

Two policier officers arrived with the ambulance that had been called to take away Rullebet's body. One of them now stood beside Thom, handcuffed to him their wrists hung together side by side in a perverse parody of companionship. The other officer was standing on the edge of the stage, his back to the people below, facing Thom and accusing him.

'The law says that there are precautions that must be observed at every theatrical performance. Were you aware of them and did you abide by them?'

'I was aware of them,' Thom said weakly. 'But the theatre apparently was not. Everything here is maintained badly.'

'Are you claiming that you had no idea there were live electrical cables above the stage?'

'They shouldn't have been there. No one warned me.'

'But you were seen in the rigging loft.'

'I was checking the hemps, the ropes. The tech crew were responsible for the electrics.'

'They say they told you there was a fault.'

'They said there was a problem with the curtain winch.'

'But they warned you there was a fault?'

'No.' Thom was struggling to remember exactly what had been said during that brief encounter in the interval. 'I asked them what the trouble was, but they wouldn't discuss it with me.'

'They say you complained about their work.'

'Yes. They are incompetent.'

'You still went ahead with the show, though. You put your young a.s.sistant's life in danger.'

'No. It's the theatre's responsibility to provide a safe working environment.'

'So you admit you didn't make your own safety check. Is that because you didn't know how to? Or couldn't you be bothered?'

'I signed a contract. A standard agreement. That agreement contains warranties about safety and public liability.'

'You are not a member of the public when performing.'