THE WORLD’S STAGE THEATRE
Devlin is briefly distracted by a pretty young lady with a fashionably low cut bodice (Avanil style), but manages to stay on the lookout for assassins.
Later, after the sun has fully set (and well after the jealous Khinasi shipmaster Orlando has strangled to death his lovely young wife, Dominica, at the instigation of the wicked Jacobus) Renn and Devlin notice a slim figure swaddled in a fine cloak of deep blue velvet and wearing a curious hanging mask of pale yellow cloth just behind them in the gallery. This person surely was not there just a moment ago. The masked one leans forward and whispers in Renn’s ear with a voice as smooth and deathly as a silken noose,
Before Renn can puzzle out the meaning of the weird poetry, the stranger lets a slip of folded yellow parchment slips from the one of his ivory-hued gloves.
Applause breaks out like thunder as the play, half-forgotten now by Renn, ends on the stage below. Gentry rise in a standing ovation as the masked messenger leans back. In a moment, Renn has lost sight of the stranger.
Neither Renn nor Devlin find any sign of the mystery figure, despite their best efforts in a search of the gallery as the gentlefolk begin to descend and leave the theater.
Upon examining the paper by lantern light, Renn sees a sequence of numbers and letters written in unfamiliar, blocky but precise handwriting. A weird squiggly symbol in black ink marks the bottom of the small page. If he stares it too long; the arms seem to writhe, the sigil changing just slightly. The bottom of the page is torn as if it came from a book.
BEHIND STAGE, FILBERT
Filbert doesn’t see the yellow-masked man again. But he does overhear some queer conversation among two of the actors as the curtain draw shut and the cast fall back into the rear of the house to shed personae and costumes. A skinny woman and a short man, both half-out of baroque costumes walk arm in arm past Filbert’s hiding spot.
He hears the man whisper to the woman in a calm, yet insistent way,
Something of the smooth delivery reminds Filbert of rehearsed lines, but then again, the speaker is an actor…
In a moment, the pair is gone, passed through a doorway that leads out into the night, and now stagehands are moving to clean the rear area. Any moment they may uncover Filbert’s hiding place, unless he slips under the stage and out in a hurry, or pulls some other ruse.
Delight is to him- a far, far upward, and inward delight- who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth, ever stands forth his own inexorable self.
-from Moby Dick (Hermann Melville)
