Maskerade

astonished man.
    The sword whirled.
    The first thief spun and thrust at the shadowy shape in front of him, which turned out to be another thief, whose arm jerked up and dragged its own knife along the rib cage of the thief beside him.
    The masked figure danced among the gang, his sword almost leaving trails in the air. It occurred to Granny later that it never actually made contact, but then, it never needed to—when six are against one in a mêlée in the shadows, and especially if those six aren’t used to a target that is harder to hit than a wasp, and even more so if they got all their ideas of knife fighting from other amateurs, then there’s six chances in seven that they’ll stab a crony and about one chance in twelve that they’ll nick their own earlobe.
    The two that remained uninjured after ten seconds looked at one another, turned, and ran.
    And then it was over.
    The surviving vertical figure bowed low in front of Granny Weatherwax. “Ah. Bella Donna!”
    There was a swirl of black cloak and red silk, and it too was gone. For a moment soft footsteps could be heard skimming over the cobbles.
    Granny’s hand was still halfway to her hat.
    “Well I never!” she said.
    She looked down. Various bodies were groaning or making soft bubbling noises.
    “Deary deary me,” she said. Then she pulled herself together.
    “I reckon we’re going to need some nice hot water and some bits of bandage, and a good sharp needle for the stitching, Mrs. Plinge,” she said. “We can’t let these poor men bleed to death now, can we, even if they do try to rob old ladies…”
    Mrs. Plinge looked horrified.
    “We’ve got to be charitable, Mrs. Plinge,” Granny insisted.
    “I’ll pump up the fire and tear up a sheet,” said Mrs. Plinge. “Don’t know if I can find a needle…”
    “Oh, I ’spect I’ve got a needle,” said Granny, extracting one from the brim of her hat.
    She knelt down by a fallen thief. “It’s rather rusty and blunt,” she added, “but we shall have to do the best we can.”
    The needle gleamed in the moonlight. His round, frightened eyes focused on it, and then on Granny’s face. He whimpered. His shoulder blades tried to dig him into the cobbles.
    It was perhaps as well that no one else could see Granny’s face in the shadows.
    “Let’s do some good,” she said.

    Salzella threw his hands in the air. “Supposing he’d come down in the middle of the act?” he said.
    “All right, all right ,” said Bucket, who was sitting behind his desk as a man might hide behind a bunker. “I agree. After the show we call in the Watch. No two ways about it. We shall just have to ask them to be discreet.”
    “Discreet? Have you ever met a Watchman?” said Salzella.
    “Not that they’ll find anything. He’ll have been over the rooftops and away, you may depend upon it. Whoever he is. Poor Dr. Undershaft. He was always so highly strung.”
    “Never more so than tonight,” said Salzella.
    “That was tasteless!”
    Salzella leaned over the desk. “Tasteless or not, the company are theater people. Superstitious. One little thing like someone being murdered onstage and they go all to pieces.”
    “He wasn’t murdered onstage, he was murdered offstage. And we can’t be sure it was murder! He’d been very…depressed, lately.”
    Agnes had been shocked, but it hadn’t been shock at Dr. Undershaft’s death. She’d been astonished at her own reaction. It had been startling and unpleasant to see the man, but even worse to see herself actually being interested in what was happening—in the way people reacted, in the way they moved, in the things they said. It had been as if she’d stood outside herself, watching the whole thing.
    Christine, on the other hand, had just folded up. So had Dame Timpani. Far more people had fussed over Christine than around the prima donna, despite the fact that Dame Timpani had come around and fainted again quite pointedly several times and had eventually been forced to go for hysterics. No one had assumed for a minute that Agnes couldn’t cope.
    Christine had been carried into Salzella’s backstage office and put on a couch. Agnes had to fetch a bowl of water and a cloth and was wiping her forehead, for there are some people who are destined to be carried to comfortable couches and some people whose only fate is fetching a bowl of cold water.
    “Curtain goes up again in two minutes,” said Salzella. “I’d better go and round up the orchestra.