Frustrations of a Self-Proclaimed Villain Lord

Chapter 88: The Grand Duke Interrupts a Performance (1)

There are few things ruder than arriving in the middle of a performance and criticizing the arrangement. There are also few things more satisfying.

The balcony door opened without a sound, Abi’s doing, he had a talent for making doors forget their function whenever it suited him. Useful, certainly, but also deeply offensive to proper locks everywhere.

My father entered first, sword already drawn, moving with that deceptively relaxed gait of his, the one that made people forget he could split a battlefield open if sufficiently annoyed. Two Sonomi shadows followed behind him. I came next, and Abi trailed after me with the expression of someone preparing to enjoy a private joke at another person’s expense.

The recital hall spread below us. The stage glowed faintly now, the array lines brightening beneath Toma’s chair, his song trembling through the old room, rising in careful intervals as the conductor below guided each note with the bone baton in his hand. The man in grey gloves didn’t look up. Either he didn’t know we were here, or he wanted us to think he didn’t. Both were possible. Neither mattered.

I leaned against the balcony rail and looked down. The audience seats below were empty, but their old cushions had been marked with small silver discs, each bearing a number, not a seat number, a tone, a frequency, a place where someone was meant to sit and become another mouth for the song.

Such poor hospitality.

If one invited guests, one should at least provide refreshments.

The conductor raised his baton. Toma’s voice climbed again. The red bell answered, a thin line of dark light shooting from it toward the empty audience seats. Not toward us. Good. The trap had been drawn for the floor, not the balcony. How careless.

"Abi," I murmured.

"Yes?"

"Can you mute the balcony from the array?"

"Yes."

"Do it."

A violet shimmer spread beneath our feet, thin enough to be invisible from below. The sound in the hall shifted, Toma’s song remaining audible, but the pressure behind it no longer touched my thoughts.

Excellent. A proper villain appreciated technical assistance.

I looked down again. The conductor finally raised his head, his eyes grey, his expression polite. "Grand Duke Konstantin," he called. "You were expected through the main hall."

"I noticed."

"And yet you chose the balcony."

"Your main hall was poorly designed."

A small pause. My father smiled. The conductor didn’t.

"You’ve interfered with two hymns already," he said.

"Three, if we count your current attempt."

"The third has begun."

"Then it’s begun badly."

That annoyed him. Good. People who harmed children for rituals should at least have the decency to be sensitive about criticism. It made conversation more productive.

Toma’s voice faltered. The conductor’s baton twitched. The boy choked, then forced the note out again. My hand tightened around the balcony rail, and the wood cracked beneath my fingers.

Abi glanced at it. "Brother."

"I know."

The conductor smiled faintly. "If you disrupt him too abruptly, the resonance will tear through his throat."

I looked at Toma. His eyes were still closed, sweat running down his temples, the cloth around his wrists cut into his skin. Alive, conscious, but exhausted. He was not singing because he wanted to. And that was enough.

"I assume that was meant to make me hesitate," I said.

"It should."

"It did." The conductor’s smile widened slightly. I smiled back. "Briefly."

My father moved, not toward the stage, toward the balcony’s western support pillar. His sword struck the old brass fixture attached to the wall, and the sound that followed wasn’t loud. It was exact. A clean metallic note rang through the balcony, cutting across Toma’s song at a slanted angle. Abi moved at the same time, violet light catching the note and bending it away from the stage array.

Toma gasped and the red bell rang sharply. The conductor’s head snapped toward us. "What are you doing?"

"Interrupting," I said.

Father struck the next fixture, another precise note, then another. The melody warped, not destroyed, redirected. The stage array flickered as if it couldn’t decide which song to follow. The conductor lifted his baton sharply, trying to regain control, and I drew my sword and cut the balcony curtain rope. The heavy curtain crashed down over the hall’s side mirrors, and four lines of reflected sound died at once.

The conductor’s expression finally changed. There it was.

Fear.

A delicate little thing. I enjoyed it.

"Abi," I said.

He grinned. "With pleasure."

The Jinn lifted both hands, violet light spreading through the ceiling beams, not attacking the array directly, but touching every secondary resonance point my father and I had disrupted, each stolen note bending further out of alignment. The red bell shook violently, Toma coughed, and the song broke. The conductor snarled and drove the bone baton into the stage floor. The array flared bright red, and every silver disc in the audience seats lit at once.

Ah. So he was desperate enough to force the empty seats to act as bodies. How untidy.

From the side of the stage, Arthur burst through a narrow door with Bell behind him and two children bundled in his arms, one awake and biting his shoulder, the other unconscious. Arthur didn’t seem to mind. Good man.

Bell saw Toma and cried out, "Don’t make him sing!"

The conductor turned toward her, his expression twisting. "You should have stayed hidden."

Bell went pale, and I moved before he could lift the baton toward her. From balcony to stage wasn’t a short distance. For ordinary people. I jumped. The air rushed past me, the stage rose to meet my boots, and the impact cracked three array lines beneath my feet, the old wooden boards groaning in protest.

Toma’s chair rattled. The conductor stumbled back. I straightened.

"Threatening children in front of me," I said, "is becoming a popular mistake."

The man swung the bone baton. It didn’t look like a weapon. That was perhaps why it was so dangerous. The air split with sound, a blade made of compressed resonance cutting toward my face. I tilted my head, and the sound passed close enough to slice a few strands of hair.

My hair.

The stage went very quiet. Abi, still on the balcony, inhaled sharply. Father’s expression changed. Arthur, moving the children toward the side exit, stopped dead.

The conductor smiled. He really should not have done that.

I touched the severed strands near my temple. Only a few. Not visible to ordinary people. But I was not ordinary people.

"You," I said softly, "are very brave. Or very stupid."

I stepped forward. He swung again, and this time I didn’t dodge. My sword cut through the sound blade with a clean, ugly snap, the backlash striking the stage array. Two bells above Toma cracked, and the boy slumped against his restraints, no longer singing, though his chest still moved.

The conductor reached for the red bell. I kicked the bone baton out of his hand, and it spun across the stage and clattered near the orchestra pit. He lunged after it, but Arthur arrived first, the captain crossing the remaining distance with the calm efficiency of a man who’d been waiting all day for permission to hit someone. His fist drove into the conductor’s stomach hard enough to lift the man off his feet.

The conductor crashed onto the stage. Arthur stepped on his wrist. Something broke, a satisfying sound.

"Alive," I reminded him.

Arthur looked faintly disappointed. "Yes, Your Excellency."

Abi appeared beside Toma’s chair in a shimmer of violet light, examining the restraints first, then the red threads wrapped around the boy’s wrists. "Don’t cut them," he said. Arthur, who’d already reached for his dagger, stopped.

I crouched beside Toma. His eyelids fluttered, his lips moving, no sound coming out.

"That’s fine," I said. "Don’t speak."

His eyes opened slightly, brown, ordinary, too ordinary for what had been done to him. He looked at me as though still deciding whether I was real.

"Bell?" he mouthed.

"She’s alive."

His eyes filled, not with relief exactly, something smaller, more careful.

"She brought us to you," I continued. "A very sensible child."

Bell, standing near Arthur with the two rescued children, looked startled by the praise. Children in this network always looked startled when praise didn’t come with a hook.

How hateful.

Abi leaned closer to the threads around Toma’s wrists. "They tied his voice to the bell through pain," he said.

The conductor, breathing hard on the floor, laughed weakly. "If you remove it wrong, he’ll never speak again."

I looked at him. "You should conserve your strength."