A Hallowmas Perfomance!
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An invitation comes to you, one way or another. You find it with your cloak in the cloakroom after a high society salon, or you bump into an urchin in the Flit and before you can say ‘pickpocket’ you discover you’ve gained, not lost, something. A Rubbery Man bows to you, then proffers an envelope from his tentacled hands. Or you receive it in the morning post, slice open the seal over toast and tea, then wake in your bed with the curious conviction that you had a dream that was not a dream.
Hallowmas, when opposites meet at midnight! Wo’n’t you meet me this evening for a musical performance? In the Forgotten Quarter, under the stars. Wear your mask. - N
On the reverse, your invitation bears a map, and a clockface representing seven o’ clock. You might expect the witching hour, but seven is a number of power.
The map takes you to a sunken shrine, once open to the sky, now shadowed, now lightless, save for a path of lanterns draped in linen from the strange shores of Parabola.
Others are there, masked, murmuring. One academic, robed like an ancient astrologer with a mask like a streak of a comet, explains that the airs are thinner in the Forgotten Quarter — and in surface tradition, the airs between worlds are thinnest on Hallowe’en.
You must be waiting for something. There, in a circle of shrouded lanterns, you glimpse a figure — is it a man, or a woman? Thon wears a mantle of velvet blue studded over with stars, and dark, trailing tulle. The mask, too, is blue, but the eyes, the eyes are bluer, like scraps of lost sky. In one hand, thon holds a bow, while the other props a cello of pure, shining glass.
A kitten twitches her tail, and she is only a kitten. But for a moment, in the glow of the lanterns reflected off the glass, you see a panther.
The cellist begins to play, an easy, lilting melody, suited to any of the parlours of London. Thon plays with a practiced tenderness, coaxing out music in the caress of a bow, in a flutter of fingers. On the cellist’s lips you see a smile.
And then you see something else, hear something else. The strains of the bow grow longer, grow deeper, and you can hear the aching distance of it, gulfs as vast as the gulfs between stars, as the planets orbiting out of reach. And then —
The masked gatherers gasp, they point, they look wondering at one another, and again at the source of their shared wonder. The dark of the shrine is no longer dark. Above you the air illumines with the swirling shapes of galaxies, the colours of far-off nebulae where suns bloom into being. The music surges and soars. No longer do you feel the melancholy of distance, but limitless faith in the seen unseen sky, and the weightless joy of falling only to fly. You feel it as though the cellist were playing the strings of your heart. Below you, around you, stars flicker until you are standing in space, and amid the stars burst notes of flame like bursting fruit.
Soon, the rhythm settles into the rhythm of a dance, do you know it? Somebody turns to somebody else, and asks the pleasure of a waltz. One by one, two by two, your fellow guests and gatherers begin to whirl, and dance across the heavens.