Work Text:
At the opera house, Saul had hoped to enjoy the full performance without incident, but he was grimly unsurprised when the stage cratered into itself at the end of Act I, swallowing up not only the changeling boy but Queen Titania, the poet, and the entire retinue of fairies. Indeed, Randolph had accepted the tickets from Imogen Holst in anticipation of not a pleasant evening off but rather the likelihood of merry malevolent hell breaking loose. Imogen—a petite, supremely self-possessed force of nature—got on shockingly well with Randolph, in large part because she reacted to occult disruptions of her work not with fear and gibbering, but the irritated pragmatism she was showing now, marshalling would-be rescuers away from the unnatural new abyss with the assurance of a born general.
Saul was terribly familiar with all this, thanks to the ghost-knaves that had stormed The Perfect Fool, the horde of demon pigs that had erupted from the stove in The Wandering Scholar, and the towering waves of water that had nearly drowned the ballerinas in Meddling with Magic. Calling on his skills and senses as the Walker was by now second nature, and he was on his feet before the first screams from the pit reached his ears.
What he hadn’t expected was running commentary next to him from Lord Peter Wimsey. The light drawl was familiar, as were the beautiful, sensitive hands deftly executing silent arpeggios, dropping beefy men dead in their tracks as they charged towards the stage. But Saul knew for a fact that Wimsey was in Rome, at the behest of some autocratic sod in the Foreign Office, and a second glance at his chatty ally reminded him that Wimsey had a nephew.
“There we go,” Saint-George said, as the last thug in sight collapsed. “How dreadfully out of practice I am, but it’s not as if I go looking to get in the middle of these. Fancy a drink after we clear out of here?”
“You are out of practice,” Saul said crisply, “if you think we’ll be in the clear afore matins, what with twenty people trapped in that hole and—”
“Oh hell and damn,” Saint-George exclaimed, hastily smashing his hands down on his invisible keyboard, his eyes locking onto the actor cast as King Oberon. The unseen chords had the effect of knocking the wind out of the man.
As he wiggled his fingers through what Saul recognized as a trussing pattern, Saint-George looked resigned. “You were saying?”
Saul shrugged. “It’ll keep. The Keeper will likely have some words for you as well.”