“And what the fokkin’ hell do you think is funny?” Fee demanded.
“Sorry,” Liz said.
“Pack up and move it the hell out of here!” Fionna shouted. “Go on with you!”
Boo pulled Liz further away from the stage and bent his head close to hers. “Don’t stir her up. There’s something wrong here.”
“Can you feel it, too?”
“Yes, I can. Like sittin’ on a powder keg, and everyone throwin’ lit matches. It’s makin’ everybody touchy, but I can’t find a source for it. Keep an eye peeled. I just feel somethin’s goin’ to happen. Don’t know what, yet.”
Fionna burst vehemently into song. The musicians caught up with her a line or so later, weaving their threads with the instrument of her voice. It was an angry song about injustice and killing the innocent. Unlike the quiet hurt the folk song had engendered the first night in O’Flaherty’s, this one grabbed the listener by the ears and made him despise the abusers. Liz felt fury crackle in the air. The magic Green Fire were making was a dangerous kind. Fionna stalked from side to side of the stage, exhorting the invisible audience to join with her in hating the oppressors. She flung an arm around the microphone stand at the east side of the stage and screeched a verse into that one. The fringes whipped around the metal pole, but didn’t drop back when she let go. As she took one whirling step away, the microphone followed her. It leaned dangerously for a split second, then crashed at her feet. Swearing a blue streak that could be heard from every speaker in the room, Fee stood and quivered with rage while the grips and Fitz jumped forward to help her free.
“Cut the damned fringe off the damned sleeves,” Fionna’s order echoed throughout the arena. Ears stunned by the level of the rock music, Liz couldn’t hear Fitz’s side of the discussion, but his pleading expression was eloquent. “I do not bloody care. I’m not a fokkin’ snake charmer like St. Patrick!”
The costumer’s face stiffened. Nigel Peters fairly leaped up the steps to make peace.
“Oh, no!” Fionna exclaimed, in answer to an unheard plea from her manager. “Do you think I want to have me own clothes making a fool of me?”
Nigel looked up toward the northwest and made a throat-cutting gesture at the booth. Fionna’s microphone was turned off, rendering her inaudible to the rest of the people in the arena. She, Nigel and Fitz engaged in a three-sided pantomime row, only a few syllables loud enough to be understood. Nigel tapped his watch. As an argument, it was absolutely unassailable. There wasn’t time to fuss. The show must go on. Sadly, Fitzgibbon produced his scissors and barbered the trim on the sleeves to three inches in length. A stagehand appeared with a broom. Fitz watched him sweep up the cuttings with the same dismayed expression a mother might watch her child’s first haircut. Without looking back at him, Fionna returned to her spot at the east edge of the stage. The musicians struck up. Fionna grabbed the microphone and opened her mouth.
A mechanical shriek blasted out. Everyone jumped as steam started pouring upward from the pipes lined up in a long frame at the edge of the stage. Fantastic green figures swam upward along the insubstantial curtain. Snakes and birds twisted into Celtic knotwork, created with laser lights; Liz let out an admiring gasp, but it stopped everyone else dead.
“What in all the saints’ names was that?” Fionna asked, recovering her wits.
“That effect isn’t supposed to go until the sixth song!” came the despairing cry of the stage manager. “What’s going on up there?” He seized the mouthpiece of his headset in one hand and started gesticulating with the other hand.
“Sorry,” came Robbie’s tremulous voice over the intercom. The steam ceased rising. “My hand slipped and pushed the cursor too far ahead on my instructions. It won’t happen again.”
“It had bloody not better,” everyone on the stage muttered, almost in unison.
But it did. Little things continued to go awry. Effects happened late, or went off on the wrong part of the stage. Liz watched with the feeling that she was seeing a building being demolished a few tiles at a time with the debris falling on innocent passersby. The wonderful feeling that had pervaded the arena early that afternoon was gone without a trace, leaving behind it deep gloom. Much of it could be laid at Robbie Unterburger’s feet.
“The girl is just plain off,” Boo commented, not without sympathy, watching Fionna dodge tiny explosions that had been laid on the floor of the stage like an unlucky cowboy ordered to “dance” by a rival gunslinger. If Robbie wasn’t clearly so apologetic, it would look like she was deliberately trying to make Fionna look bad.
“Do you think she senses the foreboding that’s growing in here?” Liz asked. “She might be affected by it.” The thought interested her greatly for a moment. “Is Robbie a sensitive? Could she be a possible recruit for either of our departments?”
Beauray’s fair eyebrows rose high on his forehead. “Never thought of that, ma’am. She might be just what you say, but I’d doubt whether she’d be interested. You have to admit our wage structure don’t sound as appealin’ when you know what these people are paid.”
Liz nodded. If it weren’t for the call of patriotism she’d have been sorely tempted by the pay scales she saw listed on the FYI document in her briefing packet. She prided herself on her competence; she would probably do very well at one of these jobs—if it hadn’t meant dealing with egos like her old school chum’s.
The drummer struck a downbeat, and the rehearsal resumed. The band managed to get through a couple of numbers unhindered, for which everyone looked grateful. Protective spells at the ready, Liz maintained her vigilance, but she would have had to be lying to say she didn’t enjoy having a rock concert virtually to herself. A small part of her missed the camaraderie of the crowds. In spite of the pushing and the occasionally impaired view, the people who attended an event like this one shared in a special kind of symbiotic energy. It came from the performers, but it was amplified a millionfold by the audience and given back again. At a really good concert, the transfer back and forth lifted the performance from enjoyable to stellar. Fionna and her players were certainly capable of lighting that kind of fire in their fans. They exalted, they comforted, they challenged, all at the same time. Liz stood rocking to the beat, watching Fee and Michael dance toward one another in the center of the stage, then whirl outward again, like a pair of electrons in a very active molecule. Michael, all in black, dignified, powerful, stepped backwards toward the north end of the stage, watching his fingers stirring the strings of his guitar. Fee, feminine, excitable, vibrant, reached the south end and turned in a wide circle. The flying fringes on her dress caught the lights in slashing sprays of white. She halted, standing straight as a candle. With the air of a priestess of a long-ago culture, she pointed down at a crystal formation the size of a pumpkin. And waited. She stopped singing.
“Hold it!” she shouted. “Right now!” As the music died, Liz felt a sense of loss equal to that of someone snatching her teddy bear away. Fionna clapped her hands to her hips and glared up at the control room booth.
“When I am standing here and singing the cue line,” Fionna shouted in a rising tone that threatened to end in a banshee shriek, “I expect to have the green lasers meet at me feet and light up that bloody crystal that is sitting right here. It is not a tiny little rock. It is a monstrous, great chunk of rock. I should think,” her voice reaching to every corner of the Superdome, “that even up there you might be able to see it! Excu-use me!”
The technical director’s soothing voice came over the loudspeaker. “Sorry, Fee, darling. Robbie was just a little behind on her cues. Other than that it was perfect. Wasn’t it, loves? Can we try it again? From the last mark.”
Moodily, Michael Scott took up his station at the north end of the round stage, nodded his head at the other musicians. Voe Lockney beat his sticks together over his head. One, two, three, and the band began to play. Fionna, who had withdrawn with her arms crossed over her chest, listened, waiting. There was a feeling of anticipation, not happy. Liz would like to have enjoyed herself, reminded herself that this was a job, a still-unsolved mystery. The two dancers made their way toward one another, body language seducing, drawing inward toward one another and out again. Michael withdrew toward his dark fastness. Fionna stepped, whirled, and glided toward the gleaming crystal.