Shadowbridge (26 page)

Eventually Eskie entered the hall. She carried a tray through the dormitorium, which she placed on the floor beside his bed. A large bowl and a fist-sized chunk of bread lay on it. She didn’t expect him to take it from her. “You need to eat,” she said, as if to the whole room. “If you want me to leave, then I will, and you can feed yourself.”

When he didn’t move, she nodded as if satisfied. “All right, then.” She left the bed and walked with growing speed to the door and out again.

The bowl sat within his line of sight unless he rolled over onto his side, turning his back to it. Steam snaked out of it, and his stomach clenched at the smell. His eyes felt as if they would at any moment collapse into his skull; the sockets themselves throbbed. He had to order his hand to reach for the spoon. Once he had it, he had to concentrate to direct himself to lean up on one elbow, and then he had to drag himself closer to the tray.

The soup was hot and oily and thick. If the cook had made it for him, it must have been before…before the accident. Otherwise it would have been full of broken seashells or something else to kill him. Or maybe Eskie had made it. If only he’d spoken to her, said what he felt, she would have stayed, would have fed him as she did all the other boys. They didn’t care that she belonged to Bogrevil, why should he? He was a boy, nobody at all. She wasn’t his age. She’d never given him a reason to hope or even believe—no, that wasn’t entirely true. She had warned him, had protected him, had in her way made him feel special and different from all the others. He didn’t want to be just one more boy in the paidika, his body a source of someone else’s pleasure and an afrit’s meal until he was nothing but a husk, back where he began, stupid and helpless forever. Why would anyone desire that? But when he closed his eyes, he saw the sphinx again, alive and bright and loving, and he wanted her more than anything. He trembled with desire.

By the time he wiped the crust of bread around the bowl to sop up the last bit of the liquid, he felt newly born. He’d have crawled into a box for another client now—at least, he felt as if he could. It would turn off his mind, set him free from what he knew. Later. Let them ask him later.

He lay back and was soon asleep.

 . . . . . 

The paidika didn’t open for business the following night. The events of the anniversary had taken a toll and required recovery. Some boys had indeed been subjected to the afrits twice that night, which Bogrevil never would have allowed any other time. The ones who weathered the abuse best needed to be carried to their beds; even when fed afterward, they showed little improvement. Recovery would be slow. One boy had, like Abnevi, gone mad, his mind scrambled. “One more for the laundry” was Bogrevil’s glum response. It meant one less money earner among his brood, for which reason if no other he didn’t punish Diverus directly.

The cook, with a hand swollen to twice its normal size, took to his bed, where he intended to remain for days, whining that he must be avenged. Food became a matter of immediate concern, and Eskie had to take over in the kitchen. Without sustenance the exhausted boys would not recover, and Bogrevil needed them active by the second night. He knew perfectly well how the cook goaded and teased certain boys and that he’d repeatedly tried to have his way with some of them; in Bogrevil’s opinion the bastard was lucky the blade hadn’t ended up between his ribs. Nevertheless, Diverus had to be seen to pay for inflicting it. Such an act of rebellion could not be allowed to pass unchallenged, or soon the entire paidika would be out of control, stabbing cooks, snubbing clients, and most importantly disrupting the afrits. Those monstrosities would not take to being inconvenienced for long, and the price would be Bogrevil’s to pay. His servitude to them had another year to run, after which he suspected he would be dispatched or, if lucky, merely forced to find someone to take his place before the ephemeral monsters released him. It wasn’t as if he could escape them on his own. Where, in a world of ocean, could he hide from water creatures? He’d been young and insanely foolish, a ship captain’s cabin boy emptying the slops over the bow, unaware that their ship had entered demon-haunted, seaweed-ensnarled doldrums, oblivious to the horrors swimming in their wake. And then when he’d befouled them, he’d laughed in their faces. It was a wonder they had let him keep his; but afrits did nothing but for a reason. They had wanted something from him. They needed a human agent for their purpose. Oh, to be a ship’s mate again, to be free of these infernal tunnels, to breathe sea air and not worry about the likes of these misfortunate boys…which thought brought him back to the problem at hand.

The simplest solution seemed to be to rent out Diverus as often as possible from now on.

 . . . . . 

There is much in life that seems random, events for which no obvious purpose is apparent even though they may compound. In the aftermath only can a pattern be discerned—missteps lead to an inevitable conclusion, an inescapable fate, sometimes doom and sometimes triumph. We curse the one and pretend to be responsible for the other, while neither fortune is true.

The next evening the paidika opened for business again. Only two of the boys were still out of commission, and that was excuse enough for Bogrevil to recommend Diverus to some of the clients. Immediately this proved unnavigable: He had been too clever. Previously he had talked so many of them
out
of engaging the handsome “damaged mute” that the first time he proffered Diverus like some newfound treasure, he got a look of such intense shock and loathing from the client that he made a great show of laughing nervously and proclaiming the suggestion “just my little joke,” before sending the client off with a reliable boy at half the going rate by way of an apology. Then he sat on the steps with a blighted look about the eyes.

He could not recall which or how many of the various strutting peacocks he’d dissuaded from Diverus in the past. There had been so many. If he didn’t refrain from promoting Diverus, he would surely see his reputation suffer—one could not habitually cover such an injudicious suggestion with a bit of laughter or soon the clients would decide for themselves that he was unreliable, and then he would find himself at the mercy of the afrits’ smoke. However he looked at it, promoting Diverus spelled doom.

The result was that Diverus was demoted back to walking about with a tray strapped to his head, and Bogrevil chose the last remaining punishment available when he loudly ordered Diverus to clean the three parlors after everyone had gone. “An’ before you retire, too—you don’t sleep till these rooms is spotless!” He had to hope that such a bellowed exaction sounded harsh enough. At least until he could think up something else. Meanwhile, he discovered that he had a much more pressing—and annoying—problem: his musician.

After a night of blissful accompaniment provided by the donated trio of players, Bogrevil found the out-of-tune plinking of the household instrumentalist no longer tolerable. It was a shortcoming that needed remedy, or else he would assuredly strangle the talentless lad in short order.

The trio had left behind a shawm, bestowing it upon the paidika as a kind of lagniappe, for indeed they had been richly compensated by the lubricious crowd all through the night, more so than at any venue where they’d previously performed. Bogrevil had even petitioned to buy their contract from the guest who happened to be their owner, but the price proved wildly immoderate. Nevertheless, he couldn’t—he just couldn’t—go back to the discordant torture that had graced the parlors before then. How had he ever tolerated it?

In a moment of brilliance—at least, he thought so—he proposed a contest to all the boys in the house, that whoever was able play the shawm would be relieved of all other cleaning and serving duties and
elevated
to the position of musician, a proposal dependent upon their ignorance of the fact that
musician
was not a title currently deserving of any respect at all, and certainly not something to which one aspired given the verbal abuse their master and his customers had heaped upon the hapless boy and his tuneless lute from the very first night. For those serving, however, the prospect was so much better than their current station that, one after another during that slow night, they took up the shawm and tried to play it—with unsurprising if excruciating results.

If an untuned lute was a pitiful thing to hear, the squeals of a tortured reed proved infinitely worse. Many of the boys could produce noises on it, but no one was able to produce music. For the paidika the only consequent benefit was that arriving clients were quick to pay for and select a boy for the evening and go off to a distant chamber just to escape the teeth-grating cacophony.

Word of the contest spread to the depths of the laundry, and those with enough sense and a desire to escape their fate made the climb up and crowded the hallways. Abnevi was brought along, too, but unhinged as he was he could neither determine which end of the shawm went into his mouth nor tell when—as it happened, never—he was making music.

Watching each of his peers fail, Diverus found no reason to try it himself. He knew he had never held a musical instrument in his life. Instead he stayed away from the parlors and out of Bogrevil’s way, even hiding in the stairwell to Bogrevil’s chambers, where he managed to doze awhile.

Finally, late in the night, long after all the boys had tried and failed and retreated dismally to their inescapable duties and from there finally to bed, he entered the empty middle parlor to gather mugs and plates to carry to the kitchen. Some client’s grubby hand had smeared a wall with an oily print, and he brought in a bucket from the kitchen and scrubbed at the mark.

Having cleaned the handprint, Diverus wandered over to the pillows where the lute and the shawm lay. For all their efforts no one had managed to coax a single musical strain out of the shawm. It seemed likely to Diverus that the hapless musician would have his job back tomorrow. Perhaps he would improve now that his position had been so threatened. Perhaps he would practice.

Diverus picked the shawm up to look at it more closely. The reed mouthpiece had been deformed by teeth biting it too hard, boys clamping and chewing on it in an attempt to accomplish what they could not through blowing. The tubular body was still gaily painted, though the lacquer was worn away around the holes from many fingers over many years. The wider bell had been chipped, but long ago. It now bore Abnevi’s teeth marks, too. It had seen a lot of use before arriving here.

The instrument felt odd in his hands, soft and pliable, but he assumed that this was because his arms were tired. His palms seemed to slide around the shawm as if they and it were old friends. Without thinking he lifted it to his mouth, and his lips pressed tightly around the reed. His eyes rolled closed. The sound of blood roared in his ears; then, distantly, he heard a drone that rose and fell and swirled, catching him up. He felt as if he were approaching the place again where the sphinx dwelled—close, he was so close, and the swirl of the music took on added urgency as he strained, and failed, to reach that place. He could almost hear her voice again.
It wants music—
the whisper threaded past him in the darkness of his mind.

When he opened his eyes a client was staring at him. Perhaps the man had been sitting outside one of the private rooms, disheveled and drunk on the essence he’d smoked; he was pressed against the tiled edge of the doorway as though it were the floor and he had fallen there. His hands pressed to his face beneath a look of wonderment, or shock, as if what he’d heard had cut into some private and forgotten piece of his soul.

A few moments later Bogrevil arrived from wherever he had been. The disquiet of his features might have been rage, and Diverus, reacting to the look, quickly put down the shawm and stepped away from it. “I’m sorry,” he said. Confused by what he’d done—not really certain what he’d done—he spoke the words before he could compose himself. He hadn’t meant to speak, but he couldn’t take it back, too late.

The master of the paidika then proved himself a master of the obvious. “You spoke,” he said, and in those two syllables was an undertone that said he ought to have known all along.

“I—” He could think of nothing to say, and his voice sounded as raw and strange as when he’d spoken to Eskie. He cleared his throat, lowered his eyes. In the shadows behind Bogrevil, others were arriving, stumbling, shambling.

“Never mind the words now. Pick that thing up.” Bogrevil pointed at the shawm.

Reluctantly, Diverus obeyed. “I meant no harm,” he said.

“Put it to your lips again.”

He needed no coaxing: Drawn to action by the very touch of the shawm, he tasted the reed again, tasted his own spit, and in an instant the sound emerged. He tried to watch his fingers close over the holes, to watch as a tune settled over him like a cape, coming from he knew not where; but his eyes rolled up of their own accord and he floated away, back into the dreamspace where she dwelled. His mother the sphinx was there, somewhere; he could feel her like a breeze upon his cheek, and in the distance that pale rectangle of light that he’d seen in his vision, and there, the pink slab of marble…Whether the song lasted one minute or ten, he didn’t know, but when he returned to his senses he saw that the client in the front had sunk to his knees and was sobbing. Others—boys who should have been abed, other clients who emerged from the corridors—gaped at him, struck dumb. Weaving through the paidika, the sound had pulled them here, its magic so powerful that clients had come without their masks and costumes. Two women stood in their midst, having shed their male disguises; one was half undressed, as was the man with her, suggestive of the manner in which they’d been sharing the afrit smoke. And the afrits—had they allowed the people to escape? Did the music affect them, too, the way the flute of a snake charmer entranced a cobra?

With the tune ended, some of them looked at the others with a shock of recognition, as if they were acquainted outside the brothel and would never have dreamed of finding one another here. At the back, Eskie peered apprehensively between two of the boys.