Shadowbridge (27 page)

Bogrevil drew a deep breath. If he’d been angry at first, the wide-eyed look upon his face now wasn’t rage at all, but something like ebullience. He entered the parlor and held out his hand. Diverus gave him the shawm.

“Why,” he asked gravely, “have you kept this skill, this gift—for it’s surely what the gods gave you upon that dragon beam—why have you kept it a secret from us?”

“I didn’t know I knew it.”

A moment longer Bogrevil stared at him. Then he laughed deep in his throat, once, twice. He turned to look at the assembled clients. “
This
is my anniversary present.” He pointed back at Diverus, chuckling as he did. “I’m blessed by the gods themselves, am I not?” He seemed to become aware of the state of his audience, cleared his throat, and then to no one in particular stated, “Yes, it is not the policy of this establishment to cater to the female sex. It’s not my prejudice, but the law of the span, which I’m sure everyone on the span knows. This being a special night, exceptions will be made…still, let’s not be
advertising
our violation, hmm?” When no one moved, he added, “He’s not going to play no more right now, so get off.”

At that they did disperse, albeit with reluctance, some up the stairs, others to collect their masks and costumes. The boys looked their new musician over with a mix of resentment and reverence. Bogrevil had Kotul help the weeping client up and on his way, and then said to Diverus, “I can’t let you have this back just yet. Got to get them all out the door and the rest of us to bed, or we’ll be standing here all night. You could transfix the sun and hold the night with that reed.” He bent down and lifted the untuned lute by its neck from the pillows, then handed that to Diverus. “Here. Amuse yourself with this instead.”

He strode back to Eskie and presented her the shawm. “For safekeeping. We’ll need it later, assuming—” He was interrupted by the strumming of the lute. Still out of tune, yet that had not kept Diverus from plucking a lilting phrase from it. Bogrevil wheeled about and watched him, amazed.

Diverus held the lute away from himself, and with his free hand turned the pegs one by one as though knowing exactly how much each needed to be adjusted. His eyes were strangely unfocused, as if he were listening to someone tell him how to accomplish this. When he strummed it again, the lute was in tune. The sound of it was as sweet as a zephyr, one that had never blown before through that sunken place.

Clients coming to the steps to leave stopped again and watched.

Bogrevil hurried to Diverus and covered the strings with a hand. Glazed dark eyes focused on him again, uncertain in their gaze. “Was I…” He saw the effect upon everyone and didn’t need to finish the question.

A small hourglass drum lay on its side, and Bogrevil picked that up. He snatched the lute away and handed him the drum, nodded at it. For a moment Diverus caressed its shape as if by instinct, as he might have done the body of a lover. Seating himself on the pillows, he began to play an easy, loose beat, and shortly added flourishes, making it complex, intriguing. There was magic in the rhythm beneath his palms and fingers.

“You can play anything?” asked Bogrevil.

Diverus stopped. He didn’t realize he had sat. He looked up at his owner. “I don’t…I don’t know where it comes from. I don’t know how it happens.”

“Well, don’t you worry on that, ’cause
I
do,” Bogrevil replied, and the look he wore was of a man envisioning great wealth.

 . . . . . 

Diverus became the celebrity of the paidika. The few who’d heard him that first night came back again the next, accompanied by a few more. While he played, the clients were transported, almost as they would have been by afrit smoke, and for far less investment—at least initially. They stood, leaned, sat, forgot their drinks, their conversation, even their established goal in coming here. One or two wept during a mournful passage he played on the shawm, and even Bogrevil looked stricken by the beauty of it when Diverus finally stopped—but not so stricken that he didn’t jump up immediately and take advantage of the now pliable clientele. It turned out that the music weakened their resistance to Bogrevil’s overtures. He easily matched them with boys, now also similarly docile, and sent them all off to the back rooms, even collecting a
higher
fee than he’d previously asked. His instinct for profit assured him that they would pay—he could smell their surrender—and they did, unhesitatingly. Either dazed by the music or magnanimous because of it, they met his price and went off to smoke the boys.

Almost immediately someone petitioned for Diverus’s company; Bogrevil was ready for that with a fee that he would never have asked for any boy before. The client looked stricken by the figure, but Bogrevil justified it. “For you to have him to yourself deprives everyone else of his magic—the music stops, you see. The smoke sucks the will out of him this night and likely tomorrow. The cost has to compensate for that much loss. You ain’t paying
me,
see, you’re paying all these good people to deprive them of the serenity he provides. But if you’re willing to cover it, he’s yours, make no mistake.” The client hastily declined and chose another, but that was all right. Bogrevil had his sights on other evenings. Word would get out, and someone would come along and pay it simply
because
the price was so exorbitant.

Meantime, word of the gods’ musician spread across the span.

Weeks passed, with Bogrevil fine-tuning performances, limiting the shawm to a few minutes a night or whenever a fight threatened to break out. Diverus developed a sense of when to pick it up in order to quiet the customers.

The shawm soon became but one among dozens of instruments: As word of him spread, so did the story that he could play anything given to him. At the end of the first week someone placed a santur before Diverus and handed him two sticks. He set down his lute, accepted the sticks, and with almost no pause delicately hammered a plangent tune that made people shiver. The next night someone gave him a single-stringed fiddle with a bow, and he made it sing as if with a human voice.

Two nights after that Kotul at the bottom of the steps called for Bogrevil, who came running from the back, thinking that a great disaster had befallen them. What he found was a line of curiosity seekers that extended all the way up the steps; each person had brought an instrument, and each wanted to make Diverus play it. It was a disaster in the making. The business of the paidika was becoming the performances of Diverus.

Thinking quickly, Bogrevil shouted up the steps, “It’s a condition of this establishment that if the boy can play your instrument, it remains
with
the establishment.” The line of turbaned, masked, cloaked men and women roared with indignation, but Bogrevil waved them silent. “Look here, nobody’s making you come down here like this—you have two choices. You either rent his time privately, in which case you can use him as you like, or you accept the challenge that he’ll play anything you hand him. The boy don’t come cheap, but that’s how it is. He’s blessed, and you pay for that.”

The line broke up. Only a few remained to accept the rules and challenge the boy with their obscure instruments. They all went home empty-handed, but in most cases not until Bogrevil had packed them off to one of the rooms in back. Even losing, they were transported by the music.

Disaster was averted, and money flowed copiously. Bogrevil thought that if he could sustain this level of income for even a few months, he would retire from the brothel with enough wealth to flee to some large isle—oh, there were some big enough, he’d heard it from travelers, five or six spans on—where he would live far away from the demons, the ocean, and the children for the rest of his life.

The pile of instruments surrounding Diverus grew steadily, a testament to his magical skill. He would pick up the simplest ocarina and then a small harp, without hesitating, without thinking, and play. Bogrevil luxuriated in the attention as if it were all about him.

Then one evening, moments after they had opened their doors for business, Mother Kestrel arrived. She had with her three youths, and they shoved aside the boy on the door and went down the stairs together in a cluster, a four-headed dreadnought. Above them the boy at the door stuck two fingers in his mouth and whistled a signal to Kotul at the bottom. The group made it halfway down before he stepped into view like a barbican gate dropped in their path. Her boys drew up and eyed her nervously. One complained, “You didn’t tell us about
him.
”

“I couldn’t, now, could I, being as how I’ve never been down this far.”

Bogrevil, sent for the moment the alarm was sounded, appeared beside his behemoth. “Ah, Mother K,
lovely
to see you as always,” he said. “Of course, you’re not really supposed to be here during business hours, are you? I mean, there
is
a prohibitive policy regarding undisguised female clients. ’Course, maybe you’d be unaware of that, bein’ as how you’re no client.”

She slipped down a few more steps while her escort hung back. “I’m not makin’ a delivery this time.”

“Well, there’s a pity, because they look strapping strong, your youngsters. I can always use boys with good constitutions. They last so much longer.”

“I’m here to talk about the idiot.”

Bogrevil glanced around as if to identify the subject. “I’m afraid,” he said at last, “I’ve got no idiot here at this time. My boys are rather more than that.” A tune played on a lute floated up the stairwell, crisp as a chilled wine.

“That’s what I’m talking about,” she said. “The stories come to me that our lad finally showed his gifts, what he got on the dragon beam.”

“
Our
lad? I wasn’t aware we’d ever coupled, you and I.”

One of the boys sniggered. Mother Kestrel came closer. “You know who I mean,” she accused. “Word is, you’re taking in a lot of coin on account of his gifts.”

“Well,
some,
certainly. But you know, we struck a bargain, you and I, when I took him in—that all his gifts and the proceeds from those gifts were to be mine alone—”

“I spoke in haste.”

“No doubt you did. You were aggrieved to have looked after him and took my recompense for your trouble. I recall that you were paid agreeably and that you discarded him with a great expression of relief.”

She stood a moment longer. “So you won’t cut me a share in him now that he’s valuable.”

“No,” he replied. “I don’t think I will. We concluded our bargain where he is concerned. Now, should you care to fob off another one so blessed by the gods, I’m sure I could be persuaded to pay less up front in exchange for what might manifest through divine intervention later on. It is a risk, isn’t it?”

“Bastard.”

“My dear, that’s a given, so you gain nothing by pointing it out.” He reached into a pocket and produced a gold coin. “Here.” He tossed it up the stairs to her, and she caught it as efficiently as a hawk snatching a meal out of the sky. “Never let it be said I’m ungenerous.”

She stared at the coin in her palm, then back at him. The coin was gold, and the fact that he could throw it to her so casually, dismissively, spoke volumes about the money he must have taken in on account of that creature she’d tended. For months and months she’d tended him. One coin only made her greedy for another, but she saw well enough that Bogrevil had no need to give her more. If she wanted her share, she would have to make
not
parting with it too dear for Mr. Bogrevil. She turned and started back up the steps.

“Very nice to see you again, m’dear,” he called after her. “Always looking for some good strong boys.” Her entourage parted as she pushed through them. One glanced down as if considering Bogrevil’s offer, but they all followed after her. The boy on the door was speaking to someone just outside. Mother Kestrel poked a finger toward him, and one of her lads dragged him out of the way.

 . . . . . 

“A short figure in a gray tunic and domino mask stood outside the paidika that night, blocking Mother Kestrel’s path,” says the narrator. On the screen of the booth then, the puppet figure of the shadow puppeteer appears, its malachite eyes gleaming, and the audience chuckles as the joke spreads: The puppeteer has become a figure in her own story.

“That figure was a master of puppets, and was eluding the amorous intentions of her hostess on that span—a woman named Rolend, who’d fallen under the spell of the puppeteer and desired his embrace, for she believed the puppeteer to be a man. In that clever disguise the puppeteer had hired a mangy procurer bearing his own torch to take her to a place where women were not allowed entry, thinking that this would protect her from pursuit by Rolend. If her disguise could fool that amorous woman, it would surely serve to gain her entry into the paidika.

“Yet even as she allowed the crone, Mother Kestrel, and her gang of thuggish oafs to depart, the puppeteer saw, back along the alley, the light of a pole-lantern, proof that she had not escaped her passionate pursuer after all. She paid the procurer and stepped quickly through the doorway of the paidika. The procurer turned his attention immediately to the woman and her gang of boys. Waving his torch overhead, he called, ‘Madame, good evening to you and your young fellows. If it’s further pleasures you’re looking for, allow me to guide you to them!’ The puppeteer watched him scurry, rat-like, after the woman. Then the door closed and she was safe inside the paidika.

“There was no hint then that she was about to have a life-changing encounter…”

 . . . . . 

Outside, the procurer hung back behind the line of Mother Kestrel’s thugs until they had passed the oncoming lantern, which turned out to be a guide and a statuesque woman in a cloak, whom he recognized as the mistress of Lotus Hall. The moment they’d passed, he wove around the trio and up behind Mother Kestrel, desperate to reach her before she exited the narrow lane. “You’ll need light to find your way,” he said. “Is there somewhere in particular you might wish to see? I know everywhere on the span, the places that would invite you in, not like that
exclusive
place back there.” He pronounced
exclusive
as if it disgusted him. While he babbled to her, one of her boys glided up and casually snapped a blackjack against the side of his head, relieving him of his purse even as he collapsed. The torch rolled and sputtered, but continued to burn. Mother Kestrel stopped and turned back. She sized up the situation. The lad tossed the purse to her, and she caught it as she walked back to him. “Good lad, Jemmy, I’ve taught you so well,” she said affectionately, and tousled his hair. To his utter amazement she then dropped the purse into the lane beside the dazed procurer. “Right now, my dears, we need to be respectable,
terribly
respectable, which means we can’t have the likes of him calling the law down upon us. No, no, no, for once we need those very forces ourselves. So, no more mischief. Not till I solve my little problem with Mr. Bogrevil.” She walked on.