II
DIVERUS

 

 

This is the way, when someone asked, that Leodora told his tale:

 

 

 

There was once a silent boy who lived beneath the bridge. He lived neither on an island nor on land, nor even upon the water, but within the frame of a span itself. Chiseled supports and struts formed the foundation of the span, beams and cross-ties created an intricate latticework of layers between them, and upon these platforms were laid surfaces on which huts and fortifications were erected, all at different heights and lengths because no one who built there required the permission of anyone else, and few there were who sought others’ opinions. Mad geometries were the result.

As a baby the boy had sat outside his tiny hovel and looked without understanding upon the random sections of this sub-rosa city. From his platform a ladder ran to the next, which was suspended at a slightly higher level and broad enough that three dwellings had been erected across it. Another ladder, of rope, declined to a level below theirs on the opposite side.

Few houses beneath the bridge had roofs because there were no elements to protect anyone from—save the prying eyes of those situated above. The thick stalactitic surface of the span provided all necessary protection, and just acquiring the materials to erect walls was hard enough. In most cases divers, who lived on the lower levels, brought up the stone from the sea bottom, especially from around the piers, where the rocky ocean floor had been crushed and heaped as far down as anyone could see. It cost money to pay the divers, and more to have the stones hauled up on ropes and pulleys from layer to layer through the underspan hierarchy. Everyone knew that a stone was going to disappear here and another there as the pile of rock ascended, and if you were lucky and the pullers not too greedy, perhaps half of the original pile made the journey. It was the way of the underspan and no use railing at its unfairness; it had been thus for centuries and would be thus for centuries more. What it meant, however, was that walls were not built very high, but more like boundary markers than sides of a house. Most were not even as tall as the inhabitants themselves. There would be one entrance, and only the one great room. Privacy was at best an untested notion. There was always someone on a level above yours. You learned quickly which corners of your home offered sanctuary or at least deep shadows, and you conducted your intimacy there.

The boy often spent his time looking down at other people, whose behavior was as alien to him as the life of insects. Like insects, they seemed to live in patterns. The patterns he could make out, though not their meaning.

All of this may seem uncommon and strange, but on almost every span of Shadowbridge we know, substructural societies flourish below the main boulevards. Many forms of life thrive in caverns, and more in shadows, in the dark. Some of them can’t stand the light at all.

 

 

 

By the time he turned fourteen, the boy had no family.

His mother died of a wasting disease, and her body was ejected into the sea with little ceremony; his father, a man of scant talent and less ambition, had only remained with her because she managed to bring in money by begging upon the surface of the span. She used the boy for this. Even as a baby he was clearly, visibly deficient. The impoverished mother clutching her damaged child while reaching one claw of a hand toward passersby tugged at all but the hardest hearts, and she did very well for herself, for her husband. When she died the father unraveled. He knew he couldn’t care for a child, never mind one who was practically an idiot. He was the sort of man who preferred to be blown from place to place by the winds of fortune. Wherever he went he’d always found someone to take care of him, exactly as the boy’s mother had done. He had pretended to go off in search of work every morning, and she must have known he wasn’t really doing anything more than finding someplace to drink up her coin, but she never said anything to him, because he was handsome and solicitous, always showing her kindness, always promising to do better the next time, although he never did. He was handsome enough still to think he could find such a situation again, provided he didn’t bring any baggage along. He was looking over the wall of his house at his son as he thought this.

The silent boy sat near the edge of the platform with his feet dangling as he stared across the underside of the bridge, down and down to the water. He focused upon the spot where his mother’s body had vanished. He could remember every detail of how her form, wrapped in a sheet, had been carried three platforms away, where the inhabitant had assembled a chute for the disposal of the deceased; how his father had paid the inhabitant a few coins and then carried her to the edge of the chute and callously slid her off.

In his interior world the boy imagined that she had turned into a merwoman or a siren, or even a fish. He assumed that this was the natural order of things and that one day the same would happen to him, although he didn’t like the idea of becoming a fish and being caught and eaten by someone living up here, which is what happened to fish every day—he might even be caught and brought up to be eaten by himself. After all, who could say with certainty that the flow of time didn’t allow such things to happen? Who could be certain time didn’t fold over upon itself or weave back and forth like an Ondiont snake on the surface of the ocean? Certainly not he with his swirled thoughts. He didn’t want to eat his mother, and so he made up his mind that she was not a fish but a sea creature, definitely a merwoman living now in a city on the bottom of the ocean. It was a city that looked like the one where his mother had taken him to beg, up above. It had towers and spires of stone and glazed tile, bright pennants and lamps, and happy people—of course, they would all have fish bodies.

Time passed, and he lay down under the weight of this dream and dozed.

All the while he dreamed of his mother’s transformed life, his father was busy gathering up a few belongings from the house. He paused to watch the boy sleeping, curled up at the edge of the platform. If he felt anything at all for his child, perhaps he felt it then; but it wasn’t strong enough to move him to action—at least not to action in the boy’s favor.

The poles of a ladder clacked against the side of the platform from a level below, directing the father’s attentions toward the group who appeared one after the other at the top—a father and mother and two daughters. They were better dressed than he, in clothes that might have been castoffs from the richer people on the surface. They approached him, and he welcomed them, let them inspect the house, turn over the pallets, stir the ashes in the tiny hearth. There were pots, a skillet. He was leaving all that behind. Close up, the family stank the way fish did after floating for a few days. If they noticed the sleeping boy out at the far edge of the platform they said nothing, and finally they gave the father his money, enough to keep him lubricated until he’d left this span far behind. He clasped hands with the father, then threw his pack over his shoulder and climbed up the ladder to the next level, and on from there, until the gloom of the place swallowed him up as if he’d never been.

The new family spent the day carrying belongings up from the water’s edge where they’d been living, and where everything smelled like brine and rot. They carried the smell with them but it would go away, now they had moved up to better accommodations. Here they would have to live with nothing worse than cooking smells. Much higher and the air would have been smoky all the time. This was better, they thought—a perfect balance between the green swirling ocean and the dark heights beneath the span.

A black bird swooped in through the tangle of habitations and landed beside the boy. It tilted its head one way and then the other, and finally hopped over and cawed at him. He woke to shining beady eyes just inches from his own. The bird plucked at his hand as if he had food hidden there. The boy sat up, and the bird squawked and flew off. He rubbed his eyes and looked around. The sun was sinking. The whole underside of the span burned orange in the light, and each spar and beam threw off stretching shadows cut out of the air. Down below, fishing boats had tied up around the piers. His eyes moved to the one important spot in the ocean again, but there was nothing to see. He stood and shuffled back home.

If anything seemed peculiar about his home, he didn’t notice it until he had entered the doorway. A little girl stepped out and barred his way. She wasn’t any older than he, but she rose up as if inflating, and ordered him to get out. He couldn’t understand what she was doing in his house. Because he’d been asleep, he experienced the odd sensation that he’d dreamed his whole life before now, and it had evaporated forever the moment he awoke. His father was nowhere in the house, and all the scattered clothing and belongings lying about were things he’d never seen before.

Seized by terror, all he could do was wave his arms and wail wordlessly. The two adults rushed from their fire.

They didn’t know what to make of him any more than their daughter had, but they were not heartless, and it was clear he thought he lived here. The man who’d bought the platform from the boy’s father had indeed noticed him sleeping at the far edge, but because the boy had gone unmentioned, not even looked at, he’d assumed him to be a passing vagrant and nothing to do with the house; now he suspected that the boy had lived here and the man who’d sold them this place had known it. But it was too late to do anything about that—he knew that man would be long gone. The couple communicated to him that he could stay the night; in the morning they would solve his problem. He sat by the door, ragged and sullen. Two small girls now occupied the space that had been his. The one who had confronted him remained awake after her sister and made faces at him. He might have run off that night, and the man and wife would not have minded if they’d awakened in the morning and found him gone, but he lacked the sensibility to forge such a plan, much less set out on his own. He stayed.

In the morning the man took him to a different platform, well across the width of the underspan from his own. A woman lived there with a house full of children. The man and this woman bargained and bickered about him as if he weren’t standing beside them. She said, “Look, I’ve got a full house now, more than I can feed, and half of them can’t steal for spit despite my best efforts to teach ’em. The rest are all what keeps us above the tide. What you want me to do with another, then? What’s he got for me?” She knelt and looked him in the eye. Her breath was foul, her teeth brown and rotten. She clutched his wrists tightly. “What talent do you have, boy?” Her tone implied nothing friendly.

The boy could not think of any talent, and the woman frightened him. He looked away from her.

“Dumb, is it? He can’t even talk? What good is he to me?” She let go his arms and straightened up. “I can’t use him.”

The man said, “What happened to the girl you put out on the beam?”

“How you know about her? Wasn’t one of your girls, anyhow, so you’ve no business asking.”

“She bring anything back for you?”

“Nah. Ran off, she did. Someone cut her loose, took her away. Probably felt sorry for her. Took her off my hands, anyway, and that’s good enough. Could have had her for supper for all I care. Nothing would have come of it anyway, that old beam hain’t lit in years of waiting.”

The man looked down at him. “Still,” he said, “it’s a position that needs filling.”

“Fine, then you take him up there and you look after him while he waits.”

“I can’t go up there anymore. You know that. If they saw me…”

“Yeah, I know all about that, now, don’t I? You got two daughters and a wife now what don’t know nothin’ about your life before. If she knew, would she let you near them girls anymore?” She smirked at his discomfort. “You’re gonna tell me you’ve changed, hain’t you? Well, don’t bother. Matters nothing to me whether you have or not.” She glanced down at the boy, and her fingers curled like vines around his chin. “Your troubles don’t make a case for this sad bit of drool.”

The man stood awhile in silence, whether in contemplation or anger, the boy couldn’t have told; but finally he reached over and drew her hand away from the boy. She hadn’t expected his touch and jumped at the contact. The man held her hand from underneath, her fingers still curled as if cupping the boy’s chin. He placed his free hand on top of it. The boy saw something shiny slip from the man’s fingers into hers; then he let go with both, but her hand remained there, hovering just in front of the boy’s eyes. She uncurled her fist and contemplated its fresh contents. “All right, then,” she said, and glanced his way askance. “I’ll take him to fill a vacancy. But if he’s rewarded, his gift is mine. I don’t share.”

“A fair enough bargain,” the man agreed. He didn’t expect the mindless boy to do anything other than starve out on that beam, as countless others had done before him and would do again; but the important thing was, it would not be his problem. He would never have to see it happen, which meant that so far as he was concerned, it never did. A million cruelties occurred each day, but out of sight and out of mind.

He knelt and told the boy, “Now, you stay here with Mother Kestrel and she’ll provide for you. Whatever she says, you do it for her, just like she’s your own mother. Do that and everything will work out for you.”

The boy stared back at him the way a fish might have, and the man doubted that anything he said had penetrated. In fact, the boy was visiting his mother again, under the sea. He had always obeyed her, and still she had left him.

The man roughed the boy’s hair as he stood again. He gave the woman one more look that might have been a warning or resignation. Then he walked away, climbed down the ladder, and was gone.

“Well, come in, then,” said the woman, and she grabbed him by the hair and dragged him beside her.

 

 

 

The woman did feed him that day. More than a dozen children were crammed into her dwelling. They approached him, sniffing around him, trying to figure out what he might be, and whether or not his presence meant trouble for them. He’d never been near so many other children before and shied away from them, behavior that only got him into trouble, as it made him an easy target for the bullies in the group. He had no defenses. Soon enough most of the others had allied against him behind the bullies and teased him, plucked at his ragged clothes, called him names, told him he smelled awful, laughed at him. They might as well have taunted a toadstool. He cowered against the wall until the woman came and drove off the attackers. She kept him away from them the rest of the day, even feeding him separately. He got a larger portion than the others and they resented him for that, too, even though their own tyranny was the cause. They swore among themselves that the next day he would be made to pay.

The boy dozed fitfully that night, exhausted by constant fear but on guard against a concerted assault. Some hours before dawn, the woman woke him and led him out of the house. She gave him a crust to gnaw on while they traveled, and a small pack that he was to carry. They went up and down ladders, across makeshift bridges until they reached a ledge carved out of the bridge support itself. They moved by feel alone then, because no light reached the cavernous recesses just below the surface of the span. They walked carefully along the ledge. The trapped air hung thick as tepid gruel, and it stank of humans and oily fish and offal. The ledge led them out into the air. One moment all was blackness and the next a sky shot with stars stretched above them. The boy stared up in awe at the sight and nearly stepped off the ledge into the air. Only the woman’s grip saved him. She muttered a curse and yanked on his arm to get his attention.

A flight of perilously narrow steps led up to the surface of the span. He remembered the steps. His mother had led him up them every morning and down them every evening. Seeing them, remembering her, he tried to look back again at the sea where she’d slid under the surface, but he couldn’t glimpse that spot from here and the woman was hauling him up. They emerged into an alley and from there onto one of the broader cobbled streets.

He’d never seen this world after dusk. He stared at everything, glimpsing towers and minarets like shapes cut out of the night. People strolled about, not as many as during the day, but they all seemed to be disguised behind masks and capes, feathers and jewels, and someone brandishing a torch or a lantern led their way. From the street Mother Kestrel turned into another alley. The boy heard voices echo in it, whispers that seemed nearby but came from empty corners. The alley snaked around as if going somewhere but in the end dumped them back at the edge of the span again. Along the horizon, a thread of reddish glow hinted at the approach of dawn.

Across the road there was a break in the railing as there’d been where they emerged, but this time there were no steps down. Instead a skinny curving walkway projected from the edge of the span out into the void—a beam above the ocean. The woman dragged him out along it indifferently. Over the side he could see all the way to the ocean. It was a long, long way down. Waves shimmered upon the black surface, but not a sound could he hear.

Halfway out, a low wall curved up along one side of the beam, while on the other side, only pieces of the wall remained here and there like rotted teeth, having collapsed sometime in the past. People huddled against the bits of wall, one or two with their knees drawn up, another with his legs stretched in defiance across the width of the walk. The boy could see him watching, eyes shining in the pits of his sockets, as they climbed over his barrier and continued to the end of the beam.

A concave bowl hung off the end. The crumbling wall gave way to a ring of bollards supporting a circular railing. Perhaps twenty people could have sat around the ring at the top of the bowl, but only four were in the bowl at the moment.

The woman chose a spot for the boy and told him to sit. He was still watching the man they’d had to step over, paying her no mind. She had to push on his shoulders to make him sit. When finally he realized what she wanted, he complied at once. She took the pack from him, opened it, and drew out a length of chain. This she threaded between two bollards and back in around one of them, drawing it tight, and then securing it with a lock. The loose section of it ended in a cuff. The woman fitted this about the boy’s ankle and snapped it shut. He looked in puzzlement at his foot, then at her.

“There’s a good lad,” she told him. “You’ve got length enough to move about some, to relieve yourself off the edge as needs be. I’ll come back with food for you but you’re going to have to make do otherwise. You have to wait and hope and curry the gods’ favor. They appear here sometimes,” she said, “come to those who wait, who show their true and good hearts. If the gods favor you, then we will be blessed, you and me. You’ll have something no one else has. Don’t know what it will be, but we’ll hope it makes us rich. You hope for that. Think on that. All the time you’re here. You want the gods to understand what you need if you’re to have it.”

When she walked away he tried to crawl after her out of the bowl, until the chain snapped tight and he fell on his chin. He made a whining sound, but the woman didn’t hear. She had gone, back along the beam, back into the alleys, and back into her underworld. What she didn’t tell him was that he was the fourth child she’d chained to the dragon beam, that the first two had died—one of starvation, the other by foul play when no one was about—and the third had been set free to disappear, but probably to no good fortune. What she didn’t tell him was that everything she believed about the dragon beam, and the gods, and how they chose to appear, was based on gossip and invention and steeped in envy.

 

 

 

The Dragon Bowl became his existence. He didn’t starve, because the woman had learned from experience, and returned every couple of days with food for him—not a lot of food but enough to keep him alive. At first no one spoke to him or even acknowledged that he was there. The man who’d watched him being chained up came onto the bowl and sat close by, but pretended not to notice him, and then began to whisper imprecations. Even the feeble-minded boy understood that the man was whispering to imaginary beings, asking questions and hearing silent answers to which he responded. He babbled loudly until others ventured into the bowl. When they did, the madman curled up and clutched his belongings, wrapped in a shred of cloth, to his chest, and eyed them accusingly.

People came and went throughout the day. There were young lovers who came for the novelty of it, and described for each other what they would wish for if the gods were to appear. Often this was wealth, but as often it was to be happily in love with their partner forever. There were those who showed themselves to be terrified at the prospect of stepping onto the rim of the bowl, despite the number of people already waiting in it. The boy watched them all.

The first night the madman edged over to him and said, “I know you’re stealing my luck. I know you are. You can’t have it, you hear me? If you try and take it, I’ll throw you over, right into the ocean.” He grabbed the chain and yanked at it, but he couldn’t unwrap it from the bollard any more than the boy could. After a while he seemed to forget what he was doing; he took his bundle and moved back onto the dragon beam. “My luck,” he repeated, but no longer to the boy.

Three days later when the sun came up he was gone, and only the bundle remained to mark his place. The boy managed to reach it and drag it into the bowl before anyone else saw it lying there. Inside the cloth lay a broken phial containing nothing, a wooden button, some black polished stones and white polished shells, a heel of bread that had gone green with mold long ago, and fragments of a parchment that had been written upon, but torn into strips. The meaningless contents of the bundle filled him with despair, and he savagely fought with the chain and the shackle until he’d rubbed his ankle raw and bleeding. Another man came along the beam, saw the scattered items at the top of the bowl, and scooped them up. He picked at each in turn, disappointed with each find, and finally tossed the whole thing off the side of the beam. “Worthless,” he proclaimed.

The boy gestured at the chain attached to him, begging the man to set him free. “You want me to set you free?” the man responded incredulously. “Free?” He began swatting at the boy, slapping and beating him, and all the while saying calmly, “It is your duty to wait on this spot for the gods to honor you. Your duty!” He made one final, ineffectual kick at the boy before moving across the bowl and squatting on the far side, where he searched the sky as if for a sign, a reward. Nothing happened, and he finally gave up looking and hunkered down and fell asleep.

From the beating the boy learned one important thing—to be invisible. He remained a huddling shape, his head down, reflecting his defeat in life, expressing that he would take any gift the gods condescended to give him.

The woman came the next day and fed him. She noted the state of his ankle and slapped him on the head, one more bruise to teach him nothing. He was by then too exhausted to fight back or protect himself, though he would have rejoiced if the cruel man across the Dragon Bowl had jumped up and killed her. Instead the man snorted as if concurring that the boy was getting his just deserts.

Thus went his days. He sat unprotected in all weather, crouching to hide from the sun, lying flat in the curve of the bowl when the rains came and washed the dirt off all of them into the center of the bowl, where it drained back into the ocean. The floor of the bowl was tiled but he couldn’t understand what the tiles represented, if they represented anything at all, so many of them were missing.

One day a woman stabbed a man to death at the end of the beam and then leapt over the railing to her own death. The man, who had tried to assault her, died hung across the railing, watching his blood trickle into the sea. The next morning he’d been pushed off, too.

The boy didn’t have any idea how long he remained chained up. His leg festered and healed. The rain seemed to cleanse the wound, but rotted his clothes until they were tatters.

True to her word, the woman continued to bring him food. She seemed surprised by his tenacity. Every time she came now, she said, “I bet this is the last time I see you.” But he was always there the next time, emaciated and exhausted.

The food she brought seemed of a better quality then, as if she were so awed by his continuance that she was rewarding him. She touched him each time before she left, gently, almost tenderly. He couldn’t understand the look in her eyes.

One afternoon someone jumped off the beam. The boy leaned over the wall to watch the body drop to the ocean. He had only seen the movement of the jumper peripherally; he didn’t even know if it was a man, a woman, or a child. He might have jumped then, too, if it would have finished him quick; but he knew he would only have ended up dying slowly upside down, hung from the railing by the chain. It would also have called attention to him, and whoever hauled him back up would surely have beaten him again, or worse.

When the visitation finally came, he was asleep.

It was so silent and swift that he didn’t even stir. In his dream the world flashed white, scalding his eyelids. Something thin and tall spoke to him in a reedy voice, words that were not human language yet which he understood after a fashion, the syllables weaving through his brain, knitting together things that had never been united before, bits of thought that had never found a way to coalesce, words like a glue to bond the strips of parchment in the madman’s bundle.

He awoke to someone babbling nearby. The light of dawn gilded the Dragon Bowl through the spaces between the bollards. It lit the face of the man babbling beside him. He remembered the man from the day before, remembered that he’d been surly and greasy. Now the man stared with wide eyes, and his hair had gone white as clouds and sprayed out from his head.

The bowl itself had been transformed. The missing tiles had all been replaced, creating a colorful mosaic. On it lay a host of small objects, all clear like glass but flexible—containers and lids scattered about. The people who’d been sleeping on or near the beam scrambled out onto the bowl and began grabbing up the objects. Lids seemed to be the wrong size for containers, and the people combed through the scatter in a frenzy, tossing one and then another lid aside, shoving one another to get at the next, fighting over a complete container whenever a lid fit. The sealed containers seemed to have an effect on whoever held them, for anyone who made a lid pop into place immediately began to wail—more as if they’d lost something than in joy at completion of a task. Some struck those nearest them with the completed containers, while others collapsed and clutched them to their bosoms, rocking back and forth while weeping as if they held a dead child in their arms.

More people traveled along the beam every moment, pouring out, filling the bowl. Citizens of the span had seen the visitation—that was what the boy heard them calling it—and all wanted to share in whatever bounty the gods had left. Word of the event spread quickly, even to the underspan. Within the hour the boy’s keeper had pushed her way along the beam to find him. She demanded that he give her whatever the gods had bestowed upon him. He drew a container from behind his back and handed it to her. He’d found a lid to match it and handed that to her as well. He waited breathlessly to see if she would fit the lid into place. Instead she stared with swelling anger at the two pieces. “This? This is what I’ve fed you for all these months? The time I’ve invested in you, and you give me a container for fish scraps?” She backhanded him as if he had lied to her. “I thought—” She paused, shook her head, and sighed. “I let myself believe in you, in this, how stupid am I? You are useless to me.” As she said it, she bent down and snatched another of the small containers that had been overlooked, hiding it in her blouse. “Useless,” she repeated, and then, as if she’d forgotten about him, she walked around the bowl and back along the beam. Only then did he notice that the beam, like the tiles, had been repaired—that an intact low wall now ran along both sides of the narrow walkway, as must have been the case when it first appeared. The woman stepped off the beam and was accosted immediately; from what he could see, she began bargaining with citizens too frightened to come out themselves and grab one of the odd containers.

The boy didn’t understand any of it—not the woman, not the crazed people about him, not the excitement over an event that seemed to have produced nothing of value. What sort of gods played such tricks on people? They’d repaired the tiles and the beam—that seemed to be the major transformation, but of interest only to him.

He sat against the rail and watched. He had nothing, said nothing, and no one paid him much mind. As people got something, they deserted the beam, but there were many who, now that a visitation had occurred, decided to sit and wait for another. It would all begin again. It must.

Because of the “blessed” event, there would for a time be more people on the beam and in the hexagonal bowl on any given day, more abusers of children, more who resented his presence here, never mind that he was a prisoner and would gladly have left if they’d freed him. For a while everyone would anticipate the next visitation, until this one faded into memory and most of the cormorants drifted away, back to whatever routine had filled their days before.

He rocked in place, furiously frustrated by the stupidity of people. After a while different ones came and took the madman with the white hair by the arms, stood him up, and walked him down the beam. One glanced his way, and the boy said, “Please, take me, too.” The two paused. They contemplated him as if considering whether he was worth the effort; but he didn’t notice them any longer because he realized that he had spoken. He had spoken and it had made sense. Thoughts inside his head were making sense. He was observing the world around him and it was making sense—or at least the nonsense of it all was suddenly comprehensible to him as nonsense. For the first time in his life, he recognized and understood the motives of others.

The madman took notice of him and began to laugh. The two handlers dismissed the boy and hurried on with their charge.

He was aware! He stared up at the sky, at clouds and birds and sun. Whatever the gods had done for everyone else, they had given him the gift of himself.

He was still marveling at his transformation when the woman returned some hours later. She told him, “Well, I’ve found someone to take you off my hands, and that’s what I’m going to do.” She unlocked the chain from the bollards but not from his ankle. She let him get to his feet, but then pulled him along, and he had to hop to keep up.

They arrived back on the span. He wanted to run off, he wanted to shout at her for how she had treated him, but he did neither. He pretended to be the idiot she saw. His skinny legs trembled from disuse. It had been so long since he had walked anywhere beyond the length of the chain, and he was starved. He intended to bide his time, to see what she had in mind. While he now had the gift of thought, he still didn’t know much about the world or how it worked.

She led him through twisting alleys and small rough streets, avoiding the main thoroughfares, where his situation might have proved inconvenient for her, and finally came to the very end of the span. The great wall of the tower rose up before them; but instead of taking him into the tower and off the span, she turned and walked down the narrowest of lanes with the tower wall on the left and the fronts of houses on the right, so close that he could have climbed in their windows even on the chain. The lane was a cul-de-sac, but near the end of it a dark doorway had been carved out of the tower wall.

The woman banged on the door, and it opened almost immediately. A slender but round-faced man with darting eyes stood there, dressed in an embroidered robe that was belted slackly at his waist, revealing a hairy abdomen above loose trousers. He beamed at the woman. She handed him the chain. He looked the boy up and down. “He ain’t much,” he said. “Looks like a skellington, he does.”

“I told you, Bogrevil, he’s been living on the bowl, waiting for the gods.”

“I heared they come last night. They talk to you, boy?”

The boy kept his mouth closed and acted as if the question had been directed at Mother Kestrel.

“He’s mute?” Bogrevil asked.

“Yes, as I told you, he’s an idiot,” she replied testily. “You don’t want him, that’s fine, I’ll be on my way.” She reached for the chain, but Bogrevil drew it out of her reach, which tugged the boy inside the doorway.

Bogrevil said, “If he’s been visited by the gods, then I get whatever he’s got. You don’t.”

The woman looked at the boy, but he stared dumbly at the ground as if unaware of his circumstances. She snorted with laughter. “Oh, I’ll agree to that. He’s got anything from here on, it’s yours to keep, including vermin.”

Bogrevil reached out and dropped three coins into her hand then. “Excellent,” he said and drew the boy closer to him. “And if you find yourself with any other boys to be rid of, you know where to find me, m’dear. I’m always in need of stock.” He reeled the boy through the doorway and shut the door with the kick of one foot.

“There’s an end to that,” said Bogrevil. Outside the door, the woman was expressing a similar opinion, though with a curious pang of regret. She had foolishly put her faith in that boy simply because he hadn’t died. She’d let herself become sentimental. Never again, she swore. Never again.

In the dusty and dimly lit foyer Bogrevil took him by the shoulders and pressed them back, tilted his chin up, then stepped away from him. “You’re skinny as fishbones, but that’s from her feeding you on air and dreams. Otherwise you’re well turned out, or will be when you’ve had sommit to eat. Waste of talent, though. None of my clients will want to inhale an idiot. Still, we’ll find a use for you. See if you can juggle a tray, hmm?” When the boy did not respond, Bogrevil patted his cheek and released him. “Well, come on, then, follow me.” He threw back a curtain, and light from a distant source below him splashed his shadow across the ceiling of the foyer. “We’ll get you fed and bathed and into some whole clothes.” He started down a steep stairwell. The boy had forgotten about the chain, and nearly stumbled as it snapped tight and pulled him to the edge of the steps.

“I wonder what the gods gave you,” Bogrevil said as he descended. “Many’s the time I’ve said the gods are capricious. Sometimes they give us what we need, and sometimes they offer so much that it drives us mad. Sometimes they see the greed inside and they curse us for it. Sometimes the gifts don’t mean nothin’ at all.”

They went down into the belly of the tower.

True to his word, Bogrevil had the boy fed. It was more food than he’d seen in a single serving ever. After the near starvation on the dragon beam, he couldn’t eat half of it. All the while he watched the other boys sizing him up. They seemed envious of the attention being paid him, though it was no more than had been paid to them upon arriving. He kept his eyes on nothing and focused on the meal. The other boys took this to mean that he was harmless and ignored him.

After the meal, Bogrevil had one of the other boys pick the lock on the cuff and removed the chain from his ankle. Two older boys led him to a steamy chamber, stripped him of his clothing, and dropped him into a large bathing pool. A dozen others swam in it, a few laughing and squealing but most just floating, withdrawn, it seemed to him. He luxuriated in the warmth. He had no memory of anything like it. Finally, to his shock, a woman waded into the pool. She headed straight for him and took hold of him by one biceps. As naked as the boys, she might have been ten years his senior, but she wasn’t much larger than he. However, she proved to be a good deal stronger. She caught hold of him, and then scrubbed him with a brush so hard that he thought she was flaying him, but he couldn’t squirm out of her grip. A couple of the boys hooted at his predicament but stayed beyond the woman’s reach while they did. She poured something into his hair that she worked in. Whatever it was, it burned terribly, and he struggled furiously to get free of her and dunk his head. She must have expected it, for she wrapped her legs around his belly to keep him in place. Finally, when he thought his hair must be sizzling, she shoved his head underwater, then hauled him up again. He spluttered and spat, sure that his scalp had been burned away. Without a word the woman let go of him and stalked one of the jeering boys, who hadn’t been far enough away after all. The other squealers scrambled naked out of the pool for their lives, while the rest watched her and the goings-on in the water as if none of it mattered. The boy patted his head and was surprised to find that he still had hair.

Later, the same woman lifted him out by the arm and wrapped him in a great cloth. She was wearing one, too. He saw that she had an odd, dark birthmark on one shoulder. She said, “I hope you have the sense to bathe yourself, because I’m not going to do this for you every day.”

Bogrevil came in while the other boys were dressing. “How is he, Eskie?” he asked her.

“Clean,” she replied, and pushed the end of the cloth through his hair. “I rid him of his lice, though it peeled the skin from my fingertips.”

“Good.” Again Bogrevil lifted his chin and studied him. “How old you think he is?”

“Old enough, I’m sure. He has hair, hasn’t he? But he’s been underfed so very long, it could be he is seventeen or more and simply looks twelve. He does not know?”

“Not likely. Anyway, doesn’t matter, he’s not on the menu.”

“He has the looks for…the menu. Fill him out a little and an attractive enough body will appear.”

“Don’t need attractive to clean and serve. Can’t sell half-wits anyhow. Most clients are superstitious enough to think it’s contagious—an idiot’s essence will make them the same.”

“Mmmm,” she replied. “I’m not afraid. Or else it’s too late for me.” She fluttered a hand in front of her face as if to cool her fevered brow.

Bogrevil chortled. “You think you can get a rise out of him, my Eskie?”

“Is that a request?” She shook her head. “I am only saying that he’s a pretty one, though starved.” She snatched the drying cloth off him, left him standing naked while she retrieved clothes for him from a table. “Come, then, give us your arm,” she said as she drew a white tunic on him. “Come,” when she wanted him to raise a foot. Her fingers touched him everywhere, but didn’t linger. She buttoned the tunic down his chest. Its stiff collar nearly reached his chin. Her hazel eyes studied him closely. He blushed at the way she looked at him: He couldn’t help it. She noticed the color in his cheek, and her careless gaze became curious; but she said nothing. Her fingers brushed his hair from his forehead. “A proper server,” she commented and stepped back to let Bogrevil see the boy dressed in white finery, loose silk trousers, and a slender jacket.

“He wears the clothes well enough, don’t he? Superb, Eskie, superb. Now we must find out if he can balance a tray.”

She considered him. “I shall be surprised if he cannot.”

Bogrevil turned to leave. “Oh,” he said and raised a finger. “We have to give him a name. Can’t keep calling him boy. If I were to call out Come here, boy, whenever I wanted him, I’d be crushed by the onslaught.”

“He has no name?”

“I don’t know. His former keeper didn’t bother to assign him one, and he can’t tell me, if he even knows.”

She put a finger to her lips and tapped them. “Let’s call him…something like divers.”

“What?”

“Because he is different.”

“Diverus,” he repeated, mispronouncing what she’d said. “Yes, we got others like that, don’t we—Delicatus and Draucus. Like a—what, lineage, yes.”

Rather than correct him—never a good idea with Bogrevil—she concurred. “Diverus, then.” It was not a bad name in any case.

“Different. Oh, yes, he is. Nice job, Eskie. I can always rely on you an’ your upbringing.” She bowed her head at the compliment. “You go take him to his room, show him about. Maybe some of it’ll stick. We’ll try him out tonight if he can balance a tray.” He went off to see to the rest of his “merchandise.”

 

 

 

Eskie had put on a long white robe. Her black hair cascaded down the back of it. She wore bangles on her wrists and a small chain of bells on her ankles, so that her every movement tinkled and chimed as she led him through a warren of rooms and tunnels. Something about the sound created odd warmth in his belly.

The main parlors of the paidika—there were three—had intricate tapestries hung upon the walls. Two had carpets on the floor, and pillows strewn upon the carpets. The room farthest from the stairs had a square pedestal in the center, and small, backless cushioned chairs ringing the sides of it, as if a show of some sort was about to begin. Lamps and candles of various sizes and shapes filled every corner, and lanterns dangled from the ceilings. Bowls containing some sort of aromatic herbs floating in liquid stood off to each side of the doorways. Their entering the room swirled spice around them. The rooms were not occupied.

Leading from the parlors were narrow halls. The one she led him along opened onto a wider corridor lined with curtained doorways, with leather settees in between them.

Eskie saw him trying to peer into the rooms, and she stepped up to one and drew the curtain back. It was sumptuously decorated, though small and dark. The central feature of the room was an immense sinuous hookah, the cap of which nearly reached the ceiling. Two hoses depended from the side of it and snaked around the bulbous base, mouthpieces resting on pillows as if the smokers had just left the room. In the shadowy recess behind it lay a peculiar lacquered box big enough for someone to lie in. Curving tines of bone like the rib cage of a monster as big as the hookah rose from the side of the box and curled over it toward the center. Symbols painted in the lacquer were meaningless to him. Along the rest of the walls were shelves and niches that held candles, small lamps, and assorted odd objects—tiny silver pillboxes, a few statuettes of fish and other creatures, some carved from wood, others blown from colored glass, and more things he couldn’t identify. When he’d had a good look, Eskie dropped the curtain again.

Owing to the nature of the paidika’s business, she said, the boys generally slept the day through. She led him down another hall and a short flight of steps, taking them even farther from the public part of the paidika. At the end of yet another hall, a set of double doors barred their way. She opened one quietly and ushered him in.

The stone walls of the dormitorium bore brown water stains in jagged rills. The smell in the room reminded him of the underspan itself. High up near the ceiling he saw a grate, no larger than his head, which let in all the light there was, and he imagined that if he could climb up to it he might find himself looking out upon the same makeshift platforms and hovels from which he’d been removed.

The boys slept on pallets appreciably better than the one he had known at home, most of which were occupied now. A few boys’ eyes opened as chiming Eskie led him through the room, and he thought he recognized some from the bath.

She explained softly, “Everybody sleeps here, unless they’re purchased for a longer time. Even so, they’re carried back here after, to recover…but there’s no reason for me to explain this to you, is there? You won’t be serving in that way. And we’d better determine now if you’re capable of serving in other ways, which I hope you are. I would hate to see you cast into the laundry. Whatever you do, you don’t want to displease your master. He’s nice enough, providing you do as you’re told. Like most of his kind.” She stared hard into his eyes. “I hope you can understand what I’m telling you. It’s a matter of survival here.”

He sensed eyes observing him—gazes like those of lizards, watchful and cold.

Eskie took him to the kitchens next. The two connected kitchen chambers were smoky, the walls blackened with years of soot from cooking fires, even though the hearth built into the far wall exhausted into a chimney hole. The place smelled of old, rendered fat. The bald cook looked up at them as they entered, but his hands continued to work, grinding seeds with a pestle in a wide mortar.

Eskie led Diverus to an area full of polished silver trays, utensils, and pitchers. She selected a tray with an oddly shaped base and straps hanging off it. She lifted it over him and lowered it upon his head like a crown. His head was small, though, and the tray tipped. Eskie fitted the straps together beneath his chin and cinched them tightly. She tipped the tray with each hand. “Still too loose, we’ll have to find you a smaller one.”

The third one she tried seemed to fit him well enough that she didn’t cinch the straps. She placed a silver cup upon the tray, right at one edge, and filled it with liquid. He could feel the weight tipping the tray and tilted his head enough to counterbalance it.

“That’s good,” she told him. “That is what you want to do.” She set down the pitcher and strode across the kitchen. “Now,” she said from the far side. “Carry my drink to me.”

Diverus started forward. Liquid splashed his arm. He stopped and looked down at it and immediately the rest of the liquid spattered the floor in front of him, soaking his feet, followed by the clang of the cup itself as it bounced across the stones.

Eskie laughed and walked back to him. “You must not get distracted by things if you’re serving. You can’t go studying your feet without dousing the entire clientele should you be supporting a full tray.” She picked up the cup and filled it again. “Let’s try once more, see if you can do it.” She put the refilled cup on the tray and walked off again. “All right, come to me,” she called from across the room. The bald cook stopped to watch. Diverus cautiously walked across to Eskie without spilling the cup. When he reached her she said, “Now can you lower yourself so that I can reach the cup more easily?”

He thought about it for a moment before extending his back leg out, widening his stance to lower his torso. She took the cup. “Wonderful, Diverus! You learned that right away, faster than a lot of boys would’ve done.”

The cook said, “Clever lad, innit,” then went back to grinding.

She replaced the cup on the tray. “Now let’s see how you do with a full tray.”

 

 

 

After he had successfully walked the length of the kitchen twice while balancing a tray covered with cups, Eskie had the cook feed him again. She maintained that he was in need of extra nourishment. If Diverus passed out in the middle of the evening, a disaster would ensue. And while he might be forgiven, Bogrevil would certainly blame, and punish, her.

Once he’d eaten a cup of the soup that he would have again for dinner, she took him down to the lowest level of the paidika: the laundry.

This proved to be a large room at sea level with a square, shallow pool in its center. There were boys already at work in the laundry. They were different from the boys he’d seen above. A few were cruelly formed, with lumpish backs or twisted limbs, or heads too small for their bodies. Some of them were brutes, too large to be boys except that they were. They had dull faces, childish faces, faces expressing their inability to grasp anything beyond the work they were doing. The rest shuffled about with dirty or wet linens clutched in their arms. They seemed incomplete in some manner, like sleepwalkers, ignoring him and Eskie and everyone else. The ones in the pool plunged bedding and tunics into the water, sponged and squeezed and pounded the cloth, and every bit of their minds must have been focused upon the labor. One of the sleepwalkers noticed Eskie and Diverus, and stopped, gaping. His face looked old and wan; the eyes expressed a veiled panic, as if the source of his fear was inaccessible, and the lips were pulled back in a kind of rictus that drew the skin of his face tight across the bones. Diverus didn’t comprehend what the look meant, but he saw in these boys his old life beneath Vijnagar, and what Bogrevil intended for him if he failed in his other duties.

Because of Eskie, he had other duties.

Across the pool a wide barred gate revealed a view of dark water. He circled the pool and walked up to the gate. His fingers curled around the vertical bars. The padlock securing it was nearly as wide as he was—a giant’s padlock stolen from some other world. He pressed his face into the bars to see as much as possible. Where he stood lay at the very bottom of the span, looking out toward the pier of another tower on the far side of it. A boat with a single sail trolled past through the narrow channel, so close that he could make out the weathered features of the single occupant. If he could have gotten outside the gate, he might have jumped from the narrow ledge into the boat. Overhead he could see nothing save for the hint of an arch curving above the far pier. No platforms had been constructed in that space between the spans.

Eskie had come up behind him. He felt her press against him as she put a hand upon his shoulder. “It’s the way out in emergencies, this gate. If we’re raided. Which has only ever happened once or twice, because some of the magistrates are regular customers and they protect us. They don’t think we know—they come in disguise, most clients do—but Bogrevil has an informative network, and he knows things he’s not supposed to. He takes care of himself, which takes care of us.”

He slid his hand down and fingered the keyhole cover on the padlock…a small keyhole for so large a lock.

She must have noticed, for she said, “Far too big for anyone to remove it alone. Some of the boys were street pickers before ending up here, and they surely know their way around locks. That one—even if they can work it, they can’t get out without two more boys to help lift it.”

He glanced back toward the pool.

She looked at the pool, too, seeing what he implied. “Oh, they’re big enough, but they have no wish to leave. The paidika is the only proper home most of them have ever known. Many were horribly treated where they were before. You could never get them to help. In fact, they would probably stop anyone who tried to get out. Some of them sleep down here, in the corners. Like the demon sentinels of Nechron’s underworld, they are.”

He shifted his gaze, met hers with his brow furled.

“What, you’ve never heard the name of the god of the underworld? No. I suppose you wouldn’t have, would you. Who would have taken the time to educate you? They would have considered it time wasted, but I think you’re cleverer than they know, Diverus. You’ll learn everything here—especially now as you’ll be a server rather than a scrub boy.”

He looked out at the water once more before turning away and accompanying Eskie back up to the higher level. The laundry boys watched him leave as though watching him walk out of their memory.

Eskie left him at the dormitorium after assigning him a pad to sleep on. She told him to sleep as long as he could during the day. Once the paidika opened for business, he would be on his feet the rest of the night.

 

 

 

She didn’t lie to him: Diverus wandered through the three main rooms throughout that entire first night, weaving among clients and other serving boys, and the boys on display.

Most of the clientele were costumed and masked, as if arriving from a fancy ball somewhere else upon the span. He watched them descend the long, high stairway, dressed in loose pants and sometimes with sweeping capes. Bogrevil was often there to meet them. Many, he seemed to know despite—or perhaps because of—their costumes, welcoming them broadly and taking them immediately to one of the three chambers, where he would point out someone in particular. Most of the time, the guest agreed with his selection and allowed himself to be escorted into the narrow halls and the rooms beyond them. A very large boy—practically a giant—stood beside the base of the steps, with folded arms, still as a statue, though his eyes cast from room to room. Diverus he considered with disinterest.

The boys were costumed, too. Some had been painted in extravagant makeup and wore flowing garments, veils, and scarves. They could have passed for women. Others wore very little—short trunks or diaphanous robes. Some, especially muscular older boys, sported leather collars, and wide bracelets at their wrists, as if prepared for some combat. One of them strode from room to room, proudly naked beneath green paint. His hair had been spiked about his head like that of a sea sprite.

Those clients not swept up immediately by Bogrevil milled around, appraising the boys as they might have done a bolt of fabric. Their masks made them silent, somber, bestial. Beaks and snouts turned the liquid eyes above into wet stones, as if what lay beneath the mask would prove to be less recognizable even than the caricatured surface.

Whenever his tray was empty, Diverus returned to the kitchen for more. Initially Bogrevil clasped his shoulders and nudged him to let him know that it was time, but after a few hours he was able to sense from the weight of it when the tray was almost empty.

The first one he carried held cups of wine, the second, plates of finger foods. He and the other serving boys walked with measured strides in and out of the rooms, eyeing one another without comment. In the center parlor a boy sat cross-legged and played lamely at a stringed instrument with a curved neck. Diverus had never seen such an instrument and didn’t know what it was called, but he knew from the dissonant notes that the boy was not accustomed to it. The clients all but ignored the performance until one young guest spilled a drink upon him, and the clustered entourage burst into laughter. That brought Bogrevil into the room so fast, it seemed he’d anticipated it. The young man smirked as if the matter was not of consequence and made a vague apology, insisting it had been an accident; but the trio who’d accompanied him still sniggered as he spoke and exchanged glances that, even beneath their masks, expressed cruel delight. Bogrevil asked them if they had any particular preference for the evening—“a particular essence you cared to sample.” It seemed an innocent question but somehow conveyed the message that they must now either choose or leave. After fidgeting and shrugging among one another, they turned and departed back up the steps, with Bogrevil at their heels. He smiled and waved them along, but when he came back down the steps, his face had gone sharp and humorless. To the giant boy at the bottom, he said, “They never come in again, separately or together. The gate, if they do.” The giant nodded slightly, though how he would distinguish them, Diverus couldn’t fathom.

To the wine-soaked musician Bogrevil snarled, “At least tune the damned thing.”

The remainder of the evening provided no excitement or diversion, and exhaustion replaced curiosity well before the end of the night. Sent off to bed, he slept so heavily that he likely could have been tossed into the laundry pool and wouldn’t have noticed. He neither sensed nor cared who else shared the room, or who was missing.

In the afternoon, when he awoke, he found Eskie seated beside one of the pallets, feeding a boy as though he was ill; and he looked ill, too. He watched Diverus through sunken eyes so asthenic that they couldn’t maintain the glance and fell, unfocused upon anything this side of the grave. Eskie wouldn’t meet his glance at all.

 

 

 

The nights thereafter were much the same. Over time he learned to identify returning customers well enough that if he was carrying their preferred drink or food, he would meet them at the bottom of the steps—an act that did not go unnoticed by Bogrevil, who reconsidered him, scrutinizing him as if to decide if he’d misjudged Diverus and, granted that he was a superb judge of flesh, been in some manner misled. He commented to the giant, “It’s a shame that one’s a mute, ’cause it’s clear he’s much more clever than what appears.” The giant, who was not more clever than he appeared, stared at Diverus in perplexity.

The later the night wore on, the more the clients came in clusters, and by the second half of the evening there weren’t but one or two individuals in any of the three parlors. The rest had retired to the private chambers. On his way to and from the kitchens he noticed some of them in the corridors, lolled on the settees between the private rooms; sometimes they were sleeping, but even the conscious ones appeared exhausted and muddled. Occasionally they needed assistance to manage the steps up to the span again, which task was assigned to boys who hadn’t been picked, or to him and the other servers if no one more suitable was available. These people always smelled mephitic, as if some poison leaked from their pores. Diverus did not focus on what was going on in the paidika, or what it meant that boys who were chosen for a night the next day had to be spoon-fed, didn’t leave their pallets, and often were given a second night off to rest. He didn’t want to know. He listened to other servers gossip about it—tales of how boys who pried into the goings-on in those chambers disappeared. The boys who entered the chambers with clients refused to tell those who weren’t chosen what happened to them.

Exhaustion became his excuse for not pursuing any answers. He slept through almost every day and worked through most of the night, with barely enough reserves to find his way back to his bed in the morning.

Then one very busy night, very late, one client in a purple cape and wearing a spangled mask arrived in the final minutes, and there were no boys left for him. At first Bogrevil tried to talk him out of his desire. “It’s so late, sir, you’ll hardly have time to enjoy yourself.” He gestured to the hourglass in the corner, as if it somehow supported his argument. “Come back tomorrow night—it’s an anniversary, a celebration. We’ll fête you better than anyone.” The client remained adamant, in the manner of a drunk who has made up his mind. He demanded satisfaction, and Bogrevil finally suggested that the man consider one of the servers. He called a coffee-colored boy named Abnevi over. Though unattractively scarred with pockmarks, Abnevi was intelligent and—Bogrevil assured the client—“brimming.” The client, with obvious reluctance, accepted the offer, and Abnevi set down his tray to follow. His eyes were round with terror.

When the three of them had left the parlor, the remaining server, named Olk, nudged Diverus. Olk had a deformed, withered arm, and Diverus supposed that as with himself, superstitious clients feared that the deformity was communicable. Grinning sourly, Olk said, “We’re lucky, the way we are. You’re stupid and they don’t want you, neither.”

Before he could ask Olk to explain more, Bogrevil came back and dismissed them. As Diverus passed by, Bogrevil grabbed him by the arm and whispered, “Another night, you’ll be chosen, don’t you worry, son. You’re too pretty to go to your death in servitude.” Then he strode off.

The paidika closed up for the day, and the boys returned their trays to the kitchen and slunk off to the dormitorium. Diverus hung back until the rest had gone. Before that night he had avoided looking at what it meant to be selected, at what purpose a paidika served, because there was only one purpose for such a place that he could imagine, and one use, finally, for all of them, however kindly Bogrevil pretended to be.

He turned from the hall to the dormitorium and took a different corridor, one that led to the private rooms Eskie had shown him.

Most of them were dark behind drawn curtains, but in a couple candlelight flickered, and in creeping to the nearest one he heard a slow, quiet susurration that ebbed and flowed like waves rushing up to a beach.

Edging deeper into the doorway recess, he peeked through the space between the wall and the curtain. He could see the client, the one who had chosen Abnevi, still dressed in his billowy costume and seated upon the tail of his purple cape, cross-legged beside the immense brass water pipe. His glittering mask lay at his side. His blond hair hung over his eyes in an oily fringe, and under it the stripe of a black blindfold circled his head, like a crown fallen low. The rhythmic whooshing came as he pulled on the pipe, inhaling and then leaning back to exhale, his mouth open, slack, drool glistening like a snail’s path from the corner of it down to his collar. Barely a wisp of bluish smoke emerged from the chimney of his mouth. Abnevi was nowhere in sight on that side of the hookah. Diverus touched a finger to the curtain and drew it back farther. The tiered body of the hookah filled the middle of the chamber. A grayish fog emerging from its top led his eye around the curtain to the far side.

Abnevi lay in the long, inscribed lacquer box, beneath the curious fingers of bone. His eyes were closed so that he would not see what Diverus now looked upon—what neither of the chamber’s occupants saw. The fog congealed above Abnevi, into manifest horror. Perched upon the bony tines like a creature of prey, the thing was yet insubstantial—a translucent, ribbed torso that glistened in the candlelight like a grub; it overlooked the sleeping boy. A bluish vapor rose out of Abnevi’s face toward it. The skin of his cheeks rippled as if seen through heat, and the body twitched once, twice, as if tugged at from above. Diverus didn’t think he made a sound, but the apparition’s head drew up abruptly. It faced him. Two horrible white orbs fixed upon his position—milky eyes hard as alabaster. The jagged black hole of its mouth spiraled shut, snipping the stream of vapor, which snapped as if sprung, back into Abnevi. He bucked once more forcefully than before. The creature trembled, fluttered, and with an outraged screech flung itself off the tines and collapsed all in a moment, reeling into the hookah so fast that Diverus wasn’t sure if he’d seen it go in or it had simply evaporated.

Oblivious of any change in the situation, the blindfolded stupefied client leaned forward again and inhaled from the hookah. He choked suddenly. Then he dropped the mouthpiece, clutched his throat with one hand, his chest with the other, and fell sideways. He pawed at the blindfold and drew a dagger from his waistband, waving it as if to ward off something in the air above him. He spasmed, gave one final creaking gasp, and lay still. A darker, greasy smoke trailed from his mouth.

Diverus dropped the curtain and stepped back—bumping against someone else, who said “Oof” as he struck her.

He spun about, and there stood Eskie, glaring at him. “What do you think you’re doing?” she hissed. “Do you want to be drowned in the laundry?” He might have answered, forgetting himself, if she hadn’t gone on. “If you interrupt the process, you could kill someone, the boy or the client. Afrits have been known to turn and devour everyone in the room.”

“Afrits?” It was a word Bogrevil had used earlier.

“That which resides in the hookah. A dem—but you spoke. You spoke!”

He hadn’t meant to. Unaccustomed to his own voice, he hadn’t realized what he’d done, but Eskie had.

“You’ve been able to speak all the time, haven’t you? You kept this hidden, pretending to be the fool Bogrevil believes of you.”

He cleared his throat. Having not spoken for so long, his voice was coarse, barely a whisper. “An idiot is what I was before I arrived here,” he replied somewhat defensively. “He sees what he wants. What he was told he’d purchased.”

“But you pretend to be mute.”

He gestured his head as if to say, What should I have done? Then he asked, “What is an afrit?”

“A spirit, a demon. These ones are tied to water, the ones Bogrevil serves. And caverns—they are not accustomed to living in light.”

He knit his brow. “He serves them?”

She nodded. “His very survival depends upon his service to their kind. I know nothing of how he came to be so indentured. That is something he never speaks of. But he provides them an essence to which they’re addicted, and which in turn produces a vapor the clients crave.”

“An essence…the boys?”

“Youth is powerful. The afrits thrive upon it.”

His eyes widened at the enormity of what she was saying. “Doesn’t it kill them?”

“Over time—a long time for most—it…alters them. But it’s a pleasurable process for them.”

“How can you know that?”

She gave him a look as if he were a fool. “Because they tell me so. What was I doing in this hallway just now, do you suppose? Did you think I was looking for you? Every morning I come as I do now in finding you. When the client emerges from the room, I go in. With Bogrevil or Kotul—the big one who guards the door—I assist the hired boys to their beds because they can barely walk afterward, and I serve them food to replenish them, usually soup, a broth, and often they sleep a full day through. It’s then almost as if nothing has happened to them, as if they’d been ill with fever and I’ve nursed them through it. They tell me sometimes of the dreams they’ve had, which are like fever dreams. Wondrous places they’ve visited while they slept—it might even be that they journey to Edgeworld.” She shook her head as if to dismiss her own observation. “But they do not see the afrit. They only know the dreamlife it gives them, for it sends them to sleep before it emerges. They are, I think, unaware that anything has been lost to them until perhaps toward the end, when their thoughts grow too confused to be unknotted. By then they are as addicted to the dreams as the clients are to the afrit’s vapors. They cannot distinguish any longer between this and dreamlife, and the one often seems superimposed upon the other. I think they really don’t know which is which.”

“The boys in the laundry.”

Her face screwed up at their mention, as if she wasn’t prepared to think about them. “Some of those. But they don’t know it. Nor much of anything else.”

“That’s my destiny, then. It’s what everyone has intended for me. Even you.” He looked her in the eye, expecting confirmation but seeing instead her alarm.

“I want nothing like that for you. You mustn’t reveal to Bogrevil what you’ve shown to me, ever—that you speak, that you’re aware.”

He said, “Tonight he promised me I would find myself in here soon, that somehow it’s better than serving.”

“Listen to me. You must disguise your cleverness, and continue to play the mute simpleton. Otherwise…and for you it would be death because you know the truth and would resist, and if you looked into the afrit’s eyes…” She glanced away from his. “If it saw you, it would devour your soul.”

“You do this for him, knowing the truth.” He tried to sound neutral, but the words accused her.

She burned scarlet. “I live, the same as you. I have the choices you have, maybe fewer. My family—” She stopped, shook her head. “I have nothing beyond the paidika, nothing to go to if I’m thrown out. Bogrevil takes care of me and I take care of the boys. I keep them healthy and alive. If I were to refuse, then they would begin to wither and die the very first time, and perhaps in great misery. You judge from the outside, Diverus, before you even know what you judge.”

He had been trying not to judge but to understand. He apologized, secretly thrilled that she had instructed him not to become one of them. However she attempted to mitigate her own role, she nevertheless wanted to keep him from becoming the sort of boy to whom she ministered. He asked, “Do others know?”

“No one knows. Sooner or later most of the boys have been hired for a night, but none would ever dare intrude as you’ve done. One or two may have early on—or else Bogrevil invented the tale to scare the others off, of how those interlopers were never seen again. Those who aren’t fed to the afrits are too simple to act upon such curiosity, and so must you be. If you had walked into that room, you would have been destroyed.”

He recalled suddenly the aftermath of what he’d seen. “The client,” he said, and turned back to the curtain. He opened it and heard her gasp behind him, but the afrit, as he knew, had fled into the safe haven of the water pipe.

The client was sprawled upon the floor, and even from the doorway Diverus could tell that he was dead.

Eskie pushed around him and ran to the body. He followed her, though watching Abnevi, who lay in a daze, his eyes darkly ringed, and unfocused as if no thought guided them. His head rolled from side to side. It will devour your soul, she’d warned.

“He is dead,” Eskie proclaimed of the client. “What has happened?”

Diverus looked down at a face that was swollen as if the man were trying to hold in a lungful of smoke. The blindfold had been pushed up above one eye. Eskie removed it. His eyelids had not quite closed, and he looked as if his own death bored him. The dagger had fallen from his hand, and his open fingers seemed to be reaching for the brass mouthpiece as though he might yet drag it to his purple lips for a final draw.

“I’m the cause of this,” Diverus said. He sank down, then explained how the afrit had somehow sensed him and retreated, and how the client unknowingly had continued to draw from the mouthpiece.

“Oh, gods.”

“But what happened?”

“The water in the pipe must have become poisonous when the afrit withdrew. He was no longer smoking its vapors; it would have been the angry poison of the demon itself. What are we to tell Bogrevil? This man is dead, and surely someone will come looking for him.”

“Surely, I will,” came the reply from behind them, and they both turned to find Bogrevil holding the curtain up. “What has happened here?” He eyed the hookah, then Abnevi with a distortive repulsion before he entered the room.

Eskie stood and moved aside. As Bogrevil crouched down she gave Diverus a sharp glance and gestured no with her head. Then she answered, “I came to retrieve the boy and found this man in this position.”

Bogrevil rolled his eyes nervously up at her; his glance flicked again to the brass hookah and back. “The afrit?”

“It had gone.”

That seemed to allay his fears, but he pretended not to be concerned for himself. “Lucky for you. You wouldn’t be telling me now if you’d met it.” Then he acknowledged Diverus. “And what’s he doing here?”

For a moment she hesitated, then said, “I enlisted him to help me. With the boys. Because he can’t say anything. You and Kotul were absent.”

He stared at her. It was clear to Diverus that he didn’t believe her; but a lewd smile crossed his lips as he contemplated both of them, and he said, “Enlisted, is it? Well, it’s no matter, and we’ll need his help now. Now he is enlisted.” He fitted the mask back onto the dead man’s face, drew the cape out from beneath the lifeless bulk, and spread it over his body like a shroud, then stood, with the dead man’s dagger in his hand, the tip pointed at Diverus’s throat. “Khanjarli,” he said. “Good craftsmanship.” He tucked it into the back of his belt.

At that moment Abnevi stumbled out from behind the hookah. He leaned against the brass bowl, his legs trembling, and stared. “Where’s my pen?” he asked. “I must write a policy and I’ve lost my pen. Oh, what’s this, is this a different dream?”

“What’s he talking about?” Eskie asked.

“An unfortunate accident,” said Bogrevil. “The dream owns him.” To Abnevi he said, “Your pen isn’t here. I think you need to come along with us now. It’s a long descent to the bottom and if anything falls out of this man’s pockets, I want you to pick it up, yes? Maybe he has your pen.”

Abnevi nodded brightly. Diverus felt ill, watching.

Bogrevil took the body by the legs, and Eskie and Diverus each took an arm as they carried it down the hall. The cape might have disguised the identity but not the substance of their burden. The body swung between them, the head dragging on the floor. No one was about at this hour, and no one else saw them.

The stairs were difficult to navigate, in part because the head struck every step, and even though the man was dead the thock of each impact made Diverus wince. Behind them Abnevi muttered, “Are we going to wash him? I want to bathe, too. Reasonable and customary cleanliness is a clause I put in every policy. It’s healthful.”

At the bottom everything was dim, although the early-morning light cast enough of a glow beneath the span that the checkered pattern of the gate was distinct. They lay the body down; Bogrevil fetched keys from a cord around his neck and unlocked the padlock. Abnevi broke away from them and clambered down into the washing pool.

By then one of the behemoths had awakened and lumbered over to see what was occurring. He was nearly bald, and his head was deformed, as if the skull had developed bulbs beneath the skin. When he saw Bogrevil he grinned stupidly and grunted. “Yes, yes,” Bogrevil said, and patted him on the shoulder. “Good fella. We need to move that lock.” The simple giant stepped over the body as though it were a log, and with Bogrevil’s help raised the padlock. The two of them managed to hook it over one of the bars on the gate. The giant then pushed the gate open.

Bogrevil came back, and they picked up the body again.

Outside, the position on the ledge afforded a view in both directions. To the right the edge of the bridge pier was close enough that the joints between the blocks of stone were visible. It would have taken only seconds to reach the corner of the pier. Beyond it the surface of the sea shimmered with distant red splashes of dawn. To the left the ledge dwindled steadily, vanishing at last into the darkness of the span’s underbelly. A bright semicircle defined the opening on the far side. Above them the air was filled with only darkness and the flitting brightness of a few passing gulls. No platforms, nor people—the underworld from which he’d emerged would be on the opposite side of the tower. There were no boats near enough to see them.

Bogrevil set his end of the corpse on the ledge. He got down onto his knees and plunged his hand into the water off the side. It took him only a moment to dredge up a large stone. This he dragged to the body, where he threw back the cape, pulled loose the man’s trousers, and shoved the stone inside them. When he had done this three times, he cinched the belt again. “That’s good enough,” he said. Getting stiffly to his feet, he gestured his helper to come out onto the ledge.

The lumpish giant shuffled past the gate, round eyes darting from side to side. He made a whining noise.

“It’s all right,” Bogrevil said. “Nobody’s tryin’ to make you leave. You two, put down your end and come over here and take a leg with me.”

They obeyed. The giant picked up both arms. “Now we shall swing him three times. Third time we let go. You understand?” He was asking the giant, who nodded, but kept glancing fearfully at the sea, as though something might come out of it at any moment.

“One.”

“Two.”

“Three.”

The body sailed out over the black water farther than Diverus had expected. It hit with surprisingly little sound, and sank immediately. The cape floated for a moment then disappeared. A stream of bubbles trickled up to the surface. The exotic mask bobbed up, expressionless without eyes behind it; it swiveled about as if looking for something, and then drifted out toward the open water.

“Right, then. Back inside, everybody,” Bogrevil ordered.

It wasn’t until the gate had closed that Diverus realized he should have run then and there. The ledge would have taken him someplace, and neither the behemoth nor Bogrevil could have caught him. Even had he dived into the sea, it would have carried him away—to a boat, to the pier of the next span—but now it was too late and he was part of the paidika again. Why hadn’t he run?

They slid the lock back onto its latch, and Bogrevil turned the key before turning to them. “Now, this did not happen. That gentleman, whoever he was, was never here, you never seen him, and you slept the whole morning through. Everyone slept.”

Behind them, Abnevi splashed and splashed and tittered in the pool. His head lolled back and his eyes rolled up at the ceiling. “Oh, that’s pretty,” he slurred, but almost immediately he raised an arm as if to protect himself from something in flight, and dove, crying, “No, no! Get away!” He remained underwater only a moment, but when he came up he was laughing.

Eskie said, “What about him?”

“It’s done sommit to him, hasn’t it? Dunno what, don’t care. He likes it so down here, I’d prefer he stay. Don’t want him babbling—we don’t know what he saw, do we? What he might tell if his mind were to come back. Down here, it won’t matter. He can tell everybody. They’re just like him.” He reached out and caught Diverus suddenly, dragged him close.

“It’s our anniversary tonight and we don’t want nothing to spoil that. Nobody answers no questions. You want to have a little fun being ‘enlisted’ in the wee hours, I don’t mind, see, ’cause you don’t take away from no customers. But no mistakes, pretty one, or what happened to Abnevi’ll be something you’ll wish happened to you.”

Diverus shook his head and drew a finger across his mouth to indicate he would say nothing. Bogrevil nodded that he understood. “Oh, yeah,” he said, “that’s right, you can’t say anything about anything.” He released Diverus then, caught Eskie by the elbow, and started back up the steps with her in tow. “Can’t say a thing!” he called out, and vanished up into the dark.

The sound of Abnevi’s unmoored laughter followed Diverus up the steps like a curse.

 

 

 

Bogrevil took Eskie with him, so Diverus had no one to speak with, no opportunity to confess the terrible guilt he felt over Abnevi’s fate. He returned to the dormitorium, where everyone was asleep, and lay down, certain that he could never fall asleep again. Abnevi’s mind was shattered and it was his doing—he had interrupted the afrit at its feeding. He kept reliving the moment when the creature’s head turned, severing its connection, the blue tendrils snapping back into the helpless boy: his fault. Those round white eyes seared him with accusation.

The next thing he knew, he was crawling from the depths of sleep and uncertain that the events had been real. Two other boys lay asleep in the room, sunken-eyed and pale. Afrit victims. Everyone else had gone. He got up and hurried past the sleepers to bathe and eat.

When he returned to the dormitorium, Eskie was feeding one of the weak boys. With the spoon she pointed to his pallet. A costume of red crushed velvet and white silk lay there beside a long white band of cloth. He dressed while she finished ministering to the other boy. The sleeves covered his hands, and strings dangled off the cuffs. She came and tied the strings to loops at the shoulders. The sleeves were so full that he could freely move his arms, but they looked like wings. Then she took the cloth and wrapped it around his head, forming a turban, efficiently, as if she did this every day. She tucked the end of the cloth into a seam, and then fastened a cheap jewel to the front of it. “That looks very good, you’re becoming one of the more attractive boys here,” she said.

The comment so appalled him that he stepped back from her. “How can you be so—” he snarled, but got no further, as the façade she had been maintaining collapsed. Her eyes filled with tears. She put her arms around him and whispered in his ear, “Remember what I’ve told you. Stay out of his way, stay out of sight. Don’t do anything to call attention to yourself. He’s dressing you for them and tonight he might do anything.”

When she drew back and smeared the tears with her palm, he saw that her cheek was bruised and swollen. “He hit you.”

“I—” She sniffled. “It was my fault.”

If he’d had a knife just then he might have changed all their fates.

 

 

 

The celebration commenced. Corridors and parlors overflowed with guests, more than he’d ever seen. A trio of musicians had been given to Bogrevil as a gift for the evening. They stood back-to-back in the center of the middle parlor: One played a small drum dangling from a lanyard around his neck, another plucked a lute, and the third fingered a reed instrument called a shawm. The paidika’s musician sat on the floor in the corner behind them, watching with envious eyes.

The side parlors had been fitted with long tables of food, artistic displays that were quickly turned into skeletal remains as if by a horde of insects and as quickly replaced.

The other boys like Diverus had been dressed in gaudier costumes than usual—feathers and glittering scales, splashes of color everywhere.

Diverus carried tray after tray of drinks—in his arms for a change, instead of on his head. Guests snatched everything off each before he’d even reached the parlors, some on their way to the afrits’ chambers—as he now thought of the back rooms. The masked visitors gobbled and guzzled as if fearing they might be stranded without sustenance for days.

Bogrevil remained at the bottom of the stairs, dressed in regal violet embroidered robes. He bowed with great flourishes to each individual or group that descended, a sultan welcoming his guests. Initially people escorted their choices to him, but as the evening wore on and the guests came to outnumber the paidika’s stable, they came to him with names written on slips of paper, which he wrote down on a small parchment on a podium beside his mammoth guard. They understood that they would have to wait to take their turns. Later arrivals might not have anyone left to choose from at all. He might send in a second client while a boy still lay in the afrit’s perch, but not a third. Nobody could recover from three sessions in a row, and it wasn’t as if he was going out of business after tonight.

Early in the festivities one guest clutched Diverus as he was retreating with an empty tray. He looked at the hand on his sleeve, noting the polished nails, and glanced up at coal-black eyes fringed by long lashes behind a gold mask. Dragged before Bogrevil, he listened as the guest said, “I’d have this one.” It was a woman, as Bogrevil must have known, too. He expected to be let go.

Bogrevil closed his hand over hers. “He’s lovely, you know. Your taste is uncommonly fine.” He let this statement hang in the air for a moment—to tease, or to torture Diverus. “He is, however, of diminished capacity, and it might well be catching. Let me assure you, were he not, he wouldn’t be serving food. Now, let me offer you something else tasty,” and he led her away. Diverus didn’t see her again for some hours.

One by one boys were purchased and taken off while others milled about waiting their turn. Each time he watched one leave the room, he wanted to stop him. Didn’t anyone notice Abnevi’s absence? Didn’t they wonder what had happened? Could they read the guilt in his eyes?

He couldn’t help thinking of each of them in their curtained and candlelit chambers, lying beneath insubstantial monstrosities as their life was drained, their souls served up as refreshment. How could Eskie suggest that they desired such a thing?

As the evening wore on, other guests considered him. Their eyes spoke their interest. He wondered what they got from what they inhaled, and why any one boy was more appealing than any other. And why was it only boys—a preference of the afrits or merely less problematic than if the genders mixed? Would there be paidikas full of girls, or was there another word for such places? He knew so little of the world, so little that was of use.

Each time his tray emptied and he escaped to the kitchen, he stalled as long as he could, staying at the back of the line, remaining as invisible as possible, remembering what Eskie had said. Perhaps the fourth time he had done this, the cook placed small brass cups upon the tray as he held it, then filled each with a green distillation. As he filled the ones nearest Diverus’s body, he leaned across the tray and said, “Clever boy. Dressed so nice, have you become merchandise now?” At Diverus’s look of shock, he laughed. “Can’t dodge all night long, you know, no matter how you hang back. It’ll be my turn to choose eventually, when they’ve all gone. He’s saving you for me.”

Diverus flung the tray at him.

Thick green liquid spattered the cook from head to waist, most of it running down his filthy apron. Diverus shoved past those waiting behind him. The cook yelled at him then erupted in the sort of laugh that promised punishment, but Diverus didn’t stop. He ran out and into one of the back corridors full of afrit chambers.

A curtain parted, and the woman who’d earlier attempted to rent him stumbled out. Her dark eyes were slits, barely open, her features slack. A blindfold hung loosely about her throat on top of her gilded mask. So drunk on the essence she’d inhaled was she that she’d forgotten to put her disguise back on, or even all of her costume. She was barefoot now and bare-shouldered. The cape she’d worn must be in the room still. She kept to the wall to steady herself. As he passed her she called out, “Pretty boy,” reaching limply for him, but then slid down onto the settee as if the gesture had robbed her of all energy.

He eluded her easily and merged into the cramped halls leading to the parlors, wriggling through clusters of guests and boys, realizing that he should have gone the other way, down to the laundry, where at least he might hide until the anniversary was over, even at the risk of never leaving it again.

Instead he emerged in the foyer before the parlors and ran right into Bogrevil, who was escorting someone from the main stairs. “Well, well, escaped from a harem, have we? Where’s your tray?” He seemed to be drunk, but it only increased his malevolence. He turned to the guest behind him and asked, “May I recommend to you this handsome creature? He’s very quiet, but you can tell just by lookin’ that his essence is the stronger for it.”

The guest considered him for but a moment, then nodded. “Definitely,” he said, a deep, almost sultry voice.

“Good,” Bogrevil replied, and clamped onto Diverus’s wrist. “Time spent with an afrit will do you proper, my boy. World of good, take you down a peg and remind Eskie who she owes her life to.” He started forward as the besotted woman with the gold mask emerged out of one narrow corridor, still lacking half her costume. She pointed at Diverus, the blindfold hanging from her hand. “Pretty boy,” she repeated. Bogrevil turned to the client, grinning. “See there, he’s very popular.” He snatched the blindfold from her and snapped it to get the sentinel’s attention. The huge Kotul took the woman by the shoulder and guided her toward the stairs. Bogrevil called out, “Be sure someone retrieves—ah, ne’er mind, I’ll do it meself.” Then with an exaggerated wigwag he led the way down the narrow hall. Boys and clients stepped aside to let him through.

In the afrit corridor Bogrevil directed them to the room the woman had just abandoned. He marched Diverus to the box in the corner and, by twisting his wrist, forced him to his knees. “Get in there. Now.” He didn’t let go, so Diverus could only crouch beneath the steepled tines and step both feet inside. Bogrevil released him. “If you try to come out of here,” he said, “I’ll drown you myself. You understand?”

The client, with obvious dismay at the tone of what was occurring, took the blindfold Bogrevil held out to him, and went around to the far side of the water pipe.

Bogrevil swept up the abandoned cape and boots; then, as if a signal had been sounded, he rushed out into the corridor before anything emerged from the hookah, transparently fearful. He might have been in league with the monstrosities, but clearly he didn’t want to encounter them.

The curtain snapped shut.

Diverus lay in the box, watching the flicker of candles, listening to the breathing of the client. He waited, anticipating he didn’t know what—Eskie had said that it put the victims to sleep before preying upon them, but how specifically he still didn’t know. He didn’t want to be awake.

Slowly he became aware of the candles growing dimmer, the light fading away. But the darkening room only made him more alert. Then on the curved ribs above him something slithered. Its grayish fingers ended in black talons, and it pulled itself along the tines as if climbing up a wall rather than dragging along horizontally. He was sure he was supposed to be asleep by now. The glowing orbs of its eyes became visible at the bottom periphery of his sight, and he squeezed his eyes closed so as not to see more. Shortly he could feel it directly above him, feel it staring down at him with such a magnetic pull that finally he couldn’t help himself.

He looked up.

Gone was the white-eyed monster, gone the tines of bone and the room. Above him on a sharp outcrop of rock sat a beautiful sphinx. Her hair was plaited in a rainbow around her smooth and perfect face. Her full breasts rested upon her paws, and her paws upon a pink marble ledge. She watched him with such tenderness that his chest grew chilly with emotion. He wanted to climb up on the ledge with her, to rest beside her. She smiled to him, reading his thoughts. Then she raised her head, looking past him, and he turned to follow her gaze.

On the far side of him a strange black booth had been set up in the sand, with a pale blue screen in its center. The world about them darkened. While the screen began to glow, the shadows of two grotesque caricatures of people walked across it as if their joints had been broken, then began to talk to each other. One looked like Bogrevil. He could hear the shadows speaking, but it was gibberish. Somehow, though, he knew the story being told, knew what they were going to do. He watched, laughed at humor that eluded him, and was stabbed by sadness at tragedy he didn’t comprehend. She spoke then, the sphinx, despairing. “You know this story?” He nodded, still watching, though he couldn’t think of its name. “I played so small a part,” she bemoaned. “But if my role were larger, then we should not have met at all in this place.” He couldn’t fathom that. “It wants music,” she commented. “That will come soon enough, I know.” Her voice broke.

He turned back to her, his heart wrenched by the sound of her weeping. Tears flowed to her paws, and dripped off the claws. He cupped his hands until they were full, and her image rippled in the held pool. He couldn’t understand how, when everything was dark around her, she continued to glow as if in soft bluish moonlight.

He raised his hands and drank her tears as if he might absorb her grief. When he opened his eyes, she was receding, though neither of them seemed to be moving at all.

“Sleep, my darling,” she said, and he knew the voice at last though he hadn’t heard it for such a long time: She hadn’t become a merwoman at all. She’d changed into this doleful manticore. “Sleep,” she said again and though he wanted to run and embrace her and never let her go this time, he could only watch her shrink into the distance, a source of retreating light that filled in with black despair and was soon gone altogether.

He turned back to the play, but the booth was closed, the screen covered; then the remaining light dimmed and the booth also disappeared. Everything was dark now, and he was alone, floating, a mask on the waves, free of anguish, of pain, of the helplessness of his life, and he released himself to the will of the black water as it carried him away. Out to sea, he hoped.

When he awoke he didn’t at first know where he was. His mind was confused, jumbled. Candles burned nearby, reflected in the white bone of the tusk-like tines above him, making them seem to dance as the candle flames flickered. He was in a bed, but the sides of it were higher than he. It was a box, really, a shallow box; and not far away stood a towering brass water pipe.

Then he remembered, and he knew what had been done to him, but he was so drained of emotion, of fear, anger, that he didn’t react to the knowledge, only contemplated it as if the emotions belonged to some other person.

Eskie should be coming for him soon. She would help him back to the dormitorium, put him to bed, and later bring him some broth, something to revive him. That sounded very appealing. He realized that he was ravenously hungry. Now he understood why the boys let themselves be chosen, even fought for the privilege of service. Already he wanted to be with the sphinx again, to hear her voice, his mother’s voice; he needed to tell her that he loved her and wouldn’t let them throw her into the sea this time. No, he would cling to her as she moved into darkness, wrap his arms around her neck, and climb upon her back and ride her so that she couldn’t disappear.

He licked his lips. They were dry, and licking them made them sticky. He remembered again that he was hungry.

After a while he crawled from the box on his own. No one remained in the chamber. The blindfold lay curled on the floor beside the pipe as if for the next client. He stood, swaying, and placed his hands on the belly of the pipe to steady himself. It was cold, and when he drew his hand away, his palm was imprinted with the designs etched in the bronze. He rapped his knuckles against it to listen to the sound echo inside. What did that do to the afrit? he wondered. Did it slumber after it had drunk of someone like him? Did it hear him? Know he was out here? He’d have liked to communicate with it, if only in the dream—if it had been merely a vivid dream and not a real vision of Nechron’s world, of some manner of afterlife. What did afrits show everyone else? He closed his eyes and rocked his head. His existence was suddenly compressed, the whole course of a lifetime squeezed inside him. His eyes ached as if they’d seen too much.

He shuffled away from the water pipe, made it to the doorway and then out into the hall. No one was there, either. Candles still burned in a few of the chambers, but in most the curtains hung open upon darkened rooms. Perhaps even now Eskie was helping someone else back to the dormitorium.

He shambled along the hallway, looking into the darkened and empty chambers, wondering if everyone else was asleep and he the only one left.

The corridors proved to be confounding this morning. He would turn a corner but almost immediately forget what hallway he’d been in prior to it. In no time at all, he lost his way to the sleeping quarters. Down a corridor that should have returned him to the dormitorium, he found himself at the base of spiraling steps that he’d never seen before. What if they took him up and out of the paidika? Might there be an exit no one had been told about, that only Bogrevil knew? He had to see, because he couldn’t imagine he would ever find his way back here again.

He climbed slowly, carefully, using hands and feet, and sometimes knees. He felt like a turtle. Each step took all his effort, and he tried to count them as he climbed but too soon forgot the number. He became aware of a noise, not voices exactly, but cooing and deep groans. He raised his head and saw that the steps ended in an open doorway. Dim light spilled down from it. He crabbed up a few more steps until his head was high enough to see through the opening into what he knew immediately were Bogrevil’s private rooms. Neither of them saw him. Bogrevil was too focused on sensation, his eyes closed, mouth drawn back in a feral grin, and foam bubbling on his lips. Eskie lay with her arms out, head back. Her legs were locked around his waist. She moaned once, licked her lips, and turned her head, folding her arms around it in a gesture expressive of pleasure.

Diverus sank down and let his head rest on the cold step. He couldn’t drown out the grunting and murmuring. Beyond that what could he do? He could barely crawl. If he intruded, Bogrevil would kill him before he’d dragged himself through the doorway—and for what? Eskie wasn’t being harmed, wasn’t performing against her will, not like he had done. Then he imagined that he saw the sphinx again, and he forgot his will.

He slid back down the steps, more confused than ever. Eskie had warned him, protected him against Bogrevil, yet here she was, his mistress, his lover if love was involved in the repulsive bargain. He wanted to feel betrayed but foundered in prying loose enough emotion. Why did he have to know this? He didn’t want to know it. Better that the afrit should wipe away all his memory and return him to the imbecilic state in which he’d lived his former life. What good was knowing the truth of things?

He stumbled through the maze of halls again, and finally into a dark and unoccupied guest room, into the box, and onto his belly. Let the creature come for him, let it steal his soul and send him forever to live with the sphinx. He didn’t care.

He fell asleep like that, but no dreams came, and if the afrit perched above him, he never knew. He woke only when one of the boys came to clean the room and found him. Thinking him dead, the cleaner ran out, calling Bogrevil’s name and shouting, “Dead! Dead!”

Diverus pushed himself onto hands and knees. His joints ached. He was like someone who had been laid down by a fever and, having come through it, wants to get away from his illness. His legs held him as he plunged across the room. He was almost at the door when Eskie arrived. She’d run from wherever she was, and when she saw him her breath caught. She reached toward his face. “Thank the gods, you aren’t dead. I thought…I was looking for you, you need—”

He slapped her hand aside. “I don’t need anything from you.”

“Diverus, what is wrong?”

He replied, “Get out of my way, please. I have to…have to eat something.” He couldn’t even look directly at her, but smoldered, his jaw clenched; yet he didn’t move.

She read his inaction, his fury, and understood, though not how or when he’d found out. “Diverus,” she said, “you can’t be in love with me.”

His whole face burned; his eyes scalded. “I’m not,” he said.

“He owns me. My family sold me to give them enough money to live on. My father was ill; he needed things we couldn’t afford. Medicines.”

“Shut up.”

“They sold me to him. I’m his slave. More so than you or any of these boys you live with.” She twisted at the waist and pulled back one sleeve of her shirt and rolled her arm so he could see the dark crescent near her shoulder. “This isn’t a birthmark. It’s his sigil. It doesn’t come off. I’m property. That’s all I am, all I can ever be.” Then she stepped aside and he pushed past her; he was not ready to hear explanations or excuses, least of all hers.

He shoved through the curtain and through a gathering of boys, then took one of the narrow halls that led to the kitchen level.

The cook was chopping turnips as Diverus entered. Glancing up, the cook said, “Well, well, come for your special treat at last, my little harem boy?” At the same time he set down his knife, placed both hands on the cutting board, and leaned forward. “Is it my turn finally, hmm?” As he reached across the board and tousled Diverus’s hair, he smiled with vulpine connivance.

Diverus snatched the knife and drove it straight through the cook’s other hand and into the board.

The cook shrieked to the ceiling. He clutched the handle but it had been driven hard into the board, and he had to rock it to loosen it, which made him squeal and squeal. His blood began to soak into the pale raw turnips. Diverus grabbed another knife, and this one he held to the cook’s throat. The cook clutched the handle stuck into his hand and whimpered. He quavered, his face pale as dough and glistening with sweat. Diverus said softly, “Never.” Then he laid down the knife and walked away. Behind him, the cook shrieked again as he finally freed his hand from the board. His cries rose and fell in waves of agony behind Diverus.

In the tight passage Bogrevil knocked past him, giving him a cursory but suspicious glance before hurrying to the kitchen. More boys followed; a few glared accusingly at him, others with a look more akin to worship. His own cored-out look challenged them all.

He went back to the dormitorium, to his pallet, and lay down. The others in the room were either asleep or too weak to do more than watch him lurch past. Kotul, asleep on his belly on the largest pallet, was sprawled halfway onto the floor.

By the time Diverus had fallen upon his pad he was shaking and feverish, and he drew his legs up, folding his arms around them, and waited for sleep that wasn’t going to come. Strangest of all was that nobody pursued him for his crime. He expected them to pour into the room, Bogrevil and his legion of boys, to drag him against his will down to the laundry pool, there to drown him in the dark and toss his miserable, weighted corpse into the sea just as he had helped dispose of the dead client. Through the vents high up on the wall, he could hear distant noises from the underspan, from the world where he’d been a captive to his own helplessness. He’d escaped it only to be a captive here, no higher nor closer to the surface of the world. The difference was that he knew it now, but knowing improved nothing. Knowing was worse than being an idiot. He wished almost that the gods had never made him aware; he’d been better off when nothing stayed with him, when the abuses rolled off, one after the other, and he felt nothing more than the immediate pain, the anguish of the moment, forgotten soon enough. This—this thinking, feeling, knowing—hurt too much, demanded too much of him. He didn’t want to die; he just wanted to lose himself once more. His brain whirled around the subject, and he closed his eyes to wring it out, to exorcise thinking, like a demon from his mind.

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.

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.

The lads stood around their victim a moment longer and only grudgingly left the purse there as they followed their leader.

 

 

 

Bogrevil made a sweeping bow and said, “Welcome, good sir, to the land where dreams o’ertake your other life. You would like a boy to smoke for the evening?”

The puppeteer hesitated and glanced from parlor to parlor, uncertain which one was providing the music. “I’ll browse?” she suggested in a deep whisper.

Bogrevil stepped back and broadly waved his arm. “By all means.” If he suspected at all that she was a woman, he didn’t show it. She was disguised, and therefore following the rules. He said, “If I can be of assistance, or when you’ve chosen, don’t hesitate to call upon me.”

They made respectful half bows; she strolled past the left-hand parlor and drew up before the middle one. The icy music of a santur trembled behind the beaded curtain there.

Seated cross-legged upon pillows in the middle of the room and surrounded by musical instruments, Diverus did not react as she stepped through the curtain. A small boy wearing a tray on his head glided up beside her to offer a drink. She took it, but then turned back, fascinated by the elegance of the tune being played and contemplating all the instruments lying about the player.

The musician himself was under the spell of his music: His eyes remained closed and his head rolled, snaking back and forth. His fingers flicked the tiny mallets with astonishing speed and accuracy. He never looked at them once. He continued playing for another ten minutes before the piece found an end, and his eyes didn’t open until the last tinny note was fading. Then his back arched and he inhaled sharply, suddenly, as if his spirit had plunged back into him from whatever dreamscape it had flown to on the wings of song.

Some of the others arose and made their way past her on unsteady legs. One was propped up by his rented boy. Outside the gauzy curtain, behind her, she heard Bogrevil directing them to various rooms. The beads hissed as he came into the parlor.

He stopped beside her. “Remarkable, ain’t he?”

She nodded. “I wondered, how much…”

“For an evening? Don’t misunderstand me, young sir, but I doubt you could afford him.” Then he named the shocking price, almost apologetically. “You see, if I let you have him for the rest of the evening, then I deprive everyone else of his boundless talent. Thus he comes very dear. No help for it, I’m afraid.”

“He plays all of these?” she asked.

“Oh, every single one. In more than a year nobody’s yet brought an instrument to our establishment that he couldn’t play, and with skill equal to what you just heard.”

“The gods favor him then.”

Bogrevil laughed. “Indeed, they do.”

Leodora considered for a moment while Diverus rolled aside the santur and took up a teardrop-shaped ud. He seemed to shiver at touching it. She asked, “What if I were to wait until the evening was over? No one would be deprived of their music then.”

Bogrevil’s brow knitted. Nobody had ever proposed that before. The quoted price for the boy’s services usually ended the conversation.

“That’s hours from now. I mean, I suppose,” he said, formulating, “the price would be a little more reasonable under those conditions. He’ll be tired, though—don’t know that he’ll care to accept. And still higher, I’m afraid, than most of the boys, because the experience will still drain him and he’ll still have to recover, and—truth is—nobody’s had him like that. It might drain him too much to play next night. There’s a lot to think about here. I must ponder it awhile.”

Leodora nodded as if she understood everything he’d said. But knowing nothing of what actually went on in this paidika, she couldn’t fathom what it was that might drain him. “I shall just listen then—if that’s all right.”

Bogrevil opened his mouth to object, but she touched his hand and a coin slipped between her fingers into his. He glanced at it, surprised and delighted by what he saw; and he wondered why he hadn’t thought to charge for the pleasure of listening to Diverus right from the start.

“Listen to your heart’s content,” he said. “I’ll see that he plays the shawm for you before daybreak.”

“That’s his best?”

“It stops everything in this place when he does it.”

“Where did he learn? He surely can’t be more than, what, fifteen?”

“Oh, he’s a year or more older than you imagine, I’m quite sure. As to where he learned, it’s the gods you’d have to ask about that.”

The first few plucked notes of another song began. Bogrevil gestured Leodora to a nearby pillow, then withdrew before the spell from the double strings clutched him as well.

She listened, watching at first, but with eyelids soon falling shut as she was spirited away by the sound. She was imagining the song accompanying a performance; it would be the perfect marriage of music with her art. She could not help but wonder if the procurer hadn’t been a god in disguise, who had led her to a destination she didn’t even know she was seeking. It was the sort of thing a trickster might do, and wasn’t the world full of them?

As the last note hovered and faded like a sunset, she opened her eyes and smiled at the performer. He nodded to her and she back at him. The room emptied out then—the remaining patrons going off either with their evening’s choice or in search of one elsewhere. The serving boys pushed through the curtain again with their trays, but she waved them off.

“You have incredible skill,” she told him. “You must have begun playing very young.”

He tilted his head as if considering this. “Yes, I must have—before I was born, I think.”

“And you can play them all?”

“So far.” He set down the ud. “Is there one you’d particularly like to hear?”

Before she answered there came a distant shout and a loud whistle that abruptly cut off. Then a voice cried, “Raid!”

Leodora jumped to her feet. She poked her head through the beaded curtain. The clamor came from the top of the long stairwell. The immense guard at the bottom of the steps had taken a position blocking the way. Out of the other two parlors people bolted, most of them in disguise and all heading away from the steps; they fought one another to get into the narrow halls, where Bogrevil gestured them to hurry. His expression was sour.

“What do we do?” she asked the musician.

“Flee, I think,” he advised. “This hasn’t happened in all the time I’ve been here, but we’ve been instructed again and again so that when it happened we’d know what to do. You should follow me.”

He picked up the ud and some of the other instruments. She reached out to accept one of the lutes and a double-reed instrument. “That’s a mijwiz,” he said. “I’m very fond of it. I’m called Diverus.”

“Jax,” she replied, and then they were in the foyer and past Bogrevil.

As they entered the narrow passage behind him, someone shouted, “There! Stop them!” It was a woman’s voice, and Leodora craned her head to see. At the bottom of the stairs the woman who’d shoved past her as she was arriving was flailing her arms madly. She had four large uniformed men with her, but they were busy combating the giant of a bouncer behind her, and the woman charged after Diverus without protection. Bogrevil stepped in front of the passage then, blocking the way with his body. Behind his back a gleam of light delineated the double-curved blade of the khanjarli dagger in his hand.

It was Leodora’s final view of him and of the events in the foyer. Diverus drew her out of the sloping passage and into a broad hall containing dozens of doorways and more passages leading off it. People were running about everywhere, some half undressed and many stumbling as if drunk or drugged. One sat on a small divan, head hanging between his knees, unable to rouse himself enough to take flight. She was surprised at the number of women scurrying from the rooms. Clearly they’d arrived disguised as men and only thrown off the disguises once they’d gained entry to these private rooms. Diverus dodged them all. She glimpsed some of the chambers they passed, each containing a giant water pipe, like a fountain fixture set in the center of the floor. Someone lay sprawled beside one, but most of the rooms were empty, the occupants already gone. In the last one, though, through the slit of the curtain she glimpsed or thought she glimpsed a face inhuman and insubstantial, with fierce marble eyes. She passed it so quickly that she didn’t make sense of it, didn’t register what she’d seen—a floating form, a ghoulish countenance—except as an afterimage, like something you can only see when you close your eyelids.

She and Diverus fell in behind a line of boys who were flooding into one dark doorway in particular. It took them down another flight of steps, easily as long as the stairs from the street. Footsteps and voices below echoed back up oddly as off water, and sure enough the room they reached contained a broad pool in which a few boys were laughing and playing, as though what was happening in the paidika was a lark, nothing to concern them.

Beyond the pool an iron gate hung open. Most of the boys and the sensible guests were escaping through it.

Outside, a narrow ledge ran in either direction. They were under the bridge, at ocean level. A few lights shone across the water, where another tower wall loomed, seeming almost close enough to touch in the dark. The water stank of rot.

The ledge was hardly wide enough for the two of them to stand shoulder-to-shoulder. To the left of the gate, boys had lined up, shivering, pressed to the wall of the bridge pier as if this was as far as they were able to come before terror incapacitated them. Their line trailed into the blackness of the bridge. The clientele, on the other hand, had all turned to the right and even now reached the end of the ledge and vanished. Diverus hesitated for a second, but turned and pursued the escaping clients. No one tried to stop him. Encumbered by the instruments in his hands and tucked beneath his arms, he could have done nothing to defend himself if they had. From the other direction a woman’s voice called out, “Diverus!” and he went rigid. He glanced back then, first at Leodora, and then beyond, into the depths of the darkness beneath the span. His face twisted up as if he was wincing in pain.

Under his breath then, he whispered, “Good-bye, Eskie,” and turned away again. Leodora glanced back, but no one had stepped out, and whoever had called couldn’t possibly have heard him.

The clients had disappeared where the ledge ended, as if they’d stepped off into the ocean and evaporated; but it was an illusion. The ledge wrapped around the corner, to roughly carved steps, which led right up the side of the pier. To be sure, they were cracked and treacherous, offering barely enough purchase for both feet placed side by side, but the customers from the paidika climbed briskly up, clustered bodies lambent in the moonlight. The musician and the puppeteer followed them.

Perhaps a third of the way up the side of the pier, the steps reached a landing of sorts. This landing, a broader platform with a rail around it, jutted off the backside of the tower, and the two of them lingered there to catch their breath. No one else was coming up behind them; Leodora gazed off across the ocean, where a single lantern’s light glowed distantly. She turned back to find Diverus leaning far over the rail on the inside of the platform. She pressed around his shoulder to see what had so captured his attention, and fell upon an astonishing view: the underworld of the span of Vijnagar.

Fires and embers glittered on dozens of levels, as far into the distance as she could see. From the look of it, the place ran the full width of the bridge. The glow from the fires suggested structures—an arch overhead and all manner of struts and supports on the far side of that arch, and even more platforms. She remembered that Ningle, too, had supports beneath it, columns of stone that propped up the great boulevards and buildings. But she had seen no one living beneath that span.

“That used to be my home,” Diverus said.

“Where?”

“Somewhere in there. Someone else lives in it now. Or maybe they’ve moved on, too. That woman who raided the paidika is from here. What do you suppose she told them to get the authorities to act on her behalf? I should have stayed behind and exposed her, shouldn’t I?”

“I don’t know how you would have done that,” she replied. “She was after you?”

“She wanted a cut of the profits I brought. I would have been trapped again if I’d stayed. He wasn’t ever going to let me go.” He sighed. “Poor Eskie. She is trapped.” When she didn’t ask him what he meant, he let the matter go. “I’ve never seen it like this, not from below. I know where we are now, and there’ll be another landing above us, one that can be accessed from underneath—in there.”

As if to prove his point, a shout burst from above them, then another more like a scream, which grew abruptly louder. A body hurtled past.

Leodora sprang back from the rail. Diverus didn’t even flinch. “I wonder,” he mused, as though the killing going on above them were a mere inconvenience, “if we might want to wait a bit. Let the two sides sort it out.” Another body fell past, this one silent. He leaned over the edge, followed the corpse down, and then looked up. “The thieves are outnumbered. They couldn’t have anticipated so many all at once. They’re used to couples sneaking off to hide, or their own sort fleeing from officials up above with whatever boodle they’ve snatched. Easy marks.” He tilted his head to one side. “I can’t even tell you how I come to know that. I couldn’t have known it back then, but someone must have said so, I must have heard it even though I was too dull to understand.”

Leodora considered that they with their arms full of musical instruments would be “easy marks,” too.

After minutes passed in silence, Diverus started up the second tier of steps, and she followed, wondering all the while why she inherently trusted the strange musician.

The second landing when they reached it was occupied only by a corpse. Though masked, he wasn’t dressed in the finery of the paidika’s clientele. Moonlight glinted off the hilt of a dagger embedded in his chest. Of the clients there was no sign. A small wooden ladder, nearly horizontal, reached from one of the inner platforms to the edge of the landing. Diverus shoved it away and it dropped, but swung below from ropes and clattered against a lower level. Someone shouted a complaint.

Without a word, he continued his climb up. By now Leodora’s legs ached, and she would have liked to sit and rest for an hour. It hadn’t seemed, she thought, anywhere near this great a climb down through the tower. The smell leaking out from the underworld grew more intense as they ascended—a greasy, sour stink it was, too.

As they neared the surface of the span, Diverus paused and pointed to where a makeshift platform butted up along the backside of the tower. They could have stepped off the narrow stairs and into the underworld from there. “This is where I used to climb from. My mother took me up, many times. And then Mother Kestrel, too, when she put me on the dragon beam.”

“The dragon beam?”

“In the bowl—it’s where I learned how to play all of these, though I didn’t know it at the time.” He continued quickly up the steps, as if to be quit of the subject, but she hurried after.

“How long ago?” she asked.

Over his shoulder he replied, “I don’t know, really. A year or more. Bogrevil maintains that I’m seventeen, but he doesn’t really know. When I arrived he thought I was twelve because I’d been starved so long, and I couldn’t have told him in any case, because I don’t know.”

Then he rattled up the last steps and through the rail to the surface. She found him waiting for her, alone. The clients had dispersed back into the lanes and streets of the span.

“You must tell me,” he said, “why you chose tonight to come to the paidika.”

“I was escaping from a situation. I thought if I went there, I could elude someone.”

“You’re not addicted to the afrits then.”

“Afrits,” she repeated, and recalled the vaporous thing she’d glimpsed.

Her ignorance seemed to reassure him. He looked around. People strode past, in every case led by someone with a lamp. He and Leodora alone stood in the shadows. “I must impose upon you,” he said. “I’ve nowhere to go, and I know no one up here.”

Leodora said, “I can help. In fact, I can offer you employment of a sort that will make use of your talent.” A lightbearer approached, and she gestured him over. “Lead us to Lotus Hall,” she said, and handed him a coin in advance, in good faith for the distance he must cover. He lowered his lantern on its pole to check the coin, then tucked it into his tunic and directed them to follow.

As they walked, Diverus said, “Would it be a good idea for me to play music? They might be looking for me, or at least listening. Word will travel.”

She nodded. “Yes, they might. On this span anyway.”

“We’re going to another?” The idea seemed to take him by surprise.

“Between your troubles and mine, probably the sooner the better. Have you never been on another span?”

He shook his head. “And what is it you do, sir, if I may ask, that you have a use for me?”

“I tell stories,” she replied, “which seems to have become a far more complicated occupation than I’d ever imagined.”