Shadowbridge

by Gregory Frost

  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.