Shadowbridge

by Gregory Frost

  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 Kest
rel 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.”