Shadowbridge

by Gregory Frost

  “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 rolle
d 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.”