Shadowbridge (22 page)

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.