Shadowbridge (23 page)

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
whoosh
ing 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.