Shadowbridge (31 page)

He glanced up. They were staring at him—both she and the seigneur—and he realized he’d been tangled in thought for an eternity. With a show of resentment he paid the fee and then marched ahead, leaving Leodora and Diverus to catch up.

The dank, echoing tunnel smelled of salt and mildew. Whitish crystals grew like veins across the walls.

As he neared the end he set the case down again, then sat on the edge of it and waited. There was no point in petulance. He wasn’t about to abandon her, after all. She angered him because she didn’t understand his motives, and that was how it had to be.

Finally she came up beside him and set her own undaya case down next to his.

“This span—”

“Hyakiyako,” he named it.

“You do remember being on it?” she asked.

He heard in her voice that she was trying to forge peace with him. He replied, “Most certainly. You can’t go farther north without traveling through, therefore we played it.”

“But you’ve no memory of it?”

“My dear,” he answered with exaggerated patience from which he immediately retreated, “I tried to explain, we played
hundreds
of spans for
thousands
of audiences. They all bleed together after a while, and one is much like any other. You must remember that your father and I didn’t start out from Bouyan, we didn’t start out anywhere near it nor here.”

“Do you know
anything
about this span at all?”

“I know my job,” he replied. “Last night I asked Grumelpyn. He travels the spans much the way I used to, and he knows the best routes and places to lodge. Of course at first I thought I would have more time—a few more
nights
to buy him drinks, talk over old days, find out everything.”

“Yet you made the choice to leave, after telling me we were staying. What did he tell you?”

He pretended with his answer not to know what she meant. “That there’s some kind of parade at night here. Not every night apparently, but he couldn’t say why or which nights or what it means that there’s a parade, because he was strongly advised to stay inside while it was going on, or else never be seen again.”

“A parade.” She glanced back at Diverus. He sat with his head down. The bejeweled turban and the tunnel shadows made him look considerably older than he was. With his bag of instruments thrown over one shoulder, he might have been a wandering mystic guiding two travelers away from the fleshpots of Vijnagar. He glanced up and shook his head as if to say that he knew nothing of Hyakiyako.

Watching this interchange, Soter insisted, “I’m afraid that’s all I can tell you. At least we should have a captive audience—I mean, if they can’t go out, then they’ll be wanting some entertainment while they’re trapped inside. That can’t be bad.”

“Can’t it?” she asked but more to herself than to him, as if she was distracted, and he imagined it was the story as the elf had laid it out that had her wondering. What sort of parade took place if everyone was dissuaded from participating? If people all stayed indoors, then who was marching in it? On the face of it, Grumelpyn’s story made no sense. But whatever the answer, the three of them could not remain inside the tunnel. They were committed now to pushing on. As if she’d reached the same conclusion, Leodora stood, hefted the undaya case by its strap once more, and continued walking.

Groaning, Soter pushed himself to his feet again. Oh, that the world would let him lie down in the tunnel and never have to be anywhere at all. Yes, a seigneur’s life would have suited him just fine.

By the time they came to the end of the tunnel, they were shielding their eyes against the light, like Meersh the trickster when he’d returned from the umbral land of the dead by popping out of his own chimney. And surely the world had presented no stranger sight to him than the span of Hyakiyako.

Vertical banners hung from poles up and down every street. The symbols painted on them meant nothing to him. Unlike the spans they had traveled since leaving Bouyan, there were hardly any tall structures on this one. The buildings were low to the ground, and wide, with double roofs—a smaller one on top of the main one, as if it were necessary for every building to represent itself in miniature above the original. Here and there even odder structures that looked like crookedly stacked cups poked up at the sky. Far down the span, probably in the middle, one great gateway dominated. It was a thing of two dark angled pillars and two curving crosspieces that ran the width of the span, the way most of the towers did. It was misty in the distance, impossible to tell what lay beyond the gate; but if that was the halfway point, then Hyakiyako was a very long span indeed. There would be no climbing that gate, either.

The view to the left revealed even more unusual aspects of the span: It abutted a hillside. The other two tunnels gave on to separate branches, boulevards running parallel at first, but slowly curving back toward the one on which they stood; the others were narrower than this one, too. Where they actually reconnected to the broader span lay somewhere in the distant haze, beyond the great gate. However, instead of there being nothing but ocean between the branches, there were hillocks rising above the level of the rails and then dipping down again out of sight.

Beyond the third branch the crest of a larger hill protruded and upon it a single tower—another of those crooked cup stacks.

It was the first span they’d come to that incorporated a landmass, although Soter imagined that she couldn’t be too terribly surprised—he had taught her stories that could not have unfolded upon bridges, and thus implied the existence of the larger landmasses. She must have realized that Bouyan could not have been the only island linked with a span, else it would have been celebrated as a novelty instead of shunned as a backwater that nobody cared to visit. Of course, knowing that abstractly wasn’t the same as seeing it.

He commented as if to himself, “The right-hand path
is
the main thoroughfare. Good, good. I guess we can trust this map of Grumelpyn’s a little more.”

Ahead of them on the streets, people milled about, dressed in jackets and robes of a finer quality than those worn on Vijnagar. A man who seemed to be acting as gatekeeper on this end of the tunnel bowed to them most formally. He wore a long dark coat, and he said something incomprehensible as he gestured for them to enter the span. Clearly, he wasn’t asking for money, but was welcoming them. It was a completely alien gesture. And then, suddenly, it wasn’t.

As had happened previously when they stepped onto a span, everything changed in a moment: The foreignness of the place evaporated like a sun dog. This, as he had explained to Leodora on the voyage out from Ningle and before they’d set foot on Merjayzin, was the magic of the spans. How it worked was something only the gods knew, but work it did. The symbols upon the nearest banner shifted from incomprehensible hatchmarks into easily discernible text, now reading quite obviously:
THE SPECTER OF NIKKI DANJO
. Diverus asked, “What does it mean, do you know?” Soter glanced back to confirm that they were staring at the same thing, but Leodora answered before he could.

“It’s a story,” she said, and then to Soter added, “You taught me a version of it.”

“That’s right. A ghost story.”

“It means we have something to perform tonight. Assuming we can find a
place
to perform.”

“We’ll have a place. I’ll find us a venue.” He stared at the sky and with affected injury said, “The child does not trust my powers.”

Leodora set down her case. “The
child,
” she said, “has seen you drunk.”

At this the one-man welcoming committee roared with laughter. Soter opened his mouth as if to tell the man to be quiet, but instead chuckled, too. He hefted the undaya case again and marched into Hyakiyako.

 . . . . . 

The banner over the door read,
EAT THIS AND HAVE A CUP OF TEA
, and beside these words was the drawing of a circle.

Soter reacted to it as if he’d been hunting for the very phrase, and lurched suddenly across the cobbled road to the wide steps up to the porch that appeared to girdle the building. A pedicab for a single passenger ran past, cutting him off from the other two. It slowed as the puller considered Leodora and Diverus, asking a question with his eyes. She shook her head, and the cab trundled on.

At the entrance beside the steps, Soter had left his case and removed his shoes, which sat next to a row of others, giving the impression that a dozen people had been lifted from their footwear and vanished upon the threshold.

Leodora placed her own shoes beside his, set her case beside the one he’d carried, and then sat upon the two of them. She stretched her neck and flexed her knotted shoulders. As her muscles found their limits and her vertebrae cracked, she groaned luxuriously. “We could use one of those pedicabs,” she remarked to Diverus. “Put the cases in instead of us, and pull them along. It would have to be easier than these straps.”

“We can trade if you like,” he suggested. “My instruments aren’t nearly so heavy.”

Before she could reply, Soter burst onto the porch. “We have lodging!” he proclaimed. “
And
a courtyard in which to perform.”

“A courtyard?”

“It’s their custom here. The entertainments are held outside but inside.” He clambered down the three wide steps, shooed her to her feet, and then grabbed his case by its strap.

“Would this have something to do with the parade?” she asked.

“I wouldn’t know. I’ve no memory of the place, though we must have played here. Of
course
we played here.” He stood with one foot on the porch, the other on the step, a majestic pose as he looked at the city around him and added, “I think.”

“Maybe you went some other way?” she suggested.

“How? There is only this one span linking Vijnagar to other places north. Yorba to the south. I remember
it.
”

“
You
said that you didn’t begin at Ningle when you traveled with Bardsham. You began somewhere else, you said. Somewhere—”

“South,” he interrupted. “Traveled for years, you understand? Years before we crossed paths with your mother. Took boats between spirals. Years and never the same span twice. That’s how big, how vast, the world is. Maybe we sailed off after Vijnagar, didn’t come farther north. Maybe we came back to Grumelpyn’s span from another. His is the end of this one, I think. The final curl in this spiral. There were places down south that thought we were thieves, stealing part of their lives and like that—telling their stories was taking their souls, keeping them. You definitely don’t want to go in that direction. Anyway, I have a map now. I’m your guide, Lea, you have to trust that I know what I’m doing.”

“You know what you’re doing but you don’t remember what it is.” She tried to remain irritated, but in the face of his ebullience this proved impossible. “All right,” she said, and perched again upon her case, flexing her toes, and considered that his justification had inadvertently provided her with more information than he’d given her since leaving Ningle. Why, she wondered, hadn’t he told her about those southern venues before? He’d told her so many things about traveling with Bardsham, but she realized now that they were only cursory things, events without details, as if he’d hoped she would take no interest in life on the spans. He’d answered questions when confronted, but he had never volunteered anything.

She wanted to know about the south. Had they gotten into trouble there? Had her mother been with them then? Had something happened on the southern spans that led to…led to—and once again, she didn’t know. She didn’t know the specifics at all.

She looked up to ask him, but Soter had left her and entered the building, disappearing into its depths.

She dusted off her feet, then wearily stood, lifted the case, and climbed up the steps. The slickly polished floor of the porch like unbroken water reflected the case and her upside down.

Diverus made no move to follow her. He stared at the rows of empty shoes as if they troubled him.

“Come on,” she said, but in response he only shifted his weight uncertainly from leg to leg. “Diverus,” she inveigled, “I’ll leave you outside if you don’t climb the steps right now.” He slipped off his own shoes, placing them against hers, watching her as if fearful she might vanish in an instant. He climbed up beside her.

“I just play music,” he said, as if that explained something.

“Tonight you do that in here.” She lifted her puppet case. Side by side, they went in.

The glossy floors extended all the way into the depths, making the place seem huge, reflectively doubling the height of the translucent wall panels. The light melting through them rendered the interior into a state of permanent, golden dusk. People sat cross-legged on the floor at low tables, eating—at least it was her impression that they were eating—and drinking. They remained no more than shapes, lumps in silk tucked into corners and alcoves of which there seemed to be an impossible number. She wondered how they could see well enough to know what they were eating. Or maybe they didn’t care. She couldn’t tell if they were watching her, or even whether they noticed her. Perhaps not, if they couldn’t identify more about her than she could of them. She might have been nothing more than the scent of barbecued eel, collecting for an instant above the tables.

Then out of the shadows the proprietor emerged, coming right up to them—a small man with crooked teeth and a sloping forehead, not much hair, and bright, eager eyes. Like two smooth white gems in that dusky light, his eyes glittered. “Yes, you come, you come,” he said. He plucked at her sleeve, at Diverus. “You both come!” He tugged them still deeper into his establishment.

It hadn’t looked all that impressive from the front, but Eat This and Have a Cup of Tea proved to incorporate more rooms in its depths than she might have imagined. She soon realized that they were walking around a central area, the source of the wan light beyond the screens, and guessed that it must be Soter’s courtyard. At the point she decided she had been led through a complete circuit, the proprietor abruptly turned and pushed back a screen, revealing another room, this one with mats on the floor.