Shadowbridge

by Gregory Frost

  . . . . .

  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.

  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 whooshing 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 wer
e 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.