“So, you’ll let him be if I go off to sleep awhile. I won’t come out and find him gone.”
“Really, Lea. Where do you get such ideas?” He smiled at Grumelpyn, but the elf continued to smirk over what was being revealed in the conversation. “Of course he can stay. Didn’t I say we needed a musician?”
“I—” She fell silent.
“What is it, child?” There was something wrong; he knew it but he dared not ask. He wished the elf would leave.
“I’m—I must be tired, that’s all. I dozed after we got back this morning, and now it feels to me as if I dreamed this…this moment. Only your friend wasn’t here. Someone else was.”
He turned as far as he could then, to see where her troubled eyes looked; and though she looked where Grumelpyn sat, Soter could almost see what she was seeing. Her expression told him everything. The Coral Man again. He wondered if he could get her to cast it back into the ocean. “Well, as you can see, there’s only Grumelpyn. Now why don’t you sleep, dear? I’m awake and you need to be rested for the performance tonight. You can always call if you need something.” He saw her smile, a sheepish grin.
“I was up all night.”
There’s the price of mischief, he thought, no different from her father in that, either.
“You’ll wake me in time.”
He knew that she knew he would. The tension in the question intimated more the fear of what might be awaiting her in her dreams. He said, “Of course, dear.”
As she left, he watched the elf’s gaze follow her.
“Remarkable,” said Grumelpyn. “Under that tunic, is she built anything like her mother? That would be something. You should have swapped her for a change—”
“Enough!” Soter slammed his palm against the table. “You are too bold.” Grumelpyn closed his eyes and sniggered. “Hate me all you like,” Soter said, “but you leave her out of it. She’s the reason things went the way they did, believe it as you like, or don’t.”
“Better than her father—is she really?”
Soter nodded.
The elf leaned back, stretching. “So…a map.” He grabbed the bottle and poured himself another drink. “You waste your time, Soter, you really do. I mean, I’ll do your map for a price. But you won’t be able to linger anywhere. Word of her is spreading like blood in water. I wasn’t even on this span nor the next and I heard about the Shadowplays of Jax. If I hear, then they will hear. Sooner or later. They travel everywhere, after all, and we know, you and I, that they’re no myth. You’ve already lingered too long on Vijnagar for your own good. Or are you perhaps hiding out from more than one party? Someone else looking for her, is there? Did she run off to join the Mangonel Circus?” He held up a hand as if to ward Soter off. “Please, don’t tell me, since you’ll lie anyway.” He sipped softly a moment. “Tell me instead about this musician and his troubling song? Is it something I’d have heard?”
“All I want from you is a map. No threads to link you to me, nothing to put you in jeopardy at all unless you’re fool enough to sign it. I couldn’t harm you if I wanted to.”
Grumelpyn tapped his nails against his cup, the sound like a skittering cockroach. “You mentioned payment.”
Soter glared, but when he placed his hand on the table, trapped beneath it were three gold coins. He slid them forward.
Grumelpyn reached out and patted the hand like a cook testing the plumpness of a chicken. At the touch of that petrified flesh, Soter snatched his hand back, leaving the money. “All right, then.” Grumelpyn sighed. “For her I will do it. She is sweet despite who raised her, and I wouldn’t wish to see her go the way of her mother. Do you think she screamed?” His smile widened, eager and repulsive.
Soter lifted his cup and drained it, closing his eyes and then avoiding Grumelpyn’s. “I get the map tonight, then,” he said.
“That’s suitable. After her final performance. I would, perhaps, accompany you north myself, only I’m bound for southern spans. Emeldora, mayhap. Have you played there yet…for old times’ sake?”
Soter blanched at the name of that fateful span. The taunt was too much for him. He pushed back his chair and stood. “We’re done,” he told the elf. He strode away.
“Don’t forget to wake her,” called Grumelpyn. “Or I could return one of these coins to you and you’d let me wake her, hey?” He chuckled.
Soter rounded the booth and pushed inside the back.
Diverus flinched and made to leap off the cases, but Soter waved away his fear. “I’m not here to eject you, so you can relax, boy. For now, anyway.”
He moved to the rear corner and sat on the floor. He pressed a hand to his forehead. “Gods and ghosts conspire,” he said, but not to Diverus, seemingly directing it at the floor.
The sordid conniving elf was, regrettably, right—they needed to move on. They couldn’t afford to stay more than a night or two anywhere on this spiral. The money was good, better each night—and that was the trouble. He’d gotten greedy, remembering how things had been with Bardsham. He couldn’t afford the luxury of staying anywhere. The troupe of Jax needed to catch up with the gossip, pass it by, stay ahead. Arguably he’d paid for a map when really he was paying for Grumelpyn’s advice. The elf might hate him, but he’d told him the truth.
. . . . .
It wasn’t until they were standing in front of Vijnagar’s north tower the next morning that Leodora found out about the map. She was played out after a second night of little sleep, following a triumphal performance, and did not at first realize what Soter was doing.
The boulevard ended by dividing into three tall tunnel mouths—three oblique routes for leaving the span. She hadn’t imagined there would be more than one. All the verges between spans she had seen thus far had provided only one portal. She’d no idea why this one should be different.
At the side of the road Soter set down the case he carried and walked off, leaving Leodora to look after their belongings and Diverus. She had dressed him up in blue robes and a turban encrusted with bright if cheap glass jewels, and darkened his face with a stain made for the puppets. He looked now like a member of a royal household and nothing like the boy who’d only escaped from bondage the day before; the stain made him look older, too. Nevertheless, by forcing him to stop in front of the lane that led to the very paidika from which he’d escaped, Soter had him all but crawling under the lid of one of the puppet cases: He crouched behind them and placed the knapsack containing his instruments on his lap to further obscure himself. Leodora recognized where they were, too. Soter had chosen the worst possible place to stop. She went after him.
He had his back to her and, as she came upon him, she saw he had unfurled a brown parchment with darker brown ink covering it in swirls and lines like veins across a leaf, but also in words, names, a few of which she recognized.
“Do you not know where we’re going?” she asked.
He jumped. “I—” He swept the document from sight and turned defiantly to face her. “What do you mean, sneaking up on me like that? Of course I know where we’re going.”
“At what point did you begin consulting a map, then? You didn’t use one before this, or did you? You made such a great show while in your cups of knowing the way across all spans.”
It was exactly what he’d intended to claim, and her rebuke left him without a response.
She glanced back at Diverus and the cases. “We have to go now, Soter. He’ll run away pretty soon if the paidika’s master doesn’t come upon him first. It’s right at the end of this alley.”
“You should never have brought him along,” he squawked. The complaint wearied her even more, but she did not want to be drawn into another protracted argument. Instead she gestured at the three tunnels.
“Which one, Soter? If you don’t tell me, I’ll pick up my case and take whichever one I want and damn the consequences.”
“The first one,” he answered. She turned away with a dismissive abruptness, and would have been content w
ith the answer had he not added, “Grumelpyn gave me the map.”
She stopped. Without turning back she asked, “The elf just happened to have a map for you?”
“I paid him for it.”
“Why?” She glanced darkly back at him.
Soter drew his arms against his body as if expecting her to assail him with her fists.
“Why?” she asked again more insistently.
“Because,” he answered, then hung his head, “I can’t remember.” He brought the map into view again and smoothed it open. “We played so many spans, your father and I. More than once, some of them many times. I don’t know any longer what comes next, whose establishment we performed in, who gave us lodging, even what sort of span it was. It’s all jumbled up, you see. Grumelpyn—his elvish span is way to the north, dozens of spans out. So I knew he would be familiar with everything in between, because he’s just traveled it. He drew this for me for the price of a few drinks before the performance.” He gazed at her with wounded eyes. “You simply don’t trust me enough.”
“I simply don’t trust you at all.”
“Leodora, how can you say that? I brought you here.”
“You complain that we need a musician, and I find possibly the most remarkable one in the whole world and you say get rid of him. You make secret appointments with old friends and acquire secret maps. You argue with the ghost of my mother as if she’s in the room with you—what should compel me to trust you?”
He gaped at her. “How did you—?”
“I overheard you. I have my secrets, too, Soter.” She continued back to where Diverus cowered and helped him up. Then she lifted her case, and Diverus his satchel, and the two of them entered the first tunnel, leaving the remaining case behind for Soter.
. . . . .
The tunnel had its own seigneur, who lived in a box-like house in the middle of the passage, from which he controlled the flow of traffic and collected a fee from every traveler. The fees for crossing varied from span to span. More ancient and decrepit spans often had no collectors at all any longer—it was a position that tended to be handed down through families, and families could die out—while on richer spans that considered themselves favored by the gods, the fees might be exorbitant. Soter had dreamed from time to time of being a seigneur. It seemed such an easy life.
Leodora and Diverus waited at the seigneur’s booth for him to catch up. A few other people passed them without acknowledgment, paid their money, and kept going, in one direction or another, their footfalls echoing away. The far end was nothing more than a ball of bright light without details, as if the tunnel led straight into the sun.
Soter set his case down beside them and walked up to the booth.
The seigneur—his beaky, chicken-like head protruding from the window on a scrawny neck—named his fee. Soter put a hand to his chest and stepped back. “Outrageous,” he grumbled. “That’s twice what it used to be to come through here.”
Observing this performance, Leodora commented, “I thought you couldn’t remember this span.”
“I didn’t say I didn’t remember anything,” he replied, using umbrage to disguise that he’d been caught out, but he could see that she was skeptical of all he said. When, he wondered, had she decided not to trust him anymore? And why? If she had heard him talking to the ghosts, that had to have been back on Bouyan, because they hadn’t haunted him since. He wasn’t sure—he’d never been sure—if his ghosts were real or just the manifestation of his darkest moods; but if they were real, he’d left them behind on Bouyan. Nothing was coming after him. It was what lay ahead that he feared. He couldn’t tell Leodora without having to explain why, which he could never do, for she—like her mother—would steer straight for the heart of doom instead of turning away. A thousand lies were better than that. “I’m protecting her,” he said to the darkness of the tunnel, as if it were a chant to ward off evil. As long as he adhered to that goal, perhaps the ghosts would leave him alone, let him be. He couldn’t make her dispense with this boy. Certainly, he had said all along that they needed a good musician, but he couldn’t have predicted she would find someone into whom the gods had fed their magic. Gods’ magic was always capricious if not openly treacherous. She was supposed to be collecting stories on the spans, not people. Stuck, he was trapped by his own words, which hadn’t seemed dangerous when he’d uttered them. The performances did need a good musician; but that was something for him to find, not her. He’d been guiding Leodora, cautiously, carefully. How had he lost control so easily? It was all the fault of that woman, Rolend, chasing after the great puppeteer, a celebrity she could bed. He’d made light of the pursuit when he should have helped Leodora fend the woman off. Such an insignificant mistake. He’d been in his cups; she couldn’t expect him to be ready to offer advice on every little detail of their journey. So she’d run off, taken refuge in a paidika, and found someone…extraordinary, same as Bardsham had found Leandra. No, no, he didn’t care for the parallel there at all.
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 indo
ors, 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.
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