CONTENTS

TITLE PAGE

DEDICATION

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

CONFERRING WITH GODS

ONE

TWO

I BOUYAN

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

II DIVERUS

III NEW SPANS FOR OLD

ONE

TWO

THREE

EPILOGUE
THE BLACK SHIP

SHADOWBRIDGE ends here, but the story…

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ALSO BY GREGORY FROST

COPYRIGHT

To Michael Swanwick for urging me ever onward,
and to Marianne Porter for reading it more times than he did

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Numerous people have contributed to the fashioning of this book and concomitant world over the years, and so I would like to attempt to thank as many of them as possible: Eternal gratitude to the members of the Philadelphia Stories Workshop and the Nameless Workshop; to first and partial readers Marianne, Janine, Fran, and Oz; to Michael once again for a lot of discussions; to Richard Bradshaw for inspiration; to Laura Jorstad for remarkable edits; and to my agent Shana Cohen and editor Keith Clayton for seeing the shape of the larger spiral.

CONFERRING WITH GODS

ONE

The first time Leodora spoke to a god, she had climbed to the top of the bridge tower and she was masked.

It was late in her third day on the span called Vijnagar, a broad segment on one of the infinite bridges that uncoil across the oceans of Shadowbridge. She went there to withdraw before her performance as the mysterious puppeteer known as Jax, to be herself awhile, and to answer to no one.

The towers—there were three supporting Vijnagar—were like great flat-topped and frieze-covered behemoths looming above the buildings and creatures on the surface that threaded the distances between them. Leodora climbed up the outside of the western pylon, going up the rungs hand over hand. To either side of her, statues of avatars and demons, monsters and heroes hung out from the corners to stare at one another, so that the climber between them could not help sensing the painted eyes that seemed to watch her hooded figure as it ascended. Most of their identities, along with their stories, were unknown to her. Like any span of Shadowbridge, Vijnagar had its own gods and tales, and she hadn’t been here long enough to collect many of the stories, but she did recognize some of the elements: the talaria that sprouted from one figure’s ankles, the gnarled knobkerrie brandished by another. These things described and adorned gods and heroes she’d heard of, whose tales she knew from elsewhere—some from the three spans she’d traveled before this. Other objects confounded her, and she hung awhile between sky and sea, trying to guess what purpose they served. One of the figures, in a long coat, leaned around from the back edge and held up a disk as if about to hand it to her. It looked like a shell strung on a necklace that, instead of circling his throat, plugged into his ears. What could that possibly be? And what legend could it be from? The next figure above him didn’t help her, either. Painted black, with spiked blue hair, sharp-tipped ears, and red eyes like flames, the figure’s identity eluded her, too.

She climbed on.

At the top she reached up and, finding gouged handholds, curled her fingers into them and pulled herself over the edge. Her blue shadow stretched before her. She lay against the cool stone to catch her breath, staring down the length of the walkway that ran to the far side of the tower. Finally she gathered herself up and knelt on one knee.

On both sides of the walkway stood more statues, figures larger than life, two rows of them hedging it all the way to the far side of the span, where presumably there were other rungs down the opposite pylon. The statues were positioned, as gods should be, overlooking the buildings and beings of Vijnagar. She wondered if the gods of enigmatic Edgeworld had cast the statues when they made this span or if it was the inhabitants of Vijnagar who had chiseled them. The nearest ones looked to have been brightly painted once upon a time, long ago. The colors had all but faded away.

Leodora got to her feet. The walkway was deserted. Unlike on the span of Phosphoros, where other people frequented the tops of the supporting towers, she was alone here. She pushed back the hood of her tunic and, reaching behind her, undid the ribbons of the domino mask that covered her head to the nose, then drew the mask away. She sighed as if all of her tension had been bound up in the disguise, as perhaps it had. The thick braid of her red hair unfurled from inside her hood.

Turning about, she beheld the world.

The sun hung like a spectacular gong behind thin clouds on the horizon, not quite ready to relinquish the sky to the two deformed moons of Saphon and Gyjio. They were creeping up into the eastern sky behind her like two furtive eyes while the sun’s dusking light spread molten gold across the sea and painted every spire and minaret with its fire.

This was the hour when sacrifices were performed and spells cast and oracles consulted; the time when light and darkness split the world down below, and one could seek for glimpses of each in the other.

The dying evening wind plucked at her loose clothes, the breeze sliding up her sleeves and dancing around her torso, billowing her tunic like a sail. It reminded her of a moment in the story of how Death came into the world.

She leaned over and looked down the way she had climbed.

In the ocean below, the shadowy shapes of large fish clustered around the immense pier at the base of the pylon, there to breed in the warm, buoyant water. On many spans fishing off a pierside was a popular pastime, but not on Vijnagar, where the people held many fish to be sacred, some by decree. No one’s line dangled in among the fish she saw.

The notion of fishing drew forth an unpleasant memory. For most of her life Leodora had viewed Shadowbridge only from below one straight and decrepit span, called Ningle; it was somewhere off to the east, over the horizon, part of another bridge. Almost as an act of defiance now, she climbed the tower heights of spans to look upon the world as though it might be something she could possess. As if she reigned with the lined-up avatars in a sky palace somewhere even higher.

In the sun fire she glowed like a burnished goddess—a goddess of Edgeworld, surveying the whole of Shadowbridge from beyond the moons. She would have climbed through the clouds themselves if there had been a ladder so tall.

She ran a hand over the top of her head, caught the leather strip binding her braid, gave it a tug. Her hair fanned out across her neck and shoulders—hair as copper and shining as the sunlight upon the sea. She shook it, luxuriating in the freedom. Here, on this height, she was unrestrained.

Stepping back, she turned and strolled a ways between the stone figures. There to the right was one that might have been Chilingana, one of whose stories she would be performing tonight. Glancing left, she spied a figure of certain identity—the demigod Shumyzin, recognizable by the tusks protruding from his mouth. He faced west and brandished a shield and short sword to hold off a clawing gorgon whose snarling face promised death. The swollen sun gave color to Shumyzin’s terrible pop-eyed and unpainted features. Almost health. She sauntered over to him and ran her hand along the edge of his shield, then crouched on the balls of her feet and peered from beneath it down upon the span itself.

Far below, hundreds of people milled about in the lanes and crooked by-roads. She regarded the onion domes of spires finished in gold filigree, the sloping roofs of simple houses cast in darkness beneath them, and colorful tower cupolas, no two the same shade. In one slender nearby minaret, a servant carried a torch from level to level, lighting candles and oil lamps, kindling globes of fairy light in window after window, creating a steadily rising spiral of candescent jewels.

Open fires lit Kalian Esplanade, one of the two main thoroughfares. The first torchbearers had emerged to look for work—for couples and parties they could escort from place to place. There was good money to be made by a well-spoken and knowledgeable torchbearer. Theirs and other lights coruscated the length of the span, all the way to the northernmost support tower of Vijnagar. The salmon sunlight also bathed the flat-topped heights of that terminus. She espied the edge of the next span beyond it, curving out from behind that tower and dwindling into the darkness of the northern sea.

A goddess’s peace settled upon her as she contemplated her temporary domain. “This is where I belong,” she said. And it was true, and she had always known it. Never again would she live beneath the endless spans of the bridge of life, watching but separate and unwelcome. She was going to be forever of the life, immersed.

The breeze whispered across her face, suddenly cool. She glanced up.

The statue of Shumyzin was staring down at her over the rim of the shield with furious eyes. “Hai,” said the statue as if in agreement.

Leodora skittered back from beneath him.

Shumyzin’s head tracked her over his shoulder. He didn’t look like a statue anymore. His skin was bluish beneath the sun’s glow. His huge eyes glistened white with pinprick pupils. Around his tusks he was smiling. His golden armor gleamed.

“Who are you?” she said, the only question she could think to ask.

“You don’t know? I thought sure you did.” His voice was a growl, as if gravel slid roughly inside his lungs.

“I—” She dared to look away from him. “Statues can’t talk.”

“But gods can.”

“But a statue isn’t—” she began, then gave up. Even she recognized her impertinence.

“—isn’t a god?” he finished. “And I suppose that a traveling storyteller posturing over a city should be? Especially when that city might eject her if it knew she was a woman.” He pointed his bronze sword at her.

She shook her head. Had he somehow read her thoughts? She tried to gauge whether she could get to the end of the tower and reach the rungs before he caught her.

“If you’re so certain of your divinity,” he said, “show me what you do. Tell me my story.”

“Tell?”

“That is what you do, isn’t it?” He looked at himself, at his colorless feet where encroaching night had cut off the sunlight. “And you had better be quick, too, or I’ll be stone again and it won’t count for anything.”

She goggled at him, unable to think.

“So, it was just empty talk, then,” Shumyzin derided her. “A child’s whimsy. A true god would know another god’s story. They know all the stories that are.”

Her jaw set defiantly. She didn’t like being taunted, not by anyone. She knew his tale, all right. Soter had taught it to her five years ago, when she was eleven.

“Well?” challenged the demigod.

Leodora drew a deep breath and recited.

THE TALE OF SHUMYZIN

Shumyzin was the great conquering hero of that ancient span of Mankandikha. But if he hadn’t learned to conquer fear and anger first, no one today would know his name.

As a child Shumyzin bore many insults. He was an object of scorn from adults as well as other children because of the crooked teeth that jutted from the corners of his mouth. He had no tusks then, only two big deformed and protruding molars. With his round eyes and thrust-out jaw, he looked more amphibian than human. One day the king of Mankandikha spotted him in the main street. He halted his palanquin to get a good look at the boy. A crowd gathered around. They heard the king give Shumyzin a cruel nickname: a nickname that followed him everywhere thereafter.

“Frog,” proclaimed the king.

Shumyzin ran home in tears. The name chased him through the narrow streets. It followed him like a tail.

His mother was a mortal. Her name was Yemin. She said to him, “Don’t listen to them, little one. They know nothing about you.” She stroked his cheek. “Your father, the great god Gopurbh, weathered many insults, too, before he was given charge of all the winds. We have balmy days most of the time because he’s so hard to anger. You also are made for greatness if only you can learn to withstand their insults. I know this, because I’m your mother.” He let her voice and her promises soothe his troubled soul, and soon he fell asleep in her arms.

Now, everyone else claimed that Shumyzin’s father had been a local rich man’s son, Cabor the Drunk, who’d climbed into the wrong house one night and cruelly forced himself upon Yemin; afterward—the story went—Cabor’s father paid her a tidy sum to keep quiet about his idiot son’s indiscretion. Both she and the elder Cabor strenuously denied that such an incident had ever occurred. It was the drunken lout, Cabor himself, who spread the tale. One time when the ugly child passed by, Cabor abruptly proclaimed, “That’s my bastard there. Look how he turned out!” The story spread quickly. People called Frog’s mother a whore. The boy seethed with the desire to kill them for it. But she wouldn’t let him. “I can bear their lies,” she said, “and so must you.”

He didn’t look like Cabor. He didn’t look like his mother. Or like anyone else in the entire city. Yet people often prefer scandals and gossip to rational thinking, and so the story became fact.

Frog grew up strong and steady. Unflappable. He weathered the worst taunts he could ever hear. The cruel jibes at his mother were the most awful, the hardest to bear. He worked daily for her, pushing a great grinding wheel that crushed grain into flour for bread. Yemin baked and sold the bread. Over time her son’s shoulders became striped with muscles, and his back grew wide. As he grew older his grotesque visage changed, too. His eyes bulged more than ever and his twisted teeth straightened, forming two small vicious spikes, as if all his suppressed anger had taken form in the corners of his mouth. He became terrifying to see, and although he did nothing to suggest hostility, the taunting of him stopped.

Then one day the span was invaded by a demon army. Of all the citizens, Shumyzin alone didn’t panic. Nor did he try to flee.

All those who did try to escape were cut down or rounded up to be slain later. The king who’d once made fun of Frog tried to bargain with the demons. They stripped and paraded him before his people to destroy the will of Mankandikha. His money and property were taken from him. The leader of the demonic army rode around in the king’s fine palanquin, forcing eight naked women to carry it. They were whipped if the carriage went too slowly; sometimes they were whipped anyway.

While all this was happening, the avatar of Gopurbh appeared to Shumyzin in his mother’s house, cloaking them both in mist, so that not even Yemin knew he’d appeared. The avatar said, “This is your day, and I am your father. Here are the means to defeat the fiends.” The clever god gave his son a fine scimitar and shield, and golden armor.

Once Shumyzin had put the armor on, his father told him, “You can’t be harmed today, nor seen in that armor by your enemies.”

When the demon soldiers reached the street where Shumyzin and his mother lived, the smell of her bread enticed them. They entered the shop, intending to steal its goods. They saw only Yemin at her oven, unarmed and helpless. They drew their swords to kill her.

Not one of them left the bakery alive.

Like a wave of heat Shumyzin slipped unseen through the enemy’s midst, slaughtering them one after the other. With each he killed, his tusks grew larger.

Demons on the streets suddenly clutched at themselves and doubled over, spilling their life into the dust. Their limbs dropped off; their legs were slashed out from under them. The survivors fled in terror from the lethal phantom. They knocked over their leader’s stolen palanquin, smashing it as they clambered over the sides, kicking their king in their haste to get away. The whipped maidens scattered before them, shrieking.

When the demon king pushed himself out the window, Shumyzin glided invisibly over and cut off his head. Then he ran through the streets, shaking the gory trophy at the enemy. All they saw was the gaping, dripping head itself floating upon the air. Some of them jumped to their deaths in the sea. Others raced to put a thousand spans between them and that phantom. They heard a raw voice shout after them: “Tell everyone that Shumyzin, son of Gopurbh and Yemin, guards this place and will take all your heads if you come back again.”

After that Shumyzin’s heroic deeds fell upon the span like drops of monsoon rain. He became a legend, the defender of his city, the slayer of a thousand foes. Grateful for his protection, the citizens rejected their king—the same one who had belittled Shumyzin years earlier—when he tried to take back his office. They placed Shumyzin on the throne in his place. The hero proved to be a generous ruler. He married the maiden Kyai, daughter of the sun. Although they’d humiliated him for so long, he exacted no penalty from the people…save for one episode.

One afternoon he was alerted that Cabor the Drunk was causing trouble. He found Cabor in a narrow side street. The new king’s self-proclaimed father was whipping a dwarf with a bamboo rod. Beside him lay a maiden whom he’d beaten unconscious. Shumyzin flung Cabor against a wall hard enough to knock him senseless. He had his soldiers arrest the villain, and for a week Shumyzin exhibited him in a cage hanging outside his own house. He confiscated all of Cabor’s property and wealth and gave it to the two people who’d been harmed. When the week was up, Shumyzin cut off Cabor’s nose and ears, and threw him out of the city, off the span.

Thus did the hero save Mankandikha and exact retribution on the cruel Cabor.

“And that is the tale of how Shumyzin the Sufferer, once called Frog, gained renown, but not how he and Kyai found bliss, which is another tale altogether.” Leodora concluded with the traditional ending, the promise of the next story, spontaneously. She had become so caught up by it that she’d forgotten herself. Her hands were extended, fingers pressing together, as if she’d been maneuvering her puppets. She supposed that she had. Self-consciously she glanced at the demigod. He had tears on his cheeks.

He said, “I haven’t heard my beautiful Kyai mentioned in a very long time.”

“It’s better with puppets,” she responded, and when he growled she thought she’d angered him, but realized after a moment that the gravelly rumble was laughter.

He said, “Ah, Leodora. You tell the world of your genius but you doubt it to yourself.”

“You know my name.”

“I’m a god, girl. I have to do something to warrant it besides killing a few mouth-breathing Jatos. Add that to your tale when you speak of those demons: Jatos is what they were, straight out of a sewer.”

She took note of the name but was more curious about something else. “You haven’t heard your wife’s name in a long time? Isn’t she with you?” Even as she spoke she sought among the eikons for the figure of Kyai. The goddess was not represented in the statues nearby.

Shumyzin replied, “Death doesn’t work like that. You tell the stories—I know you know about Death, Jax.” When she looked surprised, he added, “Just as I know the identity you travel under.” He made to shake his head, and a look of alarm strained his features. He glanced down at his torso. The shadow of night had reached his collarbone. “Quick now, Leodora, come here. I must tell you something.”

She got to her feet and took a reluctant step toward the frightening god.

“Closer!” he snapped.

She edged nearer.

“Listen,” said Shumyzin. “I know the one you travel with. We’re old acquaintances, he and I.”

“Soter?” she asked.

“Pah! Not the lush. The other one. The deathless one. The one who visits you in your sleep.”

She stared at him in awe.

The tiny black pupils fixed her. “I know the riddle of your coral friend.” The shadows touched his throat, and his voice shrank to a whisper. “And a warning. Jax rattles the darkness where he travels. A piece of it is sure to come calling.” His neck was now in shadow. His intense goggle-eyes regarded her in a way that imparted both his regard and his great concern for her. She had to look away from such intensity. He wheezed, “One more thing, and the most important.” He fell silent abruptly, and that drew her gaze to him again. Shumyzin’s head had turned back into stone. He faced the gorgon, a statue, as she had found him. She realized that a purple cloud masked the sun.

“The most important thing,” she muttered.

For an eternity she stared at the streaks of water on the polished cheeks—the only evidence to convince her that she hadn’t dreamed the conversation with him. She waited, hesitant, hopeful, but when the cloud passed and the dying sunlight touched him again, he did not return to life.

The overhead sky, a crepuscular blue, now twinkled with stars as if it were an inverted sea reflecting the lights of Vijnagar. Before the dusk disappeared altogether she must make the climb back to the ground. She hastily rebraided her hair, curled the braid around her fist, and then tied it up and stuffed it inside the collar of her tunic. She pulled the hood up on the back of her head. Across the horizon only a magenta swath remained, as if the sun had bled out upon the sky.

She turned and knelt, placing her fingers in the handholds. With her left foot she felt for the first of the rungs carved in the side of the bridge, then pushed herself over the edge. At the last moment she gave a final glance up, but Shumyzin remained gray and still.

The way down she took much more slowly and carefully than she had the climb up.

By the time she reached the pier, night owned the sky. All illumination now came from torches and lamps and the crescent of bold Saphon shining over the massive tower. Gyjio still hid behind it.

She easily replaced her mask as she circled the pier and then set off along the street paralleling the tower wall.

People paid her no mind. No one could tell that she among them all had just conversed with a god.

TWO

She was going to be late, but she didn’t care. She picked an outdoor café and sat down, her legs gone weak. The aftershock had caught up with her—the stupefaction of what had happened on the spire. She tried to dismiss its effect upon her, telling herself that because she hadn’t eaten since morning, this was just hunger making her feeble.

She had ample money to pay for a feast but asked only for a single dish of strongly spiced scallops and vegetables stewed over kelp, with some fermented rice wine to steady her nerves. She sat quietly awhile, watching people pass by, sipping her wine. It tingled in her belly, its sizzle reaching to her fingers. Her awe receded, the way the impact of a dream steadily recedes once one awakens.

Shumyzin had been ready to tell her something important. Maybe she could come back tomorrow…although somehow she suspected he would not manifest again, whether the sun fell upon him or not. The rules of things known and unknown were in play, and though she was incognizant of them, she sensed that what he had been about to say fell into the category of things that could not be known until their time.

Her food arrived, and after two mouthfuls she was sniffling merrily from the bite of the spices and washing the fire down with her wine. Though her face flushed with heat from the seasonings, she kept her hood up and her mask on.

On Vijnagar it was not uncommon for people to go about masked. The wealthy in particular did so, sometimes in order to conduct liaisons with lovers who, for one reason or another, might have been inappropriate. As a result, masks had attained fashionability. Many were intricate, sequined, edged in gold, scales, or feathers. A wide variety of them passed by as she ate; jewels and sequins gleamed in the torchlight. Her mask was far simpler—a tight, shiny black cloth with a diamond pattern in the weave; it covered her from the top of her head to the tip of her nose. The idea was not to draw attention to herself. She might easily have been a rich young man disguised to go slumming, and no doubt it was this impression that attracted the tattered procurer who slid onto the bench across from her, crooked his pinkie to his nose, and asked, “Paidika, young master?”

Leodora looked up coldly. He still held his pinkie to his nostril. She set down her spoon, then bit the tip of her thumb and flicked it at him.

The grubby man affected a look of indignation. He bowed a hasty apology and moved off to find a willing client. She watched him glide from table to table, eventually to an elaborately masked couple being led by a hired torchbearer. They discussed his smiling proposition and, to her surprise and disgust, went off with him, dismissing the torchbearer with a coin. It was risky business—the procurer might have been laying a trap to rob and murder them. She noted that both the man and woman wore khanjarli daggers across their bellies. They weren’t fools, whatever else. However, his skimming the area made it likely that the grubby pimp did in truth represent a paidika—a harem of boys. She shuddered at the thought of what such a place, run by so scabrous a creature, must be like.

With the meal finished, she stood on stronger legs. The wine and food in her belly gave her a compact, integrated feeling—a feeling that she could do anything. After all, she was a favorite of the gods. She was a great storyteller. And she was now most definitely late. Soter would be wringing his hands in worry that something horrible had befallen her. He always expected disaster. He courted it.

She hailed a girl with a torch, who could not have been more than twelve, and said huskily, “Lotus Hall.” The girl led her down Caritas Avenue. They passed a cluster of other unhired torchbearers, all of them the girl’s seniors, and all of them male. They glowered sullenly. Leodora chuckled.

The girl led her to the open doors, there bowing with proper respect. Leodora smiled and handed her three silver coins, where one was sufficient pay. The child’s eyes grew wide. Leodora leaned down and said, in her own voice, “There, and don’t share any of it with those ruffians we passed.” The girl’s amazement doubled as she realized she’d been leading a woman, who now slipped into the dark interior of Lotus Hall.

Some nights statues spoke and women dressed as men.

Inside the hall, torches in wall sconces to each side of the doors had been lit, as had the main chandelier. The oil burned brightly, smoking, above a noisy crowd. She didn’t see Nuberne, the owner, but his wife, Rolend, stood beside the serving bar. Moonlight trickled through the lancet windows, splashing milky radiance upon the tables. Between tables and wall lay deeper pockets of shadow. Leodora skirted the main crowd, trying to keep in the shadows, trying to avoid Rolend’s attention. But it was Rolend’s nature to notice everyone who came into her hall, no matter how crowded it was. Before Leodora was halfway down its length the mistress of the hall had swept out from behind the bar, snaked among tables and revelers, and blocked her path.

“Jax,” Rolend said, taking her hand, “I’d begun to worry that you weren’t going to perform tonight.” She thrust forward her ample bosom as though stabbed from behind, then gave a look of coy embarrassment as both breasts settled on Leodora’s arm.

Leodora drew back but bumped up against a chair. She forced a smile while she tried to maneuver around the mistress without making contact again. She replied with Jax’s deeper voice, “I always perform.”

Rolend’s smile grew sly. “I’ll bet you do, my Jax.”

Leodora’s smile never faltered, but in trying to step around the chair her foot caught behind one of its legs, and it clattered along with her. She couldn’t seem to untangle herself. Rolend gripped her fingers tight with one hand and smoothed the other across her palm. “You have such hard hands, my dear Jax. So rough for someone of such delicate skill—”

“Ro!” From the kitchen Nuberne’s voice cut through the din. “Where’s the damned yarrow, damn you?”

Rolend’s eyes hardened for an instant. She released her hold and smiled as if she hadn’t heard. She said quickly, “After the show I’ll bring you some dinner and we can dally a bit. He’s already in his cups.” Then she called out, “Yarrow’s on the bottom pantry shelf…dearest!” so shrilly that Leodora’s eyes teared.

As the mistress of the house turned away, Leodora sighed, and a voice from the table in front of her said, “She’s taken a real shine to you, lad.”

“Soter!” He had his back to her, his feet up. The bald dome of his head rested below the high back of the chair. She wriggled around the table to sit facing him. “Soter, something strange has happened. I need you to explain—”

Instead of hearing her out, he interrupted, “I’d begun to worry ’bout you. It was my misgivings that top-heavy tart related, not hers. She has none. She merely wants to make certain you’ll accommodate her after.”

Soter had been tanned by every wind that had ever blown across Shadowbridge. He was lean and dark and dry as leather. His was neither a happy nor a sad face, but one that had encountered some version of every possible eventuality. At the moment it was flushed from an extended encounter with a wine bottle.

“What am I going to do?” she asked.

He puzzled for a moment. “Feign death?”

“What did my father do?”

“Well, generally, he was about the most accommodating man there ever was.” With the two fingers of his that were missing their last joints he scratched his stubbled chin, then winced at what he’d said. “That is to say, until your mother performed his reconstruction. I don’t believe he’s the paradigm you’re looking for at the moment. ’Course, he wasn’t pretending to be somethin’ other than what he was.” She glared at him, and he waved his hands in defense. “I didn’t say you had a choice, dear heart. Prejudice is the way of the world. A few more spans up the line here, you’ll have gathered yourself a reputation to bank on, and you can come out of your headgear like a turtle out of her shell—make a big production of it, a spectacle, if that’s what you want to do. Not that I’d advise it. And there’ll still be some stretches—Malprado, for instance—where you might be prohibited…where women have no business doing business ’less it’s illicit. The mask they’d make you wear there would cover your mouth, too. Be very anonymous there. I doubt we’ll go that way. No, somewhere like old Colemaigne’d be better for you. They won’t care at all, except about the performance. Most places’ll be swayed by the wonder of you, the mysterious masked wonder called Jax. Make you an exhibit, a treasure. ’Course, if you want to remove the mask, I can’t stop you.” He poked his finger into his chest. “Not me.”

Someone in the crowd shouted out, “Jax!” but at the booth, not at her.

“Yes, but what do I do about tonight?”

Smiling crookedly, Soter sank back. “Perform, m’girl, perform. Get that idiot musician to play decently for more than five minutes at a time and we’ll do all right.” He got up, seeking his balance. The small bronze libation bowl in the center of the table rocked, splashing out liquid dark as blood. It was nearly full. How many drinks did it take to fill a libation bowl when the offering from each drink was but a drop or two?

That lush, the god had called him. It was amusing on a puppet: When Meersh drank himself stupid, people all laughed. Leodora’s jaw clenched. She needed advice and he dismissed her with a line he thought amusing: “Perform.”

“So, anyway,” Soter said, “where in the Great Spiral were you?”

“Talking to a statue,” she snapped, then marched off, leaving him staring after her in his befuddlement.

At the far end of the hall from the doors stood her booth. Twice her height, it was three panels of black drapery making up three sides of a tall box, open at the top. The ends of the upright poles protruded above the drapery. In the center of the front panel, she lifted a smaller flap of material that acted as a curtain covering a flat, featureless white silk screen. As she pinned the curtain up, some of the patrons began whistling and clapping. Without acknowledging them she circled to the side of the booth, parted the drapes near the rear corner, and stepped into darkness.

Inside, the booth’s framework of stout wooden poles, tenoned and pinned into each other, was more obvious, and all the secrets of her skill were revealed.

Behind and above the silk screen—covered on this side by a small curtain of fabric identical to the one she’d pinned up—stood a stanchion on which her lantern hung. Unlike most other lanterns, one side of it was solid brass, dull with age, another had been cut with tiny holes and two crescent moons, and a third had been fitted with a plate of blue glass. Only one side—the one facing the screen—contained anything like a lens, as a normal lantern might.

In the back right-hand corner were stacked two coffin-sized trunks in which the entire show was transported—the bottom one for the poles and drapes, the top for her puppets—and on top of the trunks, on his back and making a noise somewhere between a snore and a gargle, lay the accompanist. He was a small dark-haired man, unshaven and in clothes that were better suited to mop buckets. The unwashed smell of him wouldn’t have posed a problem on the boulevard, but in the small booth it could bring tears to her eyes.

Nevertheless, she had to wake him now; she held her breath as she tapped him on the shoulder. His head rolled. Then he jerked awake. His eyes shifted, found her, and he sat up, drawing back on the case, knees up, almost fearful in his pose.

She had no time to be concerned about his confusion or fears. He wasn’t a particularly good musician to begin with, but he was all that they’d been able to find. Soter complained that they needed a good accompanist, that they weren’t a troupe without one, but thus far they’d had no luck acquiring anyone else whose playing warranted keeping him on. Authoritatively Leodora said, “Come now, you, we have to begin. Go help Soter, set up your things beside the screen. They’re already getting sour out there.”

The musician jumped down, then slouched out of the booth. She quickly secured the ribbons that tied it closed so he couldn’t get back in.

She unfolded and set up two low trestles, one on each side of the silk screen, then lifted the top from the upper trunk and placed it squarely over the right-hand trestle, forming a table.

Then she set to work. She knew what stories she needed to tell tonight. The necessary pieces for Shumyzin’s tale were scattered in different compartments inside the trunk. She would have to root around for those during an intermission. Soter ought to know where most of them lay. Right now she was late, and the audience was hooting.

With the first box prepared she took off her tunic and mask, and stood wearing only trousers and the wide elastic band that pressed her breasts nearly flat against her ribs. She would have been happier if her chest had been smaller and easier to conceal. The band was giving her a rash. She peeled it off, then quickly took a towel and patted the perspiration from beneath both breasts. For the show she could be free of the harness, her sex hidden entirely from outside view. The beautiful thing about being a puppeteer was that she remained anonymous. She disappeared into her stories.

Dry, she wrapped herself in the loose, comfortable black shirt that she always wore to perform. She took a deep, calming breath, stood for a moment longer, then undid the ribbons on the booth flap.

From a punt she lit the lantern, rotating it so that the blue-glass side faced front. Then she knelt on the padded stool beside her box of puppets and lifted the inner curtain covering the screen. As the curtain came away, the stretched silk glowed a deep, submarine blue. Outside, the musician’s flute sounded and the crowd cheered. There were cries of “Shut up!” and “Sit down!” and “Quick, bring me another nabidh!”

From the box she took the first piece: the image of a single stick-legged house. She deftly hooked it upon the silk. Then she lifted by its rods the first puppet, a magnificent construction. She waited.

The audience muttered, settling in. The flute played an introductory trill, slipped a note, but finished, held fairly steady, then faded.

The room fell silent.

Soter’s voice filled the quiet. “We bid you welcome all. Tonight, if you’ve never witnessed it, you will see a rare thing. If you’ve been here before, then you’ve come back because you now know that I did not lie when I promised you this the first time.

“Many years ago I traveled these spans. There was a master puppeteer in those days, to whom people flocked from sometimes two cityspans distant.”

She heard the name of Bardsham carried on murmurs as upon waves. “Bastard,” she whispered. He’d never done this to her before: However sober he sounded, he was indeed drunk, and she was helpless to shut him up if he went too far. She held the rod puppet at the ready, beneath the screen where the light couldn’t throw its shadow onto anything.

“Yes, that’s right—Bardsham, a magical name. The greatest of all entertainers, so great that, although he’s been gone for near twenty years, we still speak of him in whispers, in awe. Well, I make you a promise that anyone who can recall his skill as I do will be bedazzled by what they see here tonight, for this is as near as…no, no, I won’t say that. Rather, judge for yourselves. Ladies, gentlemen, princes and paupers, foolish virgins and wicked libertines, lovers of story one and all, please dedicate your attention to the entertainments…of Jax!”

Applause followed, some cheering, a few whistles that might have been in mockery of the old man. She heard him walk past her on the far side of the drapes, sensed his entry behind her. He stumbled in the constricted darkness, chuckled to himself, then found his seat. By then the crowd had fallen silent and the light filtering in over the top of the booth dimmed—Nuberne had doused the central chandelier.

Leodora went to work.

THE TALE OF CREATION

There is a story that explains Shadowbridge to itself.

At the beginning of the world the first fisherman, Chilingana, caught the first storyfish. No bridges existed then. Even the first dragon beam had yet to appear. Chilingana lived in a stilt house built on rough pillars that climbed straight out of the sea. From Phylos Bar, looking south, you can see the ruin of them still. Chilingana was down among the pilings around one of these pillars when he caught the storyfish. He had never seen one before, because they swim so deep, and Chilingana did as he would with any fish on his line—he dropped it into his creel along with the others he’d caught already and went on fishing.

At the end of the day he hooked a line to the creel, then climbed home on the steps that curled up around one of the pillars. When he reached the top and had gathered his breath, he drew up the line to raise his catch. He could smell the fire his wife was preparing.

Behind his house Chilingana had a huge stone on which to clean the fish. From there he could throw their entrails back into the sea, a ritual to feed the kraken that dwelled below the pillars, in this way keeping it appeased as they still do off Phylos Bar, lest it surface and pull down the pylons of their span.

Chilingana reached down into the creel. Its weave was so tight that water would remain in it for a day and a half. His fingers clutched one of the fish. Holding it by its tail, he slapped its head against the stone to stun it.

He split the fish down the middle.

He cleaned it and threw the guts into the sea.

He made ready the first fillets.

He killed and cleaned each one thereafter until only the big storyfish with its dark blue head and golden eyes remained. He dipped his hand into the creel and hooked his fingers into the fish’s gills; this caused a hidden barb inside the gill to pierce the crease of his palm. Chilingana cursed and yanked back his hand.

He stared suspiciously at the trickle of blood veining his wrist, then at the fish watching him from just beneath the surface, only the tip of its snout protruding. He could see its tiny mouth and harmless knobby teeth. He couldn’t see the barb and thought maybe he’d foolishly impaled his hand on one of its spines.

With much greater care he started to reach into the container again, but before he could touch the fish, the world began to tip over. Chilingana grabbed the big gutting stone, sure that he was about to tumble right over the edge and into the sea. He tried to cry out, but poison in the barb had numbed his lips. His legs trembled and gave, and he fell like the moon rolling across the sky.

When her cooking stone was so hot that it smoked, but the fillets had still not arrived, Lupeka went looking for her husband. He had been gone much too long. And where were the fish?

When she arrived at the gutting stone, she was amazed to find her husband nowhere in sight. A row of pale fillets lay there, all in a straight line, but one of the fish had jumped out of the creel and lay on the ground, barely breathing. Lupeka picked up the fish and dropped it back in. Let Chilingana finish up with these last two when he returned. She told herself that he must have gone back down the steps. His absence disturbed her more than we can imagine, for in those days there was nowhere to hide, nothing but the great house on stilts and the empty sea all around it. No other people but these two.

After looking over the edge for him and seeing nothing but the sea, his wife took the prepared fillets back inside. Wherever he was, he would smell the cooking. Surely that must bring him out of hiding.

Chilingana came to his senses to find himself swimming. Beside him a vast blue island protruded from the dark water, and he supposed that he must have fallen from the house into the ocean, miraculously surviving, and floated away. He must have floated far, for there were no islands visible from his stilt house, and the sky was a peculiar dark brown. Despite this, the island looked oddly familiar. It seemed to rise and fall in the water.

All at once he realized it was no island at all. It was the snout of the storyfish. Beside him. And the sky was no sky, but the wicker of the creel. He began to struggle to pull himself out, but he had no arms. What had happened to him?

The fish laughed. The sound made the water bubble and roil.

Then the fish spoke to him. “This is how it is for us. We don’t have the luxuries of you who’ve been dreamed into being by greater forces.”

It was the first Chilingana had heard about this. “Dreamed?” he asked, and although he didn’t think he’d said this out loud, the fish replied, “Yes, dreamed into being. You in turn are capable of dreaming a reply to the creators. Where your dreams meet theirs the world takes shape. Today your fisherman dream met my dream of being a fish, and mine prevailed. So here you are, having fished yourself into my story.”

“Is that what happened to me?”

“I put you in my tale before you could take hold of mine.” The fish chuckled.

“Am I a fish forever, then?” The storyfish did not answer, and Chilingana grew nervous. The silence likely meant there was no good news for him. His terror broke loose. “I don’t want to be a fish!” he cried.

The fish said, “Is that right? Too good to be a fish? Very well, then. But before I’ll help you, you must grant me three wishes.” The island swam nearer.

“What?”

“First, whenever you catch a fish of my kind, you must throw it back.”

“Of course. How could I eat you after we’ve spoken?”

“Second, you must show respect for those fish you do catch, and return to the sea the ones too small to make a meal.”

“I would return you to the sea right away. All right, I agree. What else would you have of me?”

“That you tell all other people my rules and make them abide by them.”

“All other people? What other people? There is only me and my wife.”

“And if I tell you there will be more?”

“Who? Who else is coming?”

“That I cannot see. But they teem like a red tide.”

“Where are they?”

“Ah. That’s a puzzle, isn’t it? Tell me, how did you begin your life?” the fish asked.

“Well, I—” Chilingana stopped, bewildered. He didn’t know. He had never thought about it before. He had always simply been. His wife and the world had always been. So, too, the storyfish must always have been.

“You know little of the world,” said the fish.

“All right, you’re so clever, you tell me how I was begun.”

The fish’s tail flicked impatiently. “I’ve said already all I’m going to say until you honor my wishes. I do hope you’re a social animal.”

The fish’s snout loomed over him. Its laughter shook the waters, and Chilingana floundered helplessly.

He awoke with a start to find himself slouched beside the creel. His stung hand was red and swollen. The storyfish floated just below the water level, its huge eyes following him. “Why,” he said, “I must have dreamed this.”

“You think so?” said the fish. Although it remained beneath the water, its voice rang clearly in his head. “Honor your promises tonight. Then come and talk to me in the morning before you throw me back into the ocean, and I will tell you the most important thing of all—a thing you will not want to hear. But you must.”

“What’s that?”

The fish said nothing more.

Chilingana got up. He grabbed a clay pot and hurried down the steps to the water. The smell of frying fish made his stomach grumble, but he ran on. At the bottom he filled the pot, then hauled it much more slowly back up.

His wife met him at the top. “So there you are, you foolish man. I looked all over for you, I called to you. Where had you got to?”

“I was right here.”

“No, you weren’t. I came out and found your fillets but not you,” said Lupeka. The discussion would surely have blossomed into an argument, except that she noticed her husband’s swollen hand. “How did this happen?”

He first scuttled over to the creel and emptied the pot into it while he spoke. “There, fish. There’s some more water for you.” Setting down the pot, he said to his wife, “The fish stung me. It’s nothing. Nothing at all.”

“Nonsense, that needs tending to. It’ll have poison in it.”

She led him inside. His wife had cooked the fillets beautifully. He stared at them, his mouth flooding with desire, while she bandaged his hand. Finally she let him sit on the floor and handed him his portion.

He was about to take his first bite when he hesitated. The food dangled from his spoon. Lupeka asked, “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” replied Chilingana. “I just—” He lowered the spoon. “I just want to give thanks to these fish for letting me catch them. For giving their lives to sustain ours.”

“That’s an odd thing to say. And why are you bellowing?”

He said, “No, it isn’t odd at all. From now on we’re going to honor them whenever we eat. We’re going to thank them just like this.” Then he ate the food.

His wife decided that the poison from his hand had affected his brain, and so she refrained from argument.

After dinner Chilingana was exhausted. His wife insisted that he go to bed and rest. He complied. She covered him with her body to keep him warm. Into her ear, as he drifted to sleep, he muttered, “Tomorrow I’ll know everything.”

In the morning he awoke to his wife’s scream. He sat straight up on his mat and looked around the hut. She wasn’t there. He bounded outside, to find her beside the door. She had been carrying a huge fillet, which lay now at her feet. Its skin was blue. It was the storyfish.

“Fish!” cried Chilingana, and he knelt beside it. “Fish, oh no, fish, forgive me. Please forgive me. I would have put you back! Tell me the secret thing. The important thing.”

The headless fillet did not answer.

“Where is his head?” he demanded, finally paying attention to his wife. “What have you done with his head?”

She did not seem to see him. Her gaze lay beyond him on a more fearful thing. In a tiny voice she asked, “Husband, how did you create all of this?”

Chilingana turned where he knelt to see what she meant.

Beyond their small house now a great curving road stretched out across the sea. Where it curved he could see arch upon arch supporting it and immense towers reaching into the sky. The far end vanished into the morning fog. It was an impossible development. He could have worked for years erecting it all and never built anything so grand. He rose to his feet in wonderment. Where had it come from?

He knew the answer. He held the answer in his hand. “The fish wants me to go exploring.” He said it low, almost to himself.

“What?” asked his wife.

“I said I wish to go exploring. To see the world.”

“You—you’ve never mentioned it before.”

“Well, I don’t tell you everything,” he replied. And that was the very first wedge ever driven between two people.

“But how was this done? How did you build it?”

Chilingana, holding the glistening meat of the storyfish, could only answer, “I’ll never know.”

They ate the storyfish. Chilingana said the small prayer over its delectable carcass that the people of Vijnagar repeat to this day before eating a fish. He and his wife eventually set out to journey along the new spans. Every night when the fisherman slept, new ones formed, so that each morning was the first morning of a new world. It is a process that may still be occurring somewhere, for who of us can view the world all at once and know what develops everywhere? Some spans are old, and some are young. On some, the gods of Edgeworld light the Dragon Bowls and send down their gifts; on others the light no longer falls. Chilingana never learned its secrets, nor has anyone since. Without the storyfish to explain, no one knows the secret ways of Shadowbridge, or whether Chilingana travels and dreams among us still.

“…travels and dreams among us still.” The words of her epilogue reverberated in the rafters.

With one hand Leodora balanced the puppet figures of Chilingana and his wife on the screen. With her other, she reached up and rotated the lantern so that tiny stars and moons spread across the silk. The two dark figures sank slowly from sight. She unpinned the curtain and let it drop over the screen. The musician played a final note on his flute and thumped a small drum once.

For a moment there was utter silence. Then the applause exploded. Pottery banged against tables. The audience, depending upon their background, cheered, whistled, or belched approval. Her name—the name Jax—resounded from all around the hall.

She glanced back at Soter. He grinned in reply, then broke into a yawn. Had he dozed off during the performance? Possibly. It was a story that had required no participation from him. She had narrated where necessary, doing the three voices. It was a story known to everyone in the hall, and they could have followed it even if she’d said nothing at all.

Soter stood, stretching. He picked up his hammered brass bowl and went out through the drapes. He would make the rounds, visit every table, answer questions, accept drinks, tell lies about the background of the mysterious Jax, and collect what she hoped would be a sizable compensation. She had plenty of time to prepare for the next tale. She would perform three stories tonight: the demigod Shumyzin’s last of all. People loved to go out on tales of heroes.

As she thought of him, she perceived shared features between her encounter and the story she’d just played out. What had happened to Chilingana in the tale had happened to her on the bridge: The most important thing had not been spoken.

She sat back, stretching awhile. Her gaze finally fixed upon the second trunk, and the sounds of the crowd outside began to fade away.

She closed the top case and stood it on end at the back of the booth so that it blocked the access slit in the drapery. She pulled the lid off the bottom case and lifted out the three inner compartments full of puppets and props. It now appeared to be empty. She slid her fingers along the inner edge of the bottom piece until she touched the loop of black cord. Carefully she pulled up the false bottom, then knelt, holding it up with one hand, ready to drop it if interrupted. Only Soter knew about the false bottom and its contents. He didn’t know, however, about the dreams. No one did, except for a statue.

The sounds and smells of the hall faded entirely. A dim glow surrounded her, and a crackling charge tickled her brows and stood the hairs on her arms on end.

There lay her secret companion. Her treasure. The Coral Man.

She reached into the box to touch him. Fearful, awed, excited all at once. Her fingers traced the roughness of him. She could have shredded the tips if she’d pushed hard enough. The shadows cast by the lantern made his face seem more defined than it really was. She withdrew her hand, fingertips now coated with fine and vaguely luminous powder. There was powder in the box, too, a light dusting of it. She sniffed at her fingers, then put her tongue to them and tasted sea salt. Within that flavor lay her whole life before the spans: the cavern called Fishkill, the lagoon where she swam, the tales of her mother, the smell of the breeze entering her tiny garret.

Memories of the backwater island life she had abandoned.

I
BOUYAN

ONE

She was five years old the first time they let her go to Ningle. Ningle-in-the-Clouds, as Soter properly called it.

They carried their baskets of fish—her uncle and grandfather—on the path that wound beneath the canopy of trees, with the ever-visible span looming ever closer. Before then she’d only seen it from across the island, a great black stripe of cloud showing through the trees, which never moved, never broke apart, but hung in the sky like an omen. At night it transformed into a band of fairy lights coruscating in the sky. She wasn’t prepared for its true size. Almost an hour’s walk from her home, one massive leg of the span anchored somewhere deep in the bedrock of Bouyan beneath them. Steps had been carved into the side of it, each block so big that she had to clamber up with her hands—or would have if her grandfather hadn’t hefted her along with his baskets.

Soon he’d carried her so high that she closed her eyes and buried her face against his neck, smelling sawdust and varnish, the scents of his workshop, which clung to him even more tightly than she.

At the top he set down his basket and unwound her from his neck and back. Between them they had an old game where he swung her and swung her, and she laughed, screamed, giggled. This time, though, he only swung her once, then held her up, her feet resting upon stone. He said, “Now open your eyes, Lea.” She did, and was so awed by the view that she forgot to be terrified right away.

The island of Bouyan lay so far below her that wisps of cloud gauzed the treetops, and she could see clear across to a hint of their rooftops and even all the way to where a chimney of smoke signaled the location of the fishing village of Tenikemac, and farther still—to the sea itself, like a great sheet of glass upon which the whole world was set. She could see that the Adamantine Ocean stretched forever just like the stories said.

That day, standing upon the rail, with her grandfather’s hands enclosing her waist, she heard the call for the first time. It was not a voice exactly, not words, not something anyone else could hear. It whispered her name, spoke to her in the silences, invited her to find it, join it, embrace it. All without words. She thought then it was the ocean calling her. There was nothing else to see.

“Isn’t it fine?” her grandfather asked.

She turned her head to look at him, and now she was afraid. The wordless, communicating voice was frightening, and she didn’t know whether her grandfather was referring to it or to the view. He saw her fear and took her off the rail, assuring her softly, “It’s all right, child, it’s all right. I wouldn’t let anything happen to you, you know.” She knew this to be true, but she wasn’t paying attention to him.

The moment he’d touched her, the ocean call had ceased. She listened hard, but it didn’t reappear.

She would not hear it again for years, but on that day—she was certain of this now—the caller had located her. It had sought her, knowing she was somewhere. Now it would be able to find her again.

Throughout the next year Leodora spent nearly every day on the span. It teemed and surged with life, with the noises of excitement, the smells of otherness, newness. Bright costumes and plumed caps dazzled her, and facial adornments from rapier-sharp beards to spiky stiffened eyebrows, beauty spots to shaved scalps drifted past to amaze her. One day she saw a man with wide and tightly waxed mustachios, the tips of which burned with blue fire that didn’t consume them. And on another evening a raggedy fellow walked the thoroughfare with a box dangling from a lanyard around his neck while he cranked handles on either side of it, which in turn caused two metal hooks facing each other through the top of the box to spark and burn and glow in the space where they didn’t quite touch. The ragged man looked lost as he went by, and she heard someone say, “From a Dragon Bowl, that. Ruined him.” But when she asked her grandfather about the man, he replied, “Nothing to do with us, Lea, so never you mind it.”

Her grandfather did not always accompany them. As often he stayed below, on Bouyan, in his workshop, crafting or mending their furniture. Like her uncle Gousier, he was a big man, barrel-chested and powerful.

The buildings on Ningle, all made of stone, were nothing like the structures she knew on the island. Her own house and those of the fishing village were mostly made of wood and woven thatch. Houses on Ningle were dark and roughly finished, and not quite true. Their angles, as her grandfather showed her, were all slightly off the square. He took her to one street not far from the market where the buildings were so crooked that she couldn’t understand how they didn’t fall over.

The market comprised a stretch of mismatched awnings, boxes, carts, and poles. In comparison with many of the others nearby, their own stall was clean and orderly. On three sides of the center, whole fish and cleaned fillets lay in ceramic boxes, atop ice chipped from the depths of Fishkill Cavern. Deep blue awnings kept the stall in shadow and cool.

Gousier usually had someone working for him, someone on Ningle who set up the stall before they arrived and took it down at night, as well as someone to help haul the fish and watch that the clientele didn’t steal. She could remember none of these men—for they were always men—during that year. None of them remained for long. The work was too hard. And—she would later learn—descending to the island for work was considered beneath the dignity of most of Ningle’s denizens; but there were much more reprehensible acts that were not.

Her uncle seemed to enjoy her company. While they walked and climbed to market each morning, he taught her the names of the fish in his baskets and described how they were caught, what they could be used for. Once the stall was set up he put her right up front, and when someone came by and inquired about one of the fish, Leodora would proudly repeat what she knew about it. Most of the time after listening to her recitation, a customer would buy the fish, and Gousier would tell her, “Why, you’re a fishmonger, child. Look at what you sold.” He would give her a coin and let her buy something for herself. Eventually he let her parade up and down the boulevard, calling out the names of the fish they were selling, and this led more people to their stand. Her uncle and grandfather treated her like a princess out of a story—like the girl Reneleka who emerged from an oyster, coiled around a pearl, and who had created the sea dragons. It was a story they told in Tenikemac. She felt as if she, too, had been magically created.

Then one afternoon when she was sitting to the side of the stand, a woman came over and spoke to her. It seemed the most natural of events, one more person asking her questions. The woman was fidgety and furtive, but Leodora didn’t appreciate the meaning of this. She had only known kindness.

The woman invited her for a walk, with a promise of an undisclosed surprise at the end of it. Leodora would have told her grandfather, but he was with a customer on the other side of the stall. She might have told Gousier, but he was haggling with still another person over the price of a halibut. The current assistant had wandered off.

She strolled along beside her new acquaintance for only a few moments before the woman took her hand and drew her suddenly into the nearest crooked little alley, with the promise, “Your treat’s up here.”

It was the same alley her uncle had shown her, full of tilting buildings, and she marched along bravely into the not unfamiliar gloom. Then a man unfolded from the deeper shadows, and she stopped. Leodora remembered him—he had passed by their stall two or three times and then asked her about the cod, listened with a wolfish grin to what she told him, and thanked her for her recitation. He hadn’t bought anything. He grinned at her again now. He had very good teeth.

The woman shoved ahead of her and said, “Give me my money.” But the man shook his head. “When I’ve made the delivery, when they’re happy with their new arrival.” Both of them glanced down at her, and that was the moment she knew something was wrong, but the woman still gripped her wrist. The two began to argue. Leodora pulled with ever-increasing urgency to get away. The woman was too busy squabbling to notice. Abruptly Leodora broke the hold, but it was so sudden and she’d pulled so hard that she spun against the wall. The man was on her before she could get up. “All right, darlin’,” he said. The stink of him smothered her. “You come along with me now to get your surprise. No more working in a fish stall for you, not a lovely girl like you. They’ll like you where we’re going. You’ll be the most popular girl they have.” Smiling though he was all the while, his sweet words were more ominous than anything she’d ever heard. She twisted, but his grip was much harder than the woman’s, and the wall was at her back, offering no way to put distance between them. She started to scream. The man clamped his hand around her face and hissed at her. He ordered the woman to do something to silence her, and they both closed in where there was hardly enough room for one of them alone, and the acrid sweaty stink poured over her like the stench from rotting meat. The woman crouched, cooing, trying to sound tender beneath her jagged, hungry sharpness. Leodora fought for breath beneath a mask of filthy fingers. She grew dizzy.

The grip abruptly lifted from her face; the stench and the man swept away as if by magic. The woman bit back a shriek, grabbed Leodora again, and tugged her down the alley and back out onto the boulevard.

A crowd was collecting. They blocked the woman’s retreat, so that she cried out, “Someone, someone stop him!” and then, almost as an afterthought, “My child, my baby!” She wrapped herself protectively around Leodora, and the crowd obligingly opened a space for the two of them. Even as they moved into it, the crowd moved with them, stepped back as if to accompany them; but they weren’t following the woman. They were fleeing something else. Leodora twisted her head around to see.

Her grandfather.

He caught the woman before she could get past the last of the people choking the boulevard. He tore Leodora from her grasp, then wedged himself in between them. Dreamily she looked back and saw her uncle in the alley. He was bent over and seemed to be gesturing fiercely. His fist raised high and held, hovered. It clutched a mallet. The hand and mallet were wet and dark. She had seen her grandfather holding a mallet that way as he drove pegs into holes he’d cut, but Gousier brought it down harder than Grandfather ever had.

People began shouting “Kuseks!” and she looked up at their mouths, their fearful eyes. Then the woman toppled beside her, knocking someone aside, skidding on her face upon the paving stones. Their eyes locked, just for a moment, before the woman’s expression went slack and the eyes fluttered shut. The crowd turned, roaring, and split in two directions. The space filled almost instantly with a swarm of police—the Kuseks, so named for the striped sashes they wore. They grabbed her grandfather immediately. She saw him struck with a stick, and she screamed.

Her uncle charged from the alley. Blood drenched his face and clothes. He bellowed at the Kuseks to release her grandfather. She watched it all as if from the rail of Ningle, as if it were all transpiring far below, far away from her—the mallet striking once, the police beating her uncle senseless, and beating him even after that. Her grandfather swaying on his knees, blood from his scalp covering his face like a membrane, as he tried in vain to stop them.

Everyone was taken into custody, including the woman. She wasn’t dead after all. She portrayed herself as the victim, and the wounds to her face lent her credibility. She claimed the six-year-old girl was her daughter, and kept touching Leodora, running trembling fingers through her hair. Of course she was not Leodora’s mother, nor looked anything like her, but the bold assertion smothered her denial with the warped aroma of hope, a possibility that was impossible. It surely would have tripped up no one other than a girl who had no mother, generating an internal conflict that terrified and silenced her when she most needed to speak. Finally the authorities had to send for her auntie Dymphana, hauling her up from Bouyan to prove that this hadn’t been something else, a lovers’ quarrel, a domestic dispute. The moment she saw her aunt she began to wail and flung her arms about Dymphana’s waist, and then the Kuseks knew absolutely. They set her grandfather and Gousier free.

The family were escorted back to the market to find their stall a shambles. The fish had been stolen; some of the ceramics were smashed. Apologies from the nearby vendors, who might have intervened but more likely had participated in the plunder, did nothing to mitigate the damage or curb Gousier’s anger. His ribs were broken, his face was bruised and swollen, and he’d lost a tooth. The police pointed out that he had been caught in the act of murder and should be thankful he was alive to complain.

For weeks afterward he could hardly walk along beside the laborers he had to hire to cart the fish up the steps. The workers were hardly better than beggars, but no one else wanted the work. Once his bones had knit, he visited the Kuseks and paid them to see that the pathetic kidnapper was banished to a prison isle called Palipon. It was a bare chunk of rock so far out in the ocean that it could not be seen from any of the great spirals of bridges. No one sent to Palipon was ever heard from again. When he announced this over dinner, the whole family stopped moving as if upon a signal. They stared; they paled. Gousier retorted, “It’s where all her kind should go.” Then he lowered his head and ate as if no one else shared the table with him and his heart was as light as a cloud.

Later, from her bed, she heard the family arguing. Gousier snarled, “Well, what sort of a woman would sell a child into perdition? Or maybe she’s an Edgeworld goddess, do you think? It was a better life she was going to give the girl, in a tiny cell, chained in filth to a bed frame, waiting for her next customer? Because that’s what was going to happen. These people are worse than anything you know, Dymphana, I don’t care if you grew up in the same house with them!” Her aunt said something too quiet for her to hear, but Gousier drowned out the last of it: “Then maybe you’d rather have stayed up there! Maybe the street has more to offer you!” After that it seemed no one spoke again until after she’d fallen asleep.

Her grandfather, although he’d only been struck the once, seemed unable to recover. He suffered spasms, numbness, and headaches that rendered him helpless. A few months later he was dead. Her grandmother died of grief less than a month after that. Leodora was no less devastated than anyone by their combined loss. Her world was shrinking, closing in on her. She dreamed of the two of them with her in an alley where the buildings were sliding together to crush them, and both her grandparents were pushing her, trying to get her out before the walls met, but she could see the space narrowing ahead, and she knew she would never reach the avenue in time, never reach it at all, and then the walls did slam together behind her, so loud that it woke her up. The dream proved portentous.

Gousier forbid her ever to set foot on Ningle again.

Over time she would learn that he blamed her for everything that had happened that day, including the deaths of his parents, which became the foundation for unlimited blame thereafter. Gousier remained as bitter as patchroot wine. His retribution was bottomless.

It was during one of his tirades that he inadvertently called her “Leandra.” He caught himself, but the realization of what he’d said only fueled his anger, as if she had cleverly diverted him. Provoked him. After that, almost her every error or act of defiance was equated with something Leandra had done, although he never spoke the name except in anger, because he refused to acknowledge that he had ever had a sister except when too angry to help himself.

Leandra. Her mother.

TWO

A name was almost the only thing she knew of her mother—but the lacuna hadn’t been apparent before her kidnapper had tried to assume the role. And while that was impossible because Leandra was dead, the impersonation lifted the pall on her knowledge and she saw that nothing lay beneath it, nothing of her mother beyond that name, spoken only in anger.

She was to learn nothing more of her parents until she ran away from home at the age of ten.

Running away had become something of a routine by then. Initially it was herself she fled from—part of her believed her uncle’s accusations, believed that she had been responsible for her grandparents’ deaths, and she tried to escape her guilt to no avail. Dymphana was sensitive to her pain, however, and comforted her when Gousier wasn’t around, telling her, “You are not to blame for this misery, and you mustn’t think that you are. You’re a little girl. You had no experience with such people as tried to hurt you, and those who are older than you ought to have been looking out for you. They should have protected you. Your grandfather knew this, and I think it wore him down. He blamed himself. Your uncle…his way of adjusting is to cast the blame on everyone else. And you are everyone else this time. It is not your fault, child. It never was.” The more times she heard this, the more she accepted it. For a while this was enough to compel her not to hate him for the things he said. But her compliance seemed only to anger Gousier more. When another worker quit and he condemned her to the odious job of cleaning the day’s catch in Fishkill Cavern, she ran away from him. The problem was, there was no place for her to run to. She didn’t dare run to Ningle again, and she knew only a little of the island. She’d long ago been scared off exploring its mysteries, too, with ominous warnings about things that lurked in trees, in bushes, in the dark. Her knowledge of the world was so small as to be nonexistent, and Gousier had only to wait for her certain return in order to effect retribution for her misconduct.

In the past when she’d run away, she had escaped to Tenikemac, where Gousier could always hunt her down. The village in general considered her tainted, contaminated by her association with Ningle and with a family that did business there daily; but most of the villagers overlooked this censure, since most of them did business with Gousier, too. She was, after all, a mere child. They always gave her up when he came looking.

She had two playmates in the village—a girl, Kusahema, and a boy named Tastion, neither of whom at that age would have understood the proscriptions against fraternizing with her. That would come later, or perhaps they were expected to discover it on their own. Within a few years Tastion would prove to be her only friend in that village.

However, on that particular day, she broke the pattern and didn’t flee to the village. Instead she ran to Soter, never imagining that this one element of change would alter the rest of her life.

Soter had taken up residence in an old smokehouse back in the woods, where he lived in relative seclusion. The family—her grandparents—had offered it to him as a reward for having brought Leodora home to them, and thank the ocean they had been alive back then. Her uncle surely would not have let Soter remain on the island.

Soter kept two vats brewing most of the time: His concoctions were always either cooking or fermenting. The main ingredients were fruits he picked himself. She knew that he sometimes went off by himself to the far side of Bouyan and returned days later, dragging bags of fruits behind him. Other items he purchased on Ningle. The product—those quantities he didn’t consume himself, for even then he was prone to imbibe—he sold to Tenikemac. Although they held him in no higher regard than her uncle, somehow Soter managed to be more tolerated. It may simply have been that he wasn’t related to the family—and that he was careful not to mention that what they were drinking included ingredients lugged down from the spans.

Before she even saw the gray hut through the wall of brambles, she smelled his cooking brew. The furious tang of fermentation clogged the air.

She crept around the brambles, listening for any sound of him. He was often irritable when sober, and had chased her away more than once when she’d interrupted him doing seemingly nothing. At first she thought to hide behind his hut, only to find that the accumulated sediment from one of the vats had been dumped out where she would have secreted herself, creating a noisome bog. Beneath the tiny rear window of the hut stood a line of small kegs he called barriks—half a dozen hogsheads of his wine. It was the first time she’d seen them all lined up—one entire vat’s worth. The window was unshuttered.

She climbed up on two of the barriks and poked her head in the window. The interior was dim and smoky. Maybe Soter was gone. She backed out and looked around.

The woods were empty of people. Overhead, leaves sizzled in a breeze. She heard no other sounds.

She put one leg in through the window, then had to double nearly all the way, head to knees, to ease herself over the sill. She felt with her toe for the floor, stretching so much that she slid off-balance. Almost immediately her foot touched the floor, which left her balanced on one foot with the other leg out the window and raised halfway to her ear. She couldn’t get her other foot inside until she had placed her hands on the floor as if about to perform a handstand. Then she folded her leg in through the window, crouched down noiselessly, and looked about.

She was inside Soter’s makeshift pantry. She had never seen inside the pantry before: It was larger than its narrow doorway implied. To her left hung a heavy tarp, which hinted at even more space. She stepped into the doorway, parted the curtain, and stuck her head into the main room. Almost at once she drew back.

Soter was there. His silhouette perched on a low stool, knees up high, his arms splayed, like some spider creature. He was muttering softly as if to a companion—whispery words that she was unable to catch. She didn’t see anyone else. He was not looking in her direction, so she stuck her head farther out. He gave a loud, abrupt curse, and she thought he must have seen her. She stepped back behind the curtain and glanced at the tiny window, certain that she would never get through it fast enough. She scrambled instead behind the tarp and, turning to pull it tight, backed into two black cases. As she stumbled, she twisted about and caught herself on the top case, but her weight made it slide. Something from a shelf farther back fell with an alarming crash.

Soter yelled, “Damn you louse-ridden rodents! How did you get in this time?” He marched into the pantry and flung back the tarp. He had a cleaver in one hand, poised to cut her in half.

She screeched and slid as far back on the cases as she could go. Half a dozen more items bounced and rolled and crashed onto the floor.

Soter closed his eyes and clutched his ears, nearly burying the cleaver in his own head in the process. “Oh, don’t squeal, Lea! Don’t shift about!” he hissed. He groaned and backed away, dropping the tarp. “Oh, I’ve got a Glauber’s head this morning,” she heard him say.

A minute later he returned without the cleaver. “What are you doing in there, anyway? Out, come out here now.” He gestured her from the room with one hand and pinched his temples with the other.

She told him about her fight with her uncle over the amount of fish she had cut up, valiantly trying not to cry while she did, and he nodded with care, rubbing his eyes, pulling at his nose. He offered her some biscuits.

“I’m surprised,” he said, “that he hasn’t come bellowing down upon me like the wind, hammering at my door. Then I might find a place for that cleaver. He doesn’t know you’re here, does he? Doesn’t know, doesn’t care. Just chased you off and gathered up his fish and went off to sell them to people who wouldn’t have anything to do with him otherwise on behalf of some other people who wouldn’t have anything to do with him otherwise.” He patted her head and told her, quietly, that she could stay as long as she liked, provided she made no more noise. He retreated to the outer room. She followed, and found him pouring a cup of his latest brew. After a few sips, he sighed. “Rejuvenation.”

Leodora nibbled at her biscuit awhile. Then she asked him about the long cases behind the tarp.

“The undaya cases, ah-ha, yes,” he answered, very conspiratorially. “Those are a secret kept from your uncle. He doesn’t know I have them, or he’d probably want to burn them, and me along with them.”

“Why?”

“Because,” he replied, and she thought that was all he would tell her. Then he added, “They belonged to your father.”

It was a revelation that tore the breath out of her. She set down her biscuit. She had always known that she’d had a mother, but no one, not even her aunt, had ever mentioned her father.

Soter, wincing against his headache, shifted his gaze, as if wondering whether he’d revealed too much.

“But you said—” she began, much more loudly than he would have liked.

Hissing violently, he raised a hand as if to ward her off. “I know what I said,” he whispered. “I know.” His gaze held her steady. “I promised your uncle, you see. He can be very insistent when he threatens. Which you know better than I. He did not want you growing up with a lot of dreams and ideas in your head about your father. Did not…want you to know.

“I gave in because I wanted to stay here, too, where your grandfather had permitted me. Gousier does have the power to remove me. He could banish me from this island if he didn’t find it more satisfying to be able to tell me that he can do it. All of this is his property, this dung heap amid the thorns, and so long as I keep to his path I get to remain.” He grinned unevenly, which made him press his palm to the side of his head and close that eye. “I seem to have stepped off today. Wonder how we should handle this? Discretion will be key, I think. No reason he has to know anything about anything—which anyway I’ve maintained for years.”

“But what’s in the cases?” she demanded.

“Oh, well, lend me a hand with them and we shall find out together, hmm?” He held up the curtain to let her enter the pantry again.

The two cases were as long as Soter was tall, and brown with dust, spattered darkly where wine or something else had slopped over them. The nub of the leather was worn off in places, too. One case was decidedly heavier than the other. Kneeling, one eye still squeezed shut, Soter fumbled at the hasp on the smaller one. He slipped the pin free, then pushed and prodded the top up. He didn’t remove the lid, but peered secretively underneath.

Then suddenly as if he wanted to drive her back, he shoved a clicking, clattering thing at her. She leaned away but refused to be startled. She stared at what he was holding.

It was a shadow puppet, the first she’d ever seen. The body was articulated: the wrists, elbows, shoulders, and knees all revolved on pins, and each segment was fitted with a hinged rod. She pinched one of the loose ones and the puppet’s jaws opened in a great leer. She pushed on another, and from behind his legs his penis emerged. It was almost as big as his thigh, and the tip was cut with small swirls that made it seem to have a face of its own. Despite the monstrousness of his anatomy, Leodora had to bite her lip to keep from laughing.

“His name is Meersh,” said Soter.

“Meersh,” she repeated. She moved his arms and legs, flexed his wrists, marveled at the green tissue-thin skin stretched over his form. She held him up admiringly, and with an ease that surprised her circled the rods so that the puppet appeared to give a gesture of welcome to Soter. Something stirred within her. She forgot her uncle, the cavern, the hatefulness of the rest of her life. Some shape that had possessed no shape until that moment collected and formed deep inside her, and drew its first breath. She leaned around the lid to look into the case. There in three compartments lay stacks of puppets as deep as her arm, and each unique. She looked up past Meersh to Soter; tears were already forming in her eyes.

Soter gaped in awe or terror at her fingers twirling the rods of the puppet, as if staggered by what he saw. She wanted to speak but only a croak emerged, and she sobbed. Soter looked her in the face and recoiled. He dropped the tarp, escaping the sobs, escaping her, escaping the future that in his drunken cleverness he had just cast. He did not in that moment understand that what he had pried open was her life.

Her life incarnate: the puppets of Bardsham.

THREE

It may have been ridiculous ever to have believed that she had no father, but it seemed reasonable at the time. Gousier and the villagers called her mother a witch, and Leodora had simply concluded that the witch had conjured her into being. If nothing else the explanation allowed her to be magical, and she liked being magical.

Suddenly she had not only a father, but a father of legendary stature. Even in Tenikemac, isolated from the tumultuous life of the bridges, she’d heard his name—the name of the greatest shadow puppeteer who had ever traveled the myriad spans of Shadowbridge: Bardsham. And there before her, in the care of a grizzled old drunk, lay the puppets Bardsham had used. As it had been with her mother, her father was a revelation.

Soter soon had all the compartments and both cases open. He judiciously selected more puppets and spread them around him. They belonged to a dozen different stories, but he assembled them to tell his own. Then he asked her for Meersh. The grotesque Meersh was going to represent her father. For her mother he picked a sinuous figure he called Orinda.

He began the performance, sometimes looking at her, sometimes squinting as though pained at having to squeeze his memory through the cracks in his hangover.

“Your father,” he began, “came from a span far to the south of here, and at least three spirals away. You do know about the spirals, don’t you?”

“They’re other bridges,” she answered uncertainly.

“Other great long, unimaginable arms of bridges, yes, child. And each one, sooner or later, curls up like a nautilus shell, or so it’s said, because you can walk a thousand different spans, a thousand different great, wide communities filled with all sorts of people and creatures, and not ever reach that curled-up point where the bridge started or maybe ends. Who knows which. But your father, he came out of one of those places, one of those spiral ends. Or so he said…”

BARDSHAM’S TALE

His parents had their own troupe of traveling players, the Mangonel Circus. That was his real name, too. They played in public for money. They juggled and danced on cords strung high above the streets. They performed a skillful whip act with your grandmother holding up things like flowers or torches that your grandfather snipped the heads from or extinguished with a snap of his whip, until finally she held a jeweled ring lightly between two fingers and he snatched it without her fingers even moving—snatched it and with the same movement sent it into the audience, where a fight inevitably broke out over its ownership. It was a cheap ring, but a dazzling trick. The way your father told it, no one had ever seen such skill before Mangonel. There was quite a bit of sleight of hand in among the crowd, too, which had to be done most carefully if they wanted to avoid any trouble. The boy—that is, Bardsham, your father—he had a natural dexterity. Right from the time he could walk, he could steal coins from between your fingers and you wouldn’t feel so much as a breeze—just like his father did with that whip. Plus, he was so sly that anyone would have sworn he’d been across the avenue the whole time. He was a child, none too large, and who noticed him down around their hips when people were doing handsprings on a rope way up there?

The family did not overlook his talent. They trained him and trained him until he had the most skillful fingers in the world. His only limit then was how much he could make off with before the weight of his boodle pulled the pants off him.

One night another member of the troupe, a fellow called Peeds, took sick an hour before the performance. Peeds was the Mangonel shadow puppeteer and a great favorite of the boy’s as well as of the audience’s. Bardsham had heard Peeds’s stories hundreds of times, and was always transported by them. He sat through every rehearsal, absorbing all the details like any small child. Like you. When he wasn’t outside fleecing the audience, he even sat in the dark booth with Peeds. Mind you, he wasn’t supposed to be in the booth at all. His father had a temper to make your uncle look positively unassertive. But the boy took risks. And he and Peeds were friends.

So, Peeds took sick and there was nobody could do his part. Your grandmother sometimes narrated a tale for him, but she knew nothing of the puppetry itself. Nobody else had paid any attention to his old stories—they had their own acts to develop and refine. The family needed an act to link the other acts together—that’s what Peeds did with his stories, his puppets. He moved things along from the jugglers to the knife throwers, weaving the distance between the two with some tale that touched both. The boy decided to risk punishment. He confessed to his parents that he’d been studying secretly with Peeds and could do the act. He swore he knew it by heart. They didn’t have time to argue or fight or punish him—not right then. So they capitulated. That was when Bardsham the Great was born.

He’d followed how Peeds used colors to change mood, how he spun the lantern, the different ways he moved figures off the screen. For the rest—what he didn’t know—he had the instinct to invent.

His mother came up with the name. She told him, long after, that she had walked out to the end of the dragon beam sticking off the side of span where they were performing—every span has a dragon beam, Lea, not just Ningle. She stepped into the tiled Dragon Bowl at the end of that beam and asked the gods for the name, and it had come to her right then and there. That’s what she told him anyway. During his performance she stood outside the booth, telling the stories where they needed narrating, doing the introductions.

The thing about puppeteers is they’re invisible. Never seen. All you see is the handiwork, the skill. So any story she fabricated about Bardsham, it was the real story. Who he was, where he’d come from. Anything she felt like adding. If the story changed from night to night or span to span—as it did—that only added to the mystery of him.

It all began as a single provisional performance, but poor Peeds never recovered. He got sicker and thinner, till he’d grown as thin as a puppet skin himself. On his deathbed he bequeathed young Bardsham all of his puppets, his tools, his stage. His stories.

From then on the boy spent less time thieving from the audiences and more listening to them tell the stories of their spans, their people, their families. He did something no one else had ever thought of—he started collecting the heritage of Shadowbridge. Diverse elements he folded all together, making something that had never been before. It became a great giant of a story, a spiral of a tale, just like Shadowbridge itself, all linked and spun together into something bigger than any of us can see. Except for Bardsham. And such vision, you know, it makes you a little bit mad.

His father was none too happy about losing his talented little thief permanently. But he was no fool, either. The Shadowplays of Bardsham were soon bringing in the largest crowds. Nevertheless, pigheaded creature he was, he insisted that while the other acts went on, the boy must mingle with the crowd. After all, they didn’t know who he was. He was a stranger, and still small. And still a skilled pickpocket. But it was a risky and foolish proposition. Anyone could see that sooner or later the child would be caught. What pickpocket hasn’t been? And there were spans where the authorities cut off fingers if not a whole hand by way of punishment. The circus would lose far more than their little thief if that happened.

Finally it was his mother who confronted the old man to keep the son out of thieving. His hands were pure gold, she said. If he was caught thieving, the troupe would be ruined. Picking pockets brought in so little. Puppets brought in crowds. She was right, but her husband did not like being shown that he was wrong; as with many a man, it only made him insist on being wrong. He refused to listen to her. They argued. He threatened to stop the shadowplays, instead, which would have been sheer folly. He didn’t care. He wanted the boy to obey him.

The time came for them to perform their show, with the two of them still arguing and as far apart as could be. They went out with that disagreement hanging unfinished between them.

That night at the end of the whip act, Mangonel missed the ring his wife held up. It had never happened before. The whip snapped against her face instead. He swore it had been an accident, but I don’t think even he believed it. After that she had a scar across one cheek. Her husband couldn’t look at her without feeling the twist of guilt in his own breast. The only way he could expiate his crime was to capitulate on Bardsham. He released the boy from the duties of thieving.

Now on every span they came to, the boy disappeared. Wherever they went, he sought out the elders almost immediately, returning only when it was time for his performance. He asked them questions, sometimes describing versions of the stories he knew, and listened to the oldest tales they knew, hearing endless variations on the ones he told. He brought back no money now when he mingled with the crowds, but his act became more and more refined, precise, taut. He was the lure for the Mangonel Circus. Placards portrayed him as a faceless figure in a swirling purple cape. They announced his imminent arrival before the circus had even set foot upon a span. Audiences whispered his name. He was the mystery puppeteer of a million tales. Bardsham had traveled the whole world. Bardsham had been a librarian in the mythical Great Library. He was an Edgeworld god, because he knew every story on every span and only pretended at mortality—an ingenious argument given substance when an old man in one crowd claimed to have seen Bardsham’s performances when just a child. He was a shill for the circus, of course, but the story spread. People watched the troupe arrive, counted their numbers, but failed to find this mystical genius. And that, too, fueled stories of him. By whatever magic, Bardsham could look inside the audience and read the stories in their hearts. Bardsham.

And what was your father’s reward for all his work? To vanish.

His father took all the bows, receiving the kudos while the boy stayed hidden in the dark, listening to audiences shout his name, but unable to reveal his identity.

Mangonel may have given in to his wife’s demands, but he still had the means to keep the boy in his place. He got to acting as if he had performed the shadowplays, even hiding out during some performances to reinforce the impression.

Meanwhile the gulf between him and the other two family members deepened. He took performance money and went out on his own after shows, sometimes not coming home until the next day. His wife knew what he was doing but said nothing about it. After he’d scarred her, she had nothing to do with him beyond rehearsals anyway.

The world went on about its business. The Edgeworld gods blessed some spans, showering their Dragon Bowls with gifts, and completely ignored others. Women gave birth. Lovers quarreled and made up. Fish swam and ate smaller fish. The troupe traveled its circuit of spans and spirals. On each they might play four or five locales before sailing off to another arm of Shadowbridge, and sooner or later back again. It was a small circuit, hardly anything compared with all the possible spans, but enough to keep them moving all year round without returning to any particular span more than once every few years. Bardsham the child developed into Bardsham the young man. As he grew older, he also grew more frustrated. He choked at having to hide in the darkness of the booth while his father accepted his acclaim. He had great skill and he wanted to be recognized. The mysterious phantom Bardsham received letters and money from admirers, invitations to palaces, even proposals of marriage. His identity continued to attract speculation. He was a djinn kept in a bottle. No, he was horribly disfigured. He was deformed. That was why he hid his face.

While not particularly handsome or tall, the real Bardsham was not unattractive, either. As he grew older, he became a more conspicuous member of the troupe. Mangonel required him to pretend to be an idiot lest someone suspect him of being Bardsham. Now when he was old enough to be accepted as the puppeteer, it had become imperative that the mystery be maintained. The mystery of Bardsham was what filled the benches. He helped set up the acts. He assembled and broke down the platforms. But he had to pretend to be less, always less, than what he was. He was finding other people more and more appealing. Women interested him particularly. After all, they wrote him invitations. But what chance did he have with anyone he took a fancy to when he had to play the gibbering fool? Inevitably some people taunted him as he set up. They even jeered, “Hoy, there’s Bardsham!” at him while they pointed and laughed. He was doing twice the work of everyone else in the troupe. He had to be seen working like a lackey and looking like a fool. Secretly, he had to practice, to perform. Even more secretly he had to find ways to gather information on stories without revealing his identity. He donned disguises or masks when he spoke to the elders on the spans. The whole process was exhausting him.

The critical clash with his father was inevitable—a mere question of when the two tempers would flare in unison. His mother did her best to act as intermediary, but she must have known she couldn’t do it forever and dreaded the day when the two men would collide.

That day came: Bardsham had shirked some onerous chore in order to lurk about the span and gather up new stories. Mangonel saw him returning and called him. The old man had his whip.

He asked him something like “Where have you been and why haven’t you done what I told you to do?” You know the sound of it, your uncle brays the same way—when he tells you to do one thing and then damns you for not doing another. Mangonel knew perfectly well that his son had been out doing his job as Bardsham. But he hadn’t shoveled manure or swept off the stage, or cleaned some animal’s pen, which were his duties, too.

Now, Bardsham wasn’t big, but he performed so much of the troupe’s donkeywork that he was much stronger than he looked. And right then he’d had enough of trying to placate, of appeasing when it was himself being mistreated and maligned. Instead of apologizing, he walked over and told the old man that he could hire someone else to do the grunt work from now on. Bardsham had more important things to do and was tired of carrying the burden unnecessarily, just for show. Just—as he saw it—for Mangonel’s amusement. “I’m done!” he shouted, and started away.

The old man might have pretended that what he’d done to his wife was an accident, but what happened next was a hot-blooded assault.

His whip tore at Bardsham left and right, striping him with welts and blood, ripping his clothing, driving him back and back against a wall. He fell over some jugglers’ props that had been assembled—some braziers and flags and large wooden pins. When he scrambled up against the wall the whip tore his shoulder open. If he’d been a second slower, it would have been his nose. He had nothing to protect him, nothing to hide behind. The old man might have been trying to kill him, too—he snapped the whip at his son’s face, just missing an eye and leaving him afterward with a scar to match his mother’s. Maybe it was seeing that scar that made the old man realize he’d never lost control of the whip in his life, not even once, not for a second. Not with anybody.

He raised it again and snapped it, but slow enough that Bardsham caught it and pulled with all his might. Hauled off his feet, the old man flew toward him, and Bardsham, quick as lightning, let go the whip and snatched up one of the juggling pins and swung it all the way around, swung it with his arms stretched out, swung it with all his anger behind it. When it hit, that pin cracked and splintered, and bits of it flew off across the yard. It stove in the side of his father’s head.

Bardsham said he stood there afterward for the longest time, feeling a terrible fire in his throat, as if he might cry, but boiling with such hatred that he did nothing for the man who lay twitching and bleeding on the ground in front of him. Of course he was bleeding, too. His shoulder and back. His face was a mask of blood from the slash beside his eye. He dropped the broken pin and walked away.

He packed everything he owned, including the puppets left him by Peeds, and disappeared that night. Didn’t even say good-bye to his mother, which he regretted the rest of his life. But that was his choice.

Mangonel didn’t die, as it happens, but he was never any good for anything after that. He couldn’t speak right, and he couldn’t walk a straight line from one end of a room to the other between one day and the next. The Mangonel Circus is what Bardsham had killed. The Mangonel name.

The puppet that was her grandfather had jerked, stumbled, and fallen over. The figure of Meersh stood alone and somehow wretched.

Leodora had asked, “Did he ever go back?”

Soter shook his head. “He would send money to his mother whenever he had some and remembered it. But never a note, never a word. He was too ashamed to write, to say where he was. There was nothing he could say. He knew he would have killed his father. Happily. Of course his mother would have understood—you and I can see that, but not Bardsham. She must have known that she could find him, because he was famous, you know. Bardsham only grew in stature once he’d escaped from the circus. She could have found him anytime.”

“Like my mother.”

For a moment he looked alarmed. Then he smiled nervously and said, “Ah, I see what you mean—like your mother ran away from home. Yes. I often thought that his break with his family was the cause of much of his debauch—that is, his excesses. He drank and…well, drank more than any human being I’ve ever known. You could not be friends with him and not drink. He often said that he didn’t trust men who didn’t imbibe. They were afraid of something. Something inside themselves, and he felt he should be wary of it, too.”

“So when did you come to know him?”

Soter set down the last puppet figure. There would be no puppet for him.

With obvious relish he said, “I came across Bardsham while I was selling nostrums. He needed a reconnaissance man, a vanguard to make arrangements, make sure we had a place to perform and to sleep on every span, wherever we went. Make sure there would be no trouble. Likewise it must be someone with the necessary sophistication to announce him, a person of skill and wit to suss the nature of the place and its inhabitants. A person of reliable character and cunning and…” He paused, opened his hands as if tossing something in the air, and bowed slightly. “He had a need that I filled perfectly.

“Without such a person, Bardsham had to handle these things. He had to come out of the booth between each set and announce himself, interrupting the flow of the stories. That made him seem ordinary, and you can’t seem ordinary if you want to perform. Besides, he was Bardsham—ordinary wasn’t an option. The cloak of mystery was crucial.

“The two of us had been traveling parallel circuits, you might say. Every span’s different. Laws are different, permits are different. Sometimes you need one, sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you’ll get arrested if you set up without bribing the right fellow. Sometimes you get arrested if you try to bribe them. It’s half your life keeping on top of such things. A great artist cannot be distracted by such petty matters.” He sounded to her as if he were quoting someone. “An artist’s head is full of tricks and tales, not the names of who to pay off and how to finesse the obdurate authorities.”

His tone was one of longing. They had been young men then, on an adventure together. She could hear it. “The world was all before us,” he told her, then fell silent. Warily, she asked, “What about my mother?”

The dreaminess in Soter’s expression pinched into a look almost of pain. His eyes darted her way for a second. Not encouraged by his reaction, she pressed her point: “Is what Uncle Gousier says about her true?”

He picked up the puppet figure of Orinda. It glided across the case as he spoke. “What your uncle knows of your mother on the spans, he’s pieced together like a quilt—a word here, a rumor there. He never spoke to anyone who knew her. That is, other than me; and he’d prefer not to know what I know because it might spoil the picture he’s framed. He knows nothing of how she lived or what she did to survive. His account’s a fabrication. When I arrived here with you, your existence only confirmed everything he’d invented about her. That she must have been a wanton to produce a child and then abandon it was all too clear to him, and he set it like a minaret atop the story he’d already invented. You’re the crowning piece whether you wish it or not. Here you are and Leandra nowhere to be seen.” He slid the puppet back inside the case.

“But she was dead!”

“Which made no difference to him. That she’d left you in my care, in Bardsham’s care, before she went off is what matters, you see. In his mind, she abandoned you. Her death’s a mere inconvenience after the fact. An orphan proved what he already believed. She was unfit. Unfit to be his sister. And that’s the real issue.”

“Was she—” and here she stopped, poised at the brink of asking the critical question that would either vindicate or damn the image she retained, her mind shaping words the specifics of which were beyond her, but the depravity of which she’d inferred from the way her uncle’s mouth twisted and his eyes went hard as he uttered the name. “Was she really the Red Witch? Did she have powers?”

“Red Witch?” The name troubled him, she could see. “Where do you”—he tried unpersuasively to sound amused—“where do you get such a name?”

“From you,” she answered, and she watched as he hesitated, tried to recall when he had let this slip.

He squeezed shut his eyes and rubbed his forehead. “Oh. Well. It was just a name, that’s all, Leodora. A reputation. The same way that Bardsham was a name.” Orinda fell over and lay still on the box. “That’s enough now, I’m tired.”

But she would not be diverted by his pretense of exhaustion. This was too important. Her world was taking shape. “Was she the Red Witch? Did she lure men to their deaths?”

He stiffened. Slowly his hand uncovered his face. His bilious eyes distorted his haggard features into something inhumanly furious—gaunt and hard and evil. One corner of his mouth curled as he replied: “Ask your father. She lured him.”

He rose up, gathered the puppets, and shoved them back into the cases. Ignoring her as if she were no longer in the room, he carried the cases back to the dark pantry.

Although he let her stay through the night, Soter remained unapproachable, refusing to answer when she tried to speak to him. The subject was closed.

After that he tried never to mention Leandra again. If she asked a question, he wouldn’t answer with anything concrete or helpful. Mostly he feigned that he remembered too little to be of any use.

She couldn’t trust her uncle to tell her anything concrete because he did nothing but call his sister “the witch,” much the way the villagers did. To ask him was to invite trouble. Her aunt was especially reticent when Gousier was around, but even when he was absent she professed to have come to the island only after Leandra was gone and so be unable to provide any help. Leodora suspected this wasn’t true, but she didn’t want to accuse her aunt and lose the sympathy of the only person who ever sided with her.

Beyond Bouyan, her mother was nothing but a half-condensed phantom, a legend, a myth. On Bouyan she was a scourge, a harlot, an abomination.

While she couldn’t probe him for information, she did induce Soter to teach her about the puppets. He accepted her apprenticeship reluctantly at first, but with increasing devotion as, over time, her dedication and skill emerged. It wasn’t just a casual interest in puppetry she displayed. Nor were his first impressions of her dexterity off the mark. Leodora had her father’s gifts. Many times during the first years of her training, Soter proclaimed it.

The secret practice sessions gave meaning to her life. They made the indignities suffered at her uncle’s hands almost bearable. They gave her a goal to strive for—a means to leave the island, to strike out on her own.

The goal had no date. She didn’t know when or how she would leave, and she might not ever have gone at all. She really had no idea then what she was inviting—how much effort would be involved, how much of her life she would devote to practice. She would train and train while Soter forever reminded her that she wasn’t quite ready, that her skills still needed sharpening; that there was a world of detail she didn’t know, of subtlety she didn’t yet possess. As time passed, she began to think that she might spend her whole life preparing for just one performance.

FOUR

Life on Bouyan ran along with a tedious sameness.

Each morning she awoke in her small garret atop the boathouse. It was a room she had taken as a sanctuary after discovering it on one of her flights from her uncle. It had a small bed and sparse furnishings in it, suggesting that someone had lived there before her. Her aunt and uncle didn’t resist when she asked if she could move into the garret. In truth, she had asked Dymphana, who as always had acted as go-between for her; but she had watched the interchange, had seen her uncle’s hooded gaze shift to her with an incomprehensible look of relief, as though he wanted her gone. For once his desires and hers agreed. She was thirteen. Her body was changing and with it her emotional compass: She wanted privacy, she wanted her own places on the island. Her uncle’s one stipulation was that she cease all complaining about her assigned tasks.

Once she had arisen, she dressed and went down the beach to Tenikemac to watch the sea dragons surface. The village dotted the whole curve of the bay just over the north ridge. The ridge took half an hour to reach, and as she walked she watched the people already up and working, especially the half a dozen women gathering seaweed in baskets along the beach ahead of her. Soon she had reached them, but for the most part they ignored her, letting her by as if she didn’t exist. On the ridge, she stopped and watched.

The men in teams of two carried their rolled-up nets down beside the water, where they unfurled them. Tastion and his father made up one team. He pretended not to see her, so no one was suspicious of the true relationship between them.

Soon four younger boys waded into the water up to their waists, each carrying a large conch with pierced ends. In unison they raised the shells to their lips and blew a trumpet call.

Everyone stopped what they were doing and turned to study the surface.

Farther out, the water rippled. Slithers of yellow appeared, darted beneath the grayish waves. Then the heads rose up, one after another, strange, long-snouted, magisterial heads with large, black, and protruding eyes. These were the sea dragons.

There were sixteen of them in all, and she knew every one. She had never ridden them, never touched them. As a female, she wasn’t allowed. But she’d given them names. Her favorite was Muvros, the youngest, his head yellow and black, freckled with the red spots of youth, and his snout as thin as a reed. The tiny mouth at the end of it seemed forever puckered, as if sharing a kiss.

The conch boys fed the dragons long strips of the gathered seaweed and would feed them again when they returned. Meanwhile the fishermen, dragging their nets, moved into the water two by two. The dragons seemed as fascinated by the men as Leodora was with the dragons. They bowed their heads and let their riders clamber over their necks and sit. They seemed not in the least encumbered by the riders.

With a storyteller’s inquisitiveness, she wondered when this ritual had begun, and who had tamed the first dragon. Even the village itself didn’t seem to know, or else she would have known the story, too. Soter had taught her every one of their tales with the intention of having her perform them for villagers—once he was satisfied that she was skilled enough.

The dragons snaked off into deeper waters, their riders rocking from side to side. Some of the men would return early with full nets. Others stayed out all day, hunting a more difficult catch but one that might earn them more money on Ningle. Tastion and his father were among those who hunted farther away.

She watched until he was gone from sight, then turned and set off into the trees to perform the most hateful task in the world.

Fishkill Cavern lay not terribly deep inside the hill—the entrance was barely out of sight behind her before the passage turned and widened into a broad chamber. Close to the outside or not, no matter what the temperature on the island might be, the cavern remained as cold as an iceberg. Water barely dripped from the stalactites; when she was little it had been fun to watch and watch until a single drop fell. Now she felt as if her life was measured out in those drops, slow and icy and suspended for eternity.

Halfway between home and the village, nature had created the perfect repository for the village’s daily catch. A congeries of fish and mussels and other, articulated creatures surrounded Leodora every morning, laid upon reed mats that covered most of the floor. A large table comprising boulders and one flat slab stood close to one wall. That was where she spent her mornings, gutting, cleaning, and filleting; cracking and splitting and deveining. The offal poured, cold and slick, into baskets beside her, most of which would be taken back by the fishermen and thrown into the sea, sometimes as bait for other fish. The product, ready for market, was heaped on other mats and placed inside round wicker panniers with straps.

She didn’t clean all, or even most, of the catch—most of it was sold as it was. Even so there was enough work to keep her busy through the morning.

She wore her ragged clothes in layers. They kept her warm even as they became spotted with gore. Her feet were well wrapped, too. She always made a point of drying them before entering the cavern. If she hadn’t, she could have lost her toes, like the fabled trickster Meersh, against the icy cavern floor. Her hands could not be so protected. Her nimble fingers grew chilled and red, and finally numb. Her greatest fear was that she would lose so much feeling in her hands that she would chop off a finger and not notice it until her own blood was mingling with that of the fish. It was a fear grown into a phobia. Outside the cavern she kept a basket of ocean water placed in the sunlight. When her fingers numbed, she ran out and plunged them in the water. The flesh tingled to life and soon felt as if it were ablaze, the ends of her arms boiling. She did this four or five times a morning, preferring discomfort to dismemberment.

At some point her uncle would arrive, sometimes alone, sometimes with whatever vermin he could hire from Ningle to help tote the fish up onto the span, another half an hour’s walk from there. Gousier’s assistants turned over almost as often as the tide. They tended to ogle her, this young girl whose body was developing its adult shape earlier than some they knew. While they might have been the lowest of creatures on Ningle, down here on the island they were in a place that they could consider below even their station; and she, being of the island, was a pleb at their disposal. At least, so Soter had warned her. He predicted that, sooner or later, one or both assistants would try to grope her. He told her what to watch for—those subtle, vulpine glances being one of the signs. But so far no one had harmed her.

When her uncle had taken the panniers full of fish onto the span, then Leodora was freed from servitude.

Sodden with fish blood, she left the cavern and followed a small path south of the house, past Dymphana’s garden, and up over a few weedy dunes to the far side of a low promontory there. His claim on the land ended with the dunes, where the grass turned quickly into brush too thorny to cut down and the beach beyond narrowed to a footpath. The brush might have been a wall to fend off invaders from the sea—it was that thick. But if one continued along the strip of beach to the far side of them, the shore made an abrupt hook, creating a natural jetty of rock that doubled back upon the promontory like an index finger almost pressing against a thumb. When the tide was out, finger and thumb did close completely, and the small isolated inlet became a lagoon for a while. Even with the tide up and the waves coming across the hook, it remained free of strong currents and riptides, a hidden stillness. The dunes hid the lagoon from view on Gousier’s side, and the rocky hook rose inland like a low wall, as if a failed span had once upon a time attempted to push up out of the island, producing finally nothing but the thorny wildwood. No one had any use for it, and no one else ever went there.

On the sheltered strip of beach she peeled off the foul clothes. Underneath, ruddy patches marked her skin where the blood had soaked through. She immersed the clothes in the shallow water, and like coral smoke the blood swirled lazily out of them.

She left them soaking in the shallows and waded past them into the depths of the lagoon. Untied, her red hair fanned all the way to her waist.

Tiny creatures nipped at her toes, and she yelped and dove in, swimming out to the far rim of rocks, locating in them the gouge through which she could slip into the deeper water. She plunged headlong beneath the waves, kicked back up to the surface, and broke free with a gasp, in imitation of the sea dragons. She liked to play at being a dragon, at wriggling through the water with her feet together like a tail.

She had been born swimming, she thought.

The lagoon had been her private retreat for more than a year. She kept this secret even from Tastion; and, anyway, he was always out fishing or else working the fields on the distant side of the village when she went there, so there was no reason for him to know. She wanted—she needed—something to be hers alone. Even the puppets she had to share with Soter. And with the ghost of her father.

That day as on most days after swimming, she lay sunning herself, warm and muzzy and so nearly asleep that she didn’t hear any approaching footsteps. She had the impression of a sharp intake of breath, and then a voice poked through the membrane of dream with a single word: “Witch!” So loud and so near that she didn’t think it was real at all until she opened one eye and found him standing right beside her. He stepped up and his shadow blocked the sunlight.

She screeched and rolled away across the sand, scrambling for her wet clothing, draping the tunic over her budding figure before she turned to confront the intruder.

No one was there.

She roughly brushed the sand from her face, thinking she’d dreamed it all. But in the sand were his footprints, clear and cautious impressions in approach, wild gouges upon retreat. He’d fled past the wildwood and right up the rocks. She ran to them and climbed up high enough to look over the rise and saw him far away, still running in the shallows, not even daring to look back, his arms flailing ahead of him. A moment later he had disappeared around the curve of the beach.

She’d only glimpsed him for an instant—an impression of tangled, matted gray hair and ragged clothes. And that word—that word lined with horror. Witch.

She dressed in the sandy, sodden clothes then and ran to her uncle’s house. Dymphana was outdoors, digging corms from her garden.

Her aunt’s features pulled tight with concern at the sight of her. She asked, “What’s happened, child?”

Trembling, fidgeting, Leodora told her. A man had appeared, a stranger. He’d seen her and then run away. She clung to her aunt and cried, “But why witch! Why did he call me a witch? Why did he say that?”

Dymphana replied, “Oh, child, it’s not you, it’s your mother used to swim there, too, and I’m—”

Pressed against her, Leodora felt her aunt stiffen as both of them realized what had been said.

“How do you know that?” She pushed away, no longer frightened. “You said you didn’t know anything, that my mother was gone before you came to Bouyan!”

It seemed for a moment that Dymphana might try to bluff her way out of the trap, as if she weighed whether she should compound the denial with another obvious lie. Finally, however, she set down her hoe. “You must promise me never to tell your uncle nothing you hear from me. He’d know in a second where you learned it, because Soter doesn’t know a thing about Leandra’s life on this island. Gousier never told him nothin’, neither.”

“I promise,” she swore.

“You are so like her, you know that. More each day, to my eye. When I promised your uncle never to speak on your mother, it was when you was so tiny, and it seemed right then not to have you burdened with what we knew. Your uncle said he didn’t want you growing up like her. That seemed good wisdom then. But you are her daughter—and no one who knew her could ever mistake it.

“Your mother thought the ocean belonged to her, same as you—that lagoon especially, same as you. It was hers. Oh, you didn’t think anyone knew?” She smiled with tenderness through her exasperation then. “Dear heart, I keep track of you far more’n you realize. I know perfectly well that you lie about nude in the sand over past them dunes. Just like your mother did.”

A thrill ran through Leodora at the thought of her mother lying in that very same spot, seeing the same sky. The pleasure was followed a moment later by the realization that her private spot was no longer private. Like everything else, she shared it.

“The man you saw, he’d be an Omelune,” said Dymphana, as though that explained everything. “I expect he thought you were your mother.”

“Everyone calls her a witch. Everyone in Tenikemac. Uncle Gousier. Even Soter. He calls her the Red Witch.”

“Oh, does he now? To you he says this? That old fool. He has no right to talk on her at all, even if he does know such things as we don’t.”

“Well, at least he doesn’t lie,” she snapped, and for a moment she thought her aunt was going to weep.

Instead, her expression still pinched, Dymphana explained, “Red Witch is a name from the spans. No one ever called her that here. To be sure, the Omelunes called her worse. I always wondered if she adopted the name on purpose to mock Bouyan. Thumbin’ her nose at everything. That’d be like her.”

“What are Omelunes?”

Dymphana took her by the hand. “Come here and let me sit.” They walked over and sat on a broad stump in the shade. The breeze on her wet clothes quickly chilled Leodora, and she scooted off the stump and onto the ground, where she could face her aunt from within a warm patch of sunlight.

“You understand that I was no part of the household in her younger days. I didn’t meet your uncle till perhaps two years before she’d gone. She would have been a few years older than you are now when I arrived. Whenever I look on you, I can’t help seeing her like she’s a ghost right inside your skin. I’ve almost called you by her name more than once. You have so much of her—her body, her face. Your uncle sees it, too. I know he does. Even your stubbornness is your mother’s, although I’m inclined to think that being stubborn just runs in your family. For that brief while after I came, it was we two women and your grandmother living together in a small wood house all day long—it was smaller then. Your grandfather extended it three times with them extra rooms. He was a great carpenter, a builder.”

“I remember.”

“We all thought it would be filling up soon with more…” She paused, her face pinched, her eyes casting now toward the woods. Leodora knew that her aunt had given birth three times and that none of the babies had survived beyond a few months. She knew where the graves were, and that the final stillbirth had almost killed Dymphana. Her uncle would have no sons.

“Leandra told me all sorts of stories about herself. She didn’t mind telling them on herself, either. Didn’t mind looking the fool if it made for a good story. You might not have guessed, listening to her laugh at herself, make fun of herself, how much iron there was in her backbone. I came down from Ningle to live with your uncle, and I had certain airs when I first arrived here: thinking I was above this place, better than it was, and that I was above everyone born here. I needed to pretend that then. My family on Ningle—they’re all gone now—they were so poor that this life is much better than I could have hoped for there. I’d have been in a gutter or worse. Gousier was so fine and strong. He used to laugh. You wouldn’t know it now. He used to be like your mother that way. Or maybe she let him share some of her joy, so that he seemed happier than he was. All I know is, when she left, she took that joy away with her. I’ve missed it so long, it’s like something I dreamed of once that never really happened.

“It didn’t take me long to learn my limits. Your grandmother straightened me out about who I was and what was expected of me. Your mother, though, wasn’t about to be straightened out. She challenged everything.

“She used to swim out past your lagoon, where she weren’t supposed to—over the rocks and into the deep. One morning she vanished altogether out there. She was missing so long that your grandparents feared she’d drowned. Gousier went out in his esquif, paddling all over, looking everywhere. Even some of Tenikemac came out to hunt for her in sympathy. They’d lost swimmers of their own to the hidden currents and undertows—some was never seen again. And it was no balm to your grandparents’ spirits to have their standoffish neighbors come and console them over their loss. That was like the final proof that she was gone.

“It fell dark. Everyone had returned from the sea. Your grandmother was wailing now. They’d all given up. And in walked your mother. She came in stark naked and exhausted, and not a bit ashamed of her deed or her body. Proud, if barely able to stand on her own feet. Worse, in the eyes of Tenikemac especially, she claimed she’d ridden home on the back of a sea dragon. No one gave her much credence. They thought she was saying it to stir them up more. She didn’t mean to be evil. She didn’t do it to hurt them. She did it to tear down a limit. It was like she had to beat the gods of the ocean themselves. She would have been, I think, just as happy if they had destroyed her for the challenge. It would have meant something had happened, she’d gotten the gods’ attention at last.”

“Did her parents punish her? What did they do?”

“Oh, they forbade her to swim, but you know they never enforced it. They were happy that she wasn’t dead. It’s difficult to be angry when you’re so elated. And then she collapsed right there in front of them, so mostly they were too busy nursing her well to threaten her much. Her task was gutting fish, same as you. There was no worse punishment they could have inflicted on her, and none that would have done anyone any good. Couldn’t keep her from cleaning the fish unless someone else did it, and when you’re all covered in blood and guts, well, who’s going to forbid you to wash? They don’t want the stink of you like that, either.”

“So she went back to swimming?” Leodora rather liked the idea that her mother had bested them all.

“Yes, she did, child. In the end, though, that willfulness of hers boxed her in. No islander would have her. The family was even more cut off from Tenikemac then. It’s only in the past few years Gousier has opened them up a tiny bit again, at least some of the men. The women are harder. If there had been a chance for Leandra before with them, there wasn’t one after that night. Their own men had been out hunting for her, and if she’d drowned, they’d have all mourned her and made sacrifices to the sea in her name, but she weren’t drowned nor even in peril, and after that the women shunned her and made their men shun her. If she’d ever gotten into real trouble after that, they would have lifted nary a finger to help, an’ probably would have hoped the gods destroyed her.”

It was clear from the look her aunt gave her that she was supposed to take instruction from her mother’s folly. She said nothing, and Dymphana seemed to regard this as acquiescence.

“Leandra had already given up on that village anyway. I don’t know exactly when she began to look elsewhere on the island.

“The Weejar people were on the far side of Ningle as they are now, isolated by the legs of that span, and half a day’s walking around the beach unless you can find the paths, what I could never do. But back then there was a third group lived down around the southern tip a good three hours away—”

“The Omelunes,” guessed Leodora.

“That’s right. You’re so clever, you got there ahead of me. The Omelunes were a fishing village, the same as Tenikemac, only they didn’t have the skill with dragons. They used boats. Some of their people also took their fish up to Ningle, and so Tenikemac would have nothing to do with them. Weejar is more like the Omelunes were—boats for fishing, and rice swamps inland. The rice is the only reason Tenikemac trades with them.

“One day, while the men of Omelune were out fishing or selling fish, Leandra swam all the way around to their village. The women on the beach saw her splashing in the waves, and damn them if they didn’t pick up stones, every one of them, and walk to the edge of the water and start flinging them at your mother to keep her from coming in to land. They knew she didn’t belong to them. They thought she was one of the merfolk that overturn boats and drown the sailors.”

“What merfolk?” asked Leodora, half disbelieving and half curious, wondering if Soter had any figures of merfolk buried in his stacks of puppets.

“Tenikemac knows of them, too, you can ask someone there. It were such a long swim to Omelune, you can well imagine that no one from here had ever tried it before. It’s not like somebody was expecting her. What else were the women of Omelune to think?

“Leandra must have been very tired, but she turned back—they left her no choice. The problem was, the women chased her along the beach, throwing rocks wherever they found them. Finally there was this spit of land, a little peninsula sticking out in the water. Leandra wasn’t watching ahead—she was keeping her eye on them women and diving down when something looked like it would hit her. So then all of a sudden she found the women coming right at her as if across the water itself. They cut the distance in half before she understood what had happened and leapt to swim away. One of the rocks struck her in the head, and she floundered, and she sank. The women must have thought they’d killed her. They left her alone and went marching back home in triumph. They’d killed a merwoman, and wouldn’t that be something to tell the men when the men came back from fishing?

“It was pure instinct kept Leandra afloat. Pretty soon the currents had her. She kicked up her legs when she thought of it. When she was sensible. Blood stung her eyes, and it was about all she could do to keep her head above the surface. She was drifting, she didn’t know where.

“The next thing she knew there were hands on her body, and she was being dragged through the water. She said she thought that the gods of the ocean had finally got her for all the times she’d taunted them. She tried to fight, but she had no energy left and fainted dead away. Then she was being pushed up into the air and onto something hard.

“Some young fool—and a brave one, I expect, to chance rescuing a merwoman—saw her floating there and pulled her into his boat. He was from Omelune. He had no idea what had happened; he just saw this naked girl in the water and dove in after her. When he found out who she was, he paddled her back home. By the time he’d got her back to our beach, your mother had decided he was the one for her.”

“And that’s the man who called me a witch?” guessed Leodora.

“Hush, now. You want this story, don’t try and race around it.

“Afterward, the two of them met in secret. Even in Fishkill Cavern if your uncle can be believed—which he can’t. He thinks the worst of them both, of course, even though he doesn’t know anything at all. She didn’t tell him half what she told me. She was in love. She wasn’t going to tell her brother about that, was she?

“Now, the village of Omelune must have had some inkling what was going on, but maybe they didn’t know just where he was going. Surely they couldn’t have guessed that the red-haired creature they’d fended off was the same one he was visiting regularly.

“Then one night he and Leandra arranged to meet on that ridge of rocks that makes your lagoon. He was such a fool for her that he decided to swim from Omelune to the lagoon just to match her feat. To prove to her or to himself that he was worthy. He didn’t tell a soul, just set off.

“Leandra, she waited and waited and he didn’t come and his boat never appeared. She could have got into Gousier’s esquif, but not her. She had to swim off to look for him. I think she was still planning to tease him: She would creep up on his boat just to scare him. That was her intention.

“In the morning we couldn’t find her anywhere. The family looked all over. It hadn’t been so long since we’d thought her drowned, so we weren’t quite given over to panic this time. She wasn’t in the cavern. She wasn’t at Tenikemac. We had no idea where she’d got to, so it was late in the day before your grandfather thought to go looking for her in the direction of Omelune. He found her on the beach. Somewhere between here and there, not all that far from home. She was sitting, just sitting, cold and wet and rocking back and forth, with that poor dead boy’s head cradled in her lap. He’d drowned trying to match her. You see what happened—her willfulness undid her in the end.”

“He died?” Leodora couldn’t understand this turn of events. She had already jumped to the end of the tale, where her mother ran away with the boy from Omelune, and this development ruined that story.

“He died, yes, and afterward nothing was good for your mother on the island. Omelune blamed her for his death. When they saw her, when they realized who she was, the women accused her of being a water witch, a lorelei. A love-struck girl wasn’t enough for them. She tried to drown herself, tried to swim to the ends of the ocean and let the gods take her soul; but your grandfather had some sense of this. He was watching her close now, and he went after her, brought her back, locked her in the boathouse with only her grief for a companion, and wouldn’t let her out until he was satisfied she’d got the idea of drowning herself out of her head. Even I couldn’t see her or talk to her that whole time. He let nobody near her. And then, while she was locked up, a terrible storm struck the island. Nets and boats were tossed around and torn apart. Your uncle’s esquif was smashed up on some rocks, and that’s the hole what’s still in its side. Weejar and Tenikemac both suffered, but not like Omelune. That poor cursed village was stamped flat, and so many people died that you couldn’t have made a village out of what was left. The survivors blamed your mother for it all. They knew already she was some sort of ocean spirit. Now she was worse: Leandra the Red-Haired Witch, the Soul-Drinker. Either they couldn’t see her misery or they didn’t believe it. Weejar took in some of the survivors—of course, Tenikemac so typically refused to be a haven for those who’d sold fish on Ningle. The Omelune opinion of your mother, though, spread everywhere. Weejar traded with Tenikemac the same as now. Pretty soon your mother had nowhere to go at all. The whole island had set itself against her.”

“Why didn’t Grandfather…do something?”

“What could he do? We were already viewed as no better than a necessary evil by Tenikemac. It’s a role we’ve long accepted, because we make a good living by filling that niche. The taint of the spans was bad enough, and her jeopardizing their men worse, but now we harbored something cursed.

“When Leandra insisted on accompanying your grandfather and Gousier onto Ningle, the two of them agreed it was a very good idea. She was seventeen. She was a beauty. She ought to have been married. And it was clear that she could never find a suitable husband here. I think they hoped she would catch someone’s eye up there.

“A few times she went up, and I’m sure she must have been learning all she could of the place. Laying her plans. She said nothing to me or anyone. One morning she went up with the men and never came down again. Vanished right out from under their noses. That was the last time anyone in the family ever laid eyes on her.”

“She ran away.”

“That she did, and alone, too. No one thought she could get far, but they had always underestimated her distance. Gousier went looking for her up and down the span and found nothing, not a trace. She’d taken a full purse from the family coffers—we had as much then as now. No one begrudged her that; she would have been given more as a dowry had things gone right. The money meant she could buy herself into the shadows, though. Buy passage to some other great long stretch of spans, leaving no trail to follow, no way to guess which way she’d gone.

“The day Soter came down those steps, carrying you as proof of his tale of her, of her death, was the first we’d heard of her in years.

“Your uncle cried like a baby himself. I know that’s hard for you to imagine, but it’s true. So long as he had no idea of his sister’s fate, he could make up whatever he liked, and even if it was awful and cruel and defamed her with every word, it was comforting somehow. Like he kept her alive by inventing a world of failures for her. The truth wiped it all away. It broke him. It went much worse on him than on either of your grandparents. They’d come to accept her choice. Gousier took to drink. What he made in the stall of a day he spent in the pursuit of his own undoing. Trying to erase her, hiding from her. I couldn’t talk to him, almost like he couldn’t see me. One time he fell partway down the steps from Ningle, he was so drunk. For a while he wasn’t allowed to go up. Soter and I filled in as much as we could. Of course then Gousier accused Soter of trying to usurp his position—Soter, who wanted nothing at all to do with fish, but felt he owed your grandfather something for letting him stay. Gousier was crazy awhile, and nothing he said during that time is worth recalling. When it went on past all reason, your grandfather locked himself and Gousier in his workshop for the better part of a whole day. Neither one of them ever told what went on in there, but when they came out your uncle was bruised, bloody, and sober. And quiet. Whatever his opinions were, he said no more about her. Never mentioned his sister afterward, as if he’d never had one. He went back to work and after a time, he eased up. He was good for a bit—you might even remember from when you was little. Then, when your grandfolk died, it all came out again, everything he’d bottled up, and he cursed her for their deaths, too, blamed her all over again, but this time it was different. He bellowed at her as if she were hiding in the woods and could hear everything he said. He told her she’d killed them by breaking their hearts as surely as if she’d murdered them by her own hand.”

The idea terrified her. “Is that true? Did she?”

Dymphana leaned forward and took her hand. “Now, you think on it. Years had passed between her going and theirs. She wasn’t no more responsible than you was. They were old people. Whichever of them went first, the other was going to follow. Them Kuseks up on Ningle had more to do with your grandfather’s going than your mother and you. No, Leodora, your uncle’s like the Omelunes—he needs there to be someone responsible for all the bad things. Someone he can point at. I think he was in love with your mother a little bit, and I think part of it’s envy. I think there’s a part of Gousier that’d like to roam the spans, but the dutiful part tells him he has to stay here and maintain the tradition that his father maintained. An’ if he has to, then so does everyone else.”

Leodora stared, dumbfounded. Her aunt’s story revealed a depth of comprehension and thought that she’d never suspected. How could Dymphana think and see and know so much, and keep it all to herself? Why didn’t she feel as Leodora did the need to express her feelings—to fight the restrictions that were placed on her?

Then Leodora’s face clouded with another puzzle. “If the boy from Omelune is dead, then who is the man who thought I was my mother?”

“I expect he’s one of the other villagers, someone who didn’t leave there with the rest. There was a handful, tried to rebuild. I daresay he won’t come our way again, not now he believes the witch is still with us.”

“But how can he have been there for so many years and not come here before?”

Dymphana shrugged. “Life’s full of mysteries. Not all of ’em have answers, Leodora. Why did a storm destroy Omelune when it did? And why not Tenikemac?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, and you won’t, neither. The world has its mysteries. The gods have designs into which we and the world are woven.”

“But—” She stopped herself. “But how can anybody know if the things they’re doing are part of that plan or not?”

Dymphana smiled. “And aren’t you the deep thinker?” She tousled Leodora’s hair. “Better be careful asking that sort of question aloud, or the archivists of the Library will hear and come take you away to teach them.” She laughed at the look of bemused terror on Leodora’s face. “Oh, it’s just a myth, dear heart. The Library’s just a story.”

“It is?”

“Of course.”

In that case, she wondered, why hadn’t Soter taught it to her?

Two years later she did know the story of the Library of Shadowbridge, and far more than that.

By the time she turned fifteen, Soter had given up all his stories, and there were mermen and archivists of the Library in among the tales, along with Meersh, and two brothers who coveted each other’s gifts, and brides who drowned their husbands and husbands who beheaded their wives—of course Bardsham could have spun even more stories, but Soter had attended so many performances that he remembered a great many of them.

Now, instead of teaching her stories, he taught her how to take the elements and mix them together to make new ones. “Not until you can improvise from all you know will you become a true shadowmaster,” he told her. “That’s where your father truly excelled.” The way he said it suggested that he didn’t anticipate her excelling there ever. Yet she was devoted to the craft. She had every intention of succeeding. The world of the spans was going to be her oyster. She had decided. But while she laid her plans and dreamed of far-spun fame, other forces were conspiring to demolish every dream and keep her a prisoner there forever.

FIVE

Even before she opened her eyes that morning, she heard the strange murmurous call. It woke her nearly every morning now, no louder—if such could be said of something silent—than when she’d first heard it as her grandfather held her at the railing of the span, ten years before; since she had moved into the boathouse it had become more insistent, urgent, although the urgency gave her no guidance, no advice, no real idea of what to do in response. She climbed from her bed and crossed the narrow garret to stand in the window, to stare across the water as if this morning she might spy the source. It—whatever it was—might suddenly top the horizon to reveal its shape, and in appearing explain why it called to her and no one else. What did it want of her? It wasn’t calling her to come to it, but by the same token it was not going to let her forget its existence.

The curtains flapped in the breeze. The light coming off the ocean was gray and vaporous. It smelled of rain, though there was nothing of rain in the sky.

Melancholy joined her then, a late-awaking twin. Leodora leaned out the window like a figurehead on the prow of a ship, and stared along the shore to the north, out across the point and past, where the call was strongest, like a smell on the breeze or a gull’s cry wrapped in the wind; loud in its silence, bright in its subtlety, overwhelming in its absence—the source of her soul’s unease. One day it would surely appear and she would have her answers. She had learned to accept the frustration of not knowing when. The call remained, but she let it recede into the sizzle of the surf, and withdrew from the window.

It took her a few minutes to dress in her ragged and stained clothes for Fishkill Cavern. She climbed down the steps into the boathouse, where her uncle’s small esquif lay on supports, the hole in its side aimed at her like an empty socket. He was never going to repair it—she understood that now. It was linked to her mother and now to her, because she lived here.

She walked barefoot across the planks and picked up a wicker basket as she pushed open the wide double doors. She jumped down the stone launching ramp then padded across the beach toward the water. Streamers of seaweed were scattered all along the shore, and she collected each one, shaking out the sand and debris and little perturbed creatures before placing it in the basket.

The sand was soft and sodden between her toes. She jumped when an irate sandcrab nipped her foot before digging in deeper. Most of the little crabs scattered and scuttled and burrowed before she reached them. Later, when the tide had withdrawn, the shore would teem with gulls, squawking and fighting over the same scurrying snacks. Yet there would be new ones tomorrow, just one more of life’s mysteries.

After walking awhile, she climbed to the top of the ridge and surveyed the village, concentrating on the figures there, forcing the ocean’s call out of her head.

Moving her way were the usual group of women collecting seaweed. She spotted Kusahema and headed down the slope to their beach. Kusahema was married now, and pregnant.

When they were face-to-face, Kusahema smiled and held out her basket, and Leodora took all the strands of seaweed she’d collected and gave them to her.

“I liked your shadows the other night,” said Kusahema. “They were very funny.”

Leodora closed her eyes and bowed her head in thanks. Then she reached out and placed her hand on Kusahema’s protruding belly. “Will it be today, do you think?”

“Only the ocean can know,” came the ritual reply. Both the touch and the interchange were considered propitious. They grinned at each other, but then Kusahema’s smile faltered and she took her basket and moved on.

As recently as two years ago they had been close friends, sometimes swimming together. But as Kusahema became nubile, her family had forced her to withdraw her affection and cease meeting her friend.

Only Tastion remained close now. And that, as she had suspected for some time, was due to motives of a different sort; and even he was betrothed, soon to be married. He still told her that he would run away with her, a plan they’d hatched when they were seven, but she knew it for an empty promise.

Soon her only connection to the village would be the shadowplays that she and Soter performed for them, and which by their very nature connected her with the spans—even though most of the tales they performed for Tenikemac were its own myths and legends.

She stood alone and watched Tastion and his father, the two of them looking like two versions of the same man. They unfurled their net and moved into the water. They even moved the same way. Tastion of course pretended not to see her, which he must, just as she could not stare directly at him for any length of time. She pretended to watch the crowd farther up the beach, and so happened to be staring at Koombrun when he suddenly lurched away from the crowd and grabbed hold of one of the nets. He was trying to help, desperate to take part in the ritual, to accompany the other men. Before he’d taken two steps, he’d put his foot through the weave and tripped himself. He sprawled onto his back and turned to get up. By then his mother had come forward, and she slapped him with a series of blows that had him cowering, ducking, crawling across the sand, his foot still stuck in the net. One of the other fishermen, Lemros, came to his rescue. The crowd was laughing, but Lemros calmly unsnagged the poor brute then, wedging himself between Koombrun and his mother, helped him to his feet.

Koombrun was a year older than Tastion, which meant he should have been riding dragons long ago. He was large and strong enough, but mentally feeble. He had always been. Even as a child he hadn’t been able to keep up with Leodora and her playmates, and none of them had treated him very kindly, something she regretted as she watched his mother attacking him. His deficiency would have been no more than a tragic burden upon the family, except that his father had drowned three years earlier. In any other family the son would have stepped in to do the father’s work, but Koombrun couldn’t be allowed to fish. She often heard him in the audience during shadowplays, his nasal bleating laughter drowning out other voices. He laughed at the obvious jokes, and sometimes added his voice to everyone else’s, as if he thought it wise to pretend to understand. As if they would accept him if he did.

The village made sure that he and his mother were looked after, of course, but this came with a price for her—always to be humbled, humiliated, dependent upon others. No one else had come forward to marry her. No one would. No one wanted Koombrun in their family, and his mother would never have another child. So she punished him for all the things he couldn’t control or comprehend. For being different. Leodora sympathized with his plight. It wasn’t that much different from her own.

She stood on the beach and watched until Tastion was gone from sight. He would likely be out all day, for he and his father fished farther out than many of the others. Where they went and how they found their way back on the vast and featureless sea was a mystery to her, and even though Tastion had tried to explain it to her, she didn’t understand. All she knew for certain about fishing was that she was forbidden to do it.

Later that afternoon, after dressing in clothes uncontaminated by blood, she emerged from the boathouse to find Soter awaiting her outside.

He observed her sternly, his expression grave, although she couldn’t think of anything she had done to warrant it. Maybe, she thought, he was unhappy that he was sober. Then he turned sharply, commanding her: “Follow.”

She smiled to herself as she obeyed. The imperious stride was all too familiar. Today Soter was acting the sage, the teacher, the wise old man whose pupil was a source of constant disappointment. She knew his roles: They had little to do with her, everything to do with him.

Where most people she knew were recognizably constant, Soter comprised a collection of posturings, guises, a composite of masks, so many that she had no idea if any one of them had ever been the true Soter, or if there had never been anything but masks.

He marched her across the island to his hut. They passed Gousier’s asymmetrical house and outbuildings, where the smell of Dymphana’s white root pie filled the air. Where the path split, they went right, away from the cavern, away from the trail to Ningle.

Soter made a show of sidestepping a large tree root that snaked out of the ground in the middle of the path. His dodging it reminded her of the night he’d fallen over it: less than a year ago, after he’d performed for the villagers without her and gotten roaring drunk as well. She had heard him yelling and careering through the woods with the two undaya cases and stole out to see what he was doing. He had tripped across that root and crashed to the ground, the cases landing atop him. She arrived in time to see two village elders, fairly pickled themselves, drag him to his feet. He was weeping, blubbering incoherently, and not at the two men but as if he were alone. The villagers took him by the arms and carried him and the cases the rest of the way to his hut. His behavior was so peculiar that she had followed along behind them. As the elders returned, she had ducked into the shadows. Passing close by, one of them told the other, “He’s ashamed to be alive.”

She glanced now at the scaly back of his head and wondered if that was true. Why had he fallen to weeping that night? Ashamed to be found so drunk? But he was drunk so often. It wasn’t something she could ask him about.

His hut stood hidden among an overgrown mass of vines and weeds so thick that only the glinting hexagons of the windows hinted at its presence. The roof had been rethatched not so long ago, and thick new windows added, bought from a Ningle glazier; but an ancient smell of charred, smoked fish remained. Even the fermenting vats behind the hut couldn’t obliterate it entirely.

He’d set up the booth against the back wall. Because of the smallness of the hut, it was only half as deep as a real booth. There was no room for an accompanist.

Within the curtains, on top of the undaya cases, Soter had laid out six puppets for her. He pushed into the confines behind her, moving to the side to watch as she considered the figures. Leodora knew every story Soter knew. His tests now probed whether or not she could formulate what specific tale or tales he expected her to perform based solely on which figures he’d selected. He was adamant that she be able to carry every single story and all of its nuances in her head; that she be able to take any elements and weave a performance from them.

“There are only a handful of true stories,” he said so often that she could parrot his exact emphasis. “The rest are simply embellishments, or reconstructions. Variations, my girl. When you walk the spans you’ll hear a thousand versions of the same story. Some are dark, others light. Tales get rewritten to suit people and place. What’s beheld as divine wisdom on one span will be mythic farce on another, with nary a word dividing the two. All depends on what is believed. I’ve seen stories revised from top to bottom, too, after the gods have sent something down to a Dragon Bowl. That one about the girl made of wood who receives a magic visit from an Edgeworld god who sends her off to find a prince and her wedding—well, it was once someone much lower than a god who granted her wishes, some local spirit somewhere. After a while that local spirit wasn’t recollected anymore and got replaced. Stories, you see, are alive, or else not worth the telling.”

As to which tales might be originals, she didn’t know. Perhaps everything was embellishment. Was the simplest the more fundamental? Or just a true tale stripped of true meaning? In the end she had stopped fretting over it. It was no more important than knowing on which span the story had begun. She was expected to know every one of them, regardless of their origin.

She now considered the puppets Soter had laid out for her on the case: the orange figure that was sometimes a beggar but most often a thief, a pair of winged dragons, a maiden, an emperor, an assortment of tiny weapons, two guards, a young man, and an old man. Soter had fitted a straight wand in the old man’s hand. From that she knew he was a wizard. Last of all was the resplendent figure of the handsome suitor.

The key object was missing, however. He had withheld it on purpose to challenge her. She smiled to herself for having recognized this, too. “It’s the tale of the Druid’s Egg,” she announced authoritatively.

Soter rocked on his heels. “You are positive?”

“Yes,” she replied, concealing the doubt his question let in. “But you have the title element.” She boldly held out her hand.

Soter’s gaze fastened on hers. “How did you identify the tale if I have the key?”

“The thief figure is also the beggar figure, so his limbs are detachable. In the Druid’s Egg tale the thief isn’t swift enough to steal the egg without being bitten by one of the twin serpents who hold the egg aloft, and he loses an arm to its venom. The old man is the wizard with the magic wand. He transforms himself into the handsome suitor to capture the heart of the princess, who is the true love of the thief. She’s the reason he stole the egg in the first place—to have her for a wife. The wizard wants her because he wants to rule the kingdom. He wants power. The thief fears she won’t want him with one arm, and so—”

“Enough! Here!” He handed her the prop of the translucent golden egg. “Show. Don’t tell.” Then he collected the figures of the guards and the emperor.

“Wait! I need them. How can I tell it right?”

As if the question were superfluous, he answered, “Improvise.” He pushed apart the drapery and left the booth.

The lantern was already lighted. She had only to rotate it to cast its beam upon the taut white silk screen. Beneath the screen was a narrow shelf. A groove ran the length of it.

She brought the figure of the wizard to the screen. Normally the trappings of a set would have been hooked in place around the puppet. But Soter forced her to rely on storytelling alone to convey situations.

It was theater without a stage.

She picked up her story: “The wizard disguised himself as a physician, and gained admittance to the palace in that form, taking a small room that overlooked the city. There he performed his dark arts. He used his powers to discover every suitor the princess had, worthy or not. He saw the thief’s passion for her. That was why the wizard, in the guise of the good doctor, had sent him on the impossible quest for the Druid’s Egg—for with that prize and his knowledge of how to unlock it, the wizard would gain remarkable powers, and as a reward would give the girl to the thief, after first stealing her love for himself.

“Other, more suitable if simpleminded suitors, he plagued with easy magics so that they would never arrive in the city at all. Some lost their bearings and wandered into other spans. Some fell in love with barmaids, hags, or even their animals.”

By rotating the puppet’s arm she made the wizard’s shadow sweep the wand above his head. At the same time she spun the lantern, and its light flashed and flickered, white and red, as the different lenses splashed the silk.

“Now he was unopposed for her hand. There remained but a final act to secure her. He must hide his true unwholesome nature.”

She caught the lamp. It stopped with its red lens glowing upon the screen.

“With a blast of magic he transformed himself.”

She gave the lantern a gentle twist. The red light slowly slid to the right, replaced by darkness—the blank side of the lamp. Then the dark, too, was pushed aside by the light of the clear lens. But in the instant that darkness covered the screen, she deftly swapped the old wizard’s figure for the young suitor, carefully fiddling the rods to keep the suitor’s arms in the same position as the wizard’s.

“He became the handsomest man in the world.”

She heard Soter’s grunt of approval. It was her embellishment of the text to make him not merely handsome, but the handsomest.

“Transformed, he paused to consider himself in a mirror.” The suitor touched his face, ran his hands down his sides, then held them up to look at them. “He was pleased with his handiwork. His power remained undiminished. No one could refuse him!”

The next scene she could not fully perform without the puppets Soter had withheld.

“He went before the emperor as if just arrived from another span. He bowed with a deep respect that he felt not at all, and then asked to be considered as a son-in-law.”

The suitor knelt on one knee, bowed low, and finally lay prostrate, with his hands outstretched as if to plead with someone beyond the screen.

“His clever disguise protected him from an emperor who would have killed him for all the evil he had created in that kingdom and others.

“The emperor sent the new suitor to his daughter. She knew already that he was in the palace—word of him had reached her through her servants. Now, with her chaperone behind the nearest curtain, she met the suitor. His face did take her breath away. He was smooth in every nuance. Calculated in every implied invitation.”

The princess, dressed in a purple gown, extended a hand; he kissed her, bowing. His gestures were graceful, and each one ended with the slightest pull, drawing the girl slowly across the screen, nearer with each flourish until she almost touched him. Then he reached out behind her, and his hand wove magic knots in the air.

“Soon the princess was caught in his spell. With a flick of the wrist, he put the chaperone to sleep behind her drapery. Then he was alone with his prize.”

The suitor stepped back. He touched the princess’s shoulder and swept her clothing away. The diaphanous purple gown caught on the puppet’s sharp fingertip, lifting off the tiny pin that had held it in place on her figure. It dropped from the screen onto the small shelf below.

Leodora thought she heard Soter stifle a gasp, even though he knew that Bardsham’s princess was designed for this shocking moment. The stripping and the presentation of the rape of the princess were Bardsham’s embellishments. No one else had ever performed it this way. No one else had ever constructed a puppet whose clothing could be torn away.

She stood revealed in all her translucent nakedness. The sharp nipples of her breasts, even the dark thatch in the meeting of her thighs, were plainly visible. In a full rendition of the story, the audience had heard her speak by now and had come to know her with affection, and often a cry of alarm accompanied the moment, protests of outrage ringing out as though a real girl had been stripped bare by the fiend.

The suitor glided up against her and pushed her roughly down. She vanished below the screen. The suitor lay on top of her. The top of him became the bottom line of the screen. Slowly his body began to move back and forth, telling the story in agonizing silence. The figures sank from sight while the red of the lantern passed harsh judgment upon the scene.

“What has happened to the poor thief meanwhile? Sent out by the wizard, he has lost his left arm and very nearly his life to the dragon’s venom. More than this, he has lost his hope. What princess will have a poor man consigned now to a life of begging?—for no other fate can await him. The egg is just an egg. He can find no power there. The thief’s quest is ended. He has no power to win the affections of so beautiful a creature as the princess; the kindly doctor who sent him will dismiss the trophy, claim that he took it from some huge bird, a roc perhaps, but not from the deadly serpents. He sees now that his dream has been pure folly. He would only want her if she wanted him; and what ever made him believe she would?

“He will, he decides, complete his task and afterward climb all the way to the top of the highest minaret and throw himself to his death.

“Outside the palace, he stood for a long time beneath the window of his beloved. He set his resolve to see her one last time, that her image might be with him when he died.”

The thief began his climb. But the same vines that had carried him before were not so navigable with only one arm. He lumbered clumsily up to the balcony of his beloved, but saw nothing from the ledge. She was not there. The puppet hung his head.

“Fate was cruel today, he thought.”

He continued with less enthusiasm on toward the higher apartment of the doctor, to bid him farewell. Whatever else, he was honorable, and he would leave the egg there as he’d promised.

As she moved the puppet’s limbs with one hand, Leodora steadily lowered the vertical cutout of the vines beside him to create the illusion that he was climbing ever higher. The cutout folded in places so that it stacked neatly on the shelf as she drew it down.

“He hadn’t climbed far when his hand slipped for a moment and he twisted and grabbed a branch to save himself; but the violent movement caused the magic egg to fall from his pouch. Certain it would shatter, he dove to catch it before it struck the tiles on the princess’s balcony below. If he’d had both hands, he might have reached it, but with only the one he couldn’t. His fingers just brushed their target, and the egg hit the floor. The thief tucked his head and rolled as best he could to protect himself. It was not a long fall, but without his other arm to absorb the blow he struck the floor hard, bounced, and then lay there dazed.

“He sat up, horrified to be on this of all balconies. But it seemed that no one had heard him fall. The curtains remained drawn.

“He turned to snatch the egg and found it beside him, split in two. A fiery glow emerged from within each half.”

Leodora nimbly separated the two rods controlling the prop egg she had.

“The glow poured over him and through him. He felt as though he were the sun, burning.”

She took hold of the lanyard that secured the lantern and lowered it until its red lens was aimed straight through the translucent puppet. The skeletal structure etched lightly into the taut skins caught the light, gaining emphasis. His body seemed to have become glass. She pulled on the lanyard, raising the lantern again. The thief stood up. And now—for all eyes would follow the light as it moved—he had two arms again. The new one she had hooked into place as she pulled the rope past the screen and secured it below. The thief stood and marveled at his two hands, then danced a little jig of joy.

“He looked to the skies and thanked the gods for his good fortune. No one had seen him yet, so he fitted the two halves of the egg back together and prepared to leave. But at that moment he heard a noise, a terrible moan, emerge from beyond the curtains that closed off the balcony. His curiosity and his desire held him there. He crept across and ever so carefully parted the curtains.

“He beheld a horrible sight. His princess, the jewel of his life, lay naked and ravished. A handsome figure climbing off her turned to close its robes, faced him, and started as their eyes met. That moment seemed to last an eternity.”

The handsome suitor edged back from the princess. Her figure lay just visible, propped in place at the bottom of the screen by its rods, secured in the groove of the shelf below. The suitor suddenly sprang off screen.

“‘Guards! Guards!’ the magician cried. ‘Come quickly—a thief has broken in and attacked the princess!’ Never for a second did he imagine that the thief had succeeded in carrying out his mission. No one had ever met the twin dragons and lived. The wizard assumed that the thief had never really gone at all or had given up, as anyone else would have done. As he would have done. The plan fixed itself even as he cried out. The unconscious chaperone behind the curtain—the thief had struck her and hidden himself there. As for the girl, the wizard would magnanimously offer to marry her, thus securing her father’s eternal debt. The rape would remain a secret between them. The thief would be executed before day’s end, the shamed girl reduced to his docile slave. It was all too perfect, even better than his original plan.”

Leodora had no guards to bring onto the scene. But she did have their pikes among the weapons Soter had given her. The suitor’s figure she locked in place for a moment by setting its control rods in the grooved shelf. Then she picked up two pikes and leaned them in from the side, one above the other.

“The guards entered. The suitor thrust a finger at the thief. ‘There he is. Look at what he’s done!’”

She drew the suitor’s figure back slightly from the screen so that his shadow swelled in size while the thief leapt into motion.

“‘No!’ cried the young thief. ‘I didn’t do this—he did. I was climbing up the vines outside to fulfill my pact with the good physician who dwells higher up, but I fell onto the balcony trying to catch this!’”

He lifted into view the golden Druid’s Egg. Leodora swung down the lantern again and spun it red at the same moment that, with her pinkie, she coaxed apart the rods of the egg, splitting it open.

“‘Aiiieeee, I’m undone!’ cried the suitor. He tried to grab the egg, but the thief hopped back. The wizard stood trapped between the thief and the guards he had called. He quailed at the power of the egg. Its power would defeat any enemy—and most certainly he was the enemy of this thief. Even if the thief didn’t realize it, the egg knew.”

She gave the lantern a spin so that light became stars became red became darkness; and in that precise instant of darkness, she switched the suitor with the sharp-featured wizard.

“Helpless, the wizard watched himself transform, and in terror he ran to escape the deadly influence of the egg, ran blindly for the door—his only thought to get away from that hellish glow. But the guards reacted as guards should and lowered their pikes. They impaled the evil man.”

The pikes slid behind the wizard’s torso. She brought her middle finger to her thumb, and the figure doubled over. The pikes lifted him into the air.

“The thief knelt beside his beloved. The Druid’s Egg shone upon her. She stirred, awakened, to find herself clothed in light. A total stranger was at her side, and her wicked seducer was dead upon the pikes of her guards.”

The princess got to her feet, her body trembling. The young thief rose also.

“‘Who are you?’ she asked.”

The thief lowered his head.

“‘I’m no one. Just a common thief.’

“‘How can you say that when you have saved me?’ she replied.

“‘I saved one for whom I would willingly perish.’

“‘Don’t say such things. How could you feel that way for me when we have never met?’

“‘I could. I do. I can’t help it. But I must go now before your father finds me here. I don’t belong here.’

“‘Then take me with you.’

“‘How can I?’

“‘If you go, then I no longer belong here, either.’

“‘Oh,’ said he. ‘In that case, how can I not?’”

The princess reached to him, and he took her hand. The two shadow figures embraced in a long, lingering kiss. The egg slipped from the thief’s other hand and cracked open at his feet. The screen turned red with its light, and then, as Leodora unlooped and let slide the lanyard, the red light sank like an evening sun, taking all shadows with it. When it was below the silk screen, she blew out the light.

Outside the booth the room might have been empty, it was so quiet. She set down the figures, stood and stretched, then stepped through the curtain.

Soter seemed to gape at her, as if she were something he had never seen before. She swelled with triumph before he regained himself: His look clouded, became critical, and he said, “That’s not the way the tale ends. The emperor arrives, discovers what has happened, and gives the boy everything—the keys to his kingdom, his daughter, wealth.”

Leodora smarted at the criticism. She would not be robbed of her glory. “Improvise, someone said to me. Tales get rewritten—who told me that not an hour past? Who stole the figure of the king?”

Soter waved his hand, dismissing each point, but finding no way to contradict her. He gave a nervous laugh and tried to shift the discussion away from her objections. “Now, no matter, you did a truly fine job. A most worthy attempt in fact—”

“Attempt! Confess it, I took your breath away!”

“No, no, I’m sorry, never happened. You’re certainly getting there, but you are still a little clumsy with one thing or another—not very much, you understand, but there is always room for improvement. Those vines, not smooth enough. You are…coming along quite nicely, Leodora.”

“I’m ready,” she said with iron.

“Well, my girl, of course you want to be ready. You entertain me well enough, and the native islanders. But who are they? A far distant and less discerning cousin to the audiences on the spans. You cannot trust their simple approbation. No, no. Not reliable.”

She glared at him.

“Oh, I think, another year, perhaps. Possibly two?” He smiled like an uncle full of deep concern for her well-being—it was exactly the smile her own uncle had been giving her the past few days. It was not a look she trusted. It masked something else, something that did not have her well-being at heart.

Enraged by his false kindness, she kicked aside a stool and stormed across the hut.

“Now, Leodora,” Soter called. The voice of appeasement, another mask. She would have exited without a word if he hadn’t spoken.

She whirled about. “You pull off the role of the forgetful fool much better when you’re in your cups, old man. In fact, if you’re so stupid as to say, Oh, just two more years, my girl, you’d best be drunk. At least you’ll have an excuse for lying. Go ahead, pretend you can’t see! But I know. Understand? I know. I’m better than you say. I’m better than you can do yourself. I’m better than Bardsham!”

She flung his door out of her way.

Soter sagged in the chair where he had watched her performance. He sighed once, long and deep, as if he might expel all the air in his lungs. He hunched forward and picked up the puppet king. After staring it in the face for a long still moment, he began to roll the main rod loosely between his thumb and fingers. The puppet gyred to and fro, unable to settle on a direction. Its clattering arms swung loosely, embracing nothing.

“Back then she was only a child,” he said, as if responding to someone else in the empty room. “Of course I didn’t worry where it would lead. Why should I? Who knew what skills she had—or that she would even care.” He glanced up with a sickly grin, eyes focused on a point in front of him. “That’s right. Berate me for it now. You didn’t step in then, did you? You could have manifested, objected. Don’t set her on this path, Soter, you could have said. Did you? No.”

He dropped the puppet and picked up a clay jug from the floor beside the overturned stool. He took a long anxious drink, but even before he’d finished, his worried eyes opened, focused again upon something before him, and began tracking it. Whatever he followed, it was invisible to Leodora from her position outside his window. She’d come back with the intention of apologizing, provided that she could make him confess the truth about her abilities. She’d only meant to watch for the most propitious moment to make an entrance, and instead here he was engaged in a conversation.

Except no one else was there.

Soter’s hands trembled as he put down the jug. “Look,” he said, wiping his palm across his mouth, “I saved the child, didn’t I? Brought her back here. That ought to have been enough for you. After all, you owned my life, didn’t you? Had me in thrall, didn’t you? Used me any way that suited the moment. You think just because I was in the thick of it that I didn’t know the situation? Think I would have left her to the mercies of the spans if I’d known? You don’t understand devotion and never did—and you all moon-eyed and weepy with it yourself. For all that you could bedazzle your innumerable lovers, you never expected that hollow heart of yours might fill up, did you?”

He paused, head tilted, as if listening, then abruptly shook his head. “Ridden by your own demons? Oh, and so many of them, too, love. You could wrap anyone around your nimble fingers. And still you don’t ken how you can be enslaved and not be able to do anything but submit. Can’t imagine being on that end of it, even now and it’s over and you’re dead. But you were. You were. Don’t try to deny it to me. I was there!”

He flashed his teeth, shook his head, then seemed to perceive something else.

“Oh, I meant nothing. I was convenient. Just part of the troupe, easy to replace. Get rid of Soter, he’s becoming a nuisance, I don’t like the way he looks at me. Think I didn’t overhear that speech? Oh, the calumny I bore. Don’t you come floating in here this late with your demands, either. You’ve no claims on me. I protected your daughter from the darkness, you poxy…” He swung up the jug, swiped at the air. The jug, encountering nothing, spun him about. “Away! Away all dead plagues. You unrepentant ghosts—go back to the dark spans and the seabeds where you belong! I banish you! Begone!” As though sensing someone now at his back, he swung around, wielding the jug like a club. “I rescued her!” It was a broken cry, terrifying to hear.

He turned again, shoulders hunched, his head twisting with a canny look. Instinctively Leodora drew back into the shadows. When she peered at him again he had righted the overturned stool and sat down. The jug dangled from his hand. “No,” he said, “you’re wrong. That’s all I’m doing, it is. I’m keeping her from that danger. She’s safe down here on Bouyan. We’re all safe down here. No one comes looking nor ever will. A little lie keeps her safe, and when did the truth ever help us, heh? We were liars for a living. No. Better to be safe…down here on Bouyan.”

His head sank on his chest. He wasn’t asleep, nor could he be this easily drunk. It was more the position of someone dreading to see anything other than the floor before him. The boasting, besotted Soter had withered before her eyes into a spindly, tremulous thing. Rickety with age. An old man.

Leodora squatted awhile longer beside the window, her brain full of portentous imaginings. Had he been railing at her mother? He had been in love with her mother, and her mother, jealous of his influence over Bardsham, had tried to get rid of him—that was how it sounded. She couldn’t accept that there were real ghosts here. If her mother’s spirit truly roamed abroad on this isle, she would know it, wouldn’t she? She would have encountered it herself in all the places she shared with her mother’s past. Her mother could not come back without appearing to her. But then, could guilt and shame become so manifest as this—that Soter would punish himself with terrible visions and memories? Could guilt take such form?

He had rescued her, he said, but from what? Why were they—all of them, he’d said—in hiding?

She thought that he was spent, and she started to slide carefully away through the tangle of branches, when suddenly he spoke one last time, in a tone of abject defeat: “All right, all right. If the time comes, I swear. I promise. Yes. But not now. Please, not yet. Ask me later, can’t you? Let me get used to the idea awhile.”

She waited, crouching, holding her breath, straining as if she might hear the phantom answer. There was nothing but a final sobbing breath from Soter.

He sat on the floor, head bowed, his arms wrapped around the jug protectively. When he said nothing further, she withdrew.

SIX

Most days, by the time Leodora had finished her session with Soter, Tastion had returned and was waiting for her.

He and his father usually had good luck in their fishing. Sometimes she even passed them on the path to Fishkill as she was returning to the boathouse—either hauling their catch or returning with the net rolled up between them. Tastion would pretend to disregard her, as his father did. Later he would sneak into the boathouse to meet her. Where his family thought he had gone, she didn’t know. His work was done for the day, so perhaps no one was watching, no one noticing his absence. He risked a great deal to meet her, but not as much as he pretended. The risks had limits. Any punishment meted out would affect her more than him.

His marriage had been arranged years earlier, to a girl named Vosilana. If he’d been found alone in the boathouse with Leodora, the marriage arrangement might have been nullified, and his family would be humiliated by the revelation. He would certainly be whipped, most likely banished from his home for a time. But he was strong and handsome, his family one of the most powerful on the island. Punishments would be temporary, and if reparations could not be made with the bride’s family some other girl would be happy to take Vosilana’s place. Leodora could not replace her even had she wanted to. Tenikemac’s response to her in that event would, by comparison, make their bare tolerance of her now seem tender and loving. It would be she who had led him astray, she who had corrupted him. Gousier would have a new witch in his household. And her uncle…well, the whipping Tastion got would be far preferable to anything Gousier would do.

Given all that, she could not quite explain even to herself why she continued to see Tastion, except that she had done so for so long.

There was kissing, of course—she could hardly have denied her own lips their sweet fulfillment. Kissing scorched them both, but when the heat of passion consumed him, and although she had loved Tastion forever, a small whisper of reason stopped her from relinquishing control. In his importuning she thought she heard a tone that said once satisfied, he would go off in search of other fruit. Because she loved him she did not deny him some familiarity, and sometimes she became dizzy with him. Because she knew her place in his world, she stopped short of drowning in pleasure—which served only to frustrate and further incite her would-be lover. To his credit, he had never sworn falsely to marry her—that is, if one discounted that the two of them had been promising to run off together since they were children. Tastion never claimed that he could defy his parents, his village, or the assignment of his bride. He never pledged to give it all up, only to find ways around the rules. She wouldn’t have believed him if he had.

Today, angry and frustrated, she entered the boathouse with an urgent need for Tastion that had nothing to do with passion. She needed to ask questions if only to hear herself ask them so that she would know what her questions were. She needed him, but Tastion wasn’t there, and her spirits plunged further. She sat on her bed, took off her boot, and rubbed her toes that she’d bruised when she kicked the stool.

The force of her rage caught up with her, exhausted her. The warmth of the room added to her torpor. She leaned back on her elbows, and finally lay back to stare at the beam over her head. She saw in the grain of the wood weird faces and creatures she’d identified years before, when she was tiny; once recognized, they could never be random patterns again. One of them she’d decided was her father’s face. Another was the torso of her mother, twisting out of strings of seaweed like a mermaid. A weight like that of gathering tears filled her head with a kind of forlorn pressure but without enough weight for the drops to fall. The thick air hung about her, pressing down upon her, and she drifted to sleep.

When she awoke it was dark in the room. The sky outside was purple, streaked with the last glory of sunset at the very edge of the sea. Her head ached when she sat up. She knew that she was hungry, and that the evening meal must be ready soon. Hunger at least was easy to think about.

She got up and drew on her boots. She left the trapdoor to her room open in case Tastion turned up.

The sea rice in its broth was salty. Leodora chewed and tried not to make eye contact with Dymphana, which was facilitated by Dymphana’s preoccupation with the empty stool where Gousier usually sat. While Leodora wondered about Soter’s ghosts, so her aunt appeared preoccupied with where her uncle might be. Their unease they shared as if it were a condiment; but neither could speak of it.

Finally, when they were halfway through their portions, Gousier arrived. The smell of sweat fermented in fish and liquor accompanied him like a homunculus. Had they missed the liquor’s stink, neither of them missed the looseness in his stride and the flush to his face as if he’d run home from Ningle. Gousier drunk was too familiar a sight—it was the timing of it that was peculiar.

Dymphana stopped eating to watch him. She was watching, Leodora knew, to see how he reacted to their having begun without him. If his day had gone poorly he could explode without warning, angered by meaningless things. More than one dinner had been brought to a halt by his unprompted anger, and drunkenness did not necessarily augur well.

This night he fairly beamed at them, however. In particular, when he looked Leodora’s way, his eyes grew sly. It was clear he would not lose his temper, but the cagey, slow smile with which he considered her twisted knots in her stomach.

He took his place at the head of the table, and Dymphana spooned a serving into his bowl. While he waited for her to finish, he remarked, “What a grand day I’ve had. Just grand.”

“The fish sold well?”

“Yes, yes they did. We hardly had to throw any away.”

“But you had to stay late up there?”

“Late? Ah, no.” Another darting glance at his niece. “No, we come down about sunset as usual. I don’t like to navigate those steps in the dark, you know that. No, I been back awhile.” He considered Leodora again with hooded eyes. “I went over to settle up first.”

In a voice from which she couldn’t mask suspicion, Dymphana said, “They invited you to drink with them?”

He smiled. “They did that, yes. One of them in particular wanted to toast with me. A widow, she is.”

This last piece of information seemed so entirely superfluous that the two women exchanged glances to see if either of them understood the reference.

Obviously enjoying their perplexity, Gousier offered up another clue. “The poor creature has a terrible burden to bear. Her husband is dead.”

“Is there a different kind of widow than that?” Dymphana asked in a distinctly icy tone.

“I didn’t finish. Dear.” A hint of his true nature punctuated the syllable. “Alone, she’s burdened with a son. Her only child. A man must fish to provide for his family here. This one, though, can’t fish. Can’t be trusted with a net. Why, he’d be pulled right off any dragon and drowned.”

“You’re speaking of that poor imbecile, Koombrun.”

“Right you are.”

“And why should his circumstance matter to us now? Are you going to put him to work? Is he going to haul your fish?”

Gousier chose that moment to begin eating. He chewed the rice as if he had years to finish. Then he drank some water, cleared his throat. “Tenikemac would never allow such a thing. Why, that would only alienate the poor woman further. She’d be a pariah if anyone in her family went onto the spans.”

“So, he’s to help me in the cavern, then, Uncle,” Leodora guessed.

“Oh, I do hope so, after his fashion. As best he can, being what he is. You’ll have to teach him. Once you’re married, of course, I expect you’ll have to teach him everything from gutting fish to where to stick his—”

“Once I’m married? To Koombrun? To an idiot?”

“Just because he is mentally deficient don’t mean your children must be. Probably, they’ll all be normal. I’m sure they will and so’s his mother.” He beamed at her with affected bonhomie, beneath which an edge of malice glittered.

Her first instinct was to throw her bowl at him, but she grabbed the table instead and tried to maintain control over her terror and hate. “I’m not marrying anyone,” she said.

“Oh, but you are, Leodora, my little niece. You’re in my house, and my keeping. And I’m telling you that your only hope on Bouyan is to marry into that village. The normal ones there would never even consider you. You’ve been up on the spans yourself and the fact that you were a toddler, not aware of the rules, the choices, that cuts no fish with them. This widow—she needs providing for, she’s a burden on her neighbors, and you can fix that with your share of the takings every morning. The three of you’ll live in the boathouse for a time, till we can build something more substantial. Or better, maybe I can toss that old bastard Soter out and you can have his shack. That’s roomier.” He turned to his wife. “Yes, that’s what we’ll do. We’ll get rid of him in the bargain, won’t we?”

When neither woman said anything, he gave a shrug, took another bite of his food, and with his mouth half full added, “This is the opportunity for our family finally to join the village. This imbecile—call him what you want—your children will be their children. You’ll have to guide him in that, too, won’t you? But he’s equipped.” He smiled and chewed. “You ask him and he’ll show you. Happy he is to show you.” He laughed and shook his head.

Softly, almost kindly, Dymphana rebutted, “They won’t see it your way in Tenikemac. They won’t bring us in.”

“Of course they will. They’ll have to.”

“How long have you been working at this, Uncle? All the little things you’ve said, the funny little looks—you’ve been winding up this woman’s hopes for weeks now. This didn’t just happen tonight.”

His eyes narrowed although his smile remained. “I don’t know that I care to be accused, my girl. Especially with all I’ve done for your future. You’d see that if you—”

“Liar,” she snapped. She rose to her feet, and now her control deserted her. She heaved the bowl of rice into his face.

Gousier erupted from his seat with a howl of anguish. “My eyes!” His hands swiped at the rice stuck to his cheeks. He shook his head, pressing palms into eye sockets, and lunged all at once across the table, knocking over a pitcher and a bowl, which shattered, spreading more rice underfoot. But his hands closed on nothing.

Leodora’s place was empty.

He blinked and squinted. “I’ll kill you, you ungrateful bitch, I will!” His words burst the walls, sped through the night, pursuing her like a maleficent spirit. “Get done with your petulance, girl—the ceremony’s in two nights and I’ll deliver you to it if I have to carry you there in a net like one of their catches! Two nights hence!” Then she heard his laugh, and she knew she’d been right to run. There’d been a knife right in front of her on the table. If he’d hit her, she would have stuck it through his eye.

She fled to the boathouse but not to her garret. If he followed, Gousier would have her all but trapped up there. She went halfway up the steps instead, ready to jump if the door opened. She stuck her head into the room above and called, “Tastion?” The silence of emptiness answered her.

She took a seat on the lowest steps, with the boat close by. If Gousier came in, she could squeeze through the rotten hull of the esquif before he even saw her.

She stared through the hole in its side. She and the boat were identical. Both helpless, trapped here at her uncle’s whim. Kept from the life they were meant to live. The boat was meant to be on the ocean—it should have been on the ocean. The boat had no recourse; but she did. She must.

Again she wondered where Tastion was. Twice today she’d needed to talk with him and he’d failed her. Now she had to concern herself with the prospect of bidding him farewell. Whatever had bound her to Bouyan before, whether it was the thing that called from across the sea or the impossible hope that she and Tastion might find a life together, it couldn’t hold her any longer. Tastion would marry his chosen wife just the way he was supposed to, and the dark, slithering call would have to find a new listener. There was—

The boathouse door swung open.

Leodora slipped from the step and through the hole in the boat. Footsteps skittered past—too quick to belong to her uncle. Then she heard her name called, her name sharp with excitement. Had he heard about the arranged marriage?

He came back down.

“I’m here, Tastion,” she said through the hole.

He jumped back against the stairs. “Zarya’s teeth! That’s a mean trick to play. What are you doing in there?”

“Hiding from Gousier.”

“Oh. What have you done this time?”

“Thank you for your confidence.”

“I didn’t mean—I meant that he always blames you for everything. The bastard looks for excuses to beat you.”

“I know that’s what you meant.”

“Right now you have to come with me,” he insisted.

“Why? Where have you been all evening? Did you stay out all this time?”

“We had a—it will be easier if I show you. Come on.” He held out his hand. “Come on. What I found can even make you forget about your uncle.”

She extended her hand but said, “I don’t think so.”

He found her fingers in the dark and drew her out of the boat. “Just wait.”

She shushed him then. They both stood listening, hardly breathing. She decided that she hadn’t heard anything after all.

Tastion, unable to keep still, began whispering to her. “We found it this afternoon. The net got caught the way it does sometimes. It wouldn’t come loose and I had to dive down to it.” He pulled her out of the boathouse while he babbled softly. “But it wasn’t caught. I swam all the way to the bottom, and there was this thing in the net. We’d been dragging it along, just like…like I’m going to drag you if you don’t speed your step.”

She looked around, back toward the house. There was no one there. Absently she asked him, “What was it?”

“That’s where I’m taking you. You’ll see.”

Soon she knew they were going to the cavern. The entrance was dark. Leodora complained that they’d brought no lamp.

“You won’t need one,” he told her, and tugged her inside. She thought he meant they would be kissing in the dark. But as her eyes adjusted, she realized that the deeper cavern was lit by a feeble bluish glow. “We put it in here,” Tastion explained, “to keep it from drying out too much. It seemed only right that it should stay with the fish. It took four of us with two nets to lift it from the bottom, and all the afternoon for our dragons to haul it back.”

They rounded the bend. The whole chamber was visible. The stone table where she cut fish was outlined in a blue halo. The source of the light lay hidden behind it.

She tugged free. Tastion released her hand, and she strode boldly to the edge of the stone. What she discovered made her inhale sharply and step back. She bumped against him. He was looking over her shoulder.

A body lay on the cavern floor.

It was not a normal—not a living—body. Its luminescence she had seen before: the color of the ocean at night when tiny sea creatures clustered, darting and swaying. The color of their radiance. It seemed to emerge from within the shell, the husk that had condensed, making the features into shadows, not unlike the puppets on their sticks when the lantern shone through them; but this body wasn’t hammered fish bladder. It was a crust—a coral grown into a human shape.

A coral man.

A lump defined the nose, and shallow cavities the eye sockets. Water pooled in them, creating an illusion of wet and shiny eyes rolled back in its head. The mouth might have been invisible were it not for a darker vein through the coral there. Swirls and ridges of accretion created the illusion of clothing, too. Maybe, she thought, beneath the crust there lay a statue, and the coral had merely built up and up over that original form, so that with each new layer the unknown sculptor’s work became less defined. Maybe…But it had no discernible feet, as if it was still growing.

When Tastion spoke again, she flinched.

“It weighed as much as if the whole of Shadowbridge had been poured inside it. I tugged at the net, but it wouldn’t budge with just me pulling. Finally I had to swim up for air, and I told my father what it was. We found Lemros and Sel on their dragons, and Sel and I dove down with their net and looped it beneath our own, and then the four of us hauled it. The dragons never worked so hard. Then in the shallows we four stood on the beach, and others came and helped, and we pulled it up out of the water. We unfolded the nets to see it, and then we just marveled. No one knew what they were looking at any more than you do. But here’s something more peculiar, as if the look of it weren’t enough. After it had lain on the beach awhile, when we went to pick it up—” He stepped around her and cupped his hands under the figure’s head. “—it weighed hardly anything at all.” And so saying, he lifted it upright as if it were a stick of driftwood. “It must have been the water that weighted it, in all the little holes.”

He prattled on about their being afraid of it, and who had argued for taking it back into the ocean and who was for keeping it; but Leodora barely listened. Gingerly, she raised one finger to its cheek, straight across from her own. On contact a current flowed up her arm. Sparks spun from where her finger touched. They circled her arm, danced upon her shoulder and up her neck, around her head—sparks that only she could see, for Tastion, though he stood just beside her, kept right on babbling about bringing the figure here. The sparks dazzled her. Penetrated her as if she were coral, too.

Tastion’s hands gripped her, and she recoiled, only to find herself incongruously dangling from his arms, as though she’d fallen.

“What happened to you? What made you swoon?”

“Did I?” she asked. Her mind was a vacant beach. She let herself be drawn upright, held on to.

“You just tipped over like you’d fallen asleep. Am I that boring?” A joke to disguise his worry.

She could only shake her head. Tastion drew her away from the upright figure and stepped between them. Now the glow surrounded him. In his shadow she blinked as if she’d been asleep. Where were her thoughts?

Tastion turned her and led her out of the icy chamber, away from the figure. She went passively, too confused to contest his judgment, although she muttered “I’m fine” to reassure him. She glanced back at the figure.

Out of the cave, he guided her down the path toward Ningle and then beneath a stand of fir trees, a spot they had come to more than once to be alone. No one traveled the path to Ningle at night, and no one could have seen them sitting on their bed of needles in any case.

He said, “You aren’t taking care of yourself, my girl,” and brushed her hair back. “You shouldn’t fight with your uncle until after you’ve eaten something.”

“But I—”

“You need to have someone look after you.” He kissed her neck. “Someone to care for you.” He kissed her cheek. “Someone to provide everything.” He turned her chin and leaned forward to kiss her.

Leodora pulled away. His shadowy face seemed to wear a smile of mild exasperation, as if he was saying to her, Well, I had to try.

“Someone to provide everything for me? Why, Tastion, how thoughtful. Who has been assigned the task?”

“Don’t mock me.”

“Why? You can’t fulfill any such role yourself, if I asked, which I haven’t and won’t. We both of us know to whom you’re already tied.”

“That’s just ritual. I have to pledge to her when she comes of age, but my heart, Lea—”

“Your heart. Your heart is not the part that throbs for me, Tastion. What am I to be? Your whore in the garret?”

“What is the matter with you all of a sudden? We’ve kissed like this, made these promises—I haven’t said a thing I haven’t said before, and you liked it before.”

“I wasn’t the bartered bride of Koombrun before.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means that in two nights my uncle will have me married to the one creature in your village wretched enough to accept the tainted daughter of a witch.” She felt the heat of tears flooding her eyes, and swung her head sharply to fling them back. She would not cry over this.

“He has no right!”

“He has every right. I’m his ward. His property. He can sell me the same as any fish in his basket.”

“Well, then we’ll just…” He hesitated, finally grunted in defeat. There was no idea he could come up with that she hadn’t visited already in the boathouse. So long as both parties wished to see the union through, she would be married. Unless the village interceded. Which it wouldn’t. “Fine, then,” Tastion said. “It’ll be perfect. You can live with Koombrun and still meet me. No one will be the wiser—certainly not Koombrun. It’s the perfect camouflage, even better than the boathouse—”

She got to her feet. “I’m really nothing to you, am I? Just convenient. If I’d given in to you before, you wouldn’t even be here now. You’d have had your ride and finished with me and passed me on to your friends. Lemros and Sel could have a turn. I could carry your child and there’d be no consequences for you. Oh, maybe a rebuke from the elders, a retreat until you came to your senses, were purged of my spell. I’m not of the people. What happens to me can be kept outside the village. It won’t embarrass anybody, will it? Outside. You can’t be made to marry me. You can’t share with me what you can share with any other woman on this island.”

“That’s not so, Leodora.”

“It is so. We’ve pretended for so long that something would simply appear when we needed it to change everything. We made our pact as children, Tastion, and we’re still trying to be children. But we’re feeling things beyond what children feel, and almost doing them. Sooner or later we’re going to do them, because we want to. There never has been a solution. Not on Bouyan. The whole world here would have to change for us.”

“Where, then?” His uneasy question.

She turned, pointed through the trees to lights no brighter than stars. “Up there.”

“Lea, you know I can’t go up there.”

“I can.”

Tastion seemed lost then, as if he’d never before considered the real limits imposed upon her and upon him, as if for him things were always going to roll along, allowing him the freedom to glide through the imposed rules. She was sorry for what she’d said because of what could not, as a result, happen between them, but what she’d said was the truth, and they both had to acknowledge it now. She had. Tastion was not prepared to, and he left her.

She called to him but he didn’t stop. The darkness swallowed him up.

Leodora returned to the path and followed it to Soter’s hut.

He didn’t seem to be home. She entered anyway, going straight to the rear. In the doorway to the back room, she lingered, regarding the two stretched undaya cases lying in the recesses. She’d always had a plan of sorts, unformed but lurking at the edges of her life. Now she must shape it. She needed Soter’s help to do that.

She left the hut and continued on the path to Tenikemac.

The long house lay at the center of the village. All the other abodes were built along paths radiating from it. It had a low, nearly flat roof containing smoke holes for three different fires. Off the side facing the ocean, a huge carved merwoman figure reached with both arms as if she had been transformed in the midst of jumping through the wall, though her presence there, Leodora knew, was supposed to represent the bestowing of her blessing upon the whole village. Meetings, ceremonies, and entertainments took place in that house, and the goddess’s name was never spoken except inside it. Leodora had performed there numerous times. In two nights she was to be married there.

Soter brought his fermented product to the long house to sell. Often, after he’d bartered the liquor for food, clothing, or utensils, he would linger to drink with the men. “Absorbing my expenses,” he called it.

Tonight he seemed to have absorbed rather a lot. She walked in on him regaling half a dozen others with a rude story about a hermaphroditic mermaid. Leodora entered at the far end of the long house and had passed the first two, untended fires before anyone noticed her.

A couple of the men turned at once. One of them was Agmeon. His eyes were bloodshot. They went wide as he recognized her. He jumped up, barring her way. She nodded, making the requisite shallow, respectful bow, but when she looked up again anger still burned in Agmeon’s eyes, and he still blocked her way. “What are you doing here?” he demanded.

Soter had stopped talking. He gazed at her, bleary and unfocused.

“I came to get him. I need to talk to him.”

“Have you no decency, girl?”

She looked at herself as if expecting to find she’d forgotten to wear clothes. She shook her head. “I don’t understand. I come here all the time. I was here only a few nights past, performing for you. You saw me.”

“That was before. Now you’re betrothed to Koombrun. You do know you’re betrothed?”

“Yes.”

“It’s unseemly to be found in one man’s house with him, even worse to be here. It’s the behavior of a mispel. You leave now.” He thrust a finger past her and spoke with such vehemence that she started to turn, to leave; but her will overrode her instinct and she stopped. She had never been a part of their world, nor governed by any of their rules. Now suddenly she was required to submit, even though she would gain the respect of no one for it. Their women had to ask permission to enter the long house. She had seen it enough times to know. After the shadowplays the men stayed and the women left. She wondered if they would even consent to her using the puppets afterward. To consort with Soter. He was a man, too, however besotted, and to practice she must enter his house. They would brand her a mispel for that, most certainly. No, they would never allow it, maybe not even if Koombrun accompanied her. She could imagine the pleasure Agmeon would take in controlling her, the same as Gousier. There wasn’t a soul on the island who wasn’t allied against her.

She stood considering long enough that Agmeon circled her. “What’s the matter with you? Leave!”

“Not without him.”

Agmeon looked as if he would strike her then. Soter suddenly lurched upright and stumbled in between them, slurring his words: “What’s all this nonsense, you two? Agmeon, this is Leodora, you know who she is. Lea, what is so urgent?” He hung there like a great tortoise, with his head pushed out and swinging back and forth. When he received no reply from either of them, and the two continued to stare each other down, he waved his hands loosely and said, “All right, all right, I’ve had too much hospitality anyway. I’d get lost on the way home without a guide. Come on, child, help me with my goods and let’s go.”

Agmeon’s glance flicked between them. He seemed to weigh the matter. She could almost hear him thinking that at least with Soter she would be gone. He released an exasperated sigh and sharply withdrew, allowing the two of them to collect Soter’s payment. She gathered up loaves of bread, dried seaweed, and a shirt, stuffing them into his net bag along with a few empty jugs. He shuffled up beside her carrying his own jug and nothing else. For once she didn’t mind being his drudge. He kept turning and bidding everyone good night the whole length of the house.

Outside they had barely gone a dozen steps when he said quite soberly, “Now, what was all that business about, Agmeon not letting you in? What did he mean, you’re betrothed?”

By the time they reached his hut, she’d told him the whole story and he had launched into his own verbal assault upon Gousier: “The utter fool. Does he truly believe the village will warm to him for this? Or to you? Link with his family? They can’t possibly have told him that. He’s made it up from what they didn’t tell him.”

He stumbled approaching his hut, quickly caught himself, then stopped and stared at his own feet for a moment. “Some of us are foolish,” he said, “you from youth and I from drink. And we try to compensate for our weaknesses when we’re not giving in to them. But your uncle, Lea, is the worst kind of fool—the cocksure fool. Malicious and proud in his certainty. No one can tell him anything, and the more he stands on his points, the more wrong he is. And the more vicious.”

He entered the hut, then spun around to face her, his arms flung wide. The jug in his hand tugged him sideways. “Look at your mother!”

Not following his train of thought, she glanced about. “Where?”

“On the spans, of course!” He set down the jug. “Your uncle chased all over trying to locate her. Would not be dis…dis…wouldn’t be put off from it. Never once did he consider she might not wish to be found, and that he could’ve better used his time selling his damned fish. Idiot. Idiot.” He collapsed on a stool, repeating the word now almost as if chiding himself.

She put down the netful of crockery. “Soter,” she asked, drawing closer.

“Mmm?”

“You have to tell me now, no more dodging. No more maneuvers.”

“What?” He looked up. Though she was right in front of him, he seemed to have to search for her.

“You have to tell me now, am I any good.”

He said, “Dunno what you mean.”

Apprehension colored his attempt to fall back upon being drunk as an escape. His eyes glistened with such fear that she found herself glancing around, expecting to discover the ghosts of his conscience condensing behind her. Those ghosts, whether she saw them or not, would keep him in check unless she rattled his world enough to dissolve them. She said, “I have to know, Soter, because no matter what the answer, I’m leaving the island. Now. Tonight. I don’t have a choice anymore.”

“There’s always a choice.”

“You know there isn’t. I won’t marry Koombrun, but I have to marry Koombrun. What choice does my uncle leave? If I stay, he and the village control my life forever. I will never be allowed to come here and train, to work the puppets, to learn. So I’m taking the puppets with me. All of them. They’re mine—you said so—and I’m taking them. But I have to know now: Am…I…any…good?”

She watched the fear drain out of him as he assessed what she’d said. She had broken the wishful bubble in which he lived—the lie he perpetuated to keep things as they were, which he’d admitted to her mother’s specter. He was no different from Tastion. Or Gousier, for that matter. The three men dwelled in fantasies of their own devising, with never a thought for her as anything other than an object within the frame. One after the other, she was showing them that she neither shared nor accepted their worlds.

When Soter answered her, it was in the quiet, attentive voice of a man focused upon a single, critical issue; one who had reasoned out his course of action before this night.

“Where do you intend to go? Ningle?”

“Of course.”

“How will you hide from your uncle? He knows many people up there. How will you know whom you can trust?”

“I—I don’t know. I won’t trust anyone.”

“And you’ll carry both cases by yourself? You couldn’t carry them both from here to Tenikemac, much less up that stairway. Do you know how long a span is?”

“No.” Worry warped the syllable.

“Will you head north or south? Which is better?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s good, then, that you’ve thought this through, worked out the details.” He spoke without a trace of sarcasm. He didn’t need any to make his point. “Lea, dear, you can’t be a performer by yourself up there, either. Proper shadowplay needs three or four. I’ve told you this, I wasn’t making it up. Who’s going to play your music for you? We’ll have to find someone. Can’t be a girl puppeteer up there—the way they treated you in the long house just now will be nothing to how you’d be derided on most of the spans near here. How you go about by day’s no issue. But on stage…” He reached up and pushed his fingers into her long hair. “You’ll have to give this up. We have to disguise you. Do as your father did, starting out.”

“We have to do it? We?”

“You and me.”

“Soter, I don’t want anybody—”

“It doesn’t much matter if you do. Haven’t you been listening, or must I ask you the questions all over again? I’m coming along.”

“But why? Why do you want to?”

He pulled at his nose. “Well, first, because as I said you can’t do this on your own, no matter what you think. Second, because Gousier will make me pay in your absence once he’s done beating your aunt, and I don’t care to take your punishment when the whip comes down, thank you very much. Third, there’s no one better’n me at arranging these things. I’ve told you that.”

“Yes, but—”

“I’m not finished,” he said testily. “Fourth, I’m coming along because, Leodora, you have in you the skill to be the greatest shadowteller that the whole endless spiral of Shadowbridge has ever seen. With my guidance you might achieve such recognition as no one has ever had. As for if you’re good”—he smiled slyly—“let us just see how you perform when the audience isn’t an inbred village of sea urchins.”

She wanted to cry and laugh at the same time. She forgave him his need to dramatize the answer. She wanted to run and embrace him, thank him, but she did not let herself. She grinned but kept her passion in check. She had, after all, known she was great all along.

He drummed his fingers on the seat of the stool and said, “Now, when are we leaving?”

It was not a simple question, but a test. He wanted her to think about all she had to do. “Tomorrow night?” she ventured.

“He will come after us, same as he did your mother before you. You’ll have humiliated him in front of the village. He’ll be worse off than he was before he dreamed up this scheme. We must be careful how we go initially.” He relaxed, as if something had been decided. “Now you ought to get your sleep. He expects you to be at work in the morning, and you don’t want to give him a reason to suspect anything. He’s already angry with you. Don’t provoke him, however much you want to. Let him lord over you. Let him gloat. He doesn’t know what’s coming, which is how you want it to stay. I’ll make some arrangements meantime. Go on now.”

She shuffled her feet, made a lopsided bow, feeling idiotically in his debt for something she’d forced upon him. She withdrew before she could embarrass herself in some other way.

The boathouse was strange to her then. She lay in her bed, conscious that it would be her final night here, curling her toes against the coarse blanket as if she’d never felt it before, listening to the surf outside crackle and hiss upon the sand.

Sleep took forever to arrive. It had to catch her unawares.

The restive night delivered her to the morning tired, dreamy, and distracted. She saw everything as if in a mirror, all of it real but lacking its former substance—as if an interloping spirit had taken residence in her head. Her preoccupation blinded her, until she was climbing down the stairs, to the silence. She stopped.

Nothing called to her from across the sea.

She strained to listen. Gulls screeched. Waves spread upon the shore. Her curtains flapped. The sound beneath the sound was gone.

She was still listening for it as she wandered down the beach toward the village, not really aware of her surroundings until she saw Kusahema on the ridge. Quickly gathering a few strands of seaweed, she carried them to the pregnant girl. Kusahema refused to meet her eyes, and held her basket out shyly.

Perplexed but wishing to follow Soter’s admonition, Leodora asked, “How are you this morning?” and reached to place her hand on her friend’s belly. Kusahema jumped back, wild-eyed, shoving the basket between them. With her head tilted, she looked as if she were cringing from an attack.

“What’s wrong? What is it?”

The girl made no reply. She shook her head, shrank away, backing into the surf in order to get around Leodora. Then she hurried up the beach, a desperate waddle, while casting backward glances to make sure Leodora wasn’t pursuing her.

“Yesterday’s blessing is today’s curse,” she muttered—a line from a shadowplay that suddenly made sense to her. Gousier’s arrangement had altered her relationship to the whole village, even more than she’d imagined. Who knew how many proscriptions now weighed against her?

She walked over the ridge but refrained from approaching too close to the fishing party gathering their nets on the beach. She’d come to bid the dragons farewell, not the people.

Tastion had promised many times to take her with him to fish, but it had been another child’s promise made first in ignorance and later in mock-defiance. He would never have dared, not really.

The men unfurled their nets and waded into the choppy sea. Tastion glanced her way nervously, then kept his back to her. The women stared straight at her, a gazed barrier.

She saw Koombrun. He could only bring himself to look at her askance, shy now, maybe even fearful. His mother saw her and began slapping him, driving him away. He ducked and clutched his head and shrank back with the speed of someone who’d been beaten many times before. She regretted the misery she was bringing to him. None of this was his fault. When I’m gone, she thought, they’ll punish him for that, too. She’ll be more humiliated by that than by the union itself. The island’s no more your friend than mine, Koombrun. I’m sorry.

The other women watched him driven away. A few looked back at her as if to say, See what you’ve done? There was no point in remaining. All she was doing was defying some other rule that she was about to abandon anyway.

She glanced out at the dragons again. To her astonishment, the creatures had all turned and were facing her. Their riders, nonplussed, were gesturing helplessly. The dragons beneath them just floated in place. For a moment they seemed to acknowledge her estrangement. Then the moment passed, and the creatures swung about as one and headed out to sea. The women’s stare after that was furious. Leodora turned her back on them and set off for Fishkill Cavern.

The Coral Man stood upright in the back of the cave. The glow seemed to have left him altogether. The cold had probably killed all the tiny creatures living within him. His dullness should have made him less imposing, but she found that she could not work with her back to him. Despite the fact that he had no eyes, the sensation of being watched overpowered her. She couldn’t help looking to be sure he hadn’t come to life and edged nearer. When she couldn’t trust that he hadn’t, she went over and scratched a line on the floor in front of him. Even that corroboration failed to satisfy her in the end, and so she moved around the stone table and worked on the other side. It was inconvenient, because the cavern wall jutted out there, forcing her to hunch over her work as she beheaded and sliced and gutted each corpse. It put the mats on the wrong side, beyond her reach, and instead of placing each cleaned fillet in the basket, she had to let them pile up and then walk all the way around the stone to lay them in there.

Being able to see him didn’t improve her situation, either. Her attention kept flicking to him, as if he were moving in her periphery; but it wasn’t movement. It was more, she thought, as if he were singing to her, whispering at a level she couldn’t hear but feel.

And all at once she stopped and set down the knife and stared. She knew well the sensation she had just described. It had been absent in the boathouse, but it was back now. Only the call no longer came from across the sea.

It came from across the room.

By the time Gousier and his fool assistants arrived, she was ready to bolt. Her uncle took in the coral figure as if he’d seen it there every day of his life. Obviously someone had told him about it. He looked it up and down once—he towered over it—and then turned his attention directly to the business of the day.

She had cleaned perhaps two-thirds of the fish she should have prepared, and he saw that immediately. She anticipated a beating, and for a moment as he scowled she knew it was coming. But then he looked at her, and the scowl spread into a knowing smile and a narrow-eyed glance that said, Go ahead, enjoy your final act of defiance. The Coral Man loomed behind him in the shadows, and the two of them combined was more than she could stand. She put down the knives and turned, knocking one of the fools aside as she marched and then ran out of the cave. She heard her uncle’s savage laugh, heard him say, “She’s nervous before the event,” and heard the fools join in the laughter, but for all she reacted they might have been discussing someone else.

On any other day if she had walked out on him, Gousier would have dragged her back by the hair, cursed her, slapped her, whipped her. None of that was necessary now.

She washed and warmed her hands, then hurried away from the cavern before her uncle and his fools emerged. “Don’t provoke him,” Soter had said. For her that meant being elsewhere, and she went to her beach.

The tide was in, and the inlet lay open to the sea. She sat on the spit of sand, knees drawn up, the salty breeze ruffling her hair. Despite her impending escape, she felt as if a huge weight were tied to her. She could barely contemplate stripping off the bloody clothes and going for a swim for fear that the weight would pull her down and drown her.

It wasn’t Gousier. She wouldn’t miss him, nor the fish guts and the cold cavern to which he consigned her, any more than she would miss the marriage he’d arranged. She would miss Dymphana terribly, though. Her aunt would grieve when she’d gone, and weep for the girl who hadn’t even said good-bye. She didn’t dare, because Dymphana would stop her, even if such betrayal condemned her to marry an imbecile. However much her aunt loved her, she must follow Gousier’s way, having long ago succumbed to his governance.

This is what it was like for my mother before me, she thought. Who I hurt and whether I care—those are my choices.

The rest of her burden the Coral Man provided. She knew that effigy would call her back to Bouyan, plague her with its siren song, and in that moment she made a leap of intuition: It had come from the sea, the same as the dragons. Like her they’d heard its call. That was how a dragon had brought Tastion to it, and that was what the dragons had been staring at. Not her. She’d been standing in direct line between them and the cavern. Magic thrived in that figure to which they and she were attuned because…and here her surmise failed her outright. Dymphana had told her that not all mysteries were explained, but on the cusp of one, she resented that she couldn’t find its final panacea.

She almost got up then, to go off and prepare whatever needed preparing. Then, looking across the inlet, she thought, This is the last time I’ll ever be here. Her mother must have thought that once upon a time, too, looking out from this spot to this ocean. It seemed important to acknowledge.

She pulled off her small boots, drew off her bloody clothing, then ceremoniously walked into the water.

She swam across to the far side of the inlet, where she pulled herself up on a rock and perched like a sea otter. Like the evil mermaid of Omelune.

A cloud rolled across the sun, and the wind riding the water turned chilly. She shivered with gooseflesh and slid back into the inlet, splashing, diving down in the crystal-clear water to the bottom, where she grabbed a handful of weeds and sand, and offered a prayer of farewell to whatever could hear her thoughts. It was what Tastion said the fishermen did on their final outing.

When she kicked off from the bottom she found herself face-to-face with a sea dragon. She darted back in surprise. The dragon moved with her. Its protruding black eyes swiveled, studying her. She surfaced and drew a deep breath, ready to dive back down; but before she could, the dragon’s yellow head popped up beside her.

It wasn’t full-grown. An adult sea dragon could never have fitted through the narrow mouth of the inlet even at high tide. But it wasn’t a baby, either. Its body was mottled the way an adult’s was. Close up, she could see small soft spikes protruding from its ribs—features not visible from the beach. Features that only fishermen ever saw. A feathery ruff surrounded its neck, as thin as a dragonfly wing.

The plumes off the back of its head ended in purplish fans—one at the top of the head and one lower on the back of the neck—that seemed to rest on the water. Below the surface, its gills fluttered daintily. A puffy reddish mound, speckled like the torso, encompassed each eye. Tiny needle-like teeth encircled the crumpled mouth at the end of the reedy, tapered snout. The mouth flexed, wheezed, and blew spray at her. She thought of Muvros, the smaller dragon Tastion rode, and how it looked as if it were forever puckering for a kiss. This one was like that, too. She couldn’t help but smile.

“Hello,” she said to it.

The dragon glanced aside as if considering whether it should answer.

“What are you doing here?” she asked herself as much as the creature. It exhaled another small jet of water.

One of its paddle-shaped feet slapped against her side, and she flinched before realizing what had touched her.

The dragon turned its head to face her straight-on, its eyes swiveling to find her. With its snout it nudged her, and its whuffling breath sprayed her face.

Abruptly it turned as if to go, but remained, paddling in place. Its tail snaked across her belly. She dared to touch it now, expecting the creature to dive, to flee from her. Its skin was slightly rough. The mottling across its back was bumpy. Far down its back a third plume lay folded along its spine—another feature not visible from land. Now she understood how the riders could perch in place: They fitted against the base of the plume and held on to the lowest fan on its neck.

The dragon glanced around at her, clearly impatient. The third plume fluttered in invitation. She swam up beside the dragon and pulled herself onto its back. The rough and oily skin chafed her belly and then the insides of her thighs as she sat upright. She bent her legs and clutched its sides with her knees. They fell between the larger ribs quite naturally. Whoever had first climbed upon a sea dragon would have thought the creature had been designed for them—as she did now. The dragon seemed to think so, too.

She leaned against the rear plume and held to its neck. Neither her weight nor hold seemed to inconvenience the dragon. She was thinking, Well, this is nice, when it suddenly dove. The surface slapped her chin, closing her mouth. Water jetted up her nose, but she held on.

The dragon made a swift circuit of the inlet, lunging forward with each oar-like sweep of its paddle fins. She leaned close to its back, hoping it wouldn’t stay under too long. And as if aware of her need for air, it immediately surfaced. Leodora flexed forward like a branch that had been pulled back and then released. She clung to the dragon’s neck, spitting, coughing, gasping. And then laughing.

She laughed with a joy as naked as she. The dragon craned its neck and observed her with one solemnly inquisitive black eye. Then with a flick of its tail it scooted straight out of the inlet.

The rocks to either side scraped against her legs. Another month, she thought, and the little dragon would be too big to fit through that opening. Another hour and there wouldn’t have been enough water to clear it.

“How did you know about this?” she asked, as if the creature might suddenly explain itself. The transparent ruff fluttered, no communication she could understand. She had never seen any dragon in or near the inlet before, and she swam there nearly every day. When had it discovered the opening? Had it heard her farewell prayer? No, it would have had to be there already. Then she recalled that Dymphana had said a sea dragon had brought her mother home the night everyone thought she had drowned. This surely couldn’t be the same one—it was too young. But how did it know to find her? “How did one know to find my mother?” she wondered aloud. “Oh, I wish you could talk to me.”

Soon she had adjusted to the dragon’s thrusting motion through the water and sat with her knees bent, her heels clutching its sides, riding erect, the way the fishermen did as they left in the morning. Proud.

They journeyed well beyond the safe haven of her inlet, and farther out, around the point that divided Gousier’s land from the village. She watched her boathouse go by, stared through the open window as if she might glimpse herself watching herself. The dragon seemed to have an objective, a purpose. It carried her steadily within view of Tenikemac. “This is not a good idea, dragon,” she cautioned, but it didn’t heed her. She could have jumped off at any time, but the dragon’s purpose fixed her in place. The idea of the violation tempted and excited her. She was a girl out of their own stories. She was Reneleka and she was riding a sea dragon.

The first villager to see her was a woman on the beach, whose distant shout of alarm reached her ears even as others appeared in doorways and started down the beach. The woman flailed at the air and pointed. Shortly a dozen other women stood at the water’s edge.

Only then did she remember that she was naked. She was violating practically every taboo imaginable. Public nudity on a dragon. It almost made her laugh. She still might have dived into the water, hidden from view behind the creature. Maybe they wouldn’t have recognized her. But she stayed.

Then the dragon began circling away from the shore.

When it had turned to face out to sea, she saw coming straight at her another dragon. On its back sat Agmeon. He had the ropes of a net wrapped around his wrists as he held on to his dragon’s plume. Agmeon’s son on a second dragon held the other end of the net. They were returning early with their catch. The son’s gaze traveled down her body and then up again, meeting her eyes with a look both of arousal and embarrassment.

Agmeon’s furious, bloodshot glare held her rigid. She couldn’t shrink away now, and his anger passed to her, fueling her defiance; pride and self-esteem mixing with resentment of all the rules he embodied—how arbitrarily her position changed when he chose it. Let them banish her. They were too late. She had already banished herself.

Agmeon’s mount swam past hers. From his look as he went by, she knew if he’d had a weapon and could have dropped his net he would have killed her on the spot. His son passed more closely but could only look at her from the side of his eyes. No one spoke. Only the dragons moved. Hers swam on as if it had encountered nothing. Nor had the other two seemed to notice it.

The dragon took her around the point again and back to her inlet. She rode proud and straight the whole way, despite a trembling in her limbs she couldn’t control even though there was no one to see her now.

“You meant to do this to me, didn’t you, clever little dragon?” she asked as they arrived. “You tricked me.”

The creature didn’t acknowledge that it had heard her.

“I think I’ll call you Meersh, how would you like that?”

The sea dragon drew up beside the opening to the inlet and paddled in place. It looked back at her expectantly. The tide had begun to ebb, and the dragon could not swim into the inlet any longer. It seemed to know this.

Everything that had just happened, she thought, had to have happened exactly when and as it did.

She slid off and swam to the submerged shelf of rock. The dragon hesitated, watching her. “Go on, Meersh,” she said. “Go back to the story you came from. You’ve done your work. There can’t be any marriage with Koombrun after this. I’d have to leave the island now even if I didn’t want to.”

The dragon extended its neck. Its puckered mouth whuffled in her face as though in reply, spraying her with gentle tears. Then it swung away and dove from sight. The sea immediately erased even the ripples of its going. She looked out across the water for a long time. The dragon did not resurface.

Finally, Leodora swam back to her clothes. She wrung the blood out of them and put them on. Then, with one last look across the inlet to the unbroken sea, she started up the beach to her garret. The only proof that she hadn’t imagined her voyage was the red chafing inside her thighs from the dragon’s skin. She knew, however, that Agmeon would provide all the proof necessary for everyone else.

She spent the rest of the afternoon out of sight in the boathouse.

At dinner she gauged Gousier’s mood before appearing, but he was ebullient and carefree. He didn’t know yet. “What a perfect day this was. Business was never better,” he said, adding, “I could have sold twice the fish I had”—which was as close as he came to upbraiding Leodora for what he perceived as her dereliction that morning. He rambled on about the stall, a wealthy family throwing a party who had taken every shellfish he had. He used the idea of a family to lead in to his delight with the village and how exciting it was going to be when they were united with Tenikemac in a “great big family.” Obviously, he hadn’t visited before coming to dinner, and with luck he wouldn’t have reason to before tomorrow. One more day was all she needed.

While her uncle ate and grunted and babbled this way and that, Leodora experienced once again the recognition that she was doing something for the last time. With a focused inner quiet, she gazed around the room, burning each detail in her mind—the horizontal lines of the reeds that composed the walls; the rough plankings underfoot; the blue-dyed, frayed mat by the door; the fish oil lamps with their curlicue handles of carved bone. And beside her, Dymphana. She saw her aunt detailed in guilt: brittle, thinning hair shot through everywhere with strands of gray; a face wrecked and ravaged time and again by a useless sagacity she wasn’t allowed to express against Gousier’s pigheaded presumptions and temper. She was tied to him forever and had no idea that Leodora might not be. It was their lot; escape was unimaginable—and wasn’t that implicit even in the way Dymphana told her of her mother? Leandra, who escaped to nothing. To doom. It had been a cautionary tale as much as anything else. Gousier imposed the limits, and the women must do the best they could within those limits. Defiance destroyed you.

Eventually Dymphana sensed her stare. While Gousier babbled, their gazes met, and for a heartbeat Leodora thought her aunt must see her plans as if painted upon her face the way wedding blessings would have been this time tomorrow. But Dymphana read something else in the look, smiled a worried, empathetic smile, and then pretended again to be attentive to Gousier’s chatter.

Later the two women carried the wooden bowls and utensils down to the water’s edge to rinse them. The moons were up and bright. The sea was calm. To the north the bridge spans glittered distantly their bejeweled solicitation. Emotion boiled up in Leodora. She found herself hugging her aunt and saying what she had fought not to say: “I love you, Dymphana. I’m sorry I have to go.” Horrified by her own confession, she could only wait for her aunt to destroy her.

Dymphana stroked her hair and said, “My sweet girl, it’s all right. You won’t be far. We’ll still have time together. And maybe…maybe it won’t be so bad.” In the midst of her reassurances she began to cry. Soon it was both of them in the throes of miscommunicated despair. Leodora couldn’t stand the lie—this was worse than the confession. Another moment and the truth would explode out of her. She broke away and ran before she could confess everything she intended.

Outside the boathouse she wept awhile longer. The tears now were for the future, for the pain Dymphana would endure. Gousier would take out his anger on her just as Soter had said. There would be no one else left to hurt.

Finally she wiped her eyes and, snuffling, went inside, climbing the stairs. In her grief she failed to appreciate that a candle was already burning in her garret. She was almost at the top before she realized, and by then she could see him lying on her bed as if with eternal patience.

Tastion. Naked.

When he saw her face, however, his smile of feigned nonchalance went flat. He sat up, covering himself. “Gods, he spoke to Agmeon. He’s beat you, hasn’t he?”

She shook her head, unable to communicate the events in any sensible way. He held out his hand. She didn’t take it. Remained where she was.

Finally, as if she had asked a question, he said, “I came here to see you because…To tell you that the ceremony’s off. They’re proscribing any contact with you.”

She was hardly surprised.

“Do you understand that I won’t be able to come here again for a while? Maybe a long time? Not until things settle down. Why did you do that—ride a dragon? You could have done almost anything else and it would have been better. Parading naked through the long house is nowhere near as bad, and it’s bad enough. How in the ocean did you get a dragon to take you?”

Unable to explain, she didn’t try. She said, “I won’t marry Koombrun.”

He smiled. “I knew that. And whatever happens, you’ll still be mine.”

“Yours?” After the emotional turmoil she had just put aside, his presumption was more than she could tolerate. “When have I ever been yours? When could I ever be yours? If I’m yours, Tastion, let’s go now and tell the village. Your father. Come with me, right now.” She offered her hand. “Come. Come on. Let’s see Agmeon for his blessing. You can go just as you are. It’ll be perfect.”

It was his turn not to move. “Didn’t you hear what I just said? Just being seen with you right now would be punishable by drowning. And still, here I am. But why do you want to reject what we do have? What we’ve had all along. You act as if it’s all been just me. But it hasn’t been just me. It hasn’t only been what I want. Or were you not there?”

“It’s too late for this argument.”

He leaned forward and tried to reach her, but she shifted back. He would have had to stand up to touch her. “How can it be too late? You’re not marrying him. This will blow over in time. They’ll forget, or at least they’ll get used to—”

“I’m leaving.”

“You keep saying that, and I don’t believe you.”

“I’m leaving Bouyan, Tastion.”

He snorted as if this were an impossibility. “Going to ride off on a sea dragon? Agmeon can’t talk about anything else. And no one knows the dragon you were on—no one’s ever seen it before. Or since.”

“It was almost a baby, not grown up.”

Tastion shook his head. “There aren’t any babies in our herd this season. So you don’t know where it came from, either. How can you expect it to come back and take you where you want to go. Believe me—dragons are headstrong. As moody as people.”

“Tastion—”

“Look, Lea, everything will return to normal for us in a few months, at most a year. You won’t ever have to marry Koombrun, you’ll stay where you are, and we’ll meet in secret like always.”

She shook her head. How could he be so obstinate, so blind? He was no different than Gousier: His mind was made up regardless of the facts. “You should get dressed.”

For a moment he sat in contemplation. Then he pulled his clothes from beneath the bed. He got up, standing brazenly in front of her in a state of half arousal. He sorted through the clothes as if unable to identify his trousers, offering her one last opportunity to have him. She held her position. When it became obvious that she couldn’t be coerced or enticed, Tastion shrugged as if to say it didn’t matter, and began to dress.

She saw as if for the first time his true nature. Although she had always desired to ride Tastion as fearlessly as she had the dragon, she would not succumb. She would have left it at that and let him go; but then, in a way that all but dared her to disagree, he muttered again, “You’ll still be mine.” His shirt was half over his head. Leodora grabbed his hand and yanked him to the steps.

“Wait, I don’t have my shirt on, Lea!”

She ignored his complaint, hauled him stumbling down the steps and through the dark below. “Lea!” he said again, but laughingly this time. He thought he had won.

Outside, on a path she could have found even on a moonless night, she led him into the deeper jungle. But she kept going, passing by their hidden spot, dragging him on. He was silent now, and even his hand in hers betrayed his tension behind her.

When she stopped, the tower of Ningle loomed overhead. Lights sprinkled on either side of it, a coruscation on the night sky, a glow suggesting lines and forms, solidity out of nothingness.

Leodora began to climb the stone steps. She still had hold of him, and he stumbled up onto the first step after her. “What are you doing? Stop it.”

She paused and looked down at him. “Climb up with me.”

His eyes traveled beyond and then back to her. He craned his neck to see if they’d been followed. “Do you want me to be banished? I can’t do this. You know I can’t—”

“It’s forbidden. Proscribed. Like me. Coming to my room and offering yourself to me naked is a crime, but you can do that. Why can’t you do this?”

“That’s different.”

“Because you want to do it. I want you to do this, but this you can’t—because you don’t want to.” She climbed another step and he tore free of her grasp. She let him go.

He slid back down a step. “Stop.”

“This is where I’m going.”

He looked at the tower, at the sky. He tried to laugh at her. “Don’t be stupid. You don’t know any more about up there than I do. You don’t know anything except stories.”

“It’s all I need to know. I can be whoever I want. You already are who you’ll always be. When my life moves forward, you won’t be part of it any longer.”

“But, Lea,” he tried desperately, “you don’t have to go now. Don’t you see? The marriage is finished. You’ve destroyed it.”

“Ah, and you don’t want to give up until you’ve had me completely. What you really want to say is that you’d have me remain on Bouyan for your pleasure.”

“And is that so awful?”

“Not for you. For you it’s idyllic. Just what you want. You ride out every morning, come back in the evening, drink and laugh with your friends, and then creep off to your kept whore. Of course you won’t be beaten to death on the morrow, either, or drowned if caught.” She climbed down past him and started back along the path. She heard him come crashing through the underbrush after her.

“It was what you wanted, too.”

She stiffened. Then she nodded. “Yes, you’re right, Tastion. It was what I once wanted, too. But it’s not what I want anymore.” She set off again. Soon he closed the gap between them again.

“I’ll tell them. I’ll tell them and they’ll keep you from leaving.”

She stopped so fast that he ran into her. She turned. In the shadows he might have been simpering, showing her how clever he was—she couldn’t be certain. She didn’t have to see his face. He had just told her what she had meant to him. They had both been teasing arousal from each other for so long, but the difference she saw now was that she might actually have loved him.

“Tell them, then,” she said. “Tell Agmeon, tell the elders. Be sure and tell them the means by which you learned it, and how many other nights we’ve spent together. Tell them everything we’ve nearly done and everything you want to do. All you’ll do is bring the stars down upon your head, as well.”

Quickly he changed tack. “I’ll tell Gousier.”

Fear knifed her belly. Everything she had ever felt for or shared with Tastion evaporated. She took a step and he moved to block her. She kept coming nevertheless, impelling him backward by force of will until his heel caught against a root and he fell. He tried to grab her as he toppled, but she dodged his fingers and kept going. She expected to hear him shout his threat again, but there was silence behind her.

Where the paths branched, she turned left and went to Soter’s.

Oil lamps burned brightly within his hut. She stopped in the doorway.

One of the puppet cases stood open in the center of the room. All the puppets lay in a heap beside it, a congeries of articulated limbs and rods. From the rear Soter emerged, his eyes sparkling in the oil light, a smile on his lips at the sight of her. He looked uncommonly sober.

“Come see,” he urged. She crossed the room. “You see how the case is made?” He leaned over it and found a small black ribbon in its depths, which he ceremoniously pulled. What appeared to be the bottom of the case rose up like the trapdoor to her garret room.

“Extra compartments,” he said. “We put our belongings in this one, beneath the puppets. The other’s bigger, deeper. Your father used it for whatever came along. If pockets were picked and the boodle found its way to us, in it went. The moneys collected during performances, too. It pays to be careful on the spans. He was doing very well, and thieves lurked everywhere, in the most unexpected guises. That’s something to remember about the spans and spirals: You can be as intimate as you like with someone and the next thing, they turn on you.”

“Yes, they do, don’t they?” Through her fresh bitterness her thoughts were already leaping ahead, in another direction. “The other case is a little larger.”

“It is, yes. Like a coffin, big enough almost. Bardsham managed to fill it, though. We once carried a young…never mind.”

She hadn’t heard him. She was regarding the larger undaya case. “Do you believe in coincidence, Soter? Or do you think that some things just happen to take place at the right moment?”

He stared at her in perplexity.

“We need to take everything out of the case,” she told him, “all the puppets. I need it.”

“But I just packed it.”

She started past him, and he hurried after her, around her, muttering, “All right, all right.” He took hold of the case before she could and dragged it out of the small back room. Unfastening the lid, he carefully began removing the puppets. “They’re in proper order, be careful,” he advised when she reached in, too. Piled on the floor, there were so many, she couldn’t believe she had tried every one. Soter lifted the false bottom. “You don’t want to put anything heavy in here, you know. These cases will wear you down. In the morning they’re hardly an inconvenience, but you haul one along till sunset, and you won’t think you’ll ever stand up straight again.”

“It isn’t heavy, what I have in mind. It’s light as air.”

He dropped the bottom back into place. “Well, I hope it’s important. We can’t have anything frivolous on this escapade.” She closed the case and carried it out, leaving him bewildered between the puppet piles.

She didn’t dare light a lamp. She had to feel her way through the cavern.

Around the bend the Coral Man was glowing, but now no brighter than the farthest star. Just as well for her—she didn’t think she could have touched him again if he were brightly lit. This way, she could pretend that he was dull and harmless.

She stood the case up beside him to compare. As she had thought, he was smaller than the case, just like she was. Once it was open, she had to pat around in its depths to find the black ribbon. As she pulled up the false bottom, from the corner of her eye she thought she saw the Coral Man lean toward her. She jumped and looked straight at him. He hadn’t moved of course. It was, she insisted, her steaming breath in the air that had caused the illusion. “Why in the world am I doing this?” she muttered, and answered herself: Because he wants me to.

She had to summon every reserve of courage to touch him. She lifted him by the shoulders, and, just as Tastion had said, he felt as light as a handful of sand. She stood him in the case. It might indeed have been his coffin. She closed the false bottom; it fitted perfectly over him. As she started to shut the lid, she paused. The cave seemed to tilt, her stomach to flip. In the midst of the moment’s vertigo she experienced a premonition that this had been pre-ordained, that no accident had provided the perfect coffin for her enigma, just as no random sea dragon had swum into her lagoon. From her mother to her, from the sea to this empty figure, forces were at work, conspiring, aligning. She was supposed to go. She was certain of it now. Nothing was going to stand in her way, she couldn’t be stopped.

The moment passed but her fingers trembled as she snapped shut the lid. She tipped, lifted the case, almost expecting the thing inside it to rap on the bottom and kill her with terror. But it did nothing. It weighed nothing. The case might have been empty.

In utter darkness she shuffled back the way she’d come, traveling by instinct this last time through the uterine cave and out the narrow cleft.

Soter asked where she had been, but she said nothing to him as she handed over the case. He held it in puzzlement, and she imagined that he was trying to feel the weight of whatever she’d added, and couldn’t. He set the case down beside the puppets, opened it. Before she could stop him, he pulled up the bottom. A small sound emerged from him—the word “What?” He dropped the false bottom back into place and immediately began replacing the puppets. After a moment he said, “Later you’ll tell me what that is and where it came from and why it’s going with us. Right now you’d better hurry. We don’t want to arrive on Ningle too late, or no one will take us in. Get your belongings and hurry back quick as you can.” He flicked his fingers at her. “Go!”

Obediently she hurried out and along the dark path.

In the boathouse she saw that the light in her garret was lit, then chided herself for having left it burning. She hoped Tastion hadn’t come back.

She crept up the stairs, but it was impossible to be silent in that building. Every step creaked or groaned. She sensed rather than saw movement behind her, but before she could turn something caught the braid of her hair and yanked so hard that she was lifted off her feet. Her scalp blazed with pain. She dangled, swung like a bell once, and flew the length of the room. She slammed into the wall beside the windows. An arm’s length to the left and she would have plunged through it to her almost certain death. The wall didn’t kill her but it knocked her half senseless.

She didn’t have to see or hear him to know it was Gousier. She tried to react. Her mind screamed; her body refused to respond.

Gousier lurched across the garret, caught her hair again, dragged her across the floor to the post beside the stairs. He hauled her up again and, with his hand on her throat, crushed her hard against it.

His face was all but inhuman, and his sweat stank of liquor as well as fish, but he wasn’t drunk. Drunk, he might have been escapable. “Well, my girl, you’ve done me up good, haven’t you? Bare-tit riding their dragons? I’m lucky they haven’t just come and cut my head off and burned my house down. They’ve condemned you. No wedding. No anything. And worse. They say they’ll find someone else to haul their fish up to market. Unless—” He winced as if saying this hurt, and his head swiveled as if the room were moving around him; he let go of her throat, let go as though forgetting she was there; she sucked in a desperate breath, but before she could act he struck her so hard across the mouth that the back of her skull hitting the post exploded lightning in her head. Colors, lights, blackness spun together, shattered.

The floor scraped her chin. A splinter stung her awake. She tasted dirt but couldn’t focus on it. She wasn’t even sure how she’d fallen—the memory had been knocked out of her. She heard her uncle raving. He smashed the bed frame, tore the bedding into shreds. She ought to get up, but she still couldn’t find the means to drive her muscles to act. Not in time.

Gousier came back to work on her. He curled her braid around his hand and jerked her upright, where she dangled at his eye level. She screamed at the pain.

“I can save myself. They want me to give you up. And I’m going to. I’m going to give you to Tenikemac. Agmeon says they haven’t had to use the purging ritual you’ll endure in more than three generations. No female’s been so stupid as you. Not even…not even her.” While he spoke, he tore the clothes off her, pushing her to tug and rip them down, and finally dropping her again. He used the shreds of her bedding to gag her and tie her hands. He recited all the while. “First they carry you out into the water and hold you under as a purification, see, appeasing the dragons’ spirits, penance for your outrage. He says most people pretty much evacuate out every orifice before they’re finished, cleans out everything. But then they stop. They want you alive, see, at the end. From water to fire, that’s how it has to go. They burn you next. In the long house. Over the center fire. They cook you slow on a spit shoved right up your arse and down your spine. You go crazy from the roasting, the pain, the fire. But you don’t die then, either. You’re still alive when they cut you up into pieces. The flesh is still alive and singing with agony. And they sprinkle you out across the water to make amends for the way you’ve violated the honor of the sea. You become part of the sea and the world goes back to how it was. Fish don’t disappear, storms don’t come to smash them. No one else has to suffer. Oh, my, yes, I’ll do that, my dearest little Leandra, yes I will. But first, first I’m going to have you right here, the way everyone else did. Everyone on the spans, everyone…you gave yourself to everyone and not even a thought for me. I’m going to ride you till you’ve got splinters in your back, and you’ll be asking for the fire at the end of your night, little bitch. You show yourself to them that pays, you’ll show it to me, too.”

He dropped her and then untied his own belt. His face was contorted and he whined in the back of his throat, as if even in madness he couldn’t hide from himself what he was about to do.

Leodora felt blood spreading like the chill of death through her hair. If she lay here he would rape her, and everything he promised would follow. Without knowing quite how, she made herself get up on one knee and started to climb to her feet. Gousier saw it and, though his pants were half off, he kicked out savagely.

She dodged his foot and threw herself with all her strength against him, struck his hip but tripped against another support post, which knocked her back against him again. Gousier’s foot was still in the air. He nearly caught his balance from the first blow, but was no more ready than she for the rebound. She knocked him sideways.

He twisted and swung his descending foot to catch himself, but it slipped off the floorboard and into the stairwell. He made a desperate grab for the nearest post, shredding the skin on his fingers as he tipped through the opening and fell down the steps.

Leodora pressed herself against the post as if it were consciousness. Blood was in her face, stinging her eyes. Inside her head, the world burned bright, and she lost the sense of where she was, or why she’d been tied. When she opened her eyes again, the room held steady, and she tried standing on her own. She worked her hands to get free of the bedding, but it was so tight that her fingers had gone numb. She thought her wrist was moving, but there might have been no skin left on it for all she knew.

The steps creaked, and she whirled about to see Gousier, his face filthy with dirt and blood, come rising up out of the hole. He looked for her, turned and saw her, and grinned the most terrible, feral grin. “Leandra,” he growled, the name an emblem of all that he intended. Now he would do everything he’d promised and worse. He put his hands on the floor and continued up.

Leodora threw herself against the raised trapdoor. It snapped off its pin and slammed down onto her uncle’s head. His fingers slipped and he fell partway, and the door, with her riding it, hammered into his head a second time and then banged shut. She heard his body tumble down the stairs. She lay on her side, dust erupting out of the boards.

Silence followed while the dust settled. Streaked with dirt, sweat, and blood, choking on her gag, she strained to hear if he was coming back, praying to any gods who would listen not to let him. She was finished if he did now.

She might have lain there forever before she heard the stairs creak once more. She rolled over and tried to sit up, but her arm beneath her had fallen asleep. She lay back across the door, knowing that her weight would not deter him if he could still use his arms. If he got into the garret this time he would win.

The trapdoor thumped once. Twice, trying to rise. A pause.

A muffled voice called, “Lea?” It was Tastion.

She whined a ragged breath and rolled off the door. He pushed it open. The moment he saw her, he scrambled the rest of the way up the stairs.

“Oh, Lea, Lea, are you all right? Oh, what a stupid question, of course you aren’t. Is he coming back?” He untied her hands and helped her sit.

“He’s not…not on the stairs?”

“No.” He wiped his palm across her forehead, smearing away some of the blood that covered her entire face in a crimson mask.

“Close the trap, Tastion. Close and lock it.”

She leaned back against the wall and flexed her hands, rubbing her wrists together. Her head throbbed. Her jaw ached. She rested a moment and Tastion, to his credit, didn’t bombard her with questions. He observed calmly, “The door won’t latch. You’ve broken it.” Then after another moment had passed, he added quietly but defensively, “I didn’t tell him.”

“No.” Her fingers tingled now. She tried to get up, pushing against the wall. Tastion closed his hands around her waist and drew her to her feet. “Help me down to the water please.”

Saying nothing, he opened the trapdoor, then preceded her down the steps, but Gousier did not strike. At the bottom she said, “Wait.” The light from above revealed the shape of a leg behind the steps. She edged to it, bent down. Sparks jittered across her vision for an instant.

Gousier had careened off the stairs before reaching the bottom and somehow ended up halfway beneath them. He lay with his head tucked under one arm as if hiding from the light. Leodora nudged the arm; a groan escaped him, but he didn’t move. She backed away.

“He’s not dead?”

“Not yet.” She limped away from him, out of the boathouse and down the beach. The quiet sea was warmer than the air, and she entered the water, wading in until it reached her waist, then sat with it up to her neck. She lay back, letting the water wash her hair and clean her wounds. The salt burned, and though it made her hiss, she was glad of it. Glad to be alive to feel it. The inside of her mouth was cut. Her cheek felt stiff and puffy. She submerged her head, and listened to the sound of blood in her ears, her heartbeat thundering, her head and mouth stinging.

Coming up again she was dizzy. Tastion had to help her out of the surf. She shivered in the chill air; her naked skin prickled with goose bumps. She began to cry.

Tastion let her cling to him. After a while, he turned her, then guided her back to the boathouse.

The wound in her scalp was superficial—not from the pulling of her hair but from striking something as she fell. It had stopped bleeding and would be only a bruise and a headache on the morrow. She discarded the clothes her uncle had torn off her. She couldn’t wear them now, even if they weren’t a ruin. She thought, Just one less item I have to bring. She’d finished crying. It was time to act.

She put on other clothes, whatever was hanging on the pegs—she hardly noticed what, even as she was pulling them on. Wiping her eyes, she began picking up items from around the room: a pair of boots that she’d made herself; a few combs of bone, one of which Tastion had given her; sandals; a shell that she’d found on the beach many years earlier, which was nothing extraordinary but all the more precious to her for that and because it, like she, had survived her uncle’s assault. Everything she gathered into the center of a cloak, and tied that into a bundle. There was her whole life, weighing practically nothing. “Light as air,” she said, thinking of the coral effigy, which she was stealing from them. She would not tell Tastion. Then he wouldn’t have to lie. He watched her with eyes full of worry.

With the bundle slung over her shoulder, she leaned forward and kissed him. Her mouth twinged.

On the second step she paused to look around the garret, to make it a space in her mind, her memory. Tastion followed her down.

At the bottom she set aside the bundle. In her hand she carried strips of cloth, the same ones he’d used on her; she went to Gousier and rolled him onto his face. This time he didn’t make a sound. His head lolled. She tied his hands over his head as hard as she could, then gagged him so tightly that his back teeth showed. She attempted to haul him by the arms. One of them was twisted the wrong way, and she knew it was broken. He was too heavy. Tastion grabbed his legs then, and they picked him up and clumsily slung him over the lip of his rotted boat. He landed with a sharp report of snapping boards. The boat shook as if it might split. It tipped toward them, and Gousier’s naked buttocks abruptly protruded out the rotted hole in its side.

“Well, Uncle,” she said without humor, “you finally plugged her leak.” She had to lean against a post while sparks spun away in the darkness. Tastion touched her shoulder. “No,” she said, “I’m all right. Soter’s waiting, I can rest afterward.”

As they came through his door, Soter started to bellow at Tastion until he moved aside and Soter saw Leodora. He stared accusingly at Tastion, who shook his head and mouthed, Gousier.

Soter nodded. “In that case it’s good you’re here, boy.”

And so, despite her protests, the two men carried the cases and Leodora followed stiffly with only her small bundle of belongings. When they reached the steps, Tastion never hesitated, but climbed straight up. She called his name tenderly, knowing that he must be petrified, but he was deaf to argument. On the landing at the top, he placed the puppet case on the wall that edged the span. He gazed out over the island. Leodora came up beside him. She looked where he looked—at the lights of Tenikemac and the beautiful ocean beyond.

“You shouldn’t be here,” she told him.

He turned his head, surveyed the crumbling stone building on the other side of the wall. “So this is Ningle. Doesn’t look monstrous, does it? Just kind of seedy and run-down, and it smells like something rotten. I think it could use some mortar at the very least, don’t you ag—”

She touched his shoulder and he stopped talking. He faced her.

“I love you, Lea,” he said. “Everything I said before was because I couldn’t stand letting you go. You’ve always been here. There was never a time when you weren’t here with me.” He grimaced. “I wish I could take it all back. I wish you hadn’t heard any of it.”

She slid her arms around his waist and drew him against her.

When Soter finally reached the landing, they were still embracing. “Would have been damned nice if someone had come back down and helped me with my burden once he’d flown up the steps.” He dropped the case dramatically, but they still didn’t move. He wheezed at them, refusing to grant them any solace, and glowered as they kissed.

Then Tastion pushed himself back from Leodora. “It’s time you found…time you went.” His voice broke, and he lurched around Soter and hurried down the steps. Tears trailed silently down Leodora’s cheeks.

Gently, Soter patted her hair. He inadvertently touched the cut in her scalp, and she flinched. He withdrew his hand. “Your uncle?”

Snuffling, she wiped at her nose and replied, “I don’t know. He might be dead.”

“I wouldn’t grieve. I won’t so much as pour a drop of libation in his memory ever.” He picked up his case. “You’re following in your father’s footsteps in almost every detail. You do see that, don’t you? We’ll have to find a new name for you…on the next spiral. Come on now, grab your burden and bring it along. I know you’ll hurt all over come morning, but one thing’s certain: If he is still breathing, he’ll come looking. We need to be tucked away before the sun’s up.” He went through the gate.

Leodora remained standing there until Tastion had vanished into the darkness of the trees. “Reneleka, take care of Dymphana,” she said softly. She picked up the case and followed. Her final view was of the whole dark half of Bouyan, her home.

She was never to see it again.

II
DIVERUS

This is the way, when someone asked, that Leodora told his tale:

There was once a silent boy who lived beneath the bridge. He lived neither on an island nor on land, nor even upon the water, but within the frame of a span itself. Chiseled supports and struts formed the foundation of the span, beams and cross-ties created an intricate latticework of layers between them, and upon these platforms were laid surfaces on which huts and fortifications were erected, all at different heights and lengths because no one who built there required the permission of anyone else, and few there were who sought others’ opinions. Mad geometries were the result.

As a baby the boy had sat outside his tiny hovel and looked without understanding upon the random sections of this sub-rosa city. From his platform a ladder ran to the next, which was suspended at a slightly higher level and broad enough that three dwellings had been erected across it. Another ladder, of rope, declined to a level below theirs on the opposite side.

Few houses beneath the bridge had roofs because there were no elements to protect anyone from—save the prying eyes of those situated above. The thick stalactitic surface of the span provided all necessary protection, and just acquiring the materials to erect walls was hard enough. In most cases divers, who lived on the lower levels, brought up the stone from the sea bottom, especially from around the piers, where the rocky ocean floor had been crushed and heaped as far down as anyone could see. It cost money to pay the divers, and more to have the stones hauled up on ropes and pulleys from layer to layer through the underspan hierarchy. Everyone knew that a stone was going to disappear here and another there as the pile of rock ascended, and if you were lucky and the pullers not too greedy, perhaps half of the original pile made the journey. It was the way of the underspan and no use railing at its unfairness; it had been thus for centuries and would be thus for centuries more. What it meant, however, was that walls were not built very high, but more like boundary markers than sides of a house. Most were not even as tall as the inhabitants themselves. There would be one entrance, and only the one great room. Privacy was at best an untested notion. There was always someone on a level above yours. You learned quickly which corners of your home offered sanctuary or at least deep shadows, and you conducted your intimacy there.

The boy often spent his time looking down at other people, whose behavior was as alien to him as the life of insects. Like insects, they seemed to live in patterns. The patterns he could make out, though not their meaning.

All of this may seem uncommon and strange, but on almost every span of Shadowbridge we know, substructural societies flourish below the main boulevards. Many forms of life thrive in caverns, and more in shadows, in the dark. Some of them can’t stand the light at all.

By the time he turned fourteen, the boy had no family.

His mother died of a wasting disease, and her body was ejected into the sea with little ceremony; his father, a man of scant talent and less ambition, had only remained with her because she managed to bring in money by begging upon the surface of the span. She used the boy for this. Even as a baby he was clearly, visibly deficient. The impoverished mother clutching her damaged child while reaching one claw of a hand toward passersby tugged at all but the hardest hearts, and she did very well for herself, for her husband. When she died the father unraveled. He knew he couldn’t care for a child, never mind one who was practically an idiot. He was the sort of man who preferred to be blown from place to place by the winds of fortune. Wherever he went he’d always found someone to take care of him, exactly as the boy’s mother had done. He had pretended to go off in search of work every morning, and she must have known he wasn’t really doing anything more than finding someplace to drink up her coin, but she never said anything to him, because he was handsome and solicitous, always showing her kindness, always promising to do better the next time, although he never did. He was handsome enough still to think he could find such a situation again, provided he didn’t bring any baggage along. He was looking over the wall of his house at his son as he thought this.

The silent boy sat near the edge of the platform with his feet dangling as he stared across the underside of the bridge, down and down to the water. He focused upon the spot where his mother’s body had vanished. He could remember every detail of how her form, wrapped in a sheet, had been carried three platforms away, where the inhabitant had assembled a chute for the disposal of the deceased; how his father had paid the inhabitant a few coins and then carried her to the edge of the chute and callously slid her off.

In his interior world the boy imagined that she had turned into a merwoman or a siren, or even a fish. He assumed that this was the natural order of things and that one day the same would happen to him, although he didn’t like the idea of becoming a fish and being caught and eaten by someone living up here, which is what happened to fish every day—he might even be caught and brought up to be eaten by himself. After all, who could say with certainty that the flow of time didn’t allow such things to happen? Who could be certain time didn’t fold over upon itself or weave back and forth like an Ondiont snake on the surface of the ocean? Certainly not he with his swirled thoughts. He didn’t want to eat his mother, and so he made up his mind that she was not a fish but a sea creature, definitely a merwoman living now in a city on the bottom of the ocean. It was a city that looked like the one where his mother had taken him to beg, up above. It had towers and spires of stone and glazed tile, bright pennants and lamps, and happy people—of course, they would all have fish bodies.

Time passed, and he lay down under the weight of this dream and dozed.

All the while he dreamed of his mother’s transformed life, his father was busy gathering up a few belongings from the house. He paused to watch the boy sleeping, curled up at the edge of the platform. If he felt anything at all for his child, perhaps he felt it then; but it wasn’t strong enough to move him to action—at least not to action in the boy’s favor.

The poles of a ladder clacked against the side of the platform from a level below, directing the father’s attentions toward the group who appeared one after the other at the top—a father and mother and two daughters. They were better dressed than he, in clothes that might have been castoffs from the richer people on the surface. They approached him, and he welcomed them, let them inspect the house, turn over the pallets, stir the ashes in the tiny hearth. There were pots, a skillet. He was leaving all that behind. Close up, the family stank the way fish did after floating for a few days. If they noticed the sleeping boy out at the far edge of the platform they said nothing, and finally they gave the father his money, enough to keep him lubricated until he’d left this span far behind. He clasped hands with the father, then threw his pack over his shoulder and climbed up the ladder to the next level, and on from there, until the gloom of the place swallowed him up as if he’d never been.

The new family spent the day carrying belongings up from the water’s edge where they’d been living, and where everything smelled like brine and rot. They carried the smell with them but it would go away, now they had moved up to better accommodations. Here they would have to live with nothing worse than cooking smells. Much higher and the air would have been smoky all the time. This was better, they thought—a perfect balance between the green swirling ocean and the dark heights beneath the span.

A black bird swooped in through the tangle of habitations and landed beside the boy. It tilted its head one way and then the other, and finally hopped over and cawed at him. He woke to shining beady eyes just inches from his own. The bird plucked at his hand as if he had food hidden there. The boy sat up, and the bird squawked and flew off. He rubbed his eyes and looked around. The sun was sinking. The whole underside of the span burned orange in the light, and each spar and beam threw off stretching shadows cut out of the air. Down below, fishing boats had tied up around the piers. His eyes moved to the one important spot in the ocean again, but there was nothing to see. He stood and shuffled back home.

If anything seemed peculiar about his home, he didn’t notice it until he had entered the doorway. A little girl stepped out and barred his way. She wasn’t any older than he, but she rose up as if inflating, and ordered him to get out. He couldn’t understand what she was doing in his house. Because he’d been asleep, he experienced the odd sensation that he’d dreamed his whole life before now, and it had evaporated forever the moment he awoke. His father was nowhere in the house, and all the scattered clothing and belongings lying about were things he’d never seen before.

Seized by terror, all he could do was wave his arms and wail wordlessly. The two adults rushed from their fire.

They didn’t know what to make of him any more than their daughter had, but they were not heartless, and it was clear he thought he lived here. The man who’d bought the platform from the boy’s father had indeed noticed him sleeping at the far edge, but because the boy had gone unmentioned, not even looked at, he’d assumed him to be a passing vagrant and nothing to do with the house; now he suspected that the boy had lived here and the man who’d sold them this place had known it. But it was too late to do anything about that—he knew that man would be long gone. The couple communicated to him that he could stay the night; in the morning they would solve his problem. He sat by the door, ragged and sullen. Two small girls now occupied the space that had been his. The one who had confronted him remained awake after her sister and made faces at him. He might have run off that night, and the man and wife would not have minded if they’d awakened in the morning and found him gone, but he lacked the sensibility to forge such a plan, much less set out on his own. He stayed.

In the morning the man took him to a different platform, well across the width of the underspan from his own. A woman lived there with a house full of children. The man and this woman bargained and bickered about him as if he weren’t standing beside them. She said, “Look, I’ve got a full house now, more than I can feed, and half of them can’t steal for spit despite my best efforts to teach ’em. The rest are all what keeps us above the tide. What you want me to do with another, then? What’s he got for me?” She knelt and looked him in the eye. Her breath was foul, her teeth brown and rotten. She clutched his wrists tightly. “What talent do you have, boy?” Her tone implied nothing friendly.

The boy could not think of any talent, and the woman frightened him. He looked away from her.

“Dumb, is it? He can’t even talk? What good is he to me?” She let go his arms and straightened up. “I can’t use him.”

The man said, “What happened to the girl you put out on the beam?”

“How you know about her? Wasn’t one of your girls, anyhow, so you’ve no business asking.”

“She bring anything back for you?”

“Nah. Ran off, she did. Someone cut her loose, took her away. Probably felt sorry for her. Took her off my hands, anyway, and that’s good enough. Could have had her for supper for all I care. Nothing would have come of it anyway, that old beam hain’t lit in years of waiting.”

The man looked down at him. “Still,” he said, “it’s a position that needs filling.”

“Fine, then you take him up there and you look after him while he waits.”

“I can’t go up there anymore. You know that. If they saw me…”

“Yeah, I know all about that, now, don’t I? You got two daughters and a wife now what don’t know nothin’ about your life before. If she knew, would she let you near them girls anymore?” She smirked at his discomfort. “You’re gonna tell me you’ve changed, hain’t you? Well, don’t bother. Matters nothing to me whether you have or not.” She glanced down at the boy, and her fingers curled like vines around his chin. “Your troubles don’t make a case for this sad bit of drool.”

The man stood awhile in silence, whether in contemplation or anger, the boy couldn’t have told; but finally he reached over and drew her hand away from the boy. She hadn’t expected his touch and jumped at the contact. The man held her hand from underneath, her fingers still curled as if cupping the boy’s chin. He placed his free hand on top of it. The boy saw something shiny slip from the man’s fingers into hers; then he let go with both, but her hand remained there, hovering just in front of the boy’s eyes. She uncurled her fist and contemplated its fresh contents. “All right, then,” she said, and glanced his way askance. “I’ll take him to fill a vacancy. But if he’s rewarded, his gift is mine. I don’t share.”

“A fair enough bargain,” the man agreed. He didn’t expect the mindless boy to do anything other than starve out on that beam, as countless others had done before him and would do again; but the important thing was, it would not be his problem. He would never have to see it happen, which meant that so far as he was concerned, it never did. A million cruelties occurred each day, but out of sight and out of mind.

He knelt and told the boy, “Now, you stay here with Mother Kestrel and she’ll provide for you. Whatever she says, you do it for her, just like she’s your own mother. Do that and everything will work out for you.”

The boy stared back at him the way a fish might have, and the man doubted that anything he said had penetrated. In fact, the boy was visiting his mother again, under the sea. He had always obeyed her, and still she had left him.

The man roughed the boy’s hair as he stood again. He gave the woman one more look that might have been a warning or resignation. Then he walked away, climbed down the ladder, and was gone.

“Well, come in, then,” said the woman, and she grabbed him by the hair and dragged him beside her.

The woman did feed him that day. More than a dozen children were crammed into her dwelling. They approached him, sniffing around him, trying to figure out what he might be, and whether or not his presence meant trouble for them. He’d never been near so many other children before and shied away from them, behavior that only got him into trouble, as it made him an easy target for the bullies in the group. He had no defenses. Soon enough most of the others had allied against him behind the bullies and teased him, plucked at his ragged clothes, called him names, told him he smelled awful, laughed at him. They might as well have taunted a toadstool. He cowered against the wall until the woman came and drove off the attackers. She kept him away from them the rest of the day, even feeding him separately. He got a larger portion than the others and they resented him for that, too, even though their own tyranny was the cause. They swore among themselves that the next day he would be made to pay.

The boy dozed fitfully that night, exhausted by constant fear but on guard against a concerted assault. Some hours before dawn, the woman woke him and led him out of the house. She gave him a crust to gnaw on while they traveled, and a small pack that he was to carry. They went up and down ladders, across makeshift bridges until they reached a ledge carved out of the bridge support itself. They moved by feel alone then, because no light reached the cavernous recesses just below the surface of the span. They walked carefully along the ledge. The trapped air hung thick as tepid gruel, and it stank of humans and oily fish and offal. The ledge led them out into the air. One moment all was blackness and the next a sky shot with stars stretched above them. The boy stared up in awe at the sight and nearly stepped off the ledge into the air. Only the woman’s grip saved him. She muttered a curse and yanked on his arm to get his attention.

A flight of perilously narrow steps led up to the surface of the span. He remembered the steps. His mother had led him up them every morning and down them every evening. Seeing them, remembering her, he tried to look back again at the sea where she’d slid under the surface, but he couldn’t glimpse that spot from here and the woman was hauling him up. They emerged into an alley and from there onto one of the broader cobbled streets.

He’d never seen this world after dusk. He stared at everything, glimpsing towers and minarets like shapes cut out of the night. People strolled about, not as many as during the day, but they all seemed to be disguised behind masks and capes, feathers and jewels, and someone brandishing a torch or a lantern led their way. From the street Mother Kestrel turned into another alley. The boy heard voices echo in it, whispers that seemed nearby but came from empty corners. The alley snaked around as if going somewhere but in the end dumped them back at the edge of the span again. Along the horizon, a thread of reddish glow hinted at the approach of dawn.

Across the road there was a break in the railing as there’d been where they emerged, but this time there were no steps down. Instead a skinny curving walkway projected from the edge of the span out into the void—a beam above the ocean. The woman dragged him out along it indifferently. Over the side he could see all the way to the ocean. It was a long, long way down. Waves shimmered upon the black surface, but not a sound could he hear.

Halfway out, a low wall curved up along one side of the beam, while on the other side, only pieces of the wall remained here and there like rotted teeth, having collapsed sometime in the past. People huddled against the bits of wall, one or two with their knees drawn up, another with his legs stretched in defiance across the width of the walk. The boy could see him watching, eyes shining in the pits of his sockets, as they climbed over his barrier and continued to the end of the beam.

A concave bowl hung off the end. The crumbling wall gave way to a ring of bollards supporting a circular railing. Perhaps twenty people could have sat around the ring at the top of the bowl, but only four were in the bowl at the moment.

The woman chose a spot for the boy and told him to sit. He was still watching the man they’d had to step over, paying her no mind. She had to push on his shoulders to make him sit. When finally he realized what she wanted, he complied at once. She took the pack from him, opened it, and drew out a length of chain. This she threaded between two bollards and back in around one of them, drawing it tight, and then securing it with a lock. The loose section of it ended in a cuff. The woman fitted this about the boy’s ankle and snapped it shut. He looked in puzzlement at his foot, then at her.

“There’s a good lad,” she told him. “You’ve got length enough to move about some, to relieve yourself off the edge as needs be. I’ll come back with food for you but you’re going to have to make do otherwise. You have to wait and hope and curry the gods’ favor. They appear here sometimes,” she said, “come to those who wait, who show their true and good hearts. If the gods favor you, then we will be blessed, you and me. You’ll have something no one else has. Don’t know what it will be, but we’ll hope it makes us rich. You hope for that. Think on that. All the time you’re here. You want the gods to understand what you need if you’re to have it.”

When she walked away he tried to crawl after her out of the bowl, until the chain snapped tight and he fell on his chin. He made a whining sound, but the woman didn’t hear. She had gone, back along the beam, back into the alleys, and back into her underworld. What she didn’t tell him was that he was the fourth child she’d chained to the dragon beam, that the first two had died—one of starvation, the other by foul play when no one was about—and the third had been set free to disappear, but probably to no good fortune. What she didn’t tell him was that everything she believed about the dragon beam, and the gods, and how they chose to appear, was based on gossip and invention and steeped in envy.

The Dragon Bowl became his existence. He didn’t starve, because the woman had learned from experience, and returned every couple of days with food for him—not a lot of food but enough to keep him alive. At first no one spoke to him or even acknowledged that he was there. The man who’d watched him being chained up came onto the bowl and sat close by, but pretended not to notice him, and then began to whisper imprecations. Even the feeble-minded boy understood that the man was whispering to imaginary beings, asking questions and hearing silent answers to which he responded. He babbled loudly until others ventured into the bowl. When they did, the madman curled up and clutched his belongings, wrapped in a shred of cloth, to his chest, and eyed them accusingly.

People came and went throughout the day. There were young lovers who came for the novelty of it, and described for each other what they would wish for if the gods were to appear. Often this was wealth, but as often it was to be happily in love with their partner forever. There were those who showed themselves to be terrified at the prospect of stepping onto the rim of the bowl, despite the number of people already waiting in it. The boy watched them all.

The first night the madman edged over to him and said, “I know you’re stealing my luck. I know you are. You can’t have it, you hear me? If you try and take it, I’ll throw you over, right into the ocean.” He grabbed the chain and yanked at it, but he couldn’t unwrap it from the bollard any more than the boy could. After a while he seemed to forget what he was doing; he took his bundle and moved back onto the dragon beam. “My luck,” he repeated, but no longer to the boy.

Three days later when the sun came up he was gone, and only the bundle remained to mark his place. The boy managed to reach it and drag it into the bowl before anyone else saw it lying there. Inside the cloth lay a broken phial containing nothing, a wooden button, some black polished stones and white polished shells, a heel of bread that had gone green with mold long ago, and fragments of a parchment that had been written upon, but torn into strips. The meaningless contents of the bundle filled him with despair, and he savagely fought with the chain and the shackle until he’d rubbed his ankle raw and bleeding. Another man came along the beam, saw the scattered items at the top of the bowl, and scooped them up. He picked at each in turn, disappointed with each find, and finally tossed the whole thing off the side of the beam. “Worthless,” he proclaimed.

The boy gestured at the chain attached to him, begging the man to set him free. “You want me to set you free?” the man responded incredulously. “Free?” He began swatting at the boy, slapping and beating him, and all the while saying calmly, “It is your duty to wait on this spot for the gods to honor you. Your duty!” He made one final, ineffectual kick at the boy before moving across the bowl and squatting on the far side, where he searched the sky as if for a sign, a reward. Nothing happened, and he finally gave up looking and hunkered down and fell asleep.

From the beating the boy learned one important thing—to be invisible. He remained a huddling shape, his head down, reflecting his defeat in life, expressing that he would take any gift the gods condescended to give him.

The woman came the next day and fed him. She noted the state of his ankle and slapped him on the head, one more bruise to teach him nothing. He was by then too exhausted to fight back or protect himself, though he would have rejoiced if the cruel man across the Dragon Bowl had jumped up and killed her. Instead the man snorted as if concurring that the boy was getting his just deserts.

Thus went his days. He sat unprotected in all weather, crouching to hide from the sun, lying flat in the curve of the bowl when the rains came and washed the dirt off all of them into the center of the bowl, where it drained back into the ocean. The floor of the bowl was tiled but he couldn’t understand what the tiles represented, if they represented anything at all, so many of them were missing.

One day a woman stabbed a man to death at the end of the beam and then leapt over the railing to her own death. The man, who had tried to assault her, died hung across the railing, watching his blood trickle into the sea. The next morning he’d been pushed off, too.

The boy didn’t have any idea how long he remained chained up. His leg festered and healed. The rain seemed to cleanse the wound, but rotted his clothes until they were tatters.

True to her word, the woman continued to bring him food. She seemed surprised by his tenacity. Every time she came now, she said, “I bet this is the last time I see you.” But he was always there the next time, emaciated and exhausted.

The food she brought seemed of a better quality then, as if she were so awed by his continuance that she was rewarding him. She touched him each time before she left, gently, almost tenderly. He couldn’t understand the look in her eyes.

One afternoon someone jumped off the beam. The boy leaned over the wall to watch the body drop to the ocean. He had only seen the movement of the jumper peripherally; he didn’t even know if it was a man, a woman, or a child. He might have jumped then, too, if it would have finished him quick; but he knew he would only have ended up dying slowly upside down, hung from the railing by the chain. It would also have called attention to him, and whoever hauled him back up would surely have beaten him again, or worse.

When the visitation finally came, he was asleep.

It was so silent and swift that he didn’t even stir. In his dream the world flashed white, scalding his eyelids. Something thin and tall spoke to him in a reedy voice, words that were not human language yet which he understood after a fashion, the syllables weaving through his brain, knitting together things that had never been united before, bits of thought that had never found a way to coalesce, words like a glue to bond the strips of parchment in the madman’s bundle.

He awoke to someone babbling nearby. The light of dawn gilded the Dragon Bowl through the spaces between the bollards. It lit the face of the man babbling beside him. He remembered the man from the day before, remembered that he’d been surly and greasy. Now the man stared with wide eyes, and his hair had gone white as clouds and sprayed out from his head.

The bowl itself had been transformed. The missing tiles had all been replaced, creating a colorful mosaic. On it lay a host of small objects, all clear like glass but flexible—containers and lids scattered about. The people who’d been sleeping on or near the beam scrambled out onto the bowl and began grabbing up the objects. Lids seemed to be the wrong size for containers, and the people combed through the scatter in a frenzy, tossing one and then another lid aside, shoving one another to get at the next, fighting over a complete container whenever a lid fit. The sealed containers seemed to have an effect on whoever held them, for anyone who made a lid pop into place immediately began to wail—more as if they’d lost something than in joy at completion of a task. Some struck those nearest them with the completed containers, while others collapsed and clutched them to their bosoms, rocking back and forth while weeping as if they held a dead child in their arms.

More people traveled along the beam every moment, pouring out, filling the bowl. Citizens of the span had seen the visitation—that was what the boy heard them calling it—and all wanted to share in whatever bounty the gods had left. Word of the event spread quickly, even to the underspan. Within the hour the boy’s keeper had pushed her way along the beam to find him. She demanded that he give her whatever the gods had bestowed upon him. He drew a container from behind his back and handed it to her. He’d found a lid to match it and handed that to her as well. He waited breathlessly to see if she would fit the lid into place. Instead she stared with swelling anger at the two pieces. “This? This is what I’ve fed you for all these months? The time I’ve invested in you, and you give me a container for fish scraps?” She backhanded him as if he had lied to her. “I thought—” She paused, shook her head, and sighed. “I let myself believe in you, in this, how stupid am I? You are useless to me.” As she said it, she bent down and snatched another of the small containers that had been overlooked, hiding it in her blouse. “Useless,” she repeated, and then, as if she’d forgotten about him, she walked around the bowl and back along the beam. Only then did he notice that the beam, like the tiles, had been repaired—that an intact low wall now ran along both sides of the narrow walkway, as must have been the case when it first appeared. The woman stepped off the beam and was accosted immediately; from what he could see, she began bargaining with citizens too frightened to come out themselves and grab one of the odd containers.

The boy didn’t understand any of it—not the woman, not the crazed people about him, not the excitement over an event that seemed to have produced nothing of value. What sort of gods played such tricks on people? They’d repaired the tiles and the beam—that seemed to be the major transformation, but of interest only to him.

He sat against the rail and watched. He had nothing, said nothing, and no one paid him much mind. As people got something, they deserted the beam, but there were many who, now that a visitation had occurred, decided to sit and wait for another. It would all begin again. It must.

Because of the “blessed” event, there would for a time be more people on the beam and in the hexagonal bowl on any given day, more abusers of children, more who resented his presence here, never mind that he was a prisoner and would gladly have left if they’d freed him. For a while everyone would anticipate the next visitation, until this one faded into memory and most of the cormorants drifted away, back to whatever routine had filled their days before.

He rocked in place, furiously frustrated by the stupidity of people. After a while different ones came and took the madman with the white hair by the arms, stood him up, and walked him down the beam. One glanced his way, and the boy said, “Please, take me, too.” The two paused. They contemplated him as if considering whether he was worth the effort; but he didn’t notice them any longer because he realized that he had spoken. He had spoken and it had made sense. Thoughts inside his head were making sense. He was observing the world around him and it was making sense—or at least the nonsense of it all was suddenly comprehensible to him as nonsense. For the first time in his life, he recognized and understood the motives of others.

The madman took notice of him and began to laugh. The two handlers dismissed the boy and hurried on with their charge.

He was aware! He stared up at the sky, at clouds and birds and sun. Whatever the gods had done for everyone else, they had given him the gift of himself.

He was still marveling at his transformation when the woman returned some hours later. She told him, “Well, I’ve found someone to take you off my hands, and that’s what I’m going to do.” She unlocked the chain from the bollards but not from his ankle. She let him get to his feet, but then pulled him along, and he had to hop to keep up.

They arrived back on the span. He wanted to run off, he wanted to shout at her for how she had treated him, but he did neither. He pretended to be the idiot she saw. His skinny legs trembled from disuse. It had been so long since he had walked anywhere beyond the length of the chain, and he was starved. He intended to bide his time, to see what she had in mind. While he now had the gift of thought, he still didn’t know much about the world or how it worked.

She led him through twisting alleys and small rough streets, avoiding the main thoroughfares, where his situation might have proved inconvenient for her, and finally came to the very end of the span. The great wall of the tower rose up before them; but instead of taking him into the tower and off the span, she turned and walked down the narrowest of lanes with the tower wall on the left and the fronts of houses on the right, so close that he could have climbed in their windows even on the chain. The lane was a cul-de-sac, but near the end of it a dark doorway had been carved out of the tower wall.

The woman banged on the door, and it opened almost immediately. A slender but round-faced man with darting eyes stood there, dressed in an embroidered robe that was belted slackly at his waist, revealing a hairy abdomen above loose trousers. He beamed at the woman. She handed him the chain. He looked the boy up and down. “He ain’t much,” he said. “Looks like a skellington, he does.”

“I told you, Bogrevil, he’s been living on the bowl, waiting for the gods.”

“I heared they come last night. They talk to you, boy?”

The boy kept his mouth closed and acted as if the question had been directed at Mother Kestrel.

“He’s mute?” Bogrevil asked.

“Yes, as I told you, he’s an idiot,” she replied testily. “You don’t want him, that’s fine, I’ll be on my way.” She reached for the chain, but Bogrevil drew it out of her reach, which tugged the boy inside the doorway.

Bogrevil said, “If he’s been visited by the gods, then I get whatever he’s got. You don’t.”

The woman looked at the boy, but he stared dumbly at the ground as if unaware of his circumstances. She snorted with laughter. “Oh, I’ll agree to that. He’s got anything from here on, it’s yours to keep, including vermin.”

Bogrevil reached out and dropped three coins into her hand then. “Excellent,” he said and drew the boy closer to him. “And if you find yourself with any other boys to be rid of, you know where to find me, m’dear. I’m always in need of stock.” He reeled the boy through the doorway and shut the door with the kick of one foot.

“There’s an end to that,” said Bogrevil. Outside the door, the woman was expressing a similar opinion, though with a curious pang of regret. She had foolishly put her faith in that boy simply because he hadn’t died. She’d let herself become sentimental. Never again, she swore. Never again.

In the dusty and dimly lit foyer Bogrevil took him by the shoulders and pressed them back, tilted his chin up, then stepped away from him. “You’re skinny as fishbones, but that’s from her feeding you on air and dreams. Otherwise you’re well turned out, or will be when you’ve had sommit to eat. Waste of talent, though. None of my clients will want to inhale an idiot. Still, we’ll find a use for you. See if you can juggle a tray, hmm?” When the boy did not respond, Bogrevil patted his cheek and released him. “Well, come on, then, follow me.” He threw back a curtain, and light from a distant source below him splashed his shadow across the ceiling of the foyer. “We’ll get you fed and bathed and into some whole clothes.” He started down a steep stairwell. The boy had forgotten about the chain, and nearly stumbled as it snapped tight and pulled him to the edge of the steps.

“I wonder what the gods gave you,” Bogrevil said as he descended. “Many’s the time I’ve said the gods are capricious. Sometimes they give us what we need, and sometimes they offer so much that it drives us mad. Sometimes they see the greed inside and they curse us for it. Sometimes the gifts don’t mean nothin’ at all.”

They went down into the belly of the tower.

True to his word, Bogrevil had the boy fed. It was more food than he’d seen in a single serving ever. After the near starvation on the dragon beam, he couldn’t eat half of it. All the while he watched the other boys sizing him up. They seemed envious of the attention being paid him, though it was no more than had been paid to them upon arriving. He kept his eyes on nothing and focused on the meal. The other boys took this to mean that he was harmless and ignored him.

After the meal, Bogrevil had one of the other boys pick the lock on the cuff and removed the chain from his ankle. Two older boys led him to a steamy chamber, stripped him of his clothing, and dropped him into a large bathing pool. A dozen others swam in it, a few laughing and squealing but most just floating, withdrawn, it seemed to him. He luxuriated in the warmth. He had no memory of anything like it. Finally, to his shock, a woman waded into the pool. She headed straight for him and took hold of him by one biceps. As naked as the boys, she might have been ten years his senior, but she wasn’t much larger than he. However, she proved to be a good deal stronger. She caught hold of him, and then scrubbed him with a brush so hard that he thought she was flaying him, but he couldn’t squirm out of her grip. A couple of the boys hooted at his predicament but stayed beyond the woman’s reach while they did. She poured something into his hair that she worked in. Whatever it was, it burned terribly, and he struggled furiously to get free of her and dunk his head. She must have expected it, for she wrapped her legs around his belly to keep him in place. Finally, when he thought his hair must be sizzling, she shoved his head underwater, then hauled him up again. He spluttered and spat, sure that his scalp had been burned away. Without a word the woman let go of him and stalked one of the jeering boys, who hadn’t been far enough away after all. The other squealers scrambled naked out of the pool for their lives, while the rest watched her and the goings-on in the water as if none of it mattered. The boy patted his head and was surprised to find that he still had hair.

Later, the same woman lifted him out by the arm and wrapped him in a great cloth. She was wearing one, too. He saw that she had an odd, dark birthmark on one shoulder. She said, “I hope you have the sense to bathe yourself, because I’m not going to do this for you every day.”

Bogrevil came in while the other boys were dressing. “How is he, Eskie?” he asked her.

“Clean,” she replied, and pushed the end of the cloth through his hair. “I rid him of his lice, though it peeled the skin from my fingertips.”

“Good.” Again Bogrevil lifted his chin and studied him. “How old you think he is?”

“Old enough, I’m sure. He has hair, hasn’t he? But he’s been underfed so very long, it could be he is seventeen or more and simply looks twelve. He does not know?”

“Not likely. Anyway, doesn’t matter, he’s not on the menu.”

“He has the looks for…the menu. Fill him out a little and an attractive enough body will appear.”

“Don’t need attractive to clean and serve. Can’t sell half-wits anyhow. Most clients are superstitious enough to think it’s contagious—an idiot’s essence will make them the same.”

“Mmmm,” she replied. “I’m not afraid. Or else it’s too late for me.” She fluttered a hand in front of her face as if to cool her fevered brow.

Bogrevil chortled. “You think you can get a rise out of him, my Eskie?”

“Is that a request?” She shook her head. “I am only saying that he’s a pretty one, though starved.” She snatched the drying cloth off him, left him standing naked while she retrieved clothes for him from a table. “Come, then, give us your arm,” she said as she drew a white tunic on him. “Come,” when she wanted him to raise a foot. Her fingers touched him everywhere, but didn’t linger. She buttoned the tunic down his chest. Its stiff collar nearly reached his chin. Her hazel eyes studied him closely. He blushed at the way she looked at him: He couldn’t help it. She noticed the color in his cheek, and her careless gaze became curious; but she said nothing. Her fingers brushed his hair from his forehead. “A proper server,” she commented and stepped back to let Bogrevil see the boy dressed in white finery, loose silk trousers, and a slender jacket.

“He wears the clothes well enough, don’t he? Superb, Eskie, superb. Now we must find out if he can balance a tray.”

She considered him. “I shall be surprised if he cannot.”

Bogrevil turned to leave. “Oh,” he said and raised a finger. “We have to give him a name. Can’t keep calling him boy. If I were to call out Come here, boy, whenever I wanted him, I’d be crushed by the onslaught.”

“He has no name?”

“I don’t know. His former keeper didn’t bother to assign him one, and he can’t tell me, if he even knows.”

She put a finger to her lips and tapped them. “Let’s call him…something like divers.”

“What?”

“Because he is different.”

“Diverus,” he repeated, mispronouncing what she’d said. “Yes, we got others like that, don’t we—Delicatus and Draucus. Like a—what, lineage, yes.”

Rather than correct him—never a good idea with Bogrevil—she concurred. “Diverus, then.” It was not a bad name in any case.

“Different. Oh, yes, he is. Nice job, Eskie. I can always rely on you an’ your upbringing.” She bowed her head at the compliment. “You go take him to his room, show him about. Maybe some of it’ll stick. We’ll try him out tonight if he can balance a tray.” He went off to see to the rest of his “merchandise.”

Eskie had put on a long white robe. Her black hair cascaded down the back of it. She wore bangles on her wrists and a small chain of bells on her ankles, so that her every movement tinkled and chimed as she led him through a warren of rooms and tunnels. Something about the sound created odd warmth in his belly.

The main parlors of the paidika—there were three—had intricate tapestries hung upon the walls. Two had carpets on the floor, and pillows strewn upon the carpets. The room farthest from the stairs had a square pedestal in the center, and small, backless cushioned chairs ringing the sides of it, as if a show of some sort was about to begin. Lamps and candles of various sizes and shapes filled every corner, and lanterns dangled from the ceilings. Bowls containing some sort of aromatic herbs floating in liquid stood off to each side of the doorways. Their entering the room swirled spice around them. The rooms were not occupied.

Leading from the parlors were narrow halls. The one she led him along opened onto a wider corridor lined with curtained doorways, with leather settees in between them.

Eskie saw him trying to peer into the rooms, and she stepped up to one and drew the curtain back. It was sumptuously decorated, though small and dark. The central feature of the room was an immense sinuous hookah, the cap of which nearly reached the ceiling. Two hoses depended from the side of it and snaked around the bulbous base, mouthpieces resting on pillows as if the smokers had just left the room. In the shadowy recess behind it lay a peculiar lacquered box big enough for someone to lie in. Curving tines of bone like the rib cage of a monster as big as the hookah rose from the side of the box and curled over it toward the center. Symbols painted in the lacquer were meaningless to him. Along the rest of the walls were shelves and niches that held candles, small lamps, and assorted odd objects—tiny silver pillboxes, a few statuettes of fish and other creatures, some carved from wood, others blown from colored glass, and more things he couldn’t identify. When he’d had a good look, Eskie dropped the curtain again.

Owing to the nature of the paidika’s business, she said, the boys generally slept the day through. She led him down another hall and a short flight of steps, taking them even farther from the public part of the paidika. At the end of yet another hall, a set of double doors barred their way. She opened one quietly and ushered him in.

The stone walls of the dormitorium bore brown water stains in jagged rills. The smell in the room reminded him of the underspan itself. High up near the ceiling he saw a grate, no larger than his head, which let in all the light there was, and he imagined that if he could climb up to it he might find himself looking out upon the same makeshift platforms and hovels from which he’d been removed.

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.

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 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.

The stairs were difficult to navigate, in part because the head struck every step, and even though the man was dead the thock of each impact made Diverus wince. Behind them Abnevi muttered, “Are we going to wash him? I want to bathe, too. Reasonable and customary cleanliness is a clause I put in every policy. It’s healthful.”

At the bottom everything was dim, although the early-morning light cast enough of a glow beneath the span that the checkered pattern of the gate was distinct. They lay the body down; Bogrevil fetched keys from a cord around his neck and unlocked the padlock. Abnevi broke away from them and clambered down into the washing pool.

By then one of the behemoths had awakened and lumbered over to see what was occurring. He was nearly bald, and his head was deformed, as if the skull had developed bulbs beneath the skin. When he saw Bogrevil he grinned stupidly and grunted. “Yes, yes,” Bogrevil said, and patted him on the shoulder. “Good fella. We need to move that lock.” The simple giant stepped over the body as though it were a log, and with Bogrevil’s help raised the padlock. The two of them managed to hook it over one of the bars on the gate. The giant then pushed the gate open.

Bogrevil came back, and they picked up the body again.

Outside, the position on the ledge afforded a view in both directions. To the right the edge of the bridge pier was close enough that the joints between the blocks of stone were visible. It would have taken only seconds to reach the corner of the pier. Beyond it the surface of the sea shimmered with distant red splashes of dawn. To the left the ledge dwindled steadily, vanishing at last into the darkness of the span’s underbelly. A bright semicircle defined the opening on the far side. Above them the air was filled with only darkness and the flitting brightness of a few passing gulls. No platforms, nor people—the underworld from which he’d emerged would be on the opposite side of the tower. There were no boats near enough to see them.

Bogrevil set his end of the corpse on the ledge. He got down onto his knees and plunged his hand into the water off the side. It took him only a moment to dredge up a large stone. This he dragged to the body, where he threw back the cape, pulled loose the man’s trousers, and shoved the stone inside them. When he had done this three times, he cinched the belt again. “That’s good enough,” he said. Getting stiffly to his feet, he gestured his helper to come out onto the ledge.

The lumpish giant shuffled past the gate, round eyes darting from side to side. He made a whining noise.

“It’s all right,” Bogrevil said. “Nobody’s tryin’ to make you leave. You two, put down your end and come over here and take a leg with me.”

They obeyed. The giant picked up both arms. “Now we shall swing him three times. Third time we let go. You understand?” He was asking the giant, who nodded, but kept glancing fearfully at the sea, as though something might come out of it at any moment.

“One.”

“Two.”

“Three.”

The body sailed out over the black water farther than Diverus had expected. It hit with surprisingly little sound, and sank immediately. The cape floated for a moment then disappeared. A stream of bubbles trickled up to the surface. The exotic mask bobbed up, expressionless without eyes behind it; it swiveled about as if looking for something, and then drifted out toward the open water.

“Right, then. Back inside, everybody,” Bogrevil ordered.

It wasn’t until the gate had closed that Diverus realized he should have run then and there. The ledge would have taken him someplace, and neither the behemoth nor Bogrevil could have caught him. Even had he dived into the sea, it would have carried him away—to a boat, to the pier of the next span—but now it was too late and he was part of the paidika again. Why hadn’t he run?

They slid the lock back onto its latch, and Bogrevil turned the key before turning to them. “Now, this did not happen. That gentleman, whoever he was, was never here, you never seen him, and you slept the whole morning through. Everyone slept.”

Behind them, Abnevi splashed and splashed and tittered in the pool. His head lolled back and his eyes rolled up at the ceiling. “Oh, that’s pretty,” he slurred, but almost immediately he raised an arm as if to protect himself from something in flight, and dove, crying, “No, no! Get away!” He remained underwater only a moment, but when he came up he was laughing.

Eskie said, “What about him?”

“It’s done sommit to him, hasn’t it? Dunno what, don’t care. He likes it so down here, I’d prefer he stay. Don’t want him babbling—we don’t know what he saw, do we? What he might tell if his mind were to come back. Down here, it won’t matter. He can tell everybody. They’re just like him.” He reached out and caught Diverus suddenly, dragged him close.

“It’s our anniversary tonight and we don’t want nothing to spoil that. Nobody answers no questions. You want to have a little fun being ‘enlisted’ in the wee hours, I don’t mind, see, ’cause you don’t take away from no customers. But no mistakes, pretty one, or what happened to Abnevi’ll be something you’ll wish happened to you.”

Diverus shook his head and drew a finger across his mouth to indicate he would say nothing. Bogrevil nodded that he understood. “Oh, yeah,” he said, “that’s right, you can’t say anything about anything.” He released Diverus then, caught Eskie by the elbow, and started back up the steps with her in tow. “Can’t say a thing!” he called out, and vanished up into the dark.

The sound of Abnevi’s unmoored laughter followed Diverus up the steps like a curse.

Bogrevil took Eskie with him, so Diverus had no one to speak with, no opportunity to confess the terrible guilt he felt over Abnevi’s fate. He returned to the dormitorium, where everyone was asleep, and lay down, certain that he could never fall asleep again. Abnevi’s mind was shattered and it was his doing—he had interrupted the afrit at its feeding. He kept reliving the moment when the creature’s head turned, severing its connection, the blue tendrils snapping back into the helpless boy: his fault. Those round white eyes seared him with accusation.

The next thing he knew, he was crawling from the depths of sleep and uncertain that the events had been real. Two other boys lay asleep in the room, sunken-eyed and pale. Afrit victims. Everyone else had gone. He got up and hurried past the sleepers to bathe and eat.

When he returned to the dormitorium, Eskie was feeding one of the weak boys. With the spoon she pointed to his pallet. A costume of red crushed velvet and white silk lay there beside a long white band of cloth. He dressed while she finished ministering to the other boy. The sleeves covered his hands, and strings dangled off the cuffs. She came and tied the strings to loops at the shoulders. The sleeves were so full that he could freely move his arms, but they looked like wings. Then she took the cloth and wrapped it around his head, forming a turban, efficiently, as if she did this every day. She tucked the end of the cloth into a seam, and then fastened a cheap jewel to the front of it. “That looks very good, you’re becoming one of the more attractive boys here,” she said.

The comment so appalled him that he stepped back from her. “How can you be so—” he snarled, but got no further, as the façade she had been maintaining collapsed. Her eyes filled with tears. She put her arms around him and whispered in his ear, “Remember what I’ve told you. Stay out of his way, stay out of sight. Don’t do anything to call attention to yourself. He’s dressing you for them and tonight he might do anything.”

When she drew back and smeared the tears with her palm, he saw that her cheek was bruised and swollen. “He hit you.”

“I—” She sniffled. “It was my fault.”

If he’d had a knife just then he might have changed all their fates.

The celebration commenced. Corridors and parlors overflowed with guests, more than he’d ever seen. A trio of musicians had been given to Bogrevil as a gift for the evening. They stood back-to-back in the center of the middle parlor: One played a small drum dangling from a lanyard around his neck, another plucked a lute, and the third fingered a reed instrument called a shawm. The paidika’s musician sat on the floor in the corner behind them, watching with envious eyes.

The side parlors had been fitted with long tables of food, artistic displays that were quickly turned into skeletal remains as if by a horde of insects and as quickly replaced.

The other boys like Diverus had been dressed in gaudier costumes than usual—feathers and glittering scales, splashes of color everywhere.

Diverus carried tray after tray of drinks—in his arms for a change, instead of on his head. Guests snatched everything off each before he’d even reached the parlors, some on their way to the afrits’ chambers—as he now thought of the back rooms. The masked visitors gobbled and guzzled as if fearing they might be stranded without sustenance for days.

Bogrevil remained at the bottom of the stairs, dressed in regal violet embroidered robes. He bowed with great flourishes to each individual or group that descended, a sultan welcoming his guests. Initially people escorted their choices to him, but as the evening wore on and the guests came to outnumber the paidika’s stable, they came to him with names written on slips of paper, which he wrote down on a small parchment on a podium beside his mammoth guard. They understood that they would have to wait to take their turns. Later arrivals might not have anyone left to choose from at all. He might send in a second client while a boy still lay in the afrit’s perch, but not a third. Nobody could recover from three sessions in a row, and it wasn’t as if he was going out of business after tonight.

Early in the festivities one guest clutched Diverus as he was retreating with an empty tray. He looked at the hand on his sleeve, noting the polished nails, and glanced up at coal-black eyes fringed by long lashes behind a gold mask. Dragged before Bogrevil, he listened as the guest said, “I’d have this one.” It was a woman, as Bogrevil must have known, too. He expected to be let go.

Bogrevil closed his hand over hers. “He’s lovely, you know. Your taste is uncommonly fine.” He let this statement hang in the air for a moment—to tease, or to torture Diverus. “He is, however, of diminished capacity, and it might well be catching. Let me assure you, were he not, he wouldn’t be serving food. Now, let me offer you something else tasty,” and he led her away. Diverus didn’t see her again for some hours.

One by one boys were purchased and taken off while others milled about waiting their turn. Each time he watched one leave the room, he wanted to stop him. Didn’t anyone notice Abnevi’s absence? Didn’t they wonder what had happened? Could they read the guilt in his eyes?

He couldn’t help thinking of each of them in their curtained and candlelit chambers, lying beneath insubstantial monstrosities as their life was drained, their souls served up as refreshment. How could Eskie suggest that they desired such a thing?

As the evening wore on, other guests considered him. Their eyes spoke their interest. He wondered what they got from what they inhaled, and why any one boy was more appealing than any other. And why was it only boys—a preference of the afrits or merely less problematic than if the genders mixed? Would there be paidikas full of girls, or was there another word for such places? He knew so little of the world, so little that was of use.

Each time his tray emptied and he escaped to the kitchen, he stalled as long as he could, staying at the back of the line, remaining as invisible as possible, remembering what Eskie had said. Perhaps the fourth time he had done this, the cook placed small brass cups upon the tray as he held it, then filled each with a green distillation. As he filled the ones nearest Diverus’s body, he leaned across the tray and said, “Clever boy. Dressed so nice, have you become merchandise now?” At Diverus’s look of shock, he laughed. “Can’t dodge all night long, you know, no matter how you hang back. It’ll be my turn to choose eventually, when they’ve all gone. He’s saving you for me.”

Diverus flung the tray at him.

Thick green liquid spattered the cook from head to waist, most of it running down his filthy apron. Diverus shoved past those waiting behind him. The cook yelled at him then erupted in the sort of laugh that promised punishment, but Diverus didn’t stop. He ran out and into one of the back corridors full of afrit chambers.

A curtain parted, and the woman who’d earlier attempted to rent him stumbled out. Her dark eyes were slits, barely open, her features slack. A blindfold hung loosely about her throat on top of her gilded mask. So drunk on the essence she’d inhaled was she that she’d forgotten to put her disguise back on, or even all of her costume. She was barefoot now and bare-shouldered. The cape she’d worn must be in the room still. She kept to the wall to steady herself. As he passed her she called out, “Pretty boy,” reaching limply for him, but then slid down onto the settee as if the gesture had robbed her of all energy.

He eluded her easily and merged into the cramped halls leading to the parlors, wriggling through clusters of guests and boys, realizing that he should have gone the other way, down to the laundry, where at least he might hide until the anniversary was over, even at the risk of never leaving it again.

Instead he emerged in the foyer before the parlors and ran right into Bogrevil, who was escorting someone from the main stairs. “Well, well, escaped from a harem, have we? Where’s your tray?” He seemed to be drunk, but it only increased his malevolence. He turned to the guest behind him and asked, “May I recommend to you this handsome creature? He’s very quiet, but you can tell just by lookin’ that his essence is the stronger for it.”

The guest considered him for but a moment, then nodded. “Definitely,” he said, a deep, almost sultry voice.

“Good,” Bogrevil replied, and clamped onto Diverus’s wrist. “Time spent with an afrit will do you proper, my boy. World of good, take you down a peg and remind Eskie who she owes her life to.” He started forward as the besotted woman with the gold mask emerged out of one narrow corridor, still lacking half her costume. She pointed at Diverus, the blindfold hanging from her hand. “Pretty boy,” she repeated. Bogrevil turned to the client, grinning. “See there, he’s very popular.” He snatched the blindfold from her and snapped it to get the sentinel’s attention. The huge Kotul took the woman by the shoulder and guided her toward the stairs. Bogrevil called out, “Be sure someone retrieves—ah, ne’er mind, I’ll do it meself.” Then with an exaggerated wigwag he led the way down the narrow hall. Boys and clients stepped aside to let him through.

In the afrit corridor Bogrevil directed them to the room the woman had just abandoned. He marched Diverus to the box in the corner and, by twisting his wrist, forced him to his knees. “Get in there. Now.” He didn’t let go, so Diverus could only crouch beneath the steepled tines and step both feet inside. Bogrevil released him. “If you try to come out of here,” he said, “I’ll drown you myself. You understand?”

The client, with obvious dismay at the tone of what was occurring, took the blindfold Bogrevil held out to him, and went around to the far side of the water pipe.

Bogrevil swept up the abandoned cape and boots; then, as if a signal had been sounded, he rushed out into the corridor before anything emerged from the hookah, transparently fearful. He might have been in league with the monstrosities, but clearly he didn’t want to encounter them.

The curtain snapped shut.

Diverus lay in the box, watching the flicker of candles, listening to the breathing of the client. He waited, anticipating he didn’t know what—Eskie had said that it put the victims to sleep before preying upon them, but how specifically he still didn’t know. He didn’t want to be awake.

Slowly he became aware of the candles growing dimmer, the light fading away. But the darkening room only made him more alert. Then on the curved ribs above him something slithered. Its grayish fingers ended in black talons, and it pulled itself along the tines as if climbing up a wall rather than dragging along horizontally. He was sure he was supposed to be asleep by now. The glowing orbs of its eyes became visible at the bottom periphery of his sight, and he squeezed his eyes closed so as not to see more. Shortly he could feel it directly above him, feel it staring down at him with such a magnetic pull that finally he couldn’t help himself.

He looked up.

Gone was the white-eyed monster, gone the tines of bone and the room. Above him on a sharp outcrop of rock sat a beautiful sphinx. Her hair was plaited in a rainbow around her smooth and perfect face. Her full breasts rested upon her paws, and her paws upon a pink marble ledge. She watched him with such tenderness that his chest grew chilly with emotion. He wanted to climb up on the ledge with her, to rest beside her. She smiled to him, reading his thoughts. Then she raised her head, looking past him, and he turned to follow her gaze.

On the far side of him a strange black booth had been set up in the sand, with a pale blue screen in its center. The world about them darkened. While the screen began to glow, the shadows of two grotesque caricatures of people walked across it as if their joints had been broken, then began to talk to each other. One looked like Bogrevil. He could hear the shadows speaking, but it was gibberish. Somehow, though, he knew the story being told, knew what they were going to do. He watched, laughed at humor that eluded him, and was stabbed by sadness at tragedy he didn’t comprehend. She spoke then, the sphinx, despairing. “You know this story?” He nodded, still watching, though he couldn’t think of its name. “I played so small a part,” she bemoaned. “But if my role were larger, then we should not have met at all in this place.” He couldn’t fathom that. “It wants music,” she commented. “That will come soon enough, I know.” Her voice broke.

He turned back to her, his heart wrenched by the sound of her weeping. Tears flowed to her paws, and dripped off the claws. He cupped his hands until they were full, and her image rippled in the held pool. He couldn’t understand how, when everything was dark around her, she continued to glow as if in soft bluish moonlight.

He raised his hands and drank her tears as if he might absorb her grief. When he opened his eyes, she was receding, though neither of them seemed to be moving at all.

“Sleep, my darling,” she said, and he knew the voice at last though he hadn’t heard it for such a long time: She hadn’t become a merwoman at all. She’d changed into this doleful manticore. “Sleep,” she said again and though he wanted to run and embrace her and never let her go this time, he could only watch her shrink into the distance, a source of retreating light that filled in with black despair and was soon gone altogether.

He turned back to the play, but the booth was closed, the screen covered; then the remaining light dimmed and the booth also disappeared. Everything was dark now, and he was alone, floating, a mask on the waves, free of anguish, of pain, of the helplessness of his life, and he released himself to the will of the black water as it carried him away. Out to sea, he hoped.

When he awoke he didn’t at first know where he was. His mind was confused, jumbled. Candles burned nearby, reflected in the white bone of the tusk-like tines above him, making them seem to dance as the candle flames flickered. He was in a bed, but the sides of it were higher than he. It was a box, really, a shallow box; and not far away stood a towering brass water pipe.

Then he remembered, and he knew what had been done to him, but he was so drained of emotion, of fear, anger, that he didn’t react to the knowledge, only contemplated it as if the emotions belonged to some other person.

Eskie should be coming for him soon. She would help him back to the dormitorium, put him to bed, and later bring him some broth, something to revive him. That sounded very appealing. He realized that he was ravenously hungry. Now he understood why the boys let themselves be chosen, even fought for the privilege of service. Already he wanted to be with the sphinx again, to hear her voice, his mother’s voice; he needed to tell her that he loved her and wouldn’t let them throw her into the sea this time. No, he would cling to her as she moved into darkness, wrap his arms around her neck, and climb upon her back and ride her so that she couldn’t disappear.

He licked his lips. They were dry, and licking them made them sticky. He remembered again that he was hungry.

After a while he crawled from the box on his own. No one remained in the chamber. The blindfold lay curled on the floor beside the pipe as if for the next client. He stood, swaying, and placed his hands on the belly of the pipe to steady himself. It was cold, and when he drew his hand away, his palm was imprinted with the designs etched in the bronze. He rapped his knuckles against it to listen to the sound echo inside. What did that do to the afrit? he wondered. Did it slumber after it had drunk of someone like him? Did it hear him? Know he was out here? He’d have liked to communicate with it, if only in the dream—if it had been merely a vivid dream and not a real vision of Nechron’s world, of some manner of afterlife. What did afrits show everyone else? He closed his eyes and rocked his head. His existence was suddenly compressed, the whole course of a lifetime squeezed inside him. His eyes ached as if they’d seen too much.

He shuffled away from the water pipe, made it to the doorway and then out into the hall. No one was there, either. Candles still burned in a few of the chambers, but in most the curtains hung open upon darkened rooms. Perhaps even now Eskie was helping someone else back to the dormitorium.

He shambled along the hallway, looking into the darkened and empty chambers, wondering if everyone else was asleep and he the only one left.

The corridors proved to be confounding this morning. He would turn a corner but almost immediately forget what hallway he’d been in prior to it. In no time at all, he lost his way to the sleeping quarters. Down a corridor that should have returned him to the dormitorium, he found himself at the base of spiraling steps that he’d never seen before. What if they took him up and out of the paidika? Might there be an exit no one had been told about, that only Bogrevil knew? He had to see, because he couldn’t imagine he would ever find his way back here again.

He climbed slowly, carefully, using hands and feet, and sometimes knees. He felt like a turtle. Each step took all his effort, and he tried to count them as he climbed but too soon forgot the number. He became aware of a noise, not voices exactly, but cooing and deep groans. He raised his head and saw that the steps ended in an open doorway. Dim light spilled down from it. He crabbed up a few more steps until his head was high enough to see through the opening into what he knew immediately were Bogrevil’s private rooms. Neither of them saw him. Bogrevil was too focused on sensation, his eyes closed, mouth drawn back in a feral grin, and foam bubbling on his lips. Eskie lay with her arms out, head back. Her legs were locked around his waist. She moaned once, licked her lips, and turned her head, folding her arms around it in a gesture expressive of pleasure.

Diverus sank down and let his head rest on the cold step. He couldn’t drown out the grunting and murmuring. Beyond that what could he do? He could barely crawl. If he intruded, Bogrevil would kill him before he’d dragged himself through the doorway—and for what? Eskie wasn’t being harmed, wasn’t performing against her will, not like he had done. Then he imagined that he saw the sphinx again, and he forgot his will.

He slid back down the steps, more confused than ever. Eskie had warned him, protected him against Bogrevil, yet here she was, his mistress, his lover if love was involved in the repulsive bargain. He wanted to feel betrayed but foundered in prying loose enough emotion. Why did he have to know this? He didn’t want to know it. Better that the afrit should wipe away all his memory and return him to the imbecilic state in which he’d lived his former life. What good was knowing the truth of things?

He stumbled through the maze of halls again, and finally into a dark and unoccupied guest room, into the box, and onto his belly. Let the creature come for him, let it steal his soul and send him forever to live with the sphinx. He didn’t care.

He fell asleep like that, but no dreams came, and if the afrit perched above him, he never knew. He woke only when one of the boys came to clean the room and found him. Thinking him dead, the cleaner ran out, calling Bogrevil’s name and shouting, “Dead! Dead!”

Diverus pushed himself onto hands and knees. His joints ached. He was like someone who had been laid down by a fever and, having come through it, wants to get away from his illness. His legs held him as he plunged across the room. He was almost at the door when Eskie arrived. She’d run from wherever she was, and when she saw him her breath caught. She reached toward his face. “Thank the gods, you aren’t dead. I thought…I was looking for you, you need—”

He slapped her hand aside. “I don’t need anything from you.”

“Diverus, what is wrong?”

He replied, “Get out of my way, please. I have to…have to eat something.” He couldn’t even look directly at her, but smoldered, his jaw clenched; yet he didn’t move.

She read his inaction, his fury, and understood, though not how or when he’d found out. “Diverus,” she said, “you can’t be in love with me.”

His whole face burned; his eyes scalded. “I’m not,” he said.

“He owns me. My family sold me to give them enough money to live on. My father was ill; he needed things we couldn’t afford. Medicines.”

“Shut up.”

“They sold me to him. I’m his slave. More so than you or any of these boys you live with.” She twisted at the waist and pulled back one sleeve of her shirt and rolled her arm so he could see the dark crescent near her shoulder. “This isn’t a birthmark. It’s his sigil. It doesn’t come off. I’m property. That’s all I am, all I can ever be.” Then she stepped aside and he pushed past her; he was not ready to hear explanations or excuses, least of all hers.

He shoved through the curtain and through a gathering of boys, then took one of the narrow halls that led to the kitchen level.

The cook was chopping turnips as Diverus entered. Glancing up, the cook said, “Well, well, come for your special treat at last, my little harem boy?” At the same time he set down his knife, placed both hands on the cutting board, and leaned forward. “Is it my turn finally, hmm?” As he reached across the board and tousled Diverus’s hair, he smiled with vulpine connivance.

Diverus snatched the knife and drove it straight through the cook’s other hand and into the board.

The cook shrieked to the ceiling. He clutched the handle but it had been driven hard into the board, and he had to rock it to loosen it, which made him squeal and squeal. His blood began to soak into the pale raw turnips. Diverus grabbed another knife, and this one he held to the cook’s throat. The cook clutched the handle stuck into his hand and whimpered. He quavered, his face pale as dough and glistening with sweat. Diverus said softly, “Never.” Then he laid down the knife and walked away. Behind him, the cook shrieked again as he finally freed his hand from the board. His cries rose and fell in waves of agony behind Diverus.

In the tight passage Bogrevil knocked past him, giving him a cursory but suspicious glance before hurrying to the kitchen. More boys followed; a few glared accusingly at him, others with a look more akin to worship. His own cored-out look challenged them all.

He went back to the dormitorium, to his pallet, and lay down. The others in the room were either asleep or too weak to do more than watch him lurch past. Kotul, asleep on his belly on the largest pallet, was sprawled halfway onto the floor.

By the time Diverus had fallen upon his pad he was shaking and feverish, and he drew his legs up, folding his arms around them, and waited for sleep that wasn’t going to come. Strangest of all was that nobody pursued him for his crime. He expected them to pour into the room, Bogrevil and his legion of boys, to drag him against his will down to the laundry pool, there to drown him in the dark and toss his miserable, weighted corpse into the sea just as he had helped dispose of the dead client. Through the vents high up on the wall, he could hear distant noises from the underspan, from the world where he’d been a captive to his own helplessness. He’d escaped it only to be a captive here, no higher nor closer to the surface of the world. The difference was that he knew it now, but knowing improved nothing. Knowing was worse than being an idiot. He wished almost that the gods had never made him aware; he’d been better off when nothing stayed with him, when the abuses rolled off, one after the other, and he felt nothing more than the immediate pain, the anguish of the moment, forgotten soon enough. This—this thinking, feeling, knowing—hurt too much, demanded too much of him. He didn’t want to die; he just wanted to lose himself once more. His brain whirled around the subject, and he closed his eyes to wring it out, to exorcise thinking, like a demon from his mind.

Eventually Eskie entered the hall. She carried a tray through the dormitorium, which she placed on the floor beside his bed. A large bowl and a fist-sized chunk of bread lay on it. She didn’t expect him to take it from her. “You need to eat,” she said, as if to the whole room. “If you want me to leave, then I will, and you can feed yourself.”

When he didn’t move, she nodded as if satisfied. “All right, then.” She left the bed and walked with growing speed to the door and out again.

The bowl sat within his line of sight unless he rolled over onto his side, turning his back to it. Steam snaked out of it, and his stomach clenched at the smell. His eyes felt as if they would at any moment collapse into his skull; the sockets themselves throbbed. He had to order his hand to reach for the spoon. Once he had it, he had to concentrate to direct himself to lean up on one elbow, and then he had to drag himself closer to the tray.

The soup was hot and oily and thick. If the cook had made it for him, it must have been before…before the accident. Otherwise it would have been full of broken seashells or something else to kill him. Or maybe Eskie had made it. If only he’d spoken to her, said what he felt, she would have stayed, would have fed him as she did all the other boys. They didn’t care that she belonged to Bogrevil, why should he? He was a boy, nobody at all. She wasn’t his age. She’d never given him a reason to hope or even believe—no, that wasn’t entirely true. She had warned him, had protected him, had in her way made him feel special and different from all the others. He didn’t want to be just one more boy in the paidika, his body a source of someone else’s pleasure and an afrit’s meal until he was nothing but a husk, back where he began, stupid and helpless forever. Why would anyone desire that? But when he closed his eyes, he saw the sphinx again, alive and bright and loving, and he wanted her more than anything. He trembled with desire.

By the time he wiped the crust of bread around the bowl to sop up the last bit of the liquid, he felt newly born. He’d have crawled into a box for another client now—at least, he felt as if he could. It would turn off his mind, set him free from what he knew. Later. Let them ask him later.

He lay back and was soon asleep.

The paidika didn’t open for business the following night. The events of the anniversary had taken a toll and required recovery. Some boys had indeed been subjected to the afrits twice that night, which Bogrevil never would have allowed any other time. The ones who weathered the abuse best needed to be carried to their beds; even when fed afterward, they showed little improvement. Recovery would be slow. One boy had, like Abnevi, gone mad, his mind scrambled. “One more for the laundry” was Bogrevil’s glum response. It meant one less money earner among his brood, for which reason if no other he didn’t punish Diverus directly.

The cook, with a hand swollen to twice its normal size, took to his bed, where he intended to remain for days, whining that he must be avenged. Food became a matter of immediate concern, and Eskie had to take over in the kitchen. Without sustenance the exhausted boys would not recover, and Bogrevil needed them active by the second night. He knew perfectly well how the cook goaded and teased certain boys and that he’d repeatedly tried to have his way with some of them; in Bogrevil’s opinion the bastard was lucky the blade hadn’t ended up between his ribs. Nevertheless, Diverus had to be seen to pay for inflicting it. Such an act of rebellion could not be allowed to pass unchallenged, or soon the entire paidika would be out of control, stabbing cooks, snubbing clients, and most importantly disrupting the afrits. Those monstrosities would not take to being inconvenienced for long, and the price would be Bogrevil’s to pay. His servitude to them had another year to run, after which he suspected he would be dispatched or, if lucky, merely forced to find someone to take his place before the ephemeral monsters released him. It wasn’t as if he could escape them on his own. Where, in a world of ocean, could he hide from water creatures? He’d been young and insanely foolish, a ship captain’s cabin boy emptying the slops over the bow, unaware that their ship had entered demon-haunted, seaweed-ensnarled doldrums, oblivious to the horrors swimming in their wake. And then when he’d befouled them, he’d laughed in their faces. It was a wonder they had let him keep his; but afrits did nothing but for a reason. They had wanted something from him. They needed a human agent for their purpose. Oh, to be a ship’s mate again, to be free of these infernal tunnels, to breathe sea air and not worry about the likes of these misfortunate boys…which thought brought him back to the problem at hand.

The simplest solution seemed to be to rent out Diverus as often as possible from now on.

There is much in life that seems random, events for which no obvious purpose is apparent even though they may compound. In the aftermath only can a pattern be discerned—missteps lead to an inevitable conclusion, an inescapable fate, sometimes doom and sometimes triumph. We curse the one and pretend to be responsible for the other, while neither fortune is true.

The next evening the paidika opened for business again. Only two of the boys were still out of commission, and that was excuse enough for Bogrevil to recommend Diverus to some of the clients. Immediately this proved unnavigable: He had been too clever. Previously he had talked so many of them out of engaging the handsome “damaged mute” that the first time he proffered Diverus like some newfound treasure, he got a look of such intense shock and loathing from the client that he made a great show of laughing nervously and proclaiming the suggestion “just my little joke,” before sending the client off with a reliable boy at half the going rate by way of an apology. Then he sat on the steps with a blighted look about the eyes.

He could not recall which or how many of the various strutting peacocks he’d dissuaded from Diverus in the past. There had been so many. If he didn’t refrain from promoting Diverus, he would surely see his reputation suffer—one could not habitually cover such an injudicious suggestion with a bit of laughter or soon the clients would decide for themselves that he was unreliable, and then he would find himself at the mercy of the afrits’ smoke. However he looked at it, promoting Diverus spelled doom.

The result was that Diverus was demoted back to walking about with a tray strapped to his head, and Bogrevil chose the last remaining punishment available when he loudly ordered Diverus to clean the three parlors after everyone had gone. “An’ before you retire, too—you don’t sleep till these rooms is spotless!” He had to hope that such a bellowed exaction sounded harsh enough. At least until he could think up something else. Meanwhile, he discovered that he had a much more pressing—and annoying—problem: his musician.

After a night of blissful accompaniment provided by the donated trio of players, Bogrevil found the out-of-tune plinking of the household instrumentalist no longer tolerable. It was a shortcoming that needed remedy, or else he would assuredly strangle the talentless lad in short order.

The trio had left behind a shawm, bestowing it upon the paidika as a kind of lagniappe, for indeed they had been richly compensated by the lubricious crowd all through the night, more so than at any venue where they’d previously performed. Bogrevil had even petitioned to buy their contract from the guest who happened to be their owner, but the price proved wildly immoderate. Nevertheless, he couldn’t—he just couldn’t—go back to the discordant torture that had graced the parlors before then. How had he ever tolerated it?

In a moment of brilliance—at least, he thought so—he proposed a contest to all the boys in the house, that whoever was able play the shawm would be relieved of all other cleaning and serving duties and elevated to the position of musician, a proposal dependent upon their ignorance of the fact that musician was not a title currently deserving of any respect at all, and certainly not something to which one aspired given the verbal abuse their master and his customers had heaped upon the hapless boy and his tuneless lute from the very first night. For those serving, however, the prospect was so much better than their current station that, one after another during that slow night, they took up the shawm and tried to play it—with unsurprising if excruciating results.

If an untuned lute was a pitiful thing to hear, the squeals of a tortured reed proved infinitely worse. Many of the boys could produce noises on it, but no one was able to produce music. For the paidika the only consequent benefit was that arriving clients were quick to pay for and select a boy for the evening and go off to a distant chamber just to escape the teeth-grating cacophony.

Word of the contest spread to the depths of the laundry, and those with enough sense and a desire to escape their fate made the climb up and crowded the hallways. Abnevi was brought along, too, but unhinged as he was he could neither determine which end of the shawm went into his mouth nor tell when—as it happened, never—he was making music.

Watching each of his peers fail, Diverus found no reason to try it himself. He knew he had never held a musical instrument in his life. Instead he stayed away from the parlors and out of Bogrevil’s way, even hiding in the stairwell to Bogrevil’s chambers, where he managed to doze awhile.

Finally, late in the night, long after all the boys had tried and failed and retreated dismally to their inescapable duties and from there finally to bed, he entered the empty middle parlor to gather mugs and plates to carry to the kitchen. Some client’s grubby hand had smeared a wall with an oily print, and he brought in a bucket from the kitchen and scrubbed at the mark.

Having cleaned the handprint, Diverus wandered over to the pillows where the lute and the shawm lay. For all their efforts no one had managed to coax a single musical strain out of the shawm. It seemed likely to Diverus that the hapless musician would have his job back tomorrow. Perhaps he would improve now that his position had been so threatened. Perhaps he would practice.

Diverus picked the shawm up to look at it more closely. The reed mouthpiece had been deformed by teeth biting it too hard, boys clamping and chewing on it in an attempt to accomplish what they could not through blowing. The tubular body was still gaily painted, though the lacquer was worn away around the holes from many fingers over many years. The wider bell had been chipped, but long ago. It now bore Abnevi’s teeth marks, too. It had seen a lot of use before arriving here.

The instrument felt odd in his hands, soft and pliable, but he assumed that this was because his arms were tired. His palms seemed to slide around the shawm as if they and it were old friends. Without thinking he lifted it to his mouth, and his lips pressed tightly around the reed. His eyes rolled closed. The sound of blood roared in his ears; then, distantly, he heard a drone that rose and fell and swirled, catching him up. He felt as if he were approaching the place again where the sphinx dwelled—close, he was so close, and the swirl of the music took on added urgency as he strained, and failed, to reach that place. He could almost hear her voice again. It wants music—the whisper threaded past him in the darkness of his mind.

When he opened his eyes a client was staring at him. Perhaps the man had been sitting outside one of the private rooms, disheveled and drunk on the essence he’d smoked; he was pressed against the tiled edge of the doorway as though it were the floor and he had fallen there. His hands pressed to his face beneath a look of wonderment, or shock, as if what he’d heard had cut into some private and forgotten piece of his soul.

A few moments later Bogrevil arrived from wherever he had been. The disquiet of his features might have been rage, and Diverus, reacting to the look, quickly put down the shawm and stepped away from it. “I’m sorry,” he said. Confused by what he’d done—not really certain what he’d done—he spoke the words before he could compose himself. He hadn’t meant to speak, but he couldn’t take it back, too late.

The master of the paidika then proved himself a master of the obvious. “You spoke,” he said, and in those two syllables was an undertone that said he ought to have known all along.

“I—” He could think of nothing to say, and his voice sounded as raw and strange as when he’d spoken to Eskie. He cleared his throat, lowered his eyes. In the shadows behind Bogrevil, others were arriving, stumbling, shambling.

“Never mind the words now. Pick that thing up.” Bogrevil pointed at the shawm.

Reluctantly, Diverus obeyed. “I meant no harm,” he said.

“Put it to your lips again.”

He needed no coaxing: Drawn to action by the very touch of the shawm, he tasted the reed again, tasted his own spit, and in an instant the sound emerged. He tried to watch his fingers close over the holes, to watch as a tune settled over him like a cape, coming from he knew not where; but his eyes rolled up of their own accord and he floated away, back into the dreamspace where she dwelled. His mother the sphinx was there, somewhere; he could feel her like a breeze upon his cheek, and in the distance that pale rectangle of light that he’d seen in his vision, and there, the pink slab of marble…Whether the song lasted one minute or ten, he didn’t know, but when he returned to his senses he saw that the client in the front had sunk to his knees and was sobbing. Others—boys who should have been abed, other clients who emerged from the corridors—gaped at him, struck dumb. Weaving through the paidika, the sound had pulled them here, its magic so powerful that clients had come without their masks and costumes. Two women stood in their midst, having shed their male disguises; one was half undressed, as was the man with her, suggestive of the manner in which they’d been sharing the afrit smoke. And the afrits—had they allowed the people to escape? Did the music affect them, too, the way the flute of a snake charmer entranced a cobra?

With the tune ended, some of them looked at the others with a shock of recognition, as if they were acquainted outside the brothel and would never have dreamed of finding one another here. At the back, Eskie peered apprehensively between two of the boys.

Bogrevil drew a deep breath. If he’d been angry at first, the wide-eyed look upon his face now wasn’t rage at all, but something like ebullience. He entered the parlor and held out his hand. Diverus gave him the shawm.

“Why,” he asked gravely, “have you kept this skill, this gift—for it’s surely what the gods gave you upon that dragon beam—why have you kept it a secret from us?”

“I didn’t know I knew it.”

A moment longer Bogrevil stared at him. Then he laughed deep in his throat, once, twice. He turned to look at the assembled clients. “This is my anniversary present.” He pointed back at Diverus, chuckling as he did. “I’m blessed by the gods themselves, am I not?” He seemed to become aware of the state of his audience, cleared his throat, and then to no one in particular stated, “Yes, it is not the policy of this establishment to cater to the female sex. It’s not my prejudice, but the law of the span, which I’m sure everyone on the span knows. This being a special night, exceptions will be made…still, let’s not be advertising our violation, hmm?” When no one moved, he added, “He’s not going to play no more right now, so get off.”

At that they did disperse, albeit with reluctance, some up the stairs, others to collect their masks and costumes. The boys looked their new musician over with a mix of resentment and reverence. Bogrevil had Kotul help the weeping client up and on his way, and then said to Diverus, “I can’t let you have this back just yet. Got to get them all out the door and the rest of us to bed, or we’ll be standing here all night. You could transfix the sun and hold the night with that reed.” He bent down and lifted the untuned lute by its neck from the pillows, then handed that to Diverus. “Here. Amuse yourself with this instead.”

He strode back to Eskie and presented her the shawm. “For safekeeping. We’ll need it later, assuming—” He was interrupted by the strumming of the lute. Still out of tune, yet that had not kept Diverus from plucking a lilting phrase from it. Bogrevil wheeled about and watched him, amazed.

Diverus held the lute away from himself, and with his free hand turned the pegs one by one as though knowing exactly how much each needed to be adjusted. His eyes were strangely unfocused, as if he were listening to someone tell him how to accomplish this. When he strummed it again, the lute was in tune. The sound of it was as sweet as a zephyr, one that had never blown before through that sunken place.

Clients coming to the steps to leave stopped again and watched.

Bogrevil hurried to Diverus and covered the strings with a hand. Glazed dark eyes focused on him again, uncertain in their gaze. “Was I…” He saw the effect upon everyone and didn’t need to finish the question.

A small hourglass drum lay on its side, and Bogrevil picked that up. He snatched the lute away and handed him the drum, nodded at it. For a moment Diverus caressed its shape as if by instinct, as he might have done the body of a lover. Seating himself on the pillows, he began to play an easy, loose beat, and shortly added flourishes, making it complex, intriguing. There was magic in the rhythm beneath his palms and fingers.

“You can play anything?” asked Bogrevil.

Diverus stopped. He didn’t realize he had sat. He looked up at his owner. “I don’t…I don’t know where it comes from. I don’t know how it happens.”

“Well, don’t you worry on that, ’cause I do,” Bogrevil replied, and the look he wore was of a man envisioning great wealth.

Diverus became the celebrity of the paidika. The few who’d heard him that first night came back again the next, accompanied by a few more. While he played, the clients were transported, almost as they would have been by afrit smoke, and for far less investment—at least initially. They stood, leaned, sat, forgot their drinks, their conversation, even their established goal in coming here. One or two wept during a mournful passage he played on the shawm, and even Bogrevil looked stricken by the beauty of it when Diverus finally stopped—but not so stricken that he didn’t jump up immediately and take advantage of the now pliable clientele. It turned out that the music weakened their resistance to Bogrevil’s overtures. He easily matched them with boys, now also similarly docile, and sent them all off to the back rooms, even collecting a higher fee than he’d previously asked. His instinct for profit assured him that they would pay—he could smell their surrender—and they did, unhesitatingly. Either dazed by the music or magnanimous because of it, they met his price and went off to smoke the boys.

Almost immediately someone petitioned for Diverus’s company; Bogrevil was ready for that with a fee that he would never have asked for any boy before. The client looked stricken by the figure, but Bogrevil justified it. “For you to have him to yourself deprives everyone else of his magic—the music stops, you see. The smoke sucks the will out of him this night and likely tomorrow. The cost has to compensate for that much loss. You ain’t paying me, see, you’re paying all these good people to deprive them of the serenity he provides. But if you’re willing to cover it, he’s yours, make no mistake.” The client hastily declined and chose another, but that was all right. Bogrevil had his sights on other evenings. Word would get out, and someone would come along and pay it simply because the price was so exorbitant.

Meantime, word of the gods’ musician spread across the span.

Weeks passed, with Bogrevil fine-tuning performances, limiting the shawm to a few minutes a night or whenever a fight threatened to break out. Diverus developed a sense of when to pick it up in order to quiet the customers.

The shawm soon became but one among dozens of instruments: As word of him spread, so did the story that he could play anything given to him. At the end of the first week someone placed a santur before Diverus and handed him two sticks. He set down his lute, accepted the sticks, and with almost no pause delicately hammered a plangent tune that made people shiver. The next night someone gave him a single-stringed fiddle with a bow, and he made it sing as if with a human voice.

Two nights after that Kotul at the bottom of the steps called for Bogrevil, who came running from the back, thinking that a great disaster had befallen them. What he found was a line of curiosity seekers that extended all the way up the steps; each person had brought an instrument, and each wanted to make Diverus play it. It was a disaster in the making. The business of the paidika was becoming the performances of Diverus.

Thinking quickly, Bogrevil shouted up the steps, “It’s a condition of this establishment that if the boy can play your instrument, it remains with the establishment.” The line of turbaned, masked, cloaked men and women roared with indignation, but Bogrevil waved them silent. “Look here, nobody’s making you come down here like this—you have two choices. You either rent his time privately, in which case you can use him as you like, or you accept the challenge that he’ll play anything you hand him. The boy don’t come cheap, but that’s how it is. He’s blessed, and you pay for that.”

The line broke up. Only a few remained to accept the rules and challenge the boy with their obscure instruments. They all went home empty-handed, but in most cases not until Bogrevil had packed them off to one of the rooms in back. Even losing, they were transported by the music.

Disaster was averted, and money flowed copiously. Bogrevil thought that if he could sustain this level of income for even a few months, he would retire from the brothel with enough wealth to flee to some large isle—oh, there were some big enough, he’d heard it from travelers, five or six spans on—where he would live far away from the demons, the ocean, and the children for the rest of his life.

The pile of instruments surrounding Diverus grew steadily, a testament to his magical skill. He would pick up the simplest ocarina and then a small harp, without hesitating, without thinking, and play. Bogrevil luxuriated in the attention as if it were all about him.

Then one evening, moments after they had opened their doors for business, Mother Kestrel arrived. She had with her three youths, and they shoved aside the boy on the door and went down the stairs together in a cluster, a four-headed dreadnought. Above them the boy at the door stuck two fingers in his mouth and whistled a signal to Kotul at the bottom. The group made it halfway down before he stepped into view like a barbican gate dropped in their path. Her boys drew up and eyed her nervously. One complained, “You didn’t tell us about him.”

“I couldn’t, now, could I, being as how I’ve never been down this far.”

Bogrevil, sent for the moment the alarm was sounded, appeared beside his behemoth. “Ah, Mother K, lovely to see you as always,” he said. “Of course, you’re not really supposed to be here during business hours, are you? I mean, there is a prohibitive policy regarding undisguised female clients. ’Course, maybe you’d be unaware of that, bein’ as how you’re no client.”

She slipped down a few more steps while her escort hung back. “I’m not makin’ a delivery this time.”

“Well, there’s a pity, because they look strapping strong, your youngsters. I can always use boys with good constitutions. They last so much longer.”

“I’m here to talk about the idiot.”

Bogrevil glanced around as if to identify the subject. “I’m afraid,” he said at last, “I’ve got no idiot here at this time. My boys are rather more than that.” A tune played on a lute floated up the stairwell, crisp as a chilled wine.

“That’s what I’m talking about,” she said. “The stories come to me that our lad finally showed his gifts, what he got on the dragon beam.”

“Our lad? I wasn’t aware we’d ever coupled, you and I.”

One of the boys sniggered. Mother Kestrel came closer. “You know who I mean,” she accused. “Word is, you’re taking in a lot of coin on account of his gifts.”

“Well, some, certainly. But you know, we struck a bargain, you and I, when I took him in—that all his gifts and the proceeds from those gifts were to be mine alone—”

“I spoke in haste.”

“No doubt you did. You were aggrieved to have looked after him and took my recompense for your trouble. I recall that you were paid agreeably and that you discarded him with a great expression of relief.”

She stood a moment longer. “So you won’t cut me a share in him now that he’s valuable.”

“No,” he replied. “I don’t think I will. We concluded our bargain where he is concerned. Now, should you care to fob off another one so blessed by the gods, I’m sure I could be persuaded to pay less up front in exchange for what might manifest through divine intervention later on. It is a risk, isn’t it?”

“Bastard.”

“My dear, that’s a given, so you gain nothing by pointing it out.” He reached into a pocket and produced a gold coin. “Here.” He tossed it up the stairs to her, and she caught it as efficiently as a hawk snatching a meal out of the sky. “Never let it be said I’m ungenerous.”

She stared at the coin in her palm, then back at him. The coin was gold, and the fact that he could throw it to her so casually, dismissively, spoke volumes about the money he must have taken in on account of that creature she’d tended. For months and months she’d tended him. One coin only made her greedy for another, but she saw well enough that Bogrevil had no need to give her more. If she wanted her share, she would have to make not parting with it too dear for Mr. Bogrevil. She turned and started back up the steps.

“Very nice to see you again, m’dear,” he called after her. “Always looking for some good strong boys.” Her entourage parted as she pushed through them. One glanced down as if considering Bogrevil’s offer, but they all followed after her. The boy on the door was speaking to someone just outside. Mother Kestrel poked a finger toward him, and one of her lads dragged him out of the way.

“A short figure in a gray tunic and domino mask stood outside the paidika that night, blocking Mother Kestrel’s path,” says the narrator. On the screen of the booth then, the puppet figure of the shadow puppeteer appears, its malachite eyes gleaming, and the audience chuckles as the joke spreads: The puppeteer has become a figure in her own story.

“That figure was a master of puppets, and was eluding the amorous intentions of her hostess on that span—a woman named Rolend, who’d fallen under the spell of the puppeteer and desired his embrace, for she believed the puppeteer to be a man. In that clever disguise the puppeteer had hired a mangy procurer bearing his own torch to take her to a place where women were not allowed entry, thinking that this would protect her from pursuit by Rolend. If her disguise could fool that amorous woman, it would surely serve to gain her entry into the paidika.

“Yet even as she allowed the crone, Mother Kestrel, and her gang of thuggish oafs to depart, the puppeteer saw, back along the alley, the light of a pole-lantern, proof that she had not escaped her passionate pursuer after all. She paid the procurer and stepped quickly through the doorway of the paidika. The procurer turned his attention immediately to the woman and her gang of boys. Waving his torch overhead, he called, ‘Madame, good evening to you and your young fellows. If it’s further pleasures you’re looking for, allow me to guide you to them!’ The puppeteer watched him scurry, rat-like, after the woman. Then the door closed and she was safe inside the paidika.

“There was no hint then that she was about to have a life-changing encounter…”

Outside, the procurer hung back behind the line of Mother Kestrel’s thugs until they had passed the oncoming lantern, which turned out to be a guide and a statuesque woman in a cloak, whom he recognized as the mistress of Lotus Hall. The moment they’d passed, he wove around the trio and up behind Mother Kestrel, desperate to reach her before she exited the narrow lane. “You’ll need light to find your way,” he said. “Is there somewhere in particular you might wish to see? I know everywhere on the span, the places that would invite you in, not like that exclusive place back there.” He pronounced exclusive as if it disgusted him. While he babbled to her, one of her boys glided up and casually snapped a blackjack against the side of his head, relieving him of his purse even as he collapsed. The torch rolled and sputtered, but continued to burn. Mother Kestrel stopped and turned back. She sized up the situation. The lad tossed the purse to her, and she caught it as she walked back to him. “Good lad, Jemmy, I’ve taught you so well,” she said affectionately, and tousled his hair. To his utter amazement she then dropped the purse into the lane beside the dazed procurer. “Right now, my dears, we need to be respectable, terribly respectable, which means we can’t have the likes of him calling the law down upon us. No, no, no, for once we need those very forces ourselves. So, no more mischief. Not till I solve my little problem with Mr. Bogrevil.” She walked on.

The lads stood around their victim a moment longer and only grudgingly left the purse there as they followed their leader.

Bogrevil made a sweeping bow and said, “Welcome, good sir, to the land where dreams o’ertake your other life. You would like a boy to smoke for the evening?”

The puppeteer hesitated and glanced from parlor to parlor, uncertain which one was providing the music. “I’ll browse?” she suggested in a deep whisper.

Bogrevil stepped back and broadly waved his arm. “By all means.” If he suspected at all that she was a woman, he didn’t show it. She was disguised, and therefore following the rules. He said, “If I can be of assistance, or when you’ve chosen, don’t hesitate to call upon me.”

They made respectful half bows; she strolled past the left-hand parlor and drew up before the middle one. The icy music of a santur trembled behind the beaded curtain there.

Seated cross-legged upon pillows in the middle of the room and surrounded by musical instruments, Diverus did not react as she stepped through the curtain. A small boy wearing a tray on his head glided up beside her to offer a drink. She took it, but then turned back, fascinated by the elegance of the tune being played and contemplating all the instruments lying about the player.

The musician himself was under the spell of his music: His eyes remained closed and his head rolled, snaking back and forth. His fingers flicked the tiny mallets with astonishing speed and accuracy. He never looked at them once. He continued playing for another ten minutes before the piece found an end, and his eyes didn’t open until the last tinny note was fading. Then his back arched and he inhaled sharply, suddenly, as if his spirit had plunged back into him from whatever dreamscape it had flown to on the wings of song.

Some of the others arose and made their way past her on unsteady legs. One was propped up by his rented boy. Outside the gauzy curtain, behind her, she heard Bogrevil directing them to various rooms. The beads hissed as he came into the parlor.

He stopped beside her. “Remarkable, ain’t he?”

She nodded. “I wondered, how much…”

“For an evening? Don’t misunderstand me, young sir, but I doubt you could afford him.” Then he named the shocking price, almost apologetically. “You see, if I let you have him for the rest of the evening, then I deprive everyone else of his boundless talent. Thus he comes very dear. No help for it, I’m afraid.”

“He plays all of these?” she asked.

“Oh, every single one. In more than a year nobody’s yet brought an instrument to our establishment that he couldn’t play, and with skill equal to what you just heard.”

“The gods favor him then.”

Bogrevil laughed. “Indeed, they do.”

Leodora considered for a moment while Diverus rolled aside the santur and took up a teardrop-shaped ud. He seemed to shiver at touching it. She asked, “What if I were to wait until the evening was over? No one would be deprived of their music then.”

Bogrevil’s brow knitted. Nobody had ever proposed that before. The quoted price for the boy’s services usually ended the conversation.

“That’s hours from now. I mean, I suppose,” he said, formulating, “the price would be a little more reasonable under those conditions. He’ll be tired, though—don’t know that he’ll care to accept. And still higher, I’m afraid, than most of the boys, because the experience will still drain him and he’ll still have to recover, and—truth is—nobody’s had him like that. It might drain him too much to play next night. There’s a lot to think about here. I must ponder it awhile.”

Leodora nodded as if she understood everything he’d said. But knowing nothing of what actually went on in this paidika, she couldn’t fathom what it was that might drain him. “I shall just listen then—if that’s all right.”

Bogrevil opened his mouth to object, but she touched his hand and a coin slipped between her fingers into his. He glanced at it, surprised and delighted by what he saw; and he wondered why he hadn’t thought to charge for the pleasure of listening to Diverus right from the start.

“Listen to your heart’s content,” he said. “I’ll see that he plays the shawm for you before daybreak.”

“That’s his best?”

“It stops everything in this place when he does it.”

“Where did he learn? He surely can’t be more than, what, fifteen?”

“Oh, he’s a year or more older than you imagine, I’m quite sure. As to where he learned, it’s the gods you’d have to ask about that.”

The first few plucked notes of another song began. Bogrevil gestured Leodora to a nearby pillow, then withdrew before the spell from the double strings clutched him as well.

She listened, watching at first, but with eyelids soon falling shut as she was spirited away by the sound. She was imagining the song accompanying a performance; it would be the perfect marriage of music with her art. She could not help but wonder if the procurer hadn’t been a god in disguise, who had led her to a destination she didn’t even know she was seeking. It was the sort of thing a trickster might do, and wasn’t the world full of them?

As the last note hovered and faded like a sunset, she opened her eyes and smiled at the performer. He nodded to her and she back at him. The room emptied out then—the remaining patrons going off either with their evening’s choice or in search of one elsewhere. The serving boys pushed through the curtain again with their trays, but she waved them off.

“You have incredible skill,” she told him. “You must have begun playing very young.”

He tilted his head as if considering this. “Yes, I must have—before I was born, I think.”

“And you can play them all?”

“So far.” He set down the ud. “Is there one you’d particularly like to hear?”

Before she answered there came a distant shout and a loud whistle that abruptly cut off. Then a voice cried, “Raid!”

Leodora jumped to her feet. She poked her head through the beaded curtain. The clamor came from the top of the long stairwell. The immense guard at the bottom of the steps had taken a position blocking the way. Out of the other two parlors people bolted, most of them in disguise and all heading away from the steps; they fought one another to get into the narrow halls, where Bogrevil gestured them to hurry. His expression was sour.

“What do we do?” she asked the musician.

“Flee, I think,” he advised. “This hasn’t happened in all the time I’ve been here, but we’ve been instructed again and again so that when it happened we’d know what to do. You should follow me.”

He picked up the ud and some of the other instruments. She reached out to accept one of the lutes and a double-reed instrument. “That’s a mijwiz,” he said. “I’m very fond of it. I’m called Diverus.”

“Jax,” she replied, and then they were in the foyer and past Bogrevil.

As they entered the narrow passage behind him, someone shouted, “There! Stop them!” It was a woman’s voice, and Leodora craned her head to see. At the bottom of the stairs the woman who’d shoved past her as she was arriving was flailing her arms madly. She had four large uniformed men with her, but they were busy combating the giant of a bouncer behind her, and the woman charged after Diverus without protection. Bogrevil stepped in front of the passage then, blocking the way with his body. Behind his back a gleam of light delineated the double-curved blade of the khanjarli dagger in his hand.

It was Leodora’s final view of him and of the events in the foyer. Diverus drew her out of the sloping passage and into a broad hall containing dozens of doorways and more passages leading off it. People were running about everywhere, some half undressed and many stumbling as if drunk or drugged. One sat on a small divan, head hanging between his knees, unable to rouse himself enough to take flight. She was surprised at the number of women scurrying from the rooms. Clearly they’d arrived disguised as men and only thrown off the disguises once they’d gained entry to these private rooms. Diverus dodged them all. She glimpsed some of the chambers they passed, each containing a giant water pipe, like a fountain fixture set in the center of the floor. Someone lay sprawled beside one, but most of the rooms were empty, the occupants already gone. In the last one, though, through the slit of the curtain she glimpsed or thought she glimpsed a face inhuman and insubstantial, with fierce marble eyes. She passed it so quickly that she didn’t make sense of it, didn’t register what she’d seen—a floating form, a ghoulish countenance—except as an afterimage, like something you can only see when you close your eyelids.

She and Diverus fell in behind a line of boys who were flooding into one dark doorway in particular. It took them down another flight of steps, easily as long as the stairs from the street. Footsteps and voices below echoed back up oddly as off water, and sure enough the room they reached contained a broad pool in which a few boys were laughing and playing, as though what was happening in the paidika was a lark, nothing to concern them.

Beyond the pool an iron gate hung open. Most of the boys and the sensible guests were escaping through it.

Outside, a narrow ledge ran in either direction. They were under the bridge, at ocean level. A few lights shone across the water, where another tower wall loomed, seeming almost close enough to touch in the dark. The water stank of rot.

The ledge was hardly wide enough for the two of them to stand shoulder-to-shoulder. To the left of the gate, boys had lined up, shivering, pressed to the wall of the bridge pier as if this was as far as they were able to come before terror incapacitated them. Their line trailed into the blackness of the bridge. The clientele, on the other hand, had all turned to the right and even now reached the end of the ledge and vanished. Diverus hesitated for a second, but turned and pursued the escaping clients. No one tried to stop him. Encumbered by the instruments in his hands and tucked beneath his arms, he could have done nothing to defend himself if they had. From the other direction a woman’s voice called out, “Diverus!” and he went rigid. He glanced back then, first at Leodora, and then beyond, into the depths of the darkness beneath the span. His face twisted up as if he was wincing in pain.

Under his breath then, he whispered, “Good-bye, Eskie,” and turned away again. Leodora glanced back, but no one had stepped out, and whoever had called couldn’t possibly have heard him.

The clients had disappeared where the ledge ended, as if they’d stepped off into the ocean and evaporated; but it was an illusion. The ledge wrapped around the corner, to roughly carved steps, which led right up the side of the pier. To be sure, they were cracked and treacherous, offering barely enough purchase for both feet placed side by side, but the customers from the paidika climbed briskly up, clustered bodies lambent in the moonlight. The musician and the puppeteer followed them.

Perhaps a third of the way up the side of the pier, the steps reached a landing of sorts. This landing, a broader platform with a rail around it, jutted off the backside of the tower, and the two of them lingered there to catch their breath. No one else was coming up behind them; Leodora gazed off across the ocean, where a single lantern’s light glowed distantly. She turned back to find Diverus leaning far over the rail on the inside of the platform. She pressed around his shoulder to see what had so captured his attention, and fell upon an astonishing view: the underworld of the span of Vijnagar.

Fires and embers glittered on dozens of levels, as far into the distance as she could see. From the look of it, the place ran the full width of the bridge. The glow from the fires suggested structures—an arch overhead and all manner of struts and supports on the far side of that arch, and even more platforms. She remembered that Ningle, too, had supports beneath it, columns of stone that propped up the great boulevards and buildings. But she had seen no one living beneath that span.

“That used to be my home,” Diverus said.

“Where?”

“Somewhere in there. Someone else lives in it now. Or maybe they’ve moved on, too. That woman who raided the paidika is from here. What do you suppose she told them to get the authorities to act on her behalf? I should have stayed behind and exposed her, shouldn’t I?”

“I don’t know how you would have done that,” she replied. “She was after you?”

“She wanted a cut of the profits I brought. I would have been trapped again if I’d stayed. He wasn’t ever going to let me go.” He sighed. “Poor Eskie. She is trapped.” When she didn’t ask him what he meant, he let the matter go. “I’ve never seen it like this, not from below. I know where we are now, and there’ll be another landing above us, one that can be accessed from underneath—in there.”

As if to prove his point, a shout burst from above them, then another more like a scream, which grew abruptly louder. A body hurtled past.

Leodora sprang back from the rail. Diverus didn’t even flinch. “I wonder,” he mused, as though the killing going on above them were a mere inconvenience, “if we might want to wait a bit. Let the two sides sort it out.” Another body fell past, this one silent. He leaned over the edge, followed the corpse down, and then looked up. “The thieves are outnumbered. They couldn’t have anticipated so many all at once. They’re used to couples sneaking off to hide, or their own sort fleeing from officials up above with whatever boodle they’ve snatched. Easy marks.” He tilted his head to one side. “I can’t even tell you how I come to know that. I couldn’t have known it back then, but someone must have said so, I must have heard it even though I was too dull to understand.”

Leodora considered that they with their arms full of musical instruments would be “easy marks,” too.

After minutes passed in silence, Diverus started up the second tier of steps, and she followed, wondering all the while why she inherently trusted the strange musician.

The second landing when they reached it was occupied only by a corpse. Though masked, he wasn’t dressed in the finery of the paidika’s clientele. Moonlight glinted off the hilt of a dagger embedded in his chest. Of the clients there was no sign. A small wooden ladder, nearly horizontal, reached from one of the inner platforms to the edge of the landing. Diverus shoved it away and it dropped, but swung below from ropes and clattered against a lower level. Someone shouted a complaint.

Without a word, he continued his climb up. By now Leodora’s legs ached, and she would have liked to sit and rest for an hour. It hadn’t seemed, she thought, anywhere near this great a climb down through the tower. The smell leaking out from the underworld grew more intense as they ascended—a greasy, sour stink it was, too.

As they neared the surface of the span, Diverus paused and pointed to where a makeshift platform butted up along the backside of the tower. They could have stepped off the narrow stairs and into the underworld from there. “This is where I used to climb from. My mother took me up, many times. And then Mother Kestrel, too, when she put me on the dragon beam.”

“The dragon beam?”

“In the bowl—it’s where I learned how to play all of these, though I didn’t know it at the time.” He continued quickly up the steps, as if to be quit of the subject, but she hurried after.

“How long ago?” she asked.

Over his shoulder he replied, “I don’t know, really. A year or more. Bogrevil maintains that I’m seventeen, but he doesn’t really know. When I arrived he thought I was twelve because I’d been starved so long, and I couldn’t have told him in any case, because I don’t know.”

Then he rattled up the last steps and through the rail to the surface. She found him waiting for her, alone. The clients had dispersed back into the lanes and streets of the span.

“You must tell me,” he said, “why you chose tonight to come to the paidika.”

“I was escaping from a situation. I thought if I went there, I could elude someone.”

“You’re not addicted to the afrits then.”

“Afrits,” she repeated, and recalled the vaporous thing she’d glimpsed.

Her ignorance seemed to reassure him. He looked around. People strode past, in every case led by someone with a lamp. He and Leodora alone stood in the shadows. “I must impose upon you,” he said. “I’ve nowhere to go, and I know no one up here.”

Leodora said, “I can help. In fact, I can offer you employment of a sort that will make use of your talent.” A lightbearer approached, and she gestured him over. “Lead us to Lotus Hall,” she said, and handed him a coin in advance, in good faith for the distance he must cover. He lowered his lantern on its pole to check the coin, then tucked it into his tunic and directed them to follow.

As they walked, Diverus said, “Would it be a good idea for me to play music? They might be looking for me, or at least listening. Word will travel.”

She nodded. “Yes, they might. On this span anyway.”

“We’re going to another?” The idea seemed to take him by surprise.

“Between your troubles and mine, probably the sooner the better. Have you never been on another span?”

He shook his head. “And what is it you do, sir, if I may ask, that you have a use for me?”

“I tell stories,” she replied, “which seems to have become a far more complicated occupation than I’d ever imagined.”

III
NEW SPANS FOR OLD

ONE

Soter knew that Leodora had eluded Rolend, the love-struck mistress of Lotus Hall, the previous night by fleeing from the hall after the last performance. And he knew she hadn’t yet returned by the time he fell asleep; but he’d no inkling that she had come back with someone in tow, or that the booth now concealed a new member of the troupe.

Pushing his way through the curtain at the rear, he found a boy asleep upon the undaya cases and concluded reasonably that he’d come upon a vagrant who’d chosen the darkness of the unattended booth to sleep off his drunk.

“Of all the damned cheek!” he bellowed, and lunged.

The boy reacted by rolling away from the shout, and fell off the cases. Soter banged his foot against a lute that hadn’t been there the night before and sprawled across the top case. The only thing he caught was the small nay flute that had been lying beside the boy. In pain and frustration he cursed and clutched his leg.

At that point Leodora pierced the entrance behind him. Soter glanced back at her, triumphantly waved the small flute, and cried, “I caught this little thief pilfering from the puppet cases!”

The boy stuck his head over the top of the case. “That’s not true,” he said. “I stole nothing!”

Soter swung back and started to grab at him again.

Leodora said, “He’s not a thief, Soter. He’s a musician. His name is Diverus.”

Soter lowered his arm. “Yes, well. Well. I see now that he’s dragged his instruments in here. But what are you doing, bringing him in here? We don’t need a musician.”

“Don’t need one? Who is it complains to me every night that we won’t be a troupe until we have a real musician, because the smelly runt we’ve hired can barely play to the end of a single performance. Aren’t those your words?”

Soter recognized that he couldn’t win an argument formulated on his own complaints, and changed his tack. “How do you know a scrawny street brat like this is a real musician?”

And so she told him the story of how she had eluded Rolend by escaping into a paidika in the leg of the northern tower of Vijnagar. “Their claim to fame was their musician, who could play any instrument ever made.”

“Him?” he asked, the word dripping with skepticism.

“That’s right. They were raided and I ran with him. We escaped the raid and the paidika both, and I promised him I would hide him. You won’t find a better musician anywhere in Vijnagar. And for that reason I think we should leave Vijnagar now, before the paidika’s owner hunts us down.”

“First of all,” Soter replied, “we’re not leaving here till I say so. You’re drawing bigger crowds every night. Second of all, please don’t tell me you believed twaddle of that sort, and from a brothel, no less! It’s how they get them in the door, that kind of story. He’s some sort of magical musician? Lea, I am amazed at you.”

“It’s not—” she said, but Soter held out the nay flute and said, “Here, boy, play something. Right now.”

Diverus accepted it. He glanced at Leodora. She nodded for him to proceed. He stood up and put the flute to his lips. His eyes closed and his face twisted as if some invisible entity slid beneath his skin. Even in the shadows of the booth, his transformation was evident. Soter tensed as though against an impending blow, though he’d no idea why. The song started softly, gently. It was so seductive, so lovely, that Soter’s eyelids fluttered as if he were about to fall into a trance. Then in horror he identified the tune. It was the one they’d played on that span, the one Leandra had danced to. He lunged again at Diverus, yelping “Stop!” as he tore the flute out of the boy’s grasp. “What sort of treachery is this?” Betrayal filled his eyes like tears as he looked from Diverus to Leodora. “How do you know that song? Either of you. You’ve no right—”

“I don’t, sir!” Diverus protested. “I don’t know what song it was, nor where it comes from. It just…it just comes.”

“It’s a divine gift,” Leodora insisted. “The music pours through him. I listened to him last night, I saw the effect his music had on the clients in that place. On me, Soter.”

“Well, that song never pours out again, or he finds himself abandoned on the spot, do you understand?” Soter shouted. He made himself calm down, made his hands stop shaking by lowering them to his sides. He gripped the flute tightly. The choice of that song…how could the boy have known it? Leodora didn’t know. No one left alive knew nor could have found out. It was just a song played by a blind old musician. It had no significance to anyone but him. No, they couldn’t have known. But something did. Something.

His hand rested against the undaya case, and he snatched it back as if the leather had grown hot. For a moment he stared at it, his mind peeling back the cover, the layers of puppets, the false bottom, until he saw the chalk-white thing lying there. In his vision, it had eyes that opened to stare back at him—eyes that he recognized. The booth suddenly shrank. The sides closed in upon him and the ceiling of the hall was about to crush him flat. He didn’t dare look up at it. He slammed the nay flute on the case, turned and dove past Leodora and out of the booth.

In the wide empty hall, he stood with his head back, gasping the air. The vision wasn’t real, he chided himself. He was letting Leodora’s complaints get to him. She was the one haunted by that figure. Ever since they’d left Bouyan she’d told Soter how she dreamed of being in that boathouse of her uncle’s, of hearing a call as if from the whole ocean—that statue calling her name. There was nothing spectral in it—it was nothing but guilt and homesickness playing on her mind. He should never have consented to her bringing that piece of coral along.

He circled the booth then, putting distance between himself and the memory of the song Diverus had played. He had more than enough guilt to bear without that reminder. He barely noticed the cavernous room around him, the empty chairs, the tables, nor did he see the one figure in the hall: a squat gnomish shape seated at a table in the second row and watching him from under its lowered head until he had almost passed by, only then speaking up. “Stand me a drink for old times, would you?”

Soter stopped in midstep as if time had paused. It wasn’t possible—first that song and now…He came about slowly, warily. Purplish eyes, amused and sharp, met his own. “Grumelpyn?” he said, and drew closer. “By anyone’s gods you haven’t changed a day—it is you, isn’t it?”

“Well, if you’ll recall, we age slower than your kind, we do. You’ve changed, of course, but not so’s I wouldn’t know you—I just never expected to find you traveling the spans again, old man. Not after—”

“Yes, not after that.” He took a seat at the table across from the furtive elf. “I was more than happy to stay tucked away forever, but this puppeteer came along, needed managing, and, well, I wasn’t doing anything at all but rotting. So I thought, why not, nobody’s interested in old Soter, and here I am. But you, now, I thought…that is, that last day—”

“A terrible memory, I’ve blocked it from my mind, don’t want to think on that when there have been so many other days worth the memory.”

“Of course,” said Soter. “Now let me stand you a drink for old times’ sake.” He got up quickly and wove his way around the tables and chairs to the kitchen, where neither Nuberne nor Rolend was present. He filched a bottle from below the serving counter and carried it and two cups back to the table, all the while speculating on Grumelpyn’s motives. He was not so damaged from drink that he didn’t remember how he and the elf had parted. It was no cause for camaraderie.

While he poured, Grumelpyn chattered idly. “So, you came from the south of here with this puppeteer called Jax and you’re heading north toward my span. I would never have expected you to venture out again. This Jax is the new Bardsham, heh? And where’d he come from, I wonder.”

Ignoring the questions, Soter raised his tin cup. The elf drew one hand from out of his sleeves, crossed in front of him, and took the cup. His nails were long and sharp. He clinked with Soter’s cup. “This bottle’s on me,” Soter said. “All of it.” He leaned forward on his elbows. “Truth is, since you’ve turned up, I need your help. We are going north, like you said, but I don’t remember the half of it any longer. Been so many years.”

“Well, well. You need a map.” Grumelpyn grinned with sinister delight, revealing unnaturally pointed teeth. “Fifteen years ago you left me to fend for myself against the Agents, and now you think to buy me with a bottle of inferior liquor and to get my help in the bargain, you do.”

“You know that I couldn’t have done a thing for you. You don’t think I wanted to leave you? For cat’s sake, man, it was Bardsham’s idea—the only way he could get away was to misdirect those Agents with a decoy. And afterward there was no sign of you or him, and I’d sworn to look after the child. I’d sworn!”

“Oh, yes, I’d forgotten. You never acted to save your own skin. You were thinking of Leandra’s baby all the time. Dear, sweet Leandra about whom you could never say enough.”

Soter nodded vigorously. “I was, absolutely, thinking only of the child. Why do you think I’m with her now?” Too late he realized what he’d said. There was no covering it up.

Grumelpyn tilted his head slyly. “So, then, ’twas a daughter, the baby. And Jax the magnificent puppeteer is she, heh? Bardsham’s daughter, well, well. You should have delivered her to my span, let us take her for a changeling. Could have made a fortune. Your people wouldn’t have known the difference, the parents weren’t coming back, and the replacement child would’ve obeyed your every whim.”

“Changelings are known to be cantankerous if not ungovernable.”

“Lies,” sneered the elf. “Lies and rumors put about by people who renege on their bargains.” He showed his teeth again to ensure Soter got the implicit meaning. “She following in the old man’s footsteps all the way, then, is she really?”

Soter lowered his cup. “Grumelpyn, she’s better’n he was.”

“Oh. My, my. You really should’ve swapped her, then. We likes a good storyteller.”

“Yes, for dinner.”

“More lies. Elves don’t eat children. Generally.”

“All the same, I didn’t swap her, so wishes are air. I could have abandoned her to the spans and had done with it, couldn’t I? And I didn’t.” He waved his hand about as if to wipe the air clean of rancor. “Look here, I’ll pay you for your trouble, for a map.”

The elf snorted and set down his cup. “As soon accept coin from a sea slug, I would. I only came here because I had to see for myself if you or Bardsham was connected to this phenomenon called Jax. And now I knows all about it. Wonder who the highest bidder would be for information on his off-spring, hmm? Think there’s anyone left who cares? Might the Agents be about on the spans again?”

“Soter?”

At the sound of Leodora’s voice behind him, Soter stiffened and his heart sank.

Grumelpyn leaned around him, smiling, to look at her where she stood. “My, my,” he said, “I know whose daughter you are. Even with that mask on, I know. You’ve red hair beneath your hood, I’m certain.”

Soter could feel her eyes boring into his back, but he remained hunched over his drink as if unaware of her. Grumelpyn rose and extended a hand past him—the one that had been kept hidden in its sleeve. It was shiny and hard as marble. Soter stared past it to the smile, almost a leer, on the little fiend’s face. Grumelpyn watched his reaction.

“You’re an elf,” Leodora blurted.

Grumelpyn glanced about himself, at his torso and arms. “Why, so I am. Imagine that. I must have been transformed.” He gave Soter a look of scorn. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Soter’s frown curled with displeasure.

Leodora said, “I’m sorry, that was rude. I didn’t mean—I meant only that we haven’t encountered any elves before, on the other spans.”

Grumelpyn waved away her embarrassment. “I’m surprised not at all. Few of my kind travel this run of spans. Except for your neighbors to the north, Hyakiyako, these spans are not partial to the elvish, they’re not. And even Hyakiyako just wants us in their parade.” He glanced around the room as if expecting to find some enemies. “If word of your extraordinary performances hadn’t got out, why, I’d have never imagined old Soter was on the spans again. I was just saying.” He leaned forward for emphasis. “Rumor has it you’re the essence of an accomplished performer. I am so looking forward to a few performances, myself.”

“Yes,” Soter replied. “A shame we’re not staying longer.” He craned his head around until he could see her, then to the elf added, “Tonight’s our final performance in Vijnagar. Heading north in the morning, in fact. To your friendly Hyakiyako.”

“We are?” asked Leodora.

“My misfortune then,” replied the elf, and he gave another sly look. All at once he brightened. “At least I’ll have the privilege of seeing you once before you go. Do you know any elvish stories, by chance?”

“Some. Soter taught me them.”

“Then they’ll be corrupted, no doubt.” He chuckled. “But still worth seeing, I’m sure, if you would humor an old troll like me and perform one.”

“Of course. I’ll put one in early.” Soter could hear the confusion in her voice.

“And I thankee for it.”

When she didn’t move, Soter asked, “Is something the matter, Lea?”

“The musician—he really didn’t know that song that bothered you. He wasn’t lying. I watched him play last night.”

“Of course you did, of course he wasn’t lying.” To Grumelpyn he said, “Auditioning.”

“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 with 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 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.

There, seated beneath a low table, Soter twisted around as they entered. He held a small cup in one hand, and a small pitcher in the other, caught in the act of pouring. “About time,” he said. “I’m famished.”

The meal proved to be sumptuous and exotic. Neither Leodora nor Diverus had ever tasted anything like it, and once sampled, she could not imagine never having it again. When she raised the question of the central space they had seemingly walked around, Soter confirmed that it was the courtyard where they would perform. “It is outdoors but protected from the parade. Oh, yes, Mutsu told me about the parade. A horrifying thing, to be avoided at all costs. Your very life could be forfeit.”

“Mutsu. You remember his name?”

“Naturally.” He sipped his tea under her critical gaze, which exerted a kind of pressure on him. He set down his cup. “The truth is, he came up to me, called out my name, and said, Don’t you remember me? I’m Mutsu. So, there. He remembers me. All I remembered was the banner. Satisfied?”

“For once,” replied Leodora.

They ate awhile in stiff silence after that, until Diverus asked: “What happens now?”

“Now,” said Leodora as she stepped around a cart peddling fruit, “we hunt for stories. It’s what my father used to do wherever he went. It’s how he learned everybody’s tales.”

“Soter doesn’t come?”

“No. He makes arrangements, asks questions, tries to find out if there are other places on a span we should play, promotes us to the local people.”

“He angers you,” Diverus stated.

She eyed him askance. They walked through a bazaar of stands, most sporting bright awnings. The smells of fish and confections mixed with more human, bodily smells. It all reminded her of Ningle and her childhood, back when her uncle had been clement. Those memories were intertwined with Soter, too. “He angers me because he lies,” she replied. “I don’t always catch him out, but the occasions that I do only make me assume he’s lying the rest of the time, too.”

He changed the subject: “How do you hunt for stories, then?”

“Well”—she glanced around—“you look for signs that stories are about.”

“Signs,” he repeated with evident confusion. The confusion wasn’t his alone, either, for in truth she had little experience looking for stories. Prior to arriving on Vijnagar, Soter had been too nervous to let her go off on her own for very long, and when she could sneak off at all she’d climbed the bridge towers to escape from him. Yorba had been the first place she’d asked about a story and been given one, by a group of workers who’d been mortaring a building. That was the Dustgirl’s tale.

A palanquin crossed their path. Four men hefted it by two poles, which rested upon their shoulders. A woman’s silhouette was just visible behind the gauze curtains.

Leodora tilted her head at the passing vehicle. “There. Like them.”

“The palanquin?”

“Not the palanquin itself—the carriers. If you could spend time with them, there would be stories in it for you.”

“Why not the woman hidden behind the curtains?”

“First, she would be reluctant to tell a complete stranger very much. Second, her carriers would tell me all about her because they’re paid to transport her but also to be blind and dumb about it. They’ll have seen things. They would want to talk because they’re not supposed to. They carry her and they carry her story.”

“I see. That is, I think I see.”

She grinned. “I’m making this all up.” Doubt clouded his expression, and her smile grew wider. “The truth of it is, so far anyway, stories seem to find me.”

“The way mine did?”

“Exactly. I didn’t attend the paidika in search of a story, but I found an extraordinary one that even has elements in it from other tales I’ve been taught by Soter. Your life up till now is a story.”

“So he does know something.”

“He knows quite a lot,” she admitted, and stepped through an open space between two stalls selling various aromatic kernels, the combined smells making her nose twitch as if she might sneeze. “But I think he withholds more than he tells. When he was training me, that was helpful because he forced me to knit stories together out of scraps. As a test.”

Diverus was thoughtful for a while after that, and soon they passed the stalls and the crowd thinned, at which point he asked, “How can you be sure that the tests are over?”

She had no ready answer to that.

Ahead, there lay a park lined with intricately shaped trees and shrubs. Some looked like exotic animals. Others were either abstract or imitations of things she had never seen. In the middle of the park, a group stood clustered beneath one tree, watching two figures in their midst. The two were engaged in a game of some sort, sitting opposite each other across a square board, with the rest ringing them as though they represented the height of excitement.

Diverus followed Leodora through the park. The group might have been her ultimate goal, but she took the most circuitous route to arrive there—pausing to contemplate the unusual displays of flora: One bush had been sculpted into a flock of pigeons just leaving the ground. The fronds that represented the outstretched wings even seemed to be shaped into feathers. The artist had cleverly linked them so that from any angle some of them looked completely separated from the rest.

Eventually she did make her way to the game. Members of the group glanced her way. One nodded in so formal a manner that it seemed a shallow bow. That man had a narrow spear-shaped beard growing off the point of his chin. He turned his attention back to the game immediately but as if his look had been a signal, the people to either side of them edged away to give them space to join in.

The two players hadn’t acknowledged any of this. One was a small, thin man with a shaved head save for the wide stripe of red hair that hung from the back of his skull. He would have been the most striking member of the group were it not for the second player, who had the long-snouted head of an animal, completely white, and who sat beneath a strange ball of light. Fist-sized, it floated just above his head. Diverus touched Leodora’s shoulder, his eyes wide. She understood his startlement, and whispered to him, “Kitsune. A foxtrickster.”

The kitsune gazed intently at the crosshatched board and the array of small stones dotting it, as if the stones might change position if he looked away. If there was a pattern there, neither Diverus nor Leodora could fathom it.

The stones—some light and some dark—looked as if they’d been polished by the sea, like the little stones and shells that washed up on the beaches of Bouyan all the time; in fact, some of the white “stones” proved to be small shells. The aggregate of dark and light remained obscure to Leodora even as two more stones were laid, one by each of the players.

With the kitsune’s placement of the next dark stone, some of the watchers exchanged knowing glances as if something significant had occurred. The fox-player picked up a group of the lighter stones from the board, placing them in the lid to a small clay pot at his side, and she gleaned that he had surrounded them somehow, and thus won them. Even as he collected the “dead” stones, she noted, his black eyes remained locked on the board, his expression hard and his whiskers bristling. She had the sense that he was not certain he’d made the best move. The excitement wasn’t necessarily in his favor.

The other player picked a white shell from his pot and held it a moment while he pointedly assessed the arrangement of the remaining stones. As if following his thoughts, the fox’s seemingly permanent smile fell with resignation. He muttered something that sounded like shimata. The light stone was placed. The fox nodded. Then he and his opponent eyed each other. The dark-stone kitsune waved a furry hand once—he would not take his turn. The other placed another stone, and the fox waved away his turn again. The group relaxed and began to talk to one another as if picking up from an earlier conversation that had been suspended by the game.

The two opponents clasped hands across the board.

Diverus leaned forward and asked, “What just happened? I couldn’t see why they stopped—there are still lots of open lines.”

“I don’t know, either. Let’s find out.” She moved around some of the observers and approached the white fox. He stood now, stretching cat-like, his orange-furred arms above his head, the loose sleeves of his gown falling down around his skinny arms to his shoulders. In that position he turned to them as they approached. Leodora repeated Diverus’s question to him.

He gestured to the board, where three of the observers were bent over and discussing, apparently, earlier moves in the game. “I arrived at the point where I could see the outcome. The battle is engaged where I removed his stones, and that and this other are the only two open areas remaining. But the most I will be able to do from this moment forward is expend more stones before he deprives me of them. If this were truly war, what a foolish general I would be to send more and more soldiers into a place where I know in advance they cannot prevail. Those already taken are lost, and I cannot have them back.” He reached into his pot, raised a handful of black stones, opened his palm. “Should I not preserve these soldiers for another day and a better game? Only an idiot would do otherwise.”

Leodora met his eye and smiled.

Diverus asked, “And you both knew this?”

“We both—” He sprinkled the stones back into his pot. “—both concurred.” He looked at them critically. “This is your first game, then,” he said as he stepped away from the board.

“We’ve just arrived.”

“Then you’ve made good use of your time. And if you stay for another, you will discern how one arrives at such a crossroads.” He gestured behind himself where two other audience members were seating themselves and removing the stones, which they returned to their respective bowls.

“What is your interest here then, young travelers? You don’t know go¯, so is it the park, the topiaries?” He scrutinized Diverus closely. “You need more stain for your skin, perhaps?” Diverus moved back behind Leodora.

“Stories,” she said.

The fox tilted his head and considered her again. “How so?”

“I collect stories,” she said. “It’s my…calling.”

“That is a grand calling. But tell me, how do you keep them? Are they in a satchel? Do you have them tied up somewhere? Because the ones I know are disinclined to sit still.”

She laughed at that. Behind the fox, the new players eyed her as if warning her not to laugh while they were engaged in play. “It’s quite true, they don’t sit still and they like to change shape, one place to another.”

“Exactly so,” the kitsune agreed, and showed his prominent teeth in a smile. The player behind him made a shushing sound. “Ah,” the fox said, “we must be polite and move away if we’re to talk…or would you attend a game from the beginning? It is greatly rewarding, as I said.”

She glanced at Diverus to find him leaning around her in order to witness the opening moves. “All right,” she told the fox, “one game and then stories.”

“Excellent!” the fox replied. Then he also turned to watch.

Unlike the previous game, the one they observed from the beginning ended with a definitive final move followed by the counting of open squares—or intersections, as the fox explained it—and captured stones. “Shells has won again,” he proclaimed. “Next time, I’m going to insist on being shells.”

Some of those nearest him laughed and slapped him on the shoulder. “You can’t have shells, not with your white fur!”

He told Leodora, “They think I’d cheat. Imagine.”

“Yes, ridiculous,” she said, but she knew enough about kitsunes to side with the group.

As they were laughing and discussing the game with the players, the fox waved his arms about and said, “My friends, my friends, these two are itinerant story collectors and would like to add to their collection from our repository. Does anyone have a story they would particularly like to tell?”

The entire group began to babble at once. She heard “ghost” and “tanuki” and “When Oiwa became a lantern!” before the fox waved them to silence once more. “Please, please, we can all tell our tales but not at the same time, if they’re to make any sense of it.”

“Well,” began the one with the sharp beard, “tell her about the emperor who forgot about war. That has one of your kind in it!”

The fox waited to see if anyone objected to this choice. No one did. He asked, “Do you already have that story?” Leodora shook her head. “In that case, I shall tell it, and if there’s time we’ll pick another—or, better, you can tell us one of yours.” Everyone nodded enthusiastically and settled down to listen. The fox strode around as he declaimed and acted the various parts.

THE EMPEROR’S TALE

Way over there our span touches land. You can see the hills and the tower that stands high upon the tallest hill. We call that land Kochokana, and legend has it that’s because it looks so like the fluttering wings of a butterfly. The truth, however, is that we named it after a legendary empire. We don’t know where this original kingdom is now—some say it’s sunk beneath the sea; others claim it lies at the farthest end of the eternal bridge. Whatever the truth, at one time in our history the original land called Kochokana was ruled over by a warlord. As this title suggests, he was a man who came to power by violent acts, and who maintained his power in like manner.

He had been trained in the strategy of war from earliest childhood. This art he had taken to, proving to be the greatest strategist ever seen in Kochokana. With his childhood full of political and martial matters, he had never spent much time with women; and because of his position—because he was being groomed to be, one day, an emperor—only two women in the empire were considered worthy candidates for his affections. It is not overstating things to say he disliked them both intensely. They were spoiled and shrill creatures, and he would have nothing to do with them. Had his parents been alive, surely they would have arranged a marriage with one of these harpies regardless of her shortcomings, but as he was in charge of his life—ascending to the position of emperor at fifteen upon his father’s death—he simply refused to choose between them, no matter how much members of his court wished to see him produce an heir. He determined not to marry a woman he did not love. And so his life might have been spent—in endless battles—but for an accidental visit he made to the royal gardens.

Now, it’s often said by the most scurrilous of folk that we foxes are only out to trick humans. Not so! I tell you. We kitsunes are the victims of jealousy and bad publicity. It’s not our fault that we are handsome creatures, and that humans who fall in love with us fall very hard. It’s not as if we do anything to cause it.

So was the case here. There was a kitsune who worked as a royal gardener. She lived alone in the woods beyond the fortress, but she liked the company of people, and so every morning she assumed human form and came to work in the gardens. In this way she was part of the populace but outside and away from prying eyes, which suited her very well.

And then one morning while she knelt at her task, she sensed someone observing her, and turned to discover the emperor standing there. Recognizing him, she could not move, didn’t even dare to breathe. Dirt and sweat covered her, but the emperor saw only a beautiful maiden. Even beneath the dirt, her fox-magic shone.

The emperor knelt beside her in the black dirt. So close, he became transfixed by the beads of perspiration upon her lip, and by the scent of her body. “I’ve watched you,” he told her, “as you wiped your brow, as you dug a hole for this flower and placed it, filled it in. You were so intent upon your work that you didn’t even hear me.” Then he leaned forward and began to dig the next hole for the next plant, beside her. She sat stupefied. Here was her emperor ruining his silk robes as he clawed in the dirt with her. He held up his hands, admiring the moist dirt attached to them, and began to laugh.

“I did not know,” she said, “that our great lord enjoyed gardening.”

He sat back on his haunches and replied, “Neither did I. But that was because I didn’t realize what a radiant blossom I would find here.”

She blushed and lowered her face, but he put a finger to her chin and lifted her head until her eyes met his again. “Never bow to me,” he said.

“But, my emperor—”

“No, no. Not emperor. Husband, rather, if you would allow it.”

She stared at this handsome man, saw in his eyes the love he had for her, and fell in love with him in return there and then. She replied, lowering her head, “I would.”

Because he was the emperor and she was his choice, they were married, and his advisers, as they wished to keep their heads, kept their opinions to themselves. But soon enough it became obvious to them that this was no ordinary affection. The daily reports delivered to the emperor went unread. When someone tried to read one of them aloud, the emperor, lying on a divan beside his bride, waved him to silence and ordered that those he’d put in charge should solve these matters, not bother him with them. The daily reports ceased, and soon only the chambermaids saw the emperor and his bride. They reported back to the advisers that he and his bride saw only each other, utterly moonstruck in their affection.

Now, among his advisers lurked two spies from the neighboring province of Maitake. They had infiltrated the court long before in order to look for opportunities for invasion. Delighted by the news that the emperor was completely lost in the fox-woman’s charms, they’d no idea that she was a kitsune just as she had no idea that her love could doom a kingdom or rob her lover of his martial skills. The beauty of the situation was that, should anyone suspect them of plotting, they could blame the woman, even accuse her of being the real spy. The attack would appear to coincide with his bewitchment, and the minds of the men would forge the links to her.

When the weather turned warm, and the emperor and his court moved to his summer tower, far from the border with Maitake, the two spies sent word to their king that he must strike fast and furious. The emperor knew nothing of the attack when it came. His generals alone saved the empire from being overrun, and a border siege began.

In the summer tower the siege was but an abstraction. The emperor’s every thought was of his wondrous bride. When the generals petitioned for his advice in the siege he told them, “Do what you feel is necessary,” and then dismissed them. The greatest strategist their people had ever known had deferred to his generals and his advisers. The agents of Maitake gleefully reported that the empire must fall, and recommended more assaults on the borders.

The emperor’s advisers held an emergency meeting. “Can we trust the generals?” one adviser asked.

“Their allegiance certainly. Their skill against this formidable foe is…untested, though. They’ve never had to concern themselves with strategy before. We cannot be certain of the outcome.”

“We need him!” someone cried.

“He won’t listen. We’ve implored, importuned. It means nothing. He moons over his lowly gardener and waves us away. What fools devised this enchantment? Did someone here provide some potion in the hopes of producing an heir? Well, he may well produce one, but shortly there will be nothing to inherit.”

No one admitted anything but they all eyed one another distrustfully.

“There’s no way to move him,” said one. “The empire is surely doomed.”

Then a young member of the entourage said, “Wait, there is a way I’ve just thought of.”

“What?” cried the others—the two spies especially.

“If the empress were kidnapped by Maitake, then he would pay attention.”

“Brilliant!” they all cheered, until someone said, “But how do we get someone from Maitake to do this?”

“Ha!” cried the young man. “We don’t. We convince the empress to pretend to be kidnapped—for the good of our land.”

“Brilliant!” they all cried again.

The difficulty was in approaching her, since she was rarely out of his company. Finally the advisers approached her personal bather and explained to the woman what she must say to her mistress. The girl complied, and finally the fox-woman understood the danger she had brought to these people. Yet she could not unmake his devotion any more than she could stop her own heart from adoring him.

She stole from the bath to meet with the advisers, and agreed immediately to go along with their deception.

The two spies, at some risk, hastily returned to Maitake and reported the plot. Seated before their lord and his advisers, they said, “Look at this opportunity! We can put our own men in place and kidnap her for real! Isn’t that wonderful?”

The warlord of Maitake leaned forward and said: “Are you both idiots?” The two looked at each other. They didn’t think so, but this was hardly the response they’d expected. “If we kidnap her,” the warlord explained, “then her husband will bring all of his attention to bear upon our invasion and he’ll destroy us, just as he will if he thinks she’s been kidnapped. You fools must do everything in your power to disrupt this plot. She must not be taken by anyone!”

“But she’s in on it,” they complained. “She’s going to help.”

“Then,” growled the warlord, “you have your work cut out for you. We launch our supreme attack in two nights, and he had better not be paying attention if you want to have a home to return to.”

The two spies crept back into Kochokana and debated about what they should do. They knew they couldn’t stop the plot from unfolding. The empress would steal away in the middle of the night to the gardener’s shed in the royal gardens where the emperor had found her, and his advisers and generals would swear she’d been kidnapped. If they said anything else, their true allegiance would be revealed. “I suppose it could be worse,” said one. “How so?” said the other. “Well, the advisers could just have asked her to ask the emperor to destroy Maitake as a favor to her.” His partner pulled at his lip. “Let’s not mention that to anyone, all right?” he said. “But I do have an idea how we might undermine this without implicating ourselves.”

The “kidnapping” of the empress went off without a hitch. She withdrew to the hut in the gardens of the main fortress. Her disappearance was discovered by one of her women, and the alarm sounded. The generals importuned the emperor to gather his wits and help them destroy the enemy who had obviously taken her. But before they had even laid out their maps and battle plans, the emperor received a note from his queen, which told him to come to her at once in the gardener’s hut, where she was safely awaiting him. “Oh, my heart’s delight!” he cried, then raced from the tower and rode across his land to the royal gardens. Sure enough, he found his wife in her bath and was so overcome immediately with lust for her that they sent away the servants and made love there and then in the wooden tub. The battle plans remained untouched.

“How did he figure this out?” one adviser asked the group.

“He’s too clever for us,” replied a spy.

“No, she sent him a note. Didn’t you see?”

“Why would she do that?”

“Maybe she’s an agent of Maitake,” one of the spies suggested.

“Is that possible?”

“What other explanation is there?” the other spy asked. “The spell must have been her own.”

“What can we do? The enemy’s at the very gates! We need him now.”

“Maybe,” someone said, “we could have the spell removed.”

“We don’t know if there’s a spell.”

“There must be a spell.”

“Maybe we could kidnap her again. For real this time.”

“We can ask her to visit us. Can’t we? And then say she was kidnapped on the way here.”

“Will he believe a second kidnap plot?”

“Do we have a choice?”

They couldn’t think of an alternative, these clever men, and so they sent a message to the empress. To their dismay, she answered that she would not attend. Instead, she commanded all of them to attend her at the gardener’s cottage. At least, they thought, they might confront her in the emperor’s presence. However, when they arrived, they found her alone.

“Where is the emperor?” they asked.

“I sent him off to war.”

“You what?”

“As we were making love, he asked me what I wanted most in the world, and I told him that I wished to see him victorious over his enemies.” She unfolded a slip of paper and placed it in front of them. “He has more enemies than he knows. He tells me everything, you see. He keeps no secrets. He’s too good a man for secrets. I wish to do likewise, yet I cannot help but keep secrets when such plans as yours are required. Such plans depend upon deception.” She raised a hand to stop some of them from protesting. “Please, don’t defend the need for subterfuge. The problem with your method is that it’s quite easy to hide one deception inside another. This note, for instance. It’s a note from me, telling him that I’ve hidden myself in this cottage in order to have an assignation with him away from all the business of the court, and that the kidnapping was merely a ruse.

“I wrote no such message. I was playing your game, gentlemen. By your rules. Therefore, one or more of you must be a traitor.”

“Arrogant child! How dare you accuse us!” yelled one of the true traitors.

She stared at him, and the fox emerged from that black stare. The fox snapped its jaws at the spy’s throat. He clutched his neck with both hands and fell back a step. His neck was unmarked, but he knew that what he had seen would happen if he said one thing more; pale, trembling, he took his seat again while his partner looked on, fearfully mystified.

The fox-woman made some slight gesture and suddenly four armed warriors stepped into the cottage. All of the advisers reacted with fear then; but she watched their expressions carefully for any that were more or less than they should have been. She already had the first traitor. And now the second one gave himself away as his hand slid into the folds of his robe, where his hidden dagger lay. But the soldiers merely blocked the exits. They made no move to attack.

“All of you are under house arrest,” she said, “although I do now know the identity of at least two traitors in your midst.” She made a point of looking at none of them, although they looked at one another.

“I love your emperor dearly, yet nothing he says to me can I trust, because it’s threaded with magic, which is my fault. I told you that I would have no secrets from him, and I don’t. He knows what you are about to know.” Before their eyes she transformed then. Her sweet face became that which the traitor had seen. Her hands and bare feet changed shape and grew soft with fur. The advisers gaped; even one of the soldiers drew back. She continued to speak as if none of this had happened. “Because of my negligence, not one word could I be sure came from his true heart. The magic of the fox-people is such that we ensorcel you with our glamour whether we wish to or not. Now he knows my nature and when he comes back from this war, I will know his true feelings. In any case this siege is about to end, and there’s no need for further trickery. He will blast the enemy.”

“What if, when he returns, he doesn’t love you?” asked one of the advisers.

“Then,” she replied with bowed head, “I shall be no different from you.”

She directed the soldiers to arrest the two spies she had identified. If there were more than that, she knew they would now flee for their lives.

She left the advisers and retired to the tower to await her husband’s return and his answer. The execution of spies would come later. The guilt of those men meant far less to the fox-empress than the true heart of her husband.

The kitsune let the image of her in her tower hover in the air a great long time before he drew another breath and relaxed, so that his audience knew the story had ended.

“And what did he say?” asked Diverus. “What did her husband decide?”

The fox glanced at Leodora, who was beaming. “That,” she answered, “is another tale.”

“Just so,” the fox agreed, and bowed his head.

“Beautifully told,” she said. “I know no one who could tell it better.”

“Ma’am.” He bowed still deeper, his mouth curved in that slight smile that foxes wear. “We, all of us, have tales we could share with you if you care to hear them.”

“I do,” she replied. “Truly. But it’s evening now, and we were advised not to be out after the sun set.”

The fox shared a look with his fellows, and they all burst out laughing. But he said to her, “Quite right, you don’t want to be caught out.” More tittering accompanied the comment, though she couldn’t see what they found so amusing. “I think it’s best that you allow us to accompany you back to your accommodations, wherever they are. As a precaution against whatever it is you’re fearful of.”

“That’s very kind of you.”

“It’s nothing. We can’t very well sit here playing once the sun goes down, and it’s just about to set, as you say.”

She stood with the fox, Diverus at her side. The rest of the group folded around them like a shield, and they began to walk back through the park. “And what is the name of your abode?”

“I think it’s called Eat This and Have a Cup of Tea.”

“Ah, know it well, know it very well.” He glanced at some of the others of the group with another meaningful look.

Leodora turned to the man beside her, intending to ask him…whatever it was, the question fell from her mind as she saw him. He was changing as they walked, no longer human. He had a great curling nose now, and his chin hung down as a beard might have on someone else. The man behind him was more grotesque still. His head had become part of his shoulders, flat-topped, and his torso funneled down into skinny legs and long-taloned feet, as if he were the child of a bird that had mated with a parsnip. He blinked back at her with round, inhuman eyes. The eyes all around her had changed: Some bulged, others had turned hard and black. Noses had reshaped, distorted, or vanished altogether. Likewise hair, which had disappeared or else sprouted in odd places, or transformed into feathers, reeds, seaweed. Only the fox, transformed before she’d met him, remained the same, although in the dark and among this company he looked more sinister and rapacious than before.

As they all walked down the seemingly deserted thoroughfare, more shapes emerged from the shadows or rose up through the pavement to double their numbers.

Diverus clutched her arm, all of his terror in his grip. He was staring behind them so intently that she looked back, too. A crowd had amassed, walking behind them, some thin and stalky, others squat and elvish, some slick and others furry. Two of the squat creatures held lanterns on long flexible poles and ran along the edges of the crowd to keep up. Behind the lights there were even more creatures, but in shadow, only now and then glimpsed between other bodies and in cast light. If anything they looked more grotesque than those nearby. It was a parade of monsters, and she and Diverus were their captives. Soter would say it was all her fault for not returning while daylight remained—that is, if he ever saw her again, he would. She wanted to speak to the kitsune, but he had drawn ahead to lead the parade. Two more lights on poles bobbed beside him.

Something cold brushed her shoulder, and instinctively she pressed against Diverus, away from the source, as a towering ghost drifted past. His mismatched eyes regarded her with surprise, as though he recognized her. He wore odd clothing—a black jacket over a white shirt with another strip of material hanging from his throat. She wasn’t sure what manner of pants he wore because his legs faded below the knee into an ill-defined grayness. He floated past and toward the front.

Then all at once the parade came to a stop. Beside Diverus the creatures stepped away, and there stood the fox. He grinned. “Well,” he said, “we’ve arrived.”

Behind him lay the steps up to Eat This and Have a Cup of Tea. The fox waved them out of the parade. Holding hands, they moved toward the steps.

“I couldn’t persuade you to come with us the rest of the way, could I?” the fox asked.

“Rest of the way?”

“To the end. The parade goes on to the very end.”

“Of the span?”

“Of time,” he said, as though surprised that she didn’t comprehend this already.

“So, we…couldn’t come back.”

“Quite impossible. But we should love your company. You know so many stories.”

Diverus was edging to the steps and tugging her after him. He said, “She can’t. She has a performance tonight.”

“Really?” the fox said.

“Yes, it’s true,” she replied.

“Oh, well.” He sounded sincerely regretful. “You’d best go on, then. But come again to the park and we’ll tell you another story. And you can share one of yours.”

“That would be…I would like that.”

“Good night, then, Leodora.” He made shooing gestures at them both, then turned and took his place at the front again. The parade moved off behind him. Some of the creatures watched her and Diverus as they passed. Others stared straight ahead as if this world did not exist; those in the very back somehow did both at once.

“He said your name,” Diverus noted.

“I’m sure I never told it to him.”

“You wouldn’t really go to the park again, would you?”

She made no answer. Gesturing toward the steps, she said instead, “We’re probably late.”

They climbed up and, after removing their shoes, entered the building. The moment the door thudded closed behind them, the noise and bustle of the front room died. All those within—every single person—turned from their meals, drinks, overtures, and conversations to stare at the new, and unlikely, arrivals.

Diverus and Leodora walked barefoot across the polished wood floor. With wide eyes upon her from every side, she felt as if she were still in the grotesque parade. The eyes tracked her closely as if expecting at any moment that she might transform. One man close by made signs in the air and threw some kind of dust at them that glittered as it sprinkled down, causing Diverus to sneeze violently, which in turn caused the man to dive for safety beneath his table. Leodora paused to brush the dust from her sleeve. When nothing happened, the man poked out his head, tittered nervously, and sat up facing his food, refusing to look at them. Diverus rubbed his nose. The crowd lost interest.

The proprietor entered then. He carried a woven tray full of covered dishes. “Ah-ha,” he said, “there you two are. That Soter has taken to drink because he couldn’t find you. He was sure you were gobbled up by goblins.”

Diverus glanced askance at Leodora, who asked, “Are we late?”

“Not for my needs, no. You can see—they are all still eating. However, I am not of a nervous disposition.”

“I understand. When is it we begin, then?”

“Oh, anytime you like, although if you would wait perhaps until those who ordered this food have had their fill, you’ll be less likely to play to an empty garden.”

“Of course.”

“Grand.” He hurried off to serve the food, leaving behind lovely smells.

The central courtyard was nearly deserted. Cut off from the street and the front room, the handful of patrons there did not react when the newcomers entered, apparently connecting them neither to the parade nor directly with the anticipated performance of puppetry.

At a small table beside the booth Soter sat alone, his head on his arms. Candlelight floated in a bowl by his head, illuminating his slack expression, telling her everything she needed to know of his condition. He stared at nothing, but then sensed her and shifted. When he saw her he closed his eyes, licked his lips, and pushed himself upright, swaying slightly.

“The vagabonds return,” he muttered.

“We were collecting stories,” she said sharply. “The way I do on every span. You know that.”

“The sun set long ago. You were even warned about it.”

“Our performance wasn’t set to begin before this, and it looks as if it will have to go on without you.”

“Nonsense.” He bowed his head as if tired of the argument. “What happened to you? You could have been consumed by the monsters that walk these streets at night, the parade—”

“We joined the parade,” she interjected.

“What? What happened?”

“They ate us.” She had the satisfaction of seeing him dumbfounded. “The good thing that came of it is, I have a story to perform belonging to this span, that we’ve never heard before, and perhaps more to come. Wasn’t that worth it?”

“My girl, my headstrong mad girl. You are your mother’s child, and like her you rattle the dark.”

She gaped at those words. He had no way of knowing that Shumyzin had said the very same, and for an instant she stood in two places, atop the tower on Vijnagar and here, as if two moments had merged, folding over the events in between, as if to say that she had followed the correct path and reached the next clue, although toward what end she had no idea.

“You rattle it long enough,” he went on, “and it’ll rattle you back.”

“So I shouldn’t look for new tales?”

“I’m not saying that. I’m saying, be careful you don’t become a tale.” He poured his cup, but then pushed it at her. “Here, drink for stamina before we go on.” She picked it up. “And don’t worry about my condition. I could do my part roaring drunk, and you know it.”

She sipped the wine and put the cup down. “I know you’ve tested the notion enough times.”

He snorted, smiled. “I have, and even before yours. Now go get ready, and where’s Div—ah, there you are, boy. Get in the booth. I’ll go call us up an audience. You apply your skills, the both of you, to this story you risked your lives to get, and tomorrow night they’ll be murdering each other to get in. We’ll save Nikki Danjo’s ghost till then.” He drew himself to his feet.

Leodora pushed into the booth with Diverus behind her.

He picked up his lute. “We risked our lives?” he asked.

She shrugged at him. “Maybe a little.”

TWO

Their performance of “The Emperor’s Tale” that night proved so afflated that it was to the audience as if two demigods had manifested inside the booth to render the story. Diverus plucked a delicate tune underneath Jax’s prologue, then switched to a small flute to represent the fox-empress, inventing a bittersweet theme for her on the spot. Even Leodora, in the midst of depicting the story, found her throat constricting with emotion. Every note was the perfect complement to the shadow figures on the screen. During an interlude, when she could glance back at him, she saw that his eyes were closed and his head was swaying as he played, as if while his body sat with her his spirit ventured into some other realm to bring back a music that no one had ever heard, yet all knew the instant it was played that it already lived in their bones, threaded through generations. Wherever he channeled it from, he was playing music that had formed the moment the story was first told—the music of the story’s origin. She knew, even before she took her bow afterward, that they would be weeping as they applauded. She made Diverus come out, too, with his flute, and presented him to them. The ovation doubled. “Kitsune Jax!” someone yelled, and coins rained upon them. If Soter had an opinion of the musician at that moment, he didn’t express it, but gestured, redundantly, to them both as if the audience needed instruction in where to direct their acclaim.

The next morning, with a mist hanging over the span, she and Diverus went back to the park, but the kitsune and his brethren weren’t there. The benches on which the players had sat the day before were empty. No one played go¯ today. The strangely cut and shaped flora seemed different, too, but Leodora couldn’t be sure if it was her imagination or if the topiary had been changed. She didn’t remember the one cut like a huge bird with a fan for a tail, nor the one that looked like a giant depiction of her Meersh the Bedeviler puppet—and surely she would have noticed that one if it had been there the previous afternoon. Who was it cut these bushes, anyway?

People strolled through the park in leisurely fashion; some passing nearby stared at her curiously. Diverus noticed this first and pointed it out to her, and the two of them watched people watching her as they passed. Then one woman, rather than just watching, approached her. With her face hidden behind a small fan that she fluttered, the woman asked, “Would you sell me, young woman, some of your hair?”

“My hair?” She self-consciously touched the fall of it at her neck. She wore it unbound today, enjoying the freedom of anonymity.

“Enough to make a wig for me. I’ll pay you well.”

“I’m sorry, but no.”

The woman made a slight bow of disappointment, then fluttered away.

Diverus said, “They must never have seen hair like yours.”

“But it’s just hair!”

“To us. We might want to leave this park, though, before she finds someone who’s willing to take it from you.”

“Take my hair?” Clearly she found the idea absurd.

“In the underspan of Vijnagar, if someone liked what you had, they took it. If you disagreed with them, there was usually an argument, sometimes a fight. Sometimes a murder.”

“You saw this?”

“Not every day, no. Own nothing to feed someone’s envy and you’ll live a good long time. Otherwise, you have to be willing to fight.”

“You had something to steal?” she asked, thinking that he wasn’t merely reciting but spoke from personal experience.

“No,” he answered. “I had nothing, less than nothing, so I was left alone.”

They continued to wander idly through the park, which appeared larger than possible. Beyond the benches and up a few steps the way was blocked by a stand of bamboo grown so thickly together that when they at last located a meandering path of small stones among the stems, they had to walk single-file along it, weaving through an increasingly impeditive forest, so dense that the clogged air hung motionless, while in branches overhead unseen birds chattered shrilly. The world became green, crepuscular, and claustrophobic.

When it seemed the forest could be compressed no further and remain navigable, the bamboo began to thin, until they were catching glimpses of the world beyond it again. Soon only a single, random row of stems stood between them and the outside. The path ended at a few steps, leading down a slope to a circular pond. In the center of the pond, water trickled over an odd pile of stones that seemed to have been arranged to produce the most noise possible—the trickling and burbling drowned out even the birdsong they’d left behind. Orange fish with large sleepy eyes suggesting a jaded intelligence swam lazily near the edge of the pond and followed them as they walked around it. There were benches at intervals, but no one sat. This whole portion of the park stood deserted.

The path led to a broad oval of sand, ringed by rocks. A solitary figure stood in the sand, his face hidden beneath a low conical hat. He held a small rake and, as Leodora and Diverus came upon him, he was carefully creating a series of crosshatches. The sand had been worked elsewhere into swirls and nautiloid patterns. In silence they watched him perform, and Leodora felt as if she were watching the creator himself, making the world. He paused to consider what he’d done, standing idly with one foot on his thigh and his weight upon the rake. He seemed then like a statue, as if she had only imagined his movement. Quietly she and Diverus crept past him. If he was aware, he didn’t show it. He didn’t move at all. On the far side and bordered by short conical trees, a few steps led down from this strange plateau and across another area of exotically shaped bushes, and to a set of polished wooden trellises that served as gates. Beyond them, people moved past randomly, as if unaware of this enigmatic park.

Exiting through the gates, the two found themselves on a secondary boulevard that paralleled the one they’d taken upon arriving on the span the day before. Looking back, they found that they had walked beneath the oddly canted central tower without noticing and viewed it now on the far side of where they’d begun, halfway to the end of the span. “Maybe the bamboo forest hid it,” suggested Diverus, as if reading her thoughts, but even to himself he sounded unconvinced. He added, “Maybe we want to walk back on the road instead.”

“There certainly wasn’t anyone to ask for stories,” said Leodora.

“I think it won’t be the same going back anyway.” She looked at him questioningly, and he explained, “I think it’ll have become another park.”

What struck her as the most odd about his observation was that she both understood and agreed with him.

This entire span seemed to be alive with elusive magic.

They walked along the avenue toward the center tower, passing other pedestrians, fruit and vegetable stands, pedicabs, and shops. The shops on their right hid the park from view, and when they did catch a glimpse, all they saw was a stone wall.

The two of them had only just entered the shadow under the middle tower’s swaybacked crossbeam when a procession cut across their path.

It was nothing like the parade of monsters from the previous night. The people—for they all looked human this time—wore white garments: robes, pants, shirts, all white. Only one woman, near the front, wore color—a bright red scarf upon her head. In the middle, lying upon a board but held up above their heads on a series of poles, lay a body. It, too, was wrapped in white, from head to foot.

Leodora turned and started after them. When Diverus didn’t tag along she turned back to him. “I have to see this,” she told him. “I don’t know why, but I have to.”

The street ran directly to one of the canted uprights supporting the swooping beam overhead. The street widened to circle the upright, and the procession flowed around it like water around a stalk of bamboo. On the far side the split road opened even wider, into a crescent at the span’s edge. The funeral group spread out to fill the crescent. Leodora and Diverus remained on its fringe, slightly separate from the others so as not to intrude. They didn’t know how they might be regarded.

The woman with the red scarf began a recitation: “There are two hundred levels to the universe. The higher we ascend, the hotter it becomes. The realm of the spirits would scorch us, and even they cannot reach the level of the fire and water gods, but are connected to it only by rays, as the sun connects to us.”

A woman standing beside her and clutching the hands of two children began to wail. The children took their cues from her and added their voices to the anguish.

Diverus moved off from the clustered group, to the rail at the edge of the span. Leodora trailed after him, curious about his response. She could still hear the priestess’s recitation, but the talk of levels made little sense to her. Through thin mist the other wing of the span was visible, separate but close enough that Leodora could make out the shapes of people in the nearest lane. As she approached the rail, she could see below them the darkness of the land that sloped out from under the surface of the span. A hillside. She leaned over and peered down into a deep valley that ran between the avenues. Houses on stilts dotted the lower slopes, and the ones at the very bottom stood in water, in a narrow stream that snaked through it. The course of the stream led back to a waterfall in the gray distance. On each side of the stream, the land had been flooded—a system of small gates and channels allowed water to be diverted from the stream, enough to cover the valley floor. Some sort of crop grew in the spread of water, and people worked there with hoes and other implements, with baskets slung over their shoulders, standing ankle-deep.

The funeral recitation had ended, and the body—still on its plank but now fastened to ropes—began a steady descent over the edge. She had to lean out over the rail to see where it was going.

The hillside below was cracked open, and inside the opening, directly beneath the descending body, lay a grotto. The sides of it were jagged; down in its depths lights flickered, like candles sparkling off faceted gems, revealing more white-robed figures. They stood awaiting the body, reaching up eagerly while it descended toward the open mouth of the hill.

Diverus said suddenly, “My mother died and they dropped her down into the sea.” She glanced sidelong at him. He seemed calm, almost entranced. “There was no land under Vijnagar. Just water. They wrapped her up like that and then they sent her under the water.”

“Diverus—”

“I came to believe she’d become a mermaid and lives now in a city at the bottom of the sea.”

She found she could watch the descent of the body by watching his eyes. He tracked it until it was taken by the figures in the hole.

“It’s the same, though, isn’t it?” he said.

The priestess recited: “After the Storm of Raruro, comes a reuniting, and all spirits join. Shukkon and fukkon will join. Until that day he must remain separated from us—that is the order of things.”

Diverus pushed away from the ceremony and through the many figures in white. Leodora followed after him. He didn’t go far but sat down against a wall where a cart had been standing earlier—a few cast-off vegetables lay scattered there. He rested his face on his fists. As she came up to him, Leodora thought he looked like a little boy. She knelt, and then sat beside him.

“It’s strange,” he said immediately. “I can remember it all, but in the way you remember the stories you tell, the way I remember the story that fox told us yesterday. It never happened to me, but I can recall that emperor and his fox-wife now—as if I was there.”

She said nothing, but considered that awhile. Idly she picked up a long-necked gourd and a taro potato and began toying with them, dancing them about. There seemed to be no answer, really. Diverus had been present, and yet from what she gathered, the Diverus seated beside her hadn’t existed then. He was a creation of the gods. A Dragon Bowl had made him.

Meanwhile the funeral procession was returning from the burial. The wails of the two children at the rear of the group reached them well before the children passed by.

Without looking at him, Leodora said, “It isn’t as if you could have saved her, Diverus. Any more than I could have saved my parents. They both died before I could talk.” She met his angry eyes and held his gaze. “You think she died on your account.”

His eyes widened with surprise and betrayal, and she knew that she’d guessed right. She spun the gourd around, then waltzed it to the potato. “There isn’t a day when I don’t miss my aunt Dymphana. I can’t see her again, maybe ever.” Her throat tightened and her face flushed. She’d thought she was saying this for him, not to express her own pain. She wanted to stop but had to go on. He had to understand. She willed herself not to cry. “It’s not my fault I can’t see her. I didn’t make it this way, my uncle did. He made the rules, and what I’ve done…is because of that.”

People were walking past now. She lowered her head, unable to look at him or anyone else, knowing that she might burst into tears if she did—and how stupid and pointless that would be—but she couldn’t help it. She focused on the vegetables, on making them waltz about and pirouette upon the stones.

The crying children came abreast of her but she didn’t look up, even when their noise was right on top of her. And then suddenly the crying stopped.

At that she raised her head slowly. The children stood directly before her. They were watching her hands in fascination. They might have been twins, both with black hair and almond eyes. Above, holding their hands, their mother, the widow, met her gaze and made a pitiful attempt at a smile, ruined by grief. Her tears had etched trails in the thick powdery makeup on her cheeks. The thought came to Leodora: All of us are here on account of death.

The rest of the funeral party moved on, but the mother couldn’t work up the energy to order her children away, and so she stood there as if expecting Leodora to read her a future.

Quietly, Diverus suggested, “Tell them a story.”

She glanced over at him. He seemed to have forgotten his despair. His eyes shifted from her to the children and back again.

She spoke what she’d been thinking. “We’re all here on account of death,” she said, and she spun the long-necked gourd about, as if it were turning to face the children. “Death is everywhere, but do you know that once upon a time Death didn’t exist? No? Let me tell you, then, how Death came into our world.” She raised her eyes to the widow. “I think you should sit down to hear this. It’s not a long story, but it isn’t short, either.”

The mother knelt, and her children sat beside her.

“Now, does anyone here know who Chilingana is?” asked Leodora.

One of the twins said, “He dreamed Shadowbridge.”

“That’s right. He was the original dreamer.” She walked the taro potato forward and hid the gourd from sight, then leaned over and picked up a small cluster of enoki and set it aside. She said, “One day a different dream came to him.”

HOW DEATH CAME TO SHADOWBRIDGE

In those times the sun was called Lord Akema. He was a warrior god, terrible to behold, who would blind all those foolish enough to seek for his features. That’s why there existed the second—the false mask of Akema—Nocnal, upon which everyone might safely gaze, and which they could petition when they wanted a favor from the war god. Behind the mask of Nocnal, the warrior would listen and sometimes answer.

It was under Nocnal’s aegis that the fisherman Chilingana dreamed the bridges of Shadowbridge into place. Each night more bridges appeared—covered in structures, in houses and towers, in parks and alleys, but all of them were empty, lifeless, and still. Soon his dream stretched far across the world, and Nocnal observed it all as it unfolded.

By day, beneath the burning face of Akema, Chilingana’s life persisted as flat as bread. He fished, he ate, and he dwelled with his wife, Lupeka, in his stilt house. Although he could have stepped across the gap onto the first bridge he’d dreamed, he didn’t. He talked about going, almost every day, but each time he came to the edge of his own small world he hesitated, peered down the empty way until his eyes ached, and then gave up. He could not go traveling out upon these spans. To do so would have invited the unknown, and Chilingana, for whom everything had ever been the same, feared the unknown. He didn’t understand that the unknown needed no invitation.

One night while he lay upon his seaweed mat, a chill wind called loneliness came floating down the empty spans of the bridges he had dreamed. It swirled about his house. It slipped into the sleeves of his clothing and fluttered the cloth against him. His mouth filled with it and he rose and went out and stared off into the distance, across the near-black sea. He looked for what he knew not.

Chilingana thought his wife was asleep inside, but she lay awake. The wind had filled his house, and she had breathed it in as well as he.

She was aware of him outside, yet did not call him. No distance had ever existed between the woman and the man before he dreamed the bridges. They stretched into infinity like the lives of Chilingana and Lupeka. This new distance touched her with longing. She wondered: When had she come to be, and who had built her house? She assumed Chilingana had done it, but he never said. She had never before thought to ask. The two of them wanted for nothing: All the food of the world swam through the ocean beneath their house. Why, then, create such things as bridges? What purpose could they serve?

Fear gnawed at her then, that her husband wished to travel away from her into an unknown so vast that he might never return. The distance opened like a pit beneath her, and her breath caught in her throat.

The wind of loneliness heard her and was surfeited.

She arose and crept out the back of the house onto the balcony that surrounded it on all sides. She gazed out across the sea away from her husband. Her eyes followed Nocnal’s bright stripe upon the swirls and waves until she made out, just above the horizon, the black edge of a bridge’s line, and in the middle of it the black spire of a tower, and her fear frothed and foamed. She knew in wordless fashion that these spans connected to some other place, although she knew no other.

Her fearful musings disturbed Lord Akema’s rest, prodding the face of Nocnal to call down, “What troubles you, lady?”

“Well,” she answered, and then fell silent before the immensity of what she wanted to say. What was still emerging inside her soul had no words. She’d never known anything but herself; how could she express something so much larger? She kept silent. If Nocnal had to ask, then he didn’t understand.

Yet he continued asking her till finally she retreated inside where the walls were near, the territory small and safe. When her husband came in later and lay down beside her, she rolled over to clasp him and he held her tight. “I know,” he said.

“What?”

“Something is coming.”

The certainty in his words terrified her more than her own inexpressible unease. “What is? What’s coming? Tell me.”

“When it arrives, I’ll know it.” He couldn’t tell her more, and they lay like that, tightly bound in unshared fear, too conflicted even to remember shared desire.

Chilingana tried to forget what he’d told Lupeka. He continued fishing as he had always done, but with uneasy glances over his shoulder, down the length of the adjoining spans, across the ocean to where they vanished over the horizon.

One afternoon the face of Lord Akema was particularly fierce. Chilingana lay on the shadowed side of his house as people still do to escape the god’s fury, and he happened to glance up to find a stranger walking up the next span.

The fisherman who had created the world leapt to his feet. Other than his wife, this was the first person he had ever seen. Whatever he’d dreaded for so long, this had to be it.

The stranger was tall and gaunt. He wore robes that we would say belonged to a mystic. They were deep red and glittered with powerful designs woven with silver thread, thick as fishbones. The hood of his robe kept the stranger’s features in shadow. All Chilingana could determine was that this traveler was very dark indeed.

The stranger came to the place where the dreamed bridge ended and stepped across the gap onto the balcony encircling the stilt house. The stilts groaned beneath him as if he weighed as much as the world. He walked right up to Chilingana, who huddled shivering in the shadows. It took all the fisherman’s reserves not to cry out and flee inside. He stared into a face of sharp cheekbones and high polished brows, looked into bottomless eyes. “Who are you?” he asked.

The traveler replied, “I am Death.”

“What sort of name is that?”

Death laughed. “One new to you even though you’re the Dreamer. Your bridges have grown to encompass the world, reaching even as far as the land of the dead, which is a barren and uninhabited place I was happy to leave. Your creation invited me to walk the world, and I set out directly to find you.”

The fisherman raised his shoulders. “You aren’t making sense.”

“I think you’ll see that I am, once you’ve come inside me.” Death opened wide his robes, and Chilingana saw a place so cool and inviting that the harsh rays of Lord Akema couldn’t find him there. He must have fallen into those robes, for he had no memory of walking. Once he was inside the cool place his mind tumbled with memories. The robes that had been held open closed, and at the core of the darkness within them lay a red glow of life out of which came discordant noises he’d never known—crackling energies and devices that rang and then spoke, the barking of dogs, the canister rumble of machines as they rolled along an empty boulevard, the clicking of a metal thing that unfurled strips of paper covered in indecipherable symbols, and the voices of people—more people than he could hold in his mind—all speaking at once and shouting through objects in the sky that were nothing like Akema, lifeless creations, but spraying chatter out and down like rain in a million different tongues drowning him under their flow. He saw impossible blue-glass buildings across which clouds slid like oil, and lighted things that were not fish but traveled far beneath his perfect sea, and he knew that all of these things, however they were new to him, were also ancient, long gone, dredged up out of a collective silt of memory, from some other time and place before he and his wife had arrived. And he knew torment, for in all his new recollections, his birth was nowhere to be found.

He sank to the stones before the traveler. His head hung, too heavy for his neck to lift. Death spoke. “Now you know mortality. Now you’ll live and age and cling to what memories you have, because you will always be falling away from them.”

Then Death left the fisherman there and entered his house. Chilingana tried to crawl after him, to shield his wife from this terrible conjurer. Why should she have to know these things? She hadn’t done this—she hadn’t made the bridges. But she couldn’t be spared, else gaze down upon a mortal man whom she no longer would recognize as her husband.

Death did not leave, but when the fisherman dragged himself feebly inside, the traveler had gone, and his wife lay upon the bed, naked and open to him. She had been made fertile, able to bear children. Thus did Death plan to people his realm.

Nearing her, Chilingana recovered his strength, and they folded together and slept, safe so long as they touched.

In the morning, when he awoke, he was alone and certain that he had dreamed the traveler. He stretched, to find that his body ached unfamiliarly.

As he stood, he kicked something from the mat. It clattered across the floor. It was a silver object, small enough to lie in the palm of his hand.

Grooves threaded the length of it; at the top was a large single slot. He had brought it back from the realm within Death’s cloak.

When he stooped and lifted the thing, Chilingana dropped to his knees with his fist closed, and began to weep because now he could remember his entire life and he recognized that each day would hereafter be different from the last, and farther away than the land of Death itself.

Time upon Shadowbridge had begun. Life had arrived, carried by Death.

Leodora laid down the taro and the enoki. The gourd she’d already hidden in one sleeve, and she let it roll slowly out. It came to rest sitting up, its “head” canted as if toward the children. For them it had become the figure of Death; and for their mother, as well. She smiled at the storyteller, and now that smile was proof against grief. Her tears had dried and those of her children. “Thank you,” she said.

Some members of the funeral procession had stopped when they found the widow missing, and had wandered back. They’d clustered close enough to hear the story, and complimented Leodora by dipping their heads in an informal bow. The widow turned to her people and then folded the children back in among them, but the two kept glancing over their shoulders at Leodora and the gourds as they were drawn away, and then lost from sight.

She got up, weary, her legs stiff from all the walking followed by sitting awkwardly while she performed the tale. She saw the expression on Diverus’s face. “What is it?” she asked.

“I—I’ve no words. I stand amazed.”

Blushing, she lowered her eyes. “You’ve no call to be. You have a far more remarkable talent than mine.”

“No,” he said. “Mine was a gift from the gods.”

“How do you know mine isn’t?”

“But—” He stopped, thought. “You’ve never even set foot on a dragon beam—you said as much.”

“Is that the only way one is granted gifts?” Her voice teased now.

The question being too enormous in implication, he could only laugh with her. “I don’t know. I don’t know much of anything, do I?”

A cloud passed over the sun, and the empty street became suddenly dusky and vaguely ominous. At the crescent, where the body had been lowered, nothing had been left to mark the spot. Every building appeared to be deserted. Leodora gathered herself up.

Diverus asked, “How did you know what story to tell them?”

“I had three vegetables. The tale of Death was the first thing I thought of with three characters.” She faced him as a look of doubt crossed his face. She let it go. She didn’t want to explain herself, didn’t want to answer how stories found her or how she’d looked into the faces of those children and their mother and known what they needed to hear. She would have to admit that she didn’t understand how it happened, either, as he didn’t know where his songs came from. “Right now I’m famished. We have a long walk ahead of us still, and I wouldn’t care to have to join that parade of monsters again—they might not let us go this time.”

She offered her hand and drew him to his feet, and they walked off together.

After their performance that second night, Soter informed Leodora and Diverus that they would be journeying on following the third performance. “We need to spread your reputation far and wide, can’t be falling into the trap of staying in one place too long, even if the audiences are respectable.”

“Respectable?” Leodora all but laughed at the word he’d chosen. The central garden had been filled. People had crowded into all three entrances to see the performance.

Soter pretended not to hear the sarcasm. He rocked back and forth on his feet as though the matter they’d spoken of was closed. Judging by the look on her face, he could not have infuriated Leodora more.

“I understand none of this,” she said. “We stayed on in Vijnagar even when the mistress of the theater very nearly exposed us by trying to have her way with Jax, even after I complained of it to you. We were going to stay on even when I told you we needed to go. In fact we would be there still if it weren’t for your encounter with that elf.”

“Grumelpyn.”

“What did he say that has you pushing us along now, before we’ve even set down our belongings and drawn a breath? Even when we thought Uncle Gousier might come after us, we didn’t flee where we had an audience. In fact, on Merjayzin you were willing to risk letting him catch up with us at the thought of a paying house. We stayed there for two full weeks!”

He’d stopped rocking on his heels by then, and focused on Diverus as if he might appeal to the musician and the two of them outvote her. “Those were early days,” he explained. “We needed the reputation to build, to fly ahead, to do the work for us so that by the time we arrived upon the next and the next span, they had already heard the rumors of you and I could haggle over a larger percentage of the take for us than if we’d just come in off the street like two vagabonds who hoped to swindle them a bit before climbing out a back window and making off with our loot.”

Before Leodora could respond, Diverus asked, slowly and thoughtfully, “So by the time she found me, her reputation had grown enough that now you don’t need to worry whether the next span has heard of her, yes?”

“I—” Soter hadn’t been prepared for that question. Why couldn’t they just do as he asked for once, instead of requiring a more thorough explanation of why he expected them to do as he wished? The little musician was as bad as she was. “Of course we need to have her reputation spread. Of course we do.” He tried to laugh, to make it all light and unimportant that they might not wonder at the tension that underlay every word he spoke—the tension of fearing that he might have to give up more than he wanted. “But you know, there are infinite spans, infinite peoples and tales, and don’t you want to see more of them?” He knew, even as he spoke, that he’d taken a wrong turn, because the question itself offered her the power to decide—the very thing he wanted to avoid.

“I do want to see them all,” she said, “but I also want to learn every story, and I can’t do that if I leave each span so rapidly that I haven’t time to find the stories, hear them, add them to what I know. You said my father did the same.”

“Yes,” replied Soter, knowing there was no other answer, and no way to distract her from what she would say next, which he heard as if it were an echo preceding the sound that made it.

“I want the time to collect the stories.”

“Lea.”

“No, don’t grease your words to me. Don’t make promises and don’t explain my behavior to me when you can’t account for your own.”

“All right then.” He hung his head. It was the only option left him. “How long do we stay?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes, and that is because it’s not your responsibility to know,” he insisted, but carefully.

She shook her head in frustration.

“Three nights?”

“Longer,” she said.

“Five then.”

“I don’t know.”

He sighed. “Once again, Lea, it is my part, my role, to ascertain the best venue, and how long we can rely upon the people to attend, and who will pay us the most. This is a job I do well. I’m certainly no puppeteer, but without me, you would have no way to prove that you are.”

She leaned forward then and said, “All right. Five nights on this span.”

He nodded, and said, “Done!”

She got up heavily, as if the argument had worn her out. “I’ve two hours before the performance. I’m going to rest.” The courtyard seemed to tremble at her passing.

Left behind, Diverus fidgeted, stealing glances at Soter as he commented, “I’m new to human interactions, but I wonder that anybody understands anybody.” He, too, took his leave of the garden.

Alone, Soter toasted himself and, after downing the small cup of liquor, said, “Five, then. I can live with that. For now.”

The next three days, Leodora collected stories. Each day she checked the park before looking elsewhere. On the first day she did find a group playing go¯ there, but it wasn’t the fox and his friends, who never did reappear. “Maybe it takes a long time to go to the end of everything and come back,” said Diverus.

“But they invited us to come back the next day.” Even as she argued, she guessed the explanation, and before Diverus could say it she countered herself: “Days and nights aren’t the same to the demons in that parade.”

“That’s what I think, too,” Diverus replied. “What I meant.”

She roamed the entire span, eventually crossing onto the split on the far side of the valley of stilt houses, seeking groups, clusters of people at leisure whom she could chat up and ask for a story. She even came across the same palanquin bearers she had used in explaining story collecting to Diverus, and as she’d told him they did indeed serve up a plethora of salacious stories about their mistress. None of these could be performed, but they contained images and ideas and moments she might borrow, retool, and fold into some unrelated telling to make it unique.

She received stories such as the tale of the priest who was so lonely that he created an artificial friend, but got the spell horribly wrong so that his friend wanted most of all to eat him—a story she performed the same night, provoking both laughter and gasps.

The courtyard filled earlier each night. People declined to take dinner until afterward in order to get close to the booth.

The final performance in Hyakiyako, she concluded with a repeat rendition of “The Ghost of Nikki Danjo.” While the puppet of Masaoka pressed against the side of the screen and bit into her arm to keep from screaming, her son died in agony of poisoning. She dared not cry out, as the audience knew, else give away that she had discovered the identity of the real villain of the piece—Nikki Danjo himself.

Soter sat off to the side of the booth, both to watch Leodora’s skillful performance and to mingle with the crowd. Once again the courtyard was full to overflowing. Mutsu would be deliriously happy, almost as happy as he had been furious when Soter told him that they could not stay beyond five nights.

The crowd booed when the evil regent Nikki Danjo slid onto the screen again. The body language of the puppet implicated him as he crept across the room to advise his lord, and the puppet of Masaoka, behind him, equally betrayed her fear. Soter, though he was used to Leodora’s craft, found himself swept up in the tale. The puppets became real people. He could see the room that surrounded them rather than the shadow of doorways, screens, and lanterns. He heard not Leodora’s voice, but the voices of the overlord and the woman and the evil Danjo. He shook his head as if he’d begun to fall asleep, and blamed the many cups of rice wine he’d consumed. It was powerful stuff, and he wasn’t used to it. Plus, he conceded—if only to himself—Diverus’s music made her voice seem to change, adding weight and depth to the male voices. Soter drifted into it, his head nodding.

He straightened up on his stool, then rubbed his eyes while glancing around himself at the crowd, all so riveted by the performance that not one met his gaze. He found himself similarly drawn back to the pale screen, glowing lightly red now as the story neared an explosive climax. She had learned to increase the colors subtly, slowly, so that the audience hardly noticed that it had gone from white to crimson by the end of the play. Gods, he was proud of her! She had no idea how proud. Why didn’t he tell her? He ought to tell her.

Then, as he stared at the screen, it seemed to draw him in, growing darker the closer he came.

When he looked up, the courtyard had turned the color of blood, as if the light from her lantern had become liquid and smeared every surface. Soter dragged the back of his hand across his eyes. He looked first at the starlit sky above to confirm that it was still in place; but when he glanced down again the audience had transformed into puppets—giant, articulated puppets, their profiles translucent, features sharply drawn. He yipped and craned away in his chair, only to find that he was leaning into more puppets. The closest one swiveled its leathery head and gave him a nettled glare. He stared at the booth then, straight at the screen where Leodora performed. He clung to the identifiable shadows, denied the room. The performance continued, the story unfolded. In her fiction lay his truth. Without daring to glance away, he reached to the small table behind him and patted about for his wine cup.

A moist hand closed over his wrist and held it.

He stiffened. He sat paralyzed.

Close behind him a voice said, “So here we are at last.” It was Gousier’s voice and it was all Soter could do not to leap away screaming. Instead, denying the hive of panic whirling through his belly, he made himself slowly turn around, outwardly calm, his mouth fixed in a ghastly smile. Even that little resolve deserted him the moment he saw the speaker.

Behind and above him stood the Coral Man. It glowered down at him—he knew it though there were no eyes in its head, no distinct features at all. The grip on his wrist was some sort of clammy tentacle extending from beneath the table, as gray as the figure but alive and slick.

“Soter,” it said, the voice no longer Gousier’s, but distantly familiar—a voice from a void deep inside him that he wanted to deny. “Soter, you’ll be found. Make no mistake. Found wanting.”

He could not bear the force of the scrutiny, which seemed to split him open. It was as if all the wriggling creatures that had once lived in the pores of that chalky coral were burrowing into the wound and feasting their way through him. Soon he would be nothing but bones, enveloped completely, a husk. He had to break away, face the performance, the red screen—he trembled with the effort of dismissing the apparition—turning in time to see the fitting end of Nikki Danjo, haunting it was, yes, and Remember the story, he urged himself, it was a puppet ghost, but somehow he was in the story now, seated among puppets with a ghost of his own looming in their midst. He stared so hard at the red light and the shadow figures that his eyes burned with tears from not blinking. He squeezed them shut, then jolted upright in his seat again. His arm, twisted behind him, ached horribly and he moved it, clutching his cup. His hand slid freely upon the table. Only then did he blink and glance around, wiping again at his eyes, this time with the meat of his palm. He opened one eye while he covered the other, warily peeking at his neighbor who, sensing his movement, grinned at him and said, “Very good, yes?” A normal face—bad teeth, certainly, but a normal face, not one of her puppets. Soter knew before he’d twisted around on the stool that no Coral Man would be hovering at his back. Everyone wedged into the courtyard looked normal, joyous with recognition of the masterful storytelling they’d just witnessed. They raised their hands and applauded—a burst of noise that made him jump.

“I slept, that’s all it was. I dreamed. Bardsham—” He rolled his wrist and saw it then, the one perfect circle, the sucker mark, purple where it had bruised him. Everyone else was clapping and cheering.

The screen had gone dark, the lantern extinguished. Instinct took over and Soter leapt to his feet, walked forward, clapping his own hands and calling, “Jax, my friends, the artistry of Jax!” while the crowd shouted and pounded their cups on the tables, and someone broke out a flute and began to play a frenetic melody above the din. The cheering flowed to follow and then accompany the flute, becoming a song.

After a minute Leodora stepped through the side of the booth, her head cowled, her face masked, and the song dissolved into a roar. She had played their stories and won their hearts. This was how it had been with Bardsham. The impeccable skill of a genius had overwhelmed the crowds. The energy of their pleasure flowed right through him to the artist. It was wonderful. Behind her, Diverus came out—it was becoming a routine now—and waved the shamisen he’d been playing; the audience cheered for him, too.

Here was everything they sought and he was making them leave because he was afraid. And the Coral Man had stood right there and told him it would do no good. Run to the next span, he would be found. If you wanted to remain hidden, you could not have great talent. Talent made noise; people would notice you, remember you. Jax—they would be speaking of the master puppeteer from one end of the span to the other tomorrow. A few more days and news of these performances would overtake the stories Grumelpyn had heard, louder now and more certain, the way it had been with Bardsham. “You’ll be found”—he muttered the warning.

Why, he asked the air, why did she have to be brilliant? Why did she have to shine so brightly? Why had she made them leave the damned backwater of that island? He blamed her, knowing full well that she wasn’t to blame. He made his smiles to the crowd. Then he realized she wasn’t wearing the band that restricted her breasts. She’d forgotten to put it on after the performance. Someone would see, someone would fathom the truth. He thought to move, to step between the crowd and the object of their adoration.

Then Leodora did the unthinkable. She pushed back the cowl and drew her braid free.

Watching the crowd for any sign that they’d recognized her womanliness, he only glimpsed the flash of her hair. “No,” he said, more in disbelief than as a warning, but no one heard him over the din of the song they were singing.

He faced her then, crying, “Don’t you dare!”

But she’d already reached a hand in front of her face, and she pulled the black mask up and away. The crowd yelled louder. She tugged loose the cord binding her hair then shook it all free, a shining red fan, a copper waterfall around her. They simply went mad then.

She shouted her name and they gave it back. Cries of “Leodora!” drowned out “Jax!” Coins flew through the air and rained all around her.

Soter wanted to sear her with a look the way the Coral Man had crushed him with its regard, but her stance defied him, denying him the right to hide her any longer. It’s too late, said her pose, you may dictate the dates and the venues and the spans, but you’ll not control my identity any longer. He knew this story; he’d told it to her: How had he thought it would have a different ending this time? “Bardsham,” he despaired.

Something broke inside him. He could not oppose her, he had no will any longer, no strength for the battle any longer. Chaos was coming after him, bearing down upon them all, and it would find him whether he hid her or not. It was what the Coral Man had been saying. He stared at the mark on his wrist.

There could be no going on to the next span now. No simple passage through a tunnel would disguise her identity, her name. That would travel, too, now: the skill of her father and the shape of her mother, the name so close.

She had unleashed herself, and now they had to flee.

THREE

“What do you mean, by boat?” Leodora asked Soter.

“I mean,” he said, leaning upon the undaya case, “we have ourselves taken to another spiral of the span. We abandon this trip north along this arm of the spiral and begin again—”

“—where we’re not known! It means everything I just did on four spans is for nothing. I go back to being Jax, a boy, because they won’t know anything about what happened here tonight. The story of this will carry up the line, maybe even as far as your elf friend’s span.”

“Grumelpyn.”

“I know his wretched name,” she snarled, and for a moment he actually feared she would strike him, pick up a cup or a knife and attack him; but her anger, boiling up beyond her control, brought tears to her eyes, and despite her every effort she began to cry. “Daimons damn you, Soter, I won’t do it!”

Diverus, standing uncomfortably behind her through it all, raised his hands as if to place them on her shoulders to comfort her, but seemed at the last to lose his nerve; he drew them back against himself like a mantis about to fall upon a victim. Soter saw it, registered the significance—that a bond had grown already between them that he would be foolish to try to sever—and bowed his head, pinching the bridge of his nose. His head hurt. He should have objected to such language from her, but he couldn’t work up the false ire. He deserved every invective. Worse, he had no good argument to justify this change of plans. In that tense moment he could think of only one story, lame as it was, and only one promise that might convince her.

“You won’t have to,” he said. “You don’t have to pretend to be Jax anymore—or, rather, Jax becomes a woman. We’ll sail to a span where they won’t mind. Colemaigne. We’ll go to Colemaigne.” It had been the span of choice anyway. “It’s one of the oldest spans, and they have no restrictions about—”

“About women?” She might have been crying but her voice remained all threat.

“About much of anything. They’re the epitome of the debauched.”

“Like Vijnagar.”

“Oh, my dear, Vijnagar is positively puritanical. It hides its predilections beneath its surface.” He gestured at Diverus as living proof of what he said. “In Colemaigne there’s no hypocrisy of that sort. And they’ll welcome you. Perform a Meersh story for them first thing. They always loved him. Positively their favorite. I’ll be surprised if they haven’t erected a statue to him by now.”

“I don’t have to pretend?” She was wounded, but the anger had drained from her voice.

“No,” he assured her. “No pretending. And we’ll work our way around, you see, while the story of you spreads from two sources instead of one. By the time we play half a dozen spans on that spiral, the tales of you will have closed up, they’ll meet with us in the middle. Then we’ll have a circuit to travel. Maybe we’ll even sail to a third one before then and spread your reputation farther. Why, by the time we return to Ningle, we’ll be riding in on the shoulders of crowds, too esteemed for your uncle even to—”

“Ningle?” she said warily. “We’re going back there?”

“Not soon, but, you know, it was part of the circuit in Bardsham’s day, and there are many good venues on that spiral, but above and below it. We’re just broadening our compass, is all, as well as our repertoire. You wanted to see the world and collect its stories, didn’t you tell me that?” He waited for her reply, hanging everything on that reminder—the argument fabricated even as he was saying it.

She sniffled and made a weak smile. “All right. That is—” She turned about. “—Diverus?”

“Yes?” He seemed surprised that anyone cared to ask his opinion.

“Would you want to go? To sail to another span?” Behind her, Soter observed him coldly with a look that might have implied a threat.

He replied, “I’ve nothing to compare it to. I’ve never been on a boat.” Then as an afterthought he added, “But if it takes me farther from Vijnagar, that’s probably good, isn’t it?”

“Well, there you are,” Soter said.

She nodded. “All right, Soter. It’s settled.” He smiled but she didn’t meet his gaze, wouldn’t look at him as she parted the fabric and stepped out of the booth. He tried to listen to her retreat, but she tread silently like a cat.

Then it was just the two of them, with Diverus looking puzzled and uncertain. “You care about her,” Soter said. “Well, so do I. I’m protecting her, though she’s unaware of it.”

“Protecting her from what?” asked Diverus.

For an instant he contemplated confiding, but as quickly rejected the idea as insane. “From everything,” he replied. He stared at the open case and shivered. The Coral Man lay hidden in the bottom compartment. When that figure had invaded Leodora’s dreams, he’d dismissed it, or at least pretended to. Now he appreciated what it meant to have something without a mouth, without a face really, speaking to you.

He’d have liked to open the case, haul out the boxed puppets, and confront the figure. In his mind’s theater he carried the Coral Man to the edge of the span and tossed it into the ocean where it sank without a trace, for someone else to find. What he said was, “Be sure you secure that case well and then grab yourself some sleep, boy. We’ll be up early tomorrow for us. Or, rather, today.” Then he, like Leodora, stepped out of the booth and left Diverus alone to secure the lid and blow out the lantern.

From the stern of the ship, she watched Hyakiyako shrink slowly, steadily, rounding upon the horizon until the whole length of it and of the span north of it—which they would not know hereafter—lay upon the sea like the body of a great dark snake, with the towers that divided the two spans projecting like horns, but even this image dwindled and soon only the tops of the towers remained, illusively rising and falling, buoyed upon the choppy sea until, finally, they vanished and with them the sense of the continuity of her life. Disconnected, she could not mask the pit of terror this opened in her, that everything had now been abandoned and she was lost in a way she’d never been, even when turned from Bouyan and the haven of home.

When finally she pushed away from the lost view, the tillerman, seated beside her with one arm up and pressed to the rudder bar, looked her up and down as if not sure what he made of her.

She walked unsteadily toward the ship’s prow—for all that she’d ridden a sea dragon and lived upon an island that fished for its livelihood, she had never set foot in a boat before, and this one seemed determined to throw her to her knees. It was a shallow-bottomed craft and felt much too small and flimsy to undertake journeys across vast stretches of open water—especially with no one but the tillerman seeming to pay the slightest attention to how it sailed.

In the middle of the deck and butted up to the mainmast stood the only shelter the boat afforded, a small shack—at least, that was her opinion of it. The crew called it a “house.” Soter had ducked into its dark recesses before they’d even left the span, along with the remaining three crewmen, and he hadn’t come out since. He’d been unusually reticent this morning, mostly nodding or shaking his head in response to questions, and more than once as they’d waited to cast off she had caught his gaze at the other boats moored along the two quays that projected from the side of the span, as though he expected something to come from them. When she looked, the boats were empty. No one was paying them any mind at all.

Like Soter, Diverus sat in the shadows of the shack. He had his arms wrapped about his knees and was trying very hard not to be ill. She would have liked to have confided in him, asked him what he thought of Soter’s behavior, but clearly he was in no condition to discuss anything at the moment.

The two undaya cases were secured to the side of the little shack, surrounded by more crates and baskets of amphorae packed in straw. She steadied herself against them as the ship abruptly lurched. Then she took hold of one of the sail-control lines and swooped beneath the woven main sail and toward the second mast. A control line ran from that smaller sail to the side of the boat, and she caught it and swung beneath it with her feet up and was a child again for a moment, free and untethered. She let go and landed beside the mast, almost kicking what she took to be an enormous yellow cable, as big around as her waist, that encircled the base of the mast. The cable flinched, and Leodora caught herself against the mast, leaning forward precariously over the cable. In the middle of it an eye opened and a thin reed of a tongue flicked into the air. The cable’s color changed then, yellow becoming brown, darkening to viridian. It was not hemp rope at all, but an enormous snake. She backed away from it, then scurried to the prow of the boat, and once there glanced over her shoulder. The snake hadn’t moved. Its color was blending with the deck again, until she was looking once more at a coil of rope that had no apparent eyes or tongue. The snake had gone back to sleep. It didn’t care about her.

In the vee of the prow, ahead of the lugsail, a small step boosted her high enough that, gripping the side tightly, she could lean over the stem head of the boat to look down into the water as it parted beneath her. She saw a fragmented reflection in the ripple, a face split into shadowed halves topped by a burnished cowl of hair that flared with the late-afternoon light. The water was a deep blue, almost violet. She felt that if she’d leaned down far enough to dip her hand in, it would have come out dyed.

Ahead lay only more ocean, and no hint of any other spiral. Gulls wheeled around them, probably hoping for some food, and that suggested to her that nothing else lay anywhere near, for surely gulls would find better feeding off a span or even an isle than from a single small boat where no one was eating.

If the world was infinite as Soter claimed, then how far might Colemaigne be? The way he’d described the world when she was small, she’d imagined that one span led to the next, and wherever you were you could look out over the rail and see the nearest spiral just across the way. That was certainly not the truth, however. The world might contain infinite spirals, but they could also be infinitely separated. And so, no longer able to assume that what she assumed was true, she wondered about the truth of Colemaigne. It was a much-celebrated place, the subject of endless fables and tales and, most likely, lies. A locus for hedonistic delights, they said, where wine flowed from a huge central fountain and through a thousand capillaries, so that no matter where you were, you had only to dip your cup to sample it. Streets were paved with a crust of hard rock candy, and glazed pastry shell houses leaned over them. No one ever went hungry and every pleasure was indulged—no worries, no desires left unfulfilled. She might have been amazed by such tales once, but now—and especially after rescuing Diverus from the paidika—she understood that for one person’s pleasure to be indulged, another must submit to indulging it. Pleasure had its price, even when paid by another.

In any case the stories were ancient, as old as those of the storyfish and Meersh, according to Soter. What Colemaigne might have been in its past said nothing of what it was now. Look at Ningle, a decrepit, crumbling span that had once been new and glorious and blessed by Edgeworld, and which was surely much younger than their proposed destination.

Colemaigne by implication had to be on an ancient spiral. How else could a span so old exist? Every span linked to it must likewise be old, mustn’t it? Or did bridge spans spring up suddenly after long intervals, the way that spans had appeared night upon night in Chilingana’s story? Another span, called Valdemir in one of the Meersh tales, had fallen into the sea because it was so old. Would another span have replaced it, then or later, or was there a permanent gap where it had been? She hadn’t seen enough of the world to surmise much less know the answers to such questions. Besides, every span on every spiral had its creation story; many were alike, but just as many contradicted the rest. While Chilingana’s was nearly universal—at least it seemed to be so far—it didn’t account at all for the unseen gods of Edgeworld, for Dragon Bowls or the myriad creatures and cultures she knew existed. How could one fisherman have dreamed it all? Finally she doubted she knew anything about the truth of the origins of Shadowbridge and suspected nobody else did, either. It didn’t bear contemplating. She was part of this world. The truth of its creation and its being, whatever that was, wouldn’t make her less or more so. Nevertheless, she wondered if she could ever unravel the mystery. Maybe, someday, if she ever found the mythical Library and it contained all the works it was supposed to—maybe then she would discover the truth; but not here, not in the company of a drunken old liar and a boy her age whose memory barely stretched back beyond a few subterranean months. So she focused her thoughts on their destination and let herself be excited by the notion of setting foot on one of the most ancient spans no matter what shape it was in now, for such a span must know the oldest stories, the earliest versions of all the tales she already knew. With luck Soter would let them stay awhile on each of these spans, giving her time to soak up everything while Jax’s reputation spread.

She stood at the prow until sea spray showered her, then jumped back, but too late, already drenched. The lugsail slapped against the back of her head.

“The price of curiosity,” hissed a low voice.

She crouched and looked beneath the sail. Nobody else stood on the deck; but the snake, against the mast, had raised his head. Although his body was yellow, the head had darkened again to green.

She pushed her dripping hair out of her face and walked halfway to the second mast. “And what’s your price?” she asked, just to be certain who was speaking to her.

The snake’s head rolled from side to side. He said, “That would depend upon what you’re purchasing.”

“What sort of snake are you, then?”

“Do you mean, am I the sort who would sup on you?”

“It would be useful to know.”

“Your drenching hasn’t done a thing to curb your curiosity, has it?” He sounded amused.

She walked closer. Her bare feet left wet prints across the deck. “I’d rather know than not know, if that’s what you mean.”

His head bobbed back and forth as if he was weighing her answer, then suddenly he stretched toward her. She leaned back but otherwise didn’t move. She’d judged that he would have to unwind one coil to reach her; but close, she could see the remarkable blue and yellow facets of his eyes. He opened his mouth wide in a yawn. There were no fangs.

“If you must know, I’m an Ondiont.”

“Ondionts are water snakes.”

“So you know something then, after all. Yes, we are water serpents, my people.”

“Then what are you doing on a boat?”

“Being lazy. Actually, I’m supposed to be a sentry to protect the cargo these creatures shuttle back and forth from one span to another. I’ve been sentry now for months, and so far I haven’t had to do more than stick out my tongue to send off the occasional scavenger. Eventually, I’ve been assured, they will ferry me home.”

“Do Ondionts have a span of their own?”

He snorted. “A span? What would we do with a span? How would we get up the stairs from the sea?”

“I’ve no idea.”

“Nor does anyone else. No, we have an isle, mostly rock, full of caverns—very nice, cool caverns out of the sun to sleep in.”

“So, what do you eat?”

“Everything. Same as you.” He rubbed the side of his head against the mast, his eyes closing ecstatically. “We squeeze it to death first. If necessary.” His narrow pupils settled on her again. “Now, what is it you’re buying, storyteller?”

“How do you—?”

“I listened to all you were saying to one another when you boarded. People will tell you everything if they don’t realize you’re listening. Stillness is a great skill. I’m sure you know this. I’m sure there are moments when you hold your puppets absolutely rigid to draw in your audience, and then strike.” She thought if he’d had teeth he would have been grinning at her.

“If you know what I am, then you must know what I’m seeking.”

“You would like a tale of the Ondionts, as different from your own people as I am from you.” When she nodded, he said, “My price for this is that you must sit beside me.”

“So that you can squeeze me to death before you eat me?”

His tongue flicked in irritation. “So that you and I have a pact of trust. You must trust that I won’t crush you.”

She rubbed the bottom of one foot against the other ankle. “That would seem to put all the trust on my side of the bargain. What are you trusting me to do?”

“I am trusting you to honor the story every time you tell it on the spans of men and other creatures, by telling it true. Mine is the greater trust, because if you break it, there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“There’s nothing I can do about it, either, should you choose to crush me.”

“That’s quite probably true. But you might attract the sailors and your comrades, who are inside, and they could certainly kill me before I could finish my meal. And anyway, they would see. It’s not as if you would be easy to hide once I did eat you.”

They faced each other in silence then, and if the snake was thinking anything at all, she couldn’t tell. Yet she sensed that, like the kitsune who’d led the procession of monsters, the snake meant her no harm.

She walked boldly up beside him and sat down cross-legged on the deck. “What story then pays for my trust?”

The snake opened his mouth wide and hissed. She tensed to flee until she realized that he was laughing. “You’ve steel in you, storyteller.”

“Maybe not as much as you imagine.”

“Oh, the contrary. I’m a judge of such things. But now to your reward. Here is a story you do not know.” He lowered his head and, very delicately, laid it upon her lap. His crystalline eyes swiveled to look up at her as he spoke. “There was once a serpent woman who collected souls.”

THE STORY OF MISSANSHA

Her name was Missansha, which means “the lonely one” in the Ondiont speech. She was born blind, and this is very rare among my people. Perhaps because of this, she schooled her other senses. We have a strong sense of smell, but hers was superior. She could flick her tongue and tell you what lay beyond the horizon, picking up its scent long before anyone else could.

However, as she came of age, she developed one particular talent that no other of us has—she could sip life itself. When she came near anyone else, she drank from them. She surely didn’t know this was unusual. It was how she was. Nor could she control it, any more than the living can control the urge to breathe. Inadvertently, like a basilisk, she drained the life from two playmates.

We have elders among us in whom we place our governance, and she was taken before them for this crime; but even as she was escorted into the room, she was draining those guards who accompanied her. One collapsed at her side; the other slithered away for his life. No one, nor especially her family, could come near her. The more she cared, the more absolutely she absorbed.

Now, we do not slay our own, least of all for things they cannot control, and Missansha bore no responsibility for this. She wept for those she destroyed. We could not harm her for it.

The elders chose the only solution they could imagine. They would commission a tower for her, high enough that she would never again come near them. As you can imagine, for snakes such an undertaking was near impossible, and so we sent out messengers to the bridges, to ships, to other islands, asking for assistance. There were few who accepted our very generous offer to come and erect our tower. Serpents have an unsavory reputation among other species, most of which we’ve done nothing to earn. We’re simply distrusted for our appearance and stories concocted about us, our decency dismissed. But I digress.

There were humans who deigned to set foot on our island. They were paid handsomely for their masonry skills, their talent, and their labor—we have much gold in our caverns. And there were no unfortunate incidents of the sort that can spoil a relationship…that is, until the tower was complete and it was time to place Missansha in it.

Some of us there were who speculated that Missansha’s powers might only hold sway over her own kind. The long, ascending rampway that spiraled around the outside of the tower, though it was built for snakes, still posed a burden to us. We asked that these foreigners would escort her to her chambers. None of us wished to be close enough, and we could not have her slither off the edge of the narrow ramp.

We made another generous offer, and two of them volunteered. The rest waited alongside us.

Only one of the volunteers returned. The other died as he reached the top. His body became as glass, transparent and stiff. The survivor managed to lock her in before he stumbled back down the spiral to safety. We offered to nurse him back to health—we had much experience by now with the effect of her—but, no, the foreigners did not trust us after that, these alien creatures. They departed our shore and never returned. The tower they’d built was solid, well constructed for the ages, and we left her there, banished with us but never among us.

Once a week someone carried food to her, leaving it where she could reach it. At least for a long time this was so. Over time, the act of delivering food became a ritual. To be chosen was an honor. Because it was codified as ritual, no one asked if the food was taken, if there was a sign she still survived. She surely had long since died. The ritual continued nonetheless.

And so it was for centuries, the lonely one isolated safely above us. We congratulated ourselves that we had found a benign solution to her existence.

What happened then was that Death paid us a personal visit.

Death as you know looks like anyone. When he is among you humans, he looks like one of you. Among the Ondionts he was a serpent, and yet dissimilar. Obsidian of eyes and sheathed in bone. Unlike us, he had arms, thin as reeds and supple, down the sides of his body. We knew him the instant he arrived, and he did not dissemble, but came right to the point.

“I want to know,” he said, “how it is that you have all stopped coming to me.”

The elders, who had been unborn when Missansha was sent away, shuffled meekly up to him. They replied as one, “We don’t know what you mean.”

“There are rules,” he explained. “I for my part must adhere to them, as must you. Else what sort of a world would we have? You, for your part, seem to have ceased to die, and I wish to know how you have done this—what magic or art now protects you. I’ve traveled a long way for the answer and I will not leave without it.”

Now, none of them understood Death’s accusation. Ondionts had been born and had died as always. Our insignificant island would have become surfeited otherwise, and our caverns jammed with wriggling tenants. Death saw this for himself even as they protested their innocence. He noted the tower rising in their midst—something no snakes had built—and his sinister arms pointed at it.

“Why is that erected?” he asked.

Before they had even finished reciting the now mythic story of Missansha, Death gestured them to silence.

“You think then that by placing a problem out of sight, you resolve it? That is your notion?”

“But how could we punish her?”

“Forgive me, did I suggest you should have punished her?” answered Death. “And yet you are of the opinion that she relishes her imprisonment. That placing her in a tiny room in the sky is not a punishment to her?”

“But…but she wasn’t put to death!” exclaimed one of the elders, who immediately regretted his outburst and shrank away. For a moment he had forgotten to whom he spoke.

“No,” agreed Death, showing his teeth. “She was not. Not to death, but surely to madness have you condemned her. You are not people who fare well when isolated, and she began life more isolated than the rest of you.” With that Death passed through the crowd. One by one they lay down before him. At the tower’s base he stared up into the sky, to the very tip of it. He imagined himself there and a moment later he stood at the top, for that was how Death traveled.

His hands pressed that barred door, and it opened to him. Inside, it was dark and cobwebbed. Spiders had busily taken over the space. They dropped from their webs as he passed beneath them.

Deeper into the chamber, Death saw tiny lights burning—an entire wall of them. This struck him as unlikely. The lights sparkled. They were round like the eggs laid by Ondionts. They were eggs, in fact, and the fire in each was a spark of life. He reached the wall and pried one loose from the mucilage that held it. He held it in his hands, and with his needle-like fingers, he cracked it open and let the light escape. Like a flame it leapt up at him, and then through him. He heard it, saw it, experienced its life in a burst, because that is what the soul is—every moment of the life that was known, compressed into a flame of existence. It sang to him as it passed from this plane of being. And from the darkness behind him, a voice unused to speaking croaked, “What was that? How did my little song escape?”

Death turned and there she was. Impossibly alive, thin and ancient, and yet to him unutterably beautiful.

“I let it go,” he said.

Missansha gasped. She uncurled and rose to his height, the height of his voice. She’d learned to do that as a child, as a way of protecting herself. “How did I not hear you enter?”

“No one hears me enter, just as no one can surprise me. And yet you have just done that impossible thing.”

She didn’t need eyes to identify him. The sense of him burned her like heat.

“These,” he said, and turned back to the wall.

“My songs,” she replied. “Long ago they began to come to me here in this chamber, I don’t know from where. They entered me, pierced me, and then I birthed each one. So long ago that began, I can hardly remember the time before it.”

“Another impossible thing, I think.” He could still taste the essence of that soul he’d freed; he understood now how she had lived for so long. The lives entering her had passed to her a little of their being, each one rolling back her age. “Once upon a time, you lost your wits. You had already a power, a great and fearful power that frightened your people, and in the madness of isolation this gift transformed. It grew. You became as I am.”

He drew beside her. His hands embraced her, and for the only time in her life Missansha felt what it was like for others to stand near her. There was no pain, but she was sundering from the world. “Am I dying?” she asked.

Death answered, “No. Something else.”

She could not think what to say.

When it was done, her metempsychosis, they opened the eggs together and let Missansha’s songs fly. It was orgasmic. The songs swirled and swept through her. She leaned back her head, and her tongue flicked at the sky. She moaned and would have swooned but Death caught her. “You’re not used to it,” he told her. “So many at once is dizzying.”

She would have agreed had she been able to speak, but her voice failed her. She looked into his empty eyes and realized that she could see. He, as if apprehending her confusion, said, “Your corporeal eyes could not see; but you no longer have need of them.”

Soon the last of the souls had been released from where Missansha had collected them. She had been preserving them—though she hadn’t recognized it—as a dowry for her groom.

When, after some days of speculating, the surviving people climbed the tower, they found the room at the top abandoned. No trace remained of Missansha save for her cast-off skin. Her body was missing and the floor covered with shattered eggshells, dry and empty; covered also with the bodies of a hundred spiders, curled and desiccated.

Of Death himself there was no sign, either.

“And that,” said the snake, raising his head from her lap, “is how my people met Death. In return for providing him with a bride, we were given very long lives. And we’ve never been sure if that was his blessing or his punishment for how we’d treated her. What do you think?” He leaned over Leodora; the sun had all but set now, and the penultimate orange glow glittered in his eyes like hunger.

“Both,” she answered without hesitation, and the snake tilted his head thoughtfully and then gave a small nod.

“Ssseeyash,” he said and placed his head on her shoulder.

“What does that mean?”

His tongue darted. “It’s not translatable; you don’t have the concept in your language. It references the shedding of the skin, the death of the old shell and the life manumitted beneath, the balance of the two coexisting being true existence, and so it is a word that expresses ultimate truth.”

“That’s a very complicated way to say you think something is true.”

“Yes, which is why we have a simple word to hold all of it.”

She reached up and stroked his nose. He sighed and closed his eyes. After a moment he muttered, “You’re dangerously brave, Leodora.”

“Foolishly so?”

“That has yet to be determined, and won’t be by me. You imagine that stories protect you, and that makes you brave. But it doesn’t mean it’s true.”

“Is that a warning?”

“Advice. Nothing more. Death comes looking for everyone eventually.”

“I’ll try not to invite him.”

“I suppose you must take it lightly,” he replied. “To do otherwise is to admit your fear.”

“If I let it stand in my way, I’ll never get off this boat. I wouldn’t have gotten on in the first place. I wouldn’t have ridden a sea dragon. I’d have married the choice of my uncle.”

“All concrete objects of fear, real and tangible,” said the snake, and she knew by the way he said it that there was another kind of fear he didn’t speak of.

She would have asked him, but at that point one of the crew members raced past to the boat’s prow, and she turned to look where he did.

Riding the horizon, a black sail protruded against the sun’s ember. It was tiny, but clearly a ship.

Soter walked up beside her. She looked at him, and saw abject horror on his face. His gaze flicked over the water to where the crewman was looking, then down at her as he said, “You have to come inside. Now.”

“Inside?”

“In the shack, the house, here.”

“Why?”

“For safety. Please, don’t fight with me, just come inside till that boat out there has gone.”

“What about my friend the snake?” She turned, to find that the snake had retreated, his head down, eyes closed, back around the mast so that he looked like a rope again. His was the perfect disguise.

“What are you talking about, a snake?”

“Nothing,” she replied, and got to her feet. He grabbed her arm and drew her along beside him. As they hurried clumsily into the shack, one of the crew came out from it, carrying a large lit lantern. He carried it to the starboard side and hung it off a hook there. It dangled out over the water.

“Why not in the bow?” she asked.

“In case someone hostile comes, they’ll see the lamp, but from a distance they can’t tell if it’s fore or aft, or port or starboard, and so can’t gauge where to board till they’re close upon it. Every ship, every boat, puts the lamp somewhere different, and the only reasonable thing you can do is steer a wide berth around ’em.”

How, she wondered, did he know the way things worked on board ships? “Hostile?” she asked, but he didn’t answer.

By the time the new ship neared, the sun was gone, the sky black; the breeze had died away. For a while Leodora had watched the ship’s inexorable approach. One light split into two—two red glows like mismatched eyes of a behemoth slithering silently toward them. Soon the ship came close enough that she could make it out—at least the places where it glistened. It was black as the night around it. The red running lights were strung upon ropes, one off its nose and one off the stern. As it overtook the tail of their boat, Soter pulled her back into the blackness of the house. Where he sat behind them, Diverus looked up at the commotion. The nose of the black ship pushed into view.

The ship had a high foredeck that dropped off before the mainmast. It was a deep-bottomed craft, and its ropes and tackle creaked as it drew alongside. The red lantern on the prow rocked back and forth. The ship slowed.

Soter’s grip on her shoulders squeezed tight, and she almost cried out before he released her. She could hear him slide deeper into the darkness, his fear like an oil sprayed upon the air. The forward light glided past, and the side of the ship hove into view. It seemed to be lined with odd pillars. Then all at once she realized that the pillars were people, figures standing motionless along the side—she counted five of them, their bodies dark like the ship, edged only in the rolling red lantern light; their pale heads smooth, gleaming, hairless, their eyes seeming to welter in deep sanguine sockets. Their fixed stare like a braided force sliced through the protective shadows. Red light splashed along the deck ahead of her, doubling and bending the shadows, penetrating the depths of the three-sided house, steadily, rhythmically, like a pendulum as the forward lamp swung. She watched, hypnotized, as color flowed toward her feet and away, cast back again, closer, away and closer, away and closer. Then Soter snatched her into the depths of the shack, and the light splashed across Diverus where he sat staring at it, either unafraid or too ill to move. It lit the room, hooks and gaffs, ropes and tackle, all along the wall where Diverus sat. Soter pressed Leodora against the starboard wall and out of the light completely.

Yet for all that his dread was palpable, nothing happened. The black ship glided on into the night until the light from its rear lanterns had merged into a single spot, a cinder cooling, shrinking, until it went out altogether over the horizon.

“What was that?” she asked without turning to look at him.

“Nothing. Nothing at all,” was his answer. Then he pushed past her and strode to the stern, where he appeared to strike up a conversation with the tillerman, but too quiet to be heard.

“Could they have been pirates?” asked Diverus.

“I don’t know,” she answered, but in fact she was certain that the explanation lay elsewhere.

“Would the snake know?” He glanced up from where he sat; in the lantern light, his face devoid of anything she might call wry.

“How do you know about the snake?”

“I walked around the house before, to try to feel better. He was speaking to you about a tower. You had the same look you had with the fox, and so I knew you didn’t want to be interrupted and I came back here to wait.”

She thought a moment, then said, “You know about pirates.”

“Only from things said in the paidika. There were two boys, and they’d been stolen off a boat by pirates, far from Vijnagar, and brought to market there. I know no more than what they said, and so the black boat could have been pirates, couldn’t it?”

“I think it’s something else.”

“What?”

She shook her head. “Something that scared Soter.”

“Pirates would be enough to scare me.”

She replied, “Me, too.”

Stars smeared the sky overhead. The boat sailed on and Soter stayed beside the tillerman, while Diverus and Leodora hunkered down inside the house. Tension and the motion of the boat worked upon them, and they fell asleep against each other.

In the morning the light of dawn woke them, and they walked stiffly onto the deck, to discover that they were docked below an astonishingly high wall. It must have been twice the height of Hyakiyako. Pennants flew from its top. The wall was rough, the stone uneven, and scattered across its surface were small star-shaped objects, like medallions, that glinted in the early light. Farther along, away from the jetty, the wall opened into a dark and uninviting arch that wouldn’t even have accommodated their mast. Any ships wanting to pass to the far side of this spiral would have had to sail on to the next span up or down the line. The rest of the span repeated the pattern of massiveness broken up by low arches. The steps and the jetty appeared to be dead center along its length.

One of the crewmen, red-bearded, came up behind them, carrying a basket on his back. He passed them and, climbing up and over the prow via the step Leodora had used to look into the sea, he walked down the jetty to the wall. A platform attached to ropes lay there, with another of his shipmates standing by, and he set his cargo carefully in the center of it. Then the two of them gave two of the ropes a tug. The ropes snapped tight; the platform lurched slightly, then began to ascend. They steadied it until it slid from their reach. High above them but beneath the top of the wall, beams jutted out, and between the beams was an opening, another arch. The sound of a squeaking pulley echoed distantly down like a bird’s solitary cry.

As the crewman returned, Leodora asked him where Soter had gone.

“Up,” he said, and gestured his head at the wall. “First one of us out, he was.”

She turned, anger infusing her until she saw that the puppet cases were gone, too, already uplifted. Soter had accompanied them. She was chagrined then by her own overhasty judgment. Behind her, Diverus set down his bundle.

“Time to go,” she muttered, then looked around for the snake. He was nowhere to be seen. The mast he’d girdled was empty, the sail drawn down and wrapped in loops of rope.

The bearded crewman and another came lumbering around the house now, carrying one of the larger crates. The platform was still ascending, so they set the crate down and watched it from on deck.

“The snake,” said Leodora. “Where did he go?”

The two men looked at her, then at each other, then at her again. “Snake?” asked the bearded crewman.

“The snake who guards your cargo. He was wrapped around that mast there last night.”

The other one said, “She seen it, too.” They remained facing her, their faces tight with worry as if weighing what to do with her, and she thought that perhaps she shouldn’t have said anything, that the snake was their secret.

Abruptly, the bearded one said, “He weren’t crazy then. He were tellin’ the truth.”

“And we trussed him up for nothing,” said the other. The morning sun glistened off the stubble on his face. “This snake, he speak at you?”

She nodded uncertainly. Behind her, Diverus said, “I saw it, too. Talking to her.” They all looked his way then. “Last night. It was telling her a story.”

Said one to the other, “But why can’t we see it? Why these two an’ not us?”

“Does it matter? It’s real. That’s all, that’s what matters. We have us an avatar on board. We been blessed.”

An avatar. She’d spoken to an avatar before that no one else had seen…and Soter hadn’t seen the snake, either. But Diverus had.

The bearded sailor grabbed her by the shoulders. Close up, he smelled of sweat and brine. “You brought on us luck, girl, you and your friend. You ever want to venture between spirals some more, we’re your men. We’ll take you.”

“Thank…thank you.”

He let her go and lifted his end of the crate again. To his partner as they carried it the rest of the way off the boat, he said, “We go back to Merjayzin and get him released first thing. We’ve committed a crime here, we have to make it right. Make it right with the avatar. Bring that poor sod back on board and let him talk all he likes…” They climbed onto the jetty, their words fading.

Diverus asked, “We saw an avatar?”

“Apparently.”

He stood still a moment before asking, “What is an avatar?”

“A spirit of the gods. Or a god made flesh.”

“Or snakeskin.” He smiled a little sheepishly and hefted his bundle of instruments.

“Yes, snakeskin.” With a final glance back at the mast, she followed him up and off the boat.

From right below, the stairs looked even more imposing than they had from the boat, impossibly steep. At least, she thought, they were wide.

Responding to the same view, Diverus drew a breath and started up. The sack of instruments rattled on his back.

As she ascended, the two sailors waved to her; they grinned as if the oyster girl, Reneleka, had arisen from the water and handed them her pearl. And, thought Leodora, perhaps she had. Perhaps the snake did indeed herald great good fortune.

Twice on the climb up the steps they had to stop. The second time they stood parallel to the pulleys that lifted the platform, still a dozen steps below the top. Turned around on the steps, they could see that the ropes securing the platform ran from the pulley in beneath the opening in the wall, and as they watched, hands reached out to grab the goods and drag them off the platform, out of sight into the darkness there. The workers remained ill defined in the shadows. Clearly a large space existed beneath the surface of the span—possibly nothing more than a place to store goods; but with the memory of their climb up Vijnagar still fresh, they both could well imagine a much more extensive underworld. The semicircle out of which the pulley beams projected was itself an ancient opening, the lip of pinkish stone grooved as from years of ropes cutting into the face of it as cargo was raised, perhaps from a time before beams and pulleys had been applied.

Down below, the sailors had become no bigger than gnats and the boat a toy in a crystalline harbor. Off to one side of the boat, something serpentine floated upon the surface. It might have been nothing more than the ridge of a reef. Farther out and to the south, a cluster of small islands rode the horizon. Leodora wondered if fishermen lived there.

Above them threadbare pennants snapped in a strong breeze, which buffeted them as they came up the final few steps.

If, as all the tales claimed, most ancient Colemaigne had once been made of spun sugar and other confections, then centuries of rain and wind had eroded the hard façade of the buildings, exposing and aging more traditional materials underneath—crumbling mortar and stone. The skinny buildings had lost their flat surfaces, their precise edges. Rooftops dipped, and tiles coexisted with thatchwork while the frameworks leaned askew. The roofs and the top floors had collapsed in most of them. It was as if monstrous claws had swung down from the sky and scoured them of their skins, leaving them to rot. The buildings were chalky ruins, their cracked beams like broken bones. The wounds looked old, and yet no one had repaired or rebuilt the houses. That seemed odder still.

The steps opened onto a wide square of broken flagstones, off which half a dozen streets branched. To the supplies being hauled in below, there was no apparent direct access.

Small ramps ringed the steps, wedges with their apexes facing in toward the square. At some time in the past carts would have met travelers here and whisked them away across the span in either direction. She could see them in her mind, the carts backed up to the little ramps, accepting trunks, crates, whatever people brought. She could hear them, too. The excitement of that time crackled up into her through the broken street. The sense of displacement lasted a few minutes, then evaporated as if blown apart by the wind; after that she was fluent in the language of Colemaigne.

In the center of the square stood the remains of a fountain, with figures in the middle of some sort of animals, four of them facing four directions. The waters of the fountain trickled darkly from their mouths and down their bodies, leaving a dark stain, like blood. Soter was seated upon the edge of it with the cases beside him. His head was down, arms resting upon his thighs and his hands holding a cup between them. The stones of the street between the ramps and the fountain were pitted and cracked. Some were shattered or missing altogether, and difficult to walk on.

At their approach Soter glanced up, then lowered his head again, as if they weren’t what he’d been waiting for.

The fountain did contain wine, although if she’d stood in it, it wouldn’t have reached her ankles. It looked black, but Leodora remembered the stories he had told her and knew that it wasn’t. It seemed that at least one part of the myth was true. Small earthenware cups like the one he held dotted the lip of it.

She and Diverus flanked him and sat. Without looking up he said, “It didn’t used to be like this. When Bardsham came, they had banners flying. A welcoming crowd. They knew us, they cheered us. This place was alive.”

His words slurred appreciably. This was not his first cup of wine. She asked, “What’s happened then?”

“Blight,” he said. He gestured with the cup toward an open stall selling vegetables and fruits. She noticed that his hand was trembling as if the cup was heavy. “I asked there, and they told me,” he said. “Terrible. Cut a path the length of the span, years ago, but the place has never recovered. Chaos. The richness is gone, washed away. Your father and me, we entered this very square once in triumph, and it was everything I said it was, a confection of a span. Good days, those. Good days.”

She didn’t understand what he meant—his description of the maelstrom made it sound as if something like a water spout had descended and smashed across the span. Chaos—he used that word too freely to account for too much. He blamed everything on chaos, as if it dogged him wherever he went. He seemed inordinately affected by the state of Colemaigne.

“So, what do we do? We’re here and we’re surely not climbing aboard that boat again and going back.”

“Back? Gods, no. Not an option, going back. Anyway, it’s not blighted everywhere, according to them, or not so badly anyway. There’s another square on the opposite side, a mirror to this one. We can look. Things are better over there, they said. The whole span might not be so bad. Depends on how far…how deep.” He lost himself in some thought then, but came out of it quickly. “And it’s early, you know, barely past dawn, so there’s not much of a crowd out yet.” In fact there was nobody anywhere save for the two vendors behind their stall. He twisted about and dipped his cup. “The fountains still run, I’m pleased to say.”

For once she was inclined to let him have his fill, although his rambling about the blight upon Colemaigne told her very little. It was a span that had been great but had fallen upon hard times since he’d last seen it. Between that and the small stand selling produce, she thought again of Ningle. Someone brought the produce, someone caught the fish. She understood better than anyone the complicated processes that no one saw—and no one cared, so long as what they wanted was available.

“The other side, then,” she suggested. “It’s not that far, is it?”

“Not far,” he agreed. He stood, an unsteady moment. Prominent veins mapped his left calf and, although she’d noticed them before, it was only now she appreciated that he was an old man, strong and proud and unwilling to bend, but old nevertheless. Perhaps it was the remaining magic of this span, or the result of meeting with another divine adviser, but she seemed to be experiencing an array of epiphanies today. She found herself feeling affectionate toward him despite everything that pitted them against each other time and again. She got up and kissed his cheek. Diverus could not have looked more shocked, while Soter’s bewilderment had to swim through the muddle of his brain.

“All right,” she said. “Let’s see the rest of Colemaigne. We have to find somewhere to perform.”

She hefted one of the cases and ducked under the strap, then started walking. After a dozen steps she turned and looked back.

The other two were eyeing each other distrustfully. Then Diverus, as though taking a cue from her, offered his lighter bag of instruments to Soter and shouldered the second undaya case. “You can’t imagine what this place was like,” Soter said to him as though he hadn’t described it. “It was so magical.”

Diverus traded a look with Leodora that said he was pretty certain magic was still afoot.

The far side did prove to be in better shape. Whatever tumult Soter had been describing, its effects hadn’t blanketed the whole span. Some of the slender houses near the opposite square still maintained their surface coats, which were hard like stone, shiny and carved, like sculptures, with all manner of swirls and motifs. In one lane Leodora wetted a finger and wiped it across a bright green wall before sticking it in her mouth. “Sweet,” she said around her finger. “It really is sugar.”

“No one in the world knows how they do it, either,” Soter told her. “They’ve a guild, sworn to secrecy. Can’t even catch them working if you try.”

More people were gathered in this square, too, the span now awake for the day. They milled about shops and stalls. It was exactly like a market day on Ningle, if not as busy.

Soter inquired at the shops about some places and names, and was given directions and information. “Yes,” said one purveyor, “that old theater is still standing. No performances there anymore. The owner died, oh, years, long time back. Probably can find you a place to lodge, though. They got lots of room.”

Soter strode into the lead, along a seaward lane so narrow that they had to go single-file with their luggage and press up against the buildings if someone needed to pass by, which happened every few minutes. He regaled them all the while, in love, it seemed, with his own voice. “Oh, yes, we played there for months. People were coming from half a dozen spans away to see, not thinkin’ or maybe they just didn’t care, that we would be moving on to theirs eventually. ’Course in the end we didn’t, we got on a ship and sailed off to Remorva.” He stopped talking. A look of puzzlement pinched his face as if he couldn’t decide quite how he had drifted into that part of the story. In a more subdued manner he added, “I guess they were right to journey all that way for Bardsham, after all, ’cause they wouldn’t see his like again in a generation—not before now, in fact.” He turned about and shook a finger at Leodora and Diverus. “They’d better let us play here or they won’t know what they’re missing.” He bumped into someone coming the other way. Apologies were made, and thereafter he focused on the direction he was walking. “Better let us play,” he muttered to no one.

Carrying a load that was lighter than usual, Soter didn’t notice that he was inadvertently putting more and more distance between himself and the other two. Approaching the dragon beam of Colemaigne, he thrust a finger at it and called back, “Look at it. That thing hasn’t seen a visitation in your lifetime…What am I saying? In my lifetime, which is much more considerable. Of course, used to be nobody much minded, since the span had everything.” More quietly, he added, “My gods, it’s lost its edge, hasn’t it? Gone quiet. You see this, you bloody coral ghost, you see what happened here? This is our doing, sure as I’m walking here again. We sucked the life out of Colemaigne, and the gods of Edgeworld forgive us. I ought to know what happened here.”

He pressed against the buildings to let a woman in a dark purple wrap scuttle past, saying “Begging your pardon” as she did. She kept her head down and gave barely a sign that she’d heard him. “Not very sociable, are you,” he muttered to her back, but if she heard that she didn’t respond.

Passing the opening, he gazed out along the curve of the dragon beam.

It did look as ragged as if it had been gouged out of the sky. The sides were crumbling, and it was so thin across the middle, it was a wonder the weight of the Dragon Bowl at the end hadn’t caused the whole thing to snap off and plunge into the sea. Soter hastened to pass it by.

Diverus and Leodora progressed more slowly. The cases made passage along the lane difficult. The corners kept bumping against the uprights in the railing. When the woman in purple reached them, they had to set down the cases and step back into a doorway to let her pass. A cluster of three more people came along behind her, and so they waited in the doorway for the rest to pass, too.

Leodora asked Diverus, “Was the bowl on Vijnagar as decrepit as this before your transformation?”

Diverus peered at it ahead. “It might have been. The beam was crumbling and the walls of it had fallen away like that one. On Vijnagar, the bowl had broken tiles in the bottom, you couldn’t even tell what the mosaic had been. I can’t see from here if this one’s like that, too.”

“Would you dare me to go out on one?” she teased.

He turned to face her. “You’ve never stood in a Dragon Bowl?”

She shook her head. “I’ve meant to. The first spans, Soter argued it was too dangerous. Too public. Someone might notice, and if my uncle came along looking for us, they would tell him. Now that I think on it, that makes almost no sense. Soter’s so protective, even when there’s no reason. I don’t know why. Jax is out in the public and I’m to stay hidden from sight. Even now, you’ll notice, and there’s no chance Gousier’s hunting us here.”

“I thought you said your uncle was dead.”

“I said he might be. I don’t know for certain.” She leaned around him. “As for the beams, Soter wouldn’t allow me near one. I suppose I started climbing the towers to defy him without stepping out on a beam. Your story is the closest I’ve gotten to one.”

The impeding pedestrians had walked on, and the sea-lane was now empty. Soter had moved far ahead. Diverus slid the strap over his shoulder and hefted the undaya case. “Well,” he said, “I think I wouldn’t dare you. Unless it was the only way to get you on one.” He gave her a puckish smile and walked off clumsily with his burden.

They shortly reached the opening onto the beam, and their regard traced the curve of its route that, tentacle-like, nearly surrounded the hexagonal bowl at the end. Not a single person sat or stood anywhere on it. The Dragon Bowl was likewise empty. This was a span where the inhabitants had long since stopped believing in the capricious gods. Diverus and Leodora paused and stepped back as two more people emerged from an intersecting lane and came toward him. They looked at them sidelong as they passed, but neither so much as glanced toward the Dragon Bowl.

Up the lane Soter came to a point where everything looked like the square where the trio had first arrived. The building beside his shoulder, the nearest one, was a ruin. Half the quarrels in its windows were missing. There were one or two places where bits of glossy façade remained, but most of the front of the house revealed an underlying structure of irregular stones and gray, gritty powder. He touched one stone and it crumbled in his fingers. Above, the last story and the roof looked to have collapsed into the building. It was like a house that had been consumed by an attic fire, except that no traces of fire remained, and the rest of the houses as far down the lane as he could see shared its state of decay. Seabirds appeared to have nested in the upper reaches of some of them. The surface of the lane stretching ahead comprised nothing but flinders. The sea rail had disappeared, too, reduced to stubs where the posts had been, making the route more precarious.

Under his breath, Soter said one word: “Tophet.”

He edged forward cautiously, and had only gone a few steps before Diverus caught up with him. Diverus set down his case and scanned the damage much as Soter had. Then he stepped out and peered over the side at the ocean below. “It’s a ruin down there, too,” he said. “Looks like pieces of the houses fell off. There must have been a quay once, but it’s just rocks now. What happened here?”

Soter set down the instruments again. He shook his head at first, but then said, “I wager that, if you followed this line of damage street by street all the way back, it makes a straight line to that square where we climbed up.”

Diverus squinched his face. “Like a path, you mean? Like a giant smashed them all?”

“Not a giant,” Soter replied. “Like a curse.”

“You sound as if you know what it was.”

Soter blinked. “What? Why, no, of course I don’t. I just…now, where’s Leodor—” His eyes swelled with horror. “Oh, gods help me, no!”

Diverus turned, following his gaze, not up the lane but to the Dragon Bowl.

Leodora left her puppet case beside the opening and walked out onto the crumbling beam and onto the Dragon Bowl.

She considered that the beam’s condition made it slightly perilous, but not more so than climbing up a tower. She didn’t fear the height at all; she embraced the thrill of it.

What had Diverus felt? she wondered. What was it like to stand within the hexagonal bowl, hoping for some sign that you were exalted, chosen? A thriving span, covered with people, and only one or two would ever be blessed by the gods in such a way, and no one able to predict who it would be or when it would happen; no one sure it would ever happen at all. Spans like Ningle eventually forgot the bowl was there at all. There must be stories in that—of course there were, and she knew one: the tale of the two brothers. Soter had taught it to her years ago.

This bowl was in worse shape even than what Diverus had described of Vijnagar. There were almost no tiles remaining. If he hadn’t said, she wouldn’t have thought it had ever been covered with them.

She turned around and looked back along the ragged beam. From the narrow lane Soter was waving, and she waved back. The buildings behind him were osseous husks, like the ones on the far side they’d seen. It looked like the rest of Colemaigne all the way to the far support tower was a ruin. Before she could wonder at that, her attention was drawn to the underside of the span, visible from where she stood at the entry into the bowl. Unlike the opposite side, this one wasn’t hidden behind a solid wall.

What she saw beneath Colemaigne was utterly impossible.

There were houses in a kind of mirror image of the city above. They hung upside down off the bottom of the span. She crossed the bowl and leaned over the lip, astonished.

The wind gusted at her back, then swirled around her. It blew back her hood. Soter shouted something, but she couldn’t hear him over the wind. He was hurrying back. He’d left Diverus’s instruments in the lane.

Diverus was calling to her, too, from between his hands. His words were drowned out by a rumbling in the sky overhead, and she tilted her head back.

Above the Dragon Bowl the sky was roiling as if throbbing with heat; the blue had darkened to greenish black as though the substance of the sky itself were scorching. Lightning flicked from this mass like the tongue of the Ondiont snake, transfixing her in fascination. She wasn’t even aware that she had stepped away from the edge, back into the center of the bowl. The air crackled. It pulsed with energy that tingled right through her. She held up her hand, and a blue fire surrounded it. She had the presence of mind to think I should be frightened. Instead she spread out her arms as white lightning shot down from the middle of the overhead darkness, straight into the bowl. The world evaporated in light. The light stung her like a thousand bees and she screamed. The bowl, the beam, the span, and her friends upon it all disappeared in an instant. The pain released her and she fell into oblivion.

EPILOGUE

THE BLACK SHIP

Upon a deep-bottomed black ship well on its way across the sea to Vijnagar, beneath a thick, striped awning, a bony, bald-headed creature saw a bright flash just on the horizon whence they’d sailed and inadvertently in response said, “Ah?”

At this utterance of surprise, another, who might easily have been his gaunt twin, poured from the darkness behind him to see what had elicited the sound. On the horizon there was nothing now to behold. The morning sky was untroubled by so much as a single blemish. Not even a bird flew, as if even birds knew to keep far away from that ship.

The two creatures stared and stared at the horizon, unblinking, until one looked into the other’s sunken eyes and both shrugged together. “Enh,” said the first.

“What did you see?” asked the second.

“Nothing, Scratta.”

“This nothing caught your attention.”

“It was—”

The second one, Scratta, reached over and pressed a fingertip to his nose to cover a spot of calcitic gray showing there; when he withdrew his hand, the spot was gone, the nose pale and fleshy. He gave a satisfied nod at his handiwork. “Nothing to do with us,” he said, “unless it’s the one called Jax.”

The other shrugged again, dismissing the idea.

“No,” agreed the second, and he flowed silently back into the raven recesses of the ship.

The other turned to survey the untroubled distance behind them once more. A flash of light, he thought, most probably lightning over the horizon. It couldn’t possibly be relevant.

The black ship sailed on. It would reach Vijnagar by nightfall.

GREGORY FROST has been a finalist for nearly every major award in the fantasy field, including the Hugo, Nebula, James Tiptree, Theodore Sturgeon Memorial, International Horror Guild, and World Fantasy awards. He is the author of five previous novels, as well as the critically praised short-story collection Attack of the Jazz Giants & Other Stories. Greg is currently the Fiction Writing Workshop director at Swarthmore College. He lives in Merion Station, Pennsylvania.

BY GREGORY FROST

Lyrec

Tain

Remscela

The Pure Cold Light

Fitcher’s Brides

Attack of the Jazz Giants & Other Stories

Shadowbridge is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

A Del Rey Trade Paperback Original

Copyright © 2008 by Gregory Frost

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Del Rey Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

DEL REY is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Frost, Gregory.

Shadowbridge / Gregory Frost.

p.    cm.

“Book one.”

eISBN: 978-0-345-50494-4

1. Women storytellers—Fiction. 2. Puppeteers—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3556.R59815S53 2008

813'.54—dc22    2007033139

www.delreybooks.com

v1.0

Table of Contents

TITLE PAGE

DEDICATION

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

CONFERRING WITH GODS

ONE

TWO

I BOUYAN

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

II DIVERUS

III NEW SPANS FOR OLD

ONE

TWO

THREE

EPILOGUETHE BLACK SHIP

SHADOWBRIDGE ends here, but the story…

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ALSO BY GREGORY FROST

COPYRIGHT