Lord Tophet

II

PONS ASINORUM

ONE


Diverus awoke far too early. The theater and its environs lay so dark and silent that the only thing he could hear, lying in the small room, was the distant chatter of morning birds in the fig trees along the boulevard. He rose onto his knees, pushed the unlatched shutters apart, and leaned out the window for a better look.

The boulevard lay off to the right, around the curve of the theater’s white stucco wall and just out of sight. His view was of the smooth wall of a neighboring building, purplish in the predawn light, with a single, dark window directly across from his own, its pane made of round colored quarrels of yellow and red. He wondered if the quarrels would taste sweet if licked.

It had been three days since Jax’s premiere performance on Colemaigne, and it seemed to him that life had become a perpetual bustle ever since that name had roared up into the sky. That first evening had provided a modicum of what once had been a nightly occurrence here. Word had spread quickly, and ever since there had been a line outside the entrance to the theater. Sometimes it wound past the fig trees and as far along the boulevard as anyone could see; and as a result, Orinda had insisted they perform both matinees and evening shows the next day and the next. Although Leodora had complied, even repeating the same tales at each performance—which he’d never seen her do before—it was clear to Diverus that she was reluctant to remain in the booth once she’d set down the last puppets. For her the space was haunted. She said nothing, but she didn’t have to. He knew her routine too well, and knew when she’d deviated from it.

Now at each performance audiences flooded the theater, clogged the aisles—and praise the gods there’d not been a fire or some other incident, because no one would have reached the exit alive.

The first night had been the maddest celebration he’d ever witnessed, far more frenetic and dizzy than anything that had ever happened in the paidika. Upon emerging from the booth, Leodora was immediately surrounded by a crowd that rushed the stage to get near her, to touch her, to shout her name. They sang toasts to Meersh and his penis, to Jax and her skills, and it had gone on almost until the sun came up. Leodora had finally thrown off the effects of whatever had happened to her in the booth and joined in the celebration, drinking and cheering with the crowd. Soter, well lubricated much earlier, even went so far as to embrace Diverus, calling him “my dear boy!” as if he were some long-lost nephew. That familiarity evaporated the following day as if it had never been, but the next audience was already hammering at the doors for the upcoming performance and there was no time for reflection. For the matinee they had to stretch awnings over the stage from the highest projecting balcony, out past the thatch, to keep the sun from ruining the shadows, and then they unleashed Jax on another penny-paying crowd. Orinda might have been charging nearly nothing in those first days, but even so they were making more money with each performance than they had on Vijnagar or Hyakiyako.

It seemed to him that they’d been doing nothing but preparing for or recovering from performances, and if anything the crowds were getting larger.

Diverus ought to have been asleep; nor did he particularly want to be awake, but now that he was, he couldn’t help but brood over what had happened that first night in the booth, what was haunting his only friend. What had Leodora seen? She would not say, but he knew, or thought he knew. The Coral Man, who haunted her dreams, had appeared to her, beside her. She’d called the apparition “Father” and then she had done the thing that truly terrified him. She had begun to cry. In an instant she had transformed from the enigma he all but worshipped into a child, a simple girl devastated by loss and loneliness, and while he had no words to explain himself, his heart ached with love for her the more because of it. His goddess was human, and she had turned to him for comfort. Even Soter, the cursed old bastard—even he had seen that. But the question—the real question—was what had she seen and what did it signify? The phantom hadn’t reappeared since, but that proved nothing, did it? Standing behind her the first night, he hadn’t detected any apparition in the booth. The statue in the bottom of the puppet case was just rock. Soter was terrified of it. She was haunted by it. Yet Diverus, who’d slept in the booth on top of the very case, had experienced nothing. His dreams . . . his dreams contained apparitions of another nature altogether.

Diverus drew back from the window and sat cross-legged on his bed.

The sphinx came to him in his dreams. Most of the time he didn’t recollect the dream itself, but awoke with the image of her lingering in his mind, receding even as he recognized the desolate surroundings of his waking life and knew that she had come again. A few times it had been one of Bogrevil’s milk-eyed afrits instead, descending from the cracked ceiling of the paidika to suck the life from him. But those dreams he remembered vividly. Those dreams jolted him awake. They weren’t real. The afrits weren’t real, but recalled.

He folded his arms and considered. Supposing that the sphinx was his mother, transformed or reborn in another world he could only access through dream—was it possible that the Coral Man was Leodora’s father, also transformed, and that Bardsham also visited her in her dreams? It was as reasonable a speculation as any, although it didn’t explain why the same ghost would terrorize Soter. Why should Soter fear Bardsham?

The old man thought Diverus hardly more than an idiot, and that was fine by him. He’d learned to play that role in the paidika. Soter had no idea that he was listening and watching, nor that he’d overheard enough drunken rants and whispered gibbering to know that Bardsham’s ghost or something very like it was stalking Soter from span to span now. It had put him to flight twice. How long, Diverus wondered, would they stay here before the specter beset Soter again? It would be more difficult to convince Leodora to leave the Terrestre. The span of Colemaigne treated her like a treasure returned. Remembering the ovations, Diverus smiled, but as quickly frowned and shook his head.

Already his mind had wandered off the topic, which was whether or not the ghost of Bardsham traveled with them, and whether or not it emerged from that piece of cold chalky coral. He knew, as with everything else, that no one was going to enlighten him on the matter. Nobody had yet informed him what the Coral Man was doing in the box in the first place. If he wanted to know, he must find out himself. The notion of ghosts didn’t frighten him. Compared with afrits, a human phantom was positively welcome.

He rose up, dressed, and then crept from his chamber and along the darkened hall.

The middle balcony had its own stairs to the back of the stage, something he had learned the second day, and he slid around the rear curtain, through the small doorway to the side, and down the darkened stairwell. It had a fusty smell to it. Cautiously, although he knew nobody was about, he eased open the door in the back wall of the stage and stepped out. Closing it again, he walked quickly, head down as if that would help obscure him, into the puppet booth.

The cases were as Leodora had left them, open upon their respective collapsible biers, the case on the left draped with the discarded puppets she’d used in last night’s performance, with more piled inside. She wasn’t lingering long enough anymore even to put them all away.

At the top of the pile was the hook-nosed figure of Meersh. Diverus took hold of Meersh’s rods and lifted the puppet from the box. Then, clutching the two main rods in one hand, he raised the one that pushed Penis up from the body of the puppet. Penis was still sheathed in the yellow-dyed skin she placed on it to signify the transformation courtesy of the sun god. The larger body of the puppet was draped in a translucent gray membrane to reflect that it had been scorched. He thought of Meersh launching himself over the balcony and into the sea, and for an instant relived the memory of his mother’s corpse sliding down the chute, down past the foul layers of habitation beneath Vijnagar and into the dark swirling waters around the piers. Such a small splash, instantly erased and untraceable. From that height, the water flow had created the illusion that it was the bridge that moved upon the water.

He set the puppet down and stepped away from the box.

The confined booth was stuffy. Behind the undaya cases, his instruments—shawm, theorbo, sarangi, piba—lay strewn around the pillow on which he sat as he played. He glanced up at the thatched roof far overhead, at the striped awning still unfurled against midday sunlight, at the wan light bleeding in. He let his eyelids lower halfway and tried to listen, to sense with his body what might hover around him, but apprehended no presence other than his own in there. No Coral Man, no Bardsham’s ghost. He didn’t want to deny Leodora what she’d seen, but he couldn’t make it manifest for him. Why couldn’t he experience what she had? That would unite them further, wouldn’t it?

Stepping back beside his instruments, he reviewed how she had turned to him, her eyes welling with tears, her hair swinging like a great skein of rope behind her as she reached out for him, and he opened his arms to her, embraced her. Once more he smelled her as she pressed against him, and this time he let it stir him, and closed his eyes and fell into the memory and the sweet smell and the slick, sweaty feel of her. Gods, he loved the smell of her. For how long, he couldn’t say, but eventually he became aware that he was standing with his arms curved, his hands pressed against a back that wasn’t there, and he lowered his arms and sighed long and heavily.

He trudged to the rear of the booth and pushed his hands through the gap in the curtains beside the corner pole, emerging on stage. One of the wooden men, standing at center stage, jumped with mute surprise at the sight of him.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you,” Diverus said, and the wooden man pantomimed fluttering his hand as if to express that his heart was racing. Did they have hearts now that they were wood? He didn’t know. Bois or Glaise—Diverus couldn’t tell them apart, though Leodora seemed able to. Then the other one entered from the back of the stage and came up beside his partner. They shook hands as if they’d been formally introduced by someone, then both faced Diverus expectantly.

He thought it strange that he could understand them so well.

“Do you believe in ghosts?” he asked.

They looked at each other, then back at him. In unison, they gravely nodded.

“Have you ever seen one in this theater? I mean, a real one, not part of some play.”

One of them shook his head immediately. The other gazed toward the ceiling while tapping one finger against his chin before he, too, shook his head. He then spread his hands in query.

“Leodora thinks she saw one in the booth, the first night we performed.” One of them pointed at the puppet booth. “Yes, in there. I just wondered if the theater was known to be haunted. Orinda, the way she speaks of her husband, I thought maybe . . .”

Again they shook their heads, with obvious sadness this time.

“Well, there’s my answer, then. Good morning, gentlemen.” They bowed and he started to leave, but stopped after a few steps.

“I know. I’ve one other question. Are you acquainted with an upside-down span?”

This time they nodded in the affirmative.

“Is there a way there? Can you take me?”

They gestured back and forth at each other then, finally reaching some agreement, stepped up beside him, each with an arm slung over his shoulders, and impelled him to come along with them. They climbed down off the stage and walked up the center aisle of the theater, then down the ramp to the main doors, which were barred. One touched a finger to his lips and the other charily lifted the bar and opened one of the doors.

Outside, a few dozen people sat or lay dozing in the dark street. Diverus and the woodmen stepped quietly among them. Posters pasted on the wall, already ragged and torn, proclaimed jax! in great squid-ink-black letters. Diverus supposed that was all anyone needed to say now. Her name had become a promise of a cornucopia of delights.

From the small street the trio strode up the boulevard only a few blocks before turning and entering a street Diverus hadn’t been on before. It made a wide curve, and he supposed it must direct them around the far side of the theater and back toward the sea-lane that ran past the Dragon Bowl.

In the distance ahead, above the rooftops, the top of the bridge tower across the southern end of Colemaigne was cast golden by the early sunlight, its pennants flying languidly, dotting a parapet above an arcaded passageway that ran like the top of a wall the full width of the span.

The curving street did at last empty into the lane that ran along the sea edge of the span. This was the opposite end from where they’d arrived, though, with the Dragon Bowl a distant feature back the other way, a cup riding on the horizon.

The whole of the lane glistened in the light of dawn, the surfaces of the buildings reflecting like polished glass. The tower leg ahead was cylindrical, rising into a fluted turret on that end of the tower face. Unlike the few bridge towers he had encountered so far, the wall of this one appeared to be fully habitable across its length. Three rows of round windows lined it, interrupted in the middle by the archway of a great gate. Some of the windows were bright from lights flickering in the chambers within; the rounded bulwarks of attached and window-lined bastions jutted from it at regular intervals—perhaps ten of them across the breadth of Colemaigne.

The tower leg sank out of sight below the railing. Diverus, wedged between his guides, couldn’t lean over the edge to see what lay below. He was being guided toward a small portcullis in the leg.

Along the front of the tower wall ran a wide avenue, still in deep shadow. Beneath the lowest tier of windows in the tower stood carts and makeshift stalls. The street itself was littered with confetti and streamers as if a parade had passed by earlier. Neither of the woodmen seemed to take any notice. They crossed it briskly.

The portcullis turned out to house a gate that opened on well-oiled hinges. Inside the tower leg, dank and dark, stairs spiraled down along a central shaft, and Diverus followed his companions in their descent beneath the surface of Colemaigne.

The pillar did not offer any windows or landings along the way. The light, what there was of it, came up the open shaft from the water far below, while the way to the top, so far as he could tell from leaning his head back, receded into darkness. There must have been doors to the various levels of habitation, but those likewise all must have been closed.

The trio spiraled to the bottom. There the exit was barred with another iron gate, and this one seemed to be locked, reminding Diverus all too uncomfortably of the paidika. While the woodmen fiddled with the latch, he circled the open well to the water in the middle. If the tower leg extended all the way to the seabed below, as it surely must, then there had to be holes or cracks in the stone, letting in the dark water.

Finally, the gate creaked open, and he looked up to see one of the woodmen lifting the lock aside. He followed them out onto a wide shelf that girdled the columnar leg. One peered over the edge. The other struck a pose and indicated that Diverus should look above.

He turned as the two of them glanced at each other with obvious consternation.

Overhead was a huge transverse arch, its ribs chalky with calciferous stalactites. It curved to the center of the span, where more support pillars jutted down. Beyond them another arch reached to the far side. Even at its lowest point the ceiling was high enough for small sailing vessels to pass, but it was nowhere near the height of the span, and there was no undercity there, no levels of desperate, squalid habitation as he had known beneath Vijnagar. The thicker structure didn’t allow for them. Diverus said, “There’s nothing at all.”

The woodmen circled the tower leg, scanning the arch. They completed their circuit, then dejectedly came over to him and patted his shoulders.

“So,” he said, “there was an inverted span up there once?”

In unison the two shrugged.

“You never actually saw it yourselves, did you?”

One shook his head. The other pressed fingers to thumbs repeatedly.

“Talk. You heard people talk of it.”

The nearest woodman touched one finger to his nose and smiled, opening his hands as if to say they’d meant no harm. For all they knew, after all, it might have been here.

Diverus started to say that he had actually seen the place, then decided against it. What could they possibly add to what he already knew? He’d asked them if they had heard of it, and they had. There was nothing more they could tell him.

Disheartened, the two woodmen plodded back to the gate. Diverus ushered them along and then closed the gate after them, choosing to remain behind by himself. They reached through the bars for him, but he said, “No, I’ll be fine. You tell them at the Terrestre where I am. I’ll be along in a while.”

He watched them climb out of sight, unable to explain to them why he felt compelled to linger when there was nothing to see. He couldn’t have explained it to himself.

He sat on the shadowed side of the ledge, removed his sandals, and dangled his feet into the water, sloshing them back and forth and peering into the ripples. Sunlight reflected in the depths below him revealed the moss on the bridge support, thick tendrils of it waving lazily back and forth in green-gold depths full of darting fish. He tried to imagine a fathomless world where the light never reached. A kingdom in the depths. He’d conjured it once with childish ignorance, a place for his discarded mother to be reborn; but he wondered now what sort of creature could thrive in such darkness. Not someone he knew—not someone close. Rather, someone transformed beyond his knowing.

The undulating light upon the water and the tendrils of moss below proved hypnotic in combination, and his eyelids lowered. The tiny fish suddenly zipped away in all directions, and ripples hinted at a coalescing shape in the depths below. The light grazed the side of something pale that slipped into the shadows again. It should have jolted him alert but instead his eyes grew heavier, his head lolled, and he folded onto his side, dozing but also aware, as though in some lucid dream-state, of a shape sliding out of the water beside him. He heard small splashes, followed by a wet and supple emergence. Try as he might, he could not open his eyes, although—as if his eyelids had turned to glass—he saw at the rim of his vision a shape of milky skin, of round moon-like eyes. In his dream he instinctively recoiled from the horror that had once sucked in his thoughts, his memories, and would have absorbed his life, given more time. The afrit. He remembered Bogrevil, or was it Eskie, explaining that the creatures dwelling in the giant hookahs were water demons, repelled by light, forever rapacious, seeking an easy sup, so of course they would hang about piers in the hope of finding the occasional dozing watchman . . . or a fool musician who’d already been sampled and had about him the scent, the taste, of one already opened to them. It explained to him why he’d stayed behind: He’d been under the influence of the creature even before he saw it. Easy prey. And now he could not fend it off, the remnants of his conscious self urging his entranced body to resist but held motionless. He thought how Leodora didn’t know where he was. No one knew, nor could help.

The pale shape edged close. It touched his cheek with gelid fingers, then crawled upon him. He strained and strained and in the end managed to open his eyes, or at least his dream-self did. He was staring into a face that was no afrit after all, but something entirely unfamiliar. The skin was bone white, and the eyes as fully black as marbles. Hair that wasn’t hair hung about its face in wet, knotted strands of green and brown, parted about shell-like ears, and dripped upon him. Long sharp fingers tenderly combed his cheeks but could have flayed them. Soft slits in her throat waved open and closed. He felt her breasts pressing into him.

She smiled, her thin lips drawing back from a row of short bony fish teeth. “Sing for me,” he heard her say, and the music emerged out of him as it had out of the multicolored cat. Thus in an instant he remembered: the gods, an open pavilion with fountains and pools like no place he’d ever seen because it was no place he’d ever seen, it was Edgeworld, and beside one pool lay a cat that he’d been drawn to, that he’d touched and stroked, and which had stood up and produced the purest, most exquisite sound; then someone had proclaimed, “The choice is made,” though he didn’t understand what that meant at all, but the cat had licked him, opened its jaws wide as if yawning, except that the mouth had grown and grown until it surrounded him or he fell into it, tumbled down into darkness, into deeper depths of memory than he’d ever known before.

The light above receded. Somewhere below lay her home, his mother, and she, with the unraveling winding sheet waving above her like a ribbon, would come looking for him, would rise up to take him and never have him return to that living world of spans and bridges, spirals and magic and the confusion of what they all expected of him, whom the gods had shaped and fed to a cat. Farewell to them, farewell to the music. Farewell to Leodora. He whispered her name and it rippled through the waters. From high above came a distant reply. He cast his eyes toward the surface and through the green he saw her—pale skin and hair ablaze, Leodora in the beams of sunlight above, and he knew he didn’t want to leave her. Not yet, not before she understood what she meant to him. Why couldn’t she recognize that? It wasn’t so much.

Far below lay the kingdom of the afterlife and if he turned back now, he would never arrive. Choose, demanded the situation, like the voice in Edgeworld. “Choose,” said the apparition of his mother far below in her streaming pall.

Why was it either one or the other? He objected to the options even as he sensed that he was on Colemaigne, embraced by a dream that even now was withdrawing—never his mother at all. That was a layer of meaning pulled out of him, not one imposed by the creature. She wasn’t stealing his soul; instead she was sharing, stirring his memories into her own. She had his and he had hers now, hints of it anyway, like flecks of sunlight scattered across the water’s surface.

The image of Leodora blurred into striations, into colors woven through the green and the gold beams of light, with dark darting fish playing around her, all glittering, and then his real eyelids, which had been closed all along, parted, and the glittering light became the fierce brightness of the sun blazing upon his face. He was lying on the pier, on his back, and the sun had toured the sky until it was warming him where he slept. He could think Leodora’s name but not make his lips obey enough to say it. He told his body to sit up and it refused. The most he accomplished was to turn his head enough to see the stones beside him. She was not there, the sea creature, but the puddle of water and the strands of seaweed assured him that she’d been no dream.

With enormous effort, he finally rolled over, dragging his legs out of the water. For how long she had embraced him he couldn’t be sure, but the sun had moved up to midmorning position, so an hour or more at least. “Why,” he protested to no one, “does it have to be me they come for?”

After a while he was able to get up unsteadily.

The puddle of water became a wide wet stripe leading to the gate into the bridge support, which now hung open. She had not gone back into the water.

He picked up his sandals as he tottered beside the trail. It narrowed and then, as he entered, the stripe separated into wet uneven ovals. He closed the gate behind him. Wet footprints with discernible toes climbed the stairs ahead of him, but shrank as they ascended until they were just smudges, vanishing altogether by the time he’d made it halfway up the spiral. Her feet had dried. He gave up, and had to sit and rest then.

The climb the rest of the way back to the surface seemed to take all morning.


The name of the street that ran along the tower was now visible, sunlight splashing across the carved plaque and the nearly redundant designation of TOWERSIDE THOROUGHFARE.

People moved about up and down its length. None of them appeared to be either a sea creature or naked. More likely she, whatever she was, had climbed to one of the levels above. He wondered how long she could endure out of the water, if she transformed utterly, becoming a land creature when it suited her, and if she did, then how many others of her kind had he met and never known? How many might have passed through the paidika? He shook his head, dismissing the matter. There was no way he could resolve it.

Music echoed off the buildings, tugging at him. He smelled food cooking and instinctively followed the scent. Though he might have been disoriented and uncertain from his encounter, he was ravenously hungry.

Shortly he came to a stand selling sweet buns, and he bought three. He’d eaten the first one by the time he paid. The others he ate as he continued walking. They were filled with some kind of fruit in a thick paste. He’d never tasted its like, and he determined to go back and buy more of them for everyone in the theater—but not until he’d taken in the scope of what had assembled on the thoroughfare while he slept.

He could only call it a fair, but it must have come together haphazardly. Citizens stood in clusters in front of various booths, most of which were nothing more than a few poles with a simple curtain across the front if they were closed, swept aside if they were doing business.

In short order he saw a jeweler—a horned faun—selling bracelets and necklaces, many of which dangled from its leathery wrists; a chandler peddling bulbous orange candles—according to a sign, these would replenish by day to be burned again by night; a huge, ogreish seller of knives and next to him a duo performing sword swallowing to the delight of a small crowd. Farther on, a woman with vestigial wings was juggling painted balls while balancing barefoot on a rope a few feet off the ground. These performers must have gathered as word got out that the ban had been lifted. Had they been waiting in their houses for a dozen years, practicing in secret, or were they newly arrived off the neighboring span of Sacbé, which after all lay just on the far side of the great tower gateway?

The central gateway was framed by figures carved in high relief, one male and one female. Seeing them, he stopped, turned, and approached. On the left was a winged male figure with arms pointing skyward above it, in the act of bursting from the pedestal base. It was an exciting, active figure, but he paid it hardly any mind after the first glance, because of the effigy to the right of the archway. It was a female figure with long unjointed arms that ended in sharp sinuous fingers. A wild halo of seaweed hair on which small shells and starfish balanced surrounded her face, which was not entirely human. The eyes, wide and as perfectly round as her breasts, were like the eyes of an afrit, blank and terrible, although he knew they were black. Her mouth smiled in fierce and irrefutable invitation. Sing for me! Her command echoed in his mind. The lower half of her body, emerging from the elaborate plinth as out of a fountain, appeared to metamorphose from flesh to scales. Her sex—the lowest part of her showing above the lip of the plinth—was masked by a ribbed shell. He raised his eyes to the circular windows dotting the whole length of the wall and wondered if such creatures lived behind each.

As he stood gawking, a stilt walker abruptly materialized out of the dark gateway before him, wearing loose bright blue-and-green skirts almost to the ground, scarves and clinking bracelets seemingly awhirl. Affixed to the walker’s head was a grotesque and oversized laughing mask. Long, thickly woven strands of dark hair surrounded that face of japery. Then, in an impressive feat as he walked past, the walker somehow doubled over on the stilts and reached down to hand Diverus a coin. It was copper and bore a face like that of the stilt walker’s mask on one side. He flipped it over, and a similarly distorted face snarled at him from the other side. Glancing up again, he watched the stilt walker pivot on one leg and then seemingly—at least from Diverus’s perspective—continue along while walking backward, with the cruel face from the back of the coin now facing forward.

He watched transfixed as the giant figure strode nimbly around every impediment; meanwhile the laughing face jeered back at him like a taunt, a clown’s jape. Encountering a group of people, the walker bent over again, parallel to the ground, and flung out more coins, then righted up, pivoted, placing the snarling face in the back once more, and strode on. Diverus could no longer be certain which was front and which back.

He pocketed the curious coin but chose not to follow. He’d been teased and tricked enough for one morning.

Later then, as he waited in line to purchase more of the sweet pastries for everyone in the theater, he gasped with the sudden realization that for the first time in his life he was alone and free in the world. He was with no one and no one knew where he was. He could have turned right then and run through that broad gate and into worlds unknown, or gone up inside that tower wall and hunted for the merwoman who’d beguiled him. And knowing that he could, he knew he never would. He never would abandon Leodora, the more so because she had handed him this gift of freedom. The merwoman had shown him he could embrace a death that he’d yearned toward secretly since the moment his mother had sunk from view in the underworld of Vijnagar—whether she’d intended to or not, the creature had proffered that choice. If he had accepted it . . . She could have taken my life, he thought. If I’d agreed, she could have taken it easily.

The desire to follow his mother into oblivion, which had been his unacknowledged companion since before he’d left the squalid undercity of Vijnagar, he now acknowledged and rejected. A threshold had been crossed, one he hadn’t known he had to cross. He was Diverus now, free and complete and self-aware. Because of her, his human goddess.


“Diverus, you terrify me!”

“I didn’t mean to. They were supposed to tell you where I was. Bois and Glaise.” Diverus had given out the treats he’d brought back. Soter had glowered at him, but Soter always glowered. Sober, he seemed to have no other expression these days. But it was Leodora who chided him.

They’d gone into the booth, and she was setting up for the next performance. She chided him because his absence meant she couldn’t be in the booth. She could no longer endure the space by herself. Alone.

He answered her charge by pointing out, “You go off all the time. You mount the span towers and overlook the bridge. You told me so. You hunt up stories. Why shouldn’t I be free to go off, too, if I want? I mean, I could have run off and not come back. I’m free to do that now.” He spoke the words of defiance as if surprised by them.

She set down the rod puppet of the fisherman, Chilingana, a figure from the second story she would perform today. “You know, you’re absolutely right. Don’t listen to me. I was worried, but Bois did explain they’d left you down at the waterside. It just, when you didn’t come back . . . well, I don’t know what I thought. That maybe you’d found the inverted span, that something had come out of the water and swallowed you, that you’d decided not to come back at all. All of those things, I guess. And how could I sit in here without you? If you’d never come back, we’d never have known what happened.” She drew a breath, dismissing her careworn expression. “All the same, you’re right. I suppose I cause Soter such terror every time I go off.”

“So now you appreciate how Soter feels?” he teased.

“Let’s not presume too much. I still mean to climb towers if I’m so inclined.” “This one will prove a strange journey. It’s inhabited. It’s like a great wide palace dividing the two spans.”

She was intrigued. “Did you have any luck finding it, the Pons Asinorum?”

“The what?”

“That’s what it’s called, according to the porters down below—the inverted span is known as Pons Asinorum. The Fool’s Bridge. Did you see it again?”

“No.” He sighed, then muttered, “Fool’s Bridge, that’s what it is all right. Bois and Glaise told me they knew where it was, but it turned out what they really meant was that they’d heard about it being there, or heard of it being seen from there. Or something. But there’s not even space for an underspan down there—no one’s living there like on Vijnagar. It was just arches to let boats pass through. I don’t see how the Pons . . .”

“Asinorum.”

“I don’t see how it could ever have appeared there. Besides, we saw it in the middle of the span, you and I, where the Dragon Bowl hangs.”

“I think it doesn’t appear in just one place,” she answered. “It seems to come and go.”

“Come and go,” he repeated as if that had some other meaning. Then he brightened. “You probably will want to see the street fair. Where I purchased the buns, there’s a fair, with all kinds of performers. Fortune-telling and sword swallowing and the like. A lot of them are different, not exactly human. It must be a good place to find more stories, with all those creatures.”

“We should go this afternoon. You can take me there.”

“I would like to, Leodora,” he said, and tensed up. She heard the peculiar notes in his words, too, and stared at him curiously. He blushed under her scrutiny, and abruptly concentrated on arranging his instruments in order, an act that both of them knew to be superfluous: When she told him what story she was performing, he would grab the appropriate instrument regardless of what lay nearest.

She gently placed her hand on his shoulder. He turned to her much too fast. His features were twisted in misery. Before she could ask what was wrong, he took her face in his hands and kissed her. His lips crushed hers, his whole body trembling behind the kiss as if even the energy he needed to stand up was pouring from his lips. Then he let go, wrenching himself away as if to escape some intense force—let go and dove out of the booth, kicking the theorbo, which spun like a compass needle, coming to rest with the neck aimed at her.

She brought her fingers to her lips, and stared at the blackness of the booth. “Oh, gods,” she whispered but couldn’t move.


They didn’t go to the fair. When the sun dipped below the theater’s walls, Orinda let in the sizable crowd for the early performance. It was the last show in which she would charge a mere penny, and word had spread.

Until the time of the performance, Diverus could not be found anywhere. Soter strode about behind the stage, loudly complaining that he’d never trusted “the thankless boy” and that they should be glad he’d run off. Leodora was too lost in her own distress to object, leaving Soter to enumerate Diverus’s various offenses: laziness, disrespect, thievery, and, worst of all, bad musicianship. Orinda, at the gate with Bois collecting the entrance fees, heard none of it, and Glaise—who could say nothing in anyone’s defense anyway—ignored him.

Then Orinda returned and it was time to begin, and Leodora, ignoring the shouts and cheers, sullenly walked into the empty booth, while Soter continued quietly to denigrate the absent Diverus until Orinda said, “Hush!” with sufficient authority to shut him up.

It was at that point that Hamen and Meg appeared in the wings. They dragged between them a barely conscious and groaning Diverus. Dark purple stained his shirtfront.

Soter took one look at him and pronounced, “By the gods, the rascal’s drunk.”

Orinda remarked, “Of course you’d recognize that.” Soter twitched at her tone and held his tongue. To the two porters, she said, “Here, set him down.”

“Very sorry about this, madam,” replied Hamen, “but we didn’t discover him until Melangia Street wanted lingonberry wine, and there he was, having hacked open a cask and drunk most of it hisself.”

“What he isn’t wearing, that is,” Meg added. “Good thing Hamen recognized him. Most thieves get tossed off the span, we catch ’em, and I doubt too many survive the plummet.”

“We’ll pay for the wine, of course,” Orinda said, and she offered them a handful of coins.

“We’ll give it to Chork. It’s his territory.”

“We’re about to begin a performance. Would you both care to stay?” she asked.

“Looks like you’ve got a full house already,” Hamen said.

“We do, but I have a private box that can’t be entered save from the back, and you’re welcome to that. It gives a very good view of the screen.”

They accepted her invitation with the rationalization that no one would miss them for an hour or two; but before Orinda led them away, she turned to Soter and said, “Get him to the booth so we can start.”

“He can’t play like this.”

“Not from back here, no.”

Soter snorted contempt, but withered under her steady gaze and dragged Diverus onto the stage. The crowd thought this was part of the show and hooted at them. Diverus stumbled free of him and lurched off to career in a circle until Soter could catch hold of him again, by which point the crowd was roaring. Soter cursed as he shoved Diverus through the opening, and Leodora, where she sat between the puppet cases, swiveled around. She watched Soter deposit his besotted burden with obvious contempt. Diverus collapsed in a heap amid his instruments.


“He’s in his cups,” Soter carped, “and at the start of a performance, too.”

“So then, he’s adopted you as a role model.”

“You sound just like Orinda,” Soter answered. “Does everyone hold so low an opinion of me?”

“Just the ones who know you.” She said it almost as an afterthought, because her attention was on Diverus. She knelt beside him and helped him sit up. His head drooped, but he looked up at her with bleary eyes. She said his name. He focused on her briefly, then let his eyes roll and closed the eyelids.

“Lemme go,” he slurred. “Just lemme go.”

“I can’t. You have to play now, you have to accompany me.”

He shook his head.

“Lea, he can’t—”

“Would you please shut up and get out of here? Go announce us. Do your job instead of weighing in on everyone else’s!” She stared daggers at him until he left. Then she ministered to Diverus as best she could. She cupped his cheek, then picked out the shawm and placed it in his lap. “Here, I think you should use this.”

“No, I . . .” He shook his head again. “I can’t anymore. She tore it out of me, wanted my song.”

“Who did?”

“The wraith. Water-wraith.”

“What water-wraith?”

He tried to answer. She watched his mouth working to shape words. Finally he lowered his head in defeat. Only a few hours ago he’d been teasing her, asserting his newfound independence. Now he couldn’t even explain what had happened to him.

From outside came Soter’s call to order: “Hear-ye all! Welcome to the Terrestre, returned like your span itself from the ash pit of the gods!” The crowd cheered.

Leodora left Diverus and returned to her seat before the screen. The puppets for the first tale were laid out there—the thief, the vizier, the princess, the emperor, and the dragons.

Overhead, dusk was coloring, darkening the sky. She lifted the flap on the screen, to which she’d already pinned the frame of a palace; she reached up with her other hand to turn the lantern on her cue. Peripherally she looked at Diverus, hunched over, motionless.

Soter finished his introduction, asking them to enjoy to the fullest the artfulness of Jax. Applause and whistling followed, the crowd rowdy and eager. She turned the lantern slowly to light the screen in the blue of evening.

From behind her, the eerie tenor of the shawm rose, tremulous, out of the booth, snaking up and around the theater like a lasso looped about them, drawing them tightly into its spell. As the last note of the introduction faded away, there wasn’t a sound from the audience.

Leodora relaxed, let go of the lantern, and began the tale of the Druid’s Egg.