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