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