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