City of the Uncommon Thief

by Lynne Bertrand

  I leaned back in my chair and yawned.

  Marek stopped. “Am I keeping you from something?”

  “With all due respect, Marek Thebes, there are a thousand guild houses, all of which I can name for you by export, guildmaster, roof master, strata, fathoms. I speak twenty-three local tongues fluently, and the rest well enough to get myself someone to kiss. Additionally I was born in this city, like everyone else here, and I’ve been up here on the roofs two years. How could I not know what Ship is?”

  “I’m never sure you’re paying attention, or that you care about the work we do here. So you know also about the export log I am charged with compiling?”

  “Mm. Lot of work,” I said. Ping appeared with another tart on a dish, for Marek. I waited for him to go, then said, “Are you going to eat that?” Marek waved it away, and I took the dish.

  “The log takes work, yes,” he said. And then he told me all about how in one day he visits the fifty-two roofs of guilds in our district to collect their export estimates so we can organize rooms in our storehouses and barter for space in the cargo holds of the ships. “Meeting the guildmasters in this ritual is a privilege,” he said. “This is the only time they come out. All year. And then I am up till noctis, compiling their numbers, and that is interesting as well. And of importance.” He studied me.

  “Riveting,” I said, licking my fingers.

  He sighed. “I was going to ask Errol Thebes to fill out the log this year.”

  “Errol Thebes? Who is that? Do I know him?”

  “I’ve been called to Fremantle today, to meet with the regnat concerning a missing runner. Errol. The regnat thinks I know where he is. Don’t tell me, if you do.”

  “He’s in my pack, in small pieces,” I said. I had seen neither Errol nor Jamila. Jamila lived deep in the morgues of the guild. Errol—who knew? Gone? Caught? Dead? Chatty ne’er-do-well? He had been my best friend.

  “Meanwhile, all of Thebes’s runners have work to do, except that I noticed”—he looked at the roof log—“that you put down here that you will be working in your tent today.”

  “Accounting,” I said, putting my hands up defensively, failing to mention a private tournament of maw I had scheduled for myself with the runners on Bamako.

  “Well, you’ll have to get back to that tonight. I’m having you do the export log this year. Today. Or actually—” He looked out the door of the yurt at Berfrei. “Right now.”

  “Me?” I said. “Why me?”

  “It’s a simple form,” Marek said, reaching for a thick envelope. “The guildmasters will”—he paused—“they’ll probably like you. You’re good with languages.”

  “Am I expected to do this alone?” I said.

  “Your friend Dragomir is also apparently working on accounting.” Marek turned the log around so I could see that Dragomir had made a ditto mark under my entry. “You may take him.”

  “No thanks,” I said. “He slows me down.”

  Marek winced. “Odd Thebes, how did you ever get called to the roofs?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean. How did you become a runner?”

  “Same way as everybody else,” I said. But that was a lie.

  Coracles

  THE TOWERS SWAYED HARD IN THE WINDS, straining the lines and flinging me around like a kelp’s toy. Here I was, forced to run myself ragged, doing Errol’s chores. The only redeeming thing about the day was that Fremantle’s guards, who followed me everywhere, decided that the rogue runner would not try to contact me on such an auspicious errand. Or perhaps they didn’t want to be out in such weather. Neither did I.

  Cwym Teifi was young for a guildmaster, thirty times around the sun. He was tired and sallow, with dye-stained fingers and long hair that he had tied back like a runner’s. He had to yell to be heard over the gusts: “Cwym Teifi, yn eich gwasanaeth.”

  I yelled back, “Right. Fine. Odd Thebes, at your service, too. I’m in a hurry. Let’s use the common tongue.”

  Cwym’s expression fell. He stepped away from me toward the hatch full of guilders behind him. They were jammed in the door to the roof like pale herring just to see the sky for ten minutes. Through their ranks they passed a huge blue bowl, easily the volume of three bathing troughs but light enough he could balance it on two fingers. Cwym made as if to pass it to me but I just stared at it.

  “Soup tureen?” I said, with my quill over the form.

  “Cwrwgl,” he said. “A coracle. She is a boat.” Again he thrust the bowl toward me but I kept my hands busy, writing coracle on my form.

  From behind me a familiar voice ordered, “Take it from him, Odd Thebes.”

  “Quantity?” I said.

  Errol Thebes pushed past me and grabbed the coracle in his hands as if it were a gift to him personally. “Look, Odd Thebes!” he said. “This beautiful craft, she is strong as the sea itself and yet so fine you can see through her, like mica! She weighs less than your quill.” I stepped back in surprise at the sight of him. This was not the disheveled runner of the tufuga’s tent. He was lean and angular, and his hair was plaited like the thick manes of warriors we had read about as kelps.

  “Cwym Teifi is showing you his best work,” he said, skipping the friendly greeting. “Take a minute to admire it. See it.”

  “What I see is that someone is still struggling with the definition of hiding.” I put the date on my form: viiB. The seventh of Boreal.

  Errol turned back to the guildmaster. “Stay high,” he said.

  “High,” said Cwym Teifi. They tilted toward each other in a slight bow.

  “A gaf i roe cynnig arni?” said Errol.

  Cwym brightened. “Of course. Yes—we’d love you to try it.”

  I flinched. “But it’s a boat. And we’re on a roof.”

  “But look,” said Cwym as he grinned. He gestured to two of his runners, who rolled back a tarp to expose a square pool of water half the size of the tower’s roof. The runners’ tents from that roof were set on the banks of a lake.

  Errol grabbed the paddles from the runners, set the coracle on the waves riled up by the wind, and tumbled awkwardly into her. The bowl skidded across the surface of the water so fast I thought we were about to watch Errol slip over the edge of that tower. But he flapped the paddles and spun the boat and whooped into the wind. “This is marvelous! I am sailing on top of the world!”

  “Sailing implies the use of a sail,” I called flatly.

  Cwym roared, “Try to tip her, Errol Thebes! Try as hard as you can!” I was jarred that the guildmaster knew it was Errol Thebes in that coracle. But Errol seemed not to notice. He stood unsteadily in the little craft, put a foot up on the rim of the bowl, and stepped down hard. The rim slid into the water but came up again so fast Errol fell backward into the boat. Cwym erupted with delight.

  Errol’s voice was high: “Odd! You see? This is splendid, is it not? You must try her!”

  I tapped my quill on my paperwork. “Quantity? And it is made of—what? Abalone?”

  “She looks like abalone,” replied Cwym. “But she’s parchment dyed with indigo, laid over fine wicker.” He pointed to the line on my form that called for a description. “This one’s the color of my bound-wife’s eyes, so we call her Maggie.” He grew sober. “The real Maggie left me for the morgues three months ago. I am left with the infant she carried. Our first.”

  Errol lifted his paddles. “How on earth were you able to lead the guild into Ship, with a bound-wife passing?”

  “The work is a relief. I dread the quiet of night most of all.”

  “Aye,” said Errol. “And how will you manage the wait, in Beklemek?”

  “I can’t bear the thought. Send me news from the roofs, will you? That will be distracting, for I was a runner long ago.”

  The guilders waiting at the hatch could not get enou
gh of Errol, the way he was talking to their beloved guildmaster. You could see it in their faces, waiting to see what he would ask next. That was the disappointment I felt from Teifi when I first got here: They were all waiting for someone who cared, and all they got was me.

  “Quantity?” I held my quill over the form. “Six coracles? Something like that?”

  Cwym Teifi shook his head. “Six? Nay. We have two thousand.”

  I looked up from my papers. “Two thousand? Dwy fil o cwryglau? Are you serious?”

  “In all colors. We could make more than that, but the regnat will only take so many.” Cwym pointed to the line on my form for the tax. “And tell the regnat I have thirty-eight foundlings for him. They’ll come when we send the coracles.” He added, “Truth is, I haven’t chosen them yet. I hate that part.”

  When we left, Cwym Teifi nodded to me and said a terse thanks in the common tongue. And Errol? Cwym held Errol in his arms like a rising third son.

  * * *

  —

  Errol trailed me across the lines from Teifi to Shou. With flourish, the wizened guildmaster there, Diaochan Shou, opened a trunk lid on what appeared to be a heap of broom handles. Errol reached for one and asked, May I? in her guild’s tongue. “Wo keyi?” Diaochan grinned with the one tooth left in her gums while Errol lit the pressed powder on one end of the stick with his flint. The wind bloomed with the fragrance of cedar. As the flame reduced itself to a steady light, it revealed ornate carvings in the wood. The rough broom handle was actually an intricate trough, a tiny winding river with trees on its banks. As the ember moved down the river of tamped incense, minuscule redbirds lit up in the branches of the trees. The first stand of trees was cedar (so was the first uur of incense, Diaochan said); the next was witch hazel; the next, pear; and so on.

  “So the fragrance marks the time of day,” Errol said.

  Diaochan was delighted with him. She laid a thread of hemp, with a tiny brass bell tied to each end, over a bend in the river and held a brass bowl under it all. When the ember reached the bend, the thread burned and broke, dropping the bells into the bowl with a clamor.

  Errol laughed. “A private clock with an alarm!”

  Diaochan Shou put her hand on Errol’s shoulder and smiled up at him.

  I wrote: Fire hazard.

  * * *

  —

  As we crossed the lines I mumbled under my breath, “What did you do, memorize ‘May I?’ in every tongue? In the wyrm-slayers’ tongue, in tongue of the Three Kingdoms—?”

  “You yourself taught me.”

  “I did no such thing!” But then it came to me. In Langesonne he had wanted a list and I had written it all out for him on a scrap of palimpsest: Mag ik? Puedo? Mogu ya? I wrote “May I?” in every language spoken in the district. “I thought you wanted all those lines to use on girls?”

  The last time I saw Errol make such a face I had bet him that I could swallow my own hand.

  * * *

  —

  He plucked the vihuelas at Iberia House, shot my own quill at me from a bow at Strael, sampled eight tiny theobroma planets at Drageoirs. He chose Saturn as his favorite for the glassy rings of sugar and cardamom. Fifty houses, fifty-one—

  “Rumor has it you’ve fallen from the towers,” I said, panting, as we crossed the flies toward the last stop, Pliny. “Aye. Or that you were abducted by raiders from outside the wall, or the galaxy. Or by some girl. You’re a legend, Errol Thebes. But now as I am doing all your errands, don’t you think I have the right to know which rumor is true?” I was in excellent condition, but I had to stop more than once to bend over to fill my lungs with air, from the effort of keeping up with him. “Everyone knows this disappearance of yours has nothing to do with knotting spikes anymore. Stirring up drama. Look at you today, risking both our lives for no reason at all.”

  “I came today because it was necessary.”

  “How were you necessary? I was doing the work.”

  “You were doing the paperwork. But I knew you would forget that these people work in dark isolation all year, building the most beautiful exports on earth. Their work is full of—how would you put it?”

  “Boredom?” I said.

  “Longing.”

  I shrugged. “So you admit the iron spikes are a ruse, an excuse to get away from your life, away from your mam.”

  He was exasperated. He said, “If you are so convinced, then turn them in. You know that iosal foundling. You know it has them.”

  I hesitated, trying to figure out why I hadn’t thought of such a thing myself. All I could say was “But they’re yours.”

  He laughed. “That’s irony. Odd Thebes has sudden ethics, and I am the thief. In truth you know I’m right. The black-iron spikes are uncommon.”

  I waved my hand in dismissal. “The Long Run awaits us. And Winter Ship. And the glorious party. And girls. You have robbed me of these high pleasures, Errol Thebes. We had a plan, and now I am alone.”

  I turned to the Pliny House guildmaster, who was waiting to register the mass of feathered paper dragons his guild had produced this year. The man shouted in my ear, “The master guilders wish me to express to Errol Thebes that we will be glad to harbor the fugitive when he tires of running.”

  “Death!” I said loudly, irritated. “Are you all glad about death? And don’t you think any one of the guilders in Pliny would turn him in?”

  “Sooner their own sons,” said the guildmaster.

  Errol bowed to the man.

  I turned to Errol, agitated. “May I, this? and May I, that? That was all strategic! You’re just kissing their backends because you need allies.”

  Errol grabbed my collar. “Here’s everything you want to know. I am running the path along the top of the wall every night. During the days, I am asking every guilder who will come to the hatch, What is the origin of the black-iron spikes? No one knows. I find more information in my dreams. I sleep in empty tents during the day. It’s that simple. Today? I suspected you would not understand the importance of the work of all these guildmasters or the significance of your job. I was right.”

  I looked down at the wall that surrounded our city. It was half the height of our tower and the width of forty guilders standing shoulder to shoulder. It was a quarter mile from the closest tower. I couldn’t imagine how he’d get a line out there to run it. Plus, the wall was nearly thirty miles, the circumference of the city, so long it curved with the surface of the planet. And he expected me to believe he was running it every night?

  “It’s more likely you were abducted by a girl,” I said. “Aye, it’s always a girl.” When I turned around, he had disappeared.

  Beklemek

  WITH WINTER HARD UPON US, the city’s exports now filled the storehouses along the river while our food had dwindled to a few sacks of rice and a bin of tubers in the cavernous pantry of every guild and roof kitchen. The city moved full speed ahead toward total depletion.

  We observed this annual hardship in the ironic tradition of our ancestors, by forming a holiday around it. We called it Beklemek—the wait. While Beklemek was a holiday of unspecified length, it had a specific beginning on the Ides of Boreal, with a feast to finish off every dreg of food in the city.

  Inside the towers, Beklemek came as a relief. Guilders had been working around the clock to fill their export quotas. For them, the feast was a tired meal scraped from fry pans, followed by a round of baduk to satisfy the kelps before everyone fell into exhausted slumber. The roofs, by contrast, were in high spirits. We had worked as hard as the guilds but work came easy to us. On Thebes, we rehung Xerxes, the iron crow, which had been reforged after the sacking of our roof, and tied red pennons around his chest. We invited Bamako’s runners to join us, all dozen of them, for they had shared their food and wood with us since the fire. We also invited the six runners of the wheel-making Chakra House. We sat elbow t
o elbow and ate from lavish dishes Ping created from the same rice and roots the guild kitchens below us had no doubt burned to a crisp. Soufflés and stews, puddings and flambés. When the meal was gone, we slept in heaps around the yurt fire, and stoked the flames with the last of our wood.

  At dawn we emerged to watch a thousand roof masters take their places in a sober vigil on the north edges of their towers. They trained long-lenses on the north gate, through which was a mountain gorge they would see when the gate opened. From that gorge our river flowed, and on our river a fleet of ships would sail into our harbor.

  The daily practice of singing the sun up and down was suspended for Beklemek, and a halt put to nonessential errands. No bells rang. We pulled blankets around our shoulders and returned to the yurt, where our breath made clouds in the frozen air. For the first time in our year there was no work to do. Dragomir ran outside and pretended to eat the iron mast out of hunger. He wanted to get a laugh but he froze his tongue to the mast. We made him tell his life story while we heated spit in our hands to free him. When Marek Thebes returned from Beklemek meetings at Fremantle he reported that diversions had been planned in every district to fill a week of waiting. This did get a laugh. The ships always came after a day, two days at the most. The mood was high.

  * * *

  —

  On that first night after the Ides, we joined a district tournament of picket at Tang House. The stakes were not laid out in kisses: winners with winners, losers with losers. I was curious to watch Dragomir lose to Sa’id on purpose in order to have a chance at Grid, who appeared to be fumbling a hand at the next table and losing to Marek. Grid never lost at deck games, though, except to me. I would have warned Dragomir but the circumstances were too amusing. To their credit, our roof master and Dragomir made the most of that kiss, dragging it on longer than any I had ever had. And we all made the most of the next morning, with no fleet on our horizon.