City of the Uncommon Thief

by Lynne Bertrand

  In the wan moonlight he could see the plank that had fallen with him. The force of the fall had driven it into the earth. Frozen in the purgament of the street next to it was something that glinted of black iron. He pressed at the iron with his navaja. Kicked it. It was the hinged lid of the case that held the iron spikes.

  “Maso-swefn,” he said. A snaring dream. He remembered that foundling and its betrayal of him with those guards and then its insane question: Do you want the spikes to go with you? As if he would still live after it had lured him in. Yet, here he was, alive. And here was that iron case, and those spikes.

  From somewhere behind him came the faraway crack of voices and laughter. Utterly disorienting. Errol staggered to the edge of the alley, following the sounds.

  The telling of this is a snaring dream for me, too. What do I know of the street? Nothing really. The rubble of fountains, a shingle with the hint of past lettering. A foul system of feral canals, carrying in their ebb and flow the irfelaf of what was.

  Over the sounds of the laughter came a loud thwack and again, louder. The shadows of two creatures jerked and leapt in the light of a fire at the end of an alley. Men. They were men! They were agile. His age! One of them was beating the dust from a rug against the wall of the tower. Or not a rug. A belt or a strap. The other was bent around some object in his arms—a sack, perhaps. Errol leaned against a wall, dizzy. He was still in armor. His first thought—and this is no bard’s embellishment, not this time—was gladness at finding runners on the street. He would help them with whatever it was they were doing.

  When the strap hit the wall, it appeared to shudder. Errol squinted. The two men were laughing. They were calling out each other’s names: “Dete!” “Clegis!” This time—thwack—the strap recoiled with such speed that it wrapped around the wrist of the one called Dete, and he screamed and shook it off.

  “Look at it, Clegis! All a mess of its parts and still trying to come at me.” Errol was close enough to see the two of them were scarred with worm tunnels. A third figure shifted in the play of the fire. That one was thin and lanky, pale as a disease, taut. Hair wild as a spill of soot ink.

  “Finish up,” that pale one said, a vacant voice.

  “Aye, Jago,” said the other two.

  The strap was not a strap. Errol knew it now. It was some kind of asp, and Dete had it by the tail. And the sack was not a sack. It was a writhing kelp, a girl, and she must have just stomped on the one called Clegis, for he roared and grabbed his foot. All Errol could think was the snake must have bitten the girl, and now the girl was wounded and crazed and the runners were protecting her.

  The girl was the first to see him. She caught his eye and shook her head no. Again the snake hit the wall and the girl cried out and there was a fan-shaped splatter of blood. The snake hung from Dete’s hand, bobbing its wounded head, disoriented. Dete spun the snake over his head like a rope, counting the revolutions of it—“One! Two! Thr—”

  Errol bent over and picked up a cobble from the street. He threw it. Dete crashed into the muck and leapt up, spinning to see what had hit him.

  You have to remember who Errol was and where he had come from. He thought—I can barely write it—that those three would be ashamed of themselves. That they would forge a fast apology and tend the snake’s wounds or lay it in some narrow, decent grave, and do right by the girl. This is what he thought. He was from a high place and he did not know.

  In that pause the snake swung in an arc, threw its jaws thrice-wide on some secret hinge, and set its fangs into the white of Dete’s wrist. The air filled with pulse blood. The snake shot into the air and was a blur, and gone. The girl bit Clegis and too was gone.

  Errol stumbled backward. He flailed around a corner, down a set of cobbled stairs, sliding in the frozen armor. They were coming. He ran stupidly, clumsily. Finally he stopped, tipped his head back, turned. Dete slammed into him, felled him, pressed his face into the street.

  “Dead end. As it were,” said Jago, approaching. “Who have we here?”

  “A runner,” said Errol, “like you.”

  “He’s the Green Knight, Jago!” yelled Clegis. His breath reeked. “You can tell it by looking at him.”

  “Silence, Clegis. Or I’ll find the square inch of you that’s not already a lack and suck your blood out of it. Name?”

  “Runner,” said Errol.

  “Anonymous Runner. And from what guild hail ye?” Jago demanded. When Errol refused to speak, Jago said, “Dete, make a study of that, would you?”

  Dete broke the armor at the elbow hinge, wrenched off the sleeve and the gauntlet.

  “Branded an outlaw. Recently,” Dete said. “Before that he was second-year Thebes.”

  “You must also be runners, if you know the marks,” said Errol. Errol’s eyes settled on Jago’s forearm. A piece of leather had been sewn to him, with the first-year mark of Lascaux on it, a silk moth. “Where did you get that—”

  “Hel has no tufugas,” Jago said. “So we help ourselves.” He pointed at Errol’s crow. “I like that one for you, Dete.” Errol tried again to get away but Dete caught him. Jago said, “’Tis a rare privilege for us, your visit. We will do well by you.” He pulled a kitchen knife from somewhere behind him.

  Errol’s head was spinning. “This armor is excellent black iron, and you may have it, as a gift from me.”

  “‘Have it’?” said Jago. “This is my street. The rope that fell with you is mine. The armor is mine. The plank is mine. You are mine.”

  Errol reached into the pocket of his belt. In a swift move he crouched low and wielded the navaja. Dete and Clegis burst out laughing.

  “I am guessing,” said Jago, “you learned that from a book.”

  “And you? Where did you learn to mistreat a kelp? From what great hero? From what book?” Errol tossed the navaja up and caught it, turned it in his fingers.

  Jago scraped at his lip with the edge of his filthy fingernail. “There are no kelps on the streets. That girl Sitembile, least of all. There are no heroes, either, unfortunately for you.”

  “But, Jago,” said Clegis. “You are our hero, mine and Dete’s. You saved us from Utlag!” Errol ducked away as Jago kicked Clegis hard in the teeth.

  “Don’t mock me, ever,” Jago said to Clegis.

  Clegis was down, fumbling at his mouth.

  Errol tried again to run but Dete grabbed him from behind; Errol slashed a red bloom across Dete’s cheek. Dete was punching his face, and he felt his body fold under him like pieces of a broken chair and he was staring up at the three of them.

  For a long while Clegis and Dete pulled and cut his armor off him and took the wools he was wearing. They uncurled his fingers from the navaja. When he struggled, they knelt on his broken ribs. He did not tell them that he saw from far down the street the figure of that kelp watching him in the shadows. He was ashamed that she would see any of this. No kelp should see it.

  Jago squatted beside him. Errol could not take his eyes from the silk moth that had been cut from someone’s arm.

  Jago followed his gaze. “It’ll be easier for me to take that bird on your arm if you’re not alive for it. Clegis, let’s show some mercy.”

  Dete dragged Errol to his feet, and Clegis moved uncertainly toward him.

  “What sort of mercy is this?” whispered Errol.

  Clegis pressed the navaja hard into the side of his gut, piercing skin and driving the blade up under Errol’s ribs. Errol staggered into Clegis’s arms. And then it was done. Errol stared at the blood running in a rivulet from his own body, and willing himself not to fall.

  “That will take a day,” said Jago. “We’ll wait with you.”

  Errol bent over, trying not to slip away. “What have I ever done to you?”

  Jago laughed. “Done? Look around you. You left us here, to fend for ourselves.”

  “Me?�
�� said Errol. His voice sounded so far away in his ears. “I have never been here. I don’t even know you.”

  Bells were ringing far away.

  “Ah,” Jago said. “Nine bells. Dulcibus. Time for sweets. I wonder what we are having for dessert on the roofs.” Errol was sure he was hallucinating. There was that girl again. This time she was running toward him, in a little mob of kelps with sticks and their fists raised, and howling.

  Jago flinched. “Relentless. Let’s go. Dete, you’re a foul mess, with that wound on your face. We’ll get rid of this trouble and come back for that crow. Let’s make sure he doesn’t leave.”

  The rest happened so fast. Errol thought Dete was coming for his guild mark. But Clegis held him down and Dete took Errol’s foot in his hand. He sank the blade into the sole of it and wrenched the foot to jam the rest of the blade into the street. Errol’s vision diminished to a single point and disappeared. His body was cold and reeked of sweat and a kind of meatiness that came from his own muscles. He was pinned to the earth, and he felt nothing.

  The Baidaq

  MAREK TOLD ME TO WAIT. He left the yurt and trudged through the snow to the grate at the center of Thebes’s roof. The grate swung up on its hinge and Marek disappeared into the tower.

  When Margaret Thebes was angry, the guilders could hide from her. When she was exacting, they worked harder. But her twisted sorrow filled the tower like a disease and was more frightening than any wrath. I thought she would order Marek thrown off the roof that night in an effort to jettison the news he brought her. Fenn and Rip were gone, and now Errol. A lesser man would have put the news in writing.

  When the guilders returned Marek to us, they also sent late supper, an offering so rare I had never seen it made before: three immense cast-iron pots containing potatoes boiled to sludge; sausage blackened in the ovens; leeks sopped in oil. On any other night, we would have mocked their food, which looked like they had boiled up their socks. But tonight we were thin from Beklemek and ragged from the loss of Errol Thebes. The meal from a low place made us feel like kelps again, held up to the sky on the strength of the towers in which our parents forever toiled. We held our scalding bowls in our hands and devoured that meal.

  Ping studied the two remaining relics. “What is that?” he said.

  “The baidaq,” I said, picking it up and rolling it in my fingers. “The pawn from a shatranj board. The relic of the kitchen girl.”

  “Kitchen girl?” Ping said. “I am the cook. Yet I know nothing of a kitchen girl?”

  Every guilder in Thebes wondered what Margaret would do—I began—with the news that Errol was called to run the roofs. Any other parent would have laid out a feast for the guild in their son’s honor. Margaret was silent and refused to leave her quarters.

  Gudrun Thebes threw the mam-party. She made eyrouns for him, his favorite sweet. We all brought gifts. Mine was a stolen copy of Pliny. Woody Thebes appeared from nowhere, with his gift: a shatranj board and all its shahs, ruhks, faras, baidaqs, each meticulously hand-carved from two colors of heart pine. How I wanted that board. The black ruhk was crowded with minuscule archers. The shah’s crown was a perfect, tiny cage in which a thrush was perched on a bar with his head tossed back in song. Errol was grateful. But I knew he wanted something else. He was waiting for her. At midnight I woke him to say she had come. He came out of our room, pulling his tunic on.

  “I’ve come to pay what respects are due,” she said.

  “Aye. Thank you,” he said.

  “Don’t thank me. Wahid Thebes said you would run the guild. So that’s what I expected. You are a disappointment.”

  “I was called to the work of the roofs, Mam. Only you could rescind that offer, and you didn’t. I promise to return.”

  “And did I ask you to return?”

  “No, Mam.” His voice was as small as a kelp’s. She had diminished him yet again. Now she stepped aside. A foundling who’d been concealed behind her dragged a sack across the floor and let it fall at Errol’s feet. Why, I wondered, did the foundling appear to be embarrassed?

  “Is this a gift for me?” said Errol.

  “Aye. ’Tis the best of its kind,” Margaret said.

  Imagine my cousin Errol opening, in front of all of us, the first gift he had ever received from Margaret Thebes, the wealthiest guildmaster in the city. Imagine him wondering as he untied the sack if there was something in that bag that could account for a mam who avoided even the sight of him.

  And now imagine our quarters filling with the scent of a hundred bars of rose soap.

  “Your brothers had a reek to them,” Margaret said. “I gave them this soap to cut the stench. In fairness to you, I must give it to you as well.”

  I had been jealous of him a moment ago, with that chess set. I was not jealous now.

  To Errol’s credit he managed to thank the guildmaster, to say how useful a gift soap was. But as soon as she left, I found him cutting the bars into shards with his navaja and feeding them into the drains. Back in his bedroll he lay, reeking of roses.

  “She has no idea how to be a mam,” I said.

  “She could read a book about it,” he said.

  I laughed. “What do you want to do?”

  “Well.” He paused. He was grinning. “I’ve the hunger of ten men.”

  I hesitated, then laughed as well. “Aye,” I said. “And the darkness calls to me.”

  He was already up and running. “I feel the need for a blind feast! Will ye join me?”

  This was an old exchange between us. A code. We scrambled out of our family’s quarters and around the corner into the hall, our lanky arms and legs flailing as we raced down dozens of flights to the guild kitchens, knocking each other out of the way. Howling. All to find the kitchens with no head lamps, to make a feast for ourselves from what we could feel in the pantries in the pitch-black kitchen of an iron guild in the dead of night. A childhood game. A pelt’s feast. A wild errand. Always we left the cooks to clean the huge and wasteful mess in the morning. What could they say? He was the guildmaster’s son.

  As he ransacked the shelves and oven, making what smelled like saffron frytour, I sank my hands into a bowl of eyrouns.

  “Errol Thebes!” I called.

  “Dinna wear out my name.”

  “Catch!” I threw an egg hard where his voice was and heard it crack against the wall.

  “Was that my eyroun, which your loving mam made for me?!” he said.

  “Aye, it was! And—?” I said.

  “And you’ll lick it from the floor before we’re done here!” He was laughing. He found the remains of the egg on the floor and threw the mess back at me.

  “Come on now. Is that your best throw?” I mocked him. “You’ll be falling from the lines if that’s all the strength in that weakling arm.” I had Errol’s full attention now and I could forget he was leaving me behind for the roofs in the morning. We pelted the shelves and pans and each other and stuffed ourselves with whatever we didn’t hurl.

  Errol’s mouth was full. “Aht. Sat oo?” he asked. And then he swallowed. “Is that you, Odd?”

  “Who else would it be?” I said, licking a peeled egg and dipping it into a ceramic crock of what I hoped was sugar and not lye powder.

  “Is this you?” He paused, holding his voice steady. “Is that you, touching my shirt?”

  “What are you talking about?” I said. “I’m over here. At the table. Aim for my voice. La-la-la-la-la!”

  “Then who is this?” Errol said.

  A chill ran up my spine. There was a scuffle and the sounds of a struggle. My heart raced. What frights were left to haunt us tonight of all nights? Slyngel was a month in the morgues. Who else could it be? And why, in a guild kitchen run on flames, could I not find a single iosal flint to ignite a lamp?

  In the hallway someone
began to play a fiddle. Playing a dance I knew, a gavotte. What was next? Acrobats? Fire-eaters? I shook my head, trying to make sense of such a thing while the sweetness of the tune filled the kitchen like the thick scent of those almond eyrouns.

  “And now there’s a hand in mine,” Errol called out, his voice cracking like a pelt’s. “Odd, someone is pressing me to dance.” I felt the movement of air as bodies spun past me. “Odd? This is a gift from you, isn’t it? My favorite tune!” His voice was full of pleasure. I reached out to catch them, whoever they were, but caught only the rush of air in their wake.

  I felt for an egg on the table next to me and threw it hard. “What if that’s the bogle? What if it intends you harm?”

  “Do you intend me harm?” he said. Then, “Hey!” and he was laughing. What was someone doing to him?

  “Fine,” I said petulantly. “Fine. I see. Feh. In that case, does she have a friend?” But they were not listening to me. So I left them there—Errol and the kitchen girl—and knocked over an anonymous fiddler in the hall as I stumbled back up the unlit stairs to our quarters alone.

  A long while later, Errol returned and flung himself on the bedroll. On my own bedroll I sat cheating myself at solitaire.

  “On your last night in the tower, on the night before you leave for the roofs, you leave me alone for so long that I am an old man,” I said. But he did not answer. “Will there be offspring?” I said.

  “We danced, only. The gavotte,” he said. “She is the dawn star. She is all of the stars.”

  “When was the last time you saw even one star?”

  “Never.”

  “Then don’t commit poetry.”

  “She kissed me,” said Errol. “I must know her, Odd Thebes. Who is she? Where does she work? She must be from some strata in this guild.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Obviously she is either a bound guilder, wed to someone she hates, or she’s ugly as a fart. How else to explain her cover of darkness?”