City of the Uncommon Thief

by Lynne Bertrand

  Rip’s quarters, a hollow dug out of the earthen tunnel, was crammed with salvage: scraps of canvas blooming with mold, broken sieves, loom treadles, barrel staves, flints. Rip had cleared two narrow paths through the refuse, one to a mass of mildewed shipping sacks, the other to a sodden cushion with a heap of tiny bones on it. The place reeked of the sewer. No chair, no table.

  “You can sleep over there,” said Rip. “And put on these clothes. Sleep an uur. We’ll have to work through the night to find somewhere to hide you in the city.”

  “Hiding is not my plan. I plan to get the knotting spikes.” He was pulling Rip’s tunic over his head. It was too small. The leggings, too. They sat on the floor and ate in silence, scraping gray meat from rusted tins.

  “I didn’t ask you to save me,” said Rip.

  Errol was licking the tin. “Well, let’s think about that for a second. If I didn’t come along, that eyeball called Utlag would be disposing of your soggy remains right now.”

  “I had a plan.”

  “What was it? Taxidermy? Tell me about the job you failed to do. Seems like a pair of simple knotting spikes would be easy enough to buy or steal, or even to make.” He set the empty tin on the floor.

  “Utlag’s spikes are uncommon,” Rip said. He used the word uncommon so casually, Errol laughed. “And it’s better if you don’t know about them. You’re not exactly able to defend yourself.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. So far I’ve saved both myself and you.”

  “Luck. Your fighting is sloppy. Didn’t you have any brothers or sisters up there on the roofs, to teach you to fight?”

  “Brothers, actually. But they both were criminals, dropped before I was old enough to learn anything from them. And they certainly never taught me to knot.”

  Rip’s eyes narrowed and his mouth fell open.

  He did not get up or fumble with word or embrace Errol as other long-lost brothers had done in stories we had read. Rather he threw his head back and cried out, “Do all of Margaret Thebes’s sons have to die before this ends?” And then he said, “You have to admit, you don’t look like me.”

  Errol said, “I’ve been told that. But I’ve never seen a mirror.”

  “Again, lucky,” Rip said, uncorking his flask.

  * * *

  —

  Through the night, Errol told Rip the pieces of legends that still circulated on the roof, of two wild sons who rose high and fell fast.

  “Marek Thebes loved you especially,” said Errol. “He loves me because I’m his connection to you.”

  “He was a first-year runner when Fenn was roof master of Thebes,” said Rip. “I was in my second year. Somebody owed somebody a favor, and Marek ended up on our roof.”

  “A favor? Marek is the best roof master in this city. He didn’t need any favors,” said Errol.

  “You do know, don’t you, that he was a foundling?”

  “That’s ridiculous. He came from Topfer.”

  “Everyone comes from somewhere. He came up to the roofs with only the clothes he wore. No tent, and no pack. He grew the beard to hide the naught mark.”

  “That can’t be,” said Errol. “What does he lack? Nothing that I could see—”

  “What is your point in looking for his deficit?”

  “What is your point in slandering him?”

  “Not slander. I admired him. For the first week he slept in the weather till we all realized he wasn’t being stubborn, he just didn’t have a tent. We very much wanted him to live through winter. So we ordered skins and sewed him a black one-man tent with a chimney so he could have his own fire. Seemed to like solitude.”

  “He still uses that tent.”

  “I’m not surprised. Foundlings live frugally.”

  “I would have told Margaret Thebes had I known he was a foundling, and had him arrested. Foundlings cannot be trusted.”

  Rip looked at him with curiosity. “Why would you say that?”

  “A foundling was the cause of my drop to the streets.”

  Rip drank from the flask. “From what I see so far, I’d wager you were your own cause.”

  They sat staring at each other. Errol could feel his blood pulsing in the sole of that foot, in the wound, and it was throbbing up his shin.

  Rip broke the silence. “Well, Sabine liked you. The shield. I can’t see why.”

  “I have a clever strategy,” said Errol, picking up the tin again to see if he had missed anything. “I didn’t let Dete kill her in the fight. She liked that.”

  “Well, I resent it,” said Rip. “I thought she and I might have something.”

  “Odd once told me girls wanted to be near the three of us just because we’re the sons of the guildmaster.”

  “Who’s Odd?”

  “Your cousin. He was a kelp when you went up to the roofs. Slyngel and Gudrun’s last of nine.”

  “I don’t remember him.”

  “Of course you do. Heimdall and Ragnar’s little brother. He is my best friend. Skinny. Tall. Good company. The best card player in the guilds.”

  “Nothing.”

  “Always beating everyone at shatranj. Even you.”

  Rip made a face, trying to remember.

  “He talks quite a bit.”

  “Oh, him! Odd Thebes! Aye, I remember now.”

  Rip turned the flask in his fingers. The warm peat of whiskey filled the room. He drank again and looked at his brother, at the foot Errol had propped over the chair to relieve the pain. The wound bulged with infection. An angry red stripe ran up the inside of Errol’s calf.

  “Before you pass out in that chair, what exactly were you thinking when you offered to find the spikes?”

  “First a question for you. Where would you begin looking?” said Errol.

  “I’d ask the hawkers in the market.”

  “I should think you would have done that already this week.”

  “Or I would ask the felons who roam the city at night.”

  “Why would they tell you?”

  “I would rummage around in the streets.”

  Errol sat with his eyes closed for a while. “You haven’t looked for them, have you? You have never even tried to find the spikes.”

  “It’s not so simple as that.”

  “But you said that you tried and failed.”

  “I lied.”

  Errol said, “Why don’t you look for them? You are afraid of something.”

  “And so should you be.”

  “But Utlag nearly killed you today. What could be worse than that?”

  “Plenty,” said Rip. “Some things are better left unfound.”

  Errol didn’t have the strength to argue. “Then I should tell you that I am the one who possesses the knotting spikes.”

  “What?” Rip jumped up. “Where are they?!”

  “I came upon them on the roof in a gut run. Black-iron, plain ones that cut my fingers when I just held them. They’re in a sheath that looks like a cage, right? When I took them out—”

  “Are they here?” Rip demanded.

  “They’re buried in the street where I fell.”

  “Are they in their cage?”

  “Their sheath? Yes. That seems to be a common concern.”

  Rip sat back. “Did nothing happen to you when you found them?”

  “You mean, anything worse than being dropped to the streets, beaten and stabbed, and dying tonight of infection in a bog room off a sewer tunnel, eleven strata under the street?”

  Rip took the last swig from the bottle. “Yes.”

  The Attarh

  I SHINED MY HEAD LAMP into the chamber whose shelves were crammed with mortars and pestles, bins and bottles of a thousand shapes and colors.

  “A runner? Inside? Are you not aware this is a felony?” said the
old man who sat cross-legged in the middle of the round room on a small, round rug. He was long-boned and skinny with a scrub of white hair and short stubble on his long jaw. His eyes were closed. In one hand he held a green bowl under his nose; his other hand fanned the air over it.

  I unfolded the papers I had brought. “I am here under orders,” I said.

  “You must be vastly important.” He yawned, still fanning.

  “I’m here to inquire about an apprenticeship. I was sent by Marek Thebes, my roof master. Are you the attarh?”

  “Shine the light on yourself,” he said, opening his eyes. “Ah yes. I see why he sent you. They all think a nose will do it.” He took a deep whiff of the bowl. “No, this is just not the same. Merely a distant approximation.”

  I shrugged. “You’re busy. I’ll come back.”

  “You may stay. Ask me all your questions,” he said.

  “It’s supposed to be the other way around.”

  “Guild laws.” He tossed the whole bowl into a bin in the wall. I couldn’t tell if he was irritated with laws, me, or the contents of the bowl. “Well, what is the scent you need?”

  “I’m not here to purchase anything,” I said. “I’m here to be judged.”

  “I judge that you are here.” I put down my pack. This was going to take a while. He took the paper from me. “Marek Thebes says getting an early apprenticeship would help you. You’re not working, you’re not studying. You can’t seem to do anything but sleep.” He looked up at me. “Why not love? That’s motivation.”

  I laughed.

  “What? You don’t think an old man would remember?”

  “I’m the one who wouldn’t remember. I can’t even get a girl to run errands with me.”

  “Ah. I see. How many revolutions?”

  “Seventeen. Almost.”

  He studied me now. “Yes. Well,” he said. “Seventeen is good for love. And now I think that nose of yours would be good for this work.”

  I put my hand up to my nose. “It’s not that big.”

  “I didn’t say it was big. I said it was seventeen. What is your real name?”

  “Odd Thebes.”

  “I doubt that. I am really Kyphi Attarh. I blend the essences of every known animal, vegetable, and mineral from outside the way into formulae. For example, tell me: What or whom do you desire?”

  “The streets,” I said without a thought.

  “Plech,” he said. “Bah! Why do you want that? The formula for the streets. Let me see. Eight parts human suffering. Three parts turds. Equal parts, after that, of blood, vomit, whiskey, blade rust, maw worms, pus, death, death, and also more death, maggot slime, and the oil of fear. You want that?”

  “Aye.”

  The attarh got to his feet. He was agile. “Odd Thebes,” he said, “give up on your cousin.”

  “How do you know about him?”

  “Everyone knows. But the streets will do you in. For you, I think, we need something else—”

  “But—”

  “I think theater,” he said. “A theater for the bard.”

  “And how is it that you already know who I am?”

  “Small city. Big walls.”

  He was circling the room, reaching into bins and bowls, shaking this and that, tipping a little into a fresh bowl, all the while calling out:

  “Two parts each, oils of script parchment and iron gall ink (Get this down!); three parts, the red velvet curtain; two parts, the leather seats with horsehair stuffing; one part, the rump farting on the chair; one part, corn exploded in the fire; five, the sweat of armpits in unwashed costumes; two, greasepaint; two, wigs; one, the oil from hemp rope and pulleys. Let’s say a drop each: the rushes underfoot, the smoke from the lights, the pulp in the playbill. And we cannot forget”—he grinned at me and reached for a canister on a top shelf—“a pinch of sulfur from Bian Pao, the fragrance of stage explosions.”

  He set a carpet for me next to his on the floor. I sat with him, with the new bowl in my hands, waving the attarh of the theater into my nose. Truth? I expected nothing. But the formula in that bowl took me back immediately to the first play I had ever seen in the Great Hall of Thebes. The guilders had put on Homer’s Odyssey. I had loved it.

  “Name the formula,” Kyphi said.

  “How can I? I don’t know it.”

  “No one does. It is new. Today. Give it a name.”

  “Act One,” I said.

  “Act One! Indeed!” He crossed his arms. “All right. Repeat the entire formula to me.” He crossed his arms. I was surprised to find that I remembered all he had put into it: exactly what, and how much. Then he asked what I would add and I said the smell of anticipation. “Cypriol?” I ventured, remembering the soap in the invitations from Al-Razi.

  “Cypriol could work. But the oil of a newly cracked-open book would be better. Not strictly theater, but every play is the opening of a tale.” He retrieved a bottle and added a drop to my bowl.

  “It’s perfect,” I said, fanning as he had shown me, genuinely impressed with his skill.

  “Well done, Odd Thebes. You are welcome to take the guild exams to apprentice at Attarh House.” He grew sober then. “But I smell a longing on you that will not be satisfied here. This tower contains the mere sillage of human life, and not the life itself.”

  “Nothing will help,” I said, sniffing at my bowl again.

  “A woman could help,” he said. “You’ll forget everything.”

  “Women don’t like me.”

  “Well,” he said, tipping the contents of my bowl into a miniature glass bottle he pulled from his pocket. “Try this. Women love theater. If that doesn’t work, come back and I’ll bottle up some heroism for you.”

  “Right.” I laughed, but he was serious. “What’s in that?”

  “It is the formula we discussed, from the streets. Plus one drop of the oil of valor.”

  “Where do you get that?”

  “The antlers of rutting red deer. Which, incidentally, is exactly the same as the attarh of stupidity. Sh. Don’t tell.”

  I turned to go. “By the way,” I said. “What were you doing, when I came in? That bowl you threw away—”

  “I was trying again to perfect my formula for the attarh of the roofs,” he said. “But then you arrived with your silk-smelling hands and the rust scrapes on your leggings, your fresh sweat and the night air cold on your hair.” He inhaled deeply. “The clouds riming the lines in ice. I miss it, still.”

  I looked at him in a new way. We were dwellers in the same high world. “I wish you had saved the formula you made,” I said. “I’d have bought it from you.”

  “It’s too soon. When you come off the roofs next year, I’ll make it for you. All the runners want it when they go down into the guilds. It is the mainstay of my business. Meanwhile, go back to the sky. There is no attarh, not even this one, who can improve upon the real thing.”

  The Riverbank Yurt

  RIP WAS SHAKING HIM. “Get up! It’s that wound on your foot. I thought you were gone. Get up!” Errol’s leg was so swollen he could not bend it. He was hotter than a lamp. Rip dragged him into the sewage main, pressed him into the storage pulley, steam coming off his face and fingers in the confinement of the box.

  Errol could not remember how he and Rip arrived in the alley between Fremantle and Pitcairn. He was feverish now, and his head was full of the nightmare of the fall that ended here. There was nothing to find here. The plank that had fallen with him was gone. The rope was gone. The spikes. He also could not remember leaving that alley, slogging through canals and dark corners to the river, and wondered how he came to be standing at the flap of an orange yurt on the riverbank at the south wall, lit in the night like a white-orange moon.

  “Dagmar is not to be trusted,” Rip was saying. “No one goes in here. She has wolves. The place
is filthy.”

  “I dreamt of a woman with wolves, the night in the river.” Errol knew he was slurring. “There were wolves. She carried a bow.”

  “Not a dream,” said Rip.

  “So you’ll prop me up here by myself, with my fever and this striped leg, and hope she doesn’t eat me?” Errol leaned against the yurt.

  “Don’t tell her you’re my brother. Whatever you say, don’t say that.” Rip was already running away from him to hide below the riverbank. Errol reached to pull the strap on a brass bell, but the flap opened and there was the woman. The wolves slunk around her with their rear ends down.

  “I’m Rip Thebes’s brother.”

  “Here you go, then,” she said. She opened her hand and he saw a small metal tube with a red cap on it. “Break the wound open and get this into it. Deep. It worked the first time I put it on your foot, but then you went barefoot in the streets.” She dropped the flap and was gone.

  “That’s it?” he said through the canvas. She did not reply. He unscrewed the cap. The grease inside smelled of the innards of plants. He cleared his throat and said, “Hello?” In a long while, she opened the flap. She raised her eyebrows.

  “I think you should look at this,” he said. He pointed at his foot.

  “You cannot come in here,” she said.

  “You’ve nothing to hide. I already know it’s filthy in there.”

  She frowned. “Where is your brother, anyway?” She looked over his shoulder and uttered an oath under her breath.

  The wolves herded Errol roughly into the yurt, stepping on his feet, running him closer to the wall, furtively concealing low threats as panting.

  “Sit,” commanded Dagmar. Errol sat down. “Not you. Them.” The wolves tucked their tails around their rumps and sat.

  The room was larger than the yurt had looked. At its center was a great fire, and around the fire a circle of hamacs strung from the frame of the yurt. The earthen floor was strewn with fresh thatch of lavender and thyme. The air smelled of cedar smoke. Errol sat and Dagmar took his foot in her hand. “Roban, fecce fihle,” she said. The wolf disappeared up a stairway and returned with a clean rag in his mouth.