City of the Uncommon Thief

by Lynne Bertrand

  “Well, look at that! Look what you have. That’s very good. If you have the spikes, this means that my men and woman can sleep through the night.” Errol didn’t have the heart to tell the kelp he was about to go to the scriptorium to hand those spikes over to Utlag, in exchange for some money and the street fighter named Jago.

  Instead, for a long while he told the stories of one Arthur until the other Arthur slept: tales of battle and love and friendships that lasted beyond geography and time.

  The fire in the hearth flickered, snapped, and burst into bloom, and the flames took the appearance of a stand of lupine and smelled intensely of that attarh.

  “Is someone there?” said Errol. But there was no answer.

  When he blew out the lamp and came from the room, the pub was empty except for Rip and Trula, who sat in a corner.

  Errol said to Rip, “You should go to that wolf-woman of yours. Dagmar. She will have the cure for the ague. That kelp’s mother needn’t have died.”

  “There isn’t enough of the cure here for all the ones who have it,” said Rip.

  “But Dagmar said the city contains everything needed.”

  “It does. The rest of what we need is up there, in the guild tower apothecaries. It may as well be on the sun.”

  Collateral

  THE SCRIPTORIUM STAFF oversaw the low business of the streets: the exchanges of weapons for hostages; the testing of broken and decomposed objects suspected of being uncommon; the notarizing of contracts with shipping fleets. The scriptorium’s conical tower stood alone at the northeast corner of the city in a fenced courtyard of windblown papers and rubble, and the broken anatomy of statues. No runners lived on the top of the tower. No flies connected the roof to any others. A narrow spiral of stairs wound around the exterior wall from the earth into the clouds.

  A young monk in red damask robes, her long hair pulled in a topknot, met the brothers and the stag at the locked gate. She tied the stag to the fence, put water there, and said something to the stag that he didn’t understand. She led Errol and Rip through an arch and to an internal corridor that spiraled up the tower parallel with the exterior stairs. The corridor was lined from floor to high ceiling with gilt-and-glass cabinets.

  Despite all he had heard, Errol expected the scriptorium to be familiar to him—like a guild library, with the remains of a once-vast collection of texts. But the cabinets that lined the walls were filled with halberds, caltrops, flails, nooses, crossbows, maces, blades of various intent, and explosive devices. Each object bore a tag with the word collateralis printed upon it, and handwritten notes that Errol could not decipher.

  The abbot sat writing at a desk by a cold lick of fire at the end of the hall. The monk shifted, waiting, but the abbot wrote on without acknowledging the presence of any of them.

  “We will meet in the room where the vault is,” he finally said, as though he were talking to his papers. “A showing of hands, signatures on a contract, and the spican will be removed from”—he looked up at his guests and put up his hands in an elegant gesture of neither knowing nor caring—“wherever you have them. The hatch to the vault is maintained at a boiling temperature with internal fires, a security measure from the time when this place was responsible for protecting the obscure relics of the guild city. I will unlock the vault and place the spican within, and we are done.”

  “We’ll be done after I have my money,” said Errol. “And after you release the street runner Jago. And his cat.”

  The abbot shifted the papers on his desk. “We do have what remains of Jago. I doubt you’ll want us to release him.”

  “Ask your man Utlag. Those are my terms.”

  “Utlag is not a—” started the abbot. He started anew, “Utlag is not authorized to negotiate.”

  Errol was tired, tired from the streets, tired from his wounds, tired already of this abbot. He was distracted by something Rip had whispered on their way up the corridor, that no one must know they were brothers.

  “I’m curious,” Errol said. “Even the kelps in the guild towers have heard rumors of that scriptorium vault, that it contains the tellensacs of ancient guilders.”

  The abbot shrugged. “Irfelaf. Such a tiresome theme in this city. There is nothing precious. Not one sack of tales worth saving.”

  Errol let his eyes wander to the papers on the desk. The top page was written on parchment, in the language of all contracts, that of Pliny and Virgil and Ovid. Errol knew enough of that tongue to know commutationem meant “exchange.” He knew enough to see that the exchange to be made tonight was not the one he had been promised.

  A Mis-telling

  ERROL COULD THINK OF NOTHING TO SAY to the young monk—“Nyree,” she had introduced herself—who sat beside him at a polished table in the outer vault room. She was the same monk who had tied the stag to the fence, led them to the abbot, and now she was with him in a bizarre assembly of monks and street fighters, all of whom had some interest in the spikes Errol was to deliver. It was impossible to pay attention to her when Null and Pollux, the publican and henchman, carried Jago into the room in a barred crate, covered by a tarp.

  Errol gave distracted replies (the spican guild, an eternity) when she asked him where he was from and how long he had been in the streets.

  He was suspicious of her. On his way from the abbot’s offices to here, he had asked her to direct him to the bog pots. She had hesitated for a moment, knowing her orders. She had taken him there and waited outside the door.

  In Thebes the bogs were purely practical, and they smelled of overuse. Here, there was a long, opaline pool of perfumed salt water, with a cloud of steam over it. The knobs, faucets, and tiles of the walls had been cast and painted to appear as the branches of oak trees. A variety of birds, painted on the tiles, hid in the oak leaves. Painted fish swam in the pool. Errol found he could tap a dozen different perfumes and a dozen more varieties of soap from the plumbing. He had kept Nyree waiting.

  And now, in the vault room, it was impossible for him to pay attention to her, or anything but Jago’s crate.

  Utlag had slunk into the room after they had all arrived, and kept on his furs and hoods although they were all sweltering under the extreme temperature given off by the door to the vault in the floor.

  Had Errol seen Utlag in a corridor of Thebes, he might have thought he’d seen a guilder who had once been something to look at but was ill now and ready for the morgues. A black fluid seeped from the corners of Utlag’s lips, which he wiped constantly with a rag as he sucked and gnawed some meat from a bowl the monks had given to him. His elbows bent both forward and backward. He perched on the chair next to the abbot, who kept shifting to put distance between them. They looked something like each other, Errol noticed. When Utlag caught Errol staring at him, he crossed his eyes.

  “We don’t get any foundlings from Thebes, in the streets,” Nyree was saying.

  “Why would we send our foundlings to the streets?” Errol said, still distracted. “Pardon me.” Then, to Utlag, “Pass me that quill, will you?”

  Utlag stopped with his bowl in midair.

  “The quill,” said Errol, holding out his hand.

  Utlag’s eyes shifted to the table, which was so highly polished it reflected the lights on the ceiling like a mirror. Someone had left a cup full of quills. Under his breath, Utlag whispered, “Conflict!”

  The abbot had stopped talking, had taken an interest in this exchange. Once more Errol put forward his request; once again, Utlag would not move. The abbot sighed and reached across the table and pushed the cup of quills to Errol. “There you have it.”

  Nyree continued, “But we do have foundlings from Bamako House, so we get word about Thebes. Tell me about that foundling in Thebes who is responsible for the others. She educates the others from books, teaches them to fight with swords and also to dance. I’ve been curious. Is she merely a legend?”

/>   “In Thebes? I know the guild well and there is no such foundling.”

  “I was bringing food to one of the foundlings Bamako dropped to the streets and she, in turn, relayed to me the stories this Thebes foundling had told her, of Shirazad.”

  Why was this monk so insistent?

  “Foundlings cannot read. And they certainly don’t train for war, or dance for that matter. If someone told you all the stories of Shirazad, she could not have been a foundling. And all of Shirazad’s thousand and one tales would have filled a very long winter.”

  “It was our best winter,” said the monk. “We are without books.”

  Errol caught the irritation in Nyree’s tone. It occurred to him that she might not take the abbot’s side on all matters. He studied her for a moment, then leaned over and whispered, “Why are the foundlings in gaol?”

  Nyree said abruptly, “Thank you. Indeed, yes, please tell me one of Shirazad’s stories.” Errol felt the abbot’s eyes on them.

  The last thing on his mind were the tales of Shirazad, the bard who kept a murderous prince calm for a thousand and one nights.

  “I’ll tell one of those tales, if you don’t mind my telling it exactly as you heard it.”

  “Do tell it. I’m sure everyone would love it,” she said.

  “Remember that it is exactly the same as the tale you know,” he said again. “You won’t be bored with that?”

  “Not in the least. Go on,” she said.

  “Exact.”

  “I heard you.” She looked at him as though he were insane.

  “The king of a faraway country,” Errol began, and everyone turned to listen, “was an irritable man, with a mercurial temper and a quick finger to point.” Utlag wiped his face. “A good woman came to the palace to stay with the king and queen. When the queen was doing her laundry one afternoon on the roof of the castle, which was full of songbirds and a pleasant place, the queen said to the good woman, ‘Watch my jewels while I launder these clothes.’ The woman laid the jewels on her little rug, closed her eyes for one moment to say her prayers, and the jewels disappeared.”

  Nyree had a confused expression on her face.

  “So the rug was the thief?” said Utlag. And there was that clicking sound again.

  “Wait,” said Errol. “The king was furious about the jewels and had to blame someone. He had the woman dragged into court and accused her of theft, terrifying her with threats and finally beating her to get her to confess—which she would not do.”

  “Tiresome,” said the abbot. “I’d have gotten the confession.”

  “The king sent the woman to prison. Two years later, he was sitting in his rooftop gardens with the queen, watching a crow fly back and forth from its nest in a cedar tree, clearing out last year’s wood shavings and carrying in fresh. He watched, still, as the crow pulled the queen’s necklace from the nest and flung it to the ground. The king cried out to the guards, ‘Fetch that woman from prison so I may beg forgiveness and restore what is left of her life.’ For although he was a brutal man, he liked to think of himself as just. And that was that.”

  The abbot cleared his throat. “Why, I wonder, tell such a story of thievery on a day such as this one?”

  “I’m heaping tale upon story, as we do in the guilds,” said Errol. “The black-iron spikes were stolen and returned, so we tell tales of loss to examine every side.”

  Nyree had gotten up and was backing away from the table. “Thank you for the telling. With all the details intact.” She excused herself abruptly and said she was off to make tea.

  There was a contract to sign. While Errol was waiting for the parchment to come around, he got up and went around the table and stood with Rip.

  “You’re an idiot,” said Rip. “That bit in the abbot’s office with the irfelaf, that demanding call for a quill you didn’t use, and now this carrying on about Shirazad. Just give them the spikes.”

  “I don’t have them,” said Errol. Rip turned fast to him. Errol took the pen but moved the papers forward without signing.

  “Where are they?” Rip said.

  The abbot was droning, “And here is where we clasp hands with one another, to show we harbor no ill will. Let us rise to do that.” Everyone held up empty hands, and many were hands of the streets, some still with blood on them, and all with grime.

  But when Errol reached over the table to grasp Utlag’s hand, Utlag did not move. “Utlag?” said the abbot. “Utlag.” Nothing. “Well, all right, let’s step over here by the vault instead—”

  But Utlag plunged his hands over the table and grabbed for Errol. The hands were clammy and dry, and their thick fingernails dug into the wound on Errol’s hand. Utlag’s lips curled back, off his teeth, and he nodded toward the table. Errol looked down. He could see the reflection of the monks who flanked Utlag: the details of their hair; their robes; their topknots. He looked up at Utlag and down again at the table. Utlag’s furs were reflected. The hood. But where Utlag’s face should have been, there was no reflection.

  Utlag made that clicking sound again and said, “Now there’s a story.”

  Tangled

  THE STAG WAITED, knotted in his tether in the courtyard of the scriptorium tower. When they had left him here, he tossed his antlers. But he flung the loose line and spun around, trying to see that monk again or have a drink from the bucket of water. The more he tossed, the more tangled the line got until it was around his hind leg now and he could move nothing but his eyes.

  Out of nowhere, the monk came, running hard this time. She grabbed him roughly and strapped something to his hind leg with twine. She started to untangle the rope from his antlers but couldn’t work the knots fast enough, so she grabbed for a blade on her belt and cut the tether. She disappeared again into the scriptorium.

  Empty-Handed

  ERROL PULLED THE SHEATH from where he had it strapped around his chest, and handed it to the abbot. The abbot pulled the cloth from inside. “You’ve lied to us.”

  “Likewise, you lied to me. I saw the contract on your desk,” said Errol.

  He hardly had time to say that much before Utlag was up on his feet, black vitriol spraying the air—“Where are they? Where are my spican?”—long fingers clawing.

  Rip rubbed his face, tired. “Errol, don’t be a fool. Give them the spikes.”

  “If I do, they will turn the spikes to some foul purpose. I agreed to the trade of the spikes for money.” He looked over at the crate. “And for Jago.”

  “You’re in over your head,” said Rip. “Tell me where the spikes are.”

  “They’ll kill you. That’s the trade. They’re taking you and giving me Jago.”

  Rip sighed. “Of course they are.”

  Errol’s eyes widened. “What? You knew that?”

  “Of course.”

  “We could have planned if you’d trusted me. I can’t imagine that you would not tell your own br—”

  Rip had leapt from his chair and was pointing across the table. “He is my father! That is my father!”

  Errol did not want to look where Rip was pointing. Not at one of the monks or the abbot or even to Null or Pollux, against the wall. Out of the corner of his eye, Errol could see a grin spread across Utlag’s face, his teeth seeping with black.

  Rip was yelling again. “I beg you to consider all that implies! Give him the spikes!”

  “A father would not drown his son—”

  “And look!” said Rip, pointing at the table.

  He was already looking. Rip’s reflection was a collection of human parts and of parts missing. Blood pulsing. Sinew twitching at its bone. A socket without an eye.

  “Half a life!” said Rip. “You see now? Go!”

  With a nod from the abbot, Null grabbed Rip and dropped him to the floor. Pollux was coming for Errol.

  The monk, Nyree, appeared,
in the hall. Errol alone could see her from where he stood. She had a full tray of teapots and cups lifted over her head. While he watched, she slowly tipped the tray. The dishes slipped through the air and crashed to the floor in a clamor of porcelain and boiling water. He took the gift she had given him, leapt over the mess the crash had made, and hurled himself out the door. He could hear the alarm sounding.

  Rising

  THERE CAME THE RUNNER, sprinting toward him. Eikthyrnir was trotting already, and Errol ran alongside him as he sped across the ruins in the scriptorium yard. With an awkward leap Errol got himself onto the stag’s back.

  “Let’s get to that river!” Errol said. But Eikthyrnir turned and stopped, facing Null and Pollux across the courtyard. His skin twitched.

  “No,” said Errol, yanking the stag’s scruff. “Hey. No, I said. I’m in charge of you, and I’m telling you we are getting away from here now.” He could hear Utlag screaming. Monks were pouring out of the building. They stopped to watch as the stag tilted back on his hind legs. He grunted fast—a chuckling, a dare—then trotted forward, dancing side to side, his great rump swinging, his antlers tossing. Pollux stepped toward them, a knife in each hand, and the stag broke into a gallop, thundering straight for him.

  Null and Pollux ran for the scriptorium, but the stag crouched at full speed and sprang over them. He landed at the foot of the narrow stairs that spiraled up the tower.

  Errol could not believe he was still on Eikthyrnir’s back. They were galloping up the side of the tower. He couldn’t see the stairs beneath the broad back of the stag—only the courtyard diminishing far below them and the neighboring towers.

  The stag was a miracle of endurance. He rounded the last curve of the tower and galloped onto the roof. He trotted there, panting, filling his lungs with the thin air. Errol pressed his face into the stag’s scruff and breathed in the hot steam.