City of the Uncommon Thief

by Lynne Bertrand

  “You’re an idiot,” he said, “and more stubborn than I am, if that makes any sense. Now look at our problem. There are no lines to cross, and you cannot leap this distance, and we have that coming for us.” Utlag was screaming and hurtling his way up the stairs, hissing for Banhus-theof. The stag trotted over to the edge and looked down at him, then across the city’s horizon line. They were so far from the next tower that the bucket fires on that distant roof looked like a half dozen flickering candles in the sky.

  Errol said, “No. Eikthyrnir. No. Nyet. Nei. Whatever language you speak, we are not jumping—”

  The stag trotted to the north edge of the roof and turned around. Errol felt a quick acceleration and next he knew they were charging full-on. He could have jumped off the back of the animal. Could have let himself sprawl onto that scriptorium roof and face Utlag on his own. The stag jammed his back hoofs against the edge, set himself back like a coiled spring, and they shot into the sky like an arrow out of a bow, up and out over the black abyss. Errol was expecting to fall, to go down in a long arc, as they had at that waterfall from gaol. And then he was afraid that they would overshoot their mark. But they slammed down onto the roof of Gamalama House with such crashing force that the famous cubeb cakes, which were baking in the kitchens of that guild tower, fell flat.

  PART III

  Ready

  IT WASN’T A SLOW NIGHT for me, either. Mildenhall had come for Marek, to install him for his guild apprenticeship. We numbered fifteen now, left behind on Thebes without Emem or our roof master. No one cared whether I came or went in the direction of trouble. And, despite the fact that Marek had left instructions with us for a celebration, everyone forgot that this was my birth-night. I was seventeen.

  I ran the lines to Lascaux House and pulled Terpsichore from where she was making rags for the new pelts on their roof with a crew in her yurt. I was in a hurry. Why? Did I intend to stay the night with her? No. I don’t know. Yes. We took a swim at Teifi. We went to her tent and talked about nothing. She showed me a list of ship names and said she wanted a fleet of ships and a crew of kelps. She told me about the strata full of younger brothers and sisters she had left behind. I wasn’t really listening. I didn’t think she meant real ships or her own kelps. Everybody has their idiot dreams. Hers sounded fine with me and I told her that. Here’s all I could think about: I knew what she looked like without a shirt on.

  “Are you ready now?” she said.

  I looked behind me. It was a small tent, and there was no one in it but the two of us. Still I said, “Me?”

  Border Crossing

  I HAVE WONDERED what my twelve-year-old self would have thought of the night we were about to have in that city. Errol Thebes was crossing the sky, leaping from tower to tower on the back of a furred projectile that had entered this world through his ribs. Meanwhile, I was finding my way with the muse of the dance.

  My twelve-self would have loved this.

  The year I was twelve I used to lie in my sack every single night, thinking the same grand things. Soon I will be splendid, I thought. They’ll send me early to the roofs like the best of all the pelts in this guild. I will be wild up there and run faster than everyone. Roof masters will refer to me behind my back as indispensable. Everyone will love me like men love Arthur and Beowulf and Odysseus, the way they love my cousin Errol. I will be perfect. I’ll not have any time to think about life after the roofs. All the kelps I once knew will wish they were me. And while I am in high places I’ll find a girl so enticing she will take all of my attention. She will be so beguiling, every runner, especially Errol, will writhe with jealousy when they see her with me. And on some night when I have chased her around the roofs all night I will take her clothes off, first her tunic and then her leggings.

  That is as far as I ever got, when I was twelve and alone in my bedroll.

  And then I was thirteen, and fifteen, and seventeen. Not a kelp, not a guilder: a mearc-stapa, in our grandmothers’ tongue. A haunter of the borderlands. And it was tonight: the tenth of Rhagfyr of the fabricated year of DCCXIII. My roof master was gone. And my birth had been forgotten. And I had garlic breath from the soufflés Ping had made us for supper, and I was wearing my red wool tunic with the torn armpit, and I had brought with me a pack of cards, and my old flat pillow I’ve had since I was four. Was I staying? Was I going?

  It was a blur. I was seventeen, but I was my twelve-year-old idiot self. This runner with her hands on me, she was infinitely unexplored, a world outside my walls. Her hair was still wet from the swim. I could feel her pulse behind her ears and in her chest, and then she put her fingers in my mouth and on my hip bones and pulled up my tunic and found my belly button and kissed me on my mouth while she touched me where only my own hands had ever been. I smelled her sweat and tasted my tears.

  Corrections

  I HAVE THE SCRAP OF PAPER in my tellensac. This was hastily scrawled:

  To the runner from Thebes. I remember Shirazad’s tale exactly as it was told to us by a foundling from Bamako House. You told it wrong. The queen didn’t do laundry. She took a bath. The thief was not a crow in a tree. It was a magpie whose nest was behind a tile. At first I thought you to be a braggart from the roofs who didn’t know what he was telling, and then I realized you told it wrong on purpose. We have such a tile in the baths of the scriptorium, with a magpie painted on it. I have just now pulled away that tile and found the spican. They are not safe here, so I am leaving them with your fylgia. I wish I could send the sheath—we know from experience that the spikes are mayhem without it—but I must assume you are about to present the empty sheath to the abbot. I fear Rip will be in gaol before this night ends, and I dread to imagine what will happen with the street cat Jago, but somehow you must escape. You have seen the monstrous labyrinth that exists below the earth in this city, or you wouldn’t have asked me about the foundlings in gaol. You are clever. Here, all we have been able to do is feed the foundlings who live and breed on the streets and wait for their days in gaol. You, from high places, can do more. If you need help, contact me, but take caution. We are watched.

  In the tradition of scriptorium monks, the writer had inked an elaborate N.

  Darkness

  ERROL THEBES STOOD NEXT TO A SMALL TABLE—it was more of a desk, really—squinting into the light over a bed, waiting for His Honor the Chancellor Regnat of this vast quarantined city to stop snoring.

  The chambers spanned the top strata of Fremantle. The bed was huge, boxed off with curtains that had been tied open. The air reeked of war, as the regnat’s lamps were forged of iron, like the bed was, and like the armor and the weapons and nearly everything else here, and the lamps were fueled with sulfur powder and saltpeter. There were hundreds of them, sputtering along the walls in blinding blue-white pulses of light.

  The regnat was an inexplicably large mound under a mountain of skins and furs.

  Errol cleared his throat.

  “Not guilty!” The regnat startled. Some coins fell from the bed and Errol realized the regnat was sleeping on his gold.

  “It’s Errol Thebes, Your Honor. From Thebes.” The regnat sat up. He was wearing some sort of eye protection, which looked like twin lenses of black in a frame that fit over his head. He glanced at the door.

  “How did you get in here?”

  “Through a window,” Errol said.

  “Why aren’t you dead?”

  “I survived the drop. And the streets.”

  “This is a nightmare.”

  “No, Your Honor. It’s real. I’ve come to request your help. To report that finally someone has survived the streets and can tell you what is really happening there. The streets are overcome with”—Errol looked around the bright room seeking a word with relevance—“with darkness.”

  I cannot explain, even now, why Errol didn’t see what he didn’t see. Over the course of the next half uur, he fervently requested,
obstinately demanded, shamelessly begged, and finally attempted to bribe the regnat to lead a high army to the streets to rescue Rip, to save Arthur’s life, to pull those foundlings out of pits. What did he think? He thought the regnat would leap from his bed and ring the bells all over the city, and do what honorable kings do in books and scrolls.

  “The spikes are attached to the leg of my stag, waiting on a turret down the hall out the window.”

  “Your what?”

  “A stag, Your Honor. It’s a deer. And I understand now why Your Honor had me dropped from the roofs. You were protecting the city, keeping the black-iron needles safe in a lit room in the guarded tower of Fremantle.”

  What can I say? Errol thought the regnat was clean. I imagine he had to ignore the truth because it was getting in the way of the regnat he wanted to believe existed.

  “Absolutely.” The regnat struck a match to ignite a lamp. The lighting of a flame of a lamp in such a bright room had the effect of holding a candle to the full sun.

  “Your Honor, the prisoners are pitted against one another. I have seen cats, sheep, deer, rats—”

  “Nothing better?” said the regnat.

  “Better?” said Errol.

  “Nothing rare?” The regnat drummed his fingers on the mantel.

  Errol laughed. “A fox is rare, to me. A dog is rare.”

  The regnat kicked a log into his fireplace. “No kardunns?”

  Errol felt a chill on his neck. “None that I saw.”

  “Good.”

  “I did meet someone obsessed with rarities.”

  “Utlag. You have met Utlag.”

  “Aye.”

  “Then you have crossed paths with the abbot.”

  “Aye.”

  The regnat lit another lamp. “A freak, Utlag.”

  “It was hard to look at him,” Errol agreed.

  “He used to be something to look at.”

  “I don’t understand his relationship with the abbot.”

  “They work at cross-purposes. It can happen that way.”

  Errol felt relief wash over him. So the regnat knew everything. Of course he did. This was why he was the leader of this city. Finally, Errol thought, he had found his way back to the roofs and into the guild towers, and had told the regnat all of it, and now he could leave the work to the one who knew how to wage war and make justice pour over this city. He was tired. He didn’t want to think about the streets or about what it meant to be the son of a freak. (I could have told him a thing or two about that.) There would be good food in Fremantle and a bath and a room in this most heavily guarded of guild towers. And he could sleep.

  “Your mother is an embarrassment,” the regnat said.

  The remark took him off guard. Errol could only think to say, “I can’t imagine what she saw in Utlag.”

  “He was ‘different.’” The regnat laughed. So did Errol. “Utlag was a mistake. But Margaret Thebes wouldn’t listen. I suppose you don’t want to think—nobody wants to think about the bed life of their parents.” The regnat was studying him now, his eyes flat and cold. He said, “You are here to kill me.”

  “No! I’m a runner! You’re the regnat!”

  “You’re an outlaw.”

  “I just hoped you’d bring an army. Just your presence on the street would bring hope. I’ll go with you.”

  The regnat poked at the fire again. “Your brothers never amounted to anything.”

  “I’m not them.”

  The regnat set down the poker and crossed his arms. He said, “It’s time for you to go. To sheath those iron spikes and hand them over, and to get out of my quarters. You’re a sickness in this city. You’re Rip and you’re Fenn and you’re that foul mother and you’re Utlag.”

  Perhaps what blinded Errol was that he already believed what the regnat had said. He turned to go, then turned and thanked the regnat and reached for his hand.

  “Do you really think I’ll touch you?”

  “I apologize.”

  “I wanted you gone. I always have. When Utlag told me years ago that he threw you over the roof of the guild, I thought we were done. The two brothers were gone, and now so were you. But I realized he had done nothing more than throw off a foundling he mistook for you, and you were plenty alive in that guild. There you were, winning the Long Run. And then in Ganso, you were fool enough to defend those two pelts on your roof who stole the iron spikes, to tell me to my face that you had stolen them from these very quarters. I had my chance then and missed it. It took that foul cousin of yours to give us the best advice we’d gotten. Put a foundling on the cut line, he said. Why hadn’t I thought of it? Any damsel in distress would bring you in.”

  “I don’t understand.” Errol was backing away. “I was an innocent kelp in Thebes. I only wanted to be a runner. Why would you want Utlag to kill me?” His words sounded to him like tiny letters falling out of his mouth. He fell backward over the regnat’s footstool and got up. “Ow.”

  The regnat came toward him with sudden speed, calling out for the guards. Errol turned and ran into the wall, knocked over the globe of one of the wall lamps. Hot glass exploded on the floor and the light hissed and went out. The regnat hesitated for a moment in the sudden, lesser brightness.

  Errol saw that.

  He ran, crisscrossing the wide hallway, toppling hot globes on the walls while the regnat screamed, until the tunnel was a wreck of broken glass, sulfur reek, and darkness.

  A Ghost

  WE WERE INTO HER TENT and out of a high percentage of our clothes when there came a low bellowing from the abyss off the south side of Lascaux.

  “Here’s to the maid with a booo-sums of snow! Now to her that’s as brown as a berry! Here’s to the wife with a face full of woe—” (loud belch, long silence) “And now to the damsel that’s merrr-rrry!” Thud, as though someone had thrown something at the tent. I looked at Terpsichore, too alarmed to move. “Let the toast pass! Drink to the lass! I’ll tell you she’ll be an excuse for the glass—”

  “Don’t move,” I said to Terpsichore. “Please. Don’t move.”

  * * *

  —

  He was gaunt. His hair was matted to his head. In one hand he held a flask high. In the other he wielded his navaja. He came toward me unsteadily across a plank from Gallia. The plank bent absurdly under his weight. He appeared to have antlers growing out of his head.

  I should have been glad to see him. Beyond glad. My cousin! My best friend! Back from the dead! But, for one thing, I thought he was a ghost. And then I hoped he was, for guilt rose in my gut like bile. With him gone, I had been able to hide from what I had done, that I had been the cause of his end. But here he was, the exact size and shape of my fear. Maybe he didn’t know—

  “Parsival!” he said, slashing the air with the knife. “My arsh enemy.”

  He knew.

  “Errol Thebes! Cousin!” I whispered, feigning calm. “I, we, thought you were dead.”

  He thrust the tiny knife forward and went low, en garde. Now I could see why the plank bent under him: An enormous antlered beast, easily the size of seven of us put together, followed him, tethered to a line in his hand, its hoofs delicately balanced on the plank. The stag moved his head to study me with one eye.

  Errol’s finger went up on the hand with the flask in it. As if to tell me a secret. “Ish a stag,” he said.

  “Let me guess,” I said. “The black-iron spikes?”

  “Yes! Thash right! How did you know? Here’s to my friend Odd Theebsh, who knows everything!” He bowed to me, but the motion set him off-balance. He stepped into the air, tilted off the plank, and made a jackknifing motion to steady himself. My hands dripped with sweat.

  “What are you doing here?” I said.

  “Hiding from the regnat. Also! I’ve returned with Bayard to slay you—”

 
“Bayard is the stag?”

  He held up his navaja and said, “Bayard the Blade.”

  I crossed my arms. “You named your knife? Feh. Get off that plank. It isn’t safe.”

  “Safe! Ironic, coming from you. I’m here because”—he had to stop to think—“because I had one question for you.”

  “A question,” I said, full of dread.

  “Why did you hate me?” And there it was. “The regnat said you shugges—shugshet— The regnat said you put that foundling on the cut line and said I’d get her safe off it. So now I know it wasn’t the foundling. It was you, Oddly Enough, who wanted me dead.” He pointed the knife at me from twenty feet away and thrust it. He lifted one leg and turned himself around on the plank, as if he had meant to find me in the opposite direction. A drunken fight, alone. All the while he was saying, “I felt the earth come at me like a sledgehammer because of you! And then all kinds of horrors because of you, and then—” He paused so long I thought he had forgotten me.

  “Then?” I said.

  “Then I was unwelcome even in the low places. Irony! The guildmaster’s son—an exile from heofon and hel. How much did you hate me, Odd Theebsh?” he yelled. “More or less than your father did?”

  “My father wasn’t who we thought he was. You dropped because you stole the black-iron spikes. I didn’t steal them. I didn’t bring that on you.”

  “Maybe I did.” He looked at the knife in his hand.

  “Get off the plank, Errol.”

  “But the plank is the only place for me. Betweonen. In between. I am unwelcome everywhere. Come out here, Odd Theeebsh. Throw me off. But I should warn you. I am”—he pitched sideways—“I am a felon now. A murderer. And a fool. I trusted Rip and he lied to me.” Here he took a long swig again. “He didn’t tell me Utlag is our father till the end. Or what gaol was.”