City of the Uncommon Thief

by Lynne Bertrand

  “I know from your iosal instructions how to take a foundling and subject it to so much fear you cause it to turn into a warmongering thing. But tell me this, Utlag. How do you take a foundling and make it noble, so that it will sacrifice its life just so you can live?” Errol gritted his teeth against the cold. “Which is to say, how do you cause it to rise?”

  Utlag was silent.

  Errol whispered, “Aye. That’s what I thought.”

  The Messenger

  RIP GRINNED, at the bottom of the shaft. So, Errol did have a plan. “Fine. Is that what he said? ‘Go to the crow’? That arrogant runner. Let me out and I’ll get you the spike.”

  The Crow

  “THE CROW,” yelled Rip. “Why did he have to put it in the crow?” He was running hard along the river. He found Dagmar digging razor clams with her wolves.

  They ran together, while she tied a silk line to the nock of one of her arrows. She had rehearsed this a thousand times. At Thebes she released the arrow. It soared up and over a fly-line and arced down again to earth.

  Rip took the two ends of it in his hands, struggling to walk up that tower. He felt like a fool to be so uncoordinated. And, oh, it was a thin, thin pair of lines. Thread, really. After ten minutes he had risen three strata up the side of Thebes House. He was panting with fear. He could already feel the swaying of the towers. In an uur he was only halfway.

  Why, of the infinite hiding places in the city, did Errol choose the highest point on Thebes? And look at me. I am drenched with sweat, my hands are soaked, my heart pounds in my chest, my knees are shaking so terribly I will fall before I get anywhere near the top. I cannot believe she still has this effect on me.

  Unforgotten

  IT WAS DARK WHEN I RETURNED to Thebes. Terpsichore had gone to Lascaux. I searched half an uur for the chicken and finally heard its clucking overhead. He was perched on the roof of the yurt.

  “How did you get up there, you flightless bird?” I climbed up and sat next to him. The night breezes played with the feathers of his chest. For a long while he watched the shimmering lights of the aurora borealis. I attempted to pick him up, but he stabbed at my arm. He looked at me, then down below him into the abyss between Thebes and Bamako, then back at me, then down.

  “It’s a long way down. Is that your point?”

  And then I saw the fly was vibrating. Someone had managed to get a line over it, and they were coming up even as we watched. A man appeared, swearing, soaked in sweat. He flung himself onto our roof and lay there on the edge, filling his lungs with high air.

  He turned to look at me, and his face was as full of daring as I remembered it.

  “Who are you?” he said to me, and I felt the thrill I had always felt as a kelp when Rip Thebes noticed me.

  “I’m Odysseus. Your cousin.”

  Ovid, his harbinging complete, scratched the back of his neck with his foot, slid off the yurt, and dropped with a thud to the roof, reassembled his feathers, and disappeared into my tent.

  Irfelaf

  NYREE HAD NOT FELT IT NECESSARY to tell the abbot that she had received a delivery from a woman in the company of wolves. It was a piece of burlap, wrapped around a black-iron spike. The wolf-woman said the spike had been shot at her by archers on the roof of Fremantle. She had eyed Nyree, as if to decide whether this monk could be trusted, then had pointed to the word irfelaf, which had been scratched into the iron.

  “For the vault?” Nyree had said.

  “I believe so. Yes.”

  The tale was rising.

  Fur

  RIP OPENED THE HINGED DOOR in the crow’s underbelly. He removed the package Errol had put there. He was suddenly aware that all of Thebes’s runners stood on the roof around the mast, looking up at him.

  “The infamous Rip Thebes,” said Grid, from far below him. “Odd Thebes was right.”

  “We need an army,” Rip said.

  “There are thousands of us, prepared to fight,” Grid said. “Although we lack weapons and armor.”

  “I’ve brought the armor.” We turned to see who spoke. It was hard to tell, since the speaker was standing under a cloak of fur.

  “Who are you?” Rip said.

  “Nobody in particular.”

  “That’s Jamila Foundling,” I said.

  A Roof Master

  HIS EARS HAD BEEN UNDERWATER for a long while now, and he could hear only muffled sounds from the tunnels, and the pingings of the towers as they swayed in their foundations above him. He was trying to think of that kitchen girl and what she would do in this situation. The foundling. Sure of herself, even unto death. He would try for that.

  The water amplified the sound of the lock barrel turning and there came the slide of the bolt and the door burst open. He grabbed for the walls but the water swept him with it. He fell to the granite floor of the tunnel, too numb to feel anything. He lay sprawled, helpless, sopping, frozen, blinded by the light of a head lamp.

  He felt fingers moving across his shoulders, air moving in his face. He braced himself and wondered whether his cold body would feel the pain, or what it would be that Fenn would take first from him. But from the other side of the light came the sound of someone sucking his teeth.

  “I wonder if you remember how to call for help,” said Marek.

  The Vault

  RIP WAS THINKING TO HIMSELF that there were always three brothers, in tales from the world outside the wall. The first two were useless fools; the third was always the hero. The regnat sat across from him, a shadowy figure in the glare of the light of his lamp bearers. The fleet commander circled the table. The abbot stood by the fire holding the single spike Rip had brought.

  The doors of the vault room were suddenly thrown open, and monks ran every which way to grab blankets and towels.

  Utlag swept into the room, followed by a rare sight on the streets of a roof master carrying upon his back the body of one of his runners.

  Errol was swollen and shaking and blue from the ice water. He stared at Marek with blank eyes as monks wrapped him skillfully in blankets. “Where are we?” he whispered.

  “The scriptorium. As you asked.”

  Errol turned to study each of them and then to stare into the light that was the regnat. “I thought we might find you here.”

  “Where is the second spike, Errol Thebes?” said the regnat.

  Errol furrowed his brow. “You’ll need the sheath.”

  The monk Nyree was standing next to the abbot. She bowed slightly and said, “I believe you put the sheath in the vault, Your Grace. The last time the outlaw was here.” The abbot turned to look at Nyree, and held his eyes on her long and hard, a feeling of suspicion blooming in him.

  What happened next occurred within a fraction of a minute, but it will take more than that to describe it. It was a round of thimblerig, the shell-and-pea game. There was a pair of iron needles hiding under various cups, and I myself, skillful though I am at thimblerig, did not see them when I first heard this account.

  On the abbot’s orders, Utlag took the abbot’s key and unlocked the vault hatch, a heavy iron door in the floor. The iron was kept searing hot by internal fires; Utlag lifted the hatch with a wad of his robe, propped it up, and disappeared down the ladder. After a while he came halfway up the stairs, his eyes shifting. “The sheath isn’t there.”

  “Ridiculous,” said the abbot. “I put it there myself. Look again.”

  Utlag disappeared again. The vault was large enough only for a few shelves and trunks. He came up the stairs and stood next to the abbot and handed the key to him. “Nothing.”

  The regnat said wryly, “Shall I ask my guards to retrieve what your pet cannot fetch?”

  “It is my vault. They would be trespassing,” said the abbot.

  “This is my city,” the regnat sneered. “That key is mine. That vault is mine. This scriptorium is m
ine.” He started down the ladder.

  Nyree looked over at Errol at that moment and saw his lips curl in a grim, fleeting smile.

  “I forbid this!” yelled the abbot. But the regnat was already in the vault. His light guards made as if to follow him but there were too many of them and he waved them out of his way.

  There was a great deal of crashing and heaving. “Nothing! There is no sheath here! Where have you put it, Lugius, you fool?”

  “It’s right there!” said the abbot. He shoved his monks out of his way and flew down the stairs, turning, with the spike in one hand, to grab a lamp from Nyree with his other. Nyree pulled the lamp away from his hand.

  “I’ll hold this for you,” she said.

  He looked at her oddly, and well he should. “I’ll deal with you later,” he said.

  He was all the way down the stairs before she murmured, “I doubt it.”

  At that moment, with the abbot and the regnat in the vault, Errol heaved himself out of the blankets off the floor and stumbled toward the red-hot hatch. He threw himself upon it, to close it.

  Rip’s jaw dropped open. “What the—?” he said.

  Errol had wagered everything on an arrogance so complete that both the regnat and the abbot would ignore the enormous likelihood that he was lying to them, in particular that he was lying about the whereabouts of the second spike. It was in the vault, marked irfelaf. Not only would they both go into the vault, but they would charge into the vault. Not only would they charge, but they would not see the spike, because they were competing to find the sheath.

  Utlag’s eyes darted back and forth between Rip and Errol, and then he screamed, “Fright!” He lunged for the hatch but Rip got to him first and pulled him away. Utlag bit him.

  One would think the battalion of light guards would do something or that the monks would. But none of them understood why it mattered so much that two men might be closed in a vault that contained a few contracts and a knife sheath.

  There was one flaw in Errol’s plan: The abbot was a warrior. He did not lose. He had reached up to stop the hatch from closing and taken the full weight of it on his fingers. Errol grabbed the hatch with his shirt, burning his hands, and slammed it down again. The abbot reached up and around the hatch and grabbed Errol’s wrist. The regnat, too, reached out for him.

  In a moment that seemed to stand still in time, Errol took one look around the hall. He knew the abbot and the regnat would never release their grip on him. The door would remain open, the city in a balance. And so the bee wolf threw himself around that hatch and into the vault, grabbing the inner handle as he went in. He kicked at the regnat and the abbot and let his hanging weight pull shut the vault.

  * * *

  —

  There was a pause and then an explosion within the vault, blowing bright smoke from the seams of the hatch and filling the scriptorium. A froth of hot amber oozed from under the hatch. Something not human screamed from within.

  Utlag tore himself from Rip’s arms and threw himself down next to the vault, licking at the hot hinges. He slipped his fingers into the lock in the door, prying at it, shrieking.

  The fleet captain was pale. “Could someone explain?”

  “I believe the abbot, the regnat, and that runner have met the regnat’s beast,” Nyree said. “And it wasn’t a sheep.”

  In the smoke, Utlag turned to face the room, searching for a way to brace himself. While he stood, his skin tore off his muscles, his muscles off his bones, exposing raw nerves. Aside from the pain of it—the gums pulling back from his teeth, the throat vibrating like a live bird, the blood spraying from veins that unraveled in his hands—besides all that, there was a wasting-sorrow, as a solitary creature writhed in pain while the members of another species looked on. Rip reached for Utlag’s hand, but the hand undid itself and Rip was left holding nothing but a stain. The last organs left were a pair of lungs, which lay whinnying on the floor. A thin red bit of thread was visible from the spot where Utlag had been. The other end ran under the door into the vault to the abbot. And then the room and the vault were silent.

  “Come away,” said Nyree, reaching down. She wiped Rip’s bloody hands on her tunic. She looked at him and said, “Oh.”

  Rip wiped his hands on his tunic, then on his leggings. There was more blood on him than he could wipe off. “Where are my fingernails?” he said. When he turned, everyone was staring at him.

  One monk had his hand to his mouth.

  “Give me a mirror,” Rip said, reaching up to touch his face. His voice sounded strange to him.

  “Maybe not just now—” said Marek.

  One of the monks ran to the hallway and pulled the iron-framed mirror from the wall and turned it to Rip.

  Undone

  THE STRONG SPINE RIP HAD INHERITED from his mother held him up, and the rest of what he’d gotten from her kept his heart beating and his vision. But the parts that were from his father, the other with no shadow and no reflection, were gone.

  Together the monks tore linen towels and wrapped him in long strips, which gave him a form again that was human. Nyree reminded him the apothecarist was still on the street and could help.

  Rip didn’t seem to hear her. “There’s a chance Errol is alive in that vault,” he said.

  “Of course. We’ll take care of him. But where are you going?”

  “To my brother.”

  Done

  “SABA,” the regnat gasped. “Saba. Sabasababa.” He flung himself onto the table, rolled onto his back, and arched in a spasm. His eyes were wide-open in surprise—although there was no surprise about it—for he had finally met the beast he had known all along was in his ribs. He spat a mouthful of venom onto his chest and watched as his skin blistered in the acid of it. The monks who had opened the vault and carried him out of it now covered their faces for the scriptorium was ripe with a smell of reptile. They had seen many things but never a man dying crushed and scorched by the flail of his own fylgia.

  Marek yelled from inside the vault, and the monks came running.

  When Marek put his hand to Errol’s face, the water of his own sweat boiled at the touch on Errol’s skin. The monks ran for kitchen potholders to carry him to a quarantine room in the scriptorium, and they set him in a trough of water and watched the water roil and his body seize.

  Nyree retrieved the leather sheath from her quarters, uncurled Errol’s fingers, took the spikes. She slipped through the halls to the abbot’s office and set the sheathed spikes in a box marked CHARITABLE GIVING.

  She used a fireplace shovel to scrape what was left of Utlag into a bucket and put the bucket behind the abbot’s stove in the kitchen. She followed the red thread of his remains to the abbot’s scorched body, pressed up against a wall. She carried the abbot out of the vault and laid him next to the regnat. And it was done.

  Predator

  “I AM CONFUSED,” the tufuga whispered, standing on the ledge. “First I thought you attacked me. And second I thought we were getting out of the mines.”

  “You said,” said Sitembile, “that you wanted to save the stag.”

  “So you’re helping me?”

  The tufuga looked down at the stag, leaning against the wall of the arena, his legs folded under him, his half-sawn antlers swinging from the stumps. Then the tufuga turned and stared at Sitembile and at her snake until she shifted uncomfortably and said, “What?”

  “Snakes are wicked. Everyone knows it. You can read it in books.”

  “If I was working for Utlag, you could call me wicked. In your service, however, I’m more of an asset. Like the snake, I thrive in the dark. I strike accurately but without what you might call excessive forethought. I lack fear. Errol Thebes saved my snake and me from Jago. He was a fool. But that’s the nature of stags and, on merit, I owe him.”

  “I see. What is the name of your snake, by the way?”


  “Snake.”

  “Sentimental,” said the tufuga. “I do wonder what beast lives in my ribs. In a moment like this I can’t help but want to know.”

  “Something about you says warthog to me,” said Sitembile. “I mean that as a compliment.”

  It was the same arena Errol and Rip had seen: the oval pit with an earthen floor and a stone-and-iron wall and bars surrounding it. There were a half dozen gates in the wall, cells, with starved predators panting behind them. Rough-hewn stands gave a restless mob a place to sow disorder. Men stood on the wall, taunting the crowd and jabbing down into the arena to stick the stag with prods. More of them stood in the stands with bows and full quivers.

  The crowd wanted the stag to rise. A man on the wall slid one of the iron gates open on its wheeled track. They waited.

  “That’s Null,” whispered Sitembile. “He works for the abbot. He is unsurpassed in gaol for staging such matches. Anywhere he goes he has a ring with a fight in it.”

  A flat, broad, reptilian snout appeared from behind the raised gate. Null prodded the beast with a hook till it roared out of the cell. The reptile was twice the size of the stag. It tore about the ring on thick, squat legs, its tail whipping, swinging its head with its jaws open in a joyless grin.

  “Don’t move,” whispered the tufuga, as if the stag could hear from that distance.

  The stag knew to keep his head still, but his eyes followed the reptile circling the arena. Finally someone in the stands threw a rock at the stag, which caused him to flinch. The reptile shot at him like a projectile, throwing him into the air with legs splayed.