The idea of two gone runners conjured squalls in our chests. We felt the city’s restless quarantine, her lack of a place on any map or calendar. Most of all—
“It’s a long way down,” said Ping Thebes, our cook. We were back in the yurt. Marek narrowed his eyes, but Ping shrugged. “I’m just saying what you’re all thinking.”
Marek paced again. “Either they pulled an Icarus or they’re out gut-running and I’ll murder them myself.”
Someone whispered, “It’s the gut run.”
Marek turned to stare at Dragomir, who had come up with the two who were missing.
“The other pelts in the guild dared us to make a gut run on our first day,” Dragomir said. At fifteen times around the sun, he was a human-skin map of wens, grease ponds, and tufts. Thus, a pelt. Marek’s stare unnerved him and he blurted, “A gut run is a prank, uh, an attempt to sort of acquire an object of local value from another guild house to prove one has the, say, courage to run the fly-lines.”
A muscle twitched under the stubble of Marek’s close-cut beard. “I am aware of the meaning of ‘gut run.’”
“Of course. Yes.” Dragomir reddened.
“Why didn’t you go with them?” Marek said.
The question took Dragomir off guard, as gut runs were illegal. “I, uh, fear heights,” he fumbled.
“I see,” said Marek. He glanced out the door of the yurt into the cloud. Everything out there was high. “It’s not the drop you should fear, Dragomir. It’s me.”
“I do fear you.”
Marek sucked his teeth. “Run the lines,” he said. “Find them.”
“Me?” squeaked Dragomir. “But I have yet to run even one line—”
Marek circled the fire, past Dragomir, past Ping, past my cousin Errol. He stopped at me.
“Odd Thebes. Take the pelt. Go find what’s left of his friends.”
I flinched. “Why me? We can’t find a guild tower in this cloud, never mind two scrawny pelts. Also I had a winning hand—”
Marek hissed in my ear, “I wonder how many aces of hearts there are supposed to be in one deck of cards. Shall we find the answer under your toque?”
* * *
—
Dragomir and I stood at the edge of Thebes, our head lamps pulsing in the cloud.
He was silent. All he knew of life so far was the inside of a guild tower. Work, sleep, work. He was pale from the lack of sun. Bored from lack of plot. In guild life a bit of salt in your soup constituted a festival. A rumor on any subject from the roofs overhead kept you going for months. By the time Dragomir had rounded the sun, say, fourteen times, all he could think about was climbing through the hole in the tower roof, seeing that sun for himself. Running the infinite web of planks, ladders, masts, and flies that glistened in it. Am I going? Until today, an iron roof kept him down. And an iron wall pens us all in. We are a remnant civilization of a thousand locked towers striving to produce magnificent wares so a single fleet of ships can come once a year and take them—
“Where is the fly-line?” said Dragomir, waving his hand in the air. “I cannot feel it.”
“Here.” I guided his hand to the thread stretched over our heads and anchored securely to a mast behind us. Its other end was similarly connected to a mast on the tower to our east.
“Moth spit,” Dragomir whispered.
Moth spit, rigging, flies. We had a long list of nicknames for the lines. The best was fet-makkers. Faith makers. Stand at any edge and fling a rag over a fly as thin as the line you could draw with a quill, and step off into the abyss. Never again would fet be a theory.
“I can’t do this,” Dragomir gasped.
“That fly is strong enough to carry you and your supper across the abyss. Even if your supper is a two-ton wheel of cheese.”
“Abyss? Could we just call it ‘the area in between’?”
“Abyss. Abyss. Abyss. Get used to it.”
Through the cloud I could hear him fumbling with his pack. I pushed his hands away and reached inside the pack.
“Looking for this?” I said, holding two clips and a reel of line. “Safest thing you own. Hook the red clip to your pack and the green one to the fly. Eight strata of line and never will it snap.”
“You’re sure?” said Dragomir, his voice quavering.
“Aye. That’s why we call this your mam-line. The mam will never, ever let you fall.” I pushed the red clip onto his finger like a ring and yanked it off. The bearings in it closed fast and pinched him hard. The emergency stop. He yelped. “See? Or you can set the brakes yourself, and the line length, with these levers—” He moved before I could hurt him again. “Your mam wrote to us, Dragomir. She wants you to go slow.”
“She did?” One part surprise, one part embarrassment.
“No. Of course she didn’t. Yes she did.”
“I’m confused.”
I sighed. “Forget your mam, Dragomir. Forget your da and all your guild toys and the fifteen-year nap you’ve had in the tower. Today is the first day of your life!” I was stuffing the clips and the mam-line back into his pack. He was trying to dig them back out. “Answer me: Do you want to go fast or not?” He shrugged. “Yes, you do. You didn’t come to the roofs to be safe. All you need”—I reached into his pack again—“is this.” Now I was holding a yard-long lanyard of greased silk, with a Turk’s head knot at each end. The runner’s rag. “This is fast. Just throw this over the fly and go.”
“How far down is the drop here?”
“Fifty feet. Fifty-one, tops.”
“It’s a mile. I heard it’s a mile down.”
“Just a rumor. Anyway, after fifty feet, how could it matter? Don’t ever look down.”
“I’m going to die,” he whispered.
“You’re definitely going to die. You’re going to die when you’re an old, skinny guilder with a bound-wife and so many worthless kelps you run out of names for them. Did you knock the crow for luck?”
“Aye. Thrice.”
“So you won’t die today. Let’s go find your idiot friends.”
I tossed my rag over the line, caught it in the same hand, made a bow and flourish to Dragomir with the other, and dropped off the edge. Thirty yards through the cloud I landed on the roof of Catalhoyuk with a skid. I heard Dragomir gasp and drop behind me. Silence. For a moment I thought I lost him, but he barreled into me, the color of fear. There was no going back now for him, not without running a line or walking a plank. He was one of us.
* * *
—
We were sitting on the edge of Raepteek, and Dragomir was just saying we ought to be looking for his friends instead of stopping to eat cheese, when a light cracked from the direction of Thebes and the cloud lit up around us.
“A flare?!” he cried, while I pried him off my arm. “Wait! Who found them? We were supposed to find them!”
I licked my fingers. “Five uurs says it was Errol Thebes.”
“Ten!” he said. “Ten uurs says it wasn’t! Marek sent us!”
“If you insist.” I shrugged. “Ten uurs. I’ll go to twenty, if you have it.”
* * *
—
Marek had dispatched Errol before Dragomir and I had even left the edge of Thebes. Of course he had. Everyone knew he would. And within ten minutes Errol had found the missing pelts. Or, rather, he had run into their taut mam-lines, pinched on the fly between Ghent and Pliny.
* * *
—
The kelps in Thebes House used to whisper the names of heroes when Errol Thebes passed them in the halls of the tower. Achilles. Parsival. Jack. Most often, Bee Wolf. They were referring to Beowulf, the warrior in that story we have from the other side of the wall: broad in the face and chest, and unkempt, with long, dark red hair. Whenever I caught the kelps carrying on about this, I reprimanded them, for there was no such description in the text.
But they just touched Errol with their cold little fingers and laughed at me and whispered, ’Tis him.
Errol plucked both mam-lines. No response. He pulled out his own mam, clipped it to the fly, pinched the brake. Anyone could see the problem. Those two runners had leapt from Ghent House, with a sloped fly across an eighty-foot-wide abyss to Pliny. Cold fell while they were midair, and the cloud rimed on the line. They forgot everything they knew about braking on ice and slammed into Pliny like twin hams. They were tossed backward, up the fly, bragen ofer earsas, as my mother would say. They dropped their rags. Their green clips gripped the line. But they lost control of the reds, and five thousand feet above the street, they spun off the reels. Eight strata down they slammed the end of their lines. The common term for a drop like that is a “screamer.” Roughly, they’d been hanging four uurs in a frozen sky.
Errol yanked the first line, setting himself and everything else twanging on the fly. From far below him in the cloud came panicked begging. He wound the line around his belt to haul up the human luggage on the end of it.
This runner was a thin pelt, his face frozen in a weird grin. His chest was iced in his own heave, his leggings in piss. When he spoke, the standard greeting of the roofs came off his blue lips in a spray of spit: “SSSSsssstay high.”
“High,” returned Errol, man of many words. “I’m going to let go of you now and you’ll slip down the fly and wait at the edge of Pliny.” But the runner would have none of that. He clung to Errol, too terrified of life, death, and everything in between, to let go. “We’ll have to leave your friend down there if you don’t let go of me,” Errol said. The runner shook his head no. Errol said, “All right. We’ll do it your way.” The runner closed his eyes in relief.
I could have told him closing his eyes around Errol Thebes was a mistake. Errol curled a fast fist and threw a punch. There was a crack and the runner’s eyes took a brief tour of the inside of his skull and his body sagged. Errol said, “Wait here.”
The second body came up blue-black and motionless with a cold, hard jugular. Errol strapped the body to his back and cut the mam-line from the fly. As he was adjusting the dead weight, he heard a grinding sound behind him. The first runner had come to and was gnawing his own mam-line between his teeth.
“If that breaks, you’ll drop!” Errol shouted at him.
“I can stand on the cloud,” the runner said, continuing to gnaw. “Watch!”
“Stop! Your brain is rimed!” But there was a sickening pop of teeth as the line snapped, and the pelt disappeared, spiraling down into the cloud.
The great bee wolf clenched his fist around his own green clip and slashed the fly half a foot from where it pinched. If the clip could just hold him to the severed fly, he could dig that runner out of a cloud while they both were falling. Chances were none in a million.
Errol flipped upside down, flailing at the air for any piece of that free-falling runner. The severed fly was pulling him sideways toward Pliny. The dead pelt was shifting maniacally on his back. A sky full of nothing. More nothing. And then? A thread slipped past his cheek, fine as a strand of his own hair. Errol grabbed it, wound it around his hand, and turned to take the force of the tower.
The three of them crashed against the south wall of Pliny: Errol, the dead runner, and the live one. The green clip on the severed fly-line blew into pieces and they slid down the side of the tower, tethered now to nothing but each other. For two strata they fell. Three, five. They were coming down out of the cloud, and Errol could see the full length of Pliny and the earth a mile down. His elbow slammed against a knob of some kind and he grabbed it and they all came to a fright stop. Dangling. Errol heaved the live runner up and hung him by a loop on his pack on the knob—the heel of an iron lizard with the legs and mane of a lion. Such was the humor of the bestiary guild.
Errol’s right hand was bloody. The fingers of the left had come out of their knuckle sockets. He put the hand between his knees and twisted hard to snap his joints together.
“You’re inthane,” said the runner, lisping through broken teeth. His eyes flitted to the thick human form tied to Errol’s back. “I only wanted a gut run. I never thought Seppo would—”
“Die?” supplied Errol.
“They’ll drop me for that, won’t they?”
“If dropping you is the right thing, let’s get back to Thebes and face it.” For reasons I cannot even now explain, this terrifying statement calmed the pelt. They climbed the side of Pliny, over the iron herd that adorns the tower from which animal forms and disguises are exported, and flung themselves onto the roof.
When the bee wolf and his pelts arrived at Thebes, he shot off that flare from the yurt. Dragomir and I came in on the flies to do absolutely nothing. And I was twenty uurs richer. I never lost, betting on my cousin.
Stolen Goods
THE PELTS WERE SURNAMED, like the rest of us, after our guild house. Faisal Thebes was small and sharp. His chin, thrust forward, ended in the first ragged hairs of a goatee. He spat blood from between chipped teeth while Errol unlaced him from his pack and wrapped him in blankets.
Errol untied Seppo Thebes’s body from his back and carried it to our medic, Grid. She laid the body down. Thick-shouldered, it was, with a big head and small eyes. Grid dragged everyone’s sacks from our tents and piled them on top of it, then crawled into the tomb she had made and wrapped herself around the corpse. Dragomir asked if this was the time to begin Seppo’s going-tales, but someone said to wait.
Time has a way of folding in on itself. I can’t say if it was five minutes or an uur before the dead pelt was wiggling his fingers in front of his eyes like a baby who has just discovered that he controls the far reaches of himself.
In a high voice Seppo moaned, “I am blinded. The light is needling my eyes. Cold, silver handfuls of light are strewn up there, everywhere, jabbing me.”
Errol followed Seppo’s wide-eyed gaze into the sky. The cloud had frayed and gone. “That’s the sun,” he said.
Seppo gave a half laugh and winced with pain. “So bright, it hurts,” he said.
“You get used to it,” said Errol. “Welcome back.”
* * *
—
With the cloud off us, I could see the bucket fires across the roofs of the city. Ten thousand fires blazing on a thousand roofs, with yurts, tents, and guild flags silhouetted against the sky. It always reminded me of a massive army camped across the ridge of mountain range. I had read of such things.
Thebes’s runners settled in around the bucket fire. Petroc, Siwan, Jaromir, Sa’id, Yael, Ping, and Emem. These were the third-years, all of them deadly dull, studying for apprenticeship exams. Grid, Talwyn, Errol, and I were the second-years, by far the ablest. Mirembe, Eluned, and Dragomir were the first-year idiots. And now that Faisal and Seppo had survived their first day, so they were with us, too.
Grid stood with her hands on her hips staring at them. She herself was something to stare at: a lanky runner with white-blond hair, and scars we called lightning blooms. She said it made her a better medic, to have been hit by storms early on.
She made Faisal yell as loud as he could while she snapped his nose back into place and packed rags up his nostrils. She made him and Seppo lift their shirts. Their chests were bright black where their pack harnesses had crushed ribs. She bound them in linen strips and a firepit paste of comfrey root. I was trying to read but it was distracting to me, to watch her touching them.
“Take these beads to kill the pain,” she said, handing them water. To Seppo she added, “You’ll lose that small finger on that left hand by next week, but the rest of you will stay.” Seppo’s mouth opened and closed in horror.
Grid turned to Errol, who was restringing Faisal’s mam-line reel. “Tie those two in their tents tonight or the beads will make them wander off the edge.”
“Aye,” Errol said. He didn’t look up.
“Don’t think I don’t see you, Errol Thebes,” she said. “Your face. Your hands. Did you forget again that iron towers are hard? Get out of that tunic and I’ll rub camphor into your joints.”
Errol shrugged. “I’m fine.”
I cleared my throat. “You can give Odd Thebes a rub. I feel a great deal of pain in this area.” I pointed to my lips.
Grid rolled her eyes. “There is no cure for you, Odd Thebes.”
“Plenty of curing, going on in here,” I said, holding up my book.
“Ovid’s gossip again?” Grid said. “Aren’t you sick of love scenes yet? Don’t you have a rag to grease?”
“He can’t be reading,” Faisal said. “The book is upside down.”
“You’ve forgotten, that’s how he reads,” said Grid.
* * *
—
Behind us we heard someone suck his teeth. “Will they live?” said Marek Thebes.
“Yes. So you can murder them now,” I said, hoping for drama. Faisal and Seppo stared at their feet. Marek asked how many ribs had been broken; Grid said it was five, between the two of them.
“Well, that will render them useless until we get through Beklemek. And Faisal’s face? How did all that wreckage happen?”
Faisal looked away. Runners who went mad were risks. And a runner who obstructed another’s rescue stood to be punished.
“He and I disagreed,” said Errol, “on how to save his friend Seppo.”
I snorted, but Faisal slumped in relief. Marek spit into the fire. “I’m sure there is more to that story, Errol Thebes. And equally sure that only Odd will ever get it out of you.” Errol was silent. Marek turned to go, then paused. “Out of curiosity, Errol Thebes, do you remember how to call for help?”
Errol’s hands worked at Faisal’s reel bearings. “I believed I could save them both if I brought them in fast,” he said.
“That is riveting information, but it was not my question,” said Marek.
City of the Uncommon Thief Page 2