We were heaving the stove back toward what used to be our roof kitchen, lifting and dragging, when I looked back at the fire and saw Errol. He had wrapped his hands in his tunic and was pulling the iron bird from the blaze.
I went over to him. “We need your help.”
“This is not the end of this,” he said.
He could have meant that it would take us forever to restore the roof to our home. But he didn’t mean that. There was something to fear in that dawn and we both knew it. I was afraid even to know what it was.
A Felon
FIRES WERE STILL FLARING at midden in the rubble on our roof when we saw a procession of the regnat’s scribes, guards, and flag corps wind its way down and across, from Fremantle to Thebes.
The torchbearers dropped first off the lines, so many I lost count after four dozen, their lamps spitting wax and pulsing with white light. Then came the rustle of regal heraldry. Then, a fleet of guards, so heavily armored and armed, with a pair of swords across each back, that their rapid drops onto our roof sounded like a barrel of forks rolling down the stairs. A trumpet voluntary. A battalion of scribes. Finally, the regnat’s palanquin, a half ton of gilded ivory, was lifted from the lines and set upon a damask rug in the center of the roof. Layer upon layer of furs were removed from on top of him and cataloged aloud—Pribilof fox, Tasman stoat, Bengal tiger, Makkovik seal. I was surprised after all the care he required that the regnat could stand on his own.
He wore a full tunic of white bearskin, with the head of the bear pitched backward in a silent roar. He was pale and heavy, with fine yellow hair and restless eyes that lingered now upon Talwyn, then Eluned, then Grid. Fifty orbits? Sixty? I couldn’t say. His courtiers were all so much older than we were. Their age and their excessive display was an oppression. Even factoring Marek’s twenty-four years into the mathematics, we were on average seventeen. And everything we owned was gone. I wanted them to go. I kept this thought to myself, assuming the regnat had come, albeit awkwardly, to care for us in our grief.
He had not.
His guards dragged Seppo from our ranks, bound the pelt’s frostbitten hands and feet, and hauled him, screaming in agony with his broken ribs, to the edge. The chief scribe read from the scroll of law, announcing the felony of a plunder of the regnat’s guild, a crime punishable, like any plot against the regnat, by death.
Never before had I seen Marek kneel. “Your Honor, the theft was a mere gut run, which, as you know, is a tradition of the roofs, intended to build courage and camaraderie among runners. We are able to arrange the return of the knotting spikes, and to amend the return with a pair of the finest quality made in Thebes—”
The regnat dismissed Marek with a wave of his gloved hand. “He must die. I don’t write the law.”
“Technically he does,” I whispered.
“Poor Seppo,” said Ping.
Seppo looked over at us. He was paler than his own teeth. Would we really be emptying his tellensac tonight and pouring out his tales? It was only his second day on the roofs and he was about to be tossed, by two armed guards he had never seen, over the edge.
And then came the voice of the bee wolf.
“Your Honor! I beg an audience!” Forward Errol strode and bowed, no beggar at all. “The runner Seppo Thebes has been charged with a crime he did not commit. In failing to contest your scribe’s accusation, he is acting out of a noble but misplaced sense of loyalty. To me. I was on a gut run, as I have been nearly every night this year in the direction of Fremantle. I took the iron spikes from a table”—Errol’s hesitated—“more of a desk. From your quarters.” I was stunned. This was a direct challenge.
“The great Errol Thebes.” The regnat’s words hung slippery in the air. “So much for the noble winner of a Long Run. Sooner or later, every foul act on these roofs can be traced to one or the other sons of Margaret Thebes.”
Errol lifted his chin, as though the regnat had hit him. “I was a kelp. I hardly knew my brothers.”
The regnat snorted. “Margaret Thebes raises felons. Fenn and Rip Thebes thought they were a gift to the city till they were—”
“Killed?” I suggested from behind the crowd.
“Dropped,” said the regnat, glancing in my direction.
The scribe leaned over to the regnat. “Your Honor, Seppo Thebes is known to have committed this crime. If this other runner claims to be the thief, the law requires evidence.”
Seppo watched as an armed guard clumsily unlaced his pack and flipped it out on the roof. There were errand lists, a water canteen, half-eaten snacks. Anyone could see even Seppo was surprised.
Errol didn’t wait for the guard. He removed his pack, reached into it, and pulled out the two spikes.
“Sheath!” screamed the regnat. “Sheath them! Where is the cage! Guards!” The guards flung the regnat into the palanquin and threw the skins onto him. They were on the lines in less than a minute followed by the entire court in tumult.
We stood, stunned. Had some assassin appeared?
Marek untied Seppo, who fell into Errol’s arms.
* * *
—
Eight Fremantle guards returned at dulcibus to arrest Errol Thebes and retrieve the sheathed spikes. We were already stretching a goatskin tarp over the frame of a new yurt in a spitting drizzle out of the east when they arrived, and we told them the truth: Errol Thebes left when they did, and he was nowhere to be found. The unit returned to Fremantle empty-handed. It is worth noting that all of those empty hands were purple.
A Night Visit
THE REGNAT FINED THEBES a month of our income for harboring the fugitive whom we weren’t, in fact, harboring. Marek paid the fee from his own accounts. Fremantle’s investigators arrived on our roof the next morning before dawn and stayed, interrupting the rebuilding of the roof to interrogate us all. On Marek’s orders, even Seppo stayed true to Errol’s lie, that he had stolen the spikes. Seeing as we didn’t know where the iron spikes were, we had nothing else to hide.
On the second day after the sacking of Thebes, the regnat fined Marek again. He issued orders to every guild in the city, offering a year’s salary for Errol’s capture. Alternately: death, for harboring a fugitive who plotted against the regnat. But no news came. More guards arrived at Thebes, to set up a watch at every corner of our roof. I wondered whether the regnat would revisit the thought of dropping Seppo, to lure Errol in. I kept the idea to myself.
During those first days of Errol’s absence, I felt an inexplicable soreness in my chest, as though my ribs had been broken like Faisal’s and Seppo’s. I could not breathe without pain. I woke many times to the sound of the beating of wings, a sound I had never heard before, as the city is devoid of beasts of any kind. I made frequent trips to the reconstructed bog pots to hang my backside off the tower and read. It was the one place where the guards would not follow me.
That is where I was, in the middle of the night, when I heard someone in the next stall.
“Have you never heard the expression ‘Piss or get off the pot’?”
I knew his voice better than I knew my own. “In faith?” I laughed. And then in a whisper, “You cannot be here. Fremantle is everywhere.”
“Are you ill? What are you doing in here, half the night?”
“The regnat’s guards are on us, and you are a fugitive, and you have nothing better to do than ask after my intestines? Where have you been all week?”
“Do you miss me?” he said.
“I miss you doing your own chores.” Errol laughed and I grinned in my stall. “How did you get past the watch?”
“No one would expect me to come up through the pots.”
“I’m going to be sick. So when are you turning yourself in?”
“Never.”
“Never? What does that mean? Where will you hide on these roofs?”
“What would you hav
e done, if you were me the night the regnat came?”
“Well, I certainly wouldn’t have saved Seppo and Faisal in the first place. And I would have let the regnat drop Seppo.”
“Obviously. I meant, what would you do with the spikes?”
“Throw them over the edge. They’re junk.”
“The regnat doesn’t come out on the roofs for junk.”
“Look at the wound on your fingers. I can smell it festering from here. If the iron wounds skin, it’s junk. Anyway, why do you care? We have so many spikes.”
“Maybe the black-iron spikes are something else.”
The reference to the black-iron spikes chilled me like the names of certain weapons do. Like Skofnung, the famed sword that shrieks in battle.
“What do you mean by ‘something else’?” I said. “What purpose could two short spikes serve, but in knotting?”
“I think they’re uncommon.”
I burst out laughing. “This is a quarantined guild city. You’re joking, right? You are only longing for what you can never have. Uncommon tools belong to worlds outside the wall. What, like a flying rug?”
“Why not?”
“Pff. You’re just bored.”
“Why would Fremantle care about junk iron?” he said. “And why would the regnat drop Seppo?” I had no answer for that. Was the regnat embarrassed to be caught off guard? That didn’t explain the screaming. Sheath them! In truth, I didn’t want to think about whatever it was that could terrify a regnat.
“Well then,” said Errol. He was silent for a while, the kind of silence in which one of us was waiting for the other to catch up.
“Just, don’t tell me you still have the spikes.”
“Fine. I won’t tell you.”
I closed my book. “There is no place to hide anything on these roofs.”
“Does prinsessen paa aerten mean anything to you?”
“The princess and the pea?” I burst from the bog, tore across the roof, ripped open the flap of my tent. Under my sack in a heap of laundry was the sheath, with the two spikes inside of it.
The guards watched me run back to the bog pots. They thought I was sick. Errol put out his hand. I pulled the case from under my shirt and feigned the handoff. But then I held the case too high, too low. Why? I was furious, that’s why. If I had been caught? What then? There was some other reason I couldn’t name. And by the way, was it just sleeping on the spikes that made my chest ache?
Errol tired of this kelp’s game. He grabbed my hair and shoved my head into the bog pot. I threw the sheath at his feet.
“Don’t you want to know what happens next? What those iron spikes really are? You, more than anyone? The bard?” He let me up.
“I should tell those guards you’re here. Nothing happens next,” I spat, wiping my face. “You give them back, is what happens. Otherwise they will track you down. Small city. Big wall.”
“I need someone to hold them while I find out what they are. Someone who has nothing to lose.”
“So that’s why you’re here? Odd Thebes, at your service: nothing to lose?”
“No. I’m here because you know everyone. Everyone. Find someone who will hold them for me until I know what they do.”
Feh. Was it his face? His constant, irritating honesty? How did he do that?
“Fine,” I said. “Yes, I know someone. But you won’t like it.”
Tatu
JAMILA FOUNDLING WAITED IN THE RAIN on the edge of the roof at Samoa House. She was sopped. Rain dripped from her chin and soaked her ragged tunic. Her gray leggings clung to her skin and rivulets of rainwater dripped down her shins, off her bare toes, into the abyss. She sipped rain from her cupped palms.
“It’s just water,” I said. “It has no flavor.”
“It tastes strongly of seven.”
A line of first-year runners waited under a tarp behind us to be tatued with the mark of their guild. If I wasn’t with a foundling, I would have been under a tarp, too.
“Whatever you say.”
Certain words carried, for Jamila, the scent of almonds or wet clay or civet grease. Sounds were sopped with ochre and indigo. Rainwater was sharp and tasted of seven.
I handed her the sheath from my pack. She sniffed it, listened to it.
“Don’t ask me any questions,” I said. “Just hide that in the morgues.”
“Till when?”
“There you go with a question,” I said.
“Whatever it is, it reeks of blood.”
“It’s not blood. It’s made of iron,” I said.
“It’s made of mayhem. And it isn’t what it was.”
“What is that supposed to mean? It’s nothing. They’re nothing. Put them away.”
“Nobody notices what’s out in the open,” she said, setting the sheath in her lap. The rains had been driving down on us all day. I’d been sweeping it into barrels since sanguis. I was in no mood to argue with a foundling. I took a book out of my pack.
The girl behind us had hair down to her waist, divided into a thousand braids. I pushed up my sleeve to show off the marks on my forearm: the standing crow of Thebes from my first year on the roofs, and the flight wings, added on the first night of my second year.
“Do the towers always sway like this in wind?” she said.
“Like what?” I got up and perched at the wet edge. Jamila rolled her eyes.
“Does the tatu hurt?” the girl said. I squeezed myself onto the bench next to her.
“Not at all. Really. Half a bell and it’s over. Well, except, just be glad you’re not from Catalhoyuk. The mark, right? They put a whole map of the world on your arm. Seas of red.” We were both quiet for a bit and I added coolly, “I do wish they knew where to put this city on that map. That’s blood worth shedding.” When she was still quiet, I said, “I am guessing that you’re from Catalhoyuk.”
“Yes.”
Samoa was a busy roof, with unusual living arrangements due to the nature of its export. On the north side, master guilders, apprentices, and runners lived side by side in tents. On the south side, two dozen box-shaped yurts divided the roof into workrooms. A runner led us to one of those and held the tent flap open. Inside were a pair of stools and an oak table, stained with ash. An apprentice tufuga came in, with a red rag tied around his bald head and a red shop apron. He was tatued on every visible surface and likely, I whispered to Jamila, the surfaces that weren’t. He saw where my eyes rested, and he put his hand on his guilder’s paunch defensively before he settled in across from Jamila at the table. He reeked of cabbage.
From the first tap of the mallet on the needle-rake there was pain. Jamila stared at a spot on the floor, but when the tufuga struck bone, she flinched, knocking his ash bowl off the table. A cloud of black smoke rose around their ankles. The tufuga made a face, went out, and came back with new supplies and a rag for the blood. He dipped the needles in new ash and the work began again—batat, batat. A familiar voice spoke from the doorway.
“Odd Thebes. You’ve kept me waiting.” Errol hadn’t changed his clothes since the bog pots, six days past. He glanced at the foundling. “What’s this?”
“I don’t think you’ve been introduced to Jamila,” I said.
“Odd, are you coming? We have an arrangement.”
“This is the arrangement,” I said.
“But you said—”
“That I would find you someone with nothing to lose. This is the someone.”
“A tufuga?”
“No,” I said. “Again, this is Jamila.”
Errol’s eyes rested on the naught mark branded on Jamila’s neck. “A foundling? Foundlings are thieves. Where are my—” I pointed at the sheathed spikes in her lap. His eyes widened. The tapping hit a nerve and Jamila bit her lip. Errol said, “Couldn’t it get a master to make its tatu?”
The tufuga stiffened and said, “I beg your pardon. I am two years in Samoa.”
“That qualifies you to explain why we are about to watch it faint.”
“I don’t faint,” said Jamila. “Offend the tufuga again, though, and I’ll leave here with a one-winged crow.”
Errol looked at her in surprise. The tufuga covered a smirk with the back of his hand.
“Actually she can’t afford to pay a master’s fee,” I said.
“The guild pays for tatus,” said Errol.
“Not for a foundling.” I was surprised I knew something he did not. “You’re paying the fee; she’s handling that package for you. This was the arrangement she demanded.” I was relieved the tufuga kept his eyes to his work, for he might know the fugitive.
Errol looked at Jamila now with interest. “A demanding foundling,” he mused. “And why would a foundling want a guild mark?”
Jamila lifted her chin. She was soaked, but there was a length and shape to her that Errol would have considered extraordinary if the naught brand didn’t nullify it all. Black hair, tied in a knot to keep it out of the tufuga’s way. Eyes as black as her hair. I’m sure Errol was trying to find her deficiency. He was well within his rights to look over a foundling, but it was beneath him to question.
The apprentice was outlining the beak of the crow. He looked up at her. “We have beads for the pain,” he said.
“I do not require them.”
Errol sighed, agitated. “It should just think of something to get its mind off the needles. Let’s go, Odd. Get the package from it and let’s go. This is not what I expected.”
Jamila was wet, cold, and sore. I felt pity for her. “I’ll meet you later,” I said. Then, because I was embarrassed to care about the welfare of a foundling, I held up the book I was reading. “An excellent passage.”
“Suit yourself.” Errol pulled up his hood and left through the tent flap. I was still wondering where he could possibly be going when he returned with a stool, rainwater running from his coat. “An otherwise dull night,” he said by way of explanation.
City of the Uncommon Thief Page 4