City of the Uncommon Thief

by Lynne Bertrand

  Stillness

  THE PAIN OF INHALING with broken ribs was worse than any pain he had read about in books. He couldn’t actually remember anyone describing that. Maybe they all did and he ignored it. Wet ice had crusted on his face. He was so cold he could not feel the difference between his own skin and the black-iron armor. He lay back and stared up into the abyss. He could hear the steady rushing of wind. Or possibly that was the river.

  The Remains

  THE BLACK-STAINED MUSLIN held the shape and form of a human thumb and had the smell of blood-iron and amputation about it. Faisal picked it from my rag by its frayed edge. It was a fearful thing, and the tales that seethed around it frightened even me.

  “This relic is a maso-swefn, a snaring dream,” I began. “If you ask me who did it, at the end, I’ll tell you I don’t know. Judge for yourself.”

  When Errol Thebes was seven times around the sun, a rumor circulated like a contagion in the tower that he was haunted by a bogle. One by one, his possessions were going missing. Most disappeared never to be seen again, but some—some were found. He lost his pillow from off his bed. Days later the sopping wad of it was dredged from the bottom of a vat of wood dye in the shops. A pair of his lost leggings were found tangled in the gears of the guildhall clock. His quills were found jabbing through the bedding under a guilder recovering in the midwife’s quarters from a furnace burn. The rumor of a bogle held the place of a serious concern that the sole remaining heir to the tower was a danger to us all.

  It came in fits and starts. More than once, Errol begged me to admit the fact he thought everyone was keeping from him: that he had a wen deep in his mind that was the cause of his troubles. How else but by some slippery tumor could he explain his forgetfulness or, worse yet, the mischief he caused, unaware of himself, in the guild? I assured him he was healthy, for I had interrogated the midwife.

  When we were coming back from work one night, Errol questioned the men playing cards in the halls outside my family’s quarters. Had they seen the thief, making off with his things?

  “It’s that handsome bogle of yours,” one of them said, discarding into the pile. They all laughed, all but my father, Slyngel Thebes, who squinted at Errol as though he could see more or less than what was there. Da was always on the whiskey.

  “Has hoofs,” he slurred.

  No one in Thebes had ever seen a bogle. We lived in towers made of stone and iron. We had no ghosts, fiends, frights, changelings, or such, and nothing to fear but a dull guild life stretching on and on and on. Still we had books, and we had nightmares. In mine, the bogle was a squat, grinning, leathery little mistake with foul mischief in its fingers. Hoofs, fangs. It would lie in wait with hectic eyes under your bed, or make you appear to have boiled your own pillow in a vat of dye. I preferred the idea that Errol had a tumor.

  Margaret Thebes was the only one in the guild who dared speak publicly of any of this. Errol was our prince but he was just her kelp. For one guild meeting, Errol arrived half dressed. Margaret bellowed at him, “Are ye so thick now as to have lost your tunic yet again?” He was nine.

  “Aye,” said Errol, his voice barely audible over the sounds of five hundred guilders staring.

  “Do without, then. Cold, you might for once remember where you forgot your shirt.”

  “Yes, Mam.”

  “See all these guilders here?”

  He turned. “Aye.”

  “Look at their hands.”

  “I see them.”

  “Ask these guilders, with their hands worn by labor, if they’re glad to waste a precious day’s work, sewing fine tunics so you can cram them into the bog pipes.” I was standing next to him, feeling for once at an advantage, to have the other sister for my mam. He was desperate not to cry in front of them all. “Ask them!” she yelled.

  He stared at the floor. “Will ye waste your precious work on me?”

  Who knew what to say, caught between the guildmaster and her kelp?

  “You’re just like your brothers. I can’t bear the sight of you. Wild things and reckless. Does Wahid Thebes permit you in his woodshop, half naked like that?”

  “Odd lends me his tunic,” Errol said.

  Margaret shifted her glance to me, as if seeing me for the first time. “You’re Odd Thebes,” she said. If I wasn’t Odd Thebes, I would have been now, such was her command of that guild.

  “Aye, Mam.”

  “Gudrun’s kelp.”

  “Aye.”

  “Give him your tunic,” she said. I pulled my tunic over my head and handed it to Errol. I crossed my spindly arms to cover my skinny kelp chest. “You’re a gossip, Odd Thebes. Why must you tell other people’s stories?”

  The question flew at me from nowhere. I blurted, “I wish I were Beowulf sometimes. Odysseus. The Robbing Hood. Or anyone else. But I’m always Homer.”

  Her laugh was unfriendly. “Homer had no stories of his own.”

  “Yes he did.”

  “Tell us one.” My mouth opened and closed. Margaret waited, knowing full well I had nothing on Homer. “You are the gossip who’s inventing the rumors about Errol Thebes.”

  “No!”

  “Half the guild says so.” Margaret was silent for a long while. “Truth is slippery. Whoever tells the story decides the truth. Odysseus could have been a fool for all we know. Homer made him. Who can check his facts? You want that power, don’t you?”

  “No!” Yes, I did.

  She said, “Leave Errol Thebes’s story alone.”

  I hated her from then on. I didn’t care about her wasting-grief over the loss of two sons, the shame she carried of a bound husband who had done something so final that his name was blotted from guild records, or why she protected and punished my cousin in equal parts when he was the sole remnant of her family. Why was I so important suddenly, that she would take me on in front of the entire guild? Then it occurred to me. She wasn’t mad. She was afraid. She was afraid of a story.

  During Beklemek of our tenth year, a bony foundling appeared at our door to report that “a tellensac marked with the guildmaster’s son’s initials had been found in the”—here it hesitated—“in the luggage.” Gudrun Thebes gave Errol a mam-look.

  Neither of us had ever been lower in Thebes than the seventh strata. We had never seen the so-called luggage, which was the foundlings’ polite term for the trunks that had once served to hold guilders’ possessions but now held the guilders themselves. We were going to the morgues.

  Foundlings lined the tunnels to watch us pass, hiding behind cloaks and blankets. The morgues branched off in the halls in every direction; guilders from a thousand years were entombed above and below us. I was shaking. I would never rid myself now of the realization that the whole tower was little more than a mass grave with a remnant population living on top of it.

  “Why didn’t the foundling just bring the tellensac to you?” I whispered behind Errol.

  “It can’t touch what belongs to the guildmaster’s son,” he said. “Foundlings are contagious.”

  “More contagious than this place?”

  “Aye.”

  “What’s the penalty if he touches your things?”

  “Death.”

  “And what if he touches my things?”

  “Death, also, seeing as you are related to me.” I was filled with a sense of my own importance.

  I took a step back when the foundling opened the trunk. The tellensac had been stuffed between the waxy fingers of the corpse, with the two items that had been in it by then—a shard and a twig—spilled on the floor. The body was folded into the box. The lips had pulled back from gums and teeth.

  “How did you know the tellensac was here?” I said to the foundling. I was trying to calm myself while Errol picked his relics off the floor.

  “I sleep on this
trunk,” he said, gesturing to a rag that was his bedding. “One night I found it unlocked.”

  “Who would do such a thing?” I said.

  I had meant, Who the hel would sleep on a coffin? but the foundling said to Errol, “You must have an enemy. Would you want me to get that for you? I could use a rag. If you fear death—”

  “I fear nothing,” Errol said. He grabbed the sac from the dead guilder’s hands and the twig and shard from the floor and bolted for the tunnel. Seconds later he and I stood panting on the landing outside of the midwife’s ward.

  “For someone who fears nothing, you run fast,” I said. The blood was pumping so wildly in my ears I thought I was only imagining a woman’s voice around the corner of the wall.

  “. . . must allow the kelp his mischief, his bogling of himself,” she was saying. “Hiding his tellensac down there in the morgues. He knows his tales belong there, secrets and lies as they are.”

  I turned to Errol. “She’s talking about you,” I said, alarmed. But Errol put his finger to his lips.

  “Secrets and lies,” she said again. “I should drink—aye, you’re right—and forget it. But if I go on the whiskey, I lose my skills. I regret the day he was born.” She stood to my right with her back to me, working at something on her table.

  I was watching her so closely I failed to see the guilder on the other side of the midwife’s ward till a voice rose in a puling slur, “Bulluc stertep, bucke uertep, murie sing cuccu.” I nearly leapt out of my skin. It was my da, Slyngel Thebes, slumped in the midwife’s birthing chair, his thin neck bent under the weight of his porous slab of a nose, singing: The bull stirs, the stag farts, and we sing cuckoo . . .

  “Was that your da?” Errol whispered from behind me.

  “Nay. Some drunk.” I pushed him away, mortified.

  “Meanwhile,” the midwife droned, “I vowed to keep my mouth shut while she has Woody Thebes train the unsteady kelp to lead us.”

  “Ah yes, the hoofed one,” my father slurred. He caught sight of me then. “Feathers,” he whispered. Did he know me? Was that a grin or a leer on his face? Just then Errol came around the corner, though, and Slyngel Thebes heaved himself up and yelled, “Look! Hoofs! Speak of the beast!”

  The midwife turned fast. “Errol Thebes! Odd! Damn! Have you heard all that I said? Please dinna tell! Please! I’ll drop for it!”

  We weren’t going to tell anybody anything. We ran again, faster than we’d run any guild stair race, and reached the nineteenth strata before we even exhaled. I slammed the thick wooden door between our quarters and the hall.

  Errol punched the stone wall. “I will show her ‘unsteady’! I will creep down to her rooms in the night and jab her with a knife. And everyone will think it was your foul da that did it.” I thought he would hit me for being the son of my da, but he collapsed on the floor with his face in his hands. “Tell me what to do, Odd Thebes. You know me better than anyone. Am I bogling my own self?”

  “Definitely not!” I said, although I was unsure. I sat next to him. “Here’s the truth. On her deathbed, your mam will admit she was the very bogle stealing your things and pressing them in her kelpie diary.” This was meant to sting him for what he’d just said about my hideous da, but the idea of his mam, severe as she was, pressing anything in a diary made us both laugh.

  The bogling hardened him. By the time we were twelve, he could argue with anyone on any subject: the precise height of the wall that surrounded our city, the presence or absence of gall in ink. He was glad when arguments turned to fistfights.

  Still I would wake in the night in our shared quarters and find him standing up in his bedroll, sopped in sweat.

  “Again a nightmare?” I was half asleep.

  “Again it felt real.” He was wide-awake.

  His drawings frightened me. One sketch showed the head of the bogle, with the jaws pried open on a stick. The mandible had burst from the gums, with teeth budding in spirals around the bone like eruptions from a wound.

  One night I woke to the sound of my mam whispering outside the door of our room.

  “So much of his life is lost,” she said. “It’s no wonder the kelp forgets where he puts his things.”

  My father belched. “You haven’t two bits of brain to rub together, Gudrun. He forgets nothing. You know it’s no fairy bogle haunting Errol Thebes. Your sister herself brought this on. That fiend of hers haunts this tower—”

  Mam slammed a cup down. “You’ll be spending the night in the library again,” she said, “if you have so much free time as to use it counting my brains.”

  When I left for breakfast in the morning I stepped over my da splayed on the floor in the hall, sleeping in the slick of his own drool.

  “How you and Mam managed to breed nine kelps together, I have no idea,” I said. I never told anyone the thought that occurred to me at that moment: Slyngel Thebes himself was never far from my cousin.

  Errol burst into the Great Hall one morning, demanding to know where someone had put his tool chest. He was fourteen by then: a pelt and volatile. Across the table from me, my brothers Heimdall and Ragnar, older than we were by a decade and well into their careers as idiots, exchanged mocking glances.

  But my mother came flying down the stairs from the guild kitchens. “All is not well!” she screamed. “There be summat in the ovens!” It was an odd thing to say. There was always something in the ovens. Everyone in the hall raced to see what had frightened Gudrun Thebes. My eyes stung at the oily smoke that filled the kitchen.

  “Gudrun, were ye baking the tool bench?” one of the guilders said, waving black smoke from the open oven.

  Mam’s voice was shrill. “’Tis not my doing! Why would I?!”

  Errol slipped through the crowd and grabbed his precious navaja from the oven, so blazing hot it hissed as it seared his skin. His tools were laid out on the oven racks—chisels, planes, a bevel—their edges glowing in the flames, their wood handles turned to ash.

  “Woody will kill me,” he whispered.

  “Why would you do this, Errol Thebes?” screamed my mam. Errol backed away as though she had hit him. “I mean to say, who would do this to you?”

  “Why don’t you ask your hardworking bound-husband?”

  Mam flinched, but there indeed was my father, huddled under the bread table.

  “That fiend!” Da shrieked and we all leapt at the pitch of fear. “See it!” He jabbed at the air with his grimy finger. “Lurking in this guild all these long years. Look at it! Look! I will CATCH IT! I will make it face its undoing. Why will none of ye look?!”

  I turned to look behind me but saw nothing.

  Well, that is not exactly true. I told myself that the shapeshift in the hall was the play of lamplight or some guilder leaving the scene.

  “You’re mistaken, Slyngel Thebes,” Gudrun said. “’Tis but Errol Thebes standing here, and not a fiend.”

  “The hoofed one? Where?”

  “Right in front of you,” said Mam. “You’re pointing right at him.”

  “What? No! I’m pointing to—” And then Slyngel actually seemed to see Errol. “I cannot bear it!” he said, sobbing. “I cannot be the one who knows what I know! Look at him! Look at all of you! With your tusks, fangs, udders! Covered with fur! Leave me alone!” He tipped his flask over so a drop leaked out of it onto his gray tongue. He flung the empty thing down the hall and ran after the clattering of it. Such was the chaos that was my father.

  Heimdall spit on the floor. “Slyngel Thebes is sopped, Mam. And Errol Thebes is a fool who can’t tell the difference between his workbench and an oven.”

  Errol came down on Heimdall out of nowhere, with the force of a sledging hammer, pounding him in a fury of fists. By the time three furnace guilders pulled Errol off him, Heimdall was so bloody and swollen he looked like the bogle i
n Errol’s drawings.

  Margaret Thebes summoned Errol to her quarters that night. I shadowed him.

  As if wasting gold and guild work on Errol’s absentminded foolery wasn’t bad enough, she said, the guild was now frightened of him. If he could think of nothing better to do than burn his tools, attack his fellow guilders, and upset the fragile order of a guild tower, she would have him confined.

  “More confined than I am already?” he said.

  I took a step back, for Margaret was frightful. But Errol moved toward her. He had nothing to do with the bogling, he said. In fact, he had begun to keep his belongings in a locked trunk, and gave the key to me every night for safekeeping. The lock showed no signs of tampering. Still his clothes, drawings, books, his tellensac, and now his tools themselves continued to disappear. He had sprinkled talc on the floor to track the bogle, even if it was his own trail, but never were there footprints.

  He pulled a scrap of parchment from his pocket and thrust it at her. “Suspects,” he said.

  Margaret read the list aloud. On it were the names of all the guilders in Errol’s woodshop (except, of course, for Wahid Thebes), the apprentices who worked alongside him, my brothers, my sisters, my own mam who had taken him in, Slyngel Thebes, all of Errol’s friends, and finally me, Odd Thebes.

  “I’ll thank you for leaving me off your list,” said Margaret.

  “It can’t be you,” Errol said. “Everyone knows you stay as far from me as this quarantined guild tower allows. You spend all your time talking to the iosal foundlings.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Watch yourself, Errol Thebes. You’re at an edge.”

  “So are you,” Errol said. “Don’t summon me again until you know more than I do.”

  I thought Margaret would eat his eyes for such audacity, but something had frightened her. When Errol had mentioned the lock undone without a key, the lack of footprints in the powder, she had steadied herself with a hand on the table. I should have told Errol, but I was wounded by the appearance of my name on his list of suspects and didn’t speak to him for the better part of an uur.