It was an insane catalog, hidden in plain sight, now that I could see it, all over the tales in the library and containing, from what I could tell, the names of every foundling and guilder in Thebes. The holes in the pages were not just a naming ritual. In fact I was no longer sure they were for naming at all. They were Slyngel Thebes’s bizarre method for distracting anyone from seeing his private taxonomy hidden in the gutters.
“Were you mocking us?” I yelled. “Tracking us like beasts? Killing off the weak ones? Why record your crimes? Were you proud? Did you want someone to see this? Who on earth would ever read it here? No one! Everyone knew you were a worthless drunk. We’re relieved you’re dead!”
I put my hands to my face, regretting my own self.
Worse yet—far worse: I was trying to ignore something within myself: Before I got to any hollow or any abbreviation in any gutter, I myself knew what beast my father would pencil in for each guilder. How did I know? I didn’t even understand the game. Also, I had never seen a live beast—save that infant striped bear, that badger.
I grabbed a copy of Shirazad’s tales, flipped to the first page with a hollow cut from it. I covered the gutter before I could see it. The missing name was Dunyazad, Shirazad’s little sister. I thought of the guilder I knew who had that name, a jovial, stubborn woman who worked in the shops. I whispered, as if anyone were listening, the first beast that came to my mind. Ram. I lifted my hand. Ar. Now I was yelling, Aries! The ram indeed. I was panicked at the idea that anything my lunatic father said or wrote could make any kind of sense to me. Liu Bei was a squirrel? Yes. Ketill was a rat? Yes! The last thing I would ever want was to be like my da. His thin leggings bagging at the knees and hanging at the crotch, his stupid card games and belching and his love for that flask.
Pause.
I sat yet again at the table and reopened volume one of The Three Kingdoms. What did Jamila have to hide?
I checked every hole again, and every gutter. Finally I put the spine of the book on the table to see if it would fall open to a particular spread of pages.
It did. In a very fine ink line, a line as fine as a hair, this sentence was underlined in the text: You are surrounded with the certainty of death if you do not yield. The first three i’s in the sentence were circled, and so was the letter f in the word if. A new code?
“What is iiif?” I put my head on the table. “There is no such beast.”
Then my heart tightened fast in my ribs. I slammed the book shut, threw it on a pile on the floor. I ran all the way up the halls, shoved the grate guilder out of the way, climbed up the ladder and out to the roofs, fell into my tent, tied the flap, and dove in my sack.
That last entry was not my father’s record-keeping. There were no beasts. No holes in the page. None of Pliny’s names. Someone had discovered my father’s catalog. Someone had tracked his movements and his writings. Someone had left this book splayed wide-open so he would see it, no doubt on the table in the night library, likely in the same place I had just opened it myself. Jamila wasn’t hiding the text from Margaret that night. She was hiding it from me. The third of Faol, commonly abbreviated iiiF, was the night my father had died.
A Thief
THE AIR WAS AS THICK as the midwife’s birthing room: blood and salt sweat in it. Errol pulled Dagmar’s cape around him and burrowed under the hemp sacks. He was safe. Safe in his brother’s warren, deep in the earth. Such fierce dreams he had had, of being pierced, of having his chest splayed open. He put his hands on his ribs. His fingers came away wet.
“Rip?” His voice was ragged.
He tried to get up but fell. He had no feeling in his legs. Something weighed him down, something so vast and immoveable, Errol was sure the earth had caved in on him. Why did it have fur?
He reached for a flint, but his hand came upon the empty sheath. And now he remembered. He had ignored Rip and Dagmar and had taken the spikes from their case. He had left them next to him on a wooden crate and wrapped himself in the cloak and fallen asleep. The lamp had run down. His hand knocked a tin off a crate. The clatter was small but it brought on a frenzy of crashes. Some mammoth force was alive in the room with him, twisting now, kicking and bucking. Errol buried himself under the sacks and covered his head. When the movements stopped, he felt again for the flint and lit an edge of the sack for light.
The great beast lay on its back next to him on the shards of broken glass, with its front legs curled like the handles of an urn, and its enormous back flanks stretched across the room. Its head was turned to Errol, and a curious, fist-sized eye stared at him. Behind the snout and the eye were the low branches of a rack of antlers.
Errol tripped and stumbled over the animal and into the tunnel.
“Rip,” he whispered. He tripped over something the size and shape of a rolled-up carpet and raised the lamp. “Rip. What are you doing?”
Rip took a swig of the whiskey, drizzling liquor down his ears and neck. “Am I lying down or standing up?”
“You’re down.”
“Thank you.” He got unsteadily to his feet.
Errol cleared his throat. “Something happened in the night—”
Rip lifted the flask to his lips but stopped and lowered it. “Yes. For me, too.” He surveyed the floor of the tunnel, which was littered with new, broken things. More lamps, half books, a file. He drank from the flask. “Just so long as you didn’t take the knotting spikes out of their case.”
From within the room came the bellowing of an animal.
Rip narrowed his eyes. “You fool,” he said, pushing Errol aside, running into the room. There, in all its magnificence, was the rump of a beast. At the other end of the room, the antlers spread like two saplings.
“What is it?”
The beast swung its head around at the sound of Rip’s voice and hammered Errol in the jaw with its antler.
“It’s a stag,” said Errol. “I think it’s a large one but I have nothing to compare it with.”
“I know what it is,” murmured Rip. “How the hel—” And then he stiffened. “Who was here last night with you?”
“No one. Not even you, apparently,” said Errol.
“It was Sabine. She is unwieldy like this. Wild-eyed. Skittish. Where is she?”
“What are you talking about? Why would Sabine be here?”
“Why indeed. I’m not a fool,” Rip said. “Because this stag can’t be yours. It’s not possible.”
Errol wanted to say he had no idea what Rip was talking about. But in fact his mind returned to a nightmare, of a quick slice of an edge, and an enormous animal struggling to climb out of his ribs, wrenching open the already-bruised bones to gasp for air. Then an insane knotting, as if the skin of his chest were being torn into strips and knit together.
“Let me see you!” Rip tore Dagmar’s cape from Errol’s shoulders. He stepped back as though he had been hit. “How is that possible?” he cried. A fine wound ran up the center of Errol’s chest. Errol stared at himself in the queasy lamplight.
“It hurts,” he said.
“Well of course it hurts!” Rip yelled. Then quietly, “Of course it hurts. You’re a fool. You had to have those spikes. But this is not your stag. It can’t be. Because that simply is not possible. You would be empty, like me.” Errol could make no sense of whatever Rip was carrying on about. Rip drank from the flask and pressed the cork back into it. “Unless, of course, she was unfaithful.”
“Unfaithful? I’m telling you,” said Errol. “Sabine was not here.”
“No. Not Sabine. Mam.”
Seen
JAMILA POURED A CUP OF TEA and left it steaming between us on the plank. The bell was somnium, but I certainly wasn’t getting any sleep. I had sent for her four uurs ago, but she had ignored the summons. She finally arrived in the middle of the night, when the time suited her. Now we sat with our feet dangling over the abyss.
“What is your theory?”
“Slyngel Thebes saw things,” she said.
I handed her the cup and she drank from it. I said, “Here’s my theory. He murdered Durga and Feo. Tracked them like prey and killed them. Then he lost his mind entirely. Then he was murdered by someone who defended them.”
“I don’t think so. I think someone was after him because he was right about the beasts.”
“Right about what?”
“I know what it feels like to smell and taste and hear things no one else hears. I think he was seeing fylgias.”
I sighed. “Those aren’t our stories, Jamila. Fylgias are from outside the wall.”
“How do you know?”
“I just know. Maybe out of the corner of his eye he thought he saw a squirrel tripping over Liu Bei’s ankles. Or at a footrace, maybe he envisioned a red horse galloping next to a kelp and recorded it as equus in the book. Drunk, he could see anything he wanted to see.”
“No. He stopped seeing beasts when he was drunk. That’s why he drank so much.” She looked at me oddly then, and said, “Why did you just say red horse?”
“Are not all horses red?” She stared at me for a long while. I took the tea and stood up. “I don’t want to talk about this.”
“You see them, too,” she said.
“I see what I see.”
“What do you see when you look at me?”
“Nothing. A foundling.”
“What else?”
“I see you. No, actually”—I put my fingers up to my temples—“I see—a fat rump mounted on itty-bitty wings, with big teeth and silky black hair down to its tiny little hoofs. Huge tits.”
She laughed and said, “I sound like a bogle.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” I was sullen again.
“Fine,” she said. “Then bargain for my silence with news of the roofs.”
I put my head back and held out my arms and felt my body sway in the winter night, high over the earth. It was so high, that plank between Bamako and Thebes. It was all edge. Nothing tethered me to it. If I stumbled, I would fall. If I fell, thirty seconds later I would die. If I saw beasts, who cared? This was my air. This was my high place. I would not be followed out onto this plank by idiot brothers or a drunken dead father. Even my mam would never venture here. Out on this plank I was myself. A runner of extraordinary competence. Such competence that I could flip myself around this board and back up onto it and live. I could walk on my hands.
I told Jamila everything. Marek was leaving for Mildenhall the next week to apprentice, an idea that left us all miserable. Talwyn had bid early in her second year for seven apprenticeships, had gotten them all. Everyone was stupidly in love. Ping had negotiated his final contract with Gallia House; he would only move there, he said, if they let him bind himself to Ella, do his barrel work, and cook for everyone in the guild for the rest of his life. No one in their right mind would ever let Ping negotiate another contract. Grid and Siwan Chakra were training together for next year’s Long Run, as this year’s had been canceled unceremoniously when Errol was dropped. Faisal and Seppo were seeing twin runners from Bian Pao. Dragomir had met a pelt on Ship—Gawain or Griflet, someone from the Round Table. Most lovesick of all were Petroc and our own Siwan, hanging lights in the tent, where, as the scroll dictated, the moon and sun would meet at the dawn.
“I hate the scroll,” I said. “Even if you stay in the tent by accident, even if you’re just doing math, you’re bound. What fool thought of that and why did anyone agree to it?”
“Petroc and Siwan agreed.”
“I don’t want to worry about staying or not staying in some girl’s tent.”
“You don’t have a girl.”
“When I do.”
“Just don’t go in her tent.”
“I’ll just never fall sleep.”
“You’re in an Odd mood. Let me guess. Some girl turned you down.”
“No. Whatever. Yes.”
A Name
HOW TO FIT THE STAG OUT OF THE DOOR. Whether the stag could drink water (or whiskey) straight from the flask. Whether tinned meat was poison to a stag.
“The name of him,” said Errol. “That’s the question.”
At that moment the stag turned to look at them, hitting Rip in the chin with his antlers.
“I propose Dammit.”
“I’m trying to remember the name of that stag who lives on Yggdrasil,” said Errol. “In Valhalla. I’m sure I know it. I read those northern tales every night of my life.”
“It’s Eikthyrnir,” said Rip.
Eikthyrnir was restless, not unlike Errol, trapped in a sewage tunnel under a thousand tons of earth.
Five Hundred Pages
SHE WAS RIGHT. I was in an Odd mood.
I poured out my tellensac in a bowl she made from the front of her tunic. I took the torn page from the bowl, and put back the rest to keep it from blowing off the plank.
“It was you who stole the last page of Parsival?” she said.
“No. Yes. I have to tell you something. Don’t talk. Just listen.”
She crossed her arms. “Fine. But did you also steal the six lines of—”
“Just listen. There is a secret to whether and when you get chosen to become a runner, and I didn’t know what it was—”
“You should have asked me,” said Jamila.
“Is this how you look when you’re just listening?”
She rolled her eyes. “Fine. Go.”
“When Errol was chosen for the roofs and I wasn’t, I thought I would lose my mind. Imagine me, Odd Thebes, imprisoned forever in this tower with five hundred molding guilders—”
“Them, plus me,” said Jamila.
“I didn’t think of that. Anyway, I begged Errol to tell me how he had been chosen, but he didn’t know. They just informed him one day that he was rising and I wasn’t.
“I studied every pelt who had been called and every pelt who wasn’t, then tried to guess the differences. It wasn’t family connections or money that put anyone up on the roof. Good teeth, a throwing arm, knotting skills, geometry prowess, clean hair, card-playing ability, cookery, running speed, high marks, or, as we can all see from their choice of Errol, any sort of ability to sing on pitch.”
Jamila laughed.
“Meanwhile Errol is sewing his tent, setting his pack in order, tying his hair back like a runner. And my mam throws that party for him, and he has three uurs to go before it’s the five bell and he’ll climb the ladder and be gone forever. He and I have been cousins and best friends since we were provoked from our mothers’ innards. And I’ll be stuck in an empty tower while he’s up there in high air with ten thousand runners.”
I put up a finger to stop her protest.
“At the bakers’ bell, I broke into my brother Heimdall’s quarters on the twenty-first strata. I woke him. With his bound-wife and his family snoring around us, I laid all the money I had earned as a translator on his bed in front of him. A little more than three thousand uurs. It was literally everything I owned, and five times more gold than he had ever seen in one place.
“‘Tell me the iosal secret,’ I’d demanded. Of course, Heimdall had never been a runner, but he was a guilder by then, with two kelps already born. And every guilder knows the secret because they have to know it.”
“Heimdall would have told you the secret for free. To get rid of you.”
“Could you just listen, Jamila? This isn’t easy for me.”
“Fine.”
“Heimdall grinned and said, ‘Odd Thebes is a worse idiot than I thought. You? Mr. Nose-in-a-Scroll? You can’t guess the answer?’ He swept all my money under his bound-wife. ‘You just forfeited three thousand uurs for something I’d have gladly told you for free just to be rid of you once and for all.’
&n
bsp; “I would have given him twice the money. ‘What is it?’” I begged him.
“‘Ask the Parsival question.’”
“‘Parsival who?’ I asked. I thought he was talking about some guilder.
“‘Your favorite knight, Oddity,’ he said.
“‘The Parsival? Grail knight? Pure in heart?’
“‘One and the same.’
“‘From Parsival? I know that tale by heart.’”
“Everyone knows it,” whispered Jamila.
“Sh,” I said. “The tale goes like this. Parsival’s uncle, the king, suffers from a curse, a foul disease that makes the sickroom reek and grown men sob—”
“I know the tale,” said Jamila.
“But I need to tell it,” I said. “Parsival the young squire can’t imagine what to say to the ailing king. He doesn’t really care, is the truth of it. So he gets out of there as fast as he can and leaves his uncle behind. For five hundred pages he horses around the countryside, having his way with girls and figuring out which end of his sword is up. Fights a slew of battles against knights too big for him. Gets beaten. In the end he makes his way back to his uncle, who is nearly dead by now in the green haze of his sickroom. Now Parsival feels his uncle’s pain.
“‘Uncle, what is it that troubles you?’ he says. Et voilà! The king is cured. Just like that. Feh. Five hundred pages of unrelenting self-interest. One selfless, uncommon question. By the time Parsival asks it, you’re ready to throw the grail at his head. The curse is lifted. The king is suddenly as healthy as his own horse. The story ends.
“‘Uncle, what is it that troubles you?’ I said to Heimdall, blinking. ‘That’s the secret to rising to the roofs?’
“‘Aye, in every tower from Visby to Cairns.’
“I jumped on Heimdall’s bed, beating him with a pillow, ramming my head against the wall, yelling over and over, ‘What is it that troubles you? What is it that—’
City of the Uncommon Thief Page 22