“This is excellent advice from the one who steals other men’s women.”
“Steals? When have I ever stolen?”
“Anyway, I hate the iosal rule,” I said. “You spend the night in a tent together, east meets west, and the next thing you know you’re bound. Nothing but paperwork. And why don’t you find yourself a girl? What about that foundling you just left in the morgues?”
He made a face. “Were you following us?”
“I know everything. Everything.”
“Tell me this, then. I’m confused, Odd Thebes. I thought you loved that foundling. I once thought you loved her in a binding way.” I felt my chest tighten. If he was so sure I loved Jamila, why would he have written that contract to take her away? “But then I discover that you have bound yourself to this runner whose name you don’t even know. And then you ask me why don’t I take the foundling. An Odd question. Which do you love, the wife or the foundling?”
I spat against the wall. “The foundling belongs to me.”
“She didn’t mention belonging to anyone.”
Panic rose in me. I suddenly remembered I had fallen asleep, back in the morgues. “Was that a whole night?” I blurted. “Did the moon and the sun meet for the two of you?”
He took another pastry from the bag. “I thought you said it didn’t matter. Paperwork, you called it. If I did stay a night with her, maybe it was nothing.”
I glared at him. “Did you or not?”
He stared at me, toying with me. And then: “No. I left her.” He leaned his head back and rubbed his face with his hands. And then he began to talk about what he had seen. About the streets and gaol and Jago and Arthur. He drew his knees up to his chest like a kelp, hiding, and he wept.
I had no solutions to offer, but I wanted to possess some knowledge of equal gravity. So I told him that I was seeing beasts, as my father had.
“You really are the harbinger of the dawn,” said Errol. “The one who sees what no one else sees.” He sat up quickly now and looked at me with interest. “In that case, tell me this. Have you seen the regnat lately?”
“Not since Fremantle. That night of Al-Razi.”
“What beast did you see when you looked at him?”
“I don’t know,” I said, agitated. I didn’t want to be seeing beasts.
“Say it.”
“You won’t believe me.”
“I always believe you.”
That stunned me, for I knew it to be true. Three of spades. “The beast was unmistakable. Wings, scales, a whiptail. A filthy trail of coal smoke shooting from the sides of its fanged mouth.”
“A wyrm?”
“Aye. A reptile drooling vitriol. A dragon.”
“You’re sure? How big was it?”
“Big. The size of a yurt. If it ever did come through his ribs, it wouldn’t fit in his guild quarters.”
“Excellent,” whispered Errol. “I wonder how it would like a vault.”
The Prize
“I WON’T TURN YOU IN TO THE REGNAT, on one condition,” I said as Errol was binding my hands again. We both knew I was in no position to bargain. “I’m serious, Errol Thebes. I must know what you asked for when you won the Long Run.”
“It’s a stale subject, Odd,” he said.
“You, who already had everything. What was it?”
Errol cinched the knots. “I never got what I asked for. Anyway, it was a fool’s request. It was nothing.”
“Nothing?” I said. “I doubt that.” I knew what it was. I just wanted him to admit it.
“It will only be painful to tell you.”
“I demand to know.”
He studied my face. “I’ll tell you, but only after I bind your mouth. Otherwise I’ll have to listen to your protests.”
“You’re no friend!” I blurted. “I already know what you did. You were going to get your own place in Fremantle and leave us all behind. My mam. My family. Me.”
He gagged me. He extinguished his lamp and stood in darkness. His voice was quiet. “All right, Odd Thebes. You’ve been wanting to know this answer for two years. But you’re not going to like it. I asked them to draw up a contract for an apprenticeship for me, at Fremantle.”
“Hmph.”
“I requested a good job, fine quarters, food, good money. I told them if I had to live in Fremantle, I wanted to be set for life.” There it was! He admitted it! “They asked me if there was a love interest. I asked them to include a foundling. Your mam gave me her name. I hated foundlings but I thought you loved her. The contract was standard issue. They drew it up, signed it, and handed it to me. They were happy. It was what they all wanted me to do anyway—Fremantle, Thebes, the whole city—so why not give it to me for a prize?” How could he just stand there and revel in this? “And then,” he said, “while they watched, I crossed out my name and wrote yours.”
I convulsed.
“Don’t get excited.”
“WHAT?” I said from behind the gag.
“They wouldn’t do it. I told them it was my right to choose my reward for the Long Run, and it didn’t have to be for me. But they said no. They said you were unsuitable for the work.” I could have broken my wrists, I was pulling so hard to free my arms from behind my back. “I didn’t want to tell you all this,” he continued. “Because they’re wrong. All those languages you know, the barding, the things you see—you’re brilliant. But they couldn’t see it.” Behind that gag, I cursed in every language I knew. “They said the prize had to be for me. I argued that it would be. We all knew I would end up in Fremantle in the end, so you and I would be near each other, we would be bound, you to that foundling and me to Kitchen Girl, and we would live together. And I told them that would make my life in Fremantle bearable. The regnat offered me anything or anyone else in exchange. I was angry, but I didn’t know then that the regnat was iosal. Or that he hated me before I even met him. I still thought he was to be respected. So what did he ask for in the end? In the end I requested a fresh pear, which is, as you know, an impossibility in a walled city with a thousand locked guild towers. As impossible as kahve with cream.”
Why had I been so quick to doubt my cousin, who had never once lied to me or let me down?
Errol put his lamp on and turned to go. The chicken’s beak was raised; he was proudly holding a feather from his own tail. It was such a silly gesture, but Errol bent and took the feather. He stuck it into his thick mass of hair.
I struggled to get the binding off my mouth, to warn him that my brothers were waiting fifty yards up the tunnel. But I was bound in every possible way, and useless.
Brother Enemies
I KICKED HEIMDALL when he came down and cut the gag from my mouth. I kicked my brother Ragnar, who was with him. The tunnel was filled with guards from Fremantle, all in armor. I ran up and down their ranks, kicking them all.
“You lied to me!” I yelled at Heimdall. “How could you lie to me?”
But Heimdall had something else on his mind. “Where is he?” he said. “You warned him off!”
“What are you talking about?” I yelled, pointing down the tunnel. “He walked right into your arms!”
Heimdall grabbed for my eyeballs. Such fury I had never seen. “You warned him off! He never came out.”
“What?” I said. And then I burst out laughing. “You idiots. Of course he came out!”
Heimdall and Ragnar exchanged looks and their faces fell. They had seen him, all right. They had parted forces in the tunnel and let a stinking, ragged foundling pass through while they waited expectantly for the Errol Thebes they knew, the conquering hero.
They beat me up. They kicked the chicken and me all the way down the hall. I deserved it. Foundlings carried us up, inside the walls, and passed me back to the roofs. Grid carried me to my new bound-wife, who bathed me and washed my wounds and bandaged the
chicken and me and made me tell it all, even the parts about Jamila.
The Small Uurs
ON THE GUILD HOUSE SAMOA, Errol crept among the tents, opened the flaps until he found the tufuga. The thick little man came out with his wife, who was, to my surprise, tall and agile, with a thick mass of red hair. She was covered entirely by tatus. Her belly was as round as the tufuga’s paunch, although, based on my scant knowledge of human reproduction, only one of them was bearing a child. Errol and the tufuga disappeared into the box tent. Half an uur later, Errol emerged with his arm wrapped in fresh bandages. He ran the lines to Peste House, stole some ma’amouls for himself and the stag, and returned one last time to Thebes, marked, as any third-year runner, with the symbol of his resting house.
* * *
—
Ovid and I trailed them, keeping our distance. The city had slipped without notice into the icy month of Hornung, and we had cold-finger winds on our necks. I could hear the sounds of runners stirring in their sleep in their tents. The only light was starlight.
Errol removed one of two packages from his belt, climbed the mast, swung down under the crow’s belly, turned the lock, and opened the door. The crow contained various contracts and objects of importance to Thebes’s roof masters. He added a single long, thin package, the length of a knotting spike.
When he dropped to the roof, he set the other package into the bin of outgoing mail in the yurt. It looked like all the other long, thin packages that would be leaving the busy spican guild that morning. Anyone who saw it would assume someone at Strael House had ordered a set of knotting spikes to get some winter sweaters made. No one would guess it was an iron shaft that bore a set of instructions for the fletcher.
Chicken Drama
WHEN TERPSICHORE CAME TO MY TENT THAT NIGHT, the chicken pressed himself into the corner and issued a furtive growl. When she tried to throw him out, he staged a crowing fit, throwing his head so far back he looked like a man having his lungs removed with a fork. He fell over backward and lay spasming on my pillow. Later that night I found three quills, a handful of apothecary beads, a piece of pie, and the relics of Grid’s tellensac in his corner. On my bound-wife’s orders, I locked Ovid out of the tent, where he crowed along with every bell. I went out to remind him that roosters were, in certain parts of the world, sacrificial birds.
Help
THE APOTHECARIST TOOK HIS OLD RUNNER’S PACK from its hook by his door. It was leather, embossed with a firework display known in his birth guild as “the peony.” He had saved it for thirty-six years, dusted and oiled it and hung it next to the hook where he hung the apron he wore every day. Even in his quarters on the eighth strata he could hear the sound of the runners on the roofs singing. And he heard their thundering feet and banging pots, shaking the tower with sound in their long-standing good-night to the guilders below, at the uur of tumultus. He kept it ready.
He had packed in a hurry: his mortar and pestle; sand timers rolled in oil cloth; his original copy of Materia Medica; his lunch. Six strapping foundlings arrived to haul sacks of beads to the roof. He paid them well, as much for their discretion as for their effort. He was violating so many guild laws tonight, he had lost count.
“And?” the apothecarist whispered to Errol.
“And the roofs are quiet.”
“One thousand, three hundred, forty two,” the apothecarist whispered as they watched the foundlings come up.
“Pieces of luggage?” said Errol.
“No. Stairs. I find myself winded.”
“One pack, we said. You were supposed to bring what you could lift and haul on your own.”
“If one kelp has the ague, then others do. You should see what I had to leave behind.”
“I hope you packed those Taedium beads, in case you get bored.”
The apothecarist stopped short, for a huge, antlered beast had come around a tent. He raised an eyebrow.
“It’s a stag,” said Errol.
“Specifically it is Cervus elaphus,” said the apothecarist. “Maybe even Cervus elaphus hanglu. Though of course I have never seen either alive, only in the form of powdered antlers. Will it bite?”
“No.”
The apothecarist reached up to touch the stag’s broad neck. Eikthyrnir swung his head around to see who was touching him and knocked the apothecarist flat onto the landing.
“You said—”
“I said he doesn’t bite,” said Errol.
* * *
—
There were warm breezes, which my bound-wife would record later that morning in the roof log at Thebes as “perhaps enough to lift Odd’s spirits.” The smell of breads rising across all the roofs and the early sounds of runners stirring in their bedrolls flooded the apothecarist with memories. He took out his clean rag and unfolded it and dabbed the corners of his eyes.
“I beg your pardon,” he said.
“Not necessary. I feel it, too,” said Errol.
Errol strapped him into a harness and onto a drop line and attached the sacks to the line. He hooked himself onto the end of a line as well and gave instructions to the foundlings who would control the drop that he had no intention of dropping like stones. The apothecarist stood at the edge.
“Don’t look down,” Errol said.
“I find myself wondering about the lines. Are they fresh?” he said.
“They could hold you, me, your luggage, the stag, and the contents of this tower.”
“The stag? Surely we are not taking that behemoth with us on the same line?” The apothecarist reached for a bottle of beads in his pocket.
Errol put his hand on the man’s shoulder. “You are brave. I cannot think of another guilder who would do what you are doing today with me.”
An irritable voice behind them said, “And what am I then, a piece of cheese?”
Errol knew before he turned around who it was.
“What are you doing here?” he said.
“I’m going with you. Obviously,” said the tufuga.
Errol felt an idiotic sense of excitement. “What about your bound-wife?”
“It was she who sent me. Threw me out on my”—he looked at the tidy apothecarist—“on my welcome mat. She heard you telling me about that kelp who wants a tatu and said she would go herself if she wasn’t about to deliver a child. Where’s my harness? Otherwise I’ll have to jump to prove I’m half the man she thinks.”
“I find myself wondering which half,” said the apothecarist, looking over the grimy little tufuga. “Why do we need a tufuga on the streets?”
“Everyone wants to be marked,” the tufuga said. “More than they want your beads, they want what I have.”
* * *
—
The tufuga had jammed his gear into his old runner’s pack in such haste that bits of rags and tools jangled from it and had to be taken out and repacked.
The stag pranced impatiently while Errol strapped him into a sling. When they were all four harnessed into the drop lines, they stood all together at the edge of the plank.
“Think on this,” said Errol. “There is a kelp. His name is Arthur. He has a child’s interest in archery and beasts, and he misses his dead mam and his sister. You must get to him soon or he will not live.”
“We must get to him,” corrected the apothecarist.
The tufuga leapt off the plank and was gone. The apothecarist sat down and lowered himself into the air below him. Errol jumped with his arms widespread. And then the stag leapt, and the other three were thrown into the sky, like underwear on a clothesline on which a three-ton weight had fallen.
The apothecarist yelled, “I find myself needing to change my pants.”
Finally steady, they dropped side by side, turning in the wind, the lines spinning out in the hands of the foundlings.
“May I ask your name?” Errol shouted to t
he apothecarist.
“Bede.”
“An apothecarist named Bede?”
“It’s a coincidence.”
“And you, tufuga? What may we call you?”
“Chaunce!” He was thrilled to be falling so fast.
“And you are Errol Thebes,” said Bede. “Margaret’s son. When I return, she will flay me for this. There is no safe place to hide from her.”
Errol laughed. “Did you know who I was, all along?”
“You’re the talk of the guilds. I put two and two together when you showed up at my door and said you were Bayard. The name of your legendary knife.”
The foundlings lowered them the last few yards. Errol unclipped the harnesses and tugged on the lines, which snaked slowly away over their heads, out of the shadows into the light of the sun.
“Remarkably steady under the feet,” whispered Bede.
“Smells like my wife’s cooking,” said the tufuga. “I have the sense we’re being watched. Can we move fast enough to avoid detection?”
“Make as much noise as you can,” said Errol. “We’re depending upon being caught.”
By a Thread
I WONDERED THAT NIGHT what I would have done in Errol’s situation. The City of a Thousand Guilds was under siege. Frozen in winter, frozen in fear. Thousands of guilders toiled in the towers, their work burning upriver on the banks. Fear prevailed in the streets. Under the earth in a maze of tunnels and cells known to its inmates as gaol, beasts and humans huddled together in cells waiting to be pitted against one another, all their dreams reduced to the single hope for a quick end. Those who lost were devoured. Those who won? They were shipped out to make mayhem in the world outside the wall. Monstrous wares. Assassins. Warmongers. The regnat was corrupt. So was the abbot. The fleet captain. And that twitching creature Utlag. A pair of iron knotting spikes, the only uncommon items anyone had ever seen our city’s wall, had been turned to foul purposes. And in the middle of everything else, Errol loved a girl.
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