“I trust you too. I do. Excitement,” Utlag said. “Wait for me here.”
* * *
—
Of all that had been said in this exchange, here are the three answers Errol needed:
No one in the streets was strong enough to lead an uprising.
A predator could turn on itself.
The abbot had sole access to the vault.
A Fool
LUGIUS DID NOT LOOK UP FROM HIS DESK. He said, “Don’t talk. Just yes or no. Do you have the iron needles?” He was speaking to neither the fleet captain nor the regnat. He was speaking to Utlag, who was hiding outside the closed door. The abbot could smell him.
“Why was I not informed of this meeting?” Utlag hissed, moving into the room with a hand clenched. “Agitated.”
“You’re here, aren’t you?”
“I came with news.”
The abbot was filling out a shipping form. The fleet captain stood watching. Already he had been in this room since sundown, and his ships had been anchored downriver for more than a week, burning the guild trinkets and waiting for the true exports. The regnat sat in a far corner of the office, his body appearing as a mass of shadows at the center of blinding lamplight.
“I am interrogating that runner, to see what he knows about the spican. Meanwhile he has provided information I’m sure the abbot will be interested to know.” The abbot sighed. “Listen! This runner knows of foundlings whose beasts are rare!” The abbot’s pen stopped and his shoulders slumped. Utlag wiped the spittle from his face. “Bonnacons. Wyrms. I came here to get my records from the vault, to compare them with his information. He is going to give me names. I am sure we have something worth more than all the ships you three have filled.”
The abbot said, “How many times do I need to tell you? There are no rare beasts in this city. Least of all, yourself.”
Utlag hissed, “Then why does the regnat over there stay in the light? What rare thing is he afraid of?”
The abbot was half out of his chair. “Sit, Utlag. Sit down.”
“Listen! The runner said there is no sheepness to these foundlings he knows. They are not houseflies or rats. He is sure of it.”
“Sheepness,” said that abbot flatly, putting down his quill and staring at some point on his desk. “That’s what we have, to go on? A lack of sheepness? I, too, lacked sheepness and look what it brought me.”
A pool of black fluid filled Utlag’s lips. “Unkind,” he whispered.
The regnat spoke: “We must fill two hundred ships with exports by tonight, but we cannot, for you cannot produce the iron spikes to finish that work. You are a waste of time.”
Utlag backed away. “In that crypt below the earth I finally have someone I can trust.”
The regnat laughed. “Let me tell you something about that runner. He’s Errol Thebes, third son of Guildmaster Margaret Thebes.” Utlag was down on all fours now, at the sound of Margaret’s name, his back arched. “He is the one you thought you threw off the roof. You threw the wrong kelp off the roof, Utlag. Margaret tricked you. Now he has come and tracked us here. He’s not a kelp anymore. He’s a rising guildmaster. And he has come to finish us.”
Math
THE TUFUGA HAD SET UP A TATU BENCH BY THE FIRE, and a long queue wound around the room. Trula was making potato soup. The apothecarist was treating Arthur and a roomful of others whose symptoms were the same. Jago stood in the middle of the room, the center of a kind of chaos that was new to him.
Will Bluebird yelled out, “Who can it be, banging at the door, that isn’t here already?”
Two men stood there with hatchets and ropes. Behind them stood so many more that Will Bluebird could not see where the crowd ended. Utlag had sent for the stag, they said. Will Bluebird closed the door. Jago went to a crack in the wall and looked out.
Utlag had sent a hundred. Jago had sixteen, plus Arthur’s five. If Arthur had been well and fighting, or if they had Jago’s cat, they could almost have called it even. Jago was at the wall a long time and finally said, “Give them the stag.”
“No, we can fight,” said the apothecarist.
Jago raised his eyebrow. “A tufuga and a formidable apothecarist. Right. Listen, if you don’t give up the stag, we’ll be bloodied, and Arthur and these kelps will be taken anyway.” The two of them crossed their arms and stared at one another, until Jago said, “You know what your noble runner would say.”
The stag rose when the mob came for him. For a long moment the men all stood back, in awe of the great creature he was, his face noble, his body powerful even in surrender. Then? Then they threw a set of ropes around his antlers and another set around his legs and yanked one set to the right and the other to the left, and he went down so hard the pub shook.
The tufuga followed at a distance. The hundred men dragged the stag down into the earth, pushing and folding his great bulk into the tunnels and finally forcing him to get up and lie on a cart they could pull. The tufuga crept after them. When the stag’s antlers jammed up against the tunnel walls, the men got out their hatchets. When they reached the depths of gaol, they prodded the stag with spears to force him through the gate of the arena. A crowd cheered when he looked up at them. He struggled to stand.
Half Brother
ERROL HAD BEEN SO SURE Utlag was going to return. But now the back of his head was underwater, and the back of his legs and his shoulders. His lips were frozen hard. The spray of the drops falling on his chest had made a wet bib on his shirt, like a baby’s. It frustrated him that he could not remember the guild word for “baby.” He felt for the bars in the door with his foot, tried to think how to slide the window open so the water would run out of it before it was over his face.
A knock echoed in the tunnel, and Errol thought it was Utlag returning but it was the pinging of the stone of the earth under pressure. It was nothing.
Errol was nagged by the disparity between the stories he knew from the tales told high in the guild tower and his own story playing out here, in this low place. The men and women in the scrolls he knew did not die this way, losing whatever sanity they had because water was dripping on the same sore bit of skin. When they died at all, they died in the great heave of battle, or arm in arm with their compatriots, in a towering wall of salt-sea water. They did not vomit or relieve themselves in the water in which they lay, as he had done, or spend the last uurs of their existence in a tomb no one could ever find. He had never thought of the thousands of people whose stories went untold, whose ends were small and frightened and far away, who were never found. He cried out for mercy, and not for himself.
He heard a tentative try at the bolt. It must have been only his imagination again. There it was again.
“Let me out!” he said.
“You are still alive,” a voice said.
Errol jerked at the sound. “Utlag? Yes! Yes! I am alive! Let me out!”
“That will come later.” It was not Utlag. Errol could not place it. He was breathing too hard to hear or think.
“Later?” Errol yelled. His ears were below the water, so everything was distorted. “Later? Then you are about to hear me drown!”
“Yes. You smell of panic.”
Errol laughed and water washed into his mouth. “Give me soap and I’ll wash! Just open the door!”
“I’m not complaining. The scent of you is a pleasure. The salt sweat in your hair. And something musky, animal.”
“What sort of man are you who would torment me with this, while I drown?” He held his breath, waiting to hear the lock turn.
“A hungry one.”
“Yes. I am hungry, too. At least you are free to get yourself a meal.”
“My meal is here.”
“Open the door and give me some of it? Please. I need the strength. I am freezing.”
“A frozen meal, then.”
E
rrol felt the hairs on his arms stand up, his chest tighten hard on his lungs. “What?!” He wedged his feet against the door.
“There is no need to worry. I shall wait until you are dead or nearly so. I need something of a chase, but it will be quick.”
“You don’t have a key—” Errol said, knowing already that he was wrong.
“Utlag gave it to me. Found me. Said there was something in here for me. Traitors are particularly savory, those were his exact words.”
So Utlag had found him out. “I will not be murdered twice in the same night. I will not!”
“Ease yourself. You sound like a lytling.”
There was the word he had wanted. Lytling. Who was this, who spoke in a Thebes House dialect and knew the word for “baby”? “Rip? Rip! Is that you?”
“Who is that?” demanded the one outside his door, striking a flint in the window.
“Rip, open the door. This isn’t funny,” Errol said. “I regret all I’ve said. Let me out.”
“Who is that?” said the stranger outside the door. “How do you know my brother?”
“Your brother?” Errol gasped. “How could Rip Thebes be your brother? He is mine—”
Lost
THE TUFUGA’S HEART POUNDED, his pulse in his ears. He heard something breathing. He lifted his hands to his ears to stop it all, to calm himself.
From their shafts the prisoners listened to him move. He could sense their presence. And they could sense his. He had lost his way, lost the stag.
He touched the stone wall and felt along it and turned up a tunnel, silently.
He stopped again. He was unnerved by an essing sound that followed him. It had not been there before, but it was now: sssSSSSsss. His neck was a cold sweat. He turned to get away from it. Again it was at his heels. Something grabbed his ankle and he shouted out. He wrenched his leg away, turned, ran, crashed into a wall. The sharp grip came again from behind, and he flung his arms behind him wildly, slapping it. Now it leapt upon his back and held him until he stopped yelling.
A voice whispered in his ear, “Are you the tatu man?”
Chaunce nodded.
A lamp went on. “I am Sitembile. I am here to guard your back.”
“Guard it or break it?” Chaunce said, shielding his eyes from her light. She got down and slung her bow over her shoulder. She was a mere kelp. “Did you make that sound? That hissing?”
Sitembile’s eyes darted down at her feet, where a red asp was stretched around a curve in the tunnel, its head raised and bobbing. The tufuga jumped on the wall and clung by his fingers to a tiny outcrop of granite.
Sitembile shrugged. “I’d like to tell you he’s more afraid of you than you are of him, but that would be a lie.”
Sacrifice
“THIS IS THE PART OF THE TALE,” Errol said, straining for breath in the wet space in the rock, “where I should be overjoyed to find that my long-lost brother has arrived to open the door of my tomb. You have to admit this is awkward. Here you were going to devour me, and now you find I am related. What are the manners for this?”
Grunts and shifting.
Errol yelled, “Say something! At least keep me company. Tell me how all of this happened to you. To me.”
Fenn must have set his hand on the bolt. Errol heard the latch move. “Simple,” said Fenn. “Our mother fell in love with an apprentice ironsmith.”
“Simple,” said Errol.
“Margaret was rising. People warned her away from him, but you know how that goes. They were bound and dropped before she realized he had not come from anywhere. He was something other than human. Perhaps your sharp teeth have come in as mine did, or your appetite for flesh.”
“I don’t have that.”
“Rip didn’t inherit it either. Like his mother, he eats from the table. But if he doesn’t wash, he reeks of hides. You have that same aroma.”
“No. It is a stag you’re smelling. I am not the son of Utlag,” said Errol.
Fenn paused. “You have a fetch? Can you look in a mirror?”
“Yes.”
“You’re lucky.”
“Everyone keeps telling me that,” said Errol. “See me here, drowning three feet from my brother who plans to eat me? There’s luck for you. Worse, my plan has been thwarted.”
They both heard the sound of footfalls in the tunnel and the voice of another man, echoing off the walls.
Errol said, “Fenn?” but there was no answer. Errol could see the flickering light of his brother’s lamp through the barred window. He wanted to yell out, to be freed. But he was aware that Fenn was hungry, and he feared for whoever was coming down the tunnel. The man called out, “I am in the wrong shaft of this foul place,” and turned to go, when Errol cried out, “I am here! Save me!” He listened. There was only the dripping.
“Where?” the man asked. The word did not have time to echo before Errol heard a scuffle, a scream, and frantic chase. It was Pollux, the henchman. When it was over, Errol heard Fenn outside of his door, sobbing.
“Go on,” said Fenn.
Errol swallowed and said from a dry throat, “I can’t remember what I was saying.”
“You had some sort of plan.”
Errol moaned. This was too hard. “My plan depended on too many things. On living, for one thing. And on Rip, who, if he is alive, is too much a coward to do what is required.”
“You could be kinder to him.”
Errol laughed. “Does that seem at all ironic to you?”
“I know what it is to be human. Half, half. In that fraction is my dilemma. Rip has cared for me all these years, knowing I have no fetch in my chest. I am a monster. His ribs are empty as well. He fears that truth more than he fears death itself.”
“He is nothing but fear.”
“This is how I know you are fully human: You are fully the judge. Tell me the plan you had.”
It took only a few sentences to lay out the whole idea, for it was a simple one, juvenile really. When he was done, Errol laid his head back in the water.
“And what would you do with the iron spikes, in the end?” said Fenn.
“Destroy them.”
“And have you given some thought to what your plan would mean for Rip?”
“Obviously he and you both would be free of Utlag.”
“I’m afraid it could be more complicated than that.”
“Afraid?” It was a strange idea, that such a monster could be afraid. “I have a question for you now. Were you afraid, to be dropped?”
“Of course.”
“I was never so afraid in my life. I broke my ribs,” said Errol.
“You chose the right line, then.”
“How else would I be here?”
“I did not.”
Errol inhaled fast. “What?”
“What hurt more was that the regnat said he was dropping me for our mother’s sake. Rip had done nothing. Gut runs. That was all. I was becoming my father.”
“Mam grieves, still,” Errol said.
Fenn paused. “No.”
“She was never the same after it. But how did you survive the drop?”
“Look at me,” said Fenn, striking the flint again and putting his face to the vent. Errol gasped. “Do you call this surviving? Destroy the spikes. Destroy Banhus-theof. No one should be playing with the irfelaf. Make this half-life worth something.” The flint light went out and Errol heard Fenn shuffling down the tunnel.
Encrypted
LET ME TAKE STOCK NOW, for even I have forgotten where I have left all the players in this tale. The main actors are offstage: two black-iron knotting spikes. Divided. One lies in silence in the belly of a crow on the roof of Thebes; the other, in a pile of test arrows at Fremantle.
Errol Thebes waits deep in the earth, entombed alive among the dead in a chamber filli
ng with water. His fylgia, the great stag Eikthyrnir, has been dragged into the arena where his nightmare awaits. The tufuga is trying to find the stag before it is too late, but he has no idea what he or Sitembile can do to stop what is happening.
Rip waits, languishing in a cell, afraid to be cast in the dark with the black-iron spikes, which will crack open his ribs and find nothing but an empty bone house.
The apothecarist is with the kelp Arthur, hoping the second dose of quinine and artemisia will take effect.
Jago, lacking his fetch, is wandering the streets alone, well aware that a battle is about to begin and that he has no real part. His allegiances are to himself.
The abbot, the fleet commander, and the regnat are in the abbot’s quarters. The fleet is waiting to leave.
Utlag is running to the tombs. It has only just occurred to him that he had sent Fenn to devour the one player who knows where the iron spikes are.
Dagmar is digging clams in the mud with her wolves.
Terpsichore is packing.
Jamila Foundling is ransacking the closets of Thebes.
* * *
—
Errol heard the vent slide open. The water was high.
“You lie,” Utlag said.
“If you want the spikes, you’ll have to listen to me,” he said hurriedly. “We’ll need Rip.”
Utlag spat, “Rip is in the pits of gaol, Errol Thebes.”
“If he dies, you and I will have to knit all our toques with one needle.”
Utlag held up the lantern. “You lie.”
Errol closed his eyes. He was unaccustomed to lying. “Rip didn’t trust me with both the spikes, when we brought them in from the street. He said I was an arrogant line-runner. He took one. I kept one. Go to him first. He’ll say he doesn’t know where it is. You can understand why. He doesn’t want his ribs broken. He’ll carry on about it and yell and lie. He’ll tell you he threw it away. But he knows. Tell him for me that he can rot in hel if he doesn’t give you the spike. No. Wait. Tell him he can go to the crow.” Errol paused. “It’s an expression from Homer’s tongue.” Errol was confident Utlag would deliver his message if he soaked it in venom. “I do, actually, have one last question.
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