BE WARNED. A fragrance rises from this ink. The recipe is equal parts blood, gall, sewage, tears, the spit of a dying bard, and the soot from a sputtering head lamp. This day has not gone well.
Homer would never find himself here, squatting on a ledge in an earthen shaft, scratching plot on a scab of parchment with a quill yanked from a chicken’s ass. I’m glad for him. Let him ply his trade on the other side of the wall. Homer, Ovid, Virgil. They’re all there, no doubt barding together around a blazing fire, unfurling high tales of heroes and Olympians. I’m sure they have no trouble keeping a safe distance from their own plots. So glad for them. I fling all my good wishes to them from my pit. However, for any tales that occur on this side of the wall and that involve a shafted bard, there is Odd Thebes. Despite all of my best efforts, I am he.
The scratches of this plot begin with a game of cards, a felony theft, and a pair of missing pelts on the roof of Thebes. It was the fifth of Ganso.
Five of us were well into a round of maw in Talwyn’s tent when our roof master, Marek Thebes, called us for body count. I abandoned a perfect hand to grope my way across the flat expanse of our roof in the cloud that had lain thick as a kitchen sponge on us and stinking of fish all week. Our clothes were sopped. I could see nothing but white—not the yurt, or the earth below us, not one of the 999 other guild towers of our city, not even the snot dripping off my nose.
Marek paced inside the yurt. He felt an evil lack. Felt it in his teeth, he said. We counted ourselves off and found his teeth to be correct. There were merely fifteen of us. The two who were missing were pelts from a group who had come up that morning. Marek dispatched us to find them.
New runners always go missing. How can anything prepare them for that first full day on a tower roof? And yet there are so few places to hide. On Thebes: seventeen tents, seventeen trunks, a common yurt, a tent kitchen, and the bogs. It’s tempting, in the first days, to go down, to find permanent relief from the vast, too-beautiful sky in the grim tedium of the guild tower below. I felt my way to the grate and woke the hatch-guilder beneath it with a jab.
“Two runners gone!” I yelled. “Before the tufuga could even mark them. Did they bribe their way home?”
“That’s a dark question to wake me with,” he growled, scratching his nethers. “Look for yourself! The hatch is locked. And no pimple-faced, homesick runners paid me to slip home through it. It’s a misdemeanor for you runners to come home. You’d know that as well as any.”
(Actually what he said was “Foulen darky, wakken en gulder. Luket ye. Atchis locked, en naught puss-scabben geld-seck roonies fived my to slip mam-home twanen the bares. ’Tis a foul crimm for en of ye te mam-home roon. En ye nown it verily, Odd Thebes, bester than te rest, as ye’v trine it for your own salf thryce that once’t yar.” But if I laid out every actor’s mother tongue, every guild’s language, this quill will fray before a plot rises.)
The idea of two gone runners conjured squalls in our chests. We felt the city’s restless quarantine, her lack of a place on any map or calendar. Most of all—
“It’s a long way down,” said Ping Thebes, our cook. We were back in the yurt. Marek narrowed his eyes, but Ping shrugged. “I’m just saying what you’re all thinking.”
Marek paced again. “Either they pulled an Icarus or they’re out gut-running and I’ll murder them myself.”
Someone whispered, “It’s the gut run.”
Marek turned to stare at Dragomir, who had come up with the two who were missing.
“The other pelts in the guild dared us to make a gut run on our first day,” Dragomir said. At fifteen times around the sun, he was a human-skin map of wens, grease ponds, and tufts. Thus, a pelt. Marek’s stare unnerved him and he blurted, “A gut run is a prank, uh, an attempt to sort of acquire an object of local value from another guild house to prove one has the, say, courage to run the fly-lines.”
A muscle twitched under the stubble of Marek’s close-cut beard. “I am aware of the meaning of ‘gut run.’”
“Of course. Yes.” Dragomir reddened.
“Why didn’t you go with them?” Marek said.
The question took Dragomir off guard, as gut runs were illegal. “I, uh, fear heights,” he fumbled.
“I see,” said Marek. He glanced out the door of the yurt into the cloud. Everything out there was high. “It’s not the drop you should fear, Dragomir. It’s me.”
“I do fear you.”
Marek sucked his teeth. “Run the lines,” he said. “Find them.”
“Me?” squeaked Dragomir. “But I have yet to run even one line—”
Marek circled the fire, past Dragomir, past Ping, past my cousin Errol. He stopped at me.
“Odd Thebes. Take the pelt. Go find what’s left of his friends.”
I flinched. “Why me? We can’t find a guild tower in this cloud, never mind two scrawny pelts. Also I had a winning hand—”
Marek hissed in my ear, “I wonder how many aces of hearts there are supposed to be in one deck of cards. Shall we find the answer under your toque?”
Dragomir and I stood at the edge of Thebes, our head lamps pulsing in the cloud.
He was silent. All he knew of life so far was the inside of a guild tower. Work, sleep, work. He was pale from the lack of sun. Bored from lack of plot. In guild life a bit of salt in your soup constituted a festival. A rumor on any subject from the roofs overhead kept you going for months. By the time Dragomir had rounded the sun, say, fourteen times, all he could think about was climbing through the hole in the tower roof, seeing that sun for himself. Running the infinite web of planks, ladders, masts, and flies that glistened in it. Am I going? Until today, an iron roof kept him down. And an iron wall pens us all in. We are a remnant civilization of a thousand locked towers striving to produce magnificent wares so a single fleet of ships can come once a year and take them—
“Where is the fly-line?” said Dragomir, waving his hand in the air. “I cannot feel it.”
“Here.” I guided his hand to the thread stretched over our heads and anchored securely to a mast behind us. Its other end was similarly connected to a mast on the tower to our east.
“Moth spit,” Dragomir whispered.
Moth spit, rigging, flies. We had a long list of nicknames for the lines. The best was fet-makkers. Faith makers. Stand at any edge and fling a rag over a fly as thin as the line you could draw with a quill, and step off into the abyss. Never again would fet be a theory.
“I can’t do this,” Dragomir gasped.
“That fly is strong enough to carry you and your supper across the abyss. Even if your supper is a two-ton wheel of cheese.”
“Abyss? Could we just call it ‘the area in between’?”
“Abyss. Abyss. Abyss. Get used to it.”
Through the cloud I could hear him fumbling with his pack. I pushed his hands away and reached inside the pack.
“Looking for this?” I said, holding two clips and a reel of line. “Safest thing you own. Hook the red clip to your pack and the green one to the fly. Eight strata of line and never will it snap.”
“You’re sure?” said Dragomir, his voice quavering.
“Aye. That’s why we call this your mam-line. The mam will never, ever let you fall.” I pushed the red clip onto his finger like a ring and yanked it off. The bearings in it closed fast and pinched him hard. The emergency stop. He yelped. “See? Or you can set the brakes yourself, and the line length, with these levers—” He moved before I could hurt him again. “Your mam wrote to us, Dragomir. She wants you to go slow.”
“She did?” One part surprise, one part embarrassment.
“No. Of course she didn’t. Yes she did.”
“I’m confused.”
I sighed. “Forget your mam, Dragomir. Forget your da and all your guild toys and the fifteen-year nap you’ve had in the tower. Today is the first day of your life!” I was stuffing the clips and the mam-line back into his pack. He was trying to dig them back out. “Answer me: Do you want to go fast or not?” He shrugged. “Yes, you do. You didn’t come to the roofs to be safe. All you need”—I reached into his pack again—“is this.” Now I was holding a yard-long lanyard of greased silk, with a Turk’s head knot at each end. The runner’s rag. “This is fast. Just throw this over the fly and go.”
“How far down is the drop here?”
“Fifty feet. Fifty-one, tops.”
“It’s a mile. I heard it’s a mile down.”
“Just a rumor. Anyway, after fifty feet, how could it matter? Don’t ever look down.”
“I’m going to die,” he whispered.
“You’re definitely going to die. You’re going to die when you’re an old, skinny guilder with a bound-wife and so many worthless kelps you run out of names for them. Did you knock the crow for luck?”
“Aye. Thrice.”
“So you won’t die today. Let’s go find your idiot friends.”
I tossed my rag over the line, caught it in the same hand, made a bow and flourish to Dragomir with the other, and dropped off the edge. Thirty yards through the cloud I landed on the roof of Catalhoyuk with a skid. I heard Dragomir gasp and drop behind me. Silence. For a moment I thought I lost him, but he barreled into me, the color of fear. There was no going back now for him, not without running a line or walking a plank. He was one of us.
We were sitting on the edge of Raepteek, and Dragomir was just saying we ought to be looking for his friends instead of stopping to eat cheese, when a light cracked from the direction of Thebes and the cloud lit up around us.
“A flare?!” he cried, while I pried him off my arm. “Wait! Who found them? We were supposed to find them!”
I licked my fingers. “Five uurs says it was Errol Thebes.”
“Ten!” he said. “Ten uurs says it wasn’t! Marek sent us!”
“If you insist.” I shrugged. “Ten uurs. I’ll go to twenty, if you have it.”
Marek had dispatched Errol before Dragomir and I had even left the edge of Thebes. Of course he had. Everyone knew he would. And within ten minutes Errol had found the missing pelts. Or, rather, he had run into their taut mam-lines, pinched on the fly between Ghent and Pliny.
The kelps in Thebes House used to whisper the names of heroes when Errol Thebes passed them in the halls of the tower. Achilles. Parsival. Jack. Most often, Bee Wolf. They were referring to Beowulf, the warrior in that story we have from the other side of the wall: broad in the face and chest, and unkempt, with long, dark red hair. Whenever I caught the kelps carrying on about this, I reprimanded them, for there was no such description in the text. But they just touched Errol with their cold little fingers and laughed at me and whispered, ’Tis him.
Errol plucked both mam-lines. No response. He pulled out his own mam, clipped it to the fly, pinched the brake. Anyone could see the problem. Those two runners had leapt from Ghent House, with a sloped fly across an eighty-foot-wide abyss to Pliny. Cold fell while they were midair, and the cloud rimed on the line. They forgot everything they knew about braking on ice and slammed into Pliny like twin hams. They were tossed backward, up the fly, bragen ofer earsas, as my mother would say. They dropped their rags. Their green clips gripped the line. But they lost control of the reds, and five thousand feet above the street, they spun off the reels. Eight strata down they slammed the end of their lines. The common term for a drop like that is a “screamer.” Roughly, they’d been hanging four uurs in a frozen sky.
Errol yanked the first line, setting himself and everything else twanging on the fly. From far below him in the cloud came panicked begging. He wound the line around his belt to haul up the human luggage on the end of it.
This runner was a thin pelt, his face frozen in a weird grin. His chest was iced in his own heave, his leggings in piss. When he spoke, the standard greeting of the roofs came off his blue lips in a spray of spit: “SSSSsssstay high.”
“High,” returned Errol, man of many words. “I’m going to let go of you now and you’ll slip down the fly and wait at the edge of Pliny.” But the runner would have none of that. He clung to Errol, too terrified of life, death, and everything in between, to let go. “We’ll have to leave your friend down there if you don’t let go of me,” Errol said. The runner shook his head no. Errol said, “All right. We’ll do it your way.” The runner closed his eyes in relief.
I could have told him closing his eyes around Errol Thebes was a mistake. Errol curled a fast fist and threw a punch. There was a crack and the runner’s eyes took a brief tour of the inside of his skull and his body sagged. Errol said, “Wait here.”
The second body came up blue-black and motionless with a cold, hard jugular. Errol strapped the body to his back and cut the mam-line from the fly. As he was adjusting the dead weight, he heard a grinding sound behind him. The first runner had come to and was gnawing his own mam-line between his teeth.
“If that breaks, you’ll drop!” Errol shouted at him.
“I can stand on the cloud,” the runner said, continuing to gnaw. “Watch!”
“Stop! Your brain is rimed!” But there was a sickening pop of teeth as the line snapped, and the pelt disappeared, spiraling down into the cloud.
The great bee wolf clenched his fist around his own green clip and slashed the fly half a foot from where it pinched. If the clip could just hold him to the severed fly, he could dig that runner out of a cloud while they both were falling. Chances were none in a million.
Errol flipped upside down, flailing at the air for any piece of that free-falling runner. The severed fly was pulling him sideways toward Pliny. The dead pelt was shifting maniacally on his back. A sky full of nothing. More nothing. And then? A thread slipped past his cheek, fine as a strand of his own hair. Errol grabbed it, wound it around his hand, and turned to take the force of the tower.
The three of them crashed against the south wall of Pliny: Errol, the dead runner, and the live one. The green clip on the severed fly-line blew into pieces and they slid down the side of the tower, tethered now to nothing but each other. For two strata they fell. Three, five. They were coming down out of the cloud, and Errol could see the full length of Pliny and the earth a mile down. His elbow slammed against a knob of some kind and he grabbed it and they all came to a fright stop. Dangling. Errol heaved the live runner up and hung him by a loop on his pack on the knob—the heel of an iron lizard with the legs and mane of a lion. Such was the humor of the bestiary guild.
Errol’s right hand was bloody. The fingers of the left had come out of their knuckle sockets. He put the hand between his knees and twisted hard to snap his joints together.
“You’re inthane,” said the runner, lisping through broken teeth. His eyes flitted to the thick human form tied to Errol’s back. “I only wanted a gut run. I never thought Seppo would—”
“Die?” supplied Errol.
“They’ll drop me for that, won’t they?”
“If dropping you is the right thing, let’s get back to Thebes and face it.” For reasons I cannot even now explain, this terrifying statement calmed the pelt. They climbed the side of Pliny, over the iron herd that adorns the tower from which animal forms and disguises are exported, and flung themselves onto the roof.
When the bee wolf and his pelts arrived at Thebes, he shot off that flare from the yurt. Dragomir and I came in on the flies to do absolutely nothing. And I was twenty uurs richer. I never lost, betting on my cousin.