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.