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 the 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.”