DUTTON BOOKS
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York
First published in the United States of America by Dutton Books,
an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2021
Text copyright © 2021 by Lynne Bertrand
Map art copyright © 2021 by Francesca Baerald
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Ebook ISBN 9780525555339
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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Cover art © 2020 by AJ Frena
Cover design by Kristin Boyle
pid_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0
For Hans
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Ex Libris
Map
Elements of the Clock and Calendar
The Guild Towers of Gallia District and Their Exports
Invocation of the Muse
Part I
A Gut Run
Stolen Goods
Caput Mortuum
Sacked
A Felon
A Night Visit
Tatu
An Odd Assignment
Coracles
Beklemek
Body Count
Six Lines
Ice
A Conjuror
Ships
An Odd Remedy
Exports
A Girl
Al-Razi
An Odd Mistake
Gea
Préférerais Tu
Part II
Relics
Falling
The Twig
Purgament
The Shard
Stillness
The Remains
A Rescue
The Baidaq
Birth-Night
The Three of Spades
The River
The Khazarite’s Journal
A Pub Squall
High Poetry
Fylgia
Spoke
Utlag
The Sewers
The Attarh
The Riverbank Yurt
Wolf Work
In the Gutters
A Thief
Seen
A Name
Five Hundred Pages
Sallanen
Gaol
Iosal
A Going-Story
The Muse
No Reflection
A Guest
The Bluebird
Banhus-Theof
Collateral
A Mis-Telling
Tangled
Empty-Handed
Rising
Ready
Border Crossing
Corrections
Darkness
A Ghost
Sunrise
Master Guilder
Bound
The Apothecary
A Contract
A Stranger
Knotwork
Waiting
Mine
A Question
Mercy
Mirrors
Gallus
Burning
Farewell
Mearc-Stapa
Sonhos
The Prize
Brother Enemies
The Small Uurs
Chicken Drama
Help
By a Thread
A Delivery
An Odd Letter
Part IV
Regrets
Parting
The Gauntlet
Unready
More Poetry
Suspicions
Cold Questions
A Fool
Math
Half Brother
Lost
Sacrifice
Encrypted
The Messenger
The Crow
Unforgotten
Irfelaf
Fur
A Roof Master
The Vault
Undone
Done
Predator
An Army
Rest in Peace
Vitriol
The Double
Fright
In the Balance
A High Meeting
In a Tent
Dawn
Gauntless
One Relic
Part V
The Streetcat
Second Sight
Scars
Familiars
A Binding
An Assembly
She
The Guildmaster
Paperwork
Opening Lines
Epilogue
Ex Libris Lb
Acknowledgments
About the Author
EX LIBRIS
Errol Thebes
ELEMENTS OF THE CLOCK AND CALENDAR
THE BELLS OF THE DAY
NOCTIS: MIDNIGHT
FESTIVUM: ONE O’CLOCK
SOMNIUM: TWO
CRUSTUM: THREE
PURGAMENTUM: FOUR
EPISTOLA: FIVE
PERFECTUM: SIX
ERRATUM: SEVEN
GRANUM: EIGHT
SANGUIS: NINE
SUDORE: TEN
LACRIMAE: ELEVEN
MERIDIANUS: NOON
LIBRI: ONE
TEXO: TWO
PARIO: THREE
EFFIO: FOUR
FORCTIS: FIVE
ANIMO: SIX
RADIX: SEVEN
JOCUS: EIGHT
DULCIBUS: NINE
TUMULTUS: TEN
IN SACCI: ELEVEN
THE DAYS OF THE WEEK
IDEM 1 • IDEM 2 • IDEM 3 • IDEM 4 • IDEM 5 • IDEM 6 • IDEM 7
THE MONTHS OF THE YEAR
WINTER
BOREAL
RHAGFYR
HORNUNG
SPRING
FAOL
HLYDA
ZEPHYR
SUMMER
PIOGGIA
LANGESONNE
GAMAN
AUTUMN
SHAMAL
MISTRAL
GANSO
THE GUILD TOWERS OF GALLIA DIST
RICT
AND THEIR EXPORTS
ALBACETE
NAVAJAS
ANTWERP
LACE
ARAWAK
HAMACS
ASHLEY
DITTY BAGS
ASTRA
ASTROLABES
ATTARH
ATTARH
BAMAKO
DOHOLS
BIAN PAO
FIREWORKS
BYLG
BELLOWS
CATALHOYUK
MAPS
CHAKRA
WHEELS
COLOPHON
SPINDLES
CUBIT
WEIGHTS & MEASURES
DANNEBROG
VEXILLA
DRAGEOIRS
PLANETS
FLANDERS
DAMASK
FULCRUM
BALANCES
GALLIA
BARRELS
GAMIN
LOCKS
GENOA
BOBBINS
GHENT
WOOL FELT
HAYO
FLAILS
IBERIA
VIHUELAS
KAZBEK
BURKAS
KOUTI
CHESTS
LASCAUX
FLY-LINES, ROPE, RIGGING
MYNWY
MONMOUTHS
PARAMOUDRA
FLINTS
PAZYRYK
CARPETS
PERLEW
FISHING NETS
PHRYGIA
TOQUES
PIKOR
GRAIN SACKS
PIPS
DICE
PLINY
BESTIARIES
PYTHAGORAS
FORMULAE
QUMRAM
QUILL INK
RAEPTEEK
BEADS
SEGLOM
SAILCLOTH
SHOU
INCENSE
SINDH
BUTTONS
STRAEL
FLETCHERY
SUANPAN
ABACUSES
TALLOW
CANDLES
TANG
PLAYING CARDS
TEIFI
CORACLES
THEBES
KNOTTING SPIKES
TOKMAK
KNOBS
TSUCHI-KING
CRICKET ROOMS
TYRIA
DYES
VOZOK
SLEDGES
WILGIA
WILLOW BASKETS
YARIM TEPE
KILNWORK
Invocation of the Muse
I DON’T DREAM and never have. I hardly sleep. Lately I bide the nights by choosing names for each ship in a vast fleet. The names come to me from what sky I can see through a square cut in the roof of my tent. Taygete, Ye-Ji, Bellatrix, Al-Uqdah. I was at work on this list, long after noctis on the thirteenth of Rhagfyr, with a quill in hand and my head lamp dimly lit. An east wind harassed the tower roofs and strained the tent flaps and tethers. One of the bog-pot doors must have pulled off its hinge and was banging against the jamb. Odd Thebes lay next to me, lost in sleep.
“What was that?” I said.
“What was what?” he mumbled into his pillow.
“Someone just called for you.”
“’Tis naught.” He rolled away from me. “Who would be out in this larceny wind? No one.”
I pulled wools and a tunic from the heap of our clothes and slipped out onto the roof. The bucket fires were cold and the iron tower was slick with ice underfoot. I stood at the edge.
A minute passed before someone called again the bard’s name: “Odd Thebes.” I shone my lamp into the abyss. Twenty feet out and ten down, on the plank between my guild tower, Lascaux, and our neighbor Gallia, sat a runner so ragged I barely knew him.
“The bard ignores me and sends a mere muse,” he called, squinting into my light through a billow of steam. I had to wipe my hands of sudden sweat, for I had never seen a plank so deeply bowed as this one, certainly not under the weight of one runner.
“The outlaw returns,” I called back.
A gust of wind dispelled the steam, and now I could see that the weight bearing down on the plank was not merely the runner’s but also that of the colossal beast upon which he sat.
“What is that?” I said.
The runner studied the animal beneath him, as though he was as surprised as I was to find it there. It was a hoofed creature, easily the weight of seven guilders, umber-furred and broad in the chest, with a pair of branches jutting from the sides of its head and more of that steam huffing from velvet nostrils.
“That,” he said, “is another. A nother.” He was struggling. “An other.” The mere emphasis on the word caused the plank to tremble. In one hand he held a pair of sticks—tamping rods or lapidary files, I thought, or marlinespikes. With the other hand he removed a flask from his pocket, then uncorked it with his teeth and spit the cork into the abyss. “Tell me something,” he said, taking an unsteady swig. “Given the choice, would you rather be Sisyphus or Theseus?”
“It’s the middle of the night,” I said.
“Would you prefer to drown in the hands of a fiend or be devoured alive?”
“That depends. Are we out of arsenic?”
“I’m asking a real question. What would you do, if you were me, the irfelaf son of a high-ranking guildmaster, in a city quarantined by fear?”
“I would think twice before I filled my head with whiskey over a mile-high abyss,” I said. “On the back of a sheep on an ice-rimed plank. And insulted the only help within earshot.”
“It’s a stag,” he said.
Something moved at the edge of my lamplight. The runner and I both turned to look. A skin-and-bones foundling crouched at the edge of Gallia.
The runner flinched and blurted something in his ancient guild tongue and, to my horror, hurled the sticks at the foundling. He may as well have dropped a whole new stag onto the stressed plank. The cedar split with a sickening crack. The stag scrambled for purchase in a spray of splinters and ice but slid backward, with the runner gripping its fur. They fell into the abyss.
Then? Then. That foundling leapt out onto what remained of the plank and ran toward me. Did it not see the splintered end? The nothing air? It dove straight down, grasping at the darkness.
From inside my tent the bard called out, “What was that?”
“Um—”
There came a shift in the column of air between the towers, and I stepped back from the edge for what came next.
* * *
—
This isn’t my tale, and I won’t be accused of thieving it from the bard. But as I have a script of my own, I’ll tell this bit more. I kept a wad of that umber fur, and a feather, too. I’m sure there are cities in the world beyond our wall where, every day, guilders find such relics caught on a fence or blowing about in the street and can’t even bother to pick them up, common as the beasts are who wear them. But here, in towers devoid of animals of any kind, fur and feathers are the irfelaf, “all that remains.” I keep them in my tellensac. For similar reasons I name a fleet of ships I do not own to sail on oceans I have never seen.
PART I
A Gut Run
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.)