THE PHOENIX THIEF - Chapter Two

All day long Kilter hurried along the rooftops of Istravol. At first he tried following the two Watchmen who’d taken the feather, in hope that perhaps, somehow, he could get it back. But shortly after reaching the labor triad of the city he had to let them go, the streets having filled with warehouse workers on midday break. Any of them could have noticed Kilter on the rooftops and pointed him out to the nearest Sentry at a street corner – it had happened before, and Kilter didn’t want to repeat the ordeal of escaping them. Especially not today.
Creeping back to the solitude of the lower city, he sat down behind a chimneystack, put his head on his drawn up knees, and didn’t move for a long while.
What he was to do, how he was to tell Dmal that he’d let the Watchmen get the feather, he didn’t know. Dmal would gaze at him with those dark eyes of his, but not say a single word, and Kilter knew he wouldn’t be able to bear it. Just thinking about it made him want to curl up into a little ball.
So he didn’t think about it. He shoved it from his mind, willing himself to ignore the ache settling heavy and constricting on his shoulders and to face instead the other problems he’d made for himself that day.
He’d have to relocate his workroom. Drawing those two Sentries away was only a temporary protection for it, and it wouldn’t be long before they went at the hatchway door with crowbars, again. But it was too dangerous to go back there so soon. For the time being, he would have to stay hidden. Focusing on this, Kilter managed to get through the day, pushing away the pangs that jabbed him whenever he remembered Dmal and the feather.
A short distance away from Dmal’s tower, across the roofs of three boarding houses and a storehouse was a storage shed, in the foundation of which was one of Kilter’s other ‘nests’. All the canvas and leather he managed to sneak from cast-aside pieces in the trash were kept there. He carried several bundles from that nest, taking a different route back to Dmal’s tower every time, then scavenged through the middle triad garbage to find enough food to last him a few days. Chestnuts were good, yes, but one got tired of them quickly.
He even brought wood and metal bits from the scrapyard by the gates leading to the cropland. This took the longest, as one of the biweekly deliveries of food through the gates was happening, and Inquisitor Watchmen were everywhere, inspecting every wagonload with their extra-long truncheons and scenthounds and sending the yellow-scarfed Messengers under their command back and forth constantly. The sun was nearly finished with its westward arc by the time he was finished bringing building supplies to the tower and was able to fetch a bundle of clothes he’d hidden under a flight of stairs outside of Warehouse Seven.
Panting, he pulled the bundle of clothes through the broken window after himself, trudged down the stairs, and set the bundle beside the rest of his gathered goods. They were piled on the side of the tower opposite where Dmal lay nearby his nearly dead coals, still sleeping as a rolled up ball of patched cloth. The light seeping through the cracks and scattering bits of multi-colored flecks on the walls was now red, as if an exceptionally large piece of broken tinted glass had been hung from the sky itself, over the setting sun. Out in the city, the machinery of the warehouses still rattled and thundered, but Kilter knew they would soon cease and the streets fill with workers returning home. He had little time to find a good place to wait for night to fall before he’d risk being noticed.
For a moment he stood, staring at softly snoring Dmal, then shook his head and turned away. He blinked at the blurriness in his eyes as he knelt beside his heap of supplies, and glanced around at the walls and roof.
The tower was so unlike his workroom. There, the wide faces of the clock poured in broad streams of light and the shafts higher up, where the bells were located, always supplied fresh air. Here in the tower, if Kilter stayed inside too long, the crumbling walls seemed simply waiting to fall in on his head.
It’d be nice if they did fall in. Kilter tugged apart the bundle of clothes and shrugged into a washed-out blue coat. It was missing a sleeve, but it was still warm. Then you could see the sky through the roof.
Sky.
That was one of the words Dmal had taught him when he was little that Kilter liked best. It was pleasing when he spoke it out loud, such a small, short sound for something bigger and beyond the meaning of any other words he knew. And unlike the other meanings of the words Kilter knew for his surroundings – city, street, lamp, warehouse – the sky changed.
Kilter picked up his satchel and began climbing up the stairs again, the weight of the notebook thumping against his hip.
Maybe you’ll see the lights again tonight. He began taking the steps two at a time, eager for even the smallest bright spot in that horrible day. You won’t be late for them. They’re not like the sun going down. It’s easy to miss that.
Reaching the rooftop again, Kilter stretched out his arms, welcoming the sudden rush of the evening wind. It tossed his hair from his forehead, and he closed his eyes. The wind brought only smells of grease and smoke, and then louder and clearer the clanking and banging of metal, but he didn’t care. He trembled inside, somewhere small in his chest, and his lips twitched up at the corners.
Wind. Good. The clouds will clear.
A shrill shriek from across the city, the whistle calling the end of the day’s labor, shook Kilter from his thoughts. Not comfortable on top of the tower after what had happened there that day, he quickly scrambled over to the sloping tiles of a nearby roof. Climbing behind the cover of a row of chimneys, he sat and stared up at the sky. Now he had nothing to do but wait.
The indistinct hum of voices and thump of feet against cobbles filled the air as the warehouse workers poured into the streets. Above in the sky, the clouds shifted in the wind, and the light faded faster and faster. Before it was too dark for Kilter to see down into the streets, all the workers and their families had withdrawn into the boarding houses, taking the noise and light with them. The individual scents of cooking fires in countless little stoves and fireplaces across the Labor and Lower triads pushed back the industrial smoke, and everything outside fell into cold stillness.  
Kilter rubbed his numbing hands and nose. Then he reached into his satchel and drew out a little metal brazier much like Dmal’s down in the tower, only holding a rag he had rubbed well with a piece of squishy white waxiness from off a piece of meat. He foraged in his satchel again and brought out a hinged, jointed-together piece of metal. What it was, he wasn’t sure. Dmal had given it to him, telling him it would be useful, but only recently had he discovered its power.  
Poising the metal object over the rag brazier in his left hand, he flicked the jointed part backwards quickly. A dart of light sprung up off the metal, like a bit of escaped sunbeam. Kilter repeated this action several times, then one of the bits of light landed on the rag, and a flare of fire nibbled, pale blue, at the frayed edge of the makeshift candle.
With his hands sheltering it from the wind, Kilter coaxed the little flame higher, then crossed his legs and leaned over the brazier, the light shining on his cold-reddened nose and cheeks. The warmth was welcome and comforting. But it also reminded him of the lost feather, and frowned down at his gloved hands, wiggling his fingers to feel the leather rub against them.
They’re useless. People don’t stare when you wear them, but… they don’t really help.
They didn’t help you catch the feather.
In a sudden swell of anger he tore the gloves off and held his hands, bare for the first time that day, up before him. Against the light of the little flame, the silhouette of his left hand looked like anybody else’s. But his right was another matter.
In the flame’s flickering light, the metal bands fastened around his right palm and wrist gleamed as if liquid. They held secure a stub of wood where Kilter’s thumb should have been, and only a smooth, slight bump was left of the finger that would have been next to it. Kilter flexed the hand, frustrated with the way the wooden thumb remained motionless while his three remaining fingers curved and straightened obediently.
There were scars, too. They ran from the tips of what fingers he had left and halfway up his right arm, some patchy like Dmal’s, others pale, ragged-edged lines. But they didn’t hurt anymore, just tingled when the temperature changed suddenly, or ached if he used his arm too much. But there were no words he knew to give what had happened to his hand meaning, just as he had no names (except for feather – but no, he mustn’t think of that) to give the things in his notebook. This was just the way he was, and he had accepted it because he had to, just as he had accepted that he had to eat from the garbage and that the Watchmen did not like him. It was all he knew.
His hand had been missing pieces for as long as he could remember, since when it took him more steps to cross the streets, and when he stood next to Dmal his eyes weren’t much higher than the man’s knees. He’d woken up in the middle of an alley in the dark, his head ringing and his body aching. What was left of his bleeding hand had been heavy and hot as molten lead. His arm had been bent wrong, as well, and he couldn’t get his legs to hold him up.
But the main thing Kilter remembered of that night was Dmal. He remembered the man’s voice rising and falling gently, and the gritty smell of smoke clinging to his clothes. There had been a house, and the thought of it always brought up two other faces aside from the old man’s – those of two women, one old, and one young. The younger face had been wet with tears, though it was Kilter who felt the most pain when she cried, but the older one he recalled more clearly. Dmal had disappeared after Kilter was in the house, but she had stayed. Kilter had seen her often as he lay on a little bunk, wavering between painful consciousness and unsteady sleep. How long he lay there, he didn’t know.
There were many sharp, bitter smells, and lots of wet, dripping clothes and clouds of steam. The woman would pet Kilter’s head and feed him soup. Kilter didn’t remember much more about her, except that she looked as wrinkled as some of the fruit he sometimes found in the garbage, and she spoke to him in soft tones, all about things going on outside: fires, and running men, and shouting, her daughter, and noise like thunder. ‘Bad’, she called those things. But ‘poor off-kilter boy’, that’s what she’d called him.
Then one day, when Kilter’s hand still smarted when he moved it, a man had come, accompanied by the first Watchmen Kilter remembered seeing. He was tall, and wore a long coat and little wire and glass things over his eyes that reflected back the light, so you couldn’t see where he was looking. He’d grabbed Kilter’s forearm, and studied Kilter’s maimed hand, his eyebrows lowered and nostrils widened. It wasn’t the first time someone looked at it like that, and it hurt worse than the man’s grip on his half-healed arm.
Without letting go of Kilter, the man looked at the old woman over his shoulder. “You found him?”
She hesitated, glancing at the Watchmen on either side of her. Then she nodded.
“Tell me where.”
She twisted her hands in her apron. “Lying in the road just beneath the labor triad.”
The man peered at Kilter from behind the shiny circles over his eyes, his eyebrows drawn down tight, and his chin in his hand. At last he drew a little round box that clicked softly, repeatedly from one of his pockets.
“Clean him up some more and bring him around to Warehouse One at closing time for questioning.”
“Questioning, sir?” The old woman shook. “Oh, please, sir. Let him rest! He’s just a child. He ain’t said one word since I found him, neither – I half think he don’t speak at all, or ever will, if it comes to that. Just look at the bump his head took, there!”
The man clicked the round box shut and slipped it back into his pocket. “Bring him round to the Warehouse. Don’t be late, and don’t tell anyone. This must be kept as quiet as possible. False hope will be a terrible blow to the public now.”
Then the man left, not waiting for either Kilter or the old woman to say a word. As soon as the door shut behind the swish of his long coat, however, the woman hurried to Kilter and lifted him from the bed. After bundling him into his mended clothes, she wrapped a shawl around herself and took the notebook out from where she’d hidden it under the mattress, and thrust it into Kilter’s arms. Then the two of them slipped out into the deserted streets. She walked so quickly Kilter’s legs couldn’t keep up. In the end, she carried him through the confusion of narrow alleys until she stopped by a dilapidated house and bid him crawl into the tiny hollow place under the front stairs. He curled up there, the boards brushing his shoulders and head, and she tucked the notebook beside him, wrapped up in a stiff cloth.
“There now, little one, stay here and be ever so quiet! Don’t you make a peep, not even if you hear dogs barking. And this notebook you got? Keep it safe. Don’t you let any of the Watchmen take it or see it. Dmal – you remember him? – he’ll be coming to find you real soon, I promise. Just lie there and be quiet and don’t let anybody hear or see you.”
Then Kilter was alone again, with evening coming on once more. He could see through a crack in the boards of the stairs above him, but it wasn’t a pleasant view. The tall red and grey brick buildings loomed up over him, rooftops almost invisible through the murk of smoke. But then, far beyond the smoke and the tiles and chimneys, something glittered.
Cradling his injured arm against his chest, he blinked up at it and wished he knew how to tell it how wonderful it looked. He remembered very few words, mostly just the ones Dmal and the old woman had spoken. None of them seemed worthy. Regardless, the light overhead sparkled, blue and red, like a tiny little flame… a candle. Kilter had seen women, wives and mothers, put candles in the windows of the other rundown houses around the old woman’s house. The old woman had said they were to guide the men in the warehouses, to welcome them home.
That is your candle, off-kilter boy, Kilter decided, looking up at the faraway little sparkle.
He didn’t think that people lived higher than the buildings’ rooftops, but what else could the light be? Somewhere, somebody had set that little light out, just as he was put out into the street.
That is your candle. Kilter hugged the thought to him with his bundle. You will come home. You’ll reach your candle.
Somehow.


That all had happened a long time ago, but the same brilliant points of light shone against the darkness now, like scattered sparks from the forges of the nearby warehouses. Kilter gazed up at them from his rooftop for a long moment. Then he dropped his head onto his chest and folded his arms to hide his right hand. Those faraway candles in the sky didn’t comfort him as well as they used to. They seemed to be becoming more like the candles in the windows of Istravol’s lodging houses – waiting for someone else.
Candles can’t be in the sky, anyway, he scoffed at himself, wiping his nose on his sleeve and hugging himself against the wind. He’d gotten plenty of bruises finding out for himself how anything fell down when it wasn’t supported by something.
Garbage rustled and clattered softly in the street below, and Kilter froze as a Watchman’s dog howled far off and the clouds overhead slowly slid across the sky, hiding the glimmers of light from view again. He relaxed when the call was not repeated, but did not ease from his protective position on the rooftop. Somehow, the city seemed larger at night, when everyone else was sleeping in their homes and the streets were deserted. Kilter wished he could have someone to sit with him. He’d overheard groups of young men he imagined were about his height – for he had never stood back to back with them, as he’d watched some of them do – talking and laughing in the streets below him during noonday breaks, and watched the way they put their arms over each others’ shoulders. But there was only the notebook for Kilter, lying on the tiles beside him in his satchel with his left hand resting upon it.
A while later, Kilter was interrupted by the sound of movement behind him, and turned to see a shaggy-headed figure approaching across the rooftop. It was Dmal. Kilter quickly drew his knees up against his chest, as if he could press away the tightness there when Dmal sat down beside him, moving slowly and groaning like a rusty hinge.
“You thinking about th’ old times, little boy?” Dmal said, nodding at Kilter’s bare hands in the firelight. “You don’t do that too often.”
Kilter nodded, not returning Dmal’s gaze. He rubbed the wooden stub against his knee, pretending to be interested in watching it move. Apparently convinced, Dmal chuckled.
“You remember when I first found you, little boy, under the stairs? How little you were then! You were afraid, and wouldn’t come with me until I promised not to let anybody else find you. Yes, how scared you were! But you come with me for food. Then what do I know, next morning, you gone. You run away! Next day after that, though, you come back – you come back for more food. Yes, little boy, you’re like a little street cat. You go, but you come back for the food, without a word of where you been. You skinny ‘nough for street cat, too. You don’t eat more, you might get blown away by the wind, like that!”
Dmal snapped his fingers, laughing, but Kilter did not join him. He stared down at the street below, wishing somehow he could still see the feather there, and something heavy and thick stuck in his throat that he couldn’t swallow away.  
Dmal paused to study Kilter, the light playing off his face in rich red tones among the deep blues and greys of the night. “You all right, little boy?”
Kilter tried to nod again, but he couldn’t, and it turned into an odd sort of shudder. After gazing at him a moment, Dmal threw his arm gently over Kilter’s shoulders. Kilter stiffened, and the ache in his throat grew stronger. He bucked his shoulders, shrugged Dmal off.
“What wrong, little boy?” Dmal whispered. “You don’t talk ‘lot, I know, but you face talk for you most of the time. And right now it saying you unhappy. I don’t like to be unhappy, little boy, you know that. I don’t like you to be unhappy, either. Tell old Dmal what’s wrong.”
“I…”
Kilter ventured a glance at Dmal. The firelight was glistening in his dark, soft eyes, and he was smiling at Kilter. Kilter looked away.
“I… I need your help.” The tightness in his throat made his words catch, roughening them. “With this.”
He pulled his notebook out of the satchel. For a moment Dmal looked at it, head tilted a little to one side, and then his eyes widened.
“Where you get that, little boy? I thought… I thought you lost it!”
“I hid it.”
“Where?”
“Under the stairs.”
“Way back then? And… and you goin’ to let me see it?” Dmal’s hands shook as he held them out.
Kilter hesitated, but not for long. Dmal had trusted him with the feather. The least he could do to try and make up for losing it was to trust Dmal with the notebook.
The throb inside him didn’t go away, though. It only intensified as he gave up the notebook to Dmal. The man’s blunt fingers hurried to the place Kilter had marked with a thin piece of wood, and opened there. It was the spot Kilter had fallen asleep trying to figure out the evening before. Dmal tipped the notebook so that the firelight could fall upon the pages, and Kilter could see the wispy outlines of the latest object he’d been working on – it now lay only half-finished and alone on the floor of his workroom in the clock tower. Dmal slid his fingers over the page, and let out a long breath, shaking his head slowly.
“Oh, little boy… this notebook, it a treasure.” He paused, still shaking his head, and stroked the page again. “Yes, indeed, a treasure. You know what these is?” He pointed to the drawing of the wide-armed structure, the one with a vague drawing of a man attached below it, as if it were an odd piece of clothing.
Kilter shook his head.
“Hm, well, I figured not. Nothing like these around here for years. Yes, it was a long time ago when I saw these over Istravol. A long time.”
Kilter let his knees drop from in front of his chest and he scooted on the tiles to face Dmal more directly.
“Over Istravol?”
Dmal nodded.
“Are they… flags?”
“No, little boy. They were above th’ city, in th’ sky.”
Involuntarily, Kilter dropped back his head to scan the clouds. “How?”
“They flying things.”
“Flying?”
“They move through the air. Like moths, the way they float like a piece of paper blown by the wind. ‘cept they not fall or hit the ground or anything. They fly, little boy, like th’ birds.”
Kilter grabbed the book back from Dmal, bringing his face close to the pages and staring at the drawings as if they would start moving, and explain Dmal’s words.
“You know what they’re for! How do they work? How come there aren’t any more of them here? How do they… fly? Why? Why would someone do that?”
Dmal burst out laughing. “Little boy, I never seen you so excited! Here, let me see the notebook again, and I’ll see if I can make some sense out of what’s in there.”
Kilter practically shoved the book back into the man’s hands. He got to his knees to watch, biting his lip, as Dmal followed the odd marks marching in lines along the pages. But Dmal only shook his head.
“Nope. Still too hard for these old eyes to make out. We’ll jus’ go by th’ pictures.”  
Clearing his throat, the old man shifted his seat on the tiles and set the notebook on his shabby trouser knee. “Now here, on this page, we find a big fine flying machine. It big enough, as you can see, for a man to fly with.”
“The man would fly?”
This sounded too much like one of Dmal’s odd and obviously impossible stories. Of all the crowds of people Kilter had seen in Istravol, not one person had ever moved through the air over the city.
“Yes, little boy! Don’t you see the picture? See, you make the machine this big, tall as the shoulder, here, and then you attach the wings.”
Kilter frowned. “Wings?”
“Those things.” Dmal pointed to the spreading pieces of the machine on either side of the man, protruding from behind his shoulders like an extra pair of arms. “Birds have them, too. That why birds can fly. See? The birds fly with wings, man can fly with wings. ‘cept we have to build them. Yes, we have to build them…”
His voice trailed off, and he stared at the drawing of the man with the wings. Then he began turning the pages of the notebook one by one, smoothing them back when the wind flicked them. Kilter sat and watched. So many questions bounced around inside his head, but he didn’t quite know how to put them all into words. So he simply waited and tried to breath normally until Dmal flipped back to the page of the winged man. Dmal cocked his head at Kilter and smiled.
“You want to see something, little boy?”
Kilter nodded, his breathing at once growing rapid again in his excitement. Dmal closed the book and got to his feet.
“Come with me. It time for you to see this. I been waiting ‘till you ready, and, well, with all that happen lately… you ready.”  
Kilter snuffed out the brazier and put it back in his satchel before hurrying after Dmal as he led the way back across the rooftops and down the tower stairs. The old man cradled the notebook in his arms like he did the stray kittens he sometimes caught the entire way.
“You should have let me see this sooner, little boy. I guess that you workroom is full of this stuff, hmm? All these flying things?”
“Yes.”
Dmal laughed, shaking his head so that the thick strands of his hair swung against his cheeks. “Oh dear, little boy, oh dear! You showing me th’ notebook would have saved you a lot of trouble, a lot of trouble! Oh well, what happened then happened then, and there nothing we can do about it ‘cept make what happening now better.”
Once back inside the tower, Dmal made his way over to the chestnut-brazier, weaving between the glass-strung string without disturbing a single strand. The old man lit one of his dented lanterns, and in its wavering light led Kilter over to the canvas-covered pile of machinery. Most of the machines were completely useless now, twisted and burnt black. But one of them was what Dmal called a mounted crossbolt, and it was in fairly good shape, considering how long it had stood there. The long shaft of the rectangular-based weapon still held one of the sharp-edged darts, which were longer than Kilter’s arm, and thick as his wrist. A long time ago, Dmal had explained how the machine worked to Kilter.
“The long lever, on top there? You pull that, it lights a little fire in the machine, and explodes the dart out of there, bust down whatever in the way, and make it blow up, too. Don’t pull that lever. It dangerous. I know.”
Kilter had not been interested in the machine or explosions after Dmal showed it to him. He’d been too busy with his own machines, the ones in the notebook. Now, the window the crossbolt would have shot through was boarded up, and the cobwebby tarp covering more than half of it was thick with dust.
Dmal reached out to pat a metal strut protruding from beneath the tarp “It sad, seeing this pretty one up here, and having to wake her up, again, pull off her blanket. She should never have seen light to begin with, just like all her sisters. Down in the dark, that where they worked, back when I made them work right. But that don’t matter no more. I don’t have no delicate fingers for to work her with, no more, anyway.”
The old man sighed, inspecting his pink-scarred hands, then pulled the tarp away. When Kilter stopped coughing and blinking dust out of his eyes, he saw the machine just as he remembered it. Only this time, there was something lying underneath it, crumpled like a forgotten piece of paper.
It was one of the machines from the notebook.
Everything was there: the slender wooden supports, the gears and chains, now rusted – only this machine was so much bigger than any Kilter had ever made. Slowly, he sank to his knees, gripping the crossbolt’s struts to keep from falling over.
“Dmal?” he whispered. “Where’d you get this?”
“I found it not long after I found you, little boy. It were in th’ streets, just like you was. It were by a building on fire, though, about to be burned up, itself. The Watchmen were looking for it, but I know they not understand machines. They make them ugly – they use them for ugly things, just like the crossbolt, here. But this… this is too beautiful to ever be used badly, ain’t it, little boy?” Dmal crouched beside Kilter and ran his fingers along the hole-ridden canvas of a wing. “So I took it, and I hide it several places. It fit many places, and not so bad to move – it fold up pretty small. I decide to put it here in the tower a few years ago. Nice and safe in the tower.” Dmal turned suddenly to Kilter, holding up the book once more. “But you notebook, little boy! If I’d only known! I’d have showed you this right away, I would have, yes! You and this notebook, they change everything.”
“What do you mean?” Kilter sat down hard on the stone floor. His ears were ringing.
“Why, if you’d showed me this notebook…” Dmal eyed Kilter. “If you’d showed me this notebook, we could have made this here machine all nice and fixed years ago! I might be gettin’ old and senile, but I can still remember what this machine used to look like. An’ with the notebook to help us, we can get it looking like new. Hmm? What you say, little boy? You fix up this poor old machine with Dmal? That would make you not so sad, now wouldn’t it?”
Inside Kilter felt like shouting and jumping and running, and none of the words he knew could have possibly expressed the feeling exactly the way he wished to. So he only nodded hard.
The secrets in his notebook were coming to life. He might not have the feather anymore, but what did that matter? What was one feather, when he was about to build his own pair of wings?
Maybe you’ll reach those lights in the sky. As he began helping Dmal clear a patch of the tower floor for them to work in, Kilter cherished the thought to him. They are your candles, after all!  You’ll follow them, and you’ll fly far away – so far away, no Watchmen will ever find you.