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(Chapters 1 & 2 here (Dreamwidth), or here (LJ).)
It's only a week late!
-
- Chapter 3 -
They were fighting at the Little Dock again today; Pays could hear it from a block away. She paused in the shadow of a rickety old three-story house that had used to have sewing going on in it to make sure her knife was in her pocket, then looked stupidly down at the ground. There was *concrete* here.
She poked at it with the toe of her sandal, surprised. May Leen leaned a little further over her shoulder to get a better look at it.
On the other side of the house there was a sound like metal striking concrete, and a man roared, "Cut him again! Cut him again!"
May Leen was leaning down over Pays shoulder, squinting at the concrete in amazement. A ghost tapped on the window, opening its big white mouth wide at them - they ignored it. Pays asked May Leen suspiciously, "So is it, like, an illusion?"
"No," said May Leen impatiently. "*I* don't know. Put me down!"
Pays did, and she inflated a little, so she could use her arms. The crowd around the block roared, and someone yelled, "Fifteen on the thing with the blood on its mouth!"
Kneeling on the cement and running her hands across it, May Leen said thoughtfully, "- It's real! And it doesn't smell stolen, either! It's funny there's a new thing here!"
It was true. This building was the only one in the district newer than a hundred-fifty years old, and people had tried to burn it down over and over. It was a Tsi Ri tradition - nothing new comes to the river unless it's stolen. After big storms, due to the difficulties involved in stealing docks, the Little Dock often came loose and floated out, and once when a section of the biggest spice trading house's roof had washed off, Ma Hen had made people spend days gathering all the clay tiles up and gluing the broken ones back together and put them back on.
"I dunno who even owns this place," Pays commented, thinking out loud. "It was Magistrate Cho who put it up, but he got rid of it when he found it was haunted, so I guess it's probably Ma's, these days."
"Ma Hen," said May Leen contemptuously, "Is *old*." Roaring Girls hated old people.
There was a sickening thud around the block, and the crowd hushed a second, then roared again. "Cut him again!"
"Well, I guess she's old and she poured cement, then," said Pays, frowning. The ghost imitated her, and May Leen imitated it. It seemed strange. Was Ma going to do something with the haunted house? It didn't seem like she should need it - she did all her business out of that big sturdy warehouse by the market. And Ma had lived on the banks of the Tsi Ri since she was born. She was the last person you'd expect to break tradition like that. She said to May Leen, "Let's go -"
"Pick me up!"
Obediently, Pays did, and May Leen put her arms around Pays' neck to study herself and peered ahead curiously. "Someone's crying. Let's go *look* at him."
"We're not fighting," Pays said sharply, nervous. "Not unless we've got to."
"Yes yes yes," said May Leen happily, which meant she wasn't listening. Pays winced, but obediently carried her towards the sounds of the fight. You had to be very careful handling May Leen - Roaring Girls were born spoiled rotten, and Pays couldn't refuse everything she asked for.
Because Pays had known she was coming to the Tsi Ri today, and didn't want to mess up her good clothes if something happened, she was wearing worn blue jeans with holes in the knees, an old yellow high-collared jacket of Eu Ness's, and a pair of leather boots Bay had stopped wearing because of blood stains turning them kind of black. (Pays had big feet.) May Leen wore a bright purple silk tunic embroidered with goldfish over glimmering silver satin pants. For a Roaring Girl, this was an unusually practical ensemble - she wasn't even wearing one skirt, much less the four or five most of them preferred. Carrying May Leen around made Pays felt nervously like she was stealing something expensive in broad daylight.
Most of the time May Leen was very human-looking. She had a sharp, pointed human face with chips of bright, watching black glass for eyes, and they saw exactly what you didn't want them to. Sometimes, Pays thought, May Leen saw more than even Bay did. She was about the size of a six- or seven-year-old child when she stood straight. But when she wanted to, she could let all the humanity fall out of her, so she was nothing but a pile of fabric, and you could hit her and it wouldn't hurt her at all.
May Leen had started out made mostly from velvet, but a few times over the years she had brought home new pieces of cloth she wanted, and Bay had sewn them onto her. (She wouldn't let anyone but Bay pull her seams out.) So she had silk gloves for hands - Pays had heard a story she'd chewed them off a Silk Lady who'd annoyed her, but she didn't think Bay knew that - and hard canvas with steel thread sewn in for her mouth and feet, so she could bite and kick, and brown oilcloth for the top of her head and her back and front, so she didn't get soaked through in the rain. Her hair was partly red and orange yarn, and partly old brittle copper wire, and partly some pink-dyed human hair she'd apparently taken from somebody getting their hair trimmed.
Like all Roaring Girls, she was fascinated by things - clothes and shoes and toys and jewels and books and small machines. She had opinions about every thing she saw, and she didn't want all of them. She had very specific taste. She liked shoes without heels, bangle bracelets, and earrings, which she studded all up and down the seams of her hands. She wore bright, pretty clothes that would have looked more natural on someone who didn't have such a mean face. She liked books where terrible things happened to beautiful men so they wept. And she liked watching people cry, too.
When people fought by the river, they did it in an old stone-paved circle set a couple feet into the ground by the docks - it used to be they sold fish from it, but over the years humans and fairies had fought there too often, and now fish rotted if you took them into it. So these days the circle was only for fights, and the fishermen who didn't fight looked at it tiredly and went a ways up or down the river to sell their fish.
Ma Hen kept the pit in good repair, even though the other cobblestones around there had long since been pulled up or broken, and now it was just in the middle of dirt and straggly grass. Pays guessed it was good for business. People needed to eat and drink and buy medicine and stuff after they got stabbed.
There was a crowd around the pit today, a big one, mostly older fishermen and -women. They dressed like it was cold and smelled like fish. The clump of five teenaged boys standing off to one side, smelling of cheap incense ashes and dressed in kneeless black pants and yellow and red robes without shirts or sashes.
"Those boys aren't any good," May Leen said disapprovingly. "I like human boys who are *pretty*. Or at *least* covered in blood."
"Yeah, I'll have a talk with them. - but they're from Cinderlove, so they'll probably be covered in blood later." Cinderlove, the poorest part of Jirny City, was perpetually engulfed in a massive territorial war between the swordsmith clans on the southwest and the Ling, Singh, and Soroko Shipping Firm, which based its Jirny City operations in the northwest. The boys' clothes identified them as swordsmiths; the fishers, like all fishers, probably sided with the Firm.
Pays did not really want to get closer to those people. But May Leen said happily, "Yes, lots and lots of blood! - you're too slow! Take me to the blood!" Pays reluctantly moved closer.
The fishers all had twiggy Sea Sticks with four or five knees and blind, knotted heads, and Water Sweeps, twisted around their necks like wet, clinging blue scarves with cruel red eyes. The Sweeps looked much more graceful in the water, but Sticks never looked graceful anywhere.
The Cinderlove boys had Dust Crows on their shoulders, like ordinary crows, except that they constantly coughed with human voices, wheezing dust out all over their humans, and had metal feet. The boys' shoulders were padded with white-stained leather.
Pays guessed a Water Sweep or a Sea Stick must be fighting a Dust Crow in the middle. She didn't really want to watch; it didn't have anything to do with her, and the fierce, bloodthirsty shouts of the fishermen and the sullen looks on the boys' faces told her who must be winning.
But May Leen, who had climbed up on a startled fisherman's head to peek, scampered back to Pays and, climbing her, whispered delightedly into her ear, "There's a little human boy, and he's all bloody. I'm going to lick it alllll off." She curled up against Pays' neck, giggling at the idea.
"What?" Pays turned and shoved past a couple of big fishermen without thinking. One of them, a bald bearded man, looked down at her and tried to give her a push back. May Leen caught his hand and kissed it, then smiled brightly up at him. His eyes got a little wide, and he moved out of the way. Pays ignored them.
May Leen hadn't lied - there was a little boy there, half-kneeling against one side of the circle and panting. He looked ten or eleven, with a waist-length cloud of black hair as soft as spider silk. His torn jeans were even more ragged than those of the older boys, and he had no robe, just a ripped orange tunic. There was blood around his mouth and on his hands, and he was holding an arm over his chest to stop the bleeding from a long cut down from his left shoulder.
On the other side of the circle was the Sea Stick he was fighting. Its knees were curled around itself in a sort of cage, and it was trying to fit its shrivelled driftwood head back on.
"He knocked its head off!" said May Leen delightedly. "That little boy knocked a Sea Stick's head off! - Bay should fight him, so I can *watch*."
"Did the Stick cut him?" she asked May Leen, studying the boy carefully. He looked tired, as if he'd been in the ring a long time.
"Sticks don't cut," said May Leen disdainfully, clearly respecting Sticks the less for it. "They're all knobs. A Water Sweep bit him."
*So this isn't his first fight,* Pays thought, feeling disgusted. The angry fishers weren't going to let the little boy leave until they'd run out of fairies, or they'd done something irreversible to him. *He probably can't hold out much longer.*
The Stick got its head lodged back on its neck with a loud "thunk," and it rolled to its feet, and leapt at the boy. He ducked out of the way, managing to trip it, but he skinned his bleeding stomach along the stone as he did, and cried out.
Pays turned and grabbed a swordsmith boy's sleeve. He looked sullenly down at her. He was about twice the fighting boy's size. "Do you know him?" she demanded.
"Everyone knows him," he said shortly.
"Yeah? Are you gonna help him?"
"Help spider baby? Why am I gonna help spider baby." Pays decided after a second he must be making fun of the boy's hair.
May Leen said helpfully, giggling, "The humans want blood! It's fun when humans want blood, I get to do all sorts of stuff. They will kill your friend. It'll be *great*."
Another boy said angrily, "He's not anyone's friend. He started it. He always starts stuff."
"He talks too much and he never does anything," said a third.
"He don't want to talk to us and he always does this stupid stuff -"
"Always say he don't need our help."
"What's he doing asking for our help when he's gotta be like that - saying he doesn't need anything -"
Pays made the deduction that the boy was definitely from Cinderlove, that he wasn't popular, and that she couldn't make any other deductions from the available information. She wondered what kind of vague thing he'd done to make the fishers so mad, too.
Anyway, no one else here was going to help him. "Hey, May Leen," she began.
"Can I lick the blood off the little human boy?" May Leen purred into her ear.
"- yeah, okay, go nuts," said Pays tightly. "Just get him out of there for me."
May Leen giggled. "Put me down!" Pays did, and she coiled herself up and leapt into the pit like a flea.
The boy saw her coming before the Sea Stick did, and rolled to avoid her - Pays grimaced as he scraped his cut stomach again. She hoped May Leen would remember she was there to *help* him. May Leen's hard little feet smacked into the Sea Stick's right arm, knocking it into the boy's shoulder.
The Stick groaned, a deep, echoing sound like a ship creaking in a storm, and she laughed. The boy scrambled out of the way, his face pale and determined.
It reached its remaining gnarled arm at for her, lightning-fast. A Sea Stick's favorite tactic was to wrap one arm around its enemy and bend it - though a Stick's joints were brittle, each arm and leg was very tough and flexible, and it could take more bending than most enemies could.
But May Leen, being cloth, could not be bent at all. She let the Stick wrap itself around her, then let her air out, sighing happily as she flopped onto the ground, and tangled the stick's legs in her own. It tried to leap away, but it jumped too hard - its right leg was too deeply tangled up in May Leen's middle, and snapped off in her. It made a hopping spin around to face her, and she knocked its other arm off with its leg, cackling gleefully.
It balanced there, only one leg and its head left. Its hard, knobbly face looked confused. It had taken less than ten seconds.
The boy, whom Pays had almost forgotten about, walked up and gave the leg a very sharp, precise poke with one finger, right below the joint. It flew off - the Stick tumbled to the ground.
May Leen said happily, "Oh! That's pretty good, too!" She bent over and, stepping on the Stick's torso, yanked the head off. She looked at Pays, grinned, and tossed it to her.
Pays caught it. She turned around and looked at the angry fishers, waving the head. "Okay, yeah, whose is this?"
A small bald man with cold eyes muscled up to her - she passed the muttering head behind her back, where he couldn't reach it.
"This don't concern you, girl," he told her, his voice thick with menace. "I don't know who you think you are -"
"I'm Pasky Pays, hi, how are you. Nice weather."
May Leen leaned over her shoulder and smiled at the man. "I'm May Leeeeen. I'm the important one!"
Someone muttered furiously, "Another Pasky -"
Pays wondered which of them had annoyed the fishers.
Pays said with more confidence than she felt, "Now you probably ought to leave and attend to like your fish-related business - you know, like stuff that does not involve beating on little kids - and you know, keep doing that for a while."
"Pasky Bay," said the small man quietly, "Oughtta learn to mind his own business."
"Eh," said Pays noncomitally. She felt it would mess up the image she was trying to create if she agreed with him.
May Leen threw the head at him, chortling at the satisfying "clonk" when it made contact with the fisher's own ivory pate.
A woman and the big bearded man hauled him up and carried him away, while another fisherwoman clumsily grabbed the head, then looked uncomfortably towards the pit. She did not want to go into it for the other pieces.
The boy was suddenly there, holding up a cloth bundle. In it clattered the other five sad little pieces of the disassembled Sea Stick. "Please tell Mister Ban," said the boy politely, "To take better care of his things."
"'s big talk for a little boy who came here to die today, spider baby," said the bearded man coldly. "Ban would've had you today if your Pasky servant hadn't shown up."
"Hey, what," protested Pays, annoyed at being called a servant.
"Mister Ban," the boy said, smoothing his hair back calmly, "Will have no more chances." Pays got the idea that those words carried several meanings. "Please tell him so," the boy concluded gently. Pays admired the gumption of the little boy trying to threaten Bald Ban in that particular set of circumstances.
The Cinderlove boys had all left - now the last of the fishers left, too. Pays was left standing with the little boy with the long black hair, watching them leave.
She said helpfully, "Yeah, this is the part where you say "thank you" or else something else that's a lot like "thank you.""
"Thank you, May Leen," said the boy politely, his eyes narrowed as he saw the bald man struggling to stand in the other mens' grip.
""Thank you, Pasky Pays, and also I admire your great beauty and that thing which you are doing with your hair, whatever it is,"" corrected Pays.
"It is May Leen who fought. You only talked," he pointed out reasonably. His voice was a little muffled, and Pays realized he was speaking through gritted teeth. His eyes going a little glazed, he asked more quietly, "Are they gone now?"
Pays said, "Yeah, pretty much gone."
"Oh, good." He fell flat on his face.
May Leen oozed down off Pays and flipped him over briskly, like she was turning a pancake in a pan. He pushed himself up on one arm to get a look at what she was doing. He looked up blearily at Pays, and asked plaintively, "Will your fairy drink *all* my blood?"
"No," she said. "She doesn't like the taste, she just thinks it looks cool. And she's not my fairy. Okay, me and this fairy who's not mine taking you to a doctor -"
"No," he said quickly. "It is a shallow wound. It is nothing."
Pays said, "Bay's paying." Bay paid for all kinds of stuff he didn't know about until later.
"I do not wish to see a physician," he said, a trace of panic in his eye. That was how a lot of Cinderlove people were; it was how Bay still was. People died at the doctor.
May Leen said, standing up and licking her lips, "It's shallow. He won't die! You know what? He's older than he looks! I can tell because his blood is bitter and cool, like dreams that have lived too long without sustenance, or a story that does not end in its proper time. - Bay's blood is worse, though!"
Pays wasn't sure about accepting medical advice from May Leen, especially when there were metaphors in it, but she couldn't exactly force a kid who took on a fairy bare-handed to do anything he didn't want to. She asked the boy, who was shakily hauling himself to his feet, "So, if you're fine, how come you're all staggering around?"
His stomach growled audibly, and he hunched his shoulders, a blush rising on his face. May Leen said, enlightened, "He's hungry! It's because he's *poor*."
"You're like the great diplomat of our times, May Leen," Pays said. "In the sense that you and the great diplomat both open your mouths some."
"Yes!" said May Leen.
There was a noodle cart a ways down the street. Pays pointed to it. "Come on."
Pays and the boy sat down on a pile of weathered gray wood that had been part of the dock until last spring, and May Leen draped herself over Pays' shoulder and chewed on her hair thoughtfully. The boy ate the two bowls of pork noodles Pays brought him fastidiously, careful not to splash the broth on his hair.
Pays said as he was finishing up the second bowl, "So what's your name?"
"Spider Baby," he said politely.
"- is that your *real* name?"
"Yes, it is," he said with dignity.
"Uh-huh. Okay, how old are you, Spider Baby?"
"I am sixteen."
May Leen, who had gone limp over Pays' shoulder as if asleep, inflated her head to comment, "IIIII think he's older!"
Pays didn't, so she ignored that. "How come you're fighting with Ban Min's goons all by yourself, sixteen-year-old Spider Baby?"
"I am afraid that that is not your business," he said apologetically. He had a slightly odd accent, halting and flat, as if he had to think carefully to find the words and intonations he wanted.
May Leen protested, "I beat up guys!"
"I think that you did that mainly because you *like* beating up guys," Spider Baby reminded her gently.
"- I *do* like beating up guys!" agreed May Leen, smiling at the memory.
"Yeah, it's not my hobby," said Pays. "Okay, so, me speaking as someone for whom beating up guys is not a hobby, and you speaking as someone who got in some trouble, you have got this kind of vague awareness that a couple of individuals in some way associated with the Pasky Siblings just saved your small spidery hind end, right?"
"I think I understand that," he said cautiously, putting the bowl down beside him. "I think I understand the thing which you just said..." He was looking her over in a way that she thought meant he was trying to figure out if he needed to run. Of course, unlike her oldest brother, she was just a regular human who didn't get in fights with fairies, but maybe he didn't know that.
She went on in a cheerful voice, "And we also bought you lunch, that was real nice of us. So, if you maybe happen to know anything about Bald Ban wanting to kill any of us, it would be appropriate for you to let me know approximately right now."
His eyes widened. "...I'm afraid I don't. The possibility of being killed by Bald Ban is a matter of some concern, I acknowledge... Is it your oldest brother whom my enemy may be assaulting?" He sounded a little too eager; his silky hair was standing up some in excitement.
Pays scratched her head. She said, "I don't know if the enemy of your enemy is *actually* your friend, if that enemy happens to be Bay. Bay doesn't have friends, see - human ones, I mean, some fairies are okay. And books, and the kinds of holiday decorations that don't make noise when the motion sensor goes off."
Spider Baby's hair lost some of its poof. "It would be sufficient if the enemy of my enemy were larger, better-armed, and more impressive-looking than am I... well. It would, of course, be convenient for me if Mr. Ban were to bring Pasky Bay's wrath down upon him, but no, I haven't heard anything to suggest that he would risk such a thing."
"That guy said something about Bay," said May Leen indignantly. "He said he should mind his own business! Bay's a Hero, so *everything's* his business! And it's boring when I don't get to beat up guys. I like beating up guys!"
Spider Baby explained to her, "Ban Min is a Villain, and therefore he is obligated to say things like that, and also to pay other people to say them for him when he is otherwise engaged."
May Leen said, "Oh, okay."
"Will you beat him up?" Spider Baby asked rather hopefully.
May Leen rolled her eyes at him. "I'm *lazy*," she explained condescendingly. To prove the point, she deflated and let her eyes droop mostly shut, apparently once again asleep.
Pays asked Spider Baby suspiciously, "So how's Bald Ban a Villain?"
Spider Baby's expression turned cold, as if he was disappointed in her. He said in frigid tones, "I believe you know what he sells."
"What - you mean the swords?" asked Pays sharply, not liking where this was going. "My brother uses swords, they're kind of a part of that Hero-ing business of his, I don't know if you'd heard that -"
Suddenly Spider Baby's hand was in her hair, and he had yanked her head down to eye level with him. He said quietly, "You know what I am talking about, Pasky Pays. I have a very good sense of smell - it may have been a year since you have touched it, perhaps two - but it lingers on you..."
She tried to pull away - and found that he was much stronger than he looked. "I don't know what you're -"
"Perhaps you can lie to your brother," said Spider Baby - and though his grip was painful, his voice was oddly gentle - and the quietness of his black eyes made him look suddenly very, very old. "From what I have heard, he does not understand people well, and you, I think, have been cursed to understand too much. But you cannot lie to *me*. Don't try."
May Leen clamped her hand around his and stuck her head in between them. She said with interest, "Do you want to fight with *Pays*? *Seriously?* She falls down! A lot!"
Spider Baby exhaled and released Pays' hair - her scalp tingled, and she put a hand to it. "No," he said calmly. "I never want to fight." He stood up, bowed slightly to them, and and began to walk away. "I often do, though. Excuse me."
Pays brought her hand away from her scalp and looked at it - there were smears of red on her fingertips. His long fingernails had drawn blood. She exhaled, shaking.
May Leen said curiously, peering after him with an interested look in her black eyes, "Do you want me to kill him?"
Pays eyed May Leen. "No, we can't. We just saved his life, so that means we're not allowed to kill him, because it's prohibited by the Fallacy of Sunk Costs."
"Oh."
"...May Leen. Are you sure he's human?"
May Leen said, surprised, "He's human! He can cook!"
"How do you mean, he can cook?" Pays asked sharply. "Do you *know* him? Have you like bit the head off his white-anko Emperor candy in the past?"
"Uh-huh! He works at a shop in Cinderlove - Bay bought white-anko people for me when we went there last month. They weren't very good, though!" she added critically. "It's a bad shop. It's because it's in Cinderlove, where everything is bad, except when Bay is there, because he can't eeeeever be bad!" She seemed to picture Bay doing something bad, and laughed at whatever it was.
"Yeah, he probably can't," said Pays, considering that. If May Leen had seen him in a candy shop, he must have been out front selling things - she couldn't actually have seen him *cooking* anything. It wouldn't be the first time a business using a really good House Fairy had tried to hide their trade secret it in plain sight. Except that Pays couldn't think of any kind of House Fairy that looked and acted like Spider Baby.
"What did he smell?" May Leen asked, apparently suddenly remembering what Spider Baby had said to her. She leaned over Pays and started sniffing her neck and shoulders. "*I* don't think you smell like anything - well, you smell like lying and stealing, is all, but that's regular for you. What does Bald Ban sell that's worse than a sword?"
She had been thinking about that. She said in surprise, "I don't know. But I think I've been hired to steal it tonight."
-
The two greatest thieves in the world lived in Jirny City. One of the two was the wealthy, handsome, brilliant, and largely irritating eighteen-year-old boy who called himself Ken Gley. He had stolen many wonderful things: the gold collar from the King of the Dancing Bears, cubes of frozen darkness from the tiny, obsessively guarded freezers of the Usually Drunken Mice, and a beautiful and inexplicable stringless lute from the deaf Silk Ladies who lived in the cracks in the Wall at the End of the World.
But Ken Gley was known chiefly for having stolen fire from the Fire Babies.
The Fire Babies were small, round, cunning fairies who sometimes took the place of real newborns, with the aim of being picked up and given the chance to touch a cold little red hand to a human woman's warm face. The woman would mislay bits of her mind, growing strange and wild and cruel, but would gain certain interesting powers. The family would only know that they had had a Fire Baby with them when it vanished, leaving a trail of ashes across the floor. It could be hard to figure out which lady's face the fairy had touched.
A mother could be cast out of her city's gate because her baby had vanished and she had grieved in ways her family thought were wrong. They grew afraid, fearing that she had been touched by the fire, and would burn them with it. If the baby was found after a few days, or turned out not to have been taken at all, or to have been taken by a human, sometimes it was already too late for its mother.
The Fire Babies themselves would crawl back to their homes deep in the blackest, coldest places in the forest and add their bits of human minds to the massive fires they lived in, great smokeless bonfires that grew a tiny bit each year, and never burned themselves out. They could be seen from miles away at night, crackling and shifting like ordinary fires, their hot light dimming the cool gleam of stars to nothing at all. But if one got close, one could see the Babies crawling restlessly through the flames, or sitting and looking curiously right back at the humans who stepped out of the trees to look in at them.
Human-made fire was thin and fragile, could be killed by simple things like water and wind. And it hurt. The fire the Fire Babies made could not be extinguished, and could not burn a living thing. It only held you away from it, when you tried to go in to search for your baby. It felt smooth as glass and pushed hard as a train. No magician could part it or extinguish it. You could not get close to the Fire Babies, could not revenge yourself upon them, could not take anything from them.
But one rainy evening, a little boy had appeared at the gates of Jirny City with a shred of fire burning in his grimy hand.
Ken Gley had been dressed in rags, a skinny child only eight or nine years old stumbling with exhaustion and hunger. But his black eyes had gleamed with the proud brilliance of the sun. He would not say where he had come from; but he had brought the magic fire, and offered it to the city, along with its secrets, if they would let him inside and give him a place to live.
They would give him a house - a nice one, he explained, with a place to put a lot of books, and a swimming pool, and it should be convenient to at least two good bakeries. Following a short but pointed lecture from what *appeared* to be some mildew that had learned how to talk (it was growing in the hood of his raincoat), he decided that he also wanted a lot of money, and that there had to be a greenhouse for his fairy friends to live in.
These turned out to be two Thunder Sprites and a Leafmold (which was the thing growing on his coat). He had an Ah-Lion, too, but it wanted to live in a house. This was extremely disturbing to many people. Even Pasky Bay, who had then, at fifteen, been attended by seven fairies including his Royal-rain-leaps, had not gathered so many at so tender an age. It was the mark of a child who could grow to be very dangerous. And so many people were frightened of the little boy.
So the magistrates had argued for two days, during which no one could go in or out of the city and Ken Gley sat patiently outside the gates in the rain with his fairies and no food or shelter. By the time they agreed to his demands he had caught pneumonia and starved half to death. There were people who wanted to let him finish.
The fire had helped a good deal with the city's energy costs in the years since, more than recouping the investment in Ken Gley's nice house and generous stipend. He'd gone to school until he was seventeen and done well, except for his sudden vacations to steal things. He had yet to kill anybody that the magistrates knew of. He was popular with their daughters, and they felt that this was much worse.
Now, those stolen human babies were usually found burned black someplace near the house; but sometimes the twisted sooty track the Fire Baby left showed that it had been dragging something wriggling along with it. Many people thought Ken Gley must once have been one of these stolen babies. There had once been a brilliant sorceress named Ken Yray, a reckless and bad-tempered woman even before the fire had touched her, whose stolen son's little body had never been found. But maybe he only called himself "Ken" so people would think that; maybe he was just a boy who had learned the secret of fairy fire, and had firm ideas of what he wanted to do with it. He was a loud, flashy, cheerful person who loved being rich and who lied, Bay said with a terribly grim look in his eye, almost constantly.
Because Bay did not like to take her out into society, Pays had only seen Ken Gley a few times, and from a distance. She didn't like him, either. He didn't steal from humans, which she thought was pretty cowardly. Humans were much more frightening than fairies.
The Boy With Big Dark Eyes was a more modest sort of thief. He had to be given the name, because he had never bothered to name himself. No one knew who he was. Early in his career, which began around the year Pays turned ten, people would recall seeing him near the scene of the theft a bit before it happened, a skinny, serious-looking boy of perhaps six or seven years. He had huge, solemn eyes, and he would look around with them as if he was a bit lost, and ask earnest questions about whether the person who lived in that big house was the *Emperor*.
Those who talked to him described him as "hungry-looking." Several of them had bought him food from carts and asked him worried questions about his parents, which he always answered vaguely, "Papa's trying to get his moped fixed." People who knew anything about the Cinderlove economy and the dependence some of its participants placed upon their mopeds found this statement terribly heart-breaking, and gave him money for the alleged moped repairs.
Those eyes pulled you in, they said. So big and sad and gentle.
In later years, when presumably he had gotten bigger and less harmless-looking, he was not seen at all, but always he left his calling card. Always there were a few threads of Knife-Spider silk tied discreetly around the doorknob of the house.
He stole only from wealthy humans, and only, it seemed, from those who were excessively cruel or excessively foolish. Since he had first appeared, the year Pays turned ten, cash, jewels, gold, and expensive foods appeared with regularity in the donation box of the Brothers Of Silent But Nonetheless Extremely Angry Service, who used them to care for the city's poor. One could not take gifts back from the Brothers, once given - they went about their Service heavily armed.
They kept very accurate records of the donations they received, in case it was ever necessary to flourish them indignantly at anybody. From comparing these records to what was stolen, the police believed that the Boy had never once kept anything he stole for himself. He did keep the money for the moped repairs, but no one who'd ever given it claimed to doubt for a second that his father's moped really had broken.
The police had seen him to chase him three times in the early years, and always he had lost them in Cinderlove - in the poorest, dirtiest part of the poorest, dirtiest part of the city, where the mice were the size of dogs and the dogs barked all night for no reason, and the household fairies (Stovegirls and Almost Domesticated Foxes only, for no Linen Boy or White Cat With A Black Back would ever be seen there) angrily pounded the walls and knocked shingles off the roofs when they didn't get their wine.
There were hundreds of hungry boys with scared eyes in Cinderlove. Thousands. And three or four times a year, one of them crept alone into the wealthiest part of the city to do a job he felt was important.
Pays didn't know if she liked him, either. He reminded her too much of how her brother had once been.
And then there must be a third thief. Pays had grown slowly certain of this, over the past year, as people from all parts of the city - Cinderlove and the banks of the Tsi Ri and the shops on Tal For Street and even the people who lived on Gentian Hill and in the Summer Palace - came quietly, with pinched faces, to the Pasky apartment to talk to Bay in a room alone.
And for days and days afterward, Bay would go out with just May Leen, and would walk through the city, asking people questions and not coming home until late at night. And sometime during those days he would always go to Ken Gley's house - to ask him, Pays guessed, a question.
She didn't know what was disappearing that had to be kept so secret. But there could be no reason Bay would ever visit Ken Gley, except to ask him if he had stolen something. And she could not think what he was doing with May Leen if he wasn't looking for a thief. A Roaring Girl loved the smell of things in the wrong hands.
But when he came back he had never found anything. Pays found his face easy to read, as always; here, maybe for the first time, her brother had found something he couldn't do.
And two days ago, she remembered thoughtfully, Bay had gone out with May Leen; and the day before that, he had gone to the docks without his favorite sword - his first one, the one he'd bought from Bald Ban when he was ten. He would hate going in front of Bald Ban with that sword; it would make him feel he was at a disadvantage. Had the Third Thief, Pays wondered, stolen something from Ban Min, too?
Pays was suddenly much more interested now in meeting her new client. If she wanted to be the fourth-best thief in Jirny City, she ought to know what the third-best was spending his time stealing.
-
This isn't NaNoWriMo; it's part of an attempt to address my fundamental productivity problem, that being that that I can never work on just one project at once. Until recently, I've been trying to force myself away from that. But what'll happen is that I'll have this really great idea for Steampunk London-and-Paris Amnesiac Spy Adventure Game, but I'll have designated my Active Project as Shounen Jump-Style Demon Hunters Who Quote Poetry Serial Novel, and I'll guiltily try to force myself to work on that and end up getting nothing done. I suspect that my brain may just not be amenable to this sort of focus for anything that's not for a class or work.
So what I'm trying to do right now is just make myself sit down and write as much as I can on whatever thing I'm obsessing about at the moment, rather than trying to guilt myself into working on something I'm not feeling at the moment. So yesterday morning I wrote a page of Steampunk Gay Meiji-Era Civil Servants Novel and a page of the Shounen Jump thing, last night I wrote twelve pages of the The Chosen One Has Been Cloned Medievaloid Fantasy YA Novel, and today I did an edit of this, and will probably work on something else later.
It's only a week late!
-
- Chapter 3 -
They were fighting at the Little Dock again today; Pays could hear it from a block away. She paused in the shadow of a rickety old three-story house that had used to have sewing going on in it to make sure her knife was in her pocket, then looked stupidly down at the ground. There was *concrete* here.
She poked at it with the toe of her sandal, surprised. May Leen leaned a little further over her shoulder to get a better look at it.
On the other side of the house there was a sound like metal striking concrete, and a man roared, "Cut him again! Cut him again!"
May Leen was leaning down over Pays shoulder, squinting at the concrete in amazement. A ghost tapped on the window, opening its big white mouth wide at them - they ignored it. Pays asked May Leen suspiciously, "So is it, like, an illusion?"
"No," said May Leen impatiently. "*I* don't know. Put me down!"
Pays did, and she inflated a little, so she could use her arms. The crowd around the block roared, and someone yelled, "Fifteen on the thing with the blood on its mouth!"
Kneeling on the cement and running her hands across it, May Leen said thoughtfully, "- It's real! And it doesn't smell stolen, either! It's funny there's a new thing here!"
It was true. This building was the only one in the district newer than a hundred-fifty years old, and people had tried to burn it down over and over. It was a Tsi Ri tradition - nothing new comes to the river unless it's stolen. After big storms, due to the difficulties involved in stealing docks, the Little Dock often came loose and floated out, and once when a section of the biggest spice trading house's roof had washed off, Ma Hen had made people spend days gathering all the clay tiles up and gluing the broken ones back together and put them back on.
"I dunno who even owns this place," Pays commented, thinking out loud. "It was Magistrate Cho who put it up, but he got rid of it when he found it was haunted, so I guess it's probably Ma's, these days."
"Ma Hen," said May Leen contemptuously, "Is *old*." Roaring Girls hated old people.
There was a sickening thud around the block, and the crowd hushed a second, then roared again. "Cut him again!"
"Well, I guess she's old and she poured cement, then," said Pays, frowning. The ghost imitated her, and May Leen imitated it. It seemed strange. Was Ma going to do something with the haunted house? It didn't seem like she should need it - she did all her business out of that big sturdy warehouse by the market. And Ma had lived on the banks of the Tsi Ri since she was born. She was the last person you'd expect to break tradition like that. She said to May Leen, "Let's go -"
"Pick me up!"
Obediently, Pays did, and May Leen put her arms around Pays' neck to study herself and peered ahead curiously. "Someone's crying. Let's go *look* at him."
"We're not fighting," Pays said sharply, nervous. "Not unless we've got to."
"Yes yes yes," said May Leen happily, which meant she wasn't listening. Pays winced, but obediently carried her towards the sounds of the fight. You had to be very careful handling May Leen - Roaring Girls were born spoiled rotten, and Pays couldn't refuse everything she asked for.
Because Pays had known she was coming to the Tsi Ri today, and didn't want to mess up her good clothes if something happened, she was wearing worn blue jeans with holes in the knees, an old yellow high-collared jacket of Eu Ness's, and a pair of leather boots Bay had stopped wearing because of blood stains turning them kind of black. (Pays had big feet.) May Leen wore a bright purple silk tunic embroidered with goldfish over glimmering silver satin pants. For a Roaring Girl, this was an unusually practical ensemble - she wasn't even wearing one skirt, much less the four or five most of them preferred. Carrying May Leen around made Pays felt nervously like she was stealing something expensive in broad daylight.
Most of the time May Leen was very human-looking. She had a sharp, pointed human face with chips of bright, watching black glass for eyes, and they saw exactly what you didn't want them to. Sometimes, Pays thought, May Leen saw more than even Bay did. She was about the size of a six- or seven-year-old child when she stood straight. But when she wanted to, she could let all the humanity fall out of her, so she was nothing but a pile of fabric, and you could hit her and it wouldn't hurt her at all.
May Leen had started out made mostly from velvet, but a few times over the years she had brought home new pieces of cloth she wanted, and Bay had sewn them onto her. (She wouldn't let anyone but Bay pull her seams out.) So she had silk gloves for hands - Pays had heard a story she'd chewed them off a Silk Lady who'd annoyed her, but she didn't think Bay knew that - and hard canvas with steel thread sewn in for her mouth and feet, so she could bite and kick, and brown oilcloth for the top of her head and her back and front, so she didn't get soaked through in the rain. Her hair was partly red and orange yarn, and partly old brittle copper wire, and partly some pink-dyed human hair she'd apparently taken from somebody getting their hair trimmed.
Like all Roaring Girls, she was fascinated by things - clothes and shoes and toys and jewels and books and small machines. She had opinions about every thing she saw, and she didn't want all of them. She had very specific taste. She liked shoes without heels, bangle bracelets, and earrings, which she studded all up and down the seams of her hands. She wore bright, pretty clothes that would have looked more natural on someone who didn't have such a mean face. She liked books where terrible things happened to beautiful men so they wept. And she liked watching people cry, too.
When people fought by the river, they did it in an old stone-paved circle set a couple feet into the ground by the docks - it used to be they sold fish from it, but over the years humans and fairies had fought there too often, and now fish rotted if you took them into it. So these days the circle was only for fights, and the fishermen who didn't fight looked at it tiredly and went a ways up or down the river to sell their fish.
Ma Hen kept the pit in good repair, even though the other cobblestones around there had long since been pulled up or broken, and now it was just in the middle of dirt and straggly grass. Pays guessed it was good for business. People needed to eat and drink and buy medicine and stuff after they got stabbed.
There was a crowd around the pit today, a big one, mostly older fishermen and -women. They dressed like it was cold and smelled like fish. The clump of five teenaged boys standing off to one side, smelling of cheap incense ashes and dressed in kneeless black pants and yellow and red robes without shirts or sashes.
"Those boys aren't any good," May Leen said disapprovingly. "I like human boys who are *pretty*. Or at *least* covered in blood."
"Yeah, I'll have a talk with them. - but they're from Cinderlove, so they'll probably be covered in blood later." Cinderlove, the poorest part of Jirny City, was perpetually engulfed in a massive territorial war between the swordsmith clans on the southwest and the Ling, Singh, and Soroko Shipping Firm, which based its Jirny City operations in the northwest. The boys' clothes identified them as swordsmiths; the fishers, like all fishers, probably sided with the Firm.
Pays did not really want to get closer to those people. But May Leen said happily, "Yes, lots and lots of blood! - you're too slow! Take me to the blood!" Pays reluctantly moved closer.
The fishers all had twiggy Sea Sticks with four or five knees and blind, knotted heads, and Water Sweeps, twisted around their necks like wet, clinging blue scarves with cruel red eyes. The Sweeps looked much more graceful in the water, but Sticks never looked graceful anywhere.
The Cinderlove boys had Dust Crows on their shoulders, like ordinary crows, except that they constantly coughed with human voices, wheezing dust out all over their humans, and had metal feet. The boys' shoulders were padded with white-stained leather.
Pays guessed a Water Sweep or a Sea Stick must be fighting a Dust Crow in the middle. She didn't really want to watch; it didn't have anything to do with her, and the fierce, bloodthirsty shouts of the fishermen and the sullen looks on the boys' faces told her who must be winning.
But May Leen, who had climbed up on a startled fisherman's head to peek, scampered back to Pays and, climbing her, whispered delightedly into her ear, "There's a little human boy, and he's all bloody. I'm going to lick it alllll off." She curled up against Pays' neck, giggling at the idea.
"What?" Pays turned and shoved past a couple of big fishermen without thinking. One of them, a bald bearded man, looked down at her and tried to give her a push back. May Leen caught his hand and kissed it, then smiled brightly up at him. His eyes got a little wide, and he moved out of the way. Pays ignored them.
May Leen hadn't lied - there was a little boy there, half-kneeling against one side of the circle and panting. He looked ten or eleven, with a waist-length cloud of black hair as soft as spider silk. His torn jeans were even more ragged than those of the older boys, and he had no robe, just a ripped orange tunic. There was blood around his mouth and on his hands, and he was holding an arm over his chest to stop the bleeding from a long cut down from his left shoulder.
On the other side of the circle was the Sea Stick he was fighting. Its knees were curled around itself in a sort of cage, and it was trying to fit its shrivelled driftwood head back on.
"He knocked its head off!" said May Leen delightedly. "That little boy knocked a Sea Stick's head off! - Bay should fight him, so I can *watch*."
"Did the Stick cut him?" she asked May Leen, studying the boy carefully. He looked tired, as if he'd been in the ring a long time.
"Sticks don't cut," said May Leen disdainfully, clearly respecting Sticks the less for it. "They're all knobs. A Water Sweep bit him."
*So this isn't his first fight,* Pays thought, feeling disgusted. The angry fishers weren't going to let the little boy leave until they'd run out of fairies, or they'd done something irreversible to him. *He probably can't hold out much longer.*
The Stick got its head lodged back on its neck with a loud "thunk," and it rolled to its feet, and leapt at the boy. He ducked out of the way, managing to trip it, but he skinned his bleeding stomach along the stone as he did, and cried out.
Pays turned and grabbed a swordsmith boy's sleeve. He looked sullenly down at her. He was about twice the fighting boy's size. "Do you know him?" she demanded.
"Everyone knows him," he said shortly.
"Yeah? Are you gonna help him?"
"Help spider baby? Why am I gonna help spider baby." Pays decided after a second he must be making fun of the boy's hair.
May Leen said helpfully, giggling, "The humans want blood! It's fun when humans want blood, I get to do all sorts of stuff. They will kill your friend. It'll be *great*."
Another boy said angrily, "He's not anyone's friend. He started it. He always starts stuff."
"He talks too much and he never does anything," said a third.
"He don't want to talk to us and he always does this stupid stuff -"
"Always say he don't need our help."
"What's he doing asking for our help when he's gotta be like that - saying he doesn't need anything -"
Pays made the deduction that the boy was definitely from Cinderlove, that he wasn't popular, and that she couldn't make any other deductions from the available information. She wondered what kind of vague thing he'd done to make the fishers so mad, too.
Anyway, no one else here was going to help him. "Hey, May Leen," she began.
"Can I lick the blood off the little human boy?" May Leen purred into her ear.
"- yeah, okay, go nuts," said Pays tightly. "Just get him out of there for me."
May Leen giggled. "Put me down!" Pays did, and she coiled herself up and leapt into the pit like a flea.
The boy saw her coming before the Sea Stick did, and rolled to avoid her - Pays grimaced as he scraped his cut stomach again. She hoped May Leen would remember she was there to *help* him. May Leen's hard little feet smacked into the Sea Stick's right arm, knocking it into the boy's shoulder.
The Stick groaned, a deep, echoing sound like a ship creaking in a storm, and she laughed. The boy scrambled out of the way, his face pale and determined.
It reached its remaining gnarled arm at for her, lightning-fast. A Sea Stick's favorite tactic was to wrap one arm around its enemy and bend it - though a Stick's joints were brittle, each arm and leg was very tough and flexible, and it could take more bending than most enemies could.
But May Leen, being cloth, could not be bent at all. She let the Stick wrap itself around her, then let her air out, sighing happily as she flopped onto the ground, and tangled the stick's legs in her own. It tried to leap away, but it jumped too hard - its right leg was too deeply tangled up in May Leen's middle, and snapped off in her. It made a hopping spin around to face her, and she knocked its other arm off with its leg, cackling gleefully.
It balanced there, only one leg and its head left. Its hard, knobbly face looked confused. It had taken less than ten seconds.
The boy, whom Pays had almost forgotten about, walked up and gave the leg a very sharp, precise poke with one finger, right below the joint. It flew off - the Stick tumbled to the ground.
May Leen said happily, "Oh! That's pretty good, too!" She bent over and, stepping on the Stick's torso, yanked the head off. She looked at Pays, grinned, and tossed it to her.
Pays caught it. She turned around and looked at the angry fishers, waving the head. "Okay, yeah, whose is this?"
A small bald man with cold eyes muscled up to her - she passed the muttering head behind her back, where he couldn't reach it.
"This don't concern you, girl," he told her, his voice thick with menace. "I don't know who you think you are -"
"I'm Pasky Pays, hi, how are you. Nice weather."
May Leen leaned over her shoulder and smiled at the man. "I'm May Leeeeen. I'm the important one!"
Someone muttered furiously, "Another Pasky -"
Pays wondered which of them had annoyed the fishers.
Pays said with more confidence than she felt, "Now you probably ought to leave and attend to like your fish-related business - you know, like stuff that does not involve beating on little kids - and you know, keep doing that for a while."
"Pasky Bay," said the small man quietly, "Oughtta learn to mind his own business."
"Eh," said Pays noncomitally. She felt it would mess up the image she was trying to create if she agreed with him.
May Leen threw the head at him, chortling at the satisfying "clonk" when it made contact with the fisher's own ivory pate.
A woman and the big bearded man hauled him up and carried him away, while another fisherwoman clumsily grabbed the head, then looked uncomfortably towards the pit. She did not want to go into it for the other pieces.
The boy was suddenly there, holding up a cloth bundle. In it clattered the other five sad little pieces of the disassembled Sea Stick. "Please tell Mister Ban," said the boy politely, "To take better care of his things."
"'s big talk for a little boy who came here to die today, spider baby," said the bearded man coldly. "Ban would've had you today if your Pasky servant hadn't shown up."
"Hey, what," protested Pays, annoyed at being called a servant.
"Mister Ban," the boy said, smoothing his hair back calmly, "Will have no more chances." Pays got the idea that those words carried several meanings. "Please tell him so," the boy concluded gently. Pays admired the gumption of the little boy trying to threaten Bald Ban in that particular set of circumstances.
The Cinderlove boys had all left - now the last of the fishers left, too. Pays was left standing with the little boy with the long black hair, watching them leave.
She said helpfully, "Yeah, this is the part where you say "thank you" or else something else that's a lot like "thank you.""
"Thank you, May Leen," said the boy politely, his eyes narrowed as he saw the bald man struggling to stand in the other mens' grip.
""Thank you, Pasky Pays, and also I admire your great beauty and that thing which you are doing with your hair, whatever it is,"" corrected Pays.
"It is May Leen who fought. You only talked," he pointed out reasonably. His voice was a little muffled, and Pays realized he was speaking through gritted teeth. His eyes going a little glazed, he asked more quietly, "Are they gone now?"
Pays said, "Yeah, pretty much gone."
"Oh, good." He fell flat on his face.
May Leen oozed down off Pays and flipped him over briskly, like she was turning a pancake in a pan. He pushed himself up on one arm to get a look at what she was doing. He looked up blearily at Pays, and asked plaintively, "Will your fairy drink *all* my blood?"
"No," she said. "She doesn't like the taste, she just thinks it looks cool. And she's not my fairy. Okay, me and this fairy who's not mine taking you to a doctor -"
"No," he said quickly. "It is a shallow wound. It is nothing."
Pays said, "Bay's paying." Bay paid for all kinds of stuff he didn't know about until later.
"I do not wish to see a physician," he said, a trace of panic in his eye. That was how a lot of Cinderlove people were; it was how Bay still was. People died at the doctor.
May Leen said, standing up and licking her lips, "It's shallow. He won't die! You know what? He's older than he looks! I can tell because his blood is bitter and cool, like dreams that have lived too long without sustenance, or a story that does not end in its proper time. - Bay's blood is worse, though!"
Pays wasn't sure about accepting medical advice from May Leen, especially when there were metaphors in it, but she couldn't exactly force a kid who took on a fairy bare-handed to do anything he didn't want to. She asked the boy, who was shakily hauling himself to his feet, "So, if you're fine, how come you're all staggering around?"
His stomach growled audibly, and he hunched his shoulders, a blush rising on his face. May Leen said, enlightened, "He's hungry! It's because he's *poor*."
"You're like the great diplomat of our times, May Leen," Pays said. "In the sense that you and the great diplomat both open your mouths some."
"Yes!" said May Leen.
There was a noodle cart a ways down the street. Pays pointed to it. "Come on."
Pays and the boy sat down on a pile of weathered gray wood that had been part of the dock until last spring, and May Leen draped herself over Pays' shoulder and chewed on her hair thoughtfully. The boy ate the two bowls of pork noodles Pays brought him fastidiously, careful not to splash the broth on his hair.
Pays said as he was finishing up the second bowl, "So what's your name?"
"Spider Baby," he said politely.
"- is that your *real* name?"
"Yes, it is," he said with dignity.
"Uh-huh. Okay, how old are you, Spider Baby?"
"I am sixteen."
May Leen, who had gone limp over Pays' shoulder as if asleep, inflated her head to comment, "IIIII think he's older!"
Pays didn't, so she ignored that. "How come you're fighting with Ban Min's goons all by yourself, sixteen-year-old Spider Baby?"
"I am afraid that that is not your business," he said apologetically. He had a slightly odd accent, halting and flat, as if he had to think carefully to find the words and intonations he wanted.
May Leen protested, "I beat up guys!"
"I think that you did that mainly because you *like* beating up guys," Spider Baby reminded her gently.
"- I *do* like beating up guys!" agreed May Leen, smiling at the memory.
"Yeah, it's not my hobby," said Pays. "Okay, so, me speaking as someone for whom beating up guys is not a hobby, and you speaking as someone who got in some trouble, you have got this kind of vague awareness that a couple of individuals in some way associated with the Pasky Siblings just saved your small spidery hind end, right?"
"I think I understand that," he said cautiously, putting the bowl down beside him. "I think I understand the thing which you just said..." He was looking her over in a way that she thought meant he was trying to figure out if he needed to run. Of course, unlike her oldest brother, she was just a regular human who didn't get in fights with fairies, but maybe he didn't know that.
She went on in a cheerful voice, "And we also bought you lunch, that was real nice of us. So, if you maybe happen to know anything about Bald Ban wanting to kill any of us, it would be appropriate for you to let me know approximately right now."
His eyes widened. "...I'm afraid I don't. The possibility of being killed by Bald Ban is a matter of some concern, I acknowledge... Is it your oldest brother whom my enemy may be assaulting?" He sounded a little too eager; his silky hair was standing up some in excitement.
Pays scratched her head. She said, "I don't know if the enemy of your enemy is *actually* your friend, if that enemy happens to be Bay. Bay doesn't have friends, see - human ones, I mean, some fairies are okay. And books, and the kinds of holiday decorations that don't make noise when the motion sensor goes off."
Spider Baby's hair lost some of its poof. "It would be sufficient if the enemy of my enemy were larger, better-armed, and more impressive-looking than am I... well. It would, of course, be convenient for me if Mr. Ban were to bring Pasky Bay's wrath down upon him, but no, I haven't heard anything to suggest that he would risk such a thing."
"That guy said something about Bay," said May Leen indignantly. "He said he should mind his own business! Bay's a Hero, so *everything's* his business! And it's boring when I don't get to beat up guys. I like beating up guys!"
Spider Baby explained to her, "Ban Min is a Villain, and therefore he is obligated to say things like that, and also to pay other people to say them for him when he is otherwise engaged."
May Leen said, "Oh, okay."
"Will you beat him up?" Spider Baby asked rather hopefully.
May Leen rolled her eyes at him. "I'm *lazy*," she explained condescendingly. To prove the point, she deflated and let her eyes droop mostly shut, apparently once again asleep.
Pays asked Spider Baby suspiciously, "So how's Bald Ban a Villain?"
Spider Baby's expression turned cold, as if he was disappointed in her. He said in frigid tones, "I believe you know what he sells."
"What - you mean the swords?" asked Pays sharply, not liking where this was going. "My brother uses swords, they're kind of a part of that Hero-ing business of his, I don't know if you'd heard that -"
Suddenly Spider Baby's hand was in her hair, and he had yanked her head down to eye level with him. He said quietly, "You know what I am talking about, Pasky Pays. I have a very good sense of smell - it may have been a year since you have touched it, perhaps two - but it lingers on you..."
She tried to pull away - and found that he was much stronger than he looked. "I don't know what you're -"
"Perhaps you can lie to your brother," said Spider Baby - and though his grip was painful, his voice was oddly gentle - and the quietness of his black eyes made him look suddenly very, very old. "From what I have heard, he does not understand people well, and you, I think, have been cursed to understand too much. But you cannot lie to *me*. Don't try."
May Leen clamped her hand around his and stuck her head in between them. She said with interest, "Do you want to fight with *Pays*? *Seriously?* She falls down! A lot!"
Spider Baby exhaled and released Pays' hair - her scalp tingled, and she put a hand to it. "No," he said calmly. "I never want to fight." He stood up, bowed slightly to them, and and began to walk away. "I often do, though. Excuse me."
Pays brought her hand away from her scalp and looked at it - there were smears of red on her fingertips. His long fingernails had drawn blood. She exhaled, shaking.
May Leen said curiously, peering after him with an interested look in her black eyes, "Do you want me to kill him?"
Pays eyed May Leen. "No, we can't. We just saved his life, so that means we're not allowed to kill him, because it's prohibited by the Fallacy of Sunk Costs."
"Oh."
"...May Leen. Are you sure he's human?"
May Leen said, surprised, "He's human! He can cook!"
"How do you mean, he can cook?" Pays asked sharply. "Do you *know* him? Have you like bit the head off his white-anko Emperor candy in the past?"
"Uh-huh! He works at a shop in Cinderlove - Bay bought white-anko people for me when we went there last month. They weren't very good, though!" she added critically. "It's a bad shop. It's because it's in Cinderlove, where everything is bad, except when Bay is there, because he can't eeeeever be bad!" She seemed to picture Bay doing something bad, and laughed at whatever it was.
"Yeah, he probably can't," said Pays, considering that. If May Leen had seen him in a candy shop, he must have been out front selling things - she couldn't actually have seen him *cooking* anything. It wouldn't be the first time a business using a really good House Fairy had tried to hide their trade secret it in plain sight. Except that Pays couldn't think of any kind of House Fairy that looked and acted like Spider Baby.
"What did he smell?" May Leen asked, apparently suddenly remembering what Spider Baby had said to her. She leaned over Pays and started sniffing her neck and shoulders. "*I* don't think you smell like anything - well, you smell like lying and stealing, is all, but that's regular for you. What does Bald Ban sell that's worse than a sword?"
She had been thinking about that. She said in surprise, "I don't know. But I think I've been hired to steal it tonight."
-
The two greatest thieves in the world lived in Jirny City. One of the two was the wealthy, handsome, brilliant, and largely irritating eighteen-year-old boy who called himself Ken Gley. He had stolen many wonderful things: the gold collar from the King of the Dancing Bears, cubes of frozen darkness from the tiny, obsessively guarded freezers of the Usually Drunken Mice, and a beautiful and inexplicable stringless lute from the deaf Silk Ladies who lived in the cracks in the Wall at the End of the World.
But Ken Gley was known chiefly for having stolen fire from the Fire Babies.
The Fire Babies were small, round, cunning fairies who sometimes took the place of real newborns, with the aim of being picked up and given the chance to touch a cold little red hand to a human woman's warm face. The woman would mislay bits of her mind, growing strange and wild and cruel, but would gain certain interesting powers. The family would only know that they had had a Fire Baby with them when it vanished, leaving a trail of ashes across the floor. It could be hard to figure out which lady's face the fairy had touched.
A mother could be cast out of her city's gate because her baby had vanished and she had grieved in ways her family thought were wrong. They grew afraid, fearing that she had been touched by the fire, and would burn them with it. If the baby was found after a few days, or turned out not to have been taken at all, or to have been taken by a human, sometimes it was already too late for its mother.
The Fire Babies themselves would crawl back to their homes deep in the blackest, coldest places in the forest and add their bits of human minds to the massive fires they lived in, great smokeless bonfires that grew a tiny bit each year, and never burned themselves out. They could be seen from miles away at night, crackling and shifting like ordinary fires, their hot light dimming the cool gleam of stars to nothing at all. But if one got close, one could see the Babies crawling restlessly through the flames, or sitting and looking curiously right back at the humans who stepped out of the trees to look in at them.
Human-made fire was thin and fragile, could be killed by simple things like water and wind. And it hurt. The fire the Fire Babies made could not be extinguished, and could not burn a living thing. It only held you away from it, when you tried to go in to search for your baby. It felt smooth as glass and pushed hard as a train. No magician could part it or extinguish it. You could not get close to the Fire Babies, could not revenge yourself upon them, could not take anything from them.
But one rainy evening, a little boy had appeared at the gates of Jirny City with a shred of fire burning in his grimy hand.
Ken Gley had been dressed in rags, a skinny child only eight or nine years old stumbling with exhaustion and hunger. But his black eyes had gleamed with the proud brilliance of the sun. He would not say where he had come from; but he had brought the magic fire, and offered it to the city, along with its secrets, if they would let him inside and give him a place to live.
They would give him a house - a nice one, he explained, with a place to put a lot of books, and a swimming pool, and it should be convenient to at least two good bakeries. Following a short but pointed lecture from what *appeared* to be some mildew that had learned how to talk (it was growing in the hood of his raincoat), he decided that he also wanted a lot of money, and that there had to be a greenhouse for his fairy friends to live in.
These turned out to be two Thunder Sprites and a Leafmold (which was the thing growing on his coat). He had an Ah-Lion, too, but it wanted to live in a house. This was extremely disturbing to many people. Even Pasky Bay, who had then, at fifteen, been attended by seven fairies including his Royal-rain-leaps, had not gathered so many at so tender an age. It was the mark of a child who could grow to be very dangerous. And so many people were frightened of the little boy.
So the magistrates had argued for two days, during which no one could go in or out of the city and Ken Gley sat patiently outside the gates in the rain with his fairies and no food or shelter. By the time they agreed to his demands he had caught pneumonia and starved half to death. There were people who wanted to let him finish.
The fire had helped a good deal with the city's energy costs in the years since, more than recouping the investment in Ken Gley's nice house and generous stipend. He'd gone to school until he was seventeen and done well, except for his sudden vacations to steal things. He had yet to kill anybody that the magistrates knew of. He was popular with their daughters, and they felt that this was much worse.
Now, those stolen human babies were usually found burned black someplace near the house; but sometimes the twisted sooty track the Fire Baby left showed that it had been dragging something wriggling along with it. Many people thought Ken Gley must once have been one of these stolen babies. There had once been a brilliant sorceress named Ken Yray, a reckless and bad-tempered woman even before the fire had touched her, whose stolen son's little body had never been found. But maybe he only called himself "Ken" so people would think that; maybe he was just a boy who had learned the secret of fairy fire, and had firm ideas of what he wanted to do with it. He was a loud, flashy, cheerful person who loved being rich and who lied, Bay said with a terribly grim look in his eye, almost constantly.
Because Bay did not like to take her out into society, Pays had only seen Ken Gley a few times, and from a distance. She didn't like him, either. He didn't steal from humans, which she thought was pretty cowardly. Humans were much more frightening than fairies.
The Boy With Big Dark Eyes was a more modest sort of thief. He had to be given the name, because he had never bothered to name himself. No one knew who he was. Early in his career, which began around the year Pays turned ten, people would recall seeing him near the scene of the theft a bit before it happened, a skinny, serious-looking boy of perhaps six or seven years. He had huge, solemn eyes, and he would look around with them as if he was a bit lost, and ask earnest questions about whether the person who lived in that big house was the *Emperor*.
Those who talked to him described him as "hungry-looking." Several of them had bought him food from carts and asked him worried questions about his parents, which he always answered vaguely, "Papa's trying to get his moped fixed." People who knew anything about the Cinderlove economy and the dependence some of its participants placed upon their mopeds found this statement terribly heart-breaking, and gave him money for the alleged moped repairs.
Those eyes pulled you in, they said. So big and sad and gentle.
In later years, when presumably he had gotten bigger and less harmless-looking, he was not seen at all, but always he left his calling card. Always there were a few threads of Knife-Spider silk tied discreetly around the doorknob of the house.
He stole only from wealthy humans, and only, it seemed, from those who were excessively cruel or excessively foolish. Since he had first appeared, the year Pays turned ten, cash, jewels, gold, and expensive foods appeared with regularity in the donation box of the Brothers Of Silent But Nonetheless Extremely Angry Service, who used them to care for the city's poor. One could not take gifts back from the Brothers, once given - they went about their Service heavily armed.
They kept very accurate records of the donations they received, in case it was ever necessary to flourish them indignantly at anybody. From comparing these records to what was stolen, the police believed that the Boy had never once kept anything he stole for himself. He did keep the money for the moped repairs, but no one who'd ever given it claimed to doubt for a second that his father's moped really had broken.
The police had seen him to chase him three times in the early years, and always he had lost them in Cinderlove - in the poorest, dirtiest part of the poorest, dirtiest part of the city, where the mice were the size of dogs and the dogs barked all night for no reason, and the household fairies (Stovegirls and Almost Domesticated Foxes only, for no Linen Boy or White Cat With A Black Back would ever be seen there) angrily pounded the walls and knocked shingles off the roofs when they didn't get their wine.
There were hundreds of hungry boys with scared eyes in Cinderlove. Thousands. And three or four times a year, one of them crept alone into the wealthiest part of the city to do a job he felt was important.
Pays didn't know if she liked him, either. He reminded her too much of how her brother had once been.
And then there must be a third thief. Pays had grown slowly certain of this, over the past year, as people from all parts of the city - Cinderlove and the banks of the Tsi Ri and the shops on Tal For Street and even the people who lived on Gentian Hill and in the Summer Palace - came quietly, with pinched faces, to the Pasky apartment to talk to Bay in a room alone.
And for days and days afterward, Bay would go out with just May Leen, and would walk through the city, asking people questions and not coming home until late at night. And sometime during those days he would always go to Ken Gley's house - to ask him, Pays guessed, a question.
She didn't know what was disappearing that had to be kept so secret. But there could be no reason Bay would ever visit Ken Gley, except to ask him if he had stolen something. And she could not think what he was doing with May Leen if he wasn't looking for a thief. A Roaring Girl loved the smell of things in the wrong hands.
But when he came back he had never found anything. Pays found his face easy to read, as always; here, maybe for the first time, her brother had found something he couldn't do.
And two days ago, she remembered thoughtfully, Bay had gone out with May Leen; and the day before that, he had gone to the docks without his favorite sword - his first one, the one he'd bought from Bald Ban when he was ten. He would hate going in front of Bald Ban with that sword; it would make him feel he was at a disadvantage. Had the Third Thief, Pays wondered, stolen something from Ban Min, too?
Pays was suddenly much more interested now in meeting her new client. If she wanted to be the fourth-best thief in Jirny City, she ought to know what the third-best was spending his time stealing.
-
This isn't NaNoWriMo; it's part of an attempt to address my fundamental productivity problem, that being that that I can never work on just one project at once. Until recently, I've been trying to force myself away from that. But what'll happen is that I'll have this really great idea for Steampunk London-and-Paris Amnesiac Spy Adventure Game, but I'll have designated my Active Project as Shounen Jump-Style Demon Hunters Who Quote Poetry Serial Novel, and I'll guiltily try to force myself to work on that and end up getting nothing done. I suspect that my brain may just not be amenable to this sort of focus for anything that's not for a class or work.
So what I'm trying to do right now is just make myself sit down and write as much as I can on whatever thing I'm obsessing about at the moment, rather than trying to guilt myself into working on something I'm not feeling at the moment. So yesterday morning I wrote a page of Steampunk Gay Meiji-Era Civil Servants Novel and a page of the Shounen Jump thing, last night I wrote twelve pages of the The Chosen One Has Been Cloned Medievaloid Fantasy YA Novel, and today I did an edit of this, and will probably work on something else later.