Terror Thirty-Seven - Robbers

Catching up to the guy with the wheelbarrow covered in white robes isn’t too hard. He’s got a heavy load to carry, and he doesn’t look like he’s in a hurry. The problem is getting him to let us take some of the robes he has.

“I could bribe him,” I say. I’m winded from all the jogging, but not so badly I can’t plot and scheme.

“Might not work,” Felix says. “Actually, yeah, it probably would, but then he might tell people right after so he makes even more money from it.”

“And I don’t exactly have a lot of coins left,” I mutter. “Okay, we need to distract him so that we can take those robes.”

“All of them?” Felix asks.

I hum. “Well, at least three. But I don’t know which ones will fit. So we should probably grab a bunch.” The wheelbarrow is overflowing with robes. There are four poles on each side of it keeping things from spilling over, and despite that, a few robe arms are still dangling off the sides. I guess the guy doesn’t really care.

“How do we distract him?” Felix asks. I can see her tilting her head, the way she does when she’s looking with her wind. I guess she’s not used to her eyes yet.

“I don’t know,” I admit. I glance around too. The road is lined with workshops and little smithies and warehouses. This isn’t the residential part of Montele. There are plenty of weird smells in the air. Coal fire, the weird smells from dye-makers and the constant sulphur-y stink that I think all the cities around here have.

“He’s turning,” Felix says.

The man is paused by the entrance of a wider alleyway, wrestling with a bump in the cobbled sidewalks that’s jamming the wooden wheel at the front of his wheelbarrow. He grunts, then pushes into the alley. That might work!

“Come on!” I say before I dart after him. I reach into my cloak at the same time and pull out one of my more fearsome-looking butterbutts.

The alley is dark, the walls around it leaving it in a permanent shadow, and there’s detritus collecting on the sides, but it’s otherwise pretty clean. The clothing guy is nearing the middle of the passageway, and he’s all alone.

“Go,” I whisper to my butterbutt.

It bobs in my hand, then darts ahead with a low hum before I tug Felix along with me and wait out of sight.

“What was that?” Felix asks.

I grin. “I told it to poke his butt,” I say.

A moment later there’s a howl from within the alley, then a loud smack. My butterbutt! Did he squish it?

A second howl reassures me that the little monster is just fine. “M-monster! There’s a monster violating me!” the man screams. Felix and I watch as he runs out of the alley, face stained with tears and hands clamped over his butt.

We look at each other, and both start to giggle at the same time.

“Q-quick,” I say between giggles. Felix and I move into the alley and find his cart in the middle, entirely unattended except for my proud butterbutt stationed atop the clothes. I run over and scoop the little guy up. “Well done,” I say as I tuck him away.

Felix grabs a couple of robes from the pile and folds them over her shoulder, then she grabs a couple more. “You should take some too,” she says.

I nod and pick a couple up, quickly folding them over my arm. They stink, and a lot of them have ugly yellow sweat stains and marks from food on their fronts. Nasty.

“How many do you have?” I ask.

“Five,” Felix says. She’s probably stronger than I am; I have four and I can already feel the weight of them. “We should tip the cart,” she says.

“Why?”

“It’ll make it harder to tell how many are missing,” Felix says. Putting action to words, she plants her foot on the edge of the wheelbarrow and gives it a shove. It crashes to the ground, robes flopping out of it.

“Let’s go!” I say as I heft the robes I’ve stolen. We run out of the far end of the alley, clothes streaming out behind us as we move as quickly as we can. “We should go back to Esme’s place,” I say. It’s awkward to speak while using my chin to keep the pile of robes pinned down.

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“Alright. Do you know where to go?”

“Uh,” I say.

I kinda know where Esme’s place is. More or less. Definitely less than more. I don’t quite get lost, but Felix and I do end up circling around a couple of blocks and walking down the wrong streets a few times. Fortunately it’s midday, and no one seems to care about two girls walking around half-buried in robes.

I do find Esme’s place, eventually.

“Hello!” I call out as we push into the front door.

Miss Gertrude is sitting at a table in the kitchen, a mug warming her hands while thin wisps of vapour drift out of it. “Hello,” she says.

I freeze, my smile locking into place. How can someone who looks like a kindly older lady give us such scary vibes? Then again, Mom looks like a very nice person and she can be a little scary too, sometimes. “H-hi,” I say. “Do you know if Esme’s back?”

“She is,” Gertrude says before taking a slow sip from her mug. “In her room, with a few books and scrolls I doubt she’s meant to have.”

“Ah,” I say.

“Go on. I’m certain she’ll be excited to see all those Heroic adept robes you are definitely not meant to have.”

“Right,” I say before darting past and up the stairs.

Esme’s door is closed, so I knock twice with the tip of my shoe. The door opens a crack, and Esme peers at me before sticking her head out and looking down both ends of the corridor. “Okay,” she says. “It’s clear. Come on in.”

Felix and I move in, and I immediately dump all of the robes onto the floor. “Why all the sneakiness?” I ask.

Esme stares at the robes for a moment before she pulls the door shut. “I don’t want to get caught,” she says. There’s a strange glint in her eyes, fear mixed with excitement, mixed with a whole heap of anxiety. “I did something terrible.”

“What did you do?” I ask.

“I... I stole.” She gulps. “I stole some books. But... but it’s to get other books. And I can put them back. No one will notice, right?”

“Uh,” I say. I glance at Felix, but she’s no help. “I’m sure no one will notice,” I lie. “What kind of books?”

Esme’s fear is instantly replaced by excitement. “I got a few. See, the academy needed to file the plans for its construction with the city. There’s inspections and taxes and all that kind of stuff.”

I nod. Boring stuff. We don’t have taxes at home, because Mom said so. “Alright.”

“And when the city tosses its old records out, the Great Library always takes them.” She darts over to her bed, reaches under, and pulls out a pack. From within she reveals a pair of dusty old books and a scroll she quickly unrolls atop her bed. The parchment is old, or at least not very well maintained. There’s too much dryness on the edges and some of the inks are fading.

“Is that the academy?” I ask as I look over it. The map is a little hard to read. Lots of lines without much context to them.

“It is,” Esme says. “About seventy years ago, but I hardly imagine they’ve moved too many buildings around.”

“Nice,” I say. “This is going to help a ton. Do you have anything else?”

“Yup,” Esme says. She grins, big and proud. “These books are manuals and semi-religious texts from the church of Héroe. They use them to train new priests and trainers and stuff like that. They’re a very militaristic religion, you know, so they have a lot of rules.”

“Makes sense,” I say. “I think Semper has a bunch of rules too, right?”

Esme huffs. “Not that many. They’re mostly rules on how to write, when to take breaks from writing, and things like grammar and book-sorting.”

“Right,” I agree. I’m not about to tell her how silly I find some of those things.

“How do those help us?” Felix asks. It’s not a terrible question.

Esme picks up the book and hugs it close, cheeks puffed and hair quite sparky. ‘Because, Miss Felix, these will tell us exactly where the priests at the academy are hiding all of the books.”

“Oh,” I say.

This is great!

***