Bum

The cards on the pitch rail swayed a little every time the Lobby doors swung open, and Bum had been watching them sway for most of the morning.

They stood at the back of the Mezzanine with their shoulders against the cold glass, where nobody needed them to move. Below, Beasts crossed the Glass Lobby in twos and threes, talking fast and shaking hands. Up here a Wolf walked the brass rail with a tin of pins, straightening cards that were already straight. Nineteen cards hung there. After the nineteenth was a gap exactly the width of one more.

The Wolf stopped in front of them.

“You’ve been standing there an hour,” they said. “Either you’re spying or you want a job. I’m Dorian. I keep the rail.”

Bum touched the lump of kryptonite in their pocket, felt its rough edge, and said they’d take the job.

“Good.” Dorian tapped the gap. “Twenty Beasthoods, twenty pitches. The last one’s from a small desk, and it’s still on Fair Copy Row with Kerensa, because Kerensa won’t let a clause out crooked. Fetch it. Back before dusk. Pitches go up at dusk, and I don’t pin late.”

They opened the tin and checked the pins, which were already lined up by size.

“Years I’ve kept this rail,” Dorian said, more lightly than the words deserved. “Never once had all twenty.”

They pressed a paper twist into Bum’s hands. A closing roll, baked on the Kerb at first light, still warm. “Thanks in advance.”

The arcade ran under the Mezzanine in a long curve of slanted desks. Down in the Lobby the handshake bell rang for somebody else’s Word, and a cheer went up. Two Beasts in grey-stitched cloth sat very still on a bench by the doors while the crowd flowed round them. A quiet room drew fewer Shapes, one of them had told a passing desk that morning. The desk had laughed, then looked back over their shoulder twice.

Kerensa was a Cat with a pen behind one ear and a single page in front of them.

“If Dorian sent you,” they said, without looking up, “the answer is not yet.”

The clause was one line. The small desk promised to keep a lamp lit on their corner of the old road until the eve of first frost.

“It says keep lit,” Kerensa said. “It doesn’t say who keeps it lit if they can’t. A Word that doesn’t say that is a Word that breaks on the first cold night.”

Bum looked up through the arcade glass. The light on the towers had gone orange. They could feel the hurry climbing their throat, the easy little sentence that would make Kerensa scowl and sign anything.

They didn’t say it. They set the roll by Kerensa’s elbow, sat on the step beside the desk, and asked to hear the clause out loud.

Kerensa read it. Crossed out three words. Read it again. On the third reading Bum said it back to them slowly, and Kerensa stopped halfway, wrote four new words, and sat back.

“There,” they said, and blotted it. “You didn’t rush me. Most do.”

Bum ran with the card held flat between both hands, up the Mezzanine stairs, while the last of the sun slid off the top of the glass. They had no intention of leaving before the final card came down tonight, not if it ran till morning.

At the gap, Dorian stood holding a single pin. They didn’t move, and they didn’t look at the stairs. They looked at the empty space on the rail, the way you watch a door for someone who might not come.

Dorian took the card without a word, read the clause once, and laid it face down on the brass beside the gap.

“Last pitch is at full dark,” they said. “It goes up then. Not before.”

Bum nodded and went back to their place against the glass. They’d have stayed there all night, too, except that a walker came in through the Lobby doors below with grey dust on their boots and said, loud enough to carry, that the stretch past the Deal Boards had gone dark again. Three Beasts were out on it, walking home between dark posts, with the night coming on.

Bum was down the stairs before they’d decided anything. In the middle of the Lobby a broad Beast named Augustin Rhee caught their hand, turned it a little, and set the grip right.

“Say it so they hear it.”

So Bum said it out loud. Every walker cut off on the old road, in by morning. The bell rang. A few Beasts clapped, the way you clap for somebody else’s Word.

Then they climbed back up to tell Dorian, and Dorian looked at them the way they’d looked at the gap.

“I’ll be back before the last pitch,” Bum said.

Dorian’s mouth went thin. “Then be back. I won’t hold the gap for you past full dark.”

Out on the Kerb the tables smelled of flour and smoke from the morning’s baking. A lamp trader was packing tins into a crate. They handed one lamp across and showed Bum how to trim the wick. Bum trimmed it far too short, and the lamp gave a small, sulky flame.

“You’ve hurt its feelings,” the trader said. “Again. Less.”

The second time it caught properly. The brass was warm from the Kerb stove, and Bum held it with both hands, the way they’d held the card.

Two tables down, a trader was rolling up an awning. “The grey-stitched lot say leave a dark stretch dark and the Shapes go somewhere else,” they said to nobody in particular. They didn’t sound sure it was wrong. Bum wasn’t sure either. They walked on anyway.

At the foot of the Spire a Hyena sat with a thermos of tea, watching the avenue empty. Their eyes went to the lamp.

“Worst thing first,” they said. “It doesn’t get lighter for being carried well. I’ve carried one thing sixty years.” They unscrewed the thermos lid and poured, and didn’t say what the thing was. “Go on, then.”

Bum went on. Every table they passed was another table between them and the rail. Somewhere behind them the Lobby bell rang for somebody else’s Word, and their stomach turned over. It was too early for the last pitch, surely. Surely.

Past the last trader the Deal Boards stood in fresh paint, a long wall of handshakes written up in big letters. Past them the old road began.

The post nearest the boards already had a lamp on it. It was burning, wick trimmed neat, glass wiped clean. Nobody stood near it. There was no tag on the hook and no crate at its foot.

“Wasn’t there at noon,” the last trader said, folding a stool. “Wasn’t me.”

The next post along was dark, and so was every post after it, out into the grey.

Bum reached up and hung their lamp on the empty hook. It swung, steadied, and a small round of road came back into colour: packed earth, old stones, a tuft of brown grass. It wasn’t much. It was the first one.

They looked back. High on the tower front, behind the Mezzanine glass, a small dark shape stood at the rail and didn’t move.

Then they looked out at the dark posts.

Bum turned and ran back down the Kerb for the next lamp. They weren’t walking now and they weren’t watching. One lamp, one post, one look up at the glass, every trip, for as long as the night lasted. The lamp trader saw them coming and, without a word, unpacked the crate again.

When they came back out with the second lamp, the one by the Deal Boards was still burning, steady as anything, and there was still nobody standing anywhere near it.