TheCur4tor

TheCur4tor came onto the avenue with everyone else that morning, and left it almost at once. Coming off the avenue, the street tipped your head back for you. Cold glass towers stood shoulder to shoulder all the way up, very serious about it, and TheCur4tor looked at all that height and thought: but where do the little streets go?

So they went to find out. Down the side streets the glass gave way to tables, and the tables smelled of pastry. This was the Kerb. A Raccoon in a floury apron held out a paper-wrapped hand pie, crimped along the edge with a little mark.

“Pork and apple,” the Raccoon said. “Yours, if you tell one tower desk the Kerb fed you. Those are the terms.”

In Bullhattan, TheCur4tor would learn, everything came with its terms said out loud. Nobody here would eat a surprise. TheCur4tor agreed, and ate, and it was a very good pie.

On an upturned crate behind the table sat a Hare, all on their own, turning a borrowed pencil round and round. They’d walked in that morning too. Nobody had spoken to them yet. TheCur4tor sat down beside them, and by the end of the pie the two of them were going wherever they went next together.

Where they went was Fair Copy Row, the slanted desks under the Lobby’s arcade where Bullhattan’s writers draft their Words. The desks slope toward you. The Hare set down their pencil and it rolled straight off. TheCur4tor set down their fountain pen, the one with the heavy cap, and it stayed exactly where it was.

A Deer at the next desk looked up. “Now that’s a proper cap,” they said. “Ysolde. I cut nibs for the whole Beasthood.” They tapped the slope. “The Jungle reporters have one of my pens. Carry them an ask. Politely. My words: Please send Ysolde’s pen home. Not ‘give it back.’ ‘Send it home.’ Terms: I cut you a nib for your trouble.”

The reporters’ desks were at the far end of the arcade, loud and quick and full of questions. The Hare went very still.

“You go,” the Hare said. “I’ll wait here.”

“Quicker on your own,” said Ysolde.

It would have been. TheCur4tor could see the whole errand done in two minutes. They could also see the Hare on that crate again, turning a pencil.

So TheCur4tor uncapped the heavy pen and wrote Ysolde’s words out on a card, slowly, in their best hand, word for word. They blew on the ink. Then they gave the card to the Hare.

“You hold the words,” TheCur4tor said. “I’ll say them. We go together.”

It took a long time. The Hare stopped twice. TheCur4tor stopped with them, both times, and did not hurry them once.

At the reporters’ desks, TheCur4tor said the ask exactly as written. A reporter read the card, raised an eyebrow at the handwriting, and said they’d think about it. Then they pinned the card to their board, right in the middle, where everybody passing would see it.

Walking back, the Hare was holding their own ears a little higher.

Ysolde listened to all of it. “You took your time,” they said.

“We took it together,” said TheCur4tor.

Ysolde looked at the Hare, then down the arcade at the card still pinned up there in TheCur4tor’s ink, and nodded once.

“That’ll hold.”

The Glass Lobby sits over the Vaults, all polished floor and tall windows, and on Thursday evening it was packed to the walls with the vote. Open collars stood on one side, buttoned collars on the other, and the talk was all pledges: who had shaken, who hadn’t, who still might. In the middle of it, Aurel Solvang, a Beagle with a pocket ledger, was writing so fast the pencil squeaked.

TheCur4tor had not come about the vote. They had come about the road.

The news had been coming in all week. Stretches of the old road were going dark for days at a time, and walkers were stuck out there in the Grey, between one lamp and the next, with no way to see the road home. Somebody ought to go and get them. TheCur4tor looked at their own two hands and thought: well.

In Bullhattan you say your terms first, so first TheCur4tor wrote them down. They did it on Fair Copy Row, on the sloped desks, and set the heavy-capped pen down after. It stayed put, the way it always did. The Hare read the card over their shoulder, one ear twitching. Every walker cut off on the old road, in by morning.

Then they went into the Lobby, and the room went quiet. It always does here when someone is about to say exact words. Augustin Rhee took TheCur4tor’s hand and set the grip right before anything was said: thumb over thumb, palm flat to palm, no slack.

“Now,” said Augustin.

“Every walker cut off on the old road,” TheCur4tor said, loud and slow, “in by morning.”

They shook. Down in the Vaults the bell rang, one deep note that came up through the floor into everyone’s feet. A Word shaken over the Vaults binds. If TheCur4tor broke it, both palms would go cold, and stay cold. Everyone in the room knew it. TheCur4tor felt their hand warm in Augustin’s, and let go.

Aurel was already at their elbow, ledger open. “Which side’s that for?”

“No side,” said TheCur4tor. “It’s not a pledge. It’s a Word about the road.” They said it plainly, so the nearest desks of both collars heard, and a few Beasts looked away, a bit embarrassed to have hoped.

Aurel looked at the ledger, then at TheCur4tor, and for once wrote nothing down.

Ysolde caught them at the door and pushed a lamp into TheCur4tor’s hand. “I still owe you a nib,” they said. “And the reporters still haven’t answered me about the pen. Go on. Quick as you can.”

Quick as you can. TheCur4tor turned to the Hare. “Stay here where it’s warm. I’ll be back by morning.”

The Hare’s ears went flat. They looked past the doors, past the end of the avenue, to where the dark began. Then they took the card out of TheCur4tor’s hand and held it against their chest.

“I’m not waiting on a crate again,” they said.

TheCur4tor knew what that had cost to say. They also knew what it would cost them. A Hare who is frightened of the dark walks slowly, and the morning was already shaken on.

They went together.

Past the avenue, the old road ran on post by post, and the lamps got further apart. At the first empty hook, the Hare stopped. TheCur4tor stopped with them, lamp swinging, and waited, and felt a slice of the night go by that they would never get back. At the second empty hook, the same. Their palms were still warm. They kept checking anyway.

On the post where the last lamp gave out, someone had tied a knot of rough cord, small and neat and pulled tight. The Hare touched it, as if it helped to know somebody had been this far before them. Beyond it the road went grey, and so quiet it pressed on them both.

The Hare held the card up to the lamplight and read the Word out, all of it, in their own voice. It wobbled only a little.

“That’ll hold,” the Hare said.

TheCur4tor lifted the lamp higher, and they stepped into the grey stretch side by side.