Fantastic Metropolis

“Gad?” he croaks. “Pip?”

No answer. His friends still asleep, the lazy good-for-nothings. The burning in his bladder is preventing his own return to that enviable state. With another groan, louder and more self-pitying, not just an expression but an advertisement of suffering, Kestrel rolls onto the floor, a journey of mere inches; at some point and for some reason, both equally forgotten, he or someone else had slid the thin mattress off the bed. Which, he realizes, explains the odd perspective of the beer bottles. Still, as he rises to his feet and lurches into the bathroom, a nagging doubt accompanies him, as if he’s overlooked something. He passes his hand over the lumen on the bathroom wall, then immediately deactivates it, senses shrieking in protest at the hammerflash of light, and does his business in the dark. It’s only when he staggers back into the room that Kestrel notices the other beds are empty.

And freezes long enough to digest the implications of this discovery. When he has, he rushes to the window and yanks the curtains open, recoiling from an explosion of sunlight and startled pigeons on the ledge outside. He squints with horror into the brightness of day. Two floors below, Bayberry Street bustles with carriages and pedestrians. Kestrel feels like he’s been caught in a downdraft, a dangerous wind shear.

Cursing, he faces back into the room and sees that a note has been left on top of one of the beds. He wafts it to him, reads Gad’s scribbled hand: Kes—tried to wake you. Gone to the Gate. See you there!

He crumples the paper, lets it fall to the floor. Tried to wake you—not too Oddsdamn hard, they didn’t! How difficult can it be to wake one sleeping person? That, come to think of it, he does kind of half-remember, like the ragged remnant of a dream, having been jolted awake by the impact of his mattress striking the floor, and threatening the disturbers of his sleep with grievous bodily harm if they didn’t leave him alone, is irrelevant. What matters is that his two best friends have deserted him. The pendulum clock on the wall reads twenty past ten: pentad assignments are almost certainly posted by now.

But maybe it isn’t too late, after all. Perhaps there’s been a delay, and he can still catch the tail end of the ceremony. Scarcely pausing to preen before the bathroom mirror, licking his hands and smoothing the worst of his ruffled feathers back into place so that it doesn’t look quite as much like he’s just flown backward through a hurricane, Kestrel throws on clean clothes, fastens his dice pouch to his belt, swings his half-empty waterskin over his neck, and clatters down the stairs to the lobby of the Pigeon’s Roost… where he collides with the eponymous innkeeper, a cadaverous, something-more-than-middle-aged airie with a scarred and withered wing his colorful clothing cannot heal or conceal.

“Getting a late start this morning, young Kestrel?” There’s nothing pleasant in Pigeon’s pinched smile or the frosty glitter of his gray eyes beneath bushy pewter eyebrows. The vibrant red feathers of his headcrest fan open as he speaks, resembling a crown of flames in the brilliant sunlight streaming through the front windows.

Kestrel blushes at the sudden memory of jeering at Pigeon and pelting him with pizza crusts when he’d come to their room for the third time with a complaint about the noise; this after the common room had closed and they’d moved the party upstairs. “Er, about last night,” he begins. “I feel terrible…”

“You look it.” Pigeon grunts with satisfaction, headcrest stiff and at its full extension. His pointed ears have pricked up as well, hoisted by fine silver chains that run from the top and sides of his scalp to a series of small rings and studs piercing the helixes of his ears. Such elaborate architectures of jewelry, reminiscent of the rigging of sailing ships or suspension bridges, are considered fashionable among airies of Pigeon’s generation, but Kestrel and his friends eschew such garish ornamentation. Kestrel wears but a single piece of jewelry, a thin chain of three braided threads—two gold, one silver—that coils about his left ear to dangle an inch below the lobe. He has a habit of flicking the loose ends with his index finger when nervous or impatient, as now.

“I’m sorry about the noise and, well, all the rest of it,” he gamely presses on, keeping his voice low so that the clerk at the front desk—a delph in dark glasses who stands as motionless as the pile of rocks he pretty much resembles—won’t overhear the humiliating apology. And because he’s a trifle sensitive just now to loud voices, including his own. On the hangover scale of one to ten, he’s got to be pushing eleven.

“So you’ve got some manners after all.” Pigeon’s head bobs in a fashion queasily reminiscent of his namesake bird, which Kestrel has never encountered in such numbers as here in Mutatis Mutandis, strutting about the busy streets of the Commonwealth’s capital like they own the place. The pigeon population of distant Wafting, his home nesting, is kept small and timid by the many species of raptors that call the Featherstone Mountains home.

“Which is more than I can say for your molting friends,” the innkeeper continues in a growl. “Slunk out of here this morning without so much as a peep. I was within a feather of tossing the lot of you out last night. I still might.”