The Phoenix Thief

THREE

AFTER MOVING MOST of Dmal's sorted piles of odds and ends the next morning, Kilter and Dmal dragged the crippled flying machine out from under the crossbolt and spread out its ragged wings across the tower floor. It looked like an old moth that had beaten itself against one of the street lamps too many times: frayed, bent, and even burnt here and there. Kilter stared at it. Then he rumpled his hair with a hand and let his breath out in a long sigh, puffing out his cheeks. He glanced at Dmal.

"Don't you worry, little boy." The old man laughed. "We got this notebook, you remember. And we got all the little pieces and stuff we need right here." He swept his arm out, gesturing over his stash of gathered things.

Kilter ran his eyes along the tattered machine again, and wrinkled his nose. "You really think it's going to... fly?"

"Not now it won't, little boy. Why, it's sat down there in the dust, housing mice, for 'most ten years! But you jus' wait and see when we get done with it." Dmal crouched down beside the machine and began flipping through the notebook again, moving each page as gently as if it might crumple like the dry leaves that fell from the few trees in the upper city and sometimes drifted down over the lower triads. "So you say you made some of these of you own, little boy?"

Kilter sat down on the gritty stone beside Dmal and nodded.

"Exactly like this one?"

"This one's a lot bigger. It's taller than me."

"Did you make any of them out of these same materials – wood, canvas, th' gears?"

"I used this." Kilter reached over to touch the time-stiffened fabric stretched over the frame of the wings. "There was some of it stuck to one of the pages. I found more in an alley behind a warehouse. What makes this piece hard?" He tapped his fingers against the browned surface again, and fine, sticky orange-brown dust bounced off it at the motion.

"The canvas? It been rubbed with pine tar, to make it stronger, and waterproof. This get heavy with water, it fall right out of the sky as if these weren't even wings, little boy."

"Pine tar?"

"It come out of a certain kind of trees, the ones what don't grow leaves on their branches, but long things like grass. You can use linseed and wax, too, but linseed don't grow 'round here no more. Thanks to your door, we two can still get out into the forest, but we do it later. Right now, we need wood, and grease, and canvas."

"I got those."

"Here?"

Kilter nodded.

Dmal smiled, pulling off his jacket and setting it beside his chestnut-brazier. "Then what we waiting for, little boy? Here, you find me the hammer I have somewhere in that pile there, the one by the stairs, and we can start taking the canvas off this old frame. We'll fix the broken parts, get some new gears and pulleys to replace those missing ones, and then use the old canvas as a pattern to cut the new canvas with."

Dmal working with the hammer and Kilter with a screwdriver he dug from among a pile of odd screws, the two soon had the stiff, crumbling old canvas off the flying machine. They rolled it up and stashed it alongside the tower wall, then found pieces of wood from Kilter's gathered supply that they could carve into replacements for the broken parts of the wings' frames. As they worked, Dmal hummed almost continually. But he stopped now and then to flip through the notebook and point out various things to Kilter.

"See, you shape the wings curved a little, like in this drawing, so to catch th' wind better. Bird wings, they flap, but not these. These wings, they stay stiff, hold whoever wearing them up in the air, riding on th' wind like a boat do on water."