Genie and the Trinketeers

The beginning of a story I'll have to add to my list of books to write...





         Genie dove under the bed, cursing his stupidity. He should have been on the alert and heard the footsteps hastening down the corridor. He should not have trusted T.B. to keep watch properly.

         A key rasped in the lock, the one Genie had picked only moments before.

         “It’s unlocked?” said a man’s voice through the door.

         “I must have forgotten to lock it.” The young woman sounded distracted, and not at all suspicious. Genie breathed a quiet sigh of relief.

         He saw two pairs of feet enter the hotel room. The sturdy leather boots remained just inside the door, while the old, worn slippers hurried about. Genie could hear the girl stuffing her belongings into her bags, unaware that someone had recently sorted through them. Not that Genie had found anything to steal. The young woman was quite poor.

         “You burned the note?” The man’s boots moved toward the hearth.

         “Of course.”

         Genie glanced at the crumpled piece of paper in his balled up fist, recalling the reason he had been caught off guard. He was not a very quick or skilled reader. T.B. was a little better at it.

         T.B. Genie wondered why the boy had not warned him of the woman’s return, but he was not angry. It was no fault of T.B.’s that he had not been born a thief, like Genie. The boy had lived his whole life on the Wayward, having been abandoned in one of the stairwells as an infant. “T.B.” stood for the only names he had ever known: The Baby, The Brat, and—when he was lucky—The Boy. When he was in trouble the staff usually called him another name that began with B—and ended with a D.

         “Do you have everything? Better check around and make sure,” said the man.

         For a panicked moment, Genie was certain he was about to be discovered. He shrank back toward the headboard and the wall, away from the two pairs of feet, and turned his face to the carpet so that no reflection of light on his eyes could betray him. The man and young woman moved about the room. They opened and shut drawers, inspected the wardrobe, but they did not look under the bed.

         “Come on, now. We don’t want to keep the caravan waiting,” said the man.

         When he heard the latches on the lady’s suitcase click shut, Genie breathed again. The man and young woman left the hotel room, locking the door behind them, and Genie crawled out from beneath the bed. He was shaken by the close shave. Never had he come so near to capture, not in all the three months since he had stowed away and begun systematically burglarizing the rooms of the walking hotel.

         It was only as he reached into his pocket for a lock pick to let himself out of the room that Genie remembered the note. He unfolded it carefully. The half-burned piece of paper had caught his eye as he had cast about for places to search for valuables. Genie slowly reread the message—what the fire had left of it.

“Janelle, we know what you…want to help you. Check out of the Wayward when it…Lake Montague. The caravan…to fetch you. ~Martheu, Trinketeer. Burn this….”

         Genie’s eyes returned to the word “Trinketeer,” and lingered there for a moment. He had heard the word before. The Trinketeers were traders and, as Genie understood it, they traded only in the finest of wares. “Lake Montague,” why, that was where the Wayward was right now. It was clear from the fragmented message that the young woman—named Janelle—was at this very moment on her way to join the Trinketeers.

         Genie slid the note up his sleeve and pulled the lock pick from his pocket. No doors on the Wayward ever stayed closed to him very long. He had been picking locks for more than half of his fourteen years. Once in the corridor, Genie looked about for T.B. He heard a bell toll once, warning anyone who wanted to disembark here that the Wayward would soon be moving again.

         “Blast!” said Genie. Forgetting all about T.B., he hurried for the stairs, leaping down them three and four at a time. The tenants he passed in the stairwell took him—as they always had—for one of the hotel boys. There were usually plenty of cooks’ assistants and mechanics’ apprentices about the place.

         Genie reached the ground floor—which was, as it happened, quite a few meters above the ground—and hurried through the kitchens to a disused broom cupboard in the back. Genie slipped inside and lifted up the loose floorboards, beneath which he had stored the results of the last three months of thieving. In the pitch black of the cupboard, Genie felt about for a sack and began filling it with the contents of his hoard.

         Soon he was hurrying for the door, a heavy, bulging sack over his shoulder. Turning a corner Genie ran into T.B.

         The younger boy’s face lit up. “Genie! They didn’t catch you!”

         No thanks to you, Genie felt like replying, but instead he said, “Of course not. Nobody can catch a born thief like me.” He ducked into the shadows beneath a staircase, pulling T.B. with him.

         T.B. now noticed the sack. “You’re leaving?”

         “Yes. I’m off to give the Trinketeers a try.” Genie tapped his foot impatiently. He had little time. The floor was already beginning to vibrate slightly as the Wayward’s four steam-powered legs warmed up. “Alone,” Genie added as an afterthought. It would be hard enough looking after himself, let alone a little orphaned hotel rat.

         “But I thought I was your assistant.” T.B. started to cry.

         Genie wanted to roll his eyes. “You were a great assistant, T.B., but you didn’t think I could stay here forever, did you? A born thief like me doesn’t belong anywhere. You’ve got to stay here, though. How will your parents find you when they come back if you leave the Wayward?” Genie felt no shame at using T.B.’s secret dream against him.

         The floor lurched once and then began to sway in a slow, steady rhythm. Blast! Genie started to sling his sack over his shoulder, but thought better of it. There was no way he could take it with him now that he could not use the front doors.

         Genie looked at T.B.’s unhappy face, then dropped the sack—three months worth of loot—at the boy’s feet. “Here.”

         Genie fled back through the kitchens and into the storage room that served as a cellar. He shoved a crate off the trapdoor and picked its padlock. A moment later he lifted the heavy wooden square and lowered himself through it. His feet found the repairman’s rungs at the top of one of the Wayward’s legs. Genie tried not to look at the ground far below him as he eased the trap door shut and began to descend.

         It was much harder than climbing up had been three months ago. The Wayward had been standing still then. Now the metal leg Genie clung to moved steadily back and forth, and a capricious wind was trying from each direction in turn to blow him off. These, combined with scalding jets of steam that just barely missed him and made the rungs almost too hot to touch, turned Genie’s escape into a harrowing experience.

         Finally the young thief reached the final rung and dropped the last two meters to the ground. Genie stared up as the Wayward’s pipe-covered underbelly passed overhead. Then he looked around at where he had landed. Low green hills dotted with stout evergreens rolled away before him in each direction but one—in which lay the lake. Genie started back toward Lake Montague, thinking of the three months of thieving he now had to make up for. Trusting in the Trinketeer’s reputation, it would not take too long.