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“You’re going to regret stealing my glasses, you know,” Agatha called. “And my little clank.”
“That branch is not going to hold your weight, Sturmvoraus,” Gilgamesh said, ‘helpfully’ from his place on the ground. “Royal burden and all, you know.”
Tarvek glared at the blur that was Gil, decided that calling him an idiot was a waste of breath, and continued to climb. It’s not as if I have any choice, you oaf, he thought anyway. The damn bird took my glasses too!
“Be careful it doesn’t peck your eyes out! It’d be a tragedy for you to be even less useful to Agatha!”
Oh look, pinecones. I wonder if I can knock some of them off and hit Gil… no, too risky. I might catch Agatha instead. Briefly Tarvek entertained himself by imagining using Gil as a landing pad.
“Then again, weasels are supposed to be nimble. We’ll find out if you land on your feet.”
Weasels kill prey many times their size, Wulfenbach. Tarvek reached the branch where the magpie was hopping back and forth, cackling. He settled himself on the adjoining branch. “Hello, Herr Corvid. I don’t suppose I can interest you in a trade,” Tarvek said conversationally.
“Never negotiate with terrorists, Sturmvoraus!”
Tarvek ignored him. “I will give you this,” he removed his perfectly polished house sigil and held it up, “...in exchange for my and Agatha’s glasses, and her little clank.”
“He’s gone featherbrained if he thinks the bird understands a word of what he says,” Gilgamesh shook his head.
The magpie tilted its head at Tarvek and muttered at him, then tilted its head the other way.
“Oh very well. Fruitcake on top of the pin.”
The magpie cackled and bobbed its head.
~~
Gil stared, frowning, at Tarvek, as the redhead fed the magpie pinches of fruitcake, and Agatha cooed, petting the magpie’s back. The magpie had, inexplicably, accepted the Sturmvoraus sigil pin, and returned the items it had snatched during their walk.
“Loki is a good name for you, don’t you think?” Tarvek asked the bird. He truly had no idea if the animal understood him, but he was happy to keep up the game if it irked Gilgamesh this much.
The magpie cackled, bobbed its head and accepted another piece of fruitcake.
“Well then, your name is Loki henceforth.”
~~
It started with Gil’s teaspoons. Zoing couldn’t keep the bird away. It would swoop down just as Zoing would put the teacup with Gil’s tea on his desk, and snatch the teaspoon. What the blasted bird did with the spoons, Gil had no idea, but Zoing would screech and try to chase after the bird.
Before long, the damn magpie - Gil absolutely refused to call it by name - started snatching Gil’s sigil pins. Somehow. The pin that Gil would lay out the night before would always be missing when he reached for it as he dressed the next morning. It got so that he had to take it out of a drawer in order for him to be able to wear one.
As for Tarvek, the bird refused to steal anything of his, or Agatha’s. In fact, Gil walked past Tarvek’s lab one afternoon, to hear him scolding the wasp weasel that always hung around him, and the bird.
“Cravat, no biting or trying to eat Loki! I have two shoulders, you know! You can sit on one and Loki can perch on the other! Loki! Don’t try to peck Cravat or I will be furious at you!”
Gil peered around the edge of the doorway. The wasp weasel and the bird had been put on top of one of the work tables, side by side. Tarvek was standing in front of them, arms crossed, scowling at the two animals, both the weasel and the bird standing and hanging their heads. Gil listened as Tarvek chided the magpie for stealing the wasp weasel’s cravat, and the wasp weasel was told in turn to return the bird’s sigil collar.
A few hours later, Gil saw the same wasp weasel scampering past, a tiny white cravat tied around his neck, with an equally tiny Sturmvoraus sigil pinned to said cravat. The next time his teaspoon was stolen, Gil noticed the tiny Sturmvoraus sigil hanging from a leather thong looped around the magpie’s neck.
Agatha apparently found it cute.
“Tarvek says that Loki wanted Tarvek to put the pin he gave Loki on him. Since the proper sized pin is too large, Tarvek made the tiny pendant. Cravat sulked, so Tarvek made him one too.”
“So the Weasel King has a weasel and an air weasel for pets.” Gil sat back, and started laughing.
He wasn’t laughing when the magpie made a point of pooping on his vest later, right before he was to join Agatha and Tarvek for dinner.
~~
Two months later, Tarvek wasn’t just feeding the one magpie any more, but a whole flock of them. He started to have to argue that he couldn’t feed them fruitcake all the time, and they’d have to make do with bread. Gil was very disturbed to see the flock fly a short distance to apparently confer, then return and bob their heads, as if agreeing to the change. Before long, Gil started seeing more magpies with little Sturmvoraus pendants around their necks. This was eventually joined by a flock of ravens, and later, crows.
Krosp sulked, not because he couldn’t eat them - the Emperor of Cats knew better than to earn the enmity of magpies, crows and ravens - but because, as he grumbled to Gil, “The damn birds tell Sturmvoraus things. Well, the smarter ones anyway. They can count up to ten, you know, and as an experiment, Sturmvoraus started putting up pictures of things. He has wooden beads and the birds drop beads into a box below the picture of the thing they want to tell him about. I don’t know how he figures out a message from that, but he does, and rewards the birds accordingly.” The cat flailed. “He has an airborne spy network! Can you imagine what he could achieve if they actually could talk?”
Occasionally, Gil would see them flying through the halls of Castle Heterodyne, holding something shiny in their beak. Out of morbid curiosity, Gil followed one to Tarvek’s lab, to find a coin-operated dispenser off to one side of the room. The raven carefully poked the coin into the slot and pressed a button with its beak. A cracker-like treat rolled out onto a dish, which the raven picked up with a caw and flew back out with.
“You’re training them to thieve,” Gil scolded when Tarvek returned to his lab.
“I am not,” Tarvek replied primly. “Have you seen what I end up with?” He went to the treat dispenser and opened the collection tin. Inside lay not only coins of different denominations and value, but washers, gears, metal buttons, bottle caps and thin stones. The coins, while shiny because they were of metal, were worn and looked like they’d been dug out of the dirt or stepped on. A number of the other items were similarly grimy or worn. Gil frowned, and fished out a fragment of metal; flat enough to fit through the slot but of irregular shape.
“I can’t sit here and dispense treats all the time, I have work to do, after all,” Tarvek huffed. “I taught Loki, Onyx and Ebony how to operate the dispenser, and they taught their fellows.” Seeing Gil’s puzzled expression, Tarvek added, “Onyx is the crow and Ebony’s the raven.”
“...They have representatives that report to you?!”
“It seems like it.” Tarvek put the tin back and refilled the treat dispenser. “The treats are a cracker made of flour, ground corn, sunflowers, mealworms and eggs. I found a baker in town who was happy to make them for me after Loki retrieved a key he’d dropped down the storm drain. They really are quite the clever birds, you know.”
“Did you teach them to hate me?”
To Gilgamesh’ surprise, Tarvek looked puzzled. “I did not. Agatha would have been unhappy with me if I did, you know. Whatever made them dislike you, you did all on your own, Wulfenbach. Corvids have long memories, and they can communicate and learn.” He gestured at the stand of pictures with their little boxes, the dispenser, and a box of broken little collars, with a whole set of new ones hanging from a hook.
As they watched, a crow flew in, holding a tiny sigil in its beak. It dropped it into the box, fished a thong from the hook, took it to a different, shallow hook and hung the necklace from it. It then wriggled its head through the loop and seemed to shrug until the necklace came off the shallow hook. With a caw, the crow flew off again.
“See? I’ve been documenting this whole thing. It’s been absolutely fascinating work.” Tarvek sounded very pleased. “I expect to be able to publish my findings next year.”
The next magpie that flew in was Loki; he was the only one with a gold Sturmvoraus sigil hanging from his neck. All the rest had the sigils made of tin. In his beak he carried an envelope, and he landed on Tarvek’s shoulder, dropping the letter in Tarvek’s open palm.
Gil recognised the handwriting on the envelope before Tarvek could tuck it away, and left, grumpy.
~~
“The magpie’s been delivering love letters?” Gil exclaimed, outraged.
“The Mistress has been very pleased with every letter she’s gotten,” the Castle replied, sounding pleased as well. Of course it was. If the Heterodyne was happy, the Castle was happy.
“It doesn’t bother you in the least that all these birds are pooping on your rooftops and walls?” Gil asked. Maybe it’ll shoot them down with the Torchmen or something.
“The rain washes it off, and if it gets particularly unsightly, that’s what minions are for,” Castle Heterodyne replied.
Gil knew he wasn’t going to get any sympathy and shut up, sulking. He still couldn’t write a love letter to save his life, and Higgs smacked hard.
~~
Agatha was no source of comfort either. “You know, if you’d paid attention, all the ones that hate you you’ve cursed at.”
“They steal my sigil pins!” Gil exclaimed, unhappy.
“That’s part of the game, you know. You’re supposed to trade a bit of bread for them.” Agatha grinned. “They hand me my sigil now when I get dressed, and I give whoever helped me that morning a bit of my breakfast.”
Gil stared at her, and sighed. “You’re helping Sturmvoraus with the research he’s doing, aren’t you?”
“It’s really fascinating, after all, and it is an advancement of scientific understanding!” Agatha shook her head. “You should’ve figured it out. I’ve had some of the birds deliver notes to von Zinzer, Van, Violetta, Zeetha, and General Zog, but they refuse to deliver any to you because you’re mean to them. Dr. Mittlemind says the University of Vienna’s Department of Psychology is already looking forward to our report.”
Gil gave up. “I guess I should be glad they’re not rats.”
“Oh, Tarvek’s got nothing to do with those,” Agatha said placidly. As she spoke, a line of eight rats came out of one of the small dingbot pathways constructed into the walls. To Gil’s alarm, they all wore the Heterodyne trilobite on a harness, to which tiny swords were strapped to their backs. “After all, they serve House Heterodyne, and have for five hundred years.”