21: Giles

Giles is a brown and silver smudge somewhere at the edge of sight. He is the thing you think you saw, only it turns out it was just a shadow or a stack of rusty buckets. It is not actually either of those things, though. It’s Giles, doing something unsavory. He’s got streaks of white in his reddish-brown fur, so he looks like someone painted racing stripes on him, and his black paws and forearms look like little tailor-made boots on the ends of his nimble little legs. His eyes manage to be beady and wide open at the same time, as innocent as a dead tree, and about as intelligent. He’s neither.

Giles is the errand-boy of Arkus Fitch, professional housebreaker, pickpocket, cardsharper and amateur gardener. Only he’s not actually an errand-boy. He’s an errand-weasel, but that doesn’t sound quite right. And really he doesn’t so much run errands as he adds a certain thematically appropriate touch to Arkus’s ensemble. Giles loves Arkus’s ensemble. All the leather straps, and hidden pockets, and dangling sacks of such and such a thing are great fun to climb on. Since he spends most of his time riding on his owner’s shoulder, Giles never really has to walk anywhere, and so he has the luxury of using his feet entirely for sport. He will sometimes spend hours exploring the network of tunnels and compartments implicit in Arkus’s outfit.

Arkus doesn’t even feed Giles, he just hides food in one of his many pockets and lets the weasel find it himself. This has made Giles very good at the only thing Arkus ever actually expects him to do. When it comes time to break into a house, Arkus will send Giles through some tiny crevice so that Giles can climb up and undo the latch from the inside. Then the weasel’s work is done, and he’s free to plunder the larder of whatever house they’re in. He doesn’t understand where his master goes while he is eating, nor does he understand the profusion of bags Arkus always comes out of the house with. All he’s been able to figure out is that more bags means better food hidden in the pouches, and more and fancier pockets to find the food in. That information is enough to keep Giles unlocking latches, night after night, so that he can continue to play hide and seek in an ever-changing sea of pouches.