The Blacktongue Thief

7 The Skinny Woman’s Bride

Near midday, I was sitting alone at the Stag and Quiet Drum, a respectable tavern of leaning stone walls braced with beams of straight white pine. The nice thing about the Drum was that, for all the care the owner had taken to make the outside look good, his attic was a mess of unused, rarely disturbed junk, and it was among that junk I made my bed after leaving the Spanth.

Having found the rooms a bit too dear, not for their quality but for the contents of my purse, I had crawled in a high window, found the attic ladder, and gone up. It amused me to no end to sneak out of their stolen attic space and then come in again to pay for a beer, so here I was. I was nicely drunk and doing that thing I do when I think so hard my eyes unfocus and I look simple. Sometimes I even breathe through my mouth. I’ve been given alms when I do it on the street. They tried to break me of it at the Low School but at last gave up, one master arguing it was a sign of intelligence, another saying it looked more like a symptom of idiocy. The former, a Magus-Reverend, loved me for my skill at languages—the other, an Assassin-at-Rope, scorned me for my affability and the “ease with which I was like to die.”

You can’t please everyone.

So there I sat, staring into the middle distance, all but drooling while the walls of the Drum shook with a Galtish song in old Holtish. It was a ridiculous song about a magical cat named Bully Boy, and it wasn’t worth explaining to them that where I come from it’s a children’s song to teach Galtish children the Holtish they’re obliged to speak.

Still, here in Holt proper, every looming kark with beer on their chin fellows up with all the other twats whenever it’s played, and they frog-blurt out what verses they remember of a song nobody from Galtia has sung since they were in knee-pants. Though, admittedly, the chorus does lend itself to drunken blurting.

I was thinking about giants.

As I have said, I come from Galtia, the easternmost of Holt’s three kingdoms.

Platha Glurris, to be specific, which means “Shining River” in the language of the Galts, first people to rule Holt, but the real river is underground and made of silver.

My da mined silver, and my best friend’s father did, too, until goblins killed the latter in the first battle of the Daughters’ War in 1222, when I was twelve. My da came back from the same, unwilling to say more than a sentence at a time, and that rarely. Of course, I only had a year and some to watch him suffer—I was off to the Low School at fourteen, and I doubt he noticed I was gone. I never worked a mine and, gods willing, never will. They slaved like mules in the darkness below the pretty hills eight days of the nine that make a week, but on the last day, Sathsday, they went to church and sang songs. Then they drank hoppy, dark beer until they and their wives were too foggy to remember to unstopper in time, thus increasing the brotherhood of man.

And what god did my father sing to? Not the Galtish holdovers, stag-headed Haros or fox-faced Fothannon. Not Mithrenor, the old Holtish god of the sea. No, my father worshipped the Allgod, represented by a bronze disc in a wood square, or, for the very rich, a gold disc set in a square of iron or lead.

The Allgod, also called Sath, also called Father Sun, was the official god of Holt and its kingdoms. To my eye, the Allgod is the god of compromise and mediocrity, much approved of by the noble class for his gospel of work, obedience, and earning just enough to get by.

Whatever simpleton devised that deity showed a shocking lack of imagination, just walking outside and worshipping the first thing that made him squint. Quite different from the wild-haired, incestuous gods of the Galts. Quite the opposite of the Forbidden God, also called the Upside-Down God, about whom you don’t speak in public in Manreach unless you want your tongue split. Old Upside-Downy was rumored to be the true god of my Takers Guild but that only the inner circles of power were schooled in his mystery.

That god might have been real for all I then knew, since he made people so angry, but the Allgod was shyte. He was the kind of god you prayed to for making water wet and fire hot, or for keeping giants out of a land where nobody has seen a giant for a thousand years. He was good at the easy things. I never saw a giant alive in Holt, just the stuffed dead one Bloth the clubfoot used to cart around on two carts lashed together in his Caravan of Sad Wonders and charge a copper shave to look at.

Now the song in the tavern was in full roar. Have you ever noticed how the very sotted delight in drawing out a final vowel? As if it’s some kind of contest of breath? And so the Holtish morons of Cadoth sang, making cat noises, in perfect intellectual agreement with the five-year-olds of Platha Glurris.

Who was I to question anyone’s intelligence, though? Streams of refugees would be flooding out of giant-stricken Oustrim even as I made my way toward it.

Now a shape loomed up at me.

“Barkeep?” this one shouted over her shoulder toward the bar while pointing at me.

The barkeep shook her head.

It was my Spanth.

I’d told her where I was staying.

“You’re drunk,” she said.

“Am not,” I said, which is of course the second most frequent lie told in taverns.

She slapped me then, right on my tattoo. Pretty hard.

I opened my mouth, and then remembered I couldn’t speak to her unless she spoke. She waited until I shut my mouth.

“Sorry, but you looked like you needed a slap, and I needed a drink.”

“You daughter of a—”

“If you talk about my mother, I have to draw blood.”

“You shyte. You rank Ispanthian shyte cunny-chin.”

“This is acceptable,” she said to me, tousling my hair like I was a child, a godsdamn child, and I took it. “My name is Galva,” she said. And then she went to the bar to collect her small glass of red wine. Another verse started up, and I was so mad, I had to do something, so I sang it.

I sang the hell out of it.

Rao rao Bully Boy rao.

During the hour or so she sat with me, I learned something about the woman behind the good shield, the quick sword, and the murder-bird.

“Who are you, anyway?” I asked. “Beyond your name, I mean. Galva, you said?”

“Galva.”

“Right.”

“You don’t need to know the rest of my name.”

“Very mysterious. Are you famous?”

“Everyone is famous to someone.”

“That’s a yes.”

I waited for her to say more, but she just looked at me over her wineglass like she was waiting for me to speak, so I spoke.

“What are you famous for, Galva the Spanth? Famous killer?”

“You have not seen me kill anyone.”

She was right, actually.

“There’s a good place to start. Why didn’t you kill them, the other waylayers, I mean? And me? Are you Galva the Merciful?”

“That day.”

“You maimed them to slow down the others. Caring for them.”

She raised her glass slightly as if to toast my great insight.

“You fight better than anyone I’ve seen. I can’t think of many people I’d rather have on my side in a pinch than you. And that big, mean, magnificent war corvid. Where is he, by the way?”

“She. Do not ask me about the bird.”

“I know they’re not strictly legal.” I pulled out a Towers deck and shuffled it just to give my hands something to do.

“Not strictly? There’s no kingdom in the north that won’t torture you for having one,” Galva said.

“I haven’t studied those statutes. Not my area of lawbreaking, really. What do they do to you in Ispanthia for having a war bird?”

She fixed my eyes and drank before she spoke. “They pull your guts out with a hook and feed them to carrion birds.”

“Fitting.”

“Our beloved King Kalith has a gift for punishment.”

“Here in Holt, they’re simple. I wouldn’t be surprised if they just hang you.”

“No. Here they flip you upside down and saw you through the middle longways.”

She demonstrated the sawing with her right hand holding some invisible felon’s invisible ankle. I wondered if she were holding the imaginary Holter facing her or facing away.

“I thought that was just for treason,” I said. “And incest. We frown on incest here since the reign of Thamrin the Neckless.”

“You know what was done with most of these corvids, do you not?”

“I don’t know. Big cages in Ispanthia and Gallardia, I guess?”

“That’s what they let people think. But the birds were killed. Seven thousand of them. Too dangerous to keep them around in such numbers, the Wise and Dread Kalith decreed. So as we who had learned to love and trust them in the field looked on, Kalith had them fed poisoned meat and burned. This is how he treated the corvids who helped us turn the goblins. Some few of us fought against it. Some more of us went missing long enough to hide our feathered kith somewhere safe and claim they died.”

“Where do you hide a beast like that? I mean, they sort of stand out.”

She said nothing.

I started dealing us two hands for a round of Towers, but she pushed the cards back at me, so I shuffled them into the deck as smoothly as I could and put them away.

“What’s her name?” I said. “Your corvid, I mean.”

“Dalgatha.”

“What’s it mean?”

“‘Skinny Woman.’”

“That’s your god of death, right? Sort of a skeleton with wings and pretty hair, yah?”

She looked at me again. She had a way of looking at you like she was painting the back of your skull with her eyes. “She’s your god, too.”

“I like them curvy.”

“Doesn’t matter what you like. That dance is ladies’ choice.”

There wasn’t much I could say to that, so we sat there until, at length, she spoke again.

“You said I was the best fighter you have seen, but you have not seen the fighters I have. And I had some small practice.”

“Goblin Wars?”

“Yes.”

“Orfay?”

“No, Goltay.”

I suppressed a shiver. Goltay was our last big defeat, fought nine years before, in 1224. Also called the Kingsdoom. Everyone knew that name. Everyone knew someone who went there. Very few people knew someone who had returned.

“Bad as they say?” I regretted it as soon as I said it. I wished I could reel it back into my mouth.

“No,” she said with disturbing calm. “It was like gathering flowers in the fields. It was so beautiful most of my friends and two of my brothers decided to stay.” I couldn’t tell if she was angry and being sarcastic or if this was Skinny Woman talk. They weren’t supposed to speak ill of death.

She looked away. I found myself scanning her scars to see if any of them looked like bites, but I stopped when her eyes flicked back to me.

“My turn,” she said. “This Guild of thieves.”

“The Takers.”

“Was it worth it? The training they gave you. That is how this works, right? They make you a thief or a killer—”

“Thief, in my case.”

“Don’t interrupt me.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t say sorry.”

I opened and closed my mouth.

“They make you a thief, and you owe them money for the rest of your life, and everybody slaps you for wine.”

“Beer, usually; it’s just you Spanths and Gallardi that dye your tongues purple. Not the rest of my life unless I die soon. And they only put the open hand on the ones that fall behind on their debt.”

“Good incentive.”

“It gets more persuasive every day.”

“And they make you do things,” she said.

“That’s one way to pay. The Deed Note.”

“Worse things than ambushing strangers?”

“No worse than ambushing you, I hope.”

“Why don’t you just do something for them, then? Pay your debt off?”

“Most amusing you should say that now. I just spoke to them. I took the deed. They’re sending me west.”

“To Oustrim.”

I nodded and said, “Hrava, specifically. Probably. But yes, Oustrim.”

“To do what?”

“I’m supposed to lie now rather than tell you. Can we just pretend I told you a lie?”

“No. Tell me the lie.”

“Fine. I’m going there to steal some magical things.”

“Good. I go to find a lost princess.”

“Perfect.”

“Good.”

“Maybe I’ll help you find her.”

“Maybe I will be grateful.”

“Fine.”

“Good.” She drank her wine.

“And to answer your question, it was worth it. The Takers. The Low School.”

“What can you do?”

“Extraordinary things.”

“This ‘talking to animals’ I have heard of. Can you do that?” she asked, her dark eyebrows raising just a bit.

“Animal-talking. It’s not talking to animals, it’s making animal sounds.”

“What, urf-urf, like a dog?”

I now made exactly the whine of a frightened dog, then turned it into a perfectly credible growl.

“Bolnu,” she said, weighing something invisible but pleasing in her supinated hand, a very Ispanthian gesture. “Is it magic?”

“No, just training.”

“Do you have magic?” she asked.

“Not much.”

“I have a little magic, too. Also not much.”

“I didn’t think the bird fell out of your arse.”

She took a sip of wine and looked at me seriously.

“That would be very dark magic,” I said.

She squinted at me, waiting to see where this was going, but not hopeful.

“But not black magic.”

She waited.

“Brown,” I said.

She searched brown magic for any possible meaning besides juvenile scatology. Finding none, she closed her eyes and shook her head in disappointment.

It wouldn’t be the last time.