The Blacktongue Thief

8 Bully Boy

Galva told me she’d made plans for us and that I should meet her by Haros’s tower the next morning at sunrise. Unfortunately, not an hour after I left the Stag and Quiet Drum, I got arrested.

It wasn’t my fault.

First thing I did, having left my bow and pack stashed in the inn’s attic so I could move light on my feet, was make my way to the town square, where the town mouth had cried the coming of giants to Oustrim. Now mouths of a different sort were crying. A group of mummers had come in a wagon all hung with bells and tattered banners and bits of stained or stolen silk. The side of the wagon had folded down and rested on legs to make a small stage, a yard off the ground. Letters on the Wagon spelled DAMS OF LAMNUR, and indeed there didn’t seem to be a man in the company.

Several dozen lookie-sees had gathered near, but only about a third of them sat on the benches the players offered—most lingered at the margins, keeping their options open should they grow bored and wish to leave. These would make the easiest prey.

The troop was performing a Crowning Play. These were little farces, half an hour long, meant not only to make laughter but to teach the names of foreign kings and queens. Foreigners were fair game in these shows, but I doubted I’d see the likeness of good King Conmarr of Holt on the boards.

Indeed, the subject of today’s mummery was the Mad Princess, the Ispanthian infanta Mireya, played by a comely lass in a red dress. She sported with the pet monkey Mireya had as a girl, the very one she later claimed spoke to her and told her the future. The role of the monkey fell to a lady dwarf very talented at making monkey noises and who capered with great energy.

Now a player in an outsized King Kalith mask, complete with foot-long mustachios, sauntered onstage, sloshing a giant goblet of wine. I looked around to see if the Spanth were watching this mockery of her home court, but I did not see her. Kalith splashed wine on the king and queen players, who had been dancing unaware just off the stage. They both sputtered and fell, and Kalith took a large painted crown and set it on his own head.

Mireya cried out while her monkey capered.

Some had a chuckle at that. The largish woman whose purse I cut with my nip-knife certainly seemed to enjoy it. When Kalith came at Princess Mireya, she held the monkey up before her and claimed the monkey had warned her of Kalith’s treachery. At that, the mummer playing the dead Ispanthian king, Mireya’s father, stood up long enough to speak. He cautioned his brother, Kalith, that the gods always revenge themselves on those who harm the mad and that nobody in their right mind talked to monkeys. When Mireya heard this, she began to caper about madly with the monkey, even down to throwing pretend feces at the crowd. Most of them howled, including the young lady I bumped into in my own feigned laughing fit and relieved of a silver earring.

Looking back, I’m glad the Spanth wasn’t there to see the infanta of her homeland reduced to throwing poo—she’d have likely dry-beat the players with the flat of her spadín and caused a brawl. I hadn’t heard of the Dams of Lamnur before, but they weren’t half-bad. I didn’t see the end of the Crowning Play, though. It’s best to be away once you’ve got what you think you can, so I moved on to other quarters. I knew the rest of the play, anyway.

Mireya, her life spared by her feigned madness, was married off to a king sufficiently distant from her home and from the treacherous uncle who meant her ill. Married off to a Gallardian king, who got eaten by goblins at the Kingsdoom. At the close of the farce, all the players would take up little props shaped like goblin heads and bite the Gallard king offstage. It was only in the last year or so that players had the nerve to represent goblins in mummery, and I choose to look at that as a sign of returning strength.

You can’t make fun of something everyone’s still terrified of.

Manreach was starting to heal.

These mummers supposedly did pretty well for themselves lampooning the woes of our neighbors to the south and east. I later heard the dwarf would swallow any silver or gold coin given to her, which made me wonder if the others let her go alone to the privy.

I wandered next through Sparktown, the old blacksmith’s streets just off the river-docks, until I reached the market. Near the eel stalls, I came to notice a gang of cats slinking about like cats do near fish stalls, but one stood out. He was a bone-skinny gray-brown tabby, slower than the rest and he never jumped, but scraped the walls near the bridge with his whiskers, staying out of open spaces. When the old lady’d whack off a fresh eel head, she’d toss it in the gutter, and the other toms would slink over and fight, but not this one. He’d sort of nod in the air, finding the scent, and then amble over in his own good time, content to lick the spot where the head landed after his fellows dragged it off.

He was blind.

That’s when the cat-catchers came.

About a dozen years ago, during a round of the plagues the goblins sent us, some old geezer at a Gallardian university worked out that one sickness, the whip-cough, was being carried by cats—so off everyone went drowning, clubbing, and otherwise dispatching anything with pointy ears and a saucy look on its face. Eventually, the plague died out, like all the goblin plagues eventually did, and everyone stopped cat-catching. Except the baron of Cadoth, whose son had died after a cat-bite went sour. Rumor was that the boy had been doing something mean and weird to it—not what you’re thinking, weirder than that—and that nobody deserved an unlucky death more than he. Still, the rich hold grudges the poor can’t afford, and the baron left the edict in place. Fortunately for cats, inflation made the bounty so small nobody much bothered anymore, and the baron didn’t care to adjust it, so cats mostly came back.

Two copper shaves a hide doesn’t buy much, but it buys a loaf of bread. It buys a fishhook. It buys three apples. So shoot two cats, that’s supper. Cat-catching won’t win you any friends, but it might keep you from starving. So here came two of the grubbiest-looking teenaged pricks you’d ever see with sacks on their backs, rag-wrapped sandals, and two cheap but nasty-looking crossbows. I’d barely worked out who or what they were before they’d both fired bolts.

One bolt chinked on stone and made a spark, but the other took a ginger long-hair through the ribs. All the cats ran but the blind one, who tried to flee but hit a wall, then made false starts in two directions before he just crouched against the wall and shivered. One of the cat-shooting turdlets scooped up and sacked the ginger, while the other hawked and spat, reloading his bow with a rusty bolt he pulled out of his pocket. The blind cat just sat there, staring in this direction and that with wide, useless yellow-green eyes. Most people just looked away, though a couple of shyte kids hooted at the fun. The turdlet with the bow took aim.

“Wait,” I said, and gods bless me, I got in between him and the cat.

“Wha, ye knap?” he said, the flower of Holtish charm.

“I’ll give you two shaves if you don’t shoot Bully Boy.”

“Sure,” he said, “sure,” lowering his bow. I had the unworthy suspicion he intended to shoot it after he got his money, but I couldn’t stand on morals—I had no intention of giving him two shaves. Not the sort he meant, anyway.

When I got close to him, I drew a small but very sharp nip-knife from my belt and, quick as a snake, ran its edge up one of his hairy cheeks and down the other, meanwhile slapping his bow down to clatter on the ground. I trip-kicked the other one—the Low School makes expert trippers, blinders, and knockers-down of all its fledglings—and as he fell with a Faw! I sprinted at the cat. I grabbed it up by its nape and ran hard as it paddled its back legs in the air.

“My cat!” the ginger-shooter yelled at my back. “That Galtie prigger stole my cat and abused me!”

I really don’t know where the chainsdam came from, but I was still a bit drunk from the Drum, and there she was, big, quick, and hard, and me with my hand too full of cat to do anything about her. I saw myself in her steel breastplate, green-eyed and o-mouthed, a squirming blind alley cat in my left hand, and she snapped a manacle on my right wrist before I was fully aware what she was about. She couldn’t see my tattoo by daylight, but we weren’t in daylight long.

“Guild, eh?” the clerk-justice said in the wobbly candlelight of the gaol. Crutches leaned against the wall behind him.

“Yes, sir.”

“The sirs won’t help you any more than your Guild will, blacktongue. You know what they say about caught thieves, aye?”

“I’m not a thief.”

“Yes, and I’ll just put the tip in, we know how these things go. What do your masters in the Guild say about caught thieves, boy? Something about branches?”

“Pruned branches feed the tree.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“So what am I charged with? I didn’t steal anything.”

“Man says it’s his cat.”

“I touched it first, doesn’t that make it my cat?”

“That’s as the law says.”

“So can I go?”

“It’s like you could if you hadn’t pulled a knife on the squire, and I say squire with a deep sense of irony.”

“You’re too smart for this work.”

“I could say as much to you, cat-grabber, purse-nipper. Prank. Do you deny tripping the one and abusing the other with a knife?”

“Not a big knife.”

“Why do it?”

“Cat’s blind. It wasn’t sporting.”

“Heh. Sporting. There’s a word you normally only hear out of rich mouths. You rich, cat-pincher?”

“Do I look it?”

“You look worn and dirty, I grant, but hardly run before the boar. Your split-toed thieving boots are decently made, and that is not a poor man’s blade on your belt.”

“Then I am rich. I have a hundred gold lions and a thousand silver owlets waiting on my ship in the Hot Sea. I’m going to go find a mermaid with a taste for old plums and a fortune in black pearls up her squinny and send her back to you.”

“Mermaids don’t have squinnies. T’s’what makes ’em a parable for life. Warm and welcoming for the first half, then it gets cold and hard and smells bad. But thank you for not being boring. You know how sick I get of hearing, ‘Spare me, Justice, I am innocent, I swear by the gods’? I had decided to hang the next squire told me he was innocent, especially if he was.”

“Can I keep the cat?”

“Cook him and eat him for all I care. Chainsdam!”

The woman who arrested me stepped forward, the blind cat docile in her fist, a half dozen candles dancing in the darkness reflected by her armor.

“Give him back his love child. Then welcome them both to cell three west.”

They didn’t even bother taking my knives off me.