The Blacktongue Thief

9 Fiddle and Famine

I sat in the grime and puddled muck of my cell, mulling my chances to find the Spanth again before she set off. They were decent, if I could get out of here. For all that she was trying to be indistinct, that raven knight stood out—for her accent, for her taste in wine, even just for her bearing. When you met her, you felt you’d met someone who mattered. Someone whose thumb would one day rest on the scale.

Me? I was just another Galt in a Holtish gaol. I watched the cat pick his way in the general direction of the high, barred window letting in the last of the sunlight. He felt his path from one dry bit of stone to another. Our cellmate stared over his gathered knees at the far wall, drunk as a pickled fish, bony in that old-man way, like he’s easing into his coming skeletonhood.

“Cats are much better at being blind than we are. It’s the whiskers,” I said.

My cellmate burped and rubbed at his thinly veiled sternum with a knotted fist, still staring wallward.

“No offense meant if you’re blind, of course,” brought another burp, this one long and whooshy. “Not that I think you are,” I said.

He had longish fingernails that looked every bit as sturdy as they were dirty, vying with his teeth and eye-whites for most yellow bits of him.

“You’re not in gaol for talking a man to death, are you?” I said.

He produced three fingers and waggled them at me in a way that could only have seemed lewder had he used two. He continued to watch the wall as if it might fall on him if he ceased his vigil.

I also looked at the wall. It was not the first gaol-wall I had seen. The graffiti here was remarkably cosmopolitan, nearly as varied as what you would find in a port city like Pigdenay. Most of it was scrawled or carved in the Holtish I’m using now, of course, but my native Galtish was also well represented. I saw nearly a paragraph of Unthern with its crammed-together, sentence-long words, and a few choice remarks in prancing Ispanthian, best spoken with a mouthful of garlic and hot chilis. Ispanthia and Unther were neighbors of Holt, so it was not surprising that travelers from either land, one east, one west, had run afoul of the chainsmen of the lovely town of Cadoth.

The only exotic language in the scrawl was Keshite, from Kesh, the seat of the old empire, a language we don’t share an alphabet with. I could read it, though, and immediately understand it. It said, “Fuck Cadoth in its hairy butt. This is a shithole city full of shit-women worse than goblins. Fuck fuck fuck with the hugest cock of elephants all Cadoth.” There was really no faulting the author’s sincerity. I could read the slashed, loopy characters not because I had ever been to hot, goblin-conquered Kesh but because of that second birth-gift I mentioned.

I am what is known as a Cipher.

A cipher is, of course, a code, but to say a person is a Cipher means they can read and understand any language without instruction. This often comes as a surprise to a Cipher’s parents, and my ma was no exception. When I was a child of five, I found a leaflet some pamphleteer had left in the market, all tread on and muddy, and asked my mother was it true the Forbidden God was the only real god and that he wanted us to please ourselves? She took a moment to understand what I’d said, sounded out the words of the flyer I held in my grubby hand.

“Did you read that, boy?” she said. She hadn’t taught me to read, she barely could herself.

“I did, Ma,” I said.

She slapped me, hard, and told me, as tears welled up in my eyes, “I did that so you’ll remember. Never tell anyone but me you can read again, least of all your da. Not while you live under his roof.”

I didn’t understand the reason for it at the time, but it served me well to hide that gift. I met another Cipher, once. She was pointed out to me at the Low School. She was kept in a comfortable apartment underground, I was told, even allowed to go out into the town with a minder. But most of her days were spent breaking codes, translating texts, or inventing ciphers of her own for the Guild. She was fat as veal and pale as a fish, wanting for nothing but liberty. That was one want too many, as I could see.

Growing up in a mining town, the thought of a shut-in’s life made me shudder, still does. Ciphers are infinitely valuable to the Guild, and dangerous—it was rumored we could even read the Murder Alphabet, the language in which the Guild’s most powerful corresponded, and in which its true history and most dangerous spells were written, but I was in no hurry to wager my life on that theory.

They were always looking for Ciphers, though. I remember once seeing a sign in a Low School tavern saying, “First beer free tonight. Just ask!” I’d been about to ask when I realized the language was one I’d never seen, probably a dead one. I held my tongue. And I kept alert for other such traps.

I read the graffiti in the gaol cell in brief glances and didn’t let myself react to any of it, even though I’d nearly laughed at the thought of all Cadoth being buggered by Keshite elephants. Now the cat had attained the sill beneath the barred window, and he bobbed his head hopefully toward the breeze coming in. A pair of muddy boots strode by at street-level. I thought about using a cantrip to squeeze myself thin enough to slip through the bars, but they were solid iron, and it would take stronger magic than mine to safely work a spell so close to them. If I tried to slip through, I might get the spell snuffed while I was halfway out and crack my sternum between those iron bars.

Iron is to free magic what cold water and laughter are to male arousal. Free magic meaning spells. Caught magic—tattoos, objects imbued with magic—would not be harmed by iron, but it might make the use of those objects less efficient. Steel is nearly as bad, but not quite—you can still toss spells with a sword or knife sheathed on your person, but a suit of chain mail? You’d have to be Fulvir or Knockburr to throw even a cantrip while wearing steel armor. And even those two could likely be damped if you put them in an iron box. Mind, magic can still affect iron, it just has trouble going through or past it. Thus, you could turn a weapon in a knight’s hand, but not stop her heart through her breastplate. Colored metals, on the other hand, do not harm spells, and copper even helps. As does formerly living matter, like wood and leather. If you see a fucker coming at you with a copper torque or circlet, watch out. Like as not a magicker. Using cantrips as I do, I wear leather jack and keep Palthra and Angna sheathed in leather-wrapped copper. The arrowheads on me aren’t enough to matter.

“Do you want out?” I said to Bully Boy. The cat could have slipped out any time but seemed, for the moment, content to stay. If someone didn’t offer us food soon, he was like to go, and I wouldn’t try to stop him.

“You’re welcome to stay if you like,” I told the little blind tabby. He just sat on the sill and bobbed his head wistfully toward the garbagy food smells coming from the street.

As the cat was called by that smell, so was I soon called by music. Someone was playing a fiddle, not terribly well, farther down the gaol in a cell I could not see. It was not the musician’s questionable talent that called me—it was that he or she was running a bow across my fiddle.

I put an ear to the thick, iron-banded door to the cell and confirmed my suspicions—not only did the fiddle have the same low sweetness as mine, the tune was Galtish, an old, old romance about two men loving the same goat-girl, getting to the point of settling it with knives, then being told she meant to have both or neither one. That’s a blacktongue woman for you—they set the tune, and we dance. I planned never to marry, and if I did, never to marry a Galt. One of us was bad enough. The groom of a blacktongue woman was in for no gentler a ride than the bride of a blacktongue man. Better to take a Galtish girleen for a moon-wife, where you could try it out for a month and see if you’d killed each other by the end of it.

I wanted a look at who was scraping my fiddle. I took the picks hidden in the leather of my belt and had the lock on the cell door open in a few heartbeats. My bony old cellmate watched and burped. I closed the door, locked it behind me and climbed up to the ceiling, bracing myself between ceiling and wall as I’d been taught and trained for, keeping to the shadows.

I followed the music. It led to a larger, open cell, with bars toward the hall. This was more of a general holding area, less secure. I hadn’t my cheat-glass with me—that handy folding mirror on a stick was back with my key-press clay, my iron-saw and other tools in my pack, still in the attic of the Stag and Quiet Drum. But the shadows were dark enough to hide me while I watched them. I saw a clutch of sad figures sitting on the dirt floor, listening as a very young man played and a wall-eyed woman sang in Galtish. These two were, of course, the archer brother and sister I had played at banditry with in the Forest of Orphans, the ones who stole the goods I’d left behind at our campsite after the Spanth and her bird ruined us. They had their backs to the bars.

The fellow with the fiddle, Naerfas, was moving side to side with the tune, a few steps left, a few steps right, choking down on the fiddle with chin and shoulder. His leftward drifts took him near the bars. I crept closer, slow as pipe smoke in a still room, knowing the last yard or so I’d be in torchlight. If I could time it right, I might be able to do what I had in mind, but it wouldn’t be easy. I felt within myself to see how my luck sat, and it sat high. Right, I thought and let the feeling tell me when and how to move. I sprang forward and then dropped. Several of the other prisoners gasped as a shadow fell from the ceiling, but young Nervous was slow. I scooped my foot in and hooked his ankle out from under him. He fell, still holding the fiddle but dropping the bow. I pulled his foot hard, got him with his bollocks tickling the bars, wrapped my legs around his one and rocked back, bending his leg at a horrible angle. He whimpered.

“My name is Kinch Na Shannack,” I said for the benefit of Naerfas’s cellmates, “and I declare myself the prior owner of this fiddle.” Notice I didn’t say true, which means nothing to the Guild. “Will you deny my claim?” He did no such thing. His sister snatched at me, but I lay back a little more, and Naerfas howled.

“Don’t think I won’t break it, Snowcheeks,” I said, for the sister was a pale one, and Snowcheeks was easier for Holters to say than her Galtish name, Snochshaeia. She relented. “Now hand me out the fiddle.”

She did.

“And the bow.”

She didn’t, for she didn’t have it. A thick woman with a goiter did. “You give me for’t?” she said, omitting the What will you as northerners do. “It’s what I won’t give you,” a Galtish woman at her side said, cracking her in the ear with a horny fist. Goiter dropped the bow and someone else slid it to me. I let Naerfas go, nodded at him and his sister, who nodded back. The whole thing had been done with proper protocol, and none would likely hold a grudge. I snugged the fiddle with my chin and shoulder, tested the bite of the bow, then finished the song, and far better than fucking Naerfas. Snowcheeks sang the last of it, which translates as something like

Fuck you, it rhymes in Galtish.

Back in my cell, Skinnybones, still staring at his wall, said, “Yer cat left.”

“I thought he might.”

“Coulda tied him to summat.”

“Why?”

“Inn’t he yours?”

“Not really.”

“‘F’Idda knowd’at, Idda et him.”

“That wouldn’t have been neighborly.”

He waggled the three fingers at me.

At mention of “etting,” I felt an uncomfortable but familiar hollowness in my middle. I’d had nothing today but a cold sausage of questionable fillings and beer from the Stag and Quiet Drum.

“They feed us here?” I said.

I got the three fingers again, waggled and bobbed up and down this time.

“I’ll stop disturbing you. Clearly, you’re working a hole in the blocks with the force of your gaze.”

That’s when I heard a bell ring three times.

The bone-bag three-fingered at me again, wiping at his mouth with a knobby wrist. A small door opened at the bottom of the larger one and birthed forth a piece of stale, hollowed-out bread with some sort of bean pottage spooned over it. Bony Bonebottom sprang up with surprising speed and took it. I got up, too, meaning to stake my claim to half, but he sneezed all over it, and I sank back down, shaking my head. I thought about thrashing him, but any scratch from those mucky nails of his would be like to go rotten.

“You know, if you had a bit more dignity, you would put me in mind of a rat,” I said.

He mantled over his prize and ate until it was gone, then picked crumbs off himself and the floor with great care and ate those as well.

“I really hoped you’d miss the crumb that settled in your chest hair. I thought I might have that one off you while you slept.”

He wiped his hands on his shabby pants, then looked at me for the first time. “Bollocks if I’m sleeping here,” he said, his grubby Cadothian street-talk traded for a handsome Galtish brogue like mine—only now did I notice his black tongue. And with that, he leapt up to the windowsill, removed two of the bars, and pushed himself out arse-first onto the street. He checked to make sure no one was watching, then he put the bars back.

“This is the Guild’s room, isn’t it?” I said.

“Thick, aren’t you, Prank? Why do you think you were let to keep the knife?” he said. “It’s the Guild’s fucking gaol.” Then he spoke in Galtish, “Hrai syrft ni’ilenna.”

I continued, “Tift se fal coumoch.”

Then we both said, “Lic faod kiri dou coumoch!”

He who leaps at the moon

Into cowshyte falls.

Glory unto cowshyte!

Holy words, those.

“Well done with the fiddle. Now get on yer way—not two days into yer indenture and ye get yerself pinched. Yer not like to follow that Spanth killer far sitting on yer arse in here. Mind ye put the bars back when ye go.”

And he scampered off into the new night.

A Galt, like me.

A priest of Fothannon Foxfoot.

And unless I missed my guess, one of the highest orders of thieves—a Famine.