The Blacktongue Thief

11 The Lady of Sourbrine

The next day, the twenty-first of Ashers, we set off west from Cadoth. Before we left that morning, I’d spoken with the cat.

“You don’t expect me to believe you’re not magicked, do you? Can you speak? No, I don’t imagine you’d want to show me all your tricks so soon, even if I am kith to you. That’s what cats and dogs are, you know—kith. Not family, nor friends, but something in between. If I take you with me, it means you’re like some hairy nephew-friend-dependent, and there’ll be a contract between us. I’ll keep you only so long as you keep silent; one ill-timed rao could be the end of me, and you, too, just as like, so if you prove a talker, I’ll set you on your four feet to preach where you please. Are we clear? Good, don’t say anything, that’s how I like you. Oh, another thing, on the matter of shyte. I’ll feed you when I can, and I know there’s nothing goes in a cat that comes out pretty. I’ll set you out of your carrying sack every few hours to sow the fields or decorate the cobblestones, but there’ll be no shyte in camp, indoors, or on the furniture. One misplaced dab of shyte and it’s divorce. I don’t know if you’re a lad cat or a lass cat, but I’ll call you Bully Boy until you advise me different, since a herd of beery morons burbled out that song the day we met. I’m one of those as sees the gods in coincidence. I’ve oiled my traveling sack to keep the wet off you. My shopping’s done, a dozen fresh arrows, a new whetstone, a pint jar of honey, a copper flask of whiskey, a quart of beer. A mess of salt herring you may have the smallest and boniest of. We’ll be leaving as soon as that dam says,” I said, pointing my nip-knife at Galva, where she sat on the bed, one arm sunk past the elbow in a boot, the other rubbing at it with an oiled rag. She stared at me with the frown and unblinking eyes of someone watching an idiot happily soiling himself.

“We’re going west,” I told Bully. “I’ll bet you’ve always wanted to see the west. Or smell it, anyway. The bronzesmiths of Molrova. The endless forests of Brayce, the golden wheat fields of Oustrim. The taverns and canals of Middlesea.”

Galva stared, shook her head a little.

“What’s that?” I said, putting my ear to the cat’s mouth. “You’re glad we’re going west because you don’t want to see Ispanthia?”

“Careful,” the Spanth said, buffing a boot-toe just that little bit harder.

“The eastern women have mustaches, you say? And woolly armpits?”

“Baes pu palitru.”

She hung the first boot half out the window so the weak sun would warm the leather and make it drink the oil. The springwood shield, which she’d rubbed with water, she now moved so the window’s square of sunlight fell on its wood and gleamed off its storm-faced boss. The wood looked almost new, no mark remaining from the arrows that had struck it in the Forest of Orphans. It really did heal itself. Gods, that shield would buy a manor house.

Who the devils was this Spanth, to carry such a thing?

“Baes pu palitro,” I repeated. “She says you’re heading for danger, Bully Boy, if I remember my Ispanthian.”

“I meant you, not the chodadu cat.”

“Was that fucking you just said?”

“I do not talk to cats.”

“Chodadu, that’s fucking, right?”

“It is already fucked.”

“Fucked?”

“Yes. Anyway, we are not going west yet. North first,” Galva said, putting more oil on her rag and starting on the second boot. I noticed now the boots were quite thick, with articulated horn or bronze plates sewn in to protect the legs. All goblin-fighters put a premium on leg armor.

“Oh? Why would she take us north, Bully?”

“If you talk to me through the cat one more time, I will skin him.”

“Why are we going north, Galva?”

“A detour. To meet a witch.”

“Is she a famous killer like you?”

“She is a great friend to Dalgatha and has fed her kingdom many souls. Pernalas Mourtas, they call this witch.”

“Deadlegs! I’ve heard of her! Bites her lovers to death, they say. But wait, she’s all the way up in Norholt.”

“Yes.”

“That’s a formidable friend. She is your friend, then?”

“I never met her.”

“How do you know she’ll want to see you?”

“I have a letter.”

“What makes you think she’ll let you near enough to give her a letter?”

Galva rolled her eyes. “Talk to your chodadu cat.”

I sharpened my knife—I like keeping Palthra keen enough to shave a Beltian’s black, black beard; or keen enough to split the difference between irritating a Spanth and enraging one—and I put oil to my boots, as Galva had done.

It proved a blessing we oiled our leathers. It rained like a bastard as we took the north road toward Norholt, the kind of rain that wets you in no time at all and just keeps at you until there’s nothing dry about you. The kind of rain that makes you feel you’re just a turd the gods are trying to wash off the road. I had put my bowstring in a pouch around my neck, but it got wet there, anyway.

The cat raoed a time or two, but I forgave him, because water was getting in my pack. Eventually, it slowed to merely a hard rain, and on we marched. The switch north didn’t trouble me. As it was nearing fall, we might make better time getting a ship out of Pigdenay, Norholt’s big port city, and heading for the far reaches of Middlesea, or maybe even Molrova if we could find a ship willing to put in there.

Molrova was anathema in the east. They were the greediest and most corrupt kingdom in all of Manreach, and the only coastal nobles there who wouldn’t let pirates pillage their waters for a price were pirates themselves.

Molrovans also traded with the Horde. Goblin ships came up the Spine River and brought tea and tiger pelts from Urrimad and cinnamon and peppercorns and taback that kynd thralls grew for them on Hordeland manfarms on the grave of Old Kesh.

What’s more, and least forgivable of all, was that they had stayed neutral during the wars. Powerful, martial Molrova had kept her axe-guards and cavalry home during thirty years of unimaginable bloodshed, calling the goblin invasions of Gallardia, Ispanthia, Beltia, Istrea, and Kesh “the south’s problem.” Mind you, the biters hadn’t reached the east either, but Holt, Brayce, and the Gunnish archipelago all sent armies to die and navies to drown just the same—so the general feeling was that Molrova was welcome to eat runny shyte with a sharp knife.

And of course, the wars had eventually touched the west.

When the Horde cooked up their wicked magicks, Molrovan horses caught the Stumbles, too. Molrovan Grays, Steppe Ponies, and Rastivan Talls bloated and died the same way eastern horses did, but the Lords of the Lying Lands were making too much money keeping out of the fight. Molrova stayed strong while southern kingdoms fell and eastern kingdoms bled white.

While the Threshers’ War fattened worms and buzzards, the karking Molrovans took two Free Cities from Beltia, the Tin Hills from Wostra, and absorbed miles of Sadunther on the Spine River. Molrovan bards wrote as many sad songs about the death of horses as the Spanths or Gallardians, but nobody outside Molrova wanted to hear them. Enough about those sealskin-wearing twats. Suffice it to say that they were bastards, and getting through their cold, deceiving lands would be no skip-hop.

Not that our current trek from Holt to Norholt was a skip-hop either. It was Ashers, second and last month of Norholt’s short summer, normally a warm month, but not this particular week. I’ll spare you our several days of rain, unseasonable cold, loose bowels, hunger, talk around fires, and small, weak fires at that. We passed a hamlet or two, hitched a ride on a vegetable cart pulled by goats, waded through a mucky flood, got hailed on and twice nearly struck by lightning. Galva woke up before daylight every day to bend each ear to her straight knees, pull her chin up past a tree branch as many times as she could, practice sword forms, do lunges and squat-jumps. Even in the rain. If you pinched that woman anywhere, you’d hurt your fingers.

My chiefest contribution those dreary days was when I climbed in some wealthy landlord’s window and stole us a roast chicken right from the pot. Of course, I was criticized by Lady Pull-Me-Ups for leaving behind the turnips.

The cat raoed and shat and pissed, though always at proper times and in acceptable places.

The highlight of our journey north was a small army that passed us, with a wonder in its midst—a baroness sitting on an old rawboned mare. She had at least a hundred spearwomen and a dozen teenaged flail-men in wild, patched leathers, as many as you’d need to protect the treasure that was a mare, especially a mare still strong enough to bear an armored rider. This one couldn’t have been more than three years old when the Stumbles came and killed all the stallions and every mare not carrying a soon-to-be-stillborn foal.

The woman on the horse—Seldra the Fair, Baroness of Sourbrine—had us stopped and faced with ready blades, though they were quickly sheathed again when she learned I was about the Guild’s business.

I didn’t mind being questioned by her as long as I got to fill my nose with the exotic scent of horse sweat, briny, coarse, and real. They were still real. I stole at least ten lungfuls of sweet horse, I burned her soot-gray flanks and fetlocks into the memories I was saving for my unlikely old age. Her every whicker was a song I’d pay an owlet for, but it was the raven knight who got the day’s real prize. The baroness, recognizing a fellow goblin-killer in Galva and knowing her for a Spanth, bade her take a handful of oats to let the old mare lip off her bare palm. No one felt the death of horses as sharply as the Spanths. She kissed the baroness’s knuckles and turned her face away and walked alone into the rain.

Before I caught up with Galva, I spoke to a young woman with a boar’s-tooth helmet and a wicked-looking horn bow.

“So what’s this, then, patrolling the border?”

“Yae, ye could say that,” she said. “Looking for Hornhead and his lot. You’d do well to get to a town and stay there ’til he’s caught, or ’til he quits the barony.”

“What’s a ‘Horn-Head’?” I said.

“Not from here, I hear, nae?”

“Nae,” I said, but not mocking. I’m a natural mimic.

“Hornhead’s a mixling.”

That got my attention. Mixlings could only be made by powerful magic, magic outlawed until some few were licensed to use it to fight the wars. Making magic, it’s also called, or bone magic. The greatest of the bone magi was Knockburr, a Galtish mage who traveled the world looking for exotic beasts to corrupt. Bone magic, making, mixing, that was how we got the corvids. That was Knockburr’s doing, mixing ravens with man-high strutting-birds from the plains of Axa and putting giant’s blood in them, too. Most mixlings die, but once you get one that’s sound, you geld it if you only want one or you breed it if you want more.

Mixing became one of the high arcana, but even those licensed to brew up monsters to fight the goblin Hordes were forbidden to mix kynd. But Fothannon knows there’s not a law made won’t be tested, and Knockburr was too powerful to be told yae or nae by such drab stuff as kings. It was said his partner Fulvir’s library held spellbooks from lost kingdoms; from the mountain-swallowed city of Bhayn as well as the drowned city of Adripur in Old Kesh.

And one of his mixlings was running amok here in Norholt.

“He’s got enough bull in him to put horns on his head, but not so much to make him stupid. He’s strong as two men and angry as ten. They say he’s protected by magic, has some spell tattooed on him makes him proof in battle.”

“You said ‘his lot.’ He’s got mates, then.”

“Half dozen or so.”

“And you’ve got this whole army looking just for them?”

The lass laughed then.

I cocked an eyebrow at her.

“Friend,” she said. “You haven’t seen him.”