The Blacktongue Thief

18 Pigdenay

Pigdenay, city of warships, city of armorers, city where the first sick horses clomped ashore, let me weave a garland of wishes for you.

O city of gray-brown bricks and mud-brown swans, city of small green windows and mean gray eyes looking out, may your salt-rubbed rotting timbers stand another year, may the anvils of your hundred smithies bang forever in the hungover skulls of King Conmarr’s wodka-drunk, lad-mad sailors. May the greasy fishpies you are famed for never cool so much one can taste the earthworms ground for filler, nor may your dungeons ever want for Galtish bards who mocked your huge, fat duke.

Pigdenay, city of rain and ashes, Pigdenay, city of whores and rashes, capital of kidnaps and ambergris, cradle of half the world’s soot, I praise your cobbled promenade, where the whale’s blubber and the kraken’s tentacle are grilled and sold across from the hall of lost sailors, mostly killed by whales and krakens.

I sing of the heart you were born without, and of the twice-sized belly you got instead. You’re a cold city, Pigdenay, but I’ll forgive you your faults as you forgive mine, for your beer is never warm, and I’m never short a stolen copper shave to buy it.

“Give us a ship stout enough to carry us, and a captain fool enough to take us west, for my feet are tired of walking and I’m keen to clear my debts.”

This last I said aloud in a sort of Allgod prayer as the city came to view.

“Let it be so,” said Norrigal, and rao said Bully Boy from his pack, for the little bastard felt quite at home there again. Now we three, or four if you count the cat, or five if you count the murder-bird sleeping flat on the Spanth’s scarred chest, looked west down the Cumber Road that led to the city’s east gate.

“First, to the harbor to find an inn,” Galva said, “I need a bath.” And in we went through the main gate, no bother given to us, nor to any who paid the entry toll.

We pushed through the swell of ox and donkey carts, past servants quick-quicking off to do their masters’ errands, past beggars comparing takes, and almost into a procession for the god of the sea. A wild-haired man with a mirrored, seaweed-bearded mask and a whip capered, clearing a path, beating his hip-drum like thunder, whipping the sky like lightning, making children laugh for joy or cry, as they will at storms. Following him came a dozen stiff-necked priests to Mithrenor bearing headdresses with silver bowls of seawater at their tops, water they dared not let spill out. At the street-corners stood cabriolet pullers offering to tug their gaudy two-wheeled carriages to the harbor, or to the university, or to the covered market hall, which was the best one outside Gallardia.

I knew this city well. I studied here three years, at the Low School, which was a True School of the Takers Guild and not a straw farm. Or at least I think it was.

We passed the Greenglass Library, a private library that rented books for copying or reading, and where copper-scholars scribbled furious notes under threat of an hourglass. It held the best collection in Holt, which I know in part because I stole nine books for them that year, two from burghers’ houses in Pigdenay, five from other towns, and two from visiting ships.

An assassin had come calling for me once, sent as a test for her and me. She’d have had me, too, but she poisoned my beer, and I fed it to a stray dog because Fothannon says giving animals booze is such pure mischief it’s like feeding him directly. Me it would have sickened, but the poor, small dog died in my sight. I shudder to think how her Assassin-Masters punished her for her failure, but I found a silver Gallardian owlet in my bed that night for my good luck. The Low School likes luck, so it liked me, until I fell into arrears.

Though I’d acquitted myself well that time, assassins scare the hell out of me, and would scare you, too, if you’d met one. The Killers Wing of the Low School has a whole building full of them, chuckling over monkshood and lethal mushrooms and castor beans, brewing stillheart and thieves’ dew in vats, practicing strangles and stabs and bathtub bleedings, swimming underwater without needing to breathe, chucking knives and blowing silent darts, magicking themselves invisible or silent, or putting on false faces.

This is important because I was about to meet an assassin again, only this one wasn’t sent to kill me.

Not yet, anyway.

Norrigal failed to sell Hornhead’s noggin to the duke’s men, who’d scarcely heard of him and didn’t think much of head-sellers. There was a carnival in town, though, and carnival people are always in the market for a curiosity. Besides which, they know more than soldiers. They have to.

Once the head was sold and the coin collected, Norrigal, Galva, and I set out on an even more challenging task—to try to find a cheap westbound ship whose crew wouldn’t kidnap, rob, or rape us, or sell us for goblin-meat, or any combination of the above.