The Blacktongue Thief

33 Fucking Unmarriageable

In case nobody’s bothered to tell you, and in case you haven’t seen one, goblins are ugly. Not like your odd cousin with too many freckles, no neck, and sausagy fingers; that’s plain homeliness. Someone will marry him if he can push a plow or brew beer. Goblins are fucking unmarriageable. Something deep in us knows they’re our blood enemies and reviles the sight of them, like a shark or a biteworm. They’re not like an ape, which you can look at and say it’s not so different from a man. But goblins? Something else again. Nobody knows where they came from. No record of them before the Knock, and scholars mostly think it was that same cataclysm that brought them over from some worse world or up from the ground. They look like they came from the ground.

This was the first time I saw one close. Actually, there were eighteen of them on the ship that came to our remote little island. They like numbers divisible by nine. That’s because they have nine fingers. What should have been a finger on their off hand became a hook they can sheathe like a cat’s claw, and they’ll drive that in and hang off you, trip your feet up, bite. On some it’s right, on most it’s left. The right-handers are held in higher regard, thought to have been blessed by their weird little god, who looks like nothing so much as a smudge if you see their praying-boards.

But the hook. That hook-hand is smaller and weaker than the weapon hand, and that arm is shorter, and maybe that’s why they don’t care for symmetry. One of our generals said the reason they tear the corners off buildings in kynd cities and collapse parts of houses is because straight lines make them queasy. They find our most beautiful monuments noisome and brutish, an affront to nature, with all the math and right angles. Goblin structures are equally bewildering to us, and the same is true of their ships.

I had been bow-hunting for cliff-chickens, having failed to catch a fish to make up for Malk’s, which I had to confess to eating, though I hadn’t had a fin of it. I was well aware that the traditional way to hunt puffins involved dangling from a cliff face and whacking at them in midair with a net on a long pole, but having no such net, no such pole, and little urge to dangle, I used cruder methods. I already had two wee birdies strung to my belt, and I was covered in puffin-shyte the high winds had whipped into me. I was just having an argument with a puffin hen who had watched me shoot her mate when I saw the sail. A green goblin-sail on the very blue water near the horizon. A gray plume of smoke dragged behind the ship, almost white against the dark gray, fast-moving clouds.

I loosed my cliff-chickens and ran, ducking behind a lift of rocks and making for the beach where we’d made camp. I knew from talking to soldiers that the handcant for goblin was to make a fist and stick the two smallest fingers out, curving them in the semblance of that hook, so that’s what I did. Galva began stripping out of her clothes, presumably to let her war bird loose. Malk took up his sabre.

“Wait,” the harpooner said. “What color was the sail? Green?” he said.

I nodded. It was green, sort of a gray-green like sage.

“That’s good,” he said. “That means they’re honoring the treaty. That’s the color of their blood. Red means our blood and they’re hunting.”

“They’re always hunting,” Malk said. “They only show the red when they’ve got numbers, and that to frighten us.”

“What’s happening?” Norrigal said.

I told her.

“Shyte,” she said, her eyes widening. “Shyte, shyte.”

“Yeah, that’s the word for it,” Malk said.

“So we fight?” I said.

“We fight,” Galva said at the same time Gormalin said, “Depends on the numbers.”

She shot the harpooner a look.

“They might not even land,” Malk said. Galva hesitated now. If she pulled that screaming bird off her chest, there’d be no hiding. “Come on, Spanth, help me scatter this lean-to.” Norrigal kicked sand over our fire pit and gave it all a brush with a leafy branch from the island’s unique tree. She sprinkled a powder that amplified a faint rotten fish smell already in the air so it would gobble up our scent. Malk went up the rockpile to have a peek, and I went with him.

“What are they even doing so far north?” I said. “They’re supposed to hate the cold.”

“They do,” Malk said. “But they come up the South Spine River, take the old Kesh High Canal over to the Spine River proper, up to hunt seals and trade. They like seals almost as much as kynd. It’s the fat. And they take the fur off the young.”

I joined him at the top of the rocks now.

“See that smoke?” he said. I nodded. “That’ll be steam-pots. They burn coal belowdecks and splash water on it, make it hot and damp down there like their islands. Solgrannon, I know you like blood, but just don’t let them land.”

“Why wouldn’t they land?” I asked, raising my voice just a tiny bit to be heard over crying gulls wheeling above us.

“They hate birds,” Galva said.

I’d heard that and forgotten it. Now the use of the corvids against them took on another layer. Kill our horses? Fine. Here’s a host of giant murder-birds fit to shred half you little pricks and give the rest nightmares in your hives.

“They probably saw debris from the Suepka. If they figure it was a kraken, they won’t expect survivors, they may just sweep the beach for valuables. If we can stay out of sight up in the rocks … Oh, for fuck’s sake,” he said.

“What?”

“The bodies.”

We ran back down the rocks toward the three dead bodies that had washed up yesterday. We’d covered them in seaweed but had decided not to burn them because we couldn’t spare the wood. They were lined up neat as you please, orderly, the way we kynd like it. The way no bodies ever washed up randomly on any shore.

“What?” said the harpooner.

“Hide them!” Malk said, pointing at the corpses.

“Where?” said Norrigal.

“Up the rocks.”

What followed was a desperate race to tug, hoist, and carry three nasty, waterlogged dead whalers up the loose, shyte-bedabbed rocks and into crags sufficiently deep to keep them from sight. We hadn’t a quarter hour before the ship might wheel about and see the blind side of the beach. We’d just managed to haul the last body, the mortal and stinking remains of the tan, barrel-shaped woman who’d leered at me from the deck that first day, onto a kind of saddle and pile smaller stones and birds’ nests on her, and Norrigal had just gotten the drag-marks broomed over when she remembered her case of vials and potions.

“Leave it!” I snapped.

“If they find us, we’ll need it!” she hissed back, and I let go her arm. Shouldn’t have done. Oh, she got the case and smashed herself down next to me flat as shoe leather, but she was in a bad place. Not comfortable. Had to hold herself up with a braced leg at a bad angle. The goblin’s sails had only just come into view when she began to shake. We both knew she was in danger of starting the mother of all rockslides if she fell.

“You hold on,” I told her.

“I am,” she said.

“You’re light as a vine,” I said.

“And you’re thick as shyte. Leave me be, I’ll manage.”

“You will,” I said.

“Shut your hole now.”

“Both a yas shut both yer holes,” Malk hissed.

The goblin ship was closer now. Peering through a veil of twigs from a nest, I watched it. In a way, it was beautiful in its weirdness. The mainmast was straight enough to do its job, but they had left burls in it, and it seemed to twist. Did they grow tortured trees on purpose to suit their tastes? The lateen sail wasn’t so different in function than what you’d see on a kynd-built ship, except that it was more a severe trapezoid than a triangle and had a patchwork of different shades of green sewn into it to further break its lines. The prow of the ship, where kynd ships would have had a winged goddess or a serpent or a wolf, displayed a goblin hand in greened-over copper, pointing with three fingers, the thumb holding the smaller finger tucked. The wind filled the sail, pushing the goblin ship fast through the water.

I saw one of them now, standing just behind the prow. My first goblin. I couldn’t make it out well, but I could already see that they were cunny-ugly, just like I’d heard.

Of course they came ashore, six of them at first, two of them holding torches they eagerly waved if a bird happened near. If you squinted, they looked almost like hunched, gray-skinned children with furs and leather on, and it was better to squint. If you stopped, you’d notice they had no noses or chins to speak of, and their elbows were in the wrong place.

They loped as much as walked, and they wore their gray-brown hair in complicated braids that said much about their station. Bits of their speech came up to me. It was a raspy, hissing business I knew humans had great pain to imitate. They had at least two consonants and one vowel that kynd could only approximate, partly because their tongues were armored against the sharpness of their teeth, the sort of teeth you’d expect to find in a river fish. So rasps, rattles, and an annoying sort of throat whistle. Not a language built for poetry, at least none I’d care for. I had a look at Galva, and she seemed to be trying to follow it.

“You speak that shyte?” I whispered.

She waggled her head, the Ispanthian signal for maybe or, in this context, a little. Then she put two fingers to her lips, pointed to the beasties, pointed to her ear, and made a one-handed weighing gesture that she used when she saw a beautiful woman or when food or music was particularly good. Right. Shut up. They. Hear. Good. Soldier’s cant and Guild cant weren’t always so different.

The biters were troubled by the birds and clearly disgusted with their shyte, so much so that their cursory walk through what had been our camp raised no suspicion with them, and they didn’t walk so far down the beach as to put them close to where we’d tucked the oar-boat away. Things looked hopeful. Then, for a bad half moment, it seemed as if one of them wanted to come up our hill, and there went Galva starting to sneak out of her mail shirt again. Then a second one talked the first one out of it. I resolved to buy the reluctant one a drink in the unlikely event we found ourselves in a tavern that would serve us both.

The discussion grew less heated, and soon, the pack of them went loping back to the wee, weird boat they rowed back to the larger weird boat. Poor Norrigal had switched positions three or four times, once spilling a fine rush of gravel that made us all clench our backsides—perhaps I shouldn’t speak for the others, but I know my own arse could have cracked a walnut. Now she was shaking like a cold dog, trying to hold herself up again, and I grabbed her belt and pulled a bit to take some of the weight off of her awkwardly braced legs. The things had made it to their ship now, and they hoisted up the anchor and caught the wind with their sails.

Thank you thank you thank you, I breathed to Fothannon, and the tosser said, You’re welcome, and here’s how he said it: I sneezed. A hard one. The kind that makes your body jerk. And when I jerked, my foot slipped off the rock it was braced on, and I kicked Norrigal. Not hard, but enough. Norrigal lost her grip on the potion case. Three little bottles and some moss or other flora went over and broke with a tinkle on an almost-flat rock below us. She gasped but then made a small sound of relief, apparently because those bottles ought not be mixed and hadn’t been. But you remember when I said the rock was almost flat? Right. Little rivulets of the potions started flowing down the rock’s surface, first toward each other.

“Oh!”

Then away.

“Ah.”

Then decisively toward.

“Shyte! Shyte!” she hissed, and a second hiss came from where a bead of brown liquid had crashed into a rivulet of pearly-clear goop.

“Shyte!” I echoed. “Should I look away?”

“Doesn’t matter, sneezer,” she said, and now a bit of fire sizzled on the rock, and soon a fine, thick plume of white smoke rose up.

“Maybe they won’t see it?” I said.

Nobody else said anything.

“Maybe they’ll think it’s, I don’t know, a geyser?”

Galva grunted.

“A volcano, then,” I said.

The goblin ship turned.

We readied ourselves to fight.