The Blacktongue Thief

34 A Shiver of Her Wings

Hours later, at sea, I had occasion to think through the battle many times, and I really found no winning scenario for us, given that they had a wizard. Goblins have magic, too, you see, different from ours but just as strong.

“Would you mind moving your foot? Take it out from under my arm and put it over my shoulder. I’ll help you. Thanks.” Malk got his foot over my shoulder. He was hurt, but not so bad as the harpooner, who was not hurt so bad as Galva. Norrigal was scratched up a bit, but that was just from how rough they dragged her. She had also caught a poisoned bolt, but it was a three-pronged drugger for pricking, not a bodkin point for punching through. Me, I had a cut from nipple to hip that I was sure would go sour, and that’s what Malk’s foot had just been touching, lighting on fire with every twitch. It had been no easy matter for him to get his leg shifted, given the dimensions of the kynd-cage we’d been crammed in.

Our strategy had been brilliant, or so I thought. Norrigal up in the rocks calling a wind against them to make it too hard to shoot arrows or bolts, the rest of us to rush them as they came ashore, before they could get on land and use their speed. It was going all right. The same six from before had just got out of their smaller boat, three with crossbows, the rest with their awful spears. The main ship had pulled as close as it dared, their crossbowmen crowding the shoreward side. Norrigal put the wind against them, so hard their boat started drifting back to the main ship. They quit the boat then and swam for it, the crossbowmen holding their weapons up out of the water with one arm while they paddled sideways, half drowning for the waves.

When they were too far to make shore easily and too close to go back, Galva said, “Now!” and we ran at them. Their archers shot bolts at us, but the wind caught under the fletchings and lifted them hopelessly up or pitifully wide, and not a one hit us. They started making a sound between a bark and a monkey’s call, a panicked sound, and that’s because they saw the corvid. The big, beautiful, awful corvid.

The swimmers, catching sight of it, lost their courage and started back for the ship, but it was too late for one of them. The corvid, thrashing its wings up over the water, caught it by the leg and plucked it back toward the beach. It didn’t waste its time with that one, just tossed it back for Galva, who easily cut it to pieces. The goblins were wearing no armor, dressed for landing as they were.

I had only my bow and knives, so I stayed at the waterline and tried an arrow at one of the ship-goblins; with Norrigal’s wind behind it, it went hard but left. I adjusted and shot again, scoring one’s arm so he howled and dropped his weapon. Then I shot a swimmer. Got him square between the shoulder blades, and he seized up and sunk in the foam.

Then the karking wizard came from below and stood on the deck of the ship. Makes sense they had a wizard on a ship. Hard to take one with an army since all that metal and iron armor in one place dampens free magic, but sailors don’t wear armor because it would sink them. These beasties had naught but leather and horn to armor them, none of which impeded magic.

Their magicker was shorter than the rest, and old, but his hair made him taller. His white, stringy hair had been done up in a sort of tower of braids that Norrigal’s wind played havoc with in a most undignified fashion. A choker of pure, shiny copper shone at his throat. If that was my first clue what he was, Galva soon delivered the second. She held up a severed goblin leg with her shield arm, pointed with it, and yelled in Ispanthian.

“Tirau sul magauru!”

Which of course meant “Shoot the wizard!” as I understood upon later reflection, as I also later understood that seeing the biters had swept her back to the Daughters’ War, when she waded in blood with her countrymen. But at the time, I couldn’t understand that any more than she could understand that she was shouting Ispanthian at a Galtish Holter. She said it twice. By that time the two remaining swimmers had made it back to the ship, and their bolts were coming nearer even through the wind as they learned to adjust, so we went back to regroup. The old one took a stone on a string and started swinging it over his head. It made a whining sound I could hear even through the wind, and I knew then what he was, and what Galva had been saying. I nocked another arrow, shot, and missed. I nocked again even as we reached the shore, but it was too late.

The wind had turned.

It was wretched hot down in the hold.

An old goblin tended a coal-pot, ladling seawater over it from time to time and growling raspy commands at the several crewmen sleeping or warming up down here, not letting them get too cozy in the steamy belly of the ship. It also served as their mess hall, which was convenient, as we were in the pantry. They hadn’t butchered any of us yet, but it was coming—they’d pinched and sniffed at us, and one of them had indicated the harpooner, whom they’d taken out to a second cage and washed with seawater, putting him in a sealskin diaper so he wouldn’t shyte and piss all over himself. To his credit, when he wasn’t crying, he was telling them to go fuck themselves.

“If I could just get at my potion case,” Norrigal said. “Or what’s left of it.” She said it funny because her cheek was smashed up against the flat bars of the cage, and because she was still drugged from the bolt she’d taken, but I understood her. I was a bit woozy, too. All our worldly goods sat in a long trough-box on the starboard side of the hold, with Galva’s horse-staff and Norrigal’s staff of thumping lying against the wall. They hadn’t even bothered going through it yet; Malk said they would sell what they could when they put in to a kynd city or a hidden goblin colony.

“They have those?” I asked. “Up here?”

“Aye, they do,” he said.

“Where?”

“They’re hidden, aren’t they? But I’ve heard they’ll take a little island like the one we just quit and dig tunnels like in their hives in the archipelago or on Urrimad. But now that the king of Molrova’s their best friend, they do all right in Molrovan cities. Grevitsa and Rastiva have whole quarters for them, though most of the people with means have left Grevitsa. It’s just goblins, thieves, and whalers there now. And the odd lace-maker.”

“What’s the king get out of it?”

“What do you think?”

“Goblin silver.”

“Aye, that.”

“No war on his southern border.”

“Aye, that, too,” Malk said. “Besides a ready supply of scapegoats for any foul deeds he undertakes. The people bear it because they know what the Threshers’ and Daughters’ did to the rest of us, and they’ve chosen ignoble peace over brutal war. And they get rich. You know the price of tea.”

“So they’re occupied.”

“No, the king’s strong. He doesn’t let so many biters in he couldn’t kill the lot at will. But if that day comes, the biters’d do the same to the Molrovan kynd trading in the Hordelands. Though death is a fair wage for those as choose to live among those fuckers, I say. But if the killing begins again, Molrova’d have no more peppercorns, cinnamon, and tiger pelts to sell, and the Horde would lose their seal meat, cheap iron ore, and amber. The pricks love amber. They use it like gold. Besides the kynd-meat they steal on the seas.”

I was about to ask him where they get that, but the answer was perfectly obvious.

“Does our king know?” I asked. “Conmarr’s no lover of goblins.”

“Sure, but what’s he going to do? Link arms with Ispanthia and their prick of a king, Kalith? No offense.”

Galva groaned, then whispered, “None taken.”

“Our Conmarr’s in no hurry to cull his land of sons and mothers now that it finally has a few again,” Malk continued. “Unther’s got less to give than we, and Gallardia’s just pretending nothing’s wrong, selling pretty paintings and teaching everyone to dance. But make no mistake. War’s coming again. It’s just a question of which side first feels itself sufficiently recovered from the last round to start hitting again. Probably them—they breed faster. And whether Molrova will remain neutral this time or actually throw in with the goblins.”

Malk told me more about Molrovans and goblins. How Molrovans who go to live in the Hordelands are called black-hands because they tattoo one hand black so goblins know they’re not to be touched. They send good fighters there so goblins will think all Molrovans are that hard. I’d heard of Grevitsa, the infamous Molrovan island city. It was the sort of place you associate with kidnappings and killers for hire and, weirdly, lace. In gentler times, it was a capital of lace-making, and now Grevitsani wore a bit of lace on their cuffs or collars to let you know where they were from and that they weren’t to be trifled with.

“Well,” I said, “here’s hoping we put in at Rastiva and not a biter colony.”

“Hope?” said Malk. “They’ll not put in to a kynd-city with us lot in the hold. They’ll break this cage down and store it or claim it’s for seal pups or goats. And you can guess where we’ll be by then.”

“If there’s no hope, why are you telling me all this?”

“Me? I’m just running my mouth to keep me from thinking and you from crying.”

“I’m not crying,” I said.

“You will be.”

“I haven’t cried since your mother left the whorehouse in Platha Glurris.”

Malk said, “Platha’s too small to have a whorehouse.”

“I know you didn’t call it that. You just called it home.”

He let slip a gravelly chuckle.

“I do not understand you Holters with your jokes of mothers and fathers,” Galva said. “You do not love your mothers?”

“We’re Galts before Holters,” Malk said, and I said, “We love each other’s mothers.”

“And fathers,” I added.

Galva grunted, and Norrigal muttered into her iron bar, “Both your fathers had bigger berries than twigs. And your mothers had too conservative a policy on infanticide.”

She laughed at her own joke. Her stomach moving moved Galva’s head, and she laughed, which made Malk chuckle, and I did, too. And the poor harpooner laughed even though he knew he was the next calf on the block. I even kept laughing when I saw a trickle of someone’s blood roll on the floor, not knowing whose it was. Through it all, I thought I heard the yipping of a fox.

When the wizard started whirling his magic-stone, he tricked Norrigal’s wind into listening to him, and now their bolts had it behind them. We were on shore by then, running for the rocks, hoping to make a stand on high ground. If Norrigal could keep alive, she might have another trick to keep their crossbows off us—we hadn’t enough armor to take it otherwise, and the thing about a bow against a crossbow is that the bow’s faster with the second shot, but not as good for ducking around rocks and such. You have to draw, then release, too slow for a peeker. Crossbow’s a better siege weapon, just a lever-pull and all that stored force goes whack. What’s more, goblin bows are stronger than you’d think because they have a stirrup on the shooting end and a claw on their belt, so they step, squat, hook, and stand, using all the strength in their legs to cock the weapon. We were bollocksed. I had a moment to wonder where my cat had got to, but I couldn’t see him. With this development, I wouldn’t be a whit surprised if the assassin hid the little beastie ’til they scooped us off the island, and then waited for a better chance.

The next thing the biters did was go after the corvid. They tried shooting it with bolts, but Galva turned course away from the rocks and jumped in front of it with her shield. Meantime, it fluttered its wings over itself—a tactic called shivering—so it got its wings stuck through a few times, but nothing was hitting it to kill. They’d have to close with it. They didn’t want to close with it. The wizard made sure they didn’t have to. He whirled that stone at a different angle, and the wind died. Nine of the goblins had got to shore now, four with bows, five with spears. The old wizard was on the ship, a good eighty yards out. I couldn’t hit him from the rocks, but I might have a shot from the beach, and I knew a path to get down there without being seen, so off I ran.

By the time I got there, Malk and the harpooner had run down to join Galva, Malk with his cutlass, Gormalin swinging the old Gunnish warrior’s ancient rusty sword over his head like he hadn’t the first clue what to do with it. He had a bolt in his leg I don’t think he’d noticed yet, and Malk had been grazed once or twice. Galva was shielding them both as best she could, but it had cost her—she’d been hit in the shoulder, and the bird was stuck in the body more than once. What the wizard on the goblin ship was doing, I didn’t know. What Norrigal was doing, I didn’t know. I just ran. I got all the way to the waterline before they saw me—I found out later it was because Norrigal had masked me. She knew better than any of us that me hitting that wizard was our only chance, and I had a good shot, seventy yards from the waterline. A long way with a short bow, but I had a chance. To shave the distance, I splashed another fifteen yards into the water so it was up to my thighs.

“Don’t miss!” I heard Norrigal yell.

But my luck was out, I felt its absence under my breastbone like an old lover’s rebuke.

I missed.

I was still correcting as I had been when the wind was blowing, so the shaft went far left. I shouldn’t have, of course, but you don’t think right in a real fight, or at least I don’t. If you can keep perfectly calm and logical with biters swarming at you, good for you, but I couldn’t then and can’t now. Fighting means making mistakes and just trying not to make the last one. Luckily, the wizard didn’t see my arrow whiz by over his pile of braided hair. He was just at the end of his spell, and now he caught that magic-stone he’d been twirling in one hand and shook it twice. A piece of the cliff over Galva and the rest chunked off and tumbled with a great noise. I nocked an arrow. Goblins splashed through the water at me. A goblin-bolt from the beach tickled the back of my head. I fired my arrow at the geezer on the boat. After I loosed, I pulled a third arrow and glanced over my shoulder at the beach. The biter who shot at me was just at the tide, starting to step and claw for a reload, much impeded by wet sand and gravel and bothered by the sound of agitated gulls crying.

Past him, Galva and Malk and the corvid, Dalgatha, had killed two goblins, but more had ringed them. That didn’t matter, though. A boulder the size of a cow had crushed Dalgatha. I peeked right and saw the wizard bending over, my arrow in his guts, another helping him. I had my arrow nocked now and shot the crossbow-squatting prick in the face just as he stood and loaded it. Galva now bent and grabbed a feather from the great, awful corvid even as it shuddered.

It was important that she grab that feather before the bird died. So important, she turned her back on her attackers even as they speared and shot her. She broke the feather, and the bird caught fire under the rock and pitched black smoke into the sky.

Her chest smoked, too, and she cried out—one of the only times I’ve heard her do that—and fell to her knees.

Now two goblins came running after me, so I ran back up the rocks toward Norrigal, who was down, curled around a quarrel in her belly. One of the biters shot me a grazing hit in the shoulder, and that put enough poison in me so I would soon fall down. They were thrashing Galva and Malk with the shaft-ends of their twisted, dark spears now, the harpooner lying senseless next to them. The goblins wanted them alive. They wanted us alive. And that’s how they got every one of us.

“So did he die?” I asked the old biter ladling seawater onto the coals. “Your crusty old rock-breaking wizard. Did he go to meet the great smudgy kark in the sky—or under the ground, more like—you pricks worship?” If he understood, he made no sign of it, just worked his grayish lips around his river-fish teeth and brought another gout of steam from the coals. Norrigal was sleeping again; she got more of their drug in her with the solid hit she’d taken in the belly than the two grazes I took.

Of course, had they known they would absorb such losses they might not have tried us—on the other hand, it might have been worth seven sailors and a wizard just to take down the corvid and eat two veteran biter-killers. They hated corvids worse than they hated us, and who could blame them? The great black birds had turned the war around, them and springwood ships.

The springwood was all but gone, but thanks to the likes of Knockburr the Bone-Mixer and the Molrovan Fulvir Lightning-Binder, we’d mastered the art of making corvids. Normally, I felt a pang of guilt saying we about what the armies of Manreach had accomplished, but I’d killed goblins now, too. I didn’t go to the wars, but I’d fought, however belatedly. Killing a goblin mage, if I’d done that, was no small feat. If I were to be filleted and eaten, Malk’s forgiveness would be small balm, but at just this moment, lying in the cage with his foot in my face as we bled all over each other, I managed to convince myself it mattered.

“Hey, Spanth,” I said.

She tilted her head to show she was listening, her eyes barely open.

“Might as well tell us why we were really going to Oustrim. I mean, I’ll take the secret to the grave.”

“And soon,” Norrigal said.

“You tell him, pruxilta. I … do not wish to talk.”

“Wait a moment,” I said. “She fucking knows and I don’t?”

“You’re Guildron, aren’t you?” Norrigal said. “But you’re maybe something else as well.”

“What’s that?” I said.

“Pork shank for a biter,” Malk said.

“Deadlegs thinks you’re exactly as your name. A kinch. The tangle in the Takers’ web,” said Norrigal. “I don’t want to go bothering your fond head with things that might or might not be true. What is true is that we were going to Oustrim to put a witch on a throne.”