The Blacktongue Thief

36 A Death of Seagulls

“Just look at me,” I said to Norrigal later. Maybe an hour, maybe half a day, time makes no sense when you’re miserably uncomfortable and waiting to die. Weird lanterns burned in the walls of the hold, it might have been night. She locked her eyes on mine. They were going to butcher the harpooner in plain sight of our cage; I saw one who seemed to be the captain come in and speak to the old steam-maker, and they both took up cleavers and rope and started for the harpooner’s cage.

I didn’t want any of that in my dreams, should I chance to sleep again before dying, so I kept my eyes turned away and thought Norrigal might want to do the same. She did.

Now the old man started whimpering, he couldn’t help himself, and neither could I blame him. It was a horrible sound to have to hear yourself making, so I started singing a song I had learned during my time in Pigdenay, a song called “Lovely, Fit, and Gay,” also known as the Pigdenay Round, for that was how it was often sung. I broke out my best tenor, and I sang against the dark thing about to happen. I sang it loud. It may have been the best I ever sung, for I wanted the poor old bastard to leave the world hearing a song of his own city, and I wanted to do it right.

Malk knew the song as well and sang it with me, loud and baritone.

Norrigal joined in, blending a high and nasal alto as best she could with her face against the bar.

The harpooner started to sing with us, but they didn’t like that, and so they hit him in the head and like killed him there, which would have been a blessing. They started on him proper then, but on we three sang.

We sang the whole thing again three more times before they were done with him, and we never looked over there, not one of us. Not even when the crew came in to eat. There was no singing over that, not over the sound of the cutting or the working of the salt grinder, and whether I passed out from my injuries or from pure horror is beyond my guessing. I know I wasn’t the only one, for when I woke again in the steamy darkness of the goblins’ hold, I was the only one conscious.

The first thing that struck me was the warmth under my breastbone—my luck was back in. The second thing I noticed was that the old steam-maker was gone. The third was that the ship was quiet. Where we had heard the sound of the crew barking and throat-whistling through their duties tacking into the wind and working the rudder, now I heard only the crying of seabirds. That struck me funny, too, for they chased gulls and terns away with whip and fire, so badly did they hate them. The crying of gulls still comforts me to this day. I noticed we were rolling a bit more than normal, and a goblin ship rolls a fair amount because they don’t build their ships with much of a keel to them. They like being able to come up in shallow waters. On one of the larger rolls, I saw the salt grinder go skittering across the floorboards, and it stopped when it hit the foot of the steam-geezer, who was down.

I wanted to say something, but I didn’t know what. I was bewildered. I touched the cage door and found that it opened when I pushed. I opened it slow. I looked back to confirm that Norrigal, Malk, and Galva were all out, and they were, hurt Galva snoring almost enough to call the poor Gormalin to mind.

I padded out and made my way to the bench-chest where our goods were kept, watching both the plank that led up to the deck and the still form of our goblin gaoler, who I now noticed was lying near a heap of his own awful vomit. I found my knives and belt. My bow and a quiver with a few arrows remained—I took those. I prodded Malk, but he slept on, looking very pale. Norrigal began to stir. I put my hand over her mouth. Her eyes went wide as she remembered who and where she was. I helped her to her wobbly legs and to the chest, where she found her staff of head-busting. I motioned for her to try to wake the others and that I was going to creep above deck and see what was happening.

I slunk up the plank with an arrow ready, and I came upon a scene of great carnage. The goblins lay in postures of tortured death, bloody heaps of their vomit all over the deck. One still lived, holding to the side and emptying his guts over horribly. It was the wizard. He looked up at me, drool trailing from his sharp-toothed mouth in the wind.

“Clever,” he said. “You know we eat weak one first. Clever. I congratulate you. I—”

One thing I know about wizards is don’t let them talk. As impressed as I was with his ability to speak Holtish and as curious as I was about what he might have to say, I didn’t want him charming me, putting me to sleep, or making a spar fall on me, so I shot him. I shot that prick, right in the head, I hung a wee skinny horn on him, say it how you will, but the short version is he won’t be turning any more witch winds around, he won’t be bringing cliffs down on any more war corvids, he won’t be diddling with his stone on a string, and when you invite him to dine with you on leg of harpooner, he’ll have to say, “No thank you.” He bared his sharp teeth in pain and grabbed the arrow, then he bled out of one eye and one of the two holes where a nose should have been, he tottered three steps, then he sat down and died sitting.

And no part of me felt bad about it.

It’s a much easier thing to kill a goblin than a man.

Seagulls wheeled overhead. One gull walked the deck near the back of the ship, making his way to a goblin corpse he’d like to have a peck at. Two more fought on the spar, a fat, mouthy one driving off another with mocking shouts. A whole pack of them pecked at a fresh pile of sick. And one mottled brownish gull lay dead near a similar pile of sick, his feathers blowing slightly in the considerable wind.

I congratulate you.

Poison.

The lot of them had been poisoned.

The ship rolled under my feet. Thunder rolled overhead. A storm was coming in now, and me on a ship full of dead biters without the first idea how to sail it.

“Fothannon, Lord of Mischief, this is your day,” I said into the rising wind. “I praise your hand in this, as I see it clear. I offer you no tears, for you hate them. I ask for no blessings, for you scorn supplication and always take more than you offer. Instead, I give you the sound that’s dearest your heart, and mine, you incorrigible old groper. I congratulate you.”

And I looked at the chaos around me and listened to the wind and the crying of the poisoned gulls, and I laughed into that wind.

I laughed tears onto my own cheeks.

I laughed straight until Norrigal called me back belowdecks.

“What the five flying fucks is the cat doing here?” she said.

Bully sat near the dead goblin steam-maker, licking a paw as though none of this held the least concern for him. Norrigal held her own hand.

“I don’t know,” I said. “What’s wrong with your hand?”

“The little bastard clawed me.”

“Did you try to touch the salt grinder?”

“And how would you know that?”

“Don’t touch the salt grinder. It’s full of poison.”

I didn’t envy whoever would have to explain the cat’s reappearance on the ship to Malk and Galva, and I envied him even less when I remembered it was going to have to be me. I told her what I saw up on the deck.

“I don’t know if you properly understood everything you discovered in the service of your underground witch, but a lot of it seemed mysterious and wonderful to me. Can we just say that something mysterious and wonderful has happened for us at last? Can we just say we’re glad the cat’s here? Without looking too far down his throat, I mean?”

After a moment’s consideration of both myself and the cat, she said, “We can.”

“And might we just say you got out and poisoned the lot of them? And that Bully here had just stowed away in my pack, unbeknownst to us and our gentle hosts?”

“We might,” she said, looking at me hard.

Bully now leapt into the pack and pulled its flap shut over himself.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Norrigal said.

Malk wasn’t in the best shape, but there was enough of him to direct us when the storm hit and, our luck in for once, we only caught the very tail of it before it howled off west with a quiver of lightning for the ships of Molrova. By the second day, Galva was trying to help us, but we made her lay lie down. We kept the goblin vessel afloat, the three of us, and even managed to steer it toward the south by day. Our biggest problem was water. Goblins can drink seawater, you see. The solitary barrel of fresh water on the boat, the one they’d been watering us with, had been vomited in by a dying goblin with a misplaced sense of discretion. If only we had thought to put out vessels during the storm, but we’d had other matters on our mind. By the first night, we had ignominiously slurped up all the rainwater that could be gathered from wringing out sailcloth.

Norrigal and I were too throat-raw to talk much, but we sat and held each other for the comfort of it, looking at the stars in their great numbers. There’s nothing like the stars far out at sea, with no torch nor lantern to argue their majesty with them. We dared a dry kiss or two, but no more. This was still more funeral barge than pleasure raft, and though we had grown somewhat used to goblin-stink, it is no aphrodisiac.

“Deadlegs could have kept us off this ship,” she croaked at one point.

“You don’t know that,” I said, my voice a husk of itself.

“Oh, I do.”

“Then you don’t know that would have helped us. We’d still be on the island. Anyway, the old girleen couldn’t have made the journey. That’s why she sent you.”

She nodded, her eyes sad.

“I wasn’t ready,” she said. “Three more years of study, maybe I would have been so. But as it is, I’ve botched as much as I’ve sorted out.”

“No,” I said, “you’re just being a Galt. There’s no tongue speaks against itself so harshly as a black tongue.”

I was looking in her pretty gray eyes so close and hard I could see stars in them. You’ll not believe this, but I saw a shooting star reflected in her eye. Her eye widened a bit.

“You saw it?” I said.

She nodded a tiny nod.

Grinned just a bit when she realized I must have seen it in her eye.

The eye moistened then, just at the edge, but Norrigal was too dry to make a tear.

By the second day, we were all of us well on our way to thirst- madness.

Happily, that’s when we saw the sails.

“Whose ship is that?” I asked Malk, who was giving himself a headache trying to look through a goblin farglass. “Is it Molrovan?”

“No,” he said. “They’re flying the three white dragons of Middlesea.”

“That’s lucky!” Norrigal said.

Middlesea was Holt’s closest ally, grown from Holtish conquests half a hundred years ago when Holt and her knights controlled everything on the north half of the mainland from Ispanthia to Molrova. As with the kingdom of Brayce, Middlers speak the language almost as we do. Not sharing a border with Holt, as Brayce did, made things more cordial. Middlesea was a strange, flat, horseshoe-shaped nation, ringing Deepbelly Bay and best known for cold-weather flowers, beer, and warships.

“Normally, a Middler fireship would be lucky,” Malk said. “If we were flying Holtish banners, it would be lucky. But they think we’re goblins.”

“Aren’t they under treaty?”

“Of course they are. As were these pricks when they found us on the island. You know the saying—Waves have nor ears nor tongues.”

“Actually, I don’t know that saying.”

“What happens on the sea stays on the sea,” he said. Then he said, “Oh shyte.”

“Please don’t say that. ‘Oh shyte’ what?”

“You see that smoke?”

“You’re the one with the glass. But I think so, yes. Does that mean…?”

“Yes.”

They were readying firedarts.

Balls to the treaty.

We were goblins.

And our good friends from Middlesea meant to burn us.