The Blacktongue Thief

46 City of Lace

In the country, we met priests of dark gods, bounty hunters, rabbit-skinners, Angrani tribeswomen who’d made their wild hair tall with dried mud, root farmers, lake-fishers, cidermen who drank too much of their work, and too-jovial woodcutters who cast covetous eyes on our donkeys.

I can’t speak for the others, but a tour of rural Molrova left me ready for a bed and a hot meal in a city.

Shame that city was fucking Grevitsa.

The plan was to meet with a thief there who’d sell us a map of Oustrim’s giant-sacked capital, Hrava. But not just any map—this one was supposed to chart the city’s maze of sewers.

And with Hrava invested by giants, knowing how to skitter under the streets could be the difference between life and that other thing. If it were accurate, this map would be worth our weight in gold.

Maybe even worth going to this rotten little hole of a town.

Grevitsa sat on an island in the Spine River with five bridges across one side and two across the other. The island was such a good natural fortress, it was said to be two thousand years old. It’s a good thing most people only live to be about sixty, because nobody’d want to spend two thousand years with those twats.

The whole town was the color of cheerful mud, sort of gray-brown shot through with bits of red or the odd flower pot. The most carefully made and delicate lace in Manreach lay displayed like the webs of divine spiders in shops that fronted on streets patrolled by garbage-eating pigs who’d nip at you if you came too close.

The pigs had earrings or brands to indicate their ownership, and if you carved a slice of bacon off one, you’d answer to the swineherd, most of them tough ex-soldiers who’d received pigs as part of their twenty-year retirement. Remember, Molrova stayed clear of the Goblin Wars, so if these men knew less of killing goblins than Spanths or Gallards did, they had fought enough feudal actions against one another in the meantime that they were no strangers to killing kynd.

Molrova was also known for amber, exquisite faceted teardrops of which hung from the throats of ladies while unworked hunks of it made belts for laundresses and tavern maids.

The real arsehole of Grevitsa, though, was the fact that biters lived there. As in, the vile, sharp-toothed, hook-armed, man-butchering, horse-killing, high-nut horrors that made the last forty years hell for all kynd everywhere were allowed to buy property here.

The Goblin Quarter stood near the harbor.

Its boundaries were marked with chains and warning signs in three languages; neither the king’s law nor the Horde’s would save those who left their own quarter. Such goblins as killed men behind their boundary faced only Horde law. Such goblins as wandered into the streets of Manreach did so at their peril. And yet risk weighs itself against profit, and there was profit to be made in dealing with the enemy.

Good profit indeed.

We found an inn, stabled our donkeys, and got to business.

The thief we had come to meet was an expatriate Spanth who now lived with goblins, in their quarter, an expert in their rasping, high speech. She met us in a Molrovan Tavern called Barana Morzhaxh, which meant, as near as I can tell, “the Man-Faced Ram,” because such was the image on the sign that swung over the iron-studded door, which had a smaller, goblin-sized door set within it. The windows were grated with iron, and skulls both goblin and kynd hung on the wall behind the bar below a rusty Molrovan long-axe. Busted skulls. Words weren’t really needed, but if you insist, All transgressors beaten equally seemed to be the moral.

One thing I couldn’t help noticing in the tavern was the abundance of men. And not just whelps of twenty-two or less—these were shipwrights, soldiers, smiths, all out drinking and dicing with beer-sogged beards, making the walls rumble with their low voices and their bellicose laughter. These were not veterans, not of the Goblin Wars, at least. Molrova had sent no levies to the second or third musters, so those levies had not been bitten, poisoned, stabbed, tusked by boars, cloven in two by blind ghalls, their stripped bones left in the dirt of Gallardia and Ispanthia or sewn onto goblin banners. I did not stand out, with my twenty-three years and my full complement of fingers.

I was in a whole country of slippers.

Molrovans were a bunch of selfish karks, just like me.

The Ispanthian thief told us her name was Chedadra, or Ched, which meant something like “rough fucker.” Rough Fucker had cheekbones that could cut glass, a war axe on her belt, horse’s teeth sewn into her dreadlocked hair, and a badly painted false eye. She was also missing the tip of her nose, which meant some Spanth or other had caught her stealing.

Fucker’s street Ispanthian was so clipped and rapid that Galva seemed barely able to follow her, let alone myself, but she gave Ched a fair bag of silver, which she weighed approvingly, and a piece of hexagonal amber with an ant lion in it. This the thief pressed against her cheek and neck with such gratitude I thought Galva might be in for a rough fuck, and she seemed to think so, too, from the way she crossed her legs toward the door and scooted her chair back.

Rather than a lesson in how illiterate killers show their Sornian love for raven knights, what Galva got for us was, as promised, a map of Oustrim’s capital, Hrava, which indeed included the sewers, as well as a bonus—the name of a non-Guild thief who might help us when we got there, if said thief had not yet been found and pulped by giants.

Ürmehen.

The Upright Man, or king of thieves.

I let my attention drift out the grated window of the Man-Faced Ram and toward the goblin quarter. Night was coming on, and the biters lit no lanterns, for they needed none to see, but I could still make out their warped, irregular buildings. I espied one or two of the nasties going about their business, moving in their arrhythmic but strangely graceful way. It gave you a headache to look at. I understood that half of Goblintown was likely underground, for they were fond of tunnels, and I could only imagine how bewildering those must have been. I was torn between a thief’s curiosity to see them and a very human desire not to go where I’m like to be eaten.

Little wonder that Ched was mad; whether her madness made her tolerant of life with the Horde or whether it came to her as a result of it was anybody’s guess, but nobody sane chooses to live with creatures who spend half their time thinking about how delicious your thigh meat would be served raw with a bowl of poison mushrooms.

I looked away from the confusion of Goblintown, and my eyes lighted on the barman, a big fellow with a greasy lace collar. His face looked recently smelted, and his hand had been tattooed black. He had lived among the biters, too, then, with them in their Hordelands. He looked at me, and I nodded. He just kept looking, and I thought about winking at him, but disappointed the god of mischief by turning my gaze away. Mischief wasn’t chief god here. Here they worshipped murder, and murder wore fine lace.

With the other business concluded, Ched surprised the lot of us by offering to sell us a magical ring. Galva waved her off at first, but Ched insisted that the other Spanth translate for us.

“What’s it do?” Norrigal and I asked in unison.

Ched spoke, then Galva said, “She says it fires lightning. Just one bolt, but deadly.”

I looked closely at it. White gold with a sort of iron trench down the middle, probably sky-iron from a fellstone. Runes in it from the Gunnish Islands promising Wolthan’s vengeance.

“Why get rid of it?” Norrigal said. “A thing like that could save your life, if it works.” But Norrigal was looking at it the same way I was—neither one of us had any question that it did something. It prickled the hairs on both our necks.

“She says she needs money more than to have her life saved. She is in debt to a goblin priest. One lightning strike won’t protect her from that.”

The price she asked seemed low for magic on that order.

Norrigal and I looked at each other.

I was thinking maybe Rough Fucker was not sensitive to magic and wasn’t sure it worked. But she wouldn’t want us to know she didn’t know, so she asked the highest price she thought she could actually get at a negotiation in a tavern. Which was still a bargain for what it probably was.

“How’d you get it?” Norrigal said, but I grabbed Galva’s arm and shook my head at her before she translated. That’s not something you ask a thief.

Norrigal handed over a gold queening and two silver knights in Middlesea coin, which was the same as Holt used.

Rough Fucker tasted the money, then made it disappear.

She handed the ring to Norrigal, who found it too large for any finger but her thumb, so that’s where she wore it.

We left the bar, happy with the way the evening had gone so far, Norrigal admiring the magical ring from time to time on the sly. I was admiring Norrigal from time to time on the sly. Galva kept her eyes open, her hand never too far from her wicked sword. Yorbez smoked her taback stub. Malk was walking in a way particular to young bravos, but perfected nowhere so well as in the Galtish lands of Holt. There’s a way a blacktongue tough sometimes walks, each step a small kick, so that the torso sways just a little. The word swagger nearly embraces that walk, but misses an element of boredom, mischief, a hope for something out of the ordinary to please happen whatever the cost.

It’s like a small, dark physical prayer.

Such prayers rarely go unanswered.