The Blacktongue Thief

50 Father of Lies

For the last few years, I’d been telling myself a marvelous fiction that, despite my laziness and love of being outside, one day I would get around to bending my neck over arcane books and learning deep magic; that being a thief was just a temporary diversion from my true calling; that with the right teachers and training, I could one day be a formidable wizard.

That’s not how seeing Fulvir’s library made me feel. What it made me feel was that I was an impostor, a decent thief, perhaps, but a mediocre spell-botcher who would be adequate on his best day and a dangerous liability on the others. Sure, I could break a fall, put a geezer to sleep, hold my breath underwater three times longer than you, but really, the people who wrote and cast spells from the books Fulvir had amassed made me look like a knee-pants barefoot serf’s bastard who chopped the heads off wheat with a stick and thought himself a knight.

The library stood two stories up inside a house made entirely of white horse bones mortared with dark mud, a house you’d never see from the road but had to wind through narrow passes to find in its clearing. In the clearing stood piles and piles of skeletons, half of them from beasts that no longer walked our world or never should have. The house proper wasn’t shaped like any other house in Manreach, but had the look of a hornet’s nest or an onion, and the library was top and center. The wood for the shelves came from shipwrecks, unless that was a lie, which it probably was, but there was no need to exaggerate what they held.

Fulvir had 170 books if he had one, and that would sound impressive enough if we were discussing ordinary books written out by Gallardian scribe-slaves or Holtish scriveners. Magic books, however, that’s another beast. He showed Norrigal and me books on how to speak with bears, dogs, and horses. How to call lightning up from the ground. How to bring the dead back to something like life and why you shouldn’t. One book wouldn’t open unless you bled on it and wouldn’t close until you sang it a song, the song it asked for, and if you left it open, the next fellow to come along would be able to read your thoughts in it.

“Why are you showing us this?” I asked.

“Don’t you know?” he said. “You are my son.”

I just blinked at him.

He and Norrigal shared a look then, like they were both in on some joke just outside my ken.

“You heard me. When I go to the towns, which I used to do on my travels, I find bored wives and make sons in them. It is nothing.”

“Nothing? That’s a long way from nothing. Anyway, you’re lying.”

“I shit in the pan, I throw it in a hole. I am not sentimental about the functions of my body. But as you say, you are not my son, because I was lying.”

What he said got me thinking, though. My da was a stoop-necked miner who knew nothing of the arts of love, while my mother was a beautiful woman who went heavy to the wedding.

“My ma was a beautiful woman,” I said, letting that bit slip from mind to mouth.

“She was. Hair like spun copper, curly hair. A tiny woman, but lovely.”

“And you passed through Galtia in those days, so they say.”

“Making seagulls sing. Your mother was a good judge of their talents.”

“The Isle of Ravens. That was my mother? Anyway, you said we. You used to travel with another magicker.”

“I was in those days foolish enough to walk my paths with a Galt. Now he is as mad as an Ispanthian princess.”

“Knockburr,” I said.

His face lost its playful, mocking, smarter-than-me look. “That name is frequently spoken in this house. You are welcome to say it as much as you like.”

I had a moment then, thinking about the name Knockburr. I had thought it a funny name, perhaps even vulgar, but now it came to me that a burr wasn’t just a spiny plant-seed or a spur on metal but also a way of talking, and that the word knock might mean the Knock, the calamity that drowned the world. Calling that great old Galt Knockburr was as much as calling him the voice of doom.

I looked away from Fulvir to an open book on a small table, a book discussing the magical properties of blood from different animals. Apparently, lion’s blood was the only thing more coveted than lamb’s blood for spellwork but, as you’d imagine, a bit harder to come by.

“You have understood every book you have turned your eyes to here, I think.”

“Not at all,” I said. “And you. Your Holtish is … not … excellent.”

“I speak sixty-one languages,” he said. “How many do you speak?”

“Do you count handcanting?”

“Of course.”

“Two perfectly. Three decently.”

“Hm. Perhaps I was wrong. A son of my body would speak at least six languages. What besides Holtish do you speak perfectly?”

“Galtish, of course.”

“Who taught you?”

“My mother. Do you speak it?”

“No,” he said.

“I thought maybe my mother taught you, too, at least in the reality of the lie you’ve chosen to tell me.”

“I was not with her long enough to learn a joke,” he said, laughing.

“You don’t have to be rude about it.”

“I already didn’t speak Galtish before she didn’t teach me to speak it.”

“Well, you should learn it, it’s beautiful.”

“Do you think so?”

“More than Molrovan.”

“This is entertaining. Please continue.”

“Molrovan sounds like a man getting kicked to death with hot broth in his mouth. It’s a wet, spitting language for whore people with whore lips. Galtish is a poet’s language.”

“Yours is a difficult language. Too many ways to say things. Why should two people saying we be different from three people saying we?”

“Spoken like someone who doesn’t understand poetry. If I say, ‘My children are children of the moon herself and we don’t need you,’ we meaning the moon and I, it implies she’s my lover. Very different from we meaning me and my children.”

Norrigal spoke up then.

“As your wife for another week, I should tell you you’re embarrassing yourself.” She started laughing like a pot about to boil over.

“What? How?”

“You’re speaking fucking Galtish right now, aren’t you? And so is he.”

She was right. She was speaking Galtish, too.

“When did we switch?”

She was laughing really hard now. “When you asked him if he spoke it and he said no!”

I could actually feel my face turning red, and I’m not usually a blusher.

“You did well against the clay man,” he said. “You’re a good fighter. For your size.”

“But I’ll never be a wizard.”

“No.”

“No for real, or Molrovan no?”

“Yes.”

“Shyte, I hate this place.”

“So leave,” he said, walking away. “And take your temporary wife with the lightning ring on her thumb with you.”

“Does that really mean stay another night?”

“As you wish,” he said.

The door to the room we would sleep in that night swung open, and two books waited for us on the bed. On the left, where Norrigal always sleeps, was a Galtish book called Charming Plants and Taming Poisons. On the right, a beginner’s treatise on magical tattoos. In Gallardian. Which he knew good and well I could read.