The Blacktongue Thief

55 The Upright Man

The sewers beneath Hrava weren’t the worst sewers I’d ever seen. I’d sooner eat a dead man’s foot than go underground again in Pigdenay, as we had to more than once at the Low School. But Hrava? Cold, as Pigdenay was normally cold, which is good for sewers if you have to be in them or above them, but Pigdenay was built five hundred years before. Apart from having all that time to collect filth and fall into ruin, the art of building shyte-tunnels was much improved by the time the wild Gunnish thanes decided they, too, wanted a city, here in the mountains between the river and the lake.

These sewers were fairly wide and, thanks to the sudden depopulation of the city, not so full of shyte. Not new shyte, anyway, which is something. Not that I was thinking about pitching a tent and having my letters sent here, but it wasn’t so bad is what I’m saying. And as such, it was a very popular place. While a good many Hravi died when the giants came, and even more fled to the wilderness, I soon realized that a tenth of the city was now below ground.

And who could blame them? Giants were serious business. How the hells were the armies of kynd supposed to stand up to those things? Pikes fifteen feet long would help, but I’ll bet a hail of twenty-pound rocks would bust a phalanx pretty fast. Ten thousand longbows shooting poisoned arrows might serve, but if kynd could make a shield wall, the giants could as well. And how long could archers keep their feet planted and their boots unwatered with a wall of ten-foot shields driving toward them? Those things could move, too, with plenty of muscle under what fat they had, and if their strides looked lumbering, it was all a matter of scale—just a few strides and they were across a field. I better understood Galva and her goblin-troubled sleep—I would be dreaming of the goblins we had faced on the island, but more so now I would hear thundering steps, a hunting horn, see kynd leashed like dogs running after me, and after them, their masters with their long, long shadows.

Hrava had become a whole city of long shadows.

Within a hundred steps of the entrance, I found myself passing ordinary folks getting by as best they could without sun or fresh air. Here was a new mother suckling her babe on a pallet of scrap wood while two broken-looking beardy men sagged against their spears. Here were twenty sad bastards hunched around a smoky tallow lamp while one read a Gunnish saga about another giant war, one that men had won to drive them over the Thralls seven hundred years before. The firelit glimpses of their faces said they regarded what they heard as mere fables—the giants they had lately encountered were worse than anything in those books. I passed a few groups who’d strung furs or sailcloth to screen their couplings and their dungings from their neighbors, but most lived in the open. And few did more than turn a sideways eye at me as I passed to assure themselves I was benign.

At a juncture of several tunnels, I came to a large stone room that served as a sort of agora. Dim orange light flickered from a very few walled torches and carefully guarded candles. People had spread cloths and even set up rickety tables in the dry middle part, selling buckles and scraps of leather, wood for burning, a few bolts of soiled cloth. A chandler dam with a ready axe and a very skinny leashed dog displayed a few dozen beeswax candles you’d need silver to take away.

The most popular table, one with a large crowd around it, belonged to a group of hunters who had just returned with a few ducks, a doe, a handful of fat rabbits, a box of straw and eggs. These women had the look of thanes—the tough Gunnish nobles who were to their folk as knights were in Holt. You’d have to have good swords and a reputation to make it through a starving city with fresh game.

I saw that those around their table had on dirty velvets and fine, worked leather rather than filthy hemp and wool. People started yelling prices, bidding against one another, a small scuffle broke out but was quickly beaten down, and soon I saw the glint of real gold going into these hunters’ hands for a duck. I saw a sword worthy of fable, two hundred years old if an hour, scrawled with runes and humming faintly with magic, go to the hunters as a crying man with a horde of children at his feet and several women behind him took the doe. Within a quarter hour, the last egg was gone for the price of a night in a fine inn, the thanes had drunk off a skin of what smelled like fruit mash liquor, and they were off again to dodge bigguns and try to fell another priceless deer.

I saw arrows for sale in a bucket, different sizes, some no doubt perfect for my bow, and I was about to ask the birthmarked fletcher’s lad how much, when I felt a hand on my sleeve. I turned, stepping back, in case the stranger’s free hand held a dirk, and backed straight into another body, the hands attached to which grabbed my belt. I covered my knife so they’d not have it out of its sheath, and then I saw them. The ginger lad and a dusky boy who’d been with him by the fallen statue of Tuur. He showed me an open hand to say, Calmly, we’re not here to fight, and I relaxed my hand on the knife, though didn’t move it far.

I shot a look at the belt-grabber, and he let go, but two more urchins had moved up behind him. I looked at the ginger. He said, “Ürmehen,” and nodded down one tunnel, which yawned like a mouth of sheer black. “Ürmehen, je,” I said. I consulted my luck heading down the tunnel with the boys, and it was swimming near normal. I was not heading for immediate tragedy, in any case, or if I were, I had even odds to escape it.

Ürmehen was my first experience with an Upright Man, an underworld boss not feal to the Guild. In that regard, he was a sort of relic—a museum piece to show what crime looked like before the Guild put a Hanger’s House in every city, and a Problem to run it, and three Worries under the Problem, and any number of Pranks, Fauns, Fetches, a small army of Scarecrows, and perhaps a Famine to do their bidding. Not to mention the assassins.

But all of that was gone when King Hagli kicked them out a decade ago, his new Ispanthian bride Mireya at his side. How had he gotten away with it? How had no Assassin-Adept poisoned or gutted them? That was a question for another day. Now I strode into a sort of mossy hallway that had been turned into a tavern and brewery. A sign, in Gunnish, read, The Worming Vault.

Witchmoss, a rare phosphorescent lichen that mostly only grows in the caves of the far north, had been cultivated here and ran in mad streaks like glowing embers along the walls. In a far corner, I saw lads and lasses stoking a fire under a yeasty vat. I saw a bunch of planks laid across the heads of broken statues serving as a bar, precious candles flickering in their hollow eyes and mouths. Proper whale oil lamps burned steady behind the bar, where the formerly wealthy drank real beer poured by a tough-looking swinish fellow of twenty with an unbecoming chin-strap beard. Not that there’s any other kind of chin-strap beard. You wear a beard like that, you’re basically saying, I have no hope of getting laid but you won’t like what happens if you punch me.

Lamps also glowed behind a sort of throne made from barrels, upon which a thirtyish man in striped southern catfurs sat, having his bare feet rubbed by a girleen of twelve or so using an expensive-smelling oil. At a small table to his left I saw an impressive pile of coins, a bottle of Gallardian wine, a few books, and if I didn’t miss my guess, a Towers deck. Two strong-looking adolescents in full chain armor stood near him with war crossbows and short spears at hand. The kids escorting me entered and knelt and jerked at my sleeve so that I knelt, too.

“Tou esc Gallard?” the man on the makeshift throne asked.

“Nou, mesc iei lei paurel am puel,” I replied.

Took me for a Gallard! Made sense, though, since his lad peeled an owlet off me. He shooed the foot-rub girl away and leaned closer.

“You a Holter?” he said in the singsong Gunnish accent, but he really just wanted me to open my mouth again.

“Technically,” I said and had barely gotten it out before he saw my black tongue wagging and hissed, in wonder, “A Galt!”

I said, “That’s as I am.”

“You are very far from home.”

“That’s the truth.”

He rubbed his chin and smiled gleefully. “I never fuck a Galt before.”

That staggered me, but I tried not to show it.

“Well,” I said, “unless my whore cousin’s been following me all this way, I don’t guess you soon will. Unless you like your meat cold,” I said, running a thumb across my neck and closing my eyes in pantomime of a throat-cutting.

He took a moment to understand what I said, then laughed hard, showing good teeth. A few lickspittle types standing near laughed with him, though I doubt they had the slightest idea what I said.

“I am thinking I like you,” he said. “Good hand with a bow. Very good. Killed two Jetenhunden. Maybe three? Je?”

“Three,” I said, “but one was with a knife.”

“Even better,” he said, glancing at Palthra in her rosed sheath. “I can see the blade?” he said. I pulled her most of the way out, enough to show half her belly and let him cover the ashmetal pattern.

“Good knife,” he said. “Magic?”

“No,” I allowed, “but you might think so to watch me use it.”

He liked that. “Ha! Je, good fighter. Maybe not such a good thief? You owe this Guild some monies?” he said, pointing at my cheek. Was I about to get slapped? Buggered? Both? Anyway, toss him, I was a fairly good thief.

“I’m a good thief,” I said. “Fairly.”

“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe me, too. So what are you wanting of me that you ask for me at Temple Square? Janliff says you gave to him a good coin to see me.”

“Could this be discussed in private?”

“No. Everyone here is loyal.”

“Fine,” I said. “I heard the king is dead.”

“Everyone is knowing this. He crossed your Guild, your Guild start the war with the giants sending men dressed like Oustri.”

He saw my mouth fall open.

“Ah, this you did not know. Many from outside Hrava do not know, but it is so. King Hagli sent away the Guild, this is known. They could not kill him. So is it surprise that they sent to him angry giants? Your Guild is like this. They play to win.”

“Why couldn’t they kill King Hagli?”

“Because he is protected by the queen.”

“How so?”

“She is like the Queen in Towers,” he said, gesturing to the deck beside him. “She is finding the traitors. Most of them.”

“But how?”

He smiled. Shook his head at me like I was a slow learner. Maybe I was.

“I was speaking of the king, Hagli. He led his picked soldiers at the canal, and there he fell. Like in a saga, but with one sad ending for him. For us, it is not so bad. We have a monopoly on beer. Some brewers were trying to make beer down here, we make them show us how, then take this place from them. Anybody else who makes beer, they get a big fire. Is best money in town, but hunting, better than looting now that the houses are all stole from.”

“And the queen? Where is she?”

“This nobody is knowing.”

“Nobody?”

“Nobody who wants to say.” He smiled impishly.

“What will it cost me to learn?”

He looked at the pile of gold on the table near him. “I have more gold than I can spend here.”

My eyes cut to his table.

“You have magic?” he said.

Now I looked at a ring on his finger, white gold, that practically hummed with some powerful spell beaten into it.

“I can do a little, but I have no weapons or rings.”

“Pity.”

“I can get you a ring that shoots lightning.”

“How much lightning?”

“One bolt.”

“Pffft.”

“Well, what do you want?”

“I am already saying it.”

“When?”

“Eeearlier,” he said, drawing it out, his eyes winking with mischief.

Oh shyte.

“I thought you were making a joke.”

“Yes and also no. Please know that I am a man of my word. Janliff is taking your coin for a meeting, now you have one. I did not have to do this. You lay with me, I tell you in private what is come to the Ispanthic queen. Unless your cousin comes, then if she is pretty and have a black tongue, I fuck her instead. Is all the same to me. All of these you see have been my lover. Except the bartender. He is ugly. But a good fighter. Maybe one day I drink enough to fuck him, too. Hä, Keln? Je?”

Keln said, “Je,” then slurped foam from a beer over his chin strap.

“He is not speaking Holtish,” Ürmehen said.

Just my luck. The one man in Hrava who can tell me what happened to Queen Mireya is too rich to bribe but will fuck anything that moves, and a special premium put on Galts. And you know, I thought about it. Fellas aren’t my flavor, but everyone’s made to fuck a teacher or two at the Low School—they want you ready to do anything to get the score. Anything. And they don’t want you squeamish about a cock up your arse if that’s the only way. Just in case you were thinking about signing up for the glamorous life of a thief, I mean.

He was waiting for an answer. I smiled coyly like I was thinking about it, thinking instead, Fothannon, make me clever. In my mind, a fox-headed man appeared to me and replied, I will, but only if you bugger me, and he laughed and danced away holding his tail in his teeth. That’s my god. Ürmehen was about to speak again, no doubt to express displeasure in my delay, when my eyes lit on his table and inspiration hit in a flash. My heart lit up warm with the foreknowledge of good luck. I smiled my most wicked smile at him.

“I have a proposition for you. Instead of trading, why don’t we wager?”

“Oh?” he said.

“I’ll play you Towers for it.”

He sat like stone for a moment.

Then he looked at his Towers deck, and back at me, saying, “Ha! I knew I was liking you! You have a deal—but varatt!” he said. “Look out! I am almost never losing at the Towers.”

And that’s the true story of how on the tenth day of Vintners, I ended up betting my arse on a card game in a sewer under an army of murdering giants at the very top of the wicked world.