The Blacktongue Thief

62 The Murder Alphabet

I had given water to Norrigal, who was in and out of sleep, and had helped her chew on some roots from her pack that dulled her pain without making her any sleepier. Then, with hammered spikes as anchors, I strung a rope Galva could get up to help the weakened queen down from her high shelf. I didn’t understand everything they said to each other, but I did get one exchange.

“Are you hurt? Why are you so weak?” Galva said.

“You try being a bird for ten days.”

For some reason, Yorbez found this so funny she almost inhaled the taback she was smoking. Galva stood near the queen on one side of the cave. I went toward the center of it to rifle the pouches of the dead Guild magicker named Bavotte, the one who had turned the giant small and the queen into a bird. There I found a small fortune in Oustri gold and silver, but alas, no owlets. I did him the favor of shutting his sunken-in eyes and putting his scarf over his face to save it from the ministrations of the flies busying around him. A torque around his neck seemed to hum with magic, so I took that, though I had no idea what it did. Was this the Hard-Stone Torque I had heard of at the Hanger’s House in Cadoth? No way to know.

I looked at the giantess, and she at me.

Something struck me about the book she held—she said it had killed the men who tried to read it. Clearly, it was written in the Murder Alphabet, which was some of the darkest magic the Guild had. But she’d said she caught it trying to get away. This stirred a memory I had about the Guild’s upper echelons.

I reached into a pouch, put on my proofed goatskin gloves.

“May I have a look at the book you’re holding?”

“It will kill you,” she said.

“Not me. But it’s poisoning you.”

She held it yet, just looking at me with her two eyes, each the size of a huge apple, and yet they looked small and beady in her great head. She had said she would fight us for the book, but that was before we gave her water. Three more deep breaths while she considered me, and she passed the book to my hands. If you want to imagine my hands shaking, I’ll not say they weren’t.

The book read, in large, gold leaf Gallardian:

At the bottom of the book’s greasy leather, in smaller gold script, it said:

Those rhyme, if you’ll notice. Very clever. No one will say those bastards aren’t clever. Set into the leather binding, at the frontiers of the square cover, pointing out but not poking past the edge, were rows of sharp teeth, all small, but different sizes of small. Cats, martens, foxes, any number of yipping, skulking things had contributed. Parts of the binding seemed to have been armored with lacquered crab shell.

As I turned the book in my hands, I saw it grow yet greasier. I knew that sheen. Thieves’ dew. A contact poison that will nauseate in small doses and kill in large ones. At the Low School, we spent many queasy evenings because they put it on our door-handles and in our beer. By the time we finished our first year, we were effectively immune. Still, I was glad for the gloves—if the secrets of the Full Shadow of the west were in this book, a mere Prank like myself might not be welcome to handle it, and the poison might be stronger.

It was a heavy book.

I knew it was full of the Murder Alphabet, but what I didn’t know was if it would kill a Cipher like me. Back in school, when I first heard of it, I had a theory it might not. The way I understood it worked, those who knew the Murder Alphabet by heart were unaffected, but you had to know it before you tried reading words or phrases. The thing was, there were hundreds of characters, and nobody went around teaching it except to the highest ranks of the Guild. You didn’t start learning it until you were named a Shadow and had a city to answer for. It was possible to learn it because no one letter would kill you, but if you were reading a word or phrase and stopped because you failed to understand something, that confusion was what invited your death in. Maybe this was why the Guild was so powerful—no thick bastards in charge.

Monarchy is a bad system because, no matter how smart you are, you can still squirt a moron out of your plumbing. Maybe you get lucky and your son or daughter is at least half as smart as you—what about your grandchild? Probably a knob, and when they inherit the throne, everything you built falls to shyte. Not so with the Guild. If you were stupid, you never went to a True School. If you weren’t brilliant, you’d never make it to the upper tiers, but if you did, the Murder Alphabet was waiting for you to make a mistake so it could kill you.

“Are you going to read that book or drool on it?” Norrigal said, slurring for the drugs in her.

“Yah,” I said. “Still deciding.”

I desperately wanted to open the book and see what was in it, see if I could really read it. My heart glowed warm when I thought of it—my luck was in. If the characters of the Murder Alphabet were going to strike me dead, I would have felt a chill going all the way to my heels at the thought of chancing it. Would I trust my life to that feeling? The gods knew I had before.

I was so scared, I half wanted to piss myself, but the difference between the strong and the weak isn’t that the strong don’t piss themselves. It’s that they hitch their pissy pants up after and go through with it. I jerked the book open to a random page, toward the end, and focused, knowing I would either understand what I saw or die.

The words at first appeared in a blur but before I could finish thinking, That’s it, I’m dead, they came into focus.

I read on. There was confirmation of what Deadlegs said in the Snowless Wood—the Takers had the Magickers well in hand, had made a straw school of them. They wanted there to be no magic in the world they did not control.

But it didn’t end there.

From the sound of this, they had the Carters, Runners, Builders, and Seafarers Guilds in their grips as well. Good business, that, in a world that must suddenly make do without horses.

The mention of the horse plague was particularly disturbing. It was certain that the Guild had profited massively from the Stumbles we all blamed the goblins for, but was this saying they manufactured that calamity themselves? The answer to that was very important, wasn’t it?

I looked back down at the spiky figures to read more, noticing now the small eyes inked on the upper corners of each page, but that was when the book shifted slightly in my hand like something alive. The eyes seemed to have moved, too.

I know now that it was becoming aware of me, reading me even as I read it. It saw everyone in the room and inventoried their strength, their magic, their significance to the Guild. It opened itself in my hand now, flipping to a page near the very front, where I saw an illustration of a crab. Before I could shut the book, that crab had leapt from the page and onto a wall.

The Book of the Full Shadow was alive.