The Blacktongue Thief

64 The Rabbit and the Wolf

“Ow!”

A pain shot through my arm. I jerked up my sleeve and saw that it was spotted with blood.

“Oh no,” I said, feeling even as I said it that I’d said it before. My tattoo was bleeding.

Again?

Or just now?

“Rao,” said Bully Boy, stalking blindly in a figure eight on the floor.

Sesta! She’s breaking free!

I saw the Assassin-Adept’s eyes first. Then I saw her arms, tattooed black from shoulders to fingertips. The arms glowed for an instant like coals. I thought, didn’t this just happen? and while I stood bewildered she struck me in the side of the head so hard she tore the top of my ear.

Shyte, that hurt.

I saw now a sigil glowing on one of her shoulders that said Iron. But I somehow already knew she was using a powerful spell called Arms of Iron. Guzzled magic, she wouldn’t be able to burn it long. Arms and hands as hard as castle-gates.

I put Angna away, reached for my bow, and nocked a shaft.

It seemed obvious to me I would stick her through.

Yes!

Here came Galva and Yorbez, motioning the queen to stay where she was.

This is as it should be.

That’s what my mind said, but my luck-sense was saying something else.

Sparks leapt as the adept used one ferrous-hard forearm to turn Yorbez’s blade, once, twice, then twisted her opponent’s arm and almost stripped the sword. Galva stepped in now and had a blow parried. Sesta spat at Galva’s eye, but only got one, which smoked, the pain making her grunt.

No. This is wrong. It’s going wrong.

I saw a sigil on the back of the assassin’s leg glow, reading Up, and before I could consider what I was doing or why my actions felt at once familiar and doomed, with the chill of bad luck running in me from tits to kneecaps, I shot above the assassin’s head.

But she didn’t go up.

Not straight, anyway.

She flew left, kicking herself off a stalactite and making straight for Mireya on the other side of the cave. I heard my arrow snick against stone in the far darkness.

The witch-queen stood but had no weapon. Galva, fast as a cat, leapt between them and thrust for the killer’s middle, feinting first so her hard arm missed the parry. Still the assassin rolled so it only nicked her, feinted left, then leapt right, striking out with a spade-like hand straight into Yorbez’s throat even as the other arm covered her own neck, raking sparks from Yorbez’s sword, which otherwise would have gorged her.

Yorbez stood, dead on her feet, expelling her final breath in an awful bloody wheeze, her windpipe crushed, her neck mercifully broken. I doubt she knew what happened. My next shot just missed the back of the assassin’s neck and cut a groove in dead Yorbez’s cheek, cutting whatever weird string had kept her standing so she dropped like a bag of rocks. I drew my knife. We all anticipated another run at Mireya, so I leapt in that direction—but adepts don’t do what you think they will. She jumped backward and made for Norrigal. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the giant trying to get up, but sinking back down again.

My own heart exploded in my chest as I saw Norrigal holding her small, ritual dagger up, helpless as a babe, but smiling all the same.

The assassin kicked the witch’s head, then punched her in the chest so hard she staved in her ribs and wrecked the plumbing around her heart. Then the killing bitch leapt off toward Galva and Mireya.

“No!” I screamed, going to Norrigal, my love, my wife until the new moon. She sputtered and looked at me with a rolling, dying eye.

She held the knife up to me, handle first. I heard Galva grunt in pain, then heard the assassin yelp.

The giant yelled something.

Norrigal couldn’t speak, just gestured with the knife.

The garden in the Snowless Wood.

The rabbit and the wolf.

I understood, or thought I did. It made sense and disgusted me at once, the way it always does when you get a glimpse of the world’s true workings, the bones in the knees of creation. All in an instant, I remembered the feel of the rabbit doe’s ears in my hand and the feel of Hornhead’s tough neckpipes cutting, the wash of his hot blood, finding it sticky on my arms later, especially on the inner bend of my elbow, the coarse hair on him, the musky, fuggy smell of him suddenly overwashed with hot brass, the intimacy of it, how I hated doing it even to an enemy. Far, far worse than stabbing or arrowing. That was all I had time to think in that moment, and that quick as blinking twice, but later I would think on it at length. The whiteness and smoothness of her neck, how her sweat-heavy hair clung to it, how you could see her heart beating in it, and how I was now supposed to cleave in twain before she died, and died with no way out of it.

No swivel home.

I’d been shown what would happen.

I just had to believe.

The rabbit’s ears in my hand.

The place her voice was born now under my knife.

Her dying in a moment anyway, and for nothing.

No reason why not.

It’s just a neck.

Move, hand.

Fucking move.

It moved.

I did it.

I cut sweet, sweet Norrigal’s throat.

In the space of two heartbeats, Norrigal was gone, and in her stead, the old witch called Deadlegs, true to her name, tottering on corpse’s legs that were nearly skeletal, bracing herself up with a cane.

As the rabbit whose throat I cut in that long-ago garden had swapped places with the wolf from the Downward Tower, so now had these two witches done. Or was it two witches? Although I had no time to dwell on it, in a glimpse, I saw the two faces very much the same, one young and fair, one older and barrel-shaped.

This one’s eyes burned with fury. I dropped the small knife and drew Palthra, leaping up and rushing at the assassin, who was down on one knee, blood streaming from where Galva had badly cut her hip. Galva was on her stomach, her arms flailing, her legs inert. The bitch broke her back! Even as Sesta stood, cut in several places, Galva rolled over as best she could and started trying to get her mail shirt off so she could free the corvid, but she hadn’t the strength.

The assassin rushed at the queen, who had found Yorbez’s sword. I rushed at the assassin’s back and stabbed down hard at the base of her neck, but she spun and elbowed me crushingly in the side; I felt a rib snap as I fell hard.

As I went down, she stripped the knife off me. The giant had stumbled and fallen—whether from weakness or some further poisoning, I couldn’t say—and was struggling unsuccessfully to rise again. The queen assumed a credible fighting stance, but before the assassin could kill her, for I was sure she would, the cave wall beyond Mireya began to rumble and shake, throwing dirt and gravel. The magic happening now was so strong the hair briefly stood up on everyone’s head.

The dead Full Shadow, the dead Assassin-Adept in leper’s robes, and the fat, dead magicker all rose and lurched as fast as their ruined limbs allowed into the cave walls, which smoked where they passed. Now a rumble shook the walls, and three figures made of dirt and rocks, with tufts of glowing witchmoss for eyes, now leapt from the cave wall near Sesta like martial cousins of the dirt-wight servants who had poured drinks for us in the Downward Tower. They formed a wall between the killer and the queen, but the Assassin-Adept was not discouraged. Not yet. She used those iron arms to smash the first stone-wight to rubble. But the spell was costing her. She was slowing down. The queen, who had edged away from the wall, moved to stab her, but Deadlegs, who had also hobbled closer to the fight, pulled her back by her hair, that’s right, a queen, by the hair, saying, “Not you, girleen. We’ll do for this whore.”

The assassin was getting the hot piss beat out of her. Not wanting to get in the middle of the storm of stone, iron, and flesh that was the fight between Sesta and the wights, I picked up my bow with its last arrow. I felt my heart glow warm. I shot that killing bitch right above her navel. She knocked the head off a second wight, and it crumbled. Her arms went white then. The spell had burned out. She absently reached a hand to where the clock had been, but that tattoo was used, and she only touched bare white flesh. The last and largest wight fetched her a kick to the side of the head, and she went sprawling. The wight was damaged, too, though, and took some effort to rise, moaning eerily as it did so—perhaps some part of Bavotte remained awake inside it and lamented its servitude and impending second death. Sesta got up to her knees, bleeding freely from her skewered belly. I picked up Galva’s bullnutter and moved closer to her.

“Look at you, you crawling cunny,” she said. “Me in this shape, and you scoot and inch like a castrated slave and hope a man of rocks will do your work for you. What, are you numbering the times I saved your worthless life? From bandits. From goblins. You weakling. I killed your lover, and I was glad to do it. Will you hold me to account, you fucking runt, or let another take the glory?”

Deadlegs whispered some things in old Galt under her breath, then said, “At least fight him in your own hide, you skinny devil.” She gestured with a claw hand and seemed to cast something away. When she did, the rest of Sesta’s magical tattoos flew off of her as puddles of ink on the ground. All of them. She tried to get off her knees and couldn’t. The rock man had collapsed, nothing but a pile of rubble, the witchmoss that had been his eyes going dull. I took the bullnutter and staggered over to Sesta, raising it above my head to cleave her skull in two. She lifted not an arm. It was the first time I saw her scared, kneeling there, gut-stuck and naked, stripped of her magic, too weak to use her training. Sesta’s mouth was open and she was sucking breath, barely able to stand. I lowered the blade. I said, “Get out of here.”

Before Sesta could get to her feet, if she could have at all, Queen Mireya of Oustrim, and the rightful queen of Ispanthia, decapitated her.