The Blacktongue Thief

4 The Hanger’s House

“How’s your face?”

I was sitting at a table in the Hanger’s House. The building was quite near the front gate, sitting in plain sight. This was the official, lower-level way to reach the Takers Guild. Of course, the Guild is where you think they aren’t, but they’re also where they say they are, which means they have little to fear from barons and dukes, and they have even been known to flout a king. No crown sits so sure that a knife in the dark may not topple it.

I had noted the square wooden sign with our hanged man holding his own noose. Good sign, that, different colors of wood inlaid and a border of gold leaf. Also, a gold livre-coin nailed to the hanged man’s free hand because nobody would dare to take it. A Gallardian lion, I noticed. Did I mention I love those? The woman sitting across from me reading my lamb-parchment ledger sheet was distractingly pretty. She appeared to be about nineteen, but the hairs on the back of my neck told me she was magicked, so she might have been older than the cronish owlet-miser I had just left.

“Nobody’s managed to slap it off me yet, so no complaints.”

The girl might have broadened her waifish smile a hairsbreadth; she might not have. Behind her, an Assassin-Adept, who had so little fat on her you could count her muscles through her tight but giving woolens and silks, lounged against the bar, just lounged lazy as the long day, as if she weren’t threat made flesh. It was hard not to stare at the adept; you could tell from her blackened neck, cheeks, and forearms she was inked almost from crown to soles in dark glyphs that would let her disappear, drink poison, spit poison. I had seen an adept at the Low School fly. Actually fly. There were maybe a hundred of them in the world. Or maybe only twenty. Whoever knew wasn’t saying. I stopped reading the glyphs on the adept’s skin before anyone caught me doing it. I wondered what the clock tattoo on her chest did.

The false waif checked the seal on my document against the one in the huge book slouched open before her, then wrote 1T 1Q 14s on each. She passed a witness coin bound to her wrist over the trounce, queening, and fourteen shillings on the table, then fed them to a leather sack, which she tossed to the Assassin-Adept, who ferried them behind the bar and appeared to descend stairs, though she had just as likely disappeared upstairs.

“Staying tonight, Prank?” the maybe-young woman said, definitely broadening her smile. A Prank is the lowest thieving rank, but a true thief, not a Scarecrow, and that’s something. I was made a Prank at the Low School in Pigdenay. Assuming I clear my debt, complete another year of study, and/or pull off a notorious caper or three, I promote to Fetch. Then, should I further distinguish myself in all the wrong company, I may earn the title of Faun. A Faun in myth has deer’s legs—you’ll not easily catch a Faun. Has a nice ring, doesn’t it? One of the Guild’s strengths is its poetry—it makes you feel you belong to something not only unopposably strong but also wickedly sly and clever.

Most of the best of us are content to remain Fauns because the last level is for ascetics and the half-mad.

The last rank of thieves, called Famines, takes an oath of hunger, and they further swear to pay for nothing. What they cannot steal, the rest of us provide for them, but even the older and slowed-down among them earn their keep by running schemes, planning for the able-bodied, and teaching. I’d learned under the baton of a Famine or two.

My interviewer hadn’t closed the book yet. “It says you favor tall girls. Is that true?” Even as she spoke, her legs lengthened, and she was looking down at me where we had once been level. I felt a pleasant but embarrassing sensation that caused me to cross my legs. “It’s a new moon tonight, you know. Most propitious for first couplings. One gold queening and I’m yours ’til midnight.”

“If you knew what I’ve done to get that money.”

“If you knew what I could do to make you forget.”

“Who’s going to watch the shop? While I wreck your womb and enslave your heart, I mean?”

“I had them both removed. And she will,” she said, nodding at an older but still-lovely woman who had appeared behind the bar. A second look confirmed it was the same girl who sat across from me now, only twenty years older. This “girl” was no mere secretary or whore; she was quite probably a Worry (a high enforcer), taking direct orders from the Problem (think mayor). My skin flushed warm with an ugly, seething jealousy. However she had doubled herself, whether grafting, echoing, or somehow bending time, I would never do magic that strong. Never.

“Never,” I said.

“Never what?” she said, pressing her tongue to the corner of her mouth and letting it retreat.

“I’ll never get this tattoo off me if I don’t…” I trailed off, watching the place her tongue had been, enjoying the hum of the erotic cantrip she was working on me.

“Pay the family?” her mouth said.

“Yes.”

“What if I told you that I had work for you?”

“I’d say keep talking for as long as I get to watch your mouth move.”

“I have work for you,” she said. Before I could respond, she pressed a witness coin to my head and magicked pictures into my mind.

I saw.

I saw.

A witness coin was powerful magic, and so far as I knew, its images were always true. I had just seen something not known in Manreach for seven hundred years and more. This was a giants’ army. One giant was formidable enough, but they were said to live in small clans beyond the Thrall Mountains, content to milk their giant hilloxen and enslave small folk stupid enough to go too far west. Five or ten at once was the most you were like to see. That they had banded together and crossed those treacherous mountains in sufficient numbers to lay low a city’s walls, crush its guard, and send its people running to the foothills, that was something awful and new to living generations.

Had we survived thirty years of tussle with the biters just to be tread over by bigguns? Not that Holt and the eastern kingdoms were soon to fall under their shadow—Hrava, the capital city of Oustrim, was eight weeks’ hard travel west of Holt by ass or oxcart, a season’s walk, or a rotten month at sea away. Six kingdoms lay between here and there. But how numerous was this army? What did it want? Could the kingdoms stop it if it meant to trample east and east all the way to the Mithrene Sea?

She interrupted my reverie, taking the witness coin back and giving me a not unfriendly pinch.

“We believe a certain Spanth you met on the road is going to Oustrim, probably to the city of Hrava. You will go with her. Win her confidence if you can—if not, follow her unseen and await further instruction,” the not-waif said. “The assault of that kingdom by giants has set large wheels in motion, and the Guild has an interest in how those wheels turn. The particulars of your mission are better not known to you at this time—if it becomes necessary to tell others why you are going, tell them you are to recover certain magical items held in the reliquary of the king of Oustrim, among them the Keshite arrow wand, a ring of Catfall, and the Hard-Stone Torque.”

“That last, what’s it do?” I said. “Make old husbands stand like young ones?”

“No. But I like the way you think.”

The way her tongue kissed her upper teeth when she said think made it so I couldn’t stop looking at her mouth again.

“Time is not your friend, Kinch,” she said. “The Spanth will not dawdle, but see that you push her when you may to make haste, and do not delay her by your own folly, or it will cost you more than coin. Today is the nineteenth of Ashers, and the moon shows the inky face we nightlings love so well. Try to make Hrava by the first of Vintners, two bright moons hence, though the gods only know what will happen there by then with the city now fallen.”

“All your talk of moons has lit my blood,” I said to her. “Half a queening? For just half the night?”

She smiled at me now with a mouthful of rotten teeth, worse even than those of the pawnbroker.

“You get what you pay for,” she said.

I practically ran out of there.