The Blacktongue Thief

13 Deadlegs

When I got to the door, which had been left ajar, the girl was nowhere to be found. Some door, too. Oak as I said, and old. Copper studs instead of iron, and copper bracing in the shape of a sideways tree, all gone bluey-green in verdigris. I pushed it all the way in, stepped up to the sill, and saw what looked like a long drop with descending ledges, at the bottom of which, far below, flickered the sort of dim, warm light candles or lamps might give. My hand went to the tattoo on my cheek before I even knew I was doing that. The hairs on the back of my neck and my forearms stood on end.

“Well?” Galva said behind and below me.

“Feels like a trap. Sings with magic.”

“A witch’s tower? Who would think this?”

“You know that’s sarcasm, right?”

“I thought I should try it once.”

On the tower’s far wall, across from me, a set of inverted stairs starting at the roof descended, but as they were faced the wrong way, you’d have to be upside down to use them. So this is what the ledges were, the bottoms of a topsy-turvy stairwell snaking down. I looked up at the roof of the tower, which suddenly looked very like a floor.

“Jump,” the Galtish girl said, her voice full of mirth.

I looked up-down again but couldn’t fathom it.

I thought to toss a copper shave down and listen for the clink, but I can’t bring myself to waste a coin.

“Jump, you darling. If she meant to kill you, she wouldn’t let you hurt your pretty legs.”

I wasn’t sure I liked the sound of that, but I jumped, meaning to use my last break-fall cantrip if I had to, but I never had time because I only fell two feet. Straight up. And cracked my head doing it. I’m good at taking falls as long as they’re down.

“Hoa!” Galva cried. I turned to look at her, where she seemed to hang outside the door, staring at me wide-eyed. I looked up at the staircase stretching up to the top (bottom?) of this turret lit here and there by candles in niches.

“Yes, watch that first step,” I said. I wanted to offer her a hand, but decided against it and stepped back. Upside-down Galva stepped up to the ledge, jumped, and knowing what to expect, somersaulted to land on her feet beside me. She was very clearly trying not to grin.

“Did you enjoy that?” I asked her. She barely nodded, but she did. Now she went to the stairs and started striding up (down?). I followed behind. It got colder as we went, and at the first landing, I saw a niche full of flickering light. Where I expected to find a candle, however, I saw an upended brick with a bit of burning smudge on it that turned out to be a wasp. Charred black, but very definitely a wasp, and a big one, too. Though it sizzled just a little as it burned, the flame did not consume it. A copper plate, new and well polished, reflected its little light. I looked more closely, fascinated. Then I nearly leapt out of my skin when the creature turned to face me the way wasps do when they’re deciding whether or not to sting you. I moved past the thing and took the next few steps by twos to catch up with Galva.

At the top of the stairs, we came into an earthen vault, as big as a minor lord’s great hall. I heard a low growl, and a huge gray wolf lying near a hearth to our right bared its fangs at us. We stopped. Galva’s hand topped her sword-hilt. The wolf cut its growl and looked to the far end of the room, where a woman of about fifty with thin, gray-brown hair and a full, beef-eating face sat on a throne of sorts, her hand making a gesture that calmed the wolf and made it lay its head down, licking its chops.

Behind the woman, two inverted torches burned, the smoke falling and pooling on the brick floor. The sconces were of greeny copper like the door bracings. As I looked about, aside from the odd tool, I saw very little dark or silver metal. Even the nailheads in the furnishings were brass.

Deadlegs would have looked like a shabby sort of queen except that her skirts were hoisted up in a most un-queenlike fashion to show bare legs and bare feet that looked like they belonged on a twenty-year-old woman, the sort of woman suitors stabbed each other over whose turn it was to dance with. As we walked up, she crossed those legs at the knee, the toes of the higher foot bobbing, seeming to keep time with our steps.

“Who comes before Guendra Na Galbraeth, Duchess of the Snowless Wood, Lady of the Downward Tower, Marshal of the Greenwood Knights and Supernumerary of the Gibbet?” said the girl from the tower door in her handsome brogue, her purply-black tongue dancing behind her teeth. She stood to the witch’s left, leaning on a raw birch staff. So Deadlegs was a Galt as well? My folk had spilled west in no small numbers, it seemed, what with the old Famine I’d met in the Guild’s prison and these two spell-cookers. We blacktongues have a knack for rising high in low places.

“Galva of Ispanthia, corvid knight, bride of Dalgatha, and servant of the infanta Mireya.”

Something loosened in the old witch’s face at the mention of this Mireya. She settled more comfortably into her throne, recrossed her stunning legs now, and bobbed the toes of the other foot. “Be welcome here,” she said. Her voice was not particular in its pitch, the sort of strong, flat edge to it older folk get when they’ve given up trying to please lovers and have set about getting things done, but it seemed to echo under my breastbone like she was showing me to be a hollow thing before her. “Would you sit?” she said.

“No,” Galva said.

“Sit anyway, you’ve been walking long.”

At that, two figures who seemed to be made of dirt shook free from the earthen walls and shambled toward us, then behind us, knotting themselves up and shuddering until they became two simple wooden chairs. When they were done, the spilled dirt from their efforts fell up and joined the dirt of the roof. My unease at sitting on the things came up an inch shorter than my desire not to insult their maker, so I sat, as did Galva. A disembodied leather glove balancing two earthenware cups in its fingers floated to us from I know not where, followed shortly by another glove bearing a ewer. We took the offered vessels, and the ewer poured dark wine into Galva’s cup, then amber beer into mine.

“How do I get one of these?” I said, nodding at the magicked vessel.

Galva shot me a look, but the witch seemed to like my spark and smiled, showing very dark teeth. “You become my bond-slave for seven years, and if I’m happy with your service, I might send you off with one, and many other gifts besides.”

“And if you’re not happy?”

“Then I turn you into a dirt-wight and put you in the ground until one of my guests needs a place to sit.”

I hadn’t anything to say, so I smiled at her and drank, and the beer was good enough to make me wonder if she was jesting about wanting a servant.

I noticed now her necklace.

Copper and green amber, but if I didn’t miss my guess, its centerpiece was a polished and engraved patella.

“I know why you’re here,” she told Galva.

“Yes.”

“May we talk seriously in front of him?” she said, nodding at me.

“I think not yet.”

I tried not to look hurt, but I’m sure I failed.

“Then we’ll talk pleasantly until I’m ready to send him off. Where are you from, boy?”

The legs recrossed themselves, and the toe bobbed. It looked odd somehow, too similar to the way it happened before.

“Platha Glurris,” I said.

“I know of it, between the Shining River and the Tattered Sea. Near the Isle of Ravens. I had the chance to go there once but never did. Does the river truly shine?”

“When the sun’s on it, like any river. But people need to feel special about a place, don’t they?”

“That they do.”

“Where are you from?” I said.

Just then, a noise came from behind us, and we turned to see the squash-headed fellow who’d been killing himself hauling the handcart bounce the thing up the final stair and trudge into the hall. The wolf by the hearth remained docile even at this noise, watched disinterestedly as Squashy dumped the ruined, neck-bent tools, but rather than clattering, they made the sound of a body hitting the floor. That’s because a body hit the floor. The tools were gone, and I now understood the neck-bent tools had been the body. There never were any tools. A fellow with hairy forearms and legs and, thankfully, a hood over his head tumbled onto the bricks, his noose still attached to him at the base of the hood. The fruit of the famous gallows at Maeth. Now the witch’s manservant took a little bronze saw from a pack on his back, and I tried not to grimace as he unpantsed the corpse and set his saw to the place where the leg meets the hip.

“Me? I’m from a pretty little glen hedged round with flowers in the month of Highgrass and with oaks and maples that go yellow in Lammas and Vintners, and not just any yellow. A yellow that makes you weep for the beauty of it. A yellow that, with the light behind the leaves, rivals the proudest panes a master glass-stainer ever turned.”

I turned my eyes from the ghastly work of the squash-man, but the zumpf zumpf zumpf of his saw stitched under her words all the same.

“The lambs that played in the glen bore the softest wool this side of the gods’ own flocks, and the goats gave milk that needed no honey to sweeten it.”

Zumpf zumpf zumpf.

“There was a lake there, full of lily pads, and when the sunset shone on the face of the lake, the lake threw back those colors so faithfully there was not a man or maiden born who wouldn’t have kissed and agreed to marry at the sight of the heavens and the waters so sweetly attuned.”

Zumpf zumpf thump (pant pant huff).

“And fish?” she continued as my eyelids grew weighty.

Zumpf zumpf.

“You had but to lay a basket on the bank, and trout would fight each other for the honor of leaping into it, and when you cut these trout for cooking, you found they had no bone, nor gut, but was all clean, sweet fillet ready for the batter and the butter and the fire.”

Zumpf zumpf zumpf.

“Wouldn’t you like to have been born in such a place as that?”

I nodded, just on the edge of a hard nap.

Zumpf … zumpf.

“The sweet darling, I think he’s getting tired.”

ZUMPF thump.

The last thing I saw before I fell asleep was the sort of thing one could easily mistake for a dream. Guendra Na Galbraeth unhooked herself from the hoisted-up skirt and sex-nymph legs that carried on crossing and recrossing themselves at regular intervals without her. Dragging her legless hips behind her, she used her very muscular, overlong arms to walk like an Urrimad mountain-ape over to where her girl had laid out the hanged man’s severed legs. The manservant was gone, but a small pile of early fall gourds and melons spilled out of his clothes where he had finally exhausted himself and broken the spell that held him together.

“Now to business,” I heard the witch say.

I passed into a dream where I suckled honey directly from a goat’s teat and was happy to do it.