The Blacktongue Thief

19 The Spigot and the Noose

The Spigot wasn’t as rough as you’d imagine a whale-city’s busiest port tavern to be. It was rougher. I saw two women get in a fight that made you sick to look at, and the fellow who tried to break them up had one eye thumbed out of its socket and wandered to a polished brass mirror on the wall, yelling and trying to get it back in.

The fellow at the table nearest the mirror didn’t like this yelling and beat his head against the brassheet until he knocked him out and the whole thing fell on him. The women fought on. One of them at last succumbed, thrashed bloody with some iron thing, I think a fireplace instrument to judge from the soot stripes whacked on her. She got dragged out the door by the hair and she was saying, “Bitch! Bitch! Bitch!” all the while, which wasn’t going to help her much when the victor got her outside. The alley, by the way, was called Cutpipe Alley, and unlike most city street names, this one left no mystery as to why it was called so. Who drinks in a place like that, anyway, aside from those looking to settle feuds or start new ones? Sailors, that’s who. Pirates, whalers, dreadnought salts. Patchy-haired, waxy old goblin drowners carrying their burns without a word to say.

We were there because the half-respectable ships were full and the respectable ones didn’t go to Molrova.

We were there because we had been unlucky.

As we walked across the gray, worm-tunneled floorboards, ripped no doubt from some ship that had spent time in warmer waters, and into the press of bodies at the Spigot, I wished I had been born a few inches closer to ceilings. It was hard to get a look around. They grow them tall up north, so here in Pigdenay even the Spanth was mostly looking at noses in the press, where Norrigal and I had a whole gallery of armpits and chest hair to enjoy. We wriggled to an almost-corner at the far side of the Spigot. The corner proper was held by a swarthy, tiny-eyed man with a bandolier of throwing knives and a tattoo of a cunny on his forehead, and none of us felt inclined to ask him to move. He sipped at a tall glass of what smelled like a paint-removing agent and stared in the middle distance, sometimes moving his lips a bit as if spellcasting. No wizard, he, just bugshyte mad.

A group of Sornian women sat at the table to our left, recognizable by the grapevine torques they wore. Sornia was a Beltian goddess always pictured as conjoined twins, one hand pouring wine from a pitcher into a goblet held by another. She had been a minor goddess of wine in Beltia before the Goblin Wars, but since the death of men and horses, she had been elevated as a symbol of women given to loving women. Her followers were found throughout Manreach, from Holt to the borders of Kesh.

Sornians were famous for violently resisting royal decrees to marry and reproduce—such decrees being popular after the Threshers’ War. You might think such a movement would be easily suppressed, but many of its adherents were birders and other warriors, and knew how to fight, both singly and in formation. One Sornian poet was arrested in Unther, but her captors never made it to gaol with her, as they were drubbed by a phalanx of her sisters using tentpoles as pikes. The group near us had the words As We Will tattooed in Beltian on arms or napes and were armed with short swords and truncheons.

Starting on opposite sides of the Sornian table, two youths were casing the place to steal. They were using a crossing pattern, coming near each other, then separating, which did nothing particularly useful except to alert professional thieves that amateurs were in the house. Poor lads who signed away their financial well-being for parlor tricks at a straw farm. One caught a look at my tattoo. I shook my head at him. Don’t even think about it. He would have guessed I was at least a Prank, and he was clearly scared he’d be wearing the tattoo himself soon. They didn’t claim the Guild’s pint—it went to an Untherian soldier-for-hire in bright striped stockings. I was so civil about it she didn’t even lean in, and tipped her bright red hat at me after she got her ale, half of which she shared with a ship’s captain she seemed keen on.

You could tell ship captains by their medals of command, issued by the Seafarers Guild. The medals varied between nations but usually included a pearl for merchants and a shark’s tooth for privateers. They wore these about their necks or on hat or lapel even when they were out drinking, just in case people like us should approach them with a need to be separated from our money.

The first captain we interviewed, and by we I mean I, was a black woman from Axa—an unallied island kingdom that had somehow managed to stave off the goblins quickly and alone. The secrets of their campaign they shared with no one, though it was rumored they had a sort of wall of mirrors on the cliffs near the capital and could burn a ship like a bratling with a hand lens burns ants. I would have liked a look at the Axaene fastrunner this captain owned—the clever riggings of Axa’s sails were poorly copied in many places—but I could barely get her to speak to me, as it was clear a galley oar would do more pulling of me than me of it.

The next commander, a woman from Istrea, had captaincy of a sleek merchant sailrunner and was looking for fancy men to keep her crew happy. I could tell she was Istrean not only by her habit of humming mmm to stall while she thought of the Holtish word but by the fly-veil on her belt. Flies in hot, marshy Istrea carried the fearful Smiling Sickness, and the disease had been getting worse. In the summer months, Istreans went veiled, and they tented their beds with fine nets.

I spoke to her longer than I should have just because I was hypnotized by her liquid brown eyes and her captain’s pendant, a coral dolphin clutching a tear-shaped pearl in its mouth. I didn’t say I wasn’t a fancy man. I asked where they were headed, what the quarters were like, and so on, staring at her the while. Foolish, but I couldn’t help myself. When she saw I was playing coy, she leaned close and said, with her trotting, weirdly musical accent, smiling all the while, “My time is valuable and you steal it. If your cock is not for pleasure, I will hook it for mmm bait.” I got off my stool like it was a hot stove, and her bodyguard, a woman with a hat made from sea-snake skins and a short, wicked bullnutter much like my bodyguard’s, kicked me in the shank with her square-toed boot as I went. I don’t say this as a matter of complaint. As with most of my suffering, I richly deserved it.

The boat we did ship on was a whaler. I hadn’t wanted a whaler because they tended to be more large than fast, and I needed to get us west in haste—we’d already passed fifteen of the fiftyish days the Guild had given me to arrive in Oustrim.

I made a point of asking if the crew would be hunting on the way to Molrova, and the captain, a Molrovan himself, wearing a baby kraken’s beak as big as a fist around his neck, made a point of making me feel stupid for asking that. He licked beer foam from his waxed, lethal-looking mustachios, and said, “No. We will sail through the Gunnish sea as quickly as possible. If a red or a spotted fatling or a square-head biter should spout near us, we will say, ‘Nim, whale. Go your ways. We have important passengers paying not one hundredth part of your value, and they do not wish to smell your burning fat.’”

“But we won’t be expected to hunt. We’re just passengers. Is that clear?”

“Perfect-clear. You will rest in your corner of the hold, and you will be dry and well fed.”

That’s what he said.

That Molrovans lie and boast of lying was well known to me. Where a Galt may lie for the sake of poetry, a Molrovan sees poetry in the lie itself. I let myself believe him because he didn’t lie about whaling on the journey, or at least, he lied in such a way that he told the truth. I trusted in his words because I wanted to. I was an accomplice to the lie because it was a comfort. To communicate with a Molrovan, you have to understand their culture. When two of them marry, they say, “I have never loved before you, and I will never love again,” and their oath-rings are made of wood. The first thing a Molrovan midwife tells a baby is, “You will live forever!” This is not a blessing, and it is not a wish. It is a lie, and the midwife laughs after she says it.

Before we shipped out, I thought I’d get a bit more silver in my purse, so I worked a hanging at the Marspur Commons, otherwise known as Noosefruit Square, where the duke’s justice was done.

The day was cold, and a fine, misty rain was falling, the sort of rain that took its time wetting you because it knew you weren’t going anywhere. Beggars had arrayed themselves near a new fountain featuring Cassa, the goddess of mercy, who must have despaired at finding herself in a place so bereft of mercy as Marspur. I recognized the statue—Cassa looked a good bit like a dancer who’d broken the city’s heart by dying young last summer. I knew her, too, when I was in my studies here, and she was as sweet as the summer day was long. The artist clearly had her in mind when he took up his chisel. There were her cheekbones, her wee nose, her beautiful legs, now marble, shown to good advantage by her short Norholtish dancer’s skirt. Gone forever were her pale blue eyes, like sunshine through ice, and there’s a pity.

Two of the beggars leaning against the fountain were sharing a sort of greasy tarp to keep the wind and rain off of them while one gnawed a bit of hard-looking bread. Holding up the tarp was no easy matter, though, as they hadn’t a thumb between them. These were likely not goblin fighters but failed thieves who’d run afoul of the Guild and been unthumbed. They sat atop a sort of crushed and sodden carpet of wildflowers offered either to Cassa or to the woman whose likeness she bore. I watched a rich dam throw a flower into the water, mutter a prayer, and go her way, seeming inconvenienced by the mendicants. And there’s humanity in a glimpse—we’ve always got a copper for a stone idol, but none for the beggar in its shadow.

I’m no better.

I gave them nothing but a second look, and they’d be buying no pies with that.

The gallows were freshly built, the whitish pine standing out against the red-brown bricks behind them. The square was only half-full, which was perfect because I’d have room to move around. They were dangling three of them; a thief who’d robbed a runner from the Runners Guild, a killer, and a bard who’d written a vicious ode about the duke’s male member, suggesting it hadn’t reached normal size because nothing grows well in the shade. She’d slandered him before and been flogged for it, but hadn’t learned. I wondered if she was a Galt, that sounds like one of us. Drannigat himself sat on a huge blackwood chair on the dais, pale-faced and puffy, watching because he couldn’t resist revenge. They hanged the disrespecter of the ducal knob first as if to say she wasn’t as important as a thief.

Drannigat’s young wife sat next to him on a smaller throne and watched the proceedings, with the duke’s thick, ringy hand on her lap and a smile that never touched her eyes nailed to her face. She looked fine in her sage silk dress with her diadem of moonstone. I got close enough to grin up at her, but never caught her eye. I wondered what she’d be like to tumble. I wondered how much I’d get for that diadem. It occurred to me that I’d be hanged myself if I said half of that out loud, and I hoped the poor lass on the gallows at least got a good, long laugh for the verse that cost her neck a stretch. What a fabulous kingdom the mind is, and you the emperor of all of it. You can bed the duke’s wife and have the duke strangled in your mind. A crippled man can think himself a dancer, and an idiot can fool himself wise. The day a magicker peeks into the thoughts of commoners for some thin-skinned duke or king will be a bad day. Those with callused hands will rise on that day, for a man will only toil in a mine so long as he can dream of sunny fields, and he’ll only kneel for a tyrant if he can secretly cut that tyrant’s throat in the close theater of his bowed head.

Even as the tool-impugner apologized to save her family, and gods bless her, she made it sound just as insincere as it was, I got a shabby leather purse off a chainsdam.

Truth be told, it was too easy stealing here—people were so cowstruck watching souls quit their bodies, they were like simpletons. So I challenged myself to do something harder. I started stalking a merchant’s fancy boy for his gold boot-anklet, trying to work out how to kneel down without being noticed, but then they led the killer onto the gibbet, and my breath caught in my throat.

It was Deerpants from the fight in the woods, the straw-haired bitch who’d nearly done for me with an axe. I was close to the platform at that point, close enough to see the carved bone fox pendant around her neck, just below the noose—were it ivory, a chainsman would have had it. When asked if she wanted to speak, she shook her head. I doubted she could have spoken out of that mouth, swollen up and missing teeth as it was from the beating Norrigal’s staff had given it.

They asked if she wanted a hood, and she was about to nod, I think, when she saw me. She actually laughed. She shook off the hood. The hangman tightened the noose, went to yank her standing-block, and she fixed me with her eyes. I should have looked away but didn’t. Her gaze wasn’t hateful. I know I’m reading into it, but it seemed her eyes were telling me lots of things at once—she forgave me for stabbing her; she forgave me for killing her man-bull; she couldn’t believe her not-so-long life was ending in this rainy place; she’d like one more mug of beer; she’d have that beer with me if she could; she hoped the life after was better than this one, and if not, she’d rather it was nothing at all. Just nothing. She looked at me and seemed to be asking me not to look away because I would help her more than some mumbling Allgod priest wagging a bronze sun on a stick, or even more than her own folk, who’d be ashamed of what she was. So I stayed there with her, another fool in thrall to the fox god and like to find his own noose.

I held my hand up in kinship, and her elbow moved, so I think she would have held her palm to me as well were she not manacled. When the hangdam yanked the block, she said ah as she fell, and that ah before her neck broke seemed the realest thing I’d ever heard said. Her voice as expressed in just that one syllable was perfect, not the deceiver’s purr she’d used before the fight or the harpy’s cry in the fray, but it was her essence; killer, lover, thief, daughter, all of it together with something of the divine as well. I loved her for that ah. I wanted to leave then, but I felt I needed to do something for her, so I removed my pattens and toed off that fucking fancy boy’s anklet as if she were still watching me, and I can’t swear that she wasn’t.

But I wasn’t done in Marspur yet—I had one last holy duty to see to. I waited until the duke’s young wife had a good snootful of mead, then cantripped a right, juicy, snotty sneeze out of her, all over Drannigat. Oh, the big man raged, near fit to split his two-cow belt, and seethed while a steward wiped him down. By the time he thought to have a magicker dowse for whomever tossed that spell, I was down an alley and bound for the sea.