The Blacktongue Thief

21 Old Friends

We left Pigdenay on a calm sea, a cool gray sky above us filled with gulls wheeling and taunting and diving. The Suepka Buryey felt as sturdy as land while still in harbor, and I allowed myself to hope the voyage wouldn’t be too bad. The captain, Yevar Boltch, had given us barely a nod when we boarded. He stood on the aft castle to confer with his first mate, a fellow Molrovan named Korkala, a brutal-looking dam who’d cut her iron-gray hair so close to her head you could see the map of scars on her scalp. She’s the one who got things done on the Suepka.

Just before we pushed off, I watched her pay the Seafarers Guild’s man, a thin swaggerer in filthy woolens. Korkala also handled discipline on the ship, and I would soon find out she liked her work. She carried a baton with a hurtful bronze fist on the end of it, not so large you’d call it a mace, but not so small you’d soon forget a sharp blow from it, even through the greasy leathers and fur these northern sailors wore.

As we put out of the harbor and Pigdenay receded to a sort of fat, handsome pile of bricks in the distance, the captain spotted the three of us above decks and nodded at Korkala.

She approached us and said, in barely understandable Holtish, “We cannot safe-keep you on decks. Ropes move, beams move, hit boys, waves take land-walkers below water, very cold. Is better below most times, with others, yes? Yes. Is good now, say good gladness to city while in harbor, but when city gone below sea, you below deck, out of way with others. Deck not safe. Remember I warn you this.”

“Thank you,” the Spanth said. “We will be very careful with ourselves. We will not be in your way,” and I never heard her accent sound so mild. Next to this bronze-fisty-carrying western whale-butcher, she sounded like a Holtish scholar. Korkala nodded at Galva, and me, and Norrigal, and that’s when the captain spoke to us for the first time since the Spigot.

“You,” he said to me. “Again, where in Galtia you from, blacktongue?”

“Platha Glurris,” I said.

He grunted and nodded, winking at me like he’d heard the name before, though at the time I thought this was shyte, the way you say “Ah,” in false recognition when you ask a foreigner their hometown and they mumble some unpronounceable syllables. Now the captain considered us as a group.

“You ready for sea-voyage?” he said, smiling just that little bit, as if he were already relishing the sight of some or all of us casting up our accounts over the railing at the first touch of rough weather.

“All packed and pretty and eager to break a wave,” I said.

“Good!” he blustered over my last word, clapping my shoulder and moving away. He didn’t give a kark and didn’t mind letting us know it.

Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, though.

We were supposed to be in Molrova in two to four weeks, depending on the whale-hunting. Never mind the cool feeling in my stomach that told me my luck was running low. I had no choice but to see things through. I’d gotten past periods of bad luck before, hadn’t I?

We had been given a small stall in the hold, near the big, empty barrels that would later slosh with rendered blubber and, if a squarehead or red whale were caught, spermaceti. We had hammocks to sleep in, a shared trunk for our goods, and a little graywood table for playing Towers or dice. Other crew members slept in their own hammocks, all in a common part of the hold practically on top of each other, save the first mate and the captain, who had their own cabins. I was just starting to think I could do this for a month when I heard a familiar voice.

“Did someone say Platha Glurris?”

Oh shyte, I thought, not sure at first why the voice was bad. Normally, I’d have put my head down and moved away just to be safe, but there was no place to run and no place to hide. I looked up and met the eyes of a strong man of thirty, missing two fingers, his face marked with a half-moon scar that was clearly a goblin bite. He was oiling up the wicked-sharp, barbed head of a harpoon. He smiled when he saw me, and a stranger would have thought it a friendly smile unless he’d seen a snake about to eat a mouse. They smile just like he did then. With his Galtish black tongue like tar behind his teeth.

He knew me.

He’d known me all my life.

And he hated me.