The Blacktongue Thief

26 Catch the Lady

Of the Suepka’s crew of eighty, she lost one to the whale and sixteen to the kraken. A further ten were too badly injured to resume their duties at first, so we soon found ourselves pressed into service. The captain himself had come to me, saying, “Our ship’s magicker said he thought you maybe have some magic to you. You or girl. Is true?”

“I have a little,” I said. “Very little.”

“What about her?”

“Less,” I lied.

“Here is situation. You make spellwork for ship, work like crew, you keep separate quarters, wine, cat.”

“So we’re to pay for the privilege of working while the crew gets paid for working.”

“No. You pay for privilege of transport on ship in separate cabins, but now you must work, too, because crew is short. I pay you back what I pay rest of crew if work is good. You make magic for me when I need this?”

“Yes.”

“Good! First thing you do, get in whale’s head, get whale-wax out with bucket.”

“Wait, why me?”

“Because kraken-bastard killed funny girl who used to do it.” Actually, it was the ship’s ballista that killed her, but now wasn’t the time. “And you are small. Pays good, and is very pleasant work. You will smell like best perfume on best whores in Gallardia.”

I’ve never been to Gallardia, but I’ve smelled their perfumes on the whores of Pigdenay, and I’ll tell you now that while spermaceti isn’t as unpleasant as the other smells coming out of a whale, I never want to smell it again. Not after wearing it from crown to heel. I went down beside the ship where the whale was lashed and bucketed that white waxy goo out of the beast’s head, crawling into the bony part of the red that was too hard to saw through and better to send a short person or child to bucket out. They hoped to sell this in Molrova since you’ll not find a better lubricant for clock gears or, properly scented, the arts of love. While I did that, cheers came up from the blubber-strippers, because a woman found a big, black mess of ambergris in the guts of the redfish, and that stuff goes for ten owlets an ounce. Between the spermaceti and the ambergris from this one whale, the captain would be able to hire all the hands he needed to replace those the kraken killed.

But the worst was to come. First, once the blubber had been hauled up to the ship in long strips, it had to be cut—and there were the Spanth and Norrigal stabbing down with big half-moon blubber spades, trying not to part their toes from their feet, trimming the huge rolls of whale fat to manageable sizes. Then the blubber-rendering started, and when the copper cookpots got going, they didn’t stop for days. The whole of the Suepka Buryey was presently coated in the rankest grease you’ll ever meet.

After the first day, I sat below with Norrigal while she wrung oil from her hair with a look on her face that, well, I probably had, too.

For my part, I was thinking that I had almost died for real and ever. Just the memory of the kraken brought a shudder, and still does, even with all I’ve seen since.

I could still smell the briny, punk smell of that squid-lord, and I would never forget it; not the sight of its rending suckers squeezing out water on the bottoms of its tree-thick tentacles, nor the sound of sailors yelling for their lovers and mothers while it stripped the skin off their backs or plunged them into the brine. That single peril had nearly ended me, and for what? So I could follow a surly Ispanthian into giantlands and only then find out why? So I could bounce unlikely grandchildren on my knee and tell them, “You know your grandfather saw a kraken once? That’s right! Stay the fuck on dry land.”

I was wondering what it would look like if, the next time we took to harbor, I simply jumped on some fast ship headed gods-care-where and left the whole mess behind. I could go where the Guild was weaker. Oustrim was the only kingdom so far to forbid the Guild entirely, and it’s said the Guild had made no inroads in the vast island of Axa, which was a kingdom unto itself.

There were so many thieves in the Odd Cities down south, pretty Istrea and rocky Beltia, that some local Upright Men and Dams had kept their independence. Might a fallen Prank of the Guild find work enough to scrape by below the notice of the Problems, Worries, and Shadows he once quaked to think of?

And yet I knew these were fancies. The Guild’s arm was as long as sails could haul and feet could run, and I had a family besides.

Also, Beltia, like its neighbor Istrea, was full of the Smiling Sickness these days, and you didn’t want that.

I looked at Norrigal.

She always looked just on the point of laughing, and I liked that about her. She seemed made of uncountable secrets and layered mirth, a sweet onion of many skins.

“You got a family, witchling?” I said. “Besides your famous great-aunt?”

“None I care to name,” she said. “I’ve a few with some of the same blood, but none that would spill a drop of it on my account. Why do you ask?”

“I don’t know. Just to hear something besides the ship creaking, I suppose.”

“There’s worse things than a ship creaking,” she said, as if to suggest I was one of them, but she grinned when she said it and never meant it, for we talked another hour down. She told me about a doe she’d befriended and taught several words to, and a place in the Snowless Wood where the mists imposed a silence you couldn’t break with a shout. She told me her mistress, Deadlegs, professed to hate bairns but had enchanted a wool blanket so it would comfort any crying babe and given it to a new-married maid in Maeth who’d left her flowers every new moon. Norrigal said she couldn’t wait to take her studies up again with Deadlegs, for whom she’d cadged a bit of ambergris from the Suepka’s take. Ambergris, it seems, was highly prized in spells. Ironically, I was summoned away from exactly this conversation to discuss magic with the captain.

I did the best I could not to look disappointed at having traded Norrigal’s heart-shaped, fay face for the mustached, sun-whipped leather beak and chops that Yevar Boltch steered above his neck. He had brought me before him to measure my worth as a magicker now that his was drowned.

“What can you do, little magicker?” he said. “Can you bring luck to a hunt?”

“Yes.”

“Raise a wind?”

“No.”

“Right a capsized boat?”

“No.”

“Can you make ship’s mast strong to hull? Is already done for now, no wind, no stone will break mast, but spell must be done again every moon or two.”

“He could actually do that? That’s big. Are you sure he really did that?”

“So … no?”

“No.”

He wiped his beard with his hand like there was something disgusting in it, which there probably was. “Are you sure about the luck?”

I nodded. He knew I was lying, but he didn’t hold my lie against me. If anything, it made him like me better.

After another few moments of this interview, he finally discovered something I could do that interested him. I had my fiddle and could play it decently. The only other fiddler on the ship had been the Molrovan harpooner bitten half-sized by the red whale. So fiddle I did, facing the corner of the cabin, while captain Yevar Boltch and Korkala had violent-sounding sexual relations. Having picked out a few words in Molrovan, I gather she did something unsavory to him with that bronze-headed baton she carries around, but it could have been worse for him had we not been sailing with a treasury of world-class lubricants.

While I spent evenings scraping away at my fiddle, accompanied by the nastiest grunts, oaths, and imperatives east of Molrova, trying to pretend I was in a fine house full of magic books and owlets, the Spanth and Malk Na Brannyck were becoming fast friends. They shared a love for Catch the Lady, a card game very popular with soldiers too poor or smart to play Towers, which needed money and eventually blood. They shared Galva’s wine, though she wouldn’t drink his whiskey. She told him as she had told me when I offered her a pull from my own copper flask that it made her evil. He had a laugh at that and said, “That’s the fucking point of it.”

She laughed, too.

She almost never laughed.

They talked about goblins and horses, great blind ghalls and how to kill them, and, like as not, they talked about what a pathetic coward was Kinch Na Shannack.

The next few days were mostly shyte. I would say that I worked like an ox except that an ox’s field is much cleaner and more pleasant than a whale ship. As much as I hated the work, I feared a lull in it because that would be when Malk would strike, if strike he meant to. While the crew was short, and while I slaved away with them, I was too valuable to hurt. So I worked.

The only bright points of the whole voyage came from the time I spent with Norrigal. Following the days of cooking down the sheets of whale fat, she and I had the indescribable pleasure of helping scrub the deck with a nose-burning, eye-watering blend of ash and human urine—yes, we shat for ourselves, but we pissed for the Suepka Buryey—which meant a lot of kneeling and brushing on our hands and knees together. You’ll think this mad, but the smell of stale piss, when it catches me unawares, makes me oddly nostalgic for that knee-bruising, back-wearying labor, and all because of Norrigal. Mind, she was greasy and she stank, but I doubt there would have been a general hoisting of skirts at the sight of myself coated in filth and half crying from disgust.

She told me about her home, a hamlet near a glen in Galtish Estholt, and about chasing her brothers with spells that sounded like wolf-howls, or spells that brought ground-wasps up to sting their arses. She said she did that to stop her brothers beating her and wrestling her down, which it did for a time, until the bastards reported her to the baron’s chainsmen and she had to renounce magic in front of three villages.

“I’ll never forget it,” she said. “It was a fall day and the trees were that brilliant yellow they get to be, and everyone I ever knew and loved was standing with strangers against me, looking at me like I was a fell thing, their breaths steaming in the cold. Ravens cawing in the trees. It was then I knew I had more love for magic than family, and it more love for me.

“‘Norrigal Na Galbraeth,’ the baron’s Holtish Allgod priest said, ‘as you stand accused of mischievous sorcery, and as we have no cause to doubt the source of those accusations, you are required to abandon the hidden arts for the rest of your minority. Will you abide by the judgment, which accords with the will of your family, the standards of the village, the edict of the baron, and the pleasure of the king, and will you turn your back now and until your nineteenth year on the false advantages procured by unnatural entanglements?’

“But magic seemed to me the best way to get ahead in this world, and here they all were asking me to give it up—that or they’d send me off to the mines near your town and fine my father into lower poverty than he already knew. He was a shepherd and hadn’t a lamb to spare. So I did what all those with a gift for ‘unnatural entanglements’ have always done. I lied. I let them put the iron manacles on me to damp me, but then went to the blacksmith one town over and became his lover so he’d take them off. As soon as they were, I gave the smith his promised night and then marched straight back to the old magicker who’d been teaching me and begged him to carry on with my education. He was just an old lakeside net-man and bear-tamer, singing fish up to the bank and giving old husbands charms to stiffen the branch, and though he gave me my start in the arts, he hadn’t the nerve to defy the baron and risk his own license. So I practiced what I already knew on my own, in secret, until my seventeenth year, then set off and went to find my way with Deadlegs.”

“Your seventeenth year can’t be far behind you.”

“Far enough, you faithless flatterer.”

And so it went.

We slept near enough so I heard her night-breathing and she mine, and Bully took a liking to her. He purred with great energy when she came near and once even dropped from the foot of my hammock to climb up to hers, and she comforted him quietly, in the dark, and though I couldn’t make out what she was saying, it cheered me to hear her affection. Quite without meaning to, I imagined Norrigal holding a bairn to her bosom, my bairn, and talking thusly to it, and my eyes opened wide in the darkness. I had never thought of putting a nut in the shell with anything but raw terror, and here I was fondly musing on my own perpetual servitude. “What the Foxannon Fuckfoot is wrong with me?” I said in the darkness.

“How’s that?” Norrigal whispered.

“Nothing, nurse the cat.”

“What?”

“I mean pet him. He likes that.”

“You’re a nutter,” she said and fell silent.

I heard the cat drop to the boards and slink off, and the moment was done.