The Blacktongue Thief

49 The Golem

Where Norrigal had been riding, I now saw a sort of figure, smooth, but crude, like something a sculptor might roll out of clay with his fingers, only this was kynd-sized, just about my height exactly. It turned toward me now. Instead of eyes, it had two indentations like a thumb would make, and I thought I could even see the whorls of thumbprints in them. Its mouth was a round, small hole like a navel. The hole opened and closed and Norrigal’s voice came out of it.

“Then we were in a thorn bramble, and the wolf was tangled so I got off, and did I ever bleed myself peeling thorns out of his hide…”

It slapped the coin out of my hand, which I found quite unfriendly, but things got worse quickly. It grabbed my arms now with its simple hands like clay gauntlets, and they were strong despite their mushy give.

“Hey!” I said and kicked it in the chest, a push-kick to get it off me, but my boot slid off, and the thing closed with me. Before I knew what to do, it had bulled me up against the rock wall by the side of the path, and now it was putting its potter’s clay hand up over my nose and mouth to stop me breathing. I tried to turn my face away, and did the first two times, but finally, it managed to plug me up, and I felt my eyes bugging.

I saw that the donkey had caught up to us, and it hee-hawed at the struggle, though it was impossible to say who it was rooting for.

The clay thing moved its navel-mouth-hole up to my eye and kept talking at me in Norrigal’s voice.

“And it took the rabbit in its mouth and bit, and there I was on the forest floor with it sharing its kill raw, the blood on my cheeks just the same as on its muzzle, and I realized we weren’t so different, but now I wasn’t wee anymore, and I knew the ride was over, and still I determined to ride a wolf again…”

I snaked my hands between its arms and braced my left knuckles under its left arm, slapping up hard with my right hand. A person would have broken their hold at that, falling off to their own right with ribs exposed for an elbow or a knife, but this thing? The arm came off of it with a wet clay sound, but at least it let go and I got a breath in me.

“Galva!” I yelled. “Norrigal! We’re under attack!”

Where were they?

Had this lumpy bugger harmed my witchlet?

It picked its arm up and put it back on, still talking.

“You have to ride a wolf sometime, Kinch, you simply have to promise me you will…”

“Would you please shut up?” I said, then called again for my moon-wife and the birder. “You’re not fucking Norrigal,” I said and kicked its leg, meaning to trip it, but the leg came off. Of course. Why wouldn’t it? It had its arm back on now and hopped so it hooked me around the neck and spun me so my head banged into the rocks, and I saw those little lights you see when you bang your skull a good one.

It fell with me and rolled over on me so my face was pressed in its soft clay chest, and that was bad. I pushed myself up a bit, but it hugged the back of my head, and thrash as I might, I couldn’t get it off me to breathe. Since its arms were busy with my head, I got my knife out and started stabbing it deep, probing; sometimes an automaton will have a sheep’s or a deer’s heart in it to make it go, though I’d never seen a clay one before and didn’t know how it worked. Its body seemed naught but thick, heavy clay. I was about to die, and I got that mad strength a drowning man gets; instead of thrashing wild, I grabbed its head with one hand and with the other cut its clay neck, right through a root’s tendril that served it for a spine, until the head came off.

I learned enough about magic later to know it probably had a mandrake in its head, as mandrakes make great brains or hearts for animated figures, so with that severed, its arms lost most of their strength. I pushed it off and took big, ragged breaths. The homunculus was weakly feeling around for its noggin, hoping to make itself whole again. I couldn’t have that, so I said, “No, you don’t!” and gave the clay head a kick, spinning it on the ground.

From the thing’s navel mouth, Norrigal’s voice screeched, “Ooo, that’s dirty! You’re a dirty fighter, Kinch!”

“Right you are,” I said and punted the head off the path so I heard it go “Eeeeeeee!” and thump down the stony mountainside. I wanted no more mischief from the creature, so I kicked its detached leg over, too.

It fought weakly to try to keep me from cutting its arms off, but it wasn’t much good without the head. And yet, even as it tangled my arms up and tried to hinder me, I saw that the impression my face had made in the middle of its chest now bulged out from concave to convex so I was looking at a sort of death mask of my own face in its chest. The clay Kinch-face now spoke, and in my own voice, too.

“That’s fine, that’s fine,” it said as I cut an arm off it, the hand grabbing on my sleeve, making it hard for me to pry it off. I chucked the arm off the road and reached for the other one, which it tried to keep away from me while my voice kept coming out of my clay face in its middle.

“That’s fine,” it said to me, its voice now thickening, taking on a foreigner’s burr, “but you’ll not have any of my books.”

“What’s that?” I said to me.

And now the face in the clay changed. It wasn’t me anymore. It became an older man’s face with deep lines bracketing the mouth and the tilted-up eyes you see in fair Gunnish men and darker Molrovans. It spoke again, only this time its voice wasn’t mine but a rich, melodic baritone voice with a thick Molrovan accent.

“I said, you impish little Galt, that you will not have any of my books. I heard you thinking you would steal from me, and you won’t do that, will you?”

“No!” I said. “No!”

“Good!” it said, but its eyes in its chest lit like two coals and smoked. “I don’t believe you.” It stood up on its one leg and balanced itself by extending its one arm, and, wobbling, it said, “Are you afraid, boy? Galtish boy?”

I almost said yes, but before I could, it barked the word No! with great violence. “Do not insult me with the truth!” it said.

I said, “Fuck you, then, I’m not afraid.”

“Are you tired?” it said, and I inventoried my aching, leaden muscles and said, “No, I could run the day long.”

“Good! Are you hungry?” it said.

And I realized I actually wasn’t hungry, so agitated from the fight was I, so I said, “Yes,” because we were in Molrova and you lie, don’t you?

So it grinned a wolfy grin and opened its mouth and shot a great jet of what I thought was fire at me, for it was hot, but as it gushed into my face and up my nose, and I shut my eyes against it, a bit of it got in my mouth, and I sputtered and coughed. It was soup. Hot soup, salty, peppered, some sort of fowl. Squab? Squab and black pepper soup?

“Ack!” I said. “I love this place!”

And it said, “Yes! And I am glad you are here.”

I coughed and choked, my eyes still shut hard against the hot stew, and I realized I was sitting down. Someone was handing me a cloth, and I wiped soup out of my eyes and off my face. People were talking. When I managed to get my eyes open, I was bewildered, because I wasn’t on a stony mountain path at all; I was seated at a table in a hall, and Galva was next to me, Norrigal on my right, and Yorbez smoking her stump of taback.

“Did you hear a thing I said?” Norrigal asked. “I was telling you a story, and you fell asleep and dropped your face in the soup.”

“Was it a story about riding a wolf?” I said.

“What else?”

I blew a snort of soup out of my nose and said, “I heard it.”

Then I remembered the cold chill I’d felt to think her gone and maybe murdered by a clay man, and I couldn’t stop myself kissing her cheek, though in fact she turned at the last instant, and I smooched her weirdly on the corner of her eye.

“You fond knob,” she said and smilingly shoved me off.

I became aware of an older man now, with a prominent forehead and lips that rested in a purse of disapproval between the parentheses of his deep wrinkles. He looked at me appraisingly.

“Kinch Na Shannack, student of the Takers Guild, third year physical, second year magical, and Norrigal Na Galbraeth, handmaiden of the Downward Tower, would the two of you like to see a library?”

“Not in the least,” I said and got up to follow him.