The Blacktongue Thief

65 Running West

I found Bully Boy after the fight was done, raoing softly in a corner, scared as a cat ever was. It wasn’t until I draped him across my shoulders and wore him like a stole that he purred. He felt safe on me, I suppose, the little blind fool. Wearing him so, I took him over to where Deadlegs and Mireya were seeing to Galva.

I never knew there was magic in the world strong enough to fix a broken back, but that’s exactly what the old witch now did for the ruined Spanth. I took the chain mail shirt off Galva and set it far enough away it wouldn’t weaken the spell. Deadlegs fixed her as good as new, and maybe better. She had me leave the cave and fetch Galva’s staff where it still lay in the grass near the road where we’d fought the giants. Deadlegs took that staff, with its clockwork horse magic in it, and had me break it with a stone—it was important to break it such that it would snug back together, so with a smaller spell she salted it and made it brittle first. She then dipped the broken ends in some of Galva’s blood and spit, chanted over it for the better part of an hour, then joined the pieces together. Then off with the salt, on with wine and some of my blood to strengthen it. But I was glad to give it. Galva cried out, and when Deadlegs raised the staff from off the ground, she stood, too, like a marionette with its strings jerked tight, looking vigorous and hale. Next, the old witch laid her palm over Galva’s blinded eye and drew out the poison Sesta had spit into it, flicking the venom onto the cave floor as if it had missed in the first place.

That eye would always be a shade paler than its mate.

The first thing the birder did with her healed body was to go to the body of Yorbez. Galva smiled down at her old teacher. “You found her,” she said in Ispanthian. She kissed both of her cheeks. “Thank you, Mistress. I will see you both before long.” I realized I didn’t know if “Mistress” was Yorbez or Dalgatha, the Skinny Woman. I always thought maybe these Death-lovers were faking it, putting on a brave mask if you will, but the woman seemed genuinely glad to see the body of her sword instructor and friend lying there with a blue face from having her pipes crushed, because that meant her spirit was frolicking somewhere with their jolly, winged lady skeleton.

I’ll never get the Spanths.

I looked at Deadlegs now and saw that her hair, which still had some browny-gray color in it when she arrived, had become a hoary storm of white. One of her eyes bugged, and she seemed unwell. Even a witch of her power had limits; between the swivel spell, the stone men, and healing Galva, she’d nearly killed herself, and unless I missed my guess, getting us out of here would tax her further yet.

The giantess groaned in discomfort, and the witch saw to her as well, dusting her with a powder from Norrigal’s pack that perked her up, healing the lacerations from her overfast growth. Perhaps the younger witch had been saving the powder for herself, with her legs smashed as they had been. Perhaps she hadn’t wanted the giant to murder us all as she’d done for the exhausted thieves. Perhaps she hadn’t the strength to work a spell on herself, as much pain as she’d been in. Deadlegs answered my curiosity, after a fashion.

“That’ll keep her from dying,” the witch said, “but shouldn’t make her feel well enough to kill us all.”

“What’s become of your … great-niece?” I said. “Is she dead?”

Deadlegs smiled at me. “She cannot be while I live. And when I die, which I’m like to do before I see the Snowless Wood again, she’ll make another, younger, and she’ll be the old one.”

“Is she…”

“She’s back where you found her. She’ll heal, but you’ll not see her soon, if ever.”

“I’ll get back to her,” I said, “one way or another.”

“By earth or by water,” Deadlegs started.

“By fire or crow,” I finished.

“You must hide from the Takers. You’ll bring that book with you and find a way to translate what it says. What’s in there will rend your Guild to tatters. Do that, and it’ll pay all the blood spilt so far. Do that, and you’ll be a man worthy of his father.”

I hadn’t time to consider the possible import of that last, because the book, as if understanding it was being spoken of, stirred from where I’d left it and began moving for the cave’s mouth again. I hit it with a rock, and it lay still.

Galva told Mireya what Deadlegs said, and Mireya spoke to her.

Galva started to protest, but the queen interrupted her and insisted. The knight walked over to me, seeming none too happy about the news she carried.

“My sovereign, Mireya, has told me to come with you, Galt, to keep you alive and make sure you do what is right with that book.”

“How nice for both of us.”

“Now help me with one more thing,” Deadlegs said, handing me a saw-knife and gesturing at the dead assassin. She sat heavily on the cave floor and pulled her own rotted legs off, casting them aside like damp firewood, then looking at me expectantly.

“Well?”

I glanced at Sesta’s headless form.

Thank the gods her head was turned away from me.

I wasn’t made for cutting legs off. I was what the Galts call mud-brave, meaning I’d get my hands in the shyte to get a job done, but I had never been blood-brave.

“Don’t make me do it,” I said.

“Why?” Deadlegs said and nodded at the killer’s corpse. “Were you planning on taking her home with you?”

The way she said it was so like Norrigal, so Galtish, so casually awful.

I missed my moon-wife so dearly then, it felt as if I’d known her my whole life instead of, what, six weeks? I’d met her not sixty days past, and now spending an hour without her made no sense at all.

If you’ve never fallen hard in love and lost your heart’s sovereign, go on and laugh at me. If you have, have a drink and dab an eye.

I would do what needed to be done with this murdering Guild book, then I would return to find Norrigal, be she in an upside-down tower or a right-side-up grave. And if the gods were kind enough to show her to me living once again, I would promise myself to her for as many moons as she had want of me.

Deadlegs must have been reading my thoughts as she had in the Snowless Wood, for she said, “As if Norrigal Na Galbraeth would look twice at your sort again. You’re as like to fuck an elf.”

Again, just the rhythm Norrigal would have used.

I looked at her.

“It can’t be,” I said. “It just fucking can’t.”

The old witch grinned.

How’d her legs get dead anyway?

Norrigal hadn’t just been her great-niece.

A giant threw a tree on them.

Norrigal was Deadlegs.

Long ago and also now.

Somehow.

“This needs thinking about,” I said. “I’ll just—”

“Get the legs.”

“I’ll just get the legs.”

Before I could do that, though, she bit me.

On the arm.

Hard.

And smiled bloody.

“What the fuck was that for?”

“Something to remember me by.”

The giants came soon after.

A dozen or more of them, one of them a cousin of Misfa. They reached their ox-long arms and their sow-sized heads through the cave mouth and Galva made to fight them, but Mireya wouldn’t let her. I was glad of it. We’d barely beaten three, with one of mighty Fulvir’s spells to help us. Misfa got shakily to her feet and made her way to the opening, which neither she nor her kin could wholly fit through. She grabbed her kinsman’s hand and he told her how strong she was, that the war went well, but that an army of smallmen approached.

“That’ll be the Spanths or the Holtish,” I said, “those armies from Middlesea. And how the devils are we going to get out of here? Do we have to fight these bigguns?”

“Sure and we don’t,” Deadlegs said. “They’d mash us like turnips. I’ve got about one more big spell in me before I need to sleep for a week, and if these bigguns aren’t to kill us, someone’s got to get their kinswoman out of this cave. First, though, Kinch, you have to free a horse from her.”

“What? The sleepers? I can’t.”

“You’d best learn. Your future’s not in taking, lad. It’s in making.”

We proposed a deal with Misfa, and she agreed.

Deadlegs guided me through a spell to crack a sleeper tattoo. It was the strongest magic I’d yet done, stronger than I’d ever dreamed of working, and I had no idea what I was doing. But at the end of it, a hoof broke free from the giant’s skin. Then a head and mane, a horse’s startled eyes. Soon, the whole thing was out, clopping on the cave floor.

Bloody with her blood, as if it had just foaled from her thigh.

A stallion.

A young, strong stallion.

Something Manreach hadn’t seen in twenty years. The plague killed all the boy horses and most of the mares, so that now even those were old and mostly died out. This creature, this brown, lovely, sweet-smelling, warm creature, this heavy, grass-loving dog, this saddleless bearer, was nothing less than a miracle.

Galva shivered when she heard those hooves on stone, and when it exploded a whinny in the confines of the cave, she sobbed openly and might have dropped to her knees in thanks and wonder if she hadn’t had a better idea. She went to the animal and gave him an apple. If I live a thousand years, I’ll see few things as beautiful as that Spanth feeding the last, or first, or only stallion in Manreach an apple. Even the giants outside the cave were transfixed, lying on their bellies to look in the slit at us.

Then came our part of the deal.

Deadlegs’s specialty was magic to do with minerals—it’s why her stone men and dirt-wights worked so well, why she had been able to sink a tower upside down in the earth. So she spoke to the stones of the cave and asked them wouldn’t they like to stretch a bit, wouldn’t it feel good? The cave started to shake then, gravel and dust rained on us, turning the lot of us white.

“Fothannon, is it going to fall on us?”

“Might do,” she said, seemingly unconcerned.

But it didn’t.

What it did was to triple the size of the cave mouth so two women could ride a horse through it and a giant could duck.

We went out with the dust on us like a procession of ghosts. It turns out giants really are an honorable lot, or at least this bunch were. Misfa limped out to them, to their thunderous embraces and laughter not so different from the laughter of kynd. They backed straight off from us as Deadlegs and Mireya rode the horse out, a horse Mireya had plumbed its name for and found to be Ēsclaer, Gallardian for lightning. I don’t know how much of the giants’ reverence was gratitude for the return of their kinswoman, how much was the value of their own word, how much was liking for our trust in going out among them, and how much was plain fear of Deadlegs, who had made a small mountain open its mouth. That last they needn’t have bothered with—there was barely enough fuel for spells left in Deadlegs to fling a pebble at a field mouse, not until she slept and ate and bathed.

She leaned half-asleep on Mireya’s back.

“Where are you off to?” I asked her.

Half slurring with exhaustion, she said, in Galtish, “To find the Ispanthian army and see if they like their witch-queen so well as her usurping uncle, Kalith.”

“Sounds risky,” I said. “What’s to stop them from breaking out bullnutters and hacking each other to pieces over it? Or one of them to kill her in her sleep?”

Deadlegs’s weary eyes moved back and forth, trying to focus on me. “You got a better idea?”

“Can’t say I have.”

I saw the chance in it, at least. Mireya seemed very much a queen, was a queen, had ruled a kingdom and kept her king alive—for a time—with the deadliest legion of bastards in Manreach trying to kill them both. And Spanths were horse-mad to their bones. If Mireya couldn’t charm and command the loyalty of an Ispanthian army from the back of the world’s only stallion, she’d never do it at all.

“Besides,” Deadlegs slobbered, “it’s not like we’re going west, over deadly mountains and to the giantlands, hiding from the whole of the Takers Guild with little magic, one good sword, and a biting arsehole of a murder-book in our pack.”

“Fair point,” I said. “And my family? Will you? Can you?”

She nodded slow against the queen’s back. “I’ll have them hid and warded. No promises. Except to do all I can.”

Which might be much. If she could get word east, she could have my family moved out of Platha Glurris and Brith Minnon. The Guild would spare no expense to find me and the book, but how much energy they’d spend trying to find my tired old mum, handful of siblings, and stammering niece was another matter.

Meanwhile, if I could milk the book of its secrets and find a way to make them known, I could make life hard for the Takers. If it turned out they’d killed the horses out from under us for their own power and profit, they’d be hard pressed to hide anywhere. It would be like every one of the fuckers had a tattoo of a noose on their necks, and drinks on the house to any mob good enough to string them up.

“Now. For the love of Samnyr,” Deadlegs said, “and all the gods besides. Shut up. And let. Me sleep.”

And she was out.

Mireya, who had just finished a hushed talk and a long stare with Galva, whose eyes were no drier than hers, nodded at me hard once and wheeled the horse.

A horse.

A real and actual horse I had brought back into the world under my own hand. If I died the very next day, and it didn’t seem unlikely, I’d done something, hadn’t I?

Galva and I ran west, me with the cat over my shoulder, my pack on my back and the poisonous book in a second bag carried under my arm; an oilskin sack the Full Shadow had, probably for just this purpose. A ring of Catfall on my finger and a torque that did I know not what on my neck. The sky was dark in the west, and I knew we’d be rained on before nightfall, but the day’s last warm sun was shining on us.

“I’ll keep carrying you for a bit, but if you shyte on me, it’s over,” I told Bully.

He didn’t reply.

“So, Bully,” I said, “are we going to be killed in the giantlands?”

He said nothing.

“Would you like to see Galtia someday?”

Nothing.

Well, he wasn’t much at prophecy, but I was glad all the same for his warmth and goodwill. I had many cold nights before me and, for company, only a Spanth who’d rather sharpen a sword than talk. I missed Norrigal like a part of myself that I hadn’t known I had. She was back in the Snowless Wood now, I thought it likely, her legs wrecked until she made a maiden of herself, however that was done.

Galva and I ran through the foothills of Oustrim. We ran past copses of gorgeous yellow-leaved trees hissing in the wind, and past broken houses giants had wrecked, and past streams that burbled as though there wasn’t a trouble in the wide world. When we got a chance to rest, I’d have to see about getting Bully Boy back into my skin.

But for now, it was good to have the little beast on my shoulder. I could tell Bully liked having the sun on his face and a breeze in his whiskers; a blind cat’s pleasures are few.

Let him stay awake for a little bit.

Let him smell the autumn and the fires on it and the voles and mice and birds he’d never catch preparing for the winter.

“Rao,” he said.

I like to think that was thanks.