The Blacktongue Thief (Blacktongue, #1)

by Christopher Buehlman

I was trained in lock-picking, wall-scaling, fall-breaking, lie-weaving, voice-throwing, trap-making, trap-finding, and not a half-bad archer, fiddler, and knife-fighter besides. I also knew several dozen cantrips—small but useful magic. Alas, I owed the Takers Guild so much money for my training that I found myself squatting in the Forest of Orphans with these thick bastards, hoping to rob somebody the old-fashioned way. You know, threaten them with death.

You can tell how big a town is by how many gods have temples there and how big those temples are. For example, a village with one mud road, one tavern that’s really just the back of a fat man’s house, and a dying ox everyone shares at plowing time will have an Allgod church. No roof, logs to sit on, an altar with tallow candles and a niche where different gods’ statues will go depending on the holiday. Those statues will be carved from ash or hickory, with generous breasts on the goddesses and unthreatening pillicocks on the gods, except Haros, who will be hung like the stag he is, because everyone knows he screws the moon so hard she has to sink beneath the hills and rest from it.

Men love a woman who doesn’t seem to give a damn, so long as she’s handsome. We also love a happy woman, so long as she’s fair, or a sad pretty one, or an angry girleen with a good face. You see how this works.

the rich hold grudges the poor can’t afford,

“You’re too smart for this work.” “I could say as much to you, cat-grabber, purse-nipper. Prank. Do you deny tripping the one and abusing the other with a knife?” “Not a big knife.” “Why do it?” “Cat’s blind. It wasn’t sporting.” “Heh. Sporting. There’s a word you normally only hear out of rich mouths. You rich, cat-pincher?” “Do I look it?” “You look worn and dirty, I grant, but hardly run before the boar. Your split-toed thieving boots are decently made, and that is not a poor man’s blade on your belt.” “Then I am rich. I have a hundred gold lions and a thousand silver owlets waiting on my ship in the Hot Sea. I’m going to go find a mermaid with a taste for old plums and a fortune in black pearls up her squinny and send her back to you.” “Mermaids don’t have squinnies. T’s’what makes ’em a parable for life. Warm and welcoming for the first half, then it gets cold and hard and smells bad. But thank you for not being boring. You know how sick I get of hearing, ‘Spare me, Justice, I am innocent, I swear by the gods’? I had decided to hang the next squire told me he was innocent, especially if he was.” “Can I keep the cat?” “Cook him and eat him for all I care. Chainsdam!”

Our cellmate stared over his gathered knees at the far wall, drunk as a pickled fish, bony in that old-man way, like he’s easing into his coming skeletonhood.

Iron is to free magic what cold water and laughter are to male arousal. Free magic meaning spells. Caught magic—tattoos, objects imbued with magic—would not be harmed by iron, but it might make the use of those objects less efficient.

He who leaps at the moon Into cowshyte falls. Glory unto cowshyte! Holy words, those.

There’s nothing so opaque as the heart of a stranger.

Pigdenay, city of warships, city of armorers, city where the first sick horses clomped ashore, let me weave a garland of wishes for you. O city of gray-brown bricks and mud-brown swans, city of small green windows and mean gray eyes looking out, may your salt-rubbed rotting timbers stand another year, may the anvils of your hundred smithies bang forever in the hungover skulls of King Conmarr’s wodka-drunk, lad-mad sailors. May the greasy fishpies you are famed for never cool so much one can taste the earthworms ground for filler, nor may your dungeons ever want for Galtish bards who mocked your huge, fat duke. Pigdenay, city of rain and ashes, Pigdenay, city of whores and rashes, capital of kidnaps and ambergris, cradle of half the world’s soot, I praise your cobbled promenade, where the whale’s blubber and the kraken’s tentacle are grilled and sold across from the hall of lost sailors, mostly killed by whales and krakens. I sing of the heart you were born without, and of the twice-sized belly you got instead. You’re a cold city, Pigdenay, but I’ll forgive you your faults as you forgive mine, for your beer is never warm, and I’m never short a stolen copper shave to buy it. “Give us a ship stout enough to carry us, and a captain fool enough to take us west, for my feet are tired of walking and I’m keen to clear my debts.”

I don’t say this as a matter of complaint. As with most of my suffering, I richly deserved it.

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.

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.

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.

Norrigal took my hand and held it as more laughter came from the deck and someone started playing a drum and hornpipe. “Shyte, you’re ugly,” I said, meaning the opposite. “Yeah,” she said. “You, too.” Then she kissed me.

You cannot help yourself. Your mouth is like an old man’s bladder.”

Your mouth is like an old man’s bladder.”

“So why are you telling me?” I said. “Just by way of being friendly.” “Telling me where they make the best fish stew, that’s friendly. Warning me off a tavern where they water down the wine, that’s friendly. Blurting out an anecdote about murder while I’m remembering a moment of earthly bliss, that’s not friendly at all. I’d call that macabre at best and threatening at worst.”

“You’re a right wanker.” “Do you hate me?” “What’s to hate about you? We all serve our masters. The situation, though, that’s to be hated. They’ve really got your carrot in the goat’s mouth, haven’t they?” “I’ve never heard that expression.” “I invented it.”

Though he was cordial to us, he held his conversation with Galva in Ispanthian so formal and rapid I only snared a half dozen words. Giants, mountains, war, honor, quail, and wine. We ate quail and drank wine. Giants, war, and mountains were on their way. If honor decided to attend our adventures, I only hoped I’d recognize her; she’d been pointed out to me a few times, but we’d never really gotten acquainted.

I confess I hadn’t thought much of Yorbez to look at her, but when it comes to fighting, it isn’t always the most fit-looking geezer that wins. Yorbez was only fast when she had to be, and then it was blinding. When she fought Malk and the younger Spanths, she ducked, reversed directions, cracked knees, got behind her adversary, all while never seeming terribly bothered. You couldn’t put your finger on why each exchange ended with the other eating wood; it looked like luck, but of course, it wasn’t. She just seemed to casually fall into place where she was supposed to be and feed the other one a sword or a heel or an elbow.

Malk was walking in a way particular to young bravos, but perfected nowhere so well as in the Galtish lands of Holt. There’s a way a blacktongue tough sometimes walks, each step a small kick, so that the torso sways just a little. The word swagger nearly embraces that walk, but misses an element of boredom, mischief, a hope for something out of the ordinary to please happen whatever the cost.

“I thought maybe my mother taught you, too, at least in the reality of the lie you’ve chosen to tell me.” “I was not with her long enough to learn a joke,” he said, laughing. “You don’t have to be rude about it.” “I already didn’t speak Galtish before she didn’t teach me to speak it.” “Well, you should learn it, it’s beautiful.” “Do you think so?” “More than Molrovan.” “This is entertaining. Please continue.” “Molrovan sounds like a man getting kicked to death with hot broth in his mouth. It’s a wet, spitting language for whore people with whore lips. Galtish is a poet’s language.”

“When you eat your bread, thank the cat,” he said in Holtish so all could understand, even though it was a Molrovan saying. It meant that for the grain to stay safe, mice had to die.

Proper whale oil lamps burned steady behind the bar, where the formerly wealthy drank real beer poured by a tough-looking swinish fellow of twenty with an unbecoming chin-strap beard. Not that there’s any other kind of chin-strap beard. You wear a beard like that, you’re basically saying, I have no hope of getting laid but you won’t like what happens if you punch me.

And that’s the true story of how on the tenth day of Vintners, I ended up betting my arse on a card game in a sewer under an army of murdering giants at the very top of the wicked world.

“So, wait, giantkind aren’t supposed to lie?” “Some do. Not my tribe.” That figured. Leave it to giants to get holy about the truth. It’s always the big, thick wankers saying, “Don’t lie,” isn’t it? Only the strong, the rich, and the dying think truth is a necessity; the rest of us know it for a luxury.

Monarchy is a bad system because, no matter how smart you are, you can still squirt a moron out of your plumbing. Maybe you get lucky and your son or daughter is at least half as smart as you—what about your grandchild? Probably a knob, and when they inherit the throne, everything you built falls to shyte. Not so with the Guild. If you were stupid, you never went to a True School. If you weren’t brilliant, you’d never make it to the upper tiers, but if you did, the Murder Alphabet was waiting for you to make a mistake so it could kill you.

I was so scared, I half wanted to piss myself, but the difference between the strong and the weak isn’t that the strong don’t piss themselves. It’s that they hitch their pissy pants up after and go through with it.