The Blacktongue Thief (Blacktongue, #1)

by Christopher Buehlman

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.”