“That’s as they said, to a man, and all gone to the worming vaults now.”
“S’not goblins,” another old man said.
“Nae, s’worse.”
“Nothin’ worse.”
“There’s worse.”
“How so?” said the girl.
“Goblins you look down at—what’s past the Thralls looks down at you.”
The gaffer who said that last was a one-legger, his empty pants leg pinned up, the hand at the crutch missing fingers. A goblin killer, he. Goblins bite.
But it wasn’t goblins I was marching toward, and for that, I was strangely relieved.
Even as a slipper who’d never met a living goblin, I knew they’d brewed up plagues to sicken us and kill our horses. I knew the second war, the Threshers’ War, went so badly you’d scarcely find a man between thirty and sixty, and the Daughters’ War made so many women soldiers you’d hardly find a child between eight and fifteen.
The giants I’d seen in the witness coin were fearsome, and no question, but kynd and goblins were made to kill each other.
7
The Skinny Woman’s Bride
Near midday, I was sitting alone at the Stag and Quiet Drum, a respectable tavern of leaning stone walls braced with beams of straight white pine. The nice thing about the Drum was that, for all the care the owner had taken to make the outside look good, his attic was a mess of unused, rarely disturbed junk, and it was among that junk I made my bed after leaving the Spanth.
Having found the rooms a bit too dear, not for their quality but for the contents of my purse, I had crawled in a high window, found the attic ladder, and gone up. It amused me to no end to sneak out of their stolen attic space and then come in again to pay for a beer, so here I was. I was nicely drunk and doing that thing I do when I think so hard my eyes unfocus and I look simple. Sometimes I even breathe through my mouth. I’ve been given alms when I do it on the street. They tried to break me of it at the Low School but at last gave up, one master arguing it was a sign of intelligence, another saying it looked more like a symptom of idiocy. The former, a Magus-Reverend, loved me for my skill at languages—the other, an Assassin-at-Rope, scorned me for my affability and the “ease with which I was like to die.”
You can’t please everyone.
So there I sat, staring into the middle distance, all but drooling while the walls of the Drum shook with a Galtish song in old Holtish. It was a ridiculous song about a magical cat named Bully Boy, and it wasn’t worth explaining to them that where I come from it’s a children’s song to teach Galtish children the Holtish they’re obliged to speak.
Still, here in Holt proper, every looming kark with beer on their chin fellows up with all the other twats whenever it’s played, and they frog-blurt out what verses they remember of a song nobody from Galtia has sung since they were in knee-pants. Though, admittedly, the chorus does lend itself to drunken blurting.
I was thinking about giants.
As I have said, I come from Galtia, the easternmost of Holt’s three kingdoms.
Platha Glurris, to be specific, which means “Shining River” in the language of the Galts, first people to rule Holt, but the real river is underground and made of silver.
My da mined silver, and my best friend’s father did, too, until goblins killed the latter in the first battle of the Daughters’ War in 1222, when I was twelve. My da came back from the same, unwilling to say more than a sentence at a time, and that rarely. Of course, I only had a year and some to watch him suffer—I was off to the Low School at fourteen, and I doubt he noticed I was gone. I never worked a mine and, gods willing, never will. They slaved like mules in the darkness below the pretty hills eight days of the nine that make a week, but on the last day, Sathsday, they went to church and sang songs. Then they drank hoppy, dark beer until they and their wives were too foggy to remember to unstopper in time, thus increasing the brotherhood of man.
And what god did my father sing to? Not the Galtish holdovers, stag-headed Haros or fox-faced Fothannon. Not Mithrenor, the old Holtish god of the sea. No, my father worshipped the Allgod, represented by a bronze disc in a wood square, or, for the very rich, a gold disc set in a square of iron or lead.
The Allgod, also called Sath, also called Father Sun, was the official god of Holt and its kingdoms. To my eye, the Allgod is the god of compromise and mediocrity, much approved of by the noble class for his gospel of work, obedience, and earning just enough to get by.
Whatever simpleton devised that deity showed a shocking lack of imagination, just walking outside and worshipping the first thing that made him squint. Quite different from the wild-haired, incestuous gods of the Galts. Quite the opposite of the Forbidden God, also called the Upside-Down God, about whom you don’t speak in public in Manreach unless you want your tongue split. Old Upside-Downy was rumored to be the true god of my Takers Guild but that only the inner circles of power were schooled in his mystery.
That god might have been real for all I then knew, since he made people so angry, but the Allgod was shyte. He was the kind of god you prayed to for making water wet and fire hot, or for keeping giants out of a land where nobody has seen a giant for a thousand years. He was good at the easy things. I never saw a giant alive in Holt, just the stuffed dead one Bloth the clubfoot used to cart around on two carts lashed together in his Caravan of Sad Wonders and charge a copper shave to look at.
* * *
Now the song in the tavern was in full roar. Have you ever noticed how the very sotted delight in drawing out a final vowel? As if it’s some kind of contest of breath? And so the Holtish morons of Cadoth sang, making cat noises, in perfect intellectual agreement with the five-year-olds of Platha Glurris.
Here come a cat at gather week
Rao rao Bully Boy rao
A Winney-cat her love to seek
Rao rao Bully Boy raaaaoooooooooo
Who was I to question anyone’s intelligence, though? Streams of refugees would be flooding out of giant-stricken Oustrim even as I made my way toward it.
Now a shape loomed up at me.
“Barkeep?” this one shouted over her shoulder toward the bar while pointing at me.
The barkeep shook her head.
It was my Spanth.
I’d told her where I was staying.
“You’re drunk,” she said.
“Am not,” I said, which is of course the second most frequent lie told in taverns.
She slapped me then, right on my tattoo. Pretty hard.
The brewer’s wife was heard to say
She’d cleave the catling’s tail in twae
So Bully raoed and ran away
Rao rao Bully Boy raaaaaaaaaaaooooooooooo
I opened my mouth, and then remembered I couldn’t speak to her unless she spoke. She waited until I shut my mouth.
“Sorry, but you looked like you needed a slap, and I needed a drink.”
“You daughter of a—”
“If you talk about my mother, I have to draw blood.”
“You shyte. You rank Ispanthian shyte cunny-chin.”
“This is acceptable,” she said to me, tousling my hair like I was a child, a godsdamn child, and I took it. “My name is Galva,” she said. And then she went to the bar to collect her small glass of red wine. Another verse started up, and I was so mad, I had to do something, so I sang it.