That night, I left Bully in the room and took Norrigal to the oldest part of Edth, near the harbor and the low, round fortress they call the Merman’s Tower. We dangled our feet over the seawall, listening to the creaks and gentle thuds of the ships, the gurgle of the water, the cries of night birds.
A huge statue of Cassa, goddess of mercy and Mithrenor’s wife, stood with one open hand cupped toward the sea in supplication, the other on her breast. It was to her all prayers for lost sailors were directed. She stayed faithful to Mithrenor no matter how many nymphs and daughters of man he put bastards in, and her only price was that sometimes, just sometimes, he was to show mercy and be kind. If she had to trick him, it wasn’t beneath her. Would you drown your own flesh? Cassa would say, taking hold of his whip-hand as he was on the verge of capsizing some stricken vessel. What trick is this, he would ask, for my flesh is divine and cannot drown? To which she would answer Do you not remember the black-haired maiden who loved you on this shore not thirty years agone? Her issue went beneath the sails and on this very ship cleaves to his life. Mithrenor would say, Which is he, then? Show me him, and I will pluck him off and drown the rest. To which the clever Cassa would reply, Why, he is the most handsome, the most like you. And while Mithrenor scanned the boat and tried to determine which sailor most resembled him, Cassa would calm the wind and still the sea, and Mithrenor, unable to see himself more reflected in one sailor’s face than other, yet seeing something of himself in every one, would let the vessel go. That’s how the myth goes, at least, but you know how the gods are when you need them.
To look close at the statue of Cassa, you’d see her pretty feet are pocked where grieving wives, sons, and mothers have gouged her with hammer, pick, or rock for not saving their most dear ones. Her feet were stained, as well, where some had cut a thumb to bleed on her in protest. It is to be noted they attack the goddess of second chances because she’s a safe outlet for their grief—Cassa will never take vengeance. Mithrenor’s statue, just on the other side of the fortress, that’s a different matter. Everyone’s afraid of that bastard. His twin tail fins had not a mark on them, even though he’s the one with the whip. He’s the ship-killer. People don’t really believe he’ll send a giant wave to drown the city if his statue is desecrated, but better safe than sorry. Sweet Cassa gets the chisel and the weepy bleeders while Mithrenor does as he pleases. You see? You really can learn something from the gods.
I looked about and saw nobody near enough to hear us.
Cassa, I thought as hard as I could, don’t let Norrigal stab me or curse me or blind me with a powder when I say what I must. If she needs to hit me, I understand, but let it not be in the parts, or the throat, or with a rock larger than would easily fit in her hand.
“There’s an assassin in my cat,” I said.
“What?” she said.
“You heard me. And not just an assassin. An Assassin-Adept.”
“What’s that? The worst possible kind of assassin, then?”
“Yah. She’s got about a hundred magic tattoos, one of them’s got her heartbeat in it so the Guild’ll know if she dies. Her name’s Sesta. She’s fairly horrible. Wasn’t sure if I should tell you her name, but she knows yours, so it only seems fair. Especially since I doubt that’s her real name, just her killer’s name, ’cause that’s how old she was when she killed someone. The first time, I mean. Sesta means ‘six.’ In Istrean. So I guess she’s from Istrea. Though she’s not got much accent, but they train them out of that.”
Norrigal fetched me a cuff on the crown, fairly hard. But just one. Then she licked her hand and smoothed what must have been a proud flag of hair she’d slapped standing.
Wasn’t so bad. Thanks, Cassa. You’re a plum.
“You babble like an old man when you’re nervous, do you know that?”
“Yah, but I learned to control it. Except around you.”
“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.”
I sighed and looked at Deepbelly Bay, where the lanterns from the huge, round Merman’s Tower’s walls reflected in the water.
“Even if I could, I’m disinclined to kill the cat,” I said.
“Your soft heart’s going to be your undoing. Sometimes you’ve got to cut a throat.”
I remembered the bull-man in the forest and shuddered. There was one throat I’d cut, and no pleasant business.
“I know. But killing the cat’s not an option, is it?” I said.
“It wouldn’t be prudent. The life-rune she showed you, that’s strong magic. Not flashy, but sure.”
“So the cat can’t die.”
“No.”
“And that assassin will find me no matter how I try to throw her off—besides reporting me to the Guild.”
“Hmm.”
“I know that hmm. You’ve got something, haven’t you?”
She stood then and stood me up with her. She got behind me and put my arm in the same pose as Cassa, held out to the sea. She put my hand on my own breast, and in that posture, she held me from behind and whispered in my ear, “Light a candle to sweet Cassa tonight; the notion she put in my head may yet show you great mercy.”
To make a good magical tattoo, you need to have an understanding of flesh in general, but also the flesh of the one you’re going to mark. There are many types of these tattoos; the assassin Sesta was covered in skin-runes and glyphs, each a sort of stored spell or ward. She was a walking grimoire. She had much of the power of a magicker, but the power was borrowed from others—all she had to learn to do was use it, not make it, which left her free to train her body into the fearsome thing it was.
My tattoo, a penalty mark, disappears in all but firelight. That sort’s easy. The one who put it on me had been a lover of mine, which made it go fast.
One tattoo the Guild was famous for was a telling-mouth. Some mouths bore messages and would disappear when those messages had been discharged. Some translated languages, though these were hard to make and notoriously mischievous—it was said one had intentionally started a war. The most coveted sort, however, was a tattler; one of these mouths, paired with an eye and an ear, would report all you did and said and with whom you spent your time.
Of course, the key words were carefully guarded, but a good wizard could coax a telling-mouth to speak, so the Guild never put them on its own. As these things work out, many a jealous old dodderer had herself ruined when her pennygroom turned out to be a spy, witting or unwitting, and the same tattoo that reassured her of his fidelity sang her banking secrets away or disclosed enough about her to get her blackmailed or twinned by a mimic.
Of all our traits, the gods most hate jealousy because it makes us like them.
The hardest tattoos to make were sleepers, and that’s what Galva bore. The corvid that leapt from her chest when she needed it existed in a sort of sleep-time, never aging, but drawing a certain amount of life from its bearer. Calling it forth hurt her, reabsorbing it hurt her; if it were injured, she could heal it by putting it back, though she would suffer some of its pain, which was what nearly undid her, absorbing some of the crushed bird’s hurt on the goblin ship. I didn’t know a very great deal about the art, but I knew enough to be impressed that Norrigal had nearly mastered it. For all her occasional bungles, she was already a damned impressive magicker at a young, young age. Little doubt she’d be a match for Deadlegs if she lived so long.
We stole upon the cat while he seemed to be sleeping, though it was hard to tell because the little bastard slept wide-eyed. Norrigal had taken a circle of leather and written charms on it; she sunk a drawstring in it to make a hood and fixed iron on it to bind. It was mine to approach the cat using the hood, but not to bring the hood out until I was ready to act. We came home near the night’s exact middle. Malk and Galva were laughing drunkenly in the next room. The cat was perched under a table in the room I shared with Norrigal, seeming to keep vigil. If it were just the cat, he couldn’t see a damned thing, but how was I to know? The Assassin-Adept had to be in him for our plan to work. Best to test him.
Norrigal lay down on the bed, feigning exhaustion, while I approached the cat.
“Hey-ho, Bully,” I said and took out a fine, plump Middlesea snail I’d saved him, letting him smell it. He raoed his interest in it, and I used it to lead him from under the table. Tossing it against the far wall would have guaranteed his back was to me, but if the bitch were looking out his eyes, it would have seemed too suspicious. I had to do something a little suspicious. Right, the middle of the room it was. The snail landed with a fat plop. Bully bobbed his head snakelike, sniffing, then started for it, feeling his way along with each step. A change came over him as I watched him, and he stopped. He looked over at me. There was the sign I was looking for—the Assassin-Adept was moving him. Had I turned away from his gaze and pretended to occupy myself with something else, that would have looked too suspicious. But if I watched him placidly, perhaps lost in thought, that was just a little suspicious, and so I did. Norrigal lay as if on the verge of passing out.
Bully looked back at the snail and, instead of feeling his blind way there, slunk quickly to fetch it, then went under the bed. I listened for hacking but heard none. The assassin wasn’t alarmed; she was letting him eat his prize. We knew from the way the sailors had nabbed Bully and tossed him over on the Suepka Buryey that he could be moved against swiftly, so now Norrigal, who had seemed halfway to sleep, sprang alert and alive and grabbed wee Bully by the tail.
Friends and lovers, this was a fight. I’ll not describe the fury of clawing and biting that followed except to say that the better half of it was Norrigal’s. In the end, she flailed poor Bully on the bed like she was trying to break him, getting her hips into it and all, and she managed to stun him and the evil thing he was hosting enough for me to get the hood on. The sleep-drugs she had crumbled up in the nose of it soon did their work, and Bully snored in his leather-and-iron hood while Norrigal bled and breathed hard. Her hair was a fright.
“Do you think he broke his back?” I said, picking up one of Bully’s paws.
“Do you think I care?”
“I thought we agreed not to hurt him,” I said.
She wiped a bit of blood off her scratched cheek and said, “We’ll play a little game now. I’ll pretend you didn’t say that, and you pretend you’re grateful you haven’t a new knot on your head.”
The door opened now, and Galva rushed in with her shield down and her spadín cocked over it. “Quei chodaderias bain elchi?” Her Holtish always suffered when she was drunk or agitated, and just now she was both.
What fuckery goes on here?
“Nothing,” I said.
She looked at the hooded cat, then looked at Norrigal bleeding and panting. She saw her horrent elf-locks. The witch saw what she was looking at, spit in her hand, and smoothed down her hair. Galva shook her head and left, meeting Malk in the hallway. Malk asked what was going on.
“They commit some act with the cat in a mask; it is not my concern. I am going to bed.”
The sound of a tattoo needle tapping is a particular sound, one that you won’t forget, especially when you have to look at the reminder each day. The cat went on my arm, my left arm, between the elbow and the armpit. I could hide him as I pleased and look at him when I needed. If anything went wrong, and a lot could go wrong, better it was on a limb I could lose than close to my heart or other necessaries. Not that I relished the thought of spending my remaining days a beggar, which was what a one-armed thief could expect, but where there’s life, there’s pain. Or hope. I’m terrible at keeping my sayings in order.
Norrigal tap-tap-tapped that cat onto me in the space of about half a day, sweating over me the while despite the cold air. She mixed the ink with ash made from burned fur and clipped claws, along with other things she’d got in the magic quarter. A bit of caterpillar ichor (I don’t know if it’s really called ichor—she called it goo, but that hardly sounds thaumaturgic, does it?), kraken’s ink for power, iron filings for binding. She spoke her spells in the language of the old Galts, a bit different from what we speak at home, but the best possible idiom for change magic.
When she started in with the ink and the tapping on her thorn, the magic feeling in the air got strong, and I saw a wondrous thing; it looked as though she’d caught a thread from the cat, who lay sleeping near me, and hooked that onto the thorn, and as she made the image, the real cat unraveled like wool. I watched it happen. She didn’t outline the tattoo of the cat and fill in—she drew it entire starting at his tail and ending at the tip of his nose, and when she was halfway through, half a cat lay on the table near, still snoring his snore in his hood. When he was down to just a head, off came the hood, but she left sleep-herbs crumbled near his wee nose. He was breathing, I could see and feel his illustrated chest rising and falling on my biceps, and yet the air came and went from the head on the table where his whiskers moved and his eyes, closed at last, twitched under his lids. A fantastical business, magic—it’s easy enough to see how it drives some mad.
Norrigal explained it all to me when the cat was gone to ink.
“You’ve not killed the killer. Whatever’s in the cat exists now just as it did, only stilled and silent. Your living heart should power that rune of hers and make her seem alive to those who watch. Have a care, though—you may rouse the sleeper if you speak the cat’s true name or the killer’s.”
“I don’t know either.”
“Then let’s hope they’re not so simple you say them accidental.”
“How else might the spell come loose?”
“A witch could peel it off you and rouse it. A lightning storm could rouse it, no one knows why except that lightning comes from the hands of the gods direct, and they’re with us when it sparks. If you die, it could die with you, or it could spring from you living, no one knows which. Careful of your dreams—the Spanth sleeps easy with her bird because it’s not got a human mind in it and because it loves her. You’ve a hostile intelligence within you, and it may try to worm its way into your mind. Dreams would be the best way, because we’re the least guarded then. If you sense yourself having a nightmare about the tattoo coming off you, especially if you bleed, wake yourself up, because it might be tearing itself off you to spill that killing bitch into your bed. But for now? They shouldn’t have the first clue where she went. You’ve hid the killer twice. Once in a cat and the cat in you. She’s as good as disappeared. When you’re ready to kill her, you can. But no mistake; you’ll need to kill her one day or the next. She’s in your blood, and you in hers. If she gets out of you, she’ll be able to find you wherever you go. Just by dreaming.”
That night, I lay in my cold bed considering my options. I still had the Guild to answer to, and the first of Vintners was coming fast.
Try to make Hrava by the first of Vintners, two bright moons hence.
New moon had been the night before.
Just shy of two weeks left in the month.
Seventeen days.
Not enough time to get so far, I thought.
How late would I be?
A week?
Two?
The word try was encouraging, with its suggestion the Guild understood unforeseen events. Like a kraken taking a whaler. But how much grace would they afford me, with their assassin gone silent? How often did she normally communicate with them, if she did?
And what day would trigger my own unseen, unheard, but soon felt punishment?
The bastard of it was that I had no way to know.
Every day past the first of the month was dice rolled with ever worsening odds, and all that I loved on the table.
Trapping their assassin in my flesh would, for the moment, save my Norrigal getting killed, for I was sure that was Sesta’s intention. If I left Galva, Malk, and Norrigal to their plan and went my own way, another Guildron would likely catch their trail and follow. The most obvious thing the Guild was after in sending me with Galva was getting their assassin near Queen Mireya, probably to kill her, but possibly to catch her. I had foiled this, though it would take them a while to figure it out.
My best chance was to help Galva do what she planned, for Norrigal was bound by Deadlegs to help the Spanth. Then I would take such money as I could to aid my flight. I couldn’t lie to myself. I was utterly bollocksed. One way or the other, the Guild would find out what I did and make an example of me. Unless I disappeared. If they knew I betrayed them, my family would come to grief. But if I were simply gone, and the assassin with me? Any number of misfortunes might have befallen us, and they wouldn’t waste time harming my kin when I might not have been at fault.
As for my chances to disappear, they increased with every step I took west. The Takers’ power was greatest in the east; Ispanthia, Gallardia, and Holt—they were still formidable in the central nations of Middlesea, Istrea, Sadunther, and Unther—but Molrova, Wostra, and Beltia, in the west, were mere outposts.
Brayce, between Holt and Middlesea in the north, was another possibility, as it was nearly uninterrupted forest from end to end. The Guild had no interest in taming the wild Braycish clans, and less in the trading of deer skins and lumber. What good was a thief in a kingdom of hunters, woodsmen, and war chiefs, whose strange timber capital, Door, was not so populous as the third largest city in Holt? Unless I wanted to take up long-axe and bow and live in a fucking treehouse hung with antlers and the hacked-off arms of my enemies, I’d best keep west.
It was known the kingdom of Oustrim, where we were now heading, had outlawed the Guild and driven them underground. I would say exiled them, but there’s no getting rid of the Takers—they just go into hiding, and there’s nobody better at that, but their presence would be much diminished in Oustrim, and a careful man, particularly one with a witchlet’s help, could likely slip their notice.
The problem with going west was that Oustrim was said to be full of giants and Molrova full of Molrovans. Still, disappearing takes luck and money, and the more of one you have, the less of the other you need. My best chance was to continue with Galva away from civilization and toward possible wealth.
Also, there was the very small matter of my being hopelessly enamored with Norrigal Na Galbraeth.
All roadsigns, every last one, pointed west.