Page 18 of The Thrice-Bound Fool

What else did we have?

Food, water, whiskey; though not much. Furs, tarps, tinder, punk, and torches. Stakes and a hammer. Waterproofing lard. A wee saw, an axe, a few other tools. That wicked-evil book bound in an iron bear trap. That book was full of tricks, traps, and spells, mind, maybe even one that could kill a herd of freakish great owls, but I had no time to read it. And the gods knew it was like to do for us if I freed it.

How would I read it anyway, dark as it was down here, me balanced awkwardly on this rock-spine? I suppose I could rope myself in and hang, then light the lamp. I could just see the lamp oil flask in the packs, and there was the tinder.

I wish I knew someone who’d read the book already, to ask them what page to look on, but as it was written in the Murder Alphabet, the list of people who’d read it was confined to a few Full Shadows of the Takers Guild, plus myself, gifted as I am in reading tongues. The book was smart, though.

“What are you doing?” the Spanth said.

“Thinking,” I said.

“Can you do this faster?”

“Not with you wagging your bean-tickler at me. Now leave me be, something’s coming to me.”

If there’s such a thing as haughty silence, that’s what Galva gifted me.

I used it.

After a moment, I grinned.

“Book of the Full Shadow,” I told it, “I am your true and proper master, having lawfully found and claimed you, as is the right of any thief with any thing whatever that should fall under his hand. Having mastered your deadly letters, thus proving my right to traffic with you, I command you to speak to me.”

Nothing.

I splashed it with lamp oil.

It sputtered, I swear it did, then sprung itself open, having been mostly loosed from its bear trap and lying on the trunk of the balanced tree as it was. I’d left the rear cover of it in the bear trap, the chain of it wrapped around a rock spur so it couldn’t go flipping itself off into darkness.

“You’ll see or smell that I’ve got a smoldering wick of punk here. And if die we must, as it seems we must without your help, in the name of the Forbidden God, I promise to burn you to fucking ashes.”

It flipped its pages now.

Opened to the page with the mouth, the one it had opened to when it tried that stunt at the westernmost inn in the world. It spoke.

Its voice was a dry rasp but tempered with something almost human, a high note like a woman, child, or castrato.

Ty? Ty n’ coulms pēct li num dou deāct andiget.

Gallardian. Like the writing on the front of it.

I’d caught the word andiget, forbidden, so deāct was like to be god; but it would be slow going if I had to try to reason out every word.

“Do you speak Holtish?”

Alas, I do, it said, with a strong Gallardian accent.

“Then please do so.”

An ugly language. A language of cobblers, good only for speaking with boot nails in the mouth.

“I’m happy to speak Galtish with you if you know it.”

Only Galts speak Galtish. Why learn the language of the slave when you already speak the language of the master?

“I’ll be ripping out a random page and wiping my arse with it when next you slander the blacktongues.”

It now flipped to a page with an elaborate ink drawing of a kraken. As I watched, the kraken’s beak pushed up off its page, started biting gently at the air.