Page 4 of The Thrice-Bound Fool

It wasn’t long after that we found ourselves at the uphill half-dilapidated provisioner’s looking for a guide over the Thralls. So, right. I was listing the good things of each candidate. One-Eye was an Oustrim man named Gredjyk, fortyish, blond and tan and gristled. Bit of a belly on him, but it wasn’t hurting his love life. He recognized me from my walk, of course, and even looked at me with a little twinkle in his eye, like he thought he had something over the other mountain guide because he and I had shared a how-d’ya-do.

The Wostran was a straight criminal. Had one of those Wostran tassled, semi-shapeless hats in vivid colors, this one red, and he was small and mustachioed. He was armed with a medium-size crossbow, a spear with a serrated bit in the middle of the head, and at least three visible knives. His hands lacked a few fingers, but whether from goblins or frostbite was anybody’s guess. I guessed frostbite. He had the eely look of a slipper, meaning one who’d slipped the muster and not gone to the wars.

Like me.

There was no candlelight in the provisioner’s, so I couldn’t see if he had a Guild tattoo, but the Guild wasn’t strong out here, or so I thought and hoped. Happily, he also couldn’t see my Guild tattoo, though the Debtor’s Hand would be perfectly plain on my cheek the first time we shared a fire. That hand cost me a hard slap on that cheek nearly every time I went to a tavern; the slapper got a free beer on the Guild, and I couldn’t say shyte about it. One thing for the Wostran—he smelled better than the goat man, but that’s little wonder.

I took another look at One-Eye.

“That’s the fellow from the field,” I said to Galva, confident One-Eye spoke no or little Holtish.

“You mean…?”

“Yah,” I said, quickly making little goat horns with my fingers, hiding this with a turn of my body.

She looked disgusted.

“How about you?” I said to the Wostran. “You speak any Holtish? Or Ispanthian?”

“I am speaking little,” he said.

“What can you do for us?”

“Keep you life. If you not stupid.”

“How about you?” I said to the goat man. Then I said it in Galtish and Ispanthian.

He said something in Gunnish, smiled at us, and nodded like he thought the interview was going great.

“That’ll do,” I said to the provisioner, and then I looked at the Wostran.

“You’re hired.”

“That is it?” Galva said.

“Yah.”

“Just because he speaks a little Holtish and the other does not?”

“It’s a coin toss anyway,” I said. “The provisioner recommended both of them. What the kark was I gonna ask them? How many clients they’d killed and eaten? Whether they were going to piss in the tent or outside of it? How they like their bacon? At least this one can say yes, no, or maybe.”

Sensing the matter had been sorted, and not in his favor, One-Eye grew agitated. But he didn’t get proper angry until he called the provisioner over and, with a little translating, had the results explained to him. He nearly came to blows with the Wostran, then said something accusatory to me in rapid Gunnish, jabbing his finger at me close enough I was tempted to out my better knife, Palthra, or petal, and shave it off him. Instead, I said, “I didn’t say a thing, I promise. Goats around here, they just can’t keep their mouths shut.”

At my own mention of shut mouths, I remembered something that had occurred to me in the morning. I scanned a crooked shelf stacked with ironmongery until my eyes alit upon two toothy semicircles of black, rust-pitted iron joined in the middle by an axis and a small, flat pan.

“How much for the bear trap?” I asked.

3The Last Town for Fuck-All Miles

We left the provisioner’s well provisioned indeed. We expected the Thralls to take a month or more to cross, though so few who’d been over them came back that this was less an estimate than a guess with notions. I had enough furs, tarp, rope, tools, and other necessities to droop any lesser donkey than ours. I had no less than sixty arrows with ugly, matted fletching and rusty little leaf-shaped heads—a bit long for my draw, but they flew well enough. Galva had found three sticky goatskins of what she pronounced the worst wine in Manreach, but whether we still were in Manreach was open to argument.

Our Wostran, a trapper, hunter, guide, and, as I would learn from his stories, arsonist, walked well ahead of us, steering us up the ever-steepening foothills that led to the Thralls. He’d traded his tasseled red chapeau, as obvious as blood on a bedsheet, for a brownish fur hat that covered his ears. It was getting colder, but I had resolved to put off looking like a rodent until the last possible instant. I made buckteeth like a beaver at the back of his head, so of course that was the moment he chose to look behind him. I turned my beaver-face into a sneeze because I really couldn’t go offending the one person of the three of us with a chance to get us over the Thralls, god of mischief or no. It wasn’t like old Fothannon Foxfoot would help me in the mountains if our guide left us to die. He’d just laugh. Making him laugh is supposed to get you into paradise, but I wasn’t ready yet and only half believed that shyte anyway. I mean, I was looking forward to running around bare-arsed in a cool forest full of clear streams and nymphs and such, fucking and eating honeycomb and telling jokes by fires whose smoke never blew in your face. Who wouldn’t?

Well, Galva, for one. She was looking forward to walking from the depths of “this sea of troubles” we lived in—no argument there—and meeting Dalgatha, the Skinny Woman, like a bridegroom and a bride, or in this case, two brides, and that was fine by Galva. What happens after that she’d never really said, but it starts with the romantic beach meeting. Worshippers of Mithrenor, god of the sea with his two fishy tails, go into the sea and are carried by merfolk into an underwater city of wonders. So, nobody agrees on what paradise looks like. Hell gets a lot more consensus. Darkness, fire, and devils. Sometimes cold and darkness and devils. And the devils might be spiny or scaly, or in the shape of worms, or covered in broken glass and shyte or whatever, but they’re nothing you’d want to meet is the point. There’s always devils, so maybe there’s something to that.

Goblins are close enough to devils, and they’re as real as brass.

The more important thing about all these stories is they agree completely on what death isn’t. And what it isn’t, to hear any kynd with a whiff of religious feeling tell it, is lying in a dark hole and rotting. Losing your skin and gaining a grin, as they say in Holt. What it isn’t is being still and quiet forever without a thought in your mud-packed skull. Which is curious, because that’s the one thing death actually looks like from the outside. There are days, mostly days ending in y, where I think maybe it’s just all stories we tell ourselves because we can’t buck up and look at a world we’re no longer glorifying with our very important business of eating, dunging, and scratching our itchy bits. I mean what in the moist, hairy kark would the world do without us, and by us, I mean me, because sod you.