Page 9 of The Thrice-Bound Fool

“Othbleddr?” I said, recalling the word on the sign hanging off that woman, remembering an instant too late that it meant “adulteress.”

“AIE!” she yelled in fury, but it sounded so much like “aye,” I had a chuckle. Which made her madder. She chucked a rock up at me. But now Galva came up behind her, knocked the seax out of the woman’s hand with the edge of her shield.

“Don’t kill her!” I said.

Galva knocked her down with the shield, stunned her.

“Why not?”

“Because she’ll know where the cave is.”

“What cave?”

“Fuck if I know. But that Wostran’s like to be dead. If he is, she’s our guide now.”

What followed was a real pain in the arse, and weird besides.

We had to get back to the trail, likely in the other direction from where this limping kark’s cave and our destination would be, secure the donkey and the corvid, see if any of the wounded were still alive, and decide whether to kill them for mercy or prudence’s sake if they were.

But we were in for a few surprises.

First of all, while the donkey stood docile, chewing at scrubby grass on the rock wall, the corvid was nowhere in sight. Happily, we soon heard her crark, and Galva ran off toward her. I brought our prisoner along at a much slower pace.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said when I finally caught up.

The bird was stalking, rasping and hissing at the Wostran, who was up and walking, fast and janky, despite being dead. Yeah, you heard me. Instead of the red hat he wore in town or the furry business he wore in the mountains, he now wore the Book of the Full shadow like a hat, open on top of his crown.

“Elynnyr bear witness,” I said.

The captured woman, Ylda, made a distressed noise to see her husband or former husband in such a state despite her earlier enthusiasm for killing him. Love’s complicated, you know?

The book had inky tendrils running from its open pages into Worrig’s ears, eyes, nose, and mouth. I remember one image I had seen in the book, just about halfway through it; an illustration of a tentacled jellyfish of sorts, called a Mithrene warboat because it floats on the Mithrene Sea and dangles tentacles down to kill wee fish with. Now I saw the dire purpose of the thing. A way to give the book legs by driving dead men. At least, I was pretty sure Worrig was dead.

Maybe it would be best to ask him.

“Oi, man, you dead?” I said.

For answer, he gave me a groan that you’d expect to hear from the deadest-sounding live person or the most alive-sounding dead person you’d ever met. His eyes all rolled up white in his head didn’t help settle the matter.

While I was working out what to do, Galva stepped up, clearly set to cut Worrig’s head off, but before she could strike, the book pulled its tendrils back inside itself, and the Wostran dropped like a sack of meat. Dead as cold hell. He burped, the dead do that sometimes, and a wash of blood and ink came out of his nose and mouth in case I had any doubts about it. The book lay in the road, still, like a naughty student who hopes to escape a scolding by not being noticed.

“How the fuck did you get out of the pack?” I said, but it didn’t answer.

The tendrils that had come out of it were awfully long.… Had it unreeled one to where the Wostran lay dying, or dead, and made him free it? Why hadn’t it served one of us so when we slept near it?

Only the dead, I thought, and I wasn’t sure it came from me. But it made sense. If I had died, that thing would have slithered a feeler up my nose and mounted me like a donkey.

I had to get somewhere safe with that book and learn its secrets—chief among them whether the Guild had killed the horses and which of the crowned heads in Manreach were under their hand—before one of those secrets killed us. “What’s in there will rend your Guild to tatters,” Deadlegs had said, and she knew her business. I had never had a more important, deadly, or uncertain task ahead of me than getting into that book and reading what only the twelve—now eleven—Full Shadows of the Guild (and a few birth-gifted Ciphers like me) could read without dying.

But it also occurred to me, for the first time but not the last, that we might all be better off without the karking thing. It was a bastard’s bastard and full of tricks that were well beyond my ken, now and maybe for good.

The lair of these mountain brigands wasn’t just a cave. It was a proper little fortress, complete with a stone wall overlooking the pass, murder holes, and a ready supply of fist-to-head-sized rocks for chucking on the taxman, should he find you here. Happily, the whole band of seven had been out to kill us—a consumptive, one-legged fisher-boy could have held this place against us, had there been one left. But now we had two prisoners: Worrig’s wife, Ylda, and the girleen whose hand and cheek I had married with an arrow. Both were badly hurt but like to heal if their wounds could be kept fresh.

What to do with them, there was the question.

We had killed four of their six comrades, with two unaccounted for. They knew these passes, and we didn’t. They were scared shyteless about how this was going to end.

Couldn’t fault them for it.