Page 92 of The Thrice-Bound Fool

And that’s when Galva did it.

She put her sword down.

“What the crying fuck?” I actually said, and the princess pinched me hard. Oh, I’d have liked to cut the throat on her.

The crowd made an excited noise, though some booed, and one laughed. What was this little gladiator doing? Was she giving up? You don’t surrender to a fucking tiger, the terms are awful.

But she wasn’t surrendering at all.

She still had the shield in her left hand, but she lowered it.

Looking right at the thing.

She put her hand up, then slowly put it down, with her palm toward the sand, like you’d do to tell a dog to sit. And you’ll think I’m lying, but Jubel the fucking tiger closed her mouth and sat. Watching Galva. Curious, like. And what did that mad Spanth do? She knelt down and sat on her heels. Just two killers taking a bit of sun on a black patch of volcanic sand.

Everyone was transfixed.

The crowd made a rising oooooh sound when it scooted forward at her and reached its paw out. But it wasn’t trying to grab her. It rolled over on its back, still reaching. It was playing, just like Butter the cat. Or Bully, if he heard you, the little blind sprumlet.

The tiger wanted her belly rubbed.

Galva obliged, and even from the stands I could see the grin on her.

The crowd was laughing, maybe out of pure joy—that’s what I felt, seeing neither of these glorious beasts was about to die.

Now the ringmaster rode up on the camel he towered over the arena with and started shouting at Galva, and like as not the tiger, too, feeling no doubt that he’d been made a mockery of. He was ignored. So he dropped the Erydoni tongue and started in with slave talk. My tongue. But Galva had started picking some up in the ludus, so she understood when he said, “Fight!”

Yet still she rubbed the big kitty’s belly while it pawed gently at her face.

You should have heard the half-giants laugh.

Of course, they laughed harder when he hit Galva across the cheek with the butt of the long spear he carried, because they’re vicious cunts, as I’ve told you.

But you know who wasn’t laughing.

Galva.

She stood up faster than you’d believe—that kneel the Calar Bajat fighters get into isn’t like a proper sit, it’s actually a ready pose—and she stood. The tiger figured out it was getting-up time as well and she rolled onto her feet, too.

“You want fight?” Galva said, in Arvisk, or Galtish, and that’s the first time I’d heard her speak it.

The marshal gestured at the tiger with the spear, which he’d flipped around so the pointy end was ready.

He was good and high up on that camel, but after the fight with the Free Wankers of the Twigs and Berries on the steppes, I could have told him he wasn’t high enough. Galva ducked that spear like the ringmaster was moving through water and leapt, half climbing the camel, and grabbing his arm. She twisted and flung that kark right off his saddle. And who was waiting for him? Jubel the fucking tiger. It was no hard guess that she’d felt the butt-end or maybe even the point of his spear through the bars of her cage a few times, because she leapt on him like she’d been waiting her whole life for it. I’ll bet they heard the crowd cheering and laughing all the way back across the Thralls. I’ll bet Norrigal heard it in the Snowless Wood.

Now maybe you’re thinking Galva did a foolish thing, throwing her life away by laying hands on a master, and she a slave. And normally, you’d be right. That’s a killing offense, and not a quick killing either. That’s the sort of thing that can make you grow a hat of fire and sing a brass song up on old Thumos’s mountain.

But there was an unwritten rule in the Palace of Bones; you can get away with anything—short perhaps of harming a royal or a priest—as long as it’s sufficiently entertaining. And I’m here to tell you, watching that leap, and then watching that bastard’s face go in the tiger’s mouth, was whiskey and cake.

Whiskey. And. Cake.

34The Tiger’s Sister

Speaking of things people take pleasure from, I got the opium not off the king but off that wee seven-foot minister of his with the blue cloak sewn with coral. I don’t really want to talk about it much because I got into his chambers while he was belly-down on a table getting clystered, and if you don’t know what that is, don’t go asking anybody what it means; you’re better off. We’ll just say that, belly-down, he was more in a position to enjoy his pipe—the one in his mouth—than to protect the little pearly purse he keeps the tarry black in, and I had off with that. Probably the servant performing the grim service for him got blamed, but a thief who worries about every skin but his own will not be long in the trade, and perhaps not even in his skin.

One thing worth noting is that I found the sathium tunnel I made use of to get from the hall outside my door to the hall outside his was wet. Salt water again. I had no idea what it was about, as I understood us to be far from a coast, and nor was the climate here anything like damp enough to leach through the stone and make a puddle, salty or fresh. The Sunless Sea was said to be nearest, though still a day’s journey south and west. I never saw it, though I tasted a fair few fish from its strangely lighted depths. Slaves from the east like to talk about that sea, and it’s hard to know truth from rumor. One of the more fantastical creatures said to swim about in that vast blackness is a sort of mermaid, even more elusive than the ones in the Hot Sea you sometimes hear sunstruck sailors rave about. These are called glass mermaids, and you can faintly see the darker heart and liver of them through their skin so white as to be almost clear. That puts me off a bit, I confess. I wouldn’t mind a snog with a mermaid just to see what it’s like, but only if it’s the kind modest enough to hide her innards if not her knaps.

So, yeah, I pinched Zherit Dayborn’s poppy-nectar and got it to him the next day. He was slightly less of a cunt to me, now that I’d shown myself capable, and I knew I could go to him for another favor if needed. That’s really all there is to say about that rather easy bit of theftwork. I had mastered the palace and, as I was taught to do at the Low School, made myself indispensable to important persons.