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it wrote, and watching it make those strange marks I shouldn’t have been able to understand struck me as important, though I had yet to work out why.

There was one more discovery waiting for me that night in the palace, and I would owe it to that most dependable source of information: gossip.

“She’s alive?” one house-slave asked another. I had cracked the access-door in my own hallway, about to return home, when I heard voices and had to wait. This news one imparted to the other was big enough to turn them from walking and talking to stopping in the hallway for a proper chat.

“Yes! Isn’t it wonderful? The king’s own surgeon has been working on her in the ludus since the fight. I’ve been carrying messages back and forth.”

“Did you see her?”

“I did.”

“Do you think she’ll live?”

“I don’t know about such things, but she looks strong. She might. I heard King Agraias wanted it hidden from the hivelings that she had survived. He hopes she’ll fight again after they return east. He already had the tiger’s pelt flensed and left in her room as a gift for when she wakes.”

“Some gift. She loved that beast.”

“You know our masters don’t think as we do.”

“No. They’re harder.”

“They’re mean-hearted shit-fuckers,” the one said in a whisper, and they both laughed and looked around to make sure they weren’t heard. Well, clearly they were, but not by anyone about to disagree with them about the character of the Erydoni. I thought about writing DEATH TO THE SHIT-FUCKERS on the wall in solidarity with these two kynd slaves who’d found a hero in Galva—one their own size and sort who’d become the fiercest fighter on the blacksand—but then realized that of course they couldn’t read. Knowing letters was a kind of power, one the half-giants weren’t about to share with their chattel. None of the slaves would be invited to the Apocalypse the next day, when all of the Erydoni would gather to read their awful goddie’s high holy words.

This struck me as important as well, but I put it back for later and started thinking about what I’d heard.

However much Agraias wanted to please the goblin ambassadors, the barfy, balding old wanker loved the Tiger’s Sister as much as his subjects did. I did not doubt the whispers I was hearing, that he would have told the little karkers she died, but had her attended to by his personal surgeon rather than the butcher they used at the ludus. This surgeon had kept Hasp alive many months longer than he should have been; his potions were responsible for the several temporary recoveries that had us all thinking the old Galt would never really die. I have little doubt that Galva would have been piped away that afternoon without his ministrations.

I felt it in my skin that I had something big to do tonight. Fuck if I knew what it was, but it wasn’t dying by suicide attacking goblin ambassadors and their elite personal guards. Galva was alive. Alive! And I was going to get us out of here somehow.

But first I had a cat to coax back into his tattoo.

Did you ever fall into despair, recover, then fall again harder?

Getting Bully Boy safely stowed again didn’t take long, but it needed a level of concentration that allowed no other thoughts to intrude. I hadn’t awakened and then becalmed my little feline sleeper tattoo nearly as much as Galva had her war corvid, so it was a harder thing for me. And once I got it done, my mind was empty of everything but his contented purring as he passed from waking flesh to sleeping ink. It was empty of my previous despair, and empty also of my recent fortitude. But when even the purring stilled, and with it the tranquility that a good purr always brings, the hopelessness came crashing back. I’d figured out where the water in the sathium tunnels had come from and made a new friend. Harralah for me. Galva was still alive, though hurt and stuck in her ludus. Two harralahs for her. But those nine goblins slept, if they slept, cozy in whatever the fuck they sleep in, dreaming of eating kynd thigh meat raw in a bowl of poison mushrooms just after knocking down the walls of whichever of our cities they’d care to dust with thunder.

I was failing.

I couldn’t yet say I’d failed, but that seemed a technicality.

Better a thrice-bound thief than a fool, the saying went, but here I was thrice-bound and no decent thief.

A fool only.

My future looked full of royal beatings, the eventual death of my only kynd friend in the arena, the smell of winey upchuck, and, eventually, news that the fourth and likely final Goblin War had started with a lot of booms and bangs.

It occurred to me to cut my own throat, and I honestly might have done except I was too tired to pull Bully Boy out again, and it didn’t seem right to risk killing him just because I wanted no more of being one of the smallest and weakest members of one of the smallest and weakest races of man-things. What had I ever had but poor options? I could have gone to war, property of the Holtish army, and if I’d lived, depending on how much of me had come back, I’d have been working the silver mines or begging in the streets. Instead, I’d sold myself body and soul to the Takers, chucking myself as far west as you could go straight into actual fucking slavery, without even the illusion of choice as a lubricant.

Were I to cut my throat, and I’m not saying I was going to, but hypothetically, I would need to write a note to Galva and give it to someone I could trust to get it to her. Who would that be? The night cyclops? The kitchen lad Hasp had been friendly with? And what language would I write her in? I had been starting to learn Ispanthian, as she had asked me to against the day I might go back with her to that warm, proud kingdom in the east; but I wouldn’t say my understanding was up to the task of explaining my sorrow to leave her behind and my hope that she would one day win her freedom and get back to our barely civilized excuse for a civilization. Fuck if I would write the last words of my life in Holtish, the language of Galtia’s oppressors, even if it was a much-shared tongue thanks to those karkers having a good navy.

I picked up the not-so-sharp knife I had and found a stone I could sharpen it against.

Not for any particular reason.

Just sharpening it.

Knives had many uses, and a sharp one was better for all of them than a dull one.

Maybe, on the remote chance, less than a hair’s breadth against a mile, that I might decide to open a vein, I could write my next-to-last letter to Galva in Holtish, and then, just as a bite-my-knap to that language of barnacled bastards and badger-buggers, pen my final one to Quiggles Fucking Silversides the fucking cuttlefish.