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“If we start a fight on the roof, especially with that bird, the steersman might decide not to land that cloud-ship.”

She nodded, but in a way that meant she heard me, not that she agreed. You get to know a person’s gestures, that means you know them well. That’s how animals know us, not through words but how we look at them, how we stand, where we put our hands.

There’s no lying in the language of the flesh.

I eased the gate open, and she, I, and the corvid moved from the ascender landing to the roof proper.

Now she went to my ear with, “If we let the goblins get aboard, maybe the crew is here for them, with orders to get them home. Then we have to fight the crew, too.” The impressive thing was that while she spoke to me, she reached out and grabbed Dalgatha’s beak, pushing it down, which I guess means, Don’t eat those karkers just yet.

Galva didn’t attack, and she didn’t let the bird attack.

I had a feeling she’d done the same math I had—the crew, the goblins, and ourselves all wanted the ship for different purposes. It would be a three-way fight. And the last to jump in usually won those.

We waited.

Now the ship thumped and bumped to a halt, and a halfie had tied the ship down.

The goblins struck.

It was nine goblins against five Erydoni.

Only, the five Moth Knights of the Deepest Hive were the ones who really engaged. They leapt on the half-giants and had jabbed those poisoned spears into three of their foes before they knew the fight was on. And that poison is the fastest-acting stuff I’ve ever seen—in a scarce few heartbeats, the three wounded halfies fell on the deck of the cloud-ship twitching their way into whatever sooty afterlife Thumos promised. Before he fell, one soldier managed to shove his blackglass spear through a biter, armor and all, as you’d run a knife through a slightly tough melon.

“Move!” Galva said, and we stole quickly toward the fight.

Of the last two halfies, one was killed outright in the next beat, a Moth Knight stabbing him in the groin while another put his point through the eye.

The last man, the pilot, struck the head from a biter with his blackglass sword, and as the three Moth Knights did for him, we lit into the ambassadors. Well, Galva and Dalgatha did. I managed to knife one kark in the back, I’m good at that, but then I leapt clear. All I had was a sad-bastard knife to attack with and nothing to stop their poisoned blades but an arse-shake and a smile. It didn’t matter. Dalgatha was proof against their poison and Galva had a sword, and that magnificent shield. As on the battlefields of Gallardia, the corvid pecked, tore, and maimed goblins, tossing the stunned and injured behind her for Galva to finish. The ambassadors were butchered, there’s no better word for it, a torrent of green blood soaking the red stones, getting clotted up with ash on the ground and ash still falling. I saw one of their silver masks in a puddle of the gray-green muck, but I only had a glimpse because one of the Moth Knights cut the ropes securing the cloud-ship and it started to heave up into the dirty gray sky.

Now the three big biters got into the cloud-ship and braced to repel boarders, meaning us.

I picked up one of the goblin spears and leapt, using its hook to pull myself up and over onto the deck.

“Why the fuck did I do that?” I actually said and had no answer for myself as two of the ugly karkers came running to kill me. They would have done, too, despite my very basic goblin-spear training in the Ludus of the Green Devil, had not the cloud-ship pitched violently, I guessed from the weight of Dalgatha grabbing the dangling end of the cut mooring rope and pulling down. The goblins both slid, coming to rest on the lip of the deckwall. I slid, too, but instead of dropping my spear and grabbing for something to hold, which I think I could have done, I let myself slide point-first at the leftmost Hordelaw shytestain, laughing with the sheer stupidity of it and hoping to get Foxfoot’s attention. If I died laughing or amused him, I might flip from this hell into a Galtish heaven despite my many failings. But before the goblin and I could impale each other, Dalgatha had managed a wing-assisted leap onto the deck.

My laughter caught in my throat as two things happened at once.

The second was that my spear went straight up whatever passes for a bunger on the goblin I had sledded into, and I murdered him proper.

But not before it happened.

So much of this is luck, you know, and this was a bad bit of it.

Dalgatha landed practically on top of the two Moth Knights, and she couldn’t see them bunched as they were on their lip of wood. They both drove their spears hard into her belly.

She screamed.

The cloud-ship righted itself, so the deck was flat again. The one I was half up the arse of died. Galva clambered onto the deck, saw that her corvid was down. She screamed and came at the last biter. He took his spear out of the dying bird and got to his feet. I saw the pilot’s blackglass sword on the deck, and I took it up and stabbed at the kark’s back, but slipped on the corvid’s blood and fell, hitting him clumsily and causing no harm. No harm, I say, but looking away in a fight is harm enough, and when he stole a glance at me, Galva hit him so hard with her shield she knocked him into me and the three of us went down again. He tried to bite my face off, but I whipped my head back like a cat ducking a snake, too fast for him. Those awful teeth snapped just in front of my nose, and I smelled everything that was in his mouth, and none of it was good.

Dalgatha, whom I thought already dead, had one last fuck you in her for the goblin horde—her beak was near enough the Moth Knight’s foot that she snapped at it the way he’d snapped at my face. She didn’t miss, though, and had the wee cunt’s foot off. Now Galva was up on her knees, and the thing grappled her, it was like the two of them danced drunkenly, as the bear and Jubel the tiger had. Galva had her head bulled against its head, her face turned away to keep clear of its teeth.

Her hand groped at its belt, looking for a knife or other weapon.

I picked up the sword again.

It grabbed up her shield, which she’d dropped.

I saw too late to brace myself that the cloud-ship was about to bump against a spire on the roof of the palace, and when we did, the goblin was jarred into the deckwall again.