Page 19

“Yah, well, maybe not that page. Now repeat what you said a moment ago.”

Kinch Na Shannack, you are in exquisite trouble.

“That’s two of us,” I said, moving the smoking punk and its raisin of fire closer.

If only I could accept the gift you offer, but I am bound to live and serve.

“Seems to me you’d want out of this hole, too, to have a better chance of doing your work.”

Perhaps.

“So how do we get rid of those feathered arseholes upstairs?”

The Istrean Greenwolf isn’t a wolf at all—it’s a plant that eats flies, mice, and small birds. It looks like a series of squarish green books, if books had frilly eyelashes, open to show purplish insides. Don’t ever touch one of these vile things, or you’ll be losing skin. You see, that purple bit is covered with a glue so strong carpenters and hatmakers harvest it for their craft. They got farms of them near the Odd Cities in Istrea, and the better-off citizens perch them on their windows to cut down on flies and lessen the chance the dread Smiling Sickness visits their home. There’s something in that glue that flies just love. Hummingbirds as well. The bigger ones can take a rat.

The book had opened itself to a page showing an expert illustration of one of these green beasties, its stalk all coiled in knots, its book-like mouth open, with a constellation of moths, flies, bees, and small birds pasted to it. In one tendril, it held a sort of oil-pot with a slender spout. When I tipped the book upright, the spout protruded. And when, as instructed by the Book of the Full Shadow, I tipped it more, a finger-thick stream of glue came out of the spout, slow as syrup. I used a small branch with dead leaves on it to dab this glue on a much larger branch I had harvested from the tree, with Galva’s help. It was almost as long as Galva was tall. On this branch, I had already stuck strips of donkey meat in various places (sorry, donkey, I know I do your race no favors). On one end of the branch I had tied a rope.

The owl-things had been watching the whole process, the smell of cut meat making them slaver and bob their heads as they do, clicking and hooing.

“That’s right, you wee cunts, click and bob, click and bob.”

The Spanth shook her head, as she always did when I spoke to animals or objects.

I handed her the branch, for she had a stronger arm than I did. Much stronger.

“Mind you only grab it here. No, HERE!”

She took it up like a javelin.

“Don’t touch your shoulder with it, for kark’s sake.”

“I have thrown a chodadu javelin before, thief.”

“Yah, but not one covered in glue and filets of donkey, I’ll wager.”

“Be still.”

She stepped carefully on the precarious ridge, then threw, and threw hard—you forget what a brute the woman is until she moves with a purpose.

The branch flew up and over the edge of the sort of cliff above us.

The owl-monsters watched its progress with great interest.

It sailed out of our sight, and they followed, already fighting each other over the right to tear into it first. One birdie’s excited clicking soon turned to screeching. Then they were all screeching.

“That ought to do it,” I said.

Now Galva and I worked together to heave up the root-end of the balanced tree. It made a great, grinding crack and slide as it pitched over and fell, both of us hugging the rock we stood on as flat as we could against the possibility of a branch or root hooking us down with it. It tumbled, dragging the rope attached to the baited branch, and I heard them screaming.

“This is for you, Foxfoot. I give you four screaming chickens on a stick,” I said as the stuck, howling owl-things were dragged over us and down in a shower of feathers, rocks, snow, and shyte; yah, they shat as they fell, and you would have, too. “And if you’ve seen anything funnier this week, I’ll kiss your little fox bollocks.”

They crashed into the deep, yelling all the while, and good riddance.

But they weren’t the only ones to yell that day.

I heard a snip come from the high rock spike and saw the dead donkey, with all our saddlebags strapped to it, go tumbling after the owls and the tree.

“Noooooooooo!” I yelled, despite my Guild training, for there went our food, our warmth, our very lives. Movement caught my eye, and I saw what had betrayed us—the Book of the Full Shadow, for all that it was bear-trapped to the rocks, had sent an inky tendril from the page with the Mithrene warboat drawing on it, the same sort that had strung into Wostran’s head to make a puppet of him just a day ago. I watched as the eelish tendril snapped back into the book, with the dull glint of something like steel in the half-light. A blade. It had used a blade to cut that donkey’s strap and doom us.