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I needed help with this situation.

I thought about peeling open the Book of the Full Shadow, but that’s the last book in which I’d look for healing arts. Not that I’d managed to read much of it, and not that I had a library to choose from, but I’m just saying it wasn’t made to preserve the lives of kynd but to end or encumber them.

I knew better than to ask Fothannon Foxfoot for anything. If I prayed him to heal her, he might do, but then he’d cripple her in a fall or make me twice as sick to punish me for bothering him without amusing him. I thought about the other deities in Galtish godlore, none of whom I’d made myself beloved of, but maybe a homegrown goddie would be better than nothing in a pinch.

I’ve already spoken of Solgrannon Bloodmuzzle, the pack-lord of battle, and he’s a good one to pledge your death to when facing extreme odds in a fight. Mithrenor was a mighty one, but not Galtish, though he’d replaced the old Galtish sea god with my people by being more interesting. The Galtish version was just a big whale, nice enough fella, kind of simple if you ask me, but not the twin-tailed, storm-whipping, city-drowning whoremaster Mithrenor was. But since we were about as far from a fucking sea as you could get, and he was kind of a bastard besides, he’d be useless to my half-dying Spanth.

Elynnyr the Silent had huge eyes and no mouth, and you called on her to witness oaths, agreements, and the worst of sights. Normally she was just there for comfort or assurance, but the other gods could cut a bloody mouth under her nose and bid her speak when only she could set a matter right. They’d have to loan her their tongue, though, to assure their silence while she said her truth. A mortal might ask her to do the same to herself, but only to right a dreadful wrong, and whoever’s tongue she decided to take wouldn’t be getting it back after she spoke.

Haros the stag was only good for fucking, love spells, fertility, and more fucking. And even if Galva liked little thiefy men, or men at all, and I liked women with nothing on them softer than a hickory workbench, she was in no shape for embraces.

We Galts had a god of healing, mind, but I knew precious little about them. Their name was Solf Hiray, the Sapling, and they appeared as a young girl, or a young boy, or a small tree, at their pleasure. If they agreed to help, they’d take the injury or sickness unto themselves; but they were small, mind, and if you called them for an injury too big for them to absorb, they’d spread the rest of the hurt to the person most beloved to the aggrieved. If that was you, brilliant, you had the right to trade your hurt for another’s. But in Galva’s case, the beloved would likely be Queen Mireya of Oustrim, former queen of Gallardia, infanta of Ispanthia—Galva’s royal countrywoman and onetime lover. As much as I wanted Galva well, I wouldn’t want to have to answer for injury I caused her queen—that is, if the Sapling deigned to make an appearance. Like most gods, there was an argument to be made that they hadn’t as much substance to them as a weak fart. I’d certainly seen a blacktongue or two call on them, but none of those miraculously recovered. Well, one recovered, but in the usual way. And the other was as dead as last summer.

No, I decided on the second day in the lair, calling on the gods was a fool’s errand.

“Solf Hiray, blessed quickgreen sapling, stiller of fever and stauncher of blood, I know not if these are your preferred titles. And I know my face is strange to you, having never rightly tithed. But I wonder if, not for my sake but for that of this honorable knight who lies stricken, you might lessen her travail? And if you must share her hurt, share it with me; for, though I am far from her most cherished, yet am I near.”

I had lit some stinking lamps and now waved their greasy smoke about with Galva’s precious springwood shield, having no idea if this would help or harm negotiations with the god. Neither had I any notion if we were too far away from Galtia, plum at the other end of the known world, for Solf Hiray to be able to hear me at all. The wind howled in the lair’s doorway like a hungry thing, and Galva sweated her furs damp, or fouled them with waste faster than I could change them. I tried to keep water in her, but she threw it up half the time. I was losing the battle. And getting tired, besides. I had for uncounted hours been afraid to lie down lest Galva steal away from me as I slept. To be piped away by Samnyr Na Gurth, as my legends said, or united on the strand with her Serene Lady, as she believed. As I coughed from the lamp-smoke, it all seemed like karkery to me.

Was there really any more to death than the snuffing of a flame that came from nothing, and back to nothing went?

While she lay stewing in her fever, I sat near and bent to study the Book of the Full Shadow. I had some ink and paper in the pack I wore close, and I set them near me now. I had nearly put them in the larger packs, and had I done so, they would have gone down the chasm with the donkey, the provisions, and our hopes generally. The bear trap lay near just in case I needed to snap it back on the murderous thing, and I suppose it knew that, because it offered no obvious mischief, at least at first.

I lingered only briefly on the larger illustrations, some done in black ink and sepia, some I thought in blood; a dragon, the beaky kraken from before, various crabs and mouths, a man with two short swords pointed at his head. An arsenal of murders, no doubt. Most disturbing was a gallows tree with the hanged men and women upside down, their feet toward the sky, their nooses taut as if to keep the hanged from flying, and all of them smiling. Meanwhile, on the ground, the chainsfolk and watchers lay dead, and dead birds as well; one dead, grinny fellow in an executioner’s hat held a piece of parchment with writing on it that was too small for me to read. That scene had been done in grubby, browny-black ink I thought was made from burned gallows noose and infants’ blood, and it frightened me that I knew that, like the book had told me without words.

I tried not to look at any one of these images too long, lest they draw me into them. I sensed the book wanted very much to draw me in.

So I went to the bits between the pictures and read text in the Murder Alphabet. Some of it was ledger-stuff—expenses of the Full Shadow while he served in Hrava. But instead of bribes, poisons, and the wages of magickers and artificers, as you’d expect, I was reading about the most banal sort of business: pigeons, bread, and legumes for meals; razors for shaving heads and dyes for lepers’ robes, for the Guild survived in that city disguised as the afflicted, not bothered on their island even by Galva’s beloved witch-queen who’d outlawed them, for she couldn’t see them there. And why? Sure and they’d wanted to kill her, or better, capture her, and that they’d done at last when the giants they’d provoked came and threw the city of Hrava into chaos. But why had it taken them so long to take one woman down, as good as they were at general bastardy and artful murder?

Not any woman, I reminded myself, a witch-queen who talked to animals and brought rain.

Leaving that aside, how did the bigguns cross? There was a fit question, for I’d rather go toward their home in the Giantlands by whatever channel they’d arrived than through blizzards and chasms as we’d done so far, getting chased by karking owls.

Of course, they’d come in the summer, not in the gloaming.

Still, the snow never left those peaks.

“How the spiny devils did they get across?” I muttered at the book.

Are you asking? said a papery voice, and I wasn’t sure if I heard or thought it.

“I am.”

What will you give me?

“What do you want?”

A parley.

“Well, we’re talking now, aren’t we?”

Not really. I want to see you.

“So look.”

You’re not being helpful.

And at that, the book went dead in my arms and felt like just a book. I hadn’t even realized that it felt like a living thing before, or at least a wakeful one, until it slept in protest. So I looked and looked, skipping past the most wicked sorts of illustrations, meant only for the eyes of the Guild’s most high, I thought, these between strangely sparse and dull rations of text. I skimmed through bits about the Forbidden God, telling myself I’d get back to those later, though they mostly seemed the same drivel you’d hear about any deity. Highest one, Most to be served, bollocks like that. Only one bit seemed interesting—Taster of all the world’s horrors and delights. Sounds like someone I’d get along with, him. Or her. Or it. What was it, a great fucking black tongue? Anyway, I was disappointed. I had been curious, you know? How do you not be curious about a forbidden fucking god? I mean, the Allgod was the opposite, wasn’t he? The recommended god. The perfectly legal and sometimes even mandated god. And nobody gave two almost-dry karks for him. But the one you weren’t even supposed to talk about? I’ll have two tankards full, please. Just as soon as I figure out how to get us past these mountains alive.