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I held my hand up and turned my face away when she dipped down for more kissery, and this angered her.

She now reached over to the table, took up the piece of roast beef, and started in trying to force it into my mouth. I shook my head back and forth, and tried to buck her off me, but she seemed to weigh a quarter ton. I knew that the beef, or gravy, or both, were going to do something bad to me if they got in my mouth, so I pressed my lips together tighter than a dog’s arsehole when you poke it, not that I’ve ever done that. All right, that was a lie. But now Filaine and I were in a proper wrestling match, and though I had the feeling I was going to lose, I fought game and hard. At one point, my foot knocked over that candle and extinguished it, and no sooner had its golden flame gone out than the room changed in aspect. It was now gloomy and inky and dark, full of horrors. The roast beef wasn’t beef and never had been, but a centipede with a small human face on it—my face, I thought—opening its mouth again and again, as I had done for the kiss, so you see it terrified and shamed me both. And I looked at her face now, and she was no longer the fair Gallardian dam, Filaine, but the book itself, still wigged with Filaine’s hair and wearing her body, but its face was now that of the book-crab I had seen scuttling in the cave near Hrava. It leaned its stalk eyes and hinged crab mouth closer to my face as it tried to squeeze the centipede between my lips, and the worst thing about this situation was that I couldn’t even open my mouth to curse and swear at this buggy bitch-book-crabby thing, for I seem to take strength from saying fuck and kark and cunt and the like.

I’m sorry if you don’t like it, neither did me ma, that’s just who I am.

But now the second intercession interceded, and not a mouse’s hiccup too soon.

I saw a flapping of gull’s wings behind the girl-haired crab-head, and of a sudden, two hands fisted up in that hair and yanked the monster off me.

My Norrigal!

She was leaning half in the window and started in beating the book-thing’s crabby head against the wall, with shell-pieces flying. The centipede it had been trying to shove in my mouth squealed and ran back on the platter in had come from, which now crawled with other vermin, and a crab’s pincer rose out of the mead-goblet the thing had tried to get me to drink from, pinching at the air as though hoping to grab a lip off me.

Norrigal now swiveled with the creature and pulled it out the window.

It screamed a chilling scream as it went, very much like a woman falling to her death.

I could only see Norrigal’s top third, no doubt for want of legs, but that was naked of cloth. And though I know this was a strange time to make such an observation, her knaps were larger than I recalled. I mean, I loved those knaps of hers, so it struck me to see them out of their usual shape. My witchlet, as I’d once called her, was panting hard when she said, “I’ve only a moment before it comes back. It’s the fucking book. And something else trapped in it. Look over there.” She motioned, indicating another wing of whatever manor or castle we were in.

I saw a dimly lit window sunk in the dark stone, figures in silhouette seeming to look back at me. How many? Two, three? They seemed to be holding glasses, as though the lord and lady of this place were drinking spiced wine against the cold and watching with mild interest to see if a young servant couple were going to fuck or fight.

“Now look in that door,” Norrigal said and pointed at a door inside this room, on the near wall behind me.

I opened it.

No sooner had I than a wailing and pleading rose up, in different languages.

Before me I saw a case of wood and glass on the wall, its tiny latch closed but not locked. Inside the case, dozens of tiny kynd, mostly men, but a few dams, had been stretched wide, pinned by their hands and feet and heads. The poor karkers looked for all the world like moths and wasps and butterflies in an alchemist’s specimen-case. They were all of them begging me to free them. I was about to reach in, lift the lid, and start pulling pins, so pathetic was their wailing.

Before I did, though, I looked closer at one of those faces.

Fuck if it wasn’t Worrig, the false Wostran guide. His nose and mouth were bloody, his head marked with the ink the book had stained him with when it rode him like its witch-steed. The look on his face was so awful, so terrified and hopeless, that despite myself, my hand reached for the latch.

Norrigal almost snatched me bald pulling me back and away.

“I only told you to look, ye eejit. You can’t help them, only join them. If you’d have eaten aught from that plate or spent your seed in this room, you’d be pinned there as well, and none could pull you down. Shyte, here she comes.”

With that, the crab-faced woman grabbed Norrigal by the hair and yanked her out the window, climbing in and coming for me.

“Jump!” I heard Norrigal say, and it wasn’t the first time she’d bid me do so.

Now I noticed the half stone I wore on a chain around my neck had full risen, pointing at the window.

So, using all my strength, I pushed the horror in front of me aside, knocking it down with a screech that stood up the hairs of my neck, and I dove out the high window. I remembered how in the picture there’d been rocks on the shore. Sure and I saw those rocks now, rising killing-fast as I careened toward them. But I never did land with a splat and die, else I wouldn’t be telling you this. And neither did the Catfall ring on my finger need to save me as it had in the crevasse. Rather, I found myself once again in the Downward Tower, in the Snowless Wood, in Norholt, as I had been when Norrigal had first bid me jump, against the evidence and counsel of my own eyes, long and not so long ago. For as I was learning, magic was very much a matter of two contradictory things being true at once.

As Norrigal herself both was and was not the feared witch known as Deadlegs.

She stood there, holding her back and stirring a pot in a most witchlike fashion.

She looked very tall, as I seemed to be looking at her from near the floor.

She had no colors to her, nor the room, and I can’t explain how, but it was as if I looked through a strange glass and my eyes were not my own.

And, if I didn’t mistake myself, my strangely gray and colorless Norrigal was holding her back, because she was starting to be fat with child.

8I Am My Own Dog

“What, are you…? Did we?” I said, wanting to gesture at her, but when I raised my hand, it wasn’t a hand but a paw.