Page 27

Now she said, “Amiel,” which I later learned was the name of her youngest brother, and the one she loved best. He died in Goltay, with so many others. Only eighteen years on him, and a poet of some talent, never meant for the sword. But now he was in her sleepwalk-dream, and apparently so was a wolf, and she meant to protect him from it. I got the worrying feeling I was the karking wolf.

“Oi, Galva,” I said. “Go easy, mate.”

She growled some words in Ispanthian, which is a pretty enough language in their sad-bastard songs, but there’s none sounds more dangerous with anger behind it. I risked a glance at the book and saw that the dam in the picture was smiling and holding a bloody sword. A thief-looking geezer was at her feet with no head on him.

Oh, for fuck’s sake.

I closed the book with my foot, but it opened itself again with a flat thwack.

I got the idea Galva couldn’t see exactly where I was, thank the salty-balled gods of sea and shallows, but she moved fast when she heard the book slam open.

She leapt and swung hard.

Had she been in health, I believe she would have cut the head right off me, I felt the air of it. And make no mistake, Galva sick is far from slow. But neither was I slow, nor was I sick. I fell back and rolled away from her, came up near where her shield leaned against the wall. I took it up, heavier bastard than it looks, and used it to turn a lunge that would have gutted me, plus two lightning-fast cuts. I now spotted an iron-headed shovel out of the corner of my eye. I karked her next attack by chucking the shield straight at her and rolled again, coming up with the shovel. The woman was fucking relentless. She was closing distance with me fast in a kind of a low, martial crab-walk. I dove away from her as she skipped into a lunge, and I swatted the fucking book hard, like I was killing a three-stone snapper-turtle. That book doesn’t like iron, magic doesn’t in general, and it squealed. Galva shuddered as if she’d been struck.

I gave the book another thump, and Galva jerked and dropped her sword. I dearly hoped I wasn’t doing her damage, but she’d have cut me to snips and gobbets had I not acted so. The picture in the book was back to the woman birthing herself out of the beastie. I shut the book, put the shovel on it, and every other iron thing I could find.

Galva stood, looking both confused and horribly frail.

“What am I doing?” she said in a voice that told me she was herself again.

“You were dreaming,” I said.

“Where is Chuchín?”

“What’s that?”

“My … my.…”

She looked on the point of tears, not a look I see on her.

“You’re all right now. Go back and have a lie-down.”

She nodded, rubbed her face with her hands.

“I remember it a little,” she said with a small voice.

“Was there a wolf?”

“How did you know?”

“You howled and licked your cunny.”

She shook her head at me in that way that only my mother was better at.

Crawled back under the furs and slept.

She even snored, which she wasn’t prone to normally.

It was sort of adorable, I’m not going to lie, like watching a big fuck-off wolf roll over to get its belly rubbed.

I brought her sword over and laid it by her.

I would of course go back to working on the book, but never again without iron close to hand.

While I tried in vain to tap the secrets I suspected the deadly images held, I read quite a lot about the day-to-day business of running a crime organization that had been forced to go to ground. I read dull details of payments to this person or that person; I saw who was secretly working the Guild’s business in Oustrim’s army or in the University of Hrava. I saw mention of my old friend Ürmehen, the Upright Man, whom the Guild was allowing to live because he provided a sort of front to take the blame for any business they were about in the capital. The king and queen had allowed him to do business because they thought he would help them check the Guild coming up from deep hiding. They were right about that, but wrong about how poorly the Guild itself would weather the fall of the city to giants. I also read about two attempts to kill Queen Mireya, both of which failed and resulted in further weakening of their position in the city of Hrava. Useful, perhaps, but not the sort of thing I could use to endanger the Guild in any real way. I couldn’t help feeling I had only gotten into the entrance hall of the book and that the real secrets were yet denied me. There was perhaps enough here to make someone think they had hold of Guild secrets; or at least to convince themselves of it and turn away from the Gallery of Fell Delights, as I strangely understood the images to be called, before drowning in them.

One page of interest to me showed a poor wrestler, the sort you might see trying for prize money or even just food at a public feast, barefoot, dirty, wearing just his breeks, and down in a pose. They called this kind of sport beggar’s bouts. Only, his feet weren’t balanced on the earth; he was standing on a stack of books.