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When they were gone, that hand lovingly cradling mine turned into a pliers, and she pinched the nerve in the webbing between thumb and firstfinger slowly, but so hard my hand went numb, saying, “Shhhh,” as she might to a troubled lover. Yah, it hurt. Worth it.

We both started laughing, trying to keep it quiet.

We talked for a while, telling each other this and that about our separate lives here. You know what I will have told her, the bitch princess, the sweet old Galt piped away home. She told me there was some fire-hot slakesword fighter she was like to fight soon, and the slakesword had both speed and reach on her bullnutter. Her name, Galva said, was Apia, which was an Istrean word meaning “bee.” I thought back to Sesta, that killing cunny of an Assassin-Adept that nearly did for us all in the cave near Hrava.

“Why is it every time I hear of an Istrean woman, she’s dangerous as fuck?”

Galva thought about this for a moment, then said, “Istrea is beautiful, I am told, but poor. Poverty is a sort of slavery. When I passed into slavery, I knew I would be made to fight or whore. Perhaps these two women with bloody hands chose as I did.”

I nodded at this.

Galva dom Braga was no fool, no mere sullen killer, as I had imagined she might be before she started talking to me from her heart.

“Well,” I said, “this has been divine, but I really must get back to my shytey room and try to fetch an hour’s sleep before I wake to my trade as the jingly punch-sack of a royal twatling.”

“Yes. And I must pet Jubel’s belly and drink more wine.”

“That’s a good trade to have,” I said.

“Yes,” she said, and I expected her to add something like, “Until you have to stand on the blacksand and fight,” but she didn’t say that. Between her training, her religion, and the feeling that every day lived after the Goblin War was just found coin, the fighting wasn’t so bad for her. In a strange way, she was home. No wonder they’d put her and the tiger in the same cage. They were sisters, of a sort. Being a gladiator suited her, at least, as much as it could suit anyone.

Here her hands were well bloody, her life likely short, after the saying of the Skinny Woman.

Before I let myself back out of the cage, she said, “Whatever you will plan for us, waste no time.”

I cocked my eyebrow at her, meaning, “Why?”

“Just a rumor. But…”

I added a slight head tilt to the eyebrow, meaning, Go on.

“There are goblins in the city, or so one has heard from one who has heard.”

“I know,” I said. “I saw one fight the last time you fought. And they’ve got some of the little karks mining blackglass.”

“No, I do not mean goblin slaves.”

I raised both eyebrows and my chin.

What, then?

“I mean goblins from the Horde, from their imperatrix, come in embassy.”

I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and nodded.

The implications of friendly contact between the goblin hordes with their numbers and magic and hunger for manflesh and these big western karks with their cloud-ships, thunderdust, and blackglass were clear, and fucked, and would now lurk behind my every thought like a gallows. There were times at which even the most hopeful in Manreach felt that every hour marched us toward a day when all kynd were numbered and dumbed and corralled, none of us ever again to be born free save in a few snowy places too stony for tunnels, and those of us who remained little better than rats to hide and forage and hide again. Sometimes it seemed the best possible outcomes were personal, that one individual might live a decent life and die before such times descend. I hoped it myself—we all did, I think. But a pact between these larger and smaller races could move that awful day forward a generation. I would sleep little that night, imagining the shadows of goblin sky-ships against the clouds over Lamnur and Pigdenay, and maybe one day little Platha Glurris.

I clasped Galva’s hand long and warmly, and left, hoping to all the gods gathered she was wrong.

Two days later, I saw that she was not.

35The Goblin Embassy

“Kitch, what do you think they have behind their masks?” said Princess Renata.

“Arses!” I proclaimed in my gayest fool’s voice, “For it is well known that goblinfolk sit on their faces and chew with their hips!”

It was no small chore keeping myself merry for my not-so-little tyrant while we watched her father and his ministers receive the ambassadors from the imperatrix and the three united Hordeclans; to wit, Urrimad, Old Kesh, and the islands now known as the Goblin Archipelago. Each of these had a vassal ambassador, with one Horde ambassador. That’s four diplomats, escorted by five Moth Knights, guards of the Deepest Hive—goblins nearly my height with big nasty polearms, the gleam of their points and blades filmed over with what I did not doubt was some fast and sure goblin venom. I looked about to see if there was some larger force in tow, but it seemed these nine had traveled light.