The Blacktongue Thief by Christopher Buehlman

Author:Christopher Buehlman [Buehlman, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781250621191
Google: ixPoDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1250621194
Publisher: Tor Books
Published: 2021-05-24T23:00:00+00:00

33

Fucking Unmarriageable

In case nobody’s bothered to tell you, and in case you haven’t seen one, goblins are ugly. Not like your odd cousin with too many freckles, no neck, and sausagy fingers; that’s plain homeliness. Someone will marry him if he can push a plow or brew beer. Goblins are fucking unmarriageable. Something deep in us knows they’re our blood enemies and reviles the sight of them, like a shark or a biteworm. They’re not like an ape, which you can look at and say it’s not so different from a man. But goblins? Something else again. Nobody knows where they came from. No record of them before the Knock, and scholars mostly think it was that same cataclysm that brought them over from some worse world or up from the ground. They look like they came from the ground.

This was the first time I saw one close. Actually, there were eighteen of them on the ship that came to our remote little island. They like numbers divisible by nine. That’s because they have nine fingers. What should have been a finger on their off hand became a hook they can sheathe like a cat’s claw, and they’ll drive that in and hang off you, trip your feet up, bite. On some it’s right, on most it’s left. The right-handers are held in higher regard, thought to have been blessed by their weird little god, who looks like nothing so much as a smudge if you see their praying-boards.

But the hook. That hook-hand is smaller and weaker than the weapon hand, and that arm is shorter, and maybe that’s why they don’t care for symmetry. One of our generals said the reason they tear the corners off buildings in kynd cities and collapse parts of houses is because straight lines make them queasy. They find our most beautiful monuments noisome and brutish, an affront to nature, with all the math and right angles. Goblin structures are equally bewildering to us, and the same is true of their ships.

I had been bow-hunting for cliff-chickens, having failed to catch a fish to make up for Malk’s, which I had to confess to eating, though I hadn’t had a fin of it. I was well aware that the traditional way to hunt puffins involved dangling from a cliff face and whacking at them in midair with a net on a long pole, but having no such net, no such pole, and little urge to dangle, I used cruder methods. I already had two wee birdies strung to my belt, and I was covered in puffin-shyte the high winds had whipped into me. I was just having an argument with a puffin hen who had watched me shoot her mate when I saw the sail. A green goblin-sail on the very blue water near the horizon. A gray plume of smoke dragged behind the ship, almost white against the dark gray, fast-moving clouds.

I loosed my cliff-chickens and ran, ducking behind a lift of rocks and making for the beach where we’d made camp.

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