The Blacktongue Thief Quotes
"Not that I was afraid to die, but maybe who you die with is important."
"It pays surprisingly well, being a highwayman."
"A raven the size of a stag rushed onto the road."
"I pointed at the stranger and made the sign for magicker."
"I pissed myself a little, I’m not ashamed to tell you."
"The surest way to make one love you is to hurt them."
"I’ve got some sort of disease about money, a love for coin that has little to do with commerce."
"Luck is very real, and anyone who tells you differently wants all the credit for their own success."
"The gods only know what will happen there by then with the city now fallen."
"Goblins you look down at—what’s past the Thralls looks down at you."
"I saw myself in her steel breastplate, green-eyed and o-mouthed."
"You can’t make fun of something everyone’s still terrified of."
"You know, if you had a bit more dignity, you would put me in mind of a rat."
"Well done with the fiddle. Now get on yer way—not two days into yer indenture and ye get yerself pinched."
"Careful, the eastern women have mustaches, you say? And woolly armpits?"
"He who leaps at the moon, Into cowshyte falls. Glory unto cowshyte!"
"Wouldn’t you like to have been born in such a place as that?"
"The sweet darling, I think he’s getting tired."
"S’an ear. Now quiet. I haven’t used this spell before. Not when it counts."
"Friends, would you have any food with you?"
"Do you think I don’t know what you are? That you have the gift for reading?"
"Give us a ship stout enough to carry us, and a captain fool enough to take us west, for my feet are tired of walking and I’m keen to clear my debts."
"We are leaving this hill now, since this pruxilta made a fadoran of it."
"You’ll offer something to Solgrannon, then."
"That’s not fair. I was going to—Shut your cake-hole."
"Hope you enjoyed your chicken stew, you murdering bitch!"
"But magic seemed to me the best way to get ahead in this world, and here they all were asking me to give it up—that or they’d send me off to the mines near your town and fine my father into lower poverty than he already knew."
"A man who can pitch a tent and live in a valley three heartbeats wide is a happy man."
"This style of fighting was called li dench_ē_ct di lįan, the tooth of the vine, or just the vine, and it was Gallardian."
"The day a magicker peeks into the thoughts of commoners for some thin-skinned duke or king will be a bad day."
"Whatever mistakes you make, son, let no man call you a coward."
"We’ll never know, will we? Nor will we know how many men got thrown into that bitch Death’s cunny for want of one more to stand with us."
"He was making bets like the rest of them. Some very few had bet on me, thanks to the tempting odds, which I believe stood at twelve to one."
"I had heard tales of krakens wrapping up whole ships and dragging them under, but this one had no hope of doing that; it wasn’t a fifth the size of the big, piggy whale-taking ship."
"What a fabulous kingdom the mind is, and you the emperor of all of it."
"You can bed the duke’s wife and have the duke strangled in your mind."
"They teach the vine in the Low School, of course—it’s embraced by thieves as warmly as the army takes to boxing and the navy takes to buggery."
"For my part, I had broken a small finger on his off hand, slapped the piss out of his ears, and thumbed his eyes a time or two."
"'Are you going to fight him or breed him?'"
"I bit the shyte out of him. He yelled and drooled more, started biting my arm in return."
"Funny how an attack by a sea monster makes everyone less interested in a duel."
"It was a disgraceful display all around."
"I wasn’t so steady myself, having very little strength left in any part of me."
"The shoddy rockpile of an island seemed a summer, fall, and gloaming away, but it was our only hope."
"The kraken had run out of sailors to eat and, after swiveling one huge, too-smart eye in our direction, was floating toward us now."
"The kraken hoisted him aloft above us, and ripped him in pieces as he yelled, chucking the head like a ball."
"The monster was at the top of the mainmast now, moving itself back and forth, rocking the ship with its weight."
"I looked at the chaos around me and listened to the wind and the crying of the poisoned gulls, and I laughed into that wind."
"She was a fat dam, too, dressed in good Gallardian velvet."
"I watched as a fine spill of white crystals fell out one end."
"I saw a shooting star reflected in her eye."
"The harbormistress of Edth sat before us in a very large chair in a very large room on the third landing of a tower that leaned just a little over the harbor as if listening."
"The smell of the biters doubtless stirring memories for him and Galva, a goblin began walking along with us on its side of the chain, keeping pace with us."
"The whole town was the color of cheerful mud, sort of gray-brown shot through with bits of red or the odd flower pot."
"We ate quail and drank wine. Giants, war, and mountains were on their way."
"What the men did to the goblin was no better than what the goblins did to Malk. In fact, it was worse."
"The Coldfoot guard grunted and sweated. Grevitsani had poured on now, bigger, stronger folk taking the place of the less powerful."
"Life was a kind of virginity, to be defended until the wedding day, then joyfully given over."
"Your mouth is like an old man’s bladder."
"I wished I spoke Ispanthian just so I wouldn’t have to hear her Holtish."
"Better her boy drowned than got fed to biters seven years after the wars. A sorry, godsawful business either way."
"It wasn’t until we got back to our lodgings that I realized I was holding Malk’s boot."
"Thanks, fucking Malk. Thanks for the good humor."
"It’s natural to try to make life after a death."
"The giants pushed down into the valley and began to break the farms and eat our oxen."
"You have more gold than I can spend here."
"I was about to die, and I got that mad strength a drowning man gets."
"I’m sure your sisters have fleas up their squinnies, too."
"I lost my arse at Towers, and it hurts to ride my horse, but I haven’t any horse, so you can ride my ass."
"Only the strong, the rich, and the dying think truth is a necessity; the rest of us know it for a luxury."
"The difference between the strong and the weak isn’t that the strong don’t piss themselves. It’s that they hitch their pissy pants up after and go through with it."
"No one will say those bastards aren’t clever. Set into the leather binding, at the frontiers of the square cover, pointing out but not poking past the edge, were rows of sharp teeth, all small, but different sizes of small."
"She was kind and powerful and generous. When I addressed her, I turned my gaze down as I seemed to remember Ispanthian protocol demanded, but she took my chin and pointed my face up until I met her eyes."
"The way she said it was so like Norrigal, so Galtish, so casually awful."
"I hadn’t time to consider the possible import of that last, because the book, as if understanding it was being spoken of, stirred from where I’d left it and began moving for the cave’s mouth again."
"I had many cold nights before me and, for company, only a Spanth who’d rather sharpen a sword than talk."
"I missed Norrigal like a part of myself that I hadn’t known I had."
"Let him smell the autumn and the fires on it and the voles and mice and birds he’d never catch preparing for the winter."
"I could tell Bully liked having the sun on his face and a breeze in his whiskers; a blind cat’s pleasures are few."