The Silver Spike

  Raven got a big chuckle out of the whole thing. “Hail, O Mighty Hunter, Terror of Ratkind.”

  “Stuff it.” I rolled me over and saw about a square foot of raggedy-ass canvas peeking out of the rubble pile. I had me a stroke of cunning. I stood up, dusted me off, and sat back down. They went back to their sniffing around. I dug the thing out, decided it was somebody’s backpack, then decided it might be why our villain had made a stand here when all he really needed to do was duck through that hole and leave the soldiers sucking dust.

  “What have you got there?” Raven yelled when he noticed. Bomanz didn’t say nothing but his beady little eyes lit right up.

  They caught on quick. Raven wanted to open the pack right there. Bomanz told him, “This isn’t the place. Anybody could come along.”

  Raven thought about sneaking into the building the killer had used to make his getaway. Great idea, only somebody had boarded up the hole from inside. “Guess we might as well take it back to the temple,” he said.

  The soldiers were waiting for us at the end of the alley. There were a dozen of them and they were ready for trouble. We would’ve walked right into them if we hadn’t had a tame wizard along to sniff them out.

  We backed off to talk. Bomanz supposed all the exits from the maze of alleys would be covered by now. Pretty soon they would come in after us. He could get us out right now but that would take so much flash and show it would get Exile all twisted out of shape.

  “Over the rooftops, then,” Raven said. Like it was obvious and easy.

  “Great idea. But I’m an old man. Sneaking up on five hundred. A wizard, not a monkey.”

  “Give him the pack, Case. He can cover his own butt and get it home to Mama. We’ll play tag with the soldiers.”

  “Say what? Oh. Yeah. Sure. You’re the guy with style.

  You play tag with them.” But I took the pack off. Bomanz wiggled into it. It was too big for him.

  Softly, he told me, “Don’t take silly chances. She’ll want you to come back.”

  Chills up the spine, and some more thoughts about what kind of a crazy man was I, being here in the first place. Potato farming never looked so good.

  I don’t know if Raven heard. He didn’t give no sign. We went off and found a way up to the roofs, which was a crazy country of steep pitches, flats, chimneys, slate, copper, tile, thatch, and shingle. Like no two builders ever used the same materials. We stumbled and clunked around and did our damnedest to fall off and break a head or a leg, but something always got in the way.

  I might have been better off if I’d busted my bean.

  For a while it didn’t look like hunking around on the roofs was going to do no good. Whenever we took a peek to see if it was safe, there was some soldiers hanging out. But just when I asked Raven, “How do you like pigeon? ‘Cause it looks like we’re going to spend the rest of our lives up here,” some kind of hoorah broke out back about where we left the old wizard and every soldier in sight headed that way.

  I said, “That silly sack probably did something subtle like turn somebody into a toad.”

  “Must you always be negative, Case?” Raven was having him a good time.

  “Me? Negative? The gods forfend! I’ve never had a negative thought in my life. Where did you get a notion like that?”

  “It’s clear. Drop on down there.”

  On down there was a two-story fall to a rough cobblestone landing. “You’re shitting me.”

  “No.”

  “Then you go first so I can land on you.”

  “You are in a contrary mood, aren’t you? Go on.”

  “No, thank you. I’ll just go find me a place where I can climb down.”

  Maybe I crowded it a little. He gave me a nasty look and said, “All right. You do what you have to do. But I’m not going to hang around waiting for you to catch up.” He rolled over the edge of the roof, hung down, kicked out, let go.

  I know he done it just to give me some shit. And he got what he asked for, showing off. He sprained an ankle. When he slowed down cussing and fussing enough, I told him, “You hang on right there. I’ll be there in a minute.”

  I wasn’t, of course.

  I cut across a couple roofs and found a way to climb down into the street parallel to the one where I left Raven. I hitched up my pants and headed around the corner into the nearest cross street — and ran smack into a whole gang of gray boys.

  Their sergeant laughed. “God damnl Here’s one so eager he came running.”

  I guess I didn’t react too well. I just stood there gawking for about five seconds too long. When my feet finally decided it was time to get moving it was too late. There was five of them around me. They had nightsticks and mean grins. They meant business. The sergeant told me, “Fall in with the rest of the recruits, soldier.”

  I eyeballed about ten numb-looking guys in a bunch, most of them looking the worse for wear. “What is this bullshit?”

  He chuckled. “You just enlisted. Second Battalion, Second Regiment, Oar Home Defense Forces.”

  “Like hell.”

  “You want to argue about it?”

  I looked at his buddies. They were ready. And I wasn’t going to get no help from the other “recruits.”

  “Not right now. We’ll talk it over later, one-on-one.” I gave him my best imitation of Raven’s I’m-going-to-make-a-necklace-out-of-your-toes look. He got the idea.

  He wanted to try some bluster but he just said, “Fall in. And don’t give us no shit. We ain’t no more excited about this than you are.”

  So that was how I got me back into the army.

  LV

  Raven waited awhile, then, troubled, hobbled around looking for Case. He didn’t find a trace. Case might have stepped off the edge of the earth.

  He could spend hours in a futile search that would keep him at risk himself or he could go home and have Silent and Bomanz hunt the easy way.

  The pain in his ankle had awakened the old pain in his hip, so that he was stove up in both legs and moved with the spryness of an eighty-year-old arthritic. It was no time for heroics.

  He had no trouble entering the temple, reaching the tower, and getting upstairs. Except from his own body. Someone up top had been watching. Silent covered his progress with a curtain of gentle, selective blindness.

  Bomanz got after him before he got through the door. “Where’s Case? What happened?”

  “I don’t know. He disappeared. How about you do something for this ankle while I tell it?” He settled with his back against a wall, leg outthrust. He told what there was to tell.

  Bomanz poked, prodded, and twisted. Raven winced. The wizard said, “Not much I can do but kill the pain. Silent? You know more about healing than I do.”

  Silent paused in his translation for Darling, moved in on the ankle without enthusiasm. Bomanz puttered around, muttering, “Got to come up with something of his he had long enough to make his own.” Grumble, grumble, paw through Case’s few possessions, come up with his journal. “This ought to do it.” He shuffled into a corner and went to mumbling and twitching.

  Silent did not do much more for Raven’s ankle than Bomanz had. The pain was gone but it still did not want to work right when Raven put his weight on it. He wasn’t going to win any footraces for a few days.

  Everyone waited tensely for Bomanz. No one expressed the common fear, that Case had been caught by Exile’s soldiers.

  Bomanz finally looked up. “I need the city map.”

  Silent got it from Darling. Bomanz fussed over it a minute before saying, “He’s somewhere in this area.”

  Raven said, “That’s that open area where the windwhale dropped us.”

  “Yes.”

  “What the hell is he doing out there?”

  “How should I know? Somebody maybe better go out there and find out. Aw, hell! Me and my big mouth.” Darling had pointed at him, clicked her tongue, and winked. He was elected.

  Raven closed his eyes, relaxed for a few minu
tes, letting the tension and aches fade. Then he asked, “What was in the pack?”

  One of the Torques said, “More money than I ever heard of one guy lugging around. It’s in the comer, you want to look it over.”

  “Don’t know if I have that much ambition.” But he levered himself up. “Nothing there that was useful?”

  “I tell you, I can’t remember me a time when found money wasn’t useful to me.”

  That did not sound promising. Raven went through the pack, was disappointed. He looked at Darling. She signed, “Anything?”

  He shook his head, but signed, “It does prove that the assassin, and therefore the murdered man, were linked with the theft of the spike. This stuff came from the Barrowland. Some of these kinds of coins haven’t been in circulation anywhere else for centuries. But Bomanz told you that already.”

  She nodded.

  “And he could not use anything here to get an idea where the man is, the way he did with Case?”

  She shook her head. She got up and started pacing, pausing occasionally to look outside. After a while, she caught Silent’s attention, signed, “Slip down and eavesdrop on Exile. Carefully. I do not want him getting too far ahead of us.”

  Bomanz did not return till after midnight. “Where have you been?” Raven grumped. “You had us worried we were going to lose you, too.”

  “It’s not that easy to get around out there. They have patrols everywhere, trying to keep another blowup from happening. The fighting is sporadic tonight. Exile had Gossamer and Spidersilk doing donkey work, rounding up wizards and whatnot who came here to grab the spike. That’s where all the excitement is tonight. Excitement for the future is going to be provided by the cholera. It’s showing up everywhere now.”

  Everyone glared at him. “What about Case?” Raven snapped. “Get to the point, old man.”

  Bomanz smiled. But there was no humor there. “He’s gone back into the army.”

  “What?”

  Darling flashed some signs at Raven. Raven said, “She’s right. Quit dicking around and tell it.”

  “They’ve put up a camp in that open area. With a fence around it. And they’re grabbing every man between fifteen and thirty-five they can lay hands on. They’re shoving them in there and calling them the Oar Home Defense Forces Brigade. They may give them a little training so they can use them to do most of the dying if there’s an attack, but I think the main reason they’re there is Exile wants the most dangerous part of the population locked up where it can’t cause any more trouble for the grays.”

  Darling signed, “How do we get him out?”

  “I don’t know if we can. He may have to get himself out.” He stopped them before they jumped all over him. “I tried. I went to the gate and gave the guards a long sob story about how they had my only grandson and means of support. While they were still being polite they told me there wasn’t nobody going to get out of there, and anyway they didn’t remember taking in anybody by the name Philodendron Case. I think they would have.”

  Raven said, “He’s technically a deserter even if he’s the only man from the Guards still around. He wouldn’t have given them his real name.”

  “I realized that while I was talking. So I gave it up before they got too angry. They were pretty reasonable considering they’d had people after them all day.”

  Everyone looked to Darling. She signed, “We will leave him there for now. He is safer there than we are here. We have the means if there is a desperate need to communicate with him. We have other matters to concern us. I suggest we give them some attention. Time is running out on us. And everyone else.”

  LVI

  Old Man Fish had grown first troubled, then frightened when Smeds didn’t show. Smeds had cared for the problem posed by Tully Stahl alive, but how about the problem of Tully Stahl dead? The grays had the body. If they identified it how long would it be before they discovered who Tully had run with?

  Not long enough. Smeds had bought some time but the sands in the glass kept on running and the bodies kept falling.

  That was the trouble with this thing. They kept beating the inevitable back, but always the margin was a little narrower afterward. And the cost of holding it at bay escalated and the price of failure became more dreadful while the payoff never looked any better.

  He felt no remorse over Tully Stahl. Tully had begged for it. The wonder was that he had lasted so long. But Timmy Locan bothered him a lot. Of the four of them Timmy had been the least deserving of an unpleasant end.

  He was about to give up on Smeds and go back to hiding in the ruins when he heard how the grays were conscripting all the citizens of military age they could grab.

  Intuition told him what had happened. Smeds was in the army now.

  Which was, probably, the safest place he could be. If he’d had sense enough to give them a false name.

  The boy had sense.

  Old Fish headed for the ruins, to tuck himself away from the eyes of the hunters, and on the way had him an inspiration. Why not hide in plain sight himself? They would argue a little because of his age, but they would take him. And it would be a damned good hedge against the coming privations of the siege. Soldiers, even militiamen, would get fed better than guys hiding in collapsed cellars. And the witch people running Oar should protect their soldiers from the cholera more diligently than they would the general population.

  He headed for the camp the grays had set up on the razed ground.

  It went about as he expected. They let him in after a little argument and a quick check for signs he was carrying cholera. He gave his name as Forto Reibas, which was a joke on himself and the grays alike. It was the name he had been given at birth but no one had used it for two generations.

  LVII

  For all the black riders had harassed the Limper into a frothing rage repeatedly with their tricks and traps and stalls, they had used sorcery very little. He did not understand their game. It troubled him, though he did not admit that even to himself. He was confident his own brute strength would carry him, was confident there was no one else in this world any longer who could match him strength for strength.

  They knew that. That was what troubled him. They stood no chance against him, yet they harassed and guided him in a way that suggested they had every confidence in the efficacy of what they were doing. Which meant a big and terrible pitfall somewhere ahead.

  They had used so little sorcery that he had stopped watching for it. His own style was smashing hammer blows. Subtlety was the last thing he expected from anyone else.

  It was not till he came upon the same disfigured tree for the fourth time that he woke to the realization that he had seen it before, that, in fact, his tireless run had been guided into a circle about fifty miles around and he had been chasing himself for hundreds of miles. Another damned stall!

  He controlled his rage and found his way off the endless track. Then he paused to take stock of himself and his surroundings.

  He was a little north of the Tower. He felt it down there, somehow mocking, daring, almost calling him to come try its defenses again. An affront, it was.

  It seemed likely there was nothing his enemies would like more than to have him waste time beating his head against that adamantine fortress. So he put temptation aside. He would deal with the Tower after he had taken possession of the silver spike and had shaped it into the talisman that would give him mastery of the world.

  He headed north, toward Oar.

  His step was sprightly. He chuckled as he ran. Soon, now. Soon. The world would pay its debts.

  LVIII

  Toadkiller Dog loped nearer the Tower, uncertain why he tempted fate so. He sensed the Limper running in circles north of him and was amused. These new lords of the empire were not as terrible as the old, but they were smart. Maybe smarter than any of the old ones except the Lady herself and her sister. He was satisfied that the power had passed into competent hands.

  Something he had heard some wise man say. About
the three stages of empire, the three generations. First came the conquerers, unstoppable in war. Then came the administrators, who bound it all together into one apparently unshakable, immortal edifice. Then came the wasters, who knew no responsibility and squandered the capital of their inheritance upon whims and vices. And fell to other conquerers.

  This empire was making the transition from the age of the conquerer to that of the administrator. Only one of the old ones was left, the Limper. The heirs of empire were out to crowd him off history’s stage. Conquerers were too rowdy and unpredictable to keep around if you wanted a well-ordered empire.

  He would do well to consider his own place in this nonchaotic future.

  He trotted to what he considered a safe distance from the Tower gate, sat, waited.

  Someone came out almost immediately. A someone whose vision of the future had room for a timeless old terror like Toadkiller Dog.

  They formed an alliance.

  LIX

  Smeds groaned as he pushed his blanket aside and rolled over. He had bruises on his bruises and aches in every muscle and joint. Sleeping on the ground did not help.

  This was the third time he had wakened in this tent he shared with forty men. He was not looking forward to another day in the militia.

  “You all right, Ken?” a tentmate asked. He was using the name Kenton Anitya.

  “Stiff and sore. Guess I’ll get a chance to work out the kinks before the day is over.”

  “Why keep fighting them? You can’t win.”

  Someone looked outside. “Hey! It snowed. Got about an inch out there.”

  Jeers and sarcastic remarks about their good fortune.

  Smeds said, “Since I was a kid people been kicking me around. I ain’t gonna take it no more. I’m gonna kick back and keep on kicking till they decide it’s easier to leave me alone.” He’d had four fights with the grays running their training platoon already.

  Another neighbor said, “You’re getting to them. But your tactics aren’t so great. Got to use your head a little, too.”