Maybe it was a trick of the rising moon.
He got up where the footing was good, stood, glanced at the tree again. Definitely something weird going on there. The whole thing was glowing.
He looked down in front of him. His heart stilled.
Something stared back at him from fifty feet away. It had a head the size of a bushel basket. Its eyes and teeth shown in the tree light. Especially its teeth. Never had he seen so many sharp teeth, or so big.
It started toward him.
His feet would not move.
He looked around wildly, saw Tully and Timmy headed away from the tree at a dead run.
He looked forward again as the monster began its leap, its jaws opening to snap at his head. He hurled himself backward. As the monster arced after him a blue bolt from the tree smacked it aside as a man’s hand swats a flying insect.
Smeds landed hard, but hard did not slow him a step. He took off running and never looked back.
* * *
“I saw it, too,” Old Man Fish said, and that put the quietus on Tully trying to make like Smeds was imagining things. “Like he said, it was as big as a house. Like a giant three-legged dog. The tree zapped it. It ran away.”
“Three-legged dog? Come on. What was it doing?”
Smeds said, “It was trying to dig something up. It was sniffing and pawing the ground just like a dog trying to dig up a bone.”
“Damn it to hell! Complications. Why does there always have to be complications? That for sure means it’ll take longer than I thought. But we don’t got no time to waste. Sooner or later somebody else is going to get the same idea I did.”
“Don’t get in no hurry,” Fish said. “Take your time and do it right. That is, if you want to live long enough to enjoy being rich.”
Tully grunted. Nobody suggested they give it up. Not even Smeds, who had felt the monster’s breath on his face.
“Toadkiller Dog,” Timmy Locan said.
“Say what?” Tully snapped back.
“Toadkiller Dog. There was a monster in the fight up here called Toadkiller Dog.”
“Toadkiller Dog? What the hell kind of name is that?”
“How the hell should I know? He ain’t my pup.”
Stupid joke, but everybody laughed anyway. They needed to.
6
Raven hardly sobered up for three weeks. One night I came back to our place, I’d had enough. I’d had to hurt a man bad that day, a nut who earned it trying to grab my boss’s kids. Even so I felt bad. Somehow I worked it out that it was all Raven’s fault I got in a position where I had to hurt somebody.
He was drunk on his ass. “Look at you, sucking on a wineskin like it was your mother’s tit. The great and famous tough guy Raven, so bad he offed his old lady in the public gardens at Opal. So bad he went head-to-head with the Limper. Laying around feeling sorry for himself and whining like a three-year-old with a bellyache. Get up and do something with yourself, man. I’m sick of seeing you like this.”
In a stumbling, slurred voice he told me to get stuffed, it wasn’t any of my damned business.
“The hell it ain’t! It’s my damned money paying for the room here, dipshit. And I got to come home every day to the stink of old puke and spilled wine and a goddamn soil pot you ain’t got time to empty yourself. When was the last time you bothered to change your clothes? When was the last time you had a bath?”
He cussed me in a cracked-voice scream.
“You’re just about the most selfish, thoughtless bastard I ever seen. Won’t even clean up after yourself.”
I went on like that, louder and angrier. But he never really fought back, which made me think maybe he was about as disgusted with himself as I was with him. But who can go around admitting he’s a hopeless, useless hunk of shit?
Finally he ran out of what little fight he had. He got up and staggered out, without any parting shot. He did not burn any bridges behind him.
A guy I worked with and I talked it over about what you do with drunks. His dad was a reformed drunk. He told me you got to stop trying to help them out. You got to stop making excuses for them and not take excuses from them. You got to put them on a spot where they can’t do nothing but face the truth because they aren’t going to change a bit till they decide to do it. They got to be the ones who believe they’ve turned into dregs and something has got to be changed.
I didn’t know if I could wait around long enough for Raven to decide he was a real grown-up man and he was going to have to face reality. Darling was gone and that was that. There were kids to be found. That whole past, down in Opal, had to be hooked back out into the light and made peace with.
Actually, I was pretty sure he would come around, given time. The kind of guy he was being was the kind he held in deep contempt. That had to seep through. But it sure was frustrating, waiting him out.
He came back home four days later, sobered up and cleaned up and looking halfway like the Raven I remembered. He was all apologetic. He promised to get straight and to do better.
Sure. They do that, too.
I would believe it when I saw it.
I didn’t make any big deal out of anything. I didn’t preach. There wasn’t no profit in that.
He hung on pretty good. He looked like he was getting somewhere. But then two days later I came home and found him so stinking he couldn’t crawl.
Hell with him, I said.
7
They were running shorthanded, what with Timmy laid up after getting caught in a blast of the tree’s blue light, but Smeds did not see where it made any difference. They were not getting anywhere. They could not go out there in the daytime without being seen from the town. After dark that monster always came and dug in its hole. They could not go out there then. And for a long time after it chased the monster, the tree remained alert, laying for more intruders. Timmy had found that out the hard way.
It looked like there was maybe an hour each morning, just before dawn, when it might be possible to get something accomplished safely.
But what? Nobody had figured that out. They sure weren’t going to get a chance to chop the sucker down. Ringing it wasn’t worth squat, even if you could get close enough for long enough to do it. How long for a ringed tree to die? Especially this kind?
Somebody suggested poisoning it. That sounded so good that they talked it over, recalling things they had seen used to kill weeds and stuff. Only the method demanded that they have a poison. Which meant going back to Oar to buy it. With money they did not have. And it might take as long as ringing the son of a bitch. Time was not an ally. Tully was in a panic about time already. He thought it a miracle no competition had yet shown.
“We got to do it fast.”
Timmy said, “We ain’t going to get it done as long as that monster keeps coming around.”
“So maybe we help him find what he wants.”
“You better got a mouse in your pocket when you say ‘we,’ cousin,” Smeds said. “Because I ain’t going out there to help that thing do squat.”
“We burn it,” Fish said.
“Huh? What?”
“The tree, fool. We burn it down.”
“But we can’t go out there and…”
Fish yanked a stick out of their woodpile. It was a yard long and two inches in diameter. He sailed it off through the woods. “Take a while, but it’ll pile up. Then in with a torch or two. Whoosh. Up in flames. Fire burns out, we go pick up our spike.”
Smeds sneered. “You forgot the soldiers.”
“Nope. But you’re right. Got to come up with a diversion.”
Tully said, “That’s the best idea yet. We’ll go with it till somebody thinks up something better.”
Smeds grunted. “It’ll beat sitting on our asses, that’s for sure.” He was used to the woods now. There was no adventure left in this. Not that there had been a lot before. He was bored.
They started pitching sticks immediately. The three younger men made it a game, betting fr
om their shares. Sticks began to accumulate.
The tree did not like the game. Sometimes it sniped back.
* * *
They thought Smeds was crazy, sneaking out every couple nights to watch the monster dig. “You got more balls than brains,” Tully told him.
“Better than sitting around.”
It was not that dangerous. He just had to keep down. The beast never noticed a low profile. But if you got up and showed it a silhouette, look out!
The monster’s labor was slow, but it worked as though obsessed. The nights came and went, came and went.
In time it unearthed what it sought.
Smeds Stahl was watching the night it came up with a grisly trophy, a horror, a human head.
That head had been too long in too many graves, and too often injured. The monster closed its jaws on ragged remnants of hair, lifted the gruesome object. Dodging bolts from the tree, it carried the head to a backwater in the nearby river.
Smeds tagged along behind. Carefully. Very carefully.
The beast laved the head with care and tenderness. The tree crackled and sputtered, unable to project its power that far.
Once the head was clean, the giant hound limped back the way it had come. Smeds stole along behind, amazing himself with his daring. The beast circled the dead dragon, which more than ever appeared to be an odd feature of the terrain. It stepped over a bit of tattered leather and stone almost invisible in the soggy earth, not noticing. Smeds spotted it, though. He picked it up and pocketed it without thinking.
On the other side of the dragon the tree continued to crackle and fuss, frustrated.
When Smeds pocketed that old fetish it twitched, proclaiming to anyone properly attuned the fact that it had been disturbed.
Smeds halted in a shadow, freezing. Moonlight had fallen upon that horrible head. He saw it clearly.
Its eyes were open. A grotesque smile stretched its ruined mouth.
It was alive.
Smeds almost lost sphincter control.
8
Oar is the city nearest the old battleground and burying place called the Barrowland. The alarm cried by the fetish there touched two residents.
One was an old, old man living incognito because he had contrived to stage his apparent death during the struggle that had devastated the Barrowland. The alarm struck him as he sat guzzling in a workingman’s tavern with new cronies who thought him an astrologer. When it hit him he knew a moment of panic. Then, tears streaming, he rushed into the street.
A questioning babble arose behind him. When his comrades came out to learn what was wrong he had vanished.
9
It was another of those damned days. Oar was a troubled city. There were scattered disturbances, conflict between Rebel and imperial partisans, and a lot of private crimes were getting committed under the guise of politics. My boss was talking about shutting up his city house and moving out to a place he owned near Deal. If he did that I’d have to decide whether or not to go along. I wanted to talk it over with Raven, but …
He was passed out when I got there.
“Over a goddamned woman you never even had,” I grumbled, and kicked a tin plate across the room. The son of a bitch hadn’t bothered to clean up after himself again. I thought about kicking him around the room. But I wasn’t mad enough to try that yet.
Even drunk and wasted away, he was still Raven, the baddest man I’d ever met. I didn’t need to get into it with him.
He woke up so sudden I jumped. He used the wall to pull himself up. He was pale and shaking and I never for a second took it for the effect of the wine. That old boy was scared shitless.
He couldn’t hardly stand up without that wall to help, and he was probably seeing three of me and little blue men besides, but he gobbled out, “Case, get your stuff together.”
“What?”
He was working his way along the wall toward his heap of stuff. “Something just broke out of the Barrowland.… Oh, god!” He went down on his knees, holding his stomach. He started puking. I handed him water to cleanse his mouth and a rag to wipe up with. He didn’t argue. “Something got out. Something as dark as…”
Up came another load.
I asked, “You sure it wasn’t just a nightmare? Or maybe the grape boogies?”
“It was real. It wasn’t the wine. I don’t know how I know. I know. I saw it as clear as if I was there. There was that beast everybody called Toadkiller Dog.” He talked slow, trying not to slur. He slurred anyway. “Something was with it. Something greater. Something of the true darkness.”
I didn’t know what to say. He believed it even if I didn’t. He had his mess cleaned and was starting to stuff his things into a bag. He asked, “Where did you stable the horses?”
He was serious. Unable to navigate and brain-pickled, but he was by-damned going to do something right now.
“Thulda’s. Why? Where you going?”
“We got to get help.”
“Help? We? You forgetting I got me a job here? I got responsibilities. I can’t just mount up and ride off chasing lights you seen in the swamp because you got ahold of some doctored wine.”
He got mad. I got mad right back. We yelled and screamed some. He threw things because he wasn’t in good enough shape to run me down. I stomped his wineskin to death and watched its blood trickle across the floor.
The landlady kicked the door in. She weighed two hundred pounds and was as mean as a snake. “I told you bastards I wasn’t going to put up with no more of this.…”
We rushed her. She was a liar and a cheat and a bully and she probably stole things from the rooms when she thought she wouldn’t get caught. We threw her down the stairs and stood around laughing like a couple of kid vandals. She started screeching again down below. She wasn’t hurt.
I stopped laughing. She wasn’t hurt, but she might have been. And I didn’t have the excuse of being drunk. “I take it you’re headed out of town?”
“Yeah.” The humor had fled him, too. His color was ghastly.
“How you going to get out of town? It’s the middle of the night.”
“Cash considerations. The magical key.” He shouldered his bag. “You about ready?”
“Yeah.” He knew I would come all the time.
* * *
“Hey, Loo!” the gateman called into the gatehouse while Raven clinked coins. “Get your ass up. We got us another customer.” He grinned apologetically. “Loo, he’s got a day job plucking chickens. Got too damned many kids. You would think a guy would learn how to stop after the first dozen. Not Loo.” He kept on grinning.
“You’d figure,” I admitted. “This that good a job? I don’t see so many guys happy with their work like you.”
“Pretty boring on the night watch, mostly. Been a profitable night tonight, though.”
“Others have gone before us?” Raven asked.
“Only one guy. This old man about an hour ago. In such a big damned hurry he just scattered coins all over the place.”
That was what you call your basic broad hint. Raven ignored it. I made small talk till Loo turned out with the keys and opened the small port through the big gate. Raven just stared straight ahead. When Loo opened up he tossed some silver.
“Why, thank you, yer grace. Come around anytime. Any time. You got a friend down here to South Gate.”
Raven didn’t say anything. He just grimaced and led his horse through the gateway onto the moon-washed road.
“Thanks,” I told the gatemen. “See you guys around.”
“Anytime, yer grace. Anytime. I’m yer man.”
Raven must have paid them off good.
The grimace was familiar, though I hadn’t seen it for a while. “Your hip bothering you again?”
“It’ll be all right. I’ve traveled with worse.”
Sour bastard. He’d shaken the wine, pretty well, but the hangover was hanging over. “Taking a long time to heal.”
“What the hell you expect? I’m not
so young anymore. And it was one of her arrows Croaker got me with.”
Raven didn’t seem to hold no grudge. He just couldn’t figure it out.
He probably didn’t want to figure it out. His idea of Raven was that Raven was a doer, not a thinker.
Sometimes I wondered how he could feed himself so much crap.
10
The old man, worn out, stood beside his ragged mount, stared at the dusty crossroads. To the east lay Lords. Southward the road led to Roses and beyond, to other great cities. The people he had come chasing had split here. He did not know who had gone which direction, though it seemed reasonable that the White Rose had turned east toward her fastness in the Plain of Fear. The Lady should have continued southward, toward her capital, the Tower at Charm.
With that parting, the armistice between them would have ended.
“Which way?” he asked the animal. The shaggy pony did not express an opinion. The old man could not decide which woman would be best equipped to act on his news. His impulse was to keep going south, but only because by turning east he would be headed into the rising sun.
“We’re too old for this, horse.”
The animal made a sound that, for a moment, he took to be a response. But the pony was looking back the way they had come.
Dust cloud. Fast riders coming down. Two, looked like. After a moment the old man recognized the wild-eyed style of the man in the lead. “Here comes our answer. Let’s go.” He hurried along the eastbound road, turned aside into a copse, found a spot where he could watch the riders. He would take the road they ignored.
Their mission had to be the same as his. That those two men should arrive here at this moment, hurrying like hell was yapping at their heels, for any other reason, strained credulity. The one called Raven could have heard the alarm. At some time in his life he had had some small training in the art, and his spirit had spent a long time snared in the coils of the Barrowland. He was sensitive enough.
The old man’s eyelids drooped. He prepared an herbal draft that would help keep him alert long enough to see what those two men would do.