The Silver spike

• Chapter 1
  
• Chapter 2
  
• Chapter 3
  
• Chapter 4
  
• Chapter 5
  
• Chapter 6
  
• Chapter 7
  
• Chapter 8
  
• Chapter 9
  
• Chapter 10
  
• Chapter 11
  
• Chapter 12
  
• Chapter 13
  
• Chapter 14
  
• Chapter 15
  
• Chapter 16
  
• Chapter 17
  
• Chapter 18
  
• Chapter 19
  
• Chapter 20
  
• Chapter 21
  
• Chapter 22
  
• Chapter 23
  
• Chapter 24
  
• Chapter 25
  
• Chapter 26
  
• Chapter 27
  
• Chapter 28
  
• Chapter 29
  
• Chapter 30
  
• Chapter 31
  
• Chapter 32
  
• Chapter 33
  
• Chapter 34
  
• Chapter 35
  
• Chapter 36
  
• Chapter 37
  
• Chapter 38
  
• Chapter 39
  
• Chapter 40
  
• Chapter 41
  
• Chapter 42
  
• Chapter 43
  
• Chapter 44
  
• Chapter 45
  
• Chapter 46
  
• Chapter 47
  
• Chapter 48
  
• Chapter 49
  
• Chapter 50
  
• Chapter 51
  
• Chapter 52
  
• Chapter 53
  
• Chapter 54
  
• Chapter 55
  
• Chapter 56
  
• Chapter 57
  
• Chapter 58
  
• Chapter 59
  
• Chapter 60
  
• Chapter 61
  
• Chapter 62
  
• Chapter 63
  
• Chapter 64
  
• Chapter 65
  
• Chapter 66
  
• Chapter 67
  
• Chapter 68
  
• Chapter 69
  
• Chapter 70
  
• Chapter 71
  
• Chapter 72
  
• Chapter 73
  
• Chapter 74
  
• Chapter 75
  
• Chapter 76
  
• Chapter 77
  
• Chapter 78
  
• Chapter 79
  
• Chapter 80
  
• Epilogue
  

This here journal is Raven’s idea but I got me a feeling
he won’t be so proud of it if he ever gets to reading it
because most of the time I’m going to tell the truth. Even if
he is my best buddy.

Talk about your feet of clay. He’s got them run all the
way up to his noogies, and then some. But he’s a right guy
even if he is a homicidal, suicidal maniac half the time. Raven
decides he’s your friend you got a friend for life, with a
knife in all three hands.

My name is Case. Philodendron Case. Thanks to my Ma. I’ve
never even told Raven about that. That’s why I joined the
army. To get away from the kind of potato diggers that would stick
a name like that on a kid. I had seven sisters and four brothers
last time I got a head count. Every one is named after some damned
flower.

A girl named Iris or Rose, what the hell, hey? But I got a
brother named Violet and another brother named Petunia. What kind
of people do that do their kids? Where the hell are the Butches and
Spikes?

Potato diggers.

People that spend their whole lives grubbing in the dirt, sunup
to sundown, to root out potatoes, cabbages, onions, parsnips,
rootabagas. Turnips. I still hate turnips. I wouldn’t wish
them on a hog. I joined the army as soon as I could sneak off.

They tried to stop me. My father and uncles and brothers and
cousins. They didn’t get away with it. I’m still amazed
how that one old sergeant managed to look so bad the whole clan
backed down.

That’s what I wanted to be when I grew up. Somebody who
could just stand there and look so bad people dribbled down their
legs. But I think you got to be born with it.

Raven’s got it. He just looks at somebody trying to jack
him around and the guy turns white.

So I joined up and went through the training and went out
soldiering, sometimes with Feather and Journey, sometimes with
Whisper, mostly here in the north. And I found out soldiering
wasn’t what I thought it would be. I found out I didn’t
like it a whole lot better than digging potatoes. But I was good at
it, even if I kept doing something to get busted every time I made
sergeant. I finally got posted to the Guards at the Barrowland.
That was supposed to be a big honor but I never believed it.

That’s where I met Raven. Only he went by the name of
Corbie then. I didn’t know he was a spy for the White Rose.
’Course, nobody did or he would have been dead. He was just
this quiet old crippled guy who said he used to soldier with the
Limper but had to get out after he got his leg hurt so bad. He hung
out in an abandoned house he fixed up. He made his living doing
things for guys that didn’t want to do them for themselves.
The Guards got paid good and the Barrowland was a hundred miles
into the Great Forest where there wasn’t nothing else to
spend it on but booze. Corbie got plenty of work polishing boots
and swabbing floors and currying horses. He used to come in and do
the colonel’s office and then play chess with him, which is
where I ran into him the first time.

He smelled odd right from the start. Not White Rose odd but you
knew he wasn’t no runaway farm boy like me or some city kid
from the slums that signed up because there wasn’t nothing
else to do with his life. He had some class when he wanted to show
it. He was educated. He talked maybe five or six languages and he
could read and I heard him talk with the old man about things that
I didn’t have a rooster’s notion what they meant.

So I got me this idea. I’d get to be his buddy and then
get him to teach me how to read and write.

It was the same old thing, see. Join the army and get off the
farm and go on adventures and life would be great. Learn to read
and write, I could get out of the army and go off on adventures and
everything would be great.

Sure.

I don’t know if everybody is that way. I’m not the
kind that can ask guys about things like that. But I know me enough
to know that there ain’t nothing ever going to turn out to be
exactly what I want and nothing is ever going to satisfy me.
I’m the guy with so much ambition I’m living here in a
one room walk-up with a wino whose big talent seems to be puking
his guts up after scarfing down about three gallons of the cheapest
wine he can find.

So anyway I got Raven to start teaching me and we ended up
buddies, even if he was weird. And that didn’t do me no good
when the shit storm hit and he turned out to be a spy. Lucky for
me, my bosses and his bosses had to get together to gang up on the
monster in the ground up there, that us Guards was getting paid so
good to watch.

That’s when I found out he was really Raven, the guy that
used to run with the Black Company, that took the White Rose away
from the Limper when she was a little kid and hid her out and
raised her up till she was ready to take on her destiny.

I thought he was dead. So did everybody else, on both sides.
Especially the White Rose, who had loved him, and not like a
brother or father. Which is why he turned himself into a dead man
and ran away. He couldn’t handle what it means to have
somebody in love with you. Running away was the only thing he knew
how to do.

But he was some in love with her, too, and the only way he had
to show it was turn himself into Corbie and go spying and hope he
could find her some big weapon she could use when she came to her
final confrontation with the Lady. My big boss.

So what happens? Fate sticks an oar in and stirs everything up
and when we look around what do we find? The Dominator, the old
monster buried in the Barrowland, the blackest evil this old world
ever knew, was awake and trying to get out, and the only way to
stop him was for everybody to drop their old fights and gang up. So
the Lady came to the Barrowland with all her double-ugly champions,
and the White Rose came with the Black Company, and things started
getting interesting.

And damnfool Raven mooned around in the middle of it all
thinking he could just walk over and take up with Darling like he
hadn’t walked out on her and let her think he was dead for a
bunch of years.

The damn fool. I know more about sorcery than he’ll ever
know about women.

So they let the old evil come up out of the ground, then they
jumped all over it. It was so big and black they couldn’t
kill its spirit, only its flesh, so they burned that flesh to ash
and scattered the ash and imprisoned its soul in a silver spike.
They drove the spike into the trunk of a sapling that was the son
of some kind of god that would live forever and grow around it and
keep it from ever causing any more grief. Then they all went away.
Even Darling, with some guy named Silent.

There were tears in her eyes when she went. Some of that feeling
for Raven was still there inside her. But she was not going to open
up and let him do it to her again.

And he stood there watching her go, dumbstruck. He
couldn’t figure out why she would do that to him.

Damn fool.

It was weird that nobody else thought of it right away. But
maybe that was because people were more taken with what had
happened between the Lady and the White Rose and were wondering
what that would mean to the empire and the rebellion. For a while
it looked like half the world was up for grabs. Everybody who was
the sort to do some grabbing was eyeballing his or her chances and
scouting around to see if they might get turned into eunuchs if
they tried.

So it was up to some second-rate hustlers from Oar’s north
side to take first whack at stealing the silver spike.

The news from the Barrowland was still in the shithouse rumor
stage when Tully Stahl came pounding on the door of the room where
his cousin Smeds Stahl stayed.

The room Smeds lived in had no furnishings except roaches and
dirt, half a dozen mildewed, stolen blankets, and half a gross of
empty clay wine jugs that he never got around to taking back. They
made him pay deposit at the Thorn and Crown. Smeds called the jugs
his life savings. If times got really tough he could trade eight
empties for a full.

Tully said that was a dumb way to do things. Whenever Smeds got
ripped and pissed he started throwing things around. He wasted his
savings.

The shards never got picked up, either, just kicked against one
wall, where they formed a dusty badland.

When Tully got on him Smeds figured he was just putting on airs
because he was flush. Tully had two married women giving him
presents for helping out around the house when the old man was
gone. And he was living with a widow he was going to clean out as
soon as he found some other woman to take him in. He thought being
a success gave him the right to dish out advice.

Tully pounded on the door. Smeds ignored him. The Kinbro girls
from upstairs, Marti and Sheena, eleven and twelve, were there for
their “music lessons.” The three of them were naked and
tumbling around on the ratty blankets. The only instrument in sight
was a skin flute.

Smeds made the girls stop bouncing and giggling. There was
people who wouldn’t appreciate how he was preparing them for
later life.

Pound. Pound. Pound. “Come on, Smeds. Open up. It’s me. Tully.”

“I’m busy.”

“Open up. I got a deal I got to talk about.”

Sighing, Smeds untangled himself from skinny young limbs and
trudged to the door. “It’s my cousin. He’s all
right.”

The girls had been into the wine. They didn’t care. They
didn’t cover themselves. They just sat there grinning when
Smeds let Tully in.

“Some friends,” Smeds explained. “You want in?
They don’t mind.”

“Some other time. Get them out.”

Smeds glared at his cousin. Getting too damned pushy.
“Come on, girls. Get your clothes on. Papa has to talk
business.”

Tully and Smeds watched while they got into ragged clothing. It
didn’t occur to Smeds to dress. Sheena gave old Hank the
Shank a playful slap as she went by. “See you later.”
The door closed. “You’re going to get your ass in a
sling,” Tully said.

“No more than you. You ought to meet their
mother.”

“She got any money?”

“No. But she blows a mean horn. Got a thing about it. She
gets going she just can’t quit.”

“When you going to clean this pigsty?”

“Soon as the maid gets back from holiday. So what’s
so important you have to break in on my party?”

“You heard about what happened up in the
Barrowland?”

“I heard some stories. I didn’t pay no attention.
What do I care? Won’t make no difference to me.”