The Silver spike (10 page)

They might believe he had been broken of his hunger for power,
but would they ever believe he was free of his thing for that dark
woman? How could he convince them when he had yet to convince
himself? She had been a deadly candle to many a man’s moth
and the flame did not lose its attraction by being out of sight or
out of reach.

He grunted, prized himself off his butt. His legs were stiff. He
had been seated a long time. Darling and Silent watched him amble
past a stand of something that looked like pink ferns ten feet
tall. Little eyes peeped out warily. The ferns were some sort of
organ. The mantas used them for an infant creche.

He went as far as his acrophobia let him. It was the first he
had looked overboard in a week.

Last time they had been over water. He had been able to see
nothing but haziness and blue all the way to undefined
horizons.

The air was clearer today. The view was very nearly
monochromatic again, but this time brown. Just a few hints of green
flecked it. Way, way ahead there was something that looked like it
might be smoke from a big fire.

They had to be two miles high. There was not a cloud in the
sky.

“Soon you will have your chance to prove yourself, Seth
Chalk.”

He glanced back. A menhir stood four feet behind him. It had not
been there a moment before. They were that way, coming and going
without sound or warning. This one was a little more gray and
mica-flecked than most. It had a scar down its face side six inches
wide and seven feet long where something had scraped through lichen
and weathered surface stone. Bomanz did not understand
talking-stone civilization. They had no obvious hierarchy, yet this
one generally spoke for them when there was official speaking to be
done.

“How so?”

“Do you not feel it, wizard?”

“I feel a lot of things, rock. What I feel most of all is
grumpy about the way you all have been doing me. What am I supposed
to feel?”

“The mad psychic stink of the thing that you sensed
escaping the Barrowland. From Oar. It is no farther away
now.”

The talking stones spoke in a dead monotone, usually, yet Bomanz
sensed the taint of suspicion that lay in the menhir’s mind.
If he could tell the old evil was stirring from as far as Oar, when
it was weak, how was it that he could not sense it now, when it was
so much stronger?

How was it that he, too, was alive when he was supposed to be
dead?

Did he know about the resurrection of the shadow because it had
been one with his own? Had they conspired together and come out of
the unhallowed earth of the Barrowland together? Was he a slave of
that old darkness?

“It was not that that I sensed,” Bomanz said.
“I heard the scream of one of the old fetish alarms being
tripped when something moved that should not have. That isn’t
the same thing at all.”

The stone stood silent for a moment. “Perhaps not.
Nevertheless, we are upon the thing. In hours, or a day or two, as
the winds decide, the battle will be joined. Your fate may be
determined.”

Bomanz snorted. “A rock with a sense for the dramatic.
It’s absurd. You really expect me to fight that
thing?”

“Yes.”

“If it’s what I think it
is . . . ”

“It is the thing called the Limper. And the thing known as
Toadkiller Dog. Both are handicapped.”

Bomanz sneered and snorted. “I’d call being without
a body something more than a handicap.”

“It is not weak, this thing. That smoke rises from a city
still burning three days after its departure. It has become the
disciple of death. Killing and destruction are all it knows. The
tree has decreed that it be stopped.”

“Right. Why? And why us?”

“Why? Because if it continues amok its course will someday
bring it to the Plain. Why us? Because there is no one else. All
who had any great power were consumed in the struggle in the
Barrowland except thee and we. And, most of all, we do it because
the god has commanded it.”

Bomanz muttered and grumbled under his breath.

“Prepare yourself, wizard. The hour comes. If you are
innocent in our eyes you must be guilty in his.”

Of course. There could be no ground in the middle. Not for him.
He did not have the strength to hold it. Never had had, if the
truth be known, though he had deluded himself in the years of his
quest for knowledge about those who had been enchained by the
ancients.

Did he know remorse for the horror brought on by his rumblings?
Some. Not as much as he thought he should. He told himself that
because of his intercession at the penultimate moment, his
self-sacrifice, the outbreak of darkness had been far gentler than
it could have been. Without him the night might have lasted
forever.

The old man ambled away from the stone, rapt in his own
thoughts. He did not notice the stone turning jerkily, keeping its
scarred face toward him. The menhirs never moved while being
watched by human eyes. How they knew they were being watched no one
knew.

Bomanz’s meander took him to the aft end of the windwhale.
Small rustlings accompanied him. Chaperones. If he noticed he
ignored them. They had been with him always.

He settled upon a soft, unprotesting lump of whale flesh about
chair height. It made comfortable sitting. But he knew he would not
be staying long. The windwhale was especially fetid here.

For the hundredth time he contemplated escape. All he had to do
was jump and use a levitator spell to soften his fall. That was
well within his competence. But not within the compass of his
courage.

His fear of heights was not totally debilitating. Should he
fall, he would retain enough self-possession to save himself. But
there was no way he could bring himself to take the plunge
voluntarily.

Resigned, he looked back the way he had come. Home, such as it
was and had been, lay a thousand miles away. Maybe a lot farther.
They were passing over lands of which he had never heard, where all
who saw it marveled at the great shape in the sky and had no idea
what it was.

There was no guarantee he would step into friendly lands if he
did go over the side. In fact, the terrain below looked actively
hostile.

Hell with it. He had gotten himself into this. He would ride it
out.

“Hunh!”

He was an old man but his eyes were plenty sharp.

The high, clean air allowed him to see a long way. And up north,
at the edge of discernment when he looked at them a fraction of a
point off directly, were two dots at an altitude even higher than
that of the windwhale. To be visible at all at that distance they
had to be the size of windwhales.

Bomanz snorted.

This monster was the vanguard of a parade.

He chuckled then. There were rustles nearby, the natives
disturbed by his amusement. He chuckled again and rose. This time
he strolled the length of the windwhale before he alighted again,
as far forward as he dared go.

The smoke was much nearer. It rose higher than the windwhale. He
saw hints of the fires that fed the column, which had begun to
develop a bend in its trunk down lower. Grim. Maybe the rock was
right. Something had to be done.

This was the dozenth such city, though the first they had come
to still in its death throes. The progress of the insanity was an
arrow pointing due south, a craziness that could make sense only to
the crazy himself.

The windwhale began rumbling with internal flatulences. The
horizon tilted, rose. Mantas piped and squealed behind Bomanz. He
got a death grip on his seat.

The monster was headed down.

Why? It was not time to drop a menhir. It was not feeding
time.

Mantas hurtled past in pairs and squadrons, spade-headed darts
spreading across the sky, headed toward the city and its coronet of
circling carrion birds.

“There is a good wind running a mile below us,
wizard.” Bomanz glanced back. His scar-faced stone friend.
“If it holds we will overtake the destroyer shortly after
nightfall. You have only that long to prepare.”

Bomanz glanced around again. The stone was gone. But he was not
alone. Darling and Silent had come to stare at the stricken city.
The dark man’s face was impassive but Darling’s was a
study in empathetic agony. That touched the soft-headed,
softhearted side of the old man. He faced her, said, “We will
put an end to the pain, child.” He spoke carefully so she
could read his lips.

She looked at Silent. Silent looked at her. Their fingers flew
in the speech of the deaf. Bomanz caught part of the exchange. He
was not pleased.

They were discussing him and Silent’s remarks were not
complimentary.

Bomanz cursed and spat. That bastard had it in for him for no
damned reason.

The manias decimated the carrion birds, used the up-draft from
the fires to soar high, then returned to the windwhale carrying a
feast for their young. They settled down to nap.

But there was no real relaxation for anyone. The windwhale had
dropped till it was only half a mile high. It passed the city,
scudding along at twenty miles an hour. Soon the monster had to
climb back into less vigorous air so as not to catch up before
nightfall.

The scar-face stone returned when Bomanz was not looking. When
he did notice it, he said, “I feel it now, rock. It reeks of
corruption. And I still have no idea what I could do to hurt
it.”

“Worry not. There is a new decree from the god. You are
not to reveal yourself except in extreme circumstance.
Our attack will be exploratory, experimental, and admonitory
only.”

“What the hell? Why? Go for the kill, I say. Hit him with
everything the one time he don’t know we’re coming.
We’ll never get a better shot.”

“The god has spoken.”

Bomanz argued. The god won.

The windwhale began shedding altitude at dusk. Soon after
nightfall Bomanz spied the campfires of an army ahead. A pair of
mantas took to the air to scout. They returned, reported whatever
they reported. The windwhale slanted down toward the encampment,
cutting a course that would rip through its heart.

Mantas poured off the windwhale’s back, scrambled around
and over one another in a search for updrafts.

Bomanz felt the old terror moving closer. It was restless but
did not seem alert.

The ground came up and up. Bomanz clung to his seat and awaited
certain impact, now unconcerned by the insult inplicit in the fact
that a dozen menhirs had moved into position around him and
Darling, and her thugs were spread out ready for trouble.

The windwhale leveled out. Campfires slid out of sight beneath
it. The screaming down there was almost inaudible because of the
creak and rumble and intervening bulk of the giant of the sky.
Bomanz felt the shock of the old evil, caught completely
unprepared. It went into a pure black rage.

Just as it began to respond mantas swooped in from every
direction. They cut the heart out of the night with the glare of
the lightnings they discharged from the store in their flesh. Bolts
stabbed around by the hundred, keeping the old horror so busy
guarding himself he had no chance to counterattack.

The windwhale dumped tons of ballast and began a slow ascent,
struggling to gain altitude against the weight of plunder.

Bomanz could not see the monster’s underside and was glad.
Its tentacles would be grasping men and animals and anything else
it considered edible. It was an intelligent beast but it did not
exempt other intelligences from its food supply if they were its
enemies.

Many of the Plain races ate their enemies.

Bomanz found the idea repugnant in practice, yet it had a
certain moral allure. How vigorously would men prosecute their wars
if they had to eat those who fell before their swords?

Interesting. But how to impose the requirement?

The mantas began returning. Near as the old man could tell, they
were very pleased with themselves.

It was over. The windwhale was up and safely away and now
preoccupied with its digestion. Bomanz rose. Time to turn in.

As he passed Darling, Silent, and the scarred menhir, he said,
“Next time the bear is going to bite back. You should have
stuck him while you had him.”

The “bear“ was stunned, numb, immobile within the
desolation of his camp, desperately trying to grasp the sense of
his sudden misfortune.

His entire existence was a headlong assault upon adversity.
Having something go sour was never a surprise. But a disaster of
these proportions, with its implication of vast, previously
unconsidered forces in motion, had for the moment obliterated his
initiative. He lacked even his usual insane volition driven by the
engine of rage.

The beast Toadkiller Dog was less stricken. Its memories of the
son of the tree were fresh. It had not deceived itself when it came
to that sprig’s connection with its sire. It had been but a
matter of time till Old Father Tree showed an interest.

Toadkiller Dog had been to the Plain of Fear. He had come
face-to-face with the god. His memories of the confrontation were
not sweet. He had been lucky to escape.

But that had been a profitable adventure. He had seen the Plain
firsthand. Now what he knew might become a useful tool. If the
wicker man would listen.

Unlikely.

It was not now the half-rational thing that had been the Limper
before. It had become so self-centered, so self-involved, as to be
the hub of a solipsistic universe.

The beast prowled the camp, past men and the remains of men.
Shock lay upon the survivors like a smothering quilt. Only a few
understood what had happened. He heard mutterings about the wrath
of the gods. Those men did not know how truly they spoke.

It would be hard to hold them together if that theory gained
credence. Problems of conscience were endemic already.