The Silver spike (23 page)

They took Timmy inside one of those. Smeds stood in a shadow and
looked at it and wondered what he was going to do and kept hearing
Fish say they were fighting for their lives now.

He’d never been much of a fighter. He’d always
walked away when he could. When he could not he’d always
gotten whipped. He hadn’t had the desire or meanness, or
whatever, even when he’d had no choice.

Which got him to remembering all the bullies who had taunted and
slapped and shoved him around and puzzling the eternal why did they
do it when he’d never done a thing to them. The old anger
bubbled up, along with the nerve-tingling vengeance fantasies, the
miasma of bitter hatred.

One of the men came back out of the building, urinated into the
street, backed off, and just leaned against the wall. He
didn’t act like he was doing anything but just hanging out.
He wasn’t alert enough to be a sentinel.

Smeds staggered forward without the slightest damned idea what
he was doing. Besides shaking so bad his toe-nails rattled.

He stumbled, went down on one knee onto a broken brick, could
not silence a whining curse, and in the shock of pain suffered an
inspiration.

He came up limping, stumbling, muttering to himself.

He headed straight for the man, sort of singing, “Once
there was a farmer’s daughter, couldn’t behave like a
maiden ought-er.”

The thug was alert now. But he did not move.

Smeds did a pratfall, giggled, got onto his hands and knees,
pretended a bout with attempted upchucking, then got his feet under
him and headed out. Straight into the wall about ten feet from the
man watching him. He backed off muttering, looked at the wall like
he couldn’t understand where it had come from. Then he put
one hand against it for support and started stumbling toward the
thug. At a distance of four feet he pretended to take first notice
of the man, who was watching more with amused contempt than with
suspicion.

Smeds made a little “Gleep!” he hoped sounded
startled and frightened and silently thanked whatever gods there
might be that he hadn’t been recognized. Now if the guy just
stayed in character and tried to roll him in the guise of
helping . . . 

Smeds stumbled and went down onto hands and knees.

“Looks like you had one too many, old buddy.” The
thug stepped over.

Smeds made gagging sounds. Inside, he was listening to Old Man
Fish. “Like taking a woman, Smeds. Slide it in. Don’t
stab.”

The man started giving him a hand up. He did not see the blade
in Smeds’s palm. Smeds leaned against him and began sliding
in between his ribs, into his heart.

One part of Smeds stood outside, guiding his hand. The rest was
in a passion of terror and horror, oblivious to the world. Only one
coherent thought splashed across that chaos. It was a lie that
killing got easier each time you did it.

When he came out of the fog, consciously, he was a hundred feet
away, dragging a still-twitching body.

“What the hell am I . . . ?”

Getting it out of sight, of course. Because this was just the
start.

He heard a muted scream and realized that another such had
opened the first rent in the fog that had possessed him.

Smeds went into the building with the caution and intense
concentration of a stalking cat. He compartmented his emotion, did
not let them torment him when Timmy screamed. He used the cries to
move a few quick steps each time.

What the hell was he doing?

The screams came from a basement. Smeds started down the steps,
so committed he moved as though under a compulsion. Six steps down
he hunkered, then almost stood on his head to get a look
around.

The base of the stair ended a few feet from a doorway without a
door in it. Light and the screams came through that. Smeds eased
down a couple more steps, then carefully lowered himself over the
side, got underneath the stair, looked around.

It was hard to see much, but it looked like the fires had been
gentle here. This part of the basement was untouched. There
wasn’t a whiff of old smoke.

He could make our most of what was being said in that other
room. Someone was asking Timmy impatient questions. Another two men
were bickering about the character Smeds had killed. One was
worried that the man had run out, the other didn’t give a
damn.

Under the stair was not the place to be if someone decided to go
looking. The light from the room would give him away. Smeds moved
out carefully, got behind a pile of junk to the left of the
doorway.

And there he squatted, unable to think of anything to do.

Timmy passed out or something. He wasn’t yelling anymore.
One man was grumbling about that while the other two went on about
the man in the street. The grumbler snapped, “He has been
gone too long. Give me some peace. Go find him. Both of
you.”

Two men stomped out and headed upstairs, still arguing. They
were the other two who had snatched Timmy.

Smeds rose, stretched, drifted over till he could see into the
room.

Timmy was tied into a chair, slumped forward, unconscious. A man
bent over him, back to Smeds. Too good to be true. He slapped
Timmy. “Come on! Come out of it. Don’t die on me now.
We’re too close to the truth.”

Slide it in, slide it in, Smeds told himself, gliding toward the
man.

The man sensed danger, started to turn, eyes and mouth
opening . . . 

Too late.

Smeds’s knife pierced his heart. He made a grisly noise
that wasn’t quite a scream, tried to get hold of Smeds,
folded up.

Maybe it was easier after all . . . The
detachment went. His heart hammered. His hands shook. His breath
came in gasps. He stumbled over to Timmy, cut the ropes binding
him . . . Gods! They’d burned out one of
his eyes! They’d . . . 

Timmy fell over on his face.

Smeds got down and tried to bring him out of it. “Hey!
Timmy! Come on. It’s me. Smeds. Come on. We got to get out of
here before those other guys come back.”

Then it hit him. “Shit!” Timmy had croaked.
“Son of a bitch! I come in here and risk my ass for
nothing . . . ” Except maybe for
whatever Timmy told them before he checked out.

Then he felt like a total shit, getting pissed at Timmy for
dying and inconveniencing him. Then he got confused, not knowing
what to do about the fact that he was in here and still had to get
out and there were bodies here something probably ought to be done
about.

“Hey, Abel!” somebody shouted from outside.
“You better come check this out. Somebody offed
Tanker.”

Smeds dropped Timmy’s hand, frantically jerked his knife
out of the dead man—wizard?—and got himself over beside
the doorframe as the someone yelled, “You hear me,
Abel?” Feet thump-thump-thumped down the stairs.

“We’re maybe in deep shit here. Somebody stuck a
knife in Tanker . . . What the shit is going on
here?”

The man had stopped just outside the doorway. Smeds came around
thrusting at what he guessed should be chest
height . . . and discovered that the big voice
belonged to the smallest of the thugs. He turned the thrust into an
uppercut, drove his blade up and in under the man’s chin, not
sliding it, driving it with all the force of panic into the
man’s brain.

He had not looked the other two in the eye at their moment of
realization. Gods! That was scary. He jumped back, stumbled over
Abel and Timmy, fell on his back as his victim toppled forward.

Before Smeds was all the way back on his feet someone else
called some question downstairs. He dove over to reclaim his knife.
The man continued to move, one leg slowly pumping. For a moment he
thought of a dog trying to scratch. Crazy.

The damned knife was wedged in bone. It wouldn’t come
loose. He scrambled around looking for another weapon, any weapon,
while the voice from the head of the stairs asked several questions
more. All Smeds could come up with was the dead man’s own
knife, which he pulled from its sheath with a sort of superstitious
dread.

He got against the wall beside the doorway again and waited. And
waited. And waited.

In time the shakes went away. The nerves calmed some. He
realized that his latest victim could be seen from the stairs.

He waited some more.

He had to make a move. The longer he dicked around, the more
time there would be for something to go wrong.

His muscles did not want to unlock. He was completely terrified
of the consequences of making any move.

But he did, finally, drag himself around far enough to peek
through the doorway.

Morning light spilled down from upstairs. It showed him nothing
to fear. He made his feet move. He found no trouble on the ground
floor. From the doorway he could see nothing but desolation, city
badlands where not a soul stirred. He wanted to run, all the way to
the Skull and Crossbones.

He bore down, did what had to be done, dragging the body out of
the street, to the cellar, where it was less likely to be
discovered soon. Then he headed for home. But he did not run,
though his legs insisted they had to stretch out and go.

We dropped into Oar in the middle of the night but we
didn’t find Darling and them till noon next day, and then
only because we had Bomanz along to sniff them out. They
weren’t where they were supposed to be. Meantime, I ran into
two guys that I knew from when me and Raven were staying in Oar,
and they wanted to talk talk talk.

Nobody in town had much else to do.

“Things don’t look good,” Raven said as we
drifted through the streets, following Bomanz’s sorcerous
nose. “All these people packed in here, no chance to get out,
food stocks probably getting low, plague maybe getting ready to
break out. The place is ripe. Would have been long gone if this was
high summer and the heat was eating up everybody’s tolerance.
You know anything about these twins?”

He wasn’t talking to me. When it comes to sorcerers and
sorcery I don’t know nothing about nothing except I want to
stay out of the way.

“Never heard of them,” Bomanz said. “That
doesn’t mean anything. The Lady had a whole crop coming
up.”

“How do you think you’d stack up against
them?”

“I don’t plan to find out.”

I spotted a white rose painted on a door. “Look
there.” They looked. Other people were looking, too, and
trying not to be noticed doing it.

“That damned screw-up Silent,” Raven growled.
“He’s talked her into doing something
stupid.”

“Who you trying to bullshit?” I asked. “When
did anybody ever talk Darling into doing something she didn’t
want to do?”

He grumbled some, then grumbled some more.

Bomanz’s nose picked out their hideout then, and after
some shibboleth stuff we got into the cellar where Darling was
holding court with a gang of leftovers from Oar’s Rebel
heyday. They didn’t look like much to me.

Raven grunted. He wasn’t impressed either. He reported the
high points of our visit to the Barrowland. That didn’t take
a minute, even using sign. Then Darling let us in on the situation
in Oar, which took a lot longer than a minute.

Raven wanted to know what she was doing, painting white roses
around town. She said she wasn’t. In fact, she said nobody
that had anything to do with the movement admitted doing it. Since
none of those roses had been seen before she arrived she thought
somebody recognized her in the street and was trying to get
something stirred up.

She didn’t have a shred of evidence. Didn’t seem
likely to me. Anybody that recognized her, that wasn’t
personally committed to the cause, should ought to go for the
bounty on her, the way I figured. She would fetch a good price, and
Silent not a bad sum, and even the Torque brothers were good for a
chunk that could keep you in beans for a long time.

Raven figured it the way I did. But he wasn’t going to
argue with Darling, so he asked if there had been any progress
finding the silver spike.

“None,” she signed. “We have been very busy
stampeding around old ground already covered by other hunters,
finding nothing while we ate their dust. In the meantime our small
allies have been busy spying on those other hunters that our
brothers of the movement have identified for us.”

Bomanz wanted names. He got them. A long string, with a half
dozen noted as having enlisted with the deceased.

“You know any of those people?” Raven asked.

“No. But I’ve been out of touch. The curious angle
is, there hasn’t been any attention from the Tower. This
thing is pulling in every hedge wizard and tea-leaf reader with a
smidge of ambition. These twins are pretty plainly up to exactly
what you’d expect from their kind faced with an opportunity
like this. News like this gets around faster than the clap.
It’s got to have reached the Tower. Why isn’t some real
heavyweight up here to sit on those two?”

I suggested, “Because they don’t have windwhales to
carry them around and all their flying carpets got skragged back
when.”

“They have other resources.”

There wasn’t no point worrying about it since we
weren’t going to come up with an answer.

Raven wanted to know how the other guys were trying to find the
spike. He figured maybe the problem was that the hunters were
attacking it from the wrong direction.

Darling signed, “Spidersilk and Gossamer have made
repeated direct searches. They also provoke and watch the other
hunters, who have been concentrating on finding the men who stole
the spike and brought it to Oar.”

I asked, “How do we know the damned thing is even
here?”

Bomanz said, “You can sense it. Like a bad
smell.”

“But you can’t tell where it is?”

“Only very vaguely. Right now I’d guess it’s
somewhere north of us. But I can’t narrow that directionality
to below about a hundred thirty degrees of arc.” He raised
his arms to show what he meant. “It’s the nature of the
thing to maximize the evil around it. If it could be sniffed out
easily there would be little chance for the play of chaos. It
isn’t sentient but it responds to and feeds back the dark
emotions and ambitions around it. One way to find the men who
brought it out of the Barrowland might be to look for people who
were out of town during the proper time period and who have shown
changed patterns of behavior. Generally, aggravated tendencies
toward indulging weaknesses they’ve had all along.”