The Silver spike (29 page)

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 damn! 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.

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 minutes, 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 corner, 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.”

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.

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.