The Silver spike (4 page)

Hell with him, I said.

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 from 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.

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.

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 aholt 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.

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.

Raven reined back to a walk. “We gave that old boy a
fright.”

“Probably figures we’re bandits. We look it. You
going to kill these horses today? Or can we string them along for
awhile?”

Raven grunted. “You’re right, Case. No sense getting
in so big a hurry we end up taking twice as long because we have to
walk most of the way. Funny. That old boy reminded me of that
wizard Bomanz that got eaten by the Barrowland dragon.”

“All them old-timers look the same to me.”

“Could be. Hold up.” He studied the crossroads. I
tried to spot the old man in the copse. I was sure he was watching
us.

“Well?” I asked.

“They split up like they said they would.”

Don’t ask me how he knew. He knew. Unless he was just
faking it. I’ve seen him do that.

“Darling went east. Croaker kept heading south.”

I’d play his game. “How do you figure?”

“She was with him.” He rubbed his hip. “She
would be headed for the Tower.”

“Oh. Yeah.” Big deal. “Which way are we
headed? Whichever, we got to rest soon.”