The Silver spike (6 page)

The trail had grown confused. That of the prey was overlaid by
other scents equally familiar, tantalizing, and hated. “As
well,” he whispered. “As well. Take them all and have
done.” He sniffed. “Him! And that accursed White Rose.
And the one who thwarted me in Opal. And the wizard who set us
free.” Ruined lips quivered in momentary fear. Yes. Even he
knew the meaning of fear. “Her!”

The beast called Toadkiller Dog believed that she had lost her
powers. He wanted to believe that himself. That would be a justice
beautiful beyond compare. He needed to believe it. But he dared
not, not entirely, till he saw for himself. Toadkiller Dog operated
from motives not his own. And she was as crafty and treacherous a
being as ever any human had been.

Moreover, he had tried to disarm her himself, once, and his
failure had reduced him to this.

Toadkiller Dog bulled through the gateway, shouldering soldiers
aside. Gore dripped off him. For hours he had ravened through the
city, feeding an ancient thirst for blood. He moved on four limbs
now, though one was as artificial as the wicker man’s body.
He, too, peered down the road.

The forest warriors collapsed, falling asleep where they were.
The wicker man was driven. He showed no inclination to baby his
followers.

A tottering shaman, on his last legs, tried to speak to the
wicker man, tried to make him understand that unalloyed flesh could
not keep the pace he had set.

The head turned slightly. The expression that shown through the
ruin was one of contempt. “Keep up or die,” it
whispered. It beckoned men to come lift it onto the back of the
beast. It rode out, insane with a hunger for revenge.

The folks we was chasing never did much to cover up which way
they was headed. I don’t guess they thought they had any
reason. Anyway, Raven knew where the guy he was chasing was headed.
Some place called Khatovar, all the way down on the southern edge
of the world.

I knew the guy, Croaker. Him and his Black Company boys did a
job on me at the Barrowland, though they never did me too bad. I
got out alive. So I had mixed feelings about them. They were a hard
bunch. I didn’t feel like I really wanted to catch them.

The more we rode along, the more Raven dried out and turned back
into the real Raven. And I don’t mean into the Corbie that I
got to know when I first met him, I mean the real bad-ass so tough
and hard he was death on a stick. I don’t think it ever
occurred to him to take a drink after he made up his mind that he
had something else to do.

We had practice sessions every morning before we rode out and
every evening after we set camp. Even when he was at his weakest it
was all I could do to handle him. When he really started coming
back he beat me at everything but throwing rocks and running
footraces.

His hip never let up on him.

He wouldn’t never stop over at an inn or in a village.
Putting away temptation, I guess.

You ain’t never going to impress me with nothing if you
think you’re going to tell me tall tales and you ain’t
never see the Tower at Charm. There ain’t nothing ought to be
that big. It’s got to be five hundred feet tall and as black
as a buzzard’s heart. I never seen nothing like it before and
I don’t expect I ever will again.

We never went too close. Raven said there wasn’t no sense
getting those people’s attention. Damned straight. That was
the heart of the empire, the home of the Lady and all those old
evils called the Ten Who Were Taken.

I went off a few miles and kept my head down while Raven skulked
around trying to find something out. I was perfectly happy to get
rested up from all those hundreds of miles of riding.

He materialized out of a sunset that painted the horizon with
end-of-the-world fires. He sat down across from me.
“They’re not in the Tower. They stopped there for a
couple weeks, but then they headed south again. She followed
them.”

I got to admit I groaned. I never was a whiner in all my
soldiering days, but I never got put through anything like this,
either. A man ain’t made for it.

“We’re gaining on them, Case. Fast. If they fool
around in Opal like they did here we’ll have them.” He
gave me a fat smile. “You wanted to see the world.”

“Not the whole damned thing in a week. I kind of counted
on enjoying the seeing.”

“We don’t get them turned around and headed toward
the trouble, there might not be much damned world left.”

“You going to take time out to look for your kids while
we’re down there?” I wanted to see the sea. I wanted
that since I was little. A traveling man come through and told us
kids lies about about the Jewel Cities and the Sea of Torments.
From then on I always thought about the sea when I was digging
potatoes or pulling weeds. I pretended I was a sailor, holy-stoning
a deck, but I was going to be a ship’s master someday.

What did I know?

More than the sea, now, I wanted to see Raven do right and get
right with himself and his kids.

He gave me a funny look, then just ducked the question by not
answering it.

We accumulated a fair arsenal here and there as we rode along.
Just outside Opal we got a chance to show it off. Not that that
done a lot of good.

This great big old hairy-ass black iron coach come roaring out
of the city and straight up the road at us, them horses looking
like they was breathing fire. I never saw anything like it.

Raven had. “That’s the Lady’s! Stop it!”
He whipped out a bow and strung it.

“The Lady’s coach? Stop it? Man, you’re crazy!
You got guano for brains.” I got my bow out, too.

Raven threw up a hand in a signal for them to halt. We tried to
look stand-and-deliver, your money or your life. Mean.

Them coachmen never even slowed down. It was like they never
even saw us. I ended up going ass over appetite into a ditch with
about a foot of muck and water in it. When I got up I saw Raven had
ended up in some blackberry bushes on the other side.
“Arrogant bastards!” he shouted after the coach.

“Yeah. Got no damned respect for a couple of honest
highwaymen.”

Raven looked at me and started laughing. I looked at him and
went to laughing right back. After a minute, he said, “There
wasn’t anybody inside that coach.” He sounded
puzzled.

“When did you have time to look?”

“I think I know what’s happening. Come on. We have
to hurry. Catch your horse.”

I caught her. She was too stupid to hold a grudge. But his kept
leading him around, looking back like he was thinking, You
ain’t going to pull that crazy shit on me again, you son of a
bitch. This game went on for a while. I finally stopped it by
sneaking up on the beast from the other direction.

We blew about a half hour diddling around there.

The big black ship was about a half hour down the channel when
we got to the waterfront. For a minute I thought Raven was going to
chop that gelding of his into fish bait. But he just dismounted and
stood there on the wharf, staring out to the sea. Whenever a local
growled at us about being in the way he just gave them one of those
looks that stilled the heart and quickened the feet.

He had it all back, whatever it was. Those weren’t soft
guys, there on that waterfront.

The black ship faded into the haze out on the water. Raven
shuddered his way back to the racket and fish smells. “Guess
we’ll have to sell the horses and find a ship headed for
Beryl.”

“Hang on here, man. Enough is enough. Reasonable is
reasonable. You figure on heading all the way to the end of the
world? Look around here. This is Opal. Almost ever since I’ve
known you I been hearing how you got to get back to Opal and find
out about your kids. Look it! We’re here! Let’s do
it.”

The guy was my friend. But he had trouble hanging in. Before he
was Raven he was Corbie, and before he was Corbie he was Raven. And
sometime way back he was somebody else before he got to be Raven
the first time. I don’t know who, but I know he was somebody
high-class and he came from Opal and he left two kids behind,
twins, when he got on with Croaker and that bunch and headed north
for the fighting in Forsberg.

He plain left those kids to the winds of fortune. He tortured
himself because he didn’t know what happened to them, because
he wasn’t shit as a father. Me, I figured it was high time he
got that all straightened out.

He thought about it a long time. He kept looking down the coast,
eastward, like the answer might be there. What I saw when I looked
that way was the homes of rich people on top of cliffs, overlooking
the sea. I always kind of suspected he was one of them.

“Maybe when we come back through,” he said, finally.
“When we’re headed north again.”

“Sure.” Bullshit.

He heard me thinking. He sort of shrank into himself. He did not
look at me.

Best ship we could get for Beryl was on some kind of fat scow
leaving in two days. I got sick just looking at it.

Raven got good and polluted that night even though I never said
another word about his kids. I guess he heard me thinking. Or he
heard himself, which is worse.

I got up early. Raven would be nursing a hangover all day. He
was one of those old farts had to tell you all about how he never
got one when he was young. I went off to look around.

I did all right. I never got lost. And the city had so many
different kinds in it after a couple generations being part of the
empire that almost everywhere I could find somebody who spoke one
of the languages that I did.

It wasn’t a lot of fun rooting around in a friend’s
past. I didn’t learn a whole lot, anyway. I couldn’t
find hardly anybody who remembered anything, and what they did
remember mostly sounded like it was fairy tale. Good stories always
get bigger. But I think I got some sense out of all the
nonsense.

A long time back a character named the Limper was the governor
of the province that included Opal. The Limper was one of the
original Ten Who Were Taken, the undead sorcerer-devils who were
the Lady’s champions. They were called Taken because they had
been great villains in their own right once, but they had been
enslaved by a greater and darker power.

This one called the Limper was about as corrupt and rotten a
governor as ever there was.

I knew the guy later. He had been up to the Barrowland for the
last big battle, where he got his. All I can say is, there
wasn’t no one anywhere in this wide world who shed a tear
when he went down. Of all the Taken he was the craziest and
nastiest.

Anyway, he was the boss in Opal and him and his cronies was
gutting the province, stealing the coppers off dead men’s
eyes. A certain Baronet Corvo, whose family had become allied with
the empire when it first came into the area, went off on an
assignment somewhere. While he was gone his old lady got to messing
around with the Limper’s gang. To the point where she helped
rob the baronet’s family of most of its honors and titles and
all its properties. She helped frame some uncles and cousins and
brothers so they could be executed and their properties
confiscated.

I couldn’t find out much about her. The marriage was
arranged and there never was any love in it. I got the impression
it was set up to end a feud that had been going on for a hundred
years. It didn’t work.

She cleaned out and killed off Raven’s family. Then he
killed her and her whole gang except for the Limper himself. Maybe
he could have gotten everything back if he had wanted. The Limper
never was in good with the Lady. But Raven found Darling, the White
Rose, who became the Lady’s mortal
enemy . . . 

Not a bad job of finding out, if I do say so myself. Even if I
couldn’t find out one thing about Raven’s kids. I only
run into two people who remembered there was kids. They
didn’t know what happened to them.

Nobody cared but me, it seemed.

We sold the horses. They didn’t bring enough. They was
pretty ragged after the beating they took coming south. Raven had a
bad hangover and wasn’t in no mood to argue. But I was
getting brave in my old age.

I asked him, “What’s the point in us chasing Croaker
halfway across the world? Especially when the last time you ran
into him he put an arrow into you? Say we do catch him. If he
don’t finish the job, if he even listens, what’s he
going to do about whatever happened up north?”

I got to admit I was plenty skeptical about what he claimed
maybe happened up there. Even if he did study a little black
sorcery way back when.

I guess you could call it nagging. I said, “I figure you
got a lot more important business right here in Opal.”

He gave me an ugly look. “I don’t much care what you
think about that, Case. Mind your own business.”

“It is my business. It’s me getting dragged halfway
across the world and maybe ending up getting killed someplace I
never heard of because you got problems inside your
head.”

“You aren’t a slave, Case. There’s no one
holding a knife to your throat.”

I couldn’t say I owe you, man, but you wouldn’t
understand nothing about that. You taught me to read and write and
believe I had a little value as human being before you went off the
end. So I said, “If I drop out, who’s going to clean
you up when you puke all over yourself? Who’s going to drag
you out after you start a fight in some tavern and get your ass
stomped?”

He’d done that last night and if I hadn’t showed up
when I did he maybe would’ve gotten himself killed.

This guy who was riding off to save the world.

He was in a rotten mood. His head ached with the hangover. His
hip hurt. His body ached from the beating. But he could not find a
way to answer me even in that humor. He just said, “I’m
going to do what I’m going to do, Case, right or wrong.
I’d like to have you along. If you can’t make it, no
hard feelings.”