The Silver spike (7 page)

“What the hell else I got to do with my life? I got
nothing to tie me down.”

“Then why do you keep bitching?”

“Sometimes I like to have what I’m doing make some
kind of sense.”

We got on the boat, which was a grain ship crossing over in
ballast to collect a cargo, and we were off to a part of the world
even Raven hadn’t seen before. And before we got to the other
side we was both damned sure we shouldn’t have done it. But
we did decide not to try walking back to Opal when the ship’s
master refused to turn her around.

Actually, the trip didn’t start out all that bad. But then
they had to go untie the mooring ropes.

A storm caught us halfway over. It wasn’t supposed to blow
at that time of year. “It never storms this season,”
the bosun promised us right after the wind split a sail the topmen
didn’t reef in time. For four more days it kept on not
storming at that time of year. So we were four more days behind
when we hit the dock in Beryl.

I didn’t look back. Whatever I’d thought about Raven
and his kids and obligations before, that wasn’t interesting
now. They were on the other side of the big water and I was cured
of wanting to be a sailor. If Raven suddenly decided he had to go
back and balance accounts I was going to tell him to go pick his
nose with his elbow.

The bunch we were chasing had left a plain trail. Raven’s
buddy had gone through Beryl like thunder and lightning, pretending
to be an imperial legate on a mystery mission.

“Croaker is in a big hurry now,” Raven said.
“It’s going to be a long chase.”

I gave him a look but I didn’t say it.

We bought new horses and rounded up travel stuff. When we headed
out what they called the Rubbish Gate we were seven days behind.
Raven took off like he was going to catch up by tomorrow
morning.

In the heart of the continent, far to the east of the
Barrowland, Oar, the Tower, and Opal, beyond Lords and even that
jagged desolation called the Windy Country, lies that vast,
inhospitable, infertile, bizarre land called the Plain of Fear.
There is sound reason for the name. It is a land terrible to men.
Seldom are they welcomed there.

In the heart of the Plain of Fear there is a barren circle. At
the circle’s center stands a gnarly tree half as old as time.
The tree is the sire of the sapling standing sentinel over the
Barrowland.

The few scabrous, primitive nomads who live upon the Plain of
Fear call it Old Father Tree and worship it as a god. And god that
tree is, or as close as makes no difference. But it is a god whose
powers are strictly circumscribed.

Old Father Tree was all a-rattle. Had he been human, he would
have been in a screaming rage. After a long, long delay his son had
communicated details of his lapse in the matter of the digging
monster and the buried head and the wicker man’s insane
murder spree.

The tree’s anger was not entirely inspired by the
tardiness of his son. As much was directed at his own impotence and
at the dread the news inspired.

An old devil had been put down forever and the world had
relaxed, had turned to its smaller concerns. But evil had not
missed a stride. It was back in the lists already. It was running
free, unbridled, unchallenged, and looked like it could devour the
world it hated.

He was a god. On the wispiest evidences he could discern the
shapes of potential tomorrows. And the tomorrows he saw were
wastelands of blood and terror.

The failure of his offspring could be precursor to the greater
failure of his own trust.

When his hot fury had spent itself he sent his creatures, the
talking stones, into the farthest, the most hidden, the most
shadowed reaches of the Plain, carrying his call for an assembly of
the Peoples, the parliament of the forty-odd sentient species
inhabiting that most bizarre part of the world.

Old Father Tree could not move himself, nor could he project his
own power beyond certain limits, but he did have the capacity to
fling out legates and janissaries in his stead.

The old man could barely keep himself upright in the saddle when
he reached Lords. His life had been sedentary. He had nothing but
will and the black arts with which to sustain himself against the
hazards of travel and his own physical limits.

His will and skill were substantial but neither was
inexhaustible nor indefatigable.

He learned that he was just five days behind his quarry now. The
White Rose and her party were in no hurry, and were having no
trouble getting around the imperial authorities. For all his
desperation he took two days off to rest. It was an investment of
time he was sure would pay dividends down the road.

When he left Lords he did so with a horse and pack mule selected
for stamina and durability, not for speed and beauty. The long far
leg of the next stage would take him through the Windy Country, a
land with a bad reputation. He did not want to linger there.

As he passed through ever smaller, meaner, and more widely
separated hamlets, approaching the Windy Country, he learned that
he was gaining ground rapidly—if closing the gap by four days
in as many weeks could be called rapid.

He entered the uninhabited land with little optimism for a quick
success. There were no regular, fixed tracks through the Windy
Country, which even the empire shunned as worthless. He would have
to slow down and use his talent to find the trail.

Or would he? He knew where they were headed. Why worry about
where they were now? Why not forget that and just head for the
place where they would leave the Windy Country? If he kept pushing
he might get there before they did.

He was three-quarters of the way across the desolation, into the
worst badlands, a maze of barren and wildly eroded stone. He had
made his camp and had fed himself and had lain back to watch the
stars come out. Usually it took him only moments to fall asleep,
but tonight something kept nagging at the edge of his
consciousness. It took him a while to figure out what it was.

For the first time since entering the Windy Country he was not
alone within that circle of awareness open to the unconscious
scrutiny of his mystic sensibilities. There was a party somewhere
about a mile east of him.

And something else was moving in the night, something huge and
dangerous and alien that cruised the upper airs, hunting.

He extended his probing mind eastward, cautiously.

Them! The quarry! And alert, troubled, as he was. Certain
something was about to happen.

He withdrew immediately, began breaking camp. He muttered all
the while, cursing the aches and infirmities that were with him
always. He kept probing the night for that hunting presence.

It came and went, slowly, still searching. Good. There might be
time.

Night travel was more trouble here than he expected. And there
was the thing above, which seemed able to spot him at times,
despite his best efforts to make himself one with the land of
stone. It kept his animals in a continuous state of terror. The
going was painfully slow.

Dawn threatened when he topped a knife-edge ridge and spotted
his quarry’s camp down the canyon on the other side. He began
the descent, feeling that even his hair hurt. The animals grew more
difficult by the minute.

A great shadow rolled over him, and kept on rolling. He looked
up. A thing a thousand feet long was dropping toward the camp of
those he sought. The still stone echoed his shouted,
“Wait!”

He anticipated the lethal prickle of steel arrowheads with every
step. He anticipated the crushing, stinging embrace of windwhale
tentacles. But neither dread overtook him.

A lean, dark man stepped into his path. He had eyes as hard and
dark as chunks of obsidian. From somewhere nearby, behind him,
another man said, “I’ll be damned! It’s that
sorcerer Bomanz, that was supposed to have got et by the Barrowland
dragon.”

A serpent of fire slithered southward, devouring castles and
cities and towns, growing larger even as pieces of it fell away.
Only fire black and bloody red lay behind it.

Toadkiller Dog and the wicker man were the serpent’s
deadly fangs.

Even the wicker man had physical limits. And periods of
lucidity. At Roses, after the city’s punishment, in a moment
of rationality, he decided that neither he nor his soldiers could
survive the present pace. Indeed, losses among his followers came
more often from hardship than from enemy action.

He camped below the ruined city several days, recuperating, till
wholesale desertions by plunder-laden troopers informed him that
his soldiers were sufficiently rested.

Five thousand men followed him in his march toward Charm.

The Tower was sealed. They recognized him in there. They did not
want him inside. They named him rebel, traitor, madman, scum, and
worse. They mocked him. She was absent, but her lackeys remained
faithful and defiant and insufficiently afraid.

They set worms of power snaking over stone already adamantine
with spells set during the Tower’s construction: writhing
maggots of pastel green, pink, blue, that scurried to any point of
attack to absorb the sorcerous energy applied from without. The
wizards within the Tower were not as great as their attacker, but
they had the advantage of being able to work from behind defenses
erected by one who had been greater than he.

The wicker man spewed his fury till exhaustion overcame him. And
the best of his efforts only left scars little more than stains on
the face of the Tower.

They taunted and mocked him, those fools in there, but after a
few days they tired of the game. Irked by his persistence, they
began throwing things back at him. Things that burned.

He got back out of range.

His troops no longer believed him when he claimed that the Lady
had lost her power. If she had, why were her captains so
stubborn?

It must be true that she was not in the Tower. If she was not,
then she might return anytime, summoned to its aid. In that
instance it would not be smart to be found in the wicker
man’s camp.

His army began to evaporate. Whole companies vanished. Fewer
than two thousand remained when the wicker man’s sorceries
finally breeched the Tower gate. They went inside without
enthusiasm and found their pessimism justified. Most died in the
Tower’s traps before their master could stamp in behind
them.

He fared little better.

He plunged back outside, rolled on the ground to extinguish the
flames gnawing his body. Stones rained from the battlements,
threatened to crush him. But he escaped, and quickly enough to
prevent the defection of his few hundred remaining men.

Toadkiller Dog did not participate. And he did not hang around
after that humiliation. Cursing every step, the wicker man followed
him.

The Tower’s defenders used their sorcery to keep their
laughter hanging around him for days.

The cities between Charm and the sea paid, and Opal doubly. The
wicker man’s vengeance was so thorough he had to wait in the
ruins six days before an incautious sea captain put in to
investigate the disaster.

The wicker man’s rage fed upon his frustration. The very
fates seemed to conspire to thwart his revenge. For all his
frenzied and indefatigable effort he was gaining no
ground—except in the realm of madness, and that he did not
recognize.

In Beryl he encountered wizardry almost the equal of that he had
faced at the Tower. The city’s defenders put up a ferocious
fight rather than bend the knee to him.

His fury, his insanity, then, cowed even Toadkiller Dog.

Tully sat on a log and scratched and stared in the general
direction of the tree. Smeds didn’t think he was seeing
anything. He was feeling sorry for himself again. Or still.
“Shit,” he muttered. And, “The hell with
it.”

“What?”

“I said the hell with it. I’ve had it. We’re
going home.”

“Listen to this. What happened to the fancy houses and
fancy horses and fancy women and being set for life?”

“Screw it. We been out here all damned spring and half the
summer and we ain’t got nowhere. I’m going to be a
North Side bum all my life. I just got a big head for a while and
thought I could get above myself.”

Smeds looked out at the tree. Timmy Locan was out there throwing
sticks, a mindless exercise that never bored him. He was tempting
fate today, getting closer than ever before, policing up sticks
that had flown wide before and chucking them onto the pile around
the tree. That was less work than gleaning the woods for deadwood.
The nearby forest was stripped as clean as parkland.

Smeds thought it looked like they could set the fire any day
now. In places the woodpile was fifteen feet high and you
couldn’t see the tree at all.

What was Tully up to? This whining and giving up fit in with his
behavior since their dip in the river, but the timing was suspect.
“We’ll be ready to do the burn any day aow. Why not
wait till then?”

“Screw it. It ain’t going to work and you know it.
Or if you don’t you’re fooling yourself.”

“You want to go home, go ahead. I’m going to stick
it out and see what happens.”

“I said we’re going home. All of us.”

Right, Smeds thought. Tully was cranking up for a little screw
your buddy. “What you want to bet you come up outvoted three
to one, cousin? You want to go, go. Ain’t nobody going to
stop you.”

Tully tried a little bluster, coming on like he thought he was
some kind of general.

“Stuff it, Tully. I ain’t no genius, but just how
dumb do you think I am?”

Tully waited a little too long to say, “Huh? What do you
mean?”

“That night you went chickenshit and run off to the river
on us. I got to thinking about how you done that to me before. You
ain’t going to pull it on me this time, Tully. You
ain’t taking off with the spike and leaving old Smeds
standing there with his thumb up his butt.”