The Silver spike (17 page)

Why?

Then the memories came. Not in a flood, thankfully. In snippets
and dribbles. In reasonable temporal order. The thing that came to
dig, the horror it uncovered. The death that had come out of the
forest and fallen upon the town. The
fire . . . The
fire . . . The
fire . . . 

The soldiers went rigid with fear and awe and fled in terror as
the lightning crackled among the branches of the tree. Their
captains came out and gaped at the fierce blue light washing the
Barrowland.

The tree concentrated its entire intellect upon its immediate
forebear and finally, after so many weeks, passed the news of its
great failure.

The twins Gossamer and Spidersilk strode toward the now quiet
tree in lock step. Both wore black leather helmets that hid them
completely. Their outfits were mirror images of one another, just
as their bodies were. Though their powers were an order of
magnitude less deadly and ferocious than those of any of the Ten
Who Were Taken, they made the world think otherwise by aping the
style and dress of their predecessors.

Thus they successfully donned the mantle of what it was their
ambition to become. And if they survived long enough they might
hone their wickedness till they were, indeed, indistinguishable
from old terrors now mostly gone from the earth.

Thus doth evil breed.

The twins halted three yards from the tree, their fear carefully
concealed from their soldiers. They stopped. They stared. They
circled the tree, going opposite directions. When they met where
they had started they knew.

Their black hearts were heavy with fear, but also entertained a
spark of wicked hope.

They summoned their lieutenants. In half an hour the troops were
headed for Oar.

The hell with the Limper. There was bigger game afoot.

It was late afternoon. Smeds looked up from his work on the
wall. He grinned. Two more hours and his sentence to the labor
battalion—three days for petty vandalism and malicious
mischief—would end. And the damned spike would be tucked away
safe in a place no one could find. Only he would know that it lay
in a pocket in the mortar under a certain merlon stone twenty-seven
east of the new east-side tower overlooking the North Gate.

Smeds was smugly proud of himself for having thought of such a
nifty hiding place. Who would think of that? Nobody. And if by some
remote chance somebody did, who would go tearing down the whole
damned wall to find it? They would pay for the information.

He grinned again.

His imperial overseer scowled but did not crack his whip. That
whip had taught Smeds quickly to keep up his share of the work even
while he was daydreaming.

His grin died not because the overseer disapproved but because
the cloud of dust to the north, that had been approaching for
several hours, had come within a mile of the wall and had disgorged
two hurried black riders. They had to be Gossamer and
Spidersilk.

They knew about the spike.

Man, they had come back fast. He did not like what that
implied.

At least maybe now Tully would get a convincing glimpse of what
these people were really like when they had their gloves off.

Time came without a bite from the whip, despite his having
wandered off into reveries about a young woman he had met the day
before he had let himself get caught painting an obscene slogan on
a pre-imperial monument. It had cost him to get a professional
letter writer to teach him to inscribe the slogan. He could not
read or write his own name.

That girl was going to be waiting for him tonight, a scant
fourteen years of ripening heat.

He came down out of the scaffolding thinking of a bath and fresh
clothing and there was Old Man Fish waiting for him to get his
release, a simple formality involving snipping a wire from around
his neck. “What’s up?” Smeds asked.

“I figured somebody ought to come make sure they let you
go when they were supposed to. Tully couldn’t be bothered.
Timmy’s still laid up.”

Timmy had let the wizard take the hand the morning Smeds had
started his sentence. “He all right? Did it work?”

“Looks like. No problem with that kind of pain.
Let’s go.”

They walked a way, not talking much. Smeds looked around through
narrowed eyes. They were tearing down three times as fast as they
were rebuilding. There were clear areas that covered a dozen acres.
The gray boys had been more evident since the bunch from the north
had come in, but now they were everywhere. Platoons of the
Nightstalkers moved around quickly and purposefully. Soldiers from
other outfits seemed to be posted on every corner. Twice they were
stopped and asked to state their names and business.

Unprecedented.

“What the hell is going on?” Smeds asked.

“I don’t know. They were just getting started when I
was coming to get you.”

“Gossamer and Spidersilk got back from the Barrowland
about two hours ago. I watched them from the wall. They were in a
hell of a big hurry.”

“Unh. So there it is.” Fish glanced over, his bushy
white eyebrows two ragged caterpillars arching their backs.
“Did you put it into the wall?”

Smeds did not answer.

“Good. I figured that’s what it had to be. You
couldn’t have done better. And I just forgot I even thought
you might have been up to something like that.”

They walked along listening to the rumors running the streets.
One refrain kept coming up. The imperials had sealed the city.
Anybody who wanted could get in but they weren’t going to let
anyone out till they found someone or something they wanted bad. A
house-to-house search had begun already and they were being as
thorough as imperials always were.

“We got a problem,” Smeds said.

“We have more than one.”

“I told Tully till I was blue in the face.”

“Maybe you should have said let’s stay. Contrary as
he’s been, he might have decided he had to get
out.”

“I’ll remember that. We got to have a sitdown, all
four of us. We got to pound some facts into Tully’s
skull.”

“Yes. Or just do what has to be done whether he likes it
or not.”

“Yeah.”

They turned into the street that led past the Skull and
Crossbones. The shadows made Smeds jumpy. He expected a Gossamer or
Spidersilk to come bounding out of every one. He had forgotten his
date entirely. “Nothing to do now but cover our asses and try
to ride it out. They don’t find anything they’ll figure
the spike went on down the road.”

“Maybe.”

“They have to loosen up sometime. You can’t keep a
city like Oar locked up very long.”

“They don’t find it easy, Smeds, they’ll try
looking hard. Maybe offer some rewards. Big ones, considering the
trouble they’re going to already.”

“Yeah.”

“I saw the doc Timmy visited. Remember? I’m pretty
sure he caught whatever Timmy had. He had that same
look.”

Smeds stopped walking. “Shit.”

“Yeah. And then there’s the wizard that did his
hand. Two arrows pointing straight at us and too late to dodge them
by running away. We have some hard choices to make.”

Smeds stood staring into the twilight indigo behind spires
rising from the heart of the city. Here it was. What he had been
afraid this would come to from the beginning, only it
wouldn’t be Fish and Timmy he’d have to stick a knife
in. “I think I can do it if it has to be done.
You?”

“Yes. If that’s the decision.”

“Let’s go get a drink and look at the
angles.”

“You don’t want to drink much. If that’s the
move we’re going to make. That wizard will have to be done
quick. He isn’t stupid. It won’t be long before he
figures out that what the grays are looking for might be the same
thing that burned Timmy’s hand. And not much longer for him
to realize he’s the cutout between us and them. He
won’t be easy if he’s looking for us to
come.”

“I’m still going to have to have one long
one.”

Into the Skull and Crossbones. It was the neighborhood social
hour but there were tables available. The landlord did not have the
sort of personality that brought in the free-spending hordes. To
Smeds’s relief his cousin was prominent among the
missing.

Neither of them spoke till a pitcher had been delivered and
Smeds had downed a long draft. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve.
“Been thinking. The way I see it, we got a whatchamacallit,
quorum, right here. You and me. Timmy can’t do anything even
if he wanted. And Tully would just argue and fuss and try to take
over and make everybody do things his way. Then he’d screw it
up and get us all killed.”

“True.”

“So what are we going to do?”

Old Man Fish smiled softly. “You telling me to decide?
You want me to tell you what to do? So that way it isn’t
your fault, you were just doing what you were told?”

Smeds hadn’t thought of it that way consciously. But there
was a truth there that startled him.

“That’s all right,” Fish said. “You just
needed to have that up where you could look at it and see if you
were trying to be a weasel. How do you feel about doing
it?”

That was an easy one. “I don’t want to. Those guys
never done nothing but try to help us when we asked. But better
their asses than mine. I ain’t going to let them take me down
because I know I’m going to feel bad about doing what, as far
as I can see, is the only thing that’ll keep the grays
off.”

“So you just talked yourself into it.”

Smeds thought about that. His stomach knotted up. “I guess
so.”

“That’s one vote for action.”

“You go the other way, we have to get Timmy or Tully to
kick in a tiebreaker.” Some foolish part of him harkened to a
hope that he would be voted down. Another part said it would be
nice to be alive to have a guilty conscience.

“I’m with you.” Fish managed a weak smile.
“No tie. I don’t like it either. But I don’t see
any other way out. You think of one, let me know. I’ll be
plenty happy to change my mind.” Fish poured himself a
beer.

Smeds’s stomach just kept knotting and sinking.

Toadkiller Dog slipped into the monastery as silent as death.
The windwhales were not yet below the horizon, scudding north,
inexplicably abandoning their mission when it lacked only a touch
of being complete. The monster was puzzled in the extreme but it
did not allow that to paralyze him. He had enough distractions in
the form of a thousand wounds and pains.

He slipped through the ruins and down into the subbasement,
where he surprised a monk in the process of sabotaging the
claywork. One snap of his jaws ended that, though it was probably
too late to salvage anything.

He went over and stared at the head floating in the keg of oil.
He was not a fast thinker, but steady, and he got where he wanted
to go given time. The debate of the hour was whether or not there
was any value in continuing an alliance with a thing so obviously
mad and out of control.

The head stared back, awake and aware and completely helpless.
The monster was not a subtle or reflective sort and so did not
think it ironic that fate kept rendering helpless what was possibly
the most powerful and most dangerous being in the world.

The head stared with great intensity, as though there was some
critical message it had to get across. But what little unspoken
communication had existed between them in the past no longer
worked.

Toadkiller Dog whuffed, snapped the head up, and carried it out
of the monastery. He concealed it in a place he thought would be
safe, then limped away wearily.

It was start-over-from-scratch time and he had no idea, really,
where to find the kinds of recruits he would need to do the tasks
he needed done. He knew only where not to look. They had left
nothing but desolation behind them in the north.

He did not hurry. He did not feel pressed. He would live till he
ran into something powerful enough to kill him.

He thought he had all the time in the world.

There were lights in the wizard’s place. “He live
alone?” Fish asked.

“I don’t know,” Smeds said. The wizard seemed
to be the wealthiest man in his neighborhood. He had real
windows.

A shadow moved across a paper shade.

“Doesn’t matter anyway. There’s no guarantee
he won’t have friends in, or a client.”

Smeds started. He had not thought about the chance of this
becoming a massacre. He glanced up the street, the direction the
patrol had gone. The gray boys were all over the place. This had to
go down quick and quiet. “You able to do your
part?”

“Yes. I’m working myself up the same way I did
before we attacked at Charm. Big wizard, little wizard, the risks
are pretty much the same.”

“You were at Charm? I didn’t know that.”

“I was young and dumb. I don’t kick it around. The
grays are still fighting that one. They don’t want to let
anybody who went there die of old age.”

“Patrol.”

They faded into the shadows between two buildings, got down as
low as they dared without sprawling in the garbage and dogshit. At
the same moment light spilled from the wizard’s doorway. A
woman emerged. The clip-clop of the soldiers’ boots picked
up. They reached the woman as she reached the street.

“Evening, ma’am,” one said.
“You’re out late. Consulting the wizard?”

There was not enough light to see it but Smeds knew she would be
looking from one soldier to another, scared, trying to decide if
she had good reason to be. She croaked, “Yes.”

“May we have your name? We have to keep track of everyone
who comes and goes.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know, ma’am. It’s orders.
It’s the same all over town, wherever there’s anybody
in his line of business. Me and Luke being naturally lucky, we got
this here clown on our beat that don’t seem like he’s
going to get done all night.”