The Silver spike (35 page)

The Limper bit the hoof off the thing that had one in his mouth,
spit it out, let out a howl like the world’s death scream.
Bodies and pieces of body flew. Only Toadkiller Dog hung on. He and
the Limper rolled around growling and screaming while the others
tried to get back into it.

Exile assessed the damage. He looked at me. “He’s
too strong for us. It wasn’t a great hope, anyway. Will you
contribute?”

I signed to Darling, “He wants help.”

She nodded, fixed on the action. For a moment I thought she
wasn’t going to answer. Then she made a complicated series of
hand gestures. The eagle plunged off her shoulder, went flapping
off and up.

I saw what Exile meant about Limper being too strong. One of the
monsters was doing the foot-in-mouth trick to keep his sorceries
silent. Toadkiller Dog was on his back, hanging on with all four
limbs, his jaws still locked on the Limper’s head, which he
had almost completely turned around. But the others could not keep
his limbs pinned. He used those to devastating effect.

The shadow of the windwhale grew more and more deep. It was
coming down. Already I could smell it.

It dropped tentacles into the fray, grabbed Limper without any
care to avoid getting anyone or anything else. Toadkiller Dog was
in that mess, a couple other monsters, and a couple of human beings
too squished to scream. A windwhale has the strength to snap
five-hundred-year-old royal oaks. The Limper did not. The windwhale
tore the whole mess into bitty pieces and dumped it into the giant
pot.

Something to be said for brute strength sometimes.

The pot lid slammed down. Clasps clanked. The pyre roared to
life.

I wondered how the Limper would get out of this one. He’d
survived the worst so many times before.

I looked at Exile. “What about the silver
spike?”

He was not happy.

“You couldn’t take the Limper, you can’t take
us.”

He checked the windwhales, the talking stones, the walking
trees, the centaurs and mantas, said, “You have a point. On
the other hand, why surrender a tool you can use to knock the
empire down? I have good soldiers here. The chances of battle look
no worse than those of not fighting.”

I couldn’t answer that. I took it to Darling. Everyone in
sight was watching, waiting for a clue to their next move.

Tension was not down a bit because the Limper was out of the
game.

I signed. Darling had me hold the standard so she would have
both hands free to answer. I felt funny doing that, like I was
making a commitment to a cause I still did not truly support. She
signed at me for a long time.

I told Exile, “The spike will not be used at all, by
anyone, whatever the cost. A place has been prepared by the tree
god, in the abyss between universes, where only a power greater and
more evil can retrieve it.” Which meant, I guess, that
anybody bad enough to get the damned thing back would be bad enough
not to need it in the first place.

Exile looked around, shrugged, said, “That’s good
enough for me. We planned to isolate it, too, but our method would
have been less certain.”

A flash and crash trampled his last word.

Bomanz had stirred himself. Up the way, Gossamer took a couple
drunken steps and walked right off the rampart. The old wizard
said, “She disagreed with the decision.”

Exile stared at Spidersilk, frozen in midmotion. She relaxed
slowly, lowered her gaze, after a minute went to check on her
sister.

I checked Bomanz. The old boy looked real pleased with
himself.

Speaking of old men. Where the hell was that guy who’d
been following Exile around?

Gone. And I never noticed him go.

That old bastard was half-spook.

Raven came to slowly, shaky and disoriented. Memory of a
flashing boot and savage impact. Realization that he had a
ferocious headache. That his hip had begun to ache. That he was so
cold he had begun to feel warm in his extremities.

A moment of panic. He tried to thrash around, found his limbs
only vaguely cooperative. Worse panic before the onset of
reason.

He wriggled his way out of the snow, got to his feet carefully.
He felt himself over, scraped frozen blood off his face. The
bastard had got him good. Almost had to admire those guys, the way
they were hanging in there against the whole world.

Painfully, he dragged himself out of the ditch, stood on wobbly
legs looking around, the old hip wound gnawing. Things had changed.
There were monsters in the sky and witch fires flaring in the
distance.

The Limper had come. Darling would be in the middle of it. And
he wasn’t there.

She would think he had run out again.

Raven reached the center of excitement in time to witness
Gossamer’s fall. Everyone seemed to relax after the incident.
The Limper must not be a threat right now.

The crowd came down off the wall. Soldiers brought horses for
Exile and Brigadier Wildbrand. A platoon of Nightstalkers fell in
around them and they started moving north. Raven wondered what the
hell was happening. It looked like Darling and Exile had cut a
deal.

He could not catch them now, wobbly as he was.

The twins had their heads together. They threw dark looks after
the departing company. They radiated a stench of wickedness about
to break loose.

Better stick with them.

When the monsters began sliding across the sky Smeds suffered an
attack of caution. Able to think of nowhere else to run, he headed
back to the ditch.

The guy he had kicked was still there, twitching once in a
while. He backed off and watched, waiting to see what the guy would
do. After a while the guy woke up, dragged himself out, and
tottered off. Good. Now he had a place to wait for Fish. He went
over and around and entered the culvert from the northern end,
passed through, and sat down to wait.

Fish showed up a forever later, standing over there on the
footbridge  He didn’t have the other blue bag. Damn.
Smeds whistled just loud enough to carry to Fish, waved
cautiously.

“What happened?” he asked when Fish arrived.
“Where’s the other bag?”

Fish explained.

Smeds told his story.

Fish said, “We need to get out of here, then. Let’s
get the stuff. We might be able to get out one of the breaches if
there’s any more excitement. With the spike up for grabs we
can count on that.”

They got the blue bags, which they rubbed up with dirt, and
Smeds’s pack, and headed for the area where the wall had been
breached. The city was a place of ghosts. The living cowered behind
locked doors and barred windows, praying their gods would keep them
safe from the terrors without and the cholera within.

The occasional cry of a cholera victim made Smeds think more of
haunts bedamned than of the living in pain.

Exile wouldn’t say where the spike was hid. He
didn’t act like he wanted to pull something, just like he
wanted to be in on the whole thing. Like he wanted a look at the
cause for all the fuss. Can’t say I blame him. I saw it back
when it was just a big nail. I wanted to see how it had
changed.

He led us up toward Oar’s North Gate, got up on the wall,
and started marching back and forth. We stuck tight. Outside, the
friendly troops had begun a shift to the north. Exile took
inspiration, told Brigadier Wildbrand to seal off the area inside
the wall. We’d had enough trouble over that hunk of metal
already. He asked for masons and heavy lifting equipment to be
brought, too.

The damned spike was in the wall! No wonder nobody ever found
it.

Wildbrand sent messages. Nightstalkers moved in. I was
concerned. I would’ve been more concerned if the sky
wasn’t filled with monsters.

It took two hours to assemble machinery and workmen, and another
for them to get set up to start pulling the wall apart. Nobody
could stay tense all that time.

Sometime during the wait Bomanz asked Exile, “What
arrangements did you make to keep your fire fueled? Rendering the
Limper was a good idea but you’ll have to pressure-cook him
for days. The fire seems to be failing.”

Exile looked down south. Bomanz was right. Exile frowned,
muttered, grumbled at Brigadier Wildbrand. Next time I looked some
of my scabrous old buddies from the militia were running firewood
to the pot. And not doing a very good job.

Once everything was set and the spike’s hiding place was
sealed off inside the city and out, Exile asked Darling if she was
ready to see it brought to light. She told him to get on with
it.

There was a new kind of tension around, like everyone’s
temper was short and we were all waiting for somebody to do
something inexcusable so we could let off steam by kicking his
butt.

Guys started banging away with sledges and wedges and pry bars
and ten minutes later the first stone rose out of its setting.

The day got on into late afternoon before the workmen exposed
the layer of mortar supposed to contain the spike. For a moment
everyone forgot enmities and allegiances and crowded up to stare at
the blackened half of the spike that lay exposed. Darling told
Silent to go get it.

He borrowed a mason’s hammer, put on heavy leather gloves,
took along a lined leather sack and somebody’s old shirt to
wrap and pack it in. He wasn’t going to take any chances with
the damned thing.

Darling readied a small wooden chest.

About the time Silent chopped the spike loose I glanced toward
that giant pot. So I missed the beginning of the excitement around
me but not its start at the pot, where the men feeding the fire
suddenly scattered, like a school of minnows when a large hungry
fish appears.

The top blew off the pot.

Something made of pieces of all the things that had gone into
the pot, with way too many limbs and those in all the wrong places,
crawled over the pot’s lip, fell into the fire.

Someone screamed behind me. I whirled.

One slight Nightstalker had knocked Brigadier Wildbrand off the
back of the wall. Another had stuck a knife into Exile. The first
was hurtling toward Bomanz.

Gossamer and Spidersilk!

Bomanz went over backward, flailing the air, and plunged
headfirst into the snow that had drifted against the wall.

Only Darling retained any presence of mind. She let go the White
Rose banner, yanked out her sword, gave Bomanz’s attacker a
hearty chop, and followed him over the edge.

The one after Exile screeched.

That screech plain demolished everybody. We all just
collapsed.

She jumped down and started hacking and slashing at Silent. She
took the spike away, climbed back up, raised it overhead, and
howled triumphantly.

Raven appeared out of nowhere, stuck her in the brisket, tried
to knock the spike away, failed on his first try but got it his
second. It tumbled down into the snow outside. Raven and whichever
twin followed it a moment later, Raven grinding his knife into her
belly while she screamed and tried to strangle him.

And outside the wall the thing from the pot humped and waddled
and dragged itself toward us, oblivious to the resistance of the
Plain creatures.

“Time to go,” Fish told Smeds.

They stepped out of hiding and strode toward the nearest breach
like they were on a mission from the gods. Men wild-eyed with panic
paid them no heed. They scrambled over rubble, dropped down
outside, and started moving southward.

Smeds expected disaster every step. Not till they crossed the
first low ridge and Oar disappeared did he begin to feel at all
positive. “We did it! Goddamn! We really got out!”

“It could still go to hell on us,” Fish cautioned.
Then he grinned. “But I’ll tell you, the future looks
brighter than it has for months.”

Impressions swirled as Raven toppled from the wall with the
screaming sorceress: ground turning and rushing upward, a windwhale
making its booming protest as its attempt to grab the thing from
the pot was rebuffed.

Impact! He felt his blade reach her spine, going between
vertebrae. He felt his right leg twist beneath her and snap. They
screamed at one another as their faces smashed together.

He got the better of it. He retained consciousness and even a
fragment of will. He dragged himself away, a few feet, started
trying to guess the damage to his leg. Didn’t feel like a
compound fracture. Hurt bad enough, though.

Bodies lay all around him. Only Bomanz seemed to be
breathing.

Packing snow around the leg helped numb it a little.

People were yelling above. He saw Case jumping around, waving,
pointing. He looked.

The thing from the pot was coming. It wasn’t a hundred
yards away. And nothing seemed able to stop it. Mantas pounded it
with their lightnings. It didn’t pay them any attention. It
had only one thought: the silver spike.

Case was trying to get him to get the spike and get it up top
before the thing got hold of it.

Bomanz rolled over, got to his hands and knees, shook his head,
looked around dumbly, spotted the thing, turned almost as pale as
the snow. He croaked, “I’ll try to hold it off. Find
the spike. Get it up to Darling.”

He staggered to his feet, tottered toward the thing.

Raven supposed it really could not be called the Limper anymore,
though the Taken’s insanity, ambition, and rage drove it.

He looked for some sign of the spike. The pain in his leg was
the worst he had felt since Croaker had got him with the
Lady’s arrow.

Raven finally seemed to get it through his skull what we wanted.
I’d already volunteered to go down. Darling wouldn’t
let me. Now I signed, “Looks like his leg is
broke.”