The Silver spike (36 page)

She nodded.

Bomanz hit the thing from the pot with a grandpa power spell. It
stopped the thing in its tracks. It went down on its belly, lay
there glowing biliously, making a nasty whining noise.

A couple of Nightstalkers brought Brigadier Wildbrand back up.
She had a busted arm and some busted ribs and looked like death on
a stick but she was ready to fight. I told her, “I think
you’re the top imperial left.”

She looked at the mess, said, “Yes,” but seemed
fresh out of ideas.

A talking stone dropped out of the sky, hit the rampart. It was
my old buddy with the scar. He wanted orders from the White Rose.
The White Rose didn’t have any orders.

Raven scrabbled around in the snow. The thing from the pot
started moving again. Centaurs raced around it, throwing javelins.
Bomanz’s spell had softened its protection. Most of the
javelins got through. The thing looked like a porcupine. But it
didn’t seem to notice or care about the missiles.

Talk about your single-minded obsessions!

Bomanz popped it again.

Stopped it in its tracks again, too. It smoldered. The javelins
burned. But it was not out of the game, it was just stalled. Bomanz
looked up, shrugged. What more could he do?

Raven kept digging in the snow, dragging his broken leg. He
didn’t bother looking around to see what was gaining on him.
He’d find it in time or he wouldn’t.

I told Wildbrand, “Long as we’re standing around not
doing anything, why don’t we get some ropes down there so we
can hoist my buddies up?” Silent was on his feet now but
looked like he was only maybe ten percent in this world. In fact,
he looked like a lunatic, foaming at the mouth.

Wildbrand looked at me like I had brain fever if I thought she
was going to lift a finger to save any Rebel. I reminded her,
“We got a whole gang of hungry windwhales up there.”
Scar flashed away to cue the nearest. It started dropping. Scar
reappeared, chuckling.

Wildbrand gave me a classic dirty look, put some of her boys to
work on one of the cranes that had been used to pull the wall
apart.

I yelled at Silent, “Get ready to come up!” He
ignored me. He was getting ready to give the Limper thing some kind
of surprise.

Old man Bomanz yelled, cut loose with his best shot, and tried
to dive out of the way all at the same time. None of it did him any
good.

The thing smashed into him, flowed over him. He screamed once,
more in outrage than pain or terror, then tried to fight.

Silent looked up at Darling, smiling through tears. He sort of
bowed with just his head . . . and jumped.

Goddamned madman!

He hit the thing’s back. Flesh splashed like water and
burned like naphtha, though the flame was green. The thing started
rolling over and over and over, leaving pieces of itself
behind.

Raven kept on looking for the spike.

Darling started hammering stone with her fist, shedding silent
tears. I was afraid she’d break something she was so
violent . . . She stopped, whirled, signed,
“Have the windwhale take it now. It will never be
weaker.”

I didn’t have to tell Scar. He read sign. He flashed away.
By the time he got back the windwhale was pulling the thing apart
again.

I asked Wildbrand, “You think you can keep the pot boiling
this time, if we put the pieces back in?”

She got a face like a fishwife looking for a fight. “You
do your part, I’ll take care of mine. How do you plan to get
the lid back on?”

That was easy. “Scar, have one of the big guys put the top
back on the pot. Maybe carry a few hundred tons of firewood,
too.”

Wildbrand gave me the look, checked her temper, said
“Maybe you aren’t stupid,” and had her men help
her down to the street.

Down south, where the breaches were, there was mass confusion.
People were heading out, a flood the grays could not stem if they
were bothering to try.

The thing tumbled into the pot. The lid went on with a big,
final clang.

Raven screamed.

He had found the silver spike. Or it had found him.

By the time I looked at her Darling was hammering the wall
again, both fists bloody.

He had gotten hold of the thing with his naked hand.

He got to his feet. On a broken leg! He held the spike up toward
us. I yelled.

He looked at me. I did not know him. A terrible change had come
over him. He laughed horribly. “It’s mine!”

His eyes were the Dominator’s eyes. Eyes of insanity and
power, that I had seen in the Barrowland the day the Lady had
brought her husband down. They were the eyes of the Limper, ready
to be entertained by the agony of a world that had given him
nothing but pain. They were the eyes of everyone who ever nursed a
grudge and suddenly found it within their power to do whatever they
wanted, without fear of reprisal.

“Mine!” He laughed.

I looked at Darling, as sour with despair as ever I’d
been.

She turned off the water, started signing. She was as pale as a
sheet of paper. I shook my head. “I can’t do
that.”

“We have to.” Tears streaked her face. She
didn’t want to do it, either. But it had to be done or the
hell we’d put ourselves through would have been time and pain
utterly wasted.

Raven had studied sorcery long ago. Just enough to blot his
soul, a taint the spike could rip into and use as a channel for its
evil.

“Do it!” she signed.

Damn her! He was my best friend. Damn that rock Scar. He could
have given the order anytime, but he waited and made us do it so we
couldn’t lay off the blame on his precious tree god.

“Kill him,” I said. “Before it possesses him
completely.”

Near as I could tell Scar didn’t do a damned thing.

But down there a centaur’s arm shot forward. A javelin
flashed. The shaft smashed in through one of Raven’s temples
and out the other.

This time he would not be back from the dead. This time he
wasn’t faking.

I sat down and turned inside myself, wondering if I hadn’t
dragged my feet so much while we were headed south would we have
caught up with Croaker and so maybe never have gotten into this
spot. This monster was going to be riding my shoulders for the rest
of my life.

Darling did her own version of going into a pout.

Only Torque kept his mind on the job. He got the wooden chest
from Darling, shinnied down the crane rope, got the spike away from
Raven. He climbed back up, set the box down by Darling, came over
to me and said, “Tell her I’m out of it, Case. Tell her
I just couldn’t take it no more.” He walked away, maybe
going looking for the brother who had left with Raven and
hadn’t come back.

I didn’t much blame him for going.

Smeds laid the last stone on the old man’s cairn. The
tears were gone. The anger was quiet. It was not right that Fish
should have fallen to cholera after taking the worst that could be
thrown by the world’s nastiest villains. But there was no
justice in this existence.

It there was, Timmy Locan would be here, not Smeds Stahl.

Smeds went on, into the city Roses. A year later he was a
respected member of the community, owner of a struggling brewery.
He lived well but without ostentation that would excite unwanted
curiosity. He never told his story to a soul.

No matter how many times I walked around it, the hole into the
tree god’s “abyss” still looked like a piece of
black silk suspended a yard above the ground. It refused to have
more than two dimensions.

Darling brought the little chest containing the silver spike,
threw it through. It took both of us to do the coffin that
contained all that had been left in the big pot when, after a week
of cooking, it had been allowed to boil dry. The black circle
vanished as though a stage magician had sucked the cloth up his
sleeve.

We went and got clean for what seemed like the first time in
years, then Darling showed me around the rabbit warren that had been
home for the Black Company and Rebel movement for so many years.
Fascinating. And repellent. That people should put themselves
through such hell . . . I wished them better
times than mine, wherever they were.

Somehow we ended up doing what men and women seem unable to
avoid. Afterward, she dressed in the clothing of a peasant woman,
without a hint of mail or a single hidden blade.

“What goes?” I asked.

She signed, “The White Rose is dead. There is no place for
her anymore. No need.”

I didn’t argue. I never was on that side.

For want of anything better to do we got Old Father Tree to give
us a ride to where we could check out the progress of the potato
industry.

It hadn’t changed a whole lot, except the people I knew
had got older.

The grandkids wouldn’t believe a word of our stories but
they d fight anybody who didn’t agree that we told the most
exciting lies in the world.