This here journal is Raven's idea but I got me a feeling he won't be so proud of it if he ever gets to reading it because most of the time I'm going to tell the truth. Even if he is my best buddy.
Talk about your feet of clay. He's got them run all the way up to his noogies, and then some. But he's a right guy even if he is a homicidal, suicidal maniac half the time. Raven decides he's your friend you got a friend for life, with a knife in all three hands.
My name is Case. Philodendron Case. Thanks to my Ma. I've never even told Raven about that. That's why I joined the army. To get away from the kind of potato diggers that would stick a name like that on a kid. I had seven sisters and four brothers last time I got a head count. Every one is named after some damned flower.
A girl named Iris or Rose, what the hell, hey? But I got a brother named Violet and another brother named Petunia. What kind of people do that do their kids? Where the hell are the Butches and Spikes?
Potato diggers.
People that spend their whole lives grubbing in the dirt, sunup to sundown, to root out potatoes, cabbages, onions, parsnips, rootabagas. Turnips. I still hate turnips. I wouldn't wish them on a hog. I joined the army as soon as I could sneak off.
They tried to stop me. My father and uncles and brothers and cousins. They didn't get away with it. I'm still amazed how that one old sergeant managed to look so bad the whole clan backed down.
That's what I wanted to be when I grew up. Somebody who could just stand there and look so bad people dribbled down their legs. But I think you got to be born with it.
Raven's got it. He just looks at somebody trying to jack him around and the guy turns white.
So I joined up and went through the training and went out soldiering, sometimes with Feather and Journey, sometimes with Whisper, mostly here in the north. And I found out soldiering wasn't what I thought it would be. I found out I didn't like it a whole lot better than digging potatoes. But I was good at it, even if I kept doing something to get busted every time I made sergeant. I finally got posted to the Guards at the Barrowland. That was supposed to be a big honor but I never believed it.
That's where I met Raven. Only he went by the name of Corbie then. I didn't know he was a spy for the White Rose. 'Course, nobody did or he would have been dead. He was just this quiet old crippled guy who said he used to soldier with the Limper but had to get out after he got his leg hurt so bad. He hung out in an abandoned house he fixed up. He made his living doing things for guys that didn't want to do them for themselves. The Guards got paid good and the Barrowland was a hundred miles into the Great Forest where there wasn't nothing else to spend it on but booze. Corbie got plenty of work polishing boots and swabbing floors and currying horses. He used to come in and do the colonel's office and then play chess with him, which is where I ran into him the first time.
He smelled odd right from the start. Not White Rose odd but you knew he wasn't no runaway farm boy like me or some city kid from the slums that signed up because there wasn't nothing else to do with his life. He had some class when he wanted to show it. He was educated. He talked maybe five or six languages and he could read and I heard him talk with the old man about things that I didn't have a rooster's notion what they meant.
So I got me this idea. I'd get to be his buddy and then get him to teach me how to read and write.
It was the same old thing, see. Join the army and get off the farm and go on adventures and life would be great. Learn to read and write, I could get out of the army and go off on adventures and everything would be great.
Sure.
I don't know if everybody is that way. I'm not the kind that can ask guys about things like that. But I know me enough to know that there ain't nothing ever going to turn out to be exactly what I want and nothing is ever going to satisfy me. I'm the guy with so much ambition I'm living here in a one room walk-up with a wino whose big talent seems to be puking his guts up after scarfing down about three gallons of the cheapest wine he can find.
So anyway I got Raven to start teaching me and we ended up buddies, even if he was weird. And that didn't do me no good when the shit storm hit and he turned out to be a spy. Lucky for me, my bosses and his bosses had to get together to gang up on the monster in the ground up there, that us Guards was getting paid so good to watch.
That's when I found out he was really Raven, the guy that used to run with the Black Company, that took the White Rose away from the Limper when she was a little kid and hid her out and raised her up till she was ready to take on her destiny.
I thought he was dead. So did everybody else, on both sides. Especially the White Rose, who had loved him, and not like a brother or father. Which is why he turned himself into a dead man and ran away. He couldn't handle what it means to have somebody in love with you. Running away was the only thing he knew how to do.
But he was some in love with her, too, and the only way he had to show it was turn himself into Corbie and go spying and hope he could find her some big weapon she could use when she came to her final confrontation with the Lady. My big boss.
So what happens? Fate sticks an oar in and stirs everything up and when we look around what do we find? The Dominator, the old monster buried in the Barrowland, the blackest evil this old world ever knew, was awake and trying to get out, and the only way to stop him was for everybody to drop their old fights and gang up. So the Lady came to the Barrowland with all her double-ugly champions, and the White Rose came with the Black Company, and things started getting interesting.
And damnfool Raven mooned around in the middle of it all thinking he could just walk over and take up with Darling like he hadn't walked out on her and let her think he was dead for a bunch of years.
The damn fool. I know more about sorcery than he'll ever know about women.
So they let the old evil come up out of the ground, then they jumped all over it. It was so big and black they couldn't kill its spirit, only its flesh, so they burned that flesh to ash and scattered the ash and imprisoned its soul in a silver spike. They drove the spike into the trunk of a sapling that was the son of some kind of god that would live forever and grow around it and keep it from ever causing any more grief. Then they all went away. Even Darling, with some guy named Silent.
There were tears in her eyes when she went. Some of that feeling for Raven was still there inside her. But she was not going to open up and let him do it to her again.
And he stood there watching her go, dumbstruck. He couldn't figure out why she would do that to him.
Damn fool.
It was weird that nobody else thought of it right away. But maybe that was because people were more taken with what had happened between the Lady and the White Rose and were wondering what that would mean to the empire and the rebellion. For a while it looked like half the world was up for grabs. Everybody who was the sort to do some grabbing was eyeballing his or her chances and scouting around to see if they might get turned into eunuchs if they tried.
So it was up to some second-rate hustlers from Oar's north side to take first whack at stealing the silver spike.
The news from the Barrowland was still in the shithouse rumor stage when Tully Stahl came pounding on the door of the room where his cousin Smeds Stahl stayed.
The room Smeds lived in had no furnishings except roaches and dirt, half a dozen mildewed, stolen blankets, and half a gross of empty clay wine jugs that he never got around to taking back. They made him pay deposit at the Thorn and Crown. Smeds called the jugs his life savings^ If times got really tough he could trade eight empties for a full.
Tully said that was a dumb way to do things. Whenever Smeds got ripped and pissed he started throwing things around. He wasted his savings.
The shards never got picked up, either, just kicked against one wall, where they formed a dusty badland.
When Tully got on him Smeds figured he was just putting on airs because he was flush. Tully had two married women giving him presents for helping out around the house when the old man was gone. And he was living with a widow he was going to clean out as soon as tie found some other woman to take him in. He thought being a success gave him the right to dish out advice.
Tully pounded on the door. Smeds ignored him. The Kinbro girls from upstairs, Marti and Sheena, eleven and twelve, were there for their "music lessons." The three of them were naked and tumbling around on the ratty blankets. The only instrument in sight was a skin flute.
Smeds made the girls stop bouncing and giggling. There was people who wouldn't appreciate how he was preparing them for later life.
Pound. Pound. Pound. "Come on, Smeds. Open up.
It's me. Tully." "I'm busy."
"Open up. I got a deal I got to talk about." Signing, Smeds untangled himself from skinny young limbs and trudged to the door. "It's my cousin. He's all right."
The girls had been into the wine. They didn't care. They didn't cover themselves. They just sat there grinning when Smeds let Tully in.
"Some friends," Smeds explained. "You want in? They don't mind."
"Some other time. Get them out."
Smeds glared at his cousin. Getting too damned pushy. "Come on, girls. Get your clothes on. Papa has to talk business."
Tully and Smeds watched while they got into ragged clothing. It didn't occur to Smeds to dress. Sheena gave old Hank the Shank a playful slap as she went by. "See you later." The door closed. "You're going to get your ass in a sling," Tully said.
"No more than you. You ought to meet their mother."
"She got any money?"
"No. But she blows a mean horn. Got a thing about it. She gets going she just can't quit."
"When you going to clean this pigsty?"
"Soon as the maid gets back from holiday. So what's so important you have to break in on my party?"
"You heard about what happened up in the Barrowland?"
"I heard some stories. I didn't pay no attention. What do I care? Won't make no difference to me."
"It might. You hear the part about the silver spike?"
Smeds thought. "Yeah. They stuck it in a tree. I thought that would be handy to glom on to. Then I thought some more and figured there wouldn't be enough silver in it to make it worth the trip."
"It isn't the silver, cousin. It's what's in the silver."
Smeds turned it around in his mind some. He couldn't find Tully's angle. "You better lay it out by the numbers." Smeds Stahl was not known for his keen mind.
"That big nail has the soul of the Dominator trapped in it. That means it's one bad hunk of metal. You take some big wazoo of a sorcerer, I bet he could pound it into some kind of all-time mean amulet. You know, like in stories."
Smeds frowned. "We aren't sorcerers."
Tully got impatient. "We'd be the middlemen. We go up there and dig it out of that tree and hide it out till word gets around that it's gone. Then we let it out that it's for sale. To the highest bidder."
Smeds frowned some more and put his whole brain to work. He was no genius but he had plenty of low, mean cunning and he had learned how to stay alive. "Sounds damned dangerous to me. Something we'd need help on if we wanted to come out of it in one piece."
"Right. Even the easy part, going up there and liberating the damned thing, would be more than a two-man job. The Great Forest might be a pretty rough place for guys who don't know anything about the woods. I figured we'd need two more guys, one of them who knows about the woods."
"Already we're talking a four-way split here, Tully. On how much?"
"I don't know. Give them time to bid it up, I think we'd be set for life. And I ain't talking no four-way split, neither, Smeds. Two ways. All in the family."
They looked at each other. Smeds said, "You got the plan. Tell me."
"You know Timmy Locan? Was in the army for a while?"
"About long enough to figure out how to go over the hill. Yeah. He's all right."
"He was in long enough to learn how it works. We might run into soldiers up there. Would your heart be broken if they found him in an alley with his head bashed in?"
That was an easy one. "No." His heart would be fine as long as it wasn't Smeds Stahl they found.
"How about Old Man Fish? He used to trap in the Great Forest."
"Couple of straight arrows."
"That's what we need. Honest crooks. Not some guys who might try to do us out of our share. What do you say? Want to go for it?"
"Tell me how much is in it again."
"Enough to live like princes. We going to go talk to those guys?"
Smeds shrugged. "Why not? What have I got better to do?" He looked at the ceiling. "You better get some clothes on."
Heading down the stairs, Smeds said, "You'd better do the talking." "Good idea."
Heading up the street, Smeds asked, "You ever killed anybody?"
"No. I never needed to. I don't see where I'd have any problem."
"I had to once. Cut a guy's throat. It ain't like you think. They spray blood all over the place and make weird noises. And they take a long time to croak. And they keep trying to come after you. I still get nightmares about that guy trying to take me with him."
Tully looked at him and made a face. "Then do it some other way next time."
Each night there was moonlight enough, a thing came down out of the northern Great Forest, quiet as a limping shadow, into the lorn and trammeled place of death called the Barrowland. That place was heavy with the fetor of corruption. A great many corpses lay rotting in shallow graves.
Limping on three legs, the thing cautiously circled the uncorrupted carcass of a dragon, settled on its haunches in the hole it was digging so patiently, night after night, with a single paw. While it worked it cast frequent glances toward the ruins of a town and military compound several hundred yards to the west.
The garrison had existed to shield the Barrowland from trespassers with evil intentions and to watch for signs that the old darkness in the ground was stirring. Those reasons no longer existed. The battle in which the digging beast had been crippled, in which the dragon had perished, in which the town and compound had been devastated, had put an end to the need for a military stewardship.
Except that it had not occurred to anyone in authority to give the surviving Guards new assignments. Some had stayed, not knowing what else to do or where else to go.
Those men were sworn enemies of the beast.
Had it been healthy, the thing would not have been concerned. It could have dealt with those men easily. Healthy, it was a match for any company of soldiers. Crippled and still suffering from a dozen unhealed wounds, it would not be able to outrun a man let alone outfight those it would have to get through before it could pursue the messenger the Guards were sure to send flying to their masters if they discovered it.
Those masters were cruel and deadly and the beast stood no chance against them even when in the best of health.
Its master could protect it no more. Its master had been hacked to pieces and the pieces burned. Its master's soul had been imprisoned in a silver spike that had been driven into his skull.
The beast was doglike in appearance but rather uncertain in size. It had a protean nature. At times it could be as small as a large dog. At other times it might be the size of a small elephant. It was most comfortable being about twice the size of a war-horse. In the great battle it had slain many of its master's enemies before overpowering sorceries had driven it from the field.
It came stealthily, again and again, despite the fear of exposure, the pain of its wounds, and its frustration. Sometimes the wall of its excavation collapsed. Sometimes rainwater would fill the hole. And always there was the inescapable vigilance of the only truly watchful guardian the victors had left.
A young tree stood among the bones, alone. It was near immortal and was far mightier than the night skulker. It was the child of a god. In time, each night, it wakened to the digger's presence. Its reaction was uniform and violent.
A blue nimbus formed among the tree's limbs. Pale lightning ripped toward the monster. It was a quiet sort of lightning, a sizzle instead of boom and crash, but it slapped the monster like an angry adult's swing at a small child.
The beast suffered no injury, only extreme pain. That it could not endure. Each time it was hit it fled, to await another night and that delay before the child of the god awakened.
The monster's work went slowly.
Darling left Raven standing there. She rode off with that guy Silent and some other guys that were all that was left of the Black Company, a mercenary outfit that really wasn't anymore. A long time ago they was on the Lady's side but something happened to piss them off and they went over to the Rebel. For a long time they was almost the whole Rebel army.
Raven watched them go into the woods. I could tell he wanted to sit down and cry like a baby, maybe as much because he couldn't understand as because she did ride off on him. But he didn't.
In most ways he was the toughest, hardest bastard I ever saw, and not always in the best ways. When I first found out he was Raven and not Corbie I like to crapped my drawers. A long time ago there was a Raven that rode with the Black Company that was the baddest of the bad. He was with them only about a year before he deserted but he made himself a big rep while he was there. And this was the same guy.
He said, "We'll give them a couple hours' head start so it don't look like we're dogging them, then we'll get out of here."
"We?"
"You want to hang around here now?"
"That would be desertion."
"They don't know if you're dead or not. They haven't counted noses yet." He shrugged. "Up to you. Come or stay."
I could tell he wanted me to come. Right then I was the only thing he had. But he wasn't going to make no special appeal. Not hard guy Raven.
I didn't have no future at the Barrowland and I sure as hell wasn't going back to ride herd on potatoes. And I didn't have anybody else in the world, either. "All right.
I'm in."
He started walking into town. What was left after the fight. I tagged along. After a while, he said, "Croaker was about the closest thing to a friend I had when I was in the Company." He was still confused.
Croaker was the boss mere. He wasn't boss back when Raven was with them, but they had been through a few captains since the old days. Raven was confused because his old buddy and him had gotten in a fight after the Dominator got put down.
Probably to show off for Darling, Raven had decided he was going to round everything off and close the books by getting rid of the Lady, who lost her powers during the battle. And Croaker said no you don't and didn't back down. He put an arrow into Raven's hip just to show him he was serious.
"Is a friend somebody who just stands back and lets you do whatever you want whenever you want to do it?" He gave me one of his puzzled looks. "Maybe he was a whole lot more her friend than he was yours. Way I heard tell, they spent a lot of time together. They rode off into the sunset together. And you know the way those guys are about brotherhood, sticking together no matter what, the Company being their family, them against the whole world. You told me about it enough."
There was more I could have said. I could have given it to him by the numbers, how they felt about brothers who ran out on them, but he wouldn't have got it.
There wasn't nobody with more guts in a fight than Raven. He wouldn't back down from nobody or nothing. But in the emotional tight spots he was ready to pack up and run in a minute. He did it to the Company and he did it to Darling, but they could take care of themselves when he did.
I think maybe the worst stunt he ever pulled, and the one that still bugs him the most, is when he ran out on his kids.
He did that back when he enrolled in the Black Company. Maybe he had his reasons, and good ones at the time. He comes up with good excuses. But there's no getting around the fact that he left his kids when they were too young to take care of themselves. Without making any arrangements for them. He never even told anybody he had kids till he told me, sort of, when he was still being Corbie and started trying to find out what happened to them. They would be grown up now. If they survived.
He didn't find out anything.
I figured he would make finding them his quest now. He didn't have anything else going. And trudging through the forest headed south, he made noises like that was what he was planning to do.
We got as far as Oar. He went out on a drunk. And stayed on it.
I went on one, too. I went through me some bad girls. All the things a guys does when he's been out in the woods for a long time, then hits the city. Took me four days to work through that and another day to shake the hangover. Then I took a look at Raven and saw he was just getting started.
I went and found us a cheap place to stay. Then I got me a job protecting a rich man's family. That wasn't hard to do. There were all kinds of rumors about what happened in the Barrowland. The rich saw troubled times coming and wanted to get themselves covered.
Darling and her bunch were in the city somewhere, for a while. So were the bunch from the Black Company. We didn't run into any of them before they left out.
Smeds got sick of Tully's idea before they were four days out of Oar. Nights were cold in the forest. There was no place to hide from the rain. Whole hordes of bugs chewed on you and you couldn't get rid of them when you were sick of them like you could with lice and fleas and bedbugs. You could never get comfortable sleeping on the ground—if you could sleep at all with all the racket that went on at night. There were always sticks and stones and roots under you somewhere.
And there was that bastard Old Man Fish, hardly saying shit but always sneering at you because you didn't know a bunch of woodsy stuff. Like you needed to know that shit to stay alive on the North Side.
It was going to be a pleasure to cut his throat.
Timmy Locan wasn't much better. Little carrot-top runt never shut up. All right, so he was funny most of the time. So he knew every damned joke there ever was and knew how to tell them right and half of them were the kind you wanted to remember so bad it hurt, so you could crack up your friends. But they never came out right for you even when you did remember them… Damn it, even funny got old after four days.
Worse than funny, the little prick never slowed down. He bounced up in die morning like he knew it was going to be the best damned day of his life and he went after every damned day like it was. Short people weren't supposed to be joyous, they were supposed to be cocky and obnoxious. Then you could thump on them and shut them up without feeling bad about it.
Worst thing of all was, Old Man Fish said they couldn't follow the road on account of they might run into somebody who would want to know what they were up to or somebody who might remember them after they did the job. It was important that nobody knew who did it. But busting through the tangle of the woods was awful, even with Old Man Fish finding the way.
Tully hated it woise than Smeds, but he backed the old man up.
Smeds had to admit they were right. What he didn't have to admit was that the expedition was worth the slapping branches, the stabbing, tearing briars, and the for gods' sake spidenvebs in the face.
Or maybe the worst was the blisters on his feet. Those started practically before they got out of sight of Oar. Even though he did everything Old Man Fish told him to do, they just kept getting worse. At least they didn't get infected. That jerk Timmy kept telling cheerful little tales about guys in the army who had had blisters that had gotten infected and they'd had to have their feet or legs chopped off. Dipshit.
Fourth night in the woods he had no trouble sleeping. In fact, he was getting to that point where he could sleep whenever he stopped moving. The old man observed, "You're starting to toughen up. We'll turn you into a man yet, Smeds."
Smeds could have killed him then, but it was too much work to get out of his pack straps and go over and do it.
Maybe the pack was the worst part of it. He had to lug eighty pounds of junk on his back, and what they had eaten of the food part hadn't lightened the load a bit.
They reached their destination shortly after noon eight days after they departed Oar. Smeds stood just inside the edge of the forest and looked out at the Barrowland. "That's what all the fuss was about? Don't look like shit to me." He sloughed his pack, plopped down on it, leaned against a tree, and closed his eyes.
"It ain't what it used to be," Old Man Fish agreed.
"You got a name besides Old Man?"
"Fish."
"I mean a front name."
"Fish is good."
Laconic bastard.
Timmy asked, "That our tree out there?"
Tully answered, "Got to be. It's the only one there is."
Timmy said, "I love you, little tree. You're going to make me rich."
Tully said, "Fish, I think we ought to rest up some before we go after it."
Smeds cracked an eyelid and glimmed his cousin. That was as close as his cousin had come to complaining since the expedition had started. But Tully was a big-time bitcher. Smeds had wondered how long he would hold out. Tully's silence so far had helped Smeds keep going. If Tully wanted it bad enough to take what he had been, then maybe it really was as good as he talked.
The big hit? The one they had been seeking all their lives? Could it be? For that reason alone Smeds would endure.
Fish agreed with Tully. "I wouldn't start before tomorrow night. At the earliest. Maybe the night after. We have a lot of scouting to do. We'll all have to learn the ground the way we learn the geography of a lover." Smeds frowned. Was this no-talk Fish? "We have to find a secure place to camp and establish a secondary base for emergencies."
Smeds could not keep quiet. "What the hell is all this shit? Why don't we just go out there and chop the damned thing down and get out of here?"
"Shut up, Smeds," Tully snapped. "Where the hell have you been for the last ten days? Get the shit out of your ears and use your head for something besides keeping them from banging together."
Smeds shut up. His ears were open, suddenly, and they had caught a very sinister undertone in Tully's voice. His cousin had begun to sound like he regretted letting him in on the deal. Like maybe he was thinking Smeds was too dumb to be left to live. Right now he had on that same contemptuous look Fish wore so often.
He closed his eyes, shut out his companions, let his mind roll back over the past ten days, picking up things that he had heard without really hearing because he had been so busy feeling sorry for himself.
Of course they couldn't just strut out there and chop the damned tree down. There were soldiers watching the Barrowland. And even if there weren't any soldiers there was the tree itself, that was supposed to be big mojo. Sorcery there great enough to have survived the dark struggle that had hammered the guts out of this killing ground.
All right. It wasn't going to be easy. He would have to work for it harder than he'd ever worked for anything in his life. And he would have to be careful. He would have to keep his eyes open and his brain working. He wasn't going to give the Kimbro girls music lessons out here.
That day and night they rested. Even Old Man Fish said he needed it. Next morning Fish went to scout for a campsite. Tully said, "You got blisters up to your butt, Smeds. You stay here. Take care of them the way Fish said. You got to get in shape to move if we got to move. Timmy, come on."
"Where you going?" Smeds asked.
"Gonna try getting close to that town. See what we can find out." They went.
Fish came back an hour later.
"That was quick. Find a place?"
"Not a very good one. River's moved some since I was up here. Banks two hundred yards over there. Not much room to run. Let me look at them feet."
Smeds stuck them out. Fish squatted, grunted, touched a couple of places. Smeds winced. "Bad?" he asked.
"Seen worse. Not often. Got some trenchfoot getting started, too. Others probably got a touch, too." He looked vacant for a moment. "My fault. I knew you was green and Tully was as organized as a henhouse. Shoulda not let him get in such a big hurry. You get in a hurry you always end up paying."
"Decided what you're going to do with your cut yet?" "Nope. You get to my age you don't go looking that far ahead. Good chance you might not get there. One day at a time, boy. I'm going to get some stuff for a poultice."
Smeds watched the straight-backed, white-haired man fade into the forest silently. He tried to blank his mind. He did not want to be alone with his thoughts.
Fish returned with a load of weeds. "Chop these into little pieces and put them in this sack. Equal amounts of each kind." There were three kinds. "When the sack is stuffed close it up and pound on it with this stick. Roll it over once in a while. All the leaves got to get good and bruised." "How long?"
"Give it a thousand, twelve hundred whacks. Then dump it in this pot. Put in a cup of water and stir it up." "Then what?"
"Then do another sack. And stir the pot every couple minutes." The old man faded into the woods without saying where he was going.
Smeds was pounding his third sack when Fish returned. He sniffed. "Guess you can do a job right when you want." He settled, took the pot. "Good. That sack will be enough."
He turned Smeds's oldest shirt into bindings for his feet, packed them with soggy, mangled leaves. A cool tingle began soothing his pains.
Fish made the others treat their feet, too. He did his own.
Smeds leaned against his tree, troubled. He did not think he was hard enough or bad enough to kill the old man.
"There between sixty and eighty people still living over there," Tully said. "Mostly soldiers. But we heard them talking like a big bunch would be leaving in a couple days. Wouldn't hurt to wait them out on that. We could finish up our scouting."
Scouting the Barrowland started after sunset, by the light of a quarter moon. The village was dark and silent. It looked a good time to prowl the open ground.
Out the four went in a loose line abreast barely in sight of one another, Tully guiding on the tree. It was not much of a tree by Smeds's estimation. Right then it looked like a fat-trunked silver-bark poplar sapling about fifteen feet tall. He could not see anything remarkable there. Why the reputation?
He reached a point where the angle was right, caught a glint of moonlight off silver. It was real! And having gotten that one glance, he began to feel the throbbing dark power of it, like it was not metal at all but an icicle of pure hatred.
He shuddered, forced his gaze away.
It was real. The wealth was there to be had. If they could take it.
He hurried forward. A long, low, stony ridge barred his path. Odd that such a thing should be there, but he did not connect it with the dragon that was supposed to have devoured the infamous sorcerer Bomanz before being slain itself. Maybe if there had been more light to reveal what his hands and feet exposed as they disturbed the masking dirt…
He was near the top when he heard the sound. Like an animal snuffling. And another sound beneath it, like something scratching at the earth. He looked for the others. He could see no one but Tully, who was staring at the tree from ten feet away. There was something odd about the tree. The tops of its leaves glimmered with a faint bluish ghost light.
Maybe it was a trick of the rising moon.
He got up where the footing was good, stood, glanced at the tree again. Definitely something weird going on there. The whole thing was glowing.
He looked down in front of him. His heart stilled.
Something stared back at him from fifty feet away. It had a head the size of a bushel basket. Its eyes and teeth shown in the tree light. Especially its teeth. Never had he seen so many sharp teeth, or so big.
It started toward him.
His feet would not move.
He looked around wildly, saw Tully and Timmy headed away from the tree at a dead run.
He looked forward again as the monster began its leap, its jaws opening to snap at his head. He hurled himself backward. As the monster arced after him a blue bolt from the tree smacked it aside as a man's hand swats a flying insect.
Smeds landed hard, but hard did not slow him a step. He took off running and never looked back.
"I saw it, too," Old Man Fish said, and that put the quietus on Tully trying to make like Smeds was imagining things. "Like he said, it was as big as a house. Like a giant three-legged dog. The tree zapped it. It ran away."
"Three-legged dog? Come on. What was it doing?"
Smeds said, "It was trying to dig something up. It was sniffing and pawing the ground just like a dog trying to dig up a bone."
"Damn it to hell! Complications. Why does there always have to be complications? That for sure means it'll take longer than I thought. But we don't got no time to waste. Sooner or later somebody else is going to get the same idea I did."
"Don't get in no hurry," Fish said. "Take your time and do it right. That is, if you want to live long enough to enjoy being rich."
Tully grunted. Nobody suggested they give it up. Not even Smeds, who had felt the monster's breath on his face.
"Toadkiller Dog," Timmy Locan said.
"Say what?" Tully snapped back.
"Toadkiller Dog. There was a monster in the fight up here called Toadkiller Dog."
"Toadkiller Dog? What the hell kind of name is that?"
"How the hell should I know? He ain't my pup."
Stupid joke, but everybody laughed anyway. They needed to.
Raven hardly sobered up for three weeks. One night I came back to our place, I'd had enough. I'd had to hurt a man bad that day, a nut who earned it trying to grab my boss's kids. Even so I felt bad. Somehow I worked it out that it was all Raven's fault I got in a position where I had to hurt somebody.
He was drunk on his ass. "Look at you, sucking on a wineskin like it was your mother's tit. The great and famous tough guy Raven, so bad he offed his old lady in the public gardens at Opal. So bad he went head-to-head with the Limper. Laying around feeling sorry for himself and whining like a three-year-old with a bellyache. Get up and do something with yourself, man. I'm sick of seeing you like this."
In a stumbling, slurred voice he told me to get stuffed, it wasn't any of my damned business.
"The hell it ain't! It's my damned money paying for the room here, dipshit. And I got to come home every day to the stink of old puke and spilled wine and a goddamn soil pot you ain't got time to empty yourself. When was the last time you bothered to change your clothes? When was the last time you had a bath?"
He cussed me in a cracked-voice scream.
"You're just about the most selfish, thoughtless bastard I ever seen. Won't even clean up after yourself."
I went on like that, louder and angrier. But he never really fought back, which made me think maybe he was about as disgusted with himself as I was with him. But who can go around admitting he's a hopeless, useless hunk of shit?
Finally he ran out of what little fight he had. He got up and staggered out, without any parting shot. He did not burn any bridges behind him.
A guy I worked with and I talked it over about what you do with drunks. His dad was a reformed drunk. He told me you got to stop trying to help them out. You got to stop making excuses for them and not take excuses from them. You got to put them on a spot where they can't do nothing but face the truth because they aren't going to change a bit till they decide to do it. They got to be the ones who believe they've turned into dregs and something has got to be changed.
I didn't know if I could wait around long enough for Raven to decide he was a real grown-up man and he was going to have to face reality. Darling was gone and that was that. There were kids to be found. That whole past, down in Opal, had to be hooked back out into the light and made peace with.
Actually, I was pretty sure he would come around, given time. The kind of guy he was being was the kind he held in deep contempt. That had to seep through. But it sure was frustrating, waiting him out.
He came back home four days later, sobered up and cleaned up and looking halfway like the Raven I remembered. He was all apologetic. He promised to get straight and to do better.
Sure. They do that, too.
I would believe it when I saw it.
I didn't make any big deal out of anything. I didn't preach. There wasn't no profit in that.
He hung on pretty good. He looked like he was getting somewhere. But then two days later I came home and found him so stinking he couldn't crawl.
Hell with him, I said.
They were running shorthanded, what with Timmy laid up after getting caught in a blast of the tree's blue light, but Smeds did not see where it made any difference. They were not getting anywhere. They could not go out there in the daytime without being seen from the town. After dark that monster always came and dug in its hole. They could not go out there then. And for a long time after it chased the monster, the tree remained alert, laying for more intruders. Timmy had found that out the hard way.
It looked like there was maybe an hour each morning, just before dawn, when it might be possible to get something accomplished safely.
But what? Nobody had figured that out. They sure weren't going to get a chance to chop the sucker down. Ringing it wasn't worth squat, even if you could get close enough for long enough to do it. How long for a ringed tree to die? Especially this kind?
Somebody suggested poisoning it. That sounded so good that they talked it over, recalling things they had seen used to kill weeds and stuff. Only the method demanded that they have a poison. Which meant going back to Oar to buy it. With money they did not have. And it might take as long as ringing the son of a bitch. Time was not an ally. Tully was in a panic about time already. He thought it a miracle no competition had yet shown.
"We got to do it fast."
Timmy said, "We ain't going to get it done as long as that monster keeps coming around."
"So maybe we help him find what he wants."
"You better got a mouse in your pocket when you say 'we,' cousin," Smeds said. "Because I ain't going out there to help that thing do squat."
"We burn it," Fish said.
"Huh? What?"
"The tree, fool. We burn it down."
"But we can't go out there and…"
Fish yanked a stick out of their woodpile. It was a yard long and two inches in diameter. He sailed it off through the woods. "Take a while, but it'll pile up. Then in with a torch or two. Whoosh. Up in flames. Fire burns out, we go pick up our spike."
Smeds sneered. "You forgot the soldiers."
"Nope. But you're right. Got to come up with a diversion."
Tully said, "That's the best idea yet. We'll go with it till somebody thinks up something better."
Smeds grunted. "It'll beat sitting on our asses, that's for sure." He was used to the woods now. There was no adventure left in this. Not that there had been a lot before. He was bored.
They started pitching sticks immediately. The three younger men made it a game, betting from their shares. Sticks began to accumulate.
The tree did not like the game. Sometimes it sniped back.
They thought Smeds was crazy, sneaking out every couple nights to watch the monster dig. "You got more balls than brains," Tully told him.
"Better than sitting around."
It was not that dangerous. He just had to keep down. The beast never noticed a low profile. But if you got up and showed it a silhouette, look out!
The monster's labor was slow, but it worked as though obsessed. The nights came and went, came and went.
In time it unearthed what it sought.
Smeds Stahl was watching the night it came up with a grisly trophy, a horror, a human head.
That head had been too long in too many graves, and too often injured. The monster closed its jaws on ragged remnants of hair, lifted the gruesome object. Dodging bolts from the tree, it carried the head to a backwater in the nearby river.
Smeds tagged along behind. Carefully. Very carefully.
The beast laved the head with care and tenderness. The tree crackled and sputtered, unable to project its power that far.
Once the head was clean, the giant hound limped back the way it had come. Smeds stole along behind, amazing himself with his daring. The beast circled the dead dragon, which more than ever appeared to be an odd feature of the terrain. It stepped over a bit of tattered leather and stone almost invisible in the soggy earth, not noticing. Smeds spotted it, though. He picked it up and pocketed it without thinking.
On the other side of the dragon the tree continued to crackle and fuss, frustrated.
When Smeds pocketed that old fetish it twitched, proclaiming to anyone properly attuned the fact that it had been disturbed.
Smeds halted in a shadow, freezing. Moonlight had fallen upon that horrible head. He saw it clearly.
Its eyes were open. A grotesque smile stretched its ruined mouth.
It was alive.
Smeds almost lost sphincter control.
Oar is the city nearest the old battleground and burying place called the Barrowland. The alarm cried by the fetish there touched two residents.
One was an old, old man living incognito because he had contrived to stage his apparent death during the struggle that had devastated the Barrowland. The alarm struck him as he sat guzzling in a workingman's tavern with new cronies who thought him an astrologer. When it hit him he knew a moment of panic. Then, tears streaming, he rushed into the street.
A questioning babble arose behind him. When his comrades came out to learn what was wrong he had vanished.
It was another of those damned days. Oar was a troubled city. There were scattered disturbances, conflict between Rebel and imperial partisans, and a lot of private crimes were getting committed under the guise of politics. My boss was talking about shutting up his city house and moving out to a place he owned near Deal. If he did that I'd have to decide whether or not to go along. I wanted to talk it over with Raven, but…
He was passed out when I got there.
"Over a goddamned woman you never even had," I grumbled, and kicked a tin plate across the room. The son of a bitch hadn't bothered to clean up after himself again. I thought about kicking him around the room. But I wasn't mad enough to try that yet.
Even drunk and wasted away, he was still Raven, the baddest man I'd ever met. I didn't need to get into it with him.
He woke up so sudden I jumped. He used the wall to pull himself up. He was pale and shaking and I never for a second took it for the effect of the wine. That old boy was scared shitless.
He couldn't hardly stand up without that wall to help, and he was probably seeing three of me and little blue men besides, but he gobbled out, "Case, get your stuff together."
"What?"
He was working his way along the wall toward his heap of stuff. "Something just broke out of the Barrowland… Oh, god!" He went down on his knees, holding his stomach. He started puking. I handed him water to cleanse his mouth and a rag to wipe up with. He didn't argue. "Something got out. Something as dark as…" Up came another load.
I asked, "You sure it wasn't just a nightmare? Or maybe the grape boogies?"
"It was real. It wasn't the wine. I don't know how I know. I know. I saw it as clear as if I was there. There was that beast everybody called Toadkiller Dog." He talked slow, trying not to slur. He slurred anyway. "Something was with it. Something greater. Something of the true darkness."
I didn't know what to say. He believed it even if I didn't. He had his mess cleaned and was starting to stuff his things into a bag. He asked, "Where did you stable the horses?"
He was serious. Unable to navigate and brain-pickled, but he was by-damned going to do something right now. "Thulda's. Why? Where you going?" "We got to get help."
"Help? We? You forgetting I got me a job here? I got responsibilities. I can't just mount up and ride off chasing lights you seen in the swamp because you got aholt of some doctored wine."
He got mad. I got mad right back. We yelled and screamed some. He threw things because he wasn't in good enough shape to run me down. I stomped his wineskin to death and watched its blood trickle across the floor. The landlady kicked the door in. She weighed two hundred pounds and was as mean as a snake. "I told you bastards I wasn't going to put up with no more of this.…" We rushed her. She was a liar and a cheat and a bully and she probably stole things from the rooms when she thought she wouldn't get caught. We threw her down the stairs and stood around laughing like a couple of kid vandals. She started screeching again down below. She wasn't hurt.
I stopped laughing. She wasn't hurt, but she might have been. And I didn't have the excuse of being drunk. "I take it you're headed out of town?"
"Yeah." The humor had fled him, too. His color was ghastly.
"How you going to get out of town? It's the middle of the night."
"Cash considerations. The magical key." He shouldered his bag. "You about ready?"
"Yeah." He knew I would come all the time.
"Hey, Loo!" the gateman called into the gatehouse while Raven clinked coins. "Get your ass up. We got us another customer." He grinned apologetically. "Loo, he's got a day job plucking chickens. Got too damned many kids. You would think a guy would learn how to stop after the first dozen. Not Loo." He kept on grinning.
"You'd figure," I admitted. "This that good a job? I don't see so many guys happy with their work like you."
"Pretty boring on the night watch, mostly. Been a profitable night tonight, though."
"Others have gone before us?" Raven asked.
"Only one guy. This old man about an hour ago. In such a big damned hurry he just scattered coins all over the place."
That was what you call your basic broad hint. Raven ignored it. I made small talk till Loo turned out with the keys and opened the small port through the big gate. Raven just stared straight ahead. When Loo opened up he tossed some silver.
"Why, thank you, yer grace. Come around anytime. Any time. You got a friend down here to South Gate."
Raven didn't say anything. He just grimaced and led his horse through the gateway onto the moon-washed road.
"Thanks," I told the gatemen. "See you guys around."
"Anytime, yer grace. Anytime. I'm yer man."
Raven must have paid them off good.
The grimace was familiar, though I hadn't seen it for a while. "Your hip bothering you again?"
"It'll be all right. I've traveled with worse."
Sour bastard. He'd shaken the wine, pretty well, but the hangover was hanging over. "Taking a long time to heal."
"What the hell you expect? I'm not so young anymore. And it was one of her arrows Croaker got me with." Raven didn't seem to hold no grudge. He just couldn't figure it out.
He probably didn't want to figure it out. His idea of Raven was that Raven was a doer, not a thinker.
Sometimes I wondered how he could feed himself so much crap.
The old man, worn out, stood beside his ragged mount, stared at the dusty crossroads. To the east lay Lords. Southward the road led to Roses and beyond, to other great cities. The people he had come chasing had split here. He did not know who had gone which direction, though it seemed reasonable that the White Rose had turned east toward her fastness in the Plain of Fear. The Lady should have continued southward, toward her capital, the Tower at Charm.
With that parting, the armistice between them would have ended.
"Which way?" he asked the animal. The shaggy pony did not express an opinion. The old man could not decide which woman would be best equipped to act on his news. His impulse was to keep going south, but only because by turning east he would be headed into the rising sun.
"We're too old for this, horse."
The animal made a sound that, for a moment, he took to be a response. But the pony was looking back the way they had come.
Dust cloud. Fast riders coming down. Two, looked like. After a moment the old man recognized the wild-eyed style of the man in the lead. "Here comes our answer. Let's go." He hurried along the eastbound road, turned aside into a copse, found a spot where he could watch the riders. He would take the road they ignored.
Their mission had to be the same as his. That those two men should arrive here at this moment, hurrying like hell was yapping at their heels, for any other reason, strained credulity. The one called Raven could have heard the alarm. At some time in his life he had had some small training in the art, and his spirit had spent a long time snared in the coils of the Barrowland. He was sensitive enough.
The old man's eyelids drooped. He prepared an herbal draft that would help keep him alert long enough to see what those two men would do.
Raven reined back to a walk. "We gave that old boy a fright."
"Probably figures we're bandits. We look it. You going to kill these horses today? Or can we string them along for awhile?"
Raven grunted. "You're right, Case. No sense getting in so big a hurry we end up taking twice as long because we have to walk most of the way. Funny. That old boy reminded me of that wizard Bomanz that got eaten by the Barrowland dragon."
"All them old-timers look the same to me."
"Could be. Hold up." He studied the crossroads. I tried to spot the old man in the copse. I was sure he was watching us.
"Well?" I asked.
"They split up like they said they would."
Don't ask me how he knew. He knew. Unless he was just faking it. I've seen him do that.
"Darling went east. Croaker kept heading south."
I'd play his game. "How do you figure?"
"She was with him." He rubbed his hip. "She would be headed for the Tower."
"Oh. Yeah." Big deal. "Which way are we headed? Whichever, we got to rest soon."
"Yes. Soon. For the horses."
"Sure." I kept my face blank. Inside I was wishing I had balls enough to yell at him that he didn't have to go on being the iron man for me. He didn't have to prove anything to me but that he could stop sucking wine by the gallon and could stop feeling sorry for himself. He wanted to show me how much guts he had, let him show me he had the kind it took to go find his kids and make up with them. He didn't have to prove anything to that old man over there in the trees, did he?
I wished he would go ahead and announce the decision I knew he was going to make. I was getting uncomfortable, knowing I was being watched. "Come on. Which way?"
He responded by spurring his mount down the south road. What the hell was this? I even started to turn east before I realized what he'd done.
I caught up. "Why south?"
Kind of hitting it sideways, he told me, "Croaker was always an understanding kind of guy. And forgiving."
The son of a bitch was crazy.
Or maybe he'd suddenly gone sane and didn't need to whimper over Darling anymore.
The three-legged beast carried the head to the heart of the Great Forest, to the altar at the center of a ring of standing stones that had been in place for several thousand years. It could barely squeeze through the picket of ancient oaks surrounding that greatest of the holy places of the pitifully diminished forest savages.
The monster deposited the head and hobbled back into the dappled woods.
One by one the beast hunted down the shamans of the woodland tribes and compelled them to go to the head. In their terror those petty old witch doctors threw themselves upon their faces before it and worshiped it as a god. They swore oaths of fealty for fear of the jaws of the beast. Then they began tending to the head's needs.
Not once, to any, did it occur to take advantage of its powerlessness to destroy it. The fear of it was impressed too deeply into their kind. They could not imagine resistance.
And, always, there was that slavering monster to overawe them.
They went away from the holy place to collect willow withes, mystical herbs, rope grasses, leather both raw and tanned, blessed feathers, and stones known to possess magical properties. They gathered small animals appropriate for sacrifices, and even brought in a thief who was to be killed anyway. The man screamed and begged to be dispatched in the usual way, fearing the perpetual bondage and torment of a soul dedicated to a god.
Most of the stuff collected was junk. Most of the shamans' magic was mummery, but it proceeded from a deeper truth, from a fountain of genuine power. Power that was real enough to serve the head's immediate purpose.
In that oldest and most sacred of their holy places the shamans wove and built themselves a wicker man of willow and rope grasses and rawhide. They burned their herbs and slaughtered their sacrifices, christening and anointing the wicker man with blood. Their chanting invocations possessed the ring of stone for days.
Much of the chant was nonsense, but forgotten or only partly understood words of power lingered in its rhythms. Words enough to do.
When those old men finished the rite, they set the head on the wicker man's neck. Its eyes blinked three times.
One wooden hand snatched a staff from a shaman. The old man fell. Tottering, the amalgam moved to a patch of bare earth. With the foot of the staff it scratched out crude block letters.
Slowly the thing gave the old men their orders. They hurried off. In a week they were ready to make improvements on their handiwork.
The rites this time were more bloody and bizarre. They included the sacrifice of two men snatched from the ruined town beside the Barrowland. Those two were a long time dying.
When the rites were finished the wicker man and its corrupt burden possessed more freedom of movement, though no one would mistake the construct for a human body. The head could now speak in a soft, gravelly whisper.
It ordered, "Collect your fifty best warriors."
The old men balked. They had done their part. They had no taste for adventures.
The thing they had created whispered a chant in which there were no waste words. Three old men died screaming, devoured by worms that ate them from within.
"Gather your fifty best warriors."
The survivors did as they were told.
When the warriors came they hoisted the wicker man onto the back of the crippled monster. No woodland pony or ox would allow the amalgam to mount it. He then led the band down to the wreck of the town at the Barrowland. "Kill them all," he whispered.
As the massacre began the wicker man moved past, his ruined face fixed southward. His eyes smoldered with a poisonous, insane hatred.
Timmy came flying into camp moments after the racket started. He was so scared he could hardly talk. "We got to get out of here," he choked out, in one-word gasps. "That monster is back. Something is riding it. Some savages are killing them in the village."
Old Man Fish nodded once and dumped water on the fire. "Before it remembers us. Just like we rehearsed it."
"Oh, come on," Tully snarled. "Jimmy's probably seeing things.…"
The tree cut loose with the granddaddy of all blue bolts. It filled the forest with its glow and banged like heavenly lightning.
"Holy shit," Tully whispered. He took off like a stampeded bear.
The others were not too far behind.
Smeds was thoughtful as he trotted along, his arms filled with gear. Fish's precautions had paid off. Maybe. Like the old boy said, they weren't out nothing getting away for a while.
From behind came a flare in a rosy peach shade answered by another blast of blue. Something yowled like the lost soul of a great cat.
Tully claimed Fish thought too much. But here was Fish turning out to do more and more of the leading while Tully eased into Smeds's old place as shirker and complainer. Timmy wasn't changing, though. He was still the handy runt with the thousand stories.
Fish and Timmy were putting more into this than Tully. Smeds didn't think he could cut them. Especially not if the payoff was as big as Tully expected. No need to be bloody greedy then.
Smeds squatted beside his log, placed his stuff in the nest of branches left to hold it. Tully was on the river already, splashing away. "Sshh!" Fish said. Everybody froze, except Tully out there, splashing away.
Old Man Fish listened.
All Smeds heard was a lot of silence. Nor was there any lightning anymore.
Fish relaxed. "Nothing moving. We got time to strip."
Smeds took the old man's word but he didn't waste any time getting naked and shoving off.
Lying on his chest on a log in the middle of a river in the middle of the night, Smeds felt the first nibbles of panic. He could not see the island for which they were headed, though Fish said there was no way they could miss it from where they had left the bank. The current would carry them right to it.
That was no reassurance. He could not swim. If he missed the island he would drift maybe all the way to the sea.
A sudden barrage of blue flares illuminated the river. He was surprised to see that Fish and Timmy were nearby. And for all his furious splashing Tully was only a hundred feet ahead.
He felt an urge to say something, anything, just to draw courage from the act of communication. But he had nothing to say. And silence was imperative. No point asking for trouble.
During the coming hour he relived every moment of fear he'd ever known, every instance of misfortune and disaster. He was very ragged when he spied the darker loom of the island dead ahead.
It wasn't much of an island. It was maybe thirty feet wide and two hundred yards long, a nail paring of a mudbank that had accumulated weeds and scrub brush. None of the brush was taller than a man. Smeds thought it a pretty pathetic hideout.
At the moment it looked like paradise.
A minute later Fish whispered, "It's shallow enough to touch bottom. Walk your way around to the far side so there won't be tracks coming out over here."
Smeds slid off his log, discovered the water was no deeper than his waist. He followed Fish and Timmy, his toes squishing in the bottom muck, his calves tangling in water plants. Timmy yipped as he stepped on something that wriggled.
Smeds glanced back. Nothing. There had been no fireworks since the exchange that had shown him his companions on the river. The forest had begun to recall its night murmur.
"What took you guys so long?" Tully asked, with a touch of strain.
Smeds snapped, "We took time to pick up some stuff so we wouldn't starve to death out here. What're you going to munch, fireball?"
Smeds wondered if an occasional dose of stress wasn't good for the state of a guy's common sense. He'd dug up some useful memories during his helpless voyage.
Tully had run off on him before. When they were little, as a simple act of cruelty, and later, abandoning him to the mercies of bullies or leaving him to be beaten by a merchant when he, unwitting, had distracted the man while Tully had snatched a handful of coppers and run.
Tully bore watching.
Smeds could see the shadow of the future. Get Old Man Fish and Timmy Locan to kype the spike. Get dumb old Smeds to croak them when they do. Then take the loot and walk. Who is Smeds going to complain to when he has the blood of two men on his hands?
That would be just like Tully. Just like him.
They stayed on the island four days, feeding the gnats, broiling in the sun, waiting. It went hardest for Tully. He mooched food enough to get by, but he could not borrow dry clothing or a blanket to keep the sun off.
Smeds had a feeling Fish drew the wait out mainly for Tully's benefit.
Fish went over to the mainland the fourth afternoon. Walking. The channel between the island and bank was never more than chest-deep. He carried his necessaries atop his head.
He did not return till after dark.
"Well?" Tully demanded, the only one of them with any store of impatience left.
"They're gone. Before they left they found our camp and savaged it. They poisoned everything and left dozens of traps. We won't go back there. Maybe we can find what we need in the village. Those folks won't be needing anything anymore."
Smeds learned the truth of Fish's report next day, after a pass near their old camp to show Tully he was wasting his time whining for his stuff. The massacre had been complete, and had not spared the dogs, the fowl, the livestock. It was a warm morning and the air was still. The wings of a million flies filled the forest with an oppressive drone. Carrion eaters squawked and barked and chittered, arguing, as though there was not a feast great enough for ten times their number. The stench was gut-wrenching even from a quarter mile away. Smeds stopped. 'I got no business to take care of over there. I'm going to go eyeball the tree."
"I'll give you a hand," Timmy said.
Tully looked at Smeds with a snarl. Old Man Fish shrugged, said, "We'll meet you there." The stink and horror didn't seem to bother him.
The wicker man strode through the streets of the shattered city like an avenging god, stepping stiffly over the legions of the dead. The survivors of his forest warriors followed, awed by the vastness of the city and aghast at what sorcery had wrought. Behind them came a few hundred stunned imperial soldiers from the Oar garrison. They had recognized the invader and had responded to his call to arms— mainly because to defy him was to join those whose blood painted the cobblestones and whose spilled entrails clogged the gutters.
Fires burned in a thousand places. The people of Oar sent a great lament up into the darkness. But not near the dread thing stamping the night.
Furtive things moved in the shadows, rushing away from their places of hiding. Their fear was so great they could not remain still while the old terror passed. He ignored them. The backbone of resistance had been broken.
He ignored everything but the fires. Fire he avoided.
Bowstrings yelped. Arrows zipped into the wicker man as if into an archery butt. Chunks of willow and bits of stone flew. The wicker man reeled. But for the woodland warriors he would have toppled. Breathy rage tore through the head's tortured lips.
Then words came, soft and bitter, chilling the hearts of those near enough to hear. More arrows ripped the fabric of the night, battered the wicker man, clipped one of his ears, felled one of the savages supporting him. He finished speaking.
Screams tore the shadows fifty yards away. They were terrible screams. They brought moisture to the eyes of the soldiers who followed the wicker man.
Those soldiers stepped over the knotted, twitching, whining forms of men wearing uniforms exactly like their own, brothers in arms whose courage had been sufficient to buoy their loyalty. Some shuddered and averted their eyes. Some took mercy and ended the torment with quick spear thrusts. Some recognized old comrades among the fallen and quietly swore to even accounts when sweet opportunity presented itself.
The wicker man proved as unstoppable as a natural disaster. He passed through Oar, trailing death and destruction and accumulating followers, and came to the city's South Gate, where Loo and his sidekick vanished in a flurry of heels. The wicker man extended a hand, whispered secret words. The gate blasted to flinders and toothpicks. The wicker man stamped through and halted, staring down the darkened road.
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 Limpet'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."
"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.