XVI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XVII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He extended his probing mind eastward, cautiously.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XVIII

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

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

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

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

Five thousand men followed him in his march toward Charm.

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

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

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

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

He got back out of range.

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

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

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

He fared little better.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XIX

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

"What?"

"I said the hell with it. I've had it. We're going home."

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

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

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

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

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

"Screw it. It ain't going to work and you know it. Or if you don't you're fooling yourself."

"You want to go home, go ahead. I'm going to stick it out and see what happens."

"I said we're going home. All of us."

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

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

"Stuff it, Tully. I ain't no genius, but just how dumb do you think I am?"

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

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

Tully started protesting his innocence of having entertained any such thoughts. Smeds watched Timmy Locan throw sticks. He ignored Tully. After a while he watched Fish approach from the direction of the town. The old man was carrying something over his shoulder. Smeds couldn't make out what it was. He hoped it was another of those dwarf deer like the old man had got a couple weeks back. That had been some good eating.

Timmy spotted Fish. He lost interest in his sticks, wandered over.

It wasn't a deer Fish had, it was some kind of bundle that clanked when he dropped it in front of the log. He said, "Smell's gone over there. Thought I'd poke around." He opened his bundle, which he had folded from a ragged blanket. "Those guys didn't take time out to loot when they went through over there."

Smeds gaped. There were pounds and pounds of coins, some of them even gold. There were rings and bracelets and earrings and broaches and necklaces and some of them boasted jewels. He'd never seen so much wealth in one place.

Fish said, "There's probably a lot more. I just picked up what was easy to find and quit when I had as much as I could carry."

Smeds looked at Tully. "And you wanted to cut out because the whole thing was a big bust."

Tully looked at the pile, awed. Then his expression became suspicious and Smeds knew he was wondering if Fish had hidden the best stuff where he could pick it up later. Typical Tully Stahl thinking, and stupid.

If Fish had wanted to hold out he would have just hidden the stuff and not said anything. Nobody would have known the difference. Nobody was interested in that town. Nobody even wanted to think about what happened there.

"What's this?" Fish asked, glancing from Tully to Smeds.

Smeds said, "He was whining about how the whole thing was a big damned bust and he was sick of it and wanted us to go home. But look here. Even if we don't have no luck with the tree we made out like bandits. I could live pretty good for a good long time on a share of this."

Fish looked from Tully to Smeds and back again. He said, "I see." And maybe he did. That old man wasn't anybody's fool. He said, "Timmy, you got a good eye for this kind of thing. Why don't you separate that out into equal lots?"

"Sure." Timmy sat down and ran his hands through the coins, laughing. "Anybody see anything he's just got to have?"

Nobody did.

Timmy was good. Not even Tully found any reason to complain about his divvying.

Fish said, "There's bound to be more over there. Not to mention a lot of steel that could be cleaned up and wholesaled if we brought a wagon up and carried it back."

After they squirreled their shares, Tully and Old Man Fish headed back to town. Smeds didn't want to go anywhere near the place but figured he had to go along to keep Tully honest. Timmy wouldn't go at all. He was happy building up the woodpile.

Looting the town made for a ten-day full-time job, what with having to clean up all the weapons and some other large items of value and then bundling them protectively and hiding them for later recovery. They came up with enough money and jewelry and small whatnots to make a heavy load for each of them.

Even Tully seemed pleased and content. For the moment.

One night, though, he said, "You know what bugs me? How come nobody else in the whole damned city of Oar ever got the same idea I did? I'd have bet my balls that after this long we'd be up to our asses in guys trying to glom on to that spike."

Old Man Fish grunted. "I've been wondering why no one's come to see what happened to the garrison."

Nobody had any ideas. The questions just sort of lay there like dead fish too ripe to be ignored and too big to shove out of the way.

Fish said, "I reckon it's time we torched her and seen if she's going to do it or not. That woodpile gets any bigger Timmy ain't going to be able to throw them that high."

Smeds realized he was reluctant to take the next step. Tully didn't seem too anxious, either. But Timmy had a grin on ear to ear. He was raring to go.

Tully leaned over and told Smeds, "Little dip did some torch work back in town. Likes to see things burn."

"We got a good day for it here," Fish said. "A nice breeze to whip up the fire. A hot, sunshiny day, which is when we know it's asleep the deepest. All we have to do is look in our pants and see if we got some balls, then go do it."

They looked at each other awhile. Finally, Smeds said, "All right," and got up. He collected the bundle of brush that would be his to throw. Fish and Timmy got theirs. Tully had to go along.

They lit the bundles off down in the bottom of the hole the monster dug, then jumped out and charged the mountain of sticks from the windward side. They heaved their bundles. Tully's, thrown too far away, fell short, but that did not matter.

They ran like hell, Smeds, Timmy, and Fish in straight lines, Tully zigging and zagging. The tree did not wake up before they'd all made the cover of the woods.

The fire had reached inferno proportions by then.

Random bolts of blue lightning flailed around. They did not come for long, though.

Smeds could feel the heat from where he crouched, watching. That was one bitch of a bonfire. But he was not impressed. What he was, mainly, was sad.

The fire burned the rest of the day. At midnight Timmy went to check it out and came back to say there was still a lot of live coals under the ash and he hadn't been able to get near it.

Next morning they all went to look. Smeds was astounded. The tree still stood. Its trunk was charred and its leaves were gone, but it still stood, the silver spike glittering wickedly at eye level. And it did not protest their presence, no matter how close they got.

That was not close enough. There was a lot of heat in the ash still. They hauled water from the river and splashed down a path. Timmy Locan volunteered to take the pry bar and go pull the spike.

"I can't believe it," Tully said as Timmy leaned on the bar and the tree didn't do anything about it. "I can't goddamned believe it! We're actually going to do it!"

Timmy grunted and strained and cussed and nothing happened. "This son of a bitch ain't going to come! Oh!"

It popped loose. Timmy grabbed at it as it sailed past, grabbing it left-handed for a second.

Then he screamed and dropped it. "Oh, shit, that bastard is hot." He came running, crying, and shoved his hand into the last bucket of water. His palm was mostly red and beginning to show patches of blister already.

Fish took a shovel and scooped the spike out of the ashes. "Look out, Timmy. I'm fixing to dump it in there."

"My hand…"

"Ain't good to do a bad burn that way. You head back to camp. I got some salve there that'll do you a whole lot better."

Timmy pulled his hand out. Fish dumped the spike. The water hissed and bubbled. Fish said, "You carry the bucket, Smeds."

Just as Tully said, "We better make tracks. I think its starting to wake up."

It was hard to tell against that sky, but it did look like there were tiny flecks of blue out on the ends of the smallest surviving twigs.

"The spike ain't conducting heat into the heartwood anymore," Fish said. "Scat," he told the backs of a lot of pumping legs and flailing elbows.

Smeds looked back just before he plunged into the woods. Just as the tree cut loose with a wild, undirected discharge. The flash nearly blinded him. Ash flew in clouds. The pain and disappointment and… sorrow? …of the tree touched him like a gentle, sad rain. He found tears streaking his face and guilt in his heart.

Old Man Fish puffed into camp one step ahead of Tully, who was embarrassed because the old-timer had outrun him. Fish said, "We got a lot of daylight left. I suggest we get the hell on the road. Timmy, let me look at that hand."

Smeds looked over Fish's shoulder. Timmy's hand looked awful. Fish didn't like the look of it either. He stared at it, grunted, frowned, studied it, grunted again. "Salve won't be good enough. I'm going to collect up some herbs for a poultice. Thing must have been hotter than I thought."

"Hurts like hell," Timmy said, eyes still watery.

"Poultice will take care of that. Smeds. When you get that spike out of the bucket don't touch it. Dump it on that old blanket. Then wrap it up. I don't think anybody ought to touch it."

"Why the hell not?" Tully asked.

"Because it burned Timmy badder than it should have.

Because it's a bad mojo thing and maybe we shouldn't ought to take any chances."

Smeds did it the way Fish said, after the old man went hunting his herbs. After he dumped the bucket he moved the spike to a dry part of the blanket with a stick. "Hey! Tully! Check this. It's still hot even after it was in that water." Passing his hand above it he could feel the heat from a foot away.

Tully tried it. He looked troubled. "You better wrap it up good and tie it tight and put it right in the middle of your pack."

"Eh?" Tully didn't want to carry it himself? Didn't want it in his control every second? That was disturbing.

"You want to come give me a hand awhile here?" Tully asked. "I can't never get this pack together by myself."

Smeds finished bundling the spike, went over, knowing from his tone Tully had something he wanted to whisper.

As they stuffed and rolled and tied, Tully murmured, "I decided not to do it on the way back. We're still going to need them awhile. We'll do it later, in the city sometime."

Smeds nodded, not saying he wasn't going to do it at all, and was going to try his damnedest to see that Fish and Timmy and he himself got fair shares of the payoff for the spike.

He had a good idea what was going on inside Tully's head. Tully wasn't going to be satisfied with the big hit they'd made already. Tully was thinking Fish and Timmy made good mules. They could haul their shares back. Once they got to town he could take them away.

Smeds had a suspicion Tully wasn't going to be satisfied with a two-way split, either.

XX

Our fire burned down till it wasn't nothing but some patches of red. Once in a while a little flame would shoot up and prance around for a few seconds, then die. I stared up at the stars. Most were ones I'd known all my life, but they had moved to funny parts of the night. The constellations were all askew.

It was a good night for shooting stars. I'd spotted seven already.

"Uncomfortable?" Raven asked. He was watching the sky, too.

He startled me. He hadn't said anything since back around lunchtime. We didn't talk much anymore.

"Scared." I had lost track of time. I had no idea how far we'd come or where we were, except that it was one goddamned long ways from home and down in the south.

"And wondering what the hell you're doing here, no doubt."

"No. I think I got a handle on that. My trouble is I don't like having to sneak everywhere, like a thief. I might get treated like one."

I did not add that I did not like being in places where the only person who could understand me was him. If something happened to him… That was what scared me the most.

It was too awful to think about.

I said, "But it's too late to turn back."

"Some say it's never too late."

So he was thinking about his kids again, now he was plenty safe from the risk of actually having to deal with them. Also, maybe, he was having second thoughts about our ride into the unknown.

Opaque as they were to me, and maybe even to him, powerful emotions were driving him. They had Darling's name hung all over them, though he never mentioned her. One monster of a guilt was perched on his shoulders, flapping and squawking and pecking at his eyes and ears. Somehow he was going to silence that beast by catching his pal Croaker and passing the word about what happened in the Barrowland.

It didn't make no sense to me. But people never do, a whole lot.

Maybe the determination was starting to wear thin. It was one thing to take off after a guy expecting to catch him in a few weeks and a few hundred miles and something else to be on the track still after months and months and thousands of miles. People aren't built to take that without any letup. The road can blunt the most iron will.

He let the edges of it show when he said, "Croaker's been gaining on us again. He doesn't have to be as careful as we do. We have to speed it up somehow. Else we're going to chase him all the way to the edge of the world and still never catch him."

Hell. He was talking to himself, not to me. Trying to find some enthusiasm he had misplaced somewhere back up the road. There wasn't no way we were going to kick up the pace any. Not without giving up any thought of watching out for trouble from the people in the countries we were going through.

We were pushing so hard now we were killing ourselves slowly.

I glimpsed something off to the north. "There. Did you see that? That's what I was telling you about the other day. Lightning from a clear sky."

He missed it. "Maybe it's storming up there."

"Just keep an eye peeled."

We watched a series of flashes so dim their source had to be way over the horizon. Usually that kind of lightning lights up or silhouettes the tops of clouds.

"There isn't one cloud," Raven said. "And we haven't seen one for weeks. And I'd bet we won't see any as long as we're crossing this steppe." He watched another flash go. He shivered. "I don't like it, Case. I don't like it at all."

"Yeah? What's up?"

"I don't know. Not exactly. But I got that tingle again, that bad feeling I got in Oar, that set me off on this crusade."

"The thing from the Barrowland?"

He shrugged. "Maybe. But that wouldn't make sense. If it was really who I thought it was, he ought to be busy taking over the empire and making himself safe from a few loose Taken who might still be hanging around."

I'd had some time now to do some thinking about what might have moved in the Barrowland and could have had so much impact on Raven. There was only one answer that fit, though it didn't seem likely. They had burned his body and scattered the ashes. But they hadn't been able to find his head.

"If it's the Limper we really might have trouble. Nothing he ever did made a whole lot of sense. Not to us mortals. He was always crazy as a loon."

He gave me a surprised look, then a soft smile. "No sawdust between your ears, is there, kid? All right. Put those brains to work trying to figure out why even a crazy wizard would be chasing us around the world. On the thousand-to-one that really is him raising a fuss up there."

I laid back and started watching for shooting stars again. I counted six more, not really thinking about the Limper because that wasn't an idea worth taking serious. Limper didn't have no love for Raven, but he sure didn't have a grudge big enough to go chasing him, neither. Crazy or not.

"Between a rock and a hard place." It sort of just slipped out.

"What?"

"Tighten up the buckles on your ego, brother Corvus. It ain't us he's after. If it's him."

"Eh?" His eyes tightened up into a suspicious squint. That made his cold, hawkish face look more predatory than ever. I had to go use that family name.

"He's after the same thing we are. The Black Company."

"That don't make sense either, Case."

"Hell it don't. It's the only way you can get it to make any sense at all. You're just not thinking about the world the way one of the Taken would. You got a pretty screwed-up eye, but you still think people is people. Them Taken don't and never did. To them people are just tools and slaves, live junk to use and throw away. Except for the one that was so powerful she made them her slaves. And she's riding with your buddy Croaker, far as we know. Right?"

The idea sank in. He turned it over, looked at the sharp edges, grunting and shaking like a dog shitting peach seeds. After a while, he said, "She's lost her powers but she hasn't lost what she knew. And that was knowledge enough to conquer half a world and tame the Ten Who Were Taken. She'd be one big prize for any wizard who could lay hands on her."

"There you go." I closed my eyes and tried to sleep. It took me a while.

XXI

The old man sat quietly. When he moved at all he did so slowly and carefully. His status was ambiguous. He had chased these people across a continent, damned near killing himself, and for what?

For nothing, that's what. For nothing.

They were lunatics. They ought to be locked up for their own protection.

The woman watched him from about twenty feet to his left. She was a blue-eyed, stringy-haired blonde about five feet six inches tall, in her middle twenties. She had a square jaw, a too broad, lumpy bottom, and a goofy manner that made you wonder if anybody was home behind those watery eyes. And for all that, there was something strongly sensual there.

She was deaf and mute. She could communicate only via sign language.

She was in charge. She was Darling, the White Rose, the one who had put an end to the Lady's dark dominion.

How the hell could that be? It didn't add up.

Off to his right was a man who watched him with the warmth of a snake. He was tall, lean, dusky, hard as a stone with less sense of humor. These days he dressed in black, which had to be a statement of some sort, but who could tell what? He would not talk. He flat refused. Which is why they called him Silent.

He was a wizard himself. The tools of his trade lay scattered around him. As though he expected their unwilling guest to try something.

Silent's eyes were as black as jet, hard as diamonds, and friendly as death.

Damn it! A man made one mistake and four hundred years later they still wouldn't let him live it down.

There were three more of them around somewhere, brothers with the surname Torque who seemed to have no given names. They went by absurdities like Paddlefoot, Donkey Dick, and Brother Bear, except that Donkey Dick became Stubby when Darling was in listening distance, even though she couldn't hear.

All four men worshiped her. And it was obvious to everyone but her that the one called Silent entertained romantic ambitions. Lunatics. Every single one.

Something behind him yelled, "Seth Chalk! What treachery are you up to now?" and exploded in giggles.

Wearily, for the thousandth time, he replied, "Call me Bomanz. I haven't used Seth Chalk since I was a boy." He did not look around.

It had been a long, long time since he had been Seth Chalk. At least a hundred fifty years. He had no exact count. It was a year since he had escaped the thrall of a sorcery that had held him in stasis most of that time. He knew the intervening years of strife and horror—the years of the rise and growth of the Lady's empire—only by repute, after the fact.

He, Bomanz or Seth Chalk, was a living artifact from before the fact. A fool who had had no business surviving it, who wanted to use these last unexpected gift years to expiate the guilt that was his for his part in the awakening and release of the ancient evil.

These idiots were not ready to believe that, no matter that he'd damned near gotten himself killed keeping that dragon off them during the big final throat cutting in the Barrowland last winter.

Damned fools. He had done all the damage he could do in one lifetime.

The three brothers came from somewhere up forward, joined the watch. So it was not one of them who had shouted. But Bomanz knew that. Two of the three could not speak any language he understood. The third managed Forsberger so brokenly it was not worth his trouble to try.

The fool who could understand a little of Bomanz's antiquated Forsberger could not sign. Of course. So any communication not heard directly by Silent or lip-read by Darling got garbled and lost.

Only the stones communicated like regular people.

He did not like talking to rocks. There was something perverse about holding converse with rocks.

The trouble with being here was that the human beings, though lunatics, were the sanest, most believable part of the furnishings.

For the first time in his life, if he wanted to build cloud castles he had to go look down.

They had press-ganged him at that camp in the Windy Country. He was on the back of one of those fabulous monsters out of the Plain of Fear, a windwhale. The beast was a thousand feet long and nearly two hundred wide. From below it looked like a cross between a man-o'-war jellyfish and the world's biggest shark. From up top where Bomanz was, the broad flat back looked like something from an opium smoker's pipe dream. Like the imaginary forests that might grow in those vast caverns said to lie miles beneath the surface of the earth.

This forest was haunted by enough weird creatures to populate anyone's fancy nightmare. A whole zoo. And all sentient.

The windwhale was going somewhere in a hurry but was not getting there fast. There had been head winds all the way. And every so often the monster had to go down and tear up a couple hundred acres to take the edge off its hunger.

The damned thing stank like seven zoos.

A couple weird characters had singled him out for relentless harassment. One was a little rock monkey, mostly tail, no bigger than a chipmunk. It had a high, squeaky, nagging voice that made him remember his long-dead wife, though he never understood a word it said.

There was a shy centauroid creature put together backward, with the humanlike part in the rear. That part of her was disturbingly attractive. She seemed intrigued by him. He kept catching glimpses of her watching him from among the copses of uncertain organs that bewhiskered the windwhale's back.

Worst, there was a lone talking buzzard who had a smattering of Forsberger and a wiseguy mouth. Bomanz could not get away from the bird, who, if he had been human, would have hung out in taverns masquerading as the world's foremost authority, armed with an uninformed and ready opinion on every conceivable subject. His cheerful bigotry and who-cares ignorance drove the old man's temper to its limit.

Things called mantas, that looked like sable flying versions of the rays of tropical seas, symbiotes of the windwhales, with wingspans of thirty to fifty feet, were the most dramatic and numerous of his nonhuman companions. Though they looked like fish, they seemed to be mammals. They lived their whole lives on the windwhale's back. They were ill-tempered and dangerous and they bitterly resented having to share their territory with lesser life-forms. Only the will of their god contained their spite.

There were dozens more creatures equally remarkable, each more absurd than the last, but they were more shy of humans and stayed out of the way.

Discounting the mantas, the most numerous and pestiferous tribe were the talking stones.

Like most people Bomanz had heard tales of the deadly talking menhirs of the Plain of Fear. The reality seemed as gruesome as the stories. They were as shy as an avalanche and deadly pranksters. They were responsible for the Plain's deadly reputation. Near as Bomanz could tell, what everyone else considered murderous wickedness they considered practical jokery.

What could be more hilarious than a traveler who, following false directions, stumbled into a lava pit or had his mount snatched out from under him by a giant sand lion?

The stones, in the form of menhirs as much as eighteen feet tall, were the stuff of a thousand stories, hardly a one pleasant. But the seeing and hearing and having to deal with was an experience that made the stories pall—though the stones were on their best behavior now.

They were under constraint, too.

The stones had no language difficulties. Happily, many were a laconic sort. But when they did go to talking their speech was sour, acidic, caustic. The lot were verbal vandals. So how the hell come they were the ones their god had made his diplomatic corps?

It was no wonder the Plain of Fear was a wide-open madhouse. The tree god running it was a twenty-four-karat lunatic.

The stones were gray brown, mostly, without visible orifices or organs. Most were as shaggy with mosses and lichens and bugs as any normal boulder that lay around keeping its mouth shut. They intimidated the hell out of Bomanz, who liked to pretend that he was not scared of any damned thing.

There were moments when he came close to blasting them into talking gravel.

Weird damned creatures!

Every hundred miles the windwhale dropped till its belly dragged. Members of every species, including the Torque brothers, would start singing a merry "Heigh-ho!" work song and would converge on whichever menhir had made itself most obnoxious recently. Hup-hup, over the side it would go, to the accompaniment of dire threats and foul curses. Those stones that pretended to senses of humor would yodel fearfully all the way to the ground.

Damnfool crazies.

No matter how the bleeding rocks fell, they always landed upright, catlike.

The show scared the crap out of the rare peasant unlucky enough to witness it.

The stones were the Plains creatures' and tree god's communications lifeline. They spoke to one another mind to mind—though Bomanz was not about to give them credit for true sentience. No one would tell him squat, but he suspected Old Father Tree himself was running this operation—whatever this operation was—from the nether end.

One of those little things he found disconcerting was the fact that no matter how many stones went over the side, the menhir population never diminished. In fact, some of the same old stones turned up back aboard.

Goddamned insanity.

"Hey, Seth Chalk, you sour old fart, you figure out how to screw us over yet? Gawh!"

The talking buzzard had come. Bomanz replied with a gentle, tricky gesture, consisting of wrapping his hand around the bird's neck. "Just you personally, carrion breath."

Eyes watched. Nobody moved. Nobody took it seriously. The Torque brothers whooped it up. "Way to go, old man!" Paddlefoot gobbled in his outlandish lingo. "Tie his goofy neck in a knot."

"Morons!" Bomanz muttered. "I'm surrounded by morons. At the mercy of cretins." Louder. "I'm going to tie your neck in a knot and braid your toes if you don't lay off the Seth Chalk and start calling me Bomanz."

He turned loose.

The buzzard flapped off squawking, "Chalk's on a rampage! Beware! Beware! Chalk's gone berserk."

"Oh, go to hell. Marooned with lunatics."

General laughter and foolery of a sort he had not seen since his student days. But Darling and Silent neither laughed nor stopped watching him. What the hell did he have to do to make them understand that he was on their side?

"Hah!" It hit him out of the blue. An epiphany. They did not distrust him because it was he whose bumbling had wakened the old evils and loosed them to walk the earth for another dark century. He had done his part in the rectification. No. They knew what had moved his researches in the first place. His quest for tools with which to gain power. His fathomless infatuation with the Lady,  which had so distracted him he had made the mistakes that had allowed her to break her bonds.

They might believe he had been broken of his hunger for power, but would they ever believe he was free of his thing for that dark woman? How could he convince them when he had yet to convince himself? She had been a deadly candle to many a man's moth and the flame did not lose its attraction by being out of sight or out of reach.

He grunted, prized himself off his butt. His legs were stiff. He had been seated a long time. Darling and Silent watched him amble past a stand of something that looked like pink ferns ten feet tall. Little eyes peeped out warily. The ferns were some sort of organ. The mantas used them for an infant creche.

He went as far as his acrophobia let him. It was the first he had looked overboard in a week.

Last time they had been over water. He had been able to see nothing but haziness and blue all the way to undefined horizons.

The air was clearer today. The view was very nearly monochromatic again, but this time brown. Just a few hints of green flecked it. Way, way ahead there was something that looked like it might be smoke from a big fire.

They had to be two miles high. There was not a cloud in the sky.

"Soon you will have your chance to prove yourself, Seth Chalk."

He glanced back. A menhir stood four feet behind him. It had not been there a moment before. They were that way, coming and going without sound or warning. This one was a little more gray and mica-flecked than most. It had a scar down its face side six inches wide and seven feet long where something had scraped through lichen and weathered surface stone. Bomanz did not understand talking-stone civilization. They had no obvious hierarchy, yet this one generally spoke for them when there was official speaking to be done.

"How so?"

"Do you not feel it, wizard?"

"I feel a lot of things, rock. What I feel most of all is grumpy about the way you all have been doing me. What am I supposed to feel?"

"The mad psychic stink of the thing that you sensed escaping the Barrowland. From Oar. It is no farther away now."

The talking stones spoke in a dead monotone, usually, yet Bomanz sensed the taint of suspicion that lay in the menhir's mind. If he could tell the old evil was stirring from as far as Oar, when it was weak, how was it that he could not sense it now, when it was so much stronger?

How was it that he, too, was alive when he was supposed to be dead?

Did he know about the resurrection of the shadow because it had been one with his own? Had they conspired together and come out of the unhallowed earth of the Barrowland together? Was he a slave of that old darkness?

"It was not that that I sensed," Bomanz said. "I heard the scream of one of the old fetish alarms being tripped when something moved that should not have. That isn't the same thing at all."

The stone stood silent for a moment. "Perhaps not. Nevertheless, we are upon the thing. In hours, or a day or two, as the winds decide, the battle will be joined. Your fate may be determined."

Bomanz snorted. "A rock with a sense for the dramatic. It's absurd. You really expect me to fight that thing?"

"Yes."

"If it's what I think it is…"

"It is the thing called the Limper. And the thing known as Toadkiller Dog. Both are handicapped."

Bomanz sneered and snorted. "I'd call being without a body something more than a handicap."

"It is not weak, this thing. That smoke rises from a city still burning three days after its departure. It has become the disciple of death. Killing and destruction are all it knows. The tree has decreed that it be stopped."

"Right. Why? And why us?"

"Why? Because if it continues amok its course will someday bring it to the Plain. Why us? Because there is no one else. All who had any great power were consumed in the struggle in the Barrowland except thee and we. And, most of all, we do it because the god has commanded it."

Bomanz muttered and grumbled under his breath.

"Prepare yourself, wizard. The hour comes. If you are innocent in our eyes you must be guilty in his."

Of course. There could be no ground in the middle. Not for him. He did not have the strength to hold it. Never had had, if the truth be known, though he had deluded himself in the years of his quest for knowledge about those who had been enchained by the ancients.

Did he know remorse for the horror brought on by his rumblings? Some. Not as much as he thought he should. He told himself that because of his intercession at the penultimate moment, his self-sacrifice, the outbreak of darkness had been far gentler than it could have been. Without him the night might have lasted forever.

The old man ambled away from the stone, rapt in his own thoughts. He did not notice the stone turning jerkily, keeping its scarred face toward him. The menhirs never moved while being watched by human eyes. How they knew they were being watched no one knew.

Bomanz's meander took him to the aft end of the windwhale. Small rustlings accompanied him. Chaperons. If he noticed he ignored them. They had been with him always.

He settled upon a soft, unprotesting lump of whale flesh about chair height. It made comfortable sitting. But he knew he would not be staying long. The windwhale was especially fetid here.

For the hundredth time he contemplated escape. All he had to do was jump and use a levitator spell to soften his fall. That was well within his competence. But not within the compass of his courage.

His fear of heights was not totally debilitating. Should he fall, he would retain enough self-possession to save himself. But there was no way he could bring himself to take the plunge voluntarily.

Resigned, he looked back the way he had come. Home, such as it was and had been, lay a thousand miles away. Maybe a lot farther. They were passing over lands of which he had never heard, where all who saw it marveled at the great shape in the sky and had no idea what it was.

There was no guarantee he would step into friendly lands if he did go over the side. In fact, the terrain below looked actively hostile.

Hell with it. He had gotten himself into this. He would ride it out.

"Hunh!"

He was an old man but his eyes were plenty sharp.

The high, clean air allowed him to see a long way. And up north, at the edge of discernment when he looked at them a fraction of a point off directly, were two dots at an altitude even higher than that of the windwhale. To be visible at all at that distance they had to be the size of windwhales.

Bomanz snorted.

This monster was the vanguard of a parade.

He chuckled then. There were rustles nearby, the natives disturbed by his amusement. He chuckled again and rose. This time he strolled the length of the windwhale before he alighted again, as far forward as he dared go.

The smoke was much nearer. It rose higher than the windwhale. He saw hints of the fires that fed the column, which had begun to develop a bend in its trunk down lower. Grim. Maybe the rock was right. Something had to be done.

This was the dozenth such city, though the first they had come to still in its death throes. The progress of the insanity was an arrow pointing due south, a craziness that could make sense only to the crazy himself.

The windwhale began rumbling with internal flatulences. The horizon tilted, rose. Mantas piped and squealed behind Bomanz. He got a death grip on his seat.

The monster was headed down.

Why? It was not time to drop a menhir. It was not feeding time.

Mantas hurtled past in pairs and squadrons, spade-headed darts spreading across the sky, headed toward the city and its coronet of circling carrion birds.

"There is a good wind running a mile below us, wizard." Bomanz glanced back. His scar-faced stone friend. "If it holds we will overtake the destroyer shortly after nightfall. You have only that long to prepare."

Bomanz glanced around again. The stone was gone. But he was not alone. Darling and Silent had come to stare at the stricken city. The dark man's face was impassive but Darling's was a study in empathetic agony. That touched the soft-headed, softhearted side of the old man. He faced her, said, "We will put an end to the pain, child." He spoke carefully so she could read his lips.

She looked at Silent. Silent looked at her. Their fingers flew in the speech of the deaf. Bomanz caught part of the exchange. He was not pleased.

They were discussing him and Silent's remarks were not complimentary.

Bomanz cursed and spat. That bastard had it in for him for no damned reason.

The manias decimated the carrion birds, used the up-draft from the fires to soar high, then returned to the windwhale carrying a feast for their young. They settled down to nap.

But there was no real relaxation for anyone. The windwhale had dropped till it was only half a mile high. It passed the city, scudding along at twenty miles an hour. Soon the monster had to climb back into less vigorous air so as not to catch up before nightfall.

The scar-face stone returned when Bomanz was not looking. When he did notice it, he said, "I feel it now, rock. It reeks of corruption. And I still have no idea what I could do to hurt it."

"Worry not. There is a new decree from the god. You are not to reveal yourself except in extreme circumstance.

Our attack will be exploratory, experimental, and admonitory only."

"What the hell? Why? Go for the kill, I say. Hit him with everything the one time he don't know we're coming. We'll never get a better shot."

"The god has spoken."

Bomanz argued. The god won.

The windwhale began shedding altitude at dusk. Soon after nightfall Bomanz spied the campfires of an army ahead. A pair of mantas took to the air to scout. They returned, reported whatever they reported. The windwhale slanted down toward the encampment, cutting a course that would rip through its heart.

Mantas poured off the windwhale's back, scrambled around and over one another in a search for updrafts.

Bomanz felt the old terror moving closer. It was restless but did not seem alert.

The ground came up and up. Bomanz clung to his seat and awaited certain impact, now unconcerned by the insult inplicit in the fact that a dozen menhirs had moved into position around him and Darling, and her thugs were spread out ready for trouble.

The windwhale leveled out. Campfires slid out of sight beneath it. The screaming down there was almost inaudible because of the creak and rumble and intervening bulk of the giant of the sky. Bomanz felt the shock of the old evil, caught completely unprepared. It went into a pure black rage.

Just as it began to respond mantas swooped in from every direction. They cut the heart out of the night with the glare of the lightnings they discharged from the store in their flesh. Bolts stabbed around by the hundred, keeping the old horror so busy guarding himself he had no chance to counterattack.

The windwhale dumped tons of ballast and began a slow ascent, struggling to gain altitude against the weight of plunder.

Bomanz could not see the monster's underside and was glad. Its tentacles would be grasping men and animals and anything else it considered edible. It was an intelligent beast but it did not exempt other intelligences from its food supply if they were its enemies.

Many of the Plain races ate their enemies.

Bomanz found the idea repugnant in practice, yet it had a certain moral allure. How vigorously would men prosecute their wars if they had to eat those who fell before their swords?

Interesting. But how to impose the requirement?

The manias began returning. Near as the old man could tell, they were very pleased with themselves.

It was over. The windwhale was up and safely away and now preoccupied with its digestion. Bomanz rose. Time to turn in.

As he passed Darling, Silent, and the scarred menhir, he said, "Next time the bear is going to bite back. You should have stuck him while you had him."

XXII

The "bear" was stunned, numb, immobile within the desolation of his camp, desperately trying to grasp the sense of his sudden misfortune.

His entire existence was a headlong assault upon adversity. Having something go sour was never a surprise. But a disaster of these proportions, with its implication of vast, previously unconsidered forces in motion, had for the moment obliterated his initiative. He lacked even his usual insane volition driven by the engine of rage.

The beast Toadkiller Dog was less stricken. Its memories of the son of the tree were fresh. It had not deceived itself when it came to that sprig's connection with its sire. It had been but a matter of time till Old Father Tree showed an interest.

Toadkiller Dog had been to the Plain of Fear. He had come face-to-face with the god. His memories of the confrontation were not sweet. He had been lucky to escape.

But that had been a profitable adventure. He had seen the Plain firsthand. Now what he knew might become a useful tool. If the wicker man would listen.

Unlikely.

It was not now the half-rational thing that had been the Limper before. It had become so self-centered, so self-involved, as to be the hub of a solipsistic universe.

The beast prowled the camp, past men and the remains of men. Shock lay upon the survivors like a smothering quilt. Only a few understood what had happened. He heard mutterings about the wrath of the gods. Those men did not know how truly they spoke.

It would be hard to hold them together if that theory gained credence. Problems of conscience were endemic already.

There was faint hiss, a crack, and a blinding flash. The beast's fur stood straight out. Little blue sparks pranced and crackled amidst it, though the bolt had missed.

Soldiers scurried around like hens in a panic.

That sniper had attained a tremendous speed, falling from several miles high. It came and went too quickly for any response. Even in daylight there would have been little chance to get it.

Flash. Crack! Screams. A man pranced in a shroud of will-o'-the-wisp fire.

So there it was. Having made its presence known, the windwhale was embarking on a program of terrorism and attrition that would not stop till the wicker man proved he could stop it.

Toadkiller Dog snarled at the wicker man till the glaze left his rheumy eyes and he nodded once, sharply. He began to shake so hard he creaked and squeaked. He was trying to control his rage.

To yield might prove fatal.

One of those bolts, accurately delivered, could destroy his toy body, leaving him next to powerless, his army at the mercy of the monster above. Somewhere out there, planing around the camp, were manias watching for a chance at the quick kill missed during the surprise attack.

The shaking faded. In a controlled whisper the wicker man said, "Kill those campfires. They light us as targets." Then he began the slow, painful process of surrounding himself with spells against the mantas' bolts.

Toadkiller Dog limped around snapping and growling to make the soldiers hurry.

Dousing the fires did not help. The mantas came in all night. Their accuracy did not decrease. Neither did it improve.

The things seemed more interested in harassment than killing. In keeping everyone awake and frightened of the moment the next blow would fall. It was a weakling's way to fight. Though no tears fell from the sky when a bolt did splatter a soldier.

The minions of the tree god were trying to panic and disperse the Limper's army. That puzzled Toadkiller Dog. They were not that tender of heart. Men slipped away by twos and threes. He galloped as fast as he could on three real legs and a wooden one, yelping and nipping and driving them back, and in interim moments trying to get a feel for that monster in the sky. Some of the deserters objected to his bullying. He had to kill a dozen before everybody got their minds right.

Something familiar about a few of the lesser life sparks up there.

The beast sensed the wicker man's summons. He trotted over. Spells now enfolded the wicker man in layers of protection. Pain leaked out.

Toadkiller Dog was amused. The more surely the old shadow guarded himself, the greater was his pain. To make himself absolutely safe the Limper would have to subject himself to an agony that would rob him of all reason, to the point where he might not be able to get back out from behind the layered defense. The beast wondered if they knew that up there. The wicker man knew the answer. "The one they call the White Rose is riding the windwhale, shaping their tactics."

Toadkiller Dog woofed in exasperation. The White Rose! Soft of heart but bitterly lethal of maneuver. It all fell into place. She had locked them into no-win positions already. Without doing her conscience an injury. The Limper could suffer protecting himself or ease the pain and get blown off his withy steed. They could watch their army evaporate through desertion or terrorize the men into staying and have them mutiny.

And, from what he recalled of the White Rose, there would be a third and subtler option, which she would push them toward. But she could not comprehend the kind of murderous obsession driving the Limper. She would leave opportunities and openings. She would give second chances when the only workable choice would be to go for the throat.

It was a night when hell was in session. No one rested. The Limper hid so deeply in his defenses he could do nothing to stay the harassment. The pace of the attacks increased as dawn neared, as though the White Rose wanted them to know she could make their day more horrible than had been their night.

The army was half-gone when the sun rose. The tree god had won the first round.

His creatures refused a second round by day. The man-tas cleared the sky. The windwhale floated miles up and miles to the south. The Limper collected his ragtag horde and began marching toward his next conquest.

The time of easy killing was over. Now those who stood in the Limper's path were warned of his coming. Always that monster out of the Plain of Fear hung overheard, a sword of doom ready to fall at the slightest lapse in attention.

The White Rose made no mistakes. Whenever the Limper launched an attack the manias came fast and hard, trying to force him to cower inside his spells of protection. He fought back, brought a few down. Increasingly, he held back in hopes the windwhale would stray too close. He looked for new weapons in the ruins of his conquests.

The White Rose made no mistakes. Not once. But the maniacal determination of the Limper kept his army moving, gaining on his quarry. Till he gained his revenge, even the enmity of the tree god was just an annoyance, the whine of a mosquito.

But after the kill… Oh, after the kill!

XXIII

Smeds said, "There's something wrong."

"I'm beginning to get your drift," Tully said. "You think there's something wrong." Smeds had said so five times. "So does Timmy." Timmy had agreed with Smeds three or four times.

"They're right," Fish said, venturing an opinion for the first time. "There should be more industry. Carts on the road. Hunters and trappers." They were out of the Great Forest but had not yet reached cultivated country. In these parts the tide of civilization was on the ebb.

"Look there," Timmy said. He pointed, winced. His hand still hurt him.

A burnt-out cottage lay a little off the road. Smeds recalled pigs and sheep and wisecracks about the smell when they had been headed north. There was no smell now. Fish lengthened his stride, going to investigate. Smeds kept up with him.

It was grisly, though the disaster lay far enough in the past that the site was no longer as gruesome as it had been. The bones bothered Smeds the most. There were thousands, scattered, broken, gnawed, mixed.

Fish examined them in silence, moving around slowly, stirring them with the tip of his staff. After a while he stopped, leaned on his staff, stared down. Smeds moved no closer. He had a feeling he did not want to see what Fish saw.

The old man settled onto his haunches slowly, as though his own bones ached. He caught hold of something, held it up for Smeds.

A child's skull. Its top had been smashed in.

Smeds was no stranger to death, even violent death, and this was old death for someone he'd never known. It should have bothered him no more than a rumor from the past. But his stomach tightened and his heartbeat quickened. He felt a surge of anger and unfixed hatred.

"Even the babies?" he muttered. "They even murdered the babies?"

Fish grunted.

Tully and Timmy arrived. Tully looked bored. The only death that concerned him was the one awaiting him personally. Timmy looked unhappy, though. He said, "They killed the animals, too. That doesn't make sense. What were they after?"

Fish muttered, "They killed for the sake of the blood. For the pleasure of the deed, the joy in the power to destroy. For the pure meanness of it. We know too many like that already."

Smeds asked, "You think it was the same bunch that killed everybody back up there?"

"Seems likely, don't it?"

"Yeah."

Tully grumbled, "We going to hang around here all day? Or are we going to get hiking? Smeds, you decided you like it out here with the bugs and furry little things? Me, I want to get back and start enjoying life."

Smeds thought about wine and girls and the scarcity of both in the Great Forest. "You got a point, Tully. Even if five minutes ain't going to make any difference."

Fish said, "I wouldn't go living too high too sudden, boys. Might set some folks to wondering how you got it and maybe some hard guys to figuring how to get it away from you."

"Shit," Tully grumbled. "Quit your damned preaching. And maybe give me credit for a little sense."

He and Fish went off, Tully grousing and Fish listening unperturbed, with a patience Smeds found astounding. He was ready to strangle Tully himself. Once they hit the city he didn't want to see his cousin for a month. Or longer.

"How's the hand, Timmy?"

"Don't seem like it's getting any better. I don't know about burns. You? My skin's got black spots where it was the worst."

"I don't know. I saw a guy once burned so it looked like charcoal." Smeds hunched up a little, imagining the heat of the spike in his pack burning between his shoulder blades. "We get to town, you go see a doc or a wizard. Don't fool around. Hear?"

"You kidding? The way this hurts? I'd run if I didn't have to carry this damned pack."

The road was festooned with old butcheries and destructions. But the disaster had not been complete. Nearer the city there were people in the fields, and more and more as the miles passed, backs bowed with the weight of tragedies old and new.

Man is born to sorrow and despair… Smeds shuddered his way out of that. Him wallowing in philosophical bullshit?

They crested a rise, saw the city. The wall was covered with scaffolding. Despite the late hour, men were rebuilding it. Soldiers in gray supervised. Imperials.

"Gray boys," Tully grumbled. "Here comes trouble."

"I doubt it," Fish said.

"How come?"

"There'd be more of them if they were looking for trouble. They're just making sure the repairs get done right."

Tully harumphed and scowled and muttered to himself but did not argue. He had overlooked the obvious. Imperials were sticklers for getting things done right, obsessive about keeping military works in repair.

The only delay was occasioned by the construction, not by the soldiers. Tully was not pleased. He was sick of Fish looking smarter than him. Smeds was afraid he would start improvising, trying to do something about that. Something stupid, probably.

"Holy shit," Smeds said, soft as a prayer, half a dozen times, as they walked through the city. Buildings were being demolished, rehabilitated, or built where old structures had been razed. "They really tore the old town a new asshole."

Which left him uncomfortable. There were people he wanted to see. Were they still alive, even?

Wonderstruck, Tully said, "I never seen so many soldiers. Least not since I was a kid." They were everywhere, helping with reconstruction, supervising, policing, billeted in tents pitched where buildings had been razed. Was the whole damned city inundated with troops?

Smeds saw standards, uniforms, and unit emblems he'd never seen before. "Something going on here," he said. "We better be careful." He indicated a hanged man dangling from a roof tree three stories up.

"Martial law," Fish said. "Means the wise guys are upset. You're right, Smeds. We walk real careful till we find out what's going on and why."

They headed for the place Tully stayed first, it being closest. It was not there anymore. Tully was not distressed. "I'll just stay with you till I get set," he told Smeds.

But Smeds had not paid any rent, so they had thrown his junk into the street for scavengers—after cashing in his empties and stealing what they wanted for themselves— then had let the room to people dispossessed by the disaster. Fish's place had gone the way of Tully's. The old man was not surprised. He said nothing. He did look a little more gaunt and haggard and slumped.

"So maybe we can all stuff in at my old lady's place," Timmy said. He was jittery. Smeds figured it was his hand. "Just for tonight. My old man, he don't like anybody I hang around with."

Timmy's parents owned the place they lived, though they were as poor as anybody else on the North Side. Smeds had heard they got it as a payoff from the gray boys for informing back in the days when there was still a lot of Rebel activity in Oar. Timmy would not say. Maybe it was true.

Who cared anymore? They'd probably been on the right side. The imperials were more honest, and better governors, if you were at a social level where who was in charge made any difference.

Smeds did not give a rat's ass who ran things as long as they left him alone. Most people felt that way.

"Timmy! Timmy Locan!"

They stopped, waited while an older woman overhauled them. As she waddled up, Timmy said, "Mrs. Cisco. How are you?"

"We thought you were dead with the rest of them, Timmy. Forty thousand people they killed that night.…"

"I was out of the city, Mrs. Cisco. I just got back."

"You haven't been home yet?"

People jostled them in the narrow street. It was three-quarters dark but there were so many soldiers around nobody needed to run inside to hide from the night. Smeds wondered what the bad boys were doing. Working?

"I said I just got in."

Smeds saw he did not like the woman much.

She went all sad and consoling. Even Smeds, who did not consider himself perceptive, saw she was just busting because she was going to get to be the first to pass along some bad news.

"Your dad and both your brothers… I'm sorry. They were trying to help fight the fires. Your mother and sister… Well, they were conquerors. They did what conquerors always do. Your sister, they mutilated her so bad she ended up killing herself a couple weeks ago."

Timmy shook like he was about to go into convulsions.

"That's enough, madam," Fish said. "You've buried your blade to the heart."

She sputtered, "Why, the nerve…"

Tully said, "Piss off, bitch. Before I kick your ass up around your ears." He used that gentle, even tone Smeds knew meant maximum danger.

So. Cousin Tully had a little canker of humanity hidden away after all. Though he would not admit it on the rack.

"I can't handle this," Timmy said. "I think I better stay dead." Fish said, "That woman won't let you rest in peace,

Timmy."

"I know. I'll do what I got to do. But not now. I know a place called the Skull and Crossbones where we can put up cheap. If it's still there."

It was there. It was a place the invaders would have ignored as too contemptible to burn. It made Smeds think of a hooker still working twenty years past her prime, pathetic and desperate.

An imperial corporal sat in a chair out front, leaning back against a wooden wall that had forgotten the meaning of paint. He held a bucket of beer in his lap. He seemed to be napping. But when they were a few steps from the door he opened his eyes, checked them over, nodded, took a drink.

"Catch his emblem?" Smeds asked Fish inside. "Yes. Nightstalkers."

The Nightstalker Brigade was the crack outfit in the northern army, rigorously trained for night operations and combat under wizard's war conditions.

Smeds said, "I thought they were out east somewhere, trying to finish the Black Company." The proudest honor on the standard of the Nightstalkers was their defeat of the Black Company at Queen's Bridge. Before Queen's Bridge those mercenaries had been so glibly invincible that half the empire had been convinced the gods themselves were on their side.

"They're here now." "What the hell is going on around here?" "Guess we better find out. What we don't know could     I eat us up."

Timmy talked to the owner, whom he knew slightly. The man claimed he was full up with the dispossessed. None of those guests were evident. He hinted he might find space, though, if fate took a hand. Fishing for a bribe, Smeds figured. Which he would follow with a deep gouge.

"How much leverage on fate are we talking?" Timmy asked.

"Obol and a half. Each."

"You goddamned thief!"

"Take it or leave it."

The Nightstalker corporal stepped past Smeds and Timmy and plunked his bucket down in front of the landlord, who had gone as pale as death. "That's twice today, dogmeat. And this time I heard it myself."

The landlord gulped air, grabbed the bucket, and started to fill it.

"Don't try," the corporal said. "Offer me a bribe and you'll stay on the labor gang forever." He eyed Timmy and Smeds. "You guys pick yourself a room. On old Shit for Brains here for a night."

"I was just joshing with the guys, Corporal."

"Sure. I could tell. You had them rolling around on the floor. Bet you'll have the guy in the black mask in stitches. He loves you comedians."

Smeds asked, "What's going on around here, Corporal? We've been out of town."

"I could tell. I guess you can see your basic situation. Some bandits and deserters tore the place up. They wasn't too happy about that, down to the Tower. Since we was in the neighborhood we was one of the outfits got to come in and keep order. The brigadier, she started out life in the slums of Nihil, she figures here's a chance to get even with the kinds of assholes who made life hell when she was a kid. So you got thieves hanging from the roof trees. You got your pimps and priests and pushers, your sharpers and your fences and your whores won't learn no better working on the labor gangs eighteen hours a day so your regular citizens can get on with putting their lives back together.

"You ask me, she's too damned lenient. Gives them too many chances. Shithead here, the famous profiteer, he's done used up two of his shots now. First time he got paraded through the streets with a sign around his neck and got a week on the labor gang. This time he gets thirty lashes and two weeks. Because he's got all that shit between his ears and ain't going to learn dick about how he can't get away with it, next time they're going to drag him over to Mayfield Square and stick a spear up his butt and let him sit on it till he rots."

The corporal took a long drink from his refilled bucket, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, grinned. "Brigadier says let the punishment fit the crime." He took another long drink, looked at the landlord. "You ready to go do it, asshole?"

As he was about to follow the landlord into the street, the corporal paused. "I reckon you boys will be fair to your host, here, and treat his place right. 'Less you're looking for careers in construction." He grinned again and went.

"God damn!" Tully said.

"Yeah," Smeds agreed.

Fish said, "I have a feeling we're not going to be comfortable in this new Oar."

"Not for long," Smeds said. "But sufficient unto the day. Right now I need to get drunk, get laid, get a night's sleep somewheres besides on the ground."

"Not necessarily in that order," Tully said.

Timmy put on a strained smile. "A bath wouldn't hurt anything, either."

"Let's get doing what we got to do."

XXIV

We come over this hill after what seemed like forever without seeing people and there across a valley was this walled place that covered maybe a hundred acres. The wall wasn't much. It was maybe eight or ten feet high and no thicker than the kind of stone walls cotters put around their sheepfolds.

"Looks like a religious retreat," Raven said. "No banners or soldiers or anything."

He was right. We'd seen places with the same look before, but never so big. "Looks old."

"Yes. It has a feel to it, too. Peaceful. Let's go look."

"Don't look like a place Croaker would pass up, eh?"

"No. He has a bad case of the curiosities. Let's hope he hung around long enough to let us gain some ground."

We went over and found out our guesses were right. Raven got his wish. The place was a monastery called the Temple of Traveler's Repose and was a kind of warehouse for knowledge. It had been sitting there soaking it up for a couple thousand years.

We found out the guys we were chasing had stayed long enough to teach one of the monks a little Jewel Cities dialect. In fact, they'd only left that very morning.

Raven got all excited. He wanted to head right on out and the hell with the sun was going to hit the horizon in another hour. I wanted to hit him over the head and slow him down. That monastery looked like a damned good place to take a day off and get human again.

"Look here, Case," he cajoled, "they'll be making camp by now, right? Traveling with a wagon and a coach the best they could've done is twenty-five miles. Right? We go all night we can grab off twenty of that, easy." He learned that about the wagon and coach from the priest.

"And then we die. You maybe never need a rest, but I need a rest and the horses need a rest and this looks like the perfect place to do it. Hell, look at the name."

He made exasperated noises. After all this time I still didn't understand that catching Croaker was the most important thing in the world. He was so damned tired himself his thinking was as screwy as a possum's.

He wasn't the only one running shy of a full load. That priest came down with both feet solid on Raven's side.

Raven grinned when he said, "He claims the omens are so bad they aren't letting anybody onto the grounds. They're even chasing people out."

I had enough of the lingo, learned from Raven, to have gotten part of that. Also something about "the bad storm coming down from the north." I saw I wasn't going to win this round neither, so I said the hell with it and added a few comments that would have disappointed my old potato-digging mother. I went and shared my misery with the horses. They understood me.

Raven worked a deal for some supplies and we headed out. I wondered how much farther to the edge of the world. We'd already come farther than I'd ever believed possible.

We didn't talk much. Not because I had the sulks. I'd given up on them and went fatalistic a long time ago. I think Raven was brooding about that bit I'd caught that he hadn't mentioned. A bad storm coming down from the north.

In the Jewel Cities lingo "bad" can mean a couple three different things. Including "evil."

There was barely any light left when we came to a strip of woods. "Going to have to walk this part," Raven said. "That priest said the road through is good enough, but it's going to be hard to follow in the dark."

I grunted. I wasn't thinking about the woods. My mind was on the funny-looking hills on the other side. I'd never seen anything like them. They were all steep-sided, smoothly rounded, covered with a tawny dry grass and nothing else. They looked like the humped backs of giant animals snoozing with their legs tucked up underneath them and their heads turned around behind them, out of sight.

They were very dry, those hills. The light to see them hadn't never been good, but I was sure I'd seen a few black burn scars before it got too dark to see anything.

The woods were bone-dry, too. The trees were mostly some kind of scruffy oak with small, brittle leaves that had points almost as sharp as holly leaves. They were a sort of blue-gray color instead of the deep green of oaks in the north.

A feeble excuse for a creek dribbled through the heart of the wood. We watered ourselves and the horses and took time out for a snack. I was too tired to waste energy talking, except to say, "I don't think I got what it takes for another fifteen miles. Uphill."

Half a minute later he surprised me by saying. "Don't know if I got what it takes, either. Only so far you can go on willpower."

"Hip bothering you?"

"Yes."

"Might ought to have it looked at."

"Good job for Croaker, since he done it. Let's see how much we got left."

We managed about six more miles, the last couple up the dry grass hills, before we sort of collapsed by silent agreement. Raven said, "This time we'll give it an hour before we hit it again."

He was stubborn, that bastard.

We hadn't been there five minutes before I spotted evidence of that bad storm from the north. "Raven."

He looked. He didn't have nothing to say. He just sighed and helped me watch the lightning.

There wasn't a cloud between us and the stars.

XXV

Toadkiller Dog, carrying the wicker man, eased over a ridge line, halted. He shivered.

For leagues now they had sensed the presence of that place over there, an aura ever increasing in intensity and its ability to irritate. If they were sons of the shadow this was a fastness of the enemy, a citadel of light. There were few such places left.

They had to be expunged when found.

"Strange magic," the wicker man whispered. "I don't like it." He glanced at the northern sky. The creatures of the tree god were up there somewhere, just beyond sight.

This was not a good place to be, sandwiched between them and that place.

The wicker man said, "We'd better do it fast."

Toadkiller Dog had no desire to do it at all. He would bypass, given a choice.

He had choices, of course, but not many. He might get away with defying the wicker man once. That once had to be saved. In the meantime he responded to the ego of the wicker man, doing the insane, the stupid, sometimes the necessary, biding his time.

The army presently numbered two thousand. The men had collapsed in exhaustion the moment their commanders stopped moving. The wicker man summoned two to help him dismount.

They were rich men, every one. Their packs bulged with the finest treasure taken from cities their masters had devoured and from fallen comrades. Few had been with the army more than two months. Of the two thousand only a hundred had crossed the sea with the Limper. Those who did not desert had no cause to be optimistic about a long life.

The wicker man leaned against Toadkiller Dog. "Scum," he whispered. "All scum."

Close. Most with any spark of courage or decency deserted quickly.

The wicker man eyed the sky. A faint smile stretched the ruin of his mouth. "Do it," he said.

The soldiers groaned and grumbled as they stood to arms, but stand to they did. The wicker man stared at the temple. It abused his confidence, but he could not discern any concrete cause. "Go!" He slapped Toadkiller Dog's shoulder. "Scout it, damn you!"

He then assembled the surviving witchmen from the northern forest. They had not been much use lately, but he had a task for them now.

There wasn't a breath of warning. One moment the night was still except for the chirp of crickets and the uneasy rustle of men on the brink of an assault, the next it was alive with attacking manias. They came from every direction, not fifty feet high, in twos and threes, and this time their lightning was not their most important weapon.

The first flights ghosted in and dropped fleshy sausage-shaped objects four feet long. Boiling, oily flame splashed everywhere. Toadkiller Dog howled in the heart of an accurately delivered barrage. Soldiers shrieked. Horses screamed and bolted. Baggage wagons caught fire.

The wicker man would have screamed in rage had he been able. But had he had the capability, he would not have had the time.

He had begun preparing a snare. And while he had concentrated on that they had caught him flat-footed.

He was enveloped in flame. He dared not think of anything else.

He suffered badly before he shielded himself with a chrysalis of protective spells. He was sprawled on the earth then, his wicker body charred and broken. His pain was terrible and his rage more so.

Bladders continued to fall. Mantas that had dumped theirs returned with their lightning. The wicker man extended his charm to include a pair of shamans. One struggled to lift the wicker man's battered frame. The other found the tag ends of the Limper's charm and began to weave it stronger.

The remnant of the wicker man waved a blackened arm.

A manta tumbled from the night, little lightning bolts popping and snapping around it.

The wicker man waved again.

Toadkiller Dog charged the temple. Most of the men followed. A quick, successful assault would mean shelter from the horror in the sky.

That horror pursued them. The air above the Limper had become too dangerous.

Fire bladders fell and blossomed orange, finishing the baggage and supplies. Safe now, the wicker man forgot the fires. He chained his anger. He returned to his interrupted task

As Toadkiller Dog neared the monastery wall something reached out and flicked him away the way a man flicks a bug. Soldiers tumbled around him.

There would be no shelter from the devils in the sky.

Yet a few men did keep going, their progress unimpeded. Why?

The mantas came down on rippling wings. Toadkiller Dog hurled himself into the air. His jaws closed on dark flesh.

The wicker man murmured while the two shamans recovered something from the smoldering remains of a wagon. He beamed at them, oblivious to the surrounding holocaust.

The thing they brought him was an obsidian serpent, arrow-straight, ten feet long and six inches thick. The detail was astonishingly fine. Its ruby eyes blazed as they reflected the fires. The witch doctors staggered under its weight. One cursed the heat still trapped in it.

The wicker man smiled his terrible smile. He began singing a dark song in a breathless whisper.

The obsidian serpent began to change.

Life flowed through it. It twitched. Wings unfolded, long wings of darkness that cast shadows where no shadows should have been. Red eyes flared like windows suddenly opened on the hottest forges of hell. Glossy talons, like obsidian knives, slashed at the air. A terrible screech ripped from a mouth filled with sharp, dark teeth. The thing's breath glowed, faded. It began trying to break away, its gaze fixed on the nearest fire.

The wicker man nodded. The shamans released it. The thing flapped shadow wings and plunged into the fire. It wallowed like a hog in mud. The wicker man beamed approval. His lips kept forming words.

That fire faded, consumed.

The thing leaped to another. Then to another.

The wicker man indulged it for several minutes. Then the tenor of his whisper changed. It became demanding, commanding. The thing shrieked a protest. A fiery haze belched from its mouth. Still screaming, it rose into the night, following orders.

The wicker man turned his attention to the Temple of Traveler's Repose. It was time to see by what sorcery the place kept itself inviolate.

The shamans took hold and carried him toward the temple wall.

XXVI

Bomanz's knuckles were white. They ached. He had a death grip on some windwhale organ. The monster had dropped low enough that the flash and fire and chaos down below gave him a clear perspective of just how far he was going to fall if he relaxed his grip for an instant. Silent and Darling were close by, watching. One false move and Silent would give him a kick in the butt and a chance to see if he could fly.

It was testing time. The White Rose had orders to stop the old horror here, where there might be help from its victims. This time she had woven him into her plan.

In fact, he had the feeling he was the plan.

She had not explained anything. Maybe she was playing woman of mystery. Or maybe she really did not trust him.

He was in charge—till he did something unacceptable and bit a boot with his butt on his way to doing a swan dive into hell.

Menhirs seldom got any feeling into their speech. But the one that materialized behind his left shoulder managed sorrow as it reported, "He's shielded himself. Neither fire nor lightning can reach him."

The surprise had seemed a wan hope, anyway, but a long shot worth trying. "And his followers?"

"Decimated again. The monster is unconquerable, though. He suffers, but pain just makes him angrier."

"He's not invincible at all. As you will see if I get close to him."

Bomanz's least favorite talking buzzard cackled wildly.

"You're big-timer, eh? Ha! That thing is gonna squish you like a bug, Seth Chalk."

Bomanz turned away from the bird. His stomach flopped as he looked down again. The buzzard was determined to get his goat. He was amused by the bird's optimism. He had learned self-control in a hard school. He had been married for thirty years.

"Isn't it time you stones made your move?" He tried a disarming smile, a man with nothing on his mind but the issue at hand.

A little scheme had begun to fester in the back of his head. A way to put that snide vulture in his place.

The stone said, "Soon. What will you contribute to the farce?"

Before he could temporize the buzzard shrieked, "What the hell is that?"

Bomanz whirled. That damned bird wasn't scared of anything, but it was squeaky with fear now.

Vast dark wings spanned the night, masking the moon and stars. Fires animated wise and evil eyes. Another limned huge needle teeth. Those malignant eyes were fixed on those who rode the windwhale.

Silent made frantic warding signs that did no good.

Bomanz did not recognize the thing. It was nothing of the Domination, brought out of the Barrowland. He was an expert on those and believed he knew every rag and feather and bone that had gone into them. Neither was it something of the Lady's empire or she would have made it her own thing during her heyday. So it had to be loot from one of the cities desolated since the Limper had come out of the empire.

Whatever its provenance, it was dangerous. Bomanz began putting himself into that trance from which it was easiest for him to meet a supernatural challenge.

As he opened himself to the energies of another level of reality, fear struck. "Get on to the next phase!" he shouted at the scarred menhir. "Now! Recall the mantas! Get everybody off this damned thing!"

Fire-edged wings beat the night. The red-eyed thing streaked toward the windwhale.

Bomanz used the strongest warding spell he knew.

The monster tortured the night with its shriek of pain. But it came on, its path deflected only slightly. The windwhale shuddered to its impact.

All across the windwhale's back talking menhirs began vanishing, leaving baby thunderclaps.

The talking buzzard cursed like a stevedore and flailed at the air. Young mantas screeched in fear. The Torque brothers rushed Bomanz, shouting questions he did not understand. They were going to throw him off.

Darling stopped them with a gesture.

Below, the windwhale's belly opened and gave birth to a boiling globule of fire. Heat rolled up its flanks. A huge shudder ran its length. Bomanz's knuckles grew whiter. He wanted to move back but his hands had a will of their own and would not turn loose.

Another explosion tore the windwhale's belly. The great sky beast dropped a short distance. Upset became panic. "We're going down!" one of the Torques shouted in his barbaric eastern gabble. "Oh, gods, we're going down!"

Darling caught Bomanz's eye and in peremptory sign language ordered, "Do something!" She was not rattled.

Before he could respond the air filled with icy water spraying from organs on the leviathan's back. Despite the departure of the menhirs the windwhale had begun to lose buoyancy. It was shedding ballast high, hoping that would dampen the fires.

The chill water helped stifle the panic.

Mantas began coming in out of the night, fluttering into the spray. The instant they came to rest their young scrambled onto their backs, followed by other Plains creatures. Once a manta had all the weight it could bear, it flopped to one of the slippery, downsloping launch slides that allowed them to hurtle into space.

Another explosion shook the windwhale. It began a slow buckle in the middle.

Darling approached Bomanz. She looked like she would put him over the side personally if he did not start doing something more than gawk and shake.

How could she stay so damned calm? They were going to die in a few minutes.

He closed his eyes and concentrated on the author of the disaster. He tried to pump himself up.

He did not know what that thing was but he would not let it intimidate him. He was the Bomanz who had slain a grandfather of dragons. He was the Bomanz who had walked into the flames, daring the wrath of the Lady in all her majesty and strength.

But his feet had rested upon solid ground those times.

Softly, surely, he murmured the calming mantras, following with the unleashing cycles that would allow him to slide free of his flesh.

In a moment he was adrift in the whale's belly, floating through the flames, watching the dark fire-eater. Only because it fed so gluttonously had the windwhale not yet been consumed by a holocaust.

He added his skills to the self-protective efforts of the windwhale and the damping of the fire-eater's feeding. The flames began to dwindle. He tried to move subtly and do his work unnoticed by the predator. That thing had only one thought. Soon the windwhale could manage the fires alone.

The fire-eater tried to breach another gas bladder. Bomanz slapped it away. It tried again, and again, and again, failing, till it flew into a frustrated fit.

While it was out of control Bomanz insinuated tendrils of sorcery. With a jeweler's touch he evicted the commands of the wicker man. He replaced them with one overwhelming imperative: destroy the wicker man. Consume him in darkness, consume him in fire, but rid the earth of his noxious presence.

Bomanz retired to his own proper flesh. Physical sight showed him the stars masked by fire-edged wings that spanned half the sky. Those wings tilted. The body they supported dropped toward the place Old Father Tree wanted defended at all costs.

Bomanz glanced at Silent and Darling. The dusky, humorless wizard smiled slightly, nodded, made a small gesture to indicate that he had witnessed a job well done.

So maybe he was finally off the shit list.

He watched the fire-eater strike.

"Damn!" It was plunging toward the compound. Limper must have broken in.

The windwhale had fallen a long way, too. It was in easy striking distance for the wicker man. The giant of the sky had buckled in the middle, become a sagging sausage. It had no more ballast to shed. Neither could it control its motion through the sky. It was at the mercy of the wind, heading south, still losing altitude.

Silent and Darling joined Bomanz. He demanded, "Why did you stay? Why didn't you get the hell off?"

Silent's fingers danced as he relayed to Darling.

"Knock it off with the waggle fingers. You can talk."

Silent gave him a hard look. He did not say anything.

The windwhale lurched. Bomanz grabbed an organ stem as he hurtled toward the monster's side and a drop still three thousand feet till it was over. A gobbet of flame rolled up, singed him. He cursed and clung for his life. The windwhale continued to reel and shudder. It began making a hollow, booming noise that might have been a cry of pain.

An overlooked spark had tangled with a slow leak from a gas bladder. The game was about over. There was nothing to be done this time.

He was going to die in a few minutes. For some reason he could not get as upset as he thought he should. Mostly he was angry. This was not the way for the great Bomanz to go out, just dragged along, without an audience and no great battle to die in. Without a legend to leave behind.

He cursed continuously, in an unintelligible mutter.

His thoughts, more agile than ever he pretended, scurried around in frantic search for a way to make sure the wicker man went with him.

There was none. He had no weapon but the fire-eater, which was a javelin thrown and now beyond his control.

The windwhale began settling more rapidly. Fire crept up the aft half of the monster. The bend in its middle grew increasingly pronounced. The sucker was going to break up. "Come on. That half is going to go." He began climbing the steepening slope of the fore half. Silent and Darling scrambled after him.

Another explosion. Silent lost his footing. Darling grabbed a treelike organ with one hand, caught him with the other. She hoisted him to his feet.

"That ain't no woman," Bomanz muttered. "Not like I ever saw."

The rear half of the windwhale began falling faster than the front half. Secondary explosions hurled comets of whale flesh into the teeth of the night. Cursing monotonously, Bomanz continued his scramble away from disaster— every second wondering why he bothered.

The fear began to come, feeding on his helplessness. His talents were of no avail. He could do nothing but run from the conquering fire till there was nowhere left to flee.

Yet another explosion ripped and wrenched the windwhale. Bomanz fell. Below, the aft half of the monster tore free and fell away, the whole enveloped in flames. The rest of the windwhale bobbed violently, trying to return to horizontal. It yawed and rolled while it bobbed. The old sorcerer hung on. And cursed.

A whimper caught his ear.

Not five feet away he saw the glowing eyes of an infant manta. When the windwhale fragment began to stabilize he crawled thither. "They forget you, little fellow? Come on out here."

The kit hissed and spat and tried to use its lightning. It could generated no more than a spark. Bomanz dragged it out into the moonlight. "You are a tiny one, aren't you? No wonder they missed you." The kit was no bigger than a half-grown cat. It could not be more than a month old. Bomanz cradled the infant in the crook of his left arm. It ceased struggling almost immediately. It seemed content to be held.

The old wizard resumed his journey.

The windwhale had become as stable as it could. Bomanz eased nearer the side. He looked down just in time to see the other half hit ground.

Silent and Darling joined him. As always their faces were emotionless masks, one dusky, one pale. Silent stared down at the earth. Darling seemed more interested in the baby manta. Bomanz said, "Under two thousand feet now. but that's still a long way to fall. And there's still that to concern us."

That meant the small fires still burning back where the rear half had broken away. One of those could reach another gas bladder any minute.

"We should get as far forward as we can and hope for the best." He tried to sound more hopeful than he felt.

Silent nodded.

Bomanz looked around. The monastery was burning merrily, fired by the fire-eater. So that had worked, some. But when he listened the right way he could sense a knot of rage and pain seething amidst the flames.

The Limper had survived again.

And his scheme had worked some, too.

XXVII

I had a hard time believing it. Raven had given up. His hip must have hurt a lot more than he wanted to admit.

He had not moved since he had gone down, and hadn't said nothing since his body beat down his will. I think he was ashamed.

I really wished the son of a bitch would figure out that he didn't have to be a superman. I wasn't going to make him stop being my buddy because he was human.

I was as wiped out as he was but I could not lay down and die. That show up around the monastery was getting flashier all the time. In fact, some of the fireworks was headed our way. That made me too nervous to crap out, though even my toenails were tired.

Another blast. A rose of fire bloomed in the sky. A big hunk of something started falling, spinning off smaller hunks of fire.

I realized what I was seeing.

"Raven, you better get your ass up and look at this mother."

He grunted but he didn't do it.

"It's a windwhale, asshole. Out of the Plain of Fear. What do you think of that?" I saw a couple get wiped during the big bloodletting up to the Barrowland.

"So it seems."

Mr. Ambition had rolled over. His voice was cool but his face was fishbelly white, like he'd stepped around a corner and bumped noses with Old Man Death.

"So how come it's here?" Then I shut up. I'd imagined up a reason.

"Not for me, kid. Who on the Plain would know where to look for me? Who would care?"

"Then… ?"

"It's the battle of the Barrowland, still going on. It's the tree god head-to-head with whatever I felt breaking loose up there."

Light flashed. Fire busted out of one end of the part of the windwhale that was still up. "That thing isn't going to stay up there much longer. Should we go see if we can do something?"

He didn't say anything for at least a minute. He looked up at the humpbacked hills like he was thinking maybe he had enough left to go catch Croaker after all. He couldn't be more than five, ten miles away, could he? Then he levered himself to his feet, wincing, obviously favoring his bad hip. I didn't ask. I knew he'd claim it was just the chill air and cold ground.

He told me, "Better get the horses. I'll drag our stuff together."

Big job you took on yourself there, old buddy, since we basically just dropped in our tracks when we couldn't go anymore.

Since he didn't have much to do he mostly just stood there watching that flying disaster cross the sky. He looked like he was being asked to mount the gallows and put the noose around his own neck.    ,

"I've been thinking, Case," Raven said as we came down off the knee of the most northerly of those goofy humped hills, headed northeast, chasing that drifting windwhale fragment.

"Brooding is the word I would have picked, old buddy. And you been at it since the day they finally put the Dominator down. Looks like that explosion a while back was the last one."

The fragment was drifting on a course that would intercept ours. A few fires flickered on one end. It was turning end for end slowly but had stopped its fall.

"Maybe. But you say something definite like that, the gods will stick it to you. Let's just hope it clears the woods. Be rough landing in there." "What were you thinking?"

"About you and me, Croaker and his gang, the Lady, Silent, Darling. About all the things we had in common but still couldn't get along."

"I didn't see all that much you had hi common. Not once you got past having the same enemies."

"Neither did I for a long time. And none of them saw it, either. Else we all might have tried a little harder." I tried to look like I gave a shit at three in the morning. "Basically we're all lonely, unhappy people looking for our place, Case. Loners who'd really rather not be but don't know how. When we get to the door that would let us in—or out—we can't figure out how to work the latch string."

I'll be damned. That was about as open-up-and-expose-what's-inside a remark as I ever got out of him. Filled with longing and conviction. Well shave my head and call me Baldy. I been right up here beside him since a couple years ago. You don't see the changes going on in people when you're standing up close.

This wasn't the Raven I'd first met, before his ego and misadventure had gotten his soul trapped among the shadow evils of the Barrowland, before its cleansing. He had returned from the prison of the heart dramatically altered. Hell, he wasn't even the same man who had spent all his time drunk on his ass in Oar, neither.

I had kind of mixed feelings. I'd admired and liked and gotten along pretty good with the old Raven. Maybe I would again once he got through his transition. I did not know what to say to him, though I was sure he wanted a response. His knack for befuddling me never changed. "So did you figure out how to work it?"

"I have an unsettling premonition, Case. I'm almost paralyzed by a dread that I'm about to find out if I've learned anything." He stared at that piece of windwhale.

I checked it, guessed it was about two miles away and five hundred feet up. The breeze was bringing it to us.

"We going to chase it back into the hills if it carries that far?"

"You tell me, Case. This was your idea." He paused to whisper to his horse. The animals were not excited about hiking around at night either. Even if they didn't have to carry anybody.

Flame mushroomed out of the windwhale. Before the roar of the explosion reached us, I said, "We're not going to have to worry about climbing any hills."

The windwhale came down fast, turning end for end. When it was about two hundred feet off the ground some chunks fell off and it stopped coming down so fast. I had a pretty good idea where it would hit. We hurried toward the spot.

Then what was left nosed down, sped up, and hit the ground about a mile away. It bounced back into the air, maybe a hundred feet high. It kept coming, straight at us now.

At the peak of its bounce it exploded again.

It bounced two more times before it stayed down and just slid to a stop.

"Be careful," Raven said. "There might be more explosions." Fires still burned on the windwhale. Somewhere inside it was making a noise like somebody beating on the granddaddy of all bass drums.

I said, "It ain't dead yet. Look there." The end of a tentacle lay just a couple yards from me. It was jumping around like a snake with a toothache.

"Unh. Let's hobble the horses."

Excited all to hell, Raven was. Like he spent his whole life hanging around windwhales so close he could smell their bad breath. And this one had that all over.

I caught something in the firelight. "Hey! There's people up on top of that sucker."

"There had to be. Where?"

"There. Right over that black patch." I pointed. Some guys up there were hauling around on something.

Raven said, "Looks like somebody trying to get somebody else out from under something."

"Let's get up there and give them a hand." I left my horse unhobbled.

Raven grinned at me. "The exuberant folly of youth. Where does it go?"

I started climbing a blubbery, stinky cliff. He went looking for a bush to tie the horses to, that being easier than messing with hobbles. I was halfway to the top before he started after me.

The flesh of the windwhale was sort of spongy and definitely smelly, with the odor of burned flesh added. The flesh trembled with pain and failing life. Such a noble monster. I wanted to cry for it.

"Raven! Hurry up! There's three of them up here and a big fire burning back there."

Right then there was a baby explosion. It knocked me down. Gobs of fire splattered the ground. Some of the dry grass caught.

There would be trouble if that spread.

By the time Raven dragged his carcass up I had the woman across my shoulders and the old man, who was the only one on his feet, was tying her so she wouldn't slide off. Finished, the old boy whipped around and starting trying to drag a frondlike piece of windwhale off somebody else.

Panting, Raven looked at me, looked at the woman, grumbled, "It had to be, didn't it?"

I said, "Hey, this broad is solid as a rock. Or she's got a lead butt. She weighs as much as I do."

"How about you get her down?" He muttered, "I'm getting too old for this crap," and headed for the old man. "You. What the hell are you doing here?" He wasn't surprised to see the guy under the frond, though. Having Silent drop out of the sky was just the kind of trick he expected the fates to pull on him.

He was shaking as he helped the old man lift the frond. The old man started fussing over Silent. A black lump of a something glommed on to his shoulder made a sound like a kitten crying.

"Hoist him up!" the old wizard ordered. "Carry him. We don't have time for me to bring him around."

I started down then. Whatever else they said I missed. Pretty soon they started down after me.

Something whispered overhead. The lump on the wizard's shoulder mewled again. A screech tumbled down from the dark. The windwhale's manias had come to circle their dying partner.

What happened to mantas when their windwhale died?

"Ouch!" Raven yelled. "Watch where the hell you're stepping!"

At the same time the old man said, "The arrogance of you, man! The bloody insufferable, conceited arrogance. You, without claim or right, demand—demand!—explanations of me. Of me! The conceit of you surpasses comprehension. I should be asking you what you're doing here, fluttering around ahead of the Limper. Are you his forerunner? His death scout? Will you get moving? Before we get crisped like bacon?"

I got my feet on the ground, watched them. Raven was thoroughly pissed. Maybe he never figured out that he wasn't a lord anymore and the world wasn't going to jump when he barked. And he never did have sense enough to be scared of the right people. People like old Bomanz, who could probably turn him into a frog if he got aggravated.

Raven didn't get to shoot off his own mouth. Another explosion almost shook him and the old man off the windwhale. A big shudder rolled through the monster. That drumbeat stopped. The beast let out with a deep groan that said everything there was to say about death and despair.

The mantas upstairs made keening sounds. Mourning sounds. I wondered how they would manage now.

The windwhale stopped shaking. The wizard yelled, "Get out of here before the whole thing blows!"

Raven was staggering toward the horses when it happened. The blast beggared everything we had seen before. I ducked away from a blast of hot air. It hurled Raven forward. He fell on his face. Bomanz, though closer to the explosion, rode the blast, staying upright with footwork that reminded me of my old mother dancing. He looked like he was in pain.

When the ring in my ears went I heard the sad song of the mantas, again or still.

The windwhale became its own funeral pyre.

Flying chunks started grass fires all around. The horses were upset. We were not safe yet.

Raven crawled, unable to get back up. I felt like a total Daryl Dipshit standing there doing nothing to help, but my legs just wouldn't move.

The wizard caught up, hoisted Raven. They cussed each other like a couple of drunks. I got my feet going finally and leaned into the heat. "Come on, you guys. Knock it off. Let's throw this dork on a horse and get out of here before we all get turned into pork cracklings."

I already had the woman across one saddle like a sack of rice. We had to do so much running her front side was going to be one miserable bruise.

"Move it!" I yelled. "There's a breeze coming up." I scooted back and got hold of the animals before they decided they were smarter than us and headed for the high country.

While we hoisted Silent, Raven got his first good look at Darling. She was all beat to hell. Blood leaked from her mouth, ears, and nose. Her exposed skin was all bruised or blood-caked. Silent looked about as bad, and so did the wizard, pretty much, but Raven did not care jack shit about them.

"They can be healed," Bomanz said before Raven could start fussing, "If we get them away from here before the grass fires get us."

That and me heading out without waiting around for him got Raven moving. He followed me, leading the horse with Darling on it. Bomanz did not wait for either of us.

He headed around one end of the nearest grass fire, which the breeze was pushing toward the sleepy, humpbacked hills.

Raven went to muttering and cursing again. Bomanz was headed north, cradling the manta kit, which squeaked cheerfully at creatures that glided invisibly above our heads. Raven still wanted to catch his old crony, but I guess he decided it would not be smart to challenge the sorcerer right off, when he was in a bad mood, too.

I kept glancing back at the burning windwhale till we got too far into the woods to see it. It seemed to me there had to be some kind of lesson there, some kind of symbolism, but I couldn't unravel it.

XXVIII

Smeds walked into the Skull and Crossbones out of bright morning sunshine. When his eyes adjusted he spotted Timmy Locan in a dark corner at a tiny table for two. At first it looked like Timmy was just sitting there staring down at his bundled hand. When he got closer, though, Smeds saw Timmy's eyes were tight shut. Moisture glittered on his cheeks.

Smeds sat down across from Timmy. "You go to a doc like I said?"

"Yeah."

"Well?"

"He charged me two obols to tell me he didn't know what was wrong and he didn't know what to do about it unless I want him to cut it off. He couldn't even help with the pain."

"You need a wizard, then."

"Point me at the best one in town and turn me loose. I can afford him."

"That ain't a him, Timmy. It's two hers. Gossamer and Spidersilk. Top blades from Charm that just took over."

Timmy wasn't listening. "You hear what I said, Timmy? We got two bitches here straight from the Tower. Came in last night. Bad mojo. They're supposed to find out what happened up to the Barrowland. Tomorrow or the next day they're going to borrow a battalion of Nightstalkers and head up there. It's all over town."

Timmy still did not listen close enough to suit.

"You get it? They're going to get up there and find out that somebody messed with that tree. They're going to be out for blood, then."

Timmy ground his teeth a moment, said, "Be good advertising."

"What?"

"Fish says he don't think there's any way they can trace us as long as we just sit tight and keep our mouths shut. Meantime word gets around to all the wizards. Them that's interested will get here and start looking for the spike. Then we put it up for bids."

Smeds was less fond of that idea all the time. Too damned dangerous. But the rest of them, even Fish, were convinced that a sale could be made safely. They didn't believe that all wizards were crazy-mean and liked to screw people and hurt them just for the fun of it.

"It's just a business deal," Tully kept saying. "We sell. They pay off and get the spike. Everybody's happy."

Dumb shit. Everybody would not be happy. There were a skillion wizards and only one silver spike. Every damned one of them was not only going to be trying for it for himself, they were going to be out to make sure nobody else got it first. Whoever did get it might want to cover his tracks so nobody came looking to take it away from him.

Tully kept saying bullshit whenever Smeds started worrying. Even when Smeds reminded him that that was the way wizards carried on in every story you ever heard.

"I think I know where's a guy who can work on your hand, Timmy." Smeds recalled one of his aunts talking about a wizard down on the South Side who was mostly pretty honest and decent as long as you paid him what you owed him.

The street door opened. Light spilled inside. Smeds glanced around, saw the Nightstalker corporal and a couple of his buddies. The corporal raised a friendly hand. Smeds had to reciprocate or look like a shit. Then he had to stay there talking awhile so it didn't look like he was walking out because a bunch of gray boys had walked in. He used the time to tell Timmy about the wizard his aunt knew.

"So you want to try him?" "I'm ready to try anything." "Let's go, then."

The wizard was a smiling, tubby, apple-cheeked little dork with thin white hair that stuck out every which way. He came on like he'd spent his whole life waiting just for them. Smeds understood why his aunt liked the man. She was so sour and ugly that a blind dog would not wait for her except to go away.

Smeds did most of the talking because he did not trust Timmy not to blurt out more than he needed to in his eagerness to get rid of his pain. "Some kind of infection that's turning his hand all black," Smeds said.

"And making it ache," Timmy said. There was a hint of a whine in his voice. Timmy Locan wasn't a whiner.

The wizard said, "Let's open her up and look at it, then." He pulled Timmy's hand down onto his worktable, went after the bandage with a thin, sharp knife. He smiled and chattered as he worked and when he laid the bandage open he said, "It does look a bit nasty, doesn't it?"

It looked a lot nasty to Smeds. He had not seen Timmy's hand unwrapped in a week. The area of blackness had tripled in size. It now covered Timmy's whole palm and had begun to creep round to the back. The blackened flesh had a puffy look.

The wizard leaned down, sniffed. "Funny. Infected flesh usually smells. Close your eyes tight, son." Timmy did and the pudgy man started poking his hand with a needle. "What do you feel when I do this?"

"Just a little pressure. Ouch!" The needle had pricked unblackened flesh.

"Strange. Very strange. I've never seen anything like it, son. Try to relax." The wizard went to a shelf and took down a baroque brass doohickey that was not much more than a one-foot empty circle supported by six eight-inch legs. This he placed astraddle Timmy's hand. He pinched powders and dribbled drops into pockets in the brass gizmo, made with some mumbo jumbo. There was a flash and a puff of noisome smoke. A shimmer like heat off pavement appeared within the confines of the circle. The wizard stared into that. Smeds could not see that it made any difference. But the wizard's smile went away. The color left his cheeks. In a squeaky voice he asked, "What have you boys been into?"

"Huh? What do you mean?" Smeds asked. "Surprised I didn't see it sooner. The mystic stench is there. But who would have thought it? The boy has had his hand on something polluted with the essence of evil. Something pregnant with the blood of darkness. A powerful amulet, perhaps. Some periapt lost in ancient times and just now resurfacing. Something very extraordinary and hitherto unknown in these parts. Have you boys been grave robbing?"

Timmy stared at his hand. Smeds met the wizard's eye but did not say anything.

"You wouldn't have been breaking any laws digging wherever you ran into whatever caused this. But you could get in deep if you don't report it to the imperial legates." "Can you do anything for him?" "They pay good rewards."

"Can you do anything for him?" Smeds demanded. "No. Whatever caused this was created by someone far greater than I am. Assuming it to have been an amulet, the burn can be cured only by someone greater than the man or woman who created the amulet. And that someone would have to have the amulet itself to study before trying to effect a cure."

Shit, Smeds thought. Where were you going to find somebody big enough to undo the Dominator?

You weren't. "What else can you do? If you can't just fix him up?"

"I can remove the tainted flesh. That's all." "What's that mean in plain language?" "I can amputate his hand. Here. At the wrist would do it today. If that's the way you decide to go you'd better do it soon. Once the darkness works its way into the larger bones there won't be any way to tell how far or how fast it's spreading."

"What about it, Timmy?"

"It's my hand, man!"

"You heard what he said."

"I heard. Look, wiz, you got something that will stop the pain long enough for me to think straight?"

The pudgy man said, "I could put a blocking spell on that would help for a while, but it would hurt worse than ever when that wore off. And that's an idea you'd better get into your head. The longer you stall, the worse the pain is going to get. In another ten days you're not going to be able to stop screaming."

Smeds scowled. "Thanks for just not a whole lot. Do the painkiller thing for him and let us go talk it over."

The wizard sprinkled powders, mumbled, made mystic passes. Smeds watched Timmy relax a little, then even manage a feeble smile.

Smeds asked, "That it? Come on, Timmy. Let's hit the road."

The wizard said, "I need to wrap that again. I don't know that it would, but it if came in contact with someone else it might communicate itself. If the original evil was potent enough."

Smeds's insides knotted and curled as he tried to recall if he had ever touched Timmy's hand. He didn't think he had.

He barely waited to get Timmy outside before he asked, "Old Fish ever touch that when he was taking care of you?"

"No. Nobody did. Except that doc I had look at it. He poked it a couple times with his finger."

"Unh." Smeds did not like it. It was getting complicated. He did not like things complicated. Trying to untangle them usually made things worse.

They had to have a sitdown with Tully and Fish. He knew what Tully would want to do: drag Timmy out in the country somewhere, cut his throat, and bury him.

Tully had the soul of a snake. He had to break loose.

The sooner the better. Right now probably wouldn't hurt. Except then how would he get his cut of whatever the spike went for? Shit.

"Timmy, I want you should go get drunk, have a good time, but do some serious thinking and get your mind made up. Whatever you want to do, I'll back you up, but you got to remember it affects all of us. And keep an eye on Tully. Tully ain't a guy you want to turn your back on when he's nervous."

"I'm not stupid, Smeds. Tully ain't a guy I'd turn my back on when he wasn't nervous. He ever tries anything cute he's got a nasty surprise coming."

Interesting.

Smeds figured he had some deciding to do himself. Like, with the town up to the gutters in gray boys and their bosses about to find out the spike was gone from the Barrowland, was it time to hit the road and get lost someplace they'd never think to look? Was it time to do something with the spike so it would be safer than it was in his pack back at the Skull and Crossbones? He'd already had a cute idea how to handle that. An idea that might turn into a kind of life insurance if he went ahead and did it before he told the others what he had done.

Damn, he hated it when things got complicated.

There was a hell of a row with Tully when they all got together. Tully seemed a little shorter on sense every day.

"You think you're some goddamned kind of immortal?" Smeds demanded. "You think you're untouchable? There's the goddamned grays out there, Tully. They decide to get excited, they'll take you apart one piece at a time. Then they'll give the pieces to Gossamer and Spidersilk to put back together so they can make you tell them what they want to know. And whatever you tell them then, it won't be enough. Or do you think you're some kind of hero that would hold out against the kind of people that learned to ask questions in the Tower?"

"They got to find me before they can ask me anything, Smeds."

"I think we're finally getting somewhere. That's what I've been saying for the last ten minutes."

"The hell. You've been jacking your jaw about running off to some ass-wipe place like Lords.…"

"You really think you could stay out of their way here? Once they knew what they were looking for?"

"How they gonna… ?"

"How the hell should I know? What I do know is, these ain't no half-moron bozos from the North Side. These are people from Charm. They eat guys like us for snacks. The best way to stay out of their way is not to be around where they're at."

"We ain't going nowhere, Smeds." Tully was turning plain stubborn.

"You want to stand around waiting for the hammer to hit you between the eyes that's fine with me. But I ain't getting killed because you got ego problems. Selling that spike off and getting rich would be nice, but not nice enough to die for or go to the rack for. All these heavies turning up here before we even start trying to find a buyer, I'm tempted to let it go to the first bidder just to get out from under."

The argument raged on, bitterly, inconclusively, with Fish and Timmy refereeing. Smeds was as angry with himself as he was with Tully. He had a nasty suspicion he was just blowing a lot of hot air, that he would not be able to walk out on his cousin if it came to a decision. Tully was not much, but he was family.

XXIX

Toadkiller Dog lay in the shade of an acacia tree gnawing on a shinbone that had belonged to one of the wicker man's soldiers.

Only a dozen of those had survived that grisly night when they had taken the monastery. Half of those had died since. When the breeze blew from the north the stench of death was overpowering.

Only two of the witch doctors had gotten through alive. Barely. Till they recovered, he and the wicker man were in little better shape than they had been in the beginning, back in the Barrowland.

Toadkiller Dog kept one eye on the mantas gliding overhead and around the monastery, eternally probing for soft spots in the shell of magic shielding the place. Bolts ripped through any they found. Only one in a hundred did any damage, but that was enough to guarantee eventual destruction.

The wicker man's triumph over the windwhale had given a respite of two hours. Then another windwhale had appeared and had resumed the struggle. There were four of them out there now, at the points of the compass, and they were determined to avenge their fallen brother.

Toadkiller Dog rose, bones creaking and aching, and zigzagged his way between dangerous spots to the low, thin wall that surrounded the remains of the monastery. He limped badly. His wicker leg had gone in the conflagration that had come when the Limper's firedrake had turned back upon him.

He consoled himself with the knowledge that the Limper was worse off than he was. The Limper had no body at all.

But he was working on that.

How the hell had they managed that turnaround?

Toadkiller Dog rose on his hind legs, rested his paw and chin on top of the wall.

The picture was worse, as he had expected. The talking stones were so numerous they formed a circumvallation. Groves of the walking trees stood wherever the ground was moist, feasting. They had to endure eternal drought on the Plain of Fear.

How long before they moved in and began demolishing the wall with their swift-growing roots?

Squadrons of reverse centaurs galloped among the shadows of gliding mantas, practicing charges and massed javelin tosses.

That weird horde would come someday. And there would be no turning them back while the Limper had no body.

They would have come already had they known how helpless were the besieged. That was the only smart thing the Limper had done, getting himself out of sight and lying low, so those creatures out there did not know where he stood. He was counting on the White Rose to think he was trying to lure her into a trap by pretending to be powerless.

The Limper needed time. He would do anything, would sacrifice anyone, to buy that time.

Toadkiller Dog turned away and limped toward the half-demolished main structure of the monastic complex. A frightened sentry watched him pass.

They knew they were doomed, that they had become rich beyond their hopes but at the cost of selling their souls to death. They would not live to enjoy a copper's worth of their stolen fortunes.

It was too late now, even to find hope in desertion.

One man had tried. They had him out there. Sometimes they made him scream just to remind everybody they were irked enough to take no prisoners.

Toadkiller Dog squeezed through the tight halls and down steep, narrow stairs to the deep cellar the Limper had taken for his lair. Down there he was safe from the monster boulders and whatnot the windwhales dropped when the urge took them.

The Limper had set up in a room that was large and as damp and moldy as might be expected. But the light there was as bright as artificial sources could make it. The sculptors needed that light to do their work properly.

The bodiless head of the Limper sat on a shelf overlooking the work in progress. Two armed guards and one of the witch doctors watched, too. The actual work was being done by three of the dozen priests who had survived the massacre of the monastery's inmates.

They had no idea what their reward would be if they did a good job. They labored under the illusion that they would be allowed to resume the monastery's work when they finished and their guests departed.

In the southwest corner, the highest of the enclosure, there was a small spring. The monastery drew its water from this. Below the spring, kept moist by its runoff, lay a bed of some of the finest potter's clay in the world. The monks had been using it for ages. The Limper had been delighted when he had learned of the deposit.

The sculptors had the new body roughed in to the Limper's satisfaction. It would be the body he'd always wished he'd had, not the stunted, crippled thing he'd had to endure when he'd had a body of his own. With the head on it this would stand six and a half feet tall and the body itself would fit what the Limper imagined was every maiden's dream.

About a third of the detail work was done and it was very good work indeed, with all the tiny wrinkles and creases and pore holes of a real human body, but with none of the blemishes.

Only one of the three monks was doing any sculpting. The other two were keeping the clay moist, basting its surface with oil that would keep that natural dampness in.

Toadkiller Dog glanced at the clay figure only long enough to estimate how much longer their good luck would have to hold. He was not reassured. Surely those things out there would stop procrastinating in a day or two.

He retraced his route to the surface, prowled from wall to wall, eyeing potential routes of escape.

When the hammer fell he was going out of there at a gallop, straight at the talking stone and jump over. They would not expect him to bolt and leave the Limper to his fate.

He would find a more reasonable patron somewhere else. The Limper was not the only one of the old ones who had survived.

XXX

It was not a companionable camp where we were set up east of the monastery, where the smell of bodies wasn't as bad. I mean, I did my best and me and the Torque boys and the talking buzzard and a couple of the talking stones had us some pretty good bullshit sessions around the old campfire. But the rest of them acted like a bunch of little kids.

Raven wasn't going to talk to Darling unless she made the first move. Silent wouldn't have nothing to do with Raven on account of he thought Raven was going to try to steal his girl. A girl he never really had. Darling wasn't talking to Raven because she figured he owed her about twenty giant apologies and he had to pay off before she gave him the time of day. And she was pissed at Silent because he was being presumptuous, and maybe at herself some, too, for maybe having given him grounds for his presumptions.

Just between you and me and the pillow book, I don't think she's no blushing virgin.

But maybe that's just wishful thinking. Been so long since I been in rock-throwing range of a woman that the females of those back-assward centaurs are looking good.

The Torque boys swear by them.

Old wizard Bomanz ain't getting along with nobody. He's full up to his eyeballs with ideas about how this show ought to be run and there ain't nobody will listen to him but the talking buzzard. The buzzard's name is Virgil but the stones call him Sleazeball or Garbagemouth on account of the high intellectual content of most of his conversation.

Already I'm getting blase about all those weird critters. They kind of rattled me at first, but we been here eight days now. If I ignore what they look like I knew stranger guys in the Guards.

What I can't figure is why we're sitting around. From what I hear there's only a few guys holed up in that monastery. With what we got we ought to be able to take the Limper even in top condition. But Darling is the high lord field marshal here. She says we wait.

She gets her orders from Old Father Tree. Must be he's happy so long as the Limper is buttoned up in a sack where he can't cause nobody no grief.

Raven said, "I misjudged her. She's not just sitting on her hands."

"Eh? What?" I wanted to go to sleep. So suddenly he wanted to talk.

"Darling isn't just sitting here. There's a dozen kinds of these Plain creatures so small you don't notice them or so much like something you're used to seeing you don't pay any attention. She's got those sneaking in and out of there all the time. She knows every breath they take. She's got somebody on every one of them all the time. The manias and centaurs and rock dropping are all for show. If the order comes down, the real main attack will be carried out by the little creatures. They won't know what hit them in there. She's a genius. I'm proud of that girl."

When it came to sneaky petey I figured she had some pretty good teachers, bunking around with the Black Company all them years. I told him, "Why don't you go tell her she's a genius, you're proud of her, you still love her, will she forgive you for being such a butt way back when? And let me get some sleep."

He didn't go see Darling. But he did get pissed at me and left me alone.

Not that that did much good for long.

What nobody knew but maybe Silent—since Darling can't hear and she can't lip-read the stones because they got no mouths—was that she already had the go-ahead from the boss tree. She was just waiting for the right hour to give the signal.

Naturally she timed it for when I just got sound asleep.

Things were quiet in the basement where the Limper was hiding out. There was one armed guard, one shaman overseeing, one monk keeping the clay moist, and two more making a leg for Toadkiller Dog.

The earth shook. A windwhale had hit the building with an extra big stone. Everybody moved to protect the claywork.

A dozen Plain creatures exploded out of cracks and shadows. Little missiles flew. Little blades flashed. The fastest creatures climbed all over the soldier and the shaman. They let the monks escape. Once the soldier and witch doctor went down the creatures began defacing the claywork.

It was the same elsewhere. None of the Limper's men survived.

That monster Toadkiller Dog came flying out of the monastery and landed smack in the middle of a gang centaurs. Blades flashed. Javelins flew. So did bodies. Then the monster broke loose.

Manias swarmed overhead so thick they kept running into each other. The thunder of their lightnings made a drumroll.

The monster got to the barrier of talking menhirs and walking trees. He jumped over that, too. His fur smoldered and his flanks were pincushioned with darts. The walking trees tried to grab hold of him. His strength was too violent for them.

He kept right on coming, straight at us.

Menhirs popped into his way, stalling and tripping him. Mantas tried to cook him. Centaurs galloped with him, pelting him with javelins and dashing in to try to hamstring him. Me and Raven and the Torque boys all put three or four arrows apiece into him. He never seemed to notice. He just kept on coming, howling like all the wolves in the world at once.

"Go for its eyes!" Raven yelled. "Go for its eyes!"

Right, old buddy. Sharpshoot when I'm shaking so bad I figure if I live through this one I'm going to be cleaning the brown out of my drawers for a month.

The monster was only about forty feet away when Silent said hello by smacking it in the face with a bushel of snakes, snakes that hung on and tried to crawl into its ears and mouth and nostrils.

The snakes never slowed it down but they did take its mind off whatever it had planned for us. It just plowed through.

I went flying ass over appetite. As I sailed through the air I saw Darling step in, as cool as if she was in a kitchen slicing bread, and take a cut with a two-handed sword I wouldn't have figured a woman could lift. She was a little high. She hit ribs instead of opening the thing's belly.

I hit ground and spent the next couple minutes doing an astronomical survey of a couple hundred newly hatched constellations.

A savage rain shower soaked me and brought me out of it and to my feet, where I realized that I hadn't been rained on after all. A windwhale had passed over, dumping a little ballast to slow its fall as it came down after Toadkiller Dog.

The monster was still headed west. Right behind it was a shimmery something that looked like an elephant with a nest of tentacles for a head. Bomanz's contribution to the cause.

That was the last minute when anything made sense.

The talking stones went berserk, started popping all around. Walking trees jumped up and down. Centaurs ran in circles. Everything that could talk started yelling at everything else. The windwhales went to booming and started dropping like they meant to commit suicide by smashing into the ground. The scarred-up menhir was jabbering at Silent in a lingo I didn't get and Silent was practically doing a combination flamenco and sword dance trying to tell Darling what the rock was saying.

I stumbled over to Raven and said, "Old buddy, this looks like a good time to duck out of the party. Before the keepers come to drag them all back to the asylum."

He was watching Silent. He said, "Hush." And a minute later, "The tree god has called the whole thing off. Something's happened up north. He wants everybody to drop everything and head for home."

I looked around. Two windwhales were on the ground already. Critters were piling aboard. The only talking stone around anywhere was the one hanging out with Silent. "There goes our whaleback ride to catch your buddy Croaker."

XXXI

The young tree in the Barrowland had been in a coma since the fire, intelligence damped down while its hurts healed. But there came a day when externals finally registered. There was a bustle and fuss in the Barrowland such as had not been seen since the great battle that had taken place there.

Curious, and compelled by the mandate of his father, the tree dragged himself out of his fugue, though he was far from completely healed.

The Barrowland was crawling with soldiers of the shadowed western empire. He sensed the foci of power that had to be their commanders. They were going over every inch of the surrounding ground.

Why?

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

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

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

XXXII

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

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

Thus doth evil breed.

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

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

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

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

XXXIII

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

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

He grinned again.

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

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

They knew about the spike.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Looks like. No problem with that kind of pain. Let's go."

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

Unprecedented.

"What the hell is going on?" Smeds asked.

"I don't know. They were just getting started when I was coming to get you."

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

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

Smeds did not answer.

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

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

"We got a problem," Smeds said.

"We have more than one."

"I told Tully till I was blue in the face."

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

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

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

"Yeah."

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

"Maybe."

"They have to loosen up sometime. You can't keep a city like Oar locked up very long."

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

"Yeah."

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

Smeds stopped walking. "Shit."

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

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

"Yes. If that's the decision."

"Let's go get a drink and look at the angles."

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

"I'm still going to have to have one long one."

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

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

"True."

"So what are we going to do?"

Old Man Fish smiled softly. "You telling me to decide?

You want me to tell you what to do? So that way it isn't your fault, you were just doing what you were told?"

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

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

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

"So you just talked yourself into it."

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

"That's one vote for action."

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

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

Smeds's stomach just kept knotting and sinking.

XXXIV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He thought he had all the time in the world.

XXXV

There were lights in the wizard's place. "He live alone?" Fish asked.

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

A shadow moved across a paper shade.

"Doesn't matter anyway. There's no guarantee he won't have friends in, or a client." -

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

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

"You were at Charm? I didn't know that."

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

"Patrol."

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

"Evening, ma'am," one said. "You're out late. Consulting the wizard?"

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

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

"Why?"

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

"You can go loaf in a tavern or whatever it is you'd rather be doing. I was his last client tonight."

"Yes ma'am. Right after we get your name and how to find you if we need to talk to you again."

The woman sputtered but gave the soldiers what they demanded. The grays usually got what they wanted.

"Thank you, ma'am. We appreciate your cooperation. The streets being what they are at night, Luke will walk you over to make sure you get there safely."

Smeds grinned. That was one slick gray boy.

The silent partner set off with the woman. The other soldier resumed his patrol. Smeds rose. "We're lucky, he'll really stop off for a beer."

"To get any luckier than we've just been the bastard wizard would have to be in there dying of heart failure right now. You ready?"

"Yes."

"Let's get it over with. Quietly."

Smeds dashed across the street. Quietly. Fish was supposed to give him time to get around back. Then Fish, whom the wizard had not met, would knock on the front door. Smeds was supposed to get in—quietly—and come at the wizard from behind.

The tactic made no sense to Smeds but he was not the general here.

He stopped, astonished. A side window stood open to let in the cool night air. He paused to catch his breath, then peeked.

The room was the one where the wizard had seen Timmy the first time they had come. The wizard was in there, puttering around, putting things away and mumbling to himself.

This was better than any back door.

Fish's knock, when it came, was so discreet Smeds almost missed it. The wizard cocked his head, looked like he was trying to make up his mind whether or not to answer. Finally, muttering, he left the room.

Smeds hoisted himself through the window, went after the man. He did not recall the floor being creaky. He hoped his memory was playing no tricks because he was taking no precautions against floor noise. He drew his knife as he moved.

The nerves went away. It seemed almost as though he was a bystander in his own mind. He noted that he was moving much more fluidly than was usual, ready for anything in the midst of any movement.

The wizard growled, "Keep your pants on," and started fumbling with the latch as Fish knocked for the third time.

Smeds peeked carefully.

The wizard was at the door, ten feet away, back to him, just opening up.

Fish asked, "Professor Dr. Damitz?"

"Yes. What can I do—"

And that was it.

Smeds saw the wizard rise onto his toes and start to raise his hands as he moved out to get the man from behind. Then Fish was pushing into the house, supporting the wizard, kicking the door shut behind him. He saw Smeds, was surprised. He started lowering the wizard to the floor. "How did you get in so fast?"

Smeds looked at the dead man. "Open side window. How come you did it that way?" The handle of a long knife stuck out under the wizard's chin. There was not much blood.

"Blade went straight into the brain. No chance for him to do any witch stuff while he was dying."

Smeds stared at the body. Now he understood the plan. Fish had sent him around back just to get him out of the way.

"You all right? How do you feel? A little shaky?"

"I'm all right. I don't feel much of anything at all."

"Did he keep written accounts or records? Something where he might have put down something about Timmy?"

"I don't know. I never saw him do it while we were here."

"We'd better look. You start… You feeling something now?"

"Just feeling sorry for that woman after they find him."

"Yeah. Be rough for her for a while. Look around. Try not to mess things up too much. And don't take too long. We got to get out of here." Fish went into the room where the wizard had done his interviews.

Smeds rejoined him five minutes later, carrying a large glass jar and a couple of books.

"What the hell is that?"

"Timmy's hand. I found it in a room in the back. All kinds of weird stuff back there."

"Shit. I'm glad we took time to look." He'd picked out a few books himself. "Let's get the hell out of here and get rid of this stuff. Out the window. We pull it shut, it'll latch itself behind us. I'll go first, see if it's clear."

Smeds's hands shook as he poured the first mug of beer. But it had not been as hairy as he had thought it would be. Still, there was some reaction. More than Old Man Fish was showing.

The hand and books had been cared for. The most dangerous strand had been clipped. Only one thing left to do.

Their benefactor the Nightstalker corporal came in with his beer bucket, beamed around, went for a refill.

"Shit!" Smeds said. "I clean forgot. I had a date tonight."

Fish gave him a few seconds of a commiserating look, then said, "Drink up. Catch a nap. We've got half the job still to do."

XXXVI

It seemed like I never saw Darling do much to deserve her White Rose reputation. Maybe that was because she was so unglamorous when you saw her, just a scruffy, tangle-haired blond broad in her twenties who would have fit right in with the gang back at the potato ranch. Except that she would have looked a lot more worn out now because she would have been dropping kids for ten years.

Besides her being deaf and dumb, which is always hard for the rest of us to keep separate from stupid, I think it's hard to take her serious because she does what she does so easily, so casually. Take that attack on the monastery. Slicker than greased owl shit. And no one would have gotten hurt at all if that monster Toadkiller Dog hadn't come plopping into the middle of those centaurs when he was making a run for it. And that was their damned fault. They got too eager. If they was hanging back like they was supposed to they would have had time to get out of the way.

She sure had the respect of the tree god and all the pull with him she wanted. I think he'd indulge her in anything.

She don't put on no airs, neither.

It was strange for a while. You had Darling in one spot with Silent always close, trying to stay between her and Bomanz and her and Raven at the same time, only Raven and the wizard would not get anywhere near each other because they did not trust each other any more than Silent trusted either of them.

It was all kind of amusing. Because when you are on the back of a monster a couple of miles up in the air, sharing that back with a couple hundred critters that would have you for breakfast if you don't behave, you sure as shit ain't going to get away with nothing, no matter what you'd like to try.

The Torque boys knew that. I knew it. Darling knew it. But those other three geniuses, Bomanz, Raven, and Silent, was so busy being important plugging up the knothole at the center of the universe that that never occurred to them.

The Torques were a little nervous about me, though. I used to be Guards and they was Black Company. They thought I might be lugging a grudge.

But I was saying the White Rose don't put on no airs. Not even being the White Rose. She don't like being called anything but Darling. She did not mind when I came around trying to talk to her. Only Raven and Silent minded. I told Raven to stuff it when he objected and I guess she gave Silent the same message. He didn't do nothing but stand around looking like he was making up his mind where to start carving when I talked to her.

Mind you, these were grown men. Plenty older than me.

It was Raven's fault I could talk to her at all. He had only himself to blame. It was him insisted I learn the sign language so we could communicate in situations where we couldn't talk out loud.

Not that we talked much at first, Darling and me. Just hi-how-you-doing stuff. I wasn't very good at it. She taught me more sign as we went along.

She didn't come right out and say it, but I got the feeling she was starved for somebody to talk to besides Silent. She couldn't say it with him hovering over her like he did all the time.

When I started out the only thing I was really wanting to find out was what she really thought about Raven. I wanted to keep him from making any more of a fool of himself than he already had. Maybe she figured that. She was sharp. She never gave me a chance to work it in.

So after a couple days we were talking about what it was like being country kids growing up with a war going on all around. It was easy to understand why she had gone the way she had. Everybody knew the story so she didn't need to explain.

I told her I joined up to get away from the farm, and from where I stood back then the Rebels didn't look no cleaner than the imperials. Maybe less, because she hadn't come along to start cleaning them up yet. And the imperials got paid. Good, and on time.

She did not seem offended, so I added my secret philosophy of life: any dork who became a soldier for an idea instead of the money deserved to die for his country. You're going to put it all on the table, six up with some other guy, it damned well better be for stakes you can carry away.

That did offend her. It got scorching for a few minutes, then sort of settled down to a sustained low heat, her trying to convince me that there were abstractions worth fighting and dying for and me clinging to my position that no matter how admirable the cause there was no point getting killed for it because even only twenty years down the road nobody was going to remember you or give a rat's ass if they did.

Two days went by that way. I got a feeling that if there hadn't been so much ego getting in the way Raven and Silent would have ganged up on me for hanging around with their girlfriend.

She was easy to talk to. I let out things I never said before because I thought they had no value, considering the source. Stuff about how people and the world worked, like that.

I never realized my outlook was so cynical till I tried to tie it up and put it across in that unsubtle way you have to use with sign.

I told her I could not believe in her movement because it did not promise anything for the future except freedom from the tyranny of the past. I told her that what little philosophy I'd detected driving the movement totally ignored human nature. That if the Rebels ever did manage to topple the empire, whatever replaced it would be worse.

That was the lesson of history. New regimes, to make sure they survived, were always nastier than the ones before them.

I kept after the theme of what did the Rebels offer in place of the empire? In my limited experience the people of the empire were more secure, prosperous, and industrious than they had been before its coming—except in areas where there was an active Rebel presence. I told her that for the great mass of people freedom was not an issue at all. That it was an alien concept, at least as her Rebels seemed to define it.

I told her that for a peasant—and peasants probably make up three-quarters of the population—freedom meant being able to provide for a family and market any surpluses.

When I left home the potato fields and all the rest of it were held communally. The work was long and hard and boring, but no one ever went hungry and even in the lean years there were surpluses enough to provide for a few little luxuries. In my grandfather's time, though, our fields had been just one more parcel among scores owned by one great landholder. The people who lived there were part of the furniture, like the trees and water and game, legally bound to the land. They had any number of obligations to the lord that had to be fulfilled before they could work the land. And of the product of the land they had to hand over fixed amounts to the landholder. First. If it was a bad year the lord could take everything.

But they had not had to walk in the Lady's dark shadow. So they must have been blissfully happy little farm animals.

I told her that the sons of the landholders were all backbones of the Rebel cause now, determined to liberate their enslaved homelands.

I told her I had no illusions about the Lady having any love or concern for the common people. She obliterated existing ruling classes simply to be rid of potential challenges to her own power. She had plenty of disgusting minions whose assigned domains were terrible places to be.

Finally, I argued that the empire was in no danger of falling apart, despite the fact that she had disarmed the Lady during the showdown in the Barrowland. The Lady had been obsessed with expanding her borders and the reach of her power. She had created an efficient machine to handle the domestic work of the empire. That machine had not been broken.

We had been in the air four days. Evening was coming on and ahead brown gave way to the hazy blue of the Sea of Torments. We had come a long way in a short time. When I thought about all the shit me and Raven went through to get down there to that monastery, damn! This was the only way to travel.

I left off arguing with Darling. I felt a little guilty. As that day had gone on she had argued back less and less. I think I was throwing a lot of stuff at her that she probably hadn't ever thought about. On a smaller scale I've always known people for whom a goal was everything, who never thought nothing about the consequences of the goal achieved.

Of course, I did what everybody else does. I underestimated the hell out of her.

Next day I didn't run into her till around noon. I guess I was avoiding her. But when I did see her she had bounced back.

About the same time I noticed the dark loom of land on the northern horizon and right afterward realized we were losing altitude. The windwhales were sliding into some kind of formation, a triangle above with us below. Mantas were taking to the air, gliding toward the coast.

I asked her, in sign, "Where are we? What is happening?"

She replied, also in sign, "We are approaching Opal. We are going to find Raven's children. We are going to compel him to confront his past."

That was a measure of how much the tree god valued and respected her. Though he had yanked his minions away from that monastery and had ordered them to scurry north because there was no time to lose, he would let her interrupt the journey for this because it was important to her.

I figured Raven didn't know what was coming. He'd probably need a lot of support when it hit him in. I went looking for him.

XXXVII

There was nothing out at the fourth hour; Smeds reflected. The soldiers were all off somewhere loafing because the bad boys all had sense enough to be home in bed. The bakers had not yet stumbled out to their doughs and ovens. The only sound in the street was that of the drizzle falling, of the water dripping from the roofs. He and Fish made no noise. Fish seemed not to be breathing.

There would be one problem with this one they had not faced with the other. He had seen them both before. On the other hand, they were making their move at this ungodly hour, reasonably expecting to catch him in his bed.

Breaking in should be easy, from what they recalled of the physician's place. The deed itself would have to be done quietly. There was, they suspected, a live-in housekeeper. They did not want to add her to their weight of conscience.

"There it is," Smeds said.

Like the wizard, the physician was prosperous enough to occupy his own freestanding combination home and place of business. The structure was barely a decade old. A few years before it had been built, that part of town had burned during an outbreak of violence between Rebel sympathizers and mercenaries in the imperial service. The middle class had come in to build homes upon the graves of tenements.

"Front door to the house and door to the office," Fish murmured. "Assume a back door. These places all have a little fenced-in garden behind them. Three windows we can see. I'm surprised vandals haven't destroyed that leaded-glass monstrosity."

The physician's office was scabbed onto the side of his home, set a little back. It had its own little porch and door, and beside the door a marvelously dramatic floor-to-ceiling leaded-glass window six feet wide.

"Go," Fish said.

Smeds dashed across and crouched in the slightly deeper shadow beneath the window on the building's right front. His thoughts about the weather were not polite. He was miserable enough without a soaking drizzle added on for frosting.

Fish came across as Smeds rose to test the window. He was not surprised to find it tightly secured. Fish went to the house door, achieved no better result. Smeds crossed behind him and checked the second front window. Solid. He slid around the corner of the house.

Fish was crouched in front of the office door, which he had pushed open about three inches. Smeds joined him, his knife sliding into his hand. "It was unlocked?"

"Yes. I don't like it."

"Maybe it's so clients can get in anytime."

Fish ran his hand up the inside of the door. "Maybe, but there's a heavy latch catch. Let's be careful."

"Careful is my middle name."

Fish pushed the door open, looked inside. "Clear." He slipped in.

Smeds followed, headed for the door connecting with the house. It was unlocked, too. It opened toward him. He pulled. It swung smoothly, soundlessly. He heard a faint snick behind him as Fish closed the latch. He saw nothing suspicious in the room before him. He stepped inside.

Maybe it was a whisper of cloth in motion. Maybe it was a little intake of breath. Maybe it was both. Whatever, Smeds spun down and away.

A line of fire sliced across his shoulder blade.

He landed on his knees facing the office, watching a shape collide with Fish. Fish said, "Shit!" At the same moment the shape squealed. Then it threw itself sideways and floundered through the leaded-glass window a step ahead of Smeds.

Fish came to the window. "That was him."

"He was expecting us."

"Too damned smart. Figured too much out. Can't let him get away." Fish jumped through the window.

The physician was going for all he was worth, legs and arms flailing. That fat little hedgehog was no sprinter.

Smeds followed Fish. He passed the older man moments later, and gained steadily on his prey, who had gotten a sixty-yard head start. The physician glanced back once, stumbled. Smeds gained ten yards while he was getting his balance. Fear lent him renewed stamina and speed. He stayed the same distance ahead for half a minute.

The physician knew he was not going to outrun anyone. Smeds knew he knew that. Unless he was running in a blind panic he had developed a strategy, had chosen an ultimate destination…

The physician zigged right, into a narrow alleyway.

Smeds slowed, approached cautiously.

Footfalls pounded away in the darkness.

He went after them. He was just as careful rounding another corner, again without need. Gods, it was dark in there! Third corner.

He stopped dead. There were no sounds of flight. He tried listening for heavy breathing but could not be sure he heard anything because his own intruded too much.

What now?

Nothing to do but go forward.

He dropped down and advanced in a careful duck walk. His muscles protested. He was grateful for the toughening they had gotten in the Great Forest.

There! Was that breathing?

Couldn't tell for sure. The echoes of Fish's approach overrode it.

Scrape! Swish!

What must have been a foot missed his face by a fraction of an inch. He flung himself forward but the physician was already moving again. Smeds's knife ripped along his hip.

Smeds went down hard but caught hold of a heel and managed to hang on. He snaked forward, stabbing at the man's calf, his target invisible in the darkness. The man squealed like an injured rabbit.

Smeds was so startled he let go. Then he realized he was letting his man get away. He got up and charged ahead, smashed into the man.

"Please! I won't tell anyone! I swear!"

Pain slashed along Smeds's ribs on this left side.

He flailed away with his knife, hitting anything he could. The physician tried to scream and fight back and ran away all at the same time. Smeds held on with one hand, kept hacking with the other. The physician pulled him out into a street.

Smeds kept hacking.

The physician collapsed.

Fish arrived. "Shit, Smeds. Shit."

"Got him."

"You sure he didn't get you, too?"

Smeds looked at himself. He was covered with blood. Some of it was his own.

Somebody yelled up the street. People had begun coming to stoops and windows.

Fish bent, slashed the physician's throat, said, "We've got to get out of here. There'll be soldiers here in a minute." He looked at the dead man's hand. "Unh. A mess. He touched you with that?"

"I don't think so."

"Come on." Fish offered him a hand. "You make it?"

"I'm all right for now."

Fish headed back into the alley.

Smeds began feeling it as soon as the excitement began to go out of him. He knew he would not be able to get away if a chase developed.

Instead of making for the Skull and Crossbones Fish headed into the West End.

"Where we going?" Smeds asked.

"Reservoir. Get you cleaned up. We take you home looking like that the gray boys are going to be around to ask what happened before you can get your boots off."