XXXVIII

I don't know what I expected to see when we got to Opal. Maybe nothing changed from my last time there. I sure wasn't ready for the mess we found. I gaped incredulously as we glided over the ruins, where a few survivors scurried around like frightened mice. I went and told Darling, "Don't look to me like there's much chance we'll find the people you want."

Odds never bothered Darling.

Raven and Silent now had especially black feelings for me. I'd had the gall to tell Darling who she had to find if she wanted to force Raven to face his past. Neither of them wanted that to happen.

Both of them was so busy thinking about themselves they didn't have time to wonder what Darling really thought or felt about anything.

We crossed most of the city. Up north we spied several large, neatly arranged camps. The tents were too numerous to be all army, but they showed us that the imperials were there, responding to the destruction of the city in a quick, orderly fashion. Below, soldiers and civilians were at work leveling way for the new. Though they stopped to gawk, these people did not run away.

Darling ordered us to watch for the standard of the military commander. She figured that was the place to start since the city was obviously under martial law. I couldn't figure why she thought she'd get any cooperation, though.

I asked, "What do you feel about old Raven these days?" I was real careful to keep my hands hid from him and Silent both.

I figured she wouldn't understand what I meant. I was wrong. She signed, "Once I had a child's love for a man who saved me and nurtured me and risked everything to protect me when, long before I could believe it myself, he recognized the role I would play in the struggle with the darkness. That child was like a very little girl in some ways. She was going to marry Daddy when she grew up, and it never occurred to her that things might not turn out that way till she tried to pursue it, and to press it.

"I was never really a girl, or a woman, or a human being to Raven, Case. Even though he did awful things for me. I was a symbol, an expiation, and when I insisted on becoming a person he did the only thing he could do to keep on serving the symbol and not have to deal with a flesh-and-blood woman."

"That is kind of how I always though it was," I signed.

"Many men admire Raven. He fears nothing concrete. He takes no crap from anyone. People who mess with him get hurt, and the hell with the consequences. But those are the only dimensions he has. They are the only dimensions he permits himself. How can I remain emotionally entangled with a man who will not allow himself emotions, however much he did for me in other ways? I appreciate him, I honor him, I may even revere him. But that is all anymore. He cannot change that with some demonstration, like a boy hanging by his knees from a branch to impress a girl."

I grinned because I had a gut feeling that's exactly what Raven had in mind.

Poor sucker. There just wasn't nothing left for him to win. But he wasn't the kind to accept that even if she told him to his face, point-blank.

I wanted to sneak in one or two about Silent, too, but I didn't get a chance. The military headquarters got spotted and the windwhale dropped down and moved up to it, anchored itself in place by dropping tentacles to grab rocks and trees. Its presence overhead was disconcerting to those in the camp.

I like that word, disconcerting. I got it from Bomanz.

Such a sly way to say they were having shit hemorrhages down there.

There was a big hoorah, all kinds of whoop and holler and carrying on, when a bunch of Plain critters ganged up on the scar-faced stone and threw it over the side, almost into the lap of the command staff down there.

Them old boys were pretty shook. I wondered how much more excited they would get if they knew the White Rose her own self was right over their heads. But they wasn't going to try nothing, no matter what they knew. Who'd want to duke it out with four pissed-off windwhales, which is what they would get if they wasn't polite.

Scarstone popped back up. He talked. Silent translated for Darling. I didn't hear anything. The Torque boys had let me know I was supposed to stay back, so I stayed back. Darling made a bunch of signs that I guess the stone could see somehow. It went away. After a while it came back.

After four rounds of that it didn't go away anymore. But the windwhale stayed where it was, so I guessed a deal had been struck.

I went to try to talk it over with Raven. But he was in about as foul as mood as I ever saw, and anyway he had pegged me for some kind of traitor, so I gave it up and went off to shoot the shit with the Torques and the talking buzzard and a couple other Plain creatures that wasn't too shy.

Darling goes after something she usually gets what she wants. This time she got it just before noon next day.

A hoorah broke out downstairs. Darling sent Scarface to check it out. It came back and reported. She got up and walked over to Raven, who watched her like she was the hangman coming. She signed at him. He got up and followed her, again with the eagerness of a man headed for the gallows.

I knew him well enough to see the signs. He was putting himself into a role. I tagged along wondering what it would be. Most everybody else moved closer, too.

Two young people around twenty came puffing up over the side of the windwhale.

So the impossible was possible, the improbable a sure thing. Unless the army down there figured they could placate Darling with a couple of ringers.

The boy looked like Raven twenty years younger. Same dark hair and coloration, same determined face not yet hardened into grimness.

I was only a step behind when Raven got his first look at them. He cursed softly, muttered, "She looks like her mother."

It was plain they had not been told they were here for a family reunion. They were just puzzled and scared. Mostly scared. And more so as the mob closed in around them. They did not recognize Raven.

They did recognize Darling. And that scared them even more.

Everybody waited for somebody else to say something.

Raven whispered, "Do something, Case." Desperately. "I'm lost."

"Me? Hell, I don't even speak the lingo that good."

"Case, help me out. Try to get this moving. I don't know what to do."

All right. I thought of a couple of suggestions for him, but I was never a guy who kicked crippled dogs. I went to work in my feeble Jewel Cities dialect. "You have no idea why you were brought here, do you?"

They shook their heads.

"Relax. You ain't in no danger. We just want to ask about your ancestors. Especially your parents."

The boy rattled something.

"You'll have to talk slower, please."

The girl said, "He said out parents are dead. We've been on our own since we were children."

Raven winced. I figured the voice must be like that of his wife, too.

Silent translated for Darling, who really gave them the eye. Seeing they was Raven's kids, I didn't figure it was so amazing they pulled through.

"What do you know about your parents?"

The girl took on the answering chores. Maybe she thought her brother was too excitable. "Very little." She told me pretty much what I had been able to find out for myself when we were headed south. She did know that her mother had not been a nice person. "We've managed to live her down. Last year we won a judgment that took some of our father's properties from her family and returned them to us. We expect to win more such judgments."

That was something, anyway. The girl had conjured up no special regard for the woman who had brought her into the world.

The boy said, "I don't remember my mother at all. After our births I think she had as little to do with us as she could. I remember nurses. She probably got what she deserved."

"And your father?"

"I have vague memories of a very distant man who wasn't home much but who did visit when he was. Probably out of obligation and for appearance' sake."

"Do you have any special feeling about him now?"

"Why should we?" the girl asked. "We never really knew him, and he's been dead for fifteen years."

I faced Darling, signed, "Is there any point going on?"

She signed, "Yes. Not for their sake. For his."

I asked Raven, "You got anything to put in?"

No. He didn't. I could see him thinking maybe he was going to slide out of this after all.

It wasn't going to be that easy. Darling had me tell them that their father had not died, that he had been harried into exile by their mother's confederates. She had me hit the high spots of their years together.

They had had time to get over being scared. Now they were getting suspicious. The boy demanded, "What the hell is going on? How come these questions about our old man? He's history. We don't care. If he was to walk up right now and introduce himself I'd say so what. He'd be just another guy."

I signed to Darling, "You going to keep pushing it?" and asked Raven, in Forsberger, "You want to call his bluff?"

Negatives all around. Bunch of wimps. So Raven was going to slide out. I told his kids, "Your father was very important in the life of the White Rose. He was a stand-in parent to her for years and she knew how it pained him to be in exile. She stopped here because she wanted to try to give back something of what she'd had and you couldn't."

Neither Raven nor Darling liked me saying that.

I think the girl figured it out about then. She got real carefully interested in Raven. But she didn't say anything to her brother.

I got Darling to agree this was enough and our guests ought to be turned loose. She wasn't satisfied with the way things turned out. What the hell can you do with women? You can give them exactly what they ask for and they'll cuss you because that ain't what they really want.

Just before the girl went over the side she turned and told me, "If my father was alive today he wouldn't have to fear that he would be unwelcome in his daughter's house." Then she went.

All right. There was an open door if ever I seen one.

We took off the second the girl hit ground. Darling wanted to get far away before word she was there got to somebody who could do something about it. We lit out northeast, like we was headed for the Plain of Fear.

XXXIX

Every day more people came into Oar, and nobody left. A pigeon could not get out. Several had died trying.

Some elements of the population were growing restless. There were more fights than usual. More people ended up on the labor gangs. The searches went on and on and on. There was not a building in Oar that had not been tossed at least twice, not a citizen who had not been rousted. There were rumors of big tension in high places. Brigadier Wildbrand did not think she owed Gossamer and Spidersilk anything and resented having her Nightstalkers used as bullies for their personal benefit. They were elite troops, not political gangsters.

The nature of the people entering the city changed with time. Fewer were farmers or traders. More and more were dire characters with no obvious trade.

The news about the silver spike was spreading.

Smeds did not like it. It meant big trouble. How did Gossamer and Spidersilk expect to control all those witches and wizards, some of whom might be much more potent than they suspected? And the bullies they brought with them?

Chaos threatened.

Smeds understood the strategy. The twins meant to up the heat and pressure till the spike popped to the surface. If it came up in hands other than their own they were confident they could take it away.

Could they?

Every witch and wizard in town knew that, too. But they had come hunting anyway.

Only Tully was pleased. He thought the situation perfect for the auction he wanted to run. "We got to get the word out," he told the others, over supper.

"Keep your voice down," Fish said. "Anybody in here could be a spy. And we don't get any word out. You heard of anybody offering to buy anything?"

"No," Tully admitted. "But that's because—"

"Because most of them know they can be outbid. You notice the twins aren't offering anything. They figure they can get what they want by divine right, or something."

"Yeah, but—"

"You have no grasp of the situation, Tully. Let me offer you a challenge.…"

"I'm fed up with your shit, Fish."

"Indulge me in an experiment. If I'm wrong I'll shout it from the rooftops. If I'm right, you win anyway."

"Yeah? Let's hear it."

Sucked him up again, Smeds thought. His opinion of his cousin declined by the hour.

"Here's two coppers. Go find a kid somewhere away from here. One who don't know you. Pay him to go to the Toad and Rose and tell the bullies there that the wizard Nathan is looking to hire a couple men to help him sneak out of the city tomorrow morning."

"I don't get it."

Smeds said, "Gods, Tully, couldn't you just once do something without arguing about it first?"

Fish said, "The experiment will be more instructive if it simply unfolds, explaining itself as it goes."

"Why should I do that asshole Nathan any favors?"

Smeds stood up. "I'll do it. Otherwise we'll be here till the middle of next week."

"I want Tully to do it. I want him to see that there can be a direct connection between his saying something and what happens in the real world."

"You're putting me down again, ain'tcha?"

"Tully," Smeds said, "shut the fuck up or I'm going to brain you. Pick up the goddamned money, hit the goddamned street, find a kid, and pay him to deliver the goddamned message. Now."

Tully went. Smeds had gotten pretty intense.

"He's going to get us all killed," Timmy said as soon as he was gone.

"How's your hand coming?" Smeds asked.

"Real good. Don't try to distract me, Smeds."

"Easy, Timmy," Fish said. "I think there's a chance this trick will get through to him."

"Want to bet?"

"No."

Smeds would not have taken the bet either.

The wizard Nathan and his four men had rented rooms just up the street from the Skull and Crossbones. The grays came there shortly before dawn. They found five dead men and two rooms torn to shreds. They sealed the area, searched it again, asked a lot of questions. Fish made sure they all got a good look at the mess. He asked Tully, "You starting to catch on?"

"Who would do something like that, man? Why?"

"Nathan was a wizard. If he was going to sneak, that meant he'd found the spike and wanted to make a run for it."

"But he wasn't going to leave town."

"No. He wasn't, Tully. But you said he was."

Tully started to be Tully and argue, but he bit down on it and through for a moment before he said, "Oh."

"Next time you say something without thinking first or checking to see who's listening, that could be us all carved up."

Smeds said, "You maybe went too far to make your point, Fish."

"Why?"

"This ain't over yet. Those soldiers didn't find anything but a mess. They're going to figure whoever made the mess got the spike."

"Yeah. And maybe everybody else will think so, too. Maybe even the guys who actually did it. The next few days ought to be interesting. And part of the ongoing lesson."

"What're you blathering now?" Tully demanded.

"That was a big gang in that place, eh? Five pro thugs and a sorcerer. Nobody would try to take them alone. I figure there was at least three guys did it. Probably more. Unless they're a bunch that really trust each other they're going to have trouble. Every one of them is going to know he didn't get the spike, but he isn't going to be sure about the others."

Tully said, "Oh," again, and after a while, "This shit is getting scary. I never thought it would get this hairy."

"Your problem is you never thought," Timmy muttered, but Tully did not hear him.

Fish said, "It's just starting, Tully. It's going to get hairier. And if we want to come out of it with our skins on we're going to have to be very damned careful. These aren't nice or reasonable people. They aren't going to be interested in dealing till they got no other choice."

It got hairier fast, as more, and more powerful, thauma-turgic treasure hunters poured into the city. Old feuds having nothing to do with the spike flared. The citizenry, pressed from all sides, responded by rioting on a small scale. The twins presided smugly, doing nothing to retard the escalating violence.

Smeds spent a lot of time being sorry he had let Tully get him into this in the first place. Because of the other treasure they had brought home, the living was good, but not good enough, given that he had to watch his every word every minute and spent half his time looking over his shoulder to make sure disaster was not gaining on him.

XL

We were over the Forest of Cloud, south of Oar, east of Roses, west of Lords, hiding out from imperial eyes, too many of which had seen the windwhales cruising far from their proper range over the Plain of Fear. Darling wanted to let a little of the excitement die down before she moved on.

She would not let the tree god hurry her, though he was in a minor frenzy. I did not understand exactly what was up yet, but neither did some of the others, so we were getting an education from old Bomanz, who was suddenly Darling's number-one boy.

"Since you were all there you'll recall that in the course of the battle in the Barrowland the soul or essence, of the Dominator—the most evil being ever to walk this earth— was imprisoned in a silver spike, which was then driven into the trunk of a sapling sired by the tree god of the Plain of Fear." He really did talk that way when he had an audience.

"At the time it was believed that would effectively contain and constrain the residual evil of the man forever. The sapling was the scion of a god, invulnerable, unapproachable, and so long-lived as to be, in practical terms, immortal. As the sapling grew, its trunk would engulf the spike. In time the old evil would not persist in so much as memory.

"However. We thought wrong.

"A band of adventurers succeeded in stunning the sapling long enough to get in and prize the spike out. If we are to credit the sapling's own testimony—and we must, for the nonce, because it is the only testimony we have— none of those men had the least familiarity with the art, and were remarkable only because they came up with an idea that, logically, should have originated with someone devoted to the occult."

Damn him, he did talk like that when he had an audience. And he wouldn't stop.

"Gentlemen, the silver spike is loose in the world. It's not the Dominator. He's dead. But the undying black essence that drove him remains. And that could be used by an adept to summon, coerce, and shape powers even I cannot begin to imagine or fathom. That spike could become a conduit to the very heart of darkness, an opener of the way that would confer upon its possessor powers perhaps exceeding even those the Dominator possessed.

"Our mission, our holy mission, given the White Rose by Old Father Tree himself, is to recover the silver spike and deliver it for safekeeping, at whatever cost to ourselves, before someone of power seizes upon it and shapes it to his own dark purpose and is, in this turn, shaped— perhaps into a shadow so deep there would be no chance ever for the world to win free."

That bit about "at whatever cost to ourselves" got a big hand. The talking buzzard pulled his head out from under his wing, cracked an eye, went to town heckling the old wizard. That finally distracted him from his windier fancies.

"Buzzard, if you were fit to eat I'd be picking up kindling right now!" he shouted. Then he got back to business. "The tree god has reason to suspect that the spike is now in Oar. The White Rose, Silent, the Torques, and some of our smaller companions will drop into the city. With the help of the underground they will establish a secure base, then will take up the hunt. Raven, Case, and I, because of our considerable familiarity with the site, will go on to the Barrowland to see what can be learned there."

That started a bunch of bitching. Raven didn't like being sent off someplace where Darling wasn't. I didn't think these guys had the right to draft me into their adventure I got pretty hot.

Darling took me aside and calmed me down, then convinced me that even if I remained committed to the empire in my heart, helping her in this would not harm me. Maybe she was right when she said the evil she wanted to abort wouldn't respect allegiances or philosophies. That it would divide the world into two kinds of people, its enemies and its slaves.

That was a little heavy to get down in one or two bites but I said all right, I'm just following Raven around anyway. Might as well keep on keeping on.

So that was that. I gave in. I also started giving some thought to going back to herding potatoes as a career No potato never talked anybody into making a fool of himself.

XLI

Smeds came out onto the porch of the Skull and Cross-bones figuring to shoot the shit with Fish, but found the only empty chair stood between Fish and the Nightcrawler corporal. He wanted to turn around but felt like he was committed.

He plopped down. "Hey, Corp. Don't you never do nothing but sit here and drink beer?"

"Not if I can help it."

"That's the life. I oughta go sign up."

"Yeah? You wouldn't like it. Where was you at three in the morning?"

"In bed sleeping one off."

"Lucky you. Ask me where I was at three in the morning."

"Where were you at three in the morning?"

"With about two hundred others guys out Shant, where they got all those buildings tore down and nothing new put up yet. Looking for a monster. Some guy reported there was a monster out there bigger than the Civil Palace."

"Was there?"

"Not even a little one."

"Was the guy drunk?"

"Would a sober man be out there at that time of night?"

"Got something interesting coming here," Fish interjected, jutting his chin up the street.

Smeds saw three men and a woman. She was not much to look at and too old to be interesting anyway. But she looked tough. She carried weapons like a man.

As a bunch they looked as hard and tough as any Smeds had seen. But what made them stand out was the zoo they carried with them.

The woman had a live ferret draped around her neck and chipmunks peeking out of her pockets. The tall, dark, and darkly clad man who walked to her right carried an unhooded falcon on his left shoulder. The three men behind them— Smeds thought they might be brothers—carried a bunch of monkeys and one big snake.

Smeds asked, "You going to arrest them? They're lugging enough illegal hardware to start their own war."

"And give you boys a show? Eh? My mama's stupid babies never lived to make corporal." Even so, he stuck his fingers in this mouth and whistled. When those people looked he beckoned.

The tall man looked over with tight eyes for a moment, made a slight gesture at the man with the snake. That one came over. The snake looked them over like it was sizing them up for dinner. It gave Smeds the creeps.

The corporal said, "Just a friendly word of advice, pal. The city is under martial law. Ain't nobody supposed to tote a blade over eight inches long. 'Less he's wearing gray."

The snake man went back and told the tall man, who looked at the corporal hard for a moment, then nodded.

"You see that?" Smeds said. "That goddamned monkey gave us the finger."

The corporal said, "I seen that tall guy somewhere before. Down the length of a sword. Hunh! Well. Bucket's empty. Save my chair while I walk my lizard and get me a refill." He went inside.

"What you think of that bunch?" Smeds asked Fish.

"I've seen the tall one before, too. In the same circumstances as the corporal. A long time ago. No problem remembering where or when, either, since I was only ever in one battle."

That just puzzled Smeds. He asked, "You figure they're here after the dingus, too?" He could ask because by now everyone in town had a good idea what was going on.

"They're here for it, yes. They'll help make the game interesting."

"What're you yapping about, Fish?"

"Don't mind me, boy. Just an old man maundering. Ha! I thought so. Isn't there anymore, is it?"

Down the street the animals people had stopped in front of a place Timmy said used to be a butcher shop but these days was just another dump filled up with squatters. The tall man glanced back as though he had heard Fish. Then the whole bunch moved on, indifferent to stares.

The corporal came back out with his full pail and bladder empty. "I ought to give this shit up. Bothers my stomach." He took a drink. "Where were we?"

Fish said, "I was just going to ask you when they're going to unbutton the gates. Going to start getting hungry in here now the fanners won't bring anything in."

"They don't consult me on policy, Pop. But I'll tell you something. I don't think those two bitches give a rat's ass if everybody in Oar starves. They ain't going to go hungry."

Smeds was tired of listening to the corporal. "Going to get me something to drink." He went inside and had a beer drawn, wondered how long the supply would last. And how much more patience the people of Oar had. A while, for sure. Not that many were hurting yet. But if circumstances did not change a big blowup was inevitable.

Timmy Locan came in, got him a beer, stood beside Smeds awhile without saying anything, then suggested, "Let's go for a walk when we finish these."

"All right. I need the exercise."

When they were well away from the Skull and Cross-bones, passing through a construction area where they were unlikely to be overheard, Smeds asked, "Well? What's up?"

"You remember that doc that looked at my hand when we first came back?"

"Yeah." More than a twinge of guilt. He and Fish had not told the others what they had done. Tully was so indifferent he had not noticed that the physician and wizard were no longer among the living. Timmy had noticed, though, and Smeds supposed he had some definite suspicions about two such coincidental and convenient murders. "What about him?"

"It looks like he got whatever it was that I had and passed it around to everybody who came to see him. And they passed it on, too. Not like the plague or probably everybody would have it by now. But there's a couple hundred people got it already. The ones that have had it the longest… Well, they're worse off than I was. Yesterday a woman who had it killed herself. This morning a guy whose whole arm had gone black killed four of his kids who had it before he killed himself."

"That's awful. That's really gruesome. But it isn't anything we can do anything about."

"I know that. But the thing is, see, the grays have gotten interested. They're grilling everybody with the black stuff. From the questions they're asking you can tell they think there's a connection with the spike. They're trying real hard to find out about everybody who's had it and done something about it, like me."

"I don't think you need to worry, Timmy. They can't trace it back to you."

"Yeah? Those bitches are serious, Smeds. What happens after they find out all the trails lead back to that doc, who turned up among the dead right after the stuff started spreading? They're going to figure he had a fatal accident on account of somebody he treated didn't want to be remembered. And they already know the only way to treat the stuff is to cut off whatever it's eating on. So pretty soon the word goes out to the grays to grab amputees. Especially guys with missing hands."

"Maybe you got a point. Maybe we better see what Fish thinks."

Fish agreed with Timmy. There was no reason to think Gossamer and Spidersilk would not go so far are to order the arrest of all amputees. They were determined.

Fish did some heavy thinking. "I reckon it's time to blow some smoke."

"What do you mean?" Smeds asked.

"This situation—the whole city sealed up like a bottle— can't go on forever. There'll be a blowup. When that comes we break loose with everybody else. Till then we buy time by getting them off on a wild-goose chase, or by taking advantage of the potential for chaos they've created."

Smeds was bewildered. He grew more so when Fish said, "Get rid of whatever you've got that's silver. Get gold or copper or jewels or whatever, but get rid of your silver. Smeds, you pass the word to Tully and don't let him give you any shit."

"What's going on?"

"Just do it."

So they did. Even Tully, who had become reasonably serious and responsive since Fish's demonstration of the deadly power of the loose word.

XLII

We arrived in the Barrowland by sliding down ropes with our possessions strapped on our backs. A few Plain creatures joined us. More would after we set up a safe camp. The boss menhir wanted a couple of his flint-hearted buddies there to keep an ear on us. The better to maintain quick communication, he said. Right.

The better to make sure things got done the tree god's way.

"Back where we got started," Raven said as soon as we had our feet on the ground. He'd been getting more fit to live with since Opal. He was almost back to being the old boy I'd known when I first met him.

"Back in the cold and wet," I grumped. It had been the tag end of winter when we'd left. It was sneaking up on winter again now. The leaves had fallen. We could get snow anytime. "Let's don't fool around, eh? Let's do what we got to and get out."

Raven chuckled. "How you going to keep them on the farm after they've seen the big city?"

"A little less ruckus, please," Bomanz said. "We don't yet know there aren't any imperials around."

He was halfway right. We hadn't yet seen that with our own eyes, but the Plain creatures had scouted and reported nothing bigger than a rabbit within five miles. I could trust them on that.

Bomanz had to do some wizard stuff before he was satisfied. Then he let us set up housekeeping and start a fire.

We dragged out with morning twilight and ate some god-awful cold yuck. Then we split up.

I got the town and military compound because I knew them best. Raven took the woods. Bomanz got the Barrowland itself. Near as I could tell he wasn't going to do anything but stand in the middle and take a nap.

The Plain creatures were supposed to do anything they wanted and clue us if they found anything.

I needed to do only a rough once-over to see what had happened in town. There wasn't nothing but bones left. Poking around wasn't as bad as it could have been. I did everything I could think of to find out something useful, then I went back to camp. Bomanz was just about where I'd left him, eyes still closed, but taking little tippy-toe baby steps.

At least he was moving.

Raven came back. "You done already?"

"Yep."

"Find anything?"

"A whole lot of bones. Enough to build an army of skeletons."

"Got you down, eh?"

"I knew all them guys."

"Yeah." He didn't say anything else, just waited. He can be an all-right guy when he isn't busy feeling sorry for himself.

"I figure the Limper and Toadkiller Dog did the killing. But there was somebody else there after them. Somebody went through like a mother picking a baby's nits. There ain't nothing left there that's even remotely valuable."

Raven though about that. "Nothing at all?"

"Picked as clean as the bones."

"That might be an angle to follow up in Oar. Though they would have taken only what they could carry, and that would be the kind of thing that isn't going to make a splash. Unless they did something gaudy. Which if they had they would be in the hands of the imperials already."

Bomanz joined us. He puttered around making tea while Raven told us he'd found two campsites probably used by the guys we were after, but nothing that would help us.

"If there ever was anything here the imperials got to it first."

"And if they had," Bomanz said, "they would have the spike by now."

We'd gotten reports from Oar through the stones. The news was not encouraging. It looked like a couple of imperial bigwigs were out to grab the spike and go into the empire business for themselves.

"You learn anything?" Raven asked.

Bomanz said, "Not much. There were four of them. Probably. They got away with what they did because most of the time the sapling was preoccupied with Toadkiller Dog and did not perceive them as a threat. It thought they were throwing sticks at it as a gesture of defiance."

"Sticks?" I asked.

"They threw sticks at the tree until it was almost buried. Then they set the pile on fire."

Raven muttered, "You don't have to be brilliant to be a god."

I said, "We got them now."

"What?" That Bomanz never did figure out you could be joking.

"All we got to do is look for four guys with splinters in their fingers."

Bomanz scowled. Raven chuckled. He asked, "Do we know anything about these men at all?"

Bomanz grumbled, "We don't even know they were men."

"Great."

Raven said, "Since we can't get anywhere with who, why not work on when? Can we pin down any dates? Even approximately? Then work back from them to whose movements fit?"

That sounded pretty feeble to me and I said so. "Even if Oar hadn't been attacked and half the people killed and the other half kept crazy ever since…"

"Forget I brought it up. Well, wizard, is it worth us hanging around here? Or should we go down to Oar and try to smoke them out?"

"Tentatively—pending reports from our allies from the Plain—I'd say we're wasting our time here."

The weirder side of the outfit didn't come up with anything either. At sundown we clambered back aboard our smelly airborne steed planning on having breakfast in Oar.

I was looking forward to my first decent meal in months.

XLIII

Smeds was amazed. That bastard Fish sure could stir some shit.

There was a rumor got started that this silversmith down on Sedar Row—where all the silversmiths and goldsmiths and such were located—had had a guy bring in a giant silver nail and pay him a hundred obols to turn it into a chalice and keep his mouth shut about it. Only this smith had got to celebrating his good fortune last night and had had too much to drink and had bragged to some of his cronies after swearing them to secrecy.

Today a man's life was worthless if he had anything to do with the metalworking or jewelry trades. Those who were out after the spike were getting desperate. They were stumbling over each other and causing a lot of damage in the process. Mostly to one another.

The grays were late getting into the game but when they did they did not fool around, they came with a vengeance, sweeping through the city confiscating every piece of silver they found on the assumption the spike could have been turned into anything by now. They tried giving claim chits but people were having none of that. They had been robbed by the military before.

There was resistance. There was localized rioting. People and soldiers were hurt and killed. But there were too many soldiers and even now most people were not angry enough to rebel.

"Pretty sneaky, Fish," Smeds told the old man, walking down a street where he felt safe talking. "Mean sneaky."

"It worked. That don't mean I'm proud of it."

"It worked all right. But for how long?"

"I figure three, four days. Maybe five if I feed the rumor a couple of new angles. Plus however long it takes Gossamer and Spidersilk to decided the spike isn't in any of the silver the soldiers are collecting up. So we'll be all right for maybe a week. Unless one of the free-lancers stumbles onto us somehow. But in the long run we're still had. They'll get us one way or another. Unless this backward siege breaks. Let even ten people get out of this city and get away and you've opened the whole world up to the search. Because if there's a successful breakout the man who has the spike is sure to be one of the first people gone."

"He is?"

"Wouldn't you figure that if you were in the place of the twins?"

"I guess."

"Every day they send more men to guard the walls. I don't know, but I think they're maybe working against a deadline. If they are, we might use that against them."

"A deadline? How's that?"

"Those two aren't anywhere near top dogs in the empire. Sooner or later their bosses have got to get suspicious about what they're up to. Or one of them might decide to come up here and grab off the spike for himself."

"We should have left the sucker where it was and settled."

"We should have. But we didn't. We have to live and maybe die with that. And make no mistake, Smeds. We're in a fight for our lives. You, me, Timmy, Tully, we're all dead if they ever get close to us."

"If you're trying to scare the shit out of me, Fish, you're doing a damned good job."

"I'm trying to scare you because I'm petrified myself and you're the only one I think is steady enough to help me. Tully doesn't have any backbone at all and Timmy has been living in kind of a daze ever since he lost his hand."

"I got a feeling I'm not going to like whatever you're going to say. What're you thinking?"

"One of us needs to steal some white paint. Not buy it but steal it, because a seller might remember who he sold it to."

"I can handle that. I know where to get it. If the grays aren't sitting on it. What're we going to do with it?"

"Try to change the focus of this whole mess. Try to politicize it."

There he went getting mysterious again. Smeds did not understand but decided he did not have to as long as Fish knew what he was doing.

That evening was the first time Tully asked to borrow money. It was a trivial amount and he paid it back next morning, so Smeds thought nothing of it.

That night was the first night Smeds fell asleep thinking about Old Man Fish and how he seemed to have no conscience at all once you got to know him. It was like Fish had decided he was going to get through this mess and get his share from the spike even if he had to sacrifice everybody in Oar. That didn't seem like the Fish he'd always known. But the Fish he'd always known hadn't ever had anything at stake.

He could not be sure where he stood himself. He was neither a thinker nor a doer. He had spend his life drifting, doing what he had to do to get by and not much more.

He did know that he did not want to die young or even to answer questions on the imperial rack. He knew he did not want to be poor again. He had done that and having money was better. Having a lot of money, like from selling the spike, would be even better.

He could arrive at no alternative to Fish's methods of achieving salvation, so he would go on going along. But with an abiding disquietude.

XLIV

Toadkiller Dog observed the quickening through tight eyes. He was an ancient thing and had dealt with sorcerers all his days. They were a treacherous breed. And the smell of betrayal hung thick in that monastic cellar.

He had located the necessary help more quickly than he had expected, in a country called Sweeps, a hundred miles west, where a bloody feud between families of wizards had raged unchecked for three generations. He had examined the respective families and he decided the Nacred had skills best suited to his needs. He had made contact and had struck a bargain: his help overcoming their enemies in return for theirs reconstructing his "companion."

He had told them nothing about the Limper.

The Shaded clan had ceased to exist, root and branch, sorcerers, wives, and nits that might have grown to become lice.

The twelve leading Nacred were there in the cellar, crowded around the trough of oil where the head, wedded to its new clay body, awaited a final quickening. They muttered to one another in a language he did not understand. They knew betrayal at this point would be painful and expensive.

They had seen him in action during the scouring of the Shaded. And he had been a cripple then.

He had made sure he got his own new limb first.

He growled, just a soft note of caution, an admonition to get on with it.

They did the thing that had to be done. One of the fool monks who had stayed around to restore the monastery served as the sacrifice.

Color flowed over the surface of the gray clay. It twitched and shivered almost as if it were becoming genuine flesh.

The body sat up suddenly, oil streaming off it. The Nacred sorcerers jumped back, startled. The Limper ran hands that had been clay over a body that had been clay. His smile became an ecstatic grin. "Mirror!" he said. His voice was a thunder. He looked at himself, ran fingers lovingly over a face that far exceeded the original at its best.

A bellow of rage nearly brought the ceiling down.

Toadkiller Dog caught one glimpse of what the Limper saw in the mirror.

The gorgeous new fading to reality. Truth. His face as it existed without the cosmetic overlay.

The Limper flung out of the trough, grabbed it up, hurled its contents around the cellar. The Nacreds retreated, shouted back, hastily prepared their defenses. They did not understand what was happening.

Toadkiller Dog understood. He knew the Limper's rages. This one was almost wholly contrived.

He had been looking in the wrong place when he had been watching the Nacreds for treachery. The Limper was the source of the foul smell.

He attacked. And in midleap recognized his error.

The Limper used the trough to deflect his charge, dashed to the doorway he had been blocking with his bulk. The Limper laughed, pranced up the stairs ahead of Nacred spells. Toadkiller Dog flung after him, but too late.

The stairwell collapsed.

Toadkiller Dog started digging.

"It won't be that easy, my fine pup. You thought you would use me, eh? Eh? Me! I let you think you could till you did what I needed done. Now enjoy your tomb. It's better than you deserve but I have no time to prepare you a more suitable fate." Mad laughter. Tons of earth poured in on what had collapsed already.

Toadkiller Dog dug furiously but stopped after a moment, snarled at the panic in the darkness behind him. In the ensuing silence he listened very carefully.

North! The Limper was headed north! He was crazier than ever but he had turned away from his mad quest for revenge.

There was just one answer to that puzzle. He had set vengeance aside in hopes of gathering more power.

Toadkiller Dog growled once, softly, almost amused. The shields were off the claws now.

XLV

If you dipped a wad of cotton in paint, then sponged semicircles around a common center you could create a passable imitation of a rose, Smeds discovered.

After the excitement of the search for Fish's phantom silversmith had died and he had failed to sell the rumor that one of the twins had taken possession already and was hiding it from her sister, the old man had decided to loose his final bolt. To take advantage of the potential for chaos. To add a new level of distraction to the mess plaguing Oar.

Which was why Smeds was out after midnight with a bucket of paint for the third night running. Fish had sent him to mark selected points with the sign of the White Rose to give the impression that there was an angry underground about to respond to imperial excesses.

Fish was after a slower but grander effect this time. He wanted the whole city to hear and begin to hope and believe. He wanted the grays to start worrying. The rest, he said, should take care of itself.

Smeds finished his three roses and headed home. Elsewhere Fish was painting roses of his own. Smeds had done two the night before and three the night before that, all in places where a partisan strike would be appreciated sincerely by the mass of citizens. Slow and easy, Fish said. Let it build.

Fish had had a stroke of luck last night. He had stumbled onto a couple of grays who had gotten themselves killed somehow and had painted white roses on their foreheads, claiming them for the movement he wanted to create out of the collective anger.

Smeds did not like this game. Too dangerous. They had people enough after them from directions enough already. He had worries enough with the spike hunters.

But that was not on his mind as he stole toward the Skull and Crossbones. He was mulling the puzzle presented by Tully. Earlier in the evening Tully had borrowed money from him for the fourth time in eight days, this time a fair sum and before he had repaid the last loan.

Smeds never approached the Skull and Crossbones in a hurry. That Nightstalker corporal would catch him sure, first time he did.

One peek and he knew he wasn't going in the front way. The corporal and his cronies occupied the porch. So it was the long way around and slide in the back.

And that was no good either. He found trouble on the way. And it almost found him.

Two men were lounging inside the mouth of the skinny, scruffy alley that passed behind the Skull and Crossbones. He would have walked into them if one had not coughed and and the other had not told him to shut up.

What was this? Smeds felt no inclination to ask. He settled into a shadow to wait them out.

A half hour passed. Came the hour. Nothing happened except one man coughed and the other told him to shut up. They were bored. Smeds began to nod.

A third man arrived running. "He's coming," he said, then darted over to hide not eight feet from Smeds. Smeds was wide-awake now.

Sure enough, someone was coming, and from the sound of his steps he was a little bit drunk. He was talking to himself, too.

Smeds suffered one startled moment of recognition, then Timmy was into the ambush and the men jumped him so fast he never got a chance to yell.

Smeds almost jumped in. He half rose, half drew his knife. Then he realized that the most he could hope to do was get himself killed by the other two after he got the first one he reached.

What the hell was he going to do?

He was going to follow them. See where they took Timmy, then get Fish and… And listen to Fish tell him he didn't have ball one.

For sure too late to do anything here, now. He had to follow them.

He had no idea who they were but a strong suspicion as to what: bully boys for a free-lance spike hunter who had decided to interview citizens who were short a hand.

Following was less trouble than he had expected. Timmy fought them all the way. That kept them from devoting much attention to their surroundings. And they did not go that far, just a quarter mile into an area of fire-gutted buildings condemned but not yet demolished, so bad the squatters had not moved in.

They took Timmy inside one of those. Smeds stood in a shadow and looked at it and wondered what he was going to do and kept hearing Fish say they were fighting for their lives now.

He'd never been much of a fighter. He'd always walked away when he could. When he could not he'd always gotten whipped. He hadn't had the desire or meanness, or whatever, even when he'd had no choice.

Which got him to remembering all the bullies who had taunted and slapped and shoved him around and puzzling the eternal why did they do it when he'd never done a thing to them. The old anger bubbled up, along with the nerve-tingling vengeance fantasies, the miasma of bitter hatred.

One of the men came back out of the building, urinated into the street, backed off, and just leaned against the wall. He didn't act like he was doing anything but just hanging out. He wasn't alert enough to be a sentinel.

Smeds staggered forward without the slightest damned idea what he was doing. Besides shaking so bad his toe-nails rattled.

He stumbled, went down on one knee onto a broken brick, could not silence a whining curse, and in the shock of pain suffered an inspiration.

He came up limping, stumbling, muttering to himself.

He headed straight for the man, sort of singing, "Once there was a farmer's daughter, couldn't behave like a maiden ought-er."

The thug was alert now. But he did not move.

Smeds did a pratfall, giggled, got onto his hands and knees, pretended a bout with attempted upchucking, then got his feet under him and headed out. Straight into the wall about ten feet from the man watching him. He backed off muttering, looked at the wall like he couldn't understand where it had come from. Then he put one hand against it for support and started stumbling toward the thug. At a distance of four feet he pretended to take first notice of the man, who was watching more with amused contempt than with suspicion.

Smeds made a little "Gleep!" he hoped sounded startled and frightened and silently thanked whatever gods there might be that he hadn't been recognized. Now if the guy just stayed in character and tried to roll him in the guise of helping…

Smeds stumbled and went down onto hands and knees.

"Looks like you had one too many, old buddy." The thug stepped over.

Smeds made gagging sounds. Inside, he was listening to Old Man Fish. "Like taking a woman, Smeds. Slide it in. Don't stab."

The man started giving him a hand up. He did not see the blade in Smeds's palm. Smeds leaned against him and began sliding in between his ribs, into his heart.

One part of Smeds stood outside, guiding his hand. The rest was in a passion of terror and horror, oblivious to the world. Only one coherent thought splashed across that chaos. It was a lie that killing got easier each time you did it.

When he came out of the fog, consciously, he was a hundred feet away, dragging a still-twitching body.

"What the hell am I… ?"

Getting it out of sight, of course. Because this was just the start.

He heard a muted scream and realized that another such had opened the first rent in the fog that had possessed him.

Smeds went into the building with the caution and intense concentration of a stalking cat. He compartmented his emotion, did not let them torment him when Timmy screamed. He used the cries to move a few quick steps each time.

What the hell was he doing?

The screams came from a basement. Smeds started down the steps, so committed he moved as though under a compulsion. Six steps down he hunkered, then almost stood on his head to get a look around.

The base of the stair ended a few feet from a doorway without a door in it. Light and the screams came through that. Smeds eased down a couple more steps, then carefully lowered himself over the side, got underneath the stair, looked around.

It was hard to see much, but it looked like the fires had been gentle here. This part of the basement was untouched. There wasn't a whiff of old smoke.

He could make our most of what was being said in that other room. Someone was asking Timmy impatient questions. Another two men were bickering about the character Smeds had killed. One was worried that the man had run out, the other didn't give a damn.

Under the stair was not the place to be if someone decided to go looking. The light from the room would give him away. Smeds moved out carefully, got behind a pile of junk to the left of the doorway.

And there he squatted, unable to think of anything to do.

Timmy passed out or something. He wasn't yelling anymore. One man was grumbling about that while the other two went on about the man in the street. The grumbler snapped, "He has been gone too long. Give me some peace. Go find him. Both of you."

Two men stomped out and headed upstairs, still arguing. They were the other two who had snatched Timmy.

Smeds rose, stretched, drifted over till he could see into the room.

Timmy was tied into a chair, slumped forward, unconscious. A man bent over him, back to Smeds. Too good to be true. He slapped Timmy. "Come on! Come out of it. Don't die on me now. We're too close to the truth."

Slide it in, slide it in, Smeds told himself, gliding toward the man.

The man sensed danger, started to turn, eyes and mouth opening.…

Too late.

Smeds's knife pierced his heart. He made a grisly noise that wasn't quite a scream, tried to get hold of Smeds, folded up.

Maybe it was easier after all.… The detachment went. His heart hammered. His hands shook. His breath came in gasps. He stumbled over to Timmy, cut the ropes binding him… Gods! They'd burned out one of his eyes! They'd…

Timmy fell over on his face.

Smeds got down and tried to bring him out of it. "Hey! Timmy! Come on. It's me. Smeds. Come on. We got to get out of here before those other guys come back."

Then it hit him. "Shit!" Timmy had croaked. "Son of a bitch! I come in here and risk my ass for nothing.…" Except maybe for whatever Timmy told them before he checked out.

Then he felt like a total shit, getting pissed at Timmy for dying and inconveniencing him. Then he got confused, not knowing what to do about the fact that he was in here and still had to get out and there were bodies here something probably ought to be done about.

"Hey, Abel!" somebody shouted from outside. "You better come check this out. Somebody offed Tanker."

Smeds dropped Timmy's hand, frantically jerked his knife out of the dead man—wizard?—and got himself over beside the doorframe as the someone yelled, "You hear me, Abel?" Feet thump-thump-thumped down the stairs.

"We're maybe in deep shit here. Somebody stuck a knife in Tanker… What the shit is going on here?"

The man had stopped just outside the doorway. Smeds came around thrusting at what he guessed should be chest height… and discovered that the big voice belonged to the smallest of the thugs. He turned the thrust into an uppercut, drove his blade up and in under the man's chin, not sliding it, driving it with all the force of panic into the man's brain.

He had not looked the other two in the eye at their moment of realization. Gods! That was scary. He jumped back, stumbled over Abel and Timmy, fell on his back as his victim toppled forward.

Before Smeds was all the way back on his feet someone else called some question downstairs. He dove over to reclaim his knife. The man continued to move, one leg slowly pumping. For a moment he thought of a dog trying to scratch. Crazy.

The damned knife was wedged in bone. It wouldn't come loose. He scrambled around looking for another weapon, any weapon, while the voice from the head of the stairs asked several questions more. All Smeds could come up with was the dead man's own knife, which he pulled from its sheath with a sort of superstitious dread.

He got against the wall beside the doorway again and waited. And waited. And waited.

In time the shakes went away. The nerves calmed some. He realized that his latest victim could be seen from the stairs.

He waited some more.

He had to make a move. The longer he dicked around, the more time there would be for something to go wrong.

His muscles did not want to unlock. He was completely terrified of the consequences of making any move.

But he did, finally, drag himself around far enough to peek through the doorway.

Morning light spilled down from upstairs. It showed him nothing to fear. He made his feet move. He found no trouble on the ground floor. From the doorway he could see nothing but desolation, city badlands where not a soul stirred. He wanted to run, all the way to the Skull and Crossbones.

He bore down, did what had to be done, dragging the body out of the street, to the cellar, where it was less likely to be discovered soon. Then he headed for home. But he did not run, though his legs insisted they had to stretch out and go.

XLVI

We dropped into Oar in the middle of the night but we didn't find Darling and them till noon next day, and then only because we had Bomanz along to sniff them out. They weren't where they were supposed to be. Meantime, I ran into two guys that I knew from when me and Raven were staying in Oar, and they wanted to talk talk talk.

Nobody in town had much else to do.

"Things don't look good," Raven said as we drifted through the streets, following Bomanz's sorcerous nose. "All these people packed in here, no chance to get out, food stocks probably getting low, plague maybe getting ready to break out. The place is ripe. Would have been long gone if this was high summer and the heat was eating up everybody's tolerance. You know anything about these twins?"

He wasn't talking to me. When it comes to sorcerers and sorcery I don't know nothing about nothing except I want to stay out of the way.

"Never heard of them," Bomanz said. "That doesn't mean anything. The Lady had a whole crop coming up."

"How do you think you'd stack up against them?"

"I don't plan to find out."

I spotted a white rose painted on a door. "Look there." They looked. Other people were looking, too, and trying not to be noticed doing it.

"That damned screw-up Silent," Raven growled. "He's talked her into doing something stupid."

"Who you trying to bullshit?" I asked. "When did anybody ever talk Darling into doing something she didn't want to do?"

He grumbled some, then grumbled some more.

Bomanz's nose picked out their hideout then, and after some shibboleth stuff we got into the cellar where Darling was holding court with a gang of leftovers from Oar's Rebel heyday. They didn't look like much to me.

Raven grunted. He wasn't impressed either. He reported the high points of our visit to the Barrowland. That didn't take a minute, even using sign. Then Darling let us in on the situation in Oar, which took a lot longer than a minute.

Raven wanted to know what she was doing, painting white roses around town. She said she wasn't. In fact, she said nobody that had anything to do with the movement admitted doing it. Since none of those roses had been seen before she arrived she thought somebody recognized her in the street and was trying to get something stirred up.

She didn't have a shred of evidence. Didn't seem likely to me. Anybody that recognized her, that wasn't personally committed to the cause, should ought to go for the bounty on her, the way I figured. She would fetch a good price, and Silent not a bad sum, and even the Torque brothers were good for a chunk that could keep you in beans for a long time.

Raven figured it the way I did. But he wasn't going to argue with Darling, so he asked if there had been any progress finding the silver spike.

"None," she signed. "We have been very busy stampeding around old ground already covered by other hunters, finding nothing while we ate their dust. In the meantime our small allies have been busy spying on those other hunters that our brothers of the movement have identified for us."

Bomanz wanted names. He got them. A long string, with a half dozen noted as having enlisted with the deceased.

"You know any of those people?" Raven asked.

"No. But I've been out of touch. The curious angle is, there hasn't been any attention from the Tower. This thing is pulling in every hedge wizard and tea-leaf reader with a smidge of ambition. These twins are pretty plainly up to exactly what you'd expect from their kind faced with an opportunity like this. News like this gets around faster than the clap. It's got to have reached the Tower. Why isn't some real heavyweight up here to sit on those two?"

I suggested, "Because they don't have windwhales to carry them around and all their flying carpets got skragged back when."

"They have other resources."

There wasn't no point worrying about it since we weren't going to come up with an answer.

Raven wanted to know how the other guys were trying to find the spike. He figured maybe the problem was that the hunters were attacking it from the wrong direction.

Darling signed, "Spidersilk and Gossamer have made repeated direct searches. They also provoke and watch the other hunters, who have been concentrating on finding the men who stole the spike and brought it to Oar."

I asked, "How do we know the damned thing is even here?"

Bomanz said, "You can sense it. Like a bad smell."

"But you can't tell where it is?"

"Only very vaguely. Right now I'd guess it's somewhere north of us. But I can't narrow that directionality to below about a hundred thirty degrees of arc." He raised his arms to show what he meant. "It's the nature of the thing to maximize the evil around it. If it could be sniffed out easily there would be little chance for the play of chaos. It isn't sentient but it responds to and feeds back the dark emotions and ambitions around it. One way to find the men who brought it out of the Barrowland might be to look for people who were out of town during the proper time period and who have shown changed patterns of behavior. Generally, aggravated tendencies toward indulging weaknesses they've had all along."

Darling got that from Silent. She signed back, "That method has been tried. Without success. The Limper's raid killed so many and left people so mixed around that the necessary information cannot be gathered."

"There's got to be a way," Raven carped.

One of the local guys said, "Gossamer and Spidersilk already thought of it. Get so many bad guys in that the thieves have to panic and do something to give themselves away. Sooner or later."

"Dumb," Raven said. He sneered. "All they'd have to do is snip a few loose ends, if there were any, and sit tight."

"That's what they're doing. We think." The guy went off about some really gruesome disease called the black hand that had been traced to a physician that got himself knifed an eyeblink after the twins closed the city. There was still some debate, but a lot thought the black hand maybe got started when somebody accidentally touched the spike barehand, then passed it on when he went to the physician for help. The physician passed it around to his clients and they passed it around some more, till the soldiers rounded them up so they couldn't.

Darling signed, "The twins cleave to this theory. The physician's murder was witnessed. Two men were involved. They have not been identified or even well described."

The local man went on about theories and about how none of the people with the black hand had had anything to do with grabbing the spike. The twins made sure of that right away. So there was some guy running around who maybe had been fixed up by the doc and that was an angle a lot of hunters were working.

"Maybe," I said. "But what if maybe his buddies was smart enough to put him six feet under?"

Seemed like nobody had thought about that. Nice people tend to think everybody is nice.

"What about them roses?" I asked. "If it ain't your people painting them, who is? And why?"

"A diversion, obviously," Raven said. "If we could catch whoever is doing it we might get a break."

The local talker said, "Go teach your grandma to suck eggs, fella. We've got everybody we have on the street, calming people down and asking questions. Tonight everybody is going to be watching likely places to put more up. We see somebody, he'll be over here answering questions before he can blink."

I sat myself down out of the way, fixing to take a nap. "Want to bet they don't walk into it?"

XLVII

Does clay tire? Does the earth? No. The clay man loped northward, hour after hour and mile after mile, day and night, pausing seldom and then only to freshen the coat of grease, spell-supported, that retained moisture and kept the clay supple.

The miles passed away. The hulks of raped cities fell behind. Suns rose and set. He crossed the southern frontier of the northern empire. It was early in the day.

He had not gone far when he realized he was being paced by imperial cavalry. He slowed. They slowed. He stopped. They drifted into cover and waited.

They had been waiting for him. His return had been expected.

How? By whom? For how long? What lay ahead, specially prepared for him?

He resumed his run, but more slowly, his senses keyed.

The cavalry worked in relays, no party riding more than five miles before being relieved. If he turned toward them they retreated. When he held to the road they closed in slowly, as though carefully daring his might. He suspected they wanted him to pursue them. He refused. He followed the road. In time he increased his pace.

A subtle mind opposed him.

After a while the indrift of the riders sharpened, like a charge starting to take shape.…

His attention ensnared thus, he nearly missed the slight discoloration, the minuscule sag, in the road ahead. But catch it he did. Pit trap. He hurled himself forward in a prodigious leap.

Missiles filled the air. Several slammed into him, batting him around, and he knew he had been taken. Arrows from saddle bows were whistling around him before he regained his equilibrium. The cavalry to his left had grown a little too daring. He faced them, about to welcome them with death.

A five-hundred-pound stone ripped across his right shoulder so close it brushed away the protective grease. He jumped, whirled. If that had caught him square… He sensed no presence on which to spend his wrath. He whirled again. The cavalry were galloping away, already beyond retribution.

He removed the shafts from his body, surveyed the area. There was no pit. Just the appearance of one with a trigger board much better hidden under the dust where his foot must fall if he was going to jump over. Even the stone had been hurled by an engine triggered remotely and fortune had placed him a step out of the line of fire.

That was the first trap. The next was a bridge over a small, sluggish river. Barrels of naphtha had been rigged beneath it, fixed to break open and catch fire when he stepped upon the bridge decking.

This time the diversionary troops waited atop a ridge beyond the river. Light engines hurled missiles at him as he used his power to jam the mechanism meant to breach the barrels and start the fire.

A five-pound rock hit him in the chest, flung him backward. He sprang up angrily and sprinted toward his tormentors.

Held only by a feeble peg, the center section of the bridge collapsed under his weight. The falling timbers smashed the naphtha barrels. A swarm of fire missiles was in the air before he hit water.

They had made a fool of him twice.

They would not live to try a third time.

He came boiling out of the water, up the bank below the burning bridge, into the face of renewed missile fire, bellowing…

He tripped something. A vast net flew up, toward, and over him. Its cables were as strong as steel but of a sticky, flexible substance like spider silk. The more he struggled, the more tangled he became. And something kept drawing the net tighter and dragging him back toward the water. He would have great difficulty with the verbal parts of his sorcery beneath the river.

The knowledge of the possibility that he might be vanquished by lesser beings stabbed through him like a blade of ice. He was up against something he could not overcome by brute force.

The blow of fear—the existence of which he could not confess even to himself—stilled his rage, made him take time to think, to act appropriately.

He tried a couple of sorceries. The second effected a break in the net just before he was pulled beneath the surface.

He came out of the river carefully, with concentration, and so avoided a trap armed with a blade that could have sliced him in two. Safe for the moment, he took stock. Minor, all the damage done him. But a dozen such encounters could accumulate into something crippling.

Was that the strategy? Wear him down? Likely, though each phase of each trap had been vicious enough.

He proceeded much more carefully, his emotions, his madness, under tight rein. Vengeance could await achievement of the more important triumph in the north. Once he had taken that keystone of power he could requite the world a thousand times for its cruelties and indignities.

There were more traps. Some were deadly and cunning. He did not escape unscathed, alert as he was. His enemies did not rely upon sorcery. They preferred mechanisms and psychological ploys, which for him were more difficult to handle.

Not once did he see anyone other than the cavalrymen who dogged him. He found the gates of the great port city Beryl standing open and its streets empty. Nothing stirred but leaves and bits of trash, tossed by winds from the sea. The hearthstones were cold and even the rats had gone away. Not a pigeon or sparrow swooped through the air.

The murmur of the wind seemed like the cold whisper of the grave. In that desolation even he could feel alone and lonely in spirit.

There were no ships in the harbor, no boats on the waterfront. Not so much as a punt. The haze-distorted shape of a single black quinquirireme hovered beyond the harbor light, well out to sea. There was a statement here. He would not be allowed to cross the sea. He was sure that whichever way he chose to walk along the coast he would find the shores naked of boats.

He considered swimming. But that black ship would be waiting for that. He was so massive that all his energy would have to go to staying afloat. He would be vulnerable.

Moreover, salt water would leak through his protective spells and gnaw at the grease, and then at the clay…

So there was little choice. He must do what they wanted him to do and go around. He pictured the map, chose what seemed to be the shorter way. He began running to the east.

The horsemen paced him the rest of that day. When dawn came they were gone. After a few hours he became confident enough to increase his pace. Curse them. He would do what they wanted and slaughter them anyway.

The miles passed away as they had before he had entered the empire.

As he ran he pondered the hidden purpose behind his having been turned onto this extended course. He could not prize loose the sense of it.

XLVIII

Smeds found Old Man Fish as soon as he had gotten himself some rest. Fish listened intently and watched him through narrowed eyes as he told his tale. "Didn't think you'd have what it takes, Smeds."

"Me neither. I was scared shitless the whole time."

"But you thought, and you did what you had to do. That's good. Think you'd know the man who got away if you saw him again?"

"I don't know. It was dark and I never got a real good look at him."

"We'll worry about him later. Thing we got to do now is get rid of those bodies. Where's Tully?"

"Who knows? Probably sleeping. Why not just leave them where they are? It ain't like they're out where somebody's going to trip over them."

"Because somebody besides you and me knows where they are and he might tell somebody else who might go take a look and maybe recognize Timmy Locan as a guy who used to hang around with you and me and Tully. Get it?"

"Got it." Also, maybe Fish wanted a look just to make sure Timmy had gone out the way Smeds said he had. Smeds was related to Tully Stahl and Fish already had a habit of not taking on faith anything that Stahl said.

"So get Tully and let's move."

Smeds went inside the Skull and Crossbones, nodding to the Nightstalkers corporal as he passed. The owner, who didn't have much use for them, scowled at him across the common room. Smeds had to pass close by him. The man asked, "You boys going to pay for your room? You're two days late."

"Tully was supposed to take care of it. It's his turn."

"Surprise, friend. Tully didn't. And he's running a pretty steep beer tab, too. Another day or two, I'll mention it to your buddy the corporal." He grinned wickedly. Nothing he'd like better than to send them to the labor companies.

Smeds held his eye till he flinched, then tossed him a coin. "There's for the rent. I'll tell Tully to cover his tab."

Tully was not asleep. He'd maybe heard some of that. He was pretending. Smeds said, "Come on. We've got work to do." When Tully didn't move, he added, "I'm going to count to five, then I'm going to kick your ribs in."

Tully sat up. "Shit, Smeds. You get more like that asshole Fish every day. What's so damned important you got to get me out of bed?"

"In the street." Meaning he couldn't say there, where somebody might hear. "On our way out you might pay the landlord what you owe him. He's getting edgy. Talking about mentioning you to that corporal."

Tully shuddered. "Shit. That asshole. How about you cover it for me for now, Smeds? I'll get it back to you soon as I can sneak off and tap my stash."

Smeds eyed him. "All right. We'll be waiting outside. Don't fool around." He went out, tossed a heavy coin at the landlord as he passed, said, "Don't give him no more credit," and joined Fish outside. "Back when we hit town I figured my share of the cash take should keep me pretty good for four or five years. How about you?"

"Easy. I'm an old man. My needs are simple. What's up?"

"Tully. You think even a dipshit like him could have blown his whole share already?"

"Tell me about it."

"Tully's been hitting me up for loans. The first couple times he paid me back, but not the last three times. I just now found out he didn't bother to pay the rent and he's running a big beer tab."

"Yeah?" Fish looked downright nasty for a second. "I have something to do. When he comes out you and him head out to the place. I'll catch up before you get there." He stalked off.

Tully stomped out a minute later. "All right. I'm here. What's so goddamned important? Where's Fish and Timmy?"

"Fish had something to do." Smeds thought he knew what. "He'll catch up. Timmy's dead. We're going to bury him."

Tully looked at him blankly, not watching where he walked. "You're shitting me."

"No, I'm not." Smeds told it in driblets, when no one could overhear. There were a lot of people in the street, moving restlessly, aimlessly. There was tension in the air. Smeds figured the grays wouldn't be able to keep the lid on much longer. A little more patience, a little more care, and they would have weathered the siege.

Wherever they went, wherever there were no grays, people whispered about the white roses, fed the rumor that the White Rose herself had come to Oar and was just awaiting the right portents to start the insurrection.

The grays had spies everywhere, Smeds knew. Spidersilk and Gossamer would have heard of the whispers within an hour of their first muttering. They would have to act, absurd as the rumors might be. Else someone would see something as a sign and would raise the torch of rebellion. There was another whisper, more sinister, running beneath the foolish hope of an adventure by the White Rose. This one was harder to catch because the rumor mongers were much more cautious in retailing it.

The twins, this fable insisted, had begun to feel pressed for time. They were getting set for mass executions in which they would slaughter the men of Oar till someone bought his life by surrendering the silver spike.

There was no mystery at all now about what was happening to Oar. Everyone knew about the silver spike. The knowledge seemed to signal the opening measure of a long, dark opera of dread.

Tully fussed and worried about the impending massacre till they neared the fire-gutted section where the bodies lay. Then he shifted the focus of his whine. "I ain't going in there, Smeds. They're dead, let them lay."

"The hell you're not. This whole mess came jumping out of your pointy head. You're going to hang in and help the rest of us do whatever it takes to get through it alive. Or I'll break your head personally."

Tully sneered. "Shit."

"Maybe not. But you goddamned well better believe I'll give it my best shot. Move."

Tully moved, startled by his intensity.

Fish caught up a minute later. He exchanged glances with Smeds, said, "There isn't anybody behind us. Slow down while I scout ahead." He went. Two minutes later he signaled all clear and Smeds slipped into the killing place.

The smell of death was in the air already, though not yet strong. Fish growled outside. Tully responded with a snarl but clumped inside. Smeds eased down the cellar stairs and was surprised to find the death room still illuminated by the stubs of some of the candles that had been burning before.

Nothing had changed except that the corpses had stiffened and relaxed again and a roaring swarm of flies had gathered, working their eyes, nostrils, mouths, and wounds.

Tully said, "Oh, shit!" and dumped whatever was in his stomach.

"I've seen worse," Fish said from the doorway. "And there's just a bare chance this scene here could get worse. Sit down in the chair, Tully."

"What?"

"Sit down. Before we get to work we have to have a talk about who got into the money Timmy kept in his bedroll."

Tully started, went pale, tried bluster. "What the shit you trying to pull, Fish?"

Smeds said, "Sit your ass down, Tully. Then tell us how come you got to be stealing from Timmy and mooching from me when you just made the biggest hit of your life."

"What the hell are you… ?"

Fish popped him in the brisket, pushed him into the chair. "This here is serious business, Tully. Real serious. Maybe you don't realize. Maybe you haven't been paying attention to what's going on. Look around. Come on. That's the boy. See this? This was our pal Timmy Locan. Just a sweet happy kid you conned into thinking he could get rich. These other guys did this to him. And they were gentle as virgins compared to some of the people who are after us. Look at them, Tully. Then tell us how you've been dicking up, being too damned stupid to be scared, too damned dumb to sit tight and wait the storm out."

Malevolent rage filled Tully's eyes. He looked like he was thinking about getting stubborn where stubborn was pointless.

Smeds said, "You're a screw-up, cousin. You had one damned good idea in your whole damned life and as soon as we get to work on it you got to go and try to mess it up for all of us. Come on. What did you do? Are we all in a hole?"

A flicker of cunning, quickly hidden. "I just made a couple bad bets is all."

"A couple? And you lost so much you had to go stealing from Timmy?"

Tully put on his stubborn face. Fish slapped it for him. "Gambling. You dipshit. Probably with somebody who knew you from before and knew you didn't have a pot to piss in. Tell us about it."

The words came tumbling out and they did not disappoint Smeds's suspicions in the least. Tully told an idiot's tale of bad bets made and redoubled bets laid then doubled again and lost again till, suddenly, here was Tully Stahl not only broke but behind a stack of markers that added up to a bundle and the boys holding them were not the sort to laugh it off if he reneged. So he'd had no choice. Anyway, he would have paid Timmy back out of his share as soon as they'd sold the spike, so…

Fish cut him off before he started justifying his idiot behavior. Smeds knew it was coming. And knew if Tully went at it he would turn the whole thing around so it was all their fault. He asked, "How much you still owe, Tully?"

That hint of cunning again. Tully knew they were going to bail him out.

"The truth," Fish snapped. "We're going to cover you, yeah. But one of us is going to be there to see you pay off. And then you're not getting a copper more. And you're going to pay back every bit, with interest."

"You can't treat me like this."

"You don't want to get treated like an asshole don't act like an asshole."

Smeds said, "You act like a spoiled brat…"

Fish continued, "You'll get treated a lot worse if you screw up again. Come on. Let's get to work."

Tully shrank from the menace in Fish's voice. He turned to Smeds in appeal. Smeds told him, "I'm not getting killed because you can't understand why you have to act responsible. Grab Timmy's legs and help me carry him upstairs. And think about the condition he's in next time you get a wild hair and go to thinking about doing something. Like anything."

Tully looked down at Timmy. "I can't."

"Yes you can. Just think about what if somebody else was to find him and figure out who he was and who he hung around with. Grab hold."

They moved the bodies upstairs, then waited for nightfall. Fish knew a place not far away that would be perfect, some low ground that turned marshy when it rained and bred diseases. The imperial engineers were using it for a landfill. One day the bodies would lie fifty feet below new streets.

They took Timmy out first, of course. He represented the greatest peril. The man who had been questioning Timmy went next, then the thugs, with the little one going last. Tully and Smeds did the carrying while Fish floated around watching for the grays or an accidental witness.

It went beautifully. Till the last one.

"Somebody coming," Fish breathed. "Move it. I'll distract them if they spot us."

XLIX

Toadkiller Dog was amused by his companions in misfortune, so eager to spend themselves in the digging yet so loath to do what had to be done to ensure their strength. After four days of increasing hunger he killed the weakest. He fed, and left the remains to the others. It did not take them long to overcome their reservations and revulsion. And that quickened their determination. None wanted to be next on the menu.

But the digging took another eight days.

Only the monster himself came up out of the earth. But that would have been the case had the digging taken only an hour.

He escaped the darkness of underground into the darkness of night. The trail was not hard to find, It had not rained since the hour of the Limper's perfidy. Ha! Headed north again!

He began to trot. As he loosened up he stretched himself more and more, till he fell into a lupine lope that left a dozen leagues behind him every hour. He did not break stride till he had crossed the bounds of the empire and had come to the place where the Limper had encountered a major obstacle. He stopped. He prowled and sniffed till he understood what had happened.

The Limper had not been welcomed back with tears of joy.

He caught something on the breeze, cast about, spied a distant black rider armed with a flaming spear. The rider flung that blazing dart northward.

Puzzled, Toadkiller Dog resumed his journey.

He came to another place where the Limper had had difficulties. Again he saw a black rider with a fiery spear who hurled his dart to the north.

One more repetition and the monster understood that he was being encouraged to overtake the Limper, that he would be guided to the inevitable confrontation, and that the Limper was being stalled all along his northward journey.

What could he do when he caught up? He was no match for that son of the shadow.

A black rider sat outside the gate of Beryl. He threw a blazing spear to the east. Toadkiller Dog turned. He found the trail quickly.

So. The old doom had been forced to take the long road, around the sea. He loped on, gaining two miles for each three he ran. He swam the River Bigotes and the Hyclades and streaked across the seventy silvery miles of lifeless, mirror-flat salt desert called the Rani Poor. He raced between the countless burial mounds of Barbara to reach the forgotten highways of Laba Larada. He circled the haunted ruins of Khun, passed the pyramids of Katch, which still stood sentinel over the Canyons of the Undead. Warily, he circled the remnants of the temple city of Marsha the Devastator, where the ah- still shimmered with the cries of sacrificies whose hearts had been torn out on the altars of an aloof and disdainful goddess.

The trail grew warmer by the hour.

He came into the province of Karsus, past outposts of the empire where auxiliaries recruited from the Grain tribes guarded the frontier against the depredations of their own kind more ferociously and faithfully than did the imperial legions. A black rider armed with a spear of fire watched him race across the Plain of Dano-Patha, where a hundred armies had contested the right of passage north or south or east and where some legends said the Last Battle of Time would be fought between Light and Darkness.

The Mountains of Sinjian lay beyond, and in their savage defiles he found evidence that the Limper was again being tormented and delayed, again with vicious traps narrowly escaped.

The spoor was heavy and hot and had the taint of newly opened graves.

He came out onto a prominence overlooking the Straits of Angine, where the fresh waters flowed down from the Kiril Lakes to meld with the salty waters of the Sea of Torments. His vantage was not far from that narrowest part of the strait that seafarers called Hell's Gate and overland travelers had dubbed Heaven's Bridge.

Hell was in session down there.

The Limper was on the south shore and wanted to cross over. But on the north shore someone demurred.

Toadkiller Dog settled on his belly, rested his chin on his forepaws, and watched. This was not the place to reveal himself. Maybe at the Tower, if the Limper turned west and sought a vengeance there.

As though they sensed his arrival, those who held the north shore closed up shop and hauled out. The Limper hurled glamorous violences after them. The distance was too great to do them any harm.

The Limper went across immediately. He encountered traps immediately. Toadkiller Dog decided he would hazard a more difficult crossing. After dark.

There was no need to hurry now. He had the quarry in sight. He could bide his time.

He might range ahead and lie in wait. Or he might stalk the enemies of his enemy in order to discover the .nature of their game.

L

We got a break. Raven came rolling in where I was reading a book I borrowed from the guy who owned the place where we was staying. "We got a break. Come on, Case."

I put the book aside, got up. "What's happening?"

"I'll tell you on the way." He stuck his head in the next room, yelled and invoked Darling till one of the Torques joined us. We hit the street. He started talking. "One of those little characters from the Plain hit paydirt. He overheard a man telling his cronies about an incident that almost has to involve the men who stole the spike."

I told him, "Slow down. You're getting the soldiers interested." And he was. He was that eager to get at this first assignment from Darling. "What did the guy say?"

"He and two others were hired to snatch a man and then help question him. Which they did. But someone came along and broke it up. This fellow was the only one who got away. We're going to round him up and let him walk us through his adventure."

Right.

It might be the best lead we'd get but it didn't look that great to me. "This guy is shooting his mouth off about what happened to him we're going to have to get in line to talk to him."

"We heard first. Almost direct. We're ahead of the pack. But that's why I'm in a hurry."

I noticed he was hardly limping. "Your hip finally starting to do right?"

"All this sitting around. Nothing else to do but get healthy."

"Speaking of which. I went out for a beer this afternoon. I heard talk there's cholera down near South Gate."

We walked in silence a while. Then the Torque—I still didn't know any of their real front names—said, "That'll tear it, won't it? Get a cholera outbreak going and the pot will boil over, sure."

Raven grunted.

Maybe this wasn't just our best break but our only one. Maybe we had to make it count.

We went into a place with the dumb name Barnacles. Raven looked around. "There's our man. Right where he's supposed to be." His voice had got hard as jasper. He had changed while we walked, turned into a critter like the Raven that had ridden with the Black Company.

Our man was alone. He was drunk. Fortune was smiling today. Raven told us, "You guys have a beer and keep an eye out. I'll talk to him."

We did, and he did. I don't know what he said but I never got a chance to get even with Torque by having him buy the second round. Raven got up. So did our man. In a minute we were all in the street. It was almost dark out now. Our new friend was not full of small talk. He did not seem pleased to be with us.

Raven told us, "Smiley here figured getting fifty obols for showing us around was a lot better than the alternative."

Smiley took us to an alley. "This is where we grabbed the guy."

Raven had asked questions while we walked. "And you didn't know anything about the guy? Like where he was coming from or where he was headed?"

"I told you. This Abel set it up and gave it to Shorts. Shorts just hired me and Tanker to back him up when he grabbed this guy with only one hand that was supposed to come through here. Maybe Shorts knew what was going on. I didn't."

"Convenient."

"Yeah. The more I think about it the more I figure the only reason they had me and Tanker hang around after we got the guy down to the cellar was they planned on us never leaving if they got what they wanted."

"You're probably right. That's the way those kind work."

"And you guys don't?"

"Not when we get cooperation. Show us that cellar."

I was glum. Our big strike looked like it was turning into a pocket of fool's gold. The guys who could give us answers had checked out.

Raven thought we might get something out of a look at the bodies. I was willing to bet all we would get was gagged. "Shit, this is desolate," I said as we was getting close. "How much farther?"

"About a block…"

"Hold it!" Raven said. "Quiet!"

I listened. I didn't hear nothing. But my eyes were good at night. By looking slightly to the side of them I could make out some guys. Three of them carrying a fourth. They were headed somewhere in a big hurry.

I told Raven. He asked, "You know this area?"

"Only vaguely."

"Try to get ahead of them. They won't be able to move too fast if they're carrying a body. We'll run them down from behind."

Smiley said, "I'll do a fade now."

Raven replied, "You'll come with us and tell us if you recognize any faces."

Smiley started cursing.

I took off. I figured it was a waste of time but I'd give it a shot. Five minutes and I'd be lost and they'd be long gone.

I went about three hundred yards and found myself on open ground. It looked like the area where we had landed, seen from a different direction. I couldn't see anyone in the open. Figuring they'd been to my left when I started and I'd paralleled them, I moved to my left, along the face of the ruins still standing.

Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Just like I expected. Where were the others? I worried. I thought about yelling but decided not to. I didn't want to look silly.

I thought I was paying attention but I guess I wasn't.

Somebody stepped out of nowhere and kicked me in the noogies. A perfect shot. The pain exploded through me. I bent over and puked and didn't care about anything else in the world.

He hit me in the back of the head. I went down, rooted up a little pavement with my chin. Somebody got onto me and forced me to lay out flat, facedown. He was not gentle. I wiggled a couple fingers by way of fighting back. He was not impressed.

He twisted one arm up behind me till I thought it was going to break, then whispered in my ear, "I don't want you tromping around in my life, boy. You hear?"

I did not answer.

He twisted my arm a little more. I let out a yell, proving I was getting my wind back faster than I thought.

"You hear me, boy?"

"Yeah."

"Next time I even see you or one of your buddies they're going to be picking up pieces all over Oar. You understand?"

"Yeah."

"You tell that slit she don't mind her own business she's going to be up to her twat in grays. You listening?"

"Yeah."

"Good." He hit me on the head again. I don't know why—maybe because my skull is as thick as my old man used to tell me it was—he didn't put me all the way out. I lay there powerless but aware as he drew a knife across my left cheek. Then he got up and went away and my only companions were pain, nausea, and humiliation.

After a while I got my feet under me and stumbled off to find Raven. I hadn't been whipped up on so bad since I was a kid. The slash burned like hell but wasn't as bad as I'd feared.

I actually found them pretty easy, considering. Only took me about fifteen minutes. There was a little light now from a big fire burning down south. Later I found out they were getting rid of the bodies of the first hundred people to die from the cholera. The twins must have anticipated epidemics. They'd had the engineers save all the scrap lumber from the demolished buildings.

I stumbled over Raven is how I found him.

He was out cold. He had a slash just like mine.

The Torque was about ten feet away and just starting to twitch and make noises. He had been cut, too.

So had Smiley. Twice. The second cut was about four inches below the first, ran from ear to ear, and was the last wound he'd ever suffer.

They'd done a number on us, all right.

Raven hadn't gotten him a swift kick but a good whack on the head. He was still rocky as we reported. His hands shook badly as he tried to sign to Darling: "One man, I think. Took us by surprise." He was embarrassed.

I don't think I ever saw him embarrassed like that before. But he never got took like that before, either.

I was embarrassed when my turn came because I had to report every word the man had said. I was afraid I was going to have to explain a couple of them.

She surprised me for the hundredth time by not being as ignorant as I expected.

Silent touched his cheek, signed, "Queen's Bridge."

Darling nodded.

I had to ask.

Silent signed, "When we fought the Nightstalkers at Queen's Bridge they took eighteen prisoners. They marked them all on the left cheek and turned them loose."

"What the hell? Could the soldiers themselves have the spike? Is that why they haven't had any luck finding it? Is the brigadier playing some game of her own?" I did it in sign. You get into the habit when you're around Darling long.

She looked at me weird for a few seconds, then signed, "We have to get out of here now. Soldiers—not Nightstalkers—are going to come any minute."

I saw it then.

Somebody was a mad genius, a wizard at thinking on his feet. In the minutes he'd had us at his mercy he'd put together a plan that could hurl Oar into a whirlpool of chaos and violence.

He had spared us only to spark a greater bloodletting.

The twins' soldiers would grab us, with the marks on us, and eliminate the White Rose menace. Word would get out. A significant portion of the population would start raising hell. Meantime, the twins would take our testimony on the rack and find cause to suspect the Nightstalkers and their commander. There was no love lost there now and there was no way the Nightstalkers were going to let their brigadier be arrested or even relieved of her command.

The Nightstalkers were outnumbered by the other gray regiments but they were the better, tougher soldiers and they would win in any confrontation, unless the twins themselves intervened directly.

Bloody-minded genius. Who could keep his or her mind on the silver spike with all that shit going on?

While I was thinking, Darling was flinging orders left and right. She sent all the little Plain creatures out to scout around and see who was in the neighborhood and to watch for soldiers. She sent the Torque brothers off to warn our Rebel friends. Bomanz and Silent she sent to the area where we got bushwhacked to see if they, with their talents, could pick up anything.

She looked from me to Raven and back again, deciding who should be their guide.

She picked Raven.

Before they could all work up a good scowl for me—I think Silent was pleased that he would not be leaving her alone with Raven—one of the Plain creatures zipped in to report the area clear except for an antiquated wino passed out on the wooden sidewalk half a block away.

Darling signed, "Let us go now."

We all went.

The wave of raids and arrests started less than an hour later.

LI

Smeds looked at Tully across the little table. His cousin was drinking with a grim determination but he was still stone-cold sober. Those bodies. Gruesome. Those men chasing them through the night. Those fires in the south, where they were burning the bodies of cholera victims. Now there were bands of soldiers tramping through the streets, about some nocturnal business that had set the rumors flying. It was not a time to inspire confidence in one's security.

The soldiers—some of them—were troubled, too. Moments before, several Nightstalkers had come in to consult the resident corporal. Now the whole bunch was headed out. They looked like they expected bad trouble.

"It's starting to come apart," Smeds said. He felt breathless.

Shivering, Tully nodded. "If I knew what we was going to go through I would've said screw the spike."

"The big hit, man. I guess when you think about it it wasn't never that easy for nobody that ever made it."

"Yeah. What I did, I never thought it through. Or I would've figured the world would go crazy. I would've figured there'd be just a whole mob of them who'd kill anybody and do anything to get ahold of it. What the hell is wrong with this beer? It's got a kick like a mouse."

"Better enjoy it." Fish appeared out of nowhere. He had a haggard, harried look. He joined them. "It might be the last beer in town." He slumped, wrung out. "I've done what I can. All we can do is wait. And hope."

Smeds asked, "What's going on out there? With the soldiers."

"They're rounding up Rebels. They're going to execute a big bunch in the morning. That ought to set off the explosion that will break the city wide open."

"What if it don't?" Tully asked.

"Then we're screwed. Sooner or later they'll get us. Process of elimination.' Fish stole a sip of Smeds's beer. "Cheer up. They're between us and the cholera. Maybe it'll get them before they get us."

"Shit!"

"We ought to get some sleep."

"You kidding?"

"We ought to try. We ought, at least, to get out of sight. Out of sight, out of mind, as they say."

Smeds fell asleep in about two minutes.

He was not sure what wakened him. The sun was up. So were Tully and Fish. Up and out of there. Something made him start shivering. He went to the common room. It was empty.

It hit him as he crossed to the door.

The silence.

The morning was as still as the grave. But for his footsteps he would have feared he was deaf. The door groaned as he opened it.

Everyone stood in the street, looking toward the center of Oar, waiting for something.

The wait was short.

Smeds felt it in the earth before it reached his ears, a monster vibration pursued by an avalanche of rage, a roar almost like a blow.

Fish told him, "They started the executions. I was afraid they would chicken out."

The roar grew louder, rolled closer, as an entire city, in a moment, decided that it had had enough of tyranny and oppression.

The wave came into the street outside the Skull and Crossbones. The people reeled with it.

Then mothers began herding children inside. Men began moving toward city center, in a rage for death, few of them armed because the repeated searches by the grays had turned up most of the privately held weapons. They had confiscated everything but the personal knife.

Smeds decided he must be getting old and cynical. He hadn't the slightest urge to get involved.

Neither did Fish. Tully twitched for a moment, then stood fast.

Many of the men in the street did the same. The rage was like the cholera. Not everyone had it yet. But both would claim many more before they subsided.

Fish got Smeds and Tully inside the Skull and Cross-bones and sat them down. "We don't move. We let the rumors come to us. If they turn favorable enough we'll head for the wall whenever it looks like we've got a chance to get out. Smeds, go put yourself a pack together. Stuff you'll need to travel."

Tully whispered, "What about the spike?"

"It can take care of itself."

"Where the hell is it, anyway?"

"Smeds, go pack. I don't know, Tully. I don't want to know. All I care is, Smeds found a place so good nobody else has found it."

Smeds felt Tully's angry stare as he moved away.

The first flurry of rumors spoke more eloquently of human savagery than it did of human nobility.

Despite knowing the mob was in an ugly mood, the regiment handling the executions had been caught off balance by the violence of the outburst following the first execution. They were swamped by the responding fury. Eight hundred died before panicky reinforcements, in no good order, arrived. Several thousand civilians and several hundred more soldiers died before it broke up. The fleeing citizens took a fair supply of arms with them.

Small-to-medium-sized riots bubbled up all over Oar, anywhere the grays appeared weak.

A mob tried to storm the Civil Palace. They were driven off but they left several fires burning, the worst of which raged out of control for hours.

A huge mob attacked the regiment that had moved in to beef up protection of the South Gate. Many captured weapons surfaced there. The mob overwhelmed the regiment but failed to flush the gate guards and failed to take the top of the wall. Archers posted there soon dispersed them.

Fish did not let Tully or Smeds go out once.

Come nightfall the situation grew both more chaotic and more sinister. The hard-pressed soldiers began to lose discipline, to indulge in indiscriminate slaughter. Youths got out and set fires, vandalized, looted. Individuals pursued private feuds. And the world's densest population of wizards decided to become involved. Decided to gang up and eliminate their toughest competitor.

They rallied a mob and went after Gossamer and Spider-silk. This time the attackers broke through. They exterminated the bodyguard force. One of the twins was injured, maybe killed. The entire center of the city seemed to be afire. And total madness spread with the news. It got so it seemed everyone in the city was trying to murder someone else.

The crowd of wizards turned on one another.

Chaos had not trespassed much in the neighborhood of the Skull and Crossbones earlier. But now it came creeping in with a crash and a clash and a scream.

Smeds said, "We got to get out of here."

Fish surprised him by agreeing. "You're right. Before it gets impossible. Let's grab our stuff."

Tully was too worn out to do anything but go along.

The other hangers-on watched them dully as they slipped out. Half an hour later, without serious misadventure, they had established themselves in the dark murk of a partly collapsed basement barely a hundred yards from the place where Timmy Locan had died.

The madness had no hunger for that part of Oar already gnawed to the bone by the Limper's passage.

LII

Bomanz was bad worried. "There's no limit to the insanity out there. If they keep on they'll continue till there's only one man left standing."

Raven cracked, "Let's make sure that's us."

We had hidden ourselves in the bell tower of an old temple less than a bow shot from the Civil Palace. If I wanted I could peek out and watch the place burn. We didn't let anybody know where we were going to hide out. So far, thanks to the old wizard, nobody had tripped over us.

"You think it's the spike's fault?" I asked.

"Its influence. And the more evil done around it, the thicker the miasma of madness will get."

So why weren't we busting our knuckles on somebody?

Darling was upset about what was happening. Far as I could tell, she was the only one. The rest of us was just scared of it, just wanted to stay out of the way till it burned itself out.

She would have done something if she could.

I asked, "So what we going to do? Sit?" I was thinking how the craziness must have ruined the quarantine on the cholera area.

"You got a better idea?" Raven asked.

"No."

Them that had gone out looking the other night hadn't found nothing. Only good thing turned out to be I got to spend a couple hours talking to Darling without Silent and Raven giving me the evil eye.

"But I feel like the buzzard who got so tired of waiting for something to die he went to thinking about killing something."

Bomanz said, "We need to decide what to do if there's a breakout. You can bet if there is the people who know about the spike will be the first ones gone."

"Everyone will know if it starts moving, won't they?"

"They wouldn't move it. Why should they? It's safe. Or somebody would have found it. They'll just be worried about staying alive till they can sell it."

"What makes you think they want to sell?" I asked.

"If they could use it they would have."

Made sense. That's the way bandits would work. "So why haven't they tried to hawk it?"

"Because all these assholes here think they can take it away from them and outrun each other."

I decided to take a nap. Talk was getting us nowhere. We weren't doing nothing but yak and wait on the Plain critters to drop by with reports. When the spirit moved them. They don't think like us. Some got no sense of time at all.

Which is maybe why Donkey Torque sounded so damned surprised after he took a look outside. "You guys better take a gander here."

We crowded around him.

We had us a whole new angle on all our troubles. Everybody did.

A new gang had come to town.

A black coach had just rolled into the square in front of the Civil Palace. Four black horses pulled it. Six black riders on six black horses surrounded it. An infantry battalion followed. Surprise. Those boys were all duded up in black.

"Where the hell did they come from?" I muttered.

Raven said, "You got your wish, wizard."

"Eh?"

"The Tower has taken an interest."

I felt a hand on my shoulder. Darling. I scrunched over so she could get up beside me and see. She left her hand where it was. You can guess how many friends that made me.

Someone got out of the coach. No black for this clown. "A popinjay," Bomanz said.

And me, "I always wondered what that meant."

The peacock looked around at the bodies, at the remains of the palace, said something to one of his outriders. The horseman rode up the steps and into the unburned part of the building. A minute later people started tumbling out. The other riders herded them together facing the clown.

Gossamer and Spidersilk came out. A rider chivied them toward his boss. "Called on the carpet," Bomanz said. "Be interesting to hear that."

There wasn't no doubt who was senior to who down there. The twins did everything but get down on their bellies. A back and forth went on for maybe ten minutes. Then the twins started sending their people scurrying off.

"What now?" Raven muttered. Next thing the peacock did was set up housekeeping in the only undamaged building in the neighborhood. The temple. Downstairs. We was stuck.

People started coming to see the new nabob. Brigadier Wildbrand was one of the first. The Nightstalkers had not been involved in any of the fighting so far.

The chaos died away for a few hours while the madmen of Oar digested the news about the new boy in town. Then it blazed up, white-hot.

But it died out, spent, before sundown.

We got the word well after dark, knew why it had gotten quiet.

The Limper was headed for Oar, bent on grabbing the silver spike.

Oar was not going to let him have it. According to Exile, the new man from the Tower.

"Shit," I muttered. "That Limper has more lives than a cat."

"I knew we should have made sure of him," Raven growled. He glared at Darling. Her fault. She had been so sure she had seen no need to argue with the tree god.

Exile had orders to hold Oar and destroy the Limper. Our spies said he meant to do that if it cost every life in the city.

Shit. The Tower would have to send some guy who took his job serious.

LIII

Smeds woke first. Before he had his wits in hand he knew there was something wrong.

Tully was gone.

Maybe he had to go take a leak.

Smeds scrambled out into the unexpected brightness of morning. No sign of Tully. But the nearby street, unused in recent times, was choked with traffic. Every vehicle carried corpses.

Smeds gaped. Then he ducked back down into the ruined cellar and found Fish, shook him till he growled, "What the hell is the matter?"

"Tully's gone. And you got to see what's outside to believe it."

"That idiot." Fish was wide-awake now. "All right. Get your shit. We got to move just so he don't know where to find us."

"Hunh?"

"I've run out of trust for Cousin Tully, Smeds. I want to know where he is, not the other way around. A man who can lose a fortune the way he did? That's stupid to the point of being suicidal. A man who gets over a fit of common sense as fast as he did and goes sneaking off with this city the way it is? I'm pretty close to the end of my patience. Every stunt he pulls puts us all at risk. If he's screwed up… I don't know."

"Go look outside."

Fish went. "Damn!" He came back. "We have to find out what's happening."

"That's obvious. They're using that landfill to dump bodies from the riots."

"You missed the point. Who thought that up and got all those people to work on it? When we crawled in here they were frying to rip each other's throats out."

They soon discovered that the chaos had not so much died as gone into momentary remission. And not universally. There were hot spots, most surrounding wizards reluctant to embrace a new order that had come in overnight

The twins from Charm were out and somebody called Exile was in. And Oar was supposed to be girding for another visit from the Limper.

"Things are getting crazy," Smeds said as they approached the Skull and Crossbones.

"There's an understatement if ever I heard one."

Their landlord seemed disappointed that they hadn't been killed in the riots. No. He hadn't seen Tully since he'd wanted breakfast and had stormed out because he couldn't get credit. Wasn't anything to fix, anyway.

"You got nothing?" Smeds asked.

"I got a dried-out third of a loaf I'm gonna soak in water and have for supper. You want to dig around in the cellar you might find a couple of rats. I'll roast them up for you."

Smeds believed him. "Tully didn't happen to say where he was headed, did he?"

"No. He turned right when he left out."

"Thanks," Fish said. He started toward the street.

The landlord asked, "You heard about the re-ward?"

"What reward?" Smeds asked.

"For that silver spike thing all the commotion's supposed to be about. The new guy says he'll give a hundred thousand obols, no questions asked, no tricks, no risks. Just take it in and get the money."

"Damn-O!" Fish said. "A guy could live pretty good, couldn't he? Wish to hell I had it."

Smeds grumbled, "You was to ask me, there ain't no such thing. All them witches and wizards would have found it if there was. Come on, Fish. I got to find that shithead cousin of mine."

Outside, Fish asked, "You think he'd try something?"

"Yeah, if he heard. He'd figure we deserve to get screwed on account of we been treating him so bad. Only he don't know where it's at. So he'll have to make up his mind if he can sell me to the torturers."

"I think he can. Without remorse. There isn't really anyone in this world who really matters except Tully Stahl. He probably started out just figuring to use us, then get rid of us one by one. Only things didn't go as simple as he thought they would."

"You're maybe right," Smeds admitted. "Guess we got to assume he's going to sell us out, don't we?"

"We'd be fools to give him the benefit of the doubt. You know his habits and hangouts. Look for him. I'll find out where Exile holes up and wait for him to show up there."

"What if he's already…?"

"Then we're screwed. Aren't we?"

"Yeah. Hey. What about we sell this guy the spike? A hundred thousand ain't bad. I can't even count that high."

"It's good. But if the situation is what they say—the Limper coming back—they'll go way higher. Let's let it ride a couple days."

Smeds did not argue but thought they ought to get what they could while they could get it. "I'll catch up if I can't find him."

Fish grunted and walked off.

Smeds began his rounds. He crossed Tully's trail several times. The spike was all the talk everywhere he went. Tully had to know about the reward. He wasn't running to Exile. That was a good sign. Except…

Except that a dozen independents had let out that they would go higher than Exile. A witch named Teebank had offered a hundred fifty thousand.

Smeds believed none of them except Exile. He had seen them when the hunt had been a race between thieves. They wouldn't change. They would talk mountains of obols but the payoff, when it came, would be death.

But Tully had that knack for deceiving himself. He might decide they were legitimately offering. Or he might fool himself into thinking he could outwit them. He had an inflated opinion of his own guile.

Smeds soon concluded that the pattern of Tully's movements indicated he was looking for someone.

Likely one of those fabulous purses.

He had no regard left for his cousin.

The evidence suggested Tully was gaining no ground on his quarry. Smeds was, though. He wondered if Tully was getting nervous, knowing they would be after him as soon as they knew he was gone.

Probably.

Smeds caught up but the situation was not suited to the confrontation he had been rehearsing for hours.

He was moving along a street unnaturally quiet even for after the riots, getting nervous about that, when Tully came flying out a doorway a hundred feet ahead and across the way. He hadn't yet gotten stable on his hands and knees when soldiers in black surrounded him. They bound his hands behind him, put a choke cord on him, and led him off toward the center of town.

There were six of those soldiers. Smeds stared numbly, seeing the end of his days. What the hell could he do? Get Fish? But what could Fish do? No two men were going to ambush six soldiers in broad daylight.

He tripped along behind. With each step he became more certain what had to be done, became more sick at heart. No matter that Tully had been ready to write him off.

He ducked into an alley and ran, the energy starting to burn in his veins. He went faster than necessary, trying to leech the growing fear in frenzied physical activity.

His pack hammered against his back. Like half the men in Oar he was carrying his home on his back. He had to get rid of it somehow. Somewhere safe. Most of his take from the Barrowland was in it.

He came on a pile of rubble in deep shadow. No one was around. He buried the pack hastily, hurried on to the point where he wanted to intercept Tully and the soldiers. They were not in sight. His heart sank. Had they decided to go some longer way? No. There they were. He'd just gotten way ahead. He crossed the street to a dark alley mouth. He would run back the way he had come, to his pack, through some useful shadows, on a route barren of witnesses.

The wait stretched interminably. He had time to get scared again. To talk himself into freezing up, almost.

Then they were there, a pair of soldiers out front, a pair behind, one leading Tully by the choke cord and one behind to poke him if he slowed down. Smeds's knife slipped into his hand. It was the knife he'd taken off that man in that cellar.

He flung himself forward, running hard. They barely had time to turn and see him coming. Tully's eyes got huge as he saw the knife come to his throat.

Smeds hit the choke cord and smashed through and in a moment was back in shadows clutching a knife that dripped family blood. Soldiers shouted. Feet pounded after him.

There was very little physical or emotional reaction. His mind turned to the pursuit. Two men, he decided. Very determined bastards, too. He wasn't gaining on them.

He did not want to deal with them but it looked like they might give him no choice.

He knew the place. It was only a few yards from where he had hidden his pack, where the alley was darkest. He would use the trick the physician had tried. If they went on by he would sneak away behind them.

He was amazed at himself. Smeds Stahl, scared, could still think.

He slipped into a crack in a brick wall that, probably, was a legacy of the Limper's visit. It had been improved upon by someone who had used it to get into the building, a thief or squatters. He could slide through and get away, but something that was not concern for his pack stayed him.

He picked up a broken board and waited.

They did not continue their headlong rush once his footsteps stopped. They exchanged breathless words in an unfamiliar language. Smeds grew tense. If they stuck together…

He still had the out through the building.

One soldier put on a burst that took him a hundred feet past Smeds. He called to the other. They began moving toward one another.

The one who had not run was much closer.

He did not notice the gap in the wall till Smeds popped out behind his knife. He made one strange noise, surprise that turned to pain.

Smeds tried to pull the knife free as the man fell and the other soldier yelled. It would not come. Goddamn it! Again!

Feet pounded toward him.

He grabbed his board and swung it just as the other soldier arrived. The impact slammed the man against the wall. Smeds hit him again. And again and again, feeling bones crunch, till the broken thing stopped whimpering.

He stood there panting, unaware that he was grinning, till he heard more men coming. He darted toward where his pack lay, realized he did not have time to dig it out, darted back, and tried the knife again. It would not come. Still. Then he was out of time before he could appropriate a weapon from one of the dead men. He slithered through the crack into the darkness inside the building.

Moments later there was an outraged roar from the alleyway.

Smeds kept his head down as he stepped into the street. There was little foot traffic. No one paid him any mind. He set off at a brisk pace, but not one so fast it would attract attention.

What now?

He didn't dare go find Fish. Some damned soldier might recognize him.

But Fish would hear about Tully. Fish would understand. Best thing would be to go back to the Skull and Crossbones and wait. Fish was sure to check there.

As his heartbeat slowed toward normal he became aware of the hollow in his stomach. He had not eaten since yesterday. The Skull and Crossbones was dry. Where could he find something? With stores getting low, nobody might be willing to sell…

It was a meal. Of sorts. A bowl of bad soup and a chunk of stale bread, and the fat old geek who ran the filthy place hadn't tried to rob him.

He was nearly done when a kid blew in, yelled, "Run mister! Press gang!" and sailed out the back.

"What the hell?"

"Press gang," the greasy fat man said. "Round here the grays been grabbing all the young men they can find—"

Two grays stamped in. One grinned and said, "Here's a likely-looking patriot."

Smeds sneered and went back to work on his meal. He did not feel troubled.

A wooden truncheon tapped him on the shoulder. "Come along, then."

"You better hope there's no splinters in that thing. You touch me again I'm going to shove it up your ass."

"Oh, a tough one, Cord. We like them tough, don't we? What's your name, boy?"

Smeds sighed, hearing the voices of all the bullies who'd ever baited him. He turned, looked the soldier in the eye, said, "Death."

Maybe the man saw seven murders in his eyes. He backed off a step. Smeds decided the one who kept his mouth shut was probably more dangerous.

He felt no fear at all. In fact, he felt invulnerable, invincible.

He rose slowly, flipped his bread into the talker's face, kicked him in the groan. A bully had done that to him once. He shoved his chair at the other man's legs and while he was dealing with that shoved his soup into the man's face. Then he grabbed the truncheon away from the first and went to work.

He might have killed them both if half a dozen more soldiers had not showed up to help.

They didn't beat Smeds much more than they had to to get him under control. They seemed to think the whole thing was a good joke on the man with the big mouth.

They dragged Smeds outside and added him to a group of cowed youngsters about thirty strong. Several of the youngsters got told off to carry the men Smeds had injured.

So Smeds Stahl became one of the gray boys. Sort of.

LIV

The little critters was in and out so much I was sure the people downstairs was going to find us out any minute. Bomanz and Silent was having trouble enough keeping curiosity types away without attracting the attention of the new big boy.

Raven was loving every minute of it. "What the hell are you grinning about?" I demanded.

"Those guys with the spike. They got balls down to their ankles."

"Hunh!" He would appreciate their brass.

"Come on, Case. Look. One of them decides to cut a deal for himself and winds up getting grabbed by Exile's boys for his trouble. So what do his buddies do? Big rescue attempt, against the odds? Hell, no. Before they get the guy halfway here one man just casually trots through the escort and practically lops the guy's head off. He does it so quick they can't get two descriptions that agree no matter how many witnesses they ask. And when the soldiers get riled and go after the killer, he offs two of them and leaves the rest standing around with their thumbs in their ears."

"Just your kind of fun-loving boy, eh?"

"They have style, Case. I appreciate style. It's a sort of bringing of artistry to even the most mundane—or gruesome— things that have to be done. Bet you something. If the man who made that hit had had five more minutes he would have been wearing a Nightstalker uniform, just to mess with people's minds. It's not the deed. It's how it was done."

Here was a shade of the Raven of old. Maybe the shell was ready to break. "You think these guys are just having a good time, sticking their tongues out at the world, yelling 'Catch us if you can'?"

"No. You don't understand. They're probably hiding out somewhere not fit for a pig. They're probably hungry, filthy, scared, sure they're not going to get out of it alive. But they're not letting it break them. They're going right on clawing at the faces of the wolves and vampires trying to feed on them. You see?"

I agreed mostly because I didn't and if I admitted that we'd end up spending the whole day getting me lessons in never surrender, even if the ground you're holding springs from stupid or wrong.

Agreeing worked. He moved over and got into a discussion with Silent and Darling. All business, I assume, since no sparks flew.

I got into a conversation with Bomanz, who was trying to work his way through some moral catch trap where the spike was concerned. He had some questions that nobody had answers for. I wasn't sure there were any answers. That spike was like a drop of black dye plunked into a pool of already murky water, spreading. It had poisoned Oar already. We had resisted it because we knew about it and could think it away consciously. But what would happen if our bunch got lucky and glommed on to it?

Scary.

And what the hell were we going to do with the damned thing if we did get it? I never heard none of those clowns talk about that. It was all keep the other guys from grabbing it and doing dirty.

It sure as hell hadn't been safe where they left it before.

I didn't have no ideas. Not that looked like they would work. There wasn't no place in the world you could put it that somebody else couldn't get it back from except maybe if you dropped it in the deepest part of the ocean. And that probably wouldn't do the job neither.

Some damned fish would probably gulp it down before it sank ten feet, then the fish would beach itself or get hooked by some goddamned fisherman with a hidden talent for sorcery and a secret lust for conquest.

That's the nature of evil talismans.

My best notions were to get a bunch of sorcerers together who could elevate it to the outer realm and stick in on a passing comet or to have a bunch break a little hole through to another plane, pop the spike through, and plug the hole.

Both ways was just cheaters that put the problem off on somebody else. The people of the future when the comet came back or the people of the other plane.

I had been picking up bits of the sign exchanges between Raven, Darling, and Silent, without paying much attention, just like you can't help catching snatches of a nearby conversation when it don't really interest you. Raven was getting antsy. He was finger grumbling about all this sitting around waiting for something to happen instead of getting out and making it happen.

He was on his way back all right. That was the old Raven. You got a problem you kill somebody or at least beat the shit out of them.

I was almost tempted to yell, "Hey!" when I caught him voluteering me and him to go look around the landscape where the morning's excitement had taken place. I choked it. Why let the boys downstairs know we were here when Darling could tell him to go soak his head?

Treacherous witch.

She thought it was a great idea. We should drag Bomanz along, just in case a wizard might turn up handy.

Silent grinned all the way around his face. The prick saw himself talking his talk and making his pitch every second we were gone.

I decided I was going for the head recruiter's job if I was going to get stuck as a Rebel for life. The movement could use a few more women. And a few soldiers who weren't screwballs, too.

With a little illusion help from Bomanz we just went downstairs and strutted out the front door, walking like we belonged there. Like Raven said, if we didn't belong we wouldn't've been in there in the first place. Would we?

Balls and style. That's my buddy Raven.

They had carted the body off with all the others but we had no trouble finding the place. There was blood all over and a crowd of kids still hanging around telling each other all about it.

Raven only gave the stains a glance. Bomanz had no use for that scene either. He wasn't looking for dead men.

We strolled down the alley the killer had used to make his escape. I was surprised they didn't have soldiers watching, though I couldn't imagine who they'd think they'd be laying for, either. It just seemed like something some officer would think was a dandy thing to do. If what officers use their heads for is to think.

The place where the two soldiers got killed was a little harder to find because of all the dark. That alley was a creepy place. It felt like it never got light in there. Like a place where people didn't belong at all. A place already claimed by other things, impatient with our intrusion.

Weird thoughts. I shivered.

Maybe the shades of the murdered soldiers were hanging around.

Then Bomanz conjured up a ball of light and hung it out overhead. "That's better," he said. "It got spooky for a minute, there."

He was good for something after all.

"Yeah," Raven said. They started poking around. There wasn't a whole lot to see. I went over to a rubble pile to sit and wait them out. A fat rat sauntered past without so much as a nod to intimidation by a superior species. I chucked a hunk of broken brick at him.

He stopped and eyeballed me over his shoulder, red eyes glowing. Arrogant little sucker. I grabbed another hunk of brick and this time put some arm behind it.

He charged me.

Rabid! I thought, and tried to scramble up the pile while grabbing a broken board to beat him off. The pile collapsed. I went sliding down, kicking and cussing. The rat zagged out, to be seen no more. He took him a good brag to hand his buddies.

Raven got a big chuckle out of the whole thing. "Hail, 0 Mighty Hunter, Terror of Ratkind."

"Stuff it." I rolled me over and saw about a square foot of raggedy-ass canvas peeking out of the rubble pile. I had me a stroke of cunning. I stood up, dusted me off, and sat back down. They went back to their sniffing around. I dug the thing out, decided it was somebody's backpack, then decided it might be why our villain had made a stand here when all he really needed to do was duck through that hole and leave the soldiers sucking dust.

"What have you got there?" Raven yelled when he noticed. Bomanz didn't say nothing but his beady little eyes lit right up.

They caught on quick. Raven wanted to open the pack right there. Bomanz told him, "This isn't the place. Anybody could come along."

Raven thought about sneaking into the building the killer had used to make his getaway. Great idea, only somebody had boarded up the hole from inside. "Guess we might as well take it back to the temple," he said.

The soldiers were waiting for us at the end of the alley. There were a dozen of them and they were ready for trouble. We would've walked right into them if we hadn't had a tame wizard along to sniff them out.

We backed off to talk. Bomanz supposed all the exits from the maze of alleys would be covered by now. Pretty soon they would come in after us. He could get us out right now but that would take so much flash and show it would get Exile all twisted out of shape.

"Over the rooftops, then," Raven said. Like it was obvious and easy.

"Great idea. But I'm an old man. Sneaking up on five hundred. A wizard, not a monkey."

"Give him the pack, Case. He can cover his own butt and get it home to Mama. We'll play tag with the soldiers."

"Say what? Oh. Yeah. Sure. You're the guy with style.

You play tag with them." But I took the pack off. Bomanz wiggled into it. It was too big for him.

Softly, he told me, "Don't take silly chances. She'll want you to come back."

Chills up the spine, and some more thoughts about what kind of a crazy man was I, being here in the first place. Potato farming never looked so good.

I don't know if Raven heard. He didn't give no sign. We went off and found a way up to the roofs, which was a crazy country of steep pitches, flats, chimneys, slate, copper, tile, thatch, and shingle. Like no two builders ever used the same materials. We stumbled and clunked around and did our damnedest to fall off and break a head or a leg, but something always got in the way.

I might have been better off if I'd busted my bean.

For a while it didn't look like hunking around on the roofs was going to do no good. Whenever we took a peek to see if it was safe, there was some soldiers hanging out. But just when I asked Raven, "How do you like pigeon? 'Cause it looks like we're going to spend the rest of our lives up here," some kind of hoorah broke out back about where we left the old wizard and every soldier in sight headed that way.

I said, "That silly sack probably did something subtle like turn somebody into a toad."

"Must you always be negative, Case?" Raven was having him a good time.

"Me? Negative? The gods forfend! I've never had a negative thought in my life. Where did you get a notion like that?"

"It's clear. Drop on down there."

On down there was a two-story fall to a rough cobblestone landing. "You're shitting me."

"No."

"Then you go first so I can land on you."

"You are in a contrary mood, aren't you? Go on."

"No, thank you. I'll just go find me a place where I can climb down."

Maybe I crowded it a little. He gave me a nasty look and said, "All right. You do what you have to do. But I'm not going to hang around waiting for you to catch up." He rolled over the edge of the roof, hung down, kicked out, let go.

I know he done it just to give me some shit. And he got what he asked for, showing off. He sprained an ankle. When he slowed down cussing and fussing enough, I told him, "You hang on right there. I'll be there in a minute."

I wasn't, of course.

I cut across a couple roofs and found a way to climb down into the street parallel to the one where I left Raven. I hitched up my pants and headed around the corner into the nearest cross street—and ran smack into a whole gang of gray boys.

Their sergeant laughed. "God damnl Here's one so eager he came running."

I guess I didn't react too well. I just stood there gawking for about five seconds too long. When my feet finally decided it was time to get moving it was too late. There was five of them around me. They had nightsticks and mean grins. They meant business. The sergeant told me, "Fall in with the rest of the recruits, soldier."

I eyeballed about ten numb-looking guys in a bunch, most of them looking the worse for wear. "What is this bullshit?"

He chuckled. "You just enlisted. Second Battalion, Second Regiment, Oar Home Defense Forces."

"Like hell."

"You want to argue about it?"

I looked at his buddies. They were ready. And I wasn't going to get no help from the other "recruits." "Not right now. We'll talk it over later, one-on-one." I gave him my best imitation of Raven's I'm-going-to-make-a-necklace-out-of-your-toes look. He got the idea.

He wanted to try some bluster but he just said, "Fall in. And don't give us no shit. We ain't no more excited about this than you are."

So that was how I got me back into the army.

LV

Raven waited awhile, then, troubled, hobbled around looking for Case. He didn't find a trace. Case might have stepped off the edge of the earth.

He could spend hours in a futile search that would keep him at risk himself or he could go home and have Silent and Bomanz hunt the easy way.

The pain in his ankle had awakened the old pain in his hip, so that he was stove up in both legs and moved with the spry-ness of an eighty-year-old arthritic. It was no time for heroics.

He had no trouble entering the temple, reaching the tower, and getting upstairs. Except from his own body. Someone up top had been watching. Silent covered his progress with a curtain of gentle, selective blindness.

Bomanz got after him before he got through the door. "Where's Case? What happened?"

"I don't know. He disappeared. How about you do something for this ankle while I tell it?" He settled with his back against a wall, leg outthrust. He told what there was to tell.

Bomanz poked, prodded, and twisted. Raven winced. The wizard said, "Not much I can do but kill the pain. Silent? You know more about healing than I do."

Silent paused in his translation for Darling, moved in on the ankle without enthusiasm. Bomanz puttered around, muttering, "Got to come up with something of his he had long enough to make his own." Grumble, grumble, paw through Case's few possessions, come up with his journal. "This ought to do it." He shuffled into a corner and went to mumbling and twitching.

Silent did not do much more for Raven's ankle than Bomanz had. The pain was gone but it still did not want to work right when Raven put his weight on it. He wasn't going to win any footraces for a few days.

Everyone waited tensely for Bomanz. No one expressed the common fear, that Case had been caught by Exile's soldiers.

Bomanz finally looked up. "I need the city map."

Silent got it from Darling. Bomanz fussed over it a minute before saying, "He's somewhere in this area."

Raven said, "That's that open area where the windwhale dropped us."

"Yes."

"What the hell is he doing out there?"

"How should I know? Somebody maybe better go out there and find out. Aw, hell! Me and my big mouth." Darling had pointed at him, clicked her tongue, and winked. He was elected.

Raven closed his eyes, relaxed for a few minutes, letting the tension and aches fade. Then he asked, "What was in the pack?"

One of the Torques said, "More money than I ever heard of one guy lugging around. It's in the comer, you want to look it over."

"Don't know if I have that much ambition." But he levered himself up. "Nothing there that was useful?"

"I tell you, I can't remember me a time when found money wasn't useful to me."

That did not sound promising. Raven went through the pack, was disappointed. He looked at Darling. She signed, "Anything?"

He shook his head, but signed, "It does prove that the assassin, and therefore the murdered man, were linked with the theft of the spike. This stuff came from the Barrowland. Some of these kinds of coins haven't been in circulation anywhere else for centuries. But Bomanz told you that already."

She nodded.

"And he could not use anything here to get an idea where the man is, the way he did with Case?"

She shook her head. She got up and started pacing, pausing occasionally to look outside. After a while, she caught Silent's attention, signed, "Slip down and eavesdrop on Exile. Carefully. I do not want him getting too far ahead of us."

Bomanz did not return till after midnight. "Where have you been?" Raven grumped. "You had us worried we were going to lose you, too."

"It's not that easy to get around out there. They have patrols everywhere, trying to keep another blowup from happening. The fighting is sporadic tonight. Exile had Gossamer and Spidersilk doing donkey work, rounding up wizards and whatnot who came here to grab the spike. That's where all the excitement is tonight. Excitement for the future is going to be provided by the cholera. It's showing up everywhere now."

Everyone glared at him. "What about Case?" Raven snapped. "Get to the point, old man."

Bomanz smiled. But there was no humor there. "He's gone back into the army."

"What?"

Darling flashed some signs at Raven. Raven said, "She's right. Quit dicking around and tell it."

"They've put up a camp in that open area. With a fence around it. And they're grabbing every man between fifteen and thirty-five they can lay hands on. They're shoving them in there and calling them the Oar Home Defense Forces Brigade. They may give them a little training so they can use them to do most of the dying if there's an attack, but I think the main reason they're there is Exile wants the most dangerous part of the population locked up where it can't cause any more trouble for the grays."

Darling signed, "How do we get him out?"

"I don't know if we can. He may have to get himself out." He stopped them before they jumped all over him. "I tried. I went to the gate and gave the guards a long sob story about how they had my only grandson and means of support. While they were still being polite they told me there wasn't nobody going to get out of there, and anyway they didn't remember taking in anybody by the name Philodendron Case. I think they would have."

Raven said, "He's technically a deserter even if he's the only man from the Guards still around. He wouldn't have given them his real name."

"I realized that while I was talking. So I gave it up before they got too angry. They were pretty reasonable considering they'd had people after them all day."

Everyone looked to Darling. She signed, "We will leave him there for now. He is safer there than we are here. We have the means if there is a desperate need to communicate with him. We have other matters to concern us. I suggest we give them some attention. Time is running out on us. And everyone else."

LVI

Old Man Fish had grown first troubled, then frightened when Smeds didn't show. Smeds had cared for the problem posed by Tully Stahl alive, but how about the problem of Tully Stahl dead? The grays had the body. If they identified it how long would it be before they discovered who Tully had run with?

Not long enough. Smeds had bought some time but the sands in the glass kept on running and the bodies kept falling.

That was the trouble with this thing. They kept beating the inevitable back, but always the margin was a little narrower afterward. And the cost of holding it at bay escalated and the price of failure became more dreadful while the payoff never looked any better.

He felt no remorse over Tully Stahl. Tully had begged for it. The wonder was that he had lasted so long. But Timmy Locan bothered him a lot. Of the four of them Timmy had been the least deserving of an unpleasant end.

He was about to give up on Smeds and go back to hiding in the ruins when he heard how the grays were conscripting all the citizens of military age they could grab.

Intuition told him what had happened. Smeds was in the army now.

Which was, probably, the safest place he could be. If he'd had sense enough to give them a false name.

The boy had sense.

Old Fish headed for the ruins, to tuck himself away from the eyes of the hunters, and on the way had him an inspiration. Why not hide in plain sight himself? They would argue a little because of his age, but they would take him. And it would be a damned good hedge against the coming privations of the siege. Soldiers, even militiamen, would get fed better than guys hiding in collapsed cellars. And the witch people running Oar should protect their soldiers from the cholera more diligently than they would the general population.

He headed for the camp the grays had set up on the razed ground.

It went about as he expected. They let him in after a little argument and a quick check for signs he was carrying cholera. He gave his name as Forto Reibas, which was a joke on himself and the grays alike. It was the name he had been given at birth but no one had used it for two generations.

LVII

For all the black riders had harassed the Limper into a frothing rage repeatedly with their tricks and traps and stalls, they had used sorcery very little. He did not understand their game. It troubled him, though he did not admit that even to himself. He was confident his own brute strength would carry him, was confident there was no one else in this world any longer who could match him strength for strength.

They knew that. That was what troubled him. They stood no chance against him, yet they harassed and guided him in a way that suggested they had every confidence in the efficacy of what they were doing. Which meant a big and terrible pitfall somewhere ahead.

They had used so little sorcery that he had stopped watching for it. His own style was smashing hammer blows. Subtlety was the last thing he expected from anyone else.

It was not till he came upon the same disfigured tree for the fourth time that he woke to the realization that he had seen it before, that, in fact, his tireless run had been guided into a circle about fifty miles around and he had been chasing himself for hundreds of miles. Another damned stall!

He controlled his rage and found his way off the endless track. Then he paused to take stock of himself and his surroundings.

He was a little north of the Tower. He felt it down there, somehow mocking, daring, almost calling him to come try its defenses again. An affront, it was.

It seemed likely there was nothing his enemies would like more than to have him waste time beating his head against that adamantine fortress. So he put temptation aside. He would deal with the Tower after he had taken possession of the silver spike and had shaped it into the talisman that would give him mastery of the world.

He headed north, toward Oar.

His step was sprightly. He chuckled as he ran. Soon, now. Soon. The world would pay its debts.

LVIII

Toadkiller Dog loped nearer the Tower, uncertain why he tempted fate so. He sensed the Limper running in circles north of him and was amused. These new lords of the empire were not as terrible as the old, but they were smart. Maybe smarter than any of the old ones except the Lady herself and her sister. He was satisfied that the power had passed into competent hands.

Something he had heard some wise man say. About the three stages of empire, the three generations. First came the conquerers, unstoppable in war. Then came the administrators, who bound it all together into one apparently unshakable, immortal edifice. Then came the wasters, who knew no responsibility and squandered the capital of their inheritance upon whims and vices. And fell to other conquerers.

This empire was making the transition from the age of the conquerer to that of the administrator. Only one of the old ones was left, the Limper. The heirs of empire were out to crowd him off history's stage. Conquerers were too rowdy and unpredictable to keep around if you wanted a well-ordered empire.

He would do well to consider his own place in this nonchaotic future.

He trotted to what he considered a safe distance from the Tower gate, sat, waited.

Someone came out almost immediately. A someone whose vision of the future had room for a timeless old terror like Toadkiller Dog.

They formed an alliance.

LIX

Smeds groaned as he pushed his blanket aside and rolled over. He had bruises on his bruises and aches in every muscle and joint. Sleeping on the ground did not help.

This was the third time he had wakened in this tent he shared with forty men. He was not looking forward to another day in the militia.

"You all right, Ken?" a tentmate asked. He was using the name Kenton Anitya.

"Stiff and sore. Guess I'll get a chance to work out the kinks before the day is over."

"Why keep fighting them? You can't win."

Someone looked outside. "Hey! It snowed. Got about an inch out there."

Jeers and sarcastic remarks about their good fortune.

Smeds said, "Since I was a kid people been kicking me around. I ain't gonna take it no more. I'm gonna kick back and keep on kicking till they decide it's easier to leave me alone." He'd had four fights with the grays running their training platoon already.

Another neighbor said, "You're getting to them. But your tactics aren't so great. Got to use your head a little, too."

That was Cy Green. Already he was pretty much the leader inside the tent. Everybody figured Green wasn't his real name. He didn't wear it very good. Everybody figured he'd been in the army before. He handled the military crap like he was born to it and he always let you know how you could make it easier on yourself—if you wanted to know. The guys liked him and mostly took his advice.

Smeds was reserving judgment. The guy was too much at home for him. He might be a spy. Or maybe a deserter who got swept up by the gray recruiters. Smeds had a notion that at least here in Oar, a deserter with a long military background probably had served with the Guards at the Barrowland.

"I'm open to suggestions, Cy. But I ain't going to back down."

"Look at what's going on, Ken. Originally they worked on you because they wanted to show us what could happen if we weren't good boys. You provoked so easy they kept coming back."

"Over and over. And probably again today. And I won't back down then, either."

"Calm down. You're right. It's gone past what's reasonable. But every time you see red you go for Corporal Royal."

"Only because I can't get to the sergeant."

"But the sergeant and corporal are halfway decent guys just trying to do a job that they don't think there's any point or hope to. Your real problem is Caddy. Caddy waits till they're a hair short of having you under control, then he jumps in and kicks the shit out of you."

Several of the men agreed. One said, "Caddy's got his bluff in on the rest of them."

Green said, "And he's covered as long as he don't kill you."

Smeds didn't really want to talk about it. But they were probably right about Caddy. "So?"

"Go after Caddy if you have to go for somebody. He's the root of the meanness. He's the one going to hurt you. Make him pay. And try to put a leash on that temper. You got to blow up, do it when you're right, not just 'cause you don't like how things are going. Don't none of us want to be here. We keep our heads, maybe we'll all get out of this."

Smeds wanted to throw a fit right then but he held back, mainly because he'd be doing it in the face of common sense, which would cost him the respect he had won.

He was real worried about Smeds Stahl. Smeds Stahl was getting inclined to let himself get carried away. He did need to keep a better grip. Or he'd end up doing himself in the way Tully did.

He wondered if it was the influence of the spike.

His determination to do right got a big boost at morning roll.

Fortune was all smiles. The tent next on the left started earlier and he overheard the corporal over there bellow, "Locan, Timmy," so he was ready for the trick when Corporal Royal tried it. He just kind of glanced around dumbly like everybody else, and did not respond at all when Royal tried, "Stahl, Smeds."

They were getting closer. They knew the names now.

He got another shock an hour later. They were stomping around in the mud, doing close order drill. His platoon passed another headed the other way and there in the outside file was Old Man Fish.

Fish winked and skipped to get in step.