The Silver spike (19 page)

I asked her, in sign, “Where are we? What is
happening?”

She replied, also in sign, “We are approaching Opal. We
are going to find Raven’s children. We are going to compel
him to confront his past.”

That was a measure of how much the tree god valued and respected
her. Though he had yanked his minions away from that monastery and
had ordered them to scurry north because there was no time to lose,
he would let her interrupt the journey for this because it was
important to her.

I figured Raven didn’t know what was coming. He’d
probably need a lot of support when it hit him in. I went looking
for him.

There was nothing out at the fourth hour, Smeds reflected. The
soldiers were all off somewhere loafing because the bad boys all
had sense enough to be home in bed. The bakers had not yet stumbled
out to their doughs and ovens. The only sound in the street was
that of the drizzle falling, of the water dripping from the roofs.
He and Fish made no noise. Fish seemed not to be breathing.

There would be one problem with this one they had not faced with
the other. He had seen them both before. On the other hand, they
were making their move at this ungodly hour, reasonably expecting
to catch him in his bed.

Breaking in should be easy, from what they recalled of the
physician’s place. The deed itself would have to be done
quietly. There was, they suspected, a live-in housekeeper. They did
not want to add her to their weight of conscience.

“There it is,” Smeds said.

Like the wizard, the physician was prosperous enough to occupy
his own freestanding combination home and place of business. The
structure was barely a decade old. A few years before it had been
built, that part of town had burned during an outbreak of violence
between Rebel sympathizers and mercenaries in the imperial service.
The middle class had come in to build homes upon the graves of
tenements.

“Front door to the house and door to the office,”
Fish murmured. “Assume a back door. These places all have a
little fenced-in garden behind them. Three windows we can see.
I’m surprised vandals haven’t destroyed that
leaded-glass monstrosity.”

The physician’s office was scabbed onto the side of his
home, set a little back. It had its own little porch and door, and
beside the door a marvelously dramatic floor-to-ceiling
leaded-glass window six feet wide.

“Go,” Fish said.

Smeds dashed across and crouched in the slightly deeper shadow
beneath the window on the building’s right front. His
thoughts about the weather were not polite. He was miserable enough
without a soaking drizzle added on for frosting.

Fish came across as Smeds rose to test the window. He was not
surprised to find it tightly secured. Fish went to the house door,
achieved no better result. Smeds crossed behind him and checked the
second front window. Solid. He slid around the corner of the
house.

Fish was crouched in front of the office door, which he had
pushed open about three inches. Smeds joined him, his knife sliding
into his hand. “It was unlocked?”

“Yes. I don’t like it.”

“Maybe it’s so clients can get in
anytime.”

Fish ran his hand up the inside of the door. “Maybe, but
there’s a heavy latch catch. Let’s be
careful.”

“Careful is my middle name.”

Fish pushed the door open, looked inside. “Clear.”
He slipped in.

Smeds followed, headed for the door connecting with the house.
It was unlocked, too. It opened toward him. He pulled. It swung
smoothly, soundlessly. He heard a faint snick behind him as Fish
closed the latch. He saw nothing suspicious in the room before him.
He stepped inside.

Maybe it was a whisper of cloth in motion. Maybe it was a little
intake of breath. Maybe it was both. Whatever, Smeds spun down and
away.

A line of fire sliced across his shoulder blade.

He landed on his knees facing the office, watching a shape
collide with Fish. Fish said, “Shit!” At the same
moment the shape squealed. Then it threw itself sideways and
floundered through the leaded-glass window a step ahead of
Smeds.

Fish came to the window. “That was him.”

“He was expecting us.”

“Too damned smart. Figured too much out. Can’t let
him get away.” Fish jumped through the window.

The physician was going for all he was worth, legs and arms
flailing. That fat little hedgehog was no sprinter.

Smeds followed Fish. He passed the older man moments later, and
gained steadily on his prey, who had gotten a sixty-yard head
start. The physician glanced back once, stumbled. Smeds gained ten
yards while he was getting his balance. Fear lent him renewed
stamina and speed. He stayed the same distance ahead for half a
minute.

The physician knew he was not going to outrun anyone. Smeds knew
he knew that. Unless he was running in a blind panic he had
developed a strategy, had chosen an ultimate
destination . . . 

The physician zigged right, into a narrow alleyway.

Smeds slowed, approached cautiously.

Footfalls pounded away in the darkness.

He went after them. He was just as careful rounding another
corner, again without need. Gods, it was dark in there! Third
corner.

He stopped dead. There were no sounds of flight. He tried
listening for heavy breathing but could not be sure he heard
anything because his own intruded too much.

What now?

Nothing to do but go forward.

He dropped down and advanced in a careful duck walk. His muscles
protested. He was grateful for the toughening they had gotten in
the Great Forest.

There! Was that breathing?

Couldn’t tell for sure. The echoes of Fish’s
approach overrode it.

Scrape! Swish!

What must have been a foot missed his face by a fraction of an
inch. He flung himself forward but the physician was already moving
again. Smeds’s knife ripped along his hip.

Smeds went down hard but caught hold of a heel and managed to
hang on. He snaked forward, stabbing at the man’s calf, his
target invisible in the darkness. The man squealed like an injured
rabbit.

Smeds was so startled he let go. Then he realized he was letting
his man get away. He got up and charged ahead, smashed into the
man.

“Please! I won’t tell anyone! I swear!”

Pain slashed along Smeds’s ribs on this left side.

He flailed away with his knife, hitting anything he could. The
physician tried to scream and fight back and ran away all at the
same time. Smeds held on with one hand, kept hacking with the
other. The physician pulled him out into a street.

Smeds kept hacking.

The physician collapsed.

Fish arrived. “Shit, Smeds. Shit.”

“Got him.”

“You sure he didn’t get you, too?”

Smeds looked at himself. He was covered with blood. Some of it
was his own.

Somebody yelled up the street. People had begun coming to stoops
and windows.

Fish bent, slashed the physician’s throat, said,
“We’ve got to get out of here. There’ll be
soldiers here in a minute.” He looked at the dead man’s
hand. “Unh. A mess. He touched you with that?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Come on.” Fish offered him a hand. “You make
it?”

“I’m all right for now.”

Fish headed back into the alley.

Smeds began feeling it as soon as the excitement began to go out
of him. He knew he would not be able to get away if a chase
developed.

Instead of making for the Skull and Crossbones Fish headed into
the West End.

“Where we going?” Smeds asked.

“Reservoir. Get you cleaned up. We take you home looking
like that the gray boys are going to be around to ask what happened
before you can get your boots off.”

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.