The Silver spike (20 page)

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’s 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.

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, thaumaturgic
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.

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.