The Silver spike (9 page)

“Yeah? What’s up?”

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

“The thing from the Barrowland?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What?”

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

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

“He’s after the same thing we are. The Black
Company.”

“That don’t make sense either, Case.”

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

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

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

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

For nothing, that’s what. For nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Only the stones communicated like regular people.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The damned thing stank like seven zoos.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They were under constraint, too.

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

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

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

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

Weird damned creatures!

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

Damnfool crazies.

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

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

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

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

Goddamned insanity.

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

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

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

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

He turned loose.

The buzzard flapped off squawking, “Chalk’s on a
rampage! Beware! Beware! Chalk’s gone berserk.”

“Oh, go to hell. Marooned with lunatics.”

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

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