The Silver spike (22 page)

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.

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.

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.

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.