hand into the last bucket of water. His palm was mostly red and beginning to show patches of blister already.
Fish took a shovel and scooped the spike out of the ashes. “Look out, Timmy. I’m fixing to dump it in there.”
“My hand...”
“Ain’t good to do a bad burn that way. You head back to camp. I got some salve there that’ll do you a whole lot better.”
Timmy pulled his hand out. Fish dumped the spike. The water hissed and bubbled. Fish said, “You carry the bucket, Smeds.”
Just as Tully said, “We better make tracks. I think its starting to wake up.”
It was hard to tell against that sky, but it did look like there were tiny flecks of blue out on the ends of the smallest surviving twigs.
“The spike ain’t conducting heat into the heartwood anymore,” Fish said. “Scat,” he told the backs of a lot of pumping legs and flailing elbows.
Smeds looked back just before he plunged into the woods. Just as the tree cut loose with a wild, undirected discharge. The flash nearly blinded him. Ash flew in clouds. The pain and disappointment and... sorrow?... of the tree touched him like a gentle, sad rain. He found tears streaking his face and guilt in his heart.
Old Man Fish puffed into camp one step ahead of Tully, who was embarrassed because the old-timer had outrun him. Fish said, “We got a lot of daylight left. I suggest we get the hell on the road. Timmy, let me look at that hand.”
Smeds looked over Fish’s shoulder. Timmy’s hand looked awful. Fish didn’t like the look of it either. He stared at it, grunted, frowned, studied it, grunted again. “Salve won’t be good enough. I’m going to collect up some herbs for a poultice. Thing must have been hotter than I thought.”
“Hurts like hell,” Timmy said, eyes still watery.
“Poultice will take care of that. Smeds. When you get that spike out of the bucket don’t touch it. Dump it on that old blanket. Then wrap it up. I don’t think anybody ought to touch it.”
“Why the hell not?” Tully asked.
“Because it burned Timmy badder than it should have.
Because it’s a bad mojo thing and maybe we shouldn’t ought to take any chances.”
Smeds did it the way Fish said, after the old man went hunting his herbs. After he dumped the bucket he moved the spike to a dry part of the blanket with a stick. “Hey! Tully! Check this. It’s still hot even after it was in that water.” Passing his hand above it he could feel the heat from a foot away.
Tully tried it. He looked troubled. “You better wrap it up good and tie it tight and put it right in the middle of your pack.”
“Eh?” Tully didn’t want to carry it himself? Didn’t want it in his control every second? That was disturbing.
“You want to come give me a hand awhile here?” Tully asked. “I can’t never get this pack together by myself.”
Smeds finished bundling the spike, went over, knowing from his tone Tully had something he wanted to whisper.
As they stuffed and rolled and tied, Tully murmured, “I decided not to do it on the way back. We’re still going to need them awhile. We’ll do it later, in the city sometime.”
Smeds nodded, not saying he wasn’t going to do it at all, and was going to try his damnedest to see that Fish and Timmy and he himself got fair shares of the payoff for the spike.
He had a good idea what was going on inside Tully’s head. Tully wasn’t going to be satisfied with the big hit they’d made already. Tully was thinking Fish and Timmy made good mules. They could haul their shares back. Once they got to town he could take them away.
Smeds had a suspicion Tully wasn’t going to be satisfied with a two-way split, either.
XX
Our fire burned down till it wasn’t nothing but some patches of red. Once in a while a little flame would shoot up and prance around for a few seconds, then die. I stared up at the stars. Most were ones I’d known all my life, but they had moved to funny parts of the night. The constellations were all askew.
It was a good night for shooting stars. I’d spotted seven already.
“Uncomfortable?” Raven asked. He was watching the sky, too.
He startled me. He hadn’t said anything since back around lunchtime. We didn’t talk much anymore.
“Scared.” I had lost track of time. I had no idea how far we’d come or where we were, except that it was one goddamned long ways from home and down in the south.
“And wondering what the hell you’re doing here, no doubt.”
“No. I think I got a handle on that. My trouble is I don’t like having to sneak everywhere, like a thief. I might get treated like one.”
I did not add that I did not like being in places where the only person who could understand me was him. If something happened to him... That was what scared me the most.
It was too awful to think about.
I said, “But it’s too late to turn back.”
“Some say it’s never too late.”
So he was thinking about his kids again, now he was plenty safe from the risk of actually having to deal with them. Also, maybe, he was having second thoughts about our ride into the unknown.
Opaque as they were to me, and maybe even to him, powerful emotions were driving him. They had Darling’s name hung all over them, though he never mentioned her. One monster of a guilt was perched on his shoulders, flapping and squawking and pecking at his eyes and ears. Somehow he was going to silence that beast by catching his pal Croaker and passing the word about what happened in the Barrowland.
It didn’t make no sense to me. But people never do, a whole lot.
Maybe the determination was starting to wear thin. It was one thing to take off after a guy expecting to catch him in a few weeks and a few hundred miles and something else to be on the track still after months and months and thousands of miles. People aren’t built to take that without any letup. The road can blunt the most iron will.
He let the edges of it show when he said, “Croaker’s been gaining on us again. He doesn’t have to be as careful as we do. We have to speed it up somehow. Else we’re going to chase him all the way to the edge of the world and still never catch him.”
Hell. He was talking to himself, not to me. Trying to find some enthusiasm he had misplaced somewhere back up the road. There wasn’t no way we were going to kick up the pace any. Not without giving up any thought of watching out for trouble from the people in the countries we were going through.
We were pushing so hard now we were killing ourselves slowly.
I glimpsed something off to the north. “There. Did you see that? That’s what I was telling you about the other day. Lightning from a clear sky.”
He missed it. “Maybe it’s storming up there.”
“Just keep an eye peeled.”
We watched a series of flashes so dim their source had to be way over the horizon. Usually that kind of lightning lights up or silhouettes the tops of clouds.
“There isn’t one cloud,” Raven said. “And we haven’t seen one for weeks. And I’d bet we won’t see any as long as we’re crossing this steppe.” He watched another flash go. He shivered. “I don’t like it, Case. I don’t like it at all.”
“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?”
