chest height... and discovered that the big voice belonged to the smallest of the thugs. He turned the thrust into an uppercut, drove his blade up and in under the man’s chin, not sliding it, driving it with all the force of panic into the man’s brain.
He had not looked the other two in the eye at their moment of realization. Gods! That was scary. He jumped back, stumbled over Abel and Timmy, fell on his back as his victim toppled forward.
Before Smeds was all the way back on his feet someone else called some question downstairs. He dove over to reclaim his knife. The man continued to move, one leg slowly pumping. For a moment he thought of a dog trying to scratch. Crazy.
The damned knife was wedged in bone. It wouldn’t come loose. He scrambled around looking for another weapon, any weapon, while the voice from the head of the stairs asked several questions more. All Smeds could come up with was the dead man’s own knife, which he pulled from its sheath with a sort of superstitious dread.
He got against the wall beside the doorway again and waited. And waited. And waited.
In time the shakes went away. The nerves calmed some. He realized that his latest victim could be seen from the stairs.
He waited some more.
He had to make a move. The longer he dicked around, the more time there would be for something to go wrong.
His muscles did not want to unlock. He was completely terrified of the consequences of making any move.
But he did, finally, drag himself around far enough to peek through the doorway.
Morning light spilled down from upstairs. It showed him nothing to fear. He made his feet move. He found no trouble on the ground floor. From the doorway he could see nothing but desolation, city badlands where not a soul stirred. He wanted to run, all the way to the Skull and Crossbones.
He bore down, did what had to be done, dragging the body out of the street, to the cellar, where it was less likely to be discovered soon. Then he headed for home. But he did not run, though his legs insisted they had to stretch out and go.
XLVI
We dropped into Oar in the middle of the night but we didn’t find Darling and them till noon next day, and then only because we had Bomanz along to sniff them out. They weren’t where they were supposed to be. Meantime, I ran into two guys that I knew from when me and Raven were staying in Oar, and they wanted to talk talk talk.
Nobody in town had much else to do.
“Things don’t look good,” Raven said as we drifted through the streets, following Bomanz’s sorcerous nose. “All these people packed in here, no chance to get out, food stocks probably getting low, plague maybe getting ready to break out. The place is ripe. Would have been long gone if this was high summer and the heat was eating up everybody’s tolerance. You know anything about these twins?”
He wasn’t talking to me. When it comes to sorcerers and sorcery I don’t know nothing about nothing except I want to stay out of the way.
“Never heard of them,” Bomanz said. “That doesn’t mean anything. The Lady had a whole crop coming up.”
“How do you think you’d stack up against them?”
“I don’t plan to find out.”
I spotted a white rose painted on a door. “Look there.” They looked. Other people were looking, too, and trying not to be noticed doing it.
“That damned screw-up Silent,” Raven growled. “He’s talked her into doing something stupid.”
“Who you trying to bullshit?” I asked. “When did anybody ever talk Darling into doing something she didn’t want to do?”
He grumbled some, then grumbled some more.
Bomanz’s nose picked out their hideout then, and after some shibboleth stuff we got into the cellar where Darling was holding court with a gang of leftovers from Oar’s Rebel heyday. They didn’t look like much to me.
Raven grunted. He wasn’t impressed either. He reported the high points of our visit to the Barrowland. That didn’t take a minute, even using sign. Then Darling let us in on the situation in Oar, which took a lot longer than a minute.
Raven wanted to know what she was doing, painting white roses around town. She said she wasn’t. In fact, she said nobody that had anything to do with the movement admitted doing it. Since none of those roses had been seen before she arrived she thought somebody recognized her in the street and was trying to get something stirred up.
She didn’t have a shred of evidence. Didn’t seem likely to me. Anybody that recognized her, that wasn’t personally committed to the cause, should ought to go for the bounty on her, the way I figured. She would fetch a good price, and Silent not a bad sum, and even the Torque brothers were good for a chunk that could keep you in beans for a long time.
Raven figured it the way I did. But he wasn’t going to argue with Darling, so he asked if there had been any progress finding the silver spike.
“None,” she signed. “We have been very busy stampeding around old ground already covered by other hunters, finding nothing while we ate their dust. In the meantime our small allies have been busy spying on those other hunters that our brothers of the movement have identified for us.”
Bomanz wanted names. He got them. A long string, with a half dozen noted as having enlisted with the deceased.
“You know any of those people?” Raven asked.
“No. But I’ve been out of touch. The curious angle is, there hasn’t been any attention from the Tower. This thing is pulling in every hedge wizard and tea-leaf reader with a smidge of ambition. These twins are pretty plainly up to exactly what you’d expect from their kind faced with an opportunity like this. News like this gets around faster than the clap. It’s got to have reached the Tower. Why isn’t some real heavyweight up here to sit on those two?”
I suggested, “Because they don’t have windwhales to carry them around and all their flying carpets got skragged back when.”
“They have other resources.”
There wasn’t no point worrying about it since we weren’t going to come up with an answer.
Raven wanted to know how the other guys were trying to find the spike. He figured maybe the problem was that the hunters were attacking it from the wrong direction.
Darling signed, “Spidersilk and Gossamer have made repeated direct searches. They also provoke and watch the other hunters, who have been concentrating on finding the men who stole the spike and brought it to Oar.”
I asked, “How do we know the damned thing is even here?”
Bomanz said, “You can sense it. Like a bad smell.”
“But you can’t tell where it is?”
“Only very vaguely. Right now I’d guess it’s somewhere north of us. But I can’t narrow that directionality to below about a hundred thirty degrees of arc.” He raised his arms to show what he meant. “It’s the nature of the thing to maximize the evil around it. If it could be sniffed out easily there would be little chance for the play of chaos. It isn’t sentient but it responds to and feeds back the dark emotions and ambitions around it. One way to find the men who brought it out of the Barrowland might be to look for people who were out of town during the proper time period and who have shown changed patterns of behavior. Generally, aggravated tendencies toward indulging weaknesses they’ve had all along.”
Darling got that from Silent. She signed back, “That method has been tried. Without success. The Limper’s raid killed so many and left people so mixed around that the necessary information cannot be gathered.”
