“There’s got to be a way,” Raven carped.
One of the local guys said, “Gossamer and Spidersilk already thought of it. Get so many bad guys in that the thieves have to panic and do something to give themselves away. Sooner or later.”
“Dumb,” Raven said. He sneered. “All they’d have to do is snip a few loose ends, if there were any, and sit tight.”
“That’s what they’re doing. We think.” The guy went off about some really gruesome disease called the black hand that had been traced to a physician that got himself knifed an eyeblink after the twins closed the city. There was still some debate, but a lot thought the black hand maybe got started when somebody accidentally touched the spike barehand, then passed it on when he went to the physician for help. The physician passed it around to his clients and they passed it around some more, till the soldiers rounded them up so they couldn’t.
Darling signed, “The twins cleave to this theory. The physician’s murder was witnessed. Two men were involved. They have not been identified or even well described.”
The local man went on about theories and about how none of the people with the black hand had had anything to do with grabbing the spike. The twins made sure of that right away. So there was some guy running around who maybe had been fixed up by the doc and that was an angle a lot of hunters were working.
“Maybe,” I said. “But what if maybe his buddies was smart enough to put him six feet under?”
Seemed like nobody had thought about that. Nice people tend to think everybody is nice.
“What about them roses?” I asked. “If it ain’t your people painting them, who is? And why?”
“A diversion, obviously,” Raven said. “If we could catch whoever is doing it we might get a break.”
The local talker said, “Go teach your grandma to suck eggs, fella. We’ve got everybody we have on the street, calming people down and asking questions. Tonight everybody is going to be watching likely places to put more up. We see somebody, he’ll be over here answering questions before he can blink.”
I sat myself down out of the way, fixing to take a nap. “Want to bet they don’t walk into it?”
XLVII
Does clay tire? Does the earth? No. The clay man loped northward, hour after hour and mile after mile, day and night, pausing seldom and then only to freshen the coat of grease, spell-supported, that retained moisture and kept the clay supple.
The miles passed away. The hulks of raped cities fell behind. Suns rose and set. He crossed the southern frontier of the northern empire. It was early in the day.
He had not gone far when he realized he was being paced by imperial cavalry. He slowed. They slowed. He stopped. They drifted into cover and waited.
They had been waiting for him. His return had been expected.
How? By whom? For how long? What lay ahead, specially prepared for him?
He resumed his run, but more slowly, his senses keyed.
The cavalry worked in relays, no party riding more than five miles before being relieved. If he turned toward them they retreated. When he held to the road they closed in slowly, as though carefully daring his might. He suspected they wanted him to pursue them. He refused. He followed the road. In time he increased his pace.
A subtle mind opposed him.
After a while the indrift of the riders sharpened, like a charge starting to take shape...
His attention ensnared thus, he nearly missed the slight discoloration, the minuscule sag, in the road ahead. But catch it he did. Pit trap. He hurled himself forward in a prodigious leap.
Missiles filled the air. Several slammed into him, batting him around, and he knew he had been taken. Arrows from saddle bows were whistling around him before he regained his equilibrium. The cavalry to his left had grown a little too daring. He faced them, about to welcome them with death.
A five-hundred-pound stone ripped across his right shoulder so close it brushed away the protective grease. He jumped, whirled. If that had caught him square... He sensed no presence on which to spend his wrath. He whirled again. The cavalry were galloping away, already beyond retribution.
He removed the shafts from his body, surveyed the area. There was no pit. Just the appearance of one with a trigger board much better hidden under the dust where his foot must fall if he was going to jump over. Even the stone had been hurled by an engine triggered remotely and fortune had placed him a step out of the line of fire.
That was the first trap. The next was a bridge over a small, sluggish river. Barrels of naphtha had been rigged beneath it, fixed to break open and catch fire when he stepped upon the bridge decking.
This time the diversionary troops waited atop a ridge beyond the river. Light engines hurled missiles at him as he used his power to jam the mechanism meant to breach the barrels and start the fire.
A five-pound rock hit him in the chest, flung him backward. He sprang up angrily and sprinted toward his tormentors.
Held only by a feeble peg, the center section of the bridge collapsed under his weight. The falling timbers smashed the naphtha barrels. A swarm of fire missiles was in the air before he hit water.
They had made a fool of him twice.
They would not live to try a third time.
He came boiling out of the water, up the bank below the burning bridge, into the face of renewed missile fire, bellowing...
He tripped something. A vast net flew up, toward, and over him. Its cables were as strong as steel but of a sticky, flexible substance like spider silk. The more he struggled, the more tangled he became. And something kept drawing the net tighter and dragging him back toward the water. He would have great difficulty with the verbal parts of his sorcery beneath the river.
The knowledge of the possibility that he might be vanquished by lesser beings stabbed through him like a blade of ice. He was up against something he could not overcome by brute force.
The blow of fear-the existence of which he could not confess even to himself-stilled his rage, made him take time to think, to act appropriately.
He tried a couple of sorceries. The second effected a break in the net just before he was pulled beneath the surface.
He came out of the river carefully, with concentration, and so avoided a trap armed with a blade that could have sliced him in two. Safe for the moment, he took stock. Minor, all the damage done him. But a dozen such encounters could accumulate into something crippling.
Was that the strategy? Wear him down? Likely, though each phase of each trap had been vicious enough.
He proceeded much more carefully, his emotions, his madness, under tight rein. Vengeance could await achievement of the more important triumph in the north. Once he had taken that keystone of power he could requite the world a thousand times for its cruelties and indignities.
There were more traps. Some were deadly and cunning. He did not escape unscathed, alert as he was. His enemies did not rely upon sorcery. They preferred mechanisms and psychological ploys, which for him were more difficult to handle.
Not once did he see anyone other than the cavalrymen who dogged him. He found the gates of the great port city Beryl standing open and its streets empty. Nothing stirred but leaves and bits of trash, tossed by winds from the sea. The hearthstones were cold and even the rats had gone away. Not a pigeon or sparrow swooped through the air.
The murmur of the wind seemed like the cold whisper of the grave. In that desolation even he could feel alone and lonely in spirit.
There were no ships in the harbor, no boats on the waterfront. Not so much as a punt. The haze-distorted shape of a single black quinquirireme hovered beyond the harbor light, well out to sea. There was a statement here. He would not be allowed to cross the sea. He was sure that whichever way he chose to walk along the coast he would find the shores naked of boats.
He considered swimming. But that black ship would be waiting for that. He was so massive that all his energy
