Smeds said, “Sit your ass down, Tully. Then tell us how come you got to be stealing from Timmy and mooching from me when you just made the biggest hit of your life.”
“What the hell are you...?”
Fish popped him in the brisket, pushed him into the chair. “This here is serious business, Tully. Real serious. Maybe you don’t realize. Maybe you haven’t been paying attention to what’s going on. Look around. Come on. That’s the boy. See this? This was our pal Timmy Locan. Just a sweet happy kid you conned into thinking he could get rich. These other guys did this to him. And they were gentle as virgins compared to some of the people who are after us. Look at them, Tully. Then tell us how you’ve been dicking up, being too damned stupid to be scared, too damned dumb to sit tight and wait the storm out.”
Malevolent rage filled Tully’s eyes. He looked like he was thinking about getting stubborn where stubborn was pointless.
Smeds said, “You’re a screw-up, cousin. You had one damned good idea in your whole damned life and as soon as we get to work on it you got to go and try to mess it up for all of us. Come on. What did you do? Are we all in a hole?”
A flicker of cunning, quickly hidden. “I just made a couple bad bets is all.”
“A couple? And you lost so much you had to go stealing from Timmy?”
Tully put on his stubborn face. Fish slapped it for him. “Gambling. You dipshit. Probably with somebody who knew you from before and knew you didn’t have a pot to piss in. Tell us about it.”
The words came tumbling out and they did not disappoint Smeds’s suspicions in the least. Tully told an idiot’s tale of bad bets made and redoubled bets laid then doubled again and lost again till, suddenly, here was Tully Stahl not only broke but behind a stack of markers that added up to a bundle and the boys holding them were not the sort to laugh it off if he reneged. So he’d had no choice. Anyway, he would have paid Timmy back out of his share as soon as they’d sold the spike, so...
Fish cut him off before he started justifying his idiot behavior. Smeds knew it was coming. And knew if Tully went at it he would turn the whole thing around so it was all their fault. He asked, “How much you still owe, Tully?”
That hint of cunning again. Tully knew they were going to bail him out.
“The truth,” Fish snapped. “We’re going to cover you, yeah. But one of us is going to be there to see you pay off. And then you’re not getting a copper more. And you’re going to pay back every bit, with interest.”
“You can’t treat me like this.”
“You don’t want to get treated like an asshole don’t act like an asshole.”
Smeds said, “You act like a spoiled brat...”
Fish continued, “You’ll get treated a lot worse if you screw up again. Come on. Let’s get to work.”
Tully shrank from the menace in Fish’s voice. He turned to Smeds in appeal. Smeds told him, “I’m not getting killed because you can’t understand why you have to act responsible. Grab Timmy’s legs and help me carry him upstairs. And think about the condition he’s in next time you get a wild hair and go to thinking about doing something. Like anything.”
Tully looked down at Timmy. “I can’t.”
“Yes you can. Just think about what if somebody else was to find him and figure out who he was and who he hung around with. Grab hold.”
They moved the bodies upstairs, then waited for nightfall. Fish knew a place not far away that would be perfect, some low ground that turned marshy when it rained and bred diseases. The imperial engineers were using it for a landfill. One day the bodies would lie fifty feet below new streets.
They took Timmy out first, of course. He represented the greatest peril. The man who had been questioning Timmy went next, then the thugs, with the little one going last. Tully and Smeds did the carrying while Fish floated around watching for the grays or an accidental witness.
It went beautifully. Till the last one.
“Somebody coming,” Fish breathed. “Move it. I’ll distract them if they spot us.”
XLIX
Toadkiller Dog was amused by his companions in misfortune, so eager to spend themselves in the digging yet so loath to do what had to be done to ensure their strength. After four days of increasing hunger he killed the weakest. He fed, and left the remains to the others. It did not take them long to overcome their reservations and revulsion. And that quickened their determination. None wanted to be next on the menu.
But the digging took another eight days.
Only the monster himself came up out of the earth. But that would have been the case had the digging taken only an hour.
He escaped the darkness of underground into the darkness of night. The trail was not hard to find, It had not rained since the hour of the Limper’s perfidy. Ha! Headed north again!
He began to trot. As he loosened up he stretched himself more and more, till he fell into a lupine lope that left a dozen leagues behind him every hour. He did not break stride till he had crossed the bounds of the empire and had come to the place where the Limper had encountered a major obstacle. He stopped. He prowled and sniffed till he understood what had happened.
The Limper had not been welcomed back with tears of joy.
He caught something on the breeze, cast about, spied a distant black rider armed with a flaming spear. The rider flung that blazing dart northward.
Puzzled, Toadkiller Dog resumed his journey.
He came to another place where the Limper had had difficulties. Again he saw a black rider with a fiery spear who hurled his dart to the north.
One more repetition and the monster understood that he was being encouraged to overtake the Limper, that he would be guided to the inevitable confrontation, and that the Limper was being stalled all along his northward journey.
What could he do when he caught up? He was no match for that son of the shadow.
A black rider sat outside the gate of Beryl. He threw a blazing spear to the east. Toadkiller Dog turned. He found the trail quickly.
So. The old doom had been forced to take the long road, around the sea. He loped on, gaining two miles for each three he ran. He swam the River Bigotes and the Hyclades and streaked across the seventy silvery miles of lifeless, mirror-flat salt desert called the Rani Poor. He raced between the countless burial mounds of Barbara to reach the forgotten highways of Laba Larada. He circled the haunted ruins of Khun, passed the pyramids of Katch, which still stood sentinel over the Canyons of the Undead. Warily, he circled the remnants of the temple city of Marsha the Devastator, where the ah- still shimmered with the cries of sacrificies whose hearts had been torn out on the altars of an aloof and disdainful goddess.
The trail grew warmer by the hour.
He came into the province of Karsus, past outposts of the empire where auxiliaries recruited from the Grain tribes guarded the frontier against the depredations of their own kind more ferociously and faithfully than did the imperial legions. A black rider armed with a spear of fire watched him race across the Plain of Dano-Patha, where a hundred armies had contested the right of passage north or south or east and where some legends said the Last Battle of Time would be fought between Light and Darkness.
The Mountains of Sinjian lay beyond, and in their savage defiles he found evidence that the Limper was again being tormented and delayed, again with vicious traps narrowly escaped.
The spoor was heavy and hot and had the taint of newly opened graves.
He came out onto a prominence overlooking the Straits of Angine, where the fresh waters flowed down from the Kiril Lakes to meld with the salty waters of the Sea of Torments. His vantage was not far from that narrowest part of the strait that seafarers called Hell’s Gate and overland travelers had dubbed Heaven’s Bridge.
Hell was in session down there.
The Limper was on the south shore and wanted to cross over. But on the north shore someone
