Scouting the Barrowland started after sunset, by the light of a quarter moon. The village was dark and silent. It looked a good time to prowl the open ground.
Out the four went in a loose line abreast barely in sight of one another, Tully guiding on the tree. It was not much of a tree by Smeds’s estimation. Right then it looked like a fat-trunked silver-bark poplar sapling about fifteen feet tall. He could not see anything remarkable there. Why the reputation?
He reached a point where the angle was right, caught a glint of moonlight off silver. It was real! And having gotten that one glance, he began to feel the throbbing dark power of it, like it was not metal at all but an icicle of pure hatred.
He shuddered, forced his gaze away.
It was real. The wealth was there to be had. If they could take it.
He hurried forward. A long, low, stony ridge barred his path. Odd that such a thing should be there, but he did not connect it with the dragon that was supposed to have devoured the infamous sorcerer Bomanz before being slain itself. Maybe if there had been more light to reveal what his hands and feet exposed as they disturbed the masking dirt...
He was near the top when he heard the sound. Like an animal snuffling. And another sound beneath it, like something scratching at the earth. He looked for the others. He could see no one but Tully, who was staring at the tree from ten feet away. There was something odd about the tree. The tops of its leaves glimmered with a faint bluish ghost light.
Maybe it was a trick of the rising moon.
He got up where the footing was good, stood, glanced at the tree again. Definitely something weird going on there. The whole thing was glowing.
He looked down in front of him. His heart stilled.
Something stared back at him from fifty feet away. It had a head the size of a bushel basket. Its eyes and teeth shown in the tree light. Especially its teeth. Never had he seen so many sharp teeth, or so big.
It started toward him.
His feet would not move.
He looked around wildly, saw Tully and Timmy headed away from the tree at a dead run.
He looked forward again as the monster began its leap, its jaws opening to snap at his head. He hurled himself backward. As the monster arced after him a blue bolt from the tree smacked it aside as a man’s hand swats a flying insect.
Smeds landed hard, but hard did not slow him a step. He took off running and never looked back.
“I saw it, too,” Old Man Fish said, and that put the quietus on Tully trying to make like Smeds was imagining things. “Like he said, it was as big as a house. Like a giant three-legged dog. The tree zapped it. It ran away.”
“Three-legged dog? Come on. What was it doing?”
Smeds said, “It was trying to dig something up. It was sniffing and pawing the ground just like a dog trying to dig up a bone.”
“Damn it to hell! Complications. Why does there always have to be complications? That for sure means it’ll take longer than I thought. But we don’t got no time to waste. Sooner or later somebody else is going to get the same idea I did.”
“Don’t get in no hurry,” Fish said. “Take your time and do it right. That is, if you want to live long enough to enjoy being rich.”
Tully grunted. Nobody suggested they give it up. Not even Smeds, who had felt the monster’s breath on his face.
“Toadkiller Dog,” Timmy Locan said.
“Say what?” Tully snapped back.
“Toadkiller Dog. There was a monster in the fight up here called Toadkiller Dog.”
“Toadkiller Dog? What the hell kind of name is that?”
“How the hell should I know? He ain’t my pup.”
Stupid joke, but everybody laughed anyway. They needed to.
VI
Raven hardly sobered up for three weeks. One night I came back to our place, I’d had enough. I’d had to hurt a man bad that day, a nut who earned it trying to grab my boss’s kids. Even so I felt bad. Somehow I worked it out that it was all Raven’s fault I got in a position where I had to hurt somebody.
He was drunk on his ass. “Look at you, sucking on a wineskin like it was your mother’s tit. The great and famous tough guy Raven, so bad he offed his old lady in the public gardens at Opal. So bad he went head-to-head with the Limper. Laying around feeling sorry for himself and whining like a three-year-old with a bellyache. Get up and do something with yourself, man. I’m sick of seeing you like this.”
In a stumbling, slurred voice he told me to get stuffed, it wasn’t any of my damned business.
“The hell it ain’t! It’s my damned money paying for the room here, dipshit. And I got to come home every day to the stink of old puke and spilled wine and a goddamn soil pot you ain’t got time to empty yourself. When was the last time you bothered to change your clothes? When was the last time you had a bath?”
He cussed me in a cracked-voice scream.
“You’re just about the most selfish, thoughtless bastard I ever seen. Won’t even clean up after yourself.”
I went on like that, louder and angrier. But he never really fought back, which made me think maybe he was about as disgusted with himself as I was with him. But who can go around admitting he’s a hopeless, useless hunk of shit?
Finally he ran out of what little fight he had. He got up and staggered out, without any parting shot. He did not burn any bridges behind him.
A guy I worked with and I talked it over about what you do with drunks. His dad was a reformed drunk. He told me you got to stop trying to help them out. You got to stop making excuses for them and not take excuses from them. You got to put them on a spot where they can’t do nothing but face the truth because they aren’t going to change a bit till they decide to do it. They got to be the ones who believe they’ve turned into dregs and something has got to be changed.
I didn’t know if I could wait around long enough for Raven to decide he was a real grown-up man and he was going to have to face reality. Darling was gone and that was that. There were kids to be found. That whole past, down in Opal, had to be hooked back out into the light and made peace with.
Actually, I was pretty sure he would come around, given time. The kind of guy he was being was the kind he held in deep contempt. That had to seep through. But it sure was frustrating, waiting him out.
He came back home four days later, sobered up and cleaned up and looking halfway like the Raven I remembered. He was all apologetic. He promised to get straight and to do better.
Sure. They do that, too.
I would believe it when I saw it.
I didn’t make any big deal out of anything. I didn’t preach. There wasn’t no profit in that.
He hung on pretty good. He looked like he was getting somewhere. But then two days later I came home and found him so stinking he couldn’t crawl.
Hell with him, I said.
VII
They were running shorthanded, what with Timmy laid up after getting caught in a blast of the tree’s blue light, but Smeds did not see where it made any difference. They were not getting anywhere. They could not go out there in the daytime without being seen from the town. After dark that monster always came and dug in its hole.
