The Books of the South

by Glen Cook

  Smeds dropped Timmy’s hand, frantically jerked his knife out of the dead man—wizard?—and got himself over beside the doorframe as the someone yelled, “You hear me, Abel?” Feet thump-thump-thumped down the stairs. “We’re maybe in deep shit here. Somebody stuck a knife in Tanker.… What the shit is going on here?”

  The man had stopped just outside the doorway.

  Smeds came around thrusting at what he guessed should be 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.

  46

  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.”

  “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?”

  47

  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 would have to go to staying afloat. He would be vulnerable.

  Moreover, salt water would leak through his protective spells and gnaw at the grease, and then at the clay.�
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  So there was little choice. He must do what they wanted him to do and go around. He pictured the map, chose what seemed to be the shorter way. He began running to the east.

  The horsemen paced him the rest of that day. When dawn came they were gone. After a few hours he became confident enough to increase his pace. Curse them. He would do what they wanted and slaughter them anyway.

  The miles passed away as they had before he had entered the empire.

  As he ran he pondered the hidden purpose behind his having been turned onto this extended course. He could not prize loose the sense of it.

  48

  Smeds found Old Man Fish as soon as he had gotten himself some rest. Fish listened intently and watched him through narrowed eyes as he told his tale. “Didn’t think you’d have what it takes, Smeds.”

  “Me neither. I was scared shitless the whole time.”

  “But you thought, and you did what you had to do. That’s good. Think you’d know the man who got away if you saw him again?”

  “I don’t know. It was dark and I never got a real good look at him.”

  “We’ll worry about him later. Thing we got to do now is get rid of those bodies. Where’s Tully?”

  “Who knows? Probably sleeping. Why not just leave them where they are? It ain’t like they’re out where somebody’s going to trip over them.”

  “Because somebody besides you and me knows where they are and he might tell somebody else who might go take a look and maybe recognize Timmy Locan as a guy who used to hang around with you and me and Tully. Get it?”

  “Got it.” Also, maybe Fish wanted a look just to make sure Timmy had gone out the way Smeds said he had. Smeds was related to Tully Stahl and Fish already had a habit of not taking on faith anything that Stahl said.

  “So get Tully and let’s move.”

  Smeds went inside the Skull and Crossbones, nodding to the Nightstalkers corporal as he passed. The owner, who didn’t have much use for them, scowled at him across the common room. Smeds had to pass close by him. The man asked, “You boys going to pay for your room? You’re two days late.”