by Glen Cook
Smeds saw standards, uniforms, and unit emblems he’d never seen before. “Something going on here,” he said. “We better be careful.” He indicated a hanged man dangling from a roof tree three stories up.
“Martial law,” Fish said. “Means the wise guys are upset. You’re right, Smeds. We walk real careful till we find out what’s going on and why.”
They headed for the place Tully stayed first, it being closest. It was not there anymore. Tully was not distressed. “I’ll just stay with you till I get set,” he told Smeds.
But Smeds had not paid any rent, so they had thrown his junk into the street for scavengers — after cashing in his empties and stealing what they wanted for themselves — then had let the room to people dispossessed by the disaster. Fish’s place had gone the way of Tully’s. The old man was not surprised. He said nothing. He did look a little more gaunt and haggard and slumped.
“So maybe we can all stuff in at my old lady’s place,” Timmy said. He was jittery. Smeds figured it was his hand. “Just for tonight. My old man, he don’t like anybody I hang around with.”
Timmy’s parents owned the place they lived, though they were as poor as anybody else on the North Side. Smeds had heard they got it as a payoff from the gray boys for informing back in the days when there was still a lot of Rebel activity in Oar. Timmy would not say. Maybe it was true.
Who cared anymore? They’d probably been on the right side. The imperials were more honest, and better governors, if you were at a social level where who was in charge made any difference.
Smeds did not give a rat’s ass who ran things as long as they left him alone. Most people felt that way.
“Timmy! Timmy Locan!”
They stopped, waited while an older woman overhauled them. As she waddled up, Timmy said, “Mrs. Cisco. How are you?”
“We thought you were dead with the rest of them, Timmy. Forty thousand people they killed that night. …”
“I was out of the city, Mrs. Cisco. I just got back.”
“You haven’t been home yet?”
People jostled them in the narrow street. It was three-quarters dark but there were so many soldiers around nobody needed to run inside to hide from the night. Smeds wondered what the bad boys were doing. Working?
“I said I just got in.”
Smeds saw he did not like the woman much.
She went all sad and consoling. Even Smeds, who did not consider himself perceptive, saw she was just busting because she was going to get to be the first to pass along some bad news.
“Your dad and both your brothers … I’m sorry. They were trying to help fight the fires. Your mother and sister … Well, they were conquerors. They did what conquerors always do. Your sister, they mutilated her so bad she ended up killing herself a couple weeks ago.”
Timmy shook like he was about to go into convulsions.
“That’s enough, madam,” Fish said. “You’ve buried your blade to the heart.”
She sputtered, “Why, the nerve …”
Tully said, “Piss off, bitch. Before I kick your ass up around your ears.” He used that gentle, even tone Smeds knew meant maximum danger.
So. Cousin Tully had a little canker of humanity hidden away after all. Though he would not admit it on the rack.
“I can’t handle this,” Timmy said. “I think I better stay dead.” Fish said, “That woman won’t let you rest in peace, Timmy.”
“I know. I’ll do what I got to do. But not now. I know a place called the Skull and Crossbones where we can put up cheap. If it’s still there.”
It was there. It was a place the invaders would have ignored as too contemptible to burn. It made Smeds think of a hooker still working twenty years past her prime, pathetic and desperate.
An imperial corporal sat in a chair out front, leaning back against a wooden wall that had forgotten the meaning of paint. He held a bucket of beer in his lap. He seemed to be napping. But when they were a few steps from the door he opened his eyes, checked them over, nodded, took a drink.
“Catch his emblem?” Smeds asked Fish inside. “Yes. Nightstalkers.”
The Nightstalker Brigade was the crack outfit in the northern army, rigorously trained for night operations and combat under wizard’s war conditions.
Smeds said, “I thought they were out east somewhere, trying to finish the Black Company.” The proudest honor on the standard of the Nightstalkers was their defeat of the Black Company at Queen’s Bridge. Before Queen’s Bridge those mercenaries had been so glibly invincible that half the empire had been convinced the gods themselves were on their side.
“They’re here now.”
“What the hell is going on around here?”
“Guess we better find out. What we don’t know could I eat us up.”
Timmy talked to the owner, whom he knew slightly. The man claimed he was full up with the dispossessed. None of those guests were evident. He hinted he might find space, though, if fate took a hand. Fishing for a bribe, Smeds figured. Which he would follow with a deep gouge.
“How much leverage on fate are we talking?” Timmy asked.
“Obol and a half. Each.”
“You goddamned thief!”
“Take it or leave it.”
The Nightstalker corporal stepped past Smeds and Timmy and plunked his bucket down in front of the landlord, who had gone as pale as death. “That’s twice today, dogmeat. And this time I heard it myself.”
The landlord gulped air, grabbed the bucket, and started to fill it.
“Don’t try,” the corporal said. “Offer me a bribe and you’ll stay on the labor gang forever.” He eyed Timmy and Smeds. “You guys pick yourself a room. On old Shit for Brains here for a night.”
“I was just joshing with the guys, Corporal.”
“Sure. I could tell. You had them rolling around on the floor. Bet you’ll have the guy in the black mask in stitches. He loves you comedians.”
Smeds asked, “What’s going on around here, Corporal? We’ve been out of town.”
“I could tell. I guess you can see your basic situation. Some bandits and deserters tore the place up. They wasn’t too happy about that, down to the Tower. Since we was in the neighborhood we was one of the outfits got to come in and keep order. The brigadier, she started out life in the slums of Nihil, she figures here’s a chance to get even with the kinds of assholes who made life hell when she was a kid. So you got thieves hanging from the roof trees. You got your pimps and priests and pushers, your sharpers and your fences and your whores won’t learn no better working on the labor gangs eighteen hours a day so your regular citizens can get on with putting their lives back together.
“You ask me, she’s too damned lenient. Gives them too many chances. Shithead here, the famous profiteer, he’s done used up two of his shots now. First time he got paraded through the streets with a sign around his neck and got a week on the labor gang. This time he gets thirty lashes and two weeks. Because he’s got all that shit between his ears and ain’t going to learn dick about how he can’t get away with it, next time they’re going to drag him over to Mayfield Square and stick a spear up his butt and let him sit on it till he rots.”
The corporal took a long drink from his refilled bucket, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, grinned. “Brigadier says let the punishment fit the crime.” He took another long drink, looked at the landlord. “You ready to go do it, asshole?”
As he was about to follow the landlord into the street, the corporal paused. “I reckon you boys will be fair to your host, here, and treat his place right. ‘Less you’re looking for careers in construction.” He grinned again and went.
“God damn!” Tully said.
“Yeah,” Smeds agreed.
Fish said, “I have a feeling we’re not going to be comfortable in this new Oar.”
“Not for long,” Smeds said. “But sufficient unto the day. Right now I need to get drunk, get laid, get a night’s sleep somewheres besides on the ground.”
“Not necessarily in that order,” Tully said.
Timmy put on a strained smile. “A bath wouldn’t hurt anything, either.”
“Let’s get doing what we got to do.”
XXIV
We come over this hill after what seemed like forever without seeing people and there across a valley was this walled place that covered maybe a hundred acres. The wall wasn’t much. It was maybe eight or ten feet high and no thicker than the kind of stone walls cotters put around their sheepfolds.
“Looks like a religious retreat,” Raven said. “No banners or soldiers or anything.”
He was right. We’d seen places with the same look before, but never so big. “Looks old.”
“Yes. It has a feel to it, too. Peaceful. Let’s go look.”
“Don’t look like a place Croaker would pass up, eh?”
“No. He has a bad case of the curiosities. Let’s hope he hung around long enough to let us gain some ground.”
We went over and found out our guesses were right. Raven got his wish. The place was a monastery called the Temple of Traveler’s Repose and was a kind of warehouse for knowledge. It had been sitting there soaking it up for a couple thousand years.
We found out the guys we were chasing had stayed long enough to teach one of the monks a little Jewel Cities dialect. In fact, they’d only left that very morning.
Raven got all excited. He wanted to head right on out and the hell with the sun was going to hit the horizon in another hour. I wanted to hit him over the head and slow him down. That monastery looked like a damned good place to take a day off and get human again.
“Look here, Case,” he cajoled, “they’ll be making camp by now, right? Traveling with a wagon and a coach the best they could’ve done is twenty-five miles. Right? We go all night we can grab off twenty of that, easy.” He learned that about the wagon and coach from the priest.
“And then we die. You maybe never need a rest, but I need a rest and the horses need a rest and this looks like the perfect place to do it. Hell, look at the name.”
He made exasperated noises. After all this time I still didn’t understand that catching Croaker was the most important thing in the world. He was so damned tired himself his thinking was as screwy as a possum’s.
He wasn’t the only one running shy of a full load. That priest came down with both feet solid on Raven’s side.
Raven grinned when he said, “He claims the omens are so bad they aren’t letting anybody onto the grounds. They’re even chasing people out.”
I had enough of the lingo, learned from Raven, to have gotten part of that. Also something about “the bad storm coming down from the north.” I saw I wasn’t going to win this round neither, so I said the hell with it and added a few comments that would have disappointed my old potato-digging mother. I went and shared my misery with the horses. They understood me.
Raven worked a deal for some supplies and we headed out. I wondered how much farther to the edge of the world. We’d already come farther than I’d ever believed possible.
We didn’t talk much. Not because I had the sulks. I’d given up on them and went fatalistic a long time ago. I think Raven was brooding about that bit I’d caught that he hadn’t mentioned. A bad storm coming down from the north.
In the Jewel Cities lingo “bad” can mean a couple three different things. Including “evil.”
There was barely any light left when we came to a strip of woods. “Going to have to walk this part,” Raven said. “That priest said the road through is good enough, but it’s going to be hard to follow in the dark.”
I grunted. I wasn’t thinking about the woods. My mind was on the funny-looking hills on the other side. I’d never seen anything like them. They were all steep-sided, smoothly rounded, covered with a tawny dry grass and nothing else. They looked like the humped backs of giant animals snoozing with their legs tucked up underneath them and their heads turned around behind them, out of sight.
They were very dry, those hills. The light to see them hadn’t never been good, but I was sure I’d seen a few black burn scars before it got too dark to see anything.
The woods were bone-dry, too. The trees were mostly some kind of scruffy oak with small, brittle leaves that had points almost as sharp as holly leaves. They were a sort of blue-gray color instead of the deep green of oaks in the north.
A feeble excuse for a creek dribbled through the heart of the wood. We watered ourselves and the horses and took time out for a snack. I was too tired to waste energy talking, except to say, “I don’t think I got what it takes for another fifteen miles. Uphill.”
Half a minute later he surprised me by saying. “Don’t know if I got what it takes, either. Only so far you can go on willpower.”
“Hip bothering you?”
“Yes.”
“Might ought to have it looked at.”
“Good job for Croaker, since he done it. Let’s see how much we got left.”
We managed about six more miles, the last couple up the dry grass hills, before we sort of collapsed by silent agreement. Raven said, “This time we’ll give it an hour before we hit it again.”
He was stubborn, that bastard.
We hadn’t been there five minutes before I spotted evidence of that bad storm from the north. “Raven.”
He looked. He didn’t have nothing to say. He just sighed and helped me watch the lightning.
There wasn’t a cloud between us and the stars.
XXV
Toadkiller Dog, carrying the wicker man, eased over a ridge line, halted. He shivered.
For leagues now they had sensed the presence of that place over there, an aura ever increasing in intensity and its ability to irritate. If they were sons of the shadow this was a fastness of the enemy, a citadel of light. There were few such places left.
They had to be expunged when found.
“Strange magic,” the wicker man whispered. “I don’t like it.” He glanced at the northern sky. The creatures of the tree god were up there somewhere, just beyond sight.
This was not a good place to be, sandwiched between them and that place.
The wicker man said, “We’d better do it fast.”
Toadkiller Dog had no desire to do it at all. He would bypass, given a choice.
He had choices, of course, but not many. He might get away with defying the wicker man once. That once had to be saved. In the meantime he responded to the ego of the wicker man, doing the insane, the stupid, sometimes the necessary, biding his time.
The army presently numbered two thousand. The men had collapsed in exhaustion the moment their commanders stopped moving. The wicker man summoned two to help him dismount.
They were rich men, every one. Their packs bulged with the finest treasure taken from cities their masters had devoured and from fallen comrades. Few had been with the army more than two months. Of the two thousand only a hundred had crossed the sea with the Limper. Those who did not desert had no cause to be optimistic about a long life.
The wicker man leaned against Toadkiller Dog. “Scum,” he whispered. “All scum.”
Close. Most with any spark of courage or decency deserted quickly.
The wicker man eyed the sky. A faint smile stretched the ruin of his mouth. “Do it,” he said.
The soldiers groaned and grumbled as they stood to arms, but stand to they did. The wicker man stared at the temple. It abused his confidence, but he could not discern any concrete cause. “Go!” He slapped Toadkiller Dog’s shoulder. “Scout it, damn you!”
He then assembled the surviving witchmen from the northern forest. They had not been much use lately, but he had a task for them now.
There wasn’t a breath of warning. One moment the night was still except for the chirp of crickets and the uneasy rustle of men on the brink of an assault, the next it was alive with attacking manias. They came from every direction, not fifty feet high, in twos and threes, and this time their lightning was not their most important weapo
n.
The first flights ghosted in and dropped fleshy sausage-shaped objects four feet long. Boiling, oily flame splashed everywhere. Toadkiller Dog howled in the heart of an accurately delivered barrage. Soldiers shrieked. Horses screamed and bolted. Baggage wagons caught fire.
The wicker man would have screamed in rage had he been able. But had he had the capability, he would not have had the time.
He had begun preparing a snare. And while he had concentrated on that they had caught him flat-footed.
He was enveloped in flame. He dared not think of anything else.
He suffered badly before he shielded himself with a chrysalis of protective spells. He was sprawled on the earth then, his wicker body charred and broken. His pain was terrible and his rage more so.
Bladders continued to fall. Mantas that had dumped theirs returned with their lightning. The wicker man extended his charm to include a pair of shamans. One struggled to lift the wicker man’s battered frame. The other found the tag ends of the Limper’s charm and began to weave it stronger.
The remnant of the wicker man waved a blackened arm.
A manta tumbled from the night, little lightning bolts popping and snapping around it.
The wicker man waved again.
Toadkiller Dog charged the temple. Most of the men followed. A quick, successful assault would mean shelter from the horror in the sky.
That horror pursued them. The air above the Limper had become too dangerous.
Fire bladders fell and blossomed orange, finishing the baggage and supplies. Safe now, the wicker man forgot the fires. He chained his anger. He returned to his interrupted task
As Toadkiller Dog neared the monastery wall something reached out and flicked him away the way a man flicks a bug. Soldiers tumbled around him.
There would be no shelter from the devils in the sky.
Yet a few men did keep going, their progress unimpeded. Why?
The mantas came down on rippling wings. Toadkiller Dog hurled himself into the air. His jaws closed on dark flesh.
The wicker man murmured while the two shamans recovered something from the smoldering remains of a wagon. He beamed at them, oblivious to the surrounding holocaust.