The Spark

by David Drake

  But while there weren’t any feuds like that on Beune, I’d sure read about humans getting along about that bad. I wondered if there was Beast communities more like Beune, where people—Beasts—didn’t all like each other but at least everybody got along all right. Well, when they were sober.

  “Clan is very important to me, human,” the Beast said. “More important than you can perhaps imagine. Lang has trapped the soul of the late head of my clan in the Death Dimension, so that he cannot progress to his final fate.”

  I frowned. “Hung him on the wall?” I said, thinking of Palin in his dungeon.

  “No,” said the Beast. “Your ancestor is unwilling to die, human. Mine is dead but unable to continue his journey in death. Lang travels not only in the Waste but in the Death Dimension. Lang says he will release my ancestor in the future if I do as he wishes.”

  “Do you believe him?” I said. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would, but I didn’t understand anything about the situation. In particular, I didn’t understand why the Beast was talking to me now.

  “I believe that Lang holds my ancestor trapped,” the Beast said. “My ancestor comes to me in dreams and pleads that I release him.”

  “That’s not an answer!” I said. But I suppose it was. The Beast was saying that it had no choice, and I suppose that was true.

  Instead of answering the Beast asked, “What would you do if you were freed from Lang’s compulsion, human?”

  “The first thing I’d do is treat Lang the same way I did the Shade,” I said. If I could, of course; but I was pretty sure I could handle Lang as easily as I had Lord Charles.

  “That was my expectation,” the Beast said. “Lang is in the room at the end of the corridor which meets this one.”

  The fluid blackness extended in the direction opposite to the staircase up. It withdrew, then reappeared from the mass. It dropped something on the floor between us.

  The Beast had dropped a controller onto the stone.

  It turned to the door. Well, it didn’t have a face that I could see, but the whole mass rotated in the other direction.

  “Wait!” I said; which was stupid, I should’ve just smashed the controller, but I didn’t understand what was happening. “Why are you doing this?”

  “What would you have done in my place?” the Beast asked.

  I thought for a moment. “Killed Lang, I suppose,” I said. “He’s no more your friend than he is mine. But you say he’s holding your ancestor and Lang is the only way to free him. And that’s important to you.”

  “Very important,” said the Beast. “Is your life important to you, human?”

  “Sure it is!” I said.

  “And yet you risked it to free my kin,” said the Beast. “To free what to you was merely a dangerous animal. Because that was what you thought was right.”

  “I killed the Shade,” I said. “Freeing your kin just happened. I didn’t do it to free your kin.”

  “Yes,” said the Beast. “You did what you thought was right. Whereas when I was faced with a choice, I chose to force you to do what you thought was wrong. I caused you to do things that anger and disgust you in a fashion that you would prefer to die rather than feel. But I have prevented you from dying as well.”

  “I wouldn’t have killed myself,” I said. But I knew that if it’d been a choice between letting the massacre happen or dying because I tried to stop it, I’d have tried to stop it.

  “Then,” said the Beast, “you may believe that your example has made me a better person. Or a better Beast, if you like.”

  It walked out of the cell. I looked at the controller, then pulled my weapon from my pocket.

  The controller was an Ancient artifact. I’d rather have burned down a chapel than destroy something made by the Ancients.

  I switched on my weapon and drew its tip through the controller, then back again crossways. The metal case—I think it was bronze—spit drops in all directions, and the ceramic interior shattered to dust.

  I shut off the weapon but kept it and the shield in my hands. I went looking for Lang.

  * * *

  I’d thought briefly about fetching Buck from the boat, but Lang didn’t have a dog. With a man like Lang—a thing like Lang it if the Beast was right—I didn’t worry about being fair—but also, I wasn’t worried about a fair fight. If Lang managed to kill me, well, I wouldn’t have to watch another massacre then either.

  Jacques wasn’t in sight when I came out of the cell; chances were he’d ducked somewhere when he saw the Beast. I turned the corner of the corridor and started toward the far end, fifty feet away. As I did so, the door there opened and Lang stepped out. His tunic was patterned with black and white diamonds over black trousers.

  “Hello, Lang,” I said. “I’ve come to kill you.”

  Lang reached into a tunic pocket without speaking. His hand came out empty. I smiled and switched on my equipment.

  The walls to either side became dark blurs, the stone and the joints between individual blocks merged into featureless compression. Lang blurred also as he drew his shield and weapon from their holsters on his fabric belt.

  I wondered how the Beast had gotten the controller away from Lang. Making a slave of a creature—a person—as clever as the Beast was a dangerous business.

  The corridor wasn’t wide enough for maneuvering, and that wasn’t to my taste anyway. I went straight at him, not running but taking full strides. I thought for a moment that Lang was going to dodge down the side corridor—the basement was laid out with the castle foundations as the center of a square of corridors—but instead he raised his shield and held his weapon back to strike overhand.

  He probably doesn’t get any more practice than Lord Charles did.…

  I slammed into him, shield to shield. My weapon was high also, but I had no intention of swinging that way. Lang did and carved a shrieking, sparkling trough in the stone ceiling. I thrust, aiming at his right shoulder.

  Lang jumped back, but between the shock of his weapon stalling on the stone in mid-stroke and my counterthrust, he fumbled his weapon. It bounced on the floor.

  I cut at his right hand as he bent to grab it. His shield held, but he skipped back a step and now I was standing over the fallen weapon.

  I thought of what I’d seen at Rowley’s Roost. With our shields on Lang couldn’t see my grin, but I’ll bet he knew it was there. I stepped forward.

  Lang tried to scramble away, but he had to face me to use his shield. I hacked at it very deliberately, slanting my strokes to keep from hitting the ceiling and walls. Bits began to fail under the punishment. It was just a matter of time.…

  Lang saw that too. He flung what was left of the shield at me and turned to run. I guess he was hoping to get to the staircase in the middle of the corridor. I lunged and burned across his right leg at mid thigh.

  I heard the scream in my mind, a high keening like the axle rubbing in a wooden wheel. It went on and on until I stabbed again, not really picking a target because of the pain in my head from the sound.

  My weapon drove into Lang’s body where the kidneys would have been in a human, but there was nothing remotely human about what writhed away from my sizzling cut. Nothing.

  The scream stopped, though.

  I cut again, severing the appendage that I’d taken for Lang’s head while he—it—was alive. I don’t think it was really a head, but all in all I seemed to have killed the thing. The only way to be sure would be a fire, a huge fire.

  Somebody else could worry about that. I just wanted to be gone.

  I walked back the way I’d come, to Baga’s cell. It was locked with a thick wooden crossbar. I could’ve slid it open with the heel of my right hand, but instead I cut it through to make a point.

  “C’mon, Baga,” I said. “We’re leaving.”

  “Glad to hear it, boss,” Baga said. He stuck his head out and looked both ways before he left the cell, though.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “But I’ll lead
.”

  Lang’s warriors might try to stop us, but I didn’t think they would. They’d seen me at Rowley’s Roost; Lord Charles and his warriors were all three better than Severin and Roush.

  I’d seen figures scuttling away as I turned the corner at Lang’s room. I thought of searching that room—I wondered what would happen to Boyes now that Lang was dead but the controller hadn’t been destroyed—but I didn’t want to spend the time.

  “Are we going back to Dun Add?” Baga said as we entered the castle corridor.

  “Soon,” I said. “But first, I’ve got some other business to take care of. We’re going to Castle Ariel. I need to talk with Palin.”

  Who was very likely my father.

  CHAPTER 30

  Castle Ariel and More Distant Places

  Buck hopped willingly out of the boat as soon as Baga opened up at Castle Ariel. I’d exercised him along the Road at Farandol, but he’d still been cooped up more than he liked to be. Well, he and I both had.

  The gong in the tower still echoed, though the watchman had only struck it once. He waved down at me. He was one of the soldiers who’d gone off with Garrett, though I don’t believe I’d ever heard his name.

  “Say, there’s been a fire,” said Baga. I hadn’t noticed that when I’d viewed the node through the boat’s eyes, but the smell of smoke still hung in the air.

  Somebody’s built a fire in the rocky gorge to the left of the landingplace. I peered over the edge, frowning. It must have been deliberate because there’d only been scrub clinging to the rocks when I’d last been here.

  Oh.

  “It was a pyre for the body of the Spider,” I said. “My God, it must’ve stunk like you can’t believe when Garrett came with the garrison! They must’ve hated me!”

  “Well, there was nothing we could’ve done, just the two of us,” Baga said reasonably. “I figure you did as much as anybody could ask when you killed the thing, right?”

  “I wouldn’t count on that,” I said, but there wasn’t a lot I could do about it now. Or earlier, like Baga had said. I started up toward the castle.

  One leaf of the double gate was open. A dozen people came spilling out with Welsh in the lead. “Pal!” he shouted. “Lord Pal! Good to see you again, buddy!”

  “It doesn’t sound like they’re too mad at you,” Baga said in a low voice from behind me.

  “Say, it’s good to see you!” Welsh repeated as he led me into the castle. “Come on into the command post. Say, we didn’t expect you so quick but that’s fine, everything’s going fine.”

  A soldier came running up to us with what was probably a wineskin. Half a dozen small metal cups were attached to it by light chains; they jingled like bells. “No, we’ll be in the CP,” Welsh told him. Then to me he added, “Say, Garrett just went out on patrol to Catermole and won’t be back for a week. Are you staying that long, sir?”

  They’d put the command post in the base of the gate tower. There was a bunk against the back wall; the curtain that could have concealed it was drawn back. Welsh ignored the big chair behind the desk and instead took one of the three facing it, patting the seat of another to guide me.

  “Look, I’m not here to check up on you, Welsh,” I said, feeling embarrassed. “I’m glad it’s going well, though. You said Garrett is out patrolling?”

  “Yeah, we’ve always got a squad out in one direction or another,” Welsh said. The soldier with the wine skin was filling ordinary glass goblets at a sideboard against the back wall. “Me or Garrett lead them now, but when things get settled in we’ll pass off the duty most of the time. You know, we’ve got twice the colonists moving in to the region than there were before you put us here, sir. Most to Catermole, but the country beyond the castle here’s getting quite a lot too. You’re going to be rich, Lord Pal! Richer.”

  “That’s all right,” I said, “but you’re here to make the region part of the Commonwealth. Which you’re doing. I don’t really think about money.”

  The soldier handed us the goblets. The one Welsh got was a pale pink color while mine looked as dark as ink. I’d seen the server mix water into the one he gave Welsh.

  “I’m cutting way back,” Welsh said, noting where my eyes had gone. “It’s, you know, being in charge that does it. I got a lot of folks depending on me.”

  He sipped and without meeting my eyes, added, “Garrett and Lily are making a go of it too. I won’t say it’s not hard; but I tell you, not all the trouble’s been on Garrett’s side!”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” I said again. I tried the wine and wished mine had been diluted too. “But I’m really here to talk to Lord Palin.”

  Welsh looked up. I’d surprised him. “Ah, sir?” he said. “We’ve got that whole dungeon locked like you told us, Is that all right? We haven’t disturbed him. What’s in the dungeon, I mean.”

  “That’s exactly right,” I said. I stood up. “But I’m going to disturb him now.”

  Welsh shrugged and got up also. “Here’s the keys,” he said, taking a ring of a dozen from a wall peg. “The big one’s the main door. The rest are for the cells, but none of ’em are locked.”

  He coughed into his hand and said, “Ah, Pal? D’ye want anybody to go down with you?”

  “No need,” I said. “I know where the dungeon is.”

  I started across the courtyard. Baga was walking with me. I turned to him and said, “You don’t have to go down with me, you know”

  He shrugged. “Well, I’ll wait in the door downstairs, I guess,” he said. “Remember, I was here when the Spider came back. I don’t guess anything now is going to be that bad.”

  A couple of the people in the courtyard or up on the battlements waved to us, but mostly they just stared—or bowed, or hid their faces like the two young women hanging clothes out to dry on a rack of poles and cords.

  Somebody’d pegged the Spider’s wedge-shaped head to the wall above the doorway. “It’s bigger than I remember it being,” I said, looking up as we passed under it. I wondered if the inside of the head had been cleaned—and how that could have been done.

  “It looked plenty bloody big to me,” Baga said. “And I wasn’t the one it was coming for, either.”

  We got to the shaft. “It’s just a matter of stepping in and pointing your right finger down,” I said to Baga. “But if you want to wait here, that’s fine.”

  I pointed and stepped out in the cellar. I wasn’t sure whether I actually moved in the shaft or if my body went between ground level and the dungeon without going through the space in between. It didn’t matter so long as everything worked.

  I walked to the iron door at the end of the corridor. It had been open when I came here the first time, probably open for years or decades, but Garrett and Welsh had closed it on my orders.

  Baga didn’t appear in the shaft behind me. I didn’t blame him.

  The key turned stiffly, but it turned. The hinges were more of a problem, but my burst of anger when I felt the rust fighting me made me put a foot on the jamb and jerk hard. That pulled it half open, plenty wide enough for me to slip through.

  In the cell, Palin hadn’t moved. I grinned at the thought, which helped how I was feeling.

  “Lord Palin?” I said. I wasn’t sure what to call him. I figured that was safe. “I didn’t mean to bother you again, but I need information that you’re the only one I know who might have. What do you know about the Death Dimension?”

  The husk of the man shackled to the wall laughed. The sound was like dead beetles rustling when the wind blew them against each other.

  “I know everything about that place, man,” the corpse said. “I know that I have clung to these chains for twenty years so that I am not sucked into that place and from there to my judgment.”

  “Sir,” I said. “The ancestor of, of a friend of mine, a Beast, is held there. A thing that called itself Lang trapped him, it, there. I want to free the ancestor.”

  “You are a man and you say that?” said the cor
pse.

  “I’m a man,” I said. “I need to do this. The Beast, the friend, sacrificed the most important thing there was to him in order to save me. To save my life, my soul. I want to give him back what he gave up for me. If I die then, that’s okay. I’ll pay that to free his ancestor’s spirit.”

  Palin laughed again. God, that was a horrible sound. “Do you think it is as easy as you entering my mind, as you would enter an Artifact?” he said. “And we together entering the other place?”

  The corpse’s laughter was almost as bad as Lang’s screams in my head as I killed him. “I don’t think anything!” I said. “I don’t know enough about the business to think anything. I asked you a polite question. If you can’t help me, can you tell me who can?”

  “For you alone,” Palin said, no longer laughing, “it is that easy: enter my mind, and I will take you to the place you want to be. For you alone, of all the humans who are alive at this moment.”

  “You can do that?” I said, startled to hear his words. And embarrassed to’ve gotten angry because I’d thought Palin was laughing at me.

  “I can take you to the spirit of the Beast which is trapped,” the corpse said. “I will do that for you, Lord Pal. And perhaps for my soul as well, but for you.”

  I swallowed. “Thank you, sir,” I said. “When can we do this?”

  “You will need to make preparations to safeguard your body while your spirit is out of it,” Palin said. “But as soon as you are prepared we will go, you and I.”

  * * *

  Welsh and his troops brought everything I asked for down to the cellars, but it was Baga alone who was willing to carry the bedding behind me while I took a lighted charcoal brazier into the cell itself. Baga kept swallowing, and he didn’t let his eyes fall on Palin’s body after they first accidentally flicked over it on turning the corner of the corridor, but he did it.

  “Thank you, Baga,” I said. “You can go out into the hall now. I’ll call you if I need something.”

  “Yessir!” Baga said. “I’ll be right out there and I won’t let anybody disturb you!”