He could make our most of what was being said in that other room. Someone was asking Timmy impatient questions. Another two men were bickering about the character Smeds had killed. One was worried that the man had run out, the other didn't give a d.a.m.n.

Under the stair was not the place to be if someone decided to go looking. The light from the room would give him away. Smeds moved out carefully, got behind a pile of junk to the left of the doorway.

And there he squatted, unable to think of anything to do.

Timmy pa.s.sed out or something. He wasn't yelling anymore. One man was grumbling about that while the other two went on about the man in the street. The grumbler snapped, "He has been gone too long. Give me some peace. Go find him. Both of you."

Two men stomped out and headed upstairs, still arguing. They were the other two who had s.n.a.t.c.hed Timmy.

Smeds rose, stretched, drifted over till he could see into the room.

Timmy was tied into a chair, slumped forward, unconscious. A man bent over him, back to Smeds. Too good to be true. He slapped Timmy. "Come on! Come out of it. Don't die on me now. We're too close to the truth."

Slide it in, slide it in, Smeds told himself, gliding toward the man.

The man sensed danger, started to turn, eyes and mouth opening...

Too late.

Smeds's knife pierced his heart. He made a grisly noise that wasn't quite a scream, tried to get hold of Smeds, folded up.

Maybe it was easier after all...The detachment went. His heart hammered. His hands shook. His breath came in gasps. He stumbled over to Timmy, cut the ropes binding him...G.o.ds! They'd burned out one of his eyes! They'd...

Timmy fell over on his face.

Smeds got down and tried to bring him out of it. "Hey! Timmy! Come on. It's me. Smeds. Come on. We got to get out of here before those other guys come back."

Then it hit him. "s.h.i.t!" Timmy had croaked. "Son of a b.i.t.c.h! I come in here and risk my a.s.s for nothing..." Except maybe for whatever Timmy told them before he checked out.

Then he felt like a total s.h.i.t, getting p.i.s.sed at Timmy for dying and inconveniencing him. Then he got confused, not knowing what to do about the fact that he was in here and still had to get out and there were bodies here something probably ought to be done about.

"Hey, Abel!" somebody shouted from outside. "You better come check this out. Somebody offed Tanker."

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 s.h.i.t here. Somebody stuck a knife in Tanker...What the s.h.i.t 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. G.o.ds! 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 d.a.m.ned 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 superst.i.tious 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 d.i.c.ked 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.

XLVI.

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.

n.o.body 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 d.a.m.ned screw-up Silent," Raven growled. "He's talked her into doing something stupid."

"Who you trying to bulls.h.i.t?" 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 n.o.body 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 d.a.m.ned 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 pa.s.sed it on when he went to the physician for help. The physician pa.s.sed it around to his clients and they pa.s.sed 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 n.o.body 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?"

XLVII.

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 pa.s.sed 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.