Glen Cook - Black Company 4-1 - The Silver Spike

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The Silver Spike
by
Glen Cook
Book 4 in the Black Company series
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29
30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55
56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80
Epilogue
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--
I
This here journal is Raven's idea but I got me a feeling he won't be so proud
of it if he ever gets to reading it because most of the time I'm going to tell
the truth. Even if he is my best buddy.
Talk about your feet of clay. He's got them run all the way up to his noogies,
and then some. But he's a right guy even if he is a homicidal, suicidal maniac
half the time. Raven decides he's your friend you got a friend for life, with
a knife in all three hands.
My name is Case. Philodendron Case. Thanks to my Ma. I've never even told
Raven about that. That's why I joined the army. To get away from the kind of
potato diggers that would stick a name like that on a kid. I had seven sisters
and four brothers last time I got a head count. Every one is named after some
damned flower.
A girl named Iris or Rose, what the hell, hey? But I got a brother named
Violet and another brother named Petunia. What kind of people do that do their
kids? Where the hell are the Butches and Spikes?
Potato diggers.
People that spend their whole lives grubbing in the dirt, sunup to sundown, to
root out potatoes, cabbages, onions, parsnips, rootabagas. Turnips. I still
hate turnips. I wouldn't wish them on a hog. I joined the army as soon as I
could sneak off.
They tried to stop me. My father and uncles and brothers and cousins. They
didn't get away with it. I'm still amazed how that one old sergeant managed to
look so bad the whole clan backed down.
That's what I wanted to be when I grew up. Somebody who could just stand there
and look so bad people dribbled down their legs. But I think you got to be
born with it.
Raven's got it. He just looks at somebody trying to jack him around and the
guy turns white.
So I joined up and went through the training and went out soldiering,
sometimes with Feather and Journey, sometimes with Whisper, mostly here in the
north. And I found out soldiering wasn't what I thought it would be. I found
out I didn't like it a whole lot better than digging potatoes. But I was good
at it, even if I kept doing something to get busted every time I made
sergeant. I finally got posted to the Guards at the Barrowland. That was
supposed to be a big honor but I never believed it.
That's where I met Raven. Only he went by the name of Corbie then. I didn't
know he was a spy for the White Rose. 'Course, nobody did or he would have
been dead. He was just this quiet old crippled guy who said he used to soldier
with the Limper but had to get out after he got his leg hurt so bad. He hung
out in an abandoned house he fixed up. He made his living doing things for
guys that didn't want to do them for themselves. The Guards got paid good and
the Barrowland was a hundred miles into the Great Forest where there wasn't
nothing else to spend it on but booze. Corbie got plenty of work polishing
boots and swabbing floors and currying horses. He used to come in and do the
colonel's office and then play chess with him, which is where I ran into him
the first time.
He smelled odd right from the start. Not White Rose odd but you knew he wasn't
no runaway farm boy like me or some city kid from the slums that signed up
because there wasn't nothing else to do with his life. He had some class when
he wanted to show it. He was educated. He talked maybe five or six languages
and he could read and I heard him talk with the old man about things that I
didn't have a rooster's notion what they meant.
So I got me this idea. I'd get to be his buddy and then get him to teach me
how to read and write.
It was the same old thing, see. Join the army and get off the farm and go on
adventures and life would be great. Learn to read and write, I could get out
of the army and go off on adventures and everything would be great.
Sure.
I don't know if everybody is that way. I'm not the kind that can ask guys
about things like that. But I know me enough to know that there ain't nothing
ever going to turn out to be exactly what I want and nothing is ever going to
satisfy me. I'm the guy with so much ambition I'm living here in a one room
walk-up with a wino whose big talent seems to be puking his guts up after
scarfing down about three gallons of the cheapest wine he can find.
So anyway I got Raven to start teaching me and we ended up buddies, even if he
was weird. And that didn't do me no good when the shit storm hit and he turned
out to be a spy. Lucky for me, my bosses and his bosses had to get together to
gang up on the monster in the ground up there, that us Guards was getting paid
so good to watch.
That's when I found out he was really Raven, the guy that used to run with the
Black Company, that took the White Rose away from the Limper when she was a
little kid and hid her out and raised her up till she was ready to take on her
destiny.
I thought he was dead. So did everybody else, on both sides. Especially the
White Rose, who had loved him, and not like a brother or father. Which is why
he turned himself into a dead man and ran away. He couldn't handle what it
means to have somebody in love with you. Running away was the only thing he
knew how to do.
But he was some in love with her, too, and the only way he had to show it was
turn himself into Corbie and go spying and hope he could find her some big
weapon she could use when she came to her final confrontation with the Lady.
My big boss.
So what happens? Fate sticks an oar in and stirs everything up and when we
look around what do we find? The Dominator, the old monster buried in the
Barrowland, the blackest evil this old world ever knew, was awake and trying
to get out, and the only way to stop him was for everybody to drop their old
fights and gang up. So the Lady came to the Barrowland with all her double-
ugly champions, and the White Rose came with the Black Company, and things
started getting interesting.
And damnfool Raven mooned around in the middle of it all thinking he could
just walk over and take up with Darling like he hadn't walked out on her and
let her think he was dead for a bunch of years.
The damn fool. I know more about sorcery than he'll ever know about women.
So they let the old evil come up out of the ground, then they jumped all over
it. It was so big and black they couldn't kill its spirit, only its flesh, so
they burned that flesh to ash and scattered the ash and imprisoned its soul in
a silver spike. They drove the spike into the trunk of a sapling that was the
son of some kind of god that would live forever and grow around it and keep it
from ever causing any more grief. Then they all went away. Even Darling, with
some guy named Silent.
There were tears in her eyes when she went. Some of that feeling for Raven was
still there inside her. But she was not going to open up and let him do it to
her again.
And he stood there watching her go, dumbstruck. He couldn't figure out why she
would do that to him.
Damn fool.
II
It was weird that nobody else thought of it right away. But maybe that was
because people were more taken with what had happened between the Lady and the
White Rose and were wondering what that would mean to the empire and the
rebellion. For a while it looked like half the world was up for grabs.
Everybody who was the sort to do some grabbing was eyeballing his or her
chances and scouting around to see if they might get turned into eunuchs if
they tried.
So it was up to some second-rate hustlers from Oar's north side to take first
whack at stealing the silver spike.
The news from the Barrowland was still in the shithouse rumor stage when Tully
Stahl came pounding on the door of the room where his cousin Smeds Stahl
stayed.
The room Smeds lived in had no furnishings except roaches and dirt, half a
dozen mildewed, stolen blankets, and half a gross of empty clay wine jugs that
he never got around to taking back. They made him pay deposit at the Thorn and
Crown. Smeds called the jugs his life savings^ If times got really tough he
could trade eight empties for a full.
Tully said that was a dumb way to do things. Whenever Smeds got ripped and
pissed he started throwing things around. He wasted his savings.
The shards never got picked up, either, just kicked against one wall, where
they formed a dusty badland.
When Tully got on him Smeds figured he was just putting on airs because he was
flush. Tully had two married women giving him presents for helping out around
the house when the old man was gone. And he was living with a widow he was
going to clean out as soon as tie found some other woman to take him in. He
thought being a success gave him the right to dish out advice.
Tully pounded on the door. Smeds ignored him. The Kinbro girls from upstairs,
Marti and Sheena, eleven and twelve, were there for their "music lessons." The
three of them were naked and tumbling around on the ratty blankets. The only
instrument in sight was a skin flute.
Smeds made the girls stop bouncing and giggling. There was people who wouldn't
appreciate how he was preparing them for later life.
Pound. Pound. Pound. "Come on, Smeds. Open up.
It's me. Tully." "I'm busy."
"Open up. I got a deal I got to talk about." Signing, Smeds untangled himself
from skinny young limbs and trudged to the door. "It's my cousin. He's all
right."
The girls had been into the wine. They didn't care. They didn't cover
themselves. They just sat there grinning when Smeds let Tully in.
"Some friends," Smeds explained. "You want in? They don't mind."
"Some other time. Get them out."
Smeds glared at his cousin. Getting too damned pushy. "Come on, girls. Get
your clothes on. Papa has to talk business."
Tully and Smeds watched while they got into ragged clothing. It didn't occur
to Smeds to dress. Sheena gave old Hank the Shank a playful slap as she went
by. "See you later." The door closed. "You're going to get your ass in a
sling," Tully said.
"No more than you. You ought to meet their mother."
"She got any money?"
"No. But she blows a mean horn. Got a thing about it. She gets going she just
can't quit."
"When you going to clean this pigsty?"
"Soon as the maid gets back from holiday. So what's so important you have to
break in on my party?"
"You heard about what happened up in the Barrowland?"
"I heard some stories. I didn't pay no attention. What do I care? Won't make
no difference to me."
"It might. You hear the part about the silver spike?"
Smeds thought. "Yeah. They stuck it in a tree. I thought that would be handy
to glom on to. Then I thought some more and figured there wouldn't be enough
silver in it to make it worth the trip."
"It isn't the silver, cousin. It's what's in the silver."
Smeds turned it around in his mind some. He couldn't find Tully's angle. "You
better lay it out by the numbers." Smeds Stahl was not known for his keen
mind.
"That big nail has the soul of the Dominator trapped in it. That means it's
one bad hunk of metal. You take some big wazoo of a sorcerer, I bet he could
pound it into some kind of all-time mean amulet. You know, like in stories."
Smeds frowned. "We aren't sorcerers."
Tully got impatient. "We'd be the middlemen. We go up there and dig it out of
that tree and hide it out till word gets around that it's gone. Then we let it
out that it's for sale. To the highest bidder."
Smeds frowned some more and put his whole brain to work. He was no genius but
he had plenty of low, mean cunning and he had learned how to stay alive.
"Sounds damned dangerous to me. Something we'd need help on if we wanted to
come out of it in one piece."
"Right. Even the easy part, going up there and liberating the damned thing,
would be more than a two-man job. The Great Forest might be a pretty rough
place for guys who don't know anything about the woods. I figured we'd need
two more guys, one of them who knows about the woods."
"Already we're talking a four-way split here, Tully. On how much?"
"I don't know. Give them time to bid it up, I think we'd be set for life. And
I ain't talking no four-way split, neither, Smeds. Two ways. All in the
family."
They looked at each other. Smeds said, "You got the plan. Tell me."
"You know Timmy Locan? Was in the army for a while?"
"About long enough to figure out how to go over the hill. Yeah. He's all
right."
"He was in long enough to learn how it works. We might run into soldiers up
there. Would your heart be broken if they found him in an alley with his head
bashed in?"
That was an easy one. "No." His heart would be fine as long as it wasn't Smeds
Stahl they found.
"How about Old Man Fish? He used to trap in the Great Forest."
"Couple of straight arrows."
"That's what we need. Honest crooks. Not some guys who might try to do us out
of our share. What do you say? Want to go for it?"
"Tell me how much is in it again."
"Enough to live like princes. We going to go talk to those guys?"
Smeds shrugged. "Why not? What have I got better to do?" He looked at the
ceiling. "You better get some clothes on."
Heading down the stairs, Smeds said, "You'd better do the talking." "Good
idea."
Heading up the street, Smeds asked, "You ever killed anybody?"
"No. I never needed to. I don't see where I'd have any problem."
"I had to once. Cut a guy's throat. It ain't like you think. They spray blood
all over the place and make weird noises. And they take a long time to croak.
And they keep trying to come after you. I still get nightmares about that guy
trying to take me with him."
Tully looked at him and made a face. "Then do it some other way next time."
III
Each night there was moonlight enough, a thing came down out of the northern
Great Forest, quiet as a limping shadow, into the lorn and trammeled place of
death called the Barrowland. That place was heavy with the fetor of
corruption. A great many corpses lay rotting in shallow graves.
Limping on three legs, the thing cautiously circled the uncorrupted carcass of
a dragon, settled on its haunches in the hole it was digging so patiently,
night after night, with a single paw. While it worked it cast frequent glances
toward the ruins of a town and military compound several hundred yards to the
west.
The garrison had existed to shield the Barrowland from trespassers with evil
intentions and to watch for signs that the old darkness in the ground was
stirring. Those reasons no longer existed. The battle in which the digging
beast had been crippled, in which the dragon had perished, in which the town
and compound had been devastated, had put an end to the need for a military
stewardship.
Except that it had not occurred to anyone in authority to give the surviving
Guards new assignments. Some had stayed, not knowing what else to do or where
else to go.
Those men were sworn enemies of the beast.
Had it been healthy, the thing would not have been concerned. It could have
dealt with those men easily. Healthy, it was a match for any company of
soldiers. Crippled and still suffering from a dozen unhealed wounds, it would
not be able to outrun a man let alone outfight those it would have to get
through before it could pursue the messenger the Guards were sure to send
flying to their masters if they discovered it.
Those masters were cruel and deadly and the beast stood no chance against them
even when in the best of health.
Its master could protect it no more. Its master had been hacked to pieces and
the pieces burned. Its master's soul had been imprisoned in a silver spike
that had been driven into his skull.
The beast was doglike in appearance but rather uncertain in size. It had a
protean nature. At times it could be as small as a large dog. At other times
it might be the size of a small elephant. It was most comfortable being about
twice the size of a war-horse. In the great battle it had slain many of its
master's enemies before overpowering sorceries had driven it from the field.
It came stealthily, again and again, despite the fear of exposure, the pain of
its wounds, and its frustration. Sometimes the wall of its excavation
collapsed. Sometimes rainwater would fill the hole. And always there was the
inescapable vigilance of the only truly watchful guardian the victors had
left.
A young tree stood among the bones, alone. It was near immortal and was far
mightier than the night skulker. It was the child of a god. In time, each
night, it wakened to the digger's presence. Its reaction was uniform and
violent.
A blue nimbus formed among the tree's limbs. Pale lightning ripped toward the
monster. It was a quiet sort of lightning, a sizzle instead of boom and crash,
but it slapped the monster like an angry adult's swing at a small child.
The beast suffered no injury, only extreme pain. That it could not endure.
Each time it was hit it fled, to await another night and that delay before the
child of the god awakened.
The monster's work went slowly.
IV
Darling left Raven standing there. She rode off with that guy Silent and some
other guys that were all that was left of the Black Company, a mercenary
outfit that really wasn't anymore. A long time ago they was on the Lady's side
but something happened to piss them off and they went over to the Rebel. For a
long time they was almost the whole Rebel army.
Raven watched them go into the woods. I could tell he wanted to sit down and
cry like a baby, maybe as much because he couldn't understand as because she
did ride off on him. But he didn't.
In most ways he was the toughest, hardest bastard I ever saw, and not always
in the best ways. When I first found out he was Raven and not Corbie I like to
crapped my drawers. A long time ago there was a Raven that rode with the Black
Company that was the baddest of the bad. He was with them only about a year
before he deserted but he made himself a big rep while he was there. And this
was the same guy.
He said, "We'll give them a couple hours' head start so it don't look like
we're dogging them, then we'll get out of here."
"We?"
"You want to hang around here now?"
"That would be desertion."
"They don't know if you're dead or not. They haven't counted noses yet." He
shrugged. "Up to you. Come or stay."
I could tell he wanted me to come. Right then I was the only thing he had. But
he wasn't going to make no special appeal. Not hard guy Raven.
I didn't have no future at the Barrowland and I sure as hell wasn't going back
to ride herd on potatoes. And I didn't have anybody else in the world, either.
"All right.
I'm in."
He started walking into town. What was left after the fight. I tagged along.
After a while, he said, "Croaker was about the closest thing to a friend I had
when I was in the Company." He was still confused.
Croaker was the boss mere. He wasn't boss back when Raven was with them, but
they had been through a few captains since the old days. Raven was confused
because his old buddy and him had gotten in a fight after the Dominator got
put down.
Probably to show off for Darling, Raven had decided he was going to round
everything off and close the books by getting rid of the Lady, who lost her
powers during the battle. And Croaker said no you don't and didn't back down.
He put an arrow into Raven's hip just to show him he was serious.
"Is a friend somebody who just stands back and lets you do whatever you want
whenever you want to do it?" He gave me one of his puzzled looks. "Maybe he
was a whole lot more her friend than he was yours. Way I heard tell, they
spent a lot of time together. They rode off into the sunset together. And you
know the way those guys are about brotherhood, sticking together no matter
what, the Company being their family, them against the whole world. You told
me about it enough."
There was more I could have said. I could have given it to him by the numbers,
how they felt about brothers who ran out on them, but he wouldn't have got it.
There wasn't nobody with more guts in a fight than Raven. He wouldn't back
down from nobody or nothing. But in the emotional tight spots he was ready to
pack up and run in a minute. He did it to the Company and he did it to
Darling, but they could take care of themselves when he did.
I think maybe the worst stunt he ever pulled, and the one that still bugs him
the most, is when he ran out on his kids.
He did that back when he enrolled in the Black Company. Maybe he had his
reasons, and good ones at the time. He comes up with good excuses. But there's
no getting around the fact that he left his kids when they were too young to
take care of themselves. Without making any arrangements for them. He never
even told anybody he had kids till he told me, sort of, when he was still
being Corbie and started trying to find out what happened to them. They would
be grown up now. If they survived.
He didn't find out anything.
I figured he would make finding them his quest now. He didn't have anything
else going. And trudging through the forest headed south, he made noises like
that was what he was planning to do.
We got as far as Oar. He went out on a drunk. And stayed on it.
I went on one, too. I went through me some bad girls. All the things a guys
does when he's been out in the woods for a long time, then hits the city. Took
me four days to work through that and another day to shake the hangover. Then
I took a look at Raven and saw he was just getting started.
I went and found us a cheap place to stay. Then I got me a job protecting a
rich man's family. That wasn't hard to do. There were all kinds of rumors
about what happened in the Barrowland. The rich saw troubled times coming and
wanted to get themselves covered.
Darling and her bunch were in the city somewhere, for a while. So were the
bunch from the Black Company. We didn't run into any of them before they left
out.
V
Smeds got sick of Tully's idea before they were four days out of Oar. Nights
were cold in the forest. There was no place to hide from the rain. Whole
hordes of bugs chewed on you and you couldn't get rid of them when you were
sick of them like you could with lice and fleas and bedbugs. You could never
get comfortable sleeping on the ground—if you could sleep at all with all the
racket that went on at night. There were always sticks and stones and roots
under you somewhere.
And there was that bastard Old Man Fish, hardly saying shit but always
sneering at you because you didn't know a bunch of woodsy stuff. Like you
needed to know that shit to stay alive on the North Side.
It was going to be a pleasure to cut his throat.
Timmy Locan wasn't much better. Little carrot-top runt never shut up. All
right, so he was funny most of the time. So he knew every damned joke there
ever was and knew how to tell them right and half of them were the kind you
wanted to remember so bad it hurt, so you could crack up your friends. But
they never came out right for you even when you did remember them… Damn it,
even funny got old after four days.
Worse than funny, the little prick never slowed down. He bounced up in die
morning like he knew it was going to be the best damned day of his life and he
went after every damned day like it was. Short people weren't supposed to be
joyous, they were supposed to be cocky and obnoxious. Then you could thump on
them and shut them up without feeling bad about it.
Worst thing of all was, Old Man Fish said they couldn't follow the road on
account of they might run into somebody who would want to know what they were
up to or somebody who might remember them after they did the job. It was
important that nobody knew who did it. But busting through the tangle of the
woods was awful, even with Old Man Fish finding the way.
Tully hated it woise than Smeds, but he backed the old man up.
Smeds had to admit they were right. What he didn't have to admit was that the
expedition was worth the slapping branches, the stabbing, tearing briars, and
the for gods' sake spidenvebs in the face.
Or maybe the worst was the blisters on his feet. Those started practically
before they got out of sight of Oar. Even though he did everything Old Man
Fish told him to do, they just kept getting worse. At least they didn't get
infected. That jerk Timmy kept telling cheerful little tales about guys in the
army who had had blisters that had gotten infected and they'd had to have
摘要：

eVersion2.0-seerevisionnotesatendoftextTheSilverSpikebyGlenCookBook4intheBlackCompanyseries1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344454647484950515253545556575859606162636465666768697071727374757677787980Epilogue--------------------------------------------------...

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