The Silver Spike

LV

Raven waited awhile, then, troubled, hobbled around looking for Case. He didn’t find a trace. Case might have stepped off the edge of the earth.

He could spend hours in a futile search that would keep him at risk himself or he could go home and have Silent and Bomanz hunt the easy way.

The pain in his ankle had awakened the old pain in his hip, so that he was stove up in both legs and moved with the spry-ness of an eighty-year-old arthritic. It was no time for heroics.

He had no trouble entering the temple, reaching the tower, and getting upstairs. Except from his own body. Someone up top had been watching. Silent covered his progress with a curtain of gentle, selective blindness.

Bomanz got after him before he got through the door. “Where’s Case? What happened?”

“I don’t know. He disappeared. How about you do something for this ankle while I tell it?” He settled with his back against a wall, leg outthrust. He told what there was to tell.

Bomanz poked, prodded, and twisted. Raven winced. The wizard said, “Not much I can do but kill the pain. Silent? You know more about healing than I do.”

Silent paused in his translation for Darling, moved in on the ankle without enthusiasm. Bomanz puttered around, muttering, “Got to come up with something of his he had long enough to make his own.” Grumble, grumble, paw through Case’s few possessions, come up with his journal. “This ought to do it.” He shuffled into a corner and went to mumbling and twitching.

Silent did not do much more for Raven’s ankle than Bomanz had. The pain was gone but it still did not want to work right when Raven put his weight on it. He wasn’t going to win any footraces for a few days.

Everyone waited tensely for Bomanz. No one expressed the common fear, that Case had been caught by Exile’s soldiers.

Bomanz finally looked up. “I need the city map.”

Silent got it from Darling. Bomanz fussed over it a minute before saying, “He’s somewhere in this area.”

Raven said, “That’s that open area where the windwhale dropped us.”

“Yes.”

“What the hell is he doing out there?”

“How should I know? Somebody maybe better go out there and find out. Aw, hell! Me and my big mouth.” Darling had pointed at him, clicked her tongue, and winked. He was elected.

Raven closed his eyes, relaxed for a few minutes, letting the tension and aches fade. Then he asked, “What was in the pack?”

One of the Torques said, “More money than I ever heard of one guy lugging around. It’s in the comer, you want to look it over.”

“Don’t know if I have that much ambition.” But he levered himself up. “Nothing there that was useful?”

“I tell you, I can’t remember me a time when found money wasn’t useful to me.”

That did not sound promising. Raven went through the pack, was disappointed. He looked at Darling. She signed, “Anything?”

He shook his head, but signed, “It does prove that the assassin, and therefore the murdered man, were linked with the theft of the spike. This stuff came from the Barrowland. Some of these kinds of coins haven’t been in circulation anywhere else for centuries. But Bomanz told you that already.”

She nodded.

“And he could not use anything here to get an idea where the man is, the way he did with Case?”

She shook her head. She got up and started pacing, pausing occasionally to look outside. After a while, she caught Silent’s attention, signed, “Slip down and eavesdrop on Exile. Carefully. I do not want him getting too far ahead of us.”

Bomanz did not return till after midnight. “Where have you been?” Raven grumped. “You had us worried we were going to lose you, too.”

“It’s not that easy to get around out there. They have patrols everywhere, trying to keep another blowup from happening. The fighting is sporadic tonight. Exile had Gossamer and Spidersilk doing donkey work, rounding up wizards and whatnot who came here to grab the spike. That’s where all the excitement is tonight. Excitement for the future is going to be provided by the cholera. It’s showing up everywhere now.”

Everyone glared at him. “What about Case?” Raven snapped. “Get to the point, old man.”

Bomanz smiled. But there was no humor there. “He’s gone back into the army.”

“What?”

Darling flashed some signs at Raven. Raven said, “She’s right. Quit dicking around and tell it.”

“They’ve put up a camp in that open area. With a fence around it. And they’re grabbing every man between fifteen and thirty-five they can lay hands on. They’re shoving them in there and calling them the Oar Home Defense Forces Brigade. They may give them a little training so they can use them to do most of the dying if there’s an attack, but I think the main reason they’re there is Exile wants the most dangerous part of the population locked up where it can’t cause any more trouble for the grays.”

Darling signed, “How do we get him out?”

“I don’t know if we can. He may have to get himself out.” He stopped them before they jumped all over him. “I tried. I went to the gate and gave the guards a long sob story about how they had my only grandson and means of support. While they were still being polite they told me there wasn’t nobody going to get out of there, and anyway they didn’t remember taking in anybody by the name Philodendron Case. I think they would have.”

Raven said, “He’s technically a deserter even if he’s the only man from the Guards still around. He wouldn’t have given them his real name.”

“I realized that while I was talking. So I gave it up before they got too angry. They were pretty reasonable considering they’d had people after them all day.”

Everyone looked to Darling. She signed, “We will leave him there for now. He is safer there than we are here. We have the means if there is a desperate need to communicate with him. We have other matters to concern us. I suggest we give them some attention. Time is running out on us. And everyone else.”