He got the better of it. He retained consciousness and even a fragment of will. He dragged himself away, a few feet, started trying to guess the damage to his leg. Didn"t feel like a compound fracture. Hurt bad enough, though.
Bodies lay all around him. Only Bomanz seemed to be breathing.
Packing snow around the leg helped numb it a little.
People were yelling above. He saw Case jumping around, waving, pointing. He looked.
The thing from the pot was coming. It wasn"t a hundred yards away. And nothing seemed able to stop it. Mantas pounded it with their lightnings. It didn"t pay them any attention. It had only one thought: the silver spike.
Case was trying to get him to get the spike and get it up top before the thing got hold of it.
Bomanz rolled over, got to his hands and knees, shook his head, looked around dumbly, spotted the thing, turned almost as pale as the snow. He croaked, "I"ll try to hold it off. Find the spike. Get it up to Darling."
He staggered to his feet, tottered toward the thing.
Raven supposed it really could not be called the Limper anymore, though the Taken"s insanity, ambition, and rage drove it.
He looked for some sign of the spike. The pain in his leg was the worst he had felt since Croaker had got him with the Lady"s arrow.
LXXIX.
Raven finally seemed to get it through his skull what we wanted. I"d already volunteered to go down. Darling wouldn"t let me. Now I signed, "Looks like his leg is broke."
She nodded.
Bomanz hit the thing from the pot with a grandpa power spell. It stopped the thing in its tracks. It went down on its belly, lay there glowing biliously, making a nasty whining noise.
A couple of Nightstalkers brought Brigadier Wildbrand back up. She had a busted arm and some busted ribs and looked like death on a stick but she was ready to fight. I told her, "I think you"re the top imperial left."
She looked at the mess, said, "Yes," but seemed fresh out of ideas.
A talking stone dropped out of the sky, hit the rampart. It was my old buddy with the scar. He wanted orders from the White Rose. The White Rose didn"t have any orders.
Raven scrabbled around in the snow. The thing from the pot started moving again. Centaurs raced around it, throwing javelins. Bomanz"s spell had softened its protection. Most of the javelins got through. The thing looked like a porcupine. But it didn"t seem to notice or care about the missiles.
Talk about your single-minded obsessions!
Bomanz popped it again.
Stopped it in its tracks again, too. It smoldered. The javelins burned. But it was not out of the game, it was just stalled. Bomanz looked up, shrugged. What more could he do?
Raven kept digging in the snow, dragging his broken leg. He didn"t bother looking around to see what was gaining on him. He"d find it in time or he wouldn"t.
I told Wildbrand, "Long as we"re standing around not doing anything, why don"t we get some ropes down there so we can hoist my buddies up?" Silent was on his feet now but looked like he was only maybe ten percent in this world. In fact, he looked like a lunatic, foaming at the mouth.
Wildbrand looked at me like I had brain fever if I thought she was going to lift a finger to save any Rebel. I reminded her, "We got a whole gang of hungry windwhales up there." Scar flashed away to cue the nearest. It started dropping. Scar reappeared, chuckling.
Wildbrand gave me a cla.s.sic dirty look, put some of her boys to work on one of the cranes that had been used to pull the wall apart.
I yelled at Silent, "Get ready to come up!" He ignored me. He was getting ready to give the Limper thing some kind of surprise.
Old man Bomanz yelled, cut loose with his best shot, and tried to dive out of the way all at the same time. None of it did him any good.
The thing smashed into him, flowed over him. He screamed once, more in outrage than pain or terror, then tried to fight.
Silent looked up at Darling, smiling through tears. He sort of bowed with just his head...and jumped.
G.o.dd.a.m.ned madman!
He hit the thing"s back. Flesh splashed like water and burned like naphtha, though the flame was green. The thing started rolling over and over and over, leaving pieces of itself behind.
Raven kept on looking for the spike.
Darling started hammering stone with her fist, shedding silent tears. I was afraid she"d break something she was so violent...She stopped, whirled, signed, "Have the windwhale take it now. It will never be weaker."
I didn"t have to tell Scar. He read sign. He flashed away. By the time he got back the windwhale was pulling the thing apart again.
I asked Wildbrand, "You think you can keep the pot boiling this time, if we put the pieces back in?"
She got a face like a fishwife looking for a fight. "You do your part, I"ll take care of mine. How do you plan to get the lid back on?"
That was easy. "Scar, have one of the big guys put the top back on the pot. Maybe carry a few hundred tons of firewood, too."
Wildbrand gave me the look, checked her temper, said "Maybe you aren"t stupid," and had her men help her down to the street.
Down south, where the breaches were, there was ma.s.s confusion. People were heading out, a flood the grays could not stem if they were bothering to try.
The thing tumbled into the pot. The lid went on with a big, final clang.
Raven screamed.
He had found the silver spike. Or it had found him.
By the time I looked at her Darling was hammering the wall again, both fists b.l.o.o.d.y.
He had gotten hold of the thing with his naked hand.
He got to his feet. On a broken leg! He held the spike up toward us. I yelled.
He looked at me. I did not know him. A terrible change had come over him. He laughed horribly. "It"s mine!"
His eyes were the Dominator"s eyes. Eyes of insanity and power, that I had seen in the Barrowland the day the Lady had brought her husband down. They were the eyes of the Limper, ready to be entertained by the agony of a world that had given him nothing but pain. They were the eyes of everyone who ever nursed a grudge and suddenly found it within their power to do whatever they wanted, without fear of reprisal.
"Mine!" He laughed.
I looked at Darling, as sour with despair as ever I"d been.
She turned off the water, started signing. She was as pale as a sheet of paper. I shook my head. "I can"t do that."
"We have to." Tears streaked her face. She didn"t want to do it, either. But it had to be done or the h.e.l.l we"d put ourselves through would have been time and pain utterly wasted.
Raven had studied sorcery long ago. Just enough to blot his soul, a taint the spike could rip into and use as a channel for its evil.
"Do it!" she signed.
d.a.m.n her! He was my best friend. d.a.m.n that rock Scar. He could have given the order anytime, but he waited and made us do it so we couldn"t lay off the blame on his precious tree G.o.d.
"Kill him," I said. "Before it possesses him completely."
Near as I could tell Scar didn"t do a d.a.m.ned thing.
But down there a centaur"s arm shot forward. A javelin flashed. The shaft smashed in through one of Raven"s temples and out the other.
This time he would not be back from the dead. This time he wasn"t faking.
I sat down and turned inside myself, wondering if I hadn"t dragged my feet so much while we were headed south would we have caught up with Croaker and so maybe never have gotten into this spot. This monster was going to be riding my shoulders for the rest of my life.
Darling did her own version of going into a pout.
Only Torque kept his mind on the job. He got the wooden chest from Darling, shinnied down the crane rope, got the spike away from Raven. He climbed back up, set the box down by Darling, came over to me and said, "Tell her I"m out of it, Case. Tell her I just couldn"t take it no more." He walked away, maybe going looking for the brother who had left with Raven and hadn"t come back.
I didn"t much blame him for going.
Lx.x.x.
Smeds laid the last stone on the old man"s cairn. The tears were gone. The anger was quiet. It was not right that Fish should have fallen to cholera after taking the worst that could be thrown by the world"s nastiest villains. But there was no justice in this existence.
It there was, Timmy Locan would be here, not Smeds Stahl.
Smeds went on, into the city Roses. A year later he was a respected member of the community, owner of a struggling brewery. He lived well but without ostentation that would excite unwanted curiosity. He never told his story to a soul.
EPILOGUE.
No matter how many times I walked around it, the hole into the tree G.o.d"s "abyss" still looked like a piece of black silk suspended a yard above the ground. It refused to have more than two dimensions.
Darling brought the little chest containing the silver spike, threw it through. It took both of us to do the coffin that contained all that had been left in the big pot when, after a week of cooking, it had been allowed to boil dry. The black circle vanished as though a stage magician had sucked the cloth up his sleeve.
We went and got clean for what seemed like the first time in years, then Darling showed me around the rabbit warren that had been home for the Black Company and Rebel movement for so many years. Fascinating. And repellent. That people should put themselves through such h.e.l.l...I wished them better times than mine, wherever they were.
Somehow we ended up doing what men and women seem unable to avoid. Afterward, she dressed in the clothing of a peasant woman, without a hint of mail or a single hidden blade.
"What goes?" I asked.
She signed, "The White Rose is dead. There is no place for her anymore. No need."
I didn"t argue. I never was on that side.
For want of anything better to do we got Old Father Tree to give us a ride to where we could check out the progress of the potato industry.
It hadn"t changed a whole lot, except the people I knew had got older.
The grandkids wouldn"t believe a word of our stories but they d fight anybody who didn"t agree that we told the most exciting lies in the world.