The Silver Spike

He got mad. I got mad right back. We yelled and screamed some. He threw things because he wasn’t in good enough shape to run me down. I stomped his wineskin to death and watched its blood trickle across the floor. The landlady kicked the door in. She weighed two hundred pounds and was as mean as a snake. “I told you bastards I wasn’t going to put up with no more of this...” We rushed her. She was a liar and a cheat and a bully and she probably stole things from the rooms when she thought she wouldn’t get caught. We threw her down the stairs and stood around laughing like a couple of kid vandals. She started screeching again down below. She wasn’t hurt.

I stopped laughing. She wasn’t hurt, but she might have been. And I didn’t have the excuse of being drunk. “I take it you’re headed out of town?”

“Yeah.” The humor had fled him, too. His color was ghastly.

“How you going to get out of town? It’s the middle of the night.”

“Cash considerations. The magical key.” He shouldered his bag. “You about ready?”

“Yeah.” He knew I would come all the time.

“Hey, Loo!” the gateman called into the gatehouse while Raven clinked coins. “Get your ass up. We got us another customer.” He gri

“You’d figure,” I admitted. “This that good a job? I don’t see so many guys happy with their work like you.”

“Pretty boring on the night watch, mostly. Been a profitable night tonight, though.”

“Others have gone before us?” Raven asked.

“Only one guy. This old man about an hour ago. In such a big damned hurry he just scattered coins all over the place.”

That was what you call your basic broad hint. Raven ignored it. I made small talk till Loo turned out with the keys and opened the small port through the big gate. Raven just stared straight ahead. When Loo opened up he tossed some silver.

“Why, thank you, yer grace. Come around anytime. Any time. You got a friend down here to South Gate.”

Raven didn’t say anything. He just grimaced and led his horse through the gateway onto the moon-washed road.

“Thanks,” I told the gatemen. “See you guys around.”

“Anytime, yer grace. Anytime. I’m yer man.”

Raven must have paid them off good.

The grimace was familiar, though I hadn’t seen it for a while. “Your hip bothering you again?”

“It’ll be all right. I’ve traveled with worse.”

Sour bastard. He’d shaken the wine, pretty well, but the hangover was hanging over. “Taking a long time to heal.”

“What the hell you expect? I’m not so young anymore. And it was one of her arrows Croaker got me with.” Raven didn’t seem to hold no grudge. He just couldn’t figure it out.

He probably didn’t want to figure it out. His idea of Raven was that Raven was a doer, not a thinker.

Sometimes I wondered how he could feed himself so much crap.

X

The old man, worn out, stood beside his ragged mount, stared at the dusty crossroads. To the east lay Lords. Southward the road led to Roses and beyond, to other great cities. The people he had come chasing had split here. He did not know who had gone which direction, though it seemed reasonable that the White Rose had turned east toward her fastness in the Plain of Fear. The Lady should have continued southward, toward her capital, the Tower at Charm.

With that parting, the armistice between them would have ended.

“Which way?” he asked the animal. The shaggy pony did not express an opinion. The old man could not decide which woman would be best equipped to act on his news. His impulse was to keep going south, but only because by turning east he would be headed into the rising sun.

“We’re too old for this, horse.”

The animal made a sound that, for a moment, he took to be a response. But the pony was looking back the way they had come.

Dust cloud. Fast riders coming down. Two, looked like. After a moment the old man recognized the wild-eyed style of the man in the lead. “Here comes our answer. Let’s go.” He hurried along the eastbound road, turned aside into a copse, found a spot where he could watch the riders. He would take the road they ignored.

Their mission had to be the same as his. That those two men should arrive here at this moment, hurrying like hell was yapping at their heels, for any other reason, strained credulity. The one called Raven could have heard the alarm. At some time in his life he had had some small training in the art, and his spirit had spent a long time snared in the coils of the Barrowland. He was sensitive enough.

The old man’s eyelids drooped. He prepared an herbal draft that would help keep him alert long enough to see what those two men would do.

XI

Raven reined back to a walk. “We gave that old boy a fright.”

“Probably figures we’re bandits. We look it. You going to kill these horses today? Or can we string them along for awhile?”

Raven grunted. “You’re right, Case. No sense getting in so big a hurry we end up taking twice as long because we have to walk most of the way. Fu

“All them old-timers look the same to me.”

“Could be. Hold up.” He studied the crossroads. I tried to spot the old man in the copse. I was sure he was watching us.

“Well?” I asked.

“They split up like they said they would.”

Don’t ask me how he knew. He knew. Unless he was just faking it. I’ve seen him do that.

“Darling went east. Croaker kept heading south.”

I’d play his game. “How do you figure?”

“She was with him.” He rubbed his hip. “She would be headed for the Tower.”

“Oh. Yeah.” Big deal. “Which way are we headed? Whichever, we got to rest soon.”

“Yes. Soon. For the horses.”

“Sure.” I kept my face blank. Inside I was wishing I had balls enough to yell at him that he didn’t have to go on being the iron man for me. He didn’t have to prove anything to me but that he could stop sucking wine by the gallon and could stop feeling sorry for himself. He wanted to show me how much guts he had, let him show me he had the kind it took to go find his kids and make up with them. He didn’t have to prove anything to that old man over there in the trees, did he?

I wished he would go ahead and a

He responded by spurring his mount down the south road. What the hell was this? I even started to turn east before I realized what he’d done.

I caught up. “Why south?”

Kind of hitting it sideways, he told me, “Croaker was always an understanding kind of guy. And forgiving.”

The son of a bitch was crazy.

Or maybe he’d suddenly gone sane and didn’t need to whimper over Darling anymore.