Sweet Silver Blues (20 page)

“Taking bids on your butt from Vasco, Rose, and your major. It was hot going till they got up to a quarter mark. Here.” He dumped half his load beside me. I noted a sack that looked like it might contain comestibles. I hit it first.

“What is all this stuff?”

“Raw materials. For the arsenal we’ll need if we’re going into a nest after your lady. They’d smell metal hardware ten miles off. You any good at flaking stone arrow points?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never tried.”

He looked exasperated. “Didn’t they teach you anything practical in that Marine Corps of yours?”

“Three thousand ways to kill Venageti. I’m a tool user, not a toolmaker.”

“I guess the load falls on Doris and Marsha again.” He gobbled grollish, and gave the big guys a bunch of stuff. Two minutes later, snarling and rumbling, they were chipping out arrowheads with a touch as delicate as a mouse’s. They were good, and they were fast.

Morley said, “They’re put out. They say it’s dwarf’s work. They want to know why they can’t just make themselves some ten-foot clubs and go in and break skulls. Grolls are slow sometimes.”

I could whittle a bit so I set to making myself a sword from an ironwood lath. It’s a good hard wood that will almost take an edge, but won’t hold one the way steel will. So I gave myself only one. The backstroke side I channeled and set with waste from the arrowhead flaking. That gave me a vicious tool.

Time rolled by. I shed my troubles in my concentration on my craftsmanship.

“Have mercy, Garrett!” Morley snapped. “Do you really have to put in the blood gutters?”

I looked at the thing in my hand. I sure was doing it up purple. I tried it for balance. “Close. Needs a little more work. A little more polish to lessen the drag during the cut.”

“And you call me bloodthirsty.”

“I’d rather carry a saber.”

“Come off it. One time we’re going to use this stuff. Finish it up. I cut some bolts, there. Fletch them and sharpen them. I’ll harden and poison the tips when I’m done here.” He was removing metal parts from crossbows and replacing them. The reworked weapons wouldn’t hold up, but, like he said, it was just the one raid.

“Old Man Tate is going to pee blue vinegar over the expenses. Why poison? It won’t do you any good.” I dragged bolts, glue, feathers, and thread together and started in.

“Because not everybody we meet is going to be immune.”

True. The bloodslaves would fight ferociously to defend their chances of someday joining the order of masters.

“You know anything about the nests in the Cantard, Garrett?”

“Who knows anything about any of them anywhere?”

“True. They wouldn’t survive. But?”

“There are rumors. Because of the military situation, they don’t have to be as circumspect in the Cantard. Plenty of easy prey, too. Nobody misses a soldier here or there. The nests are supposed to be bigger than usual because of that. When I was stationed down here, there were supposed to be six nests. That got reduced when some Karentine agents snatched a Venageti warlord’s daughter and let it out that she had been carried off to a nest. The warlord forgot everything else, went off to the rescue, found the nest and cleansed it, and got himself killed for his trouble. While his army was busy hunting night people, one of ours was sneaking up behind them. And that’s all I know. Except to guess that they’re happy to see so much silver leaving this part of the world.”

“They would know everything about silver, wouldn’t they?”

“They would know everything about what everyone was doing, that’s for sure. Which explains how Kayean was able to make Denny rich.”

Silver is as poisonous to the night people as cobra venom is to humans. It kills them fast and makes it stick. Not much else does. Other metals bother them to a lesser degree.

“Speaking of sneaks,” Morley said.

Dojango appeared, burdened with poles and bow-staves and whatnot. He was tipsy. He said, “It’s set for tomorrow night.”

“How much did you have?” Morley demanded.

“Don’t worry, cousin. I came here clean. Actually. They’ll have the horses and gear waiting at an abandoned mill they said is three miles up something called North Creek. They said they’d only wait one night. They said they would take the animals and stuff out tomorrow morning and bring them back the next day if we don’t show. They seemed a little nervous about being out in the countryside, actually.”

“Guess we’ll have to resurrect our centaur. Sit down and start turning those dowels into arrows. Garrett. You know this North Creek?”

“Yes.” I was tempted to ask who he thought was in charge, but kept my mouth shut. Morley had taken care of things that needed doing.

Dojango started making arrows. “Some interesting news started going around just before I came back up. About the time we were taking a peek into that tomb last night, Glory Mooncalled,
unsupported,
actually, attacked Indigo Springs.”

“Indigo Springs?” I asked. “That’s a hundred miles farther south than the army’s ever gone. And he tried it without wizards?”

Dojango smirked. “He not only tried it, he pulled it off, actually. Caught them sleeping. Killed Warlord Shomatzo-Zha and his whole staff in the first assault, then wiped out half their army. The rest ran off into the desert barefoot, wearing nothing but their nightshirts.”

“Good hunting for the night people,” Morley grumbled.

“And unicorns, centaur slavers, wild dogs, hippogriffs, and any other kind of critter that wants a piece of them,” Dojango added. “This is going to mean problems, Morley. If we have to spend much time out there.”

“How come?”

“If it’s true, it’s an unprecedented disaster for Venageti arms. When Glory Mooncalled changed sides, he swore vengeance on five warlords. For years he’s been waltzing them around the Cantard, making fools of them. Now he’s struck deep into traditionally safe territory and stomped one of the five the way I’d stomp a bug.”

“So?”

“So the Venageti are going to start flailing around like a boxer with blood in his eyes, hoping they hit something. Karentine forces will begin to move, trying to take advantage. Every nonhuman tribe in the Cantard will be out trying to profit from the confusion. In a week it’ll be so hairy it’ll be worth your life to squat to poop if you don’t have somebody to stand guard.”

“Then we’d better move fast, hadn’t we?” Morley asked.

A sentiment with which I agreed wholeheartedly. But my sneak to the bloodslave guarding the things in Zeck Zack’s ballroom had paid no dividends yet and I doubted that my revelation would come for days—if at all.

40

Zeck Zack was as cooperative as a centaur could be after his sojourn with the dead. He didn’t balk until having led us from the city via an underwall smugglers tunnel, he discovered that he had been enlisted in our enterprise for the duration.

Morley was in a puckish mood.

“But sir, surely you see all your caterwauling is without foundation. If you will reflect seriously you cannot help but confess the rectitude of our position. If we were to release you, as you so unreasonably insist, you would dash back through the tunnel and instantly set about wreaking evil upon us, imagining us to be the authors of your ill fortune rather than assuming that onus yourself, as is the fact.”

I had arrayed my army in squad diamond, with a groll out front, another behind, Dojango on the right and Morley on the left. Night-blind, I marched at the heart of the formation, ready to rush to any quarter suddenly threatened. Zeck Zack stumbled along between Morley and me.

It wasn’t long before the centaur surrendered to the inevitable. He betrayed a hitherto sequestered facet of character and began arguing with Morley in the same florid language and overblown, overly polite formulations.

The men who had brought our horses and gear were thrilled to see us. Our advent meant they couldn’t just take everything back and sell it again. Nor, they decided after eyeballing the grolls, could they murder us and do the same.

We parted ways immediately upon delivery. They were of the school that maintains wandering around at night could get you killed. We kept moving on the hypothesis that the wise man puts ground between himself and people who want to kill him.

Not a lot of ground. Those horses had heard of me and just to make trouble they insisted that the sensible thing to do was stay put.

Nobody was out to kill
them.
Nobody behind them, anyway.

Their attitude didn’t improve when the sun rose and they found themselves headed into the Cantard.

Morley accused me of anthropomorphizing and exaggerating the natural reluctance of dumb beasts to go into unfamiliar territory.

It just goes to show they had him fooled. They’re crafty in their malice, unicorns under the skin.

Having had no revelation, I set a course due west. Thither lay the most barren territory in the Karentine end of the Cantard, the desert of colorful buttes and mesas people in TunFaire picture when they think of the Cantard. I decided to head there because it seemed a logical place for the night people to have established a nest. It was so inhospitable as to be repugnant to most races. There were no discovered resources to bring exploiters with their guardians. Ample prey existed close by—especially when there were Zeck Zacks to do the rounding up.

Our second day out Morley began to suspect that I was not sure of my course. He went to work on the centaur.

“There’s no point to it, Morley,” I said. “They wouldn’t be stupid enough to trust him.”

Doris grumbled something from behind us. I could now tell the grolls apart. I had made them wear different hats.

“What?” I asked.

“He says there’s a dog following us.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Trouble?”

“Probably. We’ll have to ambush it to find out. Watch for a place where the wind is toward us.”

Three possibilities suggested themselves. The dog could be a domestic stray seeking human company. Damned unlikely. It could be an outcast from a wild pack. That meant rabies. Or, most unpleasant and most likely, it could be an outrunner scouting for game.

Marsha found a likely bunch of boulders on the lower slope of the butte we were rounding. He headed up a steep, twisting alley between, into shadows and clicky echoes. Morley, Dojango, and I dismounted and followed, rehearsing the balky animals in the vulgates of several languages.

“What did I tell you about horses, Morley?”

Doris hunkered between rocks and started blending in.

“Keep going, Morley. They’re sight as well as scent hunters. It’ll need to see movement.”

Morley grumbled. Marsha grumbled back, surly, but continued climbing. A bit later there was one brief squeal of doggie outrage from below, canceled by a meaty smack.

The horses were not reluctant going downhill. Lazy monsters.

Doris had squashed the mongrel good. He stood over it grinning as though he had conquered an entire army troop.

“Yech!” I said “Looks like a rat run over by a wagon. Lucky he missed its head.” I squatted, examined ears. “Well, damn!”

“What?” Morley asked.

“It was an outrunner. A trained outrunner. See the holes through the ears? Punched there by unicorn teeth. There’s a hunting party somewhere within a few miles of us. They’ll track the dog when he doesn’t turn up. That means we have to leave enough nasty surprises to discourage them, because we aren’t going to outrun them if they take our scent.”

“How many?”

“One adult male and all the females of his harem that aren’t too pregnant or cluttered up with young. Maybe some adolescent females that haven’t run away yet. Anywhere from six to a dozen. If they do catch up, concentrate on the dominant female. The male won’t get involved. He leaves the hunting and heavy stuff to the womenfolk. He saves himself for giving orders, mounting females, killing his male offspring if they stray from their mothers, and trying to kidnap the most attractive females from other harems.”

“Sounds like a sensible arrangement.”

“Somehow, I figured you’d feel that way.”

“Wouldn’t killing the boss break up the harem?”

“The way I hear, if that happened they’d just keep coming till they were dead or we all were.”

“That is true,” Zeck Zack said. “A most despicable beast, the unicorn. Nature’s most bankrupt experiment. But one day my folk will complete their extermination . . . ” He shut up, having recalled that the rest of us held a different view of the identity of nature’s most bankrupt experiment.

We hurried on. After a while Zeck Zack resumed talking so he could explain some of the nastier devices his folk used to booby-trap their backtrails. Some were quite gruesomely ingenious.

He had contributed nothing but carping before. His sudden helpfulness suggested the proximity of unicorns scared the tailfeathers off him.

41

After pausing at a brackish stream to water and gather firewood, we scrambled up several hundred feet of scree around the knees of a monster monolith of a butte and made camp in a pocket that couldn’t be approached in silence by a mouse. The view was excellent. None of us, with our varied eyes, or even with the spyglass, could see anything moving in the twilight.

We settled down to a small, sheltered fire. Being in the mood myself, we broached one of the baby kegs and passed it around. It held only enough for a good draft each for me, Zeck Zack, Dojango, and sips for the grolls. “Yech!” was my assessment. “Drinking that was the second mistake I’ve made in this life.”

“I won’t be so forward as to ask what the other might have been,” Morley said, “suspecting it might have been being born.” He smirked. “I presume beer jostled on the back of a pack animal in the hot sun loses something.”

“You might say. What possessed you, Dojango?”

“A slick-talking salesman.”

We sat around the fire after eating, mostly watching it die down, occasionally assaying a story or a joke, but largely tossing out notions about how we might deal with the unicorns if it came to that. I didn’t contribute much. I’d begun to fret about my revelation.