Getting it out of sight, of course. Because this was just the start.
He heard a muted scream and realized that another such had opened the first rent in the fog that had possessed him.
Smeds went into the building with the caution and intense concentration of a stalking cat. He compartmented his emotion, did not let them torment him when Timmy screamed. He used the cries to move a few quick steps each time.
What the hell was he doing?
The screams came from a basement. Smeds started down the steps, so committed he moved as though under a compulsion. Six steps down he hunkered, then almost stood on his head to get a look around.
The base of the stair ended a few feet from a doorway without a door in it. Light and the screams came through that. Smeds eased down a couple more steps, then carefully lowered himself over the side, got underneath the stair, looked around.
It was hard to see much, but it looked like the fires had been gentle here. This part of the basement was untouched. There wasn't a whiff of old smoke.
He could make our most of what was being said in that other room. Someone was asking Timmy impatient questions. Another two men were bickering about the character Smeds had killed. One was worried that the man had run out, the other didn't give a damn.
Under the stair was not the place to be if someone decided to go looking. The light from the room would give him away. Smeds moved out carefully, got behind a pile of junk to the left of the doorway.
And there he squatted, unable to think of anything to do.
Timmy passed out or something. He wasn't yelling anymore. One man was grumbling about that while the other two went on about the man in the street. The grumbler snapped, "He has been gone too long. Give me some peace. Go find him. Both of you."
Two men stomped out and headed upstairs, still arguing. They were the other two who had snatched Timmy.
Smeds rose, stretched, drifted over till he could see into the room.
Timmy was tied into a chair, slumped forward, unconscious. A man bent over him, back to Smeds. Too good to be true. He slapped Timmy. "Come on! Come out of it. Don't die on me now. We're too close to the truth."
Slide it in, slide it in, Smeds told himself, gliding toward the man.
The man sensed danger, started to turn, eyes and mouth opening.…
Too late.
Smeds's knife pierced his heart. He made a grisly noise that wasn't quite a scream, tried to get hold of Smeds, folded up.
Maybe it was easier after all.… The detachment went. His heart hammered. His hands shook. His breath came in gasps. He stumbled over to Timmy, cut the ropes binding him… Gods! They'd burned out one of his eyes! They'd…
Timmy fell over on his face.
Smeds got down and tried to bring him out of it. "Hey! Timmy! Come on. It's me. Smeds. Come on. We got to get out of here before those other guys come back."
Then it hit him. "Shit!" Timmy had croaked. "Son of a bitch! I come in here and risk my ass for nothing.…" Except maybe for whatever Timmy told them before he checked out.
Then he felt like a total shit, getting pissed at Timmy for dying and inconveniencing him. Then he got confused, not knowing what to do about the fact that he was in here and still had to get out and there were bodies here something probably ought to be done about.
"Hey, Abel!" somebody shouted from outside. "You better come check this out. Somebody offed Tanker."
Smeds dropped Timmy's hand, frantically jerked his knife out of the dead man—wizard?—and got himself over beside the doorframe as the someone yelled, "You hear me, Abel?" Feet thump-thump-thumped down the stairs.
"We're maybe in deep shit here. Somebody stuck a knife in Tanker… What the shit is going on here?"
The man had stopped just outside the doorway. Smeds came around thrusting at what he guessed should be chest height… and discovered that the big voice belonged to the smallest of the thugs. He turned the thrust into an uppercut, drove his blade up and in under the man's chin, not sliding it, driving it with all the force of panic into the man's brain.
He had not looked the other two in the eye at their moment of realization. Gods! That was scary. He jumped back, stumbled over Abel and Timmy, fell on his back as his victim toppled forward.
Before Smeds was all the way back on his feet someone else called some question downstairs. He dove over to reclaim his knife. The man continued to move, one leg slowly pumping. For a moment he thought of a dog trying to scratch. Crazy.
The damned knife was wedged in bone. It wouldn't come loose. He scrambled around looking for another weapon, any weapon, while the voice from the head of the stairs asked several questions more. All Smeds could come up with was the dead man's own knife, which he pulled from its sheath with a sort of superstitious dread.
He got against the wall beside the doorway again and waited. And waited. And waited.
In time the shakes went away. The nerves calmed some. He realized that his latest victim could be seen from the stairs.
He waited some more.
He had to make a move. The longer he dicked around, the more time there would be for something to go wrong.
His muscles did not want to unlock. He was completely terrified of the consequences of making any move.
But he did, finally, drag himself around far enough to peek through the doorway.
Morning light spilled down from upstairs. It showed him nothing to fear. He made his feet move. He found no trouble on the ground floor. From the doorway he could see nothing but desolation, city badlands where not a soul stirred. He wanted to run, all the way to the Skull and Crossbones.
He bore down, did what had to be done, dragging the body out of the street, to the cellar, where it was less likely to be discovered soon. Then he headed for home. But he did not run, though his legs insisted they had to stretch out and go.
XLVI
We dropped into Oar in the middle of the night but we didn't find Darling and them till noon next day, and then only because we had Bomanz along to sniff them out. They weren't where they were supposed to be. Meantime, I ran into two guys that I knew from when me and Raven were staying in Oar, and they wanted to talk talk talk.
Nobody in town had much else to do.
"Things don't look good," Raven said as we drifted through the streets, following Bomanz's sorcerous nose. "All these people packed in here, no chance to get out, food stocks probably getting low, plague maybe getting ready to break out. The place is ripe. Would have been long gone if this was high summer and the heat was eating up everybody's tolerance. You know anything about these twins?"
He wasn't talking to me. When it comes to sorcerers and sorcery I don't know nothing about nothing except I want to stay out of the way.
"Never heard of them," Bomanz said. "That doesn't mean anything. The Lady had a whole crop coming up."
"How do you think you'd stack up against them?"
"I don't plan to find out."
I spotted a white rose painted on a door. "Look there." They looked. Other people were looking, too, and trying not to be noticed doing it.
"That damned screw-up Silent," Raven growled. "He's talked her into doing something stupid."
"Who you trying to bullshit?" I asked. "When did anybody ever talk Darling into doing something she didn't want to do?"
He grumbled some, then grumbled some more.
Bomanz's nose picked out their hideout then, and after some shibboleth stuff we got into the cellar where Darling was holding court with a gang of leftovers from Oar's Rebel heyday. They didn't look like much to me.
Raven grunted. He wasn't impressed either. He reported the high points of our visit to the Barrowland. That didn't take a minute, even using sign. Then Darling let us in on the situation in Oar, which took a lot longer than a minute.