Raven wanted to know what she was doing, painting white roses around town. She said she wasn't. In fact, she said nobody that had anything to do with the movement admitted doing it. Since none of those roses had been seen before she arrived she thought somebody recognized her in the street and was trying to get something stirred up.
She didn't have a shred of evidence. Didn't seem likely to me. Anybody that recognized her, that wasn't personally committed to the cause, should ought to go for the bounty on her, the way I figured. She would fetch a good price, and Silent not a bad sum, and even the Torque brothers were good for a chunk that could keep you in beans for a long time.
Raven figured it the way I did. But he wasn't going to argue with Darling, so he asked if there had been any progress finding the silver spike.
"None," she signed. "We have been very busy stampeding around old ground already covered by other hunters, finding nothing while we ate their dust. In the meantime our small allies have been busy spying on those other hunters that our brothers of the movement have identified for us."
Bomanz wanted names. He got them. A long string, with a half dozen noted as having enlisted with the deceased.
"You know any of those people?" Raven asked.
"No. But I've been out of touch. The curious angle is, there hasn't been any attention from the Tower. This thing is pulling in every hedge wizard and tea-leaf reader with a smidge of ambition. These twins are pretty plainly up to exactly what you'd expect from their kind faced with an opportunity like this. News like this gets around faster than the clap. It's got to have reached the Tower. Why isn't some real heavyweight up here to sit on those two?"
I suggested, "Because they don't have windwhales to carry them around and all their flying carpets got skragged back when."
"They have other resources."
There wasn't no point worrying about it since we weren't going to come up with an answer.
Raven wanted to know how the other guys were trying to find the spike. He figured maybe the problem was that the hunters were attacking it from the wrong direction.
Darling signed, "Spidersilk and Gossamer have made repeated direct searches. They also provoke and watch the other hunters, who have been concentrating on finding the men who stole the spike and brought it to Oar."
I asked, "How do we know the damned thing is even here?"
Bomanz said, "You can sense it. Like a bad smell."
"But you can't tell where it is?"
"Only very vaguely. Right now I'd guess it's somewhere north of us. But I can't narrow that directionality to below about a hundred thirty degrees of arc." He raised his arms to show what he meant. "It's the nature of the thing to maximize the evil around it. If it could be sniffed out easily there would be little chance for the play of chaos. It isn't sentient but it responds to and feeds back the dark emotions and ambitions around it. One way to find the men who brought it out of the Barrowland might be to look for people who were out of town during the proper time period and who have shown changed patterns of behavior. Generally, aggravated tendencies toward indulging weaknesses they've had all along."
Darling got that from Silent. She signed back, "That method has been tried. Without success. The Limper's raid killed so many and left people so mixed around that the necessary information cannot be gathered."
"There's got to be a way," Raven carped.
One of the local guys said, "Gossamer and Spidersilk already thought of it. Get so many bad guys in that the thieves have to panic and do something to give themselves away. Sooner or later."
"Dumb," Raven said. He sneered. "All they'd have to do is snip a few loose ends, if there were any, and sit tight."
"That's what they're doing. We think." The guy went off about some really gruesome disease called the black hand that had been traced to a physician that got himself knifed an eyeblink after the twins closed the city. There was still some debate, but a lot thought the black hand maybe got started when somebody accidentally touched the spike barehand, then passed it on when he went to the physician for help. The physician passed it around to his clients and they passed it around some more, till the soldiers rounded them up so they couldn't.
Darling signed, "The twins cleave to this theory. The physician's murder was witnessed. Two men were involved. They have not been identified or even well described."
The local man went on about theories and about how none of the people with the black hand had had anything to do with grabbing the spike. The twins made sure of that right away. So there was some guy running around who maybe had been fixed up by the doc and that was an angle a lot of hunters were working.
"Maybe," I said. "But what if maybe his buddies was smart enough to put him six feet under?"
Seemed like nobody had thought about that. Nice people tend to think everybody is nice.
"What about them roses?" I asked. "If it ain't your people painting them, who is? And why?"
"A diversion, obviously," Raven said. "If we could catch whoever is doing it we might get a break."
The local talker said, "Go teach your grandma to suck eggs, fella. We've got everybody we have on the street, calming people down and asking questions. Tonight everybody is going to be watching likely places to put more up. We see somebody, he'll be over here answering questions before he can blink."
I sat myself down out of the way, fixing to take a nap. "Want to bet they don't walk into it?"
XLVII
Does clay tire? Does the earth? No. The clay man loped northward, hour after hour and mile after mile, day and night, pausing seldom and then only to freshen the coat of grease, spell-supported, that retained moisture and kept the clay supple.
The miles passed away. The hulks of raped cities fell behind. Suns rose and set. He crossed the southern frontier of the northern empire. It was early in the day.
He had not gone far when he realized he was being paced by imperial cavalry. He slowed. They slowed. He stopped. They drifted into cover and waited.
They had been waiting for him. His return had been expected.
How? By whom? For how long? What lay ahead, specially prepared for him?
He resumed his run, but more slowly, his senses keyed.
The cavalry worked in relays, no party riding more than five miles before being relieved. If he turned toward them they retreated. When he held to the road they closed in slowly, as though carefully daring his might. He suspected they wanted him to pursue them. He refused. He followed the road. In time he increased his pace.
A subtle mind opposed him.
After a while the indrift of the riders sharpened, like a charge starting to take shape.…
His attention ensnared thus, he nearly missed the slight discoloration, the minuscule sag, in the road ahead. But catch it he did. Pit trap. He hurled himself forward in a prodigious leap.
Missiles filled the air. Several slammed into him, batting him around, and he knew he had been taken. Arrows from saddle bows were whistling around him before he regained his equilibrium. The cavalry to his left had grown a little too daring. He faced them, about to welcome them with death.
A five-hundred-pound stone ripped across his right shoulder so close it brushed away the protective grease. He jumped, whirled. If that had caught him square… He sensed no presence on which to spend his wrath. He whirled again. The cavalry were galloping away, already beyond retribution.
He removed the shafts from his body, surveyed the area. There was no pit. Just the appearance of one with a trigger board much better hidden under the dust where his foot must fall if he was going to jump over. Even the stone had been hurled by an engine triggered remotely and fortune had placed him a step out of the line of fire.