The Silver spike by Glen Cook Page A

damned sure we shouldn’t have done it. But
we did decide not to try walking back to Opal when the ship’s
master refused to turn her around.
    Actually, the trip didn’t start out all that bad. But then
they had to go untie the mooring ropes.
    A storm caught us halfway over. It wasn’t supposed to blow
at that time of year. “It never storms this season,”
the bosun promised us right after the wind split a sail the topmen
didn’t reef in time. For four more days it kept on not
storming at that time of year. So we were four more days behind
when we hit the dock in Beryl.
    I didn’t look back. Whatever I’d thought about Raven
and his kids and obligations before, that wasn’t interesting
now. They were on the other side of the big water and I was cured
of wanting to be a sailor. If Raven suddenly decided he had to go
back and balance accounts I was going to tell him to go pick his
nose with his elbow.
    The bunch we were chasing had left a plain trail. Raven’s
buddy had gone through Beryl like thunder and lightning, pretending
to be an imperial legate on a mystery mission.
    “Croaker is in a big hurry now,” Raven said.
“It’s going to be a long chase.”
    I gave him a look but I didn’t say it.
    We bought new horses and rounded up travel stuff. When we headed
out what they called the Rubbish Gate we were seven days behind.
Raven took off like he was going to catch up by tomorrow
morning.
     
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XVI
    In the heart of the continent, far to the east of the
Barrowland, Oar, the Tower, and Opal, beyond Lords and even that
jagged desolation called the Windy Country, lies that vast,
inhospitable, infertile, bizarre land called the Plain of Fear.
There is sound reason for the name. It is a land terrible to men.
Seldom are they welcomed there.
    In the heart of the Plain of Fear there is a barren circle. At
the circle’s center stands a gnarly tree half as old as time.
The tree is the sire of the sapling standing sentinel over the
Barrowland.
    The few scabrous, primitive nomads who live upon the Plain of
Fear call it Old Father Tree and worship it as a god. And god that
tree is, or as close as makes no difference. But it is a god whose
powers are strictly circumscribed.
    Old Father Tree was all a-rattle. Had he been human, he would
have been in a screaming rage. After a long, long delay his son had
communicated details of his lapse in the matter of the digging
monster and the buried head and the wicker man’s insane
murder spree.
    The tree’s anger was not entirely inspired by the
tardiness of his son. As much was directed at his own impotence and
at the dread the news inspired.
    An old devil had been put down forever and the world had
relaxed, had turned to its smaller concerns. But evil had not
missed a stride. It was back in the lists already. It was running
free, unbridled, unchallenged, and looked like it could devour the
world it hated.
    He was a god. On the wispiest evidences he could discern the
shapes of potential tomorrows. And the tomorrows he saw were
wastelands of blood and terror.
    The failure of his offspring could be precursor to the greater
failure of his own trust.
    When his hot fury had spent itself he sent his creatures, the
talking stones, into the farthest, the most hidden, the most
shadowed reaches of the Plain, carrying his call for an assembly of
the Peoples, the parliament of the forty-odd sentient species
inhabiting that most bizarre part of the world.
    Old Father Tree could not move himself, nor could he project his
own power beyond certain limits, but he did have the capacity to
fling out legates and janissaries in his stead.
     
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XVII
    The old man could barely keep himself upright in the saddle when
he reached Lords. His life had been sedentary. He had nothing but
will and the black arts with which to sustain himself against the
hazards of travel and his own physical limits.
    His will and skill were substantial but neither was
inexhaustible nor indefatigable.
    He