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Gentleman, the silver spike is loose in the world. Its not the Dominator. Hes dead. But the undying black essence that drove him remains. And that could be used by an adept to summon, coerce, and shape powers even I cannot begin to fathom. That spike could become a conduit to the very heart of darkness, an opener of the way that would confer upon its possessor powers perhaps exceeding even those the Dominator possessed.
Our mission, our holy mission, given the White Rose by Old Father Tree himself, is to recover the silver spike and deliver it for safekeeping, at whatever cost to ourselves, before someone of power seizes upon it and shapes it to his own dark purposes and is, in his turn, shaped-perhaps into a shadow so deep there would be no chance ever for the world to win free.
Contents
Glen Cook
The Silver Spike
I
This here journal is Ravens idea but I got me a feeling he wont be so proud of it if he ever gets to reading it because most of the time Im going to tell the truth. Even if he is my best buddy.
Talk about your feet of clay. Hes got them run all the way up to his noogies, and then some. But hes a right guy even if he is a homicidal, suicidal maniac half the time. Raven decides hes your friend you got a friend for life, with a knife in all three hands.
My name is Case. Philodendron Case. Thanks to my Ma. Ive never even told Raven about that. Thats why I joined the army. To get away from the kind of potato diggers that would stick a name like that on a kid. I had seven sisters and four brothers last time I got a head count. Every one is named after some damned flower.
A girl named Iris or Rose, what the hell, hey? But I got a brother named Violet and another brother named Petunia. What kind of people do that do their kids? Where the hell are the Butches and Spikes?
Potato diggers.
People that spend their whole lives grubbing in the dirt, sunup to sundown, to root out potatoes, cabbages, onions, parsnips, rootabagas. Turnips. I still hate turnips. I wouldnt wish them on a hog. I joined the army as soon as I could sneak off.
They tried to stop me. My father and uncles and brothers and cousins. They didnt get away with it. Im still amazed how that one old sergeant managed to look so bad the whole clan backed down.
Thats what I wanted to be when I grew up. Somebody who could just stand there and look so bad people dribbled down their legs. But I think you got to be born with it.
Ravens got it. He just looks at somebody trying to jack him around and the guy turns white.
So I joined up and went through the training and went out soldiering, sometimes with Feather and Journey, sometimes with Whisper, mostly here in the north. And I found out soldiering wasnt what I thought it would be. I found out I didnt like it a whole lot better than digging potatoes. But I was good at it, even if I kept doing something to get busted every time I made sergeant. I finally got posted to the Guards at the Barrowland. That was supposed to be a big honor but I never believed it.
Thats where I met Raven. Only he went by the name of Corbie then. I didnt know he was a spy for the White Rose. Course, nobody did or he would have been dead. He was just this quiet old crippled guy who said he used to soldier with the Limper but had to get out after he got his leg hurt so bad. He hung out in an abandoned house he fixed up. He made his living doing things for guys that didnt want to do them for themselves. The Guards got paid good and the Barrowland was a hundred miles into the Great Forest where there wasnt nothing else to spend it on but booze. Corbie got plenty of work polishing boots and swabbing floors and currying horses. He used to come in and do the colonels office and then play chess with him, which is where I ran into him the first time.
He smelled odd right from the start. Not White Rose odd but you knew he wasnt no runaway farm boy like me or some city kid from the slums that signed up because there wasnt nothing else to do with his life. He had some class when he wanted to show it. He was educated. He talked maybe five or six languages and he could read and I heard him talk with the old man about things that I didnt have a roosters notion what they meant.
So I got me this idea. Id get to be his buddy and then get him to teach me how to read and write.
It was the same old thing, see. Join the army and get off the farm and go on adventures and life would be great. Learn to read and write, I could get out of the army and go off on adventures and everything would be great.
Sure.
I dont know if everybody is that way. Im not the kind that can ask guys about things like that. But I know me enough to know that there aint nothing ever going to turn out to be exactly what I want and nothing is ever going to satisfy me. Im the guy with so much ambition Im living here in a one room walk-up with a wino whose big talent seems to be puking his guts up after scarfing down about three gallons of the cheapest wine he can find.
So anyway I got Raven to start teaching me and we ended up buddies, even if he was weird. And that didnt do me no good when the shit storm hit and he turned out to be a spy. Lucky for me, my bosses and his bosses had to get together to gang up on the monster in the ground up there, that us Guards was getting paid so good to watch.
Thats when I found out he was really Raven, the guy that used to run with the Black Company, that took the White Rose away from the Limper when she was a little kid and hid her out and raised her up till she was ready to take on her destiny.
I thought he was dead. So did everybody else, on both sides. Especially the White Rose, who had loved him, and not like a brother or father. Which is why he turned himself into a dead man and ran away. He couldnt handle what it means to have somebody in love with you. Running away was the only thing he knew how to do.
But he was some in love with her, too, and the only way he had to show it was turn himself into Corbie and go spying and hope he could find her some big weapon she could use when she came to her final confrontation with the Lady. My big boss.
So what happens? Fate sticks an oar in and stirs everything up and when we look around what do we find? The Dominator, the old monster buried in the Barrowland, the blackest evil this old world ever knew, was awake and trying to get out, and the only way to stop him was for everybody to drop their old fights and gang up. So the Lady came to the Barrowland with all her double-ugly champions, and the White Rose came with the Black Company, and things started getting interesting.
And damnfool Raven mooned around in the middle of it all thinking he could just walk over and take up with Darling like he hadnt walked out on her and let her think he was dead for a bunch of years.
The damn fool. I know more about sorcery than hell ever know about women.
So they let the old evil come up out of the ground, then they jumped all over it. It was so big and black they couldnt kill its spirit, only its flesh, so they burned that flesh to ash and scattered the ash and imprisoned its soul in a silver spike. They drove the spike into the trunk of a sapling that was the son of some kind of god that would live forever and grow around it and keep it from ever causing any more grief. Then they all went away. Even Darling, with some guy named Silent.
There were tears in her eyes when she went. Some of that feeling for Raven was still there inside her. But she was not going to open up and let him do it to her again.
And he stood there watching her go, dumbstruck. He couldnt figure out why she would do that to him.
