Book 1 - The Silver spike by Glen Cook Read Free Book Online Page A

the Corbie that I
got to know when I first met him, I mean the real bad-ass so tough
and hard he was death on a stick. I don’t think it ever
occurred to him to take a drink after he made up his mind that he
had something else to do.
    We had practice sessions every morning before we rode out and
every evening after we set camp. Even when he was at his weakest it
was all I could do to handle him. When he really started coming
back he beat me at everything but throwing rocks and running
footraces.
    His hip never let up on him.
    He wouldn’t never stop over at an inn or in a village.
Putting away temptation, I guess.
    You ain’t never going to impress me with nothing if you
think you’re going to tell me tall tales and you ain’t
never see the Tower at Charm. There ain’t nothing ought to be
that big. It’s got to be five hundred feet tall and as black
as a buzzard’s heart. I never seen nothing like it before and
I don’t expect I ever will again.
    We never went too close. Raven said there wasn’t no sense
getting those people’s attention. Damned straight. That was
the heart of the empire, the home of the Lady and all those old
evils called the Ten Who Were Taken.
    I went off a few miles and kept my head down while Raven skulked
around trying to find something out. I was perfectly happy to get
rested up from all those hundreds of miles of riding.
    He materialized out of a sunset that painted the horizon with
end-of-the-world fires. He sat down across from me.
“They’re not in the Tower. They stopped there for a
couple weeks, but then they headed south again. She followed
them.”
    I got to admit I groaned. I never was a whiner in all my
soldiering days, but I never got put through anything like this,
either. A man ain’t made for it.
    “We’re gaining on them, Case. Fast. If they fool
around in Opal like they did here we’ll have them.” He
gave me a fat smile. “You wanted to see the world.”
    “Not the whole damned thing in a week. I kind of counted
on enjoying the seeing.”
    “We don’t get them turned around and headed toward
the trouble, there might not be much damned world left.”
    “You going to take time out to look for your kids while
we’re down there?” I wanted to see the sea. I wanted
that since I was little. A traveling man come through and told us
kids lies about about the Jewel Cities and the Sea of Torments.
From then on I always thought about the sea when I was digging
potatoes or pulling weeds. I pretended I was a sailor, holy-stoning
a deck, but I was going to be a ship’s master someday.
    What did I know?
    More than the sea, now, I wanted to see Raven do right and get
right with himself and his kids.
    He gave me a funny look, then just ducked the question by not
answering it.
    We accumulated a fair arsenal here and there as we rode along.
Just outside Opal we got a chance to show it off. Not that that
done a lot of good.
    This great big old hairy-ass black iron coach come roaring out
of the city and straight up the road at us, them horses looking
like they was breathing fire. I never saw anything like it.
    Raven had. “That’s the Lady’s! Stop it!”
He whipped out a bow and strung it.
    “The Lady’s coach? Stop it? Man, you’re crazy!
You got guano for brains.” I got my bow out, too.
    Raven threw up a hand in a signal for them to halt. We tried to
look stand-and-deliver, your money or your life. Mean.
    Them coachmen never even slowed down. It was like they never
even saw us. I ended up going ass over appetite into a ditch with
about a foot of muck and water in it. When I got up I saw Raven had
ended up in some blackberry bushes on the other side.
“Arrogant bastards!” he shouted after the coach.
    “Yeah. Got no damned respect for a couple of honest
highwaymen.”
    Raven looked at me and started laughing. I looked at him and
went to laughing right back. After a minute, he said, “There
wasn’t anybody inside that coach.” He sounded
puzzled.
    “When did you