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

have time to look?”
    “I think I know what’s happening. Come on. We have
to hurry. Catch your horse.”
    I caught her. She was too stupid to hold a grudge. But his kept
leading him around, looking back like he was thinking, You
ain’t going to pull that crazy shit on me again, you son of a
bitch. This game went on for a while. I finally stopped it by
sneaking up on the beast from the other direction.
    We blew about a half hour diddling around there.
    The big black ship was about a half hour down the channel when
we got to the waterfront. For a minute I thought Raven was going to
chop that gelding of his into fish bait. But he just dismounted and
stood there on the wharf, staring out to the sea. Whenever a local
growled at us about being in the way he just gave them one of those
looks that stilled the heart and quickened the feet.
    He had it all back, whatever it was. Those weren’t soft
guys, there on that waterfront.
    The black ship faded into the haze out on the water. Raven
shuddered his way back to the racket and fish smells. “Guess
we’ll have to sell the horses and find a ship headed for
Beryl.”
    “Hang on here, man. Enough is enough. Reasonable is
reasonable. You figure on heading all the way to the end of the
world? Look around here. This is Opal. Almost ever since I’ve
known you I been hearing how you got to get back to Opal and find
out about your kids. Look it! We’re here! Let’s do
it.”
    The guy was my friend. But he had trouble hanging in. Before he
was Raven he was Corbie, and before he was Corbie he was Raven. And
sometime way back he was somebody else before he got to be Raven
the first time. I don’t know who, but I know he was somebody
high-class and he came from Opal and he left two kids behind,
twins, when he got on with Croaker and that bunch and headed north
for the fighting in Forsberg.
    He plain left those kids to the winds of fortune. He tortured
himself because he didn’t know what happened to them, because
he wasn’t shit as a father. Me, I figured it was high time he
got that all straightened out.
    He thought about it a long time. He kept looking down the coast,
eastward, like the answer might be there. What I saw when I looked
that way was the homes of rich people on top of cliffs, overlooking
the sea. I always kind of suspected he was one of them.
    “Maybe when we come back through,” he said, finally.
“When we’re headed north again.”
    “Sure.” Bullshit.
    He heard me thinking. He sort of shrank into himself. He did not
look at me.
    Best ship we could get for Beryl was on some kind of fat scow
leaving in two days. I got sick just looking at it.
    Raven got good and polluted that night even though I never said
another word about his kids. I guess he heard me thinking. Or he
heard himself, which is worse.
    I got up early. Raven would be nursing a hangover all day. He
was one of those old farts had to tell you all about how he never
got one when he was young. I went off to look around.
    I did all right. I never got lost. And the city had so many
different kinds in it after a couple generations being part of the
empire that almost everywhere I could find somebody who spoke one
of the languages that I did.
    It wasn’t a lot of fun rooting around in a friend’s
past. I didn’t learn a whole lot, anyway. I couldn’t
find hardly anybody who remembered anything, and what they did
remember mostly sounded like it was fairy tale. Good stories always
get bigger. But I think I got some sense out of all the
nonsense.
    A long time back a character named the Limper was the governor
of the province that included Opal. The Limper was one of the
original Ten Who Were Taken, the undead sorcerer-devils who were
the Lady’s champions. They were called Taken because they had
been great villains in their own right once, but they had been
enslaved by a greater and darker power.
    This one called the Limper was about as corrupt and rotten a
governor as ever there was.
    I knew the guy