Smeds got sick of Tully’s idea before they were four days out of Oar. Nights were cold in the forest. There was no place to hide from the rain. Whole hordes of bugs chewed on you and you couldn’t get rid of them when you were sick of them like you could with lice and fleas and bedbugs. You could never get comfortable sleeping on the ground—if you could sleep at all with all the racket that went on at night. There were always sticks and stones and roots under you somewhere.
And there was that bastard Old Man Fish, hardly saying shit but always sneering at you because you didn’t know a bunch of woodsy stuff. Like you needed to know that shit to stay alive on the North Side.
It was going to be a pleasure to cut his throat.
Timmy Locan wasn’t much better. Little carrot-top runt never shut up. All right, so he was funny most of the time. So he knew every damned joke there ever was and knew how to tell them right and half of them were the kind you wanted to remember so bad it hurt, so you could crack up your friends. But they never came out right for you even when you did remember them . . . Damn it, even funny got old after four days.
Worse than funny, the little prick never slowed down. He bounced up in die morning like he knew it was going to be the best damned day of his life and he went after every damned day like it was. Short people weren’t supposed to be joyous, they were supposed to be cocky and obnoxious. Then you could thump on them and shut them up without feeling bad about it.
Worst thing of all was, Old Man Fish said they couldn’t follow the road on account of they might run into somebody who would want to know what they were up to or somebody who might remember them after they did the job. It was important that nobody knew who did it. But busting through the tangle of the woods was awful, even with Old Man Fish finding the way.
Tully hated it worse than Smeds, but he backed the old man up.
Smeds had to admit they were right. What he didn’t have to admit was that the expedition was worth the slapping branches, the stabbing, tearing briars, and the for gods’ sake spidenvebs in the face.
Or maybe the worst was the blisters on his feet. Those started practically before they got out of sight of Oar. Even though he did everything Old Man Fish told him to do, they just kept getting worse. At least they didn’t get infected. That jerk Timmy kept telling cheerful little tales about guys in the army who had had blisters that had gotten infected and they’d had to have their feet or legs chopped off. Dipshit.
Fourth night in the woods he had no trouble sleeping. In fact, he was getting to that point where he could sleep whenever he stopped moving. The old man observed, “You’re starting to toughen up. We’ll turn you into a man yet, Smeds.”
Smeds could have killed him then, but it was too much work to get out of his pack straps and go over and do it.
Maybe the pack was the worst part of it. He had to lug eighty pounds of junk on his back, and what they had eaten of the food part hadn’t lightened the load a bit.
They reached their destination shortly after noon eight days after they departed Oar. Smeds stood just inside the edge of the forest and looked out at the Barrowland. “That’s what all the fuss was about? Don’t look like shit to me.” He sloughed his pack, plopped down on it, leaned against a tree, and closed his eyes.
“It ain’t what it used to be,” Old Man Fish agreed.
“You got a name besides Old Man?”
“Fish.”
“I mean a front name.”
“Fish is good.”
Laconic bastard.
Timmy asked, “That our tree out there?”
Tully answered, “Got to be. It’s the only one there is.”
Timmy said, “I love you, little tree. You’re going to make me rich.”
Tully said, “Fish, I think we ought to rest up some before we go after it.”
Smeds cracked an eyelid and glimmed his cousin. That was as close as his cousin had come to complaining since the expedition had started. But Tully was a big-time bitcher. Smeds had wondered how long he would hold out. Tully’s silence so far had helped Smeds keep going. If Tully wanted it bad enough to take what he had been, then maybe it really was as good as he talked.
The big hit? The one they had been seeking all their lives? Could it be? For that reason alone Smeds would endure.
Fish agreed with Tully. “I wouldn’t start before tomorrow night. At the earliest. Maybe the night after. We have a lot of scouting to do. We’ll all have to learn the ground the way we learn the geography of a lover.” Smeds frowned. Was this no-talk Fish? “We have to find a secure place to camp and establish a secondary base for emergencies.”
Smeds could not keep quiet. “What the hell is all this shit? Why don’t we just go out there and chop the damned thing down and get out of here?”
“Shut up, Smeds,” Tully snapped. “Where the hell have you been for the last ten days? Get the shit out of your ears and use your head for something besides keeping them from banging together.”
Smeds shut up. His ears were open, suddenly, and they had caught a very sinister undertone in Tully’s voice. His cousin had begun to sound like he regretted letting him in on the deal. Like maybe he was thinking Smeds was too dumb to be left to live. Right now he had on that same contemptuous look Fish wore so often.
He closed his eyes, shut out his companions, let his mind roll back over the past ten days, picking up things that he had heard without really hearing because he had been so busy feeling sorry for himself.
Of course they couldn’t just strut out there and chop the damned tree down. There were soldiers watching the Barrowland. And even if there weren’t any soldiers there was the tree itself, that was supposed to be big mojo. Sorcery there great enough to have survived the dark struggle that had hammered the guts out of this killing ground.
All right. It wasn’t going to be easy. He would have to work for it harder than he’d ever worked for anything in his life. And he would have to be careful. He would have to keep his eyes open and his brain working. He wasn’t going to give the Kimbro girls music lessons out here.
That day and night they rested. Even Old Man Fish said he needed it. Next morning Fish went to scout for a campsite. Tully said, “You got blisters up to your butt, Smeds. You stay here. Take care of them the way Fish said. You got to get in shape to move if we got to move. Timmy, come on.”
“Where you going?” Smeds asked.
“Gonna try getting close to that town. See what we can find out.” They went.
Fish came back an hour later.
“That was quick. Find a place?”
“Not a very good one. River’s moved some since I was up here. Bank’s two hundred yards over there. Not much room to run. Let me look at them feet.”
Smeds stuck them out. Fish squatted, grunted, touched a couple of places. Smeds winced. “Bad?” he asked.
“Seen worse. Not often. Got some trenchfoot getting started, too. Others probably got a touch, too.” He looked vacant for a moment. “My fault. I knew you was green and Tully was as organized as a henhouse. Shoulda not let him get in such a big hurry. You get in a hurry you always end up paying.”
“Decided what you’re going to do with your cut yet?”
“Nope. You get to my age you don’t go looking that far ahead. Good chance you might not get there. One day at a time, boy. I’m going to get some stuff for a poultice.”
Smeds watched the straight-backed, white-haired man fade into the forest silently. He tried to blank his mind. He did not want to be alone with his thoughts.
Fish returned with a load of weeds. “Chop these into little pieces and put them in this sack. Equal amounts of each kind.” There were three kinds. “When the sack is stuffed close it up and pound on it with this stick. Roll it over once in a while. All the leaves got to get good and bruised.”
“How long?”
“Give it a thousand, twelve hundred whacks. Then dump it in this pot. Put in a cup of water and stir it up.”
“Then what?”
“Then do another sack. And stir the pot every couple minutes.” The old man faded into the woods without saying where he was going.
Smeds was pounding his third sack when Fish returned. He sniffed. “Guess you can do a job right when you want.” He settled, took the pot. “Good. That sack will be enough.”
He turned Smeds’s oldest shirt into bindings for his feet, packed them with soggy, mangled leaves. A cool tingle began soothing his pains.
Fish made the others treat their feet, too. He did his own.
Smeds leaned against his tree, troubled. He did not think he was hard enough or bad enough to kill the old man.
“There between sixty and eighty people still living over there,” Tully said. “Mostly soldiers. But we heard them talking like a big bunch would be leaving in a couple days. Wouldn’t hurt to wait them out on that. We could finish up our scouting.”
Scouting the Barrowland started after sunset, by the light of a quarter moon. The village was dark and silent. It looked a good time to prowl the open ground.
Out the four went in a loose line abreast barely in sight of one another, Tully guiding on the tree. It was not much of a tree by Smeds’s estimation. Right then it looked like a fat-trunked silver-bark poplar sapling about fifteen feet tall. He could not see anything remarkable there. Why the reputation?
He reached a point where the angle was right, caught a glint of moonlight off silver. It was real! And having gotten that one glance, he began to feel the throbbing dark power of it, like it was not metal at all but an icicle of pure hatred.
He shuddered, forced his gaze away.
It was real. The wealth was there to be had. If they could take it.
He hurried forward. A long, low, stony ridge barred his path. Odd that such a thing should be there, but he did not connect it with the dragon that was supposed to have devoured the infamous sorcerer Bomanz before being slain itself. Maybe if there had been more light to reveal what his hands and feet exposed as they disturbed the masking dirt . . .
He was near the top when he heard the sound. Like an animal snuffling. And another sound beneath it, like something scratching at the earth. He looked for the others. He could see no one but Tully, who was staring at the tree from ten feet away. There was something odd about the tree. The tops of its leaves glimmered with a faint bluish ghost light.
Maybe it was a trick of the rising moon.
He got up where the footing was good, stood, glanced at the tree again. Definitely something weird going on there. The whole thing was glowing.
He looked down in front of him. His heart stilled.
Something stared back at him from fifty feet away. It had a head the size of a bushel basket. Its eyes and teeth shown in the tree light. Especially its teeth. Never had he seen so many sharp teeth, or so big.
It started toward him.
His feet would not move.
He looked around wildly, saw Tully and Timmy headed away from the tree at a dead run.
He looked forward again as the monster began its leap, its jaws opening to snap at his head. He hurled himself backward. As the monster arced after him a blue bolt from the tree smacked it aside as a man’s hand swats a flying insect.
Smeds landed hard, but hard did not slow him a step. He took off running and never looked back.
“I saw it, too,” Old Man Fish said, and that put the quietus on Tully trying to make like Smeds was imagining things. “Like he said, it was as big as a house. Like a giant three-legged dog. The tree zapped it. It ran away.”
“Three-legged dog? Come on. What was it doing?”
Smeds said, “It was trying to dig something up. It was sniffing and pawing the ground just like a dog trying to dig up a bone.”
“Damn it to hell! Complications. Why does there always have to be complications? That for sure means it’ll take longer than I thought. But we don’t got no time to waste. Sooner or later somebody else is going to get the same idea I did.”
“Don’t get in no hurry,” Fish said. “Take your time and do it right. That is, if you want to live long enough to enjoy being rich.”
Tully grunted. Nobody suggested they give it up. Not even Smeds, who had felt the monster’s breath on his face.
“Toadkiller Dog,” Timmy Locan said.
“Say what?” Tully snapped back.
“Toadkiller Dog. There was a monster in the fight up here called Toadkiller Dog.”
“Toadkiller Dog? What the hell kind of name is that?”
“How the hell should I know? He ain’t my pup.”
Stupid joke, but everybody laughed anyway. They needed to.