The Spark

by David Drake

  “Are we on Catermole, son?” I asked.

  The boy dropped the toy he’d been holding in his hands since the boat landed. He backed two steps, then turned and ran toward the town screaming. Maybe he was screaming a name.

  “I guess he’s never seen a boat,” Baga said. “It scares folks the first time they do.”

  “I guess,” I said. It seemed to me that the boy had been jumpier than just a boat ought to mean. The boats that’d landed in Beune gathered crowds, including me in the numbers. People hadn’t run screaming.

  Buck and I walked onto the street proper. I didn’t know if Baga was following. I started whistling a song about a pretty girl leaving the place she’d lived in for a long time. I figured it’d make me look friendly to the people watching from the street or peeking out of windows.

  My shield and weapon were in my tunic pockets, but I hoped nobody would know that. They shouldn’t.

  I thought the first building on the right side of the street was a log cabin with board siding, but when I reached it I found that it was attached to the two-story frame inn and store beside it. The bigger place had a full-length porch and a bench for people to sit on, though the half-dozen folks who’d been doing that when the boat landed were on their feet now.

  The man who stepped onto the street to greet me was plump and wore a bright blue vest over a tunic of unbleached wool. “Good morning, Lord,” he said. “What would you be wanting?”

  “I was told to go to Boddington’s,” I said.

  “You’re at the right place,” the plump fellow said, “but it’s Blanco’s now and I’m Blanco. Are you looking for supplies or for a room?”

  “Mostly I want information,” I said. “They say in Dun Add that you’ve been having some problems. They asked me to look into them.”

  “Are you a tax man?” asked one of the men who’d been lounging on the porch. They were all bearded, but the speaker’s was particularly full.

  “I am not,” I said, turning my head. “I don’t know anything about taxes, and that’s all I want to know.”

  I turned back to Blanco. “Information,” I repeated. “And if you’ve got ale, I wouldn’t mind trying some to compare it with what I’m used to at home.”

  “Come on inside,” Blanco said. “We brew lager here, but I’m partial to it myself.”

  * * *

  The front room of Blanco’s had racks of goods to the right and a bar on the far left. Blanco took me to one of the tables near the bar and called, “Two lagers, Keith!” to the barman.

  The loungers on the porch had all come in with us. They took chairs at the table also or dragged other chairs closer. Blanco didn’t object, but I noticed that he left the others to buy their own beer.

  The lager came in tarred leather jacks. It was pretty good, especially after the ale I’d been drinking aboard the boat. There was nothing wrong with food and drink from the converter, but it didn’t have any life.

  “Why is it you came here?” Blanco said, lifting his jack.

  “The Leader, or anyway his people, heard there was something wrong on Catermole,” I said. “They sent me to learn what it was, since they didn’t seem to know, and to fix it. What is wrong here? Besides—”

  I caught the eye of the fellow with the big beard and raised my jack to him.

  “—you don’t like to pay taxes, which is none of my business.”

  “Bloody well told we don’t,” the local muttered, but it was into his beard rather than a challenge.

  “Look, I’d tell you if I could,” said Blanco, squirming his hands together and staring at them instead of at me. “Maybe it’s nothing.”

  “Bloody hell it’s nothing!” said the man who’d taken the chair to the right of mine. “How about Herman vanishing?”

  “Herman went off to look for the vein of gold feeding Rosebud Creek,” Blanco said, glaring at his fellow. “People who go off into the forest alone, sometimes they don’t come back. A widowmaker could’ve fallen on him in the storm we had the month after.”

  “And he might still be chipping at rocks,” another man said. “Herman was that stubborn, you know he was.”

  “He didn’t have six months food!”

  “So he’s fishing!” Blanco said. “I’m just saying that folks disappear. This is the Marches, and it doesn’t mean anything special!”

  “The guy from Barodi who went back to fetch his family!” another man said. “When she finally got here on her own, there’d been no sign of him anywhere along the way.”

  “Yeah, her and their four kids,” Blanco said. “I can think of other reasons a guy might disappear. So can you, Keeley!”

  I put down my half-emptied jack, firmly enough that a droplet squirted up in the air and dropped down into the remainder again. I said, “So you don’t think anything’s wrong, Blanco?”

  The storekeeper looked around the circle of his fellows. Angrily he said, “No, I bloody well do think something’s wrong. Only there’s nothing I can point to, nothing I could swear to in court.”

  “We’re not in court,” I said. “And I’m sure not a judge. What do you think is going on?”

  “It’s more a feeling,” the fellow with the big beard said. “It just doesn’t feel right. And sure, people disappear, Herman could still be out in the hills in the west just like Shorty said. But there been a lot of people, it seems to me.”

  “I wonder if Not-Here is coming back?” said a fellow who didn’t have a chair. “I mean, it’s not long past that this was all the Waste, right? Catermole, I mean. And now it’s Here, but what if that’s going to change again?”

  “Look, it doesn’t happen that way!” a man said. “We’re getting in hundreds of people every month. Catermole’s really developing. We’re going to be the biggest node in the Marches before long, you’ll see!”

  I didn’t doubt anything the fellow was saying—except the first bit. Nobody knows why sometimes places are Here and sometimes Not-Here. I’d asked Guntram and he doesn’t, so I figure nobody does. Things go from the Waste to Here, like Catermole did twenty-odd years ago.

  It may be that what’s Waste to people is Not-Here to the Beasts and to other things, or maybe just part of the Waste is really Not-Here. All I know for sure is that Beune has been Not-Here in the past; and I was pretty sure nobody was going to ask us living there if it was okay if the Waste and Not-Here swept over us again. Nobody was going to ask the residents of Catermole either, no matter how many of them were clearing farms or prospecting for gold.

  “Sir, what do you think?” Blanco said, still working his fingers together but now meeting my eyes.

  “I think I’ll take a look around the Road hereabouts,” I said. “I’ll need directions as to where there’s water outside Catermole, and also provisions for me and Buck—”

  Buck had been sprawled against my left ankle. He sat up when he heard his name.

  “—and my man Baga. I can buy them here?”

  “I carry dry provisions, sure,” Blanco said. “Beans, biscuit, and bacon—that what you’re talking about?”

  “Right, and maybe some dried fruit if you’ve got it,” I said.

  “There’s raisins,” said Blanco, nodding. “But sir—about payment? I won’t take any money for this.”

  And that convinced me as nothing I’d heard before that there really was something bad going on around Catermole.

  CHAPTER 23

  Calling on the Neighbors

  “How much farther are you planning to go?” Baga asked.

  You can’t tell time for sure on the Road since there’s no sun, but I judged it was three hours since we’d taken a break for lunch. The node we’d stopped at around midday was bare rock, a crag jutting out of the waste—a decent place to take the weight off our feet and eat, but waterless.

  “There’s supposed to be a stream at the next place,” I said. “It shouldn’t be too long before we get there and we can camp for the night. We need water.”

  Baga grunted.
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br />   He was carrying all the food, not because he was my servant but because I had my weapon and shield. They were why we were out here, after all, and Baga had volunteered for the job.

  Maggie hadn’t come along with us. I would’ve been fine with her in the boat to Catermole—there hadn’t been any problem when we all three rode from Marielles to Dun Add—though she wouldn’t have come on the Road with us. Baga hadn’t asked permission, and you don’t have to get very old on a place as small as Beune to learn that you don’t ask guys about how things are going with their wives.

  Which is not to say there was anything wrong between Baga and Maggie. It’s just that I understood it was none of my business.

  We’d left Catermole and were heading for Barodi. Some of the people who’d gone missing were supposed to have been on this stretch. For that matter, it was a likely direction for the tax assessors to travel by. I wondered if the folks in Dun Add would be pleased to learn their clerks had been murdered by bandits rather than by the people they were putting taxes on?

  Maybe so. Bandits had a simple solution, while hanging farmers didn’t help your tax collections.

  “I don’t know what we’re looking for,” Baga said.

  “Me neither,” I said. “To tell the truth, what I’m really doing is walking around hoping that somebody attacks me.”

  “What if they only attack loners?” Baga said. “I mean, all the ones they told us about in Blanco’s store were alone, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’d been thinking about that.”

  Which didn’t mean I had an answer. I could maybe leave Baga at the node where I planned to spend the night. Then I’d be alone.

  But so would Baga, and half a dozen of the people they’d talked about on Catermole who’d disappeared had been on Catermole, not on the Road. They might not have anything to do with the folks who’d vanished from the Road, but then I didn’t really know that anybody’d vanished from the Road. We’d spend a night in Barodi and I’d figure something out before we set out the next morning.

  Buck noticed something. “Hold up!” I called, to him and Baga both.

  “For what?” said Baga. “You mean that little crack? That’s nothing! Nothing could come through that.”

  “You’re right, nothing could come that way,” I said. “But it isn’t nothing. There was a path here and it’s been closed deliberately, not just growing shut because it wasn’t used.”

  “But if nobody can go in and out that way, it’s not what’s happening to the people who disappeared, right?”

  I didn’t reply. Buck had noticed a discontinuity in the Waste to the right of the Road. It hadn’t bothered him, but his dog brain had filed it as a possible escape route for something small that was trying to get away from him.

  To me it was a break in the pattern of lighter and darker verticals edging the Road: a vertical which was neither light nor dark but just absent. I switched my shield on and thrust my left arm into the gap. It parted. I wondered how the edges had been joined.

  I’d never tried to use either a shield or a weapon in the Waste before, but it turned out this wasn’t the Waste. Beyond the crack at the edge of the Road, there was a real path—narrow but not much worse than the path to the Consort’s Garden.

  I grimaced. I’d rather not think about that, but I’d rather a lot of things.

  “All right, Baga,” I said. “We’re going this way. Just to see where it leads.”

  Baga didn’t object, just nodded. He’d been grumbling about the weight of the pack, but he wasn’t a coward. He stayed right behind as Buck led me along the track.

  My weapon was live. I won’t pretend it made me feel safe, but this was the sort of thing I’d enrolled in the Company of Champions for. It didn’t feel exciting when I was actually doing it, and I sure didn’t feel like a hero.

  We came out onto a node as narrow from this angle as the Consort’s Garden, but this was all land. Much of it was a castle, built from the stone of the crag behind it. The walls had patches of yellow-orange lichen, but there were no vines running up them. Nobody was moving on top of the walls that I could see, but the place sure wasn’t abandoned.

  “What do we do now, boss?” Baga said.

  How would I know? I thought. But Baga was right, it was my duty to know—or at least to find out.

  “Buck and I will go up to the door—”

  The massive iron-clad gate.

  “—and ask to be admitted. If anything happens to me, get back to Catermole and take the boat to Dun Add. Tell people what it is you’ve seen here, tell Clain. And I guess the boat’s yours after you’ve done that.”

  Which would give Baga two boats, probably the only person in Here who could say that. If he could get to Catermole. As a boatman, Baga didn’t have much experience with the Road—particularly without a dog to guide him. I wished him well, but I wasn’t going to give him Buck while I was still alive.

  “Boss?” Baga said. “I’ll do that, sure. But why don’t we both go back and you tell Lord Clain? This sure looks to me like a job for the army.”

  I took a deep breath. “Baga,” I said, “I see what you’re saying. But I’m a Champion of Mankind. This particular problem the army can certainly fix, but in the longer run I think it’s important to the Commonwealth…”

  I shook my head because I felt really stupid saying this: Pal, the kid from Beune. “And to Mankind. That people learn to respect the Champions, even if there’s just one of us and we’re a long way from Dun Add.”

  One of me.

  “Yes, boss,” Baga said. “I guess I’ll leave the pack here for now, right?”

  I nodded and started for the gateway. I hadn’t really expected Baga to come with me, but it made as much sense as me going myself instead of calling for a squadron of the army.

  The castle was a circular sixty-foot tower about a hundred feet in diameter, small compared to Dun Add. It was entirely built for defense, however. The great gate was the only opening in the outer wall.

  The stone tower loomed above me. It might be little compared to Dun Add, but it sure made me feel like an ant. Facing the gate, I wasn’t sure what to do next.

  I didn’t want to put down either my shield or weapon—and I didn’t want to bang either piece on what seemed to be a solid steel plate. “Hello the house!” I shouted.

  I wondered how thick the gate was. The walls were sure too thick for anybody to hear me through them.

  Baga took out his belt knife and banged on the door with the hilt where the tang stuck up above the wooden scales riveted onto it. The sound was a string of penetrating clacks.

  “Hello the house!” I shouted again, looking up and wondering what I would do if nobody responded to our noise.

  In time—how much time depended on how thick the steel was—I could cut through the gate with my weapon. I didn’t want to do that. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t overload the weapon with the heavy use, but it seemed an awfully hostile thing to do if the folks inside weren’t hostile already. Still, if they wouldn’t communicate with me—

  A little door set into the other side of the big one hinged in with a squeal. I hadn’t noticed it—there was a light coating of rust over the whole gate so it blurred the seam—and I just about jumped out of my skin.

  A middle-aged woman stuck her head out. Baga blurted, “Who’re you?”

  “Marina, but that doesn’t matter,” she said, stepping fully out of the castle. She wore a dull blue dress with a white apron and bonnet. “You’ve got to get me out of here at once. He could come back at any time now. He’s been gone for most of the day already!”

  “Who has?” I asked, stepping past her. I was pretty sure we’d found what I was looking for—or anyway would, when he came back.

  “The Spider!” Marina said. “I don’t know what you’d call him and it doesn’t matter! We’ve got to get out now!”

  “No,” I said, shutting down my shield briefly so that I could get through the little door. “We don’t.
This is where I need to be.”

  The gate was near six inches thick, so even the one-man door I’d entered by must weigh a lot more than I could lift. It was wider at the back where the hinges were than at the front: otherwise it wouldn’t have been able to swing.

  “Come on back, honey,” I heard Baga say. “The boss knows what he’s doing.”

  I did know what I was doing, but that didn’t mean it was what he and the woman ought to be doing. “Look,” I called over my shoulder as I walked down the tunnel toward light at the far end. “If the two of you want to leave—go back to Catermole, even—you’ve got my permission.”

  This place was designed like Dun Add with a courtyard inside a ring of rooms attached to the outer wall. That central court was over fifty feet across, but I didn’t know how much of the tower was just solid stone wall.

  Baga and the woman joined me when I paused in the courtyard. There were four masonry staircases curving up to the top of the inner walls, with circular walkways at the twenty- and forty-foot levels. Marina was the only person I’d seen any sign of living here, though.

  On a whim I put myself into a trance. I gasped at what I’d found. I shuddered back to Here, meeting the worried eyes of Marina and Baga.

  There were more Ancient artifacts in this castle than I’d known in any place except the workrooms of Louis and Guntram in Dun Add. I leaned against the wall and realized that the stone fabric of the building itself was an artifact. I couldn’t tell if it went back to the Ancients, though. Indeed, I wasn’t sure that the castle had been part of Here when it was built.

  To the woman I said, “Is this Spider a Maker? A great Maker?”

  “I don’t know what he is,” Marina said. “A monster, that’s all. I think he’s from Not-Here. He goes out on the Road and catches travellers, then he brings them back here to eat. But we’ve got to go or he’ll be back!”

  “If he eats people,” Baga said, “what are you doing here?”