Glen Cook - The Silver Spike

I didn’t much blame him for going.

Smeds laid the last stone on the old man’s cairn. The tears were gone. The anger was quiet. It was not right that Fish should have fallen to cholera after taking the worst that could be thrown by the world’s nastiest villains. But there was no justice in this existence.

It there was, Timmy Locan would be here, not Smeds Stahl.

Smeds went on, into the city Roses. A year later he was a respected member of the community, owner of a struggling brewery. He lived well but without ostentation that would excite unwanted curiosity. He never told his story to a soul.

No matter how many times I walked around it, the hole into the tree god’s “abyss” still looked like a piece of black silk suspended a yard above the ground. It refused to have more than two dimensions.

Darling brought the little chest containing the silver spike, threw it through. It took both of us to do the coffin that contained all that had been left in the big pot when, after a week of cooking, it had been allowed to boil dry. The black circle vanished as though a stage magician had sucked the cloth up his sleeve.

We went and got clean for what seemed like the first time in years, then Darling showed me around the rabbit warren mat had been home for the Black Company and Rebel movement for so many years. Fascinating. And repellent. That people should put themselves through such hell... I wished them better times than mine, wherever they were.

Somehow we ended up doing what men and women seem unable to avoid. Afterward, she dressed in the clothing of a peasant woman, without a hint of mail or a single hidden blade.

“What goes?” I asked.

She signed, “The White Rose is dead. There is no place for her anymore. No need.”

I didn’t argue. I never was on that side.

For want of anything better to do we got Old Father Tree to give us a ride to where we could check out the progress of the potato industry.

It hadn’t changed a whole lot, except the people I knew had got older.

The grandkids wouldn’t believe a word of our stories but they’d fight anybody who didn’t agree that we told the most exciting lies in the world.