Book 1 - The Silver spike Read Free Page A

sticking together no
matter what, the Company being their family, them against the whole
world. You told me about it enough.”
    There was more I could have said. I could have given it to him
by the numbers, how they felt about brothers who ran out on them,
but he wouldn’t have got it.
    There wasn’t nobody with more guts in a fight than Raven.
He wouldn’t back down from nobody or nothing. But in the
emotional tight spots he was ready to pack up and run in a minute.
He did it to the Company and he did it to Darling, but they could
take care of themselves when he did.
    I think maybe the worst stunt he ever pulled, and the one that
still bugs him the most, is when he ran out on his kids.
    He did that back when he enrolled in the Black Company. Maybe he
had his reasons, and good ones at the time. He comes up with good
excuses. But there’s no getting around the fact that he left
his kids when they were too young to take care of themselves.
Without making any arrangements for them. He never even told
anybody he had kids till he told me, sort of, when he was still
being Corbie and started trying to find out what happened to them.
They would be grown up now. If they survived.
    He didn’t find out anything.
    I figured he would make finding them his quest now. He
didn’t have anything else going. And trudging through the
forest headed south, he made noises like that was what he was
planning to do.
    We got as far as Oar. He went out on a drunk. And stayed on
it.
    I went on one, too. I went through me some bad girls. All the
things a guys does when he’s been out in the woods for a long
time, then hits the city. Took me four days to work through that
and another day to shake the hangover. Then I took a look at Raven
and saw he was just getting started.
    I went and found us a cheap place to stay. Then I got me a job
protecting a rich man’s family. That wasn’t hard to do.
There were all kinds of rumors about what happened in the
Barrowland. The rich saw troubled times coming and wanted to get
themselves covered.
    Darling and her bunch were in the city somewhere, for a while.
So were the bunch from the Black Company. We didn’t run into
any of them before they left out.
     
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V
    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