Book 1 - The Silver spike Read Online Free Page A

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.
     
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VI
    Raven hardly sobered up for three weeks. One night I came back
to our place, I’d had enough. I’d had to hurt a man bad
that day, a nut who earned it trying to grab my boss’s kids.
Even so I felt bad. Somehow I worked it out that it was all
Raven’s fault I got in a position where I had to hurt
somebody.
    He was drunk on his ass. “Look at you, sucking on a
wineskin like it was your mother’s tit. The great and famous
tough guy Raven, so bad he offed his old lady in the public gardens
at Opal. So bad he went head-to-head with the Limper. Laying around
feeling sorry for himself and whining like a three-year-old with a
bellyache. Get up and do something with yourself, man. I’m
sick of seeing you like this.”
    In a stumbling, slurred voice he told me to get stuffed, it
wasn’t any of my damned business.
    “The hell it ain’t! It’s my damned money
paying for the room here, dipshit. And I got to come home every day
to the stink of old puke and spilled wine and a goddamn