He pulled out two metal cases and set them on the seat, opening first one, then the other. In each, in a foam compartment to protect it against shock, lay a pair of goggles, each with its battery pack.
Torrie pulled out one and pushed the test button, gratified when it went green, then turned the goggles on and handed the set to Dad, who clumsily pulled it down over his eyes. Dad did something with a switch on the dashboard, and the interior of the Bronco went dark; a moment later, the headlights went out.
Torrie already had the other set of goggles out and on his head. Like much else in the emergency kits, the goggles were expensive, but Dad and Mother had never been ones to pinch pennies over such things. The idea was that in case of any emergency, be it nuclear war or a tornado, they should be able to reach for the hidden catch at the top of the frame to the front door, then slide the wall panel aside as they grabbed an emergency bag on their way to the car, and be able to survive, perhaps even survive with a bit of comfort. There were additional kits in the trunks of each car, but their contents were more restricted; they were always kept in the cars, and had to be able to stand up to a Canadian border crossing or, theoretically at least, a police search.
He turned the goggles on, and the world sprang into shades of blue and black, like watching an old-fashioned black-and-white TV.
But now the moon cast enough light for him to see as far as he cared to, although he had no peripheral vision. Practiced reflexes returned; Torrie automatically began to scan from side to side.
“I’d better load up.” The boxes of ammo were on the floor, and he couldn’t load the rifles without detaching himself.
“You’d best, at that.” Dad glanced over at him as he removed his seat belt, but didn’t say anything else.
“You left too much unsaid,” Torrie finally said. “I don’t even know where to start asking you questions. Are all the stories Uncle Hosea told true?”
“All of them?” Dad shook his head. “No. I doubt it. But many of them, certainly. Most of the ones about the Aesir and the Vanir, yes, they were largely true. The Tuatha? Some of them still live.” His smile was a private one. “As Hosea ought to know.”
“And the Vestri? Are there really dwarves?”
“Certainly,” Dad said. “Although they … look somewhat different than they did in your picture books.”
“Why did you never tell me about this? About any of it?”
“I… had my reasons.” Dad’s mouth twisted. “I wanted you kept away from it. And I dislike being thought to be a liar. Even your mother doesn’t—didn’t—believe half of it, and she has had better reason than most to believe in it.”
Or maybe Mother wanted me growing up normal, and not out looking for Hidden Ways to Tir Na Nog, Torrie thought.
As long as it was just the stuff of tales that Uncle Hosea told, it was safe.
But when the Sons of the Wolf stepped out of story and onto your back porch, it was all different, but not strange, not surprising. That was the shock: that there was no shock, that he was cruising down a county road heading for a confrontation with the Sons of the Wolf, and he wasn’t burdened by any doubt.
“Like the gold?” Torrie asked.
“Like the gold. Stolen from the Fire Duke when Orfindel and I escaped. Melted down, and carefully sold off in small lots.” He smiled. “The foundation of the family fortune, although your Mother has increased it some. Rather more than some,” he said, correcting himself with a smile.
Torrie picked up a box of cartridges. In the eerie green light, he could barely make out the label. It read Winchester Super-X, in .30-06; the rifles were old Garands. He had grabbed the right boxes. Just as well.
After setting one rifle to safe, Torrie opened the box and pulled out one of the cartridges. It felt swollen, huge.
Torrie mainly fired .22s; most of his time with a rifle was spent under the tutelage of Dad or Uncle Hosea at the range, although in his senior year in high school, he’d gone through a phase of almost compulsive rabbit hunting that only ended when Mother had sworn that she would turn vegetarian before she would cook or eat another rabbit stew, fricassee, or stir-fry.
But .22s were teeny little cartridges, and each of the huge .30-06 rounds was the size of Torrie’s middle finger.
And each was tipped with a homemade silver bullet.
“Stripper clips underneath,” Dad said.
There was something suitable about giving the Sons of the Wolf the finger.
“So tell me about strategy.” Torrie quickly lined up the stripper clip, and pushed the eight cartridges into the Garand—making damn sure it was on safe before he let the bolt slide closed—then turned to slip it into the rifle rack behind their heads. He started on the second rifle, cursing at the way his fingers shook when he tried to pull the bolt back.
Dad was silent for a long moment, although muscles played at the side of his jaw. “We may not be able to take them, not here and now. They’ll have assumed we have what’s needed to deal with them, so they’ll have your mother and your woman secured, they’ll threaten them if we don’t surrender. If you can, work yourself into a position where you can shoot any who get near to either of them, while I distract them from the front.
“But if not, if that doesn’t work, we may get the chance to kill a few first, but that may be all; we won’t be able to do more than to trim the pack for them and save their leader the trouble. We may not be able to rescue the women, not here and now.”
“So what do we do?”
Dad shook his head. “In the long run, I don’t know. For the moment, it’s clear: we fight if we can and then, if necessary, we surrender. They’ll guard me closely, but they may well take you less seriously—you wait for a chance to make a break and then you take it. If I see one, I’ll drop the word ‘vague’ into a sentence—or posfe, in the Old Tongue. When I do, you move. Don’t stop to think; just go.”
“And then?” Torrie slipped the second rifle into the rack, and started loading stripper clips. Dad didn’t think things through as well as he should have; all this ammo should have been stored on stripper clips.
“And then use your judgment, young Thorian del Thorian,” Dad said. His face broke into a smile for just a moment. “There’s too much to tell you, and too little time to tell it in. Be careful in your prayers, for you may be heard; remember that the Tuatha and the other Old Ones can take on many forms, but most are bothered by cold steel; fight with your head as well as your arm.”
“Always brush between meals.”
“Ah.” Dad smiled. “And I was going to say that you should try to keep your sense of humor about you, for it may stand you in good stead.” The smile vanished. “You’re good enough with a sword that you should be able to take on most, but not all. What else? If you can escape, keep your true name to yourself unless you need to use it. There are those who will be beholden to you in Orfindel’s name, but don’t use the name lightly. It has power, too, but there’s danger in it. Some might think you know too much, although others would help you just for the naming.”
Torrie found himself mimicking a gesture that he had seen his dad make: he formed his right hand into a fist, and struck it against his palm.
Dad shook his head. “No, Asa-Thor is long dead; Hosea once saw his bones.”
An old dirt road on an earthen berm cut across the fields ahead, leading from the pavement to where a stand of trees loomed, large and threatening. Deep in the woods, something glowed, but what it was, Torrie couldn’t say.
“There’s a path,” Dad said, “that cuts across the road, about, oh, twenty yards in. I’ll slow the car there; you get out and head down it. The goggles will give you some benefit,” he said, reaching into his pocket and producing a blackened revolver, “but silence will give you more.”
Reflexively, Torrie thumbed the release and opened the cylinder. The bases of nine bullets shone back at him. little .22s.
“Silver,” Dad said, handing him a small box. “And in here, too. You’ll n
eed a head shot to drop one quickly with this, but the gun’s fairly quiet. Not silent, by any means, but quieter than the Rugers in the emergency kits.”
“And what are you going to do?”
“I’ll drive further in, and then get out and stalk my way in from the west.” He shrugged. “Or, perhaps, just confront them and wait for you. Depends on how well they have the road watched.”
Torrie closed the cylinder and tucked the gun into the pocket of his jacket.
“Don’t forget your sword,” Dad said.
Torrie looped the belt over one shoulder, then reached for the topmost Garand.
Dad reached up and flicked the dome light switch as he slowed the car. “Now.”
Rifle in one hand, his other free, Torrie threw the door open and leaped out the door into the artificial brightness of the night.
He staggered for a moment, then dropped into the field beside the road, his free hand batting brush out of the way to protect his goggles.
The car rumbled on down the road.
His head half obscured in the brush, Torrie froze in place. He had learned that on a deer stand, and learned it better from Dad and Uncle Hosea than others would. They had insisted on a ground stand, despite the fact that deer would rarely look up into a tree.
But a ground stand worked, too, if you had carefully washed traces of your scent from your body and clothing, and if the wind blew the right way, if you could hold still.
Torrie could hold still, and he did, even though the cold wind in his face would have drawn tears from his eyes if they weren’t covered by the goggles.
He could hear his heartbeat, and started counting. If a watchman waited just behind the tree line, he might have seen something, or nothing.
There was something wrong with him, Torrie decided. He should be shuddering in sympathy with whatever had happened to Mother and Maggie, or trembling in fear, but he wasn’t. It was as though everything Dad and Uncle Hosea had taught him was a preamble to this moment, and he was just going through practiced motions.
In the light of the goggles, the dirt road was almost painfully bright out in the open, and darker but still visible where the trees shaded it from the overhead moon. But bright or dark, the road was empty, and—
There! To the left of that large oak next to the other side of the road, something had moved, and then it moved again.
Beneath the level of the road, Torrie reached into his pocket and gripped the butt of his revolver tightly in his hand.
Moving swiftly but gracefully, the wolf stepped out onto the road and took a hesitant step toward Torrie, not venturing beyond the line of shadow. Walking stiff-legged, back and forth, it sniffed the air a couple of times, then took a step toward the lighted part of the road, then a step back.
It didn’t like the moonlight, apparently.
It was a huge beast, easily half again the size of the Petersons’ St. Bernard, and while its jaws were open to reveal long teeth, it was still somehow beautiful.
It was also on watch.
Torrie waited, motionless. He could do none of the others any good as long as the wolf waited there, and simply doing something for the sake of doing something wasn’t allowed when you were on a stand.
The wolf took a step down the road, and then broke into a trot, snuffling as it came, heading for a spot across the road from where Torrie crouched, motionless.
He drew the gun slowly, trying to prevent any sound of fabric on fabric, and brought it up at the end of an outstretched hand, his thumb carefully pulling back the hammer until it locked with a click that he only felt, but couldn’t hear.
It was then that he heard the wshhhh of something moving through the air behind him, and turned just in time to catch a blow across the face that sent his goggles spinning off into the night and sparks flying around the inside of his brain.
Blinded, in pain, he brought the pistol up and pulled the trigger, rewarded by the quiet crack of the .22 and a grunt of pain.
Something large and foul-smelling knocked him down, and fingers clawed at his chest, but he managed to keep hold of the gun and plant the barrel squarely into whatever it was before pulling the trigger again.
He barely felt the recoil, but whatever it was let out a low groan, and fell away from him in the dark; Torrie’s eyes could focus enough to see whatever it was stagger a few paces away to fall on the plowed ground.
Torrie turned, quickly, as the wolf sprang, and fired once, blindly, the little .22 spitting fire into the darkness, while on the ground next to him, a fully loaded Garand lay.
For a moment, he thought that he had missed: the wolf landed in a crouch as though to spring again.
But then, its bright left eye went all flat and dull in the moonlight, while the other eye, the right eye, was a dark pit, and it flopped to the ground, limp, as though its muscles had turned to Jell-O.
Torrie turned to look at the other wolf.
But … it wasn’t a wolf, not anymore; it had been changing as it attacked him, and now a naked woman lay on her side on the plowed ground, dead eyes staring un-blinkingly up at the moon overhead, her too-white torso mottled by a cicatrix of scars across her belly, and two small holes in her left breast.
The wind changed, and it brought Torrie the stink of her fouling herself in death.
He looked over at the other of the Sons, still a wolf, and remembered something that Uncle Hosea had said about the Sons, about how they were the children of Fenris’s mating with a wolf bitch, and how Fenris himself was the product of the Trickster mating with a witch, and how even the Oldest couldn’t tell whether one was a wolf pretending to be a human or a human pretending to be a wolf, and here, at least, it seemed that it was true.
It was strange. The first time he had shot a deer he had felt strange, a combination of exhilaration and guilt. It was just as well he had gotten it with a heart shot, as his hands had trembled so hard he could barely put his rifle on safe, and would probably have dropped it if Uncle Hosea hadn’t been there to lay a steadying hand on his shoulder.
But this didn’t mean anything. There were just two bags of shit and muscle and bone, one sprawled on the road, one lying on the ploughed ground, and they didn’t mean anything to him.
That thought made him feel unclean, and the thought that he was wasting time while Mother and Maggie and Dad were all in danger made him feel worse. He shook himself, once, then spent precious seconds finding his nightgoggles and seeing that they still, thankfully, worked. He settled the loop of his swordbelt around his shoulder, then reloaded and pocketed the pistol before picking up the Garand.
He started down the road at a trot, and turned off down the trail, walking as quickly and quietly as he could.
Growls and voices sounded from around the bend ahead; Torrie slowed his pace, carefully scanning back and forth for any watchman. That was the trouble with the nightgoggles: while they gave him better night vision than any animal, the field of vision was too limited. On his workbench at home, Dad had a Starlight scope and a heavy Soviet night-vision device that he had bought; Torrie would almost have preferred that to the nightgoggles.
Too-bright light knifed through the leaves ahead, sending overly bright beams splashing into the forest. Torrie slowed to a step-watch-and-step, forcing himself to keep his finger off the trigger of the Garand.
He crept into a dark patch and dropped first to one knee, then to his belly, and crawled forward on the cold dirt until he reached the base of a huge oak.
Carefully, slowly, he brought his head around until he could see out into the clearing.
The Bronco was parked, its engine silent, but the headlights were on, shining on a small cairn of stones in the center of the clearing.
There was nobody there.
Dad had been there; both of the survival kits had been torn open, and their contents scattered around the clearing, as though in a tantrum, but there was no sign of him, nor of Mother or Maggie.
Or of the Sons.
An oval of ground
in front of the cairn was a solid black, even in the light of the Bronco’s headlights as amplified by the nightgoggles, but save for that, the clearing held nothing strange.
They were all gone, and he was too far away in the dark to spot any footprints, to try to pick up a trail.
Torrie raised the nightgoggles to his forehead.
Even in the naked light of the headlights, the oval of darkness was still black as black could be. And the clearing was still empty.
Torrie waited. There wasn’t much he could do, and what little he could do made even less sense, but it was the only thing that made any sense at all. He could run around blindly, shouting pointlessly, or he could wait.
If anybody was watching for him, they had probably already seen him, but if not… if not, the best thing he could do would be to remain motionless.
He froze in place, and waited.
That had always been the hard thing in hunting, and the most important lesson. It had been impossible for him at fourteen, and Uncle Hosea had sworn that he wouldn’t take Torrie into the woods again in season if he continued to twitch.
So Uncle Hosea, in his usual way, had turned it into a game, in which they’d go for a walk in the woods, and at the command “Freeze,” Torrie would do just that, to be rewarded with a treat of some sort—a new buckle for his belt; a matching set of silver buttons sewn onto his favorite shirt; another story of the Aesir and Vanir; later, the installation of a new carburetor in his car—when he did it well.
Most importantly, he would be rewarded with a smile from Uncle Hosea. That was no less precious for being common.
He hoped Uncle Hosea was still smiling back at the house as he froze in place, forcing himself not to move, not even to breathe deeply. No twitch, no headshake, nothing. It was, as Uncle Hosea said many important things were, both simple and difficult: the secret to not moving was simply not to move.
He counted his heartbeats until he reached a thousand, then started all over again. The moon rose slowly, and shadows moved.
The Fire Duke Page 8