The Fire Duke

by Joel Rosenberg

  That was something else he had learned on a deer stand: that the woods were never silent.

  Off in the distance, an occasional car whooshed down the county road, but none turned off onto the dirt road; he would have heard that, easily. A vague, distant reek of skunk was in the air, but that was easily a mile off, and not offensive; Torrie had always found a distant skunk smell kind of pleasant, actually.

  Above his head, a scrabbling in a nearby tree told of some squirrel on a nocturnal errand, but he couldn’t hear any other animals in this patch of woods.

  He tried not to think about where the others were and how they were. Uncle Hosea had told him stories about the world being honeycombed with Hidden Ways, and maybe they weren’t just stories, but…

  He had waited at least half an hour when he finally rose to his feet. He was alone.

  Cradling his Garand in his arms, Torrie straightened. It hurt, but that was nothing unusual—it always hurt when you started to move again after freezing.

  He stalked carefully toward the cairn. The leather emergency bags had both been ripped to shreds, as had every item in them, from the sleeping bags to the bottles of pills out of the medical kits. His first instinct was to put it to senseless vandalism, but that didn’t feel right.

  He stalked over to the Bronco. The upholstery had been shredded, as well, and the glove compartment lay open, its contents scattered, as though whoever had done it was searching for something, something small.

  Torrie thumbed his flashlight on. There were stains here and there, and the interior was wet, but that was likely from when whoever it was had dumped out the plastic water bottle. The cab smelled of window-washer fluid.

  Nothing looked like fresh blood, and nothing smelled of death.

  Good.

  He shined his flashlight on the ground. It was soft outside the driver’s side of the cab, and Dad’s work boots had made a solid imprint in the damp ground. He had stepped down—not with his rifle; that lay on the ground on the other side of the Bronco—and walked toward the cairn. Four-toed animal prints inside his footprints told of Sons following him; other prints to the side could have been made before or after.

  Dad had left the road a few feet in front of the car, and Torrie lost the prints in the low grasses, but they pointed toward the cairn. Torrie followed.

  Still, nothing. He shone his flashlight ahead; the oval patch of darkness seemed to be a hole, although he couldn’t see into it; his Mini Maglite wasn’t powerful enough.

  There was a quiet rustle behind him. He set his finger on the trigger of the Garand and took a step forward. Another step, and he would clear the front of the Bronco; he could duck to one side, and take up a defensive position, all it would take—

  “Easy does it, Torrie,” a familiar voice said.

  Torrie turned to see Davy Hansen limping out of the tree line, one palm held up, fingers spread; his chest bare in the cold air; his AR15 held muzzle-high with his other hand.

  Torrie had never much liked Davy Hansen. Davy kept mainly to himself, supplementing his disability check with odd repair jobs, and sometimes seemed to resent Uncle Hosea’s ability to do the same work he could, only better, and faster, and as a favor instead of for pay. Torrie had always figured that as long as Davy had all the work he was willing to handle, he had no grounds for complaint, and should keep the occasional dropped comment to himself, but he’d never seen any point in discussing that opinion with Davy.

  Davy nodded toward the hole. “They went in through there, all of them, and then the tunnel started to shimmer for a moment, but just for a moment.”

  “You just watched them?” Torrie asked, regretting it the moment the words were out of his mouth.

  Davy only smiled. “Yeah, I just watched them. I watched a wolf change into a man to stand next to your mother and hold a knife to her throat until your father surrendered, and I watched while that wolf-man bound the wrists of all three of them and handed them down into that hole. All I did was watch.” He shrugged. “ ‘Course, back at the house, I tried to shoot the fucking things, but all that did was annoy them. Winchester hollow points don’t seem to do it—you got any silver bullets?” he asked with a sarcastic smile.

  “Lots,” Torrie said.

  That took Davy aback for a moment, but then he nodded. “Figures,” he said. Davy Hansen was too much the stoic Norski to show surprise if he could help it.

  “Them?” Torrie asked. “Were they … ?”

  “Okay? Peachy keen, kid. All three of them. The women were scratched up some, and your Dad took a punch to the gut when he didn’t move quite fast enough to suit one of them, but they all looked fine when they were lowered down.” He shrugged. “I didn’t see any point in making some sort of pointless gesture.” Davy smiled, as though over a private joke. “I’ve already done that enough for one life, maybe two.”

  Torrie set the Garand on safe, then set it down on the Bronco, the barrel pointed away from Davy. “This is loaded with silver bullets.” Moving slowly, carefully, he pulled the revolver out of his pocket and set it down on the hood, following it with his nightgoggles. “This, too. Some scattered around on the ground.”

  “I don’t like handguns.” Reluctantly, Davy set down his rifle and picked up the Garand, reflexively pulling back the bolt, even though that ejected one of the cartridges, sending it tumbling to the ground. He locked the bolt open, stooped to pick up the cartridge, and replaced it in the rifle, letting the bolt close on a loaded chamber. “Then again, with this on me, I don’t need a handgun.” He shrugged. “Somebody from town’ll be along, I expect; you want I should hold it?”

  “Yeah. On the other hand, I don’t want you to freeze.” Torrie set his scabbard and sword down on the hood before he shrugged out of his jacket. It should fit Davy, albeit only loosely.

  Loosely was good enough. He tossed the jacket to Davy, then slung the swordbelt over his shoulder and went to the rear of the Bronco.

  There was a Coleman lantern in the car’s emergency kit, and a spare rucksack; in a moment, he had the lantern brightly hissing, and in its white light stooped to pick up scattered items from the ground.

  The two plastic packets containing the stacks of twenties had been opened, then tossed aside, but the Krugerrands were gone. One of the medical kits had been torn apart, but the other lay undisturbed. Both of the sleeping bags had been shredded, as though by razors, but the Mylar sheeting had been left alone. The pistols were gone, but he found two of the slim magazines under the slashed leather bag that had carried all of the stuff.

  It probably made sense, but Torrie couldn’t make any sense of it. He would have been surprised at how calm he was being, except that his hands shook as he loaded the backpack, then stood for a moment, idly opening and closing the pliers of his SOG Paratool.

  “The one searching threw the pistols into the woods,” Davy said. “I can find them come morning.”

  “You’ll keep watch on this place,” Torrie said more than asked, as he picked up the revolver from the hood of the car. He reloaded it, then tucked it into the back of his belt.

  Davy nodded, once. Just once. “We’ll handle it.”

  Torrie handed him both packets of bills. “In case of need—” At Davy’s glare, he held up a hand. “It won’t do any good where I’m going,” he said, “or they would have taken it.”

  “I don’t need your fucking money, Thorsen,” Davy Hansen said. “But I’ll watch it, too.”

  There was a story that Uncle Hosea used to tell, about the time that one of the Tuatha had tried to trap Honir with a doorway that disappeared behind him.

  Torrie hoped that he would acquit himself as well as Honir had, but doubted it. The Sons were probably waiting down the tunnel for him.

  But what else could he do? Wait here? Davy could handle the waiting. Anybody could wait.

  He walked to the edge of the tunnel and shone the lantern down into the blackness. The tunnel went straight down about fifteen feet or so, and then led off to the s
outh. Divots cut into the side of the wall would provide a way to climb down to the tunnel floor.

  Davy tossed him the end of a rope, a bowline already tied into it, leaving a loop that Torrie could step in. He looked up; the other end had been looped under the Bronco’s front axle, and Davy stood, the Garand slung over one shoulder, holding the coil of rope.

  “Ready to belay,” he said.

  Torrie tightened the backpack’s waist strap, and felt at the hilt of his sword.

  No sense in waiting any longer. He could trust the carved handholds and footholds, but Torrie would rather trust a neighbor any day.

  He sat down on the edge of the hole and set his right foot into the loop.

  “On belay,” Davy said.

  Slowly, gradually, Torrie transferred his weight to his foot, and slowly Davy began to let the rope give.

  Lantern in one hand, the other clinging to the rope, Torrie was slowly lowered into the dark.

  “Semper fi, kid,” were the last words he heard from above.

  Just as he stepped out of the loop and onto the hard stone floor, the rope gave way, falling in a tangle to the floor. Reflexively, Torrie reached out and grabbed an end.

  The Thorsens didn’t do things by half; the rope they kept in the back of the Bronco was a rock-climbing rope, certified to hold an absurd amount of weight. Its tough fibers could take hundreds of hours of abrasion against rock, and they would give even the sharpest knife a hard time.

  But the end had been sliced through, neatly, as though by a single stroke.

  Torrie tried to shine the light of the lantern up, but all he could see was darkness, and what appeared to be solid rock far above.

  He thought about calling to Davy, but decided against that. Sounds could echo a long distance down the tunnel.

  Well, there was no point in waiting here, not with the tunnel leading away. If he had to, he could try to climb out using the handholds, but there was no rush, not now.

  He drew his sword—it made him feel better—and started off down the tunnel at a slow walk.

  It was shaped sort of like an egg, wide side down, in cross section; the ceiling, a few feet above where he could reach, came to a tight curve up top, while the floor was gently curved, almost forcing him to walk down the middle of it. The walls were stone, roughly cut, although no trace of tools had been left. He reached out a finger; they were warm to the touch, but not hot.

  Ahead, the tunnel bent left in an arc that was gentle at first, but became more severe as it went on. It led into a series of sharp cornered turns, each section of tunnel no more than ten or twelve feet long, the wall at each turn cut roughly but sharply into an archway some few feet over his head.

  For the longest time—later, he was never sure quite how long—Torrie could hear nothing except the quiet hissing of the Coleman lantern and the quiet thrumming of his own heart.

  Gradually he became aware that a very gentle, cool breeze was blowing in his direction, although he couldn’t quite figure out how. The tunnel, after all, dead-ended back where Torrie had been lowered. Did this mean that it was now open back there? Or what?

  He quickened his pace to a fast walk, hoping that would keep him ahead of anything that might be following, as he went through turn after turn, through archway after archway.

  Finally, an archway ahead opened on blackness. Torrie stopped for a moment, and thought he could hear some hiss in the distance, although perhaps it was just the lantern. He walked back a few feet, carefully set the lantern down, then walked back, stopping at the archway to listen.

  Yes, far off was a rustling, a hissing, perhaps like that of running water, but when he peered around the corner, there was no light in front of him, just the vague grayness of the path, lit by the lantern behind him, seemingly ending in blackness to either side.

  He retrieved the lantern and walked through.

  And for a moment, his head began to spin; he almost fell.

  The stone path ahead was surrounded by nothing, save where the flat stone wall behind Torrie rose far above his head, far further than the light of the lantern could show. Gently, carefully, he looked over the edge and could see nothing except a gray rock face stretching far below. The path itself, while just as roughly carved from stone as the floor of the runnel had been, didn’t seem to have any side to it: it just ended, and gingerly proddings with Torrie’s sword tip didn’t find anything hidden in the blackness underneath it.

  There was still that distant sound of running water, but he couldn’t for the life of him say whether it came from above or below or in front of him; the only thing he was sure of was that it didn’t come from behind him.

  The path through the air stretched out ahead in the darkness, and there was nothing to do but follow it.

  The rock face quickly vanished behind him, swallowed by the gloom. He started to count his steps, and got to six hundred seventy-eight before he noticed that the gloom ahead was broken by grayness that became another rock face as he approached.

  Eight hundred three, and he could make out an archway ahead of him, identical, as far as he could tell, to the one behind him.

  He stopped counting, but another hundred hurried steps brought him to the archway, and through, and into a small room—where beady eyes shone back at him out of the dark, and before he could think to move or do something, his sword and lantern had been snatched from his nerveless fingers, and rough, strong hands seized his hands and shoulders.

  He struggled helplessly, pointlessly, while the largest wolf he had ever seen, easily three feet at the shoulder, stepped out of the darkness and stopped in front of him. In another time, he would have thought of it as a magnificent beast, with its thick mane all in black and white and gray, but this wasn’t another time. But, still, he couldn’t take his eyes off it as it leaned back, as though sitting on its hind legs, and then lifted its front paws off the ground.

  And changed.

  The long muzzle receded, some hairs receding into flesh, others changing in length, while the forepaws melted into long fingers, tipped with yellowed but pointed fingernails. The chest, crisscrossed seemingly randomly with scars, was covered with a mat of dark black hair.

  The Son’s thin lips were split in a triumphant smile, but it was the eyes that held Torrie, that made him feel like a mouse facing a snake. “Greetings, Thorian son of Thorian,” the Son said, his voice raspy and harsh. “Your friends await you, ahead and above.”

  Chapter Six

  Tir Na Nog

  Afterward, Ian was never quite sure how long they walked through the dark tunnel, their way revealed only by an accompanying sourceless light that left behind no shadow and lit only their immediate surroundings. Perhaps a dozen feet in front of him and as many behind him, the dark rock merged with darkness. The effect was of walking on a treadmill, perhaps, of his feet pushing the tunnel away behind him, never really making any progress, no matter how far he walked.

  And he had no idea how far that was. After some time, it occurred to him that he could have simply counted footsteps and multiplied by three or so to get a general idea of how many feet it was, and then divided by about five thousand to get the mileage.

  But what would be the point? The tunnel seemed to stretch out indefinitely behind and ahead of him.

  Hosea kept up a steady pace, a determined smile on his dark face, but refused to answer Ian’s questions or to respond to anything he said, other than to put a long finger to his thin lips and shake his head when Ian tried to talk.

  Ian didn’t see what the need for silence was, but probably that was the point.

  Ian hadn’t been aware that there had been any mining in North Dakota, although it was clever of Hosea and Thorsen to have situated their house above a mining tunnel.

  No, that didn’t make any sense; he was trying to apply reason to a situation that was beyond reason. Mineshafts, no matter where they were, simply didn’t have a one-way entrance that could nip off the end of your finger as easily as it could a brush. You
didn’t need to travel by a mine-shaft in order to chase down a gang—bunch? band? party? pack? That was it: pack—you didn’t need to travel by mineshaft in order to chase down a pack of wolves. And mines weren’t lit by some sort of directionless light that stayed with you.

  He tried not to think. Gripping the hilt of the sword at his waist was more comforting than thought could be. Not thinking was easy. It was like the time he had his appendix out, and then was sent back to his dorm with a bottle of Demerol and Vistaril pills to keep him company. Torrie had helped him down to the TV room, and set him up in front of the TV, and there he had sat. Time had changed in its nature. It was no longer linear, but instantaneous: he was sitting in an overstuffed armchair, he had always been sitting there, and he always would, that’s how it had felt.

  It was much easier to float through life than to think about it, much easier then to sit in an overstuffed armchair, as it was here and now to just keep walking, as though he could do it forever without tiring, without suffering from hunger or thirst.

  He became aware with something akin to a shock that the tunnel was slanting up, and that it had been slanting up for some time now, although it was only his sense of balance that told him so; his ankles didn’t complain, the way they would on a long hike uphill, and he wasn’t at all winded, even though Hosea hadn’t for a moment slowed his pace.

  And finally the tunnel ended, up ahead: it turned at more than a ninety-degree angle, pointing straight up, topped by stone about ten feet above Ian’s head.

  Handholds and footholds were carved into the hard stone walls; Ian followed Hosea up, wincing for a moment as bright sunlight streamed down from above.

  He was alone in the upshaft; Ian quickly pulled himself up and through—and into bright green loveliness.

  Far upslope, the jagged gray top of the mountain was capped with snow that seemed, at least from this distance, to be of pure white. But here—at the base? halfway up? Ian couldn’t tell—the meadow was rimmed by tall pines and capped by a sky of darker blue than any Ian had seen before. Beneath the noon sun—how long had they been walking?—soft grasses rose knee-high, their green expanse spotted by wildflowers of dark red and pale, wan yellow. The wind brought Ian a dark comfortable reek of rotting humus, lightened by hints of flowery perfumes and the warm tang of sunbaked grasses.