The Fire Duke

by Joel Rosenberg

  High above, a black bird, its wings spread wide, wheeled across the sky, orbiting above the meadow several times before it flew off toward the mountaintop.

  Hosea was already replacing a thin slab of rock over the hole they had come through.

  “Os hast dju veerisht?” he asked, although given the normal slurring of his voice Ian wasn’t at all sure what he meant to say, much less what he actually said. Something about how he was feeling?

  “Eh?”

  “My apologies, young Silverstein,” Hosea said. “ ‘Are you unwell?’ I asked.”

  Not in any language I’ve ever heard. But he didn’t say that. “I’ll live.”

  “I would hope so. You may sheathe your sword, if it please you,” Hosea went on. “We … took a wrong turn.”

  “We didn’t take any turns.”

  Hosea just smiled, his teeth too white. “You might see it that way. Others might say we’re turned ninety degrees away from everything you’ve ever seen. It depends on your perspective, I suppose.”

  The situation called for some sort of witty comment. “Somehow, Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore,” he said.

  Hosea’s brow furrowed. “Toto—oh. The Wizard of Oz,” he said with a smile. “Yes. I watched it with young Thorian, just recently.” His smile was secretive, as though over some private joke. “When one gets to be my age, it’s hard to keep everything straight,” he said. “I would venture to guess that makes me Glinda, or am I the Cowardly lion? I can hardly be the Scarecrow, as I have a brain, even if it does not work as well as it once did.” He tapped a finger against his temple. “Damaged, don’t you know.”

  “Where are we?”

  Hosea frowned. “Well, we’re not in the High Wastes, which is where we should be. Where we would be, if we’d taken the right turns.” His upraised hand forestalled Ian’s objection. “Yes, yes, you saw no turns. Had the binding not been breached, even Thorian would not have seen the entrance the Sons used.” Hosea looked up the slope. “Well, we’re in a meadow, and above us is the peak of Mount AEskja, which means we’re in western Vandescard. There was a time when I could have told you to the … inch, to the inch where this exit was, but…”He sighed, and lifted his pack to his shoulders, carefully draping his cloak over it. “Well, shall we?”

  “Vandescard?”

  “A country. A part of, oh, call it Tir Na Nog, if you’d like: the New World, the Young Land, if you please. The final home of the Sidhe, the Aesir, the Vanir, and the rest of the Old Races.”

  * * *

  Ian swallowed, hard. It was too much. Bit by bit, he had swallowed the strange uncle who practically bristled with secrets, the wolf attack in which Karin Thorsen and Maggie had been captured, not killed; he had been hurried down to the basement and into a one-way door to strangeness.

  But enough. Aesir, Vanir, Old Races—never mind how crazy that sounded, because the best, the safest possibility was that Hosea was insane and some of that insanity had infected Ian.

  He took a step back. “Look, Hosea, I … I’m not sure this is really a good idea.”

  “Which? Your friends in danger, or our attempt to aid them?”

  “No, I mean this chasing off after …” He gestured.

  “What’s done is done. What is yet to be—”

  “—is yet to be. Business is business, and let boys be boys.” Ian raised a hand, fingers spread, to forestall Hosea. “I want out; I want to go home.”

  Hosea’s face grew somber. “Even if I were to tell you that it’s only you that can stand between them and disaster? That if you cannot find the way to be what you are, your friends and much else are lost?”

  “Right.” Ian snorted. “Yeah, you see a big red S on my chest?” Ignoring the other’s look of puzzlement he went on. “Am I some sort of superman, is that what you’re saying?”

  Hosea shook his head. “I … don’t do that sort of thing, not anymore. Once …” He let his voice trail off, and shook his head sadly. “But this is not once, this is now.” He straightened, and smiled sadly. “As you decide: but if you are not going to accompany me, if you are not going to follow through with this, then we shall have to make other arrangements—”

  If you’re not going to follow through—

  * * *

  Benjamin Silverstein snickered as he handled the half-finished Model T, then set it down—carefully; he always handled the goddamn models carefully—and flicked a finger at the tiny pieces on Ian’s desktop. “Looks pretty shitty, doesn’t it, kid?” he said. “I bought you this thing almost a year ago, and this is as far as you’ve gotten? When I was your age, I was scrounging for real canvas for sails—and let me tell you, putting together Old Ironsides is one hell of a lot harder than one of these dinky little fifty-piece puzzles. Just can’t follow through on anything, can you? If you’re not going to follow through, what good are you?”

  There were a lot of things Ian could have said. He could have talked about how making plastic models was his dad’s hobby, not his; he could have said that what he had wanted when he had suggested that he might like a model of some sort for his tenth birthday was to have something to do with his dad, not something to be crapped on for not doing.

  But you didn’t talk back to Ben Silverstein. “I’m sorry, Daddy,” he said. “I’ll try to do better next time. Really I will.”

  Ben Silverstein snorted. “See that you do.”

  “If you are not going to accompany me, if you are not going to follow through with this, then we will have to make other arrangements—”

  “Fuck you, Hosea,” Ian said, with more heat than he intended.

  Hosea looked down at Ian’s waist. Ian followed his gaze down to where Ian’s hand clasped the hilt of his sword, and for the life of him he didn’t remember putting it there. He spread his fingers and took his hand away, letting it drop to one side. “Sorry, sorry,” he said. “It’s—you just sounded like somebody else for a moment.”

  Hosea accepted, then dismissed, it with a nod and a shrug. “You have my apologies, Ian,” he said, gently, perhaps too gently: an adult dealing with a child’s temper tantrum. “No offense was intended. If you wish to go back, likely we can find a way at Harbard’s Crossing, when we come down the other side of the mountain,” he said, looking up for a moment toward the empty sky.

  “Harbard’s Crossing?”

  “A village, and the place of Harbard’s Ferry—on the river the Aesir used to call Gilfi, and the Vandestish call Tennes.”

  Ian jerked his thumb at the stone that capped the runnel they had come through. “And why not that way?”

  Hosea smiled. “Lift it.”

  Ian dropped to his knees, slid his fingers under the cold stone, then lifted. It was heavier than it looked: it took all his strength to get it past forty-five degrees, and flipping it over onto its back, its damp dark underside facing the sky, revealed—

  Dirt. Soil, broken only by a network of grass roots that looked like it had been there a long time.

  “You’d best see for yourself,” Hosea said, producing a folding shovel from his rucksack. He extended the telescoping handle, then snapped the blade forward and into place, then set it against the dirt. A booted foot pushed the shovel deep into the soil; Hosea levered a dirt clod out, threads of roots trailing from the blade.

  There was no tunnel, nothing besides dirt and a writhing section of earthworm where Hosea dug.

  Self-control was something he’d had to learn when his father beat the crap out of him given the slightest provocation; it was something he’d needed when he was thrown out of what had been his home with no notice, no time to make arrangements, no friends he could trust with this, because he could never have friends over, never knowing when something or nothing would send him into one of his fits.

  This wasn’t the worst. When his father had thrown him out, Ian had stopped himself on the sidewalk, his pitiful few possessions packed in a backpack, sixteen dollars in his pocket—the rest of his money was in Ben’s bank
account “… for safety—you’ve never been responsible with money,” and his stash, less than a couple hundred that he had squirreled away and, yes, stolen from Ben Silverstein’s pants when he passed out, was in the garage, hidden at the bottom of the woodpile. It had been safe there; Ben had never carried a log to the fireplace or built a fire himself when he had a son to do it.

  That was worse than this. He was all alone then.

  But the same mantra applied. “I’ll panic later,” he said, as he had calmed himself and said then.

  It was easier now. Then he had been a frightened kid, standing in the actinic glare of a mercury vapor streetlight, surrounded by darkness, without a plan, by himself. Compared to that, this was easy.

  Now, at least, there was somebody else with him, and while he didn’t entirely trust Hosea, Ian liked the older man. “I’ll panic later,” Ian said, more to himself than to anybody else. It was half of his mantra. The other half: “For now I’ll just handle it.”

  “I’ll just handle it.” Ian dug his fingers into the ground, coming away with only dirt. “Exit only, eh?”

  “Yes.” Hosea waved his hand around. “There likely is another exit close by, but I don’t know it, and it’s likely as much bound as the ones in your world.”

  “Bound?”

  Hosea pursed his lips. “I’d say spellbound, but that would imply a spellbinder, and there’s none who would be able to say about that. Exits to Hidden Ways tend to … not to hide themselves, but there is something about them that tends to cause others to ignore them.”

  “Eh?”

  Hosea paused for a moment. “The French call it jamais vu—the sense of never before having seen something familiar. Have you ever noticed something—a store, a tree, a hole in the ground—for the first time, even though you’ve passed it a hundred, a thousand, a hundred thousand times without knowing?”

  Ian nodded. There had been a March day, when he had dropped his books and notebooks beside his desk, thrown on a T-shirt, a pair of walking shorts, and his old climbing boots, and then gone out for a walk, lest any more studying and working and sleeping and studying and working and sleeping drive him absolutely bugfuck.

  Three steps out of the building it hit him. He must have walked under the old oak tree outside Sprague Hall thousands of times, but for the life of him he couldn’t remember it even being there.

  But there it stood, easily a hundred years old, gnarled limbs reaching protectively over the sidewalk, leaving him with the sensation of a father hunching over his child in a hailstorm. He had reached out and stroked its rough bark for just a moment before walking on.

  “Yeah,” Ian said. “I’ve felt it. An oak tree, once.”

  “Well, think of the time before when you saw it.”

  “Eh?”

  “Think of the time before the time you noticed it. It was there, mind you, but it didn’t make any impression on you until you noticed it.” Hosea shrugged. “Entrances to the Hidden Ways are like that, most of the time.”

  “And what happens when somebody builds a house in front of one and tries to put a sidewalk over it?”

  Hosea shook his head. “He won’t. An architect who went out to the site would find himself planning around it, avoiding building on top of it. And if he didn’t, somebody else would. You can ask any builder who has been in the trade long enough; some time or another, often for very good reasons that he just can’t quite remember later, a set of plans has to be changed.”

  He rose to his feet and offered Ian his hand. “Enough talk. Let us go.”

  Ian accepted his help, and then brushed his pants off. “What do we do now?”

  “Now?” Hosea asked. “Now is very simple: we walk. And then we walk some more. If we make Harbard’s Crossing quickly enough, we may yet intercept our friends, or if not, surely we will be able to find some word of them.” He looked at the sky again. “I doubt that their capture will be a secret, or their destination, from every … thing. So let’s walk.”

  Ian nodded. “I can do that.” He looked over at the stone and smiled.

  Hosea returned the smile. “I’m pleased that something amuses you. What might it be?”

  “Oh, I was just wishing we could take that stone along with us. The next time Maggie asks me what rock I crawled out from under, I could show it to her.”

  Chapter Seven

  In the House of the Fire Duke

  Were the truth to be known—although he was always resolved to do his best to prevent that from happening—Jamed del Bruno preferred to report to the Fire Duke with ill news rather than pleasant.

  It was not merely that he disliked His Warmth—although he did; he found the title “His Warmth” to be an offensive oxymoron—it was that the Fire Duke was always much more conscious of his obligations to those beneath him under stress than otherwise. His Warmth was, Jamed del Bruno had long decided, a cruel man more playing at than living the part of the Duke of the House of Fire, and was much more likely to play his part well when adversity reminded him of his obligations than otherwise.

  As he made his way down the broad steps of the amphitheater toward His Warmth’s loge, two long-stemmed glasses of blood-red Tenemid and the note he had just been handed held high on a silver salver, Jamed del Bruno wished for bad news for his master, although, as always, he was careful to keep no trace of expression whatsoever on his smooth face, just as he had made no comment when it was Lady Everlea rather than Lord Sensever who arrived to command His Solidity’s champion at the duel. It was a vague insult on the part of His Solidity, implying as it did that this dispute was a matter simply of money, not honor—something His Solidity implied ought to be left to women to handle, rather than noblemen.

  He made his way down past the seats of the middle class, where a burly rancher, just a generation up from cowherd, argued passionately with a smoker; their wives, each in her garish finest, watched the nobility below.

  Disdaining the seat that was barely large enough to contain his bulk, the fat duke stood next to the railing, overlooking the dueling floor below, his bulk at least partly concealed in a cowled cape that fell from neck to ankles. To his right, Lady Everlea stood, tilting a glass of pale, straw-colored wine to her full red lips, the plain onyx ring that proclaimed her allegiance to the House of Stone in open display on her ring finger. Her golden hair, gathered into a complex Ingarian knot, so closely matched the braiding about her bodice and the hems of her long sleeves that Jamed del Bruno wondered if, perhaps, the black silken gown was garnished with her own hair. That would have been a young girl’s affectation, he decided, and definitely out of place for a woman of her age.

  What was her age? Her skin had the smooth and creamy softness of a young girl’s, with no trace of wrinkles at the corners of her blue eyes or firm mouth, but something in the way that she held herself spoke of a more advanced age. It was always possible, of course, that she had a strand of the Old Races in her heritage, and they always concealed their age well.

  “Ah, Your Warmth, I see your refreshment arrives,” she said, her voice half a tone lower and more musical than Jamed del Bruno would have expected. “And perhaps some news, as well.”

  The expression on His Warmth’s face could have been a smile, but perhaps not. “Perhaps not,” he said, taking both glasses from the salver and politely offering Lady Everlea her choice. She set her now empty glass on Jamed del Bruno’s tray while considering which one of the proffered glasses to accept, as though it mattered in an idle sort of way, not as though the tradition arose from the Poisoning of Orfi.

  “A fine wine,” she said. “Although His Gelidity apparently has a higher opinion of its value than Her Ladyship does.”

  “I have noticed,” His Warmth said.

  Lady Everlea barely raised an eyebrow, and Jamed del Bruno kept his face impassive. His Warmth was constantly confounding his servants by handling financial matters himself—and directly, at that!—rather than relying on his Lady Wife—difficult to do, with her and the Heir, Venidir
del Anegir, effectively banished to the House of the Sky—or some of the ladies from the major families of the House of Fire.

  Below, the two swordsmen had entered the amphitheater. Under the watchful eyes of the crowd and the more watchful eyes of their assistants, the two men stripped down to shoes and shortened trousers, and launched into their stretching and warming exercises.

  Standing on the tiled floor below, Rodic del Renald and Stanar del Brunden could have been two waxy Vandescardian marionettes cast from the same mold: each was long-limbed and well muscled in a wiry sort of way; each carried an assortment of scars from hairline to ankles, light on the face and lower belly, heavy on the sword arm; each studiously ignored the other as they went through their preparatory exercises.

  Jamed del Bruno waited patiently until, finally, Lady Everlea selected a wineglass and waited until His Warmth politely raised his glass to his livery lips and drank before tasting her wine.

  “You seem to be in no hurry to read your note, Your Warmth,” she said.

  “True enough.” His Warmth smiled. “Simply a matter of trust; I trust that Jamed del Bruno will have carefully heated the envelope in the kitchen’s oven, then read the contents before reinscribing the seal. I would trust him to bring the letter to me immediately, not stopping to decant two glasses of a fine wine, were the news of great import.” He sipped at his glass. “Ah. Note the pleasant overtones of vanilla and berries, with just enough sweetness to make the tannin palatable. Pleasant, for such a young wine.”

  “Young, Your Warmth? I’ve never heard of anyone decanting a Tenemid that’s less than a couple score of years old.”

  His Warmth shrugged. “And this is from the 1156th year Under the Sky, more than twice that age. But still young; it’s all a matter of proportion.” His smile was of some private joke.