The Fire Duke

by Joel Rosenberg

  Jamed del Bruno kept his face emotionless as he waited, the letter still on the salver. His Warmth was quite right, and quite wrong; Jamed del Bruno habitually opened any message he could, and had a deft enough hand with his small metal probe to be able to counterfeit any wax impression in a matter of moments. But this time he hadn’t. There simply hadn’t been time to do that and prepare the wine for His Warmth and Her Ladyship, and Jamed del Bruno always did his duty first.

  The two swordsmen below had completed their preparations, and quite quietly moved to positions of attention, waiting until the hubbub in the audience ended.

  His Warmth bowed Lady Everlea toward her seat, and took his overlarge one next to her. “May I wish you fortune, Lady?” he asked, formally.

  “Of course, Your Warmth. As I wish you fortune,” she said, her eyes twinkling. “Although you will forgive me, in this instance, if the fortune I wish you is not good fortune.”

  “Of course, Lady.” His Warmth sipped his wine.

  One of the swordsmen took a step forward. “I am Stanar del Brunen, Master Swordsman in the hire of the House of Stone. I represent that the field formally known as The Remnants of Findell’s Heath is properly the property of the House of Stone, through persistent use over five generations, and swear with blade and blood to prove it so.”

  He stepped back, and the other man took his place. “I am Rodic del Renald, Master Swordsman, employed by the House of Fire. I claim that old maps, recently recovered from a dusty case of papers, prove that the boundary between the Houses falls with The Remnants of Findell’s Heath firmly and provably on the side of Fire, not Stone, and swear with blade and blood to bring said field back to the Fire.”

  The two faced each other, brought their swords up in a mirrored salute, and turned toward the Duke’s loge.

  His Warmth turned to Lady Everlea. “If you will… ?”

  She nodded. “Of course, My Lord.” Gracefully, smoothly, she rose to her feet and gestured to the two swordsmen to begin.

  Jamed del Bruno waited patiently, wondering whether he was being kept waiting in order to permit him to watch the bout without explicitly being granted the privilege—once he delivered the message, he would have to be about his duties unless His Warmth ordered him to stay—or simply for the sake of keeping him waiting. His Warmth was certainly capable of either, or both, but Jamed del Bruno was certain that His Warmth never did anything, from dropping a hint to bedding a serving girl, without carefully considering the consequences and implications.

  If it was a favor, His Warmth could have saved himself the bother. While Jamed del Bruno accepted as an intellectual proposition that it was the sword that kept the Middle Dominion free of domination by the younger and larger nations surrounding it on three sides, and had no difficulty at all believing that the so-called House of Steel, as the prime exponent of the way of the sword, was the key player in that, perhaps as important as the House of the Sky, he simply found swordfights boring.

  Below, the two swordsmen—Jamed del Bruno found it hard to tell which was which—had faced off and extended their weapons, each with his free hand on his hip while the tip of his blade toyed with the other, circling in what seemed more dance than combat, at least to Jamed del Bruno’s untrained eye.

  And then one sword tip snaked out, barely touching the opponent’s arm, and the victorious swordsman retreated a few steps, parrying or countering or whatever swordsmen did to keep an opponent’s blade away from his chest as he did.

  The blades clicked and clacked against each other for a few moments, until Lady Everlea stood once more, and the two swordsmen disengaged, saluted each other, and turned toward her.

  “Rodic del Renald,” she said, “your blood has been shed, and you have been unable to shed your opponent’s. Do you now concede the falsity of your claim or will you press onward?”

  Rodic del Renald looked toward His Warmth, no trace of pain or fear on his face.

  The Fire Duke shook his head. “I thank you for your service, son of Renald,” he said, “but it appears that the House of Stone has the right of this matter, and to shed more of your blood would be foolish.”

  “I concede my error, Lady,” Rodic said. “The field is properly property of the House of Stone, not of Flame.”

  The two swordsmen saluted first the Duke, then the crowd, then each other, and it was all over. Each handed his sword to an attendant, and while a chirurgeon dressed Rodic del Renald’s injury, his former opponent walked over and accepted Rodic del Renald’s congratulations with a handshake and a clapped hand to Rodic’s shoulder, the two of them chatting casually all the while.

  His Warmth didn’t smile as he gestured to Jamed del Bruno, then opened the envelope, glancing quickly at the piece of paper within.

  “Ah,” he said, turning to the lantern on the table and touching a corner of the paper to the flame.

  It disappeared in a flash, leaving behind nothing but a wave of heat and a light scattering of ash. His Warmth brushed at the sleeve of his tunic.

  “I would not care to gamble with you, Your Warmth,” Lady Everlea said. “You meet adversity with the same equanimity with which you greet success. I assume the letter spoke of some success.”

  His Warmth’s smile was genial. “Assumptions are always interesting.” He turned to Jamed del Bruno. “Send: Well done.”

  Jamed del Bruno nodded and bowed, and left, Lady Everlea’s empty glass balanced effortlessly on his silver salver. He heard the smile in His Warmth’s voice as the Duke addressed the emissary of the House of Stone. “Perhaps it will be different, when next our houses contend. I believe I have a new champion.”

  “Oh? May one inquire as to who that might be?”

  Jamed del Bruno didn’t hear the answer.

  Chapter Eight

  Captives

  The pack leader’s smile was wolfish, understandably. Torrie would have liked to have taken a pliers and pulled out each of the pointed teeth, one by one, but it didn’t look like he’d have much of a chance, at least not now.

  Patience, he told himself. Dad and Uncle Hosea had gone to some trouble to teach him how to develop what Dad called the “patience muscles.” This was different from holding a crouch for hours on a deer stand, but the principle was the same: you wait until it’s time to make your move, and now wasn’t the time.

  “It’s a pleasure to greet you here, Thorian del Thorian the Younger, as it has been to greet your father, and your mother and your woman,” he said, gesturing Torrie toward a bench by the fire.

  Torrie wasn’t sure how he understood the language, but it wasn’t English, and it wasn’t the little Norski he had learned in elementary school, or the French that he had tried to pick up in college. He had always admired Uncle Hosea’s gift with languages—it seemed that Uncle Hosea couldn’t hear a language without understanding it—and had thought that it would be a wonderful thing.

  But it wasn’t, and not just because he was a prisoner who had been dragged through a tunnel, then marched at spearpoint up and down hills from noon to past sunset; it wasn’t wonderful because it was so natural, as though he had always been able to speak Middle Bersmal.

  “I don’t believe your tongue was cut out, although to arrange that would not be difficult,” the Son said. “It’s considered polite to respond to a greeting.”

  “Oh,” Torrie said.

  The Son was large and hairier than most, his face and body covered with salt-and-pepper hair thickly enough to almost give the impression of him being clothed, if Torrie didn’t look down to where his somehow strangely pink penis peeked out from the dark fur. The impression was further enhanced by the jewelry that the Son wore: a golden chain from which a small amber amulet depended. The amulet was a teardrop, and embedded in it was what appeared to be the last joint of some thick finger.

  His little finger sported two familiar-looking golden rings: Mom’s and Dad’s wedding rings.

  “Please to sit,” he said.

  “I’d rather stand.
”

  “And I would rather you to sit, and I would much rather to come, you and I, to an understanding now than later, son of Thorian,” the Son said. “Will it be necessary to beat you? Or are you one of those … stoics who choose to laugh under the iron?”

  Torrie drew himself up straight. To hell with you, he thought. “Da Nivlehim vast dju, hundbretten,” he said.

  The Son laughed. “In another time, in another place, I’d enjoy to make you pay for that in pain and in blood. But my contract is to bring Thorian del Thorian to His Warmth without overly damaging him—and I shall—”

  “Du skal ikke selge skinnet for bjomen er skuut,” Torrie said. It was an old Norski saying, and while few in Hardwood still spoke Norski, a few phrases circulated in collective usage. like, this one: Don’t sell the skin until after you’ve shot the bear.

  The Son’s hairy brow furrowed for a moment, as though working out a puzzle. “Ah. But I have already to skut the bjorn,” he said. “Thorian del Thorian is in my hands. In fact, I now have two of them. And while that gives me to have a spare Thorian, it would be a shame to spend that casually.” His smile disappeared. “On the other hand, that peasant girl of yours is not necessary, nor is your mother. Need I to bite off one of their fingers to persuade you to accept what hospitality I have to offer? Or will you simply to sit?”

  There would be a time to confront the Son, Torrie promised himself, but this wasn’t it. He didn’t know the situation; he didn’t know where Mom, Dad, or Maggie was, and he didn’t have any business assuming the Son was bluffing.

  Torrie sat.

  The … den, Torrie decided it was, the den had been dug into a hillside. The tunnel in led up a short slope, then across and down. It had been neatly shored with timbers, now gray from creosote and age, worn smooth over the passing of many years. Not at all the sort of old construction he would have expected from a pack of Sons of the Wolf.

  “Good boy,” the leader said. “I’m called Herolf,” he said. “They call you Thorian, like your father?”

  Name, rank, and serial number wouldn’t do it. “Thorian,” he said. “You can call me Thorian.”

  The Son nodded. “Very well. I wanted to chat with you for a moment, privately, to explain your situation to you so that we can reach to an understanding. I’d thought about chaining you and your father, but anyone who can escape from one of the Cities, carrying an Old One who had been … held with chains that should hold anything, forever, well, I would expect that such a man should shortly be able to escape from any physical restraints I were to impose.

  “Which is where your mother and your woman are to come in, and yourself, for that matter.” He tilted his head to the side for a moment. “If either of you is to misbehave, if either of you tries to escape, I’ll have one of the women thrown into a mating den with a bitch in heat, and leave her there to amuse the waiting suitors—and I assure you they will be able to amuse themselves with her for longer than she is likely to live. And if she survives, I’ll have her throat torn out. Understood?”

  Torrie nodded. “Understood.”

  The other three were waiting for him in a small room at the end of a small tunnel, secured by a barred, round wooden door set into a circular framework. The framework was probably largely buried in the walls of the tunnel. It looked strange, sort of like an oak airlock.

  When the Son guarding the door slid aside the bar so that the door could pivot on its central pole, the bar slid easily into a socket in the tunnel, all the way to a lip that caught on the edge of the socket.

  The small room was amply lit by their own Coleman lantern, hissing quietly as it hung from one of a dozen hooks on the ceiling perhaps three feet above his head. Beyond it stood a passage to another unlit room, although Torrie was sure that wasn’t an easy way out, if it even was a way out.

  Torrie was unceremoniously shoved inside, and the door shut behind him.

  “Torrie,” Mom said, rising from where she crouched next to Dad. “Thank God you’re okay.”

  Maggie, dressed in nothing more than a torn and dirty nightshirt whose printing used to read “Somebody went to Puerto Rico, and All I Got Was This Lousy T-shirt” was slumped up against the wall; her eyes didn’t even seem to see him.

  She looked okay, if a bit battered, and the same went for Mom, whose oversized pajamas were if anything dirtier and more torn than Maggie’s clothes, but Dad lay on his side on a blanket, his face a mass of bruises, his left arm in a splint and sling.

  He looked at Torrie with his one open eye and grinned, revealing a missing canine. “I’m glad you’re well, Torrie,” he said.

  Dad, it seemed, hadn’t meekly gone along with whatever the Sons ordered; he had at least put up some resistance, Torrie decided, loathing his own passivity. But what good did it do? They were all in the same pit.

  He crouched next to Maggie. What could he say to her? He had invited her to come home with him because it would be a pleasant week off—and because he didn’t like to sleep alone—and because, more than a little, he didn’t often get a chance to show off Mom and Dad and Uncle Hosea, and he was constantly pleased with how terrific the three of them were.

  But no. Not for this. This was something out of the stories that Uncle Hosea used to tell, and while in the back of his mind he had always wondered if there was something in the stories that could reach out and touch him, he never—

  She would have to hate him for this, and he couldn’t blame her.

  “Maggie, I’m—”

  Her upper lip curled. “Shut up,” she said, loudly, just the quiet side of a shout. “You just leave me alone.”

  “Maggie—” He reached out for her, and surprisingly, she grabbed hold of the front of his shirt and yanked him off his feet, holding him close, her breath warm in his ear.

  He could barely hear her whisper. “We’re both safer if you don’t give a damn what happens to me, and vice versa. So I hate you for getting me into this, and after you try to win me back, and can’t, you resent me for it.” As she spoke, her arms held him tight.

  He opened his mouth, and then closed it, and took her in his arms, putting his lips next to her ear. “I’m sorry I got—”

  Her fingers were warm against his mouth. She shook her head, and put her lips, once again, to his ear. “My Daddy would shake his head and say ‘I raised you better than this’ if I started blaming the victim.” She held him close for a moment, then gently pushed him away.

  Her voice said, “You bastard, how could you get me in this kind of trouble? How could you think of putting me in this kind of danger?”

  But her eyes said, It’ll be okay.

  Torrie had spent a futile hour—two hours? maybe three?—exploring every inch of their tiny pair of rooms, with no luck at all. There was a duct at the juncture of wall and ceiling in each room—in the other room, it was in the corner under the large stone thundermug—and fresh air flowed in through it, but the ducts were made of stone, and nothing larger than a rat could make its way through them, and even then it would have to break through the grating that covered the duct.

  And he wasn’t a rat. Torrie decided that the room was probably a meatlocker, which helped to explain the barred door—there would be some way of locking the door outside, as well, and given that the Sons didn’t want their food eaten by rats, it was necessary to seal it in tight.

  He would have discussed his conclusion with the others, but by mutual consent, talk was kept to a minimum. If Maggie and Mom and Dad were sure they could be overheard, then they could be overheard, and there was no sense in trying to weave some sort of plan only to give it away to the wolves.

  What he wanted was a high-capacity autoloading rifle with a few dozen full magazines.

  But he didn’t have that; he didn’t have anything much. The Sons had searched him, and while they hadn’t taken his wallet or his keys, they had taken his Paratool and everything else in his pockets. Uncle Hosea always carried a double-edged razor blade—carefully wrapped in wax paper—in
his wallet, just in case he found he needed to trim something with a really sharp edge, but Torrie had never acquired the habit.

  So what he had was a Coleman lantern and a small flask of kerosene for it. That spoke of Molotov cocktail, which would do less than a lot of good with a Son of the Wolf.

  He would have to wait. The right thing to do, the reasonable thing to do, would be to roll himself up in a blanket or two and try to get some sleep, the way that Dad was doing, and that Mom at least pretended to do, although Maggie just sat, slumped on her blankets.

  Wood thunked on wood outside. “Stand back from the door,” a harsh voice said in Bersmal.

  The door pivoted open, revealing two large, hairy Sons and a short, stocky, ugly man, dressed in boots and what looked more like a wraparound canvas sarong and tunic than anything else. His face seemed almost alien under the neatly trimmed, straight black hair and neatly combed beard—too little forehead, the ridges above the eyes too heavy.

  With both hands, the short man carried a platter piled high with slightly wilted-looking apples and carrots surrounding an uncorked clay bottle that appeared to contain at least a gallon. He set the platter down on the hard floor, and then, under the watchful eyes of the Sons guarding it—him?—walked silently out of the room without saying anything.

  The door shut behind them.

  Wincing, Dad forced himself to sit up. “I hadn’t thought I’d see one of the Vestri again,” he said.

  Mom shook her head. “Vestri?”

  “Dwarf,” he said, slapping his good hand against the wall next to him. “Sons don’t build, not this well, and while they live underground, they don’t tend to do much digging; I should have guessed they’d have Vestri serfs.”

  Maggie cocked her head to one side. “It looked like a Neanderthal to me.”

  Torrie frowned at that.

  “Yeah, right,” she said, sarcastically, “don’t listen to anything I have to say. I can’t know anything; I’m just a girl, right?” She pursed her lips together for just a moment. “But take away the clothing, and the neat haircut and beard, and what does it look like to you?”