The Fire Duke

by Joel Rosenberg

  He had the steadier hand, and the BAR was a real, full auto weapon—Orphie’s Class III license made it legal, although Arnie couldn’t have cared a fig about the legality—and it could empty its twenty-round magazine in about the time it would take to fart. And not only was the BAR loaded with the Thorsen silver-tipped hand loads, but Arnie now had a half dozen mags full of the same hand loads in the ammo bag a few feet in front of the lawn chair.

  Werewolves might be able to shrug off lead and copper, but Torrie had left behind a couple of bodies that showed what silver would do for them.

  Good boy.

  Just a matter of applying the right tool to the job, like in the old days. Given enough support from the fucking tanks—which were usually somewhere else when you needed them—they could have held the Chinks back. But for tanks to knock back infantry, what you needed was canister, not the AT they had.

  But that was half the planet away, and a lifetime ago. Best to keep to the here and now, and here and now the BAR was the right choice for his main weapon.

  Of course, if Arnie hadn’t set the lawn chair up against something as solid as the base of the huge elm tree it was now resting against, the recoil would knock him out of the chair. But he had, and that was that.

  He settled comfortably into a light reverie. That was the secret of hunting: pick your spot, and wait. Deer would easily outrun a walking hunter, and they could hide in brush so thin you’d believe it couldn’t conceal a woodpecker’s pecker. A woodchuck could disappear without a trace down his hole at the slightest movement. Even a rabbit could leap from one improbable hiding place to another before you could react.

  So the trick was not to be there.

  If you sat in your blind and didn’t move, didn’t twitch, didn’t belch or fart, you weren’t there. The brush piled around Arnie’s seat at the base of the old elm wasn’t a perfect blind, but Arnie wasn’t wearing hunter’s orange, either, just an old brown wool coat over khaki workshirt and workpants.

  He sat there, not there, thinking of everything and nothing until he heard a sound behind him, a rustle of branches.

  “Arnie?”

  “Yeah,” he said, pulling the clip and ejecting the round from the BAR before rising. He put the round back into the clip and reinserted it into the weapon, then rubbed at the small of his back. It hurt, but the walk out to the car would stretch it out some, make him feel better.

  He pulled the flask from his pocket and took a long pull, letting the whiskey warm him from throat to middle. Just enough to get him going.

  Davy Larsen was decked out in his old army fatigues today, as usual, and as usual topped by his olive drab army jacket. He dropped his own lunch bucket next to the lawn chair, accepted the BAR with a nod and without comment—good boy—racked a round into the chamber with a practiced motion, and seated himself in the chair without a word, already just this side of invisible and absolutely motionless before Arnie was well on his way down the path.

  Enough for today, Arnie decided. Time for some sleep, and maybe cook himself a little dinner before he was back on shift.

  He made his way back down the path toward where Orphie’s old Chevy Nova was parked just off the road, exchanged a quick nod with the idiot Cotton kid, who was already heading back toward the stand, then pulled open the passenger door, seated himself and waited.

  In about ten minutes, Orphie staggered down the path, favoring his right leg. He opened the driver’s side door and plopped down on his seat.

  “Shit, boy,” Orphie said, accepting Arnie’s flask and taking a pull, “this don’t get easier.”

  Arnie shrugged, the way he shrugged every day. “Doesn’t need to. We just need to hang in there.”

  Orphie rubbed at his stubbled chin, then reached down and turned the keys, swearing under his breath when the engine coughed three times before turning over. “Tomorrow, you think?” he asked, as he did every day.

  Arnie shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t much care. One in three chances it happens on our watch. As long as it happens at all, I don’t care.”

  Orphie chuckled as he backed up down the road, one hand thrown over the back of the bench seat to steady him. “Odds are against us getting it.”

  Arnie shook his head. “Doesn’t matter, as long as it happens.” He took another swig of his whiskey. “I want those dogs.” They killed Ole Honistead, and while Arnie and Ole hadn’t always gotten along, but damn it, Ole was a neighbor, and you didn’t go kill Arnie’s neighbors.

  He took another swig. “Let’s get home. I need to wash up, and then get some sleep.”

  It was good to have some reason to live again.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Hidden Ways

  There were things about life in Falias that Torrie hadn’t had a lot of trouble getting used to, he decided, as he returned from a solitary shower to his room, the thick, napless towel wrapped around his waist his only garment.

  Having servants set out his clothes wasn’t going to be a hard adjustment.

  He picked up the white tunic and pulled it over his head.

  Most of their gear had been left in Torrie’s room, a comfortable enough cell, although it was lit only by a pair of lanterns, one set just above head-high in the wall.

  He quickly finished dressing, except for the short cape and the swordbelt, and there was no rush about either, so Torrie sat down hard on the thin mattress—the bed was little more than a sheet wrapped around a blanket, supported by a weaving of leather straps on a wooden frame—and started to go through the gear, figuring that there wouldn’t be anything of use.

  The pistol was long gone, of course, and so was the Gerber hunting knife—why let him keep his sword if they were going to deny him a knife? Ah, of course: a sword was many things, but a concealed weapon wasn’t among them.

  But why leave him the Swiss Army knife? Well, it didn’t look to Torrie like much of a weapon, but…

  He shrugged. Not his problem. At least, they had left him some of his survival kit. Enough for a getaway, if they could make one, and maybe enough to help set up for one. He would have to do something; somebody had to.

  He took out the physician’s kit and eyed the little bottles of Demerol, morphine, and Vistaril. Sure, he could use those to knock somebody out, but that would take minutes at least—assuming that narcotics worked at all in Tir Na Nog, an assumption he didn’t want to test.

  Best to be ready, just in case. He opened a condom and dumped a few matches in it, adding a few fingerfuls of the dry straw from his mattress ticking, then inflated it just barely, so that the air cushion would protect the latex from the straw ends, then tied the top.

  Amazingly useful things, condoms.

  A bureau was built into the stone wall; ancient, heavy oaken drawers slid silently into and out of recesses on hidden supports. Torrie tried a few until he found one with spare sheets, took out a sheet and spread it out on the bed.

  He set the still-sealed food and the fire-starting kit in the middle, opened a pair of socks and slipped one around the condom, then added another pair and the shirts and trousers, then topped the pile with the Mylar sheeting and the monocular and the Swiss Army knife, binding it all with line from the fishing kit into a square bundle that he could carry.

  It left some things out. Like the Paratool. Of all the combination tools—the Leatherman, the Gerber Multiplier, SOG’s ToolClip and MicroToolClip—it was Uncle Hosea’s favorite. He could open it one-handed, and the needlenose pliers had almost perfect registration.

  The tool selection was the best: not only did it have the two knives and bottle/can opener, but no fewer than four screwdrivers, a serrated saw blade, and a file strong enough to take the rough edge off a piece of sheet metal and smooth enough to even out a small bump in unfinished wood. Perhaps best of all, the various blades were removable with a pair of nut drivers, and that had given Uncle Hosea the chance to replace the small knife—the large one came to a fine enough point—and the largest screwdriver with a coup
le of long, bent pieces of stiff wire, useful in resetting hidden lockwork or opening hidden catches.

  Torrie held the closed Paratool in his hand. Closed, it was about the size of a roll of quarters, except flatter, easier to conceal.

  Conceal. He smiled.

  Now, back at home, a bureau with drawers like this concealed the hidden panel between Torrie’s room and the Guest Room. You could pull the bureau away from the wall—it would stick for just a moment—and even stick a piece of wire into the small gap between pine panels that covered the hidden way, but you’d never open the panel, because the catch wouldn’t give unless the weight of the bureau, sitting on the small projection at the junction of wall and floor, was holding the panel down.

  Torrie took another look at the built-in bureau. The wall was rough, more hewn than finished, pitted naturally, as though a thousand stone-eating worms had idly chewed through it. There was a tiny pit on the wall, near the juncture of the top drawer and the wall, although it had long since been clogged up with dust or some other—

  Nah. A chill ran down his back.

  Torrie opened the pick, locked it into place, and pushed it into the pit, pushing away whatever it was that had blocked it, feeling the end of the bent piece of wire fitting into a hidden catch, just the way it had hundreds of times at home.

  A twist, a pull, and a whole section of wall swung out on silent, hidden hinges.

  Holy shit.

  A puff of stale air brought smells of ancient mustiness to his nostrils, as a dark corridor loomed in front of him.

  Torrie shook his head. This wasn’t just in the style of Uncle Hosea, this was him. The hole was at the same height as the one at home, and the hidden lockwork not only worked the same way, but felt the same way—it had that same worked-smooth-without-being-oily slickness that everything Uncle Hosea made seemed to have.

  He knelt at the entrance. The floor inside was covered with dust, but only lightly, and the dust was smooth and unmarked. It felt like it had been unused for a long time.

  Footsteps sounded outside in the corridor; he pulled the Paratool out, and quickly pushed the secret door shut, then folded the Paratool and tossed it on the bed like it was too hot to handle.

  There was a knock on his door.

  “Torrie?” Maggie’s face peered in.

  “Come on in,” he said, beckoning.

  God, she looked good. Vestri servants had twisted her short hair back and up, fastening it into place with a hundred small pins topped by tiny pearls. Her dress, made from something silken and sky blue, and edged in silver and black, was cut low in front and fell full to the floor, sweeping the floor as she moved.

  “Where were you?”

  She smiled. “Tea and Whimsy with the girls again,” she said.

  “You seem to have made some friends quickly.”

  A shrug. “Well, they’re racing each other trying to figure out where I belong in local society. The winner gets either to ride my coattails partway up the next rung if I turn out to be above them, to shame the others by being the first to drop me if I’m below, or to be my lifelong friend if it’s neither.”

  “Is it really that… much?”

  “Well, yes and no.” Maggie’s mouth twitched. “I mean, technically speaking, Emberly and Geryn are senior to Dortaya, all three are ordinary families, which should make them junior to Beliana—her father is a major, but he married a common girl and has to handle his money himself, so it depends—” she let herself trail off. “It’s complicated.”

  “You’ve picked up a lot in a couple of afternoons,” he said, impressed. Most of the stories Torrie had been told had been about politics and honor, not about money and status. That was—

  “Oh, I’m awful bright for a girl.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way.”

  “ ‘Course not. I just like having you on the defensive.” Maggie’s smile broadened. “Branden del Branden stopped by to pay his respects.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. He’ll be looking for us this evening, he said.”

  “I’d expect so. He and Ivar del Hival are supposed to escort us over.” Dad clearly didn’t want any part of this reception, but Torrie was looking forward to it. A chance to get out, to learn more about what was going on. He found that he was jealous of Maggie; she seemed to make friends easily—

  But, then again, she wasn’t Thorian del Thorian the Younger. There were reasons why he hadn’t been approached.

  She cocked her head. “You look like you’re thinking deep thoughts.”

  He shrugged. “Not very.” He forced a smile. “You look great, by the way.”

  She smiled. “Better than that road-dirty wretch they dragged in here?” She came into his arms and held him tight.

  Well, why not? She smelled of summer and sunshine, with no trace of anything under the dress, and her breath was warm in his ear.

  “Would you get your hands off my ass for a moment?” she whispered. “We might be overheard.”

  Torrie shook his head. “I doubt it,” he said, quietly. “The secret passage hasn’t been used for a long time.”

  She made a face. “Secret passage?”

  He held up a finger for silence, then walked to the door, pausing silently. Nothing.

  Well, if he was going to be indiscreet…

  He opened the Paratool, extended the bent wire, and pulled open the secret door.

  Maggie’s mouth opened and closed, then opened and closed again. “Who—where does it lead?”

  Torrie shrugged as he shut the door. “Somewhere. Anywhere.” No. He knew more than that. “Probably everywhere. This place is going to be honeycombed with secret passages and hideaways, and many of them—not all—are going to interconnect.”

  Not all; Uncle Hosea would have built a few equivalents of the safe room under the northwestern corner of their living room, a safe place for secreting people or stuff that didn’t lead anywhere else, but that wasn’t what this felt like.

  It was a way out, although how and where it led was something that he couldn’t figure. There was surely another door before it joined up with the main passage, just as at home the “priest’s hole” that led from the main bathroom to the crawlway under the porch was hidden at the crawlway end behind a false wall.

  “How do you know?”

  He shook his head. “I should have figured it out a long time ago. Somebody who thinks like Uncle Hosea built this,” he said, lying.

  He knew that it wasn’t anything of the sort: this screamed of Uncle Hosea.

  When he was a kid, he had always felt deep in his gut that his parents and Uncle Hosea had been around forever, but that was the way kids always felt about grownups. He had grown out of that feeling with Mom and Dad, but had more suppressed it than lost it about Uncle Hosea. “It’s like he did in the house, except more so—that lockwork is the same …” He let his voice trail off. You Just Didn’t Talk About Private Family Business.

  But Fuck It. Maggie was in this as deep as Mom and Dad and Torrie were, and damned if she didn’t have the right to know. “It’s the same as the lockwork behind the bureau in my room, that opens a door to the back of the closet in the Guest Room.” He shook his head. “It even feels the same.”

  How long could metal stand against metal without adhering?

  Apparently forever, if Uncle Hosea had treated it properly—metals annealed to the surface? Some coating? Magic?—because Torrie was sure that that door hadn’t been opened for at least decades, probably longer.

  “It’s all his style,” Torrie went on. “He put knocking plates in the doorframes of our house like the one out front here, just smaller. The lockwork is the same, and the whole style of it is the same.” Torrie pursed his lips. “Somewhere there’ll be a hidden abditory—”

  “Abditory?”

  “—hiding place with something of some value in it, and beneath that will be something of even more value,” like the way that one of the hidden gun safes at home was a cover for what rem
ained of the strange old gold coins with the lettering on them that Torrie would bet his right hand he could read now. “It’ll all be done perfectly, to last forever, because that’s the way Uncle Hosea makes things when he can.” His head was spinning. They had a way out—

  No. Uncle Hosea was too clever for that.

  Branden del Branden had already hinted that some of the Hidden Ways around the City were known, at least to the nobility, and Uncle Hosea would have counted on that. Finding one, or even several entrances to some hidden passages wouldn’t be the key to all of them.

  But that didn’t explain much of it. If finding these passageways and abditories was so important, why didn’t the locals just batter their way through walls looking for hidden paths?

  Torrie picked up the Paratool again, this time opening the knife blade. It wasn’t the original knife blade; Uncle Hosea had replaced it with some high-tech steel, tough enough to cut through cable.

  He scraped it against the wall; it left behind no mark at all.

  Well, that explained that. The locals didn’t smash their way through the walls because they couldn’t, because the Cities had been built of some sort of super-stone, which also explained why an ancient stone city, battered by weather and war over millennia, looked so unworn.

  It was beyond Torrie; he already knew not nearly enough, and too much.

  “Dad?” he said, sticking his head out the doorway. “Do you and Mom have a minute?”

  Dad’s face was pensive as he emerged from the secret passage, and clicked the hidden doorway slowly shut, dousing the lantern with a gentle puff.

  “It won’t work,” he said, finally. “I would have to lead them myself—the cues for the Hidden Way back home aren’t something I could explain.” He ran a hand down the front of his silken tunic, smoothing it over and over, as though he was afraid that a wrinkle would show where he had been.

  “But it does connect?” Mom’s hair was twisted back into a knot, fastened with a trio of long white pins that could have been made of ivory, or bone. Her dress was cut low in front and in back, and seemed to cling too tightly to her torso, until it flared at the hips into a full skirt.