The Fire Duke

by Joel Rosenberg

  He set his rucksack down and opened it up again, pawing through it with increasing panic until he found the leather bag Freya had given him, and pulled it out.

  The apple sausages were still inside, as was the wrapped figurine, the miniature sword once again safely tucked away.

  The others were looking at him looking at it. Feeling vaguely embarrassed, he wrapped it up and tucked it away again. “A gift from a friend.”

  “Lady friend?” Torrie asked.

  Ian grinned. “Always.” He hefted his pack to his back. “Shall we get going?”

  “We have to wait for Jamed del Bruno and—”

  “My good self,” Ivar del Hival boomed from the doorway. “And I am quite ready.” He was out of his garish City livery, dressed in a white shirt and brown trousers that would have looked ordinary enough on the streets of Hardwood or anywhere else, if it wasn’t for their slightly unusual cut and the fact that the front of the trousers was secured by an open row of buttons instead of a zipper concealed by a flap.

  And the sword belt, of course, but Ian had gotten used to that, and to the sword belted around his own waist. He would probably want to talk Ivar del Hival into having his ponytail bobbed, and his bushy beard trimmed a bit, but he looked more like a fifty-year-old hippie type, albeit an unusually muscular one.

  Torrie levered himself to his feet, and grunted his way into his rucksack before belting his sword about him. “Branden del Branden,” he said, “I thank you for your hospitality, and hope to avail myself of it again.” He turned to Lord Sensever. “And I thank you for your kind wishes for me and my family.”

  “Yes. Do be sure to send them to your father, and your mother, and the Exquisite Maggie.”

  Torrie nodded. “Of course.”

  Thorian del Orvald rose to his feet and steadied himself with one hand on the edge of the desk. “I’ll walk you to the hidden exit, Grandson,” he said. “If you do not mind the company.”

  Grandson? Ian raised an eyebrow.

  Later, Torrie mouthed, then turned back to Thorian del Orvald. “My pleasure, sir. Perhaps when we return, you’ll find occasion to introduce me to my father’s mother?”

  “Yes, your grandmother would like that.” Thorian del Orvald smiled. “I’ll attempt to find such,” he said. “I hope that it won’t be terribly long.” He cleared his throat, and seemed to have some difficulty speaking.

  The pack wasn’t getting any lighter on Ian’s back. “Hey, Torrie, enough of the good-byes. Let’s make like a tree and hit the road.”

  Hosea grinned. “I like that.”

  They were two floors down and several corridors away when Torrie stopped, suddenly, his mouth open, his eyes on something far away. “Holy shit.” He shrugged out of his rucksack and dropped it to the ground next to Jamed del Bruno. “I’ll be right back,” he said, taking off in a sprint, running back the way they had come.

  Ian looked to Hosea, who stared back, blankly. “I do not know, either, Ian Silverstein,” Hosea said.

  Ivar del Hival lowered his own rucksack to the floor. “You’d best see to the lad, the two of you,” he said. “I’ll wait for you,” he said, helping Ian and Hosea off with theirs.

  Torrie had a head start on them, and he had run fester than Ian cared to and Hosea could. By the time Ian, Hosea and Thorian del Orvald in tow, arrived back at the study, Torrie was already on his knees on the floor, beside the hidden safe that was still mostly filled with gold.

  Torrie was pulling out handfuls of golden coins and more scattering them than piling them on the floor, while Branden del Branden, Lord Sensever, and Thorian del Orvald watched, only Thorian del Orvald letting his curiosity show on his lined face.

  Torrie’s face was sweat-sheened as he looked up at Hosea. “It’s just like the gun safe at home, Uncle Hosea,” Torrie said. He scooped out a last coin and then reached his hand into the safe. “Can’t feel it, but…” He looked up at Branden del Branden. “Can you get me a light? A lantern of some sort? A candle?”

  Branden del Branden was trying too hard to look impassive as he nodded and rose and walked out, returning in a few moments with a lit lantern that he handed to Torrie.

  Torrie set it down next to the hole and peered in. “Damn. I can’t see well enough. What I really need is a flashlight, or maybe …” He reached into his pouch and took out a tool that opened up into something that looked like a needlenose pliers, except that it had swing-out tools in each of its handles. “The Paratool,” Torrie said, grinning as he swung a bent piece of wire out of one handle. “Don’t leave home without it.” He reached the tool into the safe and felt about. “I can’t see it, but it should be here somewhere,” he said, his brow wrinkling in effort. “It should have felt strange. Why would the Fire Duke keep so much gold in such a useless place? A few coins, perhaps, if he liked to take it out and handle it, but what use is the Duke of the House of Fire going to have for a lot of gold? That’s what he has a bursar for: to keep it, to spend it, and besides, preoccupation with money is a woman’s thing here, beneath the notice of men.”

  “The one you knew as the Fire Duke,” Hosea said, “wasn’t really of this City—”

  “No, but he was pretending to be,” Torrie said. “Why pretend about everything except this? If he—ah, got it. Hang on a sec,” he said, slowly, carefully lifting up.

  He pulled out a piece of metal about the size and shape of a dinner plate, smooth on top, an ungainly-looking set of lockwork protruding from the bottom. Torrie carefully removed it from the lockpick of the Paratool, and set it down on the floor next to him, bottom-side up. Ian couldn’t make much sense of the lockwork, except for the six bolts, now retracted, equally spaced around its edges. Extended, those would have done one hell of a job holding it in place.

  Ian found that his heart was thumping. If the real safe was under this safe, that meant that all that gold was just a decoy. Which argued that the gold was phony—but he knew it wasn’t phony; this was from the same source that Torrie’s Dad and Hosea had stolen the gold they had taken with them when they had fled, the gold that Torrie’s Mom had laundered and invested.

  Which meant that whatever was inside this safe-within-a-safe was valuable enough that hundreds of pounds of gold was by comparison cheap enough to be used as a decoy, which meant that what was in this safe was at the very least far too valuable to be messing with without having thought it all through.

  “Torrie, it’s—” Ian caught himself. It was too late for that, as Torrie reached back into the safe, his arm going in all the way to the shoulder.

  He straightened, bringing with him a small leather bag. Trembling fingers pulled the mouth open.

  The room was somehow darker than before.

  The round, irregular red gem that lay in the palm of Torrie’s hands not only glowed as though from a deep-crimson fire but seemed to soak up light and heat, not just from the lantern on the floor next to it but from the entire room itself. In its ruddy light, Torrie’s face was streaked with dirt and sweat. It seemed to take more effort than it should have for him to close his fingers around the gem, chasing the darkness and the strange crimson light away, bringing ordinary daylight and lantern light back to the study.

  Hosea was on his knees next to Torrie. “It’s the ruby, cut from the broken necklace of the Brisings, blessed and cursed,” he said, shaking his head. “He had already found one, it seems, and was searching for the rest.”

  Sensever nodded soberly. “That was the part that bothered me. His Late Warmth was better at holding his form than any of the fire giants I’ve ever heard of. All of the Elder Races can do some of that, but I would not have thought a mere fire giant capable of such an extended masquerade. To take on a form for an hour, or a meal, or a day, perhaps—but years? It seems he had a source of power close to hand.” He reached out his hand. “I’d best take charge of it.”

  Branden del Branden was already on his feet. “I think it had best stay here, in the House of Fire. It is a flame gem, after all.”


  Thorian del Orvald stood, as well. “The duelmaster is bound to the Dominion as a whole,” he said, his hand on the hilt of his sword, his face turned ever so slightly to that side, turning his blind eye away. He wasn’t moving like a sick old man. “I’d best take it, in the name of the Sky.”

  No. None of them could be trusted with it.

  Torrie rose to his feet, the jewel in his left hand, his right hand on the hilt of his sword. “You think you can take it away from me?” he said.

  Thorian del Orvald nodded. “Yes, Grandson, I think I can. And I am sure that somebody in the City could. You don’t want to hold that gem, young Thorian. It’s far too dangerous.”

  Fuck you, Torrie, Ian thought. It was all far too dangerous, and it was Torrie’s fault, for dashing back here to pull the jewel out of the safe, without even pausing to discuss it, to think through the consequences.

  Hell, blame it on his father and mother, and his neighbors. Torrie had been raised too gently, surrounded by people he could trust. He didn’t understand the way the world really worked sometimes, that you couldn’t always trust even the ones that you should have had every reason to believe meant well by you.

  Ian knew that. Benjamin Silverstein had beaten that into him.

  Sure, Torrie was friends with this Branden del Branden, and Lord Sensever looked kindly upon him, and Thorian del Orvald was his own grandfather, but this gem was part of the Brisingamen, and each one of them would find a reason why it was too valuable for Torrie to have, each would find a reason why he or the interests he represented would be the best guardian of it.

  Damn it, Torrie.

  They would either have to give it over or fight their way out, and the two of them had no chance of fighting their way out of the City.

  Unless …

  Moving quickly while trying not to seem jerky, he stepped around behind Branden del Branden for the doorway that led out to the veranda.

  “Torrie!” Ian called out from the doorway. “Here. Guard me.”

  Torrie barely hesitated; then he tossed the gem underhand toward Ian, then leaped toward the doorway to block the others, drawing his sword as he did, his back to Ian.

  “Whatever you’re going to do, do it fast,” he said. “Our situation sucks.”

  Tell me about it, Ian didn’t say. Recriminations could wait for later, if there was a later. “Give me a minute.”

  Ian stepped back out on the veranda. The gem was warm in his hands, too warm for just having been held by Torrie for a few minutes, and while it didn’t feel heavy as he held it there, it seemed to be heavier when he tried to move it, as though whoever had pushed its mass and inertia far away hadn’t quite synchronized the two.

  He scanned the blue skies. A richer, deeper blue than he was used to, the puffy clouds so white and pure they dazzled the eye.

  And high above, a black bird circled.

  A crow, perhaps?

  No. Ian smiled.

  A raven.

  It was all logical, really. The gem needed to be kept by somebody who understood what the Brisingamen meant, who could be trusted to keep it, and perhaps the rest of the Brisingamen, until the time was right to end this cycle of the universe.

  Not yet, Ian thought. I’ve got a lot to do before then and I’m not the only one.

  “Hugin,” he shouted. “Hear me, come to me. Munin, come here, come to me, Ian Silverstein.”

  He had seen the bird circling high above before, but it hadn’t quite registered on his consciousness. Still, they had told him they would see him again, and it would make sense for Harbard to want one of them to keep an eye on developments in the City.

  The black bird high above continued in its wheeling flight over the city, and Ian’s heart fell.

  “Ian,” Torrie said from behind him, “it’s not going to hold for long in here.”

  “Shut up,” Ian said, desperately trying to think of another choice. Swallow it? No; they’d just have to cut his belly open to get it, and there was no reason to think they wouldn’t.

  Run with it? Where?

  The raven banked into first a dive, then a full stoop, its wings back.

  It dropped like a stone from the sky, then spread its broad, oily wings wide, wider, as it dived down, toward the small veranda where Ian stood.

  Yes. “Bring this to her, from me,” he shouted.

  Ian threw the gem high into the sky.

  It rumbled through the clear air, catching the rays of the sun and holding them for a moment, then flared brighter and brighter, a small sun all by itself, difficult to watch, impossible to turn away from.

  The raven’s talons fastened about it with an audible click.

  “And thank her for the apples,” Ian said. “And for the carving, always for the carving.” And he added in a whisper, sure that the bird wouldn’t hear: “Thank her for telling me that I’m … worthwhile as I am.”

  “If you weren’t such a fool, you wouldn’t have needed a retired fertility goddess to tell you all of that, Ian Silver-stone,” it said, its harsh voice already receding in the distance. “But I’ll tell her. Be well, Ian Silverstone,” it said, its broad wings beating the air as it climbed high into the sky, already heading south.

  “Thank you,” he said, doubting that the raven could hear him.

  Was it Hugin or Munin? Would it be thought or memory that would bring this piece of the Brisingamen back to Freya, to be guarded as she had promised, until the end of time? Torrie was an idiot if he thought he could trust everybody. But Ian wasn’t about to be the other kind of idiot, the fool who would never trust anybody.

  The answer to the folly on the left is not the folly on the right.

  Ian smiled, as he turned to face the shocked faces.

  It had worked.

  Thorian del Orvald was the first to settle back into his chair, a thin smile on his lined face. He touched a crooked finger to his brow, as though in a parody of a salute.

  Lord Sensever cleared his throat a few times, but then subsided, while Branden del Branden settled back behind the Fire Duke’s desk, his expression working until he settled on a look of attempted calm dignity that almost made Ian laugh.

  “So much for that,” he said.

  Ian nodded. “Yeah.”

  He slipped a hand around Torrie’s shoulders, and another around Hosea’s waist, and they walked back into the study. “Time to go home. For now.”

  He turned and looked out through the doorway into the blue sky.

  Far away, almost vanished in the distance already, the black bird was lazily flapping its wings homeward.

  “We’ll be back.”

  Epilogue

  Neighbors

  When it finally happened, it all happened fast, the way Arnie Selmo had always known it would.

  That was the way of it. Hunting or war, you spend most of your time waiting. He didn’t complain; there was a time when he had waited for a couple of days in a half-frozen, stinking foxhole. This wasn’t bad, not by comparison.

  He had been lying in the lawn chair, its back resting against the base of the tree, the BAR across his lap. Orphie was in his own blind, maybe twenty yards away, snoring, as he had been since about the first hour of their shift.

  Dammit. Orphie was too old for this. Arnie was too old for this, and he was ten years younger than Orphie.

  Well, what to do? He couldn’t ditch Orphie; that would hurt the old fellow too badly. And while Arnie thought that there really ought to be two men on each watch, maybe one would do. Shit, even two might not be enough, but it was all he figured he could get from Doc Sherve and his crowd.

  One thing for sure: less than one on duty wouldn’t do.

  Arnie would have to make damn sure that he didn’t fall asleep, but ever since Staff Sergeant Pernell had found Arnie asleep on guard duty one dark night in Uijongbu, and kicked the everloving shit out of him, Arnie had been unable to go to sleep with a rifle in his hands, so that was that.

  But shit, boy, you’d better wake up qu
ick if the—

  There was a scrabbling over by the burial cairn, and a pair of hands, one holding a bloody sword, clawed at the edge of the hole, finally finding a grip. A dirty face emerged from the hole—Torrie’s girlfriend, it was, followed by the rest of her, followed by an impossibly filthy Karin Thorsen, followed, at last, by Thorian Thorsen.

  He looked the worst of all of them: shreds of what had been a shirt hung loosely from his torso, and he was bleeding from a hundred dirty cuts, although, like the girl, he had still managed to keep a bloody sword in one hand.

  And while he was scrabbling on the ground, more crawling than running, a long gray snout pushed its way up through the hole.

  It was a magnificent beast in its own way, but Arnie had already risen from his lawn chair, his BAR held high in his hands. Like a man decades younger, he dove forward for the open, breaking his fall with the butt of the rifle, landing him right next to the ammo bag.

  He brought the BAR down, his eye focused not on the sights, but on the wolf that was bounding for Thorsen.

  A single shot barked out, and the wolf dropped like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

  Arnie grunted. Maybe Orphie wasn’t so useless after all.

  One after another, two more wolves sprang from the hole. Arnie lightly stroked the trigger of the BAR—

  —Remember, he could hear old Homer Abernathy snarling, it’s like you’re stroking a tit, not like you’re jerking off—

  —and stitched a gorgeous three-shot burst through first one, then the other. The first wolf dropped where he was, but Arnie had caught the second in midleap, and the beast rolled to a stop with its gaping mouth, showing yellowed fangs the size of Arnie’s thumbs, barely inches away from the girl’s foot.

  She surprised him by reaching out and stabbing at it with the sword she still clutched, although she didn’t surprise him by scooting back on her butt as she did. Arnie didn’t blame her, mind.

  More shots rang out, followed by the distinctive spung of a Garand going empty, followed quicker than Arnie expected by the zipperlike sound of another stripper clip’s worth of cartridges going in.