Dies the Fire

by S. M. Stirling

  Where did I see that guy before? he thought, running the gate guard's face through his memory. Yeah, he's a Russian. One of Alexi's guys.

  A blond chick met them inside the door; she was wearing bikini briefs under a long silk T-shirt effect and a dog collar, and carrying a clipboard.

  Hey, not bad, he thought, then remembered Dolores was there. Then: Wait a minute. She's not a puta. That stuff's for real.

  The greeter spoke, fright trembling under artificial cheerfulness; he recognized fear easily enough, and also the thin red lines across her back where the gauzy fabric stuck: "Lord Emiliano?"

  It took him a moment to realize she was giving him a title rather than referring to the name of his gang; for a moment more he thought he was being dissed.

  Then he began to smile.

  "Yeah," he replied, with a grand gesture. "Lead on."

  He hadn't seen a room so brightly lighted after dark since the Change; and the lobby was huge. All around it big kerosene lanterns hung at twice head-height, and a forest of lighted candles stood in branched silver holders on the tables that ringed the great space. Their snowy linen and polished cutlery glistened; so did the gray-veined white marble of the floor. All the desks and kiosks had been taken out; nothing but the head table broke the sweep of view towards the great staircase that began at the rear and divided halfway up into two sweeping curves. The flames picked out that too, black marble carved in vine-leaf patterns.

  More guardsmen stood around the outer walls; in the U that the tables formed milled a crowd whose faces he mostly recognized. The Crips and Bloods, the Russians— Alexi Stavarov himself—the chink Tongs, the Koreans, the Angels, the Italians … and groups he thought of as white-bread suburban wannabes, but it wasn't his party and he didn't get to write the guest list, and Portland wasn't what you'd call a serious gang town anyway.

  More chicks like the greeter circulated with trays of drinks and little delicacies on crackers, doing nothing but smile at pats and gropes from the hairy bearded Angels and some of the other rougher types.

  Emiliano took a glass of beer—Negro Modelo—and ate thin-shaved ham off little rondels of fresh black bread, and chatted with a few of his peers. Meanwhile his eyes probed the gathering; not everyone here were his kind. Some were politicians, looking as out of place as the half-naked women; there were even a couple of priests. And some unmistakable university students, mostly clumped together. A few scared, some looking like rabbits on speed, some tough and relaxed.

  Trumpets blared. Emiliano jumped and swore silently as an Angel with a beard like a gray Santa Claus's down his leather-clad paunch grinned at him.

  A man appeared at the top of the stairs. "The Lord Protector!" he barked, and stood aside with his head bowed. "The Lady Sandra!"

  The armed men around the great room slammed their weapons against their shields in near-unison, barking out:

  "The Lord Protector!" in a crashing shout that echoed crazily from the high stone walls. Dead silence fell among the guests.

  It took him a minute to recognize the man coming down the stairs with a splendidly gowned and jeweled woman on his arm. He'd never seen Norman Arminger in a knee-length coat of chain mail before, or wearing a long sword in a black-leather sheath. A follower—male, and armed— carried a helmet with a black feather crest and a kite-shaped shield. Arminger looked impressive in the armor, six-one and broad in the shoulders, with thick wrists and corded forearms. His face was long and lean, square-chinned and hook-nosed, with brown hair parted in the center and falling to his shoulders.

  "Lord Emiliano, good of you to join us," Arminger said. "I believe you're the last."

  "Hey—you're that guy who was writing a book on the gangs, aren't you?"

  "I was," Arminger said. "As you may have noticed, things have changed."

  He gestured, and spoke in a carrying voice: "Please, everyone have a seat. The place cards are for your convenience."

  Emiliano sat, with Dolores and his backup men. Arminger stayed standing, leaning one hip against the head table, his arms folded against the rippling mail that covered his chest.

  "Gentlemen, ladies. By now, you will all have come to the conclusion that what Changed a little while ago is going to stay Changed. This has certain implications. Before we talk, I'd like to demonstrate one of them."

  Four prisoners were prodded into the broad central floor of the hall; two middle-aged policemen in rumpled uniforms, and two guys in army gear—a big shaven-headed black and an ordinary-looking white. Arminger slid the helmet over his head; his face disappeared behind the protective mask. There were three strips of steel that came to a point just below his nose, and it gave him a bird-of-prey look; the grin beneath it did too, and the nodding plume of raven feathers. He took up the shield, sliding his arm through the loops, and drew the long double-edged sword. It glittered in the firelight as he twitched it back and forth easily, making the whisssht sound of cloven air.

  Marquez, his numbers man, leaned aside and hissed in Emiliano's ear: "This hijo is crazy! Four on one?"

  "Shut up," Emiliano murmured back. "We'll see how crazy right now."

  Arminger smiled yet more broadly at the low murmur of understanding and rustle of interest that went along the tables.

  "You men," he said loudly, addressing the prisoners. His sword pointed to a trash can. "There are weapons in there. Take them and try and kill me. If you win, you go free."

  "You expect us to believe that?" the black soldier said.

  Arminger's grin was sardonic. "I expect you to believe I'll have you doused in gasoline and set on fire if you don't fight," he said. "And you get a chance to kill me. Don't you want to?"

  "Shit yes," the soldier replied; he walked over to the garbage container and pulled out a machete in each hand. The others armed themselves as well—an ax, a baseball bat, another machete. The watchers stirred and rustled as the armed prisoners circled to surround the figure in the rippling, glittering mail.

  Then things moved very quickly. The black soldier started to attack, and Arminger met him halfway. There was a crack as one machete glanced off the shield, and a slithering clang as the other hit the sword and slid down it to be caught on the guard. And another crack, meatier and wetter-sounding, as Arminger smashed his metal-clad head into the black man's face.

  The big soldier staggered backward, his nose red ruin. Arminger's sword looped down as he turned, taking the soldier behind a knee and drawing the edge in a slicing cut. The scream of pain matched Arminger's shout as he lunged, the point punching out in a stab that left three inches of steel showing out a policeman's lower back. In the same motion the shield punched, hitting the other cop on the jaw and shattering it.

  That left the smaller soldier an opening. He jumped in and slashed, and the edge raked across Arminger's back from left shoulder to right hip.

  Sparks flew; Emiliano thought he heard a couple of the steel rings break with musical popping sounds. And Arminger staggered, thrown forward by the blow.

  That didn't stop him whirling, striking with the edge of the shield. It hit the soldier's wrist with a crackle of breaking bone, and the machete went flying with a clatter and clang on the hardwood floor. He shrieked in pain, clutching at his right forearm with his left hand, then screamed briefly again in fear as Arminger's sword came down in a blurring-bright arc.

  That ended in a hard thump at the junction of shoulder and neck. The scream broke off as if a switch had been thrown; the sword blade sliced through the neck and into the breastbone, and the killer had to brace a foot on the body to wrench it free. Then he made sure of the others— the big soldier was trying to crawl away when the point went through his kidney—and scared-looking men and women came out with wheelbarrows to take the bodies, and mops and towels and squeegees to deal with the mess. Another of the pretty girls in lingerie sprayed an aerosol scent to cover the smells.

  Every eye fixed on Arminger as he turned, shield and sword raised.

  "Gentlemen, power no longer grow
s out of the muzzle of a gun. It grows from this.''''

  He thrust his sword skyward. The blood on it glistened red-black in the light of the candles and lanterns. The armored men around the walls cheered, beating their weapons or their fists on their shields. Many of the guests joined in. Emiliano clapped himself.

  Can't hurt, he thought. And this son of a whore is either completely crazy or a fucking genius.

  When the noise subsided, Arminger went on: "Many of you know that I was a professor of history before I dabbled in urban anthropology. Some of you may know that I was once a member of the Society of Jesus. What you probably don't know is that I was also a member of a society that meets to celebrate the Middle Ages … by, among other things, practicing combat with the ancient weapons. I've persuaded quite a few members of that society to throw in with me; food is a wonderful incentive. And we're recruiting and training others, many others. Some of you have already contributed manpower. As you saw out there at the front gate, we're already the most effective armed force in this city. Certainly more effective than the overweight, over-aged, donut-eating legions of the former city government."

  He laughed, and handed the shield and dripping sword to a servant. Quite a few of the guests joined in the laughter; this wasn't a crowd where the police had many friends.

  "Making these weapons and armor requires considerable skill. Using them requires even more. But when you do have them and do know how to use them, you're like a tank to the unarmored and untrained. A hundred men so armed, acting as a disciplined unit, can rout thousands."

  Emiliano nodded slowly, and saw others doing likewise. That made sense …

  "Now, you'll also have noticed that traditional means of exchange—money—is worthless now. Right now, there's only one real form of wealth: food."

  Yeah, and we spent a couple of days wasting our time robbing banks and hitting jewelry stores, Emiliano thought with bitter self-accusation.

  He'd been living on canned stuff for days now.

  "There's enough food in this city to feed the population for about two months, if nothing was wasted. One month, more realistically, if there was a rationing system; a great deal has already been lost and destroyed. Then everyone would die. There is, however, enough for a smaller but substantial number of people for a year or more. And remember, gentlemen, there is no government anymore. Not here in Portland, not in Oregon, not in the United States. Or the world, probably, come to that."

  That got an excited buzz.

  "Yo," one of the Crips leaders said. "We thinkin' move out to the country, get the eats. With no guns, the farmers not much trouble."

  Arminger shook his head again. "Not yet. In the long run, yes. Everything that's been invented in the last eight hundred years is useless now. There's only two ways to live in a time like this—farming, and living off farmers. I don't feel like pushing a plow."

  Emiliano nodded; and again, he wasn't the only one. His father had been born a peon on a little farm in Sonora, and he had no desire at all to be one himself. Living off farmers, though …

  A haciendado, he thought, amused. He leaned forward eagerly, hardly noticing when the banquet was brought in. He was in a golden haze from more than the wines and brandies and fine liqueurs by the end of the night.

  Lord Emiliano, he thought. Got a sound to it.

  Chapter

  Five

  Sssst!" Michael Havel hissed, and held his left hand up with the fist clenched.

  Footfalls stopped behind him as he peered into the brush and half-melted snow along the Centennial Trail, in the cold shadow of the tall red cedars.

  Just being on it was a relief; all he knew of this particular stretch of country was maps and compass headings, and it was an enormous mental load off his shoulders to be able to follow a marked trail—even if it was still wet with slush, and muddy. As a fringe benefit of being here between the end of cross-country skiing season and the beginning of hiking, the animals weren't all that wary, since they didn't expect humans along.

  He'd trimmed and smoothed a yard-long stick from a branch; it was as thick as Astrid Larsson's wrist, and nicely heavy. He let it fall from where he'd been carrying it under his armpit; the end smacked into his palm with a pleasant firmness. The snowshoe hare made a break for it as he moved, streaking up the slope and jinking back and forth as it went; he whipped the stick forward and it flew in a pinwheeling blur.

  "Yes!" he said.

  The throw had the sweet, almost surprising feel you always got when you were going to hit. The rabbit stick hit the hare somewhere in the body, and it went over in a thrashing tangle of limbs and a shrill squeal. He started forward, but Astrid's voice checked him: "There's another one!"

  The second terrified-rodent streak was much farther up the slope; he waited as the girl brought the bow up, drawing in a smooth flexing of arms and shoulders as it rose.

  The string snapped against her bracer, and the arrow flashed out in a long beautifully shallow curve; he followed it with an avid hope born of days of hard work and short rations.

  Damn! he thought; the other snowshoe jinked left at just the wrong moment.

  Astrid muttered something under her breath as she recovered the arrow. Then she checked it—you had to keep broadheads sharp—and smiled at him in congratulations.

  "Better luck next time," he called to her.

  He trotted to his kill and finished the hare off with a sharp blow of the rabbit stick; the animal was a young male, a little under two pounds, with the relatively small ears and big feet of its breed. He was crouched by the side of the trail getting ready for the gutting and skinning when the stretcher came into sight.

  Eric Larsson was on one end, and his sister on the other. They both exclaimed in delight at the sight of the rabbit; even their father looked up from where he walked beside his wife and smiled.

  "And that's why they call it a rabbit stick," Havel said, grinning and waving. "Take a rest, everyone, it's time to change off anyway."

  He'd stripped off his sheepskin coat and rolled up the sleeves of his flannel shirt; it was chilly, but getting blood out of the fleece was impossible. There was a little hone in a pocket on the outside of his belt sheath; the steel went scritch-scritch-scritch over it as he put a finer edge on the puukko and began breaking the game.

  Astrid drifted off ahead; she could shoot rabbits easily enough now, and was certainly willing to eat her share, but she didn't like to watch the butchering. Eric followed, probably to tease her—someone was going to have to tell the kid to lay off it, but Havel remembered what his brothers had been like and doubted it would happen anytime soon. The problem there would come when Eric got some food and rest and felt full enough of beans to try pushing at the older man, and hopefully this whole lot would be off Michael Havel's hands by then.

  Ken stayed beside the stretcher as he always did at stops, holding Mary Larsson's hand; he and his wife talked in low tones, usually of inconsequential things back in Portland, as if this was just a frustrating interruption in their ordinary lives.

  Which means Mr. Larsson knows his wife better than I thought, Havel told himself. Which will teach me to try and sum someone up on short acquaintance.

  Biltis the orange cat also jumped up on the stretcher, burrowing down to curl up beside the injured woman in what Astrid insisted was affection and Havel thought was a search for somewhere warm and dry in this detested snowy wilderness. She made a pretty good heater-cat, though.

  He grinned at the thought; the cat would come out for its share of the offal, right enough; it would even purr and rub against his ankles. Cats and dogs and horses were more honest than people—they really did like you when you did things for them, instead of faking it.

  Signe Larsson came up; she leaned his survival pack against a tree—she carried it, when she wasn't on stretcher duty, freeing him up to forage—and squatted on her hams with her arms around her knees, watching him skin and butcher the little animal. She didn't flinch at the smell or sight of game
being butchered anymore, either.

  He'd roll the meat, heart, kidneys and liver in the hide, and they'd stew everything when they made camp—he still had a few packets of dried vegetables, and the invaluable titanium pot. You got more of the food value that way than roasting, particularly from the marrow, and it made one small rabbit go a lot further among six. Plus Mary Larsson found liquids easier to keep down. The antibiotics gave her a mild case of nausea on top of the pain of her leg; he was worried about the bone, although the pills were keeping fever away.

  "Who calls it a rabbit stick?" Signe said after a moment, nodding towards the tool he'd used to kill the hare.

  "The Anishinabe," he said, his hands moving with skilled precision. "Which means 'the People,' surprise surprise— the particular bunch around where we lived are called Ojibwa, which means 'Puckered Up.' My grandmother's people; on Mom's side, that is. I used to go stay with Grannie Lauder and her relatives sometimes; she lived pretty close to our place."

  "Oh," she said. "That's how you learned all this … woodcraft?"

  She looked around at the savage wilderness and shivered a bit. "You really seem at home here. It's beautiful, but … hostile, not like Larsdalen—our summer farm—or even the ranch in Montana. As if all this"—she waved a hand at the great steep snow-topped slopes all around them—"hated us, and wanted us to die."

  "These mountains aren't really hostile," Havel said. "They're like any wilderness, just indifferent, and … oh, sort of unforgiving of mistakes. If you know what you're doing, you could live here even in winter."

  "Well, maybe you could, Mike," she said with a grin. "What would you need?"

  "A nice tight cabin and a year's supply of grub, ideally," he said, chuckling in turn.

  She mimed picking up the rabbit stick and hitting him over the head.

  He went on: "Minimum? Well, with a rabbit stick and a knife you can survive in the bush most times of the year; and with a knife you can make a rabbit stick and whatever else you need, like a fire drill. You can even hunt deer with the knife; stand over a little green-branch fire so the smoke kills your scent, then stalk 'em slow—freeze every time they look around, then take a slow step while they're not paying attention, until you get within arm's reach."