No. there was no feeling of danger here, and that was only in part because feeling itself was damped.
He turned back. Beyond the body of the dwarf, the grayness led out to a snowy patch, where traces of light filtered down onto the ice that was marked with the red of fresh blood. That was reality, and home, and solidity; the other way would take him, once again, to Tir Na Nog.
He would feel again, no matter where he came out.
And that would be a good thing. There were times when he could only prefer numbness, but death was the ultimate numbness, and he didn’t want to die.
In a distant, passionless way, part of him wanted to follow the Hidden Way, to Tir Na Nog, to Marta—and to her—and deep inside the numbness that lay over his feelings like a sodden blanket he thought that maybe that was, after all, the right thing to do: to heave the dwarf to his shoulder and carry it back to Tir Na Nog where its bones would lie with those of Vestri and his children.
Now that was a fit place for a Son of Vestri to lie in death; not deep beneath the almost impossibly black soil of a cornfield in North Dakota.
But Ian wasn’t prepared for a trip to Tir Na Nog. And it wasn’t just the lack of supplies and people waiting for him back in Hardwood. Those were details that could be handled, one way or another. He wasn’t prepared emotionally for it.
But why not? There were no emotions here; he could just go, and who would say he was wrong?
But, no: No. The gray dullness was not the right place to be making any sort of decision at all. Important decisions shouldn’t be made by a feeling-numbed mind, trapped in a gray timelessness that allowed only dry intellect. It was wrong to do such things when your mind was dulled by alcohol, or by the Hidden Ways.
It was illogical to rely solely on logic. Important decisions needed to be made with both intellect and emotion, with the heart and balls and the brain, with your mind and with your guts, not divorced from a human reality that was feeling as much as it was thought.
But he couldn’t just leave the dead dwarf lying here, caught in the interstices between worlds. And if he wasn’t going to take it to Tir Na Nog, then cold gray logic dictated that he would have to take it back with him.
There was no fourth choice, after all, and to not decide was a decision.
His parka was in the way, so he stripped it off and dropped it to one side, unsurprised that he was neither cold with it off nor sweating with it on.
But removing it let him slide Giantkiller through his belt, which he did, and he stooped to pick up the vestri.
It was limp in death, and that should have made it hard to lift, although not impossible; the advanced first aid class he had taken some years ago had taught him how to get a limp body up into a fireman’s carry.
But it just wasn’t all that hard: maybe the vestri was lighter than he looked, but it was only the matter of a few moments before he was able to get the little man’s limp body up to his right shoulder, balanced properly.
And, with one last look that would have been a longing one if the Hidden Way permitted such a feeling, he walked back toward the ice and—
—groaned in pain at the blazing agony in his left shoulder. He would have dropped the dwarf’s body, but he staggered up against the wall of the hole, bracing the body there, his feet finding purchase somehow or other.
“Ian!” Thorian Thorsen’s broad face leaned out over the edge of the hole, impossibly high, impossibly far away.
Ian was about to let the body drop when it moved against his shoulder.
The dwarf wasn’t dead; it was just unconscious, and the gray unchangingness of the Hidden Way had hidden that.
Something warm ran down Ian’s leg.
Shit. Its wounds were bleeding. No, his wounds were bleeding.
His jaw clenched tightly to keep any groan or scream from escaping, Ian braced himself hard against the wall and ignored the way that every movement of his left shoulder made him want to scream as he pulled Giantkiller from his belt and lowered the dwarf, as gently as he could, to the ground.
He glanced up. Thorsen was gone. All his effort to avoid whimpering had been for nothing.
Well, that was reassuring, if not particularly surprising. When it all went to hell around you, Thorian Thorsen could be counted on to do something constructive, if not necessarily the best thing.
Ian took a deep breath, regretting it as the cold dry air triggered a fit of coughing.
Okay, first thing was the airway, and with the dwarf’s wide mouth sagging open and the vapor from its breath in the air, he knew it could breathe.
Second thing was to stop the bleeding.
He had to stop the goddamn bleeding. Warm blood still seeped from the thigh wound, steam rising and vanishing in the cold air. He grabbed at the edges of the wound and tried to squeeze them together, but the thick, hairy skin was slippery with blood and dirt, and his frozen fingers couldn’t get any purchase around the dwarf’s broad thigh.
He was disgusted with himself almost to the point of nausea at how good the warm blood felt on his numbing fingers. But, shit, it did.
Ian stripped off his outer shirt, trying as hard as he could to ignore the way the movement of his left shoulder brought sparks to his brain and tears to his eyes, and he wrapped the shirt about the wound, tying the arms of the shirt together as tightly as he could.
That slowed the flow of the warm blood but didn’t stop it. But maybe that was enough until they could get him to a doctor, to Doc Sherve.
Where the fuck was Thorsen, though? What was he doing? It had been …
… it had only been a few seconds since Ian had emerged with the dwarf, and whatever he was doing would take more than just a few seconds—
The roar of a powerful V-8 and the smashing of brush cut through the sound of his own ragged, painful breathing.
—although maybe not much more.
Thorsen was back at the hole, in his hands what looked at first glance like a surfboard.
He lowered it on a rope. It was a board with holes for grips around the edges, but it looked like some strange bondage device, more than anything else, what with the Velcro straps on its side.
“Strap him on tightly, Ian Silverstein, then keep the board from turning over as I pull him up.”
Easier said than done, with only one arm. Ian tried to keep the board still and roll the dwarf over onto it, but it kept slipping away.
Useless piece of shit, he could practically hear his father say.
Fuck you, Dad. he thought, and redoubled his efforts, bringing up his left hand. He would roll the dwarf onto the board, dammit, he would.
Ian screamed as something tore loose in his left shoulder, and the board skittered away on the ice, out of reach, useless, like Ian.
A distant sound of whimpering came to his ears as he struggled to kick himself over to the board, and he wasn’t surprised to realize it was his own voice.
Dammit, I just can’t.
But excuses didn’t count. Not doing what was necessary when you had a good reason was, in the final essence, just not doing what was necessary. Results count; good intentions aren’t a substitute.
Shit.
“No. Wait,” Thorian Thorsen said. He lowered one end of an extensible walking stick. “Wrap the loop around your wrist, and let me pull.”
Ian slipped his right hand through the loop and fastened his bare fingers on the cold rubber.
“Hold tightly,” Thorsen said, unnecessarily. What was Ian going to do? Hope it stuck to his goddamn hand?
He was leaning over the hole, with absolutely no leverage, but Thorsen was a strong man, even stronger than he looked, and Ian found himself being raised up, his feet finding purchase against the wall of the hole.
He slid up to the cold snow, gasping with the pain and the cold like a fish on the shore. Thorsen already had the other end of the rope tied to the hitching ball on the back of the Bronco, and at a dead run came back to Ian to carry, more than help, Ian up, and then over to the Bronco.
He lifted Ian up to the driver’s seat and helped him swing his legs inside.
“Wait for my signal,” Thorsen said, “then slowly. For the sake of the Scion, drive forward slowly, if you please.” He shut the door, hard, and ran back to the hole and dropped right down into it.
The Bronco was still warm, and Thorsen had turned the heater all the way up.
Hot air from the vents pushed the cold away, and he found that his teeth were chattering, so he just clamped his jaw together.
Thorsen had told him to wait, but when it was time to move he would want to start right away. So Ian stomped on the parking brake with his left foot, but kept his right foot firmly on the brake while he moved the car from park into drive. It wouldn’t take Thorsen—
“Now, Ian Silverstein, now!”
Ian released the brake and put his foot gently on the accelerator. Easy now, he told himself as he applied the tiniest pressure.
The Bronco rolled forward, taking up the slack in the rope, then stopped.
It would have been easy to use too much force, but Ian slowly, gently, added pressure …
… and the Bronco rolled forward, quickly, pulling the dwarf strapped to the restraining board out of the hole like a cork out of a bottle, with Thorian Thorsen clinging with both hands to the back end of the board, his legs spreading wide to keep from rolling, toes digging into the grass to stop the board from sliding under the Bronco.
He leaped to his feet and busied himself untying the board from the hitch.
Ian cursed himself for an idiot. There, sitting right under the radio, was the cell phone. While Thorsen wrestled the board toward the Bronco, Ian picked up the receiver, punched a number, and hit send.
It rang only once before Karin Thorsen’s Hello? was sweet in his ears.
“Is Doc Sherve still there?”
“Yes, he’s just on his way—is—”
“Put him on right now. Emergency.” There wasn’t time to explain, and Karin, characteristically, didn’t waste time asking for an explanation.
“Yes, Ian?” Doc’s voice had that note of professional calm that made Ian not sure whether he wanted to sigh in relief or to scream in frustration.
“We’ve got a patient for you. Multiple wounds, but I got the worst one pretty much stopped. Unconscious—I think it’s from lack of blood.”
Thorsen slammed the back hatch, and was in the passenger-side door. Ian handed him the phone—he couldn’t drive and talk with one hand—and stomped on the gas.
“No, stop the car!” Thorsen shouted, his eyes wide, his voice ringing in Ian’s ears. “Now, Ian Silver Stone.”
Ian hadn’t heard that note of command in Thorsen’s voice before, and he found that he had braked the car to a sliding stop without even thinking about it.
Thorsen held up a hand for silence. “It is Thorian,” he said into the phone. Then: “Yes. The clinic, yes. Bring Hosea with you. Say to him: ‘Ilst nicht ver brehnenst vestri.’ Tell him that: ‘Ilst nicht ver brehnenst vestri.’ ”
He is not a human. He is a vestri.
Thorsen was out the door, and slammed it hard enough to rattle something in the glove compartment. “Drive to the clinic!” he shouted. “I will stay here, on watch, until relief arrives.”
The phone bounced to the floor as Ian stomped on the accelerator.
You could trust Thorian Thorsen to think clearly, even when it was all going to hell around him. He was right—this could, just possibly, have been some sort of ruse to draw attention away.
Not that Ian believed that for a moment. But it didn’t matter what he believed; the world didn’t necessarily agree with him, and what mattered was what was, not what he believed, after all.
He could hear Karin shouting into the phone, but he couldn’t quite make out her words over the rumble of the car, and he couldn’t retrieve the handset and drive, not at the same time.
That could wait.
Chapter Three
Valin
Martha Sherve had just finished her early morning rounds and was looking forward to getting some real work done when her beeper went off.
Her rounds, such as they were, hadn’t taken much time at all: only one of the four beds was occupied, and that was only with old Orphie Hansen, and all old Orphie was doing was snoring gently while he slept off about three too many beers from last night at the Dine-a-mite in the one place in town where Ole Honistead was confident that Orphie wouldn’t drown in his own vomit.
Not that much of a trick to it: all you had to do was make sure he was sleeping on his stomach, with his head near the edge of the bed, but Martha had wired him to that new monitor anyway—she wondered if the electrodes would really stick to his hairy back without having to shave off a patch of hair—and then had set alarms for heart rate, sound, and breathing troubles. Bob had spent more than enough money on all these high-tech toys, and the maintenance contracts were ridiculously expensive—Martha wrote the checks that paid the bills, or, rather, had the new computer and Quicken write the checks for her—so they might as well get some use out of them while they were under warranty.
She really should be doing some paperwork in the office—Doc was always late with his paperwork, and it was just as well that both she and Donna could sign his name better than he could—but she hadn’t been sleeping well lately, what with the shift change, and she was thinking seriously about a quick nap when her pager went off, again, with that horrible beeping sound that she had quickly learned to hate.
She shut the beeping off as she ran down the hall, tearing open a wipe, and wiping off her hands as she did. Putting on a pair of surgical gloves from her pocket didn’t even slow her down much.
Granted, she didn’t run quite as quickly as she would have thirty years before, but she did run, and that was what counted. If you took care to choose the right food, the right exercise, and the right parents, you could still manage to move quickly when you had to, and if there was an ache here and a pain there, well, either you dove into a bottle of Demerol and Vistaril and maybe never came out, or you just did what Martha did and took enough Naprosyn to take the edge off the aches and the pains, and otherwise you just learned to live with it.
A little pain wasn’t the end of the world, after all. You could live with it.
Bob was only half out of his snowsuit, his cheeks red above his beard, but he and Donna and Ian Silverstein had managed to get the bloody little man off the restraint board and on to the exam table, and Donna, gloved as always, was already getting a large-bore needle into his incredibly thick right arm, two bags of Ringer’s hanging on the stand, waiting.
Good veins.
“Get a BP, then get the Ringer’s started in the other arm,” Doc said.
“Venous bleeding at interior of left thigh, patient unconscious, pupils dilated and nonresponsive,” Donna said, a trace of excitement in her voice coming through the familiar monotone litany.
Martha quickly had the cuff around his other arm. She pumped it up with a few quick squeezes, then slipped her stethoscope into her ears. The temptation was always to rush, but then you’d have to do it over again, and after all these years, Martha had never quite gotten used to the look on Bob’s face when she had to do it over again.
But no. Shit.
The needle dropped to ninety, then eighty, seventy, and kept dropping all the way to forty before she got the thump-thump-thump in her ears, it dropped all the way before the sound went away.
“Systolic is forty,” she announced, “and I can’t get a diastolic.”
“Okay,” Bob said, as matter-of-factly as if she’d reported that dinner was ready. “Then let’s get a second bag of Ringer’s going,” he said. “Then push two units of blood for a start.” The clinic wasn’t large enough or well-staffed enough to keep a full blood supply on hand, but Doc seemed to get a pint out of Hosea Lincoln every week. It typed as 0 negative, but there was something as strange about his blood as there was about the tall black man himself: it crossmatched a
gainst anything, and vice versa.
A universal donor couldn’t be a universal recipient—any blood type other than O negative would make the body start developing antibodies to the foreign proteins.
Hosea’s body and blood, apparently, had other ideas.
Martha tore the wrapping off a large-bore needle, and cleaned off the inside of the little man’s almost impossibly thick wrist with a wipe while she looked for a vein. Not that that took long: a ropy vein that was almost the diameter of her little finger lay right under the skin.
She pushed the needle into the thick skin, but instead of sliding in, it just pressed the skin down and slid along the wrist, scratching a thin white line.
Damn, damn, damn. Two dull needles in the last ten years, and both of them had been in emergencies. Why the hell couldn’t it happen when she had time?
She dropped it to the floor and unwrapped another as the dropped needle pinged away.
Again the needle slipped on the skin.
“No.” Donna, across the table from her, was shaking her head. “It’s not the needle. Just push hard; you’ve got to push hard to break the skin.” She stalked off through the curtains, toward the refrigerator.
That sounded silly, but Donna wasn’t crazy. Too young, too bouncy, maybe, but she knew her job.
So Martha pushed.
It was like trying to shove a fork through hard plastic, but the skin finally gave, and she attached the tube from the bag of Ringer’s, and then taped the whole mess into place, sloppily but solidly.
That would do.
Donna had already put the oxygen mask over the little man’s mouth and nose, and Martha had been too busy with taking his BP and then getting the second needle in to pay any attention to his face.
But he looked funny. His forehead was too low, like a slice had been taken out near the top of his head, and his heavy brows came within a finger’s-breadth of his hair. His jaw was heavy—all his bones seemed to be too thick—but receding. All that looked vaguely familiar, but it was strange.
The Crimson Sky Page 5