The Crimson Sky

by Joel Rosenberg

  It still made sense to never give up a point. But Branden del Branden hadn’t been out to win a first-blood duel; he had been out to take Ian’s measure. And giving him the wrong measure made it Ian’s match, not his.

  And if the warm blood trickling from the aching cut in his thigh made him wonder if he’d been as clever as he thought he had, Hosea’s brief nod said that he’d gotten it right this time.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Sons Of Fenris

  It all depended on your point of view, Ian supposed: either clouds or fog were rolling in. Did it matter? Well, maybe not, but it was nice to know the right names for things. He would have asked Hosea, or Valin, but—undoubtedly through no accident—Branden del Branden had put Hosea and his tired brown mare at the front of the party and Valin on his preposterously large but spiritlessly plodding black gelding in the back.

  Ian turned to the soldier riding at his side. “Are those clouds or is that fog?” he asked.

  The question, like all of Ian’s questions, was bluntly ignored. Apparently, the Promised Warrior could take any information—like, say, when they were going to stop for lunch—and turn it into a plan for a Vandestish invasion of the Middle Dominion.

  The familiar—if only vaguely familiar—outline of the House of Fire was, if he figured it right, going to be obscured behind him, and he would have been hard put to retrace the twisting trail even on the clearest of days.

  Which this wasn’t going to be.

  Off in the distance, past the jagged horizon that concealed Vandescard and the gray Gilfi below, an unseasonal thunderhead rose like a white mountain. Every once in a while, there was a flash of lightning that lit it up brightly against the darkening sky, but it was far too far away for him to hear any thunder.

  Well, thank goodness for small favors: the cloud bank—or fog bank; Ian refused to make a choice if the locals weren’t going to give him the full information—rolling in looked like it might well be thick and dark and wet, but there was no sign of lightning.

  It covered them more suddenly than he thought it would. One minute he was riding in bright sunshine, looking at the fair hills, and the next he was surrounded by a milky whiteness, perhaps a ten-yard ring of visibility surrounding him, eerily reminding him of the gray glow of the Hidden Ways.

  He had never been in such a thick fog, and he was surprised to find that it didn’t interfere with his hearing the way it did with his vision. He could still hear the clopping of the hooves of the horses out front and behind him; he just couldn’t see them.

  He hadn’t seen any woodland ahead, but maybe he had missed something: he found that he had to duck under low-hanging branches that seemed to sweep out of the mist faster than the slow pace of the plodding horses.

  For a moment, he idly considered leaping up into one of the trees, just to see what would happen, but…

  What would that do?

  Branden del Branden called for a break at an ancient stone piazza that stuck out from the side of the road, a disk perhaps twenty yards across, rimmed by a low stone lip, hanging out over damp white emptiness. They—or at least somebody—had been expected: a wooden barrel held water for the horses, and when two of the soldiers pulled up a dozen yards of the rope that had been fastened to a brass post, they pulled a chain of three bags out from the white milkiness. The first contained oats; the second apples; and the third the limpest, most dubious-looking carrots that Ian had ever seen.

  While the troopers saw to the animals—horses were so much work to take care of that Ian would often have preferred traveling on foot, if it weren’t so much slower—Ian took the opportunity to stretch his legs and empty his bladder, never having quite gotten the knack of standing in the stirrups and twisting to one side to relieve himself. It wasn’t exactly something they covered in high school, or at the U, after all.

  Branden del Branden walked over with a pair of meat-rolls from the provisions bag, and he offered Ian a choice, politely taking a bite from his own immediately.

  “How is your wound?” he asked.

  “It stings,” Ian said. What would the right attitude be if he really had been beaten? Forget right—what would be believed?

  Resentment? Scorn? Anger? Harbard’s ring had helped persuade Branden del Branden of something he had wanted to believe in any case, but that didn’t mean he would stay persuaded.

  Casual. Casual was the right approach. “Perhaps you’ll do me the honor of a return bout at some point?” Ideally, at some point where it isn’t in my interest to hide the fact that I’m one hell of a lot better than you’ll ever be. “I might be able to give you a better contest when I’m not so tired from the road.”

  Branden del Branden smiled knowingly. An excuse was the sort of low-class thing he would expect from an unfamilied commoner. “I’m sure that is so. Perhaps we’ll find the opportunity for a friendly contest while we’re visiting the Old Keep.”

  “Your men have been quite… discreet,” Ian said. “How soon do we get to the City?”

  “In due course, in due course.” Branden del Branden dismissed the question with a wave of his hand. “I couldn’t say for sure.”

  Ian let his frown show.

  “No,” Branden del Branden said, “I don’t mean I won’t say; I mean I can’t say. Can you find your way in this fog?”

  “No. But—”

  “But you assumed I can.” He raised a finger. “Never assume, Promised Warrior.” The comers of his mouth twitched. “Ride with me, and I’ll show you just one of the problems you face when you lead your Vandestish troops up to rape and pillage.”

  “I’m not the Promised Warrior,” Ian said. “But I don’t mind riding up front.”

  If he had to be looking at a horse’s ass, he’d just as soon it be riding next to him.

  Ian didn’t know how to explain the fog thickening while simultaneously becoming less cold and clammy, but it had done just that: he could barely see ten feet ahead on the road, and there were times when waves of billowing whiteness made even that impossible.

  Branden del Branden gestured at the surrounding whiteness. “Do you see what I mean? Could you remember the turns we have made?”

  “Turns? We’ve just followed the trail.”

  Branden del Branden gave the sort of knowing smile that Ian never liked to see on anybody’s face, including his own. “Oh, there’s been a few forks, here and there. It’s just a matter of taking the one that isn’t obscured by fog. I don’t think an invading army would find such openings, and I’d much rather not find out for sure.” He gave a quick loosening pump to the hilt of his sword. “Would you?”

  They rode in silence through the milkiness for a long time, until with each step the fog seemed to thin, the radius of his vision widening.

  “Ah.” Branden del Branden kicked his horse into a faster walk. “Now I can tell you that we’ll be at the City soon, quite soon.”

  The road ahead widened and lengthened, and the sun broke through the clouds so bright and golden that it dazzled Ian’s eyes, bringing tears that clouded his vision even more effectively than the fog itself had.

  And then they were through the clouds and into startlingly clear air, a billowy, cottony cloudscape obscuring everything below, the only solid thing visible from horizon to horizon the mountain road that crossed the saddle from the peak they were on and twisted up to the City high above.

  A bell clanged somewhere above them, and on the high ramparts, the tips of spears or bows could be seen moving quickly into position.

  The Old Keep—if it had any other name, that name had been lost in time as surely as an invader would have been lost in clouds—hadn’t been built at the top of the mountain; it had been carved from the top of a mountain by a master artisan, who had made a keep out of what clearly had been a sharply pointed and jagged peak, the highest of the spires, a turret that looked more like a Moslem minaret than anything more familiar to Ian, and poked high into the blue sky, while six smaller spires barely rose half its length. />
  The ramparts and balustrades were similar to the ones Ian had seen in Falias, the City of the House of Fire, but the piazzas weren’t roofs for lower levels the way they were in Falias, but rather they projected out from the side of what remained of the mountain, sticking out of the keep like ear mushrooms on a tree. There were probably stairs inside as well, but dozens of stairways twisted up the naked side of the dark stone, and while Ian could see no sign of railings, forms moving up and down them made it clear that they were in use, and not just decorative.

  Patches of greenery filled slashes in the side of the mountain, rimmed in a way that made it clear that they had been left by design, not by accident.

  Ian would have liked to have turned to Hosea and congratulated him on the job, but that would have been, at best, imprudent.

  There was no gate that Ian could see: the wide road across the narrow saddle between the two peaks vanished into a dark, wide hole in the side of the mountain wall.

  “Rather something, isn’t it?” Hosea said as he came abreast of them, Branden del Branden’s horsemen making no motion to bar his passage.

  “I was thinking that myself,” Ian said. He would have asked Hosea something to the effect of, Are you looking for a pat on the back?

  But it wasn’t wise to assume that nobody listening could speak English, not if he didn’t have to.

  As Branden del Branden had pointed out to him, assuming wasn’t always a good idea.

  As they crossed the saddle between peaks, Ian considered the steep slope on either side that vanished in the clouds below. It would be a long fall.

  He shook his head. It was just as well he wasn’t this Promised Warrior, it would take more than a prophecy—even if he believed in prophecy, something he would have said he didn’t a year ago—to make him want to cross this road under opposition, even assuming that he could have found his way up through the clouds to the road.

  The men of the Dominions were an awfully superstitious lot, if they were worried about an invasion through this route.

  But, no, that wasn’t it. Control the bottleneck, and nothing gets into the bottle without your permission. A tiny force could hold this road indefinitely against a huge invading army. It didn’t matter if you outnumbered your enemy ten-to-one, not if you could only confront him one-to-one, with his reinforcements coming from nearby, while your supplies and reserves had to follow you up a long trail.

  No, they weren’t afraid of an invasion on this route. For all Ian knew—and presumably for all they knew—a Hidden Way leading from, say, the Seat in Vandescard to the Dominions popped up in the Scion’s bathroom, and the Promised Warrior could at any moment and without the slightest of warnings lead a division of Vandestish swordsmen and archers up through His Altitude’s—or whatever they called him—bathtub.

  It was easy to make fun of that fear, at least within the confines of his own mind, but he understood how frightening an attack through a Hidden Way could be. There wasn’t anybody who remembered the Night of the Sons who wouldn’t empathize, and there wasn’t anybody who had taken his turn on duty at the cairn who would fail to understand, how even the possibility of such a thing could keep you up nights.

  As they rode into the cool darkness of the entrance tunnel, Ian glanced up, unsurprised to find that his eyes were still too dazzled from the outside brightness to make out the murder holes that were undoubtedly hidden there.

  Not that he tried hard to look; paying too much attention to the defenses of the Cities was probably something that somebody suspected of being the Promised Warrior would probably find it healthier—and would certainly find it more pleasant—not to be caught doing. And the easiest way not to be caught doing it was not to do it, after all. Even in the Byzantine politics of Tir Na Nog, there was a place for simple sincerity.

  A hundred yards or so inside, just past the first turn, a stone door blocked the way; a brass oblong, patinated with age, set chest-high in the middle of it. Branden del Branden dismounted momentarily and pounded a gloved fist against the brass.

  Thrummmmmm. The deep bass note rang through the tunnel.

  Ian nodded. Just like the knocking posts on the Thorsen house. Understandable, given that they’d been built by the same person.

  The stone door sank silently into the floor of the tunnel with no creaking of hinges or whirr of machinery, until the top of the easily two-foot-thick stone door was flush with the floor of the tunnel. Hosea built things to last.

  The tunnel, unsurprisingly, twisted and turned into the mountain, then doubled back on itself as it climbed steeply toward daylight, so steeply that Ian was afraid that one of the horses would slip and fall, sending the other people and animals behind it scattering like bowling pins. But somehow they kept their feet beneath them, and soon the slope became more shallow, and just when Ian’s eyes had finally adjusted to the darkness, the tunnel dumped them out on a courtyard, too brightly lit by the sun.

  The courtyard was about the size of a football field, except football fields were not typically surrounded by thirty-foot-high walls topped with bowmen in livery of sky blue—or any other color, for that matter.

  The walls were smooth and polished, canted ever-so-vaguely inward, and the hole they had come through was, as far as Ian could tell, the only way into or out of the courtyard.

  Okay, fine, he thought. You’ve brought us in through the high-security entrance, and I’m suitably impressed with your security.

  Ian didn’t believe for a moment that this was the only way in and out of the Old Keep. He had been shown the well-guarded front door, but that wasn’t the only one. If this was the only way in, the City couldn’t possibly survive.

  Yes, there surely were gardens on the slopes and piazzas of the City, and he had no doubt that herbs and fruits and vegetables were among the produce of those gardens. But the Cities didn’t feed themselves; they were fed by the peasant farmlands of the Middle Dominion, and he didn’t think it was possible that tons of food would be hauled up into this killing ground daily, to be lifted up and into the City proper.

  What was that old Yiddish word that Zayda Saul used to use for somebody who could get by on nothing, who seemed to be able to get his nourishment out of the air, like a human air fern?

  Airman—luftman, no: luftmensch, that was it. Luft-mensch.

  Ian had seen some healthy-looking—and some downright fat—people in Falias. He doubted that the Old Keep was populated solely by luftmenschen.

  Above his head, the sudden appearance of a skinny, almost skeletal-looking man made Ian doubt himself.

  “I am Darien del Darien, hereditary klaffvarer to the Scion,” he said, his voice echoing sharply off the polished walls. “I greet you on behalf of the Scion, Ian Silver Stone,” he said. His skull was naked of any hair, thin skin stretched tightly over a sharp-edged cranium. Long, bony fingers gripped the rail of the balustrade as he leaned out over the edge, and the heavy golden chain and medallion draped around his neck jingled not unpleasantly with his movements. “Do you come in peace?”

  No, a crippled old elf, a vestri, and a single swordsman are going to beat the shit out of an entire City, he thought, but he knew better than to actually say that. His sense of humor never had gone over well in Tir Na Nog.

  Or much of anywhere else, for that matter.

  “I do,” he said. Might as well get the rhinoceros in the corner out in the open. “I’ve heard it said that some think I’m the Vandestish Promised Warrior, foretold to lead invading hordes from Vandescard into the Cities, brushing aside the Crimson and Ancient Cerulean companies like so many draughts off a draughts board.

  “I swear to you that that is not so, that I am no such thing, and have no such intention.” He patted at Giantkiller’s hilt. In for a penny, in for a pound. “And I offer to anyone who doubts that the opportunity to prove it with his blood, or with mine.”

  Look, folks, he thought. Taking me up on this would be the sucker bet of all time, from your point of view. If I am this Promised
Warrior, you can’t beat me; and since I’m not—since I’m just simple Ian Silver Stone, who just got beaten by Branden del Branden in a short, first-blood affair—there’s no need to do it at all.

  “My brothers and companions of the Old Keep, hear me: I would think long and hard before challenging Ian Silver Stone.” Branden del Branden’s voice was louder and stronger than Ian had heard it before. “He could have easily beaten me in a small matter of honor, but he managed to lose while receiving a trivial wound, and still protecting himself from further injury. He may or may not be the Promised Warrior—this is something about which I say very little and know even less—but he is a fine swordsman, one trained by Thorian del Thorian the Elder himself. And he’s such a persuasive man that if the Scion himself hadn’t told me that he would likely do such a thing, I would have believed Ian Silver Stone’s claim that I had won by strength and skill.”

  Ian didn’t meet his eyes. Well, maybe he wasn’t so clever after all. Well, so much for that deception.

  Ian wasn’t sure whether or not he was looking forward to meeting this Scion, but it was going to be interesting. As, perhaps, in the old Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.”

  Darien del Darien beckoned with one skeletal finger, and a device that reminded Ian of an overly ornate window-washer’s scaffold was quickly set up and then lowered. Ian took his place on the platform next to Branden del Branden, and gripped the overhead strap. Hosea did the same, looking curiously like some sort of skinny New York subway strap-hanging commuter, while Valin, too short to reach even the lowest of the straps, clung tightly to Ian’s left arm.

  “You haven’t done this before?” Ian asked.

  The dwarf’s eyes were wide. “No.” Valin must have been intimidated: that was all he said.

  After days on the road, a hot bath was an almost obscenely pleasant luxury. In the Old Keep—or at least in the suite of rooms Ian and Hosea had been assigned—a tub was a concave circular depression in the bathroom floor, rimmed by a calf-high wall of polished marble, broad enough to sit on.