The Crimson Sky

by Joel Rosenberg

  “A lot,” Ian said. “Rather a lot.” He gestured toward the cottage. “Is she at home?”

  “No, not at the moment.” Arnie shook his head. “She left this morning, looking for some meat.” He smacked his lips. “Spit-roasted deer tenderloin, with hot applesauce … wonderful stuff. She’s picky—I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s back tonight, but I wouldn’t be worried if it’s a few days.” He shook his head. “She’s not accustomed to answering for her comings and goings, to me or anybody else.”

  “That bother you?”

  “Nah. It’s different than—it just takes some getting used to, that’s all.” Arnie clapped a hand to Ian’s shoulder. “Come on into the cottage. I’ve got a pot of stew on, and it’s really pretty good.” He raised an eyebrow. “You wouldn’t happen to have any coffee with you?”

  Ian smiled. “Oh, just a couple of pounds—present from Hosea. You have a coffee grinder?”

  “Sure. Fully electric, and all—sure.” Arnie laughed. “They don’t exactly stock those here. But, shit, boy, I was a pharmacist before you were born, and I do have a mortar and pestle, and a strong arm. I—” his head jerked to one side, and he took a step away from Ian while his right hand reached out; in instant response a gray blur streaked from the door to whap! itself firmly into his palm, and Arnie had Mjolnir in his grasp.

  Ian already had Giantkiller out, turning his back on Arnie, his eyes scanning the tree line, and then the sky. “What—where?”

  But there was nothing resembling a threat, unless you counted Valin, who at Arnie’s motion had dropped to the ground, scurrying on his belly toward the brush by the side of the trail.

  “Stand easy, boy,” Arnie said. “It’s okay. I’m just a bit jumpy, I guess. Glad I remembered to leave Mjolnir in the doorway—wouldn’t want to have to fix a hole in the front wall again.” You wouldn’t think that Arnie’s skinny arm could even lift that heavy warhammer, much less gesture idly with it, as Arnie pointed down the trail.

  Ian turned.

  “It’s just Munin.”

  At the mention of his name, the bird swooped up from behind the tree line, wings pounding the air, something small and wriggling in its talons.

  “Your friend seems to be a bit skittery,” Arnie said, smiling.

  Valin had courage when it counted, but he was perfectly willing to abandon it when it didn’t, and Ian didn’t blame him one little bit. Munin banked steeply, circling over the patch of brush, searching for Valin.

  “Just leave him be,” Ian called out. “He’ll come out when he’s ready.”

  “Your friend skulks and twists and squirms through the brush,” the raven said, taking one last cartwheel through the sky before flapping down for a landing. “I just wanted to ask of him, ‘what is the rush?’ ”

  By the time the huge raven landed in front of him, the wriggling had stopped, and what turned out to be a rat the size of a small puppy was no longer wriggling. Munin ate it in two quick bites, then waddled forward, and it was all that Ian could do to force himself to sheath Giantkiller.

  Munin gave him the fucking willies.

  Yes, it was a magnificent creature in its way, its feathers glossy as though freshly oiled, its beak black as the night and its eyes penetrating and unblinking. But as the raven ruffled its wing feathers and pecked at something beneath, a tiny pink worm of rat entrails hung down from the side of its beak, and that made Ian’s stomach twist even more than the way the raven looked at him did.

  “What is the problem, I hesitate to ask,” the bird said, cocking its head to one side, as it stared at Ian out of a cold, unblinking eye. “For you know that I’m helpful, no matter the task.”

  “Good,” Arnie said with a nod. “Then go find her and tell her that we have company, while I settle that company in. We’ve much to talk about, it seems,” he said.

  “If you could flap your arms as much as you talk, you could take to the sky and would never need walk,” Munin said as it ruffled its feathers. Then, with a loud beating of wings that drove so much dust and grit into the air that Ian had to cover his eyes with his hand, the raven leaped into the air and flapped away, climbing high into the sky before it headed off.

  Arnie watched the bird until it was out of sight.

  He turned to Ian. “Let’s see about making some of that coffee, eh?”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  Arnie sniffed the air.

  “Winter’s coming,” he said.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Arnie And Freya

  There had been some changes in the cottage, as well as in Arnie. The sleeping frame in the corner had been replaced by a rough-hewn bed with a massive headboard that showed the markings and divots of somebody roughing out a carving, even though the headboard was in use: it held a ticked mattress supported by woven leather straps. The rich, glossy furs were gone, replaced by a stack of fluffy comforters that would have looked like something out of an LL Bean catalog if the stitching hadn’t been a little crude and the color hadn’t been a blotchy off-white.

  Over in the cooking area next to the cast-iron stove, what appeared to be a simple iron-handled pump hung out from the side of the wall, over the water barrel.

  “I bet Valin’s going to bring up some river water, anyway,” Ian said.

  “If he wants to, I don’t mind. Carrying water up from the river never seemed to bother her, either—I just got tired of watching her balancing a huge barrel on either hand and walking up the road.”

  On the wall, where the trio of brass hands had supported Gungnir, a long wooden bow hung—probably Arnie’s; the hooks that had held Freya’s bow and quiver were empty.

  The biggest change was in what was missing. Of the dozen or more wooden footlockers that had crowded the small cottage, only three were left.

  The walls were surprisingly bare: the shelves that had stuck out from every free square foot of wall space were almost all gone, along with their collection of strange little mementos that had reminded Ian of his Zayda Sol’s collection of crystal carvings and little brass bells. It had never looked much like Ephie Selmo’s living room, but now it looked even less so.

  The walls had been plastered, and only the irregularity of the rippling indicated that they were made of logs, interlocked like a giant set of Lincoln Logs.

  The oval mirror remained, set high on the wall, angled slightly down. Just slightly, though.

  Arnie frowned at the way the cast-iron pot was boiling too hard on the stove, and he used a thick leather glove to move it to the burn-scorched counter. He tasted it with a long-handled wooden spoon. “Hmmm … a bit bland, still. You mind chopping some onions for me, Ian?” he asked, gesturing at the wicker basket mounted to the wall.

  “No problem.”

  “About two cups’ worth, more or less?”

  “Sure.”

  The cutting board was a slice of tree-trunk, two feet across, held fast by a quartet of wooden pegs, their tops flattened by the pounding of something. And the kitchen knife would have looked unremarkable in a kitchen back home, save for the fact that it was a little thicker and heavier than Ian was used to.

  “How fine you want them chopped?”

  “Fine as you feel like.”

  The onions were small and pale, barely more than bulbous scallions, and when Ian had finished trimming them to size and lined them up and began to chop in earnest, they quickly set his nose running, and brought tears to his eyes, and then to Arnie’s, and after Arnie swept the onions from the cutting board to a wooden bowl and then dumped them into the pot, the two of them, laughing and crying at the same time, fled from the cottage, out into the fresh air.

  “Damn, boy, but you didn’t have to chop them that fine,” Arnie said, as he removed the wooden lid from the water barrel on the porch, then dippered out a quick splash first for Ian’s face, and then for his own.

  “Point made,” Ian said. He shook his head to clear the water from his eyes—rubbing onion-tearing eyes with the hands you’d been usi
ng to handle the onions was like putting out a fire with gasoline—then blinked, hard.

  Well, that was a little better. “Then again,” Ian said, “you might mention that the wild onions hereabouts are as sharp and biting as a good knife.”

  Arnie took another drenching from the water barrel, then lowered himself carefully into one of the pair of rough-hewn wooden chairs, gesturing at Ian to take the other. “Where’s that dwarf of yours?”

  “He’s not mine,” Ian said. “He’s from a farming village near the south border. His family got word that Sons had been sent after the Thorsens—”

  “How?”

  Ian shrugged. “Who knows? Sons have vestri servants in their warrens, and you know that the vestri listen more than they talk. But the word was passed, until it reached his village that the blood of the Friend of the Father of Vestri was being sought, and somebody there knew of one of those hidden entrances into Falias …”

  Arnie nodded. “And the vestri there have known of the Hidden Way that leads to Hardwood since at least the Night of the Sons, eh?”

  “At least. They smuggled him in, he says.” Ian nodded. “He got caught and half-killed by a guard slipping into the passage, but vestri are stubborn, and he managed to make it down the passage and into the Hidden Way before he quite passed out. Next thing he knows, he’s waking up on an operating table, with Doc Sherve trying to patch him together…”

  Arnie frowned. “You don’t know who originally sent the dogs?” His mouth was tight, and the years showed in his face. Arnie had taken a bad mauling on the Night of the Sons, trying to keep them from dragging Maggie and Karin off into the night. And he and Ole had nailed the three who had chased the Thorsens and Maggie back to Hardwood.

  He didn’t like the dogs any more than Ian did.

  Ian shook his head. “Not these. Herolf says that it’s not the Northern Pack—”

  “And Sons never lie.”

  “Well, of course they do. But the Scion says that he’s had no word of this—”

  “And rulers never lie.”

  “Arnie …” Ian wanted to swear. That wasn’t the fucking point. Finding out who was responsible was important, but it could wait. You had to take first things first, and the first thing right here and now was to get the Scion committed to protecting the Thorsens—and among other things, that meant keeping the Scion alive. If the Sons had been sent by the House of Fire again, the Scion could deal with it far better than Ian could.

  And if it turned out, later on, that the Scion or his klaffvarer had, indeed, been behind this, that could be dealt with, later on.

  If it turned out, later on, that the Scion had played on Ian’s envy of the affection a good father had for his son, well… that, too, would be dealt with.

  Ian said as much. “So I’ve got to assume that the Thorsens can handle this Son, but…”

  “But there could be others.” Arnie shook his head. “No, if Thorsen blood is really what they’re after, there will be others. Maybe this Scion’s influence can persuade whoever it is to, well…,” he brightened, for just a moment, “call off the dogs.”

  “Okay,” Arnie said, after a long time, “but what if this is just a ploy? What if this whole thing is just the Sons and the Dominions scheming to get their hands on one of the Brisingamen jewels? I mean, even if this curse is real, even if they had nothing to do with sending the Sons after the Thorsens—once you’ve brought the jewel to the Old Keep, why would they want to let go of it? Just because they promised?” He made a face. “This is Tir Na Nog, Ian, not Hardwood. You never heard of a politician breaking his word?“

  “Not to me,” Ian said. “Not here. Not now.”

  “What makes you so damn special?” Arnie asked. “Here and now?”

  “I’ve got a friend,” Ian said, “who could, if he got angry enough, shatter the walls of the Old Keep, and bring it down around their necks like a house of cards,” he said.

  Arnie smiled. “You’ve got something else,” he said.

  “Oh?”

  “You’ve got a point, Ian.” He clapped a hand to Ian’s shoulder. “Go down to the river and drag that dwarf of yours back up here. Supper’s ready, and for once I’ve got an appetite.”

  Dinner was over. The stew had been surprisingly good, and the apples from the applecellar under the cottage had been, as Ian had expected, remarkable—the skin crunchy, the slightly yellow flesh beneath sweet and tart and crisp. Ian’s boots were airing out on the porch outside. It was nice to have had a chance to take those heavy things off and wash his feet, and the sneakers were an almost suspiciously sensual luxury at the end of a long day on the road.

  Food, rest, dry feet… and coffee.

  Arnie had improvised a way to make coffee. He’d ground the beans with a mortar and pestle—and a grin at Ian’s comment about how he probably hadn’t used a mortar and pestle since pharmacy school. He’d dumped the grounds in a cast-iron pot he had let warm on the stove, and had poured boiling water over the grounds, had let them steep for a few minutes, and then had filtered the grounds through a double fold of white linen that Valin had scurried out the door to wash down at the river.

  Arnie took his first sip, and broke out in a smile that dropped a dozen years off his face. “Damn, but that’s good,” he said. “It’s—”

  There was a thumping outside. Three, then two. “It’s her,” Arnie said, as he set down his cup of coffee and rose to his feet.

  Ian followed him outside and closed the door gently behind them.

  The only light in the cottage had been a trio of lanterns and the flames in the hearth, and Ian had thought of it as dark by the standard he always used—it was too dark to read—but the night outside was black as pitch, black in the quiet, out-in-the-country, middle-of-the-night sort of way that had frightened Ian the first time he had encountered it, and still gave him a chill that had nothing to do with the cold breeze blowing from the west.

  This kind of blackness made you understand why men had always feared the night, why they thought of it as a black beast to be chased away with fire and defended from by a huddling together, and for just a moment, it was all Ian could do to stop himself from running back into the light and the warmth.

  Light flared, harsh and bright, as Arnie, now well away from the porch and its flammable roof, lit a torch—how, Ian didn’t see.

  The flame of the torch flickered and crackled, and Freya stepped out of the darkness and into its light, the limp form of a small deer balanced easily with one hand over her shoulders. “Hello, my Silver Stone,” she said, her voice still holding that curious lilt that sounded vaguely Scandinavian. “I was wondering who brought the coffee.”

  She brushed away Ian’s gestured offer to help with the deer, and hung it by the bound-together hind legs from a peg at the corner of the porch. She had field-dressed it, but perhaps hadn’t let it fully bleed out before she had shouldered it for the walk home; her left shoulder and side gleamed with blood, glossy and black in the dark.

  Freya was solidly muscled, but not in any way masculine in that, her legs long and strong and well-defined, but not bulging as though swollen—Rachel McLish, not a female Arnie Schwarzenegger.

  Looking at her still made it hard to breathe, although now there were laugh lines around the corners of her eyes and the edges of her smile, and perhaps her chin was not as firm as it had been, and her waist, while still slim, had thickened some, and while she had nothing that resembled a potbelly, it was no longer flat like a bodybuilder’s, but gently rounded.

  She could no longer have passed for a girl in her teens or early twenties, but Ian found that, if anything, more erotic. It seemed more honest, somehow, even though he was sure that the only reason she had taken on a more mature appearance was to make Arnie feel more comfortable, rather than because she had to.

  “I’d best wash myself before I come into the cottage,” she said, unbuckling her heavy belt. She dropped the belt onto the porch, then reached into the deer’s body cavity and retr
ieved the hunting knife she had presumably used to field-dress it. Presumably, she didn’t want to put it back in its sheath until it was cleaned.

  Her fingers toyed for a moment with the hem of her shift, as though preparing to pull it up and over her head.

  And then she dashed off into the dark, making it clear with a smile tossed over her shoulder that the hem of the shift hadn’t been the only thing she had been toying with.

  Arnie was already looking over the deer in the light of the torch. “Nice little doe,” he said. “A few steaks will go well on the road, eh? We can do a quick butchering in the morning, assuming she can retrieve the gem tonight and we can leave then.” He looked up. “That okay with you?”

  “Hey, it’s not like I’m in charge or anything.” Ian tapped Harbard’s ring against Giantkiller’s hilt. “I’m a guy with ring and a sword; you’re the fellow with Mjolnir.”

  “Which only means I can pound things real hard, and that’s all, Ian. If you’re not in charge, I don’t know who is. I’m just hired muscle.” His grin was wolfish in the flickering light. “Shit, boy, I was once one of Harry Truman’s hired killers, but I haven’t been hired muscle ever before,” he said, “and it kind of grows on you. You can look to me for advice, but I’m just along for the ride.”

  “I’ll remember that.”

  “You’d better,” Arnie said, his voice sharp, cracked around the edges. “I’m too damned old to be running anything, Ian.” The smile dropped, and the years hung heavily on his rounded shoulders. “You keep telling me how good I look, but don’t make too much of that. Freya’s been good to me,“ he said, quietly, ”and she’s been good for me. But she’s not my Ephie. I’d trade it all and everything else I’ve ever had for another good hour with her, and know I’d gotten the better of the deal. There isn’t a day goes by …“ he shook his head. ”Some things you never get over, eh?“

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Yeah.” His voice caught. “Give me half a second, eh?”

  “Sure.”

  When Arnie spoke again, his voice was calm and easy, no trace of the restrained tears of just a few moments before. “You probably should hang on to this for a minute,” he said, as he handed the torch to Ian, “while I go inside and get Freya some clothes.” He clucked his tongue as he walked away, shaking his head and chuckling. “They never do outgrow being cockteasers, do they?”