The Silver Stone

by Joel Rosenberg

  “Can’t even trust an old friend, can I?” Ivar del Hival was still breathing heavily. “So you let the young one tire me, and then move in for the kill? Very well; have at you.”

  As the two closed, Ian heard a choking sound.

  He turned. Hosea had risen from his chair, making a horrible gagging sound, his eyes vague and unfocused, his whole body twitching as though from an electric shock. He pitched forward to the grass, still twitching, his whole body spasming.

  Chapter Three

  Decisions

  Out of the corner of his eye Ian saw something tumbling through the air toward him; reflexively, he swatted at it, knocking the piece of metal Hosea had been working on to the ground.

  Ivar del Hival and Thorsen had stopped, and were standing openmouthed, but Doc Sherve was on his feet.

  “Shitshitshit,” he said. “Not again.” He pulled the lawn chair away from where Hosea was still twitching and knelt down, flipping him over easily.

  Again?

  “I need a hand here,” Doc said, ignoring the way a flailing arm sent the contents of his shirt pocket flying. “Karin!” Another spasm sent Hosea’s hand flying, loudly backhanding Doc across the face. Doc ignored it. Ivar del Hival, Thorian, and Ian surrounded Hosea, while Doc again called for Karin.

  There was no response from the house. When Karin was up in her office working on a buy order, she tuned out the rest of the world.

  Ian dropped to his knees next to Sherve. He reached out to grab at a flailing arm, then pulled his hand back. “What is it?”

  “Grand mal seizure,” Doc said, drawing a wrapped needle from his bag. “You’re going to have to hold his arm still. Thorian—over here.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to let somebody just have a seizure?” Ian said, feeling like an idiot as soon as the words were out of his mouth. If Doc was supposed to just let him have a seizure, he’d be letting him just have a seizure.

  “Well… it depends.” If Doc took offense, it didn’t show in his voice or his face. “You let it go, if you think it might resolve by itself. Which most usually do.” Doc managed to get hold of Hosea’s flailing arm long enough to rip the sleeve up to well above the elbow—Doc Sherve was stronger than he looked. “And if it does resolve by the time we get the saline going, then we’ll just leave well enough alone.” His lips were white. “Thorian, Ian. I’m going to say this just once. You’ll have to hold his arm absolutely still long enough for me to get the needle into the vein, and then tape it into place so I can get the drip started. After that, he can twitch as much as he wants—we’ll just keep him from jerking on the tubing.

  “Arnie, there’s a phone in my bag. Pick it up, punch the send button—just the send button, or you’ll have to dial the clinic from scratch—and tell Martha that Hosea’s having another grand mal, and I want a chopper in Grand Forks standing by if pushing Valium doesn’t work.”

  He shook his head, his hands never pausing in their quick, sure movements as he readied the syringe, then stuck it sideways in his mouth while he tied a rubber strap around Hosea’s upper arm.

  “Hell,” he said, from around the mouthful of plastic, “I can push enough Valium to shut any seizure down, but I don’t want to shut down his respiration while I’m at it, you know? Okay; grab tight—here goes.”

  Ian gripped Hosea’s hand at the wrist, while Thorsen, on the other side of Doc Sherve, grabbed his upper arm with one hand, using his free hand to block the way Hosea’s free arm was flailing away. It was frightening the way the old man was twitching, his muscles clenching and unclenching, his eyes all white, nothing but gasping breaths and horrid grunts issuing from his mouth.

  “It’s okay, Hosea. You’ll be just fine,” Doc said, wiping at a spot near the crook of Hosea’s elbow. “Got good veins.”

  Ian hated needles; he closed his eyes and turned his head away until Doc grunted and said, “Got it.”

  Ian opened his eyes. A crooked crisscross of surgical tape held a needle flush against Hosea’s arm. Ivar del Hival was standing over them, holding a plastic bag in his hands, and Doc had just finished connecting up a clear piece of tubing to it.

  He started the drip, and quickly loaded a syringe and injected it into the tube.

  “C’mon,” he said, “just take it easy.” Doc shook his head, muttered something under his breath, and filled the syringe again.

  Almost instantly, Hosea started to relax. Doc put on his stethoscope and listened to Hosea’s chest for a moment before he sat back, his breath coming out with a whoosh. He smiled. “Valium’s wonderful stuff,” he said, sticking the syringe point-first into the ground and reaching into his bag for another one. When he spoke again, his voice seemed more calm than controlled. “Which gives us about five, maybe ten minutes to push some Tegretol and see if that will keep things nice and quiet.” He filled the new syringe, injected the drip bag, and frowned while he recapped the needle. His lips moved as though he was doing a quick calculation, then he adjusted the drip to a faster pace. “Okay, Arnie,” he called out over his shoulder, “you can tell Martha that we’ll be fine, at least for now; she can cancel the chopper.”

  He pulled the used syringe out of the ground, recapped the needle, and dropped both syringes into the coat pocket where he kept his garbage.

  Arnie brought the handset over to Doc. “She wants to talk to you.”

  “Hi, honey,” Doc said, lifting his shoulder, trapping the phone between his shoulder and the side of his head so he could keep his hands free. “I’d like you to get your nicely rounded bottom down to the lab; I’ll be sending Arnie Selmo in with some blood—yes, blood levels, CBC, and liver function, for a starter, and dig out his chart. If you find anything else we haven’t taken a look at recently, run it, too,” he said, his eyes never leaving his patient or his gear. “Thorian, Ivar—stretcher in my car, and a metal stand for the drip—bring that here, and let’s get him inside.” He listened to the phone for a moment more, then bit his lip. “Yes, I know. But we do the best we can.”

  Supper had been a catch-as-catch-can buffet—leftover stew, sandwiches made from still-warm home-baked bread and paper-thin slices of salty ham from the pantry, some wonderfully garlicky potted goose, all washed down with pop and beer, then finished off with cups and cups of the local traditionally weak coffee and fresh coffee cake that had the whole house smelling of cinnamon—which had seemed to embarrass Karin Thorsen, although Ian couldn’t see why.

  It was fully eight o’clock before everybody had finished, and the dishwasher was loaded, and Ian could take an after-supper cup of decaf—for some reason, the locals brewed their decaf strong—out into the back yard.

  Above, the sky was black as the oily surface of the coffee in his cup, scattered with stars as white as diamonds. He stepped out, away from the light of the house, until he moved out of the range of the motion sensor for the outdoor lights. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust, and he could make out the Milky Way. You never saw that in the city. Too much light pollution and probably too much air pollution.

  One of the stars seemed to be moving, slowly, and Ian’s sense of direction spun for a moment until he figured it was moving from northwest to southeast.

  A satellite. You couldn’t see those in the city, either. Wrong time of year, but every once in a while there was a meteor shower out here, too.

  He sniffed the night air. Yes, there was a trace of skunk off somewhere in the distance, but that wasn’t an unpleasant smell, not when it was this faint. It was kind of nice, actually.

  The patio door slid open, and then closed, and Karin Thorsen stepped out into the darkness, her eyes searching for a moment until they locked on his.

  “Ian—oh. I didn’t see you for a moment.” She took a few, tentative steps toward him, then stopped. The breeze brought the smells of Ivory soap and Obsession to him.

  “Everything okay?” he asked.

  She nodded. “Thorian says he’d like to see you in the basement in half an hour or so. Hosea took a little sou
p, and Martha Sherve’s going to sit up with him tonight,” she said. “Bob’s talking about sending him into Grand Forks for some more tests in a few days, but—” She shrugged. “You know Hosea. He doesn’t want to be handled by strangers.”

  “How long?”

  “How long what?”

  “How long has this been going on?”

  She shook her head. “He hadn’t had a seizure for ten years, not until… recently,” she said, “although he’s been on phenobarbital as long as I can remember.” She tapped the side of her head. “He has some brain damage.”

  Ian’s lips tightened. “I figured that out the day I met him,” he said, remembering the slight slurring of words, the limp, the awkward way Hosea held his right hand. “I didn’t know about the epilepsy. It’s been worse since we got back from Tir Na Nog,” he said, not really asking.

  “Yes.”

  It figured. Hosea had quite deliberately damaged part of his brain. It had been clever and subtle and all, and Ian had admired his cold-bloodedness—although, as it turned out, Hosea would have been better off trusting in Ian’s sword arm. This time.

  “What’s Doc Sherve say?”

  “Say?” She smiled. “Mostly he doesn’t say. Mostly he swears. Hosea has always been a problem for him.”

  Ian had heard the door opening and closing again, but hadn’t thought that it would be Doc, Ivar del Hival with him.

  “I thought you went home,” he said.

  “Just about to,” Doc Sherve said. “Figured I’d give you an attaboy for helping out this afternoon. You did good, kid.”

  Ian didn’t know what to say. He hadn’t been told that a whole lot. “Thanks,” he finally said.

  Sherve produced a fat cigar from an inside pocket and unwrapped it with stubby fingers. “Do as I say, not as I do,” he said, then bit off the end while he lit an old-fashioned kitchen match against the sole of his shoe. He puffed the foul-smelling cigar to life and considered the glowing coal at its tip. “And yeah, he’s a problem.” Cigar clamped in his teeth, he held out a hand and started ticking off fingers. “Normal body temperature runs just over ninety-six degrees. Resting heartbeat of forty-five, forty-six beats per minute, blood pressure one-ninety over thirty, which should make him a candidate for all sorts of problems, except that it seems natural for him, and on his stress test, his heart goes to one-twenty and his systolic pressure drops.” The doctor spoke heatedly, in contrast to his words. It was like he was swearing, not just talking. “Liver enzymes are just about nonexistent, and his white cell count says that he has acute myelocytic leukemia, but there’s no enlarged liver or spleen or lymph nodes, he doesn’t hemorrhage, and in fact when he’s cut he heals quickly, he’s not weak, and he simply doesn’t get infections, ever. Plus, he has neither an appendix nor an appendix scar—”

  “Doc—”

  “Shush. I’m not done. He has no appendix scar—nor an appendix, I was saying. Which is something I found during a contrast study I did a few years ago, which shows a gut that goes seamlessly, smoothly from small intestine to large intestine via some transitional structure I’m going to call a middle intestine—

  God knows what it does; I sure as hell don’t. His bowel manifests what appear to be diverticula, even though there’re no symptoms of either diverticulitis or diverticulosis.“ He sighed. ”And then there’s his brain. CT scan and MRI show literally dozens of damage sights—seizure foci—enough that he should be having seizures almost constantly, but until recently we’ve been able to keep him incredibly stable for years with a pathetically small regular dose of phenobarb, and I understand that when you were traipsing about Tir Na Nog,“ he said, ”he did without his medicine without any difficulty at all.“ He nodded. ”So yeah, he’s a problem.“ Sherve puffed angrily at his cigar, the smoke immediately shattered and carried away in the breeze.

  Ivar del Hival shrugged. “I do not see why you’re angry, Doctor. That Orfindel should be different from humans is unsurprising. He’s one of the Old Ones, after all. They’re no more human than the Vestri are, true enough. But why should this anger you?”

  “Because,” Sherve said, “I’m pretty good at what I do, and usually I’m very good at not worrying about what I can’t do. Didn’t bother me one bit when I used to tell Otter Larsen that if he didn’t stop drinking his liver would give up on him, which it did, and it didn’t bother me one whit that when Ephie Selmo’s cancer was killing her slowly all I could do was make the pain go away, because I could do that. I don’t care if the best thing I can do for where his stump chafes Davy Larsen is tell him to rub some Eucerine on it.” He pointed with the cigar. “Because all of that makes sense to somebody, and when it doesn’t make sense to me, I can refer it to some specialist in Grand Forks or even the Mayo if I have to. But the most Hosea will do is let me run a few tests for me to look at, and I don’t have the slightest idea what to do. Operate? On what? His brain? And do what? Should I give him more meds?” He puffed on his cigar. “What I’d like to do is some combination therapy—maybe find the right mixture of Oilantin and Tegretol and some of the new drugs and hope that will keep him stable, but that’s a job for a specialist, and I don’t think there’s any specialists in the Midwest with a lot of experience with a lot of Old Ones.”

  “All that is true, surely.” Ivar del Hival nodded. “But that’s not why you’re upset.”

  Doc muttered something unintelligible. “It’s getting worse. No physical change I can find, but more and more his seizure pattern is moving toward the way his tests say it ought to be, and it ought to be real, real bad.” He spread his hands. “But there’s nothing different I can detect—just about every test I run on him comes back with an anomaly, but they’re the same damn anomalies that he’s always had. The only thing that’s changing are his seizures, and they just keep getting worse. And I don’t have any bright ideas. Yeah, I could have called in a chopper from Grand Forks today—and I would have, if we couldn’t have shut down his seizure—but I don’t know that they’d be able to do anything, either.”

  Karin was pointedly looking away.

  Ian sighed. So, this was why she wanted him back early.

  Well, what did you expect? That she was going to bring you back so you and she could have an affair under her husband’s roof?

  No. She’d brought him back to Do Something. And he knew as well as she did what that was.

  “There is another choice,” Ivar del Hival said. “I don’t think a vestri chirurgeon could do much for him, although that’s always a possibility. But it’s one thing to lick wounds, and another to pry open a head and stir the brains around until he’s well. Still, his powers are probably still greater in Tir Na Nog, and that might be enough.”

  And there was more that could be done in Tir Na Nog. Hosea had a couple of friends at Harbard’s Crossing, Ian thought, and both of them had a talent for healing.

  Harbard and Frida, they were called. Odin and Freya, they were. Freya in particular had a healing touch; she had healed Hosea of the damage a köld had done to him, and she had healed Ian of the wear and tear that dragging an injured Hosea down the mountain had done to him. Perhaps it was her touch that had kept Hosea well in Tir Na Nog, and if so, likely it could again.

  Ian rubbed at the palms of his hands. Dragging the sledge had left his hands not merely blistered, but bloodied and infected, and overnight she had brought him back to health, leaving no wounds, no scars behind.

  “Makes my hands sweat, too, just at the thought of it,” Ivar del Hival said. “I’d just as soon stay here until things settle down at home, and if I’m not going to stay here, I’d as soon go home. I wouldn’t want His Warmth to think my villages can run themselves forever, and if I’m not going to run them forever, I need a new wife and enough time to produce a son or two.” He made a face. “But I could take him with me, and see if the air and soil of Tir Na Nog works a miracle or two. It has before, and no doubt it shall again.”

  Ian liked Ivar del Hival; he couldn’t help it.
The larger man’s loud laugh and easy, good-natured smile were infectious, and Ian appreciated, more than a little, the lessons in hand-to-hand and bowmanship that Ivar del Hival had insisted ought to supplement Thorian Thorsen’s instruction in swordmanship.

  But that was one thing. Leaving Orfindel in his hands was too much trust Hosea’s damage might have made himself less of a prize than he had been, but what if somebody didn’t believe him? And what if his value wasn’t zero? More than once, Hosea had been locked in a dungeon, imprisoned and tortured for the secrets he held, and Ian couldn’t risk that again.

  “It has to be me,” he said, quietly. “Harbard and Frida wouldn’t likely take to being disturbed by somebody they don’t know.”

  Karin Thorsen’s face was steady. “You were talking about going back, anyway.”

  Yes, he had been. Heading out on the road in search of another of the Brisingamen jewels, figuring that the trip was worth it, even if he never found what he was looking for. He had been expecting Torrie Thorsen to partner him, though. Torrie wasn’t just better at freestyle—dueling—swordplay than Ian was; he was trustworthy in a way that Ivar del Hival never would be. Want to know Torrie’s motives for something? Ask him, and he’d tell you. Ian liked that. Simple didn’t mean stupid, but it did mean trustworthy, sometimes.

  And then there was the matter of her. Ian shook his head. “I’ll have to think about it,” he said.

  Sherve frowned. “Don’t take too long.”

  Thorian Thorsen was waiting for him down in the fencing studio in the basement. “Good to see you back, Ian,” he said, gesturing at the hooks and pegs where Ian’s practice gear waited. “Take down your epée and let us try a little freestyle.”

  “But—”

  “But nothing, young Silverstein.” The older man’s smile probably would have seemed friendly, if it wasn’t for the scar that snaked down the right side of his face almost to the corner of his mouth. As it was, it seemed distant, possibly threatening. “Robert Sherve can watch over him better than can you or I, and the best thing for Hosea right now is rest.” He held out a hand, palm upwards, blunt fingers spread wide. “The best thing for you now is practice.”