The Silver Stone

by Joel Rosenberg

  Thorsen was dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, thick white socks cushioning the sneakers he seemed to prefer for sword practice. He dropped to a mat and launched into a series of stretches, and after a moment, Ian stripped off his own clothes to slip on a fresh jockstrap that smelled of chlorine—the damn things were an invitation to crotch rot if you didn’t bleach them regularly—and then pull on a faded pair of walking shorts and a tattered T-shirt that read I Know That Shit Rolls Downhill on the front, and But Why Do I Always Have to Live in the Valley? on the back.

  He took his time with his own stretches. If there was enough time to practice, there was enough time to stretch. Better to hurt a little for a moment now than to pull something.

  Thorsen was waiting impatiently by the time Ian stood up and reached for his gear. “You would think that someone who wants to make the sword his profession would want to ready himself quickly for a lesson,” he said.

  He was like that, which always surprised Ian. It couldn’t be his dueling training—a House of Steel duelist could spend days priming himself for an important duel, if he had to, and didn’t need to sweat the minutes.

  Ian put on his fencing jacket and trousers over the shorts and T-shirt, but left the gloves on a table. The new practice epée Hosea had made for him had exactly the same grip as Giantkiller, and even at the risk of injury to his hand or—much more likely—wrist, Ian found that he liked the feel of it against his hand.

  After lacing on his shoes, Ian took the epée down from its pegs on the wall. Gripping it brought a little chill to him, but it wasn’t unpleasant.

  Ian came to attention. He brought his epée up in a salute, quickly dropping his mask into place and bringing his point down and then back up when Thorsen charged, not bothering to mask himself.

  Fuck you, Master Thorian, he thought, simultaneously deciding that he couldn’t—No, that wasn’t true. He wouldn’t—take it easy on Thorsen just because the older man had refused to put his mask on. But Ian wasn’t willing to blind him over a practice point or two.

  They closed, and Ian started his favorite move, beating sixte, breaking it off to drop into a low lunge on the second sweep that went right past Thorsen’s epée to score with a touch on the calf, then beat the older man’s riposte aside as he retreated.

  Thorsen grinned. “Nicely done,” he said. “I was expecting you to try to begin with a beat, and you fooled me nicely.” His voice was level and unaccentuated, although all the while he was probing for a weakness in Ian’s defense, their blades ticking against each other with a rhythm that was almost musical for a moment, until Thorsen launched an attack on a downbeat that scored with a touch high on Ian’s sword arm, just before a thrust of Ian’s sword caught him on the left cheek before parrying Thorsen’s blade.

  That brought a grunt of pain from Thorsen, and Ian hesitated just a moment, a moment too long, as Thorsen redoubled his attack on Ian’s blade, beating it aside, leaving Ian open from head to toe, off balance, unable to get a leg behind him to retreat on.

  As Thorsen’s blade snaked in for a touch on Ian’s chest, Ian tried a last-ditch maneuver that had worked once before: he pushed himself backward, letting his feet slide out from him, and while it didn’t stop Thorsen’s blade from scoring with a hard slap against Ian’s chest, right over his heart, as Ian’s back slapped hard enough against the floor to knock the wind almost out of him, it did enable Ian to bring his own sword into line enough that Thorsen would have impaled himself on it if he hadn’t halted his advance.

  “A nice try,” Thorsen said, setting his own sword down before he stooped to offer Ian a hand up. “I would have thought you’d be out of practice from your vacation, but if these old eyes don’t mislead me, you’ve been working out—perhaps with a saber player?”

  Ian smiled as he accepted the older man’s hand. It was stronger than his would ever be, the wrist muscles thick and powerful, even for a fencer, but Thorsen’s grip was only firm enough to help Ian to his feet, nothing more.

  “I found a fencing club in Basseterre, played a few bouts,” Ian said, as he pulled off his mask.

  “I take it you didn’t try to teach them freestyle,” Thorsen said.

  “True enough,” Ian said, reclaiming his sword. He drew himself up. “Shall we begin again, this time with both of us masked?” A red weal was growing on Thorsen’s cheek where Ian’s blade had caught him. Had it been Giantkiller in Ian’s hands, it would have cut him to the cheekbone, almost matching the scar on the right side of Thorsen’s cheek.

  “As you will.”

  Ian forced himself to settle down, but he won only one of the next few points, and Thorsen settled into teacher mode, forcing Ian to go over and over the bout in slow motion, move by move, stopping over and over to go over alternatives, and alternatives to the alternatives.

  Thorsen faulted him constantly for a foot that was slightly out of line, a sweep that started an eyeblink too late or too eagerly, a moment of lost balance.

  What Thorsen called “freestyle” in English translated literally to “strategy” in Bersmal. It was basically a continuous bout, with saber scoring on epée targets, and a prohibition on scoring a follow-up point immediately after scoring a point, emphasizing the necessity of protecting yourself even after you’d landed a blow.

  Each formal style of fencing had evolved in its own way from dueling—foil from one-blow bouts by men who would not be satisfied with simply drawing blood; epée from a gentler era, when most duels ended at the first blood, and any touch would do. Freestyle—strategy—had evolved first to hone the swordfighting skills that had made Middle Dominion warriors famous from one end of Tir Na Nog to another, and later from the bouts that men used to settle matters of law and honor in the Five Cities, in which any cut might well serve to slow an opponent down, to force him to bleed or surrender, and in which nobody would stop simply because he noticed his blood on another’s sword.

  But each style had its own flaws as a model of a real fight, and Ian thought he had worked out one of freestyle’s. Best to save it for now. Besides, the older man had him in a sweat.

  “I want to go with you,” Thorian said. “Let it be me, instead of my son.”

  “With me?”

  “It’s clear that you’re going to have to be the one to take Hosea. At least, it’s been clear to him for some time, and to my wife for longer. You are welcome in … Harbard’s house, and that may not be true of others, and would certainly not be true of me.”

  “Oh?” And what would Thorsen get out of it? Ah. Of course: he would be protecting his son.

  “I’ll not mislead you, Ian. I might well be of use, but not with Harbard any more than in the Dominions. I’m a forsworn man, Ian, and as crafty and devious as he is, the One-Eyed is known to have no use for men of such little honor. Young warriors find more of his admiration. Or are his preference, depending on how you look at it.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Ian said. “Let’s see if we hear from Torrie over the next few days.” He furrowed his brow. “Wait a minute. I’ve got an idea.”

  “Oh?” Thorsen’s brow furrowed.

  “Torrie uses a credit card when he travels, doesn’t he? American Express Gold, right?”

  Thorsen shrugged. That was a matter of money and finance, and by his raising and inclination, money and finance were women’s work, and while not exactly beneath a man, sort of to one side of what he should notice. “That could be; if I wanted to know, I would ask my wife.”

  “Yeah.” Ian nodded. “I think I will. Ask your wife, that is.”

  Thorsen shrugged again. “As you wish.”

  Ian found her in the kitchen, emptying the dishwasher.

  It was Friday, which meant by the idiosyncratic Thorsen house schedule it was Hosea’s turn to handle the cleanup, but the Thorsen house rules were flexible enough to handle a problem much less serious than Hosea being in bed recovering from a seizure.

  “I need Torrie’s Amex card number,” he said.

  Karin smil
ed at him. “You’re welcome to borrow mine, if you don’t have an American Express card—but, no, you do have an American Express card; I set it up for you myself.”

  Ian was grinning from ear to ear. “No, I don’t want to charge anything to him. I think I can use it to find out where he is.”

  He was surprised to find her smile fade, and see her hesitate, just a moment. “I’ll go upstairs and see if I can get it for you.”

  Ian set the phone gently on the cradle, and sat back in the overstuffed chair in Arnie’s living room. Gently, gently; that was one of the rules: you controlled your own anger. It was yours, and not to be anybody else’s problem. If you didn’t start beating up on objects when you were frustrated, you would not end up beating on people.

  Still, it was goddamn frustrating.

  Arnie Selmo was in a pair of ragged-cuffed pajamas and an ancient plaid bathrobe. His slippers made flippity-flop sounds as he walked out of the kitchen with a pair of tall glasses. Ice cubes gently clinked as he set one down carefully on a doily on the table at Ian’s elbow.

  “Thanks, Arnie,” Ian said, taking a sip. Rich and fruity, but with a familiar tang—“Red Zinger?”

  The old man’s lined face split in a smile. “And who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks? Makes a nice iced tea, and at my age, I can live without caffeine.” Arnie lowered himself into an overstuffed armchair. “Any luck?”

  “Nothing.” Ian shook his head. “That’s the trouble with the Eurailpass. They could be anywhere from Lisbon to Bucharest, and I don’t have any way of finding them. Karin says she last heard from them in Paris, but I checked with the hotel they were at, and they left more than a week ago, and they’re not due home for another three weeks.” He frowned. “I’m surprised that Torrie would leave at all with Hosea in such shape.”

  “He wouldn’t. Not a chance. Torrie?” Arnie snorted. “But Hosea wasn’t doing badly. Oh, he’d had a seizure, but just the one. After being off his drugs for so long, that wasn’t surprising, Doc said.” His blunt fingers toyed with a tiny porcelain cat figurine from the end table, before setting it down in the exact spot it had come from.

  Ian sighed. “Well, I thought I’d come up with a brilliant idea—I got Torrie’s American Express card number from Karin, and I called them, to see if they’d tell me where it was last used. I mean, we’re in a goddamn global village; they do verifications over the phone lines from anywhere.”

  “And he hasn’t used it?”

  Ian shook his head. “They wouldn’t tell me. It’s Torrie’s own account, and nobody not on the account can get anything out of Amex without a court order.” He gestured at the phone. “Even if it’s an emergency.”

  “Well, think on it.” Arnie’s brow furrowed. “They won’t give you any information, you say, but maybe they would take some?”

  “Eh?”

  “Call them up. You’ll probably have to go to a supervisor, but explain that there’s an emergency at home, and ask them to flag his account so that next time he uses it, the vendor has to call in for a voice verification, and when he does, have them pass on the message that he’s to call home. Next time he uses the card, he gets the message.”

  “You think they could do that?”

  “I don’t see why not. And I sure as hell don’t see a need not to ask.”

  He was reaching for the phone when it rang.

  “Hello?”

  “Ian? Bob Sherve here.” Doc sounded too calm. “Hosea has had another seizure, and I’m pushing more Valium than I like to. Something’s happening tonight, one way or another, and I frankly don’t know what the hell the folks in Grand Forks could do with him, even if he was willing to let me call them in.” There was some sound in the background. “He says he wants you to take him through, tonight. Now.”

  It was scary, but there was something good about being needed. “I’m on my way. Tell Mr. Thorsen to break out a couple of the emergency kits; I’ll need them.” The Thorsens had emergency kits packed at all times. “And have Ivar swipe the stretcher from your car, then bring him downstairs to the basement.”

  “The basement?”

  “Just do it.” Ian hung up the phone and stood. Well, he was used to traveling light, and besides, he wasn’t even unpacked from his trip yet.

  Traveling light could mean discarding the extras as he wanted. Start with the basics: Giantkiller, his boots, and clothes. Bring his bags along, and repack at the Thorsens’, if there was time.

  “I’ll walk over with you,” Arnie said. Arnie was already in jeans and a flannel workshirt that hung loose on his skinny frame. He stepped into a pair of heavy workboots and laced them up with more ease and dexterity than a man his age should have had. “Let me give you a hand.”

  “Don’t mind if you do.” Ian slung Giantkiller’s belt over his shoulder, picked up a bag, and walked out into the night, Arnie Selmo right behind him.

  By the time they made it down the path, through the windbreak of trees, and to the Thorsen house, the front door was standing open behind the screen door. The door off the front hall was open as well, leading to a set of broad, wide steps to the basement.

  Basements, to Ian, had always been dank, damp places, but the Thorsens had a different idea. A central hall, lit by overhead fluorescent lights, opened on a full workshop to the right, a laundry room straight ahead, and the fencing studio and workshop to the left. Ian led the way into the fencing studio, where, the rest were waiting.

  Thorsen and Ivar del Hival were both dressed for the road, Ivar in blousy trousers and loose pullover shirt, Thorsen in jeans and workshirt, both in heavy hiking boots.

  Doc Sherve, on the other hand, looked like he had just crawled out of bed, from the way his hair was all askew to the half-tucked-in shirt with the open button that revealed the knit collar of red pajamas.

  Ordinarily, Ian would have paid more attention to how good Karin’s legs looked when she was wearing only a short black robe, but Hosea’s condition looked bad enough that he was privately embarrassed for noticing.

  Hosea lay under a blanket, strapped at waist, chest, and ankles to the stretcher, his right arm strapped down, his left hand unbound. His face looked almost green, although some of that could have been from the whining overhead fluorescent lights. His eyes were glassy and unfocused, and his breathing ragged, although it steadied as he seemed to recognize Ian.

  Ian knelt beside the stretcher. “You think it will help if we take you through?” Damn silly question. Ian knew that Hosea’s powers were stronger in Tir Na Nog, and what the hell other choice was there?

  “Through where?” Sherve’s voice was almost a snarl.

  “Be still, doctor,” Ivar del Hival rumbled. “The young Silverstone knows what he does in this, just as you do in matters of chirurgery and medicine.”

  Hosea’s mouth worked, but the only sounds that came out were grunts.

  “Well, whatever you’re going to do, you’d better do it,” Arnie said. “Sure as shit he can’t get a hell of a lot worse.”

  “Yeah.” Ian was on his hands and knees next to the fencing strip. The other time they had gone through this Hosea had been the one to operate it, not Ian, and Hosea had a way with hidden locks and catches that Torrie understood better than Ian. “Tell Torrie I’ll blaze our way, Boy Scout style, if and when he comes after us.”

  “If you wish, but I don’t see the need,” Thorian Thorsen said, squatting to help him. “I’ve left a map of the way to Harbard’s Landing for him.”

  Ian nodded. “Two steps ahead of me, eh? Good.”

  “Don’t you think—” Karin Thorsen caught herself.

  “I need to speak to you privately for a moment, Ian. Please.”

  Feeling the eyes on his back, he followed her down the hall into the laundry room.

  She opened her mouth, then closed it. “I have to ask you a favor. Please don’t let my husband go along with you.”

  He didn’t quite know what to say. “It’s not my decision. Hosea is—I mean, h
e’s been with—”

  “Hosea’s been dear to me for longer than I care to think about,” she said. “But I’m scared, and I… I am afraid of being left alone here, without Thorian.”

  It would have been easier to argue with that fear if a pack of Sons hadn’t broken into her house and dragged her half-naked and bloody off into the night and to another Hidden Way to Tir Na Nog not too long ago.

  Ian was wondering why he wasn’t afraid. It wasn’t that he was looking forward to Tir Na Nog—or maybe he was. It had been half a year since he had been back, and maybe that was what was wrong. Well, there was a quick cure for that, and he didn’t really need Thorian Thorsen’s help to scratch that itch.

  His hand found the hilt of Giantkiller. “It’ll be okay. I’ll ask him to stay here.”

  “No. He won’t listen if you ask; you have to tell him.” She took a step toward him. “Please,” she said. “Don’t let him leave me alone. I don’t pretend to be some sort of hero; I’m not, Ian. All the while we were in Tir Na Nog, it was all I could do to hold myself together, it took everything I had … I’m no use in this sort of thing, and I don’t pretend to be. I can’t—please. Please.”

  That wasn’t how Torrie and Maggie had told Ian about it, but Ian wasn’t disposed to argue. Karin would know better than he would how scared she had been, and Ian didn’t blame her one little bit.

  “Well…” He spread his hands. “I’ll—”

  He didn’t remember making a move toward her—he certainly wouldn’t have made a pass at Torrie’s mom, Thorian’s wife, would he?—but somehow or other there she was, warm in his arms, crying on his shoulder, the nearness and warmth of her making him more aware than he was comfortable with that she was wearing little if anything under her short robe.

  He stopped his hands from reaching for her. He’d long found Torrie’s mom awfully attractive, but what the hell was going on?