The Crimson Sky

by Joel Rosenberg

  The two other rucksacks and the walking stick followed the first rucksack down the hole.

  And then it was Ian’s turn. Doc Sherve and the Hansen boys had made one end of a two-inch-thick rope fast to the towing ball at the back of the Suburban. Careful of his bad shoulder, Ian gripped the rope with his good hand and stepped over the edge, carefully sliding down the rope to the bottom of the hole. He pitched each of the rucksacks down the tunnel, and by the time he turned back to pick up the walking stick, Valin was standing, albeit a bit shakily, beside him.

  The dwarf looked almost comical in his jeans and oversized boots, and particularly in the parka—but Ian didn’t even crack a smile. It would hurt Valin’s feelings.

  Ian extended the walking stick and tightened the locking rings, into place.

  “Ready?” His voice sounded steady, at least in his own ears.

  Valin cocked his massive head to one side.

  Ian gestured an apology and then switched to Bersmal: “Are thy spirits ready to return to Tir Na Nog?”

  The dwarf gave a shy smile. “This one would ask the same thing of thee, Ian Silver Stone, if such a thing would not be an impertinence.”

  This constant bowing and scraping wasn’t going to get any less tiresome. “Then, I ask of you,” Ian said, watching the dwarf’s eyes widen at Ian’s deliberate use of informal mode, “if you will do me the great favor of speaking informally with me, as an ancient curse causes formal language to make my piles bleed, and I would not have blood running down my leg and into my boots throughout our journey together.”

  He turned away, without waiting for an answer, and walked down the tunnel—

  —and into the Hidden Way.

  The hurt was gone. At least for now. Ian felt, well, nothing. His shoulder would neither ache nor heal, and in the timeless walk down into the tunnel, through the gray light that neither brightened nor dimmed, he would feel nothing. There was, perhaps, a distant sense of foreboding at the back of his mind, but that was an intellectual artifact, only. He was not excited or scared—or calm or brave. He could, if he decided to, stand here forever in the gray nothingness, without any pain in his joints from a lack of shifting position, without hunger, without the pressure of a full bladder, without loneliness or boredom.

  But not without time passing outside, though.

  So he did what he had always intended to do: he stuck the walking stick through the straps of the rucksacks, and as Valin—now walking without the gingerness Ian had become accustomed to—lifted one end to his shoulder, Ian shouldered the other end.

  The two of them set off walking, neither quickly nor slowly, but just placing one boot after the other, always surrounded by the directionless gray light, which faded off into the distance to a darker gray than Ian had ever seen before, that never quite made it to black.

  Ian tried to count his steps, as he had every time before, but this time he gave up after only a little more than a thousand. At one point, he tried holding his breath as he walked, and he was able to do that for a long but timeless time without any pain in his chest, but he found after a while that he had started breathing again, and he couldn’t even remember when, or how long.

  It was easy to maintain the even pace; it was impossible for him to maintain any other resolve. He found that he couldn’t even daydream, not even about anything sexual. He tried to remember the feel of Marta’s lips on him, of the warmth and slightly acrid taste of her mouth …

  … but nothing.

  He didn’t need to breathe, or piss, or think. While he could reach up and touch the end of the walking stick resting on his shoulder, and he was aware in an intellectual sense that it bore quite a few pounds of weight, it caused no pain, no stress, no nothing. Perhaps it should have been difficult for him and Valin to match paces so easily, but it slipped neither back nor forth on his shoulder.

  And that was strange only in a vague and theoretical sense; it wasn’t the sort of puzzlement that you worried over in your mind, like a tongue that couldn’t help probing at a sore tooth.

  It was just there, and if anything in the Hidden Way could be said to be difficult, it was difficult to keep thinking or caring about it.

  It was just easier to simply be …

  Ian Silverstein walked on.

  Bob Sherve sat with the engine off, trying to ignore the distant pain in his chest. If it got worse, he would have to take another nitro tab, and he didn’t like doing that.

  Cold seemed to bring it on; warmth helped. If you huddled into your parka and didn’t fidget, you could stay comfortable in the cold for a long time. Add a little heat source, and you could be toasty warm.

  Well, it was as good an excuse as any. Sherve chuckled to himself as he reached into his pocket and pulled out his silver cigar case.

  A single lonely cigar rattled inside. He took it out, and unwrapped it—a Romeo y Julietta Churchill. Seven inches of dark, rich satisfaction, and yet another occasion to tell all his patients to “Do as I say, not as I do.”

  Much of the time, they even did.

  He sliced off the tip with his pocket knife, careless of where the sliced-off portion bounced, and flared his old, battered Zippo to life. People who smoked cigars for style would tell you to slice the end off with one of those little guillotine things that people were always giving him for Christmas and which he could never be bothered to carry, or to never light a cigar with a real lighter. You were supposed to use one of those butane things, or a match.

  Bullshit.

  Sherve liked the acrid smell of the lighter fluid, and it only lasted for a few moments, anyway. And puffing a fresh-lit cigar to life wasn’t some sort of religious ritual, after all; it was habit and pleasure.

  By the time he had the cigar going the way he liked, the car was filled with so much smoke that he couldn’t see through the rear window. He cracked the windows on both sides, and let the breeze sweeping across the hood suck the smoke out of the car. In summertime, when he was out on one of his extended walks, sometimes people would tell him that they’d known he was coming for miles, just by the smell.

  He had maybe a half dozen of the Churchills left, and only one box of the Punch Double Coronas. Time to send off to A.E. Lloyd & Son again, if he didn’t want to have to start smoking legal cigars. They just didn’t taste as good. Forbidden fruit, maybe?

  Hard to say. Damn expensive, but nowhere among the frustrations of being a small-town doctor was low pay. Besides, what the hell else was he going to spend it on? His kids were grown and gone, back only for every other Christmas, and if either of them were going to have the decency to present him with a grandchild or two to spoil, they would have done it by now.

  New toys for the clinic were always a possibility, but it made more sense to have the county pay for as much of that as they could, to help establish the precedent. Once Bob Sherve retired—and he would retire eventually, no matter what everybody believed—it would be hard enough for them to get high-paid MDs to staff the emergency room, and just this side of impossible to get another young buck, fresh out of medical school, to take over.

  He’d had an idea that maybe Barbie Honistead could be steered into medical school, and maybe she still could be, but she had gotten involved with some boy from Florida in her first year at William and Mary, and was making noises about getting married.

  The chances of luring some Florida type to Hardwood were close enough to zero, zip, and null to be not worth the trouble to think about.

  If he had been smart, he would’ve realized how bright Karin Roelke was, twenty-odd years ago, and steered her into medicine, and maybe there was a chance with Thorian, although likely not. But, shit, when he went it was going to be bad for the town, and though he still had more than a little life in his body, he was far closer to the end than the beginning.

  Enough wool-gathering.

  Give an old man a cigar and a warm place to sit, and he could sit there all day, particularly since he’d had to start wearing those damn Depends diapers.
As if old age didn’t have enough indignities built into it.

  Which it did.

  The pain in his chest returned, and then was gone. Good.

  He reached for the car phone and punched a number. “Hello,” he said. “It’s me. If he’s going to do this, it’s about time to get going. Ian’s probably been gone long enough.”

  He sat back and considered the glowing end of his cigar.

  It couldn’t have been more than a couple of minutes before her brown Ford rolled quietly to stop next to Bob’s Suburban. Karin Thorsen probably had had the car started, with her and Hosea sitting in it, the engine running.

  Which meant she was nervous. Sherve didn’t blame her.

  He gestured at Karin to stay seated, then opened the back door to help with Hosea’s gear. The air in the brown Ford puffed out at him, smelling of warmth and cinnamon and a distant hint of Karin’s perfume. Something musky enough to make an old man remember he had been a young man, once, long ago.

  “You sure this is a good idea?” Sherve asked Hosea.

  “No, I’m sure about very little,” Hosea said. “Certainty is for the young, and whatever I am it is a certainty that I’m not young.”

  “Then why?”

  The tall man was silent for a long moment. “‘Because I might be useful. And these days, I’m not all that useful.”

  “You’re just fine, Hosea.”

  Hosea shook his head sadly. “No. There was a time when I could have led Ian to that which he’s going to be seeking, but that time is gone. That’s a good thing, in many ways. It’s good that I’m not the powerful being I once was, yes, but it’s not a comfortable thing.” He shrugged, or at least Bob Sherve thought he probably shrugged—his parka was far too large for his frame, and it hung loosely. “Besides, I have little choice in the matter. I promised Torrie’s grandfather that I would always look out for Karin and Torrie, and…” He shook his head. “And I hardly see a way I can do that here, or in the city.”

  “And you always keep your promises.”

  Hosea nodded. “Always. Which is why it’s perhaps for the best that I make promises so very rarely.”

  “I see.” If anybody else had claimed that they always kept their promises, it would have been only politeness that would have kept Sherve from laughing out loud at them, and even politeness could only do so much.

  But Bob Sherve didn’t doubt him for a moment—Hosea’s willingness to do things for other people was almost as much a legend in town as was his almost invariable refusal to promise anything. But there may well have been more to that. There was a spring in Hosea’s step that Sherve hadn’t seen before, that Sherve doubted had been there very often for centuries—how many centuries was anybody’s guess; Sherve sometimes wondered if he could count that high—as Hosea shouldered his bag and walked quickly to the hole, neither looking back nor pausing for even a heartbeat before he dropped down into the hole and vanished from sight.

  Sherve stood there, puffing on his cigar and wondering. Shit, he was half tempted to go chasing after Hosea himself, just on the off-chance that he might be able to find out what this was all about.

  But, no, that wouldn’t do at all. And it wasn’t just that he wasn’t a kid anymore, or because of the episodes of angina that had become more frequent of late.

  He had work to do, and the truth was that he really liked his work.

  Most of the time. It got harder every year, but you couldn’t let old age catch up with you. The only way to keep it in line was to refuse to give in, to fight every inch of the way.

  He puffed at the cigar for a moment, then walked to the driver’s side of Karin Thorsen’s car. Her window stuck for a moment before it rolled down.

  “It’ll be okay,” he said.

  Her smile came easily, but there was a trace of fear behind her eyes. “I worry about him—about them.”

  “ ‘Man is born to trouble, as the sparks fly upward,’ ” he said. “And which him was it—Torrie, or Thorian, or Hosea… or Ian?”

  Her mouth worked silently, then: “All, of them. I was thinking about Hosea, this time.” Her mouth took a firm set. “I’m not worried about Thorian, or Torrie, not now. I don’t think there’s ever been a Son born that would stand a chance against my Thorian, and if those … things didn’t disgust me so much, I’d feel sorry for it.”

  Bravado looks good on you, Karin, he thought.

  The distant pain in his shoulder grew sharper, and he patted at the pocket where he kept his nitroglycerin tabs. “I’ll see you later, Karin.” He turned without another word and thumbed open the bottle without taking it out of his pocket. He’d had too much practice doing that of late. By the time he was seated back in his car, he had a tab under his tongue, and he sat quietly for a few moments while the bitter taste drove the pain from his chest.

  That was better.

  Bob Sherve puffed on his cigar, put the car into drive, and drove back into town.

  Part Two

  Minneapolis, MinnesotaAndTir Na Nog

  Chapter Nine

  Vandescard

  Last time, the transition had been instantaneous: in an eyeblink, the weight that Ian had been carrying had weighed heavily in his hands, and instead of walking on the rippled gray stone of the Hidden Ways, he had been in an underground tunnel, reinforced with beams and timbers.

  It had been simple and painless from the start, and it had remained simple and painless for an eternity.

  Ian had been walking forever through the gray tunnel, his steps effortless and uninteresting, his mind unfocused and incapable of focusing.

  He had been, he thought, but, now, and for a long while, although physical sensations were still distant and devoid of meaning, each step had slowly become more difficult, more laborious, more strenuous although, strangely, hard as it was to take the next step, it wasn’t tiring.

  It felt like the very air around him was congealing into something transparent but gelatinous, so that he simply could not keep on drifting grayly as he walked but had to force his body into each step forward, each arm swing, each movement. But the resistance was only one way: he paused for a moment, and took an easy, effortless step back, unsurprised that Valin was matching his every motion.

  It would be simple to go back, in a distant way that almost angered him. Making it easy was of no importance at all.

  He pushed forward, and things began to change.

  Slowly, the directionless gray light dimmed and became a splash of golden sunlight down the tunnel ahead. Gradually, the even rippling of the hard gray stone became less even, and if not softer, then more giving, as the floor of the tunnel changed slowly from rippled stone into hard-packed dirt. Senses didn’t quite return, for they had never abandoned him, but they gained salience and relevance.

  His left shoulder had been aching for a long time, but it had been sort of like what he remembered having a tooth drilled while breathing nitrous oxide was: there was pain there, but it was somebody else’s pain, somebody he didn’t particularly care about, one way or the other.

  He realized, with a shock, that he was breathing heavily, and had been for a while, what with supporting his share of the weight of the gear.

  “I…” he said, his own voice strange and foreign in his ears, “… I need to rest.”

  “Then rest ye shall, Ian Silver Stone,” Valin’s deep basso graveled, and Ian turned to ease the walking stick to the ground.

  The cave was like the inside of a roughed-out, flattened cylinder, the incline ahead sharp for about ten yards, but becoming suddenly shallow to the opening where golden daylight trickled in through a veil of cool greenery. Behind them, the cave was dark, but it seemed …

  No.

  Ian took three running steps back down the tunnel.

  But it wasn’t a tunnel any longer: it ended with a top-to-bottom narrowing that he knew he hadn’t walked through. Above, the roof of the cave was a concavity of smooth stone, roughly square on three sides, but curved where it dropped to almost me
et the floor.

  He reached up a hand: it was smooth, but not perfectly smooth; long striations ran the length of the concavity, to where it vanished into the tunnel.

  A sense of panic washed up from the pit of his stomach. His gut spasmed, and it was all he could do to keep from shitting his pants.

  Sour vomit spewed from his mouth.

  Valin, moving easily as though he had never been injured, was at his side. “Come ye with me, Ian Silver Stone,” he said, leading Ian up the steep slope to the cusp, where it became shallow. “All ye need is fresh air and light.”

  Ian staggered out through the leaves and into the warm smell of rotting humus.

  Strange that the odor of rot would ease his nausea, perhaps, but…

  But it hadn’t been the smell that had made him nauseated. It had been the realization that the cave he had been in was shaped like it had been made by the impression of some gigantic thumb, pressed so hard into rock and soil that it even left the striations of the thumbnail impressed on the roof of the cave.

  As perhaps it had, but…

  His hand found Giantkiller’s grip, and he clung to it tightly. He thought, for just a moment, about flinging its scabbard aside, freeing the blade.

  But no. He wasn’t holding it for physical protection. It was a thing to center his universe, an anchor for his mind.

  He almost giggled: at the moment, his sword was a security blanket. He might as well hold it to the side of his face and suck his thumb.

  Three rucksacks draped across his neck and shoulders, Valin pushed through the brush covering the mouth of the cave. It was all Ian could do not to laugh. There was something about a dwarf in jeans and a workshirt that just wasn’t right.

  “Are ye well, Ian Silver Stone?”

  Ian nodded out of reflex, then realized that he was telling the truth. He did feel good. There was a distant sour taste at the back of his mouth, but an Altoid from the tin in his shirt drove that away instantly. He worked his left shoulder, and found that while there still was some pain when he tried to move it, it was by no means disabling.