The Crimson Sky

by Joel Rosenberg

  Nothing here, and no sound, other than shouts in the distance, and the pounding of Maggie’s and Billy’s feet behind him. He turned. Maggie looked ghastly pale in the harsh green mercury light, or maybe it wasn’t just the light.

  “There,” she said, pointing with her free hand, her pistol down at her side, hidden behind her right thigh the way Dad had taught her.

  “There’s something there,” she said again, pointing to a pool of shadow in front of the next apartment’s garage door. The only thing that Torrie could see there was the outline of the large, blocky plastic garbage cans that the city provided.

  Billy was jingling his keys for some reason, but then a flash of light, strong and actinic, came from his direction, illuminating the shadowed region under the eaves.

  It was silly, but the first thing that registered on Torrie’s eyes was the plastic bag of garbage that had been broken open on the snow-packed ground, widely scattering eggshells and Melitta filters filled with coffee grounds and bits of crumpled paper and discarded food.

  It was only when Maggie gasped that the gray lump lying on the ground next to the garage door resolved itself into the shape of a woman, dressed only in the sort of shapeless gray sweats that nobody seemed to wear in the city, crumpled and smashed like a broken doll.

  There was a dark spot beyond her, beyond the edge of the garage that could be hiding something, somebody, anything, but when he lunged past her and into it, yet another one of the motion-sensor lights came on, cutting through the darkness.

  Nothing.

  Torrie dropped painfully to his knees on the ice, the woman’s still-warm blood warming his knees and legs. His probing fingers found not only blood but also flesh, but when he reached through the long hair for the neck, he must have pulled at her somehow, and she tumbled over onto her back, thick yellow worms of intestine spewing out and onto the dirty ice, the horrible shit-stink almost physically pushing him back, gagging.

  He only noticed the blue and red lights flashing off the ice and snow and the garage wall when a loud voice barked, “Police. Don’t move. Partner, he’s got a knife.”

  “Fuck the knife. The other two have guns.”

  Torrie Thorsen was still rubbing at the red marks on his wrists as he waited at the battered, aged front-desk counter, resolving to add a handcuff key to his keyring and sew another one inside the seam on the back of his belt.

  He really hadn’t liked being handcuffed.

  No, that was the polite, Hardwood way to put it—the truth was that he hated it, that it made him feel helpless and furious and it was all he could do to control himself, even now. It wouldn’t have taken a Son to kill him, not with his hands locked behind his back, leaving him open and vulnerable from toes to nose.

  Anybody could have walked up and stuck anything in him.

  But it wasn’t just the danger right then and there. He resented that portable cage-for-the-arms, that turned him from Torrie Thorsen into something helpless and dependent on the goodwill of people he didn’t know and didn’t much like.

  No, this hadn’t been the time to break free, not caring what the consequences were. But maybe next time would be. He’d be ready then.

  “Hey, shit happens, er…” he looked down, “… Thorian. Sorry about the cuffs, but, you know …”

  “Yeah, Stan, I’m sure shit does happen.”

  Sergeant Donaldson, badge number 615, a white-haired, thick-set, fiftyish man who reminded Torrie vaguely of Charles Bronson, wrinkled his forehead as he looked down from his place behind the counter. “Stan?”

  “Your name isn’t Stan?”

  “No. It’s Bob. You can call me Sergeant Donaldson, if you don’t mind.”

  “And you can call me Mr. Thorsen, Sergeant Donaldson. If you don’t mind.”

  After a moment’s hesitation, Donaldson’s broad face split in a not-entirely-friendly grin. “Okay; I get the point. It’s just procedure, you know, Mr. Thorsen.”

  “Right, sure.”

  Yes, Torrie knew what it was. Standard procedure. Standard city police procedure.

  In the city, everybody was always suspected of anything, and if you saw somebody who was only trying to help standing over a body, you assumed he was a vicious murderer, and you pointed guns at him and threatened to shoot him, and you slammed him up against the side of a building and handcuffed him.

  Then you threw him in the back of a cop car, and you made him call you sir while you first-named him, and the combination of that and the fact that you’ve got the guy goddamn handcuffed and in the back of a police car, sitting behind a wire grating, gives you some sort of psychological edge in wringing information—preferably a confession—out of a guy.

  And if he actually did what you think he did, so much the better, right? It was the old Ed Meese “If they weren’t guilty, they wouldn’t be suspects” thing.

  It also came far closer than Torrie liked to taking away his dignity for good. Asking permission to go to the bathroom didn’t sit well with him, and from the moment the cops had put the cuffs on his wrists, the thing he had wanted to do most of all, silly as it sounded, was to take a leak.

  And maybe, even, if you didn’t get him to confess to whatever it was that you suspected him of, maybe he had something else to hide, something that he’d blurt out in exchange for a Coke, or a trip to the bathroom, or just a kind word and a pat on the head.

  And maybe Torrie had come too damn close to talking for his own comfort.

  Maybe. Maybe the only thing that had stopped him was that he knew he wouldn’t be believed.

  “Relax,” the cop said. “There’s no charges, no yellow sheet, and hey, once this all shakes out, I’m sure the chief is going to write you a nice attaboy for all your help.” He shrugged. “Not that I think that running out into the night to chase down a scream makes a lot of sense for civilians, but it’s brave enough.”

  He tore open the yellow envelope and dumped the contents on the counter. “One watch, Winton’s Triple Calendar—which means it isn’t likely to be fake; who fakes a Winton’s?—stainless, expensive. Very nice.” He looked up. “Don’t see a lot of mechanical watches these days. One knife, handmade, also very nice, and we’re not going to look closely and see if it’s an automatic, you being a hero and all, Mr. Thorsen, rather than a scumbag. Fifty-three dollars and forty-six, no, forty-seven cents in cash, a ring of assorted keys, one wallet, complete with credit cards, see separate inventory, attached, and why they bothered to grab that I don’t know unless it’s because they like making work for me like the damn separate inventory, attached. Two condoms.” He reached behind the counter and came up with a long brown paper package, wrapped in string. “One antique sword, wrapped up nice so that you don’t get hassled on your way home, open it and check it if you want to.”

  He spun the clipboard on the counter and slapped it to a stop with a practiced motion. “Sign here, Mr. Thorsen, unless you want to claim you’re missing something, in which case you sign here, and list the missing property here, Mr. Thorsen.” He handed the clipboard to Torrie and was silent until Torrie signed with a quick scribble. “And yeah, I’ll say for the record that you and your friends were a bunch of idiots to stick your dicks out like that, but shit, boy, you got guts. Not a lot of sense, but a lot of guts.”

  Torrie couldn’t help smiling. “I’ll tell Maggie you said that,” he said.

  “You do that, Mr. Thorsen. The girl’s got balls, too.” He took out a business card and scribbled something quickly on the back of it. “This isn’t exactly a get-out-of-jail free card, Mr. Thorsen, but if you ever run into just a little problem in this city, you give this to the officer and ask him to call me, and I’ll see if maybe, just maybe, the MPD can cut you a little slack.” He slid the card across the counter, and then waited until Torrie tucked it in his shirt pocket before he stuck out a thick hand. “We okay, Torrie?” he asked, his head cocked ever-so-slightly to one side.

  “Sure, Bob,” Torrie said. The cop’s handshake was firm, but
he wasn’t a squeezer. “You bet.”

  “Well, then, you take care.” Donaldson picked up his pen and used it to point without looking toward the Exit sign behind and to his right. “Your friends are waiting out there. For some reason or other, they didn’t want to go through the metal detector. Have a nice night.”

  Well, Torrie thought, he’d still get the handcuff keys. But for a fact, the desk sergeant could easily have been more of an asshole.

  Dad and Maggie were waiting for him out in the lobby. At—he glanced down at his watch—a quarter after two in the morning, it was empty, and their steps echoed off the old marble.

  “Well, they said they let you go,” Torrie said.

  Maggie kissed him quickly. “We weren’t the ones with blood all over us.” She slipped an arm around his waist. “We even got our guns back, with a little lecture about how civilians should leave handling murders to the professionals.”

  Dad snorted.

  “Billy and Jeff are out in the car,” Maggie said. “You okay?”

  Torrie shrugged. “Yeah.” Shit. At least he was in better shape than that poor woman.

  He looked at Dad, about to ask the obvious question, but Dad shook his head, forestalling him. “We’ll talk later,” he said. “After you’ve had some food and a hot shower. I think your friend Billy has a few things he’d like to know about, too.“

  “But…”

  “Yes.” Dad’s voice sounded almost inutterably tired. “Yes; it was him. It was the Son.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  The Heir

  There was less of a chill in the air as Ian and Hosea were conducted down the broad halls by a quartet of soldiers.

  The Old Keep may have originally been built by the Tuatha, but humans had inhabited it for long enough to make it entirely homey. The broad corridors were thickly carpeted down the middle, and the cold, ornately carved walls were covered by tapestries in places, which at least gave the illusion of warmth.

  And they were pretty. Ian’s favorite, lit only by a pair of lanterns and reflectors set high in a niche in the opposite wall, showed a half dozen almost preposterously cute little children playing in a flower garden, caught in mid-throw of a surprisingly mundane-looking ball, while a trio of tall, ethereally slim women watched over them with a smiling benevolence that was almost tangible.

  That would be the first tapestry Ian would have looked behind, if he was looking for hidden passages, just because it looked too pretty to risk disturbing.

  The endlessly complex patterns carved into the walls probably hadn’t come from some affection for a sort of monotone paisley. They covered a whole bunch of hidden passageways, if the Old Keep was anything like Falias, or the Thorsen house, for that matter.

  They crossed a high open walkway between two towers, Ian clutching at Giantkiller’s hilt for reassurance, because if none of the guards were going to grip the ancient stone railings, neither would he. Then they took a long, spiraling staircase down to where distant music and laughing voices grew nearer.

  At their approach, a pair of doors swung open, into a room filled with light and sound, with the clinking of glasses and, off in the distance, what was unmistakably a drinking song almost guttural enough to be German.

  There were perhaps a hundred or so well-dressed men and women scattered in little clumps around the ballroom, although it still would have been roomy with several times that many. One group sat and stood on an island of carpet in front of a man-high fireplace that must have been a good fifteen feet wide, while over at the other end of the room sixteen couples formed four squares of two couples each, dancing through the intricate steps of what Ian would have been tempted to call a minuet, if the music didn’t sound more Japanese than anything else.

  Perhaps a dozen vestri servants in sky-blue livery passed among the speakers and dancers, refilling tankards and glasses, none carrying serving trays. Food was served on a long table near what, if Ian had his bearings right, was the southern wall.

  As they entered the room, raised voices near the fireplace resolved themselves into two men dropping their capes to one side and walking, side by side, into the center of the room, where a golden circle perhaps twenty feet across was inlaid into the white marble floor.

  Ian was so involved with watching them square off that he didn’t notice Branden del Branden walk up behind him until he had cleared his throat, quietly, not enough to startle Ian.

  Branden del Branden was dressed much as Ian himself was: a white tunic over dark trousers, except that Branden del Branden’s tunic was filigreed with black and gold in an ornate design, while Ian’s was plain and unadorned. Most of the men had blue designs on their tunics, although Ian spotted one brown and a couple of grays.

  “Good evening, Ian Silver Stone,” Branden del Branden said. “I’ve been asked to assist as your host for the evening.” He gestured toward another small island of carpet and chairs in front of one of the smaller fireplaces set up against the west wall.

  By the time Ian and Hosea had passed the dancers, the fight was over, and the loser was hobbling back toward the large fireplace, hopping on one foot, mostly supported by the winner.

  The two swordsmen had exchanged salutes, touched swords, and then begun fighting, the motion too fast for the casual eye to follow. Ian would have bet that the taller man would have won, but the shorter fellow performed some sort of complex maneuver and ended the fight almost instantly with a quick toe-stick, which brought a yelp of surprise and pain from his larger opponent and then brought out two vestri, each with a tray of bandages and ointments, who met the pair and began work on the tall man’s foot, while the conversation picked up among the group of men and women, as though nothing untoward or unusual had gone on.

  Darien del Darien was waiting for them in the larger of the chairs; he waved Ian to one chair opposite him, and Hosea to another.

  The fourth chair was occupied by a boy that Ian would have guessed to be about twelve, maybe thirteen, redheaded enough to be Irish, and freckled across the nose and cheeks. He was dressed formally, like an adult, but the hilt of his sword was plain and unadorned, unlike the engraved and jeweled hilts that were so common.

  “Good evening to you, Ian Silver Stone,” Darien del Darien said. “I’ve promised the Scion that we will show you proper Dominion hospitality this evening, and I’ve asked the Heir to bear witness to him that I’ve done so.”

  The boy inclined his head, briefly. “It’s not that my father doesn’t trust the klaffvarer,” he said, his face perhaps too serious. “But it would be bragging on his part to speak of how well he treats you, but not on mine. Do you dance? There are more than several ladies of the court who would be happy to partner you.”

  Ian shook his head. “I’m sorry; I don’t know any of your dances, and I’m none too comfortable on my feet.”

  The Heir—if he had another name, Ian clearly wasn’t going to get it from their introduction—brightened immediately. “Oh, then, I’ll tell the musicians to schedule a round, and we’ll teach you.” His grin was reassuring. “There’s nothing to it, Ian Silver Stone.” He looked to Darien del Darien. “May I? Please?”

  The klaffvarer nodded indulgently. “Yes, my Heir,” he said. “But don’t interrupt us; the Silver Stone and I need to discuss some matters.” The boy rose, bowed politely in all directions, and quickly walked away, Darien del Darien’s smile dropping at his departure.

  “I’ve had men out searching for this Valin—with orders to bring him back unharmed, to let him escape if there’s no way to capture him. There’s been no sign,” Darien del Darien said.

  “I can’t say I’m sorry,” Ian said. Well, he could, but it would have been a clumsy lie.

  “Well, you should be sorry that he’s escaped. If he’s who he says he is, he should be able to lead us to whatever this pack is that has supposedly sent Sons after your friends.”

  “This is something that you have grave worries over?” Hosea asked.

  “Worries? Worries, n
o.” Darien del Darien shook his head. “Concerns, yes. Knowing who is behind this would be, at the very least, trade goods, and while I’m no woman to be caught up in matters of trade and commerce, I very much wish to have something to trade with you. The head of your enemy, perhaps?” He shrugged. “But without knowing who it is, there’s little I can do, directly.”

  “And indirectly?”

  “Indirectly, I’ve already taken some actions,” said Darien del Darien. “We can discuss those if we can reach an understanding on another matter.”

  “You want something from me.” Fencing lessons, perhaps? I’m really quite good at teaching foil.

  He also wasn’t all that bad at dueling, although his reputation had apparently overtaken his abilities. The Cities settled most of their internal political struggles by duel. Not the best way to settle things, perhaps—well, scratch that “perhaps”—but the important thing about many problems was that they be settled, one way or the other.

  “Very much,” Darien del Darien said. “I’m willing to do whatever I can for you and your friends. And, while my word is not, perhaps, as unbreakable as some, you’ll find that it’s been respected and respectable before, and it shall be again. I can promise you gold—surely you can always use gold—and I can promise you what aid I can muster, either of mine own or of the Dominions. I can arrange for your swift conduct between the Old Keep and Falias, and through the Hidden Ways back to your home; now or at some later time. And I can promise you my … my great gratitude.”

  Ian cocked his head to one side. “And for all this promising, what is it that you want from me?”

  “Well, that is the heart of the matter, isn’t it?” Darien del Darien nodded. “I need from you just one thing. I need to have you bring to me, here, for one day, and one day only, a jewel of the Brisingamen.”

  Ian thought he hadn’t heard him correctly for a moment. Was that all? Was that what this was all about? Was that why Darien del Darien had sent Sons to Hardwood, to scare Ian into coming to look for the source so that he could make this offer?