The Crimson Sky

by Joel Rosenberg

  Ian’s ankle had been hurting all along, but he had forced himself to try to ignore it. Now, grunting in pain, Ian sagged back against a wooden bin, and then eased himself down to the cold stone floor. He bent forward and pulled up the hem of his trousers.

  He hadn’t cut himself as deeply as he had feared, but it was deep enough, and the red flow of blood had already soaked his sock and sneaker.

  The sock wasn’t that big a deal, but the sneaker couldn’t be replaced, not here. Maybe it would wash out. Or maybe it would rot and make the sneaker unusable.

  Valin, ever-faithful Valin, was immediately at his side, the first aid kit from one of the rucksacks in his thick hands. “Please, Honored One,” he said, “friend of the friend of the Father, himself the father of Vestri, Father to the Folk—please instruct this clumsy one as to what to use of this to ease your pain.”

  There was a selection of syringes in the kit, filled and labeled, their tips covered with some sort of green high-tech plastic that was supposed to keep them sterile until it was removed.

  Fuck. The last thing he wanted to do now was ask Freya for help healing himself, but shit… it hurt, and knocking himself out with Demerol and Vistaril, while tempting, just wouldn’t do, not now.

  He shuffled through the syringes—what was atropine, anyway?—until he found one labeled “Lidocaine—use to numb injured region for stitching of minor wounds. Sterilize everything!!! RLSMD” and pulled the gunk off the tip of the needle, then sprayed a little of the clear liquid into his open wound before sticking it several times into the flesh around the wound—it stung hard enough to draw tears from his eyes, but you can’t wet a river—until he couldn’t push the plunger in any further.

  He wasn’t sure how long it was supposed to take until the lidocaine kicked in, but by Murphy’s Law, if he tried to use Harbard’s ring to persuade himself that it didn’t hurt, it would either not work on himself, as usual, or it would start working about by the time he concentrated—

  The ring pulsed, hard, once.

  His ankle went numb.

  It was like somebody had thrown a switch on the pain.

  What the fuck?

  Carefully, gingerly, he touched a fingertip to the wound. He could feel it, but the pain was gone. Ian wasn’t sure how long the lidocaine was supposed to take, but it had to be a matter of at least a couple of minutes.

  It wasn’t supposed to happen that fast.

  The ring? Well, that was possible, but… no. He could never seem to get it to work on him, although he had tried, and tried hard, but usually by the time he was done concentrating, whateverthefuck he was using it for was—

  Holy shit.

  Ian’s trembling hands opened the black plastic bottle of hydrogen peroxide. “Please use this to wash out the wound, and then please dry it with those gauze pads. We’ll disinfect it, and then dry it, and then close the wound with a few of those Steri-Strips—there, yes, those.”

  He should have tried it before. And he should have thought it out Freya wasn’t W. C. Fields—“Keep all your eggs in one basket, then watch the basket”—any more than Hosea had been, when he had originally hidden the Brisingamen jewels.

  Put them in one place? But what if somebody found that place? And if you stayed to watch over them, what if somebody found you?

  No. That wasn’t what either of them had done, because neither of them was a fool.

  Freya had hidden one gem far away.

  No, not just one: she had hidden the first one, the ruby, far away. She had still been living with Odin at the time, and she had promised not to give it to him, or to anybody else. And then, when Ian had given her the second gem, the diamond, she had kept it near her. Perhaps it was in the caverns somewhere, or beneath the floorboards of the cottage. Or maybe she had buried it deep in the ground at some spot she would remember. With her strength, that might have made sense.

  But, in any case, it was near enough to magnify the power of Harbard’s ring.

  Had it made the ring powerful enough to persuade an Aesir that she had to let him have the diamond, if only for a few days?

  Ian’s jaw clenched.

  It was time to find out.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Acton’s Legacy

  The door had been left open about a foot, but Ian knocked on the doorpost anyway. It swung open so quickly that he wondered if she had heard him hobble up the walk and was waiting for him.

  “Ian, I’m so—” she glanced down. “You’re hurt,” she said, slipping an arm around his waist before he could object.

  He had never doubted that she was strong, but still he was surprised at how she lifted him off his feet without any apparent effort, bracing his hip against hers. It would have been embarrassing, but Ian had never had any illusions about their comparative strength.

  Arnie was up and out of his chair, then down on his knees in front of him. “Do you think you broke it?”

  Ian shook his head. “No. Just cut it some.”

  Arnie took a familiar-looking first aid kit down from one of the few remaining shelves. “You wash it out?”

  “Valin did. Hydrogen peroxide, a few Steri-Strips to hold the edges of the wound together. I’ll be fine.”

  “Yeah, right. I’ll take a look at it anyway.” He broke the seal on a pair or slant-nosed scissors and propped Ian’s ankle on his lap.

  Freya rested a hand on his shoulder. “Perhaps I might? If we’re still speaking, my Silver Stone? Even if we’re not, might we possibly call a truce between us for long enough for me to help you?”

  “We’re still speaking,” Ian said. “But it doesn’t hurt all that badly.”

  In fact, it didn’t hurt at all. The ankle didn’t want to move as quickly as Ian wanted it to, and if it hadn’t been for the Ace bandage that had helped him hobble up the path, he might have fallen; he probably should have taken the hay crook to use as a crutch.

  He had no objection to Freya healing him, though.

  Shit, she owed him. Besides …

  “We’re talking, but we’re not done talking,” he said.

  “Of course, my Silver Stone. I’ll always give you a fair hearing.”

  A quick glance down at his ankle made Ian queasy; he looked away as Arnie cut away the bandages for her ministrations. Between the hydrogen peroxide and the Bacitracin, he was probably safe from any real risk of infection—when was his last tetanus booster?

  “Well, I’ve seen worse,” Arnie said. He looked up at Freya. “I think I should debride it before you do anything, though. I wouldn’t want to count on a vestri having washed all the grit out of the wound.”

  She held up a finger to warn Ian to silence. “That would be very nice, Arnold; thank you,” she said, the grin she shot over her shoulder and Arnie’s head as she walked toward the water barrel making it abundantly clear to Ian that she was going to some trouble to make Arnie feel useful, and that she would be pleased if Ian would have the decency to go along with the charade.

  Maybe it wasn’t even a charade. Maybe rinsing the wound out would actually help a little. Still, Freya had been healing much worse than this without a retired pharmacist to prep for her since the world was young. But true healing wasn’t just a matter of curing physical damage; part of being a healer was in not hurting people unnecessarily in the first place, and there was a gentleness in the way she was handling Arnie, manipulative though it was.

  “Ian?” Arnie raised his head. “When was your last tetanus shot?”

  “I was just trying to remember. Six years ago, I think—I took a broken point in the thigh during a bout.”

  “Mmmm. Doc Sherve should have made sure you were up to date.” The corner of his mouth twisted. “Maybe taken out your appendix, too, for that matter?”

  “That occurred to me, too. Too late, but it occurred to me, too.”

  “Not your job, though. It’s Doc’s.” Arnie made a tsking sound between his teeth. “He wouldn’t have let either of those slip by, ten, twenty years ago. Doc�
��s getting on in years. Not going to have him around forever, eh? Thank you, dear,” Arnie said, as he accepted a bucket of water from Freya. She held a basin, which appeared to have been made by slicing the top third off a barrel, under Ian’s ankle, while Arnie poured fresh, cold water over Ian’s wound. There was just a twinge of icy pain, but it definitely hurt. Spraying Lidocaine into the wound had probably been just a waste of the stuff.

  Damn.

  “I’m not sure, though, that you’ll be able to do anything with this,” Ian said, looking at Freya, who was watching Arnie’s cleaning of the wound as though she had never seen anything quite so miraculous in all her centuries. Arnie didn’t seem to be looking at her, but his chest puffed out just a trifle, and he nodded sagely to himself as though this was some sort of big deal.

  “Why would that be, my Silver Stone?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said quietly, intensely, willing her to believe him, “but I just don’t think you can.” The ring pulsed against his finger, painfully hard, so much so that he was surprised that the finger didn’t start to swell from the lack of circulation.

  “I think he’s right,” Arnie said. “It just looks too, I don’t know, too something—too substantial, maybe?—to heal so quickly.” He tore open a sterile sponge and dried off the wound, ignoring the small amount of suppuration. “But I guess it’s worth a try.”

  She seemed puzzled, but then nodded. “Let me see.” Her hands were soft and warm against his ankle. Gently, slowly, she cupped one hand over the wound, and the other under the other side of his ankle.

  You can’t do it, he thought. It won’t work. There is something wrong, and you can’t heal me now. Maybe you’re getting old, maybe my body is just rejecting your help, or maybe it’s something else entirely, but you can’t heal me, not now. It’s hopeless.

  Harbard’s ring was tight against his finger, at least in his mind, although he wouldn’t have been able to tell by looking at it, and when he forced his hand to clench, it closed without difficulty.

  The pulsations came faster and faster, the interval between them shorter and shorter, until they merged into an ongoing painful tightness that only relaxed when Freya shook her head, released his ankle, and with a puzzled shake of the head, sat back.

  “That was frustrating,” she said. She looked at his ankle again, and again at her hands. A streak of wet red blood and pieces of dark clotting lay spread across her right palm. She rubbed her two hands together at first gently and then harder and harder, until smoke began to rise from them, accompanied by an awful charring smell.

  Arnie laid a hand on her shoulder. “It’s okay,” he said, softly, gently, patiently.

  She rinsed her hands in the basin, the water steaming and sizzling for just a moment at her touch. When she looked up at him, she looked older and sadder. “I’m so sorry, my Silver Stone. I guess your Doctor Sherve isn’t the only one who is getting old these days.”

  Now it was easy. All he had to do was bring up the subject of the jewel, and of the Scion, yet again. He had good reasons, and she would melt beneath the heat of the jewel in the ring, like butter on a hot summer day.

  “Freya, I…”

  She looked up at him and smiled. “Why, my Silver Stone, I don’t think you’ve ever called me by my name, save for that first time, when you realized that I wasn’t just a simple ferryman’s wife. Please don’t stop. Now, you were saying?…”

  He couldn’t. He couldn’t look down into a trusting face, and bend her will, overrule her judgment by the force of his will, amplified by the ring and jewel. She was wrong, and he was right, and a loving father would suffer before the eyes of his beloved son if she didn’t change her mind, but molding a friend’s mind was to treat her like an object, a thing, to be controlled.

  That wasn’t right.

  He slipped the ring from his finger, and tucked it into his pocket. “Freya,” he said, “I need the diamond. Just for a few days. But I do need it for those two days. I don’t know what I can say to persuade you—I can swear that if I ever find another one of the jewels, I’ll not give it to you if you don’t do this for me now; I can promise that I will bring it back. But it’s important.

  “Look, when I get back with the diamond, I’ll go out on the road, again, in search of a third jewel. And I swear that I’ll bring it to you, when I find it. But for now, I have to ask you to trust me, as I have trusted you.”

  “Ian, please.” She took his hand in both of hers. It was strange that hands so strong and powerful could be so soft and warm. “I’m so very sorry, Ian. I hope you will still be my Silver Stone, as I shall always be your Freya, but I can’t be swayed by your appeal, as it hasn’t changed anything. Swear, if you will, to never give me another jewel—but what of that? You are not likely to find another, not again. But should you find one, who would you give it to? Harbard the Wanderer? Or to your father-in-law to be? You’d hardly pick either Odin or the margrave.

  “But even if you would, my reasoning still applies. Even if you promise to go out and search for the other jewels, and bring them to me, one by one as you find them. I can’t let even one…” her brow wrinkled for a moment, then she shook her head as though to clear it, “… I can’t let even one of the jewels be risked on the chance that if it comes back, you might someday find another.” She rose to her feet and looked down at him, still holding her. “I don’t think you can accept that, but so be it.”

  “No.” He returned her gaze, steadily. “I don’t like it, but I do accept it. I hope you’ll believe that, both of you.”

  She nodded. “I do,” she said. She squeezed his hand, once, gently, and released it.

  Arnie had finished bandaging Ian’s ankle, and it was hurting again. “Me, too.” He looked up and smiled. “Then again, Ian, I’m always easy to persuade, eh?”

  “Yeah, a real softie.”

  Arnie laughed.

  So be it. Scion, I’m sorry. Although, in truth, I’m sorrier for your son …

  “I’ll leave in the morning. I promised I’d return.” Hosea wasn’t exactly a hostage, but he wasn’t exactly not a hostage, either. What was the Scion’s word worth, if you couldn’t deliver?

  There was no way of knowing. Would the Scion still work to take the Sons off the Thorsens’ trail?

  What if I tell him I tried, really hard? Would that work?

  No. Why should the Scion care if he tried? The world paid off results, not effort.

  Ian had screwed up, again, and all it would take to fix that would be to remove the ring from his pocket and persuade Freya to let him borrow the diamond.

  Borrow? Shit, he could even keep the Brisingamen diamond; he could persuade Freya that it would be best off in his hands—and that might even be true; it certainly was true that he could talk anybody out of taking it away from him.

  With Harbard’s ring and a Brisingamen stone in his hand, he could make anybody believe anything.

  He could even knock on a door of a particular condominium in Bloomington and make the twisted old man who lived there care about him the way a father should care about a son, the way Ian had always had the right to be cared about—the way every kid does, the way you never stop needing because, deep inside, there’s a way in which you never stop being a little kid.

  And he would rather have snapped Giantkiller across his knee and used the jagged edge of the shard to cut his own throat than to do anything of the kind.

  Arnie nodded. “No—we leave in the morning. You’re going to need somebody to watch your back, and I’ve got a special qualification or two, squire,” he said, touching his forelock with a finger.

  “Nobody will believe that.”

  Arnie shrugged. “I ever tell you the joke about the pope and his driver?”

  “Only a couple of dozen times.”

  “I think you may have told it to me before,” Freya said with a smile. “But could you tell it to me again? I’m not sure if I remember it.”

  “Well, okay. The pope is out for a
spin in the countryside, when his driver turns pale, and pulls over. “Your Holiness, he says,” “I am most unwell.”

  “Well, the pope gets into the front seat…”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The Son

  The wind blew, dry and chill, across what, at other times of the year, was a lake; Thorian del Thorian quickened his pace along the lakeside path. Days of subzero cold and feet of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of dedicated if more than slightly odd circle-walkers had left the path clean, save for a few icy spots.

  Of course, there was the biggest icy spot of them all: Lake Calhoun. A rough oval, a mile across the long axis, about three-quarters of that across the short, it was frozen over deep and hard enough to drive a truck on, although Thorian hadn’t seen any vehicles on any of the city lakes. A canoe rack stood, lonely and coated with ice, at the northwest corner; over on the west side, a pier projected out over the ice, a wooden tongue sticking out, daring someone to use it as a diving board and break their fool neck.

  Somebody had probably done that, at some point. There was nothing so stupid that nobody would ever do it.

  At the north end of the lake, and at the south, the ice had been polished into large, vaguely circular skating areas, but the rest of the lake was covered with ice and icy snow and tracks of skiers who used it for their exercise, if only to avoid the crowds of locals too foolish to come in from the cold, too esoteric in their largely strange and effete occupations to work with their hands and backs and legs.

  And then there were the ice houses. A strange sort of sport, indeed, sitting out in the cold, trying to pull fish out of a hole in the ice.

  He would have glanced down at his watch, but there was no need to know the time. He could pace out the time with his own paces, count his own heartbeats. If only he could count down his own heartbeats. It would be interesting to know how many he had left.

  He wasn’t totally helpless. Young Thorian had insisted that he take his gimmicky little knife, and Thorian del Thorian had that in an outside pocket, although if he had the opportunity to draw that, he surely would be able to draw the larger dagger slung underneath his left armpit, or the medium-sized one strapped to his right arm. His own, very plain, folding knife he held in his right hand—it wasn’t much, but its blade had been made by Orfindel, and Thorian del Thorian had carried the knife with him every day for fifteen years.