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  The Hero King

  ( Varayan memoir - 3 )

  Rick Shelley

  Rick Shelley

  The Hero King

  1 – Arrowroot

  If a regulation Hero is supposed to constantly get himself out of insane predicaments, I was doing at least part of the job correctly. I was getting myself into the predicaments like a pro. Forget all that about jumping from the frying pan into the fire, I was going from one popcorn popper into another.

  Total panic doesn't lead to the most accurate memories. Too many impossible things had been happening at once. I had been out on an island in the Mist, the Sea of Fairy, stealing the left ball of the Great Earth Mother… to go with the right ball I had stolen a few weeks earlier in the Titan Mountains. More or less in order, I had faced an apparition of the Great Earth Mother herself threatening to destroy me, a beach full of rocks that picked themselves up and hurled themselves at my boat with the velocity of artillery shells, a sky filled with dragons that started to fall and change into other creatures after I swallowed the pecan-sized balls of the Great Earth Mother, and more rocks that turned themselves into soldiers from every period of history. Then Aaron, my new wizard, spit up a two-mile-long sea serpent to gobble up the soldiers.

  Then came the earthquake.

  My companions and I were faced with the choice of staying out on the beach and being eaten by the sea serpent along with all the bad guys, or retreating into the shrine of the Great Earth Mother-a building that was already in the process of collapsing under the shaking of the quake.

  We went inside and Aaron Carpenter, my wizard, managed to open a doorway back to Castle Arrowroot and the whole batch of us-except Master Hopay, the skipper of the boat Beathe, who had been struck and killed by one of the flying rocks-got through the passage before the shrine came tumbling down.

  But the ground was still shaking.

  It took me a moment to realize that Arrowroot was also being shaken by an earthquake, if not as severely as the island hundreds of miles away in the Mist. The tremor ended quickly at Arrowroot, though, which was lucky. Those of us who had just stepped through from the shrine were shaky enough. Dropping to the floor to ride out this tremor was all any of us was up to. And when the shaking stopped, it took a moment longer for us to realize that it was over. I know that it felt as if I were still shaking after the building stopped.

  "We've got to tell Baron Resler to get everyone away from low ground," I said-louder than necessary, but I was still thinking through the noise of the greater earthquake at the shrine. "There may be a tidal wave." Castle Arrowroot and Arrowroot Town are right on the shore of the Mist.

  "How big a wave?" Lesh asked. He was the first to get to his feet, the old soldier, recovering quickly from all the insanity that had gone before, ready to meet the next threat.

  "Hard telling. It could be twenty, maybe even thirty feet high or more, hitting with a lot of force." I just didn't know what more to say about it.

  "I'll find the baron," Lesh said. He staggered off toward the great hall while the rest of us got to our feet.

  The head of Wellivazey, our dead elf, had fallen and rolled to the side of the corridor when we came through from the shrine. Harkane, formerly squire, now man-at-arms, picked the head up. There were no complaints from the elf, though. His ersatz life after life had finally ended out on that island. To the end, he had contributed to the general weirdness of everything. And his contribution to weirdness didn't look like it was going to end even now. All I had to do was look at Aaron to know that. Aaron had a streak of pale white skin that ran from his left temple to his jaw and a tuft of the elf's platinum-blond hair above it, an eye-catching break in the black skin and hair of my wizard.

  Timon got up and went to look out toward the Mist, presumably to see if the tidal wave was coming. He may not have heard of such a thing before. I didn't bother asking.

  The eight soldiers who had crewed Beathe huddled together. I don't think any of them had been prepared for anything near what had happened. They had seen their captain, Master Hopay, squashed like a beetle, seen the boat riddled by flying rocks and destroyed, all the rest. They had been volunteers, soldiers with some experience on boats, men willing to risk a voyage out of sight of land. I doubted that any of them would ever be foolish enough to volunteer for anything again.

  "We're back at Castle Arrowroot," I told them. "The stairs down that way will take you to the great hall." I pointed, and all eight of them scrambled to their feet and ran for the stairs. I didn't blame them. Anyway, it didn't matter now. Their job was done.

  "How are you doing, Aaron?" I asked. Aaron had gone through a few more varieties of hell out there than the rest of us. He shook his head but did meet my gaze. The cloudiness was gone from his eyes.

  "I'm wondering if maybe I made the biggest mistake of my life when I got into this," he said, speaking very slowly, spacing out the words. He wasn't the only one asking himself that kind of question. I wondered the same thing every time I got in deep trouble.

  "Not that I had much choice," Aaron added after a short pause. I nodded. The way he had kept popping into Varay from Joliet, Illinois, back in the "real" world, he could hardly help "signing on" in Varay. And after growing from eight years old to an apparent mid-twenties in a couple of weeks, he certainly wouldn't fit in anywhere back in the other world.

  "If this is what winning feels like, I'm glad we didn't lose," I said.

  "We haven't won yet," Aaron said, and all I could do was stare at him. "All we've done is buy a little time to find the cure for the disease. That still lies somewhere else. It's some thing else."

  "You're sure?" I wasn't pressing him just because he was new to the wizard business. I'd have pressed Uncle Parthet just as hard. My eyes were drawn to the white streak on the side of Aaron's face again. He didn't seem conscious of it-maybe he wasn't fully aware of it yet, even though he had seen the corresponding black streak on the elf's face-but I couldn't help but stare. The memory of how Aaron had pulled the elf's head on over his own started churning my stomach again.

  "I'm sure," Aaron said. He reached up and traced the streak on his face. I know he hadn't been near a mirror, but maybe a wizard doesn't need one. "I don't know what the answer is yet. But all you've done is load the gun. You haven't pulled the trigger yet."

  That seemed to be a peculiar analogy for him to draw, but I had to reach down and touch myself again, feel the extra set of family jewels. How they got there was more than a painful memory. I still hurt from it.

  "Where do we find the answer?" I asked.

  "I can't even be sure about that," Aaron said. We started walking toward the great hall. Timon and Harkane followed. Neither of them said anything. I doubt if they even thought of trying to contribute to the conversation. "If we still had Wellivazey to question, I might be able to find out."

  "There's no chance at all of pulling him back enough for a few more questions?"

  "No chance at all," Aaron said.

  "Well, if not him, how about his father?" I asked.

  "We send him a message?" Aaron asked.

  "For a start at least." I took a deep breath. "I have to take his son home to him. Wellivazey fulfilled his part of the bargain. I can't back out. I gave my oath."

  "I could argue that, but I won't bother. Even so, you don't have to take him home right away. I know you left yourself that out. And with general destruction hanging over everything, you can't do it now, not when the Elflord of Xayber wants you dead."

  "I know. But maybe he'll agree to a truce long enough to get the general problem solved. That affects him as much as anyone else." But I really wasn't confident of getting anything but agony from the elflord.

  The great hall of Castle Arrowroot w
as in a state of complete upheaval. People were shouting and running around, trying to organize defenses against the possibility of a tidal wave, a tsunami. Part of the fishing fleet was out, as usual, and people worried about that but couldn't do anything about it. There were a number of small villages along the coast-most of them too far away to get a rider to in time.

  "You have any real idea what we're looking for?" Baron Resler asked when he saw me.

  "Just in a general way, Baron," I told him. "An earthquake out at sea can send a giant wave against the shore. How big, I can't begin to guess, but it could easily be twenty or thirty feet, I think."

  "Strong enough to knock down castle walls?" Resler asked.

  "I don't think so, but no guarantee. I just don't know."

  He nodded and went off, yelling at people, trying to get work done. Parts of the town of Arrowroot might be in danger, but maybe not. The three hundred yards or so between the shore and the town might be space enough for any wave to break itself down. The castle was right on the shore, on a manmade island. But the courtyard was twenty feet above the mean water level, and the walls above that were very thick and secure. The waves would have to top sixty feet to come over the walls, and the water wasn't that deep close to shore. Any really huge waves would break farther out and roll in, so maybe the castle itself would be safe.

  My companions and I wandered through the great hall. Each of us grabbed a flagon of beer. Lesh was already there, on his third or fourth round. Aaron got his beer and drank it straight down, and then filled it again.

  "You sure you're old enough for beer?" I asked him. A couple of months before, he had only been eight years old.

  Aaron looked at me over the top of his mug. "Right now, I feel even older than Parthet."

  It was enough to bring a smile to our faces, something we both needed.

  With a little beer in us, we were ready for food, so the five of us went back to the kitchen to scare up something to tide us over for a bit. With all the commotion going on, there were no servants handy to fetch food out to the great hall, not even for the Hero and heir of Varay. I didn't mind. Even after three and a half years all the fuss people made over me was embarrassing.

  We found places to sit in the kitchen, helped ourselves to sandwich fixings, and ate. The cooks and their helpers moved around us. They were obviously nervous because of the earthquake and all the talk about a tidal wave, but meals still had to be prepared. There hadn't been any real damage in the kitchen-or in any of the other parts of Arrowroot we had seen. If any pots had fallen, they had already been picked up. Some of the kitchen staff relaxed a little when they saw the Hero sitting around eating and drinking as though there were nothing at all to worry about. They didn't know that I was too beat to get excited about anything.

  "We should get back to Basil," I said after I had finished a two-pound ham sandwich and a couple of quarts of beer. There was no great enthusiasm in my voice, even though Basil was just a way station between Arrowroot and Cayenne, and Joy.

  Harkane refilled my mug.

  Aaron nodded. He was too busy eating to waste time talking. He was on his second sandwich. He had done all the magic. He had to be famished.

  "In a few minutes," I mumbled, and then I started working on my third quart of brew.

  "Was there a tidal wave after the Coral Lady?" Aaron asked quietly when his mouth was empty for a moment.

  That caught my attention. It was the nuking of the cruise ship Coral Lady in Tampa Bay that had started the latest string of disasters. Both of Aaron's parents had been on the ship.

  "There was a tidal wave," I said, just as quietly. "A bad one."

  "If one hits here, I want to see it," Aaron said.

  "Okay." There wasn't much else I could say. I certainly wasn't going to carp about it being dangerous, not after the magics I had seen Aaron perform out in and around the Great Earth Mother's shrine. Now, I've always been very fond of my Uncle Parthet, but he just wasn't in the same class as Aaron when it came to wizardry, even if Aaron was the rookie and Parthet had been around for twelve hundred years or more. And it wasn't just a matter of Parthet's poor eyesight.

  "I don't know how soon it might hit, so we'd better get our seats pretty soon," I said.

  Aaron stood right up, and so did the rest of us. We went up to the battlements of the keep, even higher than the outer walls. I didn't anticipate any danger there, and my danger sense didn't kick up a fuss. Or maybe it was just overloaded like the rest of me after everything that had already happened.

  The Mist. The Sea of Fairy. Mortals feared to travel out of sight of the shore. As far as anyone in the seven kingdoms was concerned, the Mist couldn't be crossed by mortals, though ships out of Fairy occasionally made the crossing. I had seen one of the Mist's dangers, a sea serpent two miles long. That was enough for me. A tsunami would be almost reassuring, make the Mist a trifle less mysterious.

  We waited, but not idly. Lesh had carried a small keg of beer along and we all had brought our mugs. Lesh was the first member of my entourage when I arrived in Varay. He had earned his knighthood righting at my side in Fairy and in the Battle of Thyme. Besides being a canny soldier with more than thirty years of experience, he had turned into an equally capable chamberlain since I had come into Castle Cayenne.

  The wave, when it came, was less than I had imagined. Two lines of heavy waves came in, several minutes apart. The second was larger. It actually splashed a little water over the curtain wall of Arrowroot-though not very much-and it washed halfway across the plaza that separates the castle from the town. Still, it wasn't very spectacular.

  "Okay, let's get back to Basil," I said when it became clear that we had seen the main event. It probably sounded like a sigh. I was feeling more lethargic than ever. At the moment, it was all I could do to lift my beer mug to my mouth again. None of the others seemed very anxious to move either.

  I looked at Aaron, then at Lesh, Harkane, and Timon-a slow scan. Nobody was jumping up to leave.

  "We do need to get moving," I said. Aaron nodded slowly, but he didn't get up. Neither did I. I did look down into my mug to see how much beer I had left. About half a mug. I lifted it for a drink. That seemed to start a chain reaction. It's like yawning-one person starts and soon everybody's doing it.

  That was when the sentry yelled.

  "Rider coming!" He pointed to the west.

  It wasn't much, but it was something. I stood to look.

  "The wave must have caused trouble somewhere close," Aaron said. It hadn't been ten minutes since the second wave dribbled back into the sea. I nodded. It was the easy guess. It also pumped a little adrenaline back into my system. The lethargy receded.

  "Let's go down to the gate," I said.

  "It seems that the baron is curious as well," Aaron said as we started down the steps to the courtyard. He pointed. Resler was already hurrying to the gate.

  The rider's horse was clomping across the wooden bridge when we reached Baron Resler.

  "There's a strange iron ship, lord," the rider said, gasping for breath as if he had been doing the running instead of the horse. "It washed ashore, t'other side of Nerva." Nerva was the nearest village along the coast, about three miles away.

  "Was it flying a flag?" I asked. I remembered the reports in the other world of two ships being missing, a Greek freighter in the Aegean and a Russian frigate in the Indian Ocean.

  "A red flag, with some design in the corner," the rider said, looking to me and then back to Resler. Well, not everyone in Varay knew who I was.

  "It figures," I said, as much to myself as to anyone else. Then I cleared my throat and spoke a little louder. "It has to be the Russian ship, a naval ship-guns, rockets, who knows what all." It wasn't the fact that it was a Russian ship that bothered me. Any armed vessel would have been just as bad. The buffer zone would make any naval types edgy.

  Resler looked to me. He didn't speak immediately, but a furrow appeared in his forehead as he thought over what I had said. I
didn't jump into any fancy explanations. Perhaps Resler had never heard of Russia, but it seemed more likely that he had. The top people in the buffer zone had a fairly decent grasp of the main facts of the mortal realm. They had to.

  "Trouble?" Resler asked finally.

  I shrugged. "It could be." I looked up at the rider. He had made no move to dismount yet. "Was there any sign of the crew?"

  "There were a couple of people on deck," he said. "I don't know if anything was said. The magistrate sent me riding at once." Every village and town in the kingdom had a magistrate if it didn't have someone higher in the feudal scale. He would be the local government, the representative of the king, and so forth.

  "How many men should I send?" Resler asked me.

  "Let's not go in looking for a fight," I said. "We'll go." I made a vague gesture with my head to indicate my companions. "This is your territory up here, so perhaps you'd want to come along. A few men, just an escort perhaps?" I did what I could to avoid stepping on the baron's privileged toes. It was a delicate point of etiquette, to be sure, since I clearly outranked Resler, but all the more essential because of that.

  "Yes, Highness," Resler said, nodding formally. He turned and yelled for horses to be saddled, then called for a half-dozen men to ride along.

  "An iron ship?" he asked me softly while we waited for the work to be done.

  "Steel," I replied. "Maybe a crew of two or three hundred men." I shrugged. "I'm just guessing on crew size. I don't know how many men a Russian frigate carries, or exactly what kind of weapons they would have. They will undoubtedly be very frightened men, Baron."

  "Frightened men can be dangerous," he observed.

  "At least there's little chance that their guns will work here," I added. Guns did work occasionally in the buffer zone, but not often enough to depend on them. But then, I had never been in the position of hoping that guns wouldn't work before. 2 – Passages

  We rode a mile and a half before I caught my first glimpse of the grounded ship. Part of the frigate's superstructure was visible over a low coastal hill. There was no sound of naval guns being fired. I took that as a good sign.