The Hero King vm-3 Read online

  "Aye, sire," Lesh said.

  "Joy will make sure that all her relatives know you're looking out for them. And Baron Kardeen will make sure you get any help you need. We'll leave Harkane to continue caring for Cayenne, though you might check in on him from time to time to make sure everything is okay there."

  "We'll manage, won't we, Lesh?" Joy said.

  He grinned at her. "Aye, my lady, we will at that, I suppose."

  "We're going up to our apartment now," Joy said. That was news to me, but no real surprise. "We're not to be disturbed for anything."

  "I'll make sure of it," Lesh said.

  And then, as quickly as we could reach it, Joy and I were alone in the huge bedroom we had inherited from my predecessor and great-grandfather. And the huge bed. There was so much to say that we didn't speak at all for quite a time. We got undressed, slowly, wasting minutes. Soft caresses, tender kisses, and an occasional stray tear that was blinked away quickly. I was getting ready to leave Joy on a mission to find and have sex with another female-who might not, technically speaking, be even remotely human. That was something that Joy and I couldn't even begin to discuss. At the moment, it really didn't matter. It was part of some very iffy possible future, something too unreal to come between us.

  We more or less rolled to the center of the huge bed, pressed together, both conscious of every second we were spending in what might be our final time together-a slightly out-of-focus long shot with petroleum jelly smeared on the camera lens to give it the proper dreamy appearance; soft music in the background, becoming slightly louder as we caught fire and hurried on to the climax. In the movies, it would be fade to black-or cut directly to a different scene with a different pacing.

  We weren't on film, though.

  Stolen breath. A moment of panting while we recovered-still holding each other, still clasping, clinging. Sweat and flushed faces. A few more tears, hidden from each other because we had our cheeks together.

  "Come back to me," Joy whispered after a too-short eternity.

  "I will." The promise hurt because I didn't know if it would be possible, and this time, I was almost certain that it wouldn't be. Even if I succeeded in reaching the Great Earth Mother and putting to work what remained of Vara, I didn't know what there would be afterward. And I did know how lonely any new world would be without Joy.

  "I will," I repeated. "I love you, Joy, more than anything else, ever."

  I was glad that she couldn't see my tears. I rolled us a little more to the side so my tears wouldn't drip on her neck and face and betray me.

  "They'll all be waiting for you downstairs," Joy said finally. "They must know what we're doing up here." A sudden touch of embarrassment warmed her face.

  I laughed softly. "If they do, then they'll be damn sure not to interrupt us before we're ready." But time was passing. We disengaged, with more slow kissing and whispered tendernesses that almost delayed us further. There was only time for me to hurry through a quick, and cold, bath. I didn't have a tank installed to provide hot water at Basil yet.

  Joy pulled on her clothes quickly, then helped me to dress in all the crud that questing requires-weapons, armor, heavy boots and trousers, all the way up to my swords and lucky Cubs cap. Going into Fairy and beyond, I wasn't even going to bother carrying a gun. There wasn't a chance in a million that one would work in the farther reaches.

  We walked down to the great hall with our arms around each other-but carefully, because of all the hardware hanging off of me.

  "Everything's ready for you, sire," Lesh said. "The horses are in the courtyard, and the cooks have put together a hot meal for you before you start."

  "Thanks, Lesh," I said. No matter what, find time to squeeze in a banquet. It's not show in the buffer zone. It's the calories that power the whole setup.

  After the more than three and a half years since my arrival in the buffer zone, I was used to cramming in food at an alarming rate. And washing it down with quarts of beer and wine and coffee. Nobody passes up a chance for a meal.

  But, all too soon, it was time to go out to the horses. The head and body of Wellivazey were on a stretcher. Electrum was saddled. My packhorse was loaded.

  "Whenever you're ready," Aaron said. I nodded, and he did the quick chant to contact the elflord.

  This time, we saw him as a large face in the sky, like an image projected against the clouds, the way Parthet and I had seen him following the Battle of Thyme. Aaron, Joy, and the rest of my people backed away, leaving a large clear space around me.

  "Anytime," I said, conversationally. And Castle Basil disappeared from around me. 14 – The Three Mirrors

  It would look like a simple optical effect on the screen, a jump cut from me sitting on my horse in the courtyard of Castle Basil to a similar shot of me sitting on my horse in the courtyard of the elflord's manor, with the packhorse on my left and the stretcher with the remains of Wellivazey on my right. There is no change in that foreground tableau, just the change in setting, in background.

  I had no sensation of movement. This transition was even simpler than stepping through one of the magic doorways, and I was so accustomed to those that I rarely thought of them as magic any longer. But the motionless jump from Basil to northern Xayber left me dizzy and disoriented for a moment.

  It had been late morning at Basil, ten, maybe closer to eleven o'clock, and the sky had been thickly overcast. I reached the elflord's estate at the northern end of the Isthmus of Xayber on a crystal-clear night. The stars were sharp specks in the sky, the five crescent moons a chilly reminder of the way that time was running out.

  Even that shouldn't have shaken me up the way it did. There was a time difference of about three hours between Varay and Louisville or Chicago. The change involved in that move had never really disrupted me, not even the first time. There were enough other weirdnesses to distract me that first time through one of the magic doorways.

  But this shift did bother me, in ways that I could hardly explain. There was a tingling of my Hero's danger sense, but not the all-out alarm that signals imminent deadly peril. I sat still on Electrum, my knees squeezed tightly against my horse's flanks, while I waited for the dizziness to pass. The night air was quite cold. I could see my breath, and the breath of both horses. The cold actually helped, I think. It jogged my mind with familiar sensations, let me concentrate on those until the discomfort passed.

  When my head quit spinning and I was able to think of things beyond the boundary of my skin, I noted that I was just in front of a wide staircase leading up to what had to be the main entrance to a huge manor house-or palace, if you like fancier terms. I was on a circular drive about the size of the racetrack at Arlington Park. The house looked to be at least five stories high, well over two hundred feet long, with wings projected toward the front at both ends.

  I dismounted just as the front door of the house opened and a flood of light jumped out to repel the darkness.

  The elflord led the way. He had a crowd of retainers with him. Only a few showed any weapons, and none of the blades I saw were being brandished. My training, and the paranoia that the elflord induced, led me to notice things like that. The servants-or slaves, whichever they were-were mainly human, though I did spot a couple of the vaguely porcine faces of troll-kind. But Xayber was definitely the only elf in evidence. Most of the servants carried lights, torches that burned as bright as halogen headlights, but without smoke. Those servants who came out of the house empty-handed went to the stretcher that held Wellivazey, the son of the elflord… and the father of Annick.

  "You might as well come inside and be comfortable for a while, while you may," the elflord said in neutral tones. "Dawn is yet a time away, and we have much to do before it comes."

  I nodded. I didn't want to speak for fear that my teeth would chatter from the unexpected nip in the unexpected night.

  Xayber turned from me to look down at his son. He touched a pale cheek, then grasped his son's shoulder. The elflord stood motionl
ess for a long moment before he gestured toward his waiting servants.

  "Take him inside and have him prepared for the vigil."

  Those servants led the way toward the door, flanked by others with the torches. Xayber turned to me and gestured after them, while a final two servants took the reins of my horses.

  "You bested him in single combat when he had every conceivable advantage, a costly miscalculation on our part," Xayber said. It wasn't an apology, but I hoped I was right in reading the statement as a "let bygones be bygones" sort of truce.

  "In some ways, your son and I were not so different," I said, choosing my words with exceptional care and making all sorts of mental reservations. "Both of us doing what we saw as our duty. This may sound banal, but there have been times when I wished that we had known each other before he died as well as we did after."

  We stopped at the top of the stairs, on a porch or patio that was long enough to hold a half-dozen shuffleboard courts end to end.

  Quite seriously, Xayber said, "I thank you for that."

  The ultrapolite, almost warm, welcome from the elflord made me more nervous than open hostility could possibly have.

  I'm not sure what I expected from the elflord's mansion-something exotic, no doubt, with sparkling lights, invisible servants, rooms perhaps marked by indefinite and shifting boundaries and optical illusions, something ostentatiously magical. The reality was considerable more mundane-lavish, luxurious, but endlessly mundane-with no more obvious feeling of magic about it than the great hall of Castle Basil. I had no real chance to fully gauge the size of the place, inside or out, but it had to compare with some of the largest "stately" homes of England. The first room inside the front door was almost large enough to hold my parents' Louisville house, garage, chimney, and all.

  The elflord's son had already been taken beyond that room. I didn't know where. The elflord and I went off to the left, to a relatively small room, one that was only about forty feet square. The chandeliers and candelabra made the room as bright as day. The walls held paintings and plaques. There were statues standing in the corners.

  "Please sit," Xayber said, pointing me at a very comfortable-looking chair by a large fireplace-everything about the place was large, including the chair. It was built for someone a couple of feet taller than me. But I managed. I slipped off the rigs for my elf swords and sat, holding the weapons across my legs. My feet barely reached the floor.

  Xayber took a similar chair a few feet away and angled toward mine. The only weapon he showed was a long dagger with a jeweled hilt, more or less the equivalent of the monogrammed breast-pocket handkerchief in parts beyond the world I was born in.

  The heat from the fireplace was welcome.

  "There's really no point in setting out before dawn, unless you've learned to see like an elf," Xayber said after a silence that must have lasted all of five minutes.

  I shook my head. "That magic is not mine."

  "Some wine?" Xayber gestured, and a servant entered the room immediately, carrying a gold tray with wine in a fancy crystal carafe and two matching goblets.

  There was no question of me refusing wine, or anything else. If Xayber intended harm, he had no need of subterfuge.

  "Where do I head from here?" I asked after I had sampled the wine-sweet, but not too bad. Actually, it was probably a top vintage for its type; I'm just not crazy about sweet wines. I'd prefer a decent beer any time.

  "Due north, from anywhere," Xayber said.

  "You mean it's at the north pole?"

  "Not precisely, but if you were following a compass, you would need to follow it north, even from the north pole."

  Right, that doesn't make sense, but it was no more impossible than a lot of other things that I had encountered in Fairy and the buffer zone. I accepted Xayber's statement as the literal truth.

  "What am I likely to meet along the way?"

  "Anything you could possibly imagine, and much that you couldn't." He gave me a self-conscious smile. "I'm sorry. I really can't be more specific than that. It is simply not possible. You know some of the dangers of Fairy." That was, I assumed, an oblique reference to my earlier foray along the Isthmus of Xayber. "The deeper into our territory you go, the more common are the hazards, especially to outsiders. The hazards are stronger and stranger. In the lands beyond Fairy, even that is no sure guide. You will likely face hazards that no one has ever seen before, that may not have existed before your arrival. That is the nature of the region, if it can be said to have a nature… if it can even rightly be called a region." He paused and lifted his wineglass in my direction.

  "And you have the added handicap of the recent and intense hatred of the Great Earth Mother."

  "You don't think I can even reach her, let alone do what I have to do then," I said. I didn't bother to make it a question.

  "No, but you are the only chance." He stared at me for a moment, then closed his eyes and stared some more. I had no doubt that he was still looking at me, still seeing something.

  "But then," he said after another long silence, "I imagine that it had to be like this when the time came. Your people have some legend about a Golden Age returning. A Golden Age you were supposed to initiate simply by being both King and Hero of Varay." I nodded when he hesitated. "Perhaps some garbling of the truth is necessary over so many generations of mortals."

  "You mean that instead of just bringing back the Golden Age of Vara, reuniting the titles had to bring back the chaos that he ended?" I asked.

  "That is certainly how it has worked out, anyway," Xayber said.

  It was as I had guessed, but having my fear confirmed didn't make me feel any better. Talk about your monumental screwups. Like that party game where the host or hostess whispers a story to one guest and the tale has to pass through everyone at the party and the final result is compared with the original story. At a party, the evolution of a simple story into something that bears little if any resemblance to the original is a gas. Translated to reality on this kind of scale, it loomed as the ultimate tragedy.

  "Then, along with everything else, the only way to get to this new Golden Age is for me to manage what Vara did, despite the difficulties."

  "My memory may be failing me, but I do seem to see some resemblance to Vara in you. Perhaps, despite everything my mind tells me, you do have some chance."

  "You remember Vara?"

  "The memories fade in time, or they would not be bearable," Xayber said, closing his eyes again. "Vara, or the one before him." He shrugged and opened his eyes to stare at me again. "This is not the first universe that has ended."

  "And you have survived the chaos before?"

  "What do the legends of Varay say of the time before time?"

  "That the Great Earth Mother roamed the void until she found a mate she considered suitable. There is nothing about what she was roaming on or where the mate came from if there was nothing around before."

  "You see the gaps then," Xayber said, and I nodded.

  "But if nothing comes after the dissolution this time, no one will survive, not even the Great Earth Mother, in the long run."

  It was Xayber's turn to nod.

  "Yet you think she'll kill the only chance for a continuation? "

  "Why should she worry about continuation?" Xayber asked. "An end is only an end, not the bleakest of prospects for one whose memories go back too far."

  I understood less about the elflord with every sentence he uttered. This was the man (or whatever he was in essence) who had tried so diligently to kill me? Who had sent his son to kill me after he failed to do it directly? Who had made a career of trying to conquer Varay? He was starting to sound a little like Uncle Parthet.

  "You should eat before you leave," the elflord said, an invitation that didn't particularly surprise me. "My servants will have a meal prepared and waiting for us now."

  We both stood. I carried my sword rigs in my left hand. Xayber led the way to a dining room that could have fed the entire population of a
large university dormitory. The table was a good thirty yards long, without exaggeration. The sides were lined with chairs, but only two places had been set, together, at one end of the table. As we entered through one doorway, a stream of servants entered from another over to our left.

  This meal was even more of a feast than a meal at Castle Basil. Since we were deep in Fairy, a land even more bound up in magic than the buffer zone, the caloric demands made on residents were even greater. There was a wide variety of food, and to be honest, most of it tasted better than the best fare served in Varay. The plates were something even finer than the finest china I had come across in my world, delicate, almost translucent. The silverware was real silver, the goblets crystal and gold with decorations of rubies, emeralds, and diamonds. I doubted that any of it was fake.

  Xayber kept me company, talking enough to prevent any long silences, yet he still managed to eat more than I packed away. I did myself proud, though, cramming in the equivalent of three or four Thanksgiving dinners, even though I had eaten a full meal just before leaving Castle Basil, and an equally full breakfast just a few hours before that. Back in the real world, that kind of gluttony could have proved quickly fatal. In Fairy, it scarcely gave me a bloated feeling.

  "It is nearly dawn," Xayber said as the meal wound down. I was still eating, but just forcing the food in now, a small cache against days of light rations to come. I nodded. There were no windows in the dining room, and the elflord certainly hadn't consulted a watch or clock, but I didn't doubt what he said.

  "I should leave as quickly as possible," I said.

  He nodded. "I have been thinking. Before you leave, there is one thing that may give us both some idea of your chances for success."

  "That sounds like it might be a dangerous thing to know," I said.

  He watched my face for a moment before he said, "If you would rather not know?"

  I paused before I answered this time also. "There's a saying back in my old world, 'Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise.' But I don't think that I could possibly have lower expectations than I do now. I have no objections, if it's something you want to know."