The Hero King Read online

  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.

  “How big is that thing?” one of Resler’s soldiers asked.

  “Not so big for a navy ship,” I said. “It can’t be more than a few hundred feet long.” Of course, even a frigate would be much larger than any vessel ever seen in the buffer zone. It might be more than ten times the length of Beathe, for example, and Beathe had been a fairly large boat for the Mist.

  The soldier didn’t have anything else to say, not even something predictable like “It’s as big as a dragon.”

  The village of Nerva wasn’t very large, about thirty stone houses. None of the cottages had sustained any serious damage from the waves, though it seemed apparent that the entire village had been awash. The fishing fleet was another story. Two of Nerva’s fishing boats had been washed ashore and damaged. There were already men looking them over to see if they could be repaired. For the families that depended on those boats, that was more important than the huge metal hulk that had also been grounded near the village.

  And it had been thoroughly grounded. The frigate had apparently plowed directly ashore. More than half of the ship was up on the beach. It seemed to be listing only a few degrees to port. Two rope ladders hung from the deck, and uniformed men were already down on the beach, inspecting the hull of the ship, guarded by other uniformed men carrying submachine guns.

  “Let me do the talking,” I told Baron Resler softly. “While those guns might not be very effective, there is a chance that they could get off a shot or two.” Resler nodded. After all, dealing with dangerous situations was my prerogative as Hero of Varay. “I don’t want to see any weapons moving,” I added, a bit louder, looking around so that everyone with us heard. “Let’s not give them any additional reasons to be nervous.”

  I got a few grunts in acknowledgment. Resler’s men were all too transparently awed by the size of the frigate. My own people weren’t. Maybe Aaron was a little nervous at seeing his first ship since his parents were killed in the bombing of the Coral Lady, but he certainly wasn’t awed by its size or its presence in Varay. And Lesh, Timon, and Harkane had seen enough television to be aware of big ships.

  “They’ll never get that boat back into the water,” Resler commented. I glanced at Aaron.

  He shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said softly. “If it becomes important, I’ll try.”

  “In the meantime, can you cook up anything to make certain that their guns won’t work?” I asked.

  He hesitated for a second, then nodded once, decisively, and started a soft chant.

  By that time, the seamen on and below the grounded frigate knew that we were heading for them. I saw several people up on the deck point our way, and the men who had climbed down to inspect the damage were all looking at us, their inspection put aside for the moment. I reined in my horse thirty yards back and dismounted. The people with me also stopped, but only Timon dismounted. He took the reins of my horse.

  I took a few more steps toward the ship.

  “My name is Gil Tyner,” I said. “This is the village of Nerva in the kingdom of Varay.” Meanwhile, I had a fervent appreciation for the translation magic of the buffer zone running through my head. I would be able to understand them, and they would be able to understand me. One of the sailors, obviously an officer from his uniform, took a few steps in my direction. One of the submachine-gun-toting men accompanied him, moving a step or two to the side.

  “I am Lieutenant Dimitry Astakhov of the Kalmikov,” the officer said. “What is this place?”

  I repeated what I had said about that. “A full explanation of that is going to take some doing,” I added. “Perhaps it should wait until I can speak with your captain. In the meantime, is there anything we can do to help? Do you have casualties that need caring for?”

  “We have some minor injuries,” the lieutenant conceded. “Our people are caring for them.” He stared at me for a moment then. “You are attired strangely,” he said then—a masterpiece of understatement.

  I took a deep breath. “You must try to understand that you are no longer on the earth you are familiar with. I believe you were in the Indian Ocean?” I waited until he nodded. Then I pointed out to sea. “That is known as the Mist, sometimes as the Sea of Fairy. But, your captain?”

  Lieutenant Astakhov seemed delighted to pass the buck to his boss. He led the way up one of the rope ladders, and I followed. The lieutenant hadn’t even tried to make a fuss about my swords. The captain of the Kalmikov was Commander Eugene Sekretov, a man who looked much too young to be in command of a ship. He had trouble speaking—not any kind of physical disability, he was just so frustrated by his situation that coherent speech was quite an effort. Bull Halsey would have had just as much trouble.

  “This is going to be difficult for you to believe,” I said by way of preface, and then I jumped right into a ten-minute discourse on the buffer zone and its relation to the other realms, mortal and fairy. The captain’s frustration grew sentence by sentence. His face flushed a deeper red. It was obvious that he neither believed me nor had a better explanation.

  “I can guess that your engines haven’t worked since your ship came to these waters, that none of your electronic communications gear works. You don’t have radio contact with anyone. Your radar and sonar don’t function. I’ve never tried to use a compass here, but I would guess that—at a minimum—it probably does not function as you would expect. I can also guess that none of your guns will fire—not your naval guns, not your pistols or the submachine guns your sailors have down on the beach. That is the nature of the place. If you haven’t already tried your weapons, please go ahead and do so now.”

>   The captain held his hand out toward Lieutenant Astakhov, and the lieutenant handed him his pistol. “There is a round in the chamber,” Astakhov said. The captain flipped off the safety and lifted the gun. I didn’t suggest that he aim it at me, but for an instant I thought he was going to. But finally, he walked over to the side of the bridge and fired it into the air.

  At least he pulled the trigger. Several times. He went through all the procedures, jacked new rounds into the chamber, and so forth, and the pistol still refused to operate. Then I waited while he called men in and tried several other weapons. Finally, he gave orders to load and fire one of the deck guns—something along the order of a four-or five-inch job by the look of it. It didn’t work either, not in four tries.

  Then we did a lot more talking. The breakthrough came when I assured the captain that we would be able to get him and all of his people back to the other world. I don’t know if he believed me when I said that nothing could be done for his ship, but there was undoubtedly a lot of what I said that he wasn’t ready to believe. And I didn’t broach the subject of just where in the other world they would be going. I just assured him that the crew would be able to get home. He could worry when the time came about explaining how he and his crew happened to walk into the Russian consulate in Chicago when they were supposed to be aboard their ship in the Indian Ocean.

  It was nearly sunset before Captain Sekretov and a third of his crew accompanied me back to Castle Arrowroot. The captain wasn’t about to leave his ship unmanned. I told him that I would make arrangements for getting them all home. I assumed that he would be intent on destroying any documents and equipment that the Russian navy considered too sensitive for foreign eyes. I didn’t care about that. I wouldn’t have minded too much if he had ordered the whole ship blown to bits—if explosives worked in the buffer zone.

  And then, finally, it was time for me to go home.

  I was a little nervous about using the magic doorway from Arrowroot to Castle Basil after the way Aaron had tapped into the system to get us home from the island. The doorways are a family magic, controlled by sets of rings made by Parthet and only usable by the royal family of Varay, and people with whom the blood royal (pardon my blush) have had sex. A pair of doorways have to be matched between specific places, with the doors on each end lined by sea-silver, a seaweed that grows only in the Mist, along the Isthmus of Xayber. That was the way it had been for as long as the magic had been in existence. But Aaron, new wizard, not part of the family in either of the necessary senses, had confided to me that he could go between any of the sea-silver-lined doorways at will, not just the matched pairs, without the proper rings or the proper family tree. And then, out on that island in the Mist, he had opened a doorway that wasn’t even part of the system to carry us back to Arrowroot. I was afraid that he might have shorted out the whole system, and magic is subject to interference and static, just like radio or television.

  But we reached the capital without any difficulty. The passage worked the way it always did.

  Castle Basil was more of a homecoming than Arrowroot.

  We headed from the connection with Arrowroot toward the great hall of Basil. I knew that word of our return would spread quickly enough without any contribution from us. Baron Kardeen reached the hall as soon as we did. He strode across the room calling out his welcome before he got to us.

  “You got what you went for?” he asked then.

  I nodded. “We lost Master Hopay and the boat, though.” I waited until he was right with us and spoke softly enough that I wouldn’t broadcast that news throughout the room. “And the elf ran out of what extra time he had.” I pointed. Harkane was still carrying the head under his arm. “Something will have to be done with that for the time being.”

  “We’ll keep it safe,” the baron said. The way he searched my eyes then, I knew the question that he didn’t want to ask.

  “I will keep my promise to him,” I said. “We would never have made it without the elf. However, I have no deadline on the promise. I was careful about that. How is the king?”

  Emotion rippled the muscles of Kardeen’s face. He controlled it with a deep breath and an instant’s hesitation. “He has been in a coma for more than a week now. Your mother or Parthet remains with him constantly.”

  Or you. I thought. I bet you take your turns as well.

  “Who’s with him now?” I asked.

  “Your mother. Parthet, I believe, is in his workroom. He’s one place or the other all of the time. I don’t think he’s left the castle since we came back from seeing you off.”

  Well, Parthet had been spending less and less time at his little cottage in the forest even before that. Even without a crisis, he had rarely gone farther from the castle than one of the pubs in the town of Basil, below the castle’s rock, for more than a year.

  “Harkane, you and Timon take the elf’s head to Parthet,” I said, and they hurried off. “Aaron, will you go up to see King Pregel with me?”

  “Of course,” he said.

  “Have you seen much of the king?” I asked Aaron while we were on our way up.

  “Parthet introduced me to him,” Aaron said. “I’ve seen him only one other time.”

  Lesh followed us upstairs and took up a familiar position outside the door to the king’s bedchamber while Aaron and I went in. Mother got up from a stool next to Pregel’s bed and hurried to intercept us as far from him as she could. In that room, that meant about eighteen feet.

  “You’ve bound him here too long,” Mother whispered angrily.

  “If I’ve bound him, it was only to give him a chance to heal himself again, the way he has so often before,” I whispered back. I was still skeptical about Mother’s belief that Pregel—her grandfather, my great-grandfather-remained alive only because I kept telling him that I couldn’t take over his job yet. Anyway, the tension between Mother and me often means that I doubt anything she tells me about anything. Twenty-one years of pervasive deceit are hard to forget.

  Mother and I stared at each other for a moment, then I suggested that she take a break. I would stay with the king for a bit.

  “Will you never release him?” she demanded.

  I bit back the impulse to snap an angry reply at her. I was too tired for patience, but I was also too tired for an argument. I was too tired for much of anything. It was more than just lassitude after weeks of short rations and mortal peril. I had never been so thoroughly drained in my life, not even when I was badly injured and holding on through sheer insanity during the struggle against the Etevar of Dorthin.

  I continued to stare at her. Slowly, I collected enough energy to say, “If we can’t find a way to stop this crazy spin into chaos, we’ll all have our release, much too soon.”

  She brushed past me and left the room.

  I leaned my head back to ease a throbbing pain at the base of my skull and closed my eyes for a moment. Disagreeing with Mother did that to me. Finally, I looked across the room at Pregel, so thin that he hardly dented the sheet pulled up to his shoulders.

  “Aaron, will you see if there’s anything you can do to help him?” Despite the unbelievable magics I had seen Aaron pull off at the shrine of the Great Earth Mother, I couldn’t work up an ounce of confidence that he could help the king. But I had to know.

  “I’ll try,” Aaron whispered simply. There was no bravado in his voice, but neither was there doubt.

  We crossed the room together. I sat on the stool Mother had vacated. Aaron stood at the foot of the bed and stared at the king.

  I could see the change in grandfather’s condition, the deterioration he had suffered in the weeks since I had last seen him. He seemed to be—quite literally—wasting away to nothing. The way people have to eat and eat just to maintain themselves in the magical climate of the seven kingdoms, wasting away actually made some sort of sense. If you couldn’t eat, you had to lose body reserves, and people don’t maintain great quantities of fat in the buffer zone. Pregel was so thin that
I thought he might almost be translucent if I held him against a strong light.

  At the end of the bed, Aaron started chanting very softly. I felt the light tingle, like static electricity, that comes from active magic (as opposed to the passive magic that can’t be escaped in the buffer zone).

  “I’m back from another crazy quest, Grandfather,” I said, speaking softly but not actually whispering. I reached over and took his hand. It was cold, impossibly cold. I felt his wrist and could barely detect a pulse—faint and irregular. His breathing was just as poor.

  As briefly as I could, I reported on my quest for the balls of the Great Earth Mother, and where they were now, the way I had to swallow them, the way they now rested between my legs. Talking about that seemed to bring back the throbbing, the ache.

  “We’ve got a chance now, Grandfather. Sure, everything seems to be going to hell in a hurry and we don’t know what we have to do to stop it, but I’ve got the ammunition. As soon as we find out what has to be done, I’m going to give it a try.”

  If there was time. If the runaway entropy didn’t drop the End of Everything on us first. It seemed strange that only when everything was spiraling toward destruction did any sort of reasonable logic seem to hold in the buffer zone. It was as if magic was descending on its way to and through science.

  “Do you remember the way I stormed out of your dining room that day?” I asked, knowing that the king wouldn’t answer. “I didn’t want any part of being Hero of Varay. I was madder than hell about the way I was secretly groomed for the job without being told, without being given a choice.”

  I shut up then. I didn’t want to go down that path again. Not that I can ever avoid the memories. Every time Mother and I have a disagreement, it brings the pain and anger back again, full force.

  Then I noticed the silence. Aaron had quit chanting. I turned and glanced up at him. He shook his head and gestured toward the door. We both walked over there.

  “There’s nothing I can do,” Aaron whispered. “He isn’t in pain, but his spirit is—well, I guess the word is restless.”