by Rick Shelley
Parthet went into one of his mumbo-jumbo chants. I was still staring at my wound, not up to speaking… or even to falling down yet. The circle of blood quit growing, and I got numb again, this time just from the waist to my knees-an anesthetic numbness, not shock numbness. When the feeling went out of me, I started to fall again, but Lesh still managed to keep me from hitting the floor.
Parthet finished his conjuring, then got on the other side of me from Lesh. As small as he was, Parthet wasn't completely helpless. Parthet also carried along the head of the dead elf.
"Get some lads to carry the body up to the castle, tonight," Parthet told Old Baldy. "The king will want to see him without any bits and pieces hacked off for souvenirs or charms. If anything's missing, be it so little as a fingernail, your beer will taste like vinegar for a year." Sometime later, I heard Parthet mumble, "Old Baldy would sell him off by the ounce and retire if he could. Where would I go for beer then?"
I didn't notice at the time that Parthet had also fetched along the elf's sword.
There was a magic passage from the back room of the Bald Rock up to the castle, a passageway put in by Parthet and my father a couple of decades back. That was the route Parthet had wanted us to take when we started out after supper. We did use it going back. Parthet opened the way and Lesh hauled me through into the castle and started shouting for help.
I didn't pay much attention to the step-by-step drag or my reception in the castle. Things got kind of dreamy for me, but I'm sure that I was still at least partly conscious. Even at the time, I wasn't worried about dying. I didn't have an instant's doubt about my eventual recovery-once I managed to forget the elf's message. After all, I didn't die on the spot, and the elf did. I had been through worse. I had certainly felt worse. I didn't see Vara or any of the other members of the congregation of Heroes that had haunted me before and during the Battle of Thyme. Parthet had said that it was all nonsense, but I still couldn't write off my experiences to imagination.
I recall seeing Baron Kardeen looking anxiously at me, and I felt surprise that we were already back at the castle. I thought to smile, to reassure the chamberlain, but I don't know if the thought reached my face.
There was some kind of delay then. We didn't pop straight through to Louisville. Lesh got me stretched out on a bench and sat by my head, holding on to make sure I didn't roll off. Parthet and Kardeen conferred for a moment, off to the side, out of earshot for me in the shape I was in. Parthet examined the dead elf's sword closely and then shook his head. He picked the elf's head up and shook it. He set the head on a small table, facing him, and touched his rings to the elf's temples.
There was some chanting.
"Talk to me, you bastard," Parthet said.
"I can't," the head replied-quite clearly.
"If you don't, we'll bury you in chicken shit."
I guess that was some sort of ultimate threat to make to a dead elf warrior. His eyes opened wide and his face grew a look of supreme terror.
"You wouldn't!"
"In a second, with the greatest glee," Parthet assured him. "Tell me, was your blade poisoned?"
"I am the son of Xayber! I have no need of poisons."
Parthet spit in his eye. "You ain't the hot shit you thought you were, or you'd still have a body beneath your wagging chin."
"Enough," Baron Kardeen said softly. I was thinking the same thing, but my mouth was still on strike. I had never seen Uncle Parthet behave so crudely.
"For now," Parthet said, sighing. "But fill a crock with the strongest whiskey you can locate and put this head in it. We may need to talk to him again later. It depends on how Gil fares in the hospital. If there was more than steel to his blade, we may have to question him again."
"We'll keep him available," Kardeen said. His voice sounded oddly strained, taut.
Maybe I was the only one shocked by the head of a dead man, or dead elf, talking. He had no lungs to push air through a larynx. In fact, I doubted very much that he had a larynx left. Dragon's Death had caught him extremely high in the throat. I had a lot of questions that I wanted to ask, but I couldn't ask them. I had all the parts the elf was missing, but he could talk and I couldn't. What's fair about that?
But then they started moving me again. I could no more move on my own than that elf could. We went through a doorway to Louisville and woke Mother. She got her chance to fuss over me, but she didn't take long at it. She knew enough about medicine to know that my wound was out of her league. She got clothes on and led the way to the garage. They stretched me out in the back of her Dodge van. We all went to the hospital. Mother didn't bother calling an ambulance. I doubt that she even considered it. She preferred to do the driving-like a maniac, but Mother always drives that way. I was too numb to cringe, but I was still conscious enough to worry about her driving.
My first hours in the hospital are a blank. After an initial examination, x-rays, and other tests, they decided that I had to have immediate surgery, and for that, they turned out my lights. I have a feeling that they were surprised by how difficult it was to put me under, and at the time, I thought that my danger sense was fighting them with every bit of magic it had. But we were in Louisville, not in the buffer zone, and the magic lost.
When I came to, I was in a private room with two IV bags dripping clear fluid into my left arm. I woke quickly, without any drowsy, dreamy period. Snap. It wasn't until I started to reach for the elf sword that wasn't over my shoulder that I noticed the tubes to my arm. Memory flooded in to fill the gaps. I looked around. I was alone, but not for long. Mother and Parthet must have just stepped out for a drink of water or something. They came back in.
"How are you feeling?" Mother asked.
I was still taking stock. "Not bad, considering," I said after a moment, and then I realized that I had echoed Kardeen's assessment of Pregel's condition. I shook my head, but didn't bother to explain the gesture to Mother and Parthet. I still felt some pain, but less than just after the fight-and it could not begin to compare to the pain I felt after the dragon fell on me outside Castle Thyme. The needles in my arms were more annoying than the pain from where the sword had slashed me. I mentioned that.
"The surgeon said that you were extremely lucky. All she had to do was sew up everything that was cut."
"How long have I been out?"
"Less than four hours altogether. The doctor said that you wouldn't be waking up for another hour or more and that you would probably be groggy all day." Mother shrugged. "I didn't take that too seriously. I saw your father wounded too many times."
"How long am I going to be cooped up here?"
"A few days. The doctor wasn't too specific. She said it depended on how you respond to the surgery, and whether there's any drainage infection."
I turned my head toward Uncle Parthet. Even with the wound and surgery, my mind was working a lot better than it normally does the morning after a good drunk. "Joy is going to be at O'Hare Airport in Chicago, just a few minutes after noon. She expects me to pick her up."
"You can't…" Mother started before she realized that I wasn't talking about going to meet her myself.
"I think there's probably time to catch her at her parents' house," I said. "It doesn't take very long to fly from St. Louis to Chicago."
"It's not six o'clock yet," Mother said. "She's probably not out of bed."
"I don't see a telephone in here," I said, looking around again.
"This is just the recovery ward," Mother told me. "You won't be moved to a regular room until later this morning."
"How much later?"
"I don't know. I'll have to check." I stared at her without speaking and she said that she would check on it right away and left.
"Where's Lesh?" I asked Parthet.
"Out with the automobile. I just went down there a bit ago to tell him that you're okay. He didn't want to come up, dressed for Varay. He's probably in more pain than you seem to be. I don't have any of the fixings for my hangover cure along."
"And I suppose your head's throbbing too."
"Not so bad, lad, not so bad. Now, what did you want to tell me that you chased your mother out for?"
"I'm going to need you to pick up Joy at the airport. I imagine she'll want to come here. If I can reach her at home, she can fly here instead of to Chicago. If not…"
"You want me to pick her up in Chicago and fetch her here."
"She doesn't know anything about Varay yet, Uncle," I said. "Not one word."
Parthet was quick on the uptake. "You mean I can't bring her down by doorway from your apartment."
"That's exactly what I mean."
"You want me to get on an airplane and bring her? I've never been on an airplane."
"You don't know what you're missing."
"And happy at that." He hesitated, but then he nodded. "I do hope you can get her on the telephone in time, though," he said.
"If they're not going to move me to a regular room in time for me to make the call, you could do it, but don't scare her to death. Tell her I'm okay before you tell her I'm in the hospital."
My surgeon came in then and bustled Parthet out of the room so she could examine me. She identified herself as Dr. Barlow as if "Doctor" were her first name and said that I shouldn't be awake yet. That came out almost like an accusation. She wanted to know how I felt, and how I happened to get stabbed so badly. Among other things.
I didn't answer any of the questions right away. She hardly gave me a chance to talk. But the delay was useful. It gave me time to try to remember if anything had been said about an "official" story. An urban hospital in the "real" world meant bureaucracy, a police report at the very least, maybe even a cop in to ask questions and be generally nosy. And I couldn't remember that we had agreed on any kind of lie to tell.
"I was out last night and got jumped," I said when I couldn't avoid the question any longer. "It was dark and I didn't see much." Keep it short. Keep it simple. We could do any necessary embellishing later.
Dr. Barlow nodded absently while she investigated the sutures she had stitched in my hide and the drain tube hanging out. "You were lucky," she said when she finished. She went to the sink at the side of the room and scrubbed her hands. "When I saw the wound, I expected to find more internal trauma than there was. The wound was deep but clean. It could almost have been made with a large scalpel. There were no severed sections of intestine, no damage to other internal organs. I stitched up the cut skin and muscles, the abdominal wall. Not much more complicated than a hernia operation, as it turned out."
"No permanent damage of any kind?" I asked.
She didn't look at me directly. "The reproductive system was not involved."
Well, I guess that was what I was referring to. I wasn't used to women doctors, even older, dumpy ones like Barlow.
"How long until I get out of the hospital?"
"Figure four or five days, if there are no complications."
"Can I get rid of these tubes? They're driving me crazy."
"Not yet. How about pain?"
"Not enough to distract me from these damn needles."
I guess I was too lucid or something. Dr. Barlow did all of the easily recognizable medical things on me without calling in a nurse to help. She checked my respiration and pulse, blood pressure, adjusted the drip on the IVs, and made a long entry in the metal-jacketed chart.
"I must be a better surgeon than I thought," she mumbled.
"Why do you say that?"
"No pain, too much energy. You shouldn't even be awake yet, and if you were awake, you should be groggy, hurting, and looking for a shot to put you back out."
"Just a waste of time," I said. "How soon can I get to a regular room? I've got an important phone call to make."
She stopped fiddling with the chart then and stared at me. "Do you ever feel pain?" she asked. The question startled me, but she wasn't being sarcastic. She was serious.
"Oh, yes, I feel pain," I told her. There were flash-backs to the Isthmus of Xayber and to the field next to Castle Thyme when I hurt so bad that death would have been welcome. "I've felt much worse pain than this."
I got to a room in plenty of time to make the call to Joy myself.
"Don't tell me you've decided that you don't want me to come back," she said as soon as she got on the line.
"I won't," I said. "It's just that I'm not going to be able to meet you at the airport. I had a little accident last night. I'm in the hospital, in Louisville. I'm okay, but it's going to be a few days before they let me out."
There was a silence that seemed to go on for quite a while before Joy said, "You sure it's not a nut house?"
"I'm sure."
"How badly are you hurt?"
"They had to operate on me during the night. Nothing major."
After another long silence, Joy said, "So, tell me just exactly where you are. I'll change my ticket and meet you there."
I told her. "My Uncle Parker will meet you at the airport," I said. "He's short, a little stooped, wears huge glasses about three inches thick, and he's something over twelve hundred years old." That was my latest estimate. Joy giggled, obviously assuming that I was making a joke. "He looks harmless, but don't let that fool you."
Joy called back twenty minutes later with her new schedule. It would take her until late afternoon to get to Louisville. I assured her that Uncle Parker would meet her and bring her straight to the hospital, and that she could stay with my mother until I got out of the hospital. I didn't clear that with Mother first, but there was no problem.
"Joy's all right," Mother said when I told her afterward. "She's not like that other creature." She tried never to refer to Annick by name. She hadn't liked Annick from their first meeting, before Annick and I had our one-night fling. At the time, I was surprised that Mother could even think that I would be attracted to anyone who got her jollies cutting the throats of sleeping men.
"What's involved in making a new set of rings?" I asked. Mother didn't pick up on the hint there right away. The family rings operate the magic doorways. The passages are a. family magic, but you don't have to be born to it. After all, Dad wasn't born to it, and he could use the doorways. The family magic came from Mother's family. She made it possible for Dad to use it… and I had already made it possible for Joy. In bed.
Mother shook her head. "That's Parthet's domain. You'd have to ask him."
Parthet had gone back downstairs, to keep Lesh company, I think. Lesh had made several previous trips to our world with me, a couple of them rather extended. The translation magic in the buffer zone makes language instruction impossible there, so we had to come out of the buffer zone before I could start teaching him English. And I wanted to learn the language of the buffer zone, which turned out to sound a lot like Old English or some early, mixed version of German and English. Lesh might not be the best teacher around, but having him to practice with helped, and I also had Mother and Parthet to draw on. That meant that I could pick up more vocabulary than you find in an army barracks. One of the flaws I had noticed in the translation magic during my first excursion as Hero of Varay was that it lumped together a lot of only vaguely similar creatures as trolls. Back in my world, without the magic to confuse things, Lesh had fourteen different terms for varieties of the creatures, and Parthet added a half-dozen more.
A moment passed before Mother said, "The rings. This girl from St. Louis?"
"Maybe." I shrugged. "I guess I won't know for sure until I see how she reacts to learning about Varay."
"A word of advice?" Mother waited, and I didn't object. "Be very certain of her before you try to explain."
I smiled. "I sort of figured that out, Mother. The fact is, I'm scared to tell her. I keep telling myself that she'll think I'm crazy if I just tell her about it, and if I just take her through one of the doorways without any warning or explanation, it'll scare her away, or make her think that she's flipped out."
"I called Dr. McCreary last night." There was a long sile
nce before Mother said that.
"No need to phony up a death certificate for me yet." I said quietly. Hank McCreary was a Varayan expatriate living in Denver. After Dad's death in Varay, McCreary signed a certificate saying that Dad died on a mountain-climbing expedition, an accidental death, body recovered, examined, and cremated.
"No, but he's also had experience treating Varayan medical problems. I didn't know yet just how serious your injuries were, just that they were beyond my limits." Mother was something of a doctor herself, up to a point. Doc McCreary had done most of her training. In a place like Varay, it doesn't take much to be leagues above everyone else in medicine.
"So, what, have you got him flying up here?"
Mother shook her head. "I called him back after your doctor finished with you."
It wasn't quite the reunion I had been looking forward to for the past three months. The location of my wound would have made that temporarily impossible even though I wasn't in any great amount of pain. Parthet brought Joy in and then he left with Mother.
Joy was all shook up, and I could see that she had been crying. She was still sniffling when she came into the room.
"I'm okay, Joy, really," I told her.
She came over to the edge of the bed, but she seemed to be afraid to even touch me. I reached for her hand, and her instinct seemed to be to jerk away. And when we did hold hands, she didn't want to put any pressure on me.
"I'm not going to break into small pieces or start screaming in pain," I said, patiently, not sarcastically-not with Joy.
"He said you've got a big, long cut in your stomach."
"All sewed up, as secure as the seams of your jeans."
Joy didn't know whether to laugh or sob. The sound that came out had a little of each in it.
"Come a little closer," I told her. She did and I finally pulled her down for a good kiss. There was nothing wrong with my mouth.
Joy Bennett, the joy of my life. She went crazy whenever I made that kind of pun. After a year together, I couldn't find many new variations. Joy was twenty-one, slender, five-three, and light enough that she never even got on a bathroom scale. Her waist was almost small enough for me to get my hands all the way around it and made the other measurements look more exaggerated than they were. Her hair was in that vague borderline range between dark blond and light brown. Her eyes were a bluish gray, the kind of eyes that thriller writers like to call "steely-cold killer's eyes," but there was nothing steely or cold about Joy's eyes. Like me, Joy was something of a computer whiz, bending a natural talent to the rigors of formal training in college. At odd moments, I wondered if she would be able to step away from it cold turkey the way I did. The answer to that might be important.