The Hero of Varay vm-2

by Rick Shelley

  "I'm going to have to sew that up," I told Harkane after I cleaned the wound. There was a fairly complete first-aid kit in our supplies. Timon found it for me. After I gave Harkane a long swig of the local painkiller-a foul-tasting brew called something that the translation magic rendered as number-I put in several butterfly stitches to draw the sides of the wound together, then doused the cut with antiseptic again and bandaged it. There were tears at the corners of Harkane's eyes until the numb-er took effect, but he gritted his teeth and didn't make a sound. As long as the wound didn't get infected, he would be okay.

  "What now, lord?" Lesh asked when I finished with Harkane and the rest of us had treated our scrapes and scratches with iodine. "Do we keep after the trolls and finish 'em?"

  I looked at the bodies strewn around us.

  "No, we've got to get on with our main job. Just make sure that all of these are really dead." I got caught by a troll playing possum once. I didn't want it to happen again.

  Lesh grunted and set to work. It was a task that didn't seem to bother him, and it would have bothered me to do it-I had done it before and wouldn't hesitate to do it again if I had to, but as long as I didn't have to, I didn't even want to watch. Timon and I rechecked the loads on the horses to make sure that there had been no mistakes in the dark. An unbalanced load would be miserable for the horse, and if things started falling off, we might lose time or more.

  Then I went over to our elf head.

  "What will you do about the bowman? Who is he? I couldn't see." Xayber's son was more agitated than I had seen him since our fight, and his death.

  "I'm not going to do anything," I said. "And the archer wasn't a he, but a she. That was the niece of Baron Resler."

  "That hellbitch? His voice climbed two octaves. Annick would have been pleased to know the effect she had.

  "You know of her?" I asked, trying to keep my voice flat.

  "I know of the banshee. We all do."

  "She must be slipping," I told him. "If she had spotted you, she would have slipped an arrow between your eyes just for the pleasure of it." Xayber's son closed his eyes. I had a curious thought. I wondered if his body, back at Castle Basil, was shuddering from the revulsion he so clearly felt for Annick.

  "There's thirty-four of 'em dead, lord," Lesh reported. "Twelve were killed by arrows, all clean shots-chest, throat, or head. She was a wicked eye with a bow, lord."

  "How's Harkane doing?" I asked softly, not turning to look.

  "He'll be right soon enough."

  "Let's break out a beer apiece before we start riding. The beer should be halfway cool and we can all use a little boost."

  "Aye, lord."

  Lesh knew just where the beer was packed, which was no surprise. One beer wasn't nearly enough for me, or for the others, but we had only one case of Michelob along and I had no idea how long it had to last, how long it might be before we got back out of the mountains.

  Then it was time to ride.

  The surviving trolls had run northeast. Annick had headed due north. We went southeast.

  "We've got a long way to go to reach the proper pass into the Titans," our dead elf told us. "You've come too far out of the way."

  I had no intention of resuming that argument, and when I didn't respond, he closed his eyes.

  We rode at a good pace that day, trying to make up ground. When we started to come upon long open stretches near the edge of Precarra, we angled more to the east. Riding took the nervous lumps out of my gut after the early-morning fight. When we stopped for lunch, I checked Harkane's arm-so far, so good. There was no bleeding and no trace of infection, though I didn't know if infection would appear that soon. He didn't complain of pain, and he seemed too alert to be hiding much, so I just gave him aspirin rather than another dose of the Varayan numb-er. That stuff was potent, but I wouldn't give or take it unless it was absolutely necessary. Our supply was limited and we might have worse injuries to deal with by the time we got back to Basil.

  Despite what I had told our elf, I was worried about the time we had lost by riding to Nushur and then chasing the trolls. I didn't know how much time we had until the general craziness and deterioration reached whatever critical mass it needed to trigger the End of Everything. I didn't know how long we would need to reach the shrine in the Titans, then the shrine out in the Mist, and finally to do whatever had to be done with the family jewels of the Great Earth Mother in order to reverse the magical entropy, or whatever it was that put the real world and the buffer zone at risk of annihilation. Dad used to say that it's crazy to worry about things you can't change, but it's hard to avoid it sometimes.

  There weren't any real roads in this section of Varay. There simply was too little traffic to keep nature from reclaiming any path. Grapes were hauled out in the autumn, wool in the spring, metals in small quantities every couple of months. Mostly, the trails there were led to the nearest stream that would float a small flat-bottomed boat and the goods went downstream to villages nearer the center of Varay. Supplies came back upstream over the same routes.

  "We'd better top off our water bags every time we see good water," Lesh said after we finished lunch. "Out in the wilds ahead, we can't count on finding much this time of year." With Harkane injured, Lesh was leading two packhorses and Timon handled the third.

  Before we left the forest for good, we came across a small pack of the seven-foot lizards, the almost-dragons, like the one that had been my welcome to Varay when I came through the first time. The midget dragons scuttled off ahead of us, their tiny wings fluttering madly even though they were too small to get the dragons off the ground. Lesh speared one-"Just for practice," he said.

  The land started getting wrinkled before we left the forest, and beyond Precarra there were deep folds, and the kind of fissures that earthquakes can cause. Layers of adjacent rock might be separated by a hundred feet, horizontally or vertically. Finding a secure path took effort when the land was at its wildest. This was a part of Varay I had not seen before, rugged but tempting, like the Badlands of the Dakotas.

  But there were also islands of green, sometimes quite extensive. There were small stands of trees, pastures, the very rare farm. Lesh warned us not to expect hospitality in this quarter of Varay, and he was right. Not even the king's Hero got more than a surly greeting or a grunt. And those were the more genial ones. Usually, we were pointedly ignored. "They're uncommon independent sorts," Lesh said, understating beautifully.

  Near sunset, we had to start detouring to find a place to cross one river that did meander through the wilds. It ran in a narrow canyon between steep walls. Even if we could have worked our horses down to the river, the waters was too swift and too deep to ford.

  "Comes down off the mountains," Lesh said. "It'll be cold water too."

  We followed the canyon upstream, toward the mountains, looking for a place to cross. We didn't find it that afternoon. We just went on until we found a decent place to camp, in an area of broken rock, boulders the size of houses scattered around.

  "Can't sleep just out in the open," Lesh said. "Even if those forest trolls aren't chasing after, there's rock trolls and always the chance of a dragon flying over looking for a feed."

  There was no fuel handy for a fire, so we made do with cold food. Lesh lowered a canvas bucket to the river on a long rope, several times, to water our horses after they cooled off. The water was frigid. I thought about hanging a six-pack of beer down to cool in the river, but decided that we had better save it for a while longer.

  The night passed without alarm, and we got an early start in the morning. A couple of hours later we crossed the river and turned east again. There were other rivers, creeks, and dry canyons to cross, but eventually we managed to get over each. We spent a full week riding east like that before our elf finally said that it was time to angle south to the mountains. We were near the pass we needed to use to enter the Titans.

  When I first arrived in Varay, all that anyone had to say about the Titans wa
s that they were impassable, unscalable, the southern boundary of the buffer zone, an absolute barrier. No one knew how far south they extended or what might lie beyond. No one went there. At least, no one came back. Gradually, I learned that there were qualifications. The Titans weren't simply a blank wall. There were foothills, and then a progressively higher series of mountain ranges, one beyond the other. People did go into the nearer reaches. Some folks lived on the lower slopes of the northernmost mountains. There were a few villages, collections of people with their farms, their sheep and cattle. There were also the mines that produced the metals, precious and common, that Varay and the other kingdoms needed. To the people of the buffer zone, the steel, tin, and copper found in the mountains were as important as the gold and silver. Our precious metals weren't draped with the same mystique in the buffer zone. Gold and silver were used as money, but barter was more common. The standard of exchange was more likely to be weights of corn or wheat than weights of gold or silver. The metals were measured against the grain, not the reverse. Mostly, gold and silver were considered useful for paying Heroes, for occasional trade with the mortal realm, and for decorative purposes. It was local currency only by default, when something more compact than grain was required. That was one of the things about the seven kingdoms that I had the most trouble adapting to.

  The Titan Mountains. You could see them from any prominence in the southern half of Varay, which made it easy to keep your directions straight. There was always a line of white and purple and brown separating sky from ground in the south, though the intersection was often blurred or hidden by clouds or haze. The closer you got to the mountains, the more impressive they became, always reaching into the sky, towering. Until you got so close that the mountains overwhelmed everything else.

  As we approached the bulwark, we crossed two ridges in the foothills, then went down a long, deep valley that left us in shadow from midafternoon on. The way led downhill to the base of the first range of the real mountains. I spent so much time looking up toward the peaks that my neck ached. The way ahead of us did seem to be nearly sheer, but I knew that it wasn't.

  When we camped for the night, the sky overhead was still bright, but the shadows in our valley made it seem like twilight. The trees in the valley were all stunted, perhaps from the limited sunlight they received. Lesh collected enough wood to keep a decent fire going through the night. We thought it might be quite chilly.

  "It'll be worse when we get up into the mountains, and we can't count on being able to run a fire every night, even if there's wood," I reminded him.

  "But no sense freezing when we don't have to," Lesh said. Then, " 'Less you think it's too risky."

  I thought about it. The idea of a fire made me nervous on general principles, but it didn't cause any recognizable twitching of my danger sense. "We'll try it, tonight at least," I said. We were going to light a fire to heat supper, so we might as well let it burn afterward.

  I was glad for the fire when I got up for my second sentry turn a couple of hours before dawn. It might be August, and we might be in the southernmost reaches of Varay, but we had already picked up a couple of thousand feet of altitude, and that night was chilly, maybe even in the low forties. I put several extra branches on the fire and brewed fresh coffee to carry the warmth inside. My danger sense was absolutely quiet. For the moment at least, we were probably safe.

  "You know, there's one benefit about coming this way," I told Lesh when we started riding again. "We're far enough south that it's not so bad going on field rations. The food will last that much longer."

  Lesh grunted. "I'd still like a good Basil breakfast."

  "Well, so would I, but it could be worse."

  "And will be soon, like as not," Lesh said. It was an easy prophecy.

  But our first days in the Titans were glorious. I quickly wished that I had found time to make the journey when there was no deadly threat hurrying me along. The lower reaches of the mountains were mostly gentle. We rode basically east, but along a curved and climbing path, edging gradually farther south. From one mountain to the next we rode through heather and scrub trees, sometimes through vast fields of wild berries that were ripe and tasted something like strawberries, but not as tart. The path we followed wasn't the best-defined route I had ever seen, but animals both wild and domestic had climbed it. People used it. We found the remains of campfires in several places, ages of fires built in the same premium locations.

  The view looking back out of the mountains was even more spectacular than the view coming toward them. All of Varay and Dorthin lay spread out below us, endless miles of green and brown, distant plumes of smoke, more distant fluffs of clouds, blue sky, and sunlight. The sun felt particularly hot on bare skin, but the mountain breeze remained quite comfortable all day. The chain mail and leather padding weren't nearly the burden they had been down in the flatlands.

  We couldn't travel very fast even though the path wasn't particularly dangerous, and each afternoon we camped at spots where others had camped before us, many times.

  Each day took us higher, farther south, deeper into the mountains. By the third afternoon like that, we had high peaks on both sides and we were riding above a steep-walled valley that might have seemed at home in Switzerland. Where sunlight hit the patches of grass and wild flowers, the colors were brilliant-greens and yellows and golds, fewer blues and reds. Once we saw a shepherd and his sheep, sixty animals or so, on the opposite slope, north of us. On a straight line, they were probably only a quarter mile away, but we would have had to travel at least three miles, most of it on foot and nearly vertical, to get to them. The shepherd watched us carefully but didn't return our greeting.

  "We must be almost south of Carsol by now," Lesh said when we made camp that night at our highest point yet. Carsol was the chief city of Dorthin.

  "But the mountains aren't part of any kingdom," I said.

  "As far as folks normally go, they are," Lesh corrected me. "When we get back into the high parts, then nobody owns them."

  "Tomorrow," Xayber's son said. It was a way of getting our attention. "If memory serves, you'll see what real mountains are like then. There'll be a high pass. This path will continue on below it, leaving the narrowest of tracks up to a high pasture. The horses won't be able to go any farther than that. There's grass and water for them there. You'll have to block this end of the pass enough to keep them from wandering over the edge. Then you'll have to walk on to the shrine of the Great Earth Mother."

  He certainly had our attention. It was the most information he had ever given out at one time.

  "How far do we have to go then?" I asked.

  "That depends on how long you can survive up there," the elf said. "Once you go beyond that high pass, the defenders of the shrine will know that you are coming. And none may enter without their permission."

  13 – The Shrine

  "You might have mentioned that before," I said.

  "And what good would it have done?" the elf asked, scorn oozing from every word. "Would it have stopped you from making the attempt or merely distracted you at a time when your puny mind could stand no additional distractions?"

  "Puny mind?" I challenged. "Whose mind is on the platter and whose is still on his shoulders?" I went on before we could get bogged down in a useless argument. "Who are these defenders, and what can we expect from them?"

  "They are the Keepers of the Shrine, beings created by the Great Earth Mother for just that purpose. And for what you can expect, you can expect to lose your lives, your minds, and the very fabric of your souls."

  "Which will cheer you no end," I said.

  He made a spitting sound, but it was dry. "Though I am dead already, I have more to lose than you ever could."

  We were setting up camp in a narrow cave that promised some protection from the wind. The days had been comfortable in the mountains, but the nights were getting colder. With sunset still a half hour off, the temperature was close to freezing and the wind chill made
the mountainside feel like Soldier Field on New Year's Day. I couldn't wait to get into thermal underwear. We had packed sets for each of us. But changing into them meant a few moments of really freezing exposure.

  "Can you be more specific about what we'll face?" I asked.

  "Only in part," the elf said. His cage was resting on a pile of supplies just inside our cave. The wind didn't seem to affect him. At least he said nothing about it and his teeth didn't chatter.

  "The defenders will offer whatever measures they believe necessary in order to destroy you. Maybe they will think that their routine precautions are enough. The shrine itself is at the center of a deadly maze-a labyrinth that can't be unraveled by logic or intuition. Acceptable visitors are escorted through by the defenders. And the inside of the shrine is defended by one of the Great Earth Mother's prime eunuchs, and you have yet to see their like in any world."

  Cheerful sort. "I've been in plenty of her shrines," I said. "None of them had any fancy defenses."

  The elf snorted. "This is no hovel thrown together by peasants with shit-stained feet. This is one of the very pillars of creation, erected by the Great Earth Mother herself, bordering on her own realms outside time and space."

  I had heard stories about the Great Earth Mother since I first arrived in Varay. Her cult was the only religious or quasi-religious one in the seven kingdoms. Although there was no organized priesthood or dogma, she had shrines in every castle, town, and village, with more scattered around the countryside-like the cave I first entered Varay through. But I had never given the Great Earth Mother any more serious though than I might have given the gods and goddesses of Greek or Norse mythology. Even when all the talk about finding her balls started, I never thought of the Great Earth Mother as a real being. I knew a lot about the buffer zone after three years there, and I had been in Fairy, but it wasn't until that evening in a shallow cave maybe four thousand feet above the plain of Varay that I had a real gut realization that I might be out to plunder the greatest treasures of an immortal being who might actually be a real goddess and the creator of all the universes.