by Rick Shelley
I moved out toward the dragon, but slowly, content to let it do most of the traveling. There were sirens blowing in the distance, coming our way, so someone had called the cops. A lot of good a state trooper was going to do, even if he had a shotgun or one of those briefcase submachine guns. Anyway, the sirens sounded too far off to reach the rest area in time to do anything but pick up the pieces.
The dragon stumbled and went down on its front knees-or whatever the proper terminology is for a dragon. It got up, and fell again. Its head slammed against the pavement, hard enough to crack it-the pavement, not the head. Lower teeth pierced its upper lip. Black blood oozed out.
"Give me the rifle," I called. Harkane was there in a second. I returned the sword and took the rifle. I went to within six feet of Tessie's snout and put five more rounds through the eye. Before long, I was going to be the Dirty Harry of the dragon-slaying business.
"Okay, let's get out of here before the cops arrive," I said, hurrying back to the van.
We got inside and I started the engine. "Bury the rifle and sword back there," I said as I put the transmission in drive and goosed the gas pedal.
"You're just going to leave that thing lying there?" Joy asked.
"Damn right. This isn't the time to get messed up in red tape."
"But what are they going to think?"
"Maybe they'll think that dragons are for real," I said. I didn't really care. "Check the map. Find us a back road into Louisville."
17 – The Mist
By the time we got back to my mother's house, the story was already breaking. The telephones and CB radios must have been busy. Most of the Louisville television and radio stations had crews on the way, and two TV stations with news helicopters were already on the scene. There were live shots of the dead dragon on TV when I switched the set in the living room on. There was no chance that anyone would be able to suppress this story-assuming that any military or governmental types might have tried out of conditioned reflex. The carcass appeared on the evening news of all three networks as well. I had the distinct feeling that Tessie would be much more than a nine-day wonder. Before the late news came on, dragon sightings had been reported in every state but Hawaii… and there had been two "sea serpent" sightings there.
"You think any of those are for real?" Joy asked.
"No. they would be swarming all over us by now if there were more." Maybe that was just my pessimism.
I switched over to CNN. The Air Force had finally admitted that a fighter plane had been missing for two weeks, lost while attempting to intercept a Tessie radar return over the Great Smoky Mountain National Park. A small coastal freighter was missing without a trace in the Adriatic. There had been no storms or reports of trouble from the ship before its disappearance. No wreckage had been found. An attempt to hijack a SAC B-l bomber had been foiled by Air Police and the FBI. The Soviet Union was making "almost an accusation" that American forces had either sunk or sabotaged a new frigate in the Indian Ocean near Diego Garcia. Despite the improved relations of the last few years, the rhetoric was fairly heated. Radio and television signals had been mysteriously jammed, off and on, for nearly two hours throughout Iberia. The Tokyo Stock Exchange had suspended trading for three days after the Nissei Index doubled in five days. Duluth, Minnesota, had recorded its first significant September summer snowfall-nine inches and counting. A few hundred miles away, Milwaukee and Chicago were breaking record high temperatures, not just for September, for any month.
I would have liked to listen to more news, maybe even spend the night in civilization, but I had to get back to Varay. I got Joy, the others, and all of our loot through to Cayenne, stopped to talk to Lesh for a few minutes, then went right over to Basil while Joy organized a late supper at Cayenne.
Supper was just ending at Basil, but there was still food on the table, so I grabbed a snack, then went looking for Kardeen. He was in his office, still working.
"Sorry I'm late," I told him. "I keep attracting dragons." I pulled the ruby out from under my shirt. I hadn't taken the jewel off since I got it. Varay isn't big on safe deposit boxes. "They seem to be drawn by this. Even in the other world." I told him about Tessie.
Kardeen nodded, and gestured me into a chair without saying anything. He looked overworked and tired. He was always overworked, but he usually kept it off his face.
"I'm going to need Parthet along on the boat or we'll never get to the other shrine," I said when I finished talking about Tessie. "He has a spell to hide people from dragons. He used it when we rode to Thyme that first time. If the spell will work around this ruby."
Kardeen sent a runner for Parthet and Xayber's son, then filled in the time by telling me about our boat and the strange things that had been happening around Varay the last few weeks. A lot of little things had been reported. It sounded vaguely like the weird reports back home. In one case, they merged quite clearly. Fishermen had reported seeing a gray steel ship drifting without power in the Mist.
"Russian, most likely," I told Kardeen. "They're missing a frigate back home." I started to list the other ways the worlds were bleeding into each other but stopped, chilled by a sudden realization.
"That ship may have nuclear weapons aboard." The chill came from wondering what the Elflord of Xayber might do if he got his hands on weapons like that and found a way to make them work in Fairy or in the buffer zone.
"It's all coming apart at the seams, isn't it?" I asked.
Parthet arrived just then, carrying the elf head-still in its birdcage-and Aaron was following close behind. Aaron was as large and mature-looking as Joy had said. Kardeen repeated my question for Parthet.
The wizard nodded. "We're running out of time, even sooner than I feared. I have yet to convince myself that we have enough time left for you to complete your work and get back here."
"Have you figured out what we have to do with the jewels when we have both of them?" I asked.
Parthet shook his head. I turned the question on the elf, and he said that he wasn't positive of the precise steps either. There was nothing in the collective memory he could tap and nothing in the written records Parthet had available.
"The answer is there to be found, though," the elf said before I could accuse him of being less than honest with us. "I would not have agreed to any of this without that certainty."
"We're going to need you on the boat with us, Uncle," I told Parthet. "We need you to shield us from the dragons this rock draws."
"Not me," Parthet said. "Aaron will have to go. I couldn't sustain that magic long enough to help. I think Aaron can. You have no idea how quickly he's grown into the craft. And it will be his initiation test, the journey into the Mist and back."
I stared up at Aaron. He hadn't said anything but hello so far, standing back out of the way. His hair was clipped short now, and he had traces of beard stubble on his chin and cheeks. He seemed assured of himself and his place in the scheme of things. But I remembered the frightened eight-year-old he had been less than two months before. In some peculiar way, I could even see the boy as a ghostly overlay on the man.
"What do you think, Aaron?" I asked.
"I know the magic," he said. "I can't say how long I can hold it until I try." His voice was deep but soft, his words precise, unhurried. I had the impression that he considered each word individually, but without losing time at it.
"He knows virtually every spell I can recall," Parthet said, speaking just as softly, but without the sense of deliberation. "And he knows many more I had forgotten. He has pored through all of my old books and his memory is-so far as I can determine-exact."
"This is what I was born to do," Aaron said.
There is something about that kind of utter certainty that always scares me.
"Has Parthet told you the price?" I asked.
Aaron shrugged. He knew what I was talking about. "I will be my own children. The little boy in me is not completely lost. He never will be."
It was going to take an
effort to avoid thinking of Aaron as that little kid who kept popping into Varay from Joliet, even though his maturation seemed to be mental and emotional as well as physical. But I stood and stuck out my hand. Aaron was four inches taller than me and his hand dwarfed mine. We shook.
"I'll say 'Welcome aboard' now, even though I haven't seen our boat yet," I told him.
"I might have been better off marrying a traveling salesman," Joy said the next morning when I was dressing. "They're home more often."
I kissed her. "It's not always like this, dear. When things are going well, I can be idle for months on end."
"Do things ever go well here?" I guess the question was inevitable.
"I'll show you when we get this flap nailed down," I said. I didn't add all of the qualifications. Joy would worry enough without them.
There was a dragon circling over Cayenne at dawn, but the beast the other night had done no harm and my people were getting used to feeling privileged to "serve" the Hero of Varay. I guess they considered the honor guard overhead part of the price.
We stepped through to Basil-Lesh, Harkane, Timon, Jaffa and Rodi, Joy, and me. It was breakfast time, naturally, but Joy and I left our companions to start eating while we made a quick trip upstairs. Mother was with the king. Pregel was either asleep or comatose. Mother said that there wasn't much difference between the two for him anymore. Sometimes he was almost alert. Sometimes days would pass without his opening his eyes. He had aged visibly. He seemed to be only a half step short of mummification.
"He can't last much longer," Mother said. "I've seen the records. It's how his father died, though at nearly twice the age."
"No, not yet. I can't stay here to take his place. I have to go after this other jewel. It's the only hope for any of us." I spoke much louder than I needed to for Mother to hear. I wanted Pregel to hear as well, if he could, and Mother had to know that was what I was doing.
"I know," she said. She met my eyes without adding anything else. I couldn't read the emotion in her eyes. The loss of understanding that came when I discovered the world that had been hidden from me had made us strangers. Nothing had changed.
I turned and left.
We ate a hearty breakfast downstairs, knowing we were going back out into the wild. Baron Kardeen assured me that our boat would carry more than enough food for the four of us and for our crew, food for nearly two months-though much of it would seem monotonous, salted meat and hardtack. I hoped that our sailors were good fishermen.
A crowd of us went from Basil to Castle Arrowroot on the shore of the Mist. Parthet and Joy were there to open the way back to Basil for the others. Even Kardeen came to see us off, and he rarely left Basil.
Kardeen had given me a description of our boat the night before, but I had never seen it. The Varayan designers made it easy on themselves by designing half a vessel and using two of them together. The boat was fifty feet long, eighteen wide in the middle, and it had a single mast precisely in the center. The ends of the boat were identical, pointed something like the ends of a Viking dragon ship but without the carvings and fancy paint. A steering oar could be attached at either end. The sides were lapstraked, like clapboard siding on a house. There were five shallow extensions below the waterline in place of a single keel or keelboard. There were benches along both sides for the rowers, an open-ended cabin through the middle of the boat, and six separate storage bins that were not quite holds. The mast carried a single sail, and the spar could be rotated all the way around the mast. You never had to worry about turning the boat around if you wanted to head in the opposite direction. Just move the steering oar to the other end, turn the rowers around on their benches, and swivel the spar and you were ready to go.
But the sight of the boat stirred my danger sense. Not that I could avoid getting aboard and setting sail, but my danger sense was making sure that I knew I was doing something foolish.
We walked over to the boat-the name Beathe was painted on the side of the cabin-from the castle, taking along much of the off-duty portion of Arrowroot's garrison and a few dozen townspeople as spectators. The only sea traffic that normally put out from Arrowroot was the fishing fleet, and they never sailed out of sight of land. Apparently, everyone knew we were going farther out.
Walking on the pier, my first impression was that there was very little boat showing above the waterline, and there were still five of us to climb aboard, weighted down with weapons and armor.
"You sure we're not overloading this thing?" I whispered to Baron Kardeen.
"Not at all." He smiled. "It may not look like much, but this is the most seaworthy class of boat sailing the Mist or the other seas. And you'll be lightening the load daily as you eat and drink."
"In other words, the longer it is before we run into heavy seas the safer we'll be."
"This ship will take a lot, loaded down or not," Kardeen said.
Beathe's master was a grizzled fisherman named Hopay-young and grizzled. He was thin but his arms were muscled like a comic book hero's. He rattled off the names of his eight rowers, but there was no way I could remember them all from one exposure. I've always had trouble with names.
I said my farewells to Parthet, Kardeen, and Joy, taking quite a lot of time with Joy. Parthet had some last-minute instructions for Aaron. Aaron and I were the last to board Beathe. There was no "all ashore that's going ashore" because only the people who were sailing went aboard.
"Whenever you're ready, Master Hopay," I said, and he started shouting orders. The boat was pushed away from the dock, oars went down, and we moved out into the Mist.
Our departure was a protracted event. The breeze was against us, so we had to rely on our rowers. We could see people waiting back on shore. Joy and Parthet moved off to the side of the crowd. I waved a couple of times, and stared at Joy until I could no longer see her clearly. I waved again, just in case she could still make me out, then turned my attention to my command.
"Which way do we go?" I asked Xayber's son. His cage was tied on top of the cabin so we couldn't lose him overboard.
"West-northwest," he said.
"We'll have the wind in our faces most of the time," Hopay warned.
"That is the way we must go," the elf said.
"It isn't a matter of choice, Master Hopay," I said. "West-northwest it is. The elf is our navigator."
"Ain't but the least part of an elf," Hopay said, squinting at him. If he was worried about Xayber's son, he took care not to show it.
"Face me toward the bow and dangle the jewel in front of me," the elf said. I did as he asked and held the ruby out until he said, "Enough. Yes, this is the right way, but we have forever to sail."
"Aaron, you're keeping a lookout for dragon?"
"Since we left the castle," he said. "You know, I've never been on a boat of any kind before." He paused, then looked straight into my eyes. "My parents debated taking me with them on the Coral Lady, but it was to be a business cruise and they thought I was too young, that I wouldn't have any fun with them busy all the time. 'Next time,' they told me."
I nodded. "I've got some idea how rough it can be. I lost my father suddenly." I glanced away, then looked at him again.
Aaron was more a wonder than the talking head of a dead elf or dragons that could slurp down a string of cars like a strand of spaghetti. Even granting the visual impossibility that he could age fifteen years in a matter of days, it would be logical to expect emotional or educational lag, but Aaron showed neither. It was as if the magic that aged him also crammed a full education into his head and gave him the equivalent experience in living. I couldn't help thinking of the cliche about orphans being forced to grow up overnight. Aaron had done that in absolutely literal fashion. And he had absorbed "years" of apprenticeship as a wizard at the same time. Magic? Well, maybe that is the closest word, but it isn't close enough.
"There's something about me you should know," Aaron said a few minutes later. We had moved all the way to the bow of Beathe, where the sides
rose to meet the nose. "You remember how I suddenly popped up in Varay?" I nodded. "Well, I can control it now, to some extent."
I needed a moment to consider that. "What extent?" I asked, amazed at how calm I sounded.
"I can use all of the doorways with the silver tracing-without rings or any of your 'family' magic. I can go to any portal from any other once I can picture the scene there. From any to any," he emphasized, "not just through the paired doorways. Only Parthet and Baron Kardeen know that."
"I appreciate your trust," I said, marveling at the power. That was something Parthet had never even hinted was possible. I was sure he couldn't do it.
"You are Hero of Varay, and you will be king if we make it back from this voyage," Aaron said. "If I am to be your wizard, you have a right to know what you can expect from me."
I nodded slowly. I had to keep reevaluating my understanding of Aaron, a constant upgrading. I told him just what we had encountered in getting the first jewel of the Great Earth Mother, in detail. I finished off, "I don't know exactly what we'll meet this time. The defenses might not be identical, but they will be at least as thorough."
"Without a doubt," Aaron said.
"And no matter what problems we meet getting to the shrine, our most critical problem is time. We could win through up here, get the second jewel, and still have the worlds fall apart on us because there isn't time to get back to Varay and do anything with them."
Aaron appeared to go blank then, for maybe thirty seconds. His eyes remained open, he didn't fall over or anything, but there just didn't seem to be anybody home.
"Check with Wellivazey," he said when he finally came back from wherever his mind had gone. "Make sure that the boat is on precisely the right heading for this island we're looking for."