by Rick Shelley
Kardeen escorted her out.
"Do you need to do anything special before we try to contact the elflord?" I asked Aaron when we were alone in the room. Timon, Lesh, and the pages were out in the hall, close but hot in the way.
"I don't think so. I just need a few minutes to make some preparations. Are you sure it's wise to call in the middle of the night?"
"I'm not sure it's wise to call him anytime, but night or day won't make any difference to the elflord. It may not even be night where he's at."
"Xayber is straight north of here, isn't it?"
"Near enough, but day and night don't necessarily coincide between here and Fairy. A week inside Fairy can be ten days out here, or two weeks, or even longer."
"That's what Parthet was talking about?"
"Part of it."
I got up and paced, over by the windows, while Aaron worked up his preliminary magics. While I couldn't follow any of the mumbo-jumbo he chanted, I had a rough idea of what he was doing. He knew that the Elflord could be dangerous, even long-distance, so he was building what defenses he could around us before he made any connection to Xayber. I had been through a couple of psychic confrontations with the elflord, and I was all in favor of getting any extra protection I could before chatting with him this time.
Calling the Elflord of Xayber was a little more complicated than picking up the telephone and dialing a number. I knew that Parthet had communicated with the Elfking something like this, back when I was trying to distract Xayber long enough to let us deal with the Etevar of Dorthin, but I hadn't been around to observe the process. I was off on the isthmus looking for sea-silver to line new magic doors and getting myself in more than enough trouble on my own. And the Elflord of Xayber had found my "number" while I was raising a little hell among his subjects. When it worked, this magic longdistance communication was a lot more comprehensive than the telephone. It really brought you close enough to "reach out and touch someone"-in my limited experience, usually to the dismay of one or the other of the parties.
"You do know that there are certain hazards to this, don't you?" I asked when Aaron paused in his preparations.
"I know about the time Parthet got caught with his spells down, and how you rescued him," Aaron said. "I know that the elflord controls a more powerful magic than I do, than you and me combined." He looked at me. "Even with the ruby and emerald contributing."
"Are they?"
"I can feel the magic," Aaron said. "If all this jive is right, they helped create the whole ballpark. Makes Adam and Eve sound like kid stuff." He circled the table, mumbling another chant. When he finished that one, he stopped at my end of the table.
"You're a regular riot of magic now, you know? I can feel the static complicating what I'm trying to do."
"Parthet told me that everything here has its own kind of magic about it," I said.
"No different anywhere," Aaron said. "But you're something else."
I nodded and tried to divert my mind from worrying by listing all of my contributions to the static-the magic of the Hero of Varay, the magic of the king, the magic of each of the elf swords (hung across my back in an "X marks the spot" arrangement, so I couldn't even sit back comfortably), and the magic of the balls of the Great Earth Mother. Each packed a potent sui generis magic. Maybe I had picked up a little extra zap from the elf and the dragons I had killed along the way-something like the primitive belief that you could get some of the lion's power by eating the heart of a lion you had killed. Only in the buffer zone, that sort of thing seemed to be fact rather than superstition.
"The static won't get in the way of your precautions, will it?" I asked.
"Give the elflord something extra to think about. Almost ready now. You know what you're going to say to the man-or whatever he is?"
"I didn't write a speech, but I've got some idea what I need to say." Only mildly sarcastic. "There going to be any trouble holding this long enough to say it all?"
"From what I've heard, the only worry is can we hang up when we want to."
"I'm ready whenever you are," I said. I sat back down in my place at the head of the table.
Aaron sat in the chair to my right, along the side of the table, and started chanting again, a different line, louder than before, more insistent. Judging by what I could feel and see, it was a stronger, or at least a more active, magic than his preparatory spells. My skin tingled, itched. The hair on my arms stood on end. The lights seemed to fade and flare alternately. The entire room seemed to pulse.
And suddenly, the Elflord of Xayber was seated at the far end of the table, staring at me, drumming his fingers-audibly-against the tabletop.
"I've been waiting to hear from you," he said. The voice was intimately familiar, recalled in every nuance from our earlier "meetings." There was a hint of condescension in his voice now, as there had been before, and a hint that he hadn't really expected me to make contact. I sat quietly and stared at him for a moment. I couldn't distinguish this magic from reality. To all intents and purposes, the elflord was actually there in the room with me… and he had brought along his own chair. Ma Bell should work so good.
"Are you ready to fulfill your vow?" Xayber asked. He looked much as I remembered him from our psychic duel years before-tall, even sitting he seemed to dwarf me; thin, with coal-black hair and a face that was so pale that it was really white, bone white.
"I have many vows to keep," I told him. "Right now, there is one that is more time-critical than returning your son's remains. Are you aware that the whole fabric of creation is disintegrating? That we seem to be running down to complete destruction?"
The elflord glanced toward Aaron at the side of the table, then said, "I have noted a few disturbances."
"It's more than that. You'd better hear the whole story." And I gave it to him, as complete as I could, the dragons in chicken eggs, the Coral Lady and Aaron, the two full moons. I covered his son's interpretation, the basics of our trips to the shrines of the Great Earth Mother, and the apparent outbreak of nuclear war in my world. Xayber asked a few questions, but even the elflord seemed to have a passing acquaintance with the vocabulary of the nuclear age-either that or the translation magic put it in terms he could relate to.
"There are now three moons in the sky," he said after I finished my recital. "Seven is the critical number."
"Then time is even shorter than I thought," I said. "And before I can bring your son home to you, I have to try to stop this spiral into chaos. If we go down to general destruction, it wipes us all out."
The elflord looked toward the ceiling. His image seemed to flicker out for just an instant before he looked at me again. He shook his head.
"It is already too late to save this universe," he said. 6 – Death Dawn
"No!"
The negative was ripped out of my throat without thought, but thought didn't alter my rejection of Xayber's verdict. The elflord stared at me. I saw pity on his face, and that added anger to the other emotions I was feeling.
"There are some things that wishing cannot change," he said.
I paused, took a deep breath, and set my jaw. "Perhaps, but you must be wrong about this."
"Doubtful," he said.
"There must be something we can do. I have the balls of the Great Earth Mother!" After all the hell I had gone through to retrieve them and the utter agony of… assimilating them, I couldn't bear to contemplate the possibility that it might have been in vain.
"This world, this universe, must pass," Xayber said. He seemed to flicker out and in again. Then he shrugged. "Perhaps it is best. The old must pass before the new may come." Fatalism. "Will you bring my son home before the end?"
"I won't give up."
Too much was flooding through my mind. I tried to focus on the elflord, but the thought of total eradication, the End of Everything, was overloading my circuits. I thought only of what I would lose in the total disaster. How can anyone really comprehend the greater disaster? I thought of the unborn
child who would never be born. I thought of losing Joy, of losing Varay after the world I grew up in had already suffered nuclear catastrophe. There was no way that my mind could accept Xayber's sentence of futility. Hey, I thought. This is a fantasy world. Never-Never Land. It can't end like this. I got so wrapped up in all the internal byplay that I didn't hear what Xayber said next.
"What was that?" I asked when I realized that I had missed something.
"I said that the old world must pass, but that if you are a true heir of Vara, you may-may-be able to see that some portion of this world is recreated in the next. You carry the seed."
"I don't understand what you're talking about."
"The seed. The seed. Are you dense? You must do what Vara did. The seed and the egg."
The seed? I stared at him for a moment. Perhaps the old euphemism was what threw me. "You mean I have to find the Great Earth Mother and knock her up?"
"If you are truly the heir of Vara, you have the seed of the new world in you," he said, nodding.
"The Great Earth Mother is already looking to kill me for taking the family jewels in the first place. And I don't think my magic is strong enough to let me take her against her will." Not to mention my own revulsion at the idea of forcing anyone.
"If you want to have any hope of preserving anything of this world, if you want to ensure that there is a next one, you must create it with her. There is no other way."
Long pause.
"There don't seem to be a lot of alternatives," I said, shaking my head at the images running through my mind. "Granting that it means that I have to try, where do I find her and how do I make my approach?"
Another long pause.
"Difficult questions," the elflord said. "It will take time to find the answers."
I hope you're not going to pull a Deep Thought on me, I thought.
"How much time?" I asked. "That commodity seems to be in particularly short supply."
"There will be a price," Xayber said. "The return of my son."
"If there is time, and if I have your guarantee that you won't do anything to hinder my attempt to find the Great Earth Mother."
"Agreed. Anything I might do would be less than you will experience in your frustration to save what can't be saved." He paused and cleared his throat. "I won't do anything to hinder you. You have my word on that. You could even return my son now. Bring him to this room and I can take him home with me."
I kept my voice level and my face straight. "I think that might be premature," I said. "When you have the answers I need."
"As you will."
"For what it may be worth, we could never have come this far without the help of your son, even after he was dead."
"I know."
I thought you might.
There was a loud noise from the corridor, something-or someone-falling against the door. I turned, distracted, and started to reach for a sword instinctively. The elflord also looked toward the door. Aaron was facing it. The door swung open and Annick hopped over Lesh. He grabbed for her ankles but missed.
"I knew there was an elf near," Annick said, not quite in a shout. A long dagger flashed through the air-through the head of the image of the elflord-and clattered off the wall behind him.
"You, the hellhound." Xayber hadn't even blinked at the dagger she threw at him, a calmness I could never have maintained, even if I knew that it was just an image of me being threatened.
"Me. Tell my father that I'll get to him yet. I'll take off his head the way he"-she pointed at me-"took the head off of that other crud."
Lesh levered himself to his feet and lurched toward Annick. She started to jump sideways, but Aaron pointed a finger at her. She went rigid and fell. Lesh broke the fall but couldn't stop her from going down.
The elflord looked at me. "I will contact you when I have the answers you seek."
"How long?" I asked.
He shrugged. "It will take time. The Great Earth Mother is always elusive."
"Hours? Days?" I wanted some idea.
"Days, at least, more likely weeks." The elflord glanced at Aaron again, then back to me. "I will find you then."
And then he was gone.
Tableau vivant. I'm sitting on the almost-throne at the head of the table. Aaron is to my. right, standing about a third of the way down the table. Lesh is on one knee, his left arm still supporting Annick's head, just off the floor. She is sprawled, still held by Aaron's restraining magic.
I don't suppose that the scene held motionless more than a couple of seconds, but it seemed much longer. That kind of frozen moment always seems impossible, a device, unless it's actually happening to you. I had one of those moments when I heard about the Challenger disaster. Dad said he experienced the same thing when he heard that President Kennedy had been killed, a frozen moment with everything about it impressed indelibly in the mind.
A blink. A deep breath. The moment ends.
I glanced at Aaron, then turned my attention to Annick. She picked herself up off the floor.
"I didn't drop you hard on purpose," Aaron said. He got up and went around the far end of the table, moving slowly. "It's just that you didn't give me the time to do it gently."
Annick flashed a fierce look at Aaron. Behind her, Lesh stood up, ready to grab her again.
"It's okay, Lesh," I said. "There's no one for her to attack now."
That turned Annick's attention from Aaron to me.
"What the hell did you think you were going to accomplish?" I asked. "The whole universe is falling apart and you've got to stage your damn theatrics."
"I came back when I heard that the king had died," Annick said. "I find a new king and a new wizard, dealing with the enemy."
"There are no enemies right now, Annick," I said. "We're all facing the same disaster."
"I still have enemies!"
She had held that level of hate when I first met her. It seemed to sustain her. She had never been able to let go of her hatred for the elf warrior who had raped her mother. Her father. And her hatred for everything in and of Fairy. That was why I had never doubted any of the fantastic tales that were told about her exploits in Fairy. I knew she was capable of the most extreme of them.
"I appreciate your help with the forest trolls," I told her, trying to forget a chance vision.of the Queen of Hearts screaming, "Off with her head!" As far as I knew, Varay had never used capital punishment. Serious crime was extremely rare among Varayans, and the Kings of Varay had always had a more potent sentence to impose, exile. People who couldn't get along in Varay could be dumped in Fairy or in my world to fend for themselves. But exile to my world looked like capital punishment at the moment, and shipping Annick into Fairy would have been no punishment at all. It would just have given her a chance to go on with her killing… until somebody, or something, killed her.
"But right now, you're a distraction I can't afford," I told her. But I needed a moment to figure out what to do with her.
"Aaron, have you been to Castle Curry yet?" I asked.
"Only briefly."
"You met Baron Veter and his guardian, Sir Compil?"
"We met." He seemed unusually terse. Aaron was watching Annick as closely as Lesh was. He was learning fast. In her killing moods, Annick needed close watching.
"I would like you to take Annick to Castle Curry and put her in the care of Sir Compil. She is to be held there through the crisis, not harshly, but with as much security as they can manage. Restrained from leaving. Have Baron Kardeen prepare a letter to that effect." Aaron nodded. "Take Lesh with you to help keep an eye on Annick until you get her turned over to Compil, then both of you get right back."
If it had been up to Lesh, I'm sure he would have hogtied Annick to make sure she didn't give him any trouble. He might even shackle her with handcuffs and leg irons, if any were available. Maybe it would have been a good idea at that. They left. Annick glared at me over her shoulder as Lesh nudged her toward the door. I doubted that Castle Curry would hold An
nick for long, but it was the most distant point in Varay from both Basil and Xayber that had a magic doorway. Once Annick managed to escape from Curry, it would take her a week to ride to Basil, nine days or more to reach Arrowroot, even if she managed to steal a good horse. That bought me some time without her. And every day that Compil managed to hold her in custody would add to the margin.
Sitting alone after the others left, I had to start thinking about what the elflord had said. This world must pass. I might be able to save a little of it-somehow add it to the next world. That was more than a little vague, but it did give me some hope to hang on to. I was ready to grab for any thread I could. Vara had managed to stick around and enjoy his new world for a time before the Great Earth Mother carved him up. If I could save enough from this world to let my mind survive in the next… if I could save Joy, maybe a chunk of the buffer zone as well…
If not? I wondered what the end would be like. Would there be a show, fireworks and earthquakes, the wild special effects of a Hollywood disaster film? Or would we just fade to black? With a whimper or with a bang.
Joy. No Joy.
I thought about movies I had seen where the hero is told that he's dying and there's no hope for a cure. John Wayne's last picture, The Shootist, was the first I thought of, where Jimmy Stewart tells the Duke that he has a cancer, and then the follow-up, with Wayne's character trying to come to terms with the end and managing to go out with style.
But it wasn't enough. It wasn't just my death in the offing, but the End of Everything-all of creation perhaps, the far end of time, when the entire universe fizzled out. According to the cosmologists back home, that wasn't supposed to happen for billions and billions of years, the heat death of the universe, entropy run down to its final chaos. And we hadn't even landed men on Mars or met our first extraterrestrials yet. No E.T. No Alf. No Mork. No Starship Enterprise.
No "Mr. and Mrs. Gil Tyner announce the birth of their first child."
No "Someday, son, this will all be yours."
Shit.